Mid-Year Course Promotions
It comes as a surprise to no one that not everyone at the same age is at the same place academically. Two unrelated eleven year old students born on the same day in the same year share the same age, but that age is only a very rough predictor of what each child knows. Whatever else their shared age could predict, we can be confident that age does not predict that those two children will have the same academic ability. Teachers and schools attempt to cope with these differences, and coping with different academic abilities is what we call differentiation. At CVCS, we are able to operationalize differentiation in a variety of ways. Students in kindergarten through grade eight can work at a pace appropriate to their individual ability and academic goals. They can also work at a curricular level appropriate to their ability.
Significant philosophical and educational issues underly this discussion of mid-year course promotions. Although I will not discuss those issues here, I need to point out that surface discussions of an issue like mid-year course promotions, which is what I am engaging in here, rely upon but have in no way worked out those underlying philosophical and educational issues. There certainly is a pragmatist approach to these issues that would approve working out the particulars and then determining the principle—our system of common law works precisely this way—and if that’s what we are doing here, we should at least examine the principles thus extracted from our decisions. But I digress.
Last year, mid-year course promotions came as late as the end of the third quarter. At that time, the practice had been to promote students to the next course when the previous course had been completed. Teachers started pointing out that what students knew when they were in the Learning Center looked different from what their learning looked like in the Online School. In some cases, very different. That discrepancy could owe to teachers’ faulty perceptions. The other, more worrisome explanation was that in someone’s haste to finish a course there was more of an emphasis on completion than learning. So we did what any responsible educator would do: we sought to verify what students claimed they knew. We learned through that process that there was an emphasis, perhaps an overemphasis, on marking lessons complete rather than on learning. The upshot of that is course promotion may not indicate student learning.
This year, we have focused on what students know and can do, especially in mathematics and language arts. Coursework in the Online School can add great value to students’ learning, of course, and students who are behind in their coursework or who are able to accelerate should be able to obtain mid-year course promotions. Because we are so focused on what students know and can do, and for a variety of other operational reasons, we moved mid-year course promotions to their eponymous place in the school calendar, January 29.
Some parents had legitimate concerns about that move. What appeared as operational obstacles last summer are now less of a problem. For example, K12 is scheduled to roll out a new math program next fall, and students who began a new math course under the old math program might have faced an inefficient transition between the two. Students who accelerated through courses could run out of curriculum in high school, but K12 has made arrangements with the University of Maryland to offer qualified seniors in any K12 school a year of university courses for the price of the books (more on that soon as details emerge).
Effective immediately, students will now be able to receive a course promotion after January 29. We will still need to validate that the student has in fact learned the material from the previous course, and that validation can come in a variety of ways. The important thing is that whatever individual plan we have for a student continues to be in the best interest of that student. Removing the deadline for course promotions should have nothing to do with that.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Is Hybrid Education a New School Paradigm?
John Goodlad in A Place Called School observed that “Schools differ; schooling everywhere is very much the same” (p. 264). There are probably many reasons to account for that observation, but one reason is likely that we have a massive, dominant understanding of what school is supposed to look like. At the risk of oversimplifying the idea, that dominant way of thinking could be called a paradigm, a word Thomas Kuhn used in 1962 to describe why certain scientific theories hold sway and how they are replaced. Think astronomy before Galileo or physics before Newton. or weather forecasting before satellites. Paradigms are powerful because they almost force us to make sense in predictable ways of things we see. Paradigms determine what we are allowed to ask and what the answers can be. We would not think, for example, that a thunderstorm was the result of someone melting beeswax, which is what the Andaman Islanders reasonably thought given the weather paradigm through which they viewed the world. You can try this yourself the next time you are in a school for the first time. You can also test this idea by telling someone about CVCS, for the surprise you hear refers to the paradigm used to make sense of what school should be.
Another paradigm we use to make sense of schooling is home schooling, which has been around since the beginning of education in the US (see, for example, Edward McClellan’s Moral Education in America) The Illinois Supreme officially sanctioned home schooling in the 1950 case People v. Levisen, which held that the “object [of compulsory attendance laws] is that all shall be educated, not that they shall be educated in any particular manner or place” and thereby established home school as a private school in the eyes of the law. Setting the legal equivalence aside, in the US, children are school in school or at home.
It is difficult to create a new paradigm of education. No Child Left Behind has made a significant impact on schooling, but it has not created a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s sense of the term. Computers and technology have changed many aspects of our lives, but even schools that are technology rich are for the most part paradigmatically the same as they were when chalkboards were the great technological advance. When you tell someone about CVCS, the two major paradigms of education, the brick and mortar school and home school, shape how people make sense of what you are saying. I have even heard people in the CVCS community struggle to describe how we do school. That’s because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to step outside a paradigm to see the world differently.
According to Kuhn, the impetus for a paradigm shift or scientific revolution occurs when science, or what is accepted as true science, cannot account for all the facts scientists encounter. Likewise if less dramatically, the two paradigms of brick and mortar schooling and home schooling cannot account for all aspects of hybrid education. We are not a brick and mortar school, yet students attend a school building and encounter a school-based curriculum and teachers who teach and assess. We are not a home school, but there are certain aspects of what we do that can be found in home schooling, namely the involvement of parents in students’ education. Is a new paradigm of education emerging? Maybe. If hybrid education is part of one paradigm and part of another, does that provide sufficient cause to make it a new paradigm? No, but the question of paradigm shift remains.
As a faculty, we have been wrestling with this paradigm issue, but not as a question of paradigm shift. Nor are we approaching it by asking what educational practices constitute a hybrid education. Any hybrid school will have a collection of educational practices that separate it from a brick and mortar school or home school, but defining what a hybrid school does is more than writing down a collection of educational practices. Moreover, approaching the question that way would require us to start within the two current paradigms of education, which means hybrid school would simply be a mixture of those two and not something different. Rather, we are approaching the question of hybrid education by asking what virtues such an education promotes. I mean virtues in the Aristotelian sense, where the purpose of anything is a matter of determining the virtues that thing fosters, rewards, and honors. For Aristotle, before understanding what the ideal constitution for a polis should be, one had to know what purpose the polis served, and the only way to understand purpose is to understand the kind of citizens the polis wanted to create. In our case, we seek to articulate not only what kind of students we want to graduate from CVCS but what kind of faculty we want to become, for it the question of virtue includes both students and faculty.
We are having dialogue all across CVCS about what the purpose of hybrid education and the values we think it should represent. Teachers are working in their departments, led by their teacher representatives, to articulate our shared hybrid education values. Teachers also have the opportunity to contribute directly to the conversation through posts to administration. Administration will meet with teacher representatives to discuss what the dialogue tells us, and then we will take that to the whole faculty and staff to give final shape to hybrid schooling values and the academic, social, and civic virtues we want to promote in ourselves and in our students. Then I will present to the CVCS Board the instructional design that will best allow those values to flourish.
I invite you to become part of this dialog.
Another paradigm we use to make sense of schooling is home schooling, which has been around since the beginning of education in the US (see, for example, Edward McClellan’s Moral Education in America) The Illinois Supreme officially sanctioned home schooling in the 1950 case People v. Levisen, which held that the “object [of compulsory attendance laws] is that all shall be educated, not that they shall be educated in any particular manner or place” and thereby established home school as a private school in the eyes of the law. Setting the legal equivalence aside, in the US, children are school in school or at home.
It is difficult to create a new paradigm of education. No Child Left Behind has made a significant impact on schooling, but it has not created a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s sense of the term. Computers and technology have changed many aspects of our lives, but even schools that are technology rich are for the most part paradigmatically the same as they were when chalkboards were the great technological advance. When you tell someone about CVCS, the two major paradigms of education, the brick and mortar school and home school, shape how people make sense of what you are saying. I have even heard people in the CVCS community struggle to describe how we do school. That’s because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to step outside a paradigm to see the world differently.
According to Kuhn, the impetus for a paradigm shift or scientific revolution occurs when science, or what is accepted as true science, cannot account for all the facts scientists encounter. Likewise if less dramatically, the two paradigms of brick and mortar schooling and home schooling cannot account for all aspects of hybrid education. We are not a brick and mortar school, yet students attend a school building and encounter a school-based curriculum and teachers who teach and assess. We are not a home school, but there are certain aspects of what we do that can be found in home schooling, namely the involvement of parents in students’ education. Is a new paradigm of education emerging? Maybe. If hybrid education is part of one paradigm and part of another, does that provide sufficient cause to make it a new paradigm? No, but the question of paradigm shift remains.
As a faculty, we have been wrestling with this paradigm issue, but not as a question of paradigm shift. Nor are we approaching it by asking what educational practices constitute a hybrid education. Any hybrid school will have a collection of educational practices that separate it from a brick and mortar school or home school, but defining what a hybrid school does is more than writing down a collection of educational practices. Moreover, approaching the question that way would require us to start within the two current paradigms of education, which means hybrid school would simply be a mixture of those two and not something different. Rather, we are approaching the question of hybrid education by asking what virtues such an education promotes. I mean virtues in the Aristotelian sense, where the purpose of anything is a matter of determining the virtues that thing fosters, rewards, and honors. For Aristotle, before understanding what the ideal constitution for a polis should be, one had to know what purpose the polis served, and the only way to understand purpose is to understand the kind of citizens the polis wanted to create. In our case, we seek to articulate not only what kind of students we want to graduate from CVCS but what kind of faculty we want to become, for it the question of virtue includes both students and faculty.
We are having dialogue all across CVCS about what the purpose of hybrid education and the values we think it should represent. Teachers are working in their departments, led by their teacher representatives, to articulate our shared hybrid education values. Teachers also have the opportunity to contribute directly to the conversation through posts to administration. Administration will meet with teacher representatives to discuss what the dialogue tells us, and then we will take that to the whole faculty and staff to give final shape to hybrid schooling values and the academic, social, and civic virtues we want to promote in ourselves and in our students. Then I will present to the CVCS Board the instructional design that will best allow those values to flourish.
I invite you to become part of this dialog.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Our Two Moments of AYP
First, we need to celebrate. For the 2008-09 school year, CVCS has made “adequate yearly progress, or AYP, a federally determined, state-defined benchmark for school performance. AYP is a composite measure, drawing on attendance, percentage of students tested, academic performance in mathematics and language arts, and for high school, graduation rates. Schools and school districts either make AYP or they do not. We made it. More importantly, student performance is not taken just as a whole but also potentially in ten sub-groups. If a school has enough students in sub-groups of specified races, limited English proficiency, low income, and special education, each of those groups must make adequate yearly progress for the school to be said to make adequate yearly progress. I am grateful for this part of the legislation, for schools can no longer rely on those groups who historically have done well in school to carry the school. Every group of students must demonstrate proficiency in mathematics and language arts, and while it is certainly true that we need to focus on individual students, as a society we recognize that individual student achievement gaps are not evenly distributed across all groups but tend to accumulate in certain minority groups. As educators, we now have no choice but to look at student achievement from the standpoint of the academically least advantaged. Apart from the social justice this part of No Child Left Behind promotes, there is the great educational challenge of solving a problem that for a long time was ignored and now appears to be very, very challenging. Yet in spite of these hurdles, CVCS made AYP. Again.
While we are in the moment of celebration, you should also know that the academic bar schools have to clear to make AYP becomes increasingly higher over time. That is, making AYP this year represents even more of an accomplishment than making it last year or two years ago. The fact that CVCS made AYP for the third year in a row is a tribute to the students, families, and teachers of CVCS, and we should all take this moment to indulge ourselves in this accomplishment.
But now it’s time to get back to work. On a more reflective occasion we can discuss the merits of No Child Left Behind, the name given to the legislation enacted in 2001, for it has its flaws as many people have pointed out. Its principal virtue, as I claim above, is that it forces us to lift every student up to ever higher levels of academic performance regardless of their sub-group membership. This year, 77.5 percent of all students at CVCS must demonstrate their proficiency against state learning standards, which is 7.5 percentage points higher than last year and 15 percentage points higher than two years ago. Taking our current overall percentage passing of 74.6 percent, you can see why I say let’s take one moment to celebrate and then get back to work. Looking ahead, by the 2013-14 school year, every student from grade three on is required to demonstrate a proficient knowledge of mathematics and language arts.
As parents in grades two through eight know, we are working hard this year to improve our success, to extend it to more and more students. Our K-8 Learning Center program now focuses on reading and writing, and every week students take grade level math exercises to see if there are deficiencies we need to target in our instruction. Students’ work samples have a published writing rubric to guide students’ work and our feedback. It is enormously hard work as everyone knows by now, but constant improvement requires hard work. And we have no choice but to constantly improve. The bar has been raised.
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