…be with you.

Today is Star Wars Day, and Shakespeare Geek and Bardfilm made sure that Shakespeare got in on the action. For my contribution… No, I’m not going to compare Luke Skywalker to Hamlet, at least not today. But I would like to share how the Star Wars franchise has made teaching Shakespeare just a little bit easier.

A series of three related dramatic works is called a trilogy. Four works make a tetralogy. Early in Shakespeare’s career, he wrote a tetralogy of plays about the English kings: Henry VI, Part One; Henry VI, Part Two; Henry VI, Part Three; and Richard III. The plays cover the span of events from 1422 to 1485, and are referred to collectively as the first tetralogy.

A bit later (though still early in his career), Shakespeare wrote another tetralogy of plays about the English Kings: Richard II; Henry IV, Part One; Henry IV, Part Two; and Henry V. These plays were set earlier; they run from 1399 to 1415. This was the second tetralogy.

This seems pretty straightforward, but it could often cause confusion, even for graduate students. The second tetralogy takes place before the first tetralogy? How can that be? Why did he do it that way? Wait, which was the first tetralogy?

Everything changed with the release of Episode One: The Phantom Menace. Now, when I explain that Shakespeare wrote the first tetralogy before the second, but the second takes place before the first, I can enjoy their momentarily confused looks. I know I can just add “You know, like Star Wars…” and instantly see the clouds lift and light shine into the room. Since the second Star Wars series, everyone understands the idea of a prequel trilogy.

So thank you to Star Wars for making a hard thing easy. May Henry IV be with you!

Last week, I participated in a blogging project sponsored by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, who encouraged bloggers to post about the influence Shakespeare has had on our lives. They’ve linked up all of our contributions on one page, and it’s worth checking out. Whether you’re a fan of Shakespeare or not, it’s exciting to read people who are passionate about something writing about how they became passionate about it.

Also, be sure to check out this fantastic song parody from Bardfilm. I missed it among all the birthday excitement, but found again via a nod from the Shakespeare Geek.

In post-birthday blogging news, I’ve been asked to write a monthly post on using data for school improvement for both the company I work for and our partner organization. If you want to get a glimpse into what I actually do for a living – anagramming passages from Shakespeare doesn’t pay what it should – check out my first installment here or here.

There is so much wrong with this article by Eric Hanushek that I fear that anything less than a line-for-line rebuttal will be woefully inadequate as a response. Out of consideration for my readers, I will refrain from providing one, and will rather try to focus on the most important points. Hanushek, of course, is the Stanford economist whose lurch into the field of education has driven much of the recent misguided effort towards “Reform” in today’s educational system. His article does a good job of summarizing his most crucial arguments, so it’s worth some time examining.

The title of the piece is “Valuing Teachers” and a brilliantly disingenuous title it is. Rather than using the word as we might use it (placing a high value on teachers), he is using it as an economist might (assessing the value of teachers). He is measuring how much teachers are worth. According to Hanushek, better teachers result in higher incomes for their students later in life. To make his case, he uses a series of unscientific leaps of logic that will yield easily to a few moments of rationality.

He notes that “a student with achievement (as measured by test performance in high school) that is one standard deviation above average can later in life expect to take in 10 to 15 percent higher earnings per year.” I have no reason to doubt his numbers.

But Hanushek is making the classic blunder of confusing correlation with causation. Do higher test scores in school directly cause higher incomes? Or is it possible that they may have common contributing factors? What about factors that the student brings in, such as intelligence, stamina, and motivation? Is it possible that parental income can be a factor in both standardized testing scores and future income? Hanushek’s famous value-added study attempted to isolate these factors, but he seems content to ignore them when citing this achievement/income connection.

And, as Diana Senechal points out, “there is no evidence (as far as I know) that students in the highest percentiles in high school are those who made the greatest gains on their standardized tests over the years. In fact, I suspect that most of them did pretty well on those tests all along.”

Using future income as a measure of teacher quality is even more outrageous than using test scores. How much does a Stanford professor make compared to a Wall Street hedge fund manager? Is that a function of the quality of education they received? In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I make significantly less than LeBron James. Did he have better teachers?

Hanushek’s solution is to “contemplate asking 5 to 10 percent of teachers to find a job at which they are more effective so they can be replaced by teachers of average productivity.” (Note to my boss: if it should ever become necessary to fire me, I would request that you instead contemplate asking me to find a job at which I am more effective.)

Hanushek’s solution – fire the bad teachers – is very simple, but it requires several assumptions that I don’t think we should be so quick to grant.

Assumptions

1. Standardized tests accurately measure student achievement.
2. The teachers whose students don’t make progress on the tests are the bad teachers.
3. There is a line of average teachers at the door waiting to be hired.
4. No factors other than teacher quality are significant.

Peruse this list, and note that Hanushek’s plan falls apart if even one of these assumptions is false. In fact, they all are.

Assumption: Standardized tests accurately measure student achievement.

False. The tests that students are given are deeply flawed indeed. Many of the questions do not test what they purport to test, and test-taking itself has become it’s own skill set that schools ignore at their own peril. If we’re careful, we can use some the results to identify areas in need of improvement. But the tests on the whole are way too idiosyncratic to use the overall scores as a basis for high-stakes decision making.

Assumption: The teachers whose students don’t make progress on the tests are the bad teachers.

False. In an August 2010 paper for the Economic Policy Institute, a team of highly distinguished education researchers laid out the case against the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. Bottom line: It doesn’t work. Test scores are simply an ineffective statistical measure for identifying bad teachers. If you don’t find twenty pages of research from a panel of experts compelling, then you can read about this well-respected hard-working teacher who got slammed by a statistical formula.

Assumption: There is a line of average teachers at the door waiting to be hired.

False. In fact, teacher recruitment and retention is becoming a serious problem. A McKinsey study, Closing the Talent Gap, describes the decline in the teaching profession’s ability to compete in the labor market.

However, I suspect there is a bit of condescension towards the profession of teaching when we assume we can just go out and hire average teachers. The implication is that the average person would make an average teacher, rather than acknowledging that teaching requires a particular set of qualities (e.g., diligence, patience, intelligence, and a calling to want to do it) for someone to even be an average teacher. To glibly say that we can just fire the bad teachers and hire average ones is unintentionally insulting.

Assumption: No factors other than teacher quality are significant.

False. Hanushek anticipates this rebuttal, and is kind enough to provide examples of other factors that are not significant:

The initiatives we have emphasized in policy discussions—class-size reduction, curriculum revamping, reorganization of school schedule, investment in technology—all fall far short of the impact that good teachers can have in the classroom. Moreover, many of these interventions can be very costly.

Costly? I thought we were discussing what is most effective. Aren’t we having a national education crisis? Hanushek has moved past his role as researcher and now is making policy judgements. Danny Westneat argues effectively against the idea that class size is irrelevant, so I don’t have to. Teachers already know the importance of class size, and I suspect that the Reformers do as well. Similarly, other initiatives we take to improve education, costly or no, are based on research and accumulation of best practices. Even if we let Hanushek fire all of the bad teachers, we would still want to implement successful education initiatives. Sorry.

Neither side is happy with our current educational system. But Reformers seem to offer nothing but slapdash solutions that keep expenses low but ignore the facts on the ground. It seems, then, we have a choice to make. Do we want to have a public education system in this country? Many do not, and would rather see the free market take over education. Charter schools seem to be a first step in that direction, and I think the Reformers who tout them have become, wittingly or unwittingly, somewhat of a stalking horse for the movement against public education. Diane Ravitch, in her eloquent response to Waiting for Superman, discusses why charter schools aren’t the panacea they’re often held up as. She also discusses the impact of poverty on student achievement, and the dangers of ignoring it in the national discussion. Paying teachers more? Keeping class size down? Addressing the needs of high-poverty schools? It all seems so… costly.

That’s what it’s going to take, though. If we want a high-quality public education system, we’re going to have to pay for it. These may be troubled economic times, but really it’s just a question of priorities. If we’re going to have public education at all, we need to increase, not decrease, funding for it. We need to increase it by a lot. Reformer “solutions” only distract from the real issue. They want us to look at charter schools, but if we look closely enough, we’ll see that the most successful charter schools are able to spend much more per student than the public schools who are expected to emulate them.

And so, we must choose between abolishing public education and funding it adequately. Abolishing it is not really a choice at all, and would lead to an even worse crisis than we have now. But, if we can adjust our priorities and give our students the schools they deserve, then, as Dan Quayle said, “We are going to have the best educated American people in the world.” (Should we be blaming his teachers?)

I met with my middle-school classes on Thursday. They have finished reading the plays, and we were able put together plans for our Digital Shakespeare projects. Plans may change, and who knows what will happen as we head into test prep season, but here is where we have decided to go by the end of the year.

6th Grade The 6th grade class has decided to retell the story of Antony and Cleopatra via Cleopatra’s Facebook page. We are currently discussing what that will look like on our discussion forum, but some of the ideas discussed include status updates, wall posts, photos, and video snippets of students performing scenes from the original play that might have been “uploaded” by characters. We even have a student who knows how to create a mock-up Facebook page when all of the other work is done. This project has a lot of potential! “Marc Antony has changed his relationship status to Married. Dislike!”

7th Grade The 7th grade class is doing a stage production of Macbeth. The plan is to film each scene and create a website with embedded videos, along with student writing about the play and emendations linked from the text. Both teacher and students know this is a very ambitious project, but they have made a commitment to put the time in. If they do, this project will be phenomenal. If they don’t, or if circumstances intervene, it will be my job to make sure the end result does honor to the work they were able to put in. This is similar to a project I did with fifth-grade students years ago, but these students are a little older and the technology is so much better now. I really hope this happens.

8th Grade The 8th grade class will not be available to me much after testing season, since they typically get pulled out for various senior-related activities throughout June, but I think our idea is quite manageable in the time we have left. The students want to create a trailer for a non-existant movie version of As You Like It. Students are currently watching real movie trailers (which are easily accessible online) to notice what features they have in common. This will be one of those movie trailers you see in the theatre that tells you the whole story of the movie, so the final product will respect the play and demonstrate student comprehension as well.

I’ll continue to post updates about the projects here, and hope to share the final projects here as well. Needless to say, I’m very excited by the possibilities! Stay tuned…

I recently saw a particularly poignant piece of graffito etched on a friend’s Facebook wall:

A public union employee, a tea party activist and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, “Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.”

And while this might easily refer to any number of anti-labor sentiments, it seems most appropriate as a reaction to the current – inexplicable – War on Teachers that has been raging in the media lately.

If you haven’t seen last Thursday’s Daily Show, you really need to go watch it. In a brilliant piece at the top of the show, Jon Stewart demonstrates the hypocrisy of the right-wing talking heads when talking about teachers. Later, he interviews education truth-teller Diane Ravitch, who lays out the rest of the argument.

If you want to understand the conversations surrounding education reform, then – as Tom Tomorrow says in this week’s strip – that’s all you need to know.

I was talking to my graduate students about the literacy standards last night, and predictably got pulled off on a tangent about accountability. I found myself making a point that I’ve alluded to before, but it’s worth making explicit now.

Robert Benchley famously said “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” I will put myself in the former category when I say that, generally, there are two kinds of people who talk about standards and accountability.

The first believes that anything worth doing is worth doing well. In order to make sure we’re doing the best job we can, it’s important to measure our results, so we can identify areas for potential improvement and apply strategies for intervention where they will do the most good.

The second believes that taxpayer-funded education is one of the evils of socialism and must be eradicated. In order to make the necessary changes, evidence must be gathered that the public education system is a failure, so that arguments to turn education over to the free market will be more persuasive.

And my point was that, when you hear someone talking about standards and accountability, it’s important to know which of these two groups that person is in.

Today I gave a workshop for Social Studies teachers on teaching our middle school history units. To illustrate the importance of learning history, I showed this clip.

This isn’t about ideology or politics. It’s frightening to me that a member of the United States House of Representatives, of either party, could be so dangerously unaware (deliberately or no) of the history of our nation. But the fact that she is considered a thought leader by so many on the other side gives me ideological concerns as well.

This week’s testing item is a favorite of mine to use as an example, because it illustrates just how careful we need to be when looking at standardized testing data.

We will be looking at Item 16 on the 2009 New York State Grade 6 Exam. The performance indicator is “5.G14 Calculate perimeter of basic geometric shapes drawn on a coordinate plane (rectangles and shapes composed of rectangles having sides with integer lengths and parallel to the axes).” You can click the figure below to enlarge.

What is this question testing? Does it fit the performance indicator? Which of the wrong answers would you predict students would choose the most often? Why? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?

The sixth-graders I’m working with are studying figurative language now, so we looked at figurative language in a scene from Antony and Cleopatra. They enjoyed the “salad days” metaphor, and the exchange where Cleopatra asks her servant Mardian about what it’s like to be a eunuch.

Cleo. Hast thou affections?
Mar. Yes, gracious madam.
Cleo. Indeed!
Mar. Not in deed, madam; for I can do nothing.

In other Shakespeare teaching news, I met with the eighth-graders who are doing As You Like It, and it looks like I will be working with them after all. And I’ve also hooked up with an enthusiastic seventh-grade class that has already read Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing, and Romeo and Juliet. It looks like I have a few online classrooms to set up.

More to come!

In this somewhat new blog feature, I will offer up a question from the statewide examinations that New York City students take each year. The purpose of this will not be for you to try to provide the correct answer, but rather to join me in examining the question. What does it tell us about student understanding? What do each of the wrong answers mean? What is this question testing? What is it really testing? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?

I gave a workshop for data teams on Friday. Three of the groups were examining last year’s 4th grade ELA scores, which I knew meant that we’d be talking about Abigail. In my visits to schools, I’ve found that students who took this exam had a lot of trouble on questions relating to this poem (click to enlarge):

Students had trouble on a number of the questions, but we will just look at one: Item 21 on the 2010 New York State Grade 4 ELA Exam:

The intended performance indicator is “Make predictions, draw conclusions, and make inferences about events and characters,” but we can be the judge of that.

What is this question testing? Does it fit the performance indicator? Which of the wrong answers would you predict students would choose the most often? Why? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?