I REMEMBER THE first time I began to realize that there might be a second hidden “achievement gap”—or what I’ve to come to call a global achievement gap—between what our more academically able students are being taught versus what they will need to succeed in today’s world. I was accompanying a group of program officers from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on visits to several “early colleges” funded by the Foundation (programs that combine high school and community college courses so that students can get college credit while still in high school). They wanted some assistance in determining what “rigor” should look like in classrooms and in assessing the progress their grantees were making as they strived to ensure that all students were “college-ready.”
We visited a total of eighteen classes over three days at three schools. Debriefing our school visits, we concluded that only one class out of the eighteen appeared to be adequately preparing students with the skills and level of intellectual challenge they’d need to succeed in college. We all came away from our visits feeling sobered and somewhat disheartened. But it was a conversation with some students in an Advanced Placement chemistry course that especially upset me. Let me describe what I saw and heard:
Students are in groups of two and three, mixing chemicals according to directions that are written on the blackboard. Once the mixtures are prepared, they heat the concoction with Bunsen burners. According to the directions on the board, they are supposed to record their observations on a worksheet. I watch a group of three young men whose mixture is giving off a thin spiral of smoke as it’s being heated—something that none of the other students’ beakers are doing. One student looks back at the blackboard and then at his notes. Then all three stop what they are doing—apparently waiting for the teacher, who is sitting at her desk, to come help them.
“What’s happening to your mixture?” I ask the group.
“Donno,” one mutters. “We must have mixed it up wrong.”
“What’s your hypothesis about what happened—why it’s smoking?”
The three look at one another, and then the student who has been doing all the speaking looks at me and shrugs.
“Do you know what a hypothesis is?” I press.
My question is greeted with blank looks. Finally, their spokesperson says, “We had it on a test as a vocab question. Isn’t it—like—an idea of what’s supposed to happen?”
These kids—who have to be among the most academically able in the school to be allowed to take an AP class—were taking a course where they were supposed to be learning college-level skills and content. But what I’d seen barely qualified as an introductory cooking class. All they were doing was following the “recipe” that the teacher had copied onto the board. When their cake flopped, so to speak, they had no idea what to do. What were these students supposed to be learning? It certainly wasn’t how to apply the scientific method to the study of a problem or the analysis of a phenomenon—arguably one of the most important skills all high school graduates need to master.
Remember my conversation in the first chapter with Jonathan King, the MIT scientist? He told me that MIT freshman coming out of high school AP classes know how to pass all the tests, but they don’t know how to observe, and they want to be told what the right answer is. I understood his words, but now I had really seen for myself what he’d been talking about. How are we supposed to compete with the growing numbers of well-educated young people from India and China and elsewhere, if we’re getting results like these, I asked myself as I left the class.
The work that teachers and students are doing in the suburban public schools we consider to be the best in the nation is supposed to be the gold standard for all of our nation’s children. When business leaders, policymakers, and educators call for a “challenging and rigorous education” for all of our students, they’re saying that every adolescent in America should take the kind of college-preparatory curriculum that only some of our students have the opportunity to take today. When Newsweek creates its list of the best high schools in America, all it looks at is the percentage of students taking the rapidly growing Advanced Placement program—courses for which the Educational Testing Service offers an exam that is considered to be as rigorous as what would be expected of college freshmen—or the much smaller International Baccalaureate program (an honors academic program that originated in Europe). The high schools with the greatest number of students taking the most AP and IB courses are considered to be the best. It’s as simple as that. Many of the most selective colleges also weigh the number of AP courses a student has taken in the admissions process. (As we’ll see, however, the number of colleges that actually allow students to place out of freshman-level courses on the basis of having taken AP courses in high school has declined significantly.)
Are these the right measures of success—the gold standard that we should hold up for all teachers and children? To what extent are students who are currently taking what we consider rigorous courses in our high schools learning the Seven Survival Skills? From powerful books written by Jonathan Kozol and others, we’ve known for some time that many poor and minority kids leave school barely knowing how to read or write—and this is truly a national disgrace and a catastrophic problem. But how are some of our most academically well-prepared students doing (or at least the students we consider to be prepared)? Are they learning how to think critically, solve problems, work collaboratively, take initiative, communicate effectively, access and analyze information, be curious and imaginative? To answer these questions, we’re going to visit some classrooms together in this chapter.
A Tale of Two Cities
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Remember this opening line to the classic novel by Charles Dickens? It sums up what I’ve seen in the years that I have spent observing and working in some of our country’s most highly regarded suburban public school districts. You walk into the main entrance of most suburban high schools, and the first thing you usually see are glass cases on the wall filled with trophies—celebrations of various sports championships. School spirit in most of America’s high schools still ebbs and flows according to how well the sports teams are performing. Walking through the hallways, you are struck by how clean and well-maintained the buildings are—unlike what you’d find in our crumbling urban schools. There is little or no graffiti on the walls, no cigarette smoke or butts in the bathrooms, and only an occasional piece of trash on the floor. When the bells ring for the change of classes, the corridors quickly fill with crowds of neatly dressed students who are talking to friends or listening to their iPods as they make their way to their next class. No fights and rarely an angry word. Except for the ubiquitous white earbuds and changes in fashion, you might think you’d been transported back to the 1950s.
By all outward appearances, it is the best of times for these students and their teachers and administrators. But the real question is not about how the sports teams are doing or how well-maintained the building looks or even how well the students are behaving. The important question is What’s going on in classrooms? Sure, sports are important, but why don’t we see more public celebrations of academic achievement in our high schools? Parents and community members and even educators sometimes forget that the real purpose of high school is to produce students who will be capable citizens and participants in our democracy—students who know how to solve problems and add value, both in their communities and in the workplace. It’s not just about winning teams. Only a small number of students play varsity sports—usually 10 percent or fewer—and only a tiny fraction of those will ever have a career in sports. By contrast, all students’ futures are profoundly affected by the quality of teaching and learning in a high school.
In order to really understand what’s happening in classrooms, you need to observe teaching and learning in lots of schools. I’m going to take you on a “learning walk” in some schools across the country. This learning walk is one way to essentially audit what’s taking place in a group of classes in a given period of time. If you spend ten minutes or so in eight to ten classes over several hours (along with district or school administrators and teacher leaders who may accompany you), you have a snapshot of the teaching and learning that take place in that school. It’s obviously not a way to evaluate individual teachers or an entire course, but this kind of sampling detects patterns within and across schools. If we know what to look for and what questions to ask students, learning walks can be a very accurate way of assessing the purpose of a lesson and the skills that students are learning in their classes—especially when augmented by other clues and evidence, such as students’ written work and the kinds of homework assignments students are given.
Like any sampling process in research, learning walks are not a 100 percent reliable means of assessing all that goes on in a school. But the idea is that every minute in class is precious—especially in the typical forty-five-minute high school class period—so observing ten-minute slices from a representative sample of classes can tell you a great deal about the students’ learning experiences in a school. Over the last decade or so, I’ve led over 100 learning walks in dozens of school districts in order to train administrators to be instructional leaders—leaders who know that improving instruction is their most important job—and to help them determine priorities for strengthening the work of the teachers in their schools.
Before we go into some classrooms, though, I need to explain the context and my ground rules. First, we will not visit the stereotypical urban high schools—which we know have been failing to educate students for years. My intention, rather, is to look at what goes on in schools that are considered to be “high-performing” models of successful education. Both of the schools we’ll visit are ranked among the best in the state where they are located—according to their state’s standardized test scores. Second, what I found in my learning walks in these two high schools was consistent with what I’ve seen in similar “good” suburban high schools all over the country. I choose to profile what was going on in these schools because they are representative of the kind of teaching and learning that’s taking place for our college-bound students in our best public high schools. My purpose is not to offer a muckraking exposé; indeed, it would be unfair to the hard-working professionals in these school districts to single them out in some way, so I use pseudonyms for the schools and their administrators. In fact, in both of the districts where these schools are located, the administrators were particularly interested in developing strategies for improving teaching and learning. What makes these districts unusual, then, when we compare them to many middle-class schools in this country, is not what’s going on in their classrooms but, rather, their leaders’ willingness to admit that, despite the good reputation of their schools and districts, they nevertheless need to improve.
The first high school, which I will call Jefferson High, is located in a southern state that was among the first to take on the problem of improving student achievement. Beginning in the late 1980s, a succession of governors has proclaimed education reform to be the state’s top priority, and their legislature was one of the first to create new curriculum standards and new tests. Indeed, the problem of test scores was the reason I was asked to consult to one of their top-performing school districts.
This district—let’s call it Ashland—boasted some of the highest test scores in the state. Ordinarily, this would be cause for celebration in the community—and especially among the school and district leaders. Accustomed to being constantly criticized in the media and having their district’s test scores compared to those of other districts, most superintendents who had test scores like Ashland’s would, understandably, be quite complacent. But most superintendents aren’t like the man whom I call Frank. He’d quit a successful career in business because he wanted to do something more meaningful. Although he was new to the job and to the field of education, Frank had been trained to truly analyze the numbers, and what he learned as he compared the district’s state test scores to other data concerned him.
Ashland’s elementary schools were among the highest-ranked in the state, according to their test scores, but Frank discovered that a national test of students’ reading abilities, which the district had administered in addition to the mandated state tests, revealed that almost one-third of his students were leaving 5th grade with reading abilities that were a year or more below grade level. Ashland was understandably proud of the fact that more than 80 percent of their high school students graduated. The problem, Frank learned, was that very few graduates ever completed a college degree—fewer than 20 percent!
Frank knew that there was a relationship between these two findings—that students who leave elementary school reading well below their grade level are at risk of dropping out of high school or, if they do complete their diploma, are unlikely to succeed in college. But Frank wanted to know what else might be wrong. To what extent, he wondered, were the high school teachers adequately preparing their students for college?
I went to visit some classes with the high school principal, who was also committed to understanding this problem. Jefferson, like most of our nation’s high schools, is organized on the basis of “tracks.” Students are put into groups according to their academic abilities—as determined by test scores and recommendations from previous years’ teachers. While many American high schools have four or even five groups or tracks, this one had only three—one for students designated as college-bound, one for those who need only a “general” education (which, today, is an absurd idea), and one for those who need some kind of remediation. To better understand the problem of the low college completion rate, we visited only classes in the first track. Here is a sampling of what we found:
Honors Geometry. Students are filling in worksheets with problems. One student tells us it’s the homework for tomorrow. The teacher remains at his desk, grading papers.
12th Grade English. Students are working in groups to translate different scenes from Macbeth into contemporary English. I ask a student to share with me what the longest paper was that he’s had to write so far this year.
“We’ve written two papers so far,” the student tells me. (This was late fall.) “The longest one was a two-page ‘How To’ essay.”
“What about last year?” I ask.
“I had to do a five-page research paper.”
9th Grade Global Studies. Students are at their desks, using colored pencils to fill in blank maps of Europe. They all have their textbooks open in front of them and are using the map in the text as reference.
10th Grade World Civilization. Teacher: “Adam Smith was for free trade. Can anyone tell me why?”
A student in the front row mutters a reply that is barely audible.
Teacher: “Right. Now, what were the six reasons for British success in 1700?”
No hands go up. The teacher answers his own question and then asks, “How was geography an advantage for England during this time?” Not waiting for a student to reply, the teacher goes on to answer the question. After several similar questions, students are directed to fill out a worksheet that is on their laptops.
12th Grade Economics. The class is watching a faded color film about a prospector in the Old West who can’t get the food and mining supplies he needs. The tape is so old that the words on the sound track can barely be heard. There are no questions on the board, and no students are taking any notes.
9th Grade Integrated Science. Students are taking a mid-term test on electricity and magnetism. I ask for a copy of the test and observe that all of the questions on the test are multiple choice.
Reading this description, you may be tempted to conclude that the trouble with this school is the teachers—that they seem to be just going through the motions or are not giving students enough challenge. Many business leaders I talk to think that the number-one problem in public education is powerful teachers’ unions and tenure laws. They believe that the quality of teaching is mediocre in many schools because unions are protecting tenured teachers who are ineffective for whatever reason. I’m certainly not a fan of tenure, but I view the problem differently. First, the quality of teachers’ preparation, continuing professional development, and supervision is very low in our nation’s schools—a problem I explore in Chapter 4. In addition, almost all of the state tests for which teachers have to prepare students are computer-scored, multiple-choice assessments of factual recall. So most teachers are doing the best job that they know how to do, and they are teaching what they have been told are the subject-content standards that their students will be tested on. The majority of teachers I meet go to work every morning wanting to make a difference for at least some kids. They’re certainly not in it for the money.
Most teacher evaluation systems are checklists of teachers’ techniques, which must be filled out periodically by school administrators. Is the purpose of the lesson and the homework assignment on the board? Are the content standards to be covered in the lesson made clear to students? And so on. Rather than look only at what teachers are doing, I try to assess what students are being asked to do: the specific skills and knowledge that students are expected to master and the level of intellectual challenge in the lesson. What the teacher does is the means by which the students learn—not the end.
Thus, for example, I listen for the nature of the questions that students are asked during class or in written assignments, while also observing how much a teacher probes students’ thinking with follow-up questions or insists that students supply more detail or supporting evidence for their answers. I have consistently found that the kinds of questions students are asked and the extent to which a teacher challenges students to explain their thinking or expand on their answers are reliable indicators of the level of intellectual rigor in a class. If the questions require only factual recall—which is most often the case—then students are probably not being asked to do very much in the way of reasoning, analysis, or hypothesizing—and the primary skill being taught is memorization. If I see this pattern in a number of classes, then I can reliably predict how well a school’s students might perform on an essay exam or how well prepared they are for college.
Next, during class discussions, I look at who’s answering the teacher’s questions. If only one or two hands are going up in response to questions—and they are usually the same hands in the front row—the implication is that few students are engaged in the lesson, and that the teacher is accustomed to calling on the “usual suspects” or, even worse, is focused only on those students whom he or she considers willing or able to learn.
Then I ask myself two questions:
1. What is the difference between what I saw in this high school class versus what I’d see being taught in, say, a 6th grade class? In other words, do I see evidence that students are being progressively intellectually more challenged as they move into higher grades?
2. What is my level of confidence that, with more classes like the ones I’ve just seen, these students will be adequately prepared for college or for today’s workplace?
When the principal and I concluded the learning walk after observing these classes and a number of others, our answers to my two questions will likely not come as a surprise to you. We were concerned. We came away from our time in classrooms with data that suggested why so few Jefferson high school graduates were completing college. They simply weren’t being taught the skills they’d need to succeed. This problem is hardly unique to Jefferson: As we learned in the Introduction, 40 percent of all students who start college need some form of academic remediation.1 Yes, there are many reasons why students don’t finish college—lack of direction in their lives and financial burdens are serious problems for many—but too often students simply lack the skills that are essential for success in college: the ability to think critically, read complex material, apply knowledge to new problems, and write well. Lacking these skills, they become frustrated, discouraged, and lose all confidence that they can succeed.
Why weren’t the educators at Jefferson teaching these skills—the ones that matter most? They’ve been told that teaching subject content is more important than teaching skills. And they’re being held accountable for getting students to pass the state test rather than for ensuring that their graduates do well after high school. So if you want to point a finger, save it for the next chapter when we look at the kinds of tests for which these teachers have to prepare their students.
Lincoln High, the name I’ll give to the second school I’ve chosen for our learning walk, is located in a New England state that has long enjoyed a reputation for having some of the best public schools and highest standardized test scores in the country. This high school is one of the highest performing in the state, and it’s been named by a national publication as one of the top fifty public high schools in the country. It’s located in a district I’ll call Zenith. Zenith would hardly be considered a middle-class school district. In fact, the median family income in this district is approaching $175,000. Those who can afford to buy homes here and pay the high property taxes choose to live in communities like Zenith in lieu of having to pay private school tuitions. Indeed, many of the executives’ children whom I interviewed in the first chapter go to high schools just like Lincoln. Lincoln graduates nearly all of its students, and almost all who graduate go on to college—including many who are accepted at some of the country’s most selective universities. High schools like Lincoln, then, think of themselves as incubators for the future leaders of our country.
Grace is the name I’ve given the superintendent who asked me to evaluate Zenith. She had read one of my articles in which I questioned whether Advanced Placement courses were the best standard for academic rigor today. Although she led a school district that was already considered to be outstanding by every measure, Grace was a “teacher’s superintendent” and very aware of the importance of good instruction. She was concerned that the district’s teacher evaluation system, which it negotiated with the union, didn’t give classroom teachers actual feedback that they could use to improve. (This is nearly a universal problem, as we’ll see.)
Grace wanted me to work with her administrators and teacher leaders to develop a common definition of excellent teaching that might eventually be used to improve the formal evaluation system. I agreed on the condition that she accompany me for a learning walk at Lincoln. I wanted us both to have some “baseline” data about the quality of teaching on an average day. Grace had never observed any classes unannounced—a common problem in education—and she was curious about what we’d see. We discussed our observation criteria before starting our walk and agreed that we’d look for evidence that students were exhibiting skills such as reasoning and critical thinking in their oral and written work. We also agreed that a working definition of excellent teaching would include challenging all students to think every day in every class. Here’s what we saw:
Advanced Placement English. It is the beginning of class, and the teacher explains that the students are going to review their notes on the literature they will use to answer questions on the Advanced Placement exam, which will be given next week. There are seven students in the room, and all of them are deeply slouched in their chairs, which are arranged in a semicircle around the teacher’s desk.
The teacher is seated at her desk, as she asks: “Now what is Woolf saying about the balance between an independent versus a social life?”
Students ruffle through their notebooks. Finally, a young woman, reading from her notes, answers, “Mrs. Ramsey sought meaning from social interactions.”
“Yes, that’s right. Now what about the artist, Lily? How did she construct meaning?”
“Through her painting,” another student mumbles, her face scrunched close to her notes.
“And so what is Woolf saying about the choices these two women have made, and what each has sacrificed?”
No reply. The teacher sighs, gets up, goes to the board, and begins writing.
Social Issues Honors Seminar. Students are watching a segment from 60 Minutes. There are no questions on the board, and none of the students has any paper in front of them. In response to my whispered question, a student tells me they watch a selection from 60 Minutes once a week.
“Why?” I ask. “Is there an assignment?”
“No” is the reply. “It’s just to be better informed, I guess.”
The video clip ends, and the teacher chooses a student to do his presentation in front of the class. He presents a three-minute, seven-slide PowerPoint on Karl Rove, which includes a political cartoon, Rove’s biography, and a description of his duties in the Bush administration. It is completely unrelated to the 60 Minutes segment they’d just watched. As soon as the presentation is finished, and without any questions or discussion of the PowerPoint, another student is called up to present.
9th Grade Honors English. A student is standing in front of the class giving a two-minute presentation on subject-verb agreement. Another student’s presentation on comma use in dependent and independent clauses follows. The apparent goal of the assignment is to have students teach one another the rules of grammar.
Advanced Placement U.S. Government. The teacher is finishing up reviewing answers to a sample test that the class took the previous day, which contains eighty multiple-choice questions related to the functions and branches of the federal government.
When he’s done, he says, “Okay, now let’s look at some sample free-response questions from previous years’ AP exams.” He flips the overhead projector on, turns out the lights, and reads from the text of a transparency: “Give 3 reasons why the Iron Triangle may be criticized as undemocratic.”
“How would you answer this question?” the teacher asks. No one replies. “Okay, who can give me a definition of the Iron Triangle?”
“The military-industrial-congressional complex,” a student pipes up.
“Okay, so what would be three reasons why it would be considered undemocratic?” The teacher calls on a student in the front row who has his hand half-raised, and he answers the question in a voice that we can’t hear over the hum of the projector’s fan.
“Good. Now let’s look at another one.” The teacher flips another transparency onto the projector. “Now this question is about bureaucracy. Let me tell you how to answer this one. . . .”
Honors Geometry. The teacher is reviewing material for an upcoming test.
“Now, what are the similarities between triangles and polygons?” the teacher asks. No one answers. “Come one, we’ve studied this,” she pleads. “Okay, then, so what does ‘proportionality’ mean?” No hands. The teacher waits and then finally asks, “Do you remember when we talked about proportionality when measuring the human body—like the ratio of waist to hip measurement or height to weight?”
Several students nod. “Okay, then,” the teachers smiles. “That’s proportionality. Now on the test, I’ll probably give you problems where you have to use polygon congruence to solve them and also use triangle congruence to prove that parts of triangles are congruent.”
Advanced Placement Chemistry. We learn that half of the class is out of school on a field trip. The remaining students are milling about and talking or sitting at their desks. Some are doing homework. The teacher is at his desk attending to paperwork.
Advanced Placement Environmental Studies. Students wander in slowly and take their seats. They continue to talk, while waiting for the class to start. After more than five minutes by the clock on the wall, the teacher gets up from his desk and speaks.
“Okay, we’re starting a unit on alternative energy today. So I have a question for you: How is charcoal made?”
No students raise their hands.
“Mesquite should tell you,” the teacher continues. “How is mesquite made? Basically it’s carbon—a clean version of coal that you find underground. Now, what do we mean by ‘sustainable’?” Without waiting for a reply, the teacher continues, “Wind and solar are sustainable, right? How about some other examples?”
“Muscle power,” a student answers.
Grace and I continue through the school and observe five more classes—none substantively different from those I’ve just described. All of them were designated as honors or Advanced Placement courses. Eventually, we call it quits and head to her office to debrief. During the short car ride back to her office downtown, Grace is silent.
Once we’re seated in her office, she finally speaks. “I just can’t believe it,” she says, shaking her head. “When I do scheduled visits for the purposes of evaluation, it’s nothing like what we saw today.”
“Based on the criteria we discussed before our learning walk, in how many of the twelve classes we observed did you think there was evidence of student thinking?” I ask.
Grace replies in a subdued voice: “I’d say we went zero for twelve.”
In fact, in the majority of the classes that we observed, teachers had a common purpose—a “core curriculum,” if you will—just as they did at Jefferson. It’s often referred to as “test-prep,” and a growing number of people believe—and studies suggest—that teaching for the sake of succeeding on the state and national standardized tests is quickly becoming an epidemic in our nation’s schools—one that is profoundly infecting our students and their ability to become critical thinkers. Before we discuss this problem further, I want to take you on one more learning walk.
You’re in the Army Now
The Department of Defense runs its own school system, which, in 2002, served more than 100,000 students in over 200 schools located on or near military bases all over the world. A major study of these Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) schools, released in 2001, revealed that the system consistently outperformed most public school districts in America. At the time the study was done, DoDEA schools enrolled a minority population that averaged 40 percent of the total, nearly half their students qualified for free or reduced-price meals, and their annual mobility rate was 35 percent due to transfers—and yet these schools graduate 97 percent of their students, and the majority go on to college.2
The National Education Goals Panel sponsored the DoDEA study. Its press release on these intriguing results quoted the Indiana governor at the time, Frank O’Bannon, who was chairman of the Panel: “The Department of Defense education formula may be one of the best-kept secrets in education, until now. We recognize that the DOD school system is unique in some ways, but there are important lessons for all schools. Educators across the nation should take a close look at these recommendations for improving the academic achievement of all students and closing the achievement gap.”3
The eight recommendations that followed were a general list of good education practices such as “high expectations for all,” “small schools,” “staff development,” “sufficient financial resources,” “organizational coherence,” “parental involvement,” and so on that go a long way toward explaining how these schools get better results when compared to many urban school districts. In addition, I observed that the DoDEA schools are better funded, their staff members are better trained, their schools are smaller so that students get more individual attention, there is far less leadership turnover, and, most important, they have the same high expectations for all students.
I was immediately curious when I learned about the DoDEA schools. It appeared that they were doing a dramatically better job of closing the achievement gap between low-income students and middle-class students—a significant accomplishment. It was exciting news. But what would I actually find in the classrooms, I wondered? Would the teaching and learning look any different from what I’d seen in conventional public schools?
Five years later, I had a chance to find out.4 Although the educators in Department of Defense schools are all civilians, their leaders are quite influenced by military culture, and to a greater extent than in most school districts, they are very committed to the idea of continuous improvement. Since the study was released, this school system that serves military parents had implemented a five-year plan in which they trained all of their principals to focus on what they called “standards-based” instruction and to make “data-driven” decisions. (I’ll explain these terms in a moment.) Several of their leaders had attended a summer institute at Harvard where I had taught, and they subsequently approached me there to ask if I’d help them think about how to evaluate this initiative.
Eventually, I was on a flight to another country, where I would live on a military base for a week, visit schools, and train educational leaders to use an assessment tool I developed to measure the effectiveness of their principals. This evaluation consisted of a number of components, but the most important was observing lessons and interviewing principals on their assessment of teaching and learning in their schools. What follows is a sampling of the lessons we observed in several middle schools and high schools over the course of the week:
7th Grade Language Arts. Students are at their desks, filling out worksheets. Looking over a student’s shoulder, I find that the sheets highlight different sentences and that the task here is to put commas in the right places within the sentences.
7th Grade Science. The teacher is teaching a lesson on gravity. “Okay, let’s review your textbook reading from last night. Who was Isaac Newton?”
A girl in the front row waves her hand frantically, and the teacher calls on her. “He discovered gravity,” she says proudly.
“Okay,” the teacher replies. “When was he born?”
No hands.
“Look it up in your text,” the teacher advises.
While the students are opening their books, the girl in the front row who’d answered the first question speaks, “What’s a galaxy and what’s a universe and are we going to learn about the stars?”
“Have you found the date yet?” The teacher asks the class, ignoring the student’s question.
9th Grade U.S. Honors History. Students are working in groups of three. Judging from the animated conversations taking place, they appear to be very engaged in their group activity. According to the directions on the board, each group is supposed to use song, dance, and pantomime to illustrate a portion of a chapter of the history text that they’ve been assigned.
I talk to a group of three girls who, they tell me, are doing a skit from a part of the textbook that describes the life of the Plains Indians. They are planning a pantomime about the tribe’s use of buffalo and the farming of squash. “What are you learning from this activity?” I ask.
“We’re learning to get out of our comfort zone,” one girl replies.
“What about history?”
“We’re learning some vocabulary,” the same girl answers.
“What vocabulary—can you show me some of the new words you’re learning?”
The girl who’s been answering the questions hesitates a moment, until admitting, “Well, they’re not new exactly. It’s more of a review. We studied Indians in 5th grade.”
11th Grade World History. Students are filling out a worksheet that requires them to answer questions on colonization—which countries colonized what areas when. They are using the maps in their textbooks as reference.
Advanced Placement Art. Students are working at tables or easels all around the spacious studio, focusing on a wide variety of drawing and painting projects. I randomly pick a student to ask about her project. She tells me that she’s working on a charcoal portrait of a young woman, which will go into the portfolio that’s a part of the AP requirement for the course.
“How do you assess your work—how do you know how good it is?” I wonder.
Her face takes on a puzzled expression. Finally, she answers, “Well, I can see that the work I’m doing now is much better than what I did last year.”
“So can you explain to me how this drawing is better than one you might have done a year ago?”
She smiles slightly and shrugs. “I don’t know. . . .”
In the week we spent observing classes, the pattern rarely varied. With the exception of one math class, which I will describe in a moment, the purpose of nearly every lesson was for students to memorize factual content. The reason for this became clear as I explored with the team what training the principals had received and what was meant by the terms standards-based and data-driven, which were the key concepts in the five-year plan and subsequent professional development that all principals had received. It turned out that for a school system that serves children of military dependents and, indeed, for nearly every state education agency in the United States, standards-based education has come to be defined as the ability to ensure that every teacher’s lesson focuses on a particular academic content standard—out of a list that has been developed by academics and curriculum specialists and then incorporated into textbooks and promulgated through ongoing professional development sessions for teachers. Indeed, all over the country, education “experts” have determined that the way to improve the academic “rigor” of high school classes is to teach more academic content.
These academic content standards are all organized by grade level and subject. So, for example, every 7th grade Language Arts teacher is expected to teach kids the proper use of commas so that they’ll pass the standardized tests on grammar and punctuation. (Why do you suppose they also teach them again in 9th grade, as we saw at Lincoln? Why do even 12th grade English teachers complain that students can’t punctuate their sentences correctly?) Similarly, all of the 7th grade science teachers are required to teach specific “units of study” like the one we saw on gravity. It is only in an occasional honors or arts class where someone may see deviations from the standard lesson. Likewise, what data-driven really means is simply that principals are trained to use the results from standardized tests to determine the extent to which teachers are, in fact, teaching the required content. The more the teachers cover the required content, the better the test scores will be for a school—and the effectiveness of principals is assessed by the progress they make in steadily improving the test scores of their school.
There is no agreement—in schools that serve children of military parents or in any other school district I know of—that all teachers should be teaching every student how to think. Teachers are expected only to cover the specified academic content. The proliferation of content standards actually makes it much more difficult for teachers to focus on inquiry and analysis and even writing. In addition, teachers have not been trained to teach all students how to reason, hypothesize, analyze, and so on. Most have never even seen lessons illustrating how this would be accomplished.
The exceptions to the rule—the teachers who use academic content as a means of teaching students how to communicate, reason, and solve problems—are rare, fewer than one in twenty in my experience. Their lessons stand out in stark contrast to what you see in most classrooms. I was lucky enough to witness one such lesson while visiting a school on the base that week, which I’ll briefly describe here:
Algebra II. It is the beginning of the period, and the teacher is finishing up writing a problem on the board. He turns to the students, who are sitting in desk-chairs that are arranged in squares of four that face one another. “You haven’t seen this kind of problem before,” he explains. “And solving it will require you to use concepts from both geometry and algebra. Each group will try to develop at least two different ways of solving this problem. After all the groups have finished, I’ll randomly choose someone from each group who will write one of your proofs on one of the boards around the room, and I’ll ask that person to explain the process your group used. Are there any questions?”
There are none, and the groups quickly go to work. There is a great deal of animated discussion within all of the groups as they take the problem apart and talk about different ways to solve it. While they work, the teacher circulates from group to group. Occasionally, a student will ask a question, but the teacher never answers it. Instead, he either asks another question in response, such as “Have you considered . . .?” or “Why did you assume that?” or simply “Have you asked someone in your group?”
What are some of the design elements that make this an effective lesson—a lesson in which students are, in fact, learning a number of the Seven Survival Skills, while also mastering academic content? First, students are given a complex, multi-step problem that is different from the ones they’ve seen in the past and, to solve it, they have to apply previously acquired knowledge from both geometry and algebra. Mere memorization won’t get them very far in this lesson; critical-thinking and problem-solving skills are required. Second, they have to find two ways to solve the problem, which requires some initiative and imagination. Just getting the correct answer isn’t good enough; they have to explain their proofs—using effective communication skills. Third, the teacher does not spoon-feed students the answers; he uses questions to push students’ thinking—as well as the limits to their tolerance for ambiguity. Finally, because the teacher has said that he’ll randomly call on a student to show how the group solved the problem, each student in every group is held accountable. The group can’t rely on the work of one or two students to get by, and the teacher isn’t going to just call on the first student to raise a hand or shout out an answer. Teamwork is required for success.
These students weren’t the only ones learning that day. For the team of educational leaders who accompanied me on the learning walks and then interviewed the schools’ principals, it was a remarkable week. They discovered that their principals could usually name their weakest teachers, but they had little to say about what they had done or might do to help their teachers become more effective. They could also usually name several of their stronger teachers, but none of them had any ideas about how those teachers could improve. The principals, the team concluded, did not have a clear idea of what elements constituted effective instruction, and they did not know what they might do to improve instruction, beyond continuing to emphasize teaching to the standards. They didn’t know because their training in these areas was, to use their leaders’ own words, “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Indeed, none of our nation’s principals in any of our school districts have received adequate training in these areas. Nor have our teachers. This is a problem we’ll explore in Chapter 4.
The most important goal identified by the educational leaders at schools that serve children of military parents, then, was the need to train their principals to be instructional leaders—individuals who know what good teaching looks like and can help all teachers improve continuously. Being standards-based and data-driven wasn’t good enough. They also came away with serious questions about the kinds of tests used to assess learning. These computer-scored, multiple-choice tests measure what students have memorized, but not whether they can apply what they have learned to new situations and problems. The tests are simply not designed to assess reasoning and analytic skills. To the great credit of these leaders, their report back to headquarters was an unflinching analysis of such weaknesses, as well as a call for a new and very different five-year plan.
The Hidden “Gap” Exposed
Here’s a short list to summarize the Seven Survival Skills before we move on:
• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
• Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence
• Agility and Adaptability
• Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
• Effective Oral and Written Communication
• Accessing and Analyzing Information
• Curiosity and Imagination
I focus my observations on high schools for this chapter because students are most developmentally ready to learn what we call critical-thinking skills in high school, and it is a time when they must prepare for the demands of careers and college. By this time, they have matured enough to reflect on their own thinking processes and to begin to understand what skills they will need to succeed as adults. However, elementary schools can and should be teaching thinking skills, as well as how to collaborate and be curious and take initiative. So, how are our nation’s middle-class elementary schools doing on teaching the Seven Survival Skills?
Rather than take you on learning walks through elementary schools where I’ve spent time, let me summarize some key findings from scholars at the University of Virginia whose study of elementary classrooms was recently published in Science.5 Funded by the National Institutes of Health, this is one of the largest studies of its kind. Researchers observed more than 2,500 1st, 3rd, and 5th grade classes in more than 1,000 schools, spread across 400 predominantly middle-class public school districts. Here are some of the things they learned:
• Fifth graders spent more than 90 percent of their time in their seats listening to the teacher or working alone and only about 7 percent of their time working in groups. Findings were similar in 1st and 3rd grades.
• In 5th grade, more than 60 percent of students’ time was spent on improving basic literacy or math skills, while less than 25 percent of their time was devoted to science and social studies.
• The average 5th grader received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem solving or reasoning; this ratio was 10:1 in 1st and 3rd grades.
The researchers summarized the kind of instruction they saw across all three grades:
Typically, over the course of a 20-minute period, instruction involved only one method or mode (e.g., vocabulary worksheet or watching the teacher do math problems), and teachers gave generic feedback on correctness rather than encouraging extension of student performance or discussing alternative solutions. . . . Opportunities to learn for this sample of mostly middle-class students proved highly variable and did not appear congruent with the high performance standards expected for students or for teachers as described by most state teacher certification and licensure documents. Rather, experiences in 5th grade, although highly variable, were geared toward performance of basic reading and math skills, not problem-solving or reasoning skills or other content areas. Few opportunities were provided to learn in small groups, to improve analytical skills, or to interact extensively with teachers.6
The elementary teachers observed in this study were almost exclusively focused on teaching the reading and math basics. Why? As a result of the No Child Left Behind law, their students are being tested every year after 2nd grade on these skills—and these alone. No school wants to be publicly shamed with the brand of “needs improvement,” which is what happens if its students do not make “adequate yearly progress” two years in a row. Indeed, because of NCLB, the curriculum in both elementary and secondary schools all across the country is being limited only to what’s being tested, according to a study conducted by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.7 Among this group’s findings:
Increased time for tested subjects since 2002. About 62 percent of districts reported that they have increased time for English language arts (ELA) and/or math in elementary schools since school year 2001–02 (the year NCLB was enacted), and more than 20 percent reported increasing time for these subjects in middle school since then. Among districts that reported increasing time for ELA and math, the average increase in minutes per week since 2001–02 was substantial, amounting to a 46 percent increase in ELA, a 37 percent increase in math, and a 42 percent increase across the two subjects combined.
Reduced time for other subjects. To accommodate this increased time in ELA and math, 44 percent of districts reported cutting time from one or more other subjects or activities (social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch and/or recess) at the elementary level. Again, the decreases reported by these districts were relatively large, adding up to a total of 141 minutes per week across all of these subjects, on average, or nearly 30 minutes per day. These decreases represent an average reduction of 31 percent in the total instructional time devoted to these subjects since 2001–02.
Greater emphasis on tested content and skills. Since 2001–02, most districts have changed their ELA and math curricula to put greater emphasis on the content and skills covered on the state tests used for NCLB. In elementary-level reading, 84 percent of districts reported that they have changed their curriculum “somewhat” or “to a great extent” to put greater emphasis on tested content; in middle school ELA, 79 percent reported making this change, and in high school ELA, 76 percent. Similarly, in math, 81 percent of districts reported that they have changed their curriculum at the elementary and middle school level to emphasize tested content and skills, and 78 percent reported having done so at the high school level.
The Center on Education Policy study illustrates just what we saw in our learning walks. Increasingly, there is only one curriculum in American public schools today: test-prep. But perhaps this is a justifiable change if more of our students are at least becoming better readers and mathematicians as a result. But here, too, the evidence is troubling. There is a new phenomenon in public education: kids known as “bubble children.” Jennifer Booher-Jennings at Columbia University was one of the first researchers to describe a test-score improvement strategy that focuses on borderline students—students who might pass the tests with some additional instruction.8 She describes a consultant to a school district giving the following advice:
Using the data, you can identify and focus on the kids who are close to passing. The bubble kids. And focus on the kids that count—the ones that show up [transfer in] at Marshall [the fictional name of the school] after October won’t count toward the school’s test scores this year. . . . Take out your classes’ latest benchmark scores and divide your students into three groups. Color the “safe cases,” or kids who will definitely pass, green. Now, here’s the most important part: identify the kids who are “suitable cases for treatment.” Those are the ones who can pass with a little extra help. Color them yellow. Then, color the kids who have no chance of passing this year and the kids that don’t count—the “hopeless cases”—red. You should focus your attention on the yellow kids, the bubble kids. They’ll give you the biggest return on your investment.
Booher-Jennings’s findings were recently confirmed by University of Chicago researchers who found that, among Chicago’s 5th graders, students in the middle of the academic range have made the most academic progress in reading and math, as measured by the standardized tests. However, those who were among the lowest-scoring students had made no progress or had even fallen further behind. And the results for the most gifted students were very uneven, with some making no gain whatsoever.9
To summarize: There is no strong evidence that any of the Seven Survival Skills are being taught at any grade level in American public schools. Instead, class time is narrowly focused on teaching only the skills and content that will be tested. (We’ll explore the quality of these tests in the next chapter.) Even worse, there is mounting evidence that, as a nation, we are not making any progress toward solving the very problem the No Child Left Behind law was designed to address—the achievement gap between predominantly white middle-class students and economically disadvantaged minority students.10 Indeed, the most significant impact of NCLB may be its contribution to the growing gap between what’s being taught and tested in even our better schools versus what today’s students will need to succeed and be productive citizens in the twenty-first century—the global achievement gap.
What About the Competition?
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was founded in 1961 in order to promote economic growth and world trade. It sponsors the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which was launched in 2000. PISA develops and administers standardized assessments of reading, mathematical, and scientific literacy to a sample of between 4,500 and 10,000 15-year-olds in participating countries. However, the OECD leaders were concerned about the extent to which these subject-content skills translate into the kinds of skills adults need in life. So in 2003, they administered a remarkable test of problem-solving skills, in addition to other assessments, in all forty-one of the countries then involved in the program. The goal was to measure what they call “cross-curricular competencies”—that is, to directly assess life competencies that apply across different areas of the school curriculum. The assessment measured students’ problem-solving abilities in three areas:11
• Making decisions under constraints
• Evaluating and designing systems for a particular situation
• Trouble-shooting a malfunctioning device or system based on a set of symptoms
When I heard about the assessment, I was fascinated. At first blush, it sounded like a test of the First Survival Skill: critical thinking and problem solving. When I looked at the test items, I was impressed. Together, they comprised a challenging assessment of a variety of problem-solving skills that adults have to use on a regular basis, such as planning the best route for a trip while taking numerous factors into consideration; designing an automated check-out system for a library; and troubleshooting a malfunctioning irrigation system. So what did the OECD learn in this first-of-its-kind international comparison? Here is a summary of the overall findings from the test:12
About one in five 15-year-olds in OECD countries can be considered a reflective, communicative problem solver. These students are able not only to analyse a situation and make decisions, they are also capable of managing multiple conditions simultaneously. They can think about the underlying relationships in a problem, solve it systematically, check their work and communicate the results. In some countries, more than a third of students reach this high level of problem-solving competencies. In other countries, however, the majority of students cannot even be classified as basic problem solvers, a level at which they are required to deal with only a single data source containing discrete, well-defined information.
How did the “home team” do? you may ask. Badly. Very badly, indeed. Our overall score put us behind twenty-eight other countries—just after the Russian Federation and barely ahead of Portugal. According to a summary of the results prepared for the U.S. Department of Education by the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly one-quarter of U.S. students scored below level 1—a level far lower than that achieved by students in the OECD countries. A lower percentage of U.S. students than OECD students scored at levels 2 and 3. And in four countries (Finland, Hong Kong–China, Japan, and Korea), 30 percent or more of students performed at level 3 in problem solving, compared to only 12 percent of U.S. students.13 This analysis reveals that even the kids we consider to be our most academically talented are not even close to the competition: “On average, U.S. high achievers for problem solving (those scoring in the top 10 percent in the United States) were outperformed by their OECD counterparts. To be in the top 10 percent of students in the United States, students needed at least a score of 604 . . . but 675 or better in Japan.”14
Let me explain one implication of these findings as we think about our children’s future. Put simply: If I’m an employer of a multinational corporation, and I need to hire lots of employees who can solve problems, all other things being equal I’m likely to locate my new facility in a number of other countries before I’d consider coming to the United States. We are simply not developing our intellectual capital to the extent that many other countries are.
Perhaps our real competitive advantage as a country in the future will be in those areas requiring innovation—which in turn relies on curiosity and imagination, the Seventh Survival Skill described in Chapter 1. Indeed, America has historically excelled in those areas where innovation has been important, though no one is quite sure why. Is it the openness of our political system that encourages the free exchange of ideas, or the nature of our free-enterprise economy that is a stimulus for entrepreneurship? If these are sources of our competitive advantage, how much longer will they continue to be so as more and more countries move toward greater free expression and less government regulation of their economies?
Our nation’s public schools are not contributing significantly to this country’s capacity for creativity, imagination, and innovation—any more than they are developing the problem-solving skills of our students. You saw the evidence with your own eyes in our learning walks earlier in this chapter. Meanwhile, countries such as India, China, and Singapore are trying to transform their education systems so as to produce more creative students.
Thomas Friedman quotes Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, one of India’s premier technology companies in one of his columns: “We need to encourage more incubation of ideas to make innovation a national initiative.” Friedman goes on to cite Nirmala Sankaran, the CEO of HeyMath, an India-based education company: “If we do not allow our students to ask why, but just keep on telling them how, then we are only going to get the transactional type of outsourcing, not the high-end things that require complex interactions and judgment to understand another person’s needs. . . . [W]e have a creative problem in this country.”15
Yong Zhao, the director of the U.S.-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence at Michigan State University, wrote the following in an Education Week commentary:
Despite China’s stunning improvements in everything from gross domestic product to student performance in international comparative studies and talent contests, the country has not been happy with its education system and has launched a series of reforms over the past two decades. The most significant government statement came on June 13, 1999, when the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council, China’s highest decision-making bodies, jointly issued “The Decision to Deepen Education Reform and Comprehensively Implement Essential-Quality-Oriented Education.”
This landmark document reflects the deep concern of China’s leaders over the negative consequences of traditional test-oriented education. Its policy goals are straightforward: to emphasize sowing students’ creativity and practical abilities over instilling an ability to achieve certain test scores and recite rote knowledge.16
The motto of Singapore’s education reform movement is “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation.” According to its Ministry of Education’s website:
Thinking Schools will be learning organizations in every sense, constantly challenging assumptions, and seeking better ways of doing things through participation, creativity and innovation. Thinking Schools will be the cradle of thinking students as well as thinking adults and this spirit of learning should accompany our students even after they leave school.
A Learning Nation envisions a national culture and social environment that promotes lifelong learning in our people. The capacity of Singaporeans to continually learn, both for professional development and for personal enrichment, will determine our collective tolerance for change.17
And as Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Singapore’s minister of education, explained in a speech: “One of the key adjustments under way is in the way we educate our young so as to develop in them a willingness to keep learning, and an ability to experiment, innovate, and take risks. . . . Our ability to create and innovate will be Singapore’s most important asset in [the] future.”18
It would seem that education reform in India, China, and Singapore is moving in a direction that is exactly the opposite of ours. As we work to close the achievement gap between white middle-class students and economically disadvantaged minority students by requiring more and more multiple-choice tests and measuring the success of our schools and our students on the basis of test scores alone, the risks of not attending to the global achievement gap increase every day.