Reason Magazine - Staff

Stand and Deliver Revisited

info@reason.com (Jerry Jessness) — Mon, 01 Jul 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Thanks to the popular 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, many Americans know of the success that Jaime Escalante and his students enjoyed at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. During the 1980s, that exceptional teacher at a poor public school built a calculus program rivaled by only a handful of exclusive academies.

It is less well-known that Escalante left Garfield after problems with colleagues and administrators, and that his calculus program withered in his absence. That untold story highlights much that is wrong with public schooling in the United States and offers some valuable insights into the workings -- and failings -- of our education system.

Escalante's students surprised the nation in 1982, when 18 of them passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam. The Educational Testing Service found the scores suspect and asked 14 of the passing students to take the test again. Twelve agreed to do so (the other two decided they didn't need the credit for college), and all 12 did well enough to have their scores reinstated.

In the ensuing years, Escalante's calculus program grew phenomenally. In 1983 both enrollment in his class and the number of students passing the A.P. calculus test more than doubled, with 33 taking the exam and 30 passing it. In 1987, 73 passed the test, and another 12 passed a more advanced version ("BC") usually given after the second year of calculus.

By 1990, Escalante's math enrichment program involved over 400 students in classes ranging from beginning algebra to advanced calculus. Escalante and his fellow teachers referred to their program as "the dynasty," boasting that it would someday involve more than 1,000 students.

That goal was never met. In 1991 Escalante decided to leave Garfield. All his fellow math enrichment teachers soon left as well. By 1996, the dynasty was not even a minor fiefdom. Only seven students passed the regular ("AB") test that year, with four passing the BC exam -- 11 students total, down from a high of 85.

In any field but education, the combination of such a dramatic rise and such a precipitous fall would have invited analysis. If a team begins losing after a coach is replaced, sports fans are outraged. The decline of Garfield's math program, however, went largely unnoticed.

Movie Magic

Most of us, educators included, learned what we know of Escalante's experience from Stand and Deliver. For more than a decade it has been a staple in high school classes, college education classes, and faculty workshops. Unfortunately, too many students and teachers learned the wrong lesson from the movie.

Escalante tells me the film was 90 percent truth and 10 percent drama -- but what a difference 10 percent can make. Stand and Deliver shows a group of poorly prepared, undisciplined young people who were initially struggling with fractions yet managed to move from basic math to calculus in just a year. The reality was far different. It took 10 years to bring Escalante's program to peak success. He didn't even teach his first calculus course until he had been at Garfield for several years. His basic math students from his early years were not the same students who later passed the A.P. calculus test.

Escalante says he was so discouraged by his students' poor preparation that after only two hours in class he called his former employer, the Burroughs Corporation, and asked for his old job back. He decided not to return to the computer factory after he found a dozen basic math students who were willing to take algebra and was able to make arrangements with the principal and counselors to accommodate them.

Escalante's situation improved as time went by, but it was not until his fifth year at Garfield that he tried to teach calculus. Although he felt his students were not adequately prepared, he decided to teach the class anyway in the hope that the existence of an A.P. calculus course would create the leverage necessary to improve lower-level math classes.

His plan worked. He and a handpicked teacher, Ben Jimenez, taught the feeder courses. In 1979 he had only five calculus students, two of whom passed the A.P. test. (Escalante had to do some bureaucratic sleight of hand to be allowed to teach such a tiny class.) The second year, he had nine calculus students, seven of whom passed the test. A year later, 15 students took the class, and all but one passed. The year after that, 1982, was the year of the events depicted in Stand and Deliver.

The Stand and Deliver message, that the touch of a master could bring unmotivated students from arithmetic to calculus in a single year, was preached in schools throughout the nation. While the film did a great service to education by showing what students from disadvantaged backgrounds can achieve in demanding classes, the Hollywood fiction had at least one negative side effect. By showing students moving from fractions to calculus in a single year, it gave the false impression that students can neglect their studies for several years and then be redeemed by a few months of hard work.

This Hollywood message had a pernicious effect on teacher training. The lessons of Escalante's patience and hard work in building his program, especially his attention to the classes that fed into calculus, were largely ignored in the faculty workshops and college education classes that routinely showed Stand and Deliver to their students. To the pedagogues, how Escalante succeeded mattered less than the mere fact that he succeeded. They were happy to cheer Escalante the icon; they were less interested in learning from Escalante the teacher. They were like physicians getting excited about a colleague who can cure cancer without wanting to know how to replicate the cure.

The Secrets to His Success

How did Escalante attain such success at Garfield? One key factor was the support of his principal, Henry Gradillas.

Escalante's program was already in place when Gradillas came to Garfield, but the new principal's support allowed it to run smoothly. In the early years, Escalante had met with some resistance from the school administration. One assistant principal threatened to have him dismissed, on the grounds that he was coming in too early (a janitor had complained), keeping students too late, and raising funds without permission. Gradillas, on the other hand, handed Escalante the keys to the school and gave him full control of his program.

Gradillas also worked to create a more serious academic environment at Garfield. He reduced the number of basic math classes and eventually came up with a requirement that those who take basic math must concurrently take algebra. He even braved the wrath of the community by denying extracurricular activities to entering students who failed basic skills tests and to current students who failed to maintain a C average.

In the process of raising academic standards at Garfield, Gradillas made more than a few enemies. He took a sabbatical leave to finish his doctorate in 1987, hoping that upon his return he would either be reinstated as principal of Garfield or be given a position from which he could help other schools foster programs like Escalante's. He was instead assigned to supervise asbestos removal. It is probably no coincidence that A.P. calculus scores at Garfield peaked in 1987, Gradillas' last year there.

Escalante remained at Garfield for four years after Gradillas' departure. Although he does not blame the ensuing administration for his own departure from the school, Escalante observes that Gradillas was an academic principal, while his replacement was more interested in other things, such as football and the marching band.

Gradillas was not the only reason for Escalante's success, of course. Other factors included:

The Pipeline. Unlike the students in the movie, the real Garfield students required years of solid preparation before they could take calculus. This created a problem for Escalante. Garfield was a three-year high school, and the junior high schools that fed it offered only basic math. Even if the entering sophomores took advanced math every year, there was not enough time in their schedules to take geometry, algebra II, math analysis, trigonometry, and calculus.

So Escalante established a program at East Los Angeles College where students could take these classes in intensive seven-week summer sessions. Escalante and Gradillas were also instrumental in getting the feeder schools to offer algebra in the eighth and ninth grades.

Inside Garfield, Escalante worked to ratchet up standards in the classes that fed into calculus. He taught some of the feeder classes himself, assigning others to handpicked teachers with whom he coordinated and reviewed lesson plans. By the time he left, there were nine Garfield teachers working in his math enrichment program and several teachers from other East L.A. high schools working in the summer program at the college.

Tutoring. Years ago, when asked if Garfield could ever catch up to Beverly Hills High School, Gradillas responded, "No, but we can get close." The children of wealthy, well-educated parents do enjoy advantages in school. Escalante did whatever he could to bring some of those advantages to his students.

Among the parents of Garfield students, high school graduates were in the minority and college graduates were a rarity. To help make up for the lack of academic support available at home, Escalante established tutoring sessions before and after school. When funds became available, he arranged for paid student tutors to help those who fell behind.

Escalante's field-leveling efforts worked. By 1987, Gradillas' prediction proved to be partially wrong: In A.P. calculus, Garfield had outpaced Beverly High.

Open Enrollment. Escalante did not approve of programs for the gifted, academic tracking, or even qualifying examinations. If students wanted to take his classes, he let them.

His open-door policy bore fruit. Students who would never have been selected for honors classes or programs for the gifted chose to enroll in Escalante's math enrichment classes and succeeded there.

Of course, not all of Escalante's students earned fives (the highest score) on their A.P. calculus exams, and not all went on to receive scholarships from top universities. One argument that educrats make against programs like Escalante's is that they are elitist and benefit only a select few.

Conventional pedagogical wisdom holds that the poor, the disadvantaged, and the "culturally different" are a fragile lot, and that the academic rigor usually found only in elite suburban or private schools would frustrate them, crushing their self-esteem. The teachers and administrators that I interviewed did not find this to be true of Garfield students.

Wayne Bishop, a professor of mathematics and computer science at California State University at Los Angeles, notes that Escalante's top students generally did not attend Cal State. Those who scored fours and fives on the A.P. calculus tests were at schools like MIT, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, USC, and UCLA. For the most part, Escalante grads who went to Cal State-L.A. were those who scored ones and twos, with an occasional three, or those who worked hard in algebra and geometry in the hope of getting into calculus class but fell short.

Bishop observes that these students usually required no remedial math, and that many of them became top students at the college. The moral is that it is better to lose in the Olympics than to win in Little League, even for those whose parents make less than $20,000 per year.

Death of a Dynasty

Escalante's open admission policy, a major reason for his success, also paved the way for his departure. Calculus grew so popular at Garfield that classes grew beyond the 35-student limit set by the union contract. Some had more than 50 students. Escalante would have preferred to keep the classes below the limit had he been able to do so without either denying calculus to willing students or using teachers who were not up to his high standards. Neither was possible, and the teachers union complained about Garfield's class sizes. Rather than compromise, Escalante moved on.

Other problems had been brewing as well. After Stand and Deliver was released, Escalante became an overnight celebrity. Teachers and other interested observers asked to sit in on his classes, and he received visits from political leaders and celebrities, including President George H.W. Bush and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. This attention aroused feelings of jealousy. In his last few years at Garfield, Escalante even received threats and hate mail. In 1990 he lost the math department chairmanship, the position that had enabled him to direct the pipeline.

A number of people at Garfield still have unkind words for the school's most famous instructor. One administrator tells me Escalante wanted too much power. Some teachers complained that he was creating two math departments, one for his students and another for everyone else. When Escalante quit his job at Garfield, John Perez, a vice president of the teachers union, said, "Jaime didn't get along with some of the teachers at his school. He pretty much was a loner."

In addition, Escalante's relationship with his new principal, Maria Elena Tostado, was not as good as the one he had enjoyed with Gradillas. Tostado speaks harshly about her former calculus teachers, telling the Los Angeles Times they're disgruntled former employees. Of their complaints, she said, "Such backbiting only hurts the kids."

Escalante left the program in the charge of a handpicked successor, fellow Garfield teacher Angelo Villavicencio. Escalante had met Villavicencio six years previously through his students -- he had been a math teacher at Griffith Junior High, a Garfield feeder. At Escalante's request and with Gradillas' assistance, Villavicencio came to Garfield in 1985. At first he taught the classes that fed into calculus; later, he joined Escalante and Ben Jimenez in teaching calculus itself.

When Escalante and Jimenez left in 1991, Villavicencio ascended to Garfield's calculus throne. The following year he taught all of Garfield's AB calculus students -- 107 of them, in two sections. Although that year's passing rate was not as high as it had been in previous years, it was still impressive, particularly considering that two-thirds of the calculus teachers had recently left and that Villavicencio was working with lecture-size classes. Seventy-six of his students went on to take the A.P. exam, and 47 passed.

That year was not easy for Villavicencio. The class-size problem that led to Escalante's departure had not been resolved. Villavicencio asked the administration to add a third section of calculus so he could get his class sizes below 40, but his request was denied. The principal attempted to remove him from Music Hall 1, the only room in the school that could comfortably ac-commodate 55 students. Villavicencio asked himself, "Am I going to have a heart attack defending the program?" The following spring he followed Escalante out Garfield's door.

Scattered Legacy

When Cal State's Wayne Bishop called Garfield to ask about the status of the school's post-Escalante A.P. calculus program, he was told, "We were doing fine before Mr. Escalante left, and we're doing fine after." Soon Garfield discovered how critical Escalante's presence had been. Within a few years, Garfield experienced a sevenfold drop in the number of A.P. calculus students passing their exams. (That said, A.P. participation at Garfield is still much, much higher than at most similar schools. In May of 2000, 722 Garfield students took Advanced Placement tests, and 44 percent passed.)

Escalante moved north to Sacramento, where he taught math, including one section of calculus, at Hiram Johnson High School. He calls his experience there a partial success. In 1991, the year before he began, only six Johnson students took the A.P. calculus exam, all of whom passed. Three years later, the number passing was up to 18 -- a respectable improvement, but no dynasty. It had taken Escalante over a decade to build Garfield's program. Already in his 60s when he made his move, he did not have a decade to build another powerhouse in new territory.

Meanwhile, Villavicencio moved to Chino, a suburb east of Los Angeles. He had to take a pay cut of more than $7,000, since his new school would pay him for only six of his 13 years in teaching. (Like many districts, the Chino Valley Unified School District had a policy of paying for only a limited number of years of outside experience.) In Chino, Villavicencio again taught A.P. calculus, first in Ayala High School and later in Don Lugo High School.

In 1996 he contacted Garfield's new principal, Tony Garcia, and offered to come back to help revive the moribund calculus program. He was politely refused, so he stayed at Don Lugo. Villavicencio worked with East Los Angeles College to establish a branch of the Escalante summer school program there. This program, along with more math offerings in the district's middle schools, allowed Villavicencio to admit even some ninth-graders into his calculus class.

After Villavicencio got his program running smoothly, it was consistently producing A.P. calculus passing scores in the 60 percent to 70 percent range. Buoyed by his success, he requested that his salary be raised to reflect his experience. His request was denied, so he decided to move on to another school. Before he left, Don Lugo High was preparing to offer five sections of AB calculus and one section of BC. In his absence, there were only two sections of AB and no BC.

Meanwhile, after seeing its calculus passing rate drop into the single digits, Garfield is experiencing a partial recovery. In the spring of 2001, 17 Garfield students passed the AB calculus exam, and seven passed the BC. That is better than double the number of students passing a few years ago but less than one-third the number passing during the glory years of Escalante's dynasty.

And after withering in the absence of its founder, the Escalante program at East Los Angeles College has revived. Program administrator Paul Powers reports that over 1,000 high school students took accelerated math classes through the college in the year 2000.

Although the program now accepts students from beyond the college's vicinity, the target pupils are still those living in East L.A.

Nationally, there is no denying that the Escalante experience was a factor in the growth of Advanced Placement courses during the last decade and a half. The number of schools that offer A.P. classes has more than doubled since 1983, and the number of A.P. tests taken has increased almost sixfold. This is a far cry from the Zeitgeist of two decades ago, when A.P. was considered appropriate only for students in elite private and wealthy suburban public schools.

Still, there is no inner-city school anywhere in the United States with a calculus program anything like Escalante's in the '80s. A very successful program rapidly collapsed, leaving only fragments behind.

This leaves would-be school reformers with a set of uncomfortable questions. Why couldn't Escalante run his classes in peace? Why were administrators allowed to get in his way? Why was the union imposing its "help" on someone who hadn't requested it? Could Escalante's program have been saved if, as Gradillas now muses, Garfield had become a charter school? What is wrong with a system that values working well with others more highly than effectiveness?

Barn Building

Lyndon Johnson said it takes a master carpenter to build a barn, but any jackass can kick one down. In retrospect, it's fortunate that Escalante's program survived as long as it did. Had Garfield's counselors refused to let a handful of basic math students take algebra back in 1974, or had the janitor who objected to Escalante's early-bird ways been more influential, America's greatest math teacher might just now be retiring from Unisys.

Gradillas has an explanation for the decline of A.P. calculus at Garfield: Escalante and Villavicencio were not allowed to run the program they had created on their own terms. In his phrase, the teachers no longer "owned" their program. He's speaking metaphorically, but there's something to be said for taking him literally.

In the real world, those who provide a service can usually find a way to get it to those who want it, even if their current employer disapproves. If someone feels that he can build a better mousetrap than his employer wants to make, he can find a way to make it, market it, and perhaps put his former boss out of business. Public school teachers lack that option.

There are very few ways to compete for education dollars without being part of the government school system. If that system is inflexible, sooner or later even excellent programs will run into obstacles.

Escalante has retired to his native Bolivia. He is living in his wife's hometown and teaching part time at the local university. He returns to the United States frequently to visit his children. When I spoke to him he was entertaining the possibility of acting as an adviser to the Bush administration. Given what he achieved, he clearly has valuable advice to give.

Whether the administration will take it is another question. We are being primed for another round of "education reform." One-size-fits-all standardized tests are driving curricula, and top-down reforms are mandating lockstep procedures for classroom instructors. These steps might help make dismal teachers into mediocre ones, but what will they do to brilliant mavericks like Escalante?

Before passing another law or setting another policy, our reformers should take a close look at what Jaime Escalante did -- and at what was done to him.

Texas' Big Test

info@reason.com (Jerry Jessness) — Wed, 01 Nov 2000 00:00:00 EST

According to Gov. George W. Bush, his state has enjoyed a "Texas miracle" in education under his watch, a renaissance in learning that could sweep the United States if he’s elected president. With nonwhite students’ scores rising on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test sometimes called the nation’s report card, friendly pundits have declared Texas a scholarly Shangri-La for blacks and Hispanics. Douglas Carnine, a professor of education at the University of Oregon and a Bush adviser, has boasted, "If you’re a minority, move to Texas."

But as Bush touts this record and other states move to mimic his state’s approach, a closer look at test scores in Texas reveals a more enigmatic picture. According to the state’s own basic skills tests, young Texans have made tremendous academic gains in the past decade. Scores on college entrance exams, however, have stagnated during the same period. In SAT scores Texas outperforms only Georgia, the Carolinas, and the District of Columbia. ACT scores, while a bit better, are tied for 39th place–hardly an impressive showing. Texas SAT scores have risen slightly in the past decade, but not as much as the scores of the nation as a whole. And while fourth grade math scores and eighth grade writing scores are near the top of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, other NAEP results are middling or below average.

Heaven knows, things could be worse. When I began teaching in Texas in 1983, a large chunk of the population was simply written off as either unteachable or unworthy of an education. These "low-group" classes bore little resemblance to the academic-track classes just a few hallways over.

In the low-group ghetto, one of my colleagues showed popular movies four days a week. A class down the hall was constantly basing art projects on the works of literature the higher-track students were actually reading. Interruptions were frequent. The intercom blared constantly. Afternoon classes were dismissed for even junior varsity sports events, and large numbers would be excused to be practice heads for cosmetology class. Frequent absences were tolerated.

Back then, supposedly enlightened educators "understood" that the poor, the disadvantaged, and the culturally different learned in their own way and thus were to be held to a lower standard. Just as the legal system meted its weakest punishments to those who committed minority-on-minority crime, the state paid scant attention to minority administrators who mismanaged minority schools. Most important, the students themselves accepted, in fact sometimes demanded, inferior standards. Naively convinced that the purpose of study was to serve one’s time and receive a diploma, they were content to rot in undemanding corners.

That all changed in 1984, with the creation of the Texas Educational Assessment of Minimal Skills, which established a minimum standard for graduation. Soon thereafter, this was replaced with an only slightly more difficult test, the euphemistically-named Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. The state also separately monitored the scores of different ethnic and economic groups, creating a system that assured that all high school graduates would possess at least a solid elementary school education. For setting this minimum standard and holding even its worst students to it, Texas deserves to boast.

Unfortunately, this approach has fostered two less worthy phenomena: Many of our schools now devote extraordinary amounts of time to preparing for the TAAS. And some schools are now so focused on the formerly ignored groups that education for average and above-average students is suffering.

The amount of time spent on TAAS preparation varies from school to school, but few, if any, are untouched. In suburban districts, teachers complain of having to dedicate substantial blocks of time–maybe one or two days per week, maybe the first 20 minutes of each class–to TAAS. In inner city and rural schools with substantial minority enrollments, real textbooks are being crowded out by such titles as TAAS Coach, TAAS Master, TAASPrep, TAAS Student Strategy Guide, Breaking the TAAS Code, Step up to TAAS, and Book and Brain for TAAS. While some of this test preparation is genuinely academic, much simply reviews below-grade-level basics or, worse, imparts mere test-taking gimmicks.

The following "reading strategies" are among those that other teachers and I have "learned" from consultants and TAAS preparation materials over the past 10 years:

• Number every paragraph and line of a reading passage and then write the line and paragraph number where the answer is found next to each question.

• Highlight words in the text that match words in the
questions or the answer choices.

• Work backward, plugging each answer into the question if appropriate.

• Learn key phrases that in released TAAS exams indicate whether a question can be answered by matching words in the text with words in the answer choices. If so, highlight matching phrases. Unless there are contrary signals, assume that the matching choice is the correct answer.

• Ask yourself, "Could I be expected to know that?" If not, look for answers in the text.

At one workshop, a consultant showed us a practice passage for eighth grade students and asked us to apply the last strategy. The question related to the presidential election of 1864. Faced with such a question, we were told, students should understand that such knowledge would not be expected of them, so they should look for the answer in the passage. Sure enough, we found a table that showed that the winner was Abraham Lincoln.

In some schools, children who have read no more than a handful of books in their lives spend their reading classes–and part of their social studies and science classes–in this manner, sometimes taking an entire hour on a single page.

The writing strategies aren’t much better. For instance: "Since a student is more likely to make mistakes when writing compound and complex sentences, avoid them. Meet TAAS writing standards by using at least one adjective per sentence and one metaphor per paragraph."

Let me rephrase this for readers who are recent graduates of Texas public schools: "Long sentences are hard. They make you make very bad mistakes. Make your sentences as easy as cherry pie. Then you will always be correct. Use exciting describing words. Use nice phrases with the words ‘as…as.’ Then you will always write good TAAS essays."

And the math strategies?

• Draw a picture that represents the problem. If 25 people are traveling in five cars, draw five cars, and mark in them, one at a time, until you reach 25. The number of marks in each car will be the number of passengers.

• Learn the "TAAS code." Total usually means add but occasionally means multiply. More, less, and difference usually mean subtract. If the question includes the word equally, the operation will probably be division.

• If there are two numbers in the problem, and one is very large and the other is very small, the operation will probably be division.

• Work backward from the answer choices. Plug them into the problem if appropriate. Decide which answers are unreasonable and eliminate them.

• Always use the picture provided.

• Make a chart.

• Do not rely on your knowledge of number facts. If you are unsure, draw and count sticks. Remember that the TAAS has no time limit.

Math students may likewise spend an entire hour solving a few simple arithmetic problems, each in various ways: with real math, then with pictures, then with sticks, then with a chart. Such students are poorly prepared for algebra, or for that matter any career that involves keeping track of inventory or making change. But they do well on the TAAS.

Again, these gimmicks are not merely part of the curriculum. In some Texas schools, they have become the curriculum. Most frightening is that these practices have vocal defenders, those who will tell you that disadvantaged students need to know these tricks to compete with their peers, or that such instruction actually covers necessary basics.

What about the tremendous progress minorities are supposed to be making? It’s real, but there’s less than meets the eye. Blacks’ and Hispanics’ TAAS and NAEP results are improving nicely, but their college board scores are not. In fact, SAT scores for Texas Hispanics have actually dropped slightly in recent years. Apologists claim that this is due to rising numbers of Hispanics taking the SAT, but the increase in Hispanic SAT takers is in line with the increase in the Hispanic population.

Schools are ranked as "recognized" or "exemplary" based on their TAAS scores despite having combined SAT scores that average in the 800s or ACT scores in the teens. Texas’ Region I, an area that stretches along the Rio Grande from the Gulf of Mexico to Laredo and is the most Hispanic area in Texas, saw SAT scores drop from 1993 to 1997, a period in which scores rose slightly nationally.

Although minority and low-income students are overrepresented at the bottom of the academic scale, it is a mistake to equate minority status with poor academic performance. While our Rio Grande Valley schools–the eastern portion of Region I–often host teenaged immigrants from Mexico who have only had a few years of primary school, and some who have attended no school at all, we also receive many immigrant students who are far superior academically to those who are American-born. Students who have attended escuela prepatatoria, the Mexican equivalent of an American high school, tend to perform at a much higher level than their American-educated peers.

So it’s interesting to note immigrant parents’ reactions to the Texas schools. My next-door neighbor, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, complains that, although the Texas Education Agency has deemed her son’s school "exemplary," he was still adding and subtracting by drawing and counting sticks long after his cousins in Monterrey had learned their basic math facts. Another acquaintance, a former business professor from Instituto Politecnico in Mexico City who had come to Texas to manage one of the ubiquitous border-area plants where Mexican workers assemble American parts, was shocked when his daughter, who had been studying algebra in Mexico, was now "learning" how to add fractions. Another, a former Monterrey teacher, lost her job teaching nominally gifted students at a Rio Grande Valley elementary school after screaming at her principal, "What’s the matter with them? Are they retarded?"

Then there’s Eloisa, who teaches a bilingual class in a Dallas suburb. "Third grade is focused completely on TAAS," she recently wrote to the Teachers’ Chatboard, an Internet group. "I’m a third grade teacher and that’s all I do. I hate it, but I’m under pressure to do it. The bad news is that 4th, 5th and so on are also focused totally on TAAS. Last week I performed a little experiment: I gave my third grade students 4th, 5th and 6th grade TAAS tests (Reading). The results: 19 out of 21 passed the 4th grade test, 16 passed the 5th, 11 passed the 6th. Conclusion: Public schools aren’t designed to…impart knowledge, but to teach strategies to pass a stupid and useless test.…My honest advice: homeschool your kid or send him to a private school."

Texas’ education establishment now knows that virtually all children are educable. That does not seem like a major epiphany, but it has improved instruction for the state’s worst students, minority and otherwise. If we were to compare the academic levels of the bottom 40 percent of students in each state, I suspect that Texas would come out near the top. If we compared the other 60 percent, I suspect that we would come out near the bottom. Our SAT and ACT scores seem to bear this out.

Few teachers, students, or parents believe that there has been a Texas miracle, but educrats and politicians are shouting this message from the rooftops. Since test scores are up, they say, it’s time to praise the teachers, promote the administrators, and send Gov. Bush to the White House. And don’t forget: Good TAAS scores are great for the property values in your neighborhood.

It’s time for a reality check. It’s good that the members of our education underclass can now figure their own restaurant bills and can read warning signs, T-shirts, and TAAS passages. But such modest success shouldn’t be confused with a miracle.

Workshop Wonderland

info@reason.com (Jerry Jessness) — Tue, 01 Aug 2000 00:00:00 EDT

Leaf through the National Education Association's most recent batch of resolutions (available at www.nea.org/resolutions/99/), and you'll find declaration D-14, which states that "continuous professional development is required for teachers and administrators to achieve and maintain the highest standards." It's hard to argue with the sentiment--except that in schools the usual means of encouraging professional development is the teacher workshop. And anyone who thinks education can be substantially improved with workshops probably hasn't ever attended one.

Not all such sessions--"teachers' in-service training" is the preferred jargon--are a waste of time. It makes sense to pursue advanced study in the field you teach, and we teachers ought to stay abreast of such topics as new laws affecting schools. But most other workshops are misguided, or foolish, or actually dangerous, should the ideas they present fall into the hands of teachers or administrators naive or ignorant enough to take them seriously.

Not long ago, for instance, I went to a workshop titled "Multisensory Grammar." There we learned that students will learn grammar more easily if, before launching into such difficult concepts as "nouns" and "verbs," we first teach them to identify the different parts of speech as blue, red, yellow, green, and orange words. Some lucky teachers were called to the front of the class and asked to place translucent chips on an overhead projector while the rest of us wrote sentences that followed their code. As I recall, "The cat ate the mouse" was a red-blue-orange-red-blue sentence.

At another workshop, we broke up into small groups, each of which got to read Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" its own way. Our group did it as a rap. Our neighbors did it as a melodrama. Another group sang it as a round, to the tune of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." None of us conveyed the sense of a widower grieving for his young, dead wife, but we managed to kill more than an hour, and, the consultant assured us, we had fun as we learned.

A very popular workshop topic is standardized tests. There's a consultant from the Dallas, Texas, area who travels around the Lone Star State giving a presentation called "Book and Brain for the TAAS." (TAAS is the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, the Holy Grail of elementary and secondary education in my state. A high pass rate means your school is "successful.") This consultant claims to have studied past TAAS tests and discovered key words and phrases that distinguish a "book" question, which can be answered by matching an answer choice to a part of the text, from a "brain" question, which requires actual thought. Students, she says, should answer the book questions first and dedicate their remaining time to the brainers. I'm not certain whether this technique does anything to raise test scores, but it certainly does nothing to improve students academically.

Until very recently, "whole language" techniques dominated the workshop market for reading teachers. Invariably, such sessions would begin with a testimonial more at home in a revival tent than a schoolhouse. Like the teachers in attendance, the consultant would aver, she had been reluctant to stop giving spelling tests. She had been even more reluctant to abandon systematic instruction in phonics. But once she broke the chains of tradition and stepped into the whole-language sunshine, all was well.

Some words, I learned at one such workshop, look like the object that they describe. The word elephant, for example, looks like an elephant: It is a big word, and the e at the beginning looks kind of like an elephant's trunk. And the word monkey resembles a monkey, because the y is like a monkey's tail. I couldn't see it, but I can never see the images in Magic Eye 3-D pictures either. I also learned that day that whole language instruction was helping create the most competent and enthusiastic readers ever. Which may be true, if one defines reading as tracing words to see whether they look like something from the zoo.

Mercifully, whole language is falling out of fashion. The equally silly "constructivist math," however, still seems to be going strong. Constructivist math, otherwise known as new-New Math or fuzzy math, grew out of recommendations from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The group said students should not merely be taught algorithms but should be allowed to discover mathematical principles for themselves. The vilified "drill-and-kill" approach, in which students recited multiplication tables and the like, should be shunned; students must seek creative ways to solve problems. These included counting fingers or blocks, making charts, writing out the problem in other words, and drawing pictures.

Drawing pictures? Yes: Our students were to learn to depict people as stick men. Objects would be represented by simple shapes. We got to practice this ourselves. "Draw three houses," the consultant commanded, and we drew three triangles. "Draw 10 girls," he continued, and we drew 10 stick figures. "Draw nine trees," he added, and we drew nine squares. In the spirit of multiculturalism, he also asked us to draw four acetunas, the Spanish word for olives. He then pointed out with glee that even those who did not speak Spanish could comply by drawing four circles.

Many in-service sessions include a component meant to "sensitize" us to our students' frustrations, especially if the children are learning-disabled, poor, or from foreign countries. Sometimes the consultant rattles off a dozen or so instructions in less than a minute, then loudly chastises us for not immediately following them. Or perhaps she will order us to take dictation onto a page that we hold atop our heads, behind our backs, or beneath our chairs. At one workshop, we were told to assemble jigsaw puzzles, some of which lacked key pieces. At another, we were given team names and told to seek out our teammates. Some of us had no teammates, so our quest was futile. Such impossible tasks, the consultant assures us, are the equivalent of what we put our students through every day.

I once went to a workshop for teachers of students with limited English proficiency, in which participants were given worksheets written mostly with nonsense words. We were ordered to read them and then answer several ensuing questions; we were chastised when we failed to do so successfully. We were told that we now felt the pain our students allegedly endured on a daily basis. (I suppose it did emulate their first day of class.)

The message: Failure is painful, so we should give our students the benefit of the doubt whenever we can.

And then there are the sessions on psychology. These are usually run by counselors or education psychologists, many of whom are more familiar with books like I'm OK, You're OK than with the works of Freud, James, Jung, or Piaget. Last fall, several of us were subjected to a dressing-down from a fellow with a guitar and a doctorate in educational psychology. After singing us a cute little song about feeling good, he chastised us for placing too much emphasis on thinking and not enough on feeling. "Schools don't need more worksheets," he explained. "If students are in touch with their feelings, they can understand, for example, works like Les Miserables."

Apparently, students don't have to study French history or look up lots of big words to get the most out of that book. If they think about how they felt the last time they were grounded, they will understand how Valjean felt when he went to prison. If they think about babysitting their little sisters, they will understand his feelings toward Cosette.

In the old days, when left-brain/right-brain theories were in vogue, education psychologists seldom passed up a chance to mention them. Apparently, some of Our Top Education Researchers had concluded that learning disabilities were brought on by disjunctures between the brain hemispheres. At one very popular workshop, teachers were taught to have their learning-disabled students twirl ribbons in front of their eyes. As I recall, the twirling was a right-brain activity, while the act of watching the ribbon was a left-brain one. Doing both together was supposed to train the hemispheres to communicate, thus eliminating the students' disabilities, or at least enabling them to read and chew gum at the same time.

My all-time favorite workshop was held at the South Dakota Indian Educators convention in 1980. There I learned that American Indians, like Asians, were right-brained people, while those of European stock were left-brained. Right-brained people, we learned, most easily learn to read ideograms, while left-brainers were better at reading phonetic script. The consultant stopped short of suggesting that we teach our Lakota students Chinese, but he wanted us to understand that we were forcing our students to read an alphabet that was not natural to them, so we should at least feel a bit guilty.

As mathematician Wayne Bishop has written, workshops are the mechanisms that spread educational viruses. Granted, they're weak viruses, but they're acting on a weak system. One gullible teacher can infect a classroom; one principal can infect a school; one curriculum director can infect an entire school system. Surely there are better roads to "continuous professional development" than this one.

Why Johnny Can't Fail

info@reason.com (Jerry Jessness) — Thu, 01 Jul 1999 00:00:00 EDT

I confess. I am a grade-inflating teacher guilty of "social promotion." I have given passing grades to students who failed all of their tests, to students who refused to read their assignments, to students who were absent as often as not, to students who were not even functionally literate. I have turned a blind eye to cheating and outright plagiarism and have given A's and B's to students whose performance was at best mediocre. Like others of my ilk, I have sent students to higher grades, to higher education, and to the workplace unprepared for the demands that would be made of them.

I am, in short, a servant of the force that thwarts nearly every effort to reform American education. I am a servant of the floating standard.

It does not matter what changes we make in curricula. The floating standard shields the status quo and guarantees the reign of mediocrity. If standards are set high but students lack the skills or motivation to meet them, the standards will inevitably drop. If many students in a given class take part-time jobs, homework will be reduced. If drugs sweep through a school, lower standards will compensate for the lack of mental clarity. Americans want quality education, but when lower grades and higher failure rates reach their own children's classes, they rebel and schools relent. Americans hate public education because standards are low but love their local schools because their children perform so well there.

Schools have their own reasons to play along. Flexible standards mean fewer complaints. When parents are happy, there are fewer lawsuits; when students are happy, there are fewer discipline problems. What's more, schools that fail students who have not met the stated standards have the expensive and unpopular obligation to retain them.

In the short term, floating standards make everybody a winner. Students build self-esteem, parents gain peace of mind, and schools save money. When the payback comes, time and distance keep the student and the school well separated. Teachers who are willing to drop standards, especially those who manage to do so while boasting of raising them, win the enthusiastic support of students, parents, and administrators, while those who genuinely attempt to challenge their charges are harassed, proselytized, or purged.

The Initiation

I was introduced to the floating standard in 1979, while teaching for the Bureau of Indian Affairs on a reservation in western South Dakota. My predecessor had been forced to resign after failing nearly half his students. In his absence, the failing grades were changed and his students were promoted to the next grade. His former students and peers considered him a capable, if imprudent, instructor. It was because of him that my students were willing and able to read grade-appropriate novels, a rarity at BIA schools.

Even though I knew my predecessor's fate, I gave some failing grades for the first grading period. After a few warnings, however, I fell into line. There was no point in doing otherwise. The students already knew that failing grades would mysteriously change over the summer and that they would advance to the next grade. I opted for self-preservation.

A few years later I moved to Texas' lower Rio Grande Valley. Since I was now an experienced teacher and was reasonably fluent in Spanish, I felt that my position would be stronger than it had been at my former school. Besides, at my interview my future principal spoke movingly about the need to push our students to their limits. In the first grading period I boldly flunked a number of students, including the daughter of an administrator of a local elementary school and a star fullback who was also the nephew of a school board member.

Shortly thereafter I was called in to meet with my principal and the aggrieved parents. Such was my naiveté that I actually bothered to bring evidence. I showed the elementary administrator her daughter's plagiarized book report and the book from which it had been copied, and I showed the fullback's father homework bearing his son's name but written in another person's handwriting. The parents offered weak apologies but maintained that I had not treated their children fairly.

My principal suddenly discovered a number of problems with my teaching. For the next few weeks he was in my class almost daily. Every spitball, every chattering student, every bit of graffiti was noted. When there were discipline problems, my superiors sided with the offending students. Teaching became impossible.

So I learned to turn a blind eye to cheating and plagiarism and to give students, especially athletes, extra credit for everything from reading orally in class to remembering to bring their pencils. In this way, I gained the cooperation of my students and the respect and support of my superiors. I gritted my teeth, toughed out the year, and sought employment elsewhere.

It wasn't until after my fifth year of teaching that I finally gave up and accepted that my only choices were either to accept the floating standard or to abandon public education. That year my assignment was to teach beginning English as a Second Language (ESL I) and Plan III (low-group) language arts. My principal was particularly adamant about having all the students pass. After issuing the first round of grades, I found myself in his office more often than my worst-behaved students. He informed me that, since our school offered "ability grouping," there was no reason for any student to fail.

He recommended a few grading techniques to help me help my students pass. All ESL students were to receive passing grades. We could promote even those who failed to learn English to the next grade without promoting them out of ESL I. In language arts, no test was to be graded below "50," even one that was turned in blank. Daily assignments were to be graded according to the number of questions answered, even if all of the answers were wrong. If eight of 10 questions were answered, the grade was to be "80," regardless of the quality of the answers. Those who still were failing at the end of the grading period were to be offered the opportunity to do reports or projects for extra credit. My neighbor, another low-group teacher who was held up to me as a mentor, boasted that he left the week's spelling words on the blackboard during spelling tests and recommended that I do the same.

I pulled in my horns too late to save myself that year. When I sent students to the office for discipline, the referral forms were placed in my file as evidence that I could not handle my classes. Failing grades were taken as proof that I was not motivating my students. Even chronic truants and habitual drug abusers would presumably have been passing had I been doing a better job of teaching. Besides, my neighbor had the same sort of students as I, and their grades were fine.

The principal recommended that my contract not be renewed. My dismissal hearing was a lonely affair attended only by my superintendent, my principal, a stenographer, and me. No champion of high educational standards descended from his ivory tower to speak on my behalf. I pointed out that those students who eschewed drugs and attended class regularly were doing well. Some of my ESL students had learned enough English that year to function in regular academic classes, and many of my language arts students were beginning to write coherent essays. I offered student compositions and tests as proof and suggested that we compare my students' standardized test scores with those of other students in the same track. My arguments fell on deaf ears.

That job and its $17,000 annual salary were hardly worth fighting for, so I left quietly. After a year as a salesperson and graduate student, however, I began to miss the classroom and decided to give teaching one more try. I returned to the district where I had given a failing grade to a star fullback. My superiors correctly assumed that I had learned my lesson and welcomed the return of the prodigal teacher. Just as Orwell's Winston Smith was finally able to win the victory over himself and love Big Brother, I was finally ready to embrace the floating standard.

In the ensuing seven years, only two of my students failed. My evaluations were "above expectations" twice and "clearly outstanding" five times. By my fifth year I had climbed to the top of the Texas teachers' career ladder and earned an annual bonus of $3,300.

I really did become a better teacher after my rebirth, if only because I had gained the cooperation of my students and superiors. My classes became much better behaved after I quit trying to force students to learn more than they cared to. My superiors became more supportive, and I actually met with cooperation, not hostility, when I sent students to the office. I tried to be as honest as possible with my charges. All of my students and any parents who bothered to visit my classroom or return my phone calls understood that grades above 80 honestly reflected performance, while those in the 70 range were fluffed up with extra credit. I explained to the parents of my immigrant students that here in the United States passing grades may be given for attendance and minimal effort and do not necessarily reflect mastery of the course material. Students who needed to be pushed lost out, but that was the price of harmony.

The Effective Schools movement of the early '90s gave the brief illusion that schools were ready for real change. In 1991 I was named head of the campus High Expectations Committee. We recommended that administrators stay out of the grading process and that teachers not be required to give evidence that failing students had been retaught and retested. We also suggested that students who complained that their grades were too low or that they were being unfairly retained should be required to prove that they had done the required work and mastered the required material.

Our recommendations disappeared over the summer. In their place was a plan to give high achievers pizza parties and letter jackets.

Why the Floating Standard?

Years ago there was a con game called the razzle-dazzle. Players threw marbles onto a numbered grid. The total corresponded to another number on a chart, where the winning numbers were very high or very low. Since there were many marbles, the odds of hitting such a total were infinitesimal. The operator could give the player the illusion that he was winning early in the game by miscounting in the player's favor. When it appeared that the player was close to winning the jackpot, the operator began counting the numbers as they really were.

Like the razzle-dazzle man, schools have fooled their clients by miscounting in what appears to be the clients' favor. By giving high grades and class credit to anyone willing to occupy space in a classroom, schools create the illusion that their players--their students--are winning. Only after leaving school and facing work or college do the students discover that they have lost.

Knowledge is power, but a diploma is just a piece of paper. Our schools have undersold the former and oversold the latter. Most employers would rather hire a 10th-grade dropout with a solid 10th-grade education than a high school graduate with only fifth-grade skills. Likewise, a dropout who later graduates from night school at age 21 will be better prepared for work and life than a student who graduates illiterate at 18. Many students and even parents fail to grasp this simple truth. For too many of them, a diploma is a sort of philosopher's stone, an object that can magically guarantee one an annual income in excess of $25,000--an object that is, furthermore, an entitlement owed to anyone willing to serve sufficient time in school.

Such students do not see teachers as mentors who help them strengthen their knowledge and skills. They see them as obstacles.

It should come as no surprise that grade inflation and course content reduction have become the norm. Grades are educational quality control, and passing grades "prove" that teacher, student, and school are successful; therefore, the "best" teachers are those who give the highest grades, and the "best" administrators are those who can convince their teachers to do so. In this bizarre system, it is better to teach 10 vocabulary words than 100. If a teacher assigns 10 words and the student learns eight, the student scores 80 on the exam and both teacher and student are successful. If the teacher teaches 100 words and the student learns 50, both student and teacher have failed, even though the second student has learned more than six times as much as the first.

Teachers have an abundance of curricular guides provided by textbook publishers, district committees, and state agencies. Although teachers are required to follow these guides, they are also expected to teach students "where they are at," help them compensate for learning disabilities, modify lessons for various learning styles, reteach students who fail to master material in the allotted time, and so on. A teacher's worst nightmare is to be assigned a "regular" class in which most students' skills are several years below par.

Imagine that you are required to teach Hamlet to a group of students who are either unwilling or unable to read such a work. If you demand that your charges read and understand the play, most will fail and you will be blamed. If you drop Hamlet and convert the class into a remedial reading course, you will be out of compliance with the curriculum. If you complain that your students are not up to the mandated task, you will be labeled insensitive and uncaring.

Fear not: The floating standard will save you. If the students will not or cannot read the play, read it to them. If they will not sit still long enough to hear the whole play, consider an abridged or comic book version, or let them watch a movie. If they cannot pass a multiple-choice test, try true-or-false, or a fill-in-the-blank test that mirrors the previous day's study sheet. If they still have not passed, allow them to do an art project. They could make a model of the Globe Theater with popsicle sticks or draw a picture of a Danish prince, or Prince Charles, or even the artist formerly known as Prince. Those who lack artistic talent could make copies of Shakespearean sonnets with macaroni letters on construction paper. If all else fails, try group projects. That way you can give passing grades to all the students, even if only one in five produces anything.

Keep dropping the standard, and sooner or later everyone will hit it. If anyone asks, you taught Hamlet in a nonconventional way, one that took into account your students' individual differences and needs.

Fixing the Floating Standard

For three decades, dismayed Americans have watched their children's test scores slip relative to those of children in other industrialized nations. Our leaders have responded with hollow excuses. Too many American children live in poverty, they say. But so do many Koreans. Many American children are raised in single-parent homes. But so are many Swedes. The United States is an ethnically diverse country. But so is Singapore. The biggest lie is that we are the only nation in the world that seeks to educate children of all socioeconomic classes. That has not been true for decades.

The reality is simpler than that. Those other nations have fixed standards.

American schools offer fixed standards for their best and worst students, but not for the largest group, those in the middle. Advanced Placement tests are the same throughout the country. International Baccalaureate offers uniform curricula and standards to top-notch students in the United States and in English-language schools throughout the world. Like the Advanced Placement exams, SAT II exams test knowledge in certain subjects. A teacher who prepares students for these tests must teach the intended content of the course or face the embarrassment of having most of his students fail the final test. Likewise, students must learn the material or fail the test and forego course credit. No student, not even a star athlete, can negotiate a higher grade on an A.P. exam.

In my early teaching years, there were no fixed standards at the bottom. We had the Iowa Basic Test, the California Achievement Test, and the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, but the low-group classes did not take them very seriously. The Zeitgeist forgave disadvantaged students and those who taught them for poor scores.

That has changed in the past decade. Ever-increasing numbers of states have mandated that their students pass a basic skills test before graduating. In Texas, the euphemistically named Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) is the standard. In order to prevent schools from ignoring any class of students, Texas wisely chose to monitor separately the test scores of all racial and economic groups. The state has demanded basic skills for all students, and the schools are delivering.

For those who seek to learn more than basics, however, the effect has been negative. Like other state-mandated minimum skills tests, the TAAS is helping to solve one problem while creating another: Basic skills are now so strongly stressed that academics suffer. Some conscientious English and reading teachers complain that they have had to cut back on literature in order to cover TAAS skills. Teachers who once taught from novels now assign reams of single-page reading passages followed by multiple-choice questions. It should be obvious that a student who has read and analyzed the works of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain would be better able to determine the sequence of events or select the main idea of a paragraph than would a student who spent his academic year reading sample test passages. Unfortunately, not all educational leaders agree, so abundant skills practice, not serious study of literature, has become the norm in too many classes.

Here's how the system works at my school. Our fourth-graders have two 70-minute reading sessions daily. In one session, the children read short selections from books, but in the other they read sample TAAS passages; they are given the entire period to digest a one- or two-page passage and then answer the five to eight questions that follow. They are encouraged to read the passage, highlight key words, write a brief summary of each paragraph, read the answer choices, eliminate unreasonable answers, reread the answers, check for words in the answer choices that match words in the passages, answer the questions, reread, and recheck. One doubts that children taught to read in this excruciatingly slow manner are likely to become avid readers, but, then again, that's not the point of the class.

Similar problems exist in other disciplines. Some science and social studies teachers complain of being told to teach their lessons in the same format, with single-page passages followed by multiple-choice questions. Many Texas elementary math teachers complain that they are encouraged to take advantage of the TAAS' lack of a time limit by having children draw and count sticks rather than memorize math facts.

And the TAAS, of course, is not the only measure of student performance, although it has a monopoly on Texas educators' attention. My district's TAAS scores have risen steadily, but our SAT and ACT scores have remained abysmal. Across the state, SAT verbal scores are exactly the same as they were a decade ago. Our SAT math scores have risen a bit in that time, but are still in the bottom quintile. In some of the state's colleges, more incoming freshmen are put in remedial classes than not.

There's another problem with the notion of national standards. In a nation as large and diverse as ours, it's simply a mistake to require everyone to learn the exact same things. While there is a certain body of history that all Americans should know, it is reasonable for schools to dedicate time to state and local history as well. On literature we cannot agree at all. Perhaps it would be good for black students to have the opportunity to read Wright, Ellison, Hughes, and Hurston before reading Steinbeck and Dickens, as it might it be for students in New Mexico to read Anaya and Cather before Hemingway.

The French can agree that each of their graduates should be familiar with Proust and Molière. We Americans have no such consensus, so we either test basic skills or leave the choice of what to test up to the schools. The result is standards that are minimal, variable, or both.

The Voluntary Standard

Those who take Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests submit to a voluntary outside standard. There is no reason that we cannot extend this option to other students as well. Textbook publishers, educators, and others could produce competing tests to be given at the end of certain courses. Schools could submit lists of works of literature read and historical eras studied to private testing companies and receive a test compiled from computer databases. These tests would free teachers from the pressure to adjust the content of their courses and would assure students and their parents that the standard for each course is fixed, not floating. If Hamlet is tested, then Hamlet, not popsicle-stick or macaroni art, will be taught.

Since the tests would be privately produced and their use voluntary, we would not see the public resistance that we have had to national exams. Universities could decide which testing services were most reliable. Admissions preference would likely be given to students who have scored well on reputable tests, allowing the market to choose the survivors.

Parents who trust their schools should be free to place their children in classes without standardized final tests. Those who want an assurance that the course's material is actually being taught should be offered the guarantee that such tests would provide. Those who prefer a fixed standard to a floating one should have that option.