This is something I’ve been playing with for some time. I keep coming back to it. It’s one of those writings that started with a clear kernel and morphed into something different. It began about a year ago when the upper administration of the Minneapolis Schools decided to “fresh start” two schools including the one I was in. It was a highly political and in some ways person decision by the powers. It was not reasonably defensible for any of the reasons given. It had the effect in part akin to demolishing slums to eliminate poverty.
Feedback?
Why we have to be critical thinkers to teach critical thinking and why we have to teach critical thinking.
Critical thinking is a set of strategies for processing toward a goal. In developing learners, the process of learning is as much a goal as any tested outcome. AS teachers, we set the got both for the outcomes of our students and for the acquisition of the critical thinking process that lets them reach those outcomes. We want our students to be critical thinkers who know and can do things. We want them to know what a hypotenuse is and how to calculate one, but we also want them to be able to decide when this is the problem that needs to be solved, and what use to make of the solution. Our goal is, or should be, to develop knowledgeable critical thinkers.
To do this, we need to assess their entry status as they come to us, determine about how far along their developmental continuum we can help them to move, given the time they will be with us, and the amount of our work load we can dedicate to them individually and as members of the whole group. In other words, we need to be critical thinkers in assessing the problem presented to us, finding a solution and deciding how best to implement what process knowledge we have to move students along as much as we can. Teachers need to be critical thinkers too, a faculty greatly complicated by the current state of American education.
Currently, many of our goals as teachers are set by entities without, state departments of education, school district administrations, principals. The goals are set for our students, but the teachers are held accountable for the students’ results. This doesn’t work well, and sometimes, not at all. Here’s part of the reason why.
The process needed to successfully reach a goal is tied to the motivation and subsequently the volition of the person or group trying to reach the goal. When a person sets both the goal and the process they will perform for reaching that goal, success is more likely. It may happen that an externally imposed goal, a demand from above for higher scores and fewer failures for example, may align with part of or even the entire goal of those being held responsible for the outcomes, but this is seldom the case. Where things go wrong is that the higher-ups have their own motivation to achieve their own goals, aligned or not, and they attempt to impose strategies on those charged with getting the desired result. Goals and often the process strategies for achieving the goals are now imposed on the performer, but not the motivation to achieve the imposed goals or to perform the imposed process strategies. While the goals may align, the process for working through to that goal seldom does. What gets undermined is the motivation of the performers who then lack the volitional energy to persevere in accomplishing that imposed goal. Why? Simple. The performers are no longer working to their own goal; they are now working toward someone else’s goal, and more importantly, not a goal set, in the case of schools, for the students, but a goal set for the teacher. The teacher may have student success as a goal, but when that ‘success’ becomes a demand from above, the demand sets the goal, not the student success.
The demand goal placed on the teacher for student success is not the same thing as the goal the teacher places on herself for her students’ success. There are two reasons for that: 1) imposed goals—goals that redirect the determination of success away from the intended goal target to some other place—lack ownership by the performer, since they are ‘owned’ by the demander, and 2) the success assessment is almost always invalid because it measures a reality that is isolated in time and no longer exists.
In the first case, a goal that is imposed on someone else ceases to be the goal the performer is acting on. If the goal of student success becomes the goal of an administrator to the extent that there is a direct demand for the teacher to achieve that goal, the goal for the teacher becomes just that—the demand by an administrator to reach his goal, not the teacher’s. Student success is no longer the ‘goal’ of the teacher; it’s the goal of the administrator. Student success has become the ‘score’ of the teacher. The teachers assessment ‘tool’ is the standardized test, the report card or the referral form, and without even considering the lack of a standard for measurements in these tools, “How many?” determines the teacher’s score. ‘Student success’ in any meaningful sense—how much they have grown academically or behaviorally, what they are prepared to take on next or how they feel about learning and its place in their lives—is no longer the teacher’s goal; the teacher’s goal is now the “How many?” test score by which they are being measured.
Okay, so we now have teachers developing strategies for meeting administrative performance goals, goals defining how the teacher should be performing based on what student data can be gathered. The luckiest students will be placed with teachers that will get them to mastery in that standardized data set. The rest will probably get short changed with one teacher and then get a new, less tested teacher who may or of course may not measure up as well. Whether this new industrial model of throwing out and replacing a presumably non-repairable mechanism with a possibly equally poor one will increase the percentage of teachers who meet who meet administrative goals, or if such a policy can keep place with attritions from teaching is not the subject of this document. What is the subject is the problem of how much the making of administrative decisions about teacher performance goals hobbles student learning and ultimately real student success because of its dependence on assessing teachers based on glimpses of artifacts of functionality in students—reading, writing and math skills primarily.
This does all relate to critical thinking by way of a sort of reversal. To bring students to their individual successes, a teacher must of course be motivated and possess the volitional resources to follow through to achieve these very difficult goals. Ideally, teachers have the motivation and volition and the skills necessary to be successful in reaching their goals for student success. No one disputes the reality that this is not always the case, but there is considerable dispute, if often not verbalized, in how to improve this shortcoming. Teachers lacking motivation and volition, which are very much personal energy reserves, may need to be helped out—perhaps out the door, but teachers with motivation and volition often may need to be helped out with the necessary skills—tools if you please—to carry out the process of mobilizing and supporting students along the course of their development. These skills beyond content knowledge and pedagogy prominently include critical thinking skills. Each child is a problem to be solved, as is each classroom, each school calendar, each testing schedule and so on. Teachers need to make critical judgments, plan critical interventions, interpret critical assessments, and so on. This critical thinking process is intense, difficult and demanding. A teacher must be fully motivated, usually by a genuine dedication to and love for the students, their individual histories and their future lives. This is the level of motivation required to set out the effort of volition to carry the work forward with an eye to the true success of the students, not a score but a life. Motivation, volition and goal are inseparably tied.
When the goal is separated from the process, the process collapses. So when administration separates out the student success goal and replaces it with the “How many?” teacher success goal, the need for critical thinking to achieve student success collapses. It is not longer relevant, but the capacity for critical thinking can shift to the new goal for the teachers, meeting the administratively demand goal. This goal is much easier to reach in fact. It will probably result in less development of students as human beings however, and it favors unmotivated teachers who will lack the volitional energy to persevere. In fact, it has in a few cases led to cheating even on a broad scale. Teachers can teach to the test, inflate grades and keep disruptive students in increasingly non-functional classrooms. Result? Higher scores, better grades with fewer failures and reduced behavioral referrals.
The administrative intervention to avoid such practices becomes imposition of mandated practices—one size fits all—standardizing curriculum and policing. Do all teachers teach the same way, start in the same place and work at the same pace? Does this not have a familiar sound? It of course ignores many of the things we’ve learned about student learning in the past fifty years. It further ignores everything we’ve learned about adult learning. Yet the bitter irony is that decision makers, often in senior offices at the state level, demand that schools remain unchanged in a changed and changing world and intensify their efforts in doing all the things that didn’t work for those decision makers themselves. Just do it harder.
Can we never allow ourselves to learn? Imposing student success goals and mandating a classroom processes is in itself unlikely to be successful, and shifts the best critical thinking strengths of teachers into job preservation strategies. And we know who the big losers are—the voiceless victims of 21st century education, the students. What are the students left with? A test score so irrelevant that even its inventors don’t bother to relate it to anything in the lives of the students. Standardized benchmark test scores are worse than a snapshot or slice in time; they are pulled out of time all together. They bear no reference to all what has gone before. They indicate nothing as regards what future options there are. And it tells next to nothing about the slice it is supposed to represent. Not so much a snapshot as a corner of one frame pulled from a life-long movie. Yes, reading, writing and math skills are critical for success in modern life, but so are food, shelter and clothing. These are all artifacts when pulled out from a life and even all together do not approach a whole life or a whole story of success. The tests stand as stark evidence of the lack of critical thinking by their creators and developers. If it is not this lack, and these decision makers really are capable of assessing and solving problems and implementing solutions, then these powerful people are knowingly subverting America’s children and our future.
The inadequacies of standardized testing provide a significant insight into what needs to happen in education. We need to teach students how to critically assess and act on each and every frame of the movie of their own lives. For each of them, education must be adapted, relevant and forwardly focused. Who are they, what do they need to get where they want to go and how do they know where that might be and when they have gotten there? They need the knowledge and skills, but they need to be critically processing their needs and goals as well as acquiring knowledge and skills. Teaching needs to inspire goals and encourage the motivation and support the volition to carry them forward. Supporting the volition means providing them with the critical processing skills, strategies and concepts from which to choose in striving toward their goals. Critical thinking is the tool kit people need to have successful lives. Critical thinking is a dynamic; it cannot be assessed in a snapshot; it can be assessed, perhaps, at the end of a life by casting back over the whole life. Formative assessment is part of critical thinking, but cannot very effectively be used to assess progress toward the process that surrounds it. It’s a bit like thinking about how one’s own brain is thinking about itself.
Others speak eloquently and in detail about why students need to be critical thinkers. Here, I want to point to what may be obvious to some already. Teachers need to be critical thinkers too. They must first get back the goals they are working toward. Teachers and students and their families need to be able to determine toward what goals students are working. Those goals define toward what goals the teacher must work to empower the students. Administration’s goals should not define teacher goals; teacher goals must define administration goals.
Administrators must work toward empowering teachers in defining and reaching there goals. Administrators and teachers, just as students, need the dynamic of critical thinking to analyze, assess and plan as part of the solutions for the problems of teaching and learning. Meaningless standardized ‘scores’ for schools and school districts are ultimately counter productive to good education and real student success. It forces every level of that school system to focus on external goals while corrupting the true education process through data manipulation and reactionary management—teaching to the test, grade inflation, keeping disruptive students in dysfunctional classrooms—disciplinary discharge for teachers with dysfunctional classrooms or teachers with high failure rates—closing and restarting schools, setting school against school in competition for ‘good’ students—withholding funding from underperforming districts, restricting funding for the highest-needs students. None of these actions, currently taking place in our schools, does anything to empower students to reach their own life goals. All of these actions, currently taking place in our schools, result from imposing goals from above, a manic hierarchy of puppet master and puppets, puppet master and puppets, puppet master and puppets.
Unless somewhere in the chain there is the courage to cut the strings, our education system is doomed to settle to it lowest potential for learning. There are two characteristics of critical thinkers that are conspicuously absent in public education: academic or professional humility and risk-taking. Without the humility to say, “I don’t know,” we give in to a failed system. Face it; we don’t have the answer. We need to ask more questions and look harder, at more things and with more eyes. Then we need be willing to step into the dark. Failure following from effort is part of learning, unless that failure becomes a failure to try. We have to risk failure to have success. How else will we learn? We do not know everything. How can we stop trying to learn? We cannot simply cut off our learning in the name of better education. Yes, let every flower bloom. Let the hybridizing happen. Reap the rewards of discovery and even chance. Without this, we ossify education and our future world. Fossils in our own time.
Successful students are the explorers, the risk-takers. They are the critical thinkers. This is the way they learn, if they can, and they must be able to if we help them be those critical thinkers. They have no way to prepare for a world that doesn’t exist yet except by taking a foundation of knowledge, a tool box of skills and a predisposition not only to learn from their future world, but create that future world with things new and as yet untested. Is it so hard to understand that to teach critical thinking students we must be critical thinkers ourselves? The whole educational community needs to be doing that, thinking critically about teaching and teaching and modeling critical thinking as a process for success in life. A success we can determine for ourselves and our students.
... JAEZZ Views 
In the “Race to the Top,” who gets left behind?
24 July 2009 Leave a comment
[This is a rambling hodge-podge. Maybe there’s something in here.]
Our obsession with competition as a solution has thrown us all into Life Lotto. So here goes. I have twenty ziglets. I need six ziglets to make my mortgage payment, two for utilities, three for food, and five for my daughter’s tuition. She’s majoring in ziglet management and will make lots of ziglets in a few years. So I have four ziglets left. I can buy two chances in the billion ziglet Life Lotto game!
Now let’s see: my two chances…one billion ziglets…the Lotto Commission keeps 50% of revenues…Hey! My chances of winning are 2 in 1,000,000,000! Imagine that if you can. I certainly can’t, but I understand this: To have a chance to be a winner of the big ziglets, I’d have to start with a lot of ziglets. What if I earned a lot of ziglets? What if I could give myself a billion ziglet bonus on top of the two billion ziglet salary I already earned? (I not sure earned is the right word there.) I could buy a half a billion two-ziglet chances, and still have billions left over, and my chances of winning are even! I’d hold have half the chance tickets! These are good odds. But all I do is win back what I paid half the time, and lose half the time. The commission is the only winner, pulling billions of ziglets out of the system, mostly from the hundreds of millions of people who buy few chances and always, always lose.
Okay, let’s get rid of the commission. Free Market Life Lotto. Now we’re ready to fly. I buy my two tickets at 4 ziglets. The pot is doubled; it’s now 2 billion ziglets. My odds are still 2 in a billion, but Ms. Golds-Sackman is loaded with ziglets. She could buy half the chances, and the odds would be that she would break even over the long haul. Hundreds of millions of losers would still feed the process, and a very few – about one every other year, if Ms. Golds-Sackman nullifies half the game – would win really big and lose most of it by investing in the Golds-Sackman Brokerage Bank. So really Ms. Golds-Sackman wouldn’t play Life Lotto, because she profits by having more one-time winners investing with her. She knows the principle of Life Lotto: some people get all the ziglets and the rest of us just gamble ours away.
Okay. Everybody knows that lotteries are just big shell games. So why do we insist on applying the principles to everything else we institutionalize? In education, we pay rewards to the success for the most advantaged while denying the least advantaged the additional resources they need just to keep up. We tilt the playing field – The New York Times article “Administration Takes Aim at State Laws on Teachers” makes clear that there is a belief that all children arrive the same and learn the same and that all content is taught the same and can be tested in an assembly line model. States must be allowed to pass laws requiring teachers to be evaluated on student test scores, i.e., pay for performance. That being the case, the teacher’s class list is their available ziglets in the “…$4.3 billion Race to the Top competition…,” as the Times calls it. And it is a competition indeed. Teachers will compete for the best, most able students, compete to teach in the most well endowed schools, and will teach to the tests, no matter how shallow the skills they assess. Their goal is not to better the students; it is to best their colleagues. And with limited resources, most will still lose in the long run.
Lose? What about the children left behind? The students who have already to suffer the indignities of not being native English speakers, not coming from a home with two college educated parents, not having had adequate prenatal care, not having adequate healthcare, not having access to healthy food, not having a home to go to after school? The Principle of Life Lotto tells us that the odds of being a biracial child, raised by a single parent and rising to the presidency are very, very long, so long that just the novelty of it at all substantially reduced those odds. But now it’s not even novel. One off.
The obscenity of such actions is depicted in the article “Professor’s Arrest Tests Beliefs on Racial Progress” also for The New York Times. In the United States, we, meaning empowered mostly white people, mostly men, are pathetically blind to the world we have created and now blame for its shortcomings. The election of a biracial president has rightly returned the spotlight to issue of race, but not back to the core of the issue. It was empowered white people, mostly men, who defined race in the first place to define what would be allowed privilege and what would not. In our “classless” society, we have formed and cemented “class-like” definitions into our psyches, on all sides of all lines, with such success that we simply assume that there is a real difference because for hundreds of years we have said, there is.
We have built the walls along the borders of our thoughts, and we all hold those walls up in our minds no matter which side of the walls we are on. Walls are our societal Frankenstein’s monster that will obsess us and drive us screaming into the frozen waste to wrestle to some end. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we have no way to uncreate this horrible force that in its rage ravages blindly. Perhaps we need to start by understanding that we too are on one side of these walls, as those across our walls have always understood.
Then we need to release the limited resource of power. It was power, not authority that put up the walls. It will take power to bring them down. In the giving up of power and the taking on of power, we need to end the competition. Power, like ziglets, is a limited resource. Deserved power is backed by authority, which brings with it responsibility. These are human rights: the basic rights to make decisions about ourselves, in our own self-interest, without impingement on others, and to continue our lives in the form of offspring for which you are then responsible and therefore over whom we have some authority. Nothing in this empowers anyone to define “other.” There is no need to define other, unless we assume authority we do not have by sheer dint of power and for the sake of disempowering, that is taking power from, others.
What we have done has been to focus our struggle, not one neutralizing the definition of race, but over who has power, because it is clear to the people on one side of their wall that they don’t have the power that the people on the other side of that wall do have. The struggle has been to get over the walls. The walls cannot be removed, at least not entirely, because they are part of who we are and have been.
The empowered people, mostly white, mostly men, don’t recognize or won’t acknowledge the unauthorized power they have. Furthermore, when they do recognize it, usually rarely and only slightly, they are at a loss as to how to give it back. Most of us have been somewhat disempowered in other power competitions anyway. Remember the principle of Life Lotto: some people get all the ziglets and the rest of us just gamble ours away. But that’s just it. The more power one has, the more one can acquire. The rich get rich, and the poor… But do the white get whiter? Well, yes. Especially if you view Whiteness as something collateral to color.
Let’s say I’m biracial, but was raised mostly by my white parent side of the family. This could be a perverse advantage of single parenting. I look black enough to get into everywhere black. I can be trusted. At the same time, I know white. I can jump across the wall and look black enough to capitalize on white guilt, people like this writer who are going to encourage “others” to get into the power. I’m truly bi-cultural, fully functional in two, competing cultures. And I can use my great intellect (God bless the DNA that built a brain that can form dendrites easily.) trained at white power-culture institutions to maneuver easily into considerable power. What cultural traits, common language and/or beliefs, have increased and which been diminished to get here? What culture defines who I am and how I am? What defines any success in this country? From infancy to wealth and power, who has the most changing to do? Why will lottery winners never become powerful, and will probably never stay rich? Because the white power-culture has been consolidated into a super-norm that even most white people can’t achieve. Whaddaya think? Pick the winner:
[1. Lost her identity, sorry; 2. Sgt. James Crowley who arrested Professor Gates in Cambridge; 3. Kenneth C. Griffin, 40 year old founder of the Citadel Investment Group, the $20 billion hedge fund; 4. Al Vivian, left, is a diversity consultant in Atlanta. images 1, 3 and 4 from The New York Times, image 2 from the Christian Science Monitor.]
In Life Lotto, is it hard to guess who has the power, just from the pictures? If you say yes, I’d wager you are way white, and are having a hard time getting what I’m writing.
Living in air doesn’t demand thinking much about air until the air starts to run out. It’s easy to see that those without enough air have the problem. It’s not easy to see that having so much of the air is the problem. It’s also easy to see why everyone is trying to get where the air is. It’s a privilege to be where the air is from the start. What percentage of your chances in this world is determined at the moment of conception? It may not make much sense when everyone, especially people who look and sound different from you, starts trying to get into your space, breathe your air, share your privilege. It may seem threatening. But here’s the real question: Who said it was your air? Whose air was it in the first place? Surely air wasn’t in the sole possession of the European aristocracy and subsequently spread throughout the rest of the world through benevolent colonization.
So as we race to the top, who gets left behind? Where isn’t there enough air? In teaching, it will be the teachers who need the most support to help kids learn, and are shoved aside to make room for new teachers. The first five years of teaching are the least productive, yet the Race to the Top will encourage churning. In learning, it will be the ones who start out behind. While the top is the target and the models are the Ken Griffins, we will never get those who start out farthest from that reality across the cultural wall into that game. If greed and avarice are deeply antithetical to your own heritage, it makes you a very poor competitor. And in life, it will still be the ones who are already gasping for air, playing Life Lotto, hoping and dreaming of getting across to a world they don’t “belong” in.
Who got to say what was top? Maybe we should just test the “best,” and forget the rest. We can define a new wall: education. Those inside the education wall will have most of the education, most of the ziglets, most of the air, most of the power. Real reform that will get us right to the top! We can build the wall on the foundations of classism and racism, maybe even sexism. Educationism!
Some people get all the ziglets and the rest of us just gamble ours away.
jay@jaezz.org
Filed under Education Policy, Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with Education, Race and Power, Whiteness