More Than a Score (47 page)

We have to understand, this is slow and difficult work. Education doesn't get transformed over night. The transformations that we've made in my high school, which is a far better place than it was twenty years ago, took time. It's been a slow, deliberate process of working hard, of getting kids support, of looking at what it is that we do to maintain progress, and then moving forward. We managed to de-track our high school—if you know anything about tracking and de-tracking, you know de-tracking is one of the hardest reforms you can do. There has to be an acknowledgment that what we do, it's not going to be a miracle overnight, which is what they're hoping to do.

The kinds of assessments that we need for kids are child-centered assessments: assessments that inform curriculum, that identify places where kids still need to learn and grow, and that also give an accurate reading of what it is that the child is able to do. When we start to move away from those child-centered purposes of assessment and instead start to focus on the other purposes—closing schools, evaluating teachers—we lose our focus. Those grades four and eight tests, when they first came out, teachers could see the test. (Up until about 2010 in New York we could see the tests.) That was so helpful. We could really understand what kids were not understanding. Now that everything is hidden and closed and you can't see the tests, those assessments have lost their instructional power. We have to get back to the idea of why we assess kids to begin with and that that purpose is to help the child grow and to make us better teachers. This is not doing it. It's not.

I love the assessments of the International Baccalaureate. We use them. They exist not to figure out what a kid doesn't know but to let a kid show what they do know. Many of them are scored by the teachers. The IB has good checks to make sure that they're being assessed fairly and with validity. They are interspersed throughout the curriculum. They're a natural part of the teaching and learning process. For example, there are papers that kids write over the course of two years. There are oral presentations that are part of it. There's a portfolio in art, with kids reflecting on their work. They really are model assessments, and if we had assessments like that and we did not use them for high-stakes purposes, we would just be in such a better place.

JH:
That's wonderful. What is your definition of the opportunity gap and what do you think we could do to close that?

CB:
I look at it through the prism of the book entitled
Closing
the Opportunity Gap
. There are a lot of different facets—per-pupil spending [is one]. The gap includes opportunity to have support services like guidance counselors, social workers, and to make sure that those support services match the needs of the community. I often say, 16 percent of our kids are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and I have three social workers. If I have three social workers with a population of 16 percent on free and reduced-price lunch, how many social workers should there be in a school where 97 percent of the kids are on free and reduced lunch? That's a part of the opportunity gap. Certainly tracking is part of the opportunity gap. Our movement has to be about making sure that all kids have access to the very best curriculum that a school has to offer.

“What Could Be”

Inquiry and the Perform
ance Assessment Alternative

This interview was conducted on July 26, 2014, and has been edited and condensed.

Jesse Hagopian:
I first heard of the New York Performance Standards Consortium Schools when I met Avram Barlowe in Washington, DC, during the spring of 2013 at an education conference put on by the Advancement Project. It was a really powerful moment because I was relating the story of the MAP test boycott in Seattle and saying we need to move away from high-stakes testing, and then Avram's was next, presenting with a colleague of his and a student he had taught at a consortium school, explaining how performance-based assessment is so superior to standardized testing. It was a powerful coming together of both how we resist the current testing regime and then what we put in its place. Did you follow the MAP test boycott while it was going on, and what was your initial reaction was to it?

Phyllis Tashlik:
Oh, yeah. Sure, we heard about it. Well, you know, we're always interested in knowing other people across the country who've come to the conclusions that we've come to because you don't want to feel all alone in this. We saw that you were objecting to a very specific test, and it looked like lots of very good reasons to oppose that very specific test. We were interested in seeing what would happen next and definitely wanted to let you know about what we were doing in New York.

JH:
I'm so glad that you and Avram and the folks with the consortium schools built on that relationship. I have to thank you for flying Garfield teachers out to see your schools because their experience learning about performance assessment at your schools has really deepened their understanding. And their presentations at Garfield have been really impressive, and I think our whole staff has gone beyond opposing the MAP test to collectively developing better assessments in our schools. So I thank you for that.

PT:
That was great to see Rachel [Eells] and Heather [Robison] most recently. We had an afternoon group that day with people from New Mexico, New Hampshire, Maine, Kentucky. It was clear you were at a beginning stage and it it's great that Rachel and Heather can bring the skills they learned at the Moderation Study back to other people at Garfield.

JH:
It's changing the culture of our schools. You know, I think a lot of us who are interested in developing critical thinking in the classroom have spent a lot of our time defending the public schools from the corporate education reform attack. And at the same time that we want to defend the schools from this attack, we also have to think about how we need to reorganize our schools, rethink what the purpose of school is, and develop better forms of assessment. So I wonder if you could tell me about how you came into the field of education and how you decided that a new approach to public education was needed.

PT:
It was very long time ago. [Laughter] And it actually for me started with more political activism and gradually I just got more involved in the whole issue of the public schools as a sort of political issue—I mean, this was during the Vietnam War and there were social movements going on in those days—but I just started to get really interested in education, in how schools run, and how kids learn and how teachers teach.

And in those days, they needed people desperately in the schools, so I didn't really have much teacher preparation. It was pretty much an on-the-job kind of preparation. So, you know, when you're a new teacher, you've got tons of energy and ideas, the school was just filled with new teachers. There weren't many mentors in those days or models or good examples, I'd say, of really good teaching just because everyone was so young and inexperienced.

I got involved with the consortium because I knew Ann Cook and Herb Mack, who are legendary in New York City public education circles. (They founded Urban Academy more than thirty years ago. Herb just retired this year after being involved with public schools for over forty years. Ann Cook, also cofounder of Urban and an activist in New York City public education, is the executive director of the consortium.) I met them when I started to work at Urban Academy. It was the late 1990s when Tom Sobol was the commissioner for New York and his whole philosophy was top-down support for bottom-up reform. Tom Sobol gave us the go-ahead. Also in New York, there had been an alternative school division, which I was involved in. I was interested in looking at those kids who were dropping out and trying to find other ways to reach them. And I recognized that the status quo is not the way to reach these kids. You really had to come up with interesting approaches to teaching and learning. So there were lots of ways that different schools were doing that, and Sobol was very interested in building on that and supporting it. Sobol gave us a waiver that allowed us to opt out of the state standardized tests. I think that first waiver was for five years.

JH:
And so that waiver provided the basis for the founding of the New York Performance Standards Consortium.

PT:
Yes, that was the legal basis of it. But what happened after Tom left is the next commissioner, Richard Mills, had a whole different approach and his whole idea was that everybody in the state should be doing the same thing, and the same thing would be five high-stakes exit exams. It was going to be a requirement that every single kid in the state was going to do these five exams, regardless of what kind of program they were in or what their goals were. Mills gave us a just a one-year waiver. And some people saw that as a defeat, but we saw it as another year to work at getting another extension. And so, in all these years, we've gone from waiver to waiver: five years, one year, four years, five years.

JH:
So yours is really a story of, year by year, having to build resistance to standardized testing both in a political struggle with the state and also in the classroom by showing the alternative.

PT:
Right. What happened is the very first waiver gave us a certain number of spots under what they call a “variance.” And so in 2007 we were able to bring in seven more schools, and we've just brought in two groups of schools. It's given us the opportunity over the years to really develop what we're doing, to refine it as a system. We've always said the consortium is not just an assessment; it's a whole system that we're engaged in.

JH:
My question to you then is why are the consortium schools public schools rather than charter schools? Because we always hear that you have to be a charter school in order to be innovative and take a different approach.

PT:
Yeah, it's funny. When we describe our schools, people say, “Oh, I know, so you're a charter school.” No. We take all kids. If you look at the data report, we have more kids on free and reduced[-price] lunch than the general school population. We have a higher number of Latino students. So we take all [the] students [we can]. The charter school movement has so much funding that comes from private sources. We don't do that. We're public schools. We accept the same amount of money as every other public school does and we accept all children. We have a high number of kids with special needs. I mean, I think the average in New York City is about 14 percent. Some of our schools have over 30 percent of kids with high needs.

JH:
Wow.

PT:
So you don't find that in the charter schools.

JH:
Right, in too many instances they want to push out the kids with high needs from charter schools so they don't drag the test scores down.

PT:
Yes, and in fact many of our schools wind up with the kids who get asked to leave the charter schools.

JH:
Can you talk about the principles that the consortium is founded on?

PT:
It started technically as an assessment issue, but it's always been about creating a more inquiry-based classroom. Having an element of choice for students and teachers, respecting students' voice. The way we define ourselves now is a teacher-designed, student-focused system with external evaluation.

JH:
Yes!

PT:
So we worked with psychometricians to develop a moderation study, which is what some of your teachers participated in. And we used a lot of the ideas about planning backwards. So if you're going to prepare students for the performance assessments, which involve extensive writing and an oral presentation of their work, what does that mean about the earlier grades? How do you prepare kids for that kind of opportunity to show what they've learned?