The perils of conflating testing and accountability

Everyone wants a great education. And our city deserves a great community college. To do that, City College has to stop trying to keep everything the same as it’s always been and start finding what really works. We have to embrace our responsibility to our community and accept accountability. That isn’t easy, but it’s a fight worth having.

Teachers all over the nation and at every level decry the wrongs they see perpetrated by the so-called “testing” movement in public education. They explain that teaching and learning are complex activities, eluding simple tests of effectiveness. People do not usually learn in linear, easily monitored ways – the true result of a semester’s work may not be realized for a year or more. In addition, standardized tests have been repeatedly shown to be biased to people from different socio-economic groups, ethnicities, first-languages, and other issues of identity. And many teachers object to being evaluated based on students’ test results, because of the complexities mentioned above.

While I agree with much of the criticism of standardized tests (see also The Coming Revolution in Public Education in the Atlantic), I also see that the move toward greater accountability, which is at the root of the testing movement, is positive. More accountability means more information for students, parents, and the public in general. More accountability means there is less chance of failing systems and schools continuing to function without change. More accountability is good for students.

Conforming to the national trends toward greater accountability in education, the California legislature and our accrediting commission (ACCJC) are asking community colleges to be more transparent in our work, to assess our selves and our students more effectively, and to provide data to the public about our success and failures with students. They are also asking us to be more efficient with public dollars and to concentrate on job training, transfer to four-year institutions, and basic skills. Despite my belief that money spent on education is almost always a good investment, this is a reasonable request. More importantly, we are public servants in a public institution and we have to listen to what our society is telling us.

Unfortunately, some community college faculty don’t want to be more accountable. Some want desperately to protect the status quo at our colleges, even though we fail, both metaphorically and literally, way too many of our students, especially if those students are African-American, Latino/a, Filipino/a, or Pacific Islander (see the Student Success Scorecard for data). Those faculty sometimes conflate the testing movement with the trend toward increased accountability. Whether the conflation is intentional or not, the effect is to scare other faculty into fighting against both testing and accountability – that is, into fighting for the status quo – even though many of them believe change in higher education is needed.

At no community college in California is the conflation and fear of the testing movement and the trend toward more accountability stronger than at City College of San Francisco, where many faculty have been fighting the statewide Student Success Task Force, the subsequent Student Success Act of 2012, and now the ACCJC sanctions. There has been less protest about the standardized testing movement, but it comes up occasionally as an example of what’s wrong with the reforms being asked for by the ACCJC.

But it is false to equate the testing movement with the accountability movement. No one, neither the ACCJC nor the California state legislature, is trying to force community colleges to administer the kinds of standardized testing that K-12 public schools must use or to be penalized for how students do on them. Community college faculty are not in danger of losing our jobs or of having our salaries based on student test performance.

On the other hand, community colleges are in danger of losing some state funding if students don’t want to take our classes or if students don’t stay in our classes through the whole semester. Community colleges are also in danger of losing accreditation if we plan and prioritize poorly and don’t have clear links between our finances and our plans.

Being more accountable, more transparent, and more responsible is a good thing. We are public employees and we are paid through public funds, so we are and should be accountable to the public. Information about how classes are taught, what students learn, and how well students do should be generally available and we as teachers and as institutions should be held responsible for our work. If we’re not responsive to the needs of our students and community, we should be penalized.

When we conflate standardized testing with accountability, fighting both, we fight the good of accountability rather than just the bad of standardized tests.

So rather than fighting to save a failing status quo, CCSF and community colleges broadly should be fighting to save our students by providing really great classes they want to take, with excellent support both in and out of the classroom. Many at CCSF and at other colleges understand that if students come to our colleges and succeed, the state will be happy to fund our work. If students don’t come or don’t succeed, the state has every right to put the money somewhere else.

Highlights from April Board Meeting

Despite rumors of civil disobedience and a pre-meeting teach-in/rally by AFT 2121, once Thursday’s CCSF Board of Trustees meeting got started it was relatively calm and smooth. Among the highlights:

• The Board appointed a new permanent Vice Chancellor of Student Development — Dr. Fabienne McPhail Naples, who comes to CCSF with a long history of advocacy for students and administrative experience. Welcome Dr. McPhail Naples!
• Accreditation activities continue at the college as we continue to try to show the ACCJC that we deserve to remain accredited in the time running up to the commission’s meeting in June. The general feeling around campus is now upbeat — we feel like our chances are good of at least raising the level of sanction, though not completely clearing all sanctions.
• The search for a permanent chancellor — hopefully to start work in October or November — has begun.
• A short discussion of the CCSF data from the Accountability Report for Community Colleges revealed that City College has significant achievement gaps for African American, Latino/a, Pacific Islander, and Filipino/a students. Trustees and the chancellor spoke to the importance of closing these gaps and AFT President Alisa Messer acknowledged the systemic inequities and the faculty’s responsibility to address them. The first steps toward improving the problem is acknowledging its existence and taking responsibility for it, so this was a good beginning conversation for the college.

ARCC 2.0: A new scorecard for CA community colleges to be released

Since 2007, the California Community College Chancellor’s office has been putting out the Accountability Report for Community Colleges (ARCC) in response to Assembly Bill 1417 (2004), which asked the Chancellor’s office “to design and implement a performance measurement system that contained performance indicators for the system and its colleges.” ARCC is a convenient, one-stop way to measure how well all of California’s 112 community colleges are doing.

The new version of ARCC is, in my view, a significant improvement over the original, because it includes outcome  and persistence measures that give students, educators, and the general public a truer sense of a college’s performance. Among the metrics — all of which can be broken out by gender, ethnicity, and other demographic information — will be:

• Student Progress and Attainment Rate
• Persistence Rate
• At Least 30 Unit Rate
• Basis Skills Progress Rate
• Career Technical Education Progress and Attainment Rate
• Career Development and College Preparation Rate

(Click here to download the definitions of these rates and other details.)

This new report will be an important measure of every college’s work and, at CCSF, we look forward to its release. The report should be available here on Monday or Tuesday (4/8 or 4/9).

ACCJC visiting team has come and gone — now, we wait

City College took another step on the way to keeping its accreditation on Thursday and Friday (4/4 and 4/5) when a nine-member visiting team from our accrediting body — the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) — spent both days meeting with administrators, faculty, classified staff, and students. They looked at documents, attended meetings, asked questions, and generally tried to find out if the college had really made the changes we outlined in our Show Cause report, submitted on March 15.

I was able to attend two different meetings with members of the team. They were forthright and honest about their questions and seemed genuinely interested in helping the college improve. They even complimented the college on the work we’ve done since July 2012 and said they “could see the difference.” That was encouraging, but it was hard not to be aware of the fact that their report could either help the college stay open or help close it down.

The visiting team will now prepare a report and send it on to the commission, who won’t meet to decide the college’s fate till June 5-7, 2013. The meeting will be held at the SFO Marriott, in Burlingame, CA.

So, now we finish up the semester and wait.

MOOC-Proof Your Classroom

I’ve been reading the news, just like everyone else. Some of us are really scared that we’re not going to have jobs, soon, owing to MOOCs and the “privatization of education.” Well, as far as I’ve observed, the “private” has always been a big part of education, especially the part that seems to benefit its constituents most. Out of my roughly 21 years of formal education, only four years have come from private education. One of those schools was far more superior than the other. I paid dearly for one; the other paid me. In both instances, I walked away with a degree. The more we do that for our students, the better. Instead of sitting around worrying about Phoenix University taking our students, I say now’s the time to up the ante on our classroom pedagogy—make today count; it’s the only way to MOOC-proof your classroom.

 

Engage your students. One of the big differences between online education and a traditional classroom is the people in the room. Where else can you get a police cadet sitting next to a nurse and a fashion designer? Only in a community college classroom, that’s where. It’s time for us to capitalize on that dynamic. Student voices need to be heard—regularly. bell hooks talks about teaching to transgress. When we examine this concept, we can see that it’s possible to commit transgressions against ourselves, against the artificial barriers we’ve erected within ourselves, such as the internalized beliefs we carry about who is capable of learning what material, and in what ways. We need to punch through those boundaries into uncharted territories until we are all thinking critically about what we’re doing in our classrooms every single day and how we could do it better. Our students need to get woken up from their morning stupor not by coffee but by the stimulating atmosphere in the room, and they need to love walking into your morning, afternoon or evening classes because of what’s happening in that physical space. Anything less and you’re plumb MOOCed.

 

It’s vital to get derailed regularly. This could be an ingenious way to employ the concept of “connectivism” (acquiring information from a network) that MOOCs capitalize on so well. We all understand how important it is to have a lesson plan. I usually know what needs to happen each week and each day. When I first started teaching, I’d count every minute of each lesson and cram it in. That meant that even one student question could interrupt my lesson plan. To a certain extent, that still happens. What has changed is that I’m now willing to let my students take charge when there is momentum. I allow an interesting discussion to derail my plan or students want to understand how to punctuate a quote instead of selecting one: Give in periodically! Switch gears; let students explain to each other while you observe. Those sparks of excitement and student-driven learning are what they will remember most. Even though you will sometimes need to say, “Let’s not today,” your students will know that if they really want it, they will win. Suddenly, you’ve entered into a collaborative partnership with your students in which they are agents of their learning, and they feel emboldened to ask, assert and interrupt. No MOOC can do that.

 

Teach your passion. Doing what I love gives me juice in the classroom. I literally catch fire when I’m talking about books, ideas and writing. Even a grammar lesson gets me to my loud-Latina place. If I didn’t sleep the night before or am having a hard day, I can forget about my own stuff when we start discussing quote interpretation or when to cite. We all know fire is catching. If you love what you do, so will they. So even if they don’t end up head over heels for coordinators and appositives, they’ll at least remember that crazy glint in your eye when you talked about punctuating sentences. Take your heart into the classroom with you; it won’t let you down.

 

It’s critical to self-evaluate often. Self-evaluation means you need feedback. When my all of my students’ eyes glaze over, I know it’s time to change my strategy. If only one is nodding out, I know I need to talk to her after class. We also need to be willing to listen to student criticism. This doesn’t mean we need to internalize everything we hear or even try to modify our practices every time we get some feedback, but we should be able to listen to how we can be more effective educators, better partners in the learning process. If three students give me the same feedback, I know it’s time to adapt and adjust, not because I’m forced into it, but because I want to be a collaborator in the education process. I may hold a Master’s degree in English, but I’m not perfect.

 

If all else fails, start designing your online class, now. What do you have to lose? If MOOCs are the future of education, shouldn’t we at least try not to get left behind? I believe the good practices we employ in our classrooms today, will cross over into the online frontier.

 

Teachers talk about productive struggle and persistence

Getting students to struggle with challenging and meaningful problems is, I would argue, the most important thing we as teachers can do. In order to do that, we have to support them both intellectually and emotionally. Here are a couple of videos with teachers talking about the importance of productive struggle and persistence and how they help students do that:

As City College moves forward, emerging from our accreditation crisis, productive persistence is one of the ideas we must engage with to improve our work with students and their success.

SMAC/Coleman Demands for Sustaining City College

Students Making a Change and Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth come out with a clear vision for how to fix City College and for how the college should look as it works to emerge from the current crisis:

City College of San Francisco is facing an uncertain future, and the lives of marginalized students are most at stake.  Students Making A Change (SMAC) and Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth are calling on the administration, Board of Trustees, faculty and classified staff to stand with students and support our demands for increasing accountability, transparency, equity, local control, and student voice/representation, as well as SMAC’s specific policy, fiscal, and structural reform recommendations.

Click here to go to the Coleman e-alert and a link to more details.