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 Performance 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?
JH: I want to get into looking more specifically at what the performance-based assessments look like in a minute. But before we do that, I really liked what you said about how the school may have started around looking at alternative assessments but has really a bigger picture of what the purpose of education is and what skills we need to cultivate. And I was reading your book Talk, Talk, Talk and I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about what a discussion-based classroom is and how the inquiry method works.
PT: What happens in a discussion-based classroom is you’re asking kids to take more responsibility for their own learning by participating in class, by expressing what they’re thinking, what their ideas are, how they’re responding to texts, how they respond to each other’s responses to text. For a teacher, learning how to facilitate that kind of discussion. You know, it’s interesting, I have a lot of opportunities now to observe other classes in other schools, including non-consortium schools, and I’m always struck—you know, now I sit in the back of the classroom—and I’m always struck by conversations that kids have among themselves that to a teacher who’s in front of the room just looks like they’re not paying attention. But so often, the kids are asking each other questions or they’re commenting on something, and it never gets to be voiced to the class as a whole because it’s not a classroom that values [that]. . . .
And, you know, it happens in all kinds of schools. It’s been really interesting for me to see that and value even more the importance of a discussion-based classroom where kids know that what they have to say is valued.
JH: So instead of being chastised for asking those questions in the back of the room, they’re invited to share them.
PT: Exactly. And instead of the teacher’s questions becoming a question that the kid has to figure out what’s the right answer that the teacher already knows, you ask these more open-ended questions so that there’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer. There’s an interpretation that can be supported with evidence from text or firsthand experience or building on what other kids have said in the classroom. And that’s a very different kind of questioning. As teachers, we often make the mistake of asking empty questions when we already know the answer because you just feel more secure as a teacher. You feel like your role isn’t being threatened. But to have the kind of open-ended questions where things could come up that you might not know, and you say, “That’s a really good question. Maybe we’ll have time to get to that,” or “Let’s put that on our list of questions for research later on in the semester.”
JH: Right. And is this a model of inquiry-based and discussion-based classroom that you have in the consortium schools across the curriculum for all the different subjects?
PT: Well, you know, it’s funny you ask that because I was just talking to some people and I said, “You know, I think we should have a theme for the year,” which we hadn’t done before, “and I think the theme should be discussion-based classrooms.”
JH: Nice.
PT: Because it’s not the way teachers have been trained, so it’s something that you have to retrain yourself for. And at Urban, it’s so pervasive that if a substitute comes in to teach, the class can run itself basically because the kids know how. And if a new teacher starts at the school, the kids will say, “Oh, yeah, you’re not an Urban teacher. You have to learn how to be an Urban teacher.” What we do, and what we encourage other schools to do is to have a whole mentoring system for new teachers. It’s not always possible, and especially now. I know what’s happening this year is budgets are being cut severely. So that means there’s less time for more experienced teachers to help the newer teachers. The apprenticeship of new teachers is a whole other issue that we’ve tried to tackle.
JH: From what you’re saying, it sounds like the method is to have the teacher really scaffold the discussion and point students in different directions and elicit questions from them and present material that challenges them to ask each other questions rather than present to them one fact after another to be learned. It sounds very Freireian to me and a way to engage the class in a lot deeper discussion.
PT: Right. And you know, it takes years to get good at it . . . you’re a history teacher, right?
JH: That’s right.
PT: It takes years to have enough materials at different reading levels to make this model work well. Avram’s been teaching for a long time, so he can move the class in the direction where they seem to be going—what’s catching their interest and how to really develop that and how to bring in enough good materials that are accessible to kids at different levels. We do a lot of what we call packets, where you have one topic, but you have reading selections at different levels related to that topic. For example, I was teaching a class on language, and we were talking about whether languages should be saved from dying.
JH: Interesting.
PT: There are languages dying all the time, just like different species. And so I had to find articles about some of the endangered languages that were very accessible to kids and then others that were even more challenging—because I had a completely mixed group of kids—so that we could all engage in the discussion. You know kids whose reading skills may not be as advanced as some other kids’, but they can still think. And they can still discuss. You know, they still have the sharp intelligence.
JH: That’s right.
PT: So you had to bring in enough materials at different levels so that as a group we can still have good discussions and we can still form more questions out of those discussions.
JH: That makes me think that real education reform would be about giving teachers time to collaborate so they can share the materials they have to develop those rich inquiry lessons.
I’d like to ask you now about the connection between your inquiry-based approach to education and then the performance-based assessments you use to evaluate and what advantages you feel performance-based assessment has over standardized bubble testing.
PT: The general public gleans what the media throw at them and the tendency is for people to think, “Oh, if you’re against standardized testing, then you’re against assessments,” which is not the case at all. What we’re against is an assessment that has the consequence of narrowing curriculum and teaching and learning. It’s important to realize that as soon as you institute these standardized tests, you’re also affecting curriculum, and you’re affecting how teachers teach, and you’re affecting how time is used. And it’s that connection between assessment, curriculum, and instruction that just doesn’t get explained enough in the public conversation about testing. Performance assessments offer such a greater opportunity to develop interesting curriculum and structure more opportunities for the teacher to relate to the kids in front of them. So out of that relationship and out of what is occurring in your classroom, you can help develop the kinds of assessments that grow organically from the material that you’ve actually been teac
hing. Whereas when you impose a standardized exam, you wind up imposing a standardized curriculum.
JH: That’s right.
PT: Which may or may not be relevant to what the class thinks is important, which will definitely narrow what’s possible in a classroom, which will have an effect on the kind of teaching that goes on, and it just goes downhill from there. And those are the vital connections that just don’t become part of the national conversation about assessment.
JH: Yes, thank you for making those connections. Can you walk me through the process of how performance-based assessment works in the consortium schools? What does it look like when a student reaches the end of a semester?
PT: Well, it grows out of the classroom. We have these four PBATs—performance-based assessment tasks—so in literature, it’s a literary analysis that the Common Core is trying to marginalize. We maintain a literary analysis.
JH: Resistance through reading literature!
PT: Right. Social Studies, it’s a research paper. Science, it’s really working like a scientist. Kids are developing experiments that grow out of what they’ve been studying or coming up with a whole new idea about an experiment. And in math, it’s an application of higher mathematics to problem solving. So those are the four main performance-based assessment tasks.
Now, that doesn’t limit the content of it. I’ll just give examples from my teaching. I taught a Latin American literature course, so the PBATs that were developed out of that would be based on Latin American literature. In Latin American fiction, one student might focus on the politics of Latin American fiction, and another might focus on the magical realism in Latin American fiction. So that varies. But the idea of a literary analysis task stays. And that goes across all the curricula.
More Than a Score Page 31