I Need MySpace!

By Cindy Long

When Caitlyn McNeill started high school last year, she wished she could take all of her middle school friends with her. Unfortunately, only half of the 16-year-old’s friends joined her at Northern High in Owings, Maryland, while the other half went to school in the neighboring town. They still manage to keep in close touch, chatting almost as often as they did when they walked the halls and ate lunch together. The only difference is that now they hang out on MySpace.com, the Web site that has become the 21st century’s answer to the 1950s soda shop.

Caitlyn McNeill is a savvy Internet user and regular visitor to MySpace. "I go on MySpace every chance I get," she says.

Caitlyn and her friends log on to MySpace to catch up with each other, post bulletins about what’s new, and chat about friends, school, weekend plans, and, of course, boys. They decorate their MySpace pages the way they might decorate their bedrooms, complete with colorful, patterned backgrounds and photos; Caitlyn’s page is greenish-blue with a star pattern.

"It’s bright and really cute,” she says. Along with posting pictures of themselves and their friends, they link to videos and MP3 files. “My friend has a video from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where Will and Carlton are doing a dance,” says Caitlyn. “It’s hilarious.”

It’s all part of the social networking revolution, in which users build personal pages and use those pages to share information, chat online, and keep in touch with others. Hundreds of such sites exist, but MySpace leads the way. It’s the third most visited Web site in the United States (behind Yahoo! and Google), averaging 36 million page views a day. Of the millions, many are students. Right now, more than half of American kids online use social networking sites, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey of teenagers.

Making connections is what powers the popularity of sites like MySpace, but it can also be cause for concern. News stories abound of online predators stalking young girls and boys by way of their profiles and luring teens, even preteens, into dangerous situations. Some kids post photographs of themselves in less-than-virtuous poses, in barely-there outfits—or worse, in incriminating situations—for all the world to see, including college admissions officers and potential employers. Students have also posted nasty comments about their classmates and teachers. In fact, more than one in three educators surveyed by the National School Boards Association (NSBA)—some 36 percent—said social networking sites have been disruptive at school.

But tell students about the concerns surrounding sites like MySpace, and the common refrain is one adults have been hearing from teenagers since the Stone Age: “You worry too much!” As media-savvy technophiles, they realize some of their peers misuse the Web, but they’re asking us to trust that most of them use it safely and responsibly. What’s more, research backs up their claims. Most students take steps to protect their privacy, and in some schools, safety and social networking have become part of the curriculum. “Simply blocking access to MySpace at school is not the end of the story,” said NSBA Executive Director Anne Bryant. “Students need to be educated about these sites and what the impact of misuse is on themselves as well as others.”

Kathy Schrock, who helps educate students on technology issues in Nauset Public Schools on Cape Cod, comes at the problems of social networking with firsthand experience. For an entire year, she had an “imposter page,” or fake profile, posted about her on MySpace by five students at a Catholic high school.

“The page they created for me was basically harmless, but it wasn’t authentic and I wanted it taken down,” says Schrock, the district’s administrator for technology, whose “Guide for Educators” is found at www.discoveryschool.com . “I had to call the teacher, who didn’t even know about MySpace. I wrote to the school, but the principal wouldn’t take care of it. MySpace wouldn’t even take it down.”

That was a year ago. The bogus page has since come down, and MySpace is now quick to remove imposter pages. In fact, its frequently asked questions include, “How do we remove an imposter profile for a teacher/faculty member” and “Someone is pretending to be me—what do I do?”

While high-profile cases involving teenagers creating imposter pages for teachers and classmates have surfaced (see this issue's "Savaged in Cyberspace " for examples), Schrock is more concerned about students’ safety. Her message to students is simple: if you have a profile, keep it private.

MySpace requires users to be at least 14, and profiles of MySpace users under 16 are automatically set to “private,” so only the users they’ve allowed access can view their profile, send instant messages and e-mails, or add them to their blog list. But kids routinely lie about their ages—either that, or there are a surprising number of high school freshmen and sophomores age 20 or above on MySpace.

Last June, MySpace announced that privacy options would be available to users of all ages and that all users could block others from contacting them, conceal their “online now” status, and prevent others from e-mailing direct links to their images. MySpace users 18 or older can no longer add users under 16 to their friends list unless they already know the person’s full name or e-mail address.

The new privacy options were announced after a 16-year-old girl tricked her parents into getting her a passport and then flew to the Mideast to be with a man she met on the site. It’s one of the most extreme stories—of which there are only a smattering, considering the tens of millions of young people who visit the site regularly.

How often is regularly? “I go on MySpace every chance I get,” Caitlyn McNeill says. She’s not alone. According to the Pew study, 48 percent of teens visit social networking sites at least once every day.

Most of Caitlyn’s MySpace habits align closely with the Pew findings, which show that young people are wise to the dangers posed by social networking sites. Caitlyn and her friends set their profiles to private; Pew found that 66 percent of teens have done the same. Caitlyn uses MySpace to keep in touch with her friends from school and to make plans; Pew found that 91 percent of teens use social networking sites to keep in touch with friends they see a lot, while 72 percent use the site to make plans with those friends. In fact, the tagline of the MySpace site is, “A place for friends.”

Caitlyn is also a fairly savvy Internet user. “There are a lot of creeps out there, and I know it,” she says. “I don’t let anybody add me to their friends list, and I don’t accept messages from anybody I haven’t met in person. Also, if your profile is set to private, the people at school you don’t like can’t find out information about you.”

Sarah Mortimer, who lives in New Hampshire, uses MySpace to keep in touch with friends both near and far. “Since I have switched schools a lot, I am able to keep in touch with kids from my old schools,” the 16-year-old says. “It’s just really nice to see someone I haven’t talked to in, like, 10 years and remember them from my childhood.” She has her profile set to private so “rapist killers don’t get me,” she says half-jokingly. But her profile also says she lives in Zimbabwe so that anyone searching in her town or ZIP code won’t find her.

That’s exactly the kind of Internet shrewdness Kim Conner, the computer teacher at Nauset Middle School, is trying to instill among her sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders. “One student put up Albert Einstein as his profile photo to help hide his identity,” Conner says. “I thought that was rather clever.”

Conner has worked social networking safety into the curriculum as a way to “make the kids aware of the different things that can happen when they use the sites without thinking,” she says.

As is the case in most districts, Conner and her students can’t access MySpace or other social networking sites at school, but she’s saved screen shots that she uses to demonstrate how profiles that aren’t set to private can reveal identifying details. For example, when kids allow their profiles and instant messages to be open, anyone can read plans they might make online. She uses the following as an example:

Nausetgirl     (5:09:55): wotz ^? wnt 2 go out?
Warrior08    (5:09:56): yS, whr do wnt 2 go?
Nausetgirl     (5:09:57): How bout the chocl@ Sparrow n Orleans?

Suddenly, anyone logged onto the page can see where the girls are meeting.

Conner also uses an example of a profile of a girl who thought she hadn’t posted anything identifiable, except for a photo gallery image of her wearing her school’s field hockey uniform.

But once students are aware of the dangers and are taught to think carefully about how they use sites like MySpace, Conner believes that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. “It’s really a great way for kids to stay connected outside of school,” she says, adding that sometimes students get online and help each other with homework or work on assignments together. But the main benefit of sites like MySpace is that they “allow young people to express themselves, be creative, and show their friends who they really are,” says Conner. “It gives them a common venue.”

Chris Luty, a senior at Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, expresses himself on his MySpace profile with photos, videos, music files, and different fonts and backgrounds. Parents and teachers beware—what kids like Chris might find appealing about their profiles would probably cross the eyes of most adults. On many teen profiles, backgrounds are a blur of vibrant colors, patterns, and clashing, often unreadable fonts, splattered with links and images. But their friends can tell a lot about their sense of humor by the videos they post, or about their musical tastes by the bands they promote.

Chris’s profile includes an Adam Sandler video and videos of live performances by three of his favorite bands—Godsmack, +44, and Patent Pending. He says that all of his friends on MySpace are people he knows in “real life.” Otherwise, he says, “I’d have no idea who was sitting behind that keyboard.”

Kim Conner acknowledges that there have been problems with abuses of MySpace, but she says she approaches it with “the one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bushel theory.”
“Some really good things can come out of this,” Conner says. “It gives all students a way to connect and be together in a safe environment. MySpace can be a very safe and positive thing.” 

Send comments on this story to clong@nea.org .

 

Uncle Sam Wants…You?

As military recruiters continue targeting students, they’re increasingly trying to win the hearts and minds of educators.

By Cynthia Kopkowski

 One of the U.S. Marine Corps’ newest “recruits” is running through the mud on Parris Island, South Carolina—the training depot where nearly 17,000 enlistees submit to a grueling 13-week boot camp each year. A second later, she scrambles up a 20-foot-high rope wall and launches herself over the top. The next morning, Bethany Deckard will tuck her cheek into the cold contours of an M16 and fire multiple rounds to practice “engaging” the enemy. For the Marines, just having Deckard at the depot is a victory. Even though she will never actually become a Marine, she interacts daily with hundreds of students who might. Deckard is a high school teacher, and that makes her one of the military’s most highly sought allies right now.

The Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force are working overtime to win the attention of teachers and education support professionals in order to reach their ultimate quarry: students. The Bush Administration’s announcement this winter that the Army and Marine Corps must increase their active duty ranks by 92,000 in the next five years means even more pressure on military recruiters to gain access to educators’ classrooms—where they’re not always welcome.

Educators, parents, and other activists are demanding restrictions on recruiters in districts in New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maryland, California, and elsewhere, and polls show the war in Iraq and calls for more troop deployments are opposed by a majority of the public.

While teachers have never been disregarded by the military, the idea of actively wooing them on a day-to-day basis “may have been more energized recently, given the political environment,” acknowledges Jane Arabian, the Department of Defense’s assistant director for enlistment. The Army’s School Recruiting Program Handbook reveals just how closely recruiters are now paying attention to educators—whom it calls “key influencers.” “Ensure an Army presence in all secondary schools,” the manual advises. “School ownership is the goal.” How best to do that? “Be indispensable to school administration, counselors, faculty, and students. Be so helpful and so much a part of the school scene that you are in constant demand, so if anyone has any questions about the military service, they call you first!” (See “By the Book,” page 37.)

Using teachers is “a very clever marketing technique,” says Allen Kanner, a clinical psychologist and researcher whose work in part focuses on military recruiting. In the last few years the military hired private firms, including those that specialize in marketing to children, to learn how to best gain a stronghold in schools, Kanner says. “Teachers are role models, and if they approve of something, then the students believe the whole school system approves of it,” he explains.

It’s the same thing you’ll hear from Curtis Gilroy, the head of recruitment for the Department of Defense. “Teachers are a significant influencer, there’s no question about it,” he says. “We just want the cadre of teachers, regardless of political persuasion or background, to speak about the military objectively.”

So while you may worry that students are tuning you out in homeroom, the Army thinks otherwise. “Before you can expect any type of assistance from school officials or be accepted by students, you must first establish rapport and credibility,” states the Army recruiting handbook. “You must convince [educators] that you have their students’ best interests in mind.”

That’s exactly what the Marines are hoping to do as they put the 80 or so educators from Louisville, Kentucky, and Richmond, Virginia, through their paces at Parris Island. Each year, they bring 12 groups of educators through the all-expenses-paid workshop, at a cost of roughly $57,000 per visit. The Army, Navy, and Air Force host similar programs. “We’re looking at those people on the fence, or more than likely, who are uninformed,” says Parris Island spokesman Lt. Scott Miller. “We’re just trying to inform them. Are we trying to win them? Yeah. We have a quota.” If recruiters successfully target the teachers first, then they have, Miller says, “another foot in the door, so to speak.”

In Tucson, Arizona, Rolande Baker had had enough of the feet in her and her colleagues’ doors. The special education and government teacher successfully lobbied the the Sunnyside School District Governing Board last year to severely curtail recruiters’ access to schools.

Baker was initially rankled by an ever-burgeoning number of recruiters interrupting students’ lunches, coming up to their tables, offering to buy them chips and nachos. After school, she’d see them handing out pencils and bumper stickers. Then the recruiters’ attention turned to Baker and her colleagues.

“They would put slips of paper in our mailboxes that said, ‘How would you like to have a day off from class? Let us come speak to your students,’” she says. “It would make me so angry, I would tear it up into little pieces.”

During the first three weeks of the 2005 school year, recruiters visited her school 38 times, says Baker. During that same period, college recruiters visited three times. Ninety-one percent of students at Sunnyside High are Black or Hispanic, and she believes that made her and her colleagues a particularly attractive target.

“It’s very insidious,” says Arlene Inouye, a speech and language specialist in Los Angeles schools and the coordinator of the Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools. “It’s become very clear that recruiters want to be an integral part of the school so that people will look at them and their position will not be questioned.”

Becoming an integral part of the schools includes the Educator Workshops on Parris Island, where Bethany Deckard and her colleagues gather for the four-day, behind-the scenes look at recruits’ experience there. Make that somewhat of a behind-the-scenes look.

While workshop participants settle into auditorium seats for a presentation by a gregarious colonel, who speaks about the Marines’ focus on character development, discipline, esprit de corps, and military bearing, a drill instructor a half-mile away is screaming through the grey morning at a recruit. A recruit who, on her 21st day of training, finds herself paralyzed with fear atop a wooden beam perched several feet above the ground. For nearly five minutes she wobbles, knees shaking, turning her stricken, damp face away as her drill instructor screams, “Your tears do nothing for me.”

For most of the educators, the emotional high point of the trip comes when watching two companies ending their training receive the revered Marine Corps pin at an event called the emblem ceremony, and then the next morning, seeing their stirring graduation ceremony. Many teachers wipe tears from their eyes during both ceremonies. Proud “ooh-rahs”—a trademark Marine cry—come from at least five former Marines in their ranks.

“I know kids who would benefit from the discipline and learning about the honor and commitment,” says Victor Smith, a math and special education teacher from Richmond. “Those who haven’t been exposed don’t understand.” Like the rest of the group, he snaps photos throughout the visit and plans to incorporate the experience into his classroom work in the coming weeks. Assistant Principal Donna Buzonas of Newport News, Virginia, says she was “shocked” to see how young the recruits look, but “it makes me proud that they’re instilling the right values in them,” she says. “If [my] kids have questions, I’ll be able to answer them.”

IN MANY DISTRICTS, THE QUESTIONS now revolve around how and where recruiters can operate. In Baker’s school district, recruiters now can come on campus only once a month. They meet only with students who request an appointment, and those meetings must take place in a designated area, not in the halls or classrooms. During annual registration, Sunnyside distributes a card that lets parents opt in on having their child’s contact information sent to the Department of Defense for recruiting purposes. The current No Child Left Behind provisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act require that to get federal funding, schools must turn over that contact information unless parents opt out. Tucson’s more restrictive opt-in approach is the same one that NEA advocates. In 2005, Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) introduced the Student Privacy Protection Act, which would amend NCLB to require an opt-in system.

Bethany Deckard wasn’t lobbying to keep recruiters out of her school hallways, but she also wasn’t likely to point students toward a recruiter. “Honestly, I was real leery and probably not encouraging it,” Deckard, an English teacher, confides quietly aboard the bus on the first day of her Parris Island visit. “It’s still hard for me. I was talking to one teacher here and she was saying, ‘I’m excited for my kids,’ and I’m thinking, ‘They could die.’”

By the end of her stay at Parris Island, Deckard’s opinion has evolved. As the bright marching tune of a brass band fills the hangar where graduation is about to begin, she reflects positively on her time on the island. “When I was watching the emblem ceremony yesterday, I just felt so proud to be a part of the United States,” she says. At this, her voice wavers. “I’m so grateful for the sacrifices they make.”

Send comments on this story to ckopkowski@nea.org.

 

By the Book The U.S. Army’s School Recruiting Program Handbook reveals that when it comes to reaching educators and students, little is left to chance. Some excerpts:   "Recruiters must first establish rapport in the schools....Once educators are convinced recruiters have their students’ best interests in mind, the school recruiting program can be effectively implemented.” “Like the farmer who fails to guard the hen house, we can easily lose our schools and relinquish ownership to the other services if we fail to maintain a strong school recruiting program.” “Never rely on guidance counselors as the sole center of influence in the school. Cultivate coaches, librarians, administrative staff, and teachers, especially those whose subjects correlate with Army programs.” “Attend as many school activities as possible. Offer your Army training and experience, your sports and hobby knowledge, etc., as a resource to the school.” “Try to obtain a schedule of high school faculty meetings....A luncheon presentation of what the Army offers young people will enhance your relationship with the entire school faculty. Start with our shared goals for students of staying in school, off drugs, and out of trouble.” “Have something to give them (pen, calendar, cup, donuts, etc.) and always remember secretary’s week with a card or flowers.” “Offer your assistance in registration and any other administrative help you can give. Remember: You need all the blueprint information on your high school you can get.” “Deliver donuts and coffee for the faculty once a month. This will help in scheduling classroom presentations and advise teachers of the many Army opportunities.”

Making it Personal

In the new movement to keep kids in school, every educator has a role to play.

We are in the midst of a school dropout crisis. According to estimates, about a million students fail to graduate every year. Roughly half of Black and Hispanic students graduate on time with a standard diploma, and less than half of American Indian and Alaska Native students complete high school. Studies show that each class of high school dropouts costs the nation more than $200 billion in lost wages and tax revenues, plus spending for social support programs.

“We are paying the price, folks,” says NEA President Reg Weaver, “socially, economically, and politically, for a generation that is more likely to be incarcerated than be in college.”

NEA Today recently asked educators to tell us how they made the difference in the life of a would-be dropout. Inspiring stories came from teachers of band and auto mechanics, kindergarten and elementary grades, in alternative and mainstream high schools.

The stories that follow only scratch the surface of what is being done—and what can be done. NEA supports making high school graduation a national priority by calling for an investment of $10 billion over the next 10 years to support dropout prevention programs. For more details on NEA’s 12-point plan (at right), plus a wealth of information and resources, including actions that educators, parents, policymakers, and businesspeople can take to reduce the dropout rate now, visit http://www.nea.org/dropout/index.html.

 

Steve Schuld, Roosevelt High School, Sioux Falls, South Dakota

 I SEE STUDENTS  who have a hard time with core classes, but come alive in my hands-on automotive class. These kids are filled with energy when they can work with their hands. One commented, “I only came to school today because we have lab. Otherwise I would have stayed in bed.”

The kids work hard in my class, and I try to encourage them to work just as hard in their core classes. I just nudge them and say, “If you can understand automotive technology, then you can use that smart brain of yours to work through those other classes for me.”

Sometimes students will get pulled from my classroom because they are failing a core class. This hurts. It seems that something they enjoyed, like learning engine mechanics, has been taken from them. So they come to hate school.

When this happens, I go to bat for the student. I arrange a sit-down with counselors, students, and parents, to devise a plan that leads to the student graduating.

Students involved in sports, band, the arts, and after-school clubs develop feelings of accomplishment in school. The kids in my auto and welding classes are no different. As educators, we need to see where student interests lie, and then cultivate that interest so their enthusiasm will spread to the rest of their academics. Dropouts are silent, so we need to be looking out for them.  

 

Bernard Nabozny, art and English teacher, Tomlinson School, Jackson, Michigan

HELPING STUDENTS who are stumbling on the road to graduation is our “soul purpose” at Tomlinson Education Center, an alternative high school in Jackson, Michigan. Ours are the intractably truant, the probationary, the pregnant, and the discipline problems. The teachers learn these young people’s stories—the missing childhoods, the abuse, the low-income/low-education history—and we all search for ways to reach as many of them as we can. Those students in turn find a trust most of them have never known.

I’ve been here nine years, and have seen teachers go to students’ homes to bring them to school and stay late to help them with missing work—or just to talk. Our very special para-pro makes calls every school day to wake or motivate certain students who need someone to hold them accountable. I’ve given a student my extra pair of glasses when hers were broken in a domestic dispute.

Last year, the whole staff worked into the summer to design a new block schedule, so our students could have the chance to get caught up. We do these things on top of our regular teaching load to catch the ones that have slipped through the cracks, all the while struggling to abide by the misguided No Child Left Behind regulations.

It’s all worth it when I think of the ones who make it. Jenny was asked not to return to her high school when she became pregnant. At first she thought it would be impossible to graduate as a young mom, but she was thrilled to find that our school had daycare and teachers who didn’t judge her. She applied herself, took as many art classes as her credits would allow, and even became my Teaching Assistant for a time. When she graduated, she wrote a note to the school board praising our program, and singled me out for giving her the opportunity to be successful.

 

Emily Mann, special education, Newtown High School, Elmhurst, New York

Ten years ago I was a special education teacher and advisor in New York City’s Newtown High School, responsible for identifying “long-term absentees.” One of them was Miguel, a motivated 11th-grader who had disappeared after calling to report that a fire had ravaged his mother’s apartment. He remained on the long-term absentee list for almost a year.

Eventually, I located him. He had gone to work full-time to support himself and help his mother. Miguel wanted desperately to return to school and graduate, but he thought he was too old. He had no idea that students can attend public school through age 21. After we spoke, Miguel returned to high school the following week. Nearly two years behind his peers, Miguel received his high school diploma. On the last day of school, he told me that he was graduating because of me and that I’d changed his life forever. I never thought of it that way—I was just doing my job.

 

Joseph Webb, Suitland High School, Suitland, Maryland

StUDENTS WHO SUCCUMB to the temptation to leave school often see the proverbial light only after it is too late. My experience as an educator includes a quarter-century as an administrator of public schools in the District of Columbia that specialized in multigenerational learning. Although they were called adult education programs, the sole criterion for acceptance was a minimum age of 16, the age at which children were no longer covered by compulsory school attendance laws.

Adolescents enrolled in my school found themselves in classes with students their parents’ or even grandparents’ age. Students were grouped based on their performance on diagnostic placement tests; ages were irrelevant. In order to meet the students where they were, self-paced learning allowed them to move to higher levels each time they demonstrated mastery of a unit. Only rarely were there any behavior problems because everybody was there voluntarily and because the older students refused to allow any disruptions. The program placed the onus for success where it belongs, squarely upon the shoulders of the student.

Some students will make bad decisions, but we shouldn’t view them as irrevocable. Students who are allowed to return to school often are more focused and committed than their peers who never left the fold. There are times when we must take several steps backward in order to get a running start.

Denise Arrigo, Millville Senior High School, Millville, New Jersey

Several years ago, I taught a senior who missed several consecutive days of school. Julio was in good standing and only months away from walking the stage. So, I called him at home. He explained that he was tired of his hour-long bus commute. He wanted to work and buy a car. I talked to his mom. She said Julio was set to be the first in his family to finish high school.

Julio had used up his unexcused absences and was told in a letter that he was being dropped from the roll. I spoke with the assistant principal and arranged a conference. At the meeting, Julio agreed not to miss any more school days. He successfully completed his schoolwork, and his mom and I shared a big hug on the night of his graduation.

 

Movita Utt, St. Paul School, Cana, Virginia

ONE NIGHT IN 2004 my son came home from a date very upset. The high school senior he had been out with, a good student all through her school career, had just informed him that she had been withdrawn as a result of numerous absences.

I learned that her mother was terribly ill, and each day the young lady wrestled with the decision of leaving her at home alone. When my son shared this story and told me how upset the young girl was not to graduate in the spring, my heart was broken. During my 23-year teaching career, I had taught this girl and five of her six brothers. 

The next day I called the attendance officer at home and talked with him for nearly an hour. We convinced him that she should be given another chance. The conditions were as follows: she could not miss so much as one hour of school the remainder of the year, she would have to attend summer session to make up all the days she had missed, and I had to commit to seeing that she would be in school each day.

I knew we needed to make some changes in her home life. I met with the girl’s uncle and aunt and they agreed to let her stay with them and see that she got on the bus each morning. I had a temporary custody agreement drawn up and took it to the young girl’s mother. She wept as I explained that her only daughter was trying to graduate and keep alive her hopes of going to college. The mother, knowing that this was the best thing, reluctantly signed the papers.

Today, still driving that same used car that my husband and I co-signed for her to buy, the young woman is a certified pharmacy technician and is on the waiting list for nursing school at a local community college. Best of all, the girl that was once labeled a dropout became my daughter-in-law last fall. 

 

Wendy Rice, Ferndale High School, Ferndale, Washington

Jenna was 14 years old when she came to the alternative school where I taught. After two short months, she dropped out of school and ran away to live on the streets of Seattle. For some reason, she continued to call and tell me she was OK. I, in turn, informed her parents.

One day, her parents and I met Jenna at a restaurant in a rough part of Seattle. This lovely girl had turned into a urine-smelling junky. Her parents kidnapped her that day and took her to a treatment facility in another state. After a series of halfway houses and other treatments, she returned to high school and graduated. She also went on to finish a bachelor’s degree from an alternative college.

Today, she is clean and sober, married and living in Oregon, where she works in the art community. That was 11 years ago, my first year teaching alternative education. Since then, countless others have sat in my classroom, each seeking more than an education. Most have wanted someone simply to listen to them.

The days of sending a troubled child to talk with their counselor are over. Today, it is the responsibility of every adult in the lives of young people to stop, look, and listen. If we don’t, we will continue to lose our children to poverty, abuse, and as dropouts.

If each teacher, paraeducator, bus driver, food service worker, and secretary listened to one child who appears to be struggling, it could change lives.

 

Paul Rayius, Band Director, Osceola Middle School, Seminole, Florida

I’ll start with the happy ending: One of my students, Ian, was recognized as the 2005–06 “Turn Around Student of the Year” at Osceola Middle School, where I teach band. The award is given each year to one student who has shown remarkable improvement academically, intellectually, and socially.

Ian was never a problem in my band class, but in sixth and seventh grades, he was having a tough time in his other classes. I went to bat for Ian when they wanted to pull him out of band for extra help in his “academic” classes. He is so dedicated to music that he agreed to switch instruments so he could take Beginning Percussion during the one period it would fit into his schedule.

When it came Ian’s turn to be recognized at the awards breakfast, our assistant principal acknowledged that through those rough couple of years, often the only reason that Ian even came to school was to attend band class. She concluded with some of the good things that he accomplished in his eighth-grade year. This is the kind of feedback no performance assessment can provide. Now, Ian is halfway through his freshman year, in the marching band, and doing quite well in school.

Sheri Green, South View Elementary School, Muncie, Indiana

TWENTY YEARS AGO I made a promise to my first kindergarten class. I said that I would be at their high school graduation, and that they had better be there, too! They were the Class of 2000. Before the graduation ceremony, I sent each former student a congratulatory letter and a poem I composed. Several of the students said it was my promise to see them through to graduation that helped keep them in school.

I make the same promise to each new class. Since then, it’s been 10 kindergarten classes, seven first-grade classes, a third-grade class, and two second-grade classes, including the one I teach now.

Years before they graduate, I see former students at the mall or in a restaurant. They always remind me to attend their commencement. They ask me, “Are you still coming to my graduation?” With a heartfelt smile and a nod, I say: “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” The “promise” has blessed me just as much as them.

 

 

Testing:
How the Sausage is Made

How do standards become test scores?

What do 'proficient' and 'grade level' really mean?

How are high-stakes tests dumbing down education?

These aren’t questions you’ll see on any test, but the answers might surprise you.

By Alain Jehlen

Little Jimmy opens his test booklet and reads:

What number goes in the box to make this number sentence true?
11 –   ?    = 2

Your whole year's work has come down to this. If he gets the right answer, your school is on its way to the modern Holy Grail: Adequate Yearly Progress. If not, you're a failure.

But how did that question get in front of him?

Each year, hundreds of millions of test questions are developed, answered, and scored. Some 45 million tests required by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, better known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), will be administered this year. The industry rakes in more than half a billion dollars a year for these tests, but its spokespeople insist their profit margins are tight because of fierce competition and ultra-tight deadlines. To you, it may seem slow if you get your scores in six weeks, but for them, the pace is frantic.

These one-size-fits-all instruments increasingly dictate what educators do for most of the rest of the year. (That, incidentally, is what “standardized” means: the same test taken under the same conditions by all those wildly different students.)

The big question: Has the focus on tests produced students who are better educated or more competitive in the world economy? Probably not. High national test scores don't correlate with healthy economies, according to a study by researcher Keith Baker (see What's in a Score?), and all the intense, high-stakes testing hasn’t had any visible impact on national test scores anyway.

That is, while scores on the high-stakes state tests go up as teachers focus on them, students do no better on other, broader achievement tests.

What's the alternative? We could make more use of a testing apparatus that adjusts to every child, evaluates results quickly, and immediately makes appropriate changes in instruction: the human educator. That's why NEA and more than 100 education, civil rights, minority, religious, and other organizations have signed a joint manifesto urging Congress to change NCLB so schools will no longer live or die according to test scores.

And you can lend your voice, too: Visit NEA's Legislative Action Center, where you can contact your own lawmakers about NCLB, and the NEA Fund for Children & Public Education, which helps candidates who support public education.

 

A Dictionary of Confusion

Words like 'proficient' and 'grade level' sound good, but mean different things in different places.

You would think educators could reach consensus on the meaning of some of the most important words in their discipline—is that too much to ask?

Yes.

Take the phrase "grade level." Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, President Bush, and other Administration leaders say the purpose of ESEA/NCLB is to bring all children up to "grade level."

Some experts like NCLB critic Gerald Bracey point out that technically, "grade level" means the skill level that divides students in half: 50 percent are above grade level, and 50 percent are below. So it's impossible to have all students at or above grade level.

But many educators use the term more loosely, and clearly so does Secretary Spellings. Ask teachers what “on grade level” means, and they’re likely to say it’s a level that most students—maybe 75 or 90 percent—can reach with good teaching and good home support. (Of course, the home situation is not something a teacher can necessarily control.)

Even 90 percent is still a far cry from 100 percent. But despite political rhetoric, NCLB’s “adequate yearly progress” provisions don’t actually say anything about “grade level.” Instead, they say all students must be “proficient” by 2014.

So what’s “proficient”? Humpty-Dumpty-esque, NCLB lets each state define “proficient” in its own way. And states have taken full advantage of their discretion. An Education Week study several years ago found enormous geographic variation in how skillful a student must be to rate “proficient.”

Ironically, the fastest way for a sub-standard student in Massachusetts, a state where the bar is set high, to become “proficient” is to move to a state where that word means something quite different.

Just the Facts?

How NCLB’s high-stakes tests actually push standards down.

Here’s a high-stakes question for you:

Class A will see this test item on its state test:
Which of the following is equal to 6(x + 6)?

     A) x + 12     B) 6x + 6     C) 6x + 12      
     D) 6x + 36     E) 6x + 66

Class B will see this item:
3 pineapples
1 serving = 1/2 pineapple

Given the information above, write a mathematics word problem for which 3 ÷ 1/2 would be the method of solution.

Both questions are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress for eighth-grade math, conducted by the U.S. Education Department. More students got Class A’s question right than Class B’s question.

But the real high-stakes question is this:

How would you prepare Class A to answer their question? And how would you prepare Class B?
Test experts point out that tests don’t just record information. They also drive what students learn and how they are taught. Teachers are under strong pressure to teach to the test—if they don’t, students, teachers, and the school will likely suffer for it.

Educators and business leaders generally agree that a well-educated person is one who can solve problems and apply knowledge to new situations—one who could do well on the question posed to Class B. But many educators report that NCLB is driving a trend toward more factual recall or formula test items like the one for Class A.

To be sure, multiple-choice questions are much cheaper and faster to score than open-ended questions. In 2005, as states got ready for the enormous increase in testing required by NCLB, Education Week reported that 15 states with 42 percent of the nation’s students had chosen to make their reading and math tests entirely multiple-choice.

“What upsets me,” says test consultant Scott Marion, “is that a lot of states were moving to richer tasks [in their tests] in the 1990s, but that’s slipping away. And teachers tend to model the kinds of questions they see on the state test.” Marion is vice president of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a non-profit that advises 15 states on their tests.

Not everyone agrees that multiple-choice is the biggest problem. H.D. Hoover, principal author of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills for 40 years (and recently retired), thinks they can be every bit as thought-provoking as open-ended questions.

Case in Point

The full moon rises at midnight…
a) always    b) usually    c) rarely    d) never.

That question stumps a lot of adults—and it’s too tough to put on a state test. Figuring it out depends on really understanding why the moon has phases, and then applying that understanding—not bad for a 10-word item. (For the answer and an explanation, see http://www.nea.org/neatoday/0704/fullmoon.html.

While Hoover defends the potential of multiple-choice questions, he agrees with Marion and others that NCLB is dumbing down tests and hurting classroom instruction. The problem, he says, is the whole emphasis on high-stakes tests. The testing regime forces states to create huge numbers of items and score the answers very fast. It’s much easier and quicker to write items that test knowledge of facts or formulas than to write questions that get at deep understanding. And for open-ended questions, it’s easier to score those that ask for facts than those that test a student’s ability to apply what’s been taught in a real-world scenario.

The result: fewer questions like Class B’s, and more “cloned” items—similar questions used year after year.

The extreme level of detail in new state content standards also contributes to the problem, Hoover adds. Questions have to be written almost in the same words as the standards—otherwise, the test-maker won’t get credit for aligning the test with them. But that means the question won’t measure how well the student can use his or her understanding beyond the immediate situation called for in the standard.

On top of that, Hoover says NCLB’s dictum that every student be “proficient” by 2014 is impossible to carry out by any reasonable definition of “proficient.”
What’s the solution? “The only way is either to change the law or to build a test so simple-minded that everyone can be ‘proficient,’” Hoover says.

Connecticut Goes to Court Can NCLB make states abandon “instructionally sound” test practices? That’s the question now before a federal court. Connecticut was using expensive, sophisticated tests with performance tasks and other open-ended questions to assess all students every other year. The federal Department of Education insisted that NCLB requires annual testing. Connecticut said it couldn’t afford to give its elaborate tests every year. The federal response: Use inferior tests if you have to, but do it every year, or do without federal funds. “[S]ome of the costs of the system are attributable to state decisions,” wrote Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. “While these decisions are instructionally sound, they do go beyond what was contemplated by NCLB.” The case is pending. Meanwhile, the state is compromising, testing yearly with tests that use complex, probing questions, but not as many of them.

 

The Mirage of Rising Test Scores

State test scores are going up, but student achievement may not match.

Does all the pain that students and teachers are going through because of high-stakes testing serve a greater purpose? Is it raising student achievement?

The answer appears to be no.

In October 2005, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is the only national testing program, reported the first results in which a significant impact from the NCLB testing program should have shown up. There wasn’t any. If you hadn’t known something big was happening in the nation’s schools, you never would have guessed it from the new numbers.

Reading achievement stayed about the same. Math scores, which have been rising for many years, rose some more, but more slowly than before NCLB took effect.

Yet many states are boasting of big gains on state tests. Why do state scores jump while national scores are level or rising slowly? Harvard University testing expert Daniel Koretz has seen this before, and he has a one-word explanation: “Coaching.”

On a test, he points out, “we can’t test kids on everything they’ve learned in math, so we just test them on 45 questions.” If the pressure to raise scores becomes great enough, teachers focus on the particular elements they know will be tested.

“In the last few years, the situation has become absolutely egregious,” Koretz says. “They’re bringing in people from the outside to tell teachers what to skip, what to throw out.”

But isn’t that just focusing on the most important topics? No, says Koretz, because the NAEP scores show that all this effort is not improving real achievement. “The people who get cheated are the kids,” he says.

It’s not a new problem. In the 1990s, Kentucky adopted a high-stakes fourth-grade reading test, which served as a model for NCLB. “They had a staggeringly large increase in scores over two years,” Koretz says. “But on the NAEP, their scores didn’t change at all.” This pattern, he says, has been repeated over and over: higher scores on a state high-stakes test, but no improvement or only a small improvement on the national test for the same subject.

Koretz studied this phenomenon early in his career, in a district whose scores on a commercial test averaged about half a year above grade level. At that time, in the 1980s, the stakes were “laughably low compared with today’s, but teachers felt pressure from the administration to raise scores. When the district bought a new test, scores dropped like a rock,” he recalls. Four years later, they were back up. But when Koretz and his colleagues gave the old test to a random sample of classes, they scored lower.

In other words, the four years of test score gains reflected teaching to the new test, not real achievement.

So what can be done to make tests reflect reality?

First, educators should set realistic expectations for student scores, Koretz says. Tests should also be written so they’re harder to coach for. If the subset of topics found on the test changes from year to year, schools will be less likely to narrow their teaching. “But that would produce smaller gains—more meaningful, but smaller,” he adds. “And nobody wants that.”

Koretz also echoes the growing call, supported by NEA and more than 100 other organizations, for assessments based on multiple measures of student performance.

“That’s not to say tests shouldn’t be in the mix,” he says, “but there’s a lot more going on in classrooms than we can capture with a single test.”

 

The Chimp, the Chump, and You

Can a dumb machine help students write smart essays?

"It is with chimpanzee greatest esteem and confidence that I write to support Risk of physical injury Employers ..."

Thus began an “essay” cooked up by University of California-Davis writing instructor Andy Jones, which earned a stellar 6 out of 6 rating from the Educational Testing Service (ETS). Not from a reader, but from software called Criterion, a leader in the field of computerized essay scoring.

UC-Davis was considering using Criterion to decide which students should be allowed to skip a writing course, and Jones thought that was a bad idea. So he took a letter of recommendation he had written, replaced the student’s name with a few words from a Criterion writing prompt, and substituted “chimpanzee” for every “the.” Criterion loved the result, calling it “cogent” and “well-articulated.”

The university shelved the plan. Yet computers are rating millions of essays per year in thousands of districts. Their main use is not for making high-stakes decisions, but to help teachers teach. Their big advantage: speed. The student gets feedback in seconds.

“It’s allowed me to triple my writing assignments,” says Irvine, California, middle school teacher Pat Thornton, who uses Criterion with her 157 writing students. “It doesn’t analyze the content of an essay—that’s still our job. But it gives students a heads-up on the mechanics.” Thornton assigns five essays a month, and grades one herself in depth. “I use it because the more students write, the better they get,” she says.

At ETS, researcher Jill Burstein says she’s heard from many teachers that they tell students, “Give me your essay when you’ve got all the spelling and grammar mistakes fixed.”

Does the program’s conventional approach damp down creativity, leading students to stick with predictable writing structures? “It could, but we don’t allow that to happen,” says Thornton. “And with kids who are really struggling with writing, that’s not all bad. At least they will pass the high school exit exam.”

Criterion costs $11 to $15 per student per year, depending on the number of students. Competing programs from Vantage Learning and Pearson Knowledge Technologies cost a bit more.

Although their main use is as a teacher aid, essay-rating programs do sometimes score high-stakes tests. Vantage’s program scores the West Virginia seventh-grade writing assessment and wrested the essay portion of the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), used by business schools, away from ETS. West Virginia uses the computer alone to score, but there’s also a human scorer on the GMAT.

Vantage says its program is more accurate than a person. That is, when a group of expert human scorers and the Vantage program score the same essays, Vantage consistently comes closer to the group’s average score than any human.

But how can a computer judge an essay? It doesn’t scratch its head, laugh at students’ jokes, or, as the UC-Davis case proved, roll its eyes at illogical sentences. But even a word processor can find misspellings and grammatical errors. Essay-scoring programs go much farther. Vantage Vice President Harry Barfoot says their program can tell whether an essay is “engaging,” “insightful,” and has “a clear sense of audience.” But he won’t divulge exactly how because that’s proprietary information.

Burstein, the ETS researcher, says its program uses words and word patterns to detect the essay’s structural elements such as introduction, main point, supporting evidence, and conclusion. Some clues are obvious, such as “For example,” and “In conclusion.” But most of the detective work is subtle, she says. The program doesn’t just evaluate isolated words. It looks for their position in the essay, what comes before and after, and many other contextual clues to calculate the probability that a set of words is a supporting argument.

Can the computer tell whether the argument is sound? No. Criterion development director Linda Reitzel of ETS likes to say that “man bites dog” makes just as much sense to Criterion as “dog bites man.”

And how about the chimps that made a chump of Criterion? “We work with good-faith writing,” says Burstein. "It’s not that you can’t fool the system—you can. That’s why we always want to keep a human in the loop."

Read the perfectly scored chimp essay.