“Socialized niceness is a significant barrier to equity work.”

Nina Weisling and Wendy Gardiner (see item #1)

“Schools and teachers alone may be unable to fix social inequalities, but they can avoid making them worse.” 

            Jessica McCrory Calarco, Ilana Horn, and Grace Chen (see item #3)

“The more I rush, the more I need to rush. Few things intoxicate me with self-importance better than rushing from one meeting to the next. After all, unimportant people don’t need to rush. But we have things upside-backwards. Truly important people don’t rush.”

            Dan Rockwell in “Efficiency Is the Enemy of Humanity” in Leadership Freak,

December 9, 2022; Rockwell can be reached at dan@leadershipfreak.com. 

“Rest is fuel for humans… Life is easier when there’s gas in your tank. Productivity goes up. Creativity comes back… Don’t wait till the weekend to put gas in your tank.”

            Dan Rockwell (ibid.)

“Simply put, we want educators to look at the kids in front of them and believe that they can know and do more tomorrow than they did yesterday, and that it will matter for their future for years to come.”

            Mike Petrilli in “Teachers Should Replace ‘the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations’ 

with ‘the Suspension of Disbelief’” in Education Gadfly, December 1, 2022; 

Petrilli can be reached at mpetrilli@fordhaminstitute.org.

“Just putting two teachers in the same room does not necessarily improve the quality of instruction students receive.”

            Nathan Jones and Marcus Winters (see item #6)

“They thought I was bad at something, so they tested me to find exactly how bad I was at it, and then spent the next years of my life making me do what I was bad at as much as possible.”

            A student describing his experience in a special education setting, quoted in

            Neurodiversity in the Classroom by Thomas Armstrong, in “Three Steps to Creating

A Classroom That Celebrates Neurodiversity” by Jennifer Russ in NEA Review, December 2022 (pp. 30-33)

   “Socialized niceness is a significant barrier to equity work,” say Nina Weisling (Carthage College) and Wendy Gardiner (Pacific Lutheran University) in this Kappan article. “Because it is subconscious, people driven by niceness may not even recognize it – or its negative effects.” Some of the ways it manifests itself:

-   Avoiding or ignoring conflict;

-   Not discussing controversial topics, especially race;

-   People-pleasing and rule-following;

-   Downplaying one’s own knowledge and expertise.

Girls are raised to be nice and maintain the comfort of others, say Weisling and Gardiner. Most teachers and mentors in K-12 schools are women, and niceness is a significant factor when it comes to avoiding difficult conversations about classroom practices like these:

-   Not calling on students equitably;

-   Using low-rigor, low-relevance materials;

-   Disproportionately sending students of color to the office;

-   Giving more attention to children who “want to learn;”

-   Using non-affirming language like “IEP kids;”

-   Refusing to use students’ preferred names or pronouns;

-   Blaming children or their families for “not achieving;”

-   Using books with stereotypes or harmful language;

-   Using books about people of color only around designated holidays or months;

-   Excluding students with disabilities from field trips and other opportunities.

“Mentors are in a position to recognize and disrupt inequitable patterns in individual classrooms and across the school,” say Weisling and Gardiner, “but only if they can recognize and work through their socialized niceness… For every hesitation a mentor fails to push through, there is a classroom full of children experiencing and internalizing the effects of implicit and overt bias. Mentors must be willing to recognize and challenge socialized niceness to engage in meaningful, practice-changing dialogue with teachers.” Some key steps:

• Being in touch with the fear that others will see you as not nice – hurting others’ feelings or making them angry – which can disrupt trusting relationships that are essential to being effective. Know that a topic like race or disability may be uncomfortable and make you feel insecure about launching a critique of a colleague’s classroom practices. 

• Recognizing that pushing through socialized niceness won’t necessarily harm a trusting relationship. “A mentor does not have to choose between a strong relationship with teachers and a willingness to challenge inequitable practices,” say Weisling and Gardiner. “Part of building a strong mentoring relationship is transparency, honesty, and productive struggle to improve practice.” 

• Reading up on equity issues and thinking through one’s own issues with race. “We recommend finding an accountability partner to review and discuss resources and prepare for challenging debriefs,” say the authors. “This lifelong journey won’t be easy.” 

• Investing in relationships with colleagues early in the school year; listening deeply to each teacher, understanding their why, their beliefs about children, how they receive feedback; then co-planning and co-teaching, doing demonstration lessons, establishing a pattern of communicating during lessons, and watching classroom videos together. 

• Choosing verbal strategies like these when debriefing with a teacher after seeing a problematic practice:

-   Here is what I noticed… Let’s explore this together.

-   Is there another way of looking at ____.

-   When ____ happened, what message do you think ____ might have heard?

-   I think ____ is the source of ____.

-   Maybe we should explore ____.

-   Are you open to the possibility that ____?

-   There is research that supports ____.

• Working with empathy, skill, and persistence when teachers react by saying that “those kids” can’t handle rigorous work; claiming to be “color-blind;” saying they’re not racist; joking to minimize the issue; deflecting or changing the topic; crying, getting angry. This is when the mentor’s investment in the relationship with the teacher can really pay off. 

“Our students deserve no less,” conclude Weisling and Gardiner. 

“No More Nice Mentors” by Nina Weisling and Wendy Gardiner in Kappan, December 2022/January 2023 (Vol. 104, #4, pp. 42-47); the authors can be reached at nweisling@carthage.edu and gardinwl@plu.edu. 

(Originally titled “Stop Punishing Poverty in Schools”)

            In this Educational Leadership article, author/consultant Paul Gorski (Equity Literacy Institute and EdChange) says there are four ways schools may exacerbate the disadvantages of students from low-income families, denying them equitable access to a first-rate education: 

            • Treating disadvantaged students as deficient – Students don’t control their families’ access to health care, housing, transportation, nutrition, tutoring, and more. But there’s a tendency for educators to fall into what Gorski calls a deficit ideology, attributing poor performance in school to deficiencies in group cultures – If only these kids cared more about their education. If only they had better role models at home. Well-intentioned educators may try to “fix” kids and families (parenting classes, workshops on “grit”), rather than recognizing strengths and making sure all students have access to high-quality teaching, curriculum, and other school experiences. 

            • Treating kids equally but inequitably – Disadvantaged students are more likely to be working and caring for younger siblings or elderly family members outside school hours. “A student responsible enough to take on these duties does not need lessons on responsibility,” says Gorski, “and neither do parents who miss family-engagement opportunities to work a second or third job.” There are ways for schools to tweak homework policies to provide equitable access to curriculum experiences. Schools should also reconsider charging high-school students with cars a $100 parking fee, requiring a doctor’s note for an absence, and holding detentions and extracurricular activities after school. Gorski believes important academic and extracurricular activities should, as much as possible, take place during the school day. 

            • Humiliating students through everyday practices – A school might have taken the wise step of waiving fees for meals, field trips, and other activities, but if the burden is on students to continuously remind educators they’re eligible, that can be embarrassing and lead students to stop asking and miss out on important experiences. Gorski has seen situations where students are told they won’t be allowed to participate in graduation if they don’t pay their library fines. Classroom show-and-tells, dress-up activities, and book fairs can also spotlight economic inequities.

            • Pricing students out of learning – Gorski interviewed a high-school student whose school had a senior trip to Costa Rica that cost $1,800. “Those trips aren’t for us,” said the student. Questioned about this, the school’s principal acknowledged the problem but said it would be unfair to deny other students this opportunity because some couldn’t afford it. Gorski said this was “a perfect inequity, expanding access for those who have the most access while deepening disparities for people already contending with economic barriers.” He suggests taking inventory of costs to families in each of these categories and figuring out ways to level the playing field for all students:

-   Basic materials parents need to pay for so their children can participate in school – for example immunizations, book and technology fees, school supplies;

-   Things parents aren’t required to pay for but can expand children’s learning opportunities – for example band equipment, a laptop to take home, costs of a dual enrollment program;

-   Items and experiences that can improve students’ social experiences and connectedness – for example, school hoodies, yearbooks, dances.

“Stop Punishing Poverty in Schools” by Paul Gorski in Educational Leadership, December 2022/January 2023 (Vol. 80, #4, pp. 22-28)

 In this article in Educational Researcher, Jessica McCrory Calarco (Indiana University/Bloomington) and Ilana Horn and Grace Chen (Vanderbilt University) say that in many schools, homework is a “status-reinforcing practice,” one of several that “stratify students’ opportunities for learning and bolster the ‘meritocratic’ narrative that higher-status groups succeed in school because of individual competence, effort, and responsibility.” And indeed, lower-SES students report spending less time on homework, more often hand it in late or incomplete, and receive more-frequent and harsher penalties, contributing to a widening achievement gap vis-à-vis more-advantaged students. 

In their longitudinal ethnographic study, Calarco, Horn, and Chen were surprised to find that in elementary and middle schools, where teachers are more aware of students’ home situations, teachers don’t attribute homework difficulties to outside-of-school factors and structural inequalities. Rather, teachers tend to blame students who struggle with homework (and, in elementary schools, their parents). The researchers found that many teachers see homework through a lens of individual agency and a “myth of meritocracy – the idea that people who are responsible, motivated, and hard-working will be successful, regardless of the challenges they face.” 

This belief system gives teachers justification for three practices that clearly widen pre-existing SES gaps: 

-   Assigning homework that students are not able to complete independently;

-   Punishing students who don’t complete homework (many classes begin with students being asked to get out their homework so it can be checked by the teacher);

-   Rewarding students who regularly meet homework expectations with praise, bonus points, and “homework passes” that allow them to miss assignments without penalty. 

Step one to addressing this situation, say Calarco, Horn, and Chen, is for teachers to question the myth of meritocracy and recognize the structural inequalities affecting many students’ ability to successfully complete homework. Steps two, three, and four are assigning manageable homework; not treating homework as a proxy for individual responsibility, competence, and effort; and lowering the stakes for homework completion. 

            Some educators have gone further, making homework optional or ungraded. But “because homework is such a deeply entrenched part of the grammar of schooling,” say the authors, “and because homework can also serve other purposes – signaling school rigor or helping parents feel connected to the school – some families and educators may resist its elimination.” Schools that stop giving homework need to find other ways to fulfill these legitimate needs. 

            Even the radical step of eliminating homework doesn’t address the unequal advantages of students whose families have more time and resources to support their children’s learning. “The need for structural solutions to structural inequalities, however, should not discourage educators from taking steps in the short term to reduce the harm caused by status-reinforcing practices,” conclude the authors. “Schools and teachers alone may be unable to fix social inequalities, but they can avoid making them worse.” 

“‘You Need to Be More Responsible’: The Myth of Meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities” by Jessica McCrory Calarco, Ilana Horn, and Grace Chen in Educational Researcher, November 2022 (Vol. 51, #8, pp. 515523); Calarco can be reached at jcalarco@indiana.edu, Horn at ilana.horn@vanderbilt.edu. 

  In this American Educational Research Journal article, Dandan Chen (Duke University School of Medicine), Michael Hebert (University of California/Irvine), and Joshua Wilson (University of Delaware) report on their comparison of scoring elementary students’ essays by hand versus using automated scoring software. Giving students frequent feedback on their writing is important, say the authors, because roughly two-thirds of U.S. students in grades 4, 8 and 12 are not writing at a proficient level. As of 2015, 46 states had instituted performance assessments of writing to hold schools accountable for improvement. 

            But there are several barriers to students doing enough writing in school and getting timely and helpful feedback:           

-   Scoring students’ writing is laborious and time-consuming for teachers.

-   Training teachers to be accurate and reliable scorers is expensive.

-   Students get a variety of writing assignments, not all of which improve writing.

-   Teachers have different criteria and levels of rigor as they score, some over-emphasizing conventions, some interpreting a rubric in different ways, some changing their leniency and severity over time.

These problems with frequency, reliability, and efficiency mean the same essay might receive a  different grade from classroom to classroom – and many students don’t get the kind of feedback that’s likely to improve their writing proficiency. 

            One proposed solution is automatic essay scoring software programmed to identify the features of student writing – vocabulary, syntax, and other traits – that a teacher would score. Ideally such programs could in a few seconds give detailed and accurate feedback to an entire class of students, and the scores would be consistent and reliable – “The same essay always receives the same score,” say Chen, Hebert, and Wilson, “and scores retain their meaning over time.” 

            But there are several worries about automatic essay scoring. Can an algorithm be programmed to read a student’s writing the way a human does, especially with intangible characteristics like style and voice? How useful is automatic feedback for students who are having difficulty with writing? And what about cost?

To answer these questions, the authors compared hand-scoring with automatic essay scoring using writing samples from 120 students in grades 3-5 in three genres. Some sample prompts:

-   Informative: Think about your favorite animal. Teach your reader all about this animal.

-   Narrative: Write a story about what you would do if you could fly.

-   Persuasive: Should kids get to pick their own bedtime?

Essays were scored by trained educators, who came up with a holistic rating for each piece of writing, and an electronic system, MI Write (formerly known as PEG Writing), which generated an overall score and ratings on a 1-2-3-4-5 scale for each of six writing traits: ideation, organization, style, sentence structure, word choice, and conventions. Here’s what the researchers found:

-   Human and machine raters both achieved high reliability.

-   The two scoring methods ranked students quite similarly.

-   Looking across the three genres of writing, there weren’t major differences between human and machine scoring.

-   To achieve comparable reliability, human scoring required 2-4 scorers, machine scoring needed to analyze several student writing samples.

-   Human scorers did a better job distinguishing the proficiency of struggling writers (those in the bottom 25 percent).

Chen, Hebert, and Wilson have these recommendations for optimizing the scoring of elementary students’ writing:

• Blend automatic with hand scoring, relying on human scorers to make the most consequential decisions. 

            • Base decisions on scores averaged across multiple assessments. 

            • Use an automatic scoring program for periodic class-wide formative assessment. This is especially helpful and reliable for students who are performing at the average and high-performing level. 

• More writing samples are needed to accurately score struggling writers.

• Teachers need to be sure students don’t game the machine scoring system and artificially inflate their scores.

“Examining Human and Automated Ratings of Elementary Students’ Writing Quality: A Multivariate Generalizability Theory Application” by Dandan Chen, Michael Hebert, and Joshua Wilson in American Educational Research Journal, December 2022 (Vol. 59, #6, pp. 1122- 1156); the authors can be reached at dandan.chen@duke.edu,mhebert1@uci.edu, and joshwils@udel.edu.

In this Harvard Educational Review article, David Liebowitz (University of Oregon) summarizes the status of U.S. teacher-evaluation policies in the early 2020s:

-   On paper, they set high standards for teaching.

-   Policies purport to help teachers grow and hold them accountable for poor performance.

-   Not meeting a high bar of teaching proficiency should, in theory, lead to dismissal.

-   Nevertheless, the vast majority of U.S. teachers continue to receive positive ratings and very few are dismissed.

What would it take, asks Liebowitz, to implement teacher evaluation that truly improves practice and has real consequences for teachers who are persistently ineffective? 

In the five years he was principal of a struggling middle school in Massachusetts, Liebowitz had a front-row seat on the state’s evaluation system. Charged with turning the school around, he knew student learning and well-being would improve if he was successful in developing, retaining, and recruiting effective teachers. He conscientiously implemented the state’s evaluation process, believing that the combination of instructional support and a modest dose of accountability” would get results. 

“However,” Liebowitz says, “teachers in my school expressed that they only experienced the accountability dimensions of my feedback, and that this compromised their ability and motivation to experiment with new instructional practices.” And indeed, he reports that there weren’t marked improvements in teaching. 

Liebowitz also wrestled with the perennial dilemma of deciding whether to dismiss struggling or early-career teachers when the hiring pool was weak. The result: after five years, the school was still designated as underperforming by the Massachusetts accountability system. This discouraging outcome led Liebowitz to think hard about the conditions under which the growth and accountability arms of teacher evaluation could truly improve teaching and learning. 

For starters, he suggests the following theory of action for an effective teacher-evaluation process:

-   Principals’ evaluations increase the effort and skills of current teachers.

-   Average teacher effectiveness gets better as teachers improve their classroom skills.

-   Teaching is also improved by dismissal and selective attrition of ineffective teachers.

-   The perceptions of increased professional prestige improves the recruitment pool.

For this theory to work, Liebowitz believes six conditions are in play, and he assesses each:

            • Reliability and validity – Principals’ evaluation ratings must reliably measure teachers’ success in boosting student learning and distinguish between effective and ineffective educators. Given the difficulty of principals spending enough time in classrooms, and the documented unreliability of value-added measures (VAM), there are challenges in this area. 

            • Accountability and incentive effects – Placing teachers in different rating categories (e.g., Exemplary, Proficient, Developing, Unsatisfactory) might improve instruction by getting teachers to exert more effort and acquire new skills. However, says Liebowitz, the persistent phenomenon of virtually all teachers getting passing grades and very few being scored Unsatisfactory suggests that, “in practice, the application of accountability pressures on individual teachers is uneven and generally minimal.” 

            • Skill development effects – In theory, the teacher evaluation process should generate meaningful coaching, PD, and other supports that improve teachers’ skills. However, says Liebowitz, “most states and districts provide limited developmental supports to teachers. Thus, growth-oriented evaluation systems have not yet improved student outcomes at scale.” 

            • Overall labor demand and supply effects – The supply of teachers wanting to get into classrooms needs to be at least as great as the vacancies created by dismissals and attrition. Liebowitz doubts this would occur in a timely manner.

            • Compositional effects on the labor market – Prospective teachers need to possess, or be able to quickly acquire, classroom skills equal or superior to those of departing teachers. Initiatives in Chicago and Washington, D.C. suggest this is possible, but unusual circumstances were involved in those school districts.

            • Growth and accountability interacting productively – “I find evidence,” says Liebowitz, “that attaching high stakes to a performance task, particularly punitive stakes, can impede performance… These behavioral responses highlight potentially negative interactions between the growth- and accountability-oriented aims of teacher evaluation policies.” He cites research from social psychology on the limited benefits of external motivation and the effect of anxiety on cognitive performance, especially in a field as demanding as classroom teaching.

            Liebowitz’s conclusion: schools should “decouple” the accountability and growth components of teacher evaluation, using scores and accountability only for probationary and underperforming teachers. For the large majority of instructors, he believes the focus should be on development and growth, providing narrative reviews, not ratings, on teachers’ progress.

            [It’s possible that Liebowitz’s school failed to make progress because he was required to use a traditional teacher-evaluation process (full-lesson observations, lengthy write-ups, an emphasis on evidence and artifacts), which crowded out informal coaching. That would explain why teachers saw the main purpose as high-stakes accountability and were wary to innovate and take risks – and why other engines of improvement like teacher teamwork didn’t take root. An evaluation process allowing for short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits, followed by face-to-face debriefs and short narrative write-ups and cumulating in end-of-year rubric evaluations with teacher input, would lower the stakes and shift the professional culture toward innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.   K.M.]

“Teacher Evaluation for Growth and Accountability: Under What Conditions Does It Improve Student Outcomes?” by David Liebowitz in Harvard Educational Review, Winter 2022 (Vol. 92, #4, pp. 533-565); Liebowitz can be reached at daviddl@uoregon.edu.

In this article in Education Next, Nathan Jones and Marcus Winters (Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development) report on their study of general-education and special-education teachers working together in the same classrooms. “Just putting two teachers in the same room does not necessarily improve the quality of instruction students receive,” say Jones and Winters. “In practice, co-teachers often do not work in the idealized way advocates of the approach recommend. Colocation does not necessarily cause effective collaboration.” 

Even so, the study found positive effects across the board. The authors analyzed test scores from grade 3-8 co-taught classrooms in Massachusetts from 2007 to 2018, during which the number of co-taught classrooms in the state increased dramatically. The main findings: being in a co-taught classroom improved test scores for students with and without disabilities. The advantage was greater in math than English language arts, especially in middle schools. 

Jones and Marcus say the co-teaching advantage wasn’t as great as previous studies had found, which is inconsistent “with the enthusiasm that surrounds the practice in special education literature.” They attribute this to the statewide scope of their study (including schools with less-than-ideal implementation), and the fact that they didn’t include the social-emotional benefits of integrating students with disabilities in regular-education classrooms. “Inclusive environments like co-taught classrooms,” they say, “can foster tolerance and understanding among typically developing students, while also supporting students with disabilities to practice and develop social skills and build friendships with a broad group of peers.” 

“Are Two Teachers Better Than One?” by Nathan Jones and Marcus Winters in Education Next, Winter 2022 (Vol. 23, #1, pp. 54-59); the authors can be reached at ndjones@bu.edu and marcusw@bu.edu. 

  In this article in NEA Review, third-grade teacher Glenn Houthuysen says that during his 29 years in the U.S. Air Force and N.J. Air National Guard, he came up with an acronym that has also been helpful in his classroom: K.L.M.

            • Knowledge – Houthuysen prides himself on his subject-area expertise, and encourages his students to be “knowledge masters.” Students test themselves by creating their own flash cards and use those to help him craft end-of-course assessments, picking the 20 most important facts and concepts, which he then uses to create the test.

            • Leadership – Houthuysen believes that being open to questions and concerns is an important part of being a faculty leader – and of course he wants to be a role model for his students, guiding them so they can also be leaders.

            • Mentoring – When a student comes to him with a problem (often from outside school), Houthuysen creates a Google Form, asks other students to make anonymous suggestions, and passes along the most helpful ones to the student. 

“Teaching Tip: The ABCs of K.L.M.” by Glenn Houthuysen in NEA Review, December 2022 (p. 10)

In this article in Language Arts, Donna Bulatowicz and colleagues announce the Charlotte Huck winner, honorees, and recommended children’s fiction books:

-   Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls by Kaela Rivera 

-   Starfish by Lisa Fipps

-   Laxmi’s Mooch by Shelly Anand

-   JoJo Makoons: The Used-to-Be Best Friend by Dawn Quigley, illustrated by Tara Audibert 

-   J.D. and the Great Barber Battle by J. Dillard, illustrated by Akeem Roberts

-   Amber and Clay by Laura Amy Schlitz, illustrated by Julia Iredale

-   Borders by Thomas King, illustrated by Natasha Donovan

-   A Sled for Gabo by Emma Otheguy, illustrated by Ana Ramirez González

-   The Lost Language by Claudia Mills

-   A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll 

-   Someone Builds the Dream by Lisa Wheeler, illustrated by Loren Long

-   Dumplings for Lili by Melissa Iwai

-   The Year I Flew Away by Marie Arnold

-   Pax, Journey Home by Sara Pennypacker, illustrated by Jon Klassen

“2022 Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children” by Donna Bulatowicz, Dahlia Constantine, Cecilia Espinosa, Holly Johnson, Irene Latham, Darius Phelps, and JoAnne Powless in Language Arts, November 2022 (Vol. 100, #2, pp. 149-154)