Preparing for Success with NYSTCE Tests: Ending accomnocastigation

      The explicit purpose of the NYSTCE tests is to help identify for certification those candidates who have demonstrated the appropriate level of knowledge and skills that are important for performing the responsibilities of an educator in New York State public schools.  As noted in the two previous blogposts, the NYSTCE tests, include the ALST, EAS, CST, and edTPA.  Categorically, the ALST, EAS, CST, and edTPA are examples of trailing indicators of success.  As such, they are the tools for demonstrating the appropriate level of knowledge and skills that are important for performing the responsibilities of an educator.  While assessing  how well teacher candidates can demonstrate and perform skills required for successful completion of the ALST, EAS, CST, and edTPA exams, by extension these exams evaluate teacher preparation programs as well.  Therefore, teacher preparation programs must monitor and adjust their leading indicators of success. 

               While planning this series, this writer intended to present one NYSTCE exam each month, identifying the primary purpose and framework of that exam.  However, it is becoming clear that revision to a program’s cultural mindset may be more essential than curriculum mapping and alignment of learning outcomes to diverse standards.  Therefore, this month the emphasis will focus on the need for teacher preparation programs to monitor and adjust their programs but also to raise expectations for promoting critical thinking, professionalism, and self-efficacy. 

            Initial NYSTCE results indicate the need to strengthen teacher candidates’ academic and quantitative literacy skills (Thompson, Case, Alvarado-Santos, 2014).  To address this need, Buffalo (2014) advocated for the development and utilization of text sets.  Examples of how to develop text sets were provides in the two previous blogposts. 

            Crucially, to prepare successful teacher candidates, teacher preparation programs must provide structured writing opportunities.  McDonald and Romano (2014) encourage providing teacher candidates with extensive practice in the application of descriptive writing.  This style of writing is anecdotal by nature.  Descriptive writing provides a snapshot view of the classroom.  Through descriptive writing, teacher candidates do not make judgments or provide justification.  The provided information is specific and relevant to instruction.  Clear, correct, and coherent descriptive writing optimizes the teacher candidates’ opportunity for subsequent analytical writing related to instructional planning, practice, and the learning environment.  Optimal utilization of descriptive and analytical writing skills leads to reflective writing pertaining to the assessment of student learning and professional growth. 

            The leading indicators for effective teacher preparation cannot be content alone.  Teacher preparation programs certainly need to exhibit balanced support between development of the teacher candidate’s pedagogy, promotion of active inquiry, and engagement of faculty across the disciplines.  They must also raise expectations for promoting critical thinking, professionalism, and self-efficacy.  Monitoring and adjusting these leading indicators of success requires a clear mission, action-based vision, and defined autonomy.

            Too often those given the authority to lead experience failure because of the misguided belief that all followers need to feel included.  Consensus is not everyone thinking the same but everyone recognizing the need to pursue a common goal.  Too often leaders wait for the former rather than guiding the group to the latter.

            As described by Marzano and Waters (2009), "defined autonomy" optimizes innovation while maximizing the achievement toward specific goals.  By contrast, “accomnocastigation” (Anderson, 2015) is a policy of lower expectations or ignoring learning outcomes in deference to the student's belief that his or her unrealized lack of self-management and social awareness skills justifies the student's exhibition of inappropriate class interactions and a lack of professionalism and/or preparedness for class assignments.  Leaders that promote a culture embracing a policy of accomnocastigation allow lower expectations and diminished skills to become the norm.  Therefore, accomnocastigation is the enemy of reform efforts and any desire to promote sustained success.

            Teacher preparation programs need to encourage defined autonomy for courses willing to provide formative assessment processes and emotional skill development for its teacher candidates.  By their nature, such approaches mitigate accomnocastigation.  Through advocacy of a clear mission, action-based vision, and defined autonomy, teacher preparation programs will embrace innovations promoting higher expectations for its teacher candidates and their subsequent exhibition of essential teaching competencies. 

            A clear mission, action-based vision, and defined autonomy are an effective leader's ultimate responsibility.  A little structure is very liberating, thereby providing a solution to the paradox of choice explicated by Schwartz (2004).  Defined autonomy, promoted by an effective leader's clear vision, is the solution to the paralysis by analysis that too often results in failure.

To cite:

Anderson, C.J. (February 20, 2015) Preparing for success with NYSTCE tests: Ending accomnocastigation

               [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/

The Disparity Between Rich and Poor Districts Create an Opportunity Gap

Regardless if part of a teacher preparation program or society as a whole, the adverse impact of the opportunity gap existing between richer and poorer school districts cannot be over-emphasized.  A district such as Scarsdale NY compared to East Harlem NY highlights and contrasts the real opportunities and threats to the learning for all mission resulting from an opportunity gap exacerbated by socioeconomic status (SES).  The reality that problems exist for families regardless of SES is indisputable.  However, the following may be helpful for understanding the real-life differences and opportunities provided for middle and upper SES students compared to lower SES students:

A study by UNICEF (2007) of the twenty-one richest nations in the world found the United States ranked last in almost every indicator of children’s well-being.  The United States had more children living in poverty (22%), had the worst record in child health and safety services, had the most children living in single-parent families, and had the lowest ranking in the positive health behaviors of its children.  Another analysis of poverty in America concluded that “disproportionately large numbers of American children remain poor” with 38% of children under 18 living in low-income families (Education Commission of the States, 2007).  Furthermore, the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is widening.  Between 1979 and 2004, the after-tax income of the top 1% of the population nearly tripled, rising from $314,000 to nearly $868,000, for a total increase of $554,000 or 176% (with figures adjusted for inflation by using 2004 dollars throughout the analysis).  During that same timeframe, the average after-tax income of the middle fifth of the population rose a relatively modest 21%, or $8,500, reaching $48,400 in 2004.  Meanwhile, the average after-tax income of the poorest fifth of the population rose just 6%, or $800, during the past 25 years, reaching $14,700 in 2004 (Sherman & Aron-Dine, 2007).  Tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration in 2001 made the gap even more pronounced.  As a result of that legislation, in 2006, households in the bottom fifth of the income spectrum received tax cuts that averaged $20 and raised their after-tax incomes by an average of 0.3%, while households in the middle fifth of the income spectrum received tax cuts that averaged $740 and raised their after-tax incomes an average of 2.5%.  The top 1% of households, however, received tax cuts in 2006 that averaged $44,200 and increased their after-tax income by an average of 5.4% (Leiserson & Rohaly, 2006).  As one analysis concluded, “Income is now more concentrated at the top of the income spectrum than in all but two years since the mid-1930s” (Sherman & Aron-Dine, 2007).  From the liberal perspective, closing the student achievement gap required closing this cavernous and still growing gap between the poor and the middle class.  The disparity in achievement and academic potential between poor and middle-class students begins prior to children entering school and is only exacerbated during the school years (Lee & Burkham, 2002; Schemo, 2006; Steinberg, 1996; Rothstein, 2004).  Children of the poor are far more likely to attend lower-quality schools with substandard facilities, fewer resources, and less qualified teachers than their middle-class peers.  They return to homes and neighborhoods that are less likely to support student learning or communicate that learning is important (DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker, 2008, pp.49-50).  

The progressive perspective of this data is the problem does not originate in the schools but are societal conditions.  Such a perspective recognizes social conditions creating an opportunity gap are leading indicators in education and must therefore, be addressed if we ever want to truly mitigate the trailing indicator known as the achievement gap.  Mehlinger (1995) posits, “If America’s poor children could be provided the same conditions for growing up, including the same quality of schools, as those afforded to middle-class suburban youth, we would have no crisis (in education) at all” (p. 27).  Otherwise, the following describes what has been the result of the opportunity gap leading to a discrepancy in achievement:

A chilling editorial in U.S. News & World Report (Zuckerman, 2006) warned that education and family background are replacing race and gender as barriers to upward mobility.  Throughout most of the 20^th century, young boys and girls could choose to drop out of school and would still have access to the middle class.  That possibility is increasingly remote in contemporary America.  Today a school dropout earns only 65 cents for every dollar earned by the high school graduate and only 33 cents for each dollar earned by those with a bachelor’s degree (United States Census Bureau, 2006a).  Those with an undergraduate degree are most likely to move up from the income bracket in which they started, but a student from the top income quartile has a 1 in 2 chance of earning a degree, while the chances of a student from the bottom quartile earning a bachelor’s degree are less than 1 in 10.  A child in a family earning under $35,000 has a 1 in 17 chance (Brooks, 2006).  The American dream is receding from reach for many of our children.  Education opens not only economic doors, but other doors as well (DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker, 2008, pp.60-61).

Readers are encouraged to reflect upon the life opportunities provided to them.  How did your family rank on the statistical continuum related to SES as noted above?  Regardless of your high school successes, if you were a child in a family earning under $35,000 would you have been able to attend a college requesting $30K-$40K per year for annual tuition? 

This is why the seven correlates of Effective Schools Research (Lezotte & Snyder, 2011) address leading indicators of learning.  Schools interdependently implementing Effective Schools Research optimize the mission of learning for all regardless of SES factors.  We all desire to make a difference for our future students.  Collaborative leadership remind us of a sound mission, provide a clear vision for growth, require our professional integrity and competency, and detail an action plan for sustained success, thereby optimizing opportunities to change students’ destinies! 

As part of the solution, last April New York State Governor Cuomo established the New NY Education Reform Commission to make recommendations for future educational reforms.  On January 2, 2013; the bipartisan Commission provided eight key recommendations:

1.      Provide high quality full-day pre-kindergarten for our most at-risk students;

2.      Create statewide models for “Community Schools” that use schools as a community hub to improve access to public, non-profit, and private services/resources, like health and social services, for students and their families;

3.      Transform and extend the school day and year to expand quality learning time for students, especially in underserved communities;

4.      Improve the teacher and principal pipeline to recruit and retain the most effective educators;

5.      Build better bridges from high school to college and careers with early college high schools and career technical education;

6.      Utilize all available classroom technologies to empower educators to meet the needs of a diverse student population and engage students as active participants in their own learning;

7.      Pursue efficiencies such as district consolidation, high school regionalization and shared services to increase student access to educational opportunities; and

8.      Increase transparency and accountability of district leadership by creating a performance management system.

A Final Action Plan is expected in Fall 2013.  In the interim, educators and stakeholders are encouraged to review the Commission’s recommendations.  Submitting your ideas is essential for addressing the complex and diverse issues potentially impacting sustained reform for optimal student success.

To cite:

Anderson, C.J. (January 4, 2013) The disparity between rich and poor districts create an

            opportunity gap [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/

References:

DuFour, R., DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (2008). Revisiting professional learning communities at

            work: New insights for improving schools. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Lezotte, L. W., & Snyder, K. M. (2011). What effective schools do: Re-envisioning the

            correlates. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Marzano, R. & Waters, T.(2009).  District leadership that works. Bloomington, IN: Solution

            Tree Press

Reason, C. (2010). Leading a learning organization: The science of working with others.

            Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.