WEAC Legislative Agenda - To Ensure Preparation for Productive Lives

This is the first in a series of articles exploring the issues identified in WEAC's Legislative Agenda. This article focuses on Preparation and the three specific issues that accompany it: parental involvement, assessment, and shared principles. For a summary of this agenda item, click here.

By ADAM BLUST

Written for OnWEAC

In Laura Ingalls Wilder's one-room schoolhouse of the last century, a few years of basic instruction in names, dates and figures provided enough preparation for a productive life on the farm or in the factory.

It is a nostalgic past many education critics would like to revive.

But today, students must be prepared for a whole host of possibilities and challenges that would not have occurred to Mrs. Wilder or her colleagues. And as education has become more complex, so have the strategies for managing it. Educators and parents alike are realizing the need for things like more parental involvement in the education process, better assessment, and a shared set of principles for how students will be educated.

Parental involvement

When Roxanne Starks first got involved with the Milwaukee PTA 11 years ago, she thought it was an organization for "middle-class white women" that had very little to do with her or her experience. But as she got more involved with projects like collecting soup labels to pay for school projects, she came to realize that the PTA had the same goal she did: improving the educational experience for her children.

"Once I knew I could make a difference for my own kids, I knew I could make a difference for other kids too," said Starks, who is now the first minority president of the Milwaukee PTA.

Starks said she made her mark by "being nosy" — always asking questions, introducing herself to teachers at the beginning of the school year, bringing up concerns to the superintendent. It's a difficult process for many parents, she said, because they are intimidated by the school and possibly discouraged by their own bad experiences in those same halls.

Schools have got to work to be more open and friendly for parents, Starks said. Just having a friendly, helpful staff person available to answer parents' questions can be a big step in the right direction. Teachers and administrators sometimes can be gun-shy after difficult encounters with parents. But Starks said one remedy for that is for educators to stay in touch with parents about all aspects of a child's education, not just when there are problems.

Of course, parents need to make the extra effort as well, Starks said. One of her main goals on the PTA has been to bring in parents who haven't been to school before. "It's a game you play," she said, bringing parents to the school building with the promise of a student performance or food buffet, and sneaking in a PTA meeting along with the cookies.

Contrary to a lot of anti-education rhetoric, Starks said, the problem is not that parents don't care about their children's education.

"I think there are a lot of parents that care. But they don't know which route to take to make their voices heard," she said.

Administrators and teachers in Green Bay wanted to hear more parents' voices, and to get them, they used one of the oldest tactics in the book — a stern talking-to. Guidance counselors, including Paula Geishirt of Green Bay West High School, wanted parents to show up at a training session on the district's new career planning guide, designed to help students plan their classes around the career path they want to follow. So they instituted a program called "Participate to Educate," where parents of students in 8th through 11th grade were required to attend a training session on the new career planning system.

If they didn't attend, they were told, their son or daughter would not get scheduled for the following year's classes.

Strong stuff, but it worked: 70% of the parents attended the sessions. After three notes home to stragglers, parents who didn't attend the training were told they could still get their children scheduled into classes, but only if they signed off on participating in this important part of their child's educational life.

Geishirt said one of the best parts of the program was that both parents and teachers were initially trained in the career guide system. "When people came to school to learn about this program, a lot of times people learned it from other parents," she said. "We stressed that this was to be a joint effort with students and parents.

"The central focus of this whole thing was an invitation to school," Geishirt said. "It showed parents and teachers in a different light to each other. We weren't just bringing parents in to talk about problems."

Geishirt said there has been a definite increase in parents' involvement with the district since the program started in January. Parents are asking more questions, and especially questions about how school will influence their child's career choices.

"It's been a lot of fun — and we're building on it," she said.

In Madison schools, educators and parents are excited about a program called FAST, for Families and Schools Together. The program, active in seven Madison schools this fall — with plans for 14 more before the school year is out — is designed to bring parents and "at risk" students together with school officials and counselors for eight weeks of talking, playing and eating together. Each meeting includes time for parents and children to play together, time for parents to talk about their problems and concerns, and a shared meal prepared for the group by a different family each week.

Karen Carlson, of Family Service of Madison, the social service agency working with the school district on the program, said local studies have shown that students who go through the program are better behaved in class and show improved attendance, and parents are 70% more likely to get involved in school activities after completing the program. Carlson said FAST works because it has simple goals: give parents time with their children, bring parents together with other parents with similar concerns, and have some fun. There's none of the lecturing that characterizes so many family therapy programs — no classes on nutrition or lessons on money management. The only "homework" is a requirement that parents spend time with their children. And parents also get to know educators and social workers in a positive setting, and can call on them in the future with questions or problems.

Assessment

Another crucial topic for the future of education is assessment — how can we measure how much students are learning the complex and interrelated knowledge and skills they need?

John Fortier of the Department of Public Instruction left three decades of classroom teaching behind to come to the DPI's assessment department because he was dissatisfied with the "No. 2 pencil" mentality in testing, which pumps out 100 million standardized tests in the United States every year.

"What most teachers think is important can't be tested by standardized methods," Fortier said.

Wisconsin, along with most other states, has been moving in fits and starts toward considering performance assessment — creating ways for a student to demonstrate knowledge, rather than just pick an answer out of a lineup.

In 1992, the state provided funding to the DPI to create performance assessments, which were to be tested in classrooms in the spring of 1996 and mandated in the 1996-97 school year. But the funding to finish the process was cut by the Legislature in 1995.

That roadblock at the state level hasn't stopped local educators like John Price, director of curriculum and staff development at Appleton Public Schools. Price is the co-founder of the Wisconsin Assessment Consortium, which includes 75 education professionals from 45 school districts, CESAs, universities and other groups. For Price, the future of measuring educational goals is through techniques like performance assessment.

"It's much more complicated — it's much deeper. We can get at the real nuances of knowledge and ability that a student has," Price said.

Appleton has been working on a major program to train teachers at all levels to use performance assessment, and is now using performance to judge students' reading and writing abilities in first and second grades. School officials are in the process of developing performance tests in computation and problem-solving for those early grades, and any new curriculum submitted to the district from now on must have a performance component, Price said.

Appleton has been working with Fox Valley Technical College on strategies for performance assessment, Price said, and the results have been dramatic: Three years ago, 80% of students who took the math portion of the technical college placement test failed it. This year, the failure rate plummeted to 2%.

Price said one of the keys to his district's success in bringing in performance concepts has been its commitment to the time and money necessary. "If you just dump something like this on a classroom teacher, it's doomed," he said.

To that end, Appleton has committed to giving teachers the time and resources needed for the new ideas: staff development programs, four summer institutes, graduate courses and salary incentives. "Teachers want to have time to share what they are doing. The biggest thing teachers need is time," Price said.

Critics of performance assessment continue to maintain that such major changes in testing are too expensive and too subjective, both concepts being rallying cries for the education critics of the '90s. But Fortier said DPI has estimated that to include performance components at three levels during a student's 12 years of public education would add only about $100 per student to the $75,000 spent by schools during that student's career.

As for subjectivity, Fortier said, early experiments with performance assessment of writing did show significant differences in how the tests were scored. But educators learned that when they had agreement on what student papers at different levels were supposed to look like, and when scorers had the proper training, consistency was dramatically improved.

In Appleton, educators have countered another criticism of performance testing by requiring each student to produce a product: "We don't have any group scores," Price said. Critics often maintain that group projects allow some students to coast on the achievement of others.

Both Fortier and Price said performance assessments have unique advantages when it comes to teachers and parents talking about how a student is doing in class. In the case of a writing test, for example, the goals are clearly shown by the example papers chosen for each achievement level, so parents, students and teachers all know what the goals are and can talk about them more easily.

Educators have always been critical of how standardized tests have been used as a political football, and Price said the emphasis in his district is on ways to improve instruction, not on better ways to compare school buildings or school districts.

The final argument for performance assessment is the most concrete: Fortier points out that business and industry officials rarely criticize schools on students' inability to remember the dates of the War of the Roses — they criticize students' ability to demonstrate and apply what they know.

Shared Principles

It may seem like a lofty and unattainable goal to get everybody in the community — parents, teachers, administrators, political leaders and many others — to agree on a set of shared principles for the education of students. But educators like Jackie Foss, a teacher at Milton Middle School, say that encouraging the involvement of the whole community is the first step to reaching that goal. And a lot of small steps can make great strides.

Foss has arranged for local industry to sponsor the delivery of newspapers to her classroom. A local grocery store gives students in the class brown bags, which the students use as a canvas for illustrated book reports. The bags are then used at the store for patrons' groceries.

"Educators, parents and the community — we shouldn't be three separate entities," Foss said. "We are all working together for the same goal."

Another small step Foss takes is to send evaluations to parents, which they can fill out anonymously to report on how they see her performance in the classroom. Foss said when you encourage parents, and don't just talk to them about problems, good things happen.

There have been few political battles over the performance assessments in Appleton, and Price said a large reason for that has been the number of people involved in the formation of the assessment system throughout the community. For example, it was parents' concerns that made sure phonics would be a necessary part of the reading instruction in the early grades.

Teachers like Foss, parents like Starks, administrators like Price and counselors like Geishirt all agree that tearing down the walls that separate their groups is the first step in bringing the community together for better education.

Once a system of trust and cooperation among all groups is established, it becomes much easier to develop a set of guiding principles for educating children.

"It's not an easy thing to get going — and it takes broad shoulders to do it," said Foss. "You're not going to have everybody agreeing all the time. ... But if it's something that will make a difference, I'll do it."

Posted October 23, 1996