Does More Paperwork Really Improve Student Achievement?

At last Wednesday's school committee meeting, the members discussed a set of model resolutions to be considered at the upcoming MASC conference (the Massachusetts Association of School Committees).  One of the resolutions, with which I heartily agree, called for the formation of a special commission to review the government-mandated reports and data required of school districts in order to determine the extent to which the reports and data benefit student achievement or simply take time that could otherwise be used in the service of teaching and learning.

In the same set of resolutions, it was noted, with respect to the new educator evaluation system, that "the formal regulations, guidelines, rubrics and resource advisory materials produced by DESE [the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education] to ensure compliance by educators and policymakers as they implement [the new evaluation system] are comprised of more than 375 pages of instructions and over 110,000 words."  I believe that at this point I have read all these pages (!!!), and I personally find the complexity of the new educator evaluation system, and the paperwork required by it, rather amazing.  There are four overall standards of performance for teachers.  Under the standards are 16 "indicators," and under the "indicators" are 33 "elements," with four defined levels for each "element."  To make a determination of performance under each element, there are 3 categories of evidence to be used and an evidence tracking form to be completed.  Overall, there is a defined 5 step evaluation cycle, 4 different types of plans, and 10 different forms to be completed and used throughout the process.  The whole thing is amazingly complex and requires a large amount of paperwork.  In general, in the corporate world, adequately supervising more than 10 direct reports is considered very difficult to do, but in schools principals generally are responsible for supervising 50 or more people, a task that is challenging enough already without adding more paperwork. There is nothing in the new law and regulations to provide schools with more resources to do this work, other than a provision for providing a "subsidy" to consultants who can be hired by school systems to "train" everyone in how to implement the system. (Perhaps in another post I'll discuss the topic of government regulations that are so complex that schools don't have the resources to figure out how to comply with them and thus have to hire consultants to develop forms and programs -- there are better uses for district funds, such as purchasing materials and supplies for classroom use, or funding useful professional development for teachers.)  In any event, I believe that the level of paperwork required by the new evaluation system will actually make it more difficult to provide good supervision by taking time away from actually meeting with, observing, and working with teachers and students.

Overall, my prediction is that the new system will focus everyone on the onerous task of just completing the paperwork,  and that it will decrease the time that can actually be spent in observing instruction and discussing it with teachers.  It makes me wonder -- are there really people who believe that requiring more paperwork of school administrators is going to contribute positively to student achievement, and how did they come to that conclusion? 

Where Do They Learn It? Some Thoughts on Bullying

This past Monday (Oct. 1st), there was an interesting item in The Boston Globe entitled "Bullying Common On Children's Shows," regarding a recent study of children's television programs by Indiana University researchers.  The study, which was published in the September Journal of Communications, reviewed three episodes of each of 50 popular children's television shows and found that some form of aggression was portrayed on 92% of the programs, "most commonly verbal types such as insulting and teasing, but also nonverbal types such as eye rolling, finger pointing, and ignoring."  The researchers also noted that in most cases the aggressors were portrayed as popular or attractive and were not either punished or rewarded as a result of the behavior.  In other words, it seems that teasing and bullying are frequently shown as normal, expected behavior.  This morning, I read an unrelated article -- a synopsis in the Marshall Memo of a recent article in the Harvard Business Review about the power of social norms to change behavior -- that seems very relevant to this problem.  The HBR article described research demonstrating that simply communicating social norms was amazingly effective in getting people to change their behavior.  For example, in hotel bathrooms a message saying that the majority of people do re-use their towels resulted in a large increase in the number of people re-using their towels, and a message in Britain to citizens in a particular town stating that "over 93% of citizens living in your town pay their tax on time" resulted in an increase in timely collections from 57 to 86 percent.   It seems to me that our children are hearing the message from the media that teasing and bullying is normal, expected behavior and/or that most people speak to others in this manner.

This is a difficult message to counter, as much as parents and teachers work at it, but we clearly need to keep trying.  (Perhaps we also need to push for changes in what is portrayed to children, but that's another topic.)  After reading the HBR article, one thing that occurred to me was to advocate for continual, explicit teaching about consideration for others.  For example, I remember that as a child I was continually hearing messages from my parents regarding consideration for others -- "Don't leave that in the way; someone might trip over it," "Don't take the last brownie; someone else may want it," and the like.  I wonder sometimes if those messages are getting lost in the high-speed pace of life these days.  As I drive into a supermarket parking lot, for example, and find shopping carts left all over rather than being returned, or cars parked in places that make it difficult for others to park, I wonder if children are instead getting the message that thinking only of one's own convenience and not of others is OK.  I think I am going to experiment at school with messages that indicate social norms ("most people avoid saying mean things to others," and the like -- whatever I can find based on facts), and I would encourage all of us to do more explicit teaching of consideration for others, like returning that shopping cart while saying to a child something like, "We need to return this so it's not in other people's way and so others can use it."

It will take all of us to change what we, as a society, are teaching our children, and I do believe that this continual explicit teaching, by our modeling and our language, will be more effective than any anti-bullying assembly or program can possibly be.  I also think we should push for changes in programming for children to more truly portray how most people really do treat each other so that children learn that the norm is politeness and civility, not teasing and bullying.