Glenn Moses's Profile

Grading regimes that work, he said, offer accurate, precise and timely feedback that is aimed at helping students improve -- not penalizing them -- and is only one type of response.

You don't give grades to adjudicate a result. You give it to kids . . . to help them get better,

Giving scores only to certain assignments and choosing carefully which scores should be included in the final grade.

Giving kids no credit for not turning in work or flunking them in some other way defeats the purpose, he said. A better result would be to force them to do the work, before school, during recess or after school.

Take a step back, however, and you begin to grasp the import of what is
happening from Amherst, Massachusetts, where highly educated white parents
have fought to preserve a tracking system that keeps virtually every child
of color out of advanced classes,

The parents who prefer
worksheets and lectures can use their clout to reverse or forestall a move
to more learner-centered classrooms

Pitched battles are more common in integrated schools,
but even here they happen rarely because, in large measure, the affluent
white parents have already won.

American education is so segregated and stratified today that the elite
mingle mostly with one another.

racking, advanced placement (AP) courses,
and gifted programs do not provide differential instruction for legitimate
pedagogical reasons -- or allow for a system based on merit -- so much as
they represent a naked grab for artificially scarce benefits by those who
have the power to get them

To begin with, AP classes at the high school
level are usually difficult but often poorly taught, with an emphasis on
short-term memorization of facts presented in lectures and textbooks -- in
effect, one long test-prep session

the
beneficiaries of these educational advantages would "be more concerned
about the labels placed on their children than about what actually goes on
in the classroom.

Granted, it is hard to deny the superiority of the
instruction in gifted-and-talented programs and some other honors or
high-track classes, what with hands-on learning, student-designed
projects, computers, field trips, and other enrichments. But research
generally shows that it is precisely those enrichments that produce better
results rather than the fact that they are accorded only to a select few.

The detracking in these 10 schools was carefully planned to bring other
students up to a high level, but not to take anything away from the
privileged children. Yet the reaction from the parents of the latter
students has been powerfully negative -- often fatal for the reform
efforts. These parents have pressured educators "to maintain separate and
unequal classes for their children, . . . [demanding] to know what their
children will 'get' that other students will not have access to.

inclusive schooling offers all students the type of
education usually reserved for gifted and talented students.

This is essentially what happened in San Diego, where
an attempt to give a leg up to lower-tracked students was, as Elizabeth
Cohen of Stanford University puts it, "the kind of project that you'd
think wouldn't bother upper-status parents at all. Wrong! They said, 'What
are you going to do special for my kid?

they are in effect sacrificing other children to their own

The psychology of those parents is that it's not
enough for their kids to win: others must lose -- and they must lose
conspicuously.

These arguments
will only persuade someone who is looking for more information about his
or her child's improvement or someone who is concerned about sustaining
the child's interest. If, however, the point is not for assessment to be
authentic but for it to serve as a sorting device, to show not how well
the student is doing but how much better he or she is doing than others,
then A's will always be necessary -- and it will always be necessary for
some people's children not to get them

In a new book titled
How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, David Labaree of
Michigan State University argues that schooling these days is not seen as
a way to create democratic citizens or even capable workers, but serves
more as a credentialing mechanism.

The point is not to get an
education but to get ahead

It is through this lens that we might regard the
demand in some affluent communities for a transmission-based, "bunch
o'facts" curriculum

if "young people who have
traditionally monopolized 'success' in the classroom are likely to find
themselves joined in success by more of their peers," this can be
"profoundly upsetting to some of their parents whose ambitions for their
children include being at the top of the class in school and getting into
elite colleges.

Of course, reasonable people can disagree about the
best way to teach math and other subjects, but more than one observer of
the "math wars" has wondered whether we are witnessing a debate over
pedagogy or about something else entirely.

Or
does parental opposition really just reflect the fear that more
sophisticated math instruction might be less useful for boosting SAT
scores and therefore for getting students into the most elite colleges?
Math reformers who counterpose merely doing arithmetic with really
understanding (and being able to apply) mathematical principles may be
missing the more pertinent contrast, which is between doing what is best
for learning and doing what is best for getting my child into the Ivy
League

Before long, the children internalize this quest and
come to see their childhood as one long period of getting ready

What they don't know, for their parents
surely will not tell them, is that this straining toward the future, this
poisonous assumption that the value of everything is solely a function of
its contribution to something that might come later, will continue right
through college, right through professional school, right through the
early stages of a career, until at last they wake up in a tastefully
appointed bedroom to discover that their lives are mostly gone

moral, social,
artistic, emotional, and other forms of development are often jettisoned
in favor of a narrow academic agenda.

What Garrison Keillor said about school choice
proposals could easily be applied to ability grouping and gifted programs:
they seem to make sense "until you stop and think about the old idea of
the public school, a place where you went to find out who inhabits this
society other than people like you.

In some places,
there is legitimate reason for concern, but as a rule too much attention
is paid to the difficulty level of what is being taught, the simplistic
assumption being that harder is better

To judge what goes on in a
classroom on the basis of how difficult the tasks are is rather like
judging an opera on the basis of how many notes it contains that are
challenging for the singers to hit

The truth is that, if tests or homework assignments
consist of factual recall questions, it doesn't make all that much
difference whether there are 25 tough questions or 10 easy ones

"Parents say,
'Look I live in this $600,000 house. I was successful with the system you
currently have. Why do we have to look at anything different?' " The twin
premises of this argument, of course, are equally ripe for challenge: that
the most important kind of success in life can be measured in terms of
real estate and that their own success occurred because of a system
that includes letter grades, separate tracks, memorizing the
multiplication table in third grade, and so on

the elite students
are getting a school-within-a-school with small classes and plenty of
attention, so "why should you be for change when your kids are benefiting
from exactly what we say is wrong with high schools?

The answer is that the system is quite clearly broken
for most students -- those who are not among the elect

f students can read but
don't, if they fail to think deeply or to take satisfaction from playing
with ideas, if they are primarily concerned with what is going to be on
the test, then something is drastically wrong with the status quo

They couch
their opposition to detracking mainly in terms of the low-track students'
"behavior" -- lack of motivation to learn, lack of commitment to school or
interest in higher education, tendency to act out, and so forth --
without making the connection between these behaviors and the low-track
students' "penetration" of an unequal and hierarchical system in which
they are at the bottom

ringing those lower-achieving students into
the classroom is going to water down things for my children. They're not
going to be able to keep up, and the teachers are going to have to slow
things down.

We need to invite people
to live up to their own best ideals, to impress upon them the moral
implications of these policies, and to help them understand that it's not
just other children but the very prospects for a democratic society that
are at risk from tracking and other practices

The reformer's job, then, is to help parents see that
favored educational practices -- from drill-and-skill teaching techniques
to letter grades to awards assemblies -- are actively impeding the
realization of the very goals that they themselves say they
want

Likewise, some parents will be relieved that
detracking doesn't mean "teaching to the middle" -- but they have to be
made aware of this

We're not in the business of educating one group of
students. As professionals we're responsible for educating everyone, and
there are things that we must not do. That's a moral and professional
issue.

“rubrics make assessing
student work quick and efficient, and they help teachers to justify to parents and others the grades that they assign to students.”[1]
To which the only appropriate response is: Uh-oh.

First of all, something that’s commended to teachers as a handy strategy of self-justification
during parent conferences (“Look at all these 3’s, Mrs. Grommet!  How could I have given Zach anything but a B?”) doesn’t
seem particularly promising for inviting teachers to improve their practices, let alone rethink their premises.

hree reliable
effects when students are graded:  They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the
learning itself.

rubrics actually help
to legitimate grades by offering a new way to derive them.  They do nothing to address the terrible reality of
students who have been led to focus on getting A’s rather than on making sense of ideas.

Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow
them to pretend that what they’re doing is exact and objective.  Frankly, I’m amazed by the number of educators whose
opposition to standardized tests and standardized curricula mysteriously fails to extend to standardized in-class assessments.

Just as it’s possible to raise standardized test scores as long as you’re willing to gut the curriculum and turn the
school into a test-preparation factory, so it’s possible to get a bunch of people to agree on what rating to give an assignment as long
as they’re willing to accept and apply someone else’s narrow criteria for what merits that rating.

To this point, my objections assume only that teachers rely on rubrics to standardize the way they think about student
assignments.  Despite my misgivings, I can imagine a scenario where teachers benefit from consulting a rubric briefly in the early stages
of designing a curriculum unit in order to think about various criteria by which to assess what students end up doing. 

As long as the rubric
is only one of several sources, as long as it doesn’t drive the instruction, it could conceivably play a constructive role. 

In support of this proposition, a girl who didn’t like rubrics is quoted as
complaining, “If you get something wrong, your teacher can prove you knew what you were supposed to do.”[

“resisting the rubric temptation” the day “one particularly uninterested student raised his hand and asked if I was going to give the
class a rubric for this assignment.”  She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now
seemed “unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value.  Worse than that,”
she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”

The fatal flaw in this logic is revealed by a line of research in educational psychology showing that students
whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.

“The whole time
I’m writing, I’m not thinking about what I’m saying or how I’m saying it.  I’m worried about what grade the teacher will give me, even if
she’s handed out a rubric.  I’m more focused on being correct than on being honest in my writing.”

In boiling “a messy process down to 4-6 rows of nice, neat, organized little
boxes,” she argues, assessment is “stripped of the complexity that breathes life into good writing.”

“we need to look to the piece of writing itself to suggest its own evaluative criteria

or (3) offer feedback that will help them become more adept at, and excited about, what they’re doing

We have to reassess the whole enterprise of
assessment, the goal being to make sure it’s consistent with the reason we decided to go into teaching in the first place.

It is time to declare war on the traditional course syllabus. If there is one single artifact that pinpoints the degradation of liberal education, it is the rule-infested, punitive, controlling syllabus that is handed out to students on the first day of class.

the net effect is that of the teacher yelling at the student.

What such syllabi often omit is any mention of learning. They list the assigned readings but not reasons why the subject is worth studying or important or interesting or deep, or the learning strategies that will be used in the course. The typical syllabus gives little indication that the students and teacher are embarking on an exciting learning adventure together, and its tone is more akin to something that might be handed to a prisoner on the first day of incarceration.

The implicit message of the modern course syllabus is that the student will not do anything unless bribed by grades or forced by threats.

“managing” students—an odd word choice that presumes students are like employees and we their bosses

The presenter advocated an intricate structure of points and penalties to ensure that every possible excuse a student might present for not meeting a requirement could be dealt with by invoking the appropriate rule, thus avoiding having to make judgments that might be challenged by a student.

the syllabus is a “legally enforceable contract”

The speaker seemed unaware that a detailed legalistic syllabus is diametrically opposed to what makes students want to learn.

We should be modeling for them the exhilaration of the life of the mind. What does it say about us if we lay out rules and force students to obey?

It is sad that many teachers are willing to forego their autonomy and the privilege of making professional judgments about academic competence and, instead, transform themselves into rule-enforcing tyrants.

A few weeks into the semester, when students have a better sense of what kind of person I am and what the course is about, we discuss what might be the best way of assigning meaningful grades.

a tentative timeline of readings and writing assignments.

What should be universal, however, is the goal of moving away from an authoritarian classroom. In doing so, we need to be mindful that students have become accustomed to the controlling syllabus.

Accordingly, I spend a great deal of time and effort building such trust and creating a sense of community in the classroom among the students and between them and me.

College faculty are fortunate in that we still have some level of autonomy in teaching.

Specifically, we’re apt to assume that people who commit crimes are morally deficient, that the have-nots in our
midst are lazy (or at least insufficiently resourceful), that children who fail to learn simply aren’t studying hard enough (or have unqualified
teachers). In other words, we treat each instance of illegality, poverty, or academic difficulty as if it had never happened before and as if the individual in question was acting out of
sheer perversity or incompetence.

is all about ‘Gotcha!

This
continues to be true even though we’ve known for quite some time that the environment matters at least as much as individual character when trying to
predict the occurrence of various types of cheating.

when teachers don’t seem to have a real
connection with their students, or when they don’t seem to care much about them, students are more inclined to cheat.

Cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or
overwhelming.

cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring
significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor.”

(Interestingly, one of the mostly forgotten findings from that old Teachers College study was that “progressive school experiences are less conducive to deception than conventional school
experiences” – a result that persisted even after the researchers controlled for age, IQ, and family background.   In fact, the more time students spent in either a progressive school or a traditional
school, the greater the difference between the two in terms of cheating.)

“when students perceive that the ultimate goal of
learning is to get good grades, they are more likely to see cheating as an
acceptable, justifiable behavior,”

Cheating is
particularly likely to flourish if schools use honor rolls and other
incentives to heighten the salience of grades, or if parents offer financial
inducements for good report cards

If students are led to focus on how well
they’re doing more than on what they’re
doing, they may do whatever they think is necessary to make it look as though
they’re succeeding

There was less cheating when they made it clear that the point was to enjoy the learning, when understanding mattered more than memorizing, and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of
exploration.

Interestingly, these studies found that even students who acknowledged that it’s wrong to cheat were more likely to do so when the school culture placed a premium on results.

it would be pointless to cheat if you were interested in the learning itself because cheating can’t help you understand an idea.

But that environment – the values and policies of a classroom, a school, or a society – is decisive in determining how pervasive cheating will
be.

What the data are telling us, like it or
not, is that cheating is best understood as a symptom of problems with the priorities of schools and the practices of educators.

Competition is perhaps the single most toxic ingredient to be found in a classroom, and it is also a reliable predictor of
cheating.

In short, a competitive school is to cheating as a warm, moist environment is to mold -- except
that in the latter case we don’t content ourselves with condemning the mold spores for growing.

How ironic, then, that some of the adults who most vociferously deplore cheating also support competitive practices – and confuse competitiveness with
excellence – with the result that cheating is more likely to occur.

Because competition, a relentless focus on achievement,
and bad pedagogy aren’t new, it stands to reason that cheating isn’t exactly
a recent development either.

In fact, Elliot Turiel compared surveys of
students from the 1920s with those conducted today and found that about the
same percentage admitted to cheating in both eras – an interesting challenge to
those who view the past through a golden haze and seem to take a perverse
satisfaction in thinking of our times as the worst ever.

In fact, we’re currently witnessing
just such pressures not only on children but on teachers and administrators who
are placed in an environment where everything depends on their students’
standardized test scores.

If schools focus on relative achievement and lead
students to do the same, it may be because they exist in a society where
education is sometimes conceived as little more than a credentialing
ritual.

Cheating could be seen as a rational choice
in a culture of warped values.

Some kinds of cheating involve actions that are indisputably objectionable. Plagiarism is one
example.

we should be able to agree
that it’s wrong to use a specific concept or a verbatim passage from another
source without giving credit if the objective is to deceive the reader about
its origin.

cheating actually consists of a failure to abide by restrictions that may be
arbitrary and difficult to defend

“I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbor can do.”
  (Or, if the implications were spelled out more precisely, “I want to see what you can do all by yourself, deprived of
the resources and social support that characterize most well-functioning real-world environments, rather than seeing how much more you and your neighbors could
accomplish together.”)

most collaboration is simply classified as cheating. End
of discussion.

hat does it say about the instructor, and the education system, that assessment is geared largely to students’ ability to memorize?

s information being collected about
students’ capacity to remember what they’ve read or heard for the purpose of helping them to learn more effectively -- or is the exercise more about sorting them (comparing
students to one another) or controlling them (by using assessment to elicit compliance)?

Once we’ve decided that someone’s action is morally wrong, her efforts
to challenge that premise, no matter how well-reasoned, merely serve to confirm
our view of her immorality.

the goal was to find ways to prevent students from being able to cheat rather than addressing
the reasons they wanted to cheat -- or what the instructors regarded as
cheating (and why).

“Maybe
a bigger problem is that teachers require students to memorize instead of teaching them how to think.”

“finally convinced me that the kinds of research papers I had customarily assigned
were not accomplishing what I had in mind.”

suppose that cheating could be at least partly curtailed by tightly monitoring and regulating students or by repeatedly
announcing the dire penalties that await anyone who breaks the rules.

“In our stampede to fight what some call a ‘plague’ of plagiarism, we
risk becoming the enemies rather than the mentors of our students; we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police
relationship. . . .Worst of all, we risk not recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform. . . [if it] encourages plagiarism because it discourages
learning.”

It is sometimes said that students who take forbidden shortcuts with their homework will just end up “cheating themselves” because
they will not derive any intellectual benefits from doing the assignment. This assertion, too, is
often accepted on faith rather than prompting us to ask just how likely it is that the assignment really would prove valuable if it had been completed in
accordance with instructions.

Outraged condemnations of cheating, at least in such instances, may turn out to have more to do with power than with
either ethics or pedagogy.  Perhaps what actually elicits that outrage is not a lack of integrity on the part of students so much as a lack of
conformity.

Such a perspective reminds us that how we educate students is the dog; cheating is just the tail.

we conclude that policy makers should either revamp exit exams to be
sufficiently challenging to make a real difference for how much students learn or abandon them
altogether.

Besides the similarity of the rhetoric and claims for and against exit exam policies over time and
across states, these debates have also typically proceeded in the absence of sound empirical
evidence on either side.

find that in states with
“minimum competency” exit exams (assessing mastery of material that students should learn
prior to beginning 9th grade) graduation rates decline by about one percentage point. In states
with “higher competency” exit exams, graduation rates decline by about two percentage points.
Nationally, each percentage point reduction in the graduation rate means that about 35,000 fewer
young people leave high school with a diploma each year.

We also find that exit exams have a greater impact on graduation rates in states’ that are more
racially/ethnically diverse and have higher rates of poverty

we asked whether exit exams increased the
reading and math achievement of students between 1971 and 2004

we also asked whether exit
exams improved the achievement of students closer to the top and the bottom of the achievement
distribution

We also
asked whether exit exams matter more or less for racial/ethnic minority students and for students
from different social class backgrounds.

We found no evidence for any effects of (minimum competency or higher competency) exit
exams on reading or math achievement at the mean or at any of several cut-points of the
achievement distribution. These results hold for 13 year olds and for 17 year olds and do not vary
across students from different racial/ethnic or social class backgrounds, undermining claims of
disparate impact.

We limited our focus
to 20 to 23 year olds with no college education (and along the way we found that exit exams
have no bearing on 20 to 23 year olds’ chances of having attended college).Young high school
graduates who obtained their diplomas in exit exam states fared no better in the labor market
than their peers who obtained their diplomas in other states

Our research suggests that exit exams fail to improve either academic achievement or early labor
market outcomes

This same basic pattern of exit exam policy evolution has played out in a number of states. States
begin by setting moderate to high standards and then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
designing exit exams that purport to hold students to these standards. In short order, however,
high failure rates and much-publicized legal challenges built on inequities in states’ education
systems test the political will of policymakers to hold students to these standards. In the end,
politics wins out over principle and the exit exam, the passing threshold, or both are altered to
increase the share of students that passes the exam. In the end, most states set the bar for passing
exit exams at a point that is too low to make any real difference for academic achievement or
workplace preparedness but just high enough to prevent a modest number of would-be graduates
from obtaining diplomas.

Our research suggests that state exit exams do harm to students who fail them but provide no
discernable benefits to students who pass them.

Exit exam policies are broken and states should
either fix them or get rid of them, but either option requires a political will we fear is in scarce
supply among policy makers and politicians.

If states choose to abandon exit exams altogether they would be on sound scientific ground.

The ethics of high
school exit exams are questionable at best

However, public opinion determines the
outcomes of elections, not science. Anyone with the courage to advocate for the abolition of high
school exit exams would likely be portrayed by opponents as ‘soft on education.’

This need to be number one also explains why we can no
longer settle for teaching to the “whole child.”  The trouble is that if you
have a whole of something, you have only one of it.  From now on, therefore, you
can expect to see conferences devoted to educating a “child-and-a-half”

In addition to competitiveness, those who specify an
entire century to frame their objectives tend not to be distracted by all the
fretting about what’s good for children.  Instead, they ask, “What do our corporations
need?” and work backwards from there. 

We must never forget the primary reason
that children attend school – namely, to be trained in the skills that will maximize
the profits earned by their future employers. 

How can we redouble our commitment to business-oriented
schooling? 

This is no time for complacency, though.  Not everyone
is on board yet, and that means we’ll have to weed out teachers whose
stubborn attachment to less efficient educational strategies threatens to
slow down the engine of our future economy. 

  How can we rid our schools of those
who refuse to be team players? 

The final distinguishing feature of education that’s geared
to the next century is its worshipful attitude toward mathematics and
technology.  “If you can’t quantify it or plug it in, who needs it?”