Common Core?

As we begin our admissions season for the 2015-16 school year, I have been getting a number of questions from prospective parents about the Common Core Standards, which most states have adopted in their public schools. For those of you who are interested in my take on the Common Core, I will say this: Houston Academy will not be adopting the Common Core Standards. In this blog entry, I’ll explain why.

For something that has elicited so much controversy, the Common Core’s premise is really quite simple: to have a set of national standards for K-12 education which standardizes what students should be expected to master at each grade level. It actually does not tell teachers how to teach, and despite popular misconceptions, there IS no curriculum. However, as a part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, every state had to test every child every year in 3-8 grade in math and reading, plus one year in high school. The results of these “high stakes” tests were used to determine whether a school was “failing.” Each school was expected to increase the percentage of students passing the test, each year, thereby meeting the law’s requirement for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Students at “failing” schools could transfer to a different school, and if the schools persistently failed, they could be “reconstituted.” Many states, including Alabama, have recently received waivers from adhering to No Child Left Behind in order to create their own accountability measures. Alabama has adopted the Common Core, but unlike most states, Alabama has chosen to use the ACT Aspire as its end-of-year test.

As it stands, though, states have poured billions of dollars into implementation of the Common Core. Nationally, putting the Common Core in place will cost the states as much as $10 billion, with an additional estimated cost of $800 million per year.[1] This, according to many, has diverted needed resources away from teacher recruitment and training, facilities, and remediation for our most challenged students. For example, amidst numerous complaints about a crumbling school infrastructure, Los Angeles spent $1 billion dollars of revenue from a “school construction bond” in order to put Common Core testing software on iPads.[2] Last year, the state of Alabama spent $6.7 million dollars on their testing program, alone.[3] Of course, the textbook companies are thrilled with this development, because it allows them to sell brand new “Common Core aligned” textbooks to every district in the United States. This amounts to a profit windfall.

While I certainly have problems with some of the content of the Common Core, I think we could all find problems with any universal set of standards. The reason why Houston Academy will not be adopting Common Core has nothing to do with the quality of the standards. It is because I have not found credible research that backs the notion that common standards, alone, will lead to increased levels of student achievement.[4]  Sure, high standards are important, but it’s only a fraction of what goes into student achievement and gains in student learning.  What’s interesting is that when one explores the scores on the Department of Educations’ National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), there has persistently been a four to five times greater difference within states than between any two states.[5] In other words, in Alabama, there’s likely to be more of a difference in test scores between any two school districts in Alabama than there is likely to be between the state of Alabama and the state of Massachusetts. Of course, states have had common sets of standards for decades. If standards, alone, could work miracles, we’d see similar achievement within our state. Additionally, whether a state has strong standards or weak standards bears no statistical relationship to either standardized test scores or student achievement.⁵

What does make a difference in student achievement? Well, years of data tell us that much of student learning is influenced by context variables that are beyond the control of the school. However, of the factors we can control, the literature has consistently confirmed that quality teaching is the single most powerful factor in increasing and improving student learning.[6]

That seems like common sense, right? I mean, I’ve never had a student come back after graduation who said, “I’d really like to thank the person who wrote your curriculum! That curriculum has made all the difference in my life. When I look back on Unit 6, Goal 3a in Chemistry – ‘Derive the empirical formula for a compound by using percent composition data’ – I can’t help but smile and think about how that has helped me in my life’s work and career success.”  No, what former students DO want to talk about is how Starla Lewis made them love math, Wanda Emblom made them want to be a doctor, or Paige Knight made them want to be a writer. 

Put another way, students don’t learn from standards; they learn from teachers.

Permit me to use this analogy. I can determine the absolute best type of fertilizer to put on my lawn to make it grow and prosper. However, if I dump the fertilizer in the middle of my lawn instead of spreading it properly and at the correct weight, I’m going to kill my grass. We can have all the finest standards in the world, but if we don’t apply those standards properly, we are not going to improve student learning.  It’s the quality of the teacher that matters.

Actually, I’d argue, you could give us students at Houston Academy from any socio-economic background, and given a certainly level of motivation and God-given ability, our teachers at HA will lead them to achieve.  Furthermore, I’d argue that it’s precisely because our teachers are freed from the demands that public school teachers face– high-stakes testing, Common Core, exhaustive evaluation systems, individualized educational plans, state certification requirements, monotonous paperwork, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, etc. – that our teachers are free to focus on children and their learning needs.  It’s because our teachers don’t have to focus on a broad set of national standards that they can focus on having high standards for every individual student. Those standards are much higher than anything the government has prescribed.

Learning is a very complex activity, and we know that every student learns differently. Not all of our students are going to be successful all the time, but what I can tell you for certain is that throwing billions of dollars at a set of national standards is not going to fix our problems. Focusing on teachers and students just might.

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[1] Chiaramonte, P. (2014, February 5). High cost of Common Core has states rethinking the national education standards. Retrieved February 24, 2015.

[2] Murphy, T. (2014, September 1). Inside the Mammoth Backlash to Common Core. Mother Jones.

[3] State of Alabama Department of Education. (2014). ACT assessments establish new baseline for student achievement [Press Release]. Retrieved from http://www.alsde.edu/sec/comm/News%20Releases/12-11-2014%20Statewide%20Assessment%20Results.pdf

[4] Loveless, T. (2012, February 1). The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning. Retrieved February 24, 2015.

 [5] Loveless, T. (2012, April 13). Does the Common Core Matter? Education Week.

[6] Brophy, J. E., & Good, T. L. (1974). Teacher-student relationships: Causes and consequences. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc.

Cruickshank, D. R., Jenkins, D. B., & Metcalf, K. K. (2003). The act of teaching (Third ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Good, T. L., & Brophy, J. E. (2003). Looking in classrooms (9th ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Wayne, A., & Youngs, P. (2003). Teacher characteristics and student achievement gains. Review of Educational-Research, 73(1), 89-122.

Forming a True Middle School

Many of you may not be aware that Houston Academy has a strategic plan.  This plan, devised by a special committee of the Board of Trustees, outlines our goals for Houston Academy for a five-year period.  A major component of that plan is the establishment of a middle school. 

You might ask, “Why do we need a middle school?”

That’s a good question. After all, Houston Academy has been very successful with the lower school comprising 3-year-old preschool through 6^th grade and the upper school comprising 7th grade through 12^th grade.

The driving force behind the middle school movement, nationally, is the research-based idea that children ages 10-14 have a unique set of learning needs; therefore, those children need a school setting, curriculum, and culture that meet those unique needs.

If you’ve ever spent time with a group of middle schoolers, you will quickly see that they are, indeed, “unique.”  As one of our teachers, who is in love with the middle school child, likes to say, “They’re not real people yet! I love them, but they’re not real people!” One of my former colleagues aptly described the middle school children as “hormones with feet.”  I particularly love a description I read in the NAIS, Middle School Handbook:

You know them.

We all do.

They are the ones we hear in a much too near booth in the fast food restaurant, talking, laughing, eating so loudly they complicate our digestion. They are the ones who cause us to hurry to new seats in a movie theater just as the theater goes dark. They are the ones we brake for as they skateboard past us down a steep hill and through a busy traffic intersection. They are the ones playing comfortably with toy cars at one moment and dreaming of real ones at the next…

Middle schoolers are complex. Next to old people, early adolescents may suffer more age-based prejudice than any other group in society. Through the middle school years, the young person frequently wonders or asks, “Am I normal?” (Finks and Stanek 2008)

If you’ve had a middle school child in your home, you’ve seen it. One day, they talk to you eagerly, like a 40-year-old historian, and the next day they sulk alone in their room, listening to Rhapsody on their iPhone, while wondering why “nobody gets them.” My own middle school daughter describes herself as “angsty.”

Not surprisingly, the brain-based research tells us that our teaching methods and environment should be driven by students’ brain structure, growth, and development.  We would never think of teaching a kindergartner the same way we teach a fifth grader, because we understand that their brain development is at a very different place. Inexplicably, though, we seem to think it’s perfectly fine to teach a 7^th grader the same way we teach a senior![1]

To successfully educate the middle school child, we also need to make sure we have a structure that reflects middle schoolers’ impulsivity and seemingly inherent need to test boundaries. Again, from a disciplinary perspective, it’s neither productive nor realistic to hold an 11-year-old to the same standards as a 19-year-old.

In short, the middle school child needs a guided and planned transition from childhood to the teen years and young adulthood. Early adolescence is an absolutely critical point in human development, and a carefully designed educational experience from grades 5-8 can have an indelible and lasting impact on our children and their future. Unfortunately, many of our schools in this country have not done a very good job structuring their middle schools. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that our middle schools have collectively failed our children.

The middle school at Houston Academy will be a model for the region. At the beginning of the year, we formed a volunteer faculty and administrative committee to study and plan for a middle school.  Before Thanksgiving, our committee took a trip to two quality independent schools: Altamont in Birmingham and the Montgomery Academy. Both schools have a middle school that encompasses grades 5-8.

Subsequently, the committee has decided to move forward in steps.  Our first step will be to reorganize the 5th and 6th grades employing a schedule that will allow the students to move between disciplines and have more class time in science, math, English, world and classical languages, and social studies.  This will NOT mean that we will denigrate the time for the arts; it will merely mean that we will rearrange the schedule to fit a middle school model.  In addition, we are looking to have a smooth transition in terms of expectations, responsibilities, and class structure from 5th grade to 8th grade. In other words, 5th graders will be handled differently from 6th graders. Our goal is to have this in place by next year. We also hope to have some athletic, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities for these grades. Concurrently, we are studying academic and social best practices of middle schools and working to integrate those ideas into our new middle school.

In the 2016-17 school year, we plan on fully integrating the 7th and 8th grade into the middle school.  Pending strong enrollment and a sound financial footing, we will hire a middle school head.

As we move forward, we will be dealing with the issues outlined below:

 I. What is our educational vision? Envision our middle school….

     A. What kind of education should we provide?

     B. What will our middle school provide that other schools don’t provide? What will our middle school provide for students that is NOT being provided under our current structure?

     C. What kinds of academic and social experiences do we want to give our students?

     D. What do we see implementing right away, in five years, in ten years?

II. What is our structure and curriculum?

     A. Day-to-Day operations

          1. How long will our classes be?

          2. How many classes in a day?

          3. When will the day start and end?

          4. How will lunch work?

          5. We will have an Advisory program. How will it work?

          6. How will we schedule teachers and students (structure and method)?

          7. What extracurricular activities will we offer? At what grades? What is our middle school athletic philosophy?

     B. Student Learning

          1. What is the objective of student learning?

          2. What do they need to know/be able to do?

          3. What criteria will we use to assess learning?

          4. How will students be tested?

          5. What constitutes successful completion of the middle school?

          6. How will curriculum be developed?

III. Write a statement of good practice in teaching

     A. What pedagogy will we use?

     B. Are we writing-based, collaborative-learning based, etc.?

IV. Facilities

     A. What physical facilities are necessary?

     B. Where will those facilities be?

     C. What will the facilities cost?

At first glance, this outline contains an overwhelming list of questions. On the other hand, this is incredibly exciting for both our teachers and our children.  We already offer the finest education in the Wiregrass. We have no educational peer, but we are going to be even better.  I can’t wait to see what we become as we evolve as a school of excellence!

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[1] Actually, research suggests that male adolescence continues well into our mid-20s. I know most women will not find that fact surprising!

Veterans Day

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. Each year, on this day, I think about my grandfather, Joseph Howard Siemens, who passed away at the age of 90 back in October of 2009.  He was a member of  what Tom Brokaw termed “the Greatest Generation.” He waded his way through the Great Depression, and he was the first man in his family to attend college for any period of time. However, he was only able to afford it because he had earned a football scholarship. Unfortunately, his college career was cut short when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Like most of the rest of the men in college at the time, my grandfather left school to fight for his country.

Photo of Robert Siemens, killed by
a German guided bomb,
September 11, 1943

Sadly, while making his way through basic training, my grandfathers’ brother, Robert, was killed by a German guided bomb in Solerno, Italy.  The army wasn't going to give my grandfather leave to go to his brother's funeral, but a rabbi intervened on behalf of my protestant grandfather, and he was able to attend.  As an aside, my brother is named after Uncle Bob, and so is one of my sons.

After returning from laying my Uncle Bob to rest, my grandfather fought in many of the major battles of the Pacific Theater, including Tarawa, the Philippines, Luzon, and Okinawa. He was fortunate enough to witness the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. Then, after taking part in the occupation of Japan, Grandpa returned to Toledo, Ohio to live a quiet life with a wife and a daughter whom he had never seen.

What we didn't know was that my grandfather earned three bronze stars for bravery. We, likewise, never knew that his best friend died right next to him during the heat of battle. My grandfather never mentioned to us that he was a war hero. Nor did he ever mention that he had post-traumatic stress. Men didn’t talk about such things in those days. Looking at today’s social media culture, it’s particularly funny that he never told us a thing about his wartime experiences. Today, we tweet out even the smallest life event for the whole world to see!

In any case, my grandfather went on with his life, spending 40 years working for the phone company. He never did go back to school. After all, he had a family to take care of, and he had to get to work. But like many other men of his generation, he was the bedrock of our family’s moral ethos, the center of our work ethic, and the primary architect of our future success. Every member of our family did what he had never done: We all earned a college degree.

In The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw argued that this was the greatest generation of people that the world has ever produced. They worked and fought, not for fame or personal aggrandizement, but because it was the "right thing to do." Just like Joseph Siemens, millions of Americans returned to their daily, mundane lives after World War II, asking for nothing in return.

Most of the members of the Greatest Generation are gone, now. Approximately 550 World War II veterans pass away each day. That leaves us with only 1.2 million veterans out of the 16 million who served in World War II.[1] I hope that their stories will not be lost on our children today.

To that point,  we have school on Tuesday at Houston Academy precisely because we want to remember and honor our veterans.  Sure, our students could have gone to the beach or had a cookout tomorrow, but what we are asking is for our students to spend Veterans Day learning about our veterans and the sacrifices they made so that we would be afforded the opportunity to vote, prosper, and live a life of freedom.

We will begin tomorrow with a school-wide ceremony at the flagpole in front of the school where we will recognize our alumni and current faculty who have served in the military. Then, we have asked our teachers to do something in class that will help our students understand what Veterans Day is all about.

On behalf of Houston Academy, I wish to formally thank everyone in our community who has served our country.  Please feel free to share your own stories (below) of the heroes who have served America. 

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[1] "Frequently Asked Questions." The National World War II Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Nov. 2014. <http://www.nationalww2museum.org>.

Let Me Introduce You to Eric Dietz

Prior to my appointment here at Houston Academy, I was the Upper School Director at University School of Jackson in Jackson, TN. In my five years in Jackson, I had the pleasure of getting to know a number of great kids, but one of the young people who stands out in my mind is Eric Dietz. Eric Dietz was the tailback on our state-finalist football team.  He was one of the toughest football players I’ve ever seen.  Eric could hit like a freight train; he would certainly rather run you over than run around you.  Eric was talented enough and hard-working enough to take his football skills to the University of Mississippi.  In high school, Eric also lettered in basketball and track, qualifying for state in track, three times. In addition, Eric was an Honor Roll student. He has continued to make Honor Roll at Ole Miss, while majoring in Mechanical Engineering.

“So what?” you might say, “We’ve had plenty of scholar-athletes graduate from HA – just like Eric.”

True.  We do a great job here at HA in that regard. Our students are more than prepared for college, and they are always talented in a multitude of areas. But, to me, what set Eric apart (besides the fact that he was a gentlemen who was kind to others), was his skill on the stage.  Eric could sing beautifully.  He starred in multiple musicals, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  Furthermore, Eric made the Tennessee All-State Choir two times.

In fact, All-West Tennessee Choir auditions took place in Memphis (90 miles away), early on a Saturday morning.  Eric played in a particularly physical football game Friday night, woke up early the next morning, and drove to Memphis. He auditioned for All-West Choir, and then went to our Choral Director to ask if he could help her do anything. She suggested to him that he might want to go home and sleep.

Now, again, Eric is a pretty special young man, but he is not unique in that many of Eric’s peers were athletes, scholars, AND artists/singers/musicians/actors. Being in plays at USJ was “cool.” Almost everyone wanted to do it, and competition for leading roles was fierce.  With their talented students and with their outstanding music teachers and directors, USJ put on productions that were often of professional quality.

Moreover, these students gained immensely from their participation in theater. It is difficult to replicate the pressure that comes with performing in a play. The ability to get up in front of a crowd and perform is an invaluable life skill. After all, how nerve-racking is a sales presentation after you’ve done that?

HA already has a band and a chorus that are better than I have ever seen in a school our size. Too, we already have an amazing visual arts program. However, the one missing component is a true performing arts program. That is a HUGE hole in our curriculum.  And, there is an enormous demand from our students for a theater program. This fall, we had 32 students go out for our lower school musical (which will be taking place the 3rd week in October).  Moreover, in the upper school, we have a large number of students who are participating in drama activities through SEACT, Flagship, and Spark Theater. Now, we have the resources and the teachers in place to have an outstanding theater program. I firmly believe that our drama and musical theater program will be every bit as good as our band, chorus, and athletic programs.

I should emphasize, too, that having a strong drama program in no way denigrates any of our other extracurricular and co-curricular activities.  It’s not a zero-sum game.  We CAN be excellent in all areas, and we SHOULD be excellent in all areas.

I don’t want to hear anyone say we’re not capable of winning state championships in ANY sport.  I won’t listen to someone tell us we can’t have the best theater program in the area. Please, don’t tell me what we can’t do! As Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”

We are about to embark on an exciting journey in our school's history.  We are going to strengthen an already strong arts program, and we will have no peer in the state of Alabama. Likewise, we are going to continue to win state championships in athletics. Our students can have it all. And they will.

"Don't Hate on our Excellence!"

In the last two years, we have been talking to our students about embracing their “excellence.” One of the things I discovered after my first few weeks at HA was that when our students were outside of Houston Academy, they weren’t always eager to let others know they were HA students. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were ashamed, but they were definitely uncomfortable with people in the greater-Dothan school labeling them as “snobby rich kids.”

The funny thing is, everyone I’ve talked to in Dothan knows that Houston Academy is the best and most rigorous school in the Wiregrass. In fact, this year, we have record enrollment in the Upper School.  The only factor that seems to keep people from coming to HA is the perception that we are unaffordable.

First of all, having been here for over a year, I can tell you that I’ve never been around a more well-mannered and assiduous group of young people than the kids at Houston Academy. Secondly, I think folks out there in the general public would be shocked to know how many of our families make tremendous sacrifices to allow their children to attend Houston Academy. Most notably, we have scores of faculty children attending HA, and as I’m sure you are aware, teachers around here are NOT typically found vacationing in the Hamptons!  Moreover, we work very hard with families here to make HA affordable. Our Board is firmly committed to offering financial aid to those who qualify, and our entire community is committed to providing a diverse environment for our students. In any case, in our capitalist republic having wealth is a sign of hard work, dedication, and entrepreneurship – not something of which to be ashamed (but perhaps that’s too political of a statement).  As I’ve told our students, there is nothing wrong with being born into a privileged environment.  The important part of being a person of privilege is to ACKNOWLEDGE that you are privileged, and act according through service to others.

To return to the notion of embracing our excellence, we have already established that HA is the most rigorous and finest education in the Wiregrass. Why should our students be ashamed of that? They should be PROUD of that! What our students go through on a daily basis is far more than the vast majority of students in this country experience. Most students would neither want to do what HA kids do, nor would they be capable of doing it.

Furthermore, our students do thousands of hours of community service every year.  They outwork their opponents in practice and on the athletic field every single day. Last year, we won two state championships in athletics and had a winning record in every single sport.  Our band and chorus won national awards. Our artists won regional competitions. Our ACT scores were the highest I’ve seen. We had 52 students take 92 Advanced Placement exams in 12 different subject areas. Our seniors earned $4.2 million in college scholarships.

What I want is for every one of our students, parents, faculty and alumni to go out into the community and let everyone know that they are a part of the HA family. I’d like us to proudly display our HA stickers on our cars.  I’d like us to wear our HA hats to Westgate, and wear our HA shirts to the movies. I believe that when folks actually see who we are and what we do, they can’t help but see what a wonderful community we have.  And if they don’t see that, that’s their problem.  Or, as one of our students wrote in shoe polish on his car last year, “Don’t hate on our excellence!”