Sunday, August 18, 2019
Ode to my administrators
To Steve, who called me "kiddo" when I asked for help renting a van for a field trip (I was 22).
To Martin, who straight up bribed kids to recruit for my class.
To John and John who taught me that things will be handled differently than you expect based on context.
To Lori, who showed me what strong, smart women are capable of.
To Phil, who showed me mercy and support as only a dad could.
To Don, who challenged my philosophy but believed in me.
To Mitch, who supported me in what I thought was the toughest year of my career.
To Stefani and Shannon, who taught me how to be the bigger person in a terrible situation.
To Laura, who restored my faith in administrators.
To Erica and Christy, who reminded me that we are all in this struggle together for the right reasons.
Saturday, August 17, 2019
The Cubs Way
Baseball is a statistician's dream sport. 162 games a season, and hundreds of ways to analyze any particular type of throw, hit, or catch. Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics figured out in 2002 how to use these statistics to his advantage. The book (and movie) written about Beane's process, Moneyball, changed major league baseball forever. Beane's system changed the type of data gathered about players and used different calculations of old data in order to reveal underrated (and cheaper to hire) players who had potential but weren't showing up with the more traditional measures.
While a friend was visiting from Chicago, we took my kids to the library to get some books and my friend found a book called "The Cubs Way" which is about the rebuilding of the Chicago Cubs franchise from around 2011-2012 and their eventual World Series championship win in 2016. (sidenote: This friend is also largely responsible for my change of allegiance in 2003 from the Seattle Mariners to the Cubs. Hey Katy, what's up!?)
The Cubs Way is written in a narrative form that goes back and forth between each game of the 2016 World Series and the backstory of how each piece of the puzzle came together. Largely it was the work of Theo Epstein, who was on board with the new system Billy Beane developed (called sabermetrics), but Epstein took it to another level, to make sure the team he put together--including all the managers, coaches, and support staff--were not just exceptional players but also good human beings who had the capacity to build meaningful relationships with each other. So in essence, Epstein was using not only quantitative data, but also qualitative. He didn't just want numbers, he wanted context. He used interviews with potential players in order to assess life experience and personalities that he felt would be a good fit with who he already had. For example, Jon Lester and Anthony Rizzo already had a relationship from when Lester supported Rizzo through cancer treatment. It is also no coincidence that Epstein was the team manager for both the Red Sox and the Cubs when both teams broke their "cursed" championship droughts.
(now for the interlude, I promise this is related....)
I started teaching in 2002-2003, the school year that No Child Left Behind (the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act) became law. As test results for math and English became the only metric for continuance of funding, every other subject suffered. I was myself a casualty of these changing priorities when I was laid off in 2009, despite having almost 4 full years in that district and a continuing contract/tenure, while first year teachers in English were allowed to keep their jobs. Sometime just before my layoff, someone in my state had the idea that if we could just represent music instruction with data then we could more effectively advocate for ourselves in this pseudoscientific, data-driven environment. Many other states were making similar efforts around the same time for generally the same purpose. What bothered me most back then was that I was doing all these composition projects with my middle school students---something I didn't wholly object to since composition is also an important skill---but that in my state, the only data we reported was how many students took the assessment. And while the composition project itself wasn't poorly designed, because of the time I was allotted, it very much dictated every piece of music I chose for the entire school year since we had to build knowledge and playing skills up to it. There was much less room for me to tailor literature choices for the particular set of students in my class.
After a few years, administrators realized that data wasn't telling them anything useful and they started asking for more metrics. More analysis. This gave them more data, but still didn't tell the whole story, and certainly didn't tell them anything about how musical any of the students were. We were asked to cross analyze and add more dimensions to the data sets. Create focus groups to increase scores. In the process, though, the human aspect of music making was lost. Just like with standardized assessments of other subjects, it only gives you a snapshot of a student's basic knowledge, not what they can do with that information to connect with other human beings. It also tells us nothing about how they use it in concert with others to create things that can be valued more than the sum of the parts. No one in education had yet experienced the Billy Beane epiphany with regards to music. Some kids weren't showing up as "achieving" in the data, but that doesn't mean they weren't learning, or that they couldn't connect with the art emotionally or communicate with an audience. Maybe they just weren't ready yet for the theory. Maybe a combination of circumstances made it difficult for them to learn. And in the meantime, their performance on other standardized tests put their school music opportunities in jeopardy. Data gathering for music wasn't working to keep kids enrolled in our classes.
I would love to see music education, nationally, move to the "Epstein" method. Assessments are only as useful as they can help a teacher pinpoint learning problems for specific skills. Teachers should be given the freedom to design their own assessments that can adhere to state standards (if standardization is actually important, I'm not convinced that it is, especially in music) instead of being forced to give a prescribed assessment to students for whom it may or may not be relevant or for which they may or may not be prepared. As Epstein used his interviews, the statistics were only part of the story, the team was built from context, and cooperation among team members was critical to their success. Teachers should have the freedom to use the context of their students dictate the direction of learning for the greatest chance at success. A student who has only had music instruction for his/her senior year in high school should not be expected to attain the same benchmark as a student who had 5 years of elementary general music and 3-7 years of ensemble instruction. Giving the teacher freedom to decide how and which assessments are given allows for the context, the relationship, and the humanity to influence the data--as it should--since then the results will be a more useful tool to improve instruction for those students.
Maybe then all students will be able to realize their own World Series music potential which has far more advocacy power than a statistical report on how well they identify letter names on the staff.
While a friend was visiting from Chicago, we took my kids to the library to get some books and my friend found a book called "The Cubs Way" which is about the rebuilding of the Chicago Cubs franchise from around 2011-2012 and their eventual World Series championship win in 2016. (sidenote: This friend is also largely responsible for my change of allegiance in 2003 from the Seattle Mariners to the Cubs. Hey Katy, what's up!?)
The Cubs Way is written in a narrative form that goes back and forth between each game of the 2016 World Series and the backstory of how each piece of the puzzle came together. Largely it was the work of Theo Epstein, who was on board with the new system Billy Beane developed (called sabermetrics), but Epstein took it to another level, to make sure the team he put together--including all the managers, coaches, and support staff--were not just exceptional players but also good human beings who had the capacity to build meaningful relationships with each other. So in essence, Epstein was using not only quantitative data, but also qualitative. He didn't just want numbers, he wanted context. He used interviews with potential players in order to assess life experience and personalities that he felt would be a good fit with who he already had. For example, Jon Lester and Anthony Rizzo already had a relationship from when Lester supported Rizzo through cancer treatment. It is also no coincidence that Epstein was the team manager for both the Red Sox and the Cubs when both teams broke their "cursed" championship droughts.
(now for the interlude, I promise this is related....)
I started teaching in 2002-2003, the school year that No Child Left Behind (the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act) became law. As test results for math and English became the only metric for continuance of funding, every other subject suffered. I was myself a casualty of these changing priorities when I was laid off in 2009, despite having almost 4 full years in that district and a continuing contract/tenure, while first year teachers in English were allowed to keep their jobs. Sometime just before my layoff, someone in my state had the idea that if we could just represent music instruction with data then we could more effectively advocate for ourselves in this pseudoscientific, data-driven environment. Many other states were making similar efforts around the same time for generally the same purpose. What bothered me most back then was that I was doing all these composition projects with my middle school students---something I didn't wholly object to since composition is also an important skill---but that in my state, the only data we reported was how many students took the assessment. And while the composition project itself wasn't poorly designed, because of the time I was allotted, it very much dictated every piece of music I chose for the entire school year since we had to build knowledge and playing skills up to it. There was much less room for me to tailor literature choices for the particular set of students in my class.
After a few years, administrators realized that data wasn't telling them anything useful and they started asking for more metrics. More analysis. This gave them more data, but still didn't tell the whole story, and certainly didn't tell them anything about how musical any of the students were. We were asked to cross analyze and add more dimensions to the data sets. Create focus groups to increase scores. In the process, though, the human aspect of music making was lost. Just like with standardized assessments of other subjects, it only gives you a snapshot of a student's basic knowledge, not what they can do with that information to connect with other human beings. It also tells us nothing about how they use it in concert with others to create things that can be valued more than the sum of the parts. No one in education had yet experienced the Billy Beane epiphany with regards to music. Some kids weren't showing up as "achieving" in the data, but that doesn't mean they weren't learning, or that they couldn't connect with the art emotionally or communicate with an audience. Maybe they just weren't ready yet for the theory. Maybe a combination of circumstances made it difficult for them to learn. And in the meantime, their performance on other standardized tests put their school music opportunities in jeopardy. Data gathering for music wasn't working to keep kids enrolled in our classes.
I would love to see music education, nationally, move to the "Epstein" method. Assessments are only as useful as they can help a teacher pinpoint learning problems for specific skills. Teachers should be given the freedom to design their own assessments that can adhere to state standards (if standardization is actually important, I'm not convinced that it is, especially in music) instead of being forced to give a prescribed assessment to students for whom it may or may not be relevant or for which they may or may not be prepared. As Epstein used his interviews, the statistics were only part of the story, the team was built from context, and cooperation among team members was critical to their success. Teachers should have the freedom to use the context of their students dictate the direction of learning for the greatest chance at success. A student who has only had music instruction for his/her senior year in high school should not be expected to attain the same benchmark as a student who had 5 years of elementary general music and 3-7 years of ensemble instruction. Giving the teacher freedom to decide how and which assessments are given allows for the context, the relationship, and the humanity to influence the data--as it should--since then the results will be a more useful tool to improve instruction for those students.
Maybe then all students will be able to realize their own World Series music potential which has far more advocacy power than a statistical report on how well they identify letter names on the staff.
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