A SERIOUS Fellow, On a SEROUS Mission, DOING a SERIOUS JOB! SERIOUSLY!

Not more testing



If students are headed to college “without the critical-thinking skills, patience, and tenacity for even en try- level courses” and that this is “most notable in their writing,” then why are teachers being pushed just to teach to a multiple-choice test, whether it is the MEAP, the NAEP or any other acronym-laden, spit out- the-information test (“Fixing Michigan’s Schools,” Feb. 7)?


Multiple-choice, standardized assessments don’t teach children how to think creatively, how to syn thesize, analyze and make judg ments about information, or to build the tenacity to tackle realistic ongo ing projects such as those found in the real world. These skills are best taught using long-term projects that simply cannot be measured on a standardized test. Furthermore, these projects are far more captivat ing, thereby enhancing student in terest, achievement and even class room behavior.


We need to move away from stan dardized tests, not just entrench ourselves in them even deeper.


Sarah Jelinek


Warren


How pessimism fuels our greatest teachers

The people behind Detroit’s new est charter school think they’ve discovered the formula for great teaching — and one of the key in gredients may surprise you.

University YES Academy, a charter school that will open its doors this September to 125 Detroit sixth-graders chosen by lottery, is the first attempt to export the na­tionally recognized model pioneered by YES Prep Houston, whose seven campuses now serve 5,400 inner city students there.

The Detroit school’s first princi pal, a Cass Tech and University of Michigan alumna named Agnes Aleobua, says her academy will rise or fall on the strength of the 10 teachers she hopes to hire after a national search that began this month.

And she thinks she knows exact ly what qualities she’s looking for, thanks to a personality survey YES Prep Houston founders Chris Barbic and Jason Bernal conducted in an attempt to discover what the most successful teachers in their schools had in common.

“Surprisingly, one of the hall marks was a pessimistic outlook,” Bernal, now the chief operating officer of YES Prep Houston, told me during a visit to Detroit last week. A study by an outside consul tant found that YES Prep’s best teachers were significantly less optimistic than either the general population or their lower-perform ing colleagues, and concluded this pessimism led them “to take full responsibility for their actions and not to leave any outcomes to chance.” 

‘Supertraits’ of super teachers 

Aleobua, who spent five months in Houston studying the YES Prep model in preparation for the open ing of her own Detroit school, says good inner city teachers “are fixat ed on the possibility that things won’t work out for their students.”

“They’re pessimistic about the current system, which is obviously broken when it comes to educating low-income and minority students,” she said. “And there really isn’t hope for those students unless we create something very different.”

I’m not convinced pessimism is the right word to describe this sense of emergency. But it’s cer tainly a far cry from the “I’m OK, you’re OK” complacency that per vades many underachieving schools. This is more like “You’re light years from OK, but I’m not quitting until I’ve exhausted every trick I know to get you there.”

Indeed, a pessimistic outlook is just one of seven “supertraits” that distinguished the highest achieving teachers at YES Prep from their lower performing colleagues.

The same study found that top teachers were far likelier than their peers to be resilient, outspoken, perfectionistic and achievement oriented,  more comfortable direct ingthe work of others and less averse to conflict and competition. 

Just the beginning? 

YES Prep Houston’s founders agreed to help launch a Detroit school after a joint appeal from University Preparatory Academy founder Doug Ross and Gov. Jenni fer Granholm, who flew to Houston together last spring.

Ross, who persuaded Macomb County developer Wayne Webber and his wife, Joan, to bankroll Uni versity YES’ $6-million start-up costs, says YES Prep is just the first of several nationally recognized charter school operators he and Henry Ford Academy founder Steve Hamp hope to lure to Detroit, with an eye to expanding charter school enrollment here to 25,000 students by 2020.

Ross says he supports the initia tives Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb has undertaken at Detroit Public Schools and believes what he and Hamp are doing will ultimately buttress Bobb’s efforts to boost student performance throughout the district.

“What we seek to do,” Ross says, “is create a public marketplace for education where every student has good choices and where we hold every school accountable.”

And who knows? With enough high-achieving, perfectionistic pes simists itching for a good fight, maybe they can.