Rubric Nation: Critical Inquiries on the Impact of Rubrics in Education

265 Pages·2015·1.436 MB·English

by  Michelle Tenam-Zemach, Joseph E. Flynn Jr.

Rubric Nation
Critical Inquiries on the Impact
of Rubrics in Education

Rubric Nation
Critical Inquiries on the Impact
of Rubrics in Education
edited by
Michelle Tenam-Zemach
Nova Southeastern University
Joseph E. Flynn, Jr.
Northern Illinois University
INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC.
Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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ISBN: 978-1-62396-961-5 (Paperback)
978-1-62396-962-2 (Hardcover)
978-1-62396-963-9 (ebook)
Copyright © 2015 Information Age Publishing Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission
from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Foreword ..............................................................................................vii
Joel Westheimer
Introduction: Why a Book on Rubrics? Problematizing
the Unquestioned .................................................................................xi
Joseph E. Flynn, Jr., Michelle Tenam-Zemach, and Leslie David Burns
1 The Rubricization of Experience .........................................................1
Michelle Tenam-Zemach
2 The Rubricization of Teacherhood and Studenthood:
Intertextuality, Identity, and the Standardization of Self ................21
Nancy G. Patterson and Lisa M. Perhamus
3 Collision Course: Postmodern Progressive Composition
Pedagogy and Positivist Traditional Assessment ...............................35
Amy L. Masko
4 Rubrics Reframed: Reappropriating Rubrics for Assessment
and Learning .......................................................................................47
Paul Parkison
5 The Sanctity of Software and Rubrics as Holy Interfaces:
A Critical Software Analysis of Rubrics as Vehicles
of Education Reform ...........................................................................67
Tom Liam Lynch
6 Standards, Rigor, and Rubrics: Prefabricated Critical Thinking ....85
Robert Boostrom
v
vi  Contents
7 Employing a Technology of Power: An Orientation Analysis
of a Teacher Task Rubric...................................................................101
Conra D. Gist
8 Rubrics in Context ..............................................................................119
Dana Haraway and David Flinders
9 (Dis)positioning Learners: Rubrics and Identity
in Teacher Education ........................................................................135
Catherine Lalonde, David Gorlewski, and Julie Gorlewski
10 Collaboration, Rubrics, and Teacher Evaluation ............................149
Susan Dreyer Leon and Laura Thomas
11 Getting Teacher-Evaluation Rubrics Right ......................................167
Kim Marshall
12 The Danielson Framework for Teaching As an Evaluation
Rubric: One Size Fits None ...............................................................185
Leslie David Burns
13 Racing the Unconsidered: Considering Whiteness, Rubrics,
and the Function of Oppression ......................................................201
Joseph E. Flynn, Jr.
An Afterword in Two Voices: The Tools of Destruction and
Empowerment: Reflections on Creating a Book About Rubrics ....223
Michelle Tenam-Zemach and Joseph Flynn
About the Editors ..............................................................................229
About the Contributors .....................................................................231
FOREWORD
Joel Westheimer
In a popular scene from the 1989 movie, Dead Poets Society, the eccentric Mr.
Keating (played by Robin Williams) asks one of his students to read aloud
from the preface of a high school poetry textbook:
To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and
figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of
the poem been rendered, and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1
rates the poem’s perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these
questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a
relatively simple matter. If the poem’s score for perfection is plotted on the
horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calcu-
lating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.
The fictional author of the text, Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, PhD, continues with
an example:
A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the
horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high
both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby reveal-
ing the poem to be truly great.
Rubric Nation, pages vii–x
Copyright © 2015 by Information Age Publishing
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. vii
viii  Foreword
Pritchard concludes by asking students to practice this rating method (us-
ing the provided rubric) because “as your ability to evaluate poems in this
matter grows, so will your enjoyment and understanding of poetry.”
Although both the textbook and its author are fictional, the satire is wor-
risomely apt. In fact, the fictional passage was based closely on a real text
found in a popular 1950s poetry textbook currently in its 12th edition and
still used by high school students across the country: Laurence Perrine’s
Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry.
As the chapters in Rubric Nation make clear, the demand for standardized
measures of quality and success in education has not abated but increased.
The relatively uncritical and universal acceptance among school reform-
ers of the importance of rubrics for teaching and learning is at once pre-
dictable and misguided. It is predictable because the idea that we should
clearly articulate educational goals and then devise methods for determin-
ing whether those goals are met is irresistibly tidy. After all, how can teach-
ers pursue high quality lessons if they do not know what they are trying to
teach and whether students are learning? Uncritical acceptance of even
such a commonsense-seeming idea, however, is misguided for the follow-
ing reason: education is first and foremost about human relationship and
interaction, and as anyone who tried to create a rubric for family fealty or
for love or for trust would discover, any effort to quantify complex human
interactions quickly devolves into a fool’s errand.
This does not mean that there is no place for evaluative rubrics in edu-
cation (or for standards, testing, and common curriculum frameworks).
Many of the chapters that follow make the need for thoughtful measures
and learning frameworks clear. Moreover, I have rarely met a teacher who
did not have standards; most have their own forms of rubrics or evaluative
frameworks as well. But “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” leg-
islation and related reforms that call for evermore standardized rubrics and
frameworks have severely restricted teachers’ abilities to act in a profession-
al capacity and exercise professional judgment on behalf of their students.
Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg calls the kind of school reform that ele-
vates the pursuit of rubrics and standardization above all other educational
considerations GERM (for Global Education Reform Movement). He de-
scribes GERM as follows:
It is like an epidemic that spreads and infects education systems through a
virus. It travels with pundits, media and politicians. Education systems borrow
policies from others and get infected. As a consequence, schools get ill, teach-
ers don’t feel well, and kids learn less.1
Not only do kids learn less, what they learn also tends to follow pre-
scriptive formulas that match the standardized tests. In the process, more
Foreword  ix
complex and difficult-to-measure learning outcomes get left behind. These
include creativity and emotional and social development as well as the
kinds of thinking skills associated with robust civic engagement. As a result,
teachers’ ability to teach critical thinking and students’ ability to think and
act critically are diminished.
Almost every school mission statement these days boasts broad goals re-
lated to critical thinking, global citizenship, environmental stewardship,
and moral character. Yet beneath the rhetoric, increasingly narrow curricu-
lum goals, accountability measures, standardized testing, and an obsession
with rubrics have reduced too many classroom lessons to the cold, stark
pursuit of information and skills without context and without social mean-
ing—what the late education philosopher Maxine Greene called mean and
repellent facts. It is not that facts are bad or that they should be ignored.
But democratic societies require more than citizens who are fact-full. They
require citizens who can think and act in ethically thoughtful ways. Schools
need the kinds of classroom practices that teach students to recognize am-
biguity and conflict in “factual” content and to see human conditions and
aspirations as complex and contested.
As our cultural obsession with standardization, rubrics, and account-
ability measures in only two subject areas (math and literacy) increasingly
dominates school reform, the most common complaint I now hear from
both teachers and administrators is this: I have been stripped of my professional
judgment, creativity, and freedom to make decisions in the best interests of my stu-
dents. When education reforms turn away from an emphasis on supporting
positive conditions of practice and move toward technocratic strategies for
“compliance,” the profession suffers, and so do students. Many teachers
would echo the sentiments of Gloria, a teacher in a recent study I conduct-
ed of the tenth-grade civics curriculum in Ontario. She told us this:
In my 22 years of teaching, never have I experienced a climate that has turned
all educational problems into problems of measurement until now. Poor
citizenship skills? Raise their math and literacy scores. Poor participation?
Doesn’t matter. Poverty? Inequality? The solution is always always to give the
students more tests. These days pedagogically, I feel like I can’t breathe.
But education goals, particularly in democratic societies, have always been
about more than narrow measures of success, and teachers have often
been called upon and appreciated for instilling in their students a sense
of purpose, meaning, community, compassion, integrity, imagination, and
commitment. Every teacher accomplishes these more artful and ambigu-
ous tasks in different ways. Much as Darwin’s theory of natural selection
depends on genetic variation, any theory of teaching in a democratic so-
ciety depends on a multiplicity of ideas, perspectives, and approaches to
exploring and seeking solutions to complex issues of widespread concern.