Professor James McDermott: interview

You may remember that back in July, Governor Patrick named two new members to the state Board of Ed, among them Professor James McDermott of Clark University. The newest issue of The Backpack (from Citizens for Public Schools) has an interview with Professor McDermott. You'll want to read it all!
On teaching and urban education:

LG: How does your background working with urban schoolchildren and teaching writing inform your goals as a new member of the Board of Education, and what are those goals?



JD: Kids, especially those written off by others, have taught me that, no matter their background or perceived abilities, they can compete with anyone anywhere. The key is their having amazing teachers who love their discipline so well they want to share the love they have of their content with younger others. My goal then is to help the bureaucracy provide amazing support for these amazing teachers – to free them from the constraints that institutions often impose. Good teachers understand the importance of designing thinking classrooms, respecting youngsters as the thinking and feeling individuals they are. They know that the end of education cannot be to produce narcissists whose only reason for schooling is to earn higher paying jobs to satisfy their yearning for instant gratification. They understand that they who follow a program or a text or a curriculum without understanding why perform an injustice on young minds.

On writing:

To me, writing is the best academic tool we have to probe thinking. I like to talk about two broad types of writing: writing to learn and writing to show learning. Writing to learn is the low-stakes writing—timed, messy, zany, brainstorming—used to quickly reflect on what you think might be going on as you try to figure [something] out…We do not use enough of this low-stakes writing in classrooms. Indeed, we do not use thinking enough in our classrooms today.

On the MCAS:

Look, I worked on the frameworks and on MCAS. MCAS is a misnomer. The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is not comprehensive and it is not a system. I call it MT – Massachusetts Test. ...


I had many ways to assess my kids. I knew my kids better than anyone correcting the MCAS test. We did portfolios and presentations and took college courses and wrote and read and laughed and struggled and grew. And then I told them: This MCAS test will ask you to do some reading and writing. All I want you to do is show your thinking – that is what we have been doing every single day. So at University Park Campus School we took the MCAS test and outscored nearly everyone in the state – no test preparation and no focus on five-paragraph essays. Scores count. But not at all costs. The funny thing is the test worked for us because we did not teach to it. On the other hand the test may actually lower expectations if kids are pulled out of actual classes to do mindless test-taking drills.

Hopeful.