October 2006 Stories

Should No Child Left Behind Be Left Behind?

Oregon’s middle school teachers feel that the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law has resulted in too much time spent preparing for state tests and not enough emphasis on social and emotional learning.

This is just one of the attitudes Maureen Musser and her research colleagues discovered after surveying middle school principals and teachers across the state to learn the effects of NCLB on teaching practices. And these results are of concern, they say, considering other research that proves the importance of schools focusing on early adolescents’ development and meeting the needs of the whole child.

“Many teachers are frustrated,” says Musser, an associate professor of education. “They feel they are being forced to teach in a way that they don’t believe in, that they don’t have time to do what they really think is valuable.”

Musser, who became director of Willamette’s School of Education this fall, is known statewide for her expertise regarding middle school. She will be taking her work to the national level in November when she and her colleagues present their research at the National Middle School Association conference in Nashville — a tough presenting gig to get.

Musser chose to come to Willamette’s education school in 1998 because the University had the premier middle-level education program in the state, she says. “I’ve always been really interested in early adolescence,” says Musser, a former sixth-grade teacher. “Middle-schoolers are changing so much both emotionally and physically. They have a great sense of humor.”

Willamette was instrumental in starting the Oregon Middle Level Consortium, a statewide group of principals and teacher educators who are interested in middle school education. Musser was co-chair of the group for many years. The consortium is influential, she says; Oregon’s Teacher Standards and Practices Commission relies on the group for information when making big changes to middle schools.

In 2003, discussions among consortium members revealed the need for more research on middle-level education, particularly what was happening in schools since the institution of NCLB. Musser and five other experts from the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Southern Oregon University, Corban College and Portland State University formed a research group to look at the issue.

First, they surveyed school principals from a sample of campuses in rural and urban areas of the state. Then they surveyed teachers, first through written questionnaires and later through in-person focus groups.

Many teachers said the federal standards and emphasis on state tests as indicators of success mean they have to focus too much on testing rather than addressing other “survival” skills they feel are important for middle-schoolers — getting along with others, a strong work ethic and reliability, for example. Some schools spend four to five weeks a year simply on test preparation. “From our research, we’re concerned that so much time is being spent on preparing for tests rather than teaching kids content,” Musser says.

This is a problem, the group says, because multiple researchers in the last 20 years have shown that a successful middle school must include relevant and challenging curriculum, multiple learning and teaching approaches that respond to students’ diversity, support for meaningful relationships, and policies that foster health, wellness and safety.

Musser and her research colleagues will make two presentations at the National Middle School Association conference. One will include their research on teachers’ responses, which has not yet been published, and the other will focus on how educators can teach for learning instead of teaching to the test.

Their research did find positive attitudes toward NCLB. Teachers said the standards made them focus more on what they’re teaching, have helped align curricula among schools and have raised overall educational expectations for students. “We don’t want to present it as totally negative,” Musser says. “The higher expectations for kids are very important.”

The research group included a long list of recommendations for Oregon’s education agencies, school administrators and teacher preparation programs. The researchers recommend that teacher training programs and administrators develop a new education model that ensures rigorous content area preparation and addresses the uniqueness of early adolescents and middle schools. They also recommend that teachers of early adolescents receive more support as they try to learn and use the best practices to teach this age group.

Much of the controversy of NCLB stems from a change in the public’s attitude toward schools, Musser says — a shift from people thinking teachers know what’s best to a questioning of teachers’ methods. “There is research showing that people with kids in school usually think that their kid’s school is great,” Musser says. “Yet there’s still this public perception among others that schools are failing.”

Tribal Judge Keeps Counsel Under the Big Sky

Lisa Adams JD’90 lived in a downtown studio over Randy’s Wine Shop when she attended law school at Willamette. At night she peered down through the skylight to see Randy and his buddies playing poker over a bottle of wine.

Salem was the smallest town she had ever lived in, with a string of cities — Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — behind her, but she liked the small classes and beautiful campus, and found the mix of government people, academics and community residents fascinating.

Adams had landed at Willamette as the result of a coin flip. “I was working as a cashier at a restaurant and flipped a coin one day to decide between law school and an MBA,” she says.

“I wasn’t into the million dollar salary, but thought law was intellectually challenging and would be a versatile degree. I liked legal research. I never intended to practice.”

The woman who serves as interim chief tribal judge on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation was introduced to American Indian law in Dean Richardson’s Civil Rights course. “I had always gravitated toward civil rights issues,” Adams says. “When you read about the tragedies of justice with regard to an entire race of people you think, ‘These people have really been wronged.’”

The judge who never meant to practice law never meant to marry, either, but fell for her husband, Mel Adams, an Oglala Sioux, four months out of law school. When she volunteered as an advisor for the Native American Student Council at the University of Washington, the students invited her to a sweat lodge. “I had no idea what a sweat was,” she says. She met Mel’s mother there, and later, Mel. “I called his mother and he answered the phone and we started talking.” When they met, it was love at first sight. “He’s really very handsome.”

Adams’ eclectic career began in Seattle, where she combined her love of writing and law as an editor and journalist for legal publications. She wrote mysteries on the side. “I understood the dualism of being a writer — live for your art while still being able to pay the bills,” she says.

After a five-year stint she moved to the opposite end of the country, living in her grandfather’s oversized 1710 house in Newark, N.J., while she worked as a city prosecutor, preparing cases for police trials. Her observation of lawyers and police officers and her legal practice provided fodder for short stories and a published suspense novel, Bound Justice.

But her life in Newark came to a halt after the Twin Towers went down in Manhattan; she lost 26 work friends. “Afterward, I couldn’t stand to be there,” she says. “It was hard to be around officers and know which ones were missing.” The police officers had not only inspired the characters in her novel, they were family.

She returned to the West Coast, taking a job as senior attorney for the Yurok Tribe in northern California, where she and her attorney husband lived in an isolated redwood forest and ate the best smoked salmon of their lives. “The Yurok are people of the river, and salmon is a staple.”

Last year an Indian Country Today newspaper ad caught her eye. Husband Mel’s tribe, the Oglala Sioux, had a vacancy for an interim tribal judge in South Dakota. Adams applied, was interviewed by 19 tribal members on live radio — the Voice of the Lakota Nation — and first heard she got the job on her car radio.

“I was absolutely thrilled,” Adams says. “My husband and I have trekked all over creation, and wound up exactly where we wanted to be.” She and Mel both feel a kinship with the landscape and culture of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

The 2.8 million acre reservation encompasses seven counties. Tribal members speak Lakota along with English, most homes are still heated by wood stove and people often hitch a ride or walk to get somewhere. Dirt roads disappear in blizzards or rainstorms and temperatures top 105 degrees and bottom out at 30 below.

Old timers pass on the legacy of Sitting Bull and Black Elk, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn has not been forgotten. Nor has the 1973 Wounded Knee incident, where 200 American Indian Movement (AIM) activists had a 71-day standoff with FBI agents and the National Guard to protest abysmal reservation conditions — including lack of running water, electricity, sewer and phone service. “I couldn’t have landed in a more politically volatile place,” Adams says, “but I love my job.”

In spite of continued lack of phone service and electricity on much of the reservation, Adams has approached her new position with vitality and hope. “I can actually help strengthen the sovereignty of the tribe by applying the law,” she says. Adams oversees all the courts — criminal, civil and juvenile — and the caseload is as long as the horizon. She has become well versed in reservation law, from domestic relations, elder abuse and inheritance to gaming and school board code to water rights, timber harvesting and animal control.

Even simple cases are often complex. “For a simple restraining order, we may have 25 people on each side show up,” she says. “Making decisions in criminal matters is always a no-win for the decision-maker from a popularity standpoint.” But the challenge of presiding over difficult cases is balanced by the best part of her job — performing marriages.

Away from work, Adams still writes, and she and Mel hike, ride mountain bikes and horses, and attend powwows and rodeos.

At night they look out from their butte-top home. Ponderosa pine ridges and meadowlark prairies roll away in every direction, eventually merging into the badlands and Black Hills. Thunderstorms sweep across the broad sky, lifting the cottonwood leaves along the road, and the air smells like grasses. On their five acres at the end of a dirt road, they keep company with elk, mountain lions, wild turkeys and eagles.

“Each evening when we come home, we watch an unobstructed sunset set aglow an endless expanse of sky,” Adams writes. “The sheer number of colors I have seen takes my breath away. When the sun dips behind the buttes, the coyotes come out and sing their songs in the night air. The porcupines and raccoons emerge, foraging in the undergrowth. I love this earth. I really do.

“For someone who never intended to practice law, I ended up in some interesting places,” Adams says. “Karma happens. My hope is to continue to be blessed with work where I can help people.

“I want to say thank you to the school that gave me the life I have. Or as they say in Lakota, Wopila, thank you from the heart.”

Masahiro Suzuki: Learning Culture Through Baseball

Ichiro Suzuki, Kenji Johjima, Kazuhiro Sasaki, Shigetoshi Hasegawa — these may not be the names Americans think of when they list baseball’s greatest players, but to the Japanese, these current and former Seattle Mariners are heroes. Baseball is one of the most popular sports in Japan, and as Major League Baseball recruits more and more Japanese players, the Asian country is turning its sights to teams like the Mariners.

“Every day in Japan, you can see Major League Baseball on TV,” says Masahiro Suzuki, a junior at Tokyo International University. “Ichiro plays almost every day, and you can watch him there.”

Last academic year, Suzuki studied at Tokyo International University of America in Salem through a partnership with Willamette University that brings Japanese students to campus. He was thrilled to get the chance to watch Ichiro and other Japanese players in seven games in Seattle. Suzuki’s dream is to become a sports journalist, and baseball is his favorite game.

When he returned to Japan, Suzuki wrote an article about the differences he noticed between American baseball and Japanese “yakyuu” (pronounced yak-you). He entered his article in a competition for the 2005-06 Swadesh Deroy Scholarship, given by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. He won first place.

At an award dinner honoring Suzuki and four other finalists last spring, he listened to the topics of the other top papers — they included global warming and political relations between North Korea and Japan. “And I wrote about Ichiro,” he says. “I thought, ‘Was I supposed to be here?’”

The scholarship, which comes with an award of 500,000 yen (about $4,300), asked university students interested in entering the foreign journalism field to submit an article on any topic. The award is a major one in Japan, and Suzuki is hoping it will help him launch a journalism career.

While in Salem, Suzuki honed his skills by writing columns about intramural sports for the Collegian, the campus newspaper. “We don’t have intramurals in Japan,” he says. “We don’t have dorms, either. We live with family or by ourselves. We don’t hang out as much, and we have only one day for a sports festival. [In America] it’s easy to make a team together, because everyone is so close.”

In his winning paper, Suzuki noted major differences between the way fans act at baseball games in America and in Japan. He wrote about how fans in America seem better connected to the players, with electronic screens flashing phrases such as “Make noise” or “Louder” to egg on the spectators. In Japan, spectators seem more separated, Suzuki says. “The players and fans have more distance between them,” he says. “There’s high fences and nets in the stadiums.”

Fewer Japanese people are going to yakyuu games than in the past, Suzuki says, partly because many of the best players have left for American teams. Suzuki noted in his paper that Kenji Johjima, who joined the Mariners in 2005, is the first Japanese catcher in Major League Baseball. “I have big hopes for him,” Suzuki wrote. “But I think he will have some problems, because the position of catcher is the most important position in terms of communicating with other players and coaching staff. As catcher his English skills will be tested.”

Suzuki recently revisited Salem to meet up with some old friends — and to head up to Seattle for a few more Mariners games. The Mariners haven’t played too well in the last few years, but Suzuki is convinced he has been a good luck charm. “The Mariners need my power,” he says. “I went to their games nine times and they won seven [of those] times. So if I go, they will win.”

Reinventing the Bard

Theatre Professor Jonathan Cole remembers falling asleep to Shakespeare in high school. “We’d read Romeo and Juliet to each other and it droned on and on,” he recalls.

And so he envisioned Shoebox Shakespeare, which will bring monologues and scenes from the Bard’s greatest hits to local high schools. He and Willamette drama students hope to “combat deadly Shakespeare with its pretentiousness and bad British accents.” Shakespeare, Cole says, is anything but dull. There’s a magic that happens when you move the Bard from the page onto the stage.

“He’s earthy, he’s vital, he’s still relevant,” Cole says. “He hits the nail on the head when he talks about the primal elements of the human condition. He throws our behavior back in our face and forces us to see ourselves for who we are. When Shakespeare writes about humankind’s all-consuming lust for power and what we give up to achieve that power, he could well be talking about our market-driven, post–9/11 economy.

“And rather than looking at the trauma of 21st century teen infatuation, we’re looking at 'Two households, both alike in dignity,'" Cole says.

The collection of scenes from Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Henry IV part I, Hamlet, Two Gentlemen of Verona and As You Like It are performed with general lighting, an empty space and modular costumes. The design, Cole says, is no design. Student actors literally create everything. Instead of Richard III walking around with a prosthetic hump, the actor creates the impression with his body.

Many fight scenes are explosive. “Elizabethans flocked to see people breaking off teeth with pliers or bear and bull baiting. Their attitude toward blood was, ‘Yes, please,’” Cole says. Cole gives modern audiences sword fights that are realistic, in spite of being carefully choreographed. “Shakespeare just says, ‘They fight,’ so we have to fill in the specifics.”

Cole’s own life runs rather like a play, with a twist of the plot at age 20. Attending college on a scholarship in music, he had a To Be or Not to Be moment while practicing for a national competition. “I realized I didn’t want to spend eight hours a day alone in a practice room,” he says.

The saxophone student had been a theatre junkie who unwound after long practice sessions by catching the final scenes of plays on the way home. On a whim, he took a semester off and auditioned for a play. To his surprise, he was cast as the lead, and the stage was set for a shift to acting, and eventually, to directing.

Cole’s long interest in the martial arts made him especially interested in how fight scenes are choreographed in plays. “I was the Star Wars kid, who entertained myself by trying to teach myself how to do gymnastics and martial arts in my back yard. Later in life, I trained in aikido, judo, jujitsu and practical shooting.” He went on to study Danzan Ryu Jujitsu at the Salem Budokai, where he will test for a black belt in March. He has pursued advanced training with the Society of American Fight Directors, and hopes to become an SAFD Certified Teacher of stage combat in the near future. Cole now teaches stage combat at Willamette, with an emphasis on unarmed combat and sword fighting. Dueling, swordplay, boxing, rolls and falls are covered, and students practice with sticks on the Quad.

In addition to theatre, Cole teaches aikido, a Japanese martial art that focuses on personal integrity and well-being. Classes begin with formal bows, and the harmonious movements build strength, flexibility and balance in students. Off campus, he is an assistant instructor at the Salem Budokai, where he helps with the adult classes in jujitsu, judo, aikido and karate.

Cole and his associates formed Revenge Arts, a company that choreographs combat scenes for theatre groups throughout the Northwest. Clients learn how to use daggers, guns, swords, staplers or even pencils to create the illusion of combat. They can also choose to learn about basic pyrotechnics, blood or gunshots effects.

“It’s all about safety,” says Cole, who is the first call for many theatre companies after actors have been hurt. “Many actors end up with bruised or broken limbs. Safe violence doesn’t have to look bad. It can look realistic.”

During rehearsal Cole often arrives home after midnight and returns at nine the next morning. “When we’re in production, we’re always here,” he says. “The production company gets to know each other incredibly well.”

His brainchild, Shoebox Shakespeare, kicks off with a Willamette performance, and then it’s on to high schools, where theatre students hope to convince Generation Y that all the world’s a stage.