Archive for August, 2008

What’s In a Name?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 19, 2008 in Education Leadership, Education Practice and School News. 2 Comments

David Whitman’s new book, Sweating the Small Stuff, looks at Amistad Academy, KIPP, SEED, and other successful inner city schools that have done the best work at closing the achievement gap.  The book is winning early praise from the education cognoscenti.  But there’s a problem: 

“I hate his subtitle, ‘Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism.’ And I like his decision to refer to this group as ‘the paternalistic schools’ even less,” writes Jay Mathews in the Washington Post.  USA Today’s Richard Whitmire, guestblogging at Eduwonk agrees, saying simply Whitman’s subtitle “needs work.” Whitney Tilson, a big charter school supporter, praises the book in his latest ed reform email blast, but adds, “I don’t like the word ‘paternalism.’  What the schools are doing is instilling not only knowledge, but the absolutely critical soft skills that are necessary to succeed in life, such as ‘kindness, decency, integrity, and hard work.’”

Checker Finn of the Fordham Foundation, which brought out Whitman’s book, notes that the schools themselves “don’t much like the label of ‘paternalism’ and reject any suggestion that their schools condescend to students or their parents, which some feel is implied by the paternalism label…But it’s undeniable that these schools aim to change the lifestyles of those who attend them.”

David Whitman explains his title this way:

By paternalistic I mean that each of the six schools is a highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values. These paternalistic schools go beyond just teaching values as abstractions: the schools tell students exactly how they are expected to behave, and their behavior is closely monitored, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance. Unlike the often forbidding paternalistic institutions of the past, these schools are prescriptive yet warm; teachers and principals, who sometimes serve in loco parentis, are both authoritative and caring figures. Teachers laugh with and cajole students, in addition to frequently directing them to stay on task.

It’s the rare person who works with or observes struggling inner city schools who doesn’t cite family disruption and a low-level of parenting skills as part of the problem.  As a teacher, I often thought my job was not just to teach my students but to help raise them.  Matthew Tabor gets it right when he notes that “very, very few education leaders, from individual community leaders to those on the national scene, are comfortable and honest enough to tell it like it is. We need to say what we are, what we aren’t, and get on with things.”  Fordham’s Mike Petrilli writes that as uncomfortable as it might be to discuss in public, “what these schools are doing is providing a middle-class, achievement-oriented culture to children who come out of a culture of poverty. And for that, the schools should be applauded (and emulated). It might not be politically correct to use these terms, but they are accurate. And that should count for something.”  

Whitman deserves praise for calling ‘em like he sees ‘em.  From what I know of the schools he profiles, his analysis–and use of the term paternalism–is spot on.  Jay Mathews worries that when a defender of these schools uses a freighted word like “paternalistic” those who don’t like the the schools methods will use the word like a cudgel.  Methinks he worries too much.  Nothing marginalizes criticism like success.  As long as these schools deliver on their promise of a solid education, you could call them “Pact with Lucifer” schools and they’d still be oversubscribed.  We ought to have reached a point where our patience with failing inner city children has shamed us into applauding and emulating success, whether or not we like the methods by which it’s achieved or take exception to how they are described.

A school’s culture matters a great deal.  In neighborhoods where children often lack strong adult guidance and authority–or are surrounded by adults who undermine it–it matters more than anything.  Whitman has done a valuable service by focusing our attention on it.  I’m looking forward to reading his book. 

Reading, Interrupted

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2008 in Literacy and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Here’s a shocker:  Students who send and receive text messages while completing a reading assignment take longer to complete their reading.  But counterintuitively, they still manage to understand what they’re reading, according to a study reported in Education Week. 

The students interrupted by messages during their reading performed just as well as uninterrupted readers on a comprehension test.  “Researchers theorized that one reason that the multitasking students did as well—but took longer—may be that they went back and reread passages after they paused to answer instant messages,” EdWeek reports.

Literacy, Numeracy…Visuacy??

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2008 in Curriculum. 8 Comments

An Australian federal government report argues for visual education, or “visuacy”, to take its place alongside literacy and numeracy as a fundamental part of the country’s curriculum. The National Review of Visual Education calls for “a rethinking of arts education in schools to end the distinction between art and other images.”  

“In much the same way that one might conceptualise a continuum of texts in the context of the English classroom, one might similarly do so in relation to a continuum of images from the most banal to the most aesthetically complex and challenging,” the report says.  Translation?  The newspaper the Australian says: students should study Picasso alongside pictures of Elle Macpherson’s underwear as part of a recasting of visual arts education away from traditional forms to include images of all kinds.

[The report] cites the example of scrutinising the “conditions of value and meaning” in images as diverse as Macpherson’s bras and briefs on the back of a bus or on a billboard, a blood-strewn road safety advertisement on television, Picasso’s Guernica reproduced in the pages of a book of 20th century European art and the television transmission of a collapsing World Trade Center.

Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools chair Su Baker is already playing defense, arguing images are words in a visual language that have to be taught in the same way as English or any other language. “This report isn’t about dumbing down, it isn’t about trivialising things.  It’s about the breadth of visual imagery we are confronted with and engaging with in the world we live in, which is heavily saturated with images. It’s about teaching kids to navigate, interpret and control those images.” she tells the Australian.

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 17, 2008 in No category. 0 Comments

A weekly roundup of the week’s most important news, information and blog posts about curriculum, teaching, education policy and other items of interest to the Core Knowledge community.

Core Knowledge

Prelude to Excellence, by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Forbes
It is not the job of our colleges and universities to make up for the shoddy education offered by K-12 schools. It is the job of those schools to ensure they produce future undergraduates who are fully prepared to do college-level work.

Critical Thinking Not Possible Without Content Knowledge
Critical thinking is not a skill like riding a bike or diagramming a sentence that, once learned, can be applied in many situations. You have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject–facts, concepts and trends–before the maxims of critical thinking will do you much good.

Sunshine Is Still The Best Disinfectant
Diane Ravitch calls on Congress to authorize national testing, based on coherent curriculum standards, but without stakes or sanctions. “If states and localities don’t want to improve their schools, then we are in deeper trouble as a nation than any law passed by Congress can fix.”

Is It Better To Read Junk Than Not Read At All?
he kind of book you used to sneak into school, and hoped not to get caught reading, has gone mainstream.  Is “Captain Underpants” the only way to turn boys into readers?  Does time spent with ”Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger?” help reading comprehension? 

Poll: Confidence in Public Schools & NCLB Slipping
A nationwide poll shows confidence in America’s public schools and the No Child Left Behind Act is declining.  The survey by Education Next also shows Americans believe Democrats are the party “more likely to improve the nation’s schools.”

Best of the Blogs

Sweating the Small Stuff at the Education Gadfly
Like firm parents, teachers at six remarkable inner-city gap-busting schools profiled in a new book are engaged in explicit character training, aimed at creating a culture of kindness, decency, integrity, and hard work.

50 Things New Teachers Need To Know at Gently Hew Stone
For years I’ve watched new teachers start their first year with no clue about how to manage all that gets thrown at them, and I’ve wanted to have something to give them, samizdat style, that lets them in on what really matters, what really works, and what they should studiously ignore. 

Che Studies at Jay P. Greene’s Blog
Raza Studies is part of the Ethnic Studies program in Tucson public high schools emphasizing Latino history and pride.  But the particular way in which Tucson’s program does this has raised some critical scrutiny.

Advanced Readers at Unwrapping the Gifted
We don’t put as much effort into teaching the advanced learners as we do into teaching the struggling learners. This is educational neglect, folks.

Teaching and Curriculum

A Marshall Plan for Reading
City Journal
A Marshall Plan for reading as a means of closing the black-white achievement gap, Sol Stern writes, is a worthy platform for anyone hoping to be New York City’s next mayor.

Studies of Popular Reading Texts Don’t Make Grade
Education Week
Open Court Reading and Reading Mastery failed to earn ratings from the What Works Clearinghouse because they do not have any studies that satisfy the agency’s rigorous evidence standards.

Test scores show need to get more help to students
Detroit Free Press
Paying more attention to what’s happening in middle school strikes at the heart of the Michigan’s other academic high hurdle — stemming the tide of high school dropouts.

Teacher’s ‘branding’ case opens a religious divide
The Chicago Tribune
A well-known and popular Ohio middle school science teacher known for strong religious beliefs is charged with branding the shape of a cross onto the forearm of an eighth-grader.

Education Policy

How Well Are They Really Doing?
The New York Times
The states have made a mockery of accountability, using weak tests, setting passing scores low or rewriting tests from year to year, making it impossible to compare progress — or its absence — over time.

Exit Scramble
Education Week
States that rushed to tie high school graduation to passing a high-stakes test now face pressure to come up with alternatives, even as critics warn against a dilution of standards.

Homeschooling and Parenting

Parents may home-school children without teaching credential, California court says
Los Angeles Times
Parents may legally home-school their children in California even if they lack a teaching credential, a state appellate court ruled Friday. The decision is a reversal of the court’s earlier position, which effectively prohibited most home schooling.

More African-Americans Being Home Schooled
National Public Radio
According to the National Center for Education Studies, the number of African Americans being home schooled is growing.

Up to 11, Most Kids Aren’t Heavy Internet Users
Media Post Marketing Daily
Today’s kids are extremely tech-savvy, still relatively few kids are heavy Net users. Furthermore, most are still into TV, books and “old fashioned” toys, according to a new report. 

Parents Shape Whether Their Children Learn To Eat Fruits And Vegetables
Science Daily
Providing fruits for snacks and serving vegetables at dinner can shape a preschooler’s eating patterns for his or her lifetime.

College Not An “Academic Safety Net”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 14, 2008 in Curriculum and Higher Education. 6 Comments

E.D.Hirsch opposed to a core curriculum?  Yes, but in college. In an essay on Forbes.com Hirsch argues against expecting colleges to do work that ought to be done by K-12 schools.  ”The underlying problem is not that our professors are feckless or that our undergraduates are brain-dead addicts of iPods and cellphones who lack curiosity and passion for knowledge, he writes.  “The real problem is that these young men and women, through no fault of their own, are showing up on campuses undereducated and unprepared for college-level work. They should have received a good general education before they arrived on campus.”

They need remedial courses–including “core curriculum” courses in science, history, the arts and civics–at the time in their lives when they want to launch out on their own, exploring, discovering and pursuing interests at a high level. A required core curriculum in college is not something to be devoutly wished for, but rather a concession to the consequences of a third-rate preparation for first-rate colleges and universities….But though we may currently need to do so, the last thing we should want to do is impose a table d’hôte of required classes on undergraduates who are enjoying their first taste of academic freedom and a chance to chart their own educational destinies.

“There is a real danger that in making colleges the academic safety net of last resort, we’ll absolve the public schools of their obligation to provide students with a sound, well-rounded education,” Hirsch cautions. ”It’s damaging to our students, to our country and to our higher education system, which is the lone bright star in our educational firmament. Everyone loses.”

Poll: Confidence in Public Schools & NCLB Slipping

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 13, 2008 in Education News and Educational Policy. 2 Comments

A nationwide poll shows confidence in America’s public schools and the No Child Left Behind Act is declining.  The survey by Education Next also shows Americans believe Democrats are the party “more likely to improve the nation’s schools.”

On NCLB: half of those surveyed support leaving it as is or renewing it with minimal changes; half think it needs a major overhaul or should be done away with. The survey also shows that Americans–especially African Americans and Hispanics–are more confident in their local police force than in their local schools.

The poll results are here.  Some other noteworthy nuggets:

  • In 2007, the EdNext poll found 57 percent of the public supported renewing NCLB as is or with minimal changes; today only 50 percent of the public do.  Support has declined among African Americans, Hispanics, and whites.
  • Public school teachers are especially critical of NCLB with only 26 percent supporting renewal as is or with minimal changes; 33 percent suggest that Congress completely overhaul the act, and another 42 percent recommend that Congress not renew the act at all.
  • Only 20% of African Americans give public schools an A or a B.  The percentage of Hispanics giving schools a D or F has doubled since last year’s poll, from 16 to 32 percent.   

“The public has more faith in its local police force than it does in its local schools,” notes EdNext.  ”This is especially pronounced among African Americans and Hispanics: Fifty-five percent of African Americans and 64 percent of Hispanics gave their police force an A or B, a significantly higher show of support than for public schools. ”

  • When asked whether students “who have been diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disabilities should be taught in regular classrooms with other students,” only 25 percent of teachers, and 28 percent of the public, favored the idea. The rest said they should be “taught in separate settings.”
  • 37 percent of respondents support the idea of public school districts offering parents the option of sending their child to a single-sex school; 25 percent oppose the idea; and the remainder are undecided.  Support is stronger among public school teachers–47 percent approve the idea.
  • More than two thirds of American parents say they would be willing to have their children take some of their high school courses over the Internet.

Making a Mockery of Accountability

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 12, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Curriculum. 9 Comments

The drumbeat for national curriculum, standards and assessments gets a little bit louder today with a strongly worded New York Times editorial.

Congress has several concerns as it moves toward reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Whatever else they do, lawmakers need to strengthen the requirement that states document student performance in yearly tests in exchange for federal aid.  The states have made a mockery of that provision, using weak tests, setting passing scores low or rewriting tests from year to year, making it impossible to compare progress — or its absence — over time.

“The country will have difficulty moving ahead educationally until that changes,” opines the Times, noting that complete lack of a relationship between states that report strong performances on their own tests and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  The Times concludes:

Congress needs to take the testing issue head-on. It should instruct the NAEP board, an independent body created by the government, to create a rigorous test that would be given free to states that agreed to use NAEP scoring standards. Then the federal government could actually embarrass the laggard states by naming the ones that cling to weak tests. Without rigorous and consistent testing, there is no way to know whether our children are getting the education they deserve and need.

Sounds an awful lot like what Diane Ravitch was talking about last week.

“A National Embarrassment”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 12, 2008 in Assessment and Testing. 3 Comments

The historically strong performance of the U.S. in the Olympic games stands in stark contrast to the performance of U.S. students compared to their peers overseas.  This irony is not lost upon The Fordham Foundation, which goes to town on the poor performance on U.S. students in their entertaining yet pointed Education Olympics this week.  Meanwhile Two Million Minutes filmmaker Bob Compton is in Beijing.  He sent this essay to Whitney Tilson, who included it in his most recent ed reform email blast.  It’s reprinted here with permission from Compton.

What if the U.S. won no Olympic medals?

 

By Bob Compton

As I prepare to go to the Beijing Olympics, I wonder what would happen if the U.S. came home with no medals. From the first Olympic Games in 1896 through 2006, the U.S. has always fared very well, leading the world with 973 gold medals and 2,405 total medals won. No other country on Earth, big or small, comes even close to America’s athletic prowess.

 But as I pack my bags, I wonder – what would happen? What if the U.S. won no gold, no silver and no bronze medals? Even worse, what if the U.S. team finished 25th in the medal competition way behind both smaller and larger countries? Would we handle it with the same nonchalance we have about our children ranking 25th in the world in mathematics? Would it merit a Blue Ribbon panel whose recommendations are never implemented? Would it generate a brief mention in the news and then pass from our minds?

 No way! Dropping to 25th in the world at the Olympics would be a national embarrassment. There would be an outcry of humiliation from Americans. The President, Congress, Governors, in fact every elected official worth their salt would demand “athletic reform.” Experts would be appointed to analyze our programmatic weaknesses compared to other countries, and every American would expect serious, measurable changes to take place within four years before the next Olympics. We would muster the will and exert every effort never to lose again in the global athletic contest of the Olympics.

 So why are we so apathetic about the decline of our children’s intellectual achievement – where 24 countries outperform U.S. students in math, arguably a more important contest than any sport. Each year our children’s ability to compete academically in the world gets worse, and each year Americans seem to care less. Elected officials give the illusion of caring, but no truly hard choices are made, and no meaningful improvements are seen.

 Fortunately, America has been relatively unchallenged economically for the past 50 years. During that time our country won the race to the moon, won the Cold War and became enormously wealthy – on the strength of science, engineering and industry that produced the biggest, the fastest, the best of everything. But times have changed.

 Our accumulated wealth and a historically liberal immigration policy have allowed us to ignore how rapidly other nations are enhancing their intellectual capital. China, for example, has gone from the extreme poverty and illiteracy produced by the Cultural Revolution to become the fourth largest economy in the world – in a mere 30 years. That’s right – only 30 years! Today, the U.S has a trade deficit of $1.5 trillion with China, and China holds $150 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, second only to Japan. China has become both our supplier of goods and our banker. Does that worry anyone else out there but me? 

 China and India, the two most populous nations on E arth – each four times our size – are producing more and more well-educated young people, particularly in math and science. Their cultures revere, recognize and reward academic excellence, and so they are perfectly tuned to the global technology competition of the 21st century.

 As Americans we believe in being number one – in sports, technology, innovation, creativity, the military and in the global economy. But all of that success is based on being number one in educating our children – something we are no longer achieving. 

 Isn’t it time we admit to ourselves this is more serious than the Olympic Games. Americans traditionally rise to the challenge and prevail. It’s time to rise to the challenge of educating our children to the highest level in the world and ensure they bring home economic gold medals.

 Go U.S.A.!

Critical Thinking Not Possible Without Content Knowledge

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 11, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Review. 3 Comments

Here’s a plan for eliminating the national debt: Charge a tax of one dollar on anyone who says ”teaching critical thinking skills” should be the goal of schools.  One person less likely to idly toss around the phrase in the future is none other than The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, arguably our most influential education writer.  He concedes today that critical thinking programs “don’t work very well, except as a measure of the gullibility of even smart educators.”  How did he come to see the light?

A remarkable article by Daniel T. Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive scientist outlines the reasons. Critical thinking, he explains in a summer 2007 American Educator article, overlooked until now by me, is not a skill like riding a bike or diagramming a sentence that, once learned, can be applied in many situations. Instead, as your most-hated high school teacher often told you, you have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject–facts, concepts and trends–before the maxims of critical thinking taught in these feverishly-marketed courses will do you much good.

“The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge),” Willingham says. “Thus, if you remind a student to ‘look at an issue from multiple perspectives’ often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives.”

Willingham’s work builds the strongest case I know for why narrowing the curriculum to load up on reading and math at the expense of other subjects is ultimately self-defeating.  If we want kids to be critical thinkers, they need the broadest possible education.  Describing Willingham’s upcoming book, Why Don’t Students Like School? — A cognitive scientist answers questions about how your mind works and what it means for the classroom,  Mathews says “Willingham’s own work is, in my view, a triumph of critical thinking because he knows his content so well….We need to do our homework and remember that no matter how brilliant we think we are, we can be useful critics only after we master the facts.”

Is It Better To Read Junk Than Not Read At All?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 11, 2008 in No category. 7 Comments

Where’s Richard Whitmire when you need him?  A pair of Wall Street Journal articles raise interesting questions about boys, reading, engaging reluctant readers…and sports trivia.  A Page One piece by John Hechinger points out what just about every elementary school teacher figures out 20 minutes into the job: if you want to see a boy engaged with a book, slip him any of the burgeoning genre of gross-out books.

Publishers are hawking more gory and gross books to appeal to an elusive market: boys — many of whom would rather go to the dentist than crack open “Little House on the Prairie.” Booksellers are also catering to teachers and parents desperate to make young males more literate. ‘There has been a real revolution’ in books that ‘have more kid appeal,’ especially when it comes to boys, says Ellie Berger, who oversees Scholastic’s trade division. ‘It’s a shift away from the drier books we all grew up with.’

The bottom line, the kind of book you used to sneak into school, and hoped not to get caught reading, has gone mainstream.  So is “Captain Underpants” the only way to turn boys into readers?  More to the point, is all reading created equal?  Does time spent with ”Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger?” help reading comprehension?  As a teacher, I’m all for engaging boys, but a steady diet of this fare invites the law of diminishing returns. 

In an unrelated WSJ piece, “Raising Bob Costas: Is Memorizing Sports Trivia Good for the Brain?” James Freeman frets that his son is spending all of his time memorizing sports trivia, and hopes to find an academic silver lining in this obsession from neuroscientists, Harvard’s Howard Gardner, and Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

I figured that if anyone would trash the idea of kids consuming trivia it would be Hirsch but he found reasons to appreciate Will’s hobby. The University of Virginia professor recalled the line from Keats that “every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.” Mr. Hirsch said that it’s great to find an interest like Will’s because “it means you like to do something intensely, and you’re more likely to be successful in life” when you do.  But Mr. Hirsch was not suggesting that learning about football had any value at all in helping one to learn about academic subjects. “I don’t think there’s any benefit as far as ‘learning-to-learn,’ because that’s been exploded.”   

I’m with Freeman’s kid.  When I was his age, I could tell you from memory the teams who plated in every World Series ever played.  Numbers invariably invoked baseball statistics: 367, 511 and 714? Ty Cobb’s liftime batting average, Cy Young’s career wins and the number of homerun Babe Ruth hit, respectively. 

But you knew that. 

 Update:  Sir Fartsalot author Kevin Bolger weighs in below in the comments section.