Neighborhood Effects on Student Achievement

by Robert Pondiscio
January 22nd, 2009

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Research and Reports | No Comments »

An intriguing study in the U.K. looks at the effects of a school’s surroundings, looking for links between a neighborhood’s physical decline and student behavior, teacher morale and test scores.  The results are reported in The Guardian.

The report’s chief author, Katy Owen, says she found that urban decay could ‘easily impact upon pupils and their teachers.’ She says: ‘They may demonstrate poor behaviour in the classroom, have low self-esteem, little appetite for educational attainment and have little cultural or social capital to draw on. Their teachers may become disillusioned and frustrated with their limited ability to teach in a community where crime and incivility is rife.’

No surprise to anyone who teaches in a hardscrabble neighborhood, certainly.  Every morning when I climbed the stairs from the subway to go to my South Bronx school, I was greeted by a sign marking the bus stop for the Riker’s Island Shuttle, which was always a cheery way to start the day–and a reminder of why you were there.

The study’s authors found it harder to link environment and test results.

What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate

by Robert Pondiscio
January 22nd, 2009

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Posted in Humor | 2 Comments »

A government ministry in England has been called on the carpet for the “impenetrable language peppered with jargon” in its reports.  OK class, let’s use our reading strategies to make sense of this passage, shall we?

An overarching national improvement strategy will drive up quality and performance underpinned by specific plans for strategically significant areas of activity, such as workforce and technology. The capital investment strategy will continue to renew and modernise further education establishments to create state of the art facilities.”

Turn and talk to your neighbor and see if you can find the main idea.  No?  Hmmm.  Let’s use context clues, then.  The agency that wrote the passage in question is the “Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.” 

They’re responsible for courses in basic literacy for adults.

Test Prep Pep Rallies

by Robert Pondiscio
January 22nd, 2009

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Education Practice, accountability | 6 Comments »

A Florida school is holding a mock funeral to help kids get ready for the upcoming FCAT writing test (HT: Gotham Schools).   ”Mourners will file past an open coffin, and a teacher will deliver a eulogy, surrounded by faculty members wearing black at the West Palm Beach campus,” the Palm Beach Post reports.

The mortician, Principal Glenda Garrett, said this ‘FCAT writing funeral’ will be a solemn occasion with a powerful lesson. Students will list and drop in the casket essay mistakes such as poor word choices — so they will avoid digging their own graves at test time. ‘We bury all of the things we should not do for writing,’ she said. ‘No baby words. Throw that into the casket. It’s dead. Goodbye.’

The “mourners” at Roosevelt Elementary School are 4th graders.  Nine and ten-year olds will bury their mistakes.  I don’t think this is what Obama had in mind when he urged us to “put away childish things.” Perhaps this is intended as something “fun” for the kids, but there’s still something that sounds a little off about it.

In recent years, the standardized test pep rally seems to have taken root in many elementary schools.  “Watch me take my ELA!  Watch me score a 4. Watch me score a 3. Watch me take my ELA,” Buffalo students chant and sing.  Principals vow to shave their heads or sleep on the school roof if kids fare well on the Big Test.  

The stunts and pep rallies are inevitably describes as a way to “ease pre-test jitters.”  This begs the question, of course where exactly those jitters emanate from.

Ed Spending “The Big Winner” in Stimulus Package

by Robert Pondiscio
January 21st, 2009

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Posted in Education News | 2 Comments »

Overlooked in yesterday’s inaugural hoopla was this piece by USA Today’s Greg Toppo about the potential impact of the stimulus package on schools.  Education is the big winner, more than health care, energy or infrastructure projects.  But, Toppo notes, there are significant strings attached: “If they want the money — and they certainly do — schools must spend at least a portion of it on a few of education advocates’ long-sought dreams.” States must develop:

• High-quality educational tests.

• Ways to recruit and retain top teachers in hard-to-staff schools.

• Longitudinal data systems that let schools track long-term progress.

Joanne Jacobs has more.  Charles Barone at Swift and Change Able, has a detailed analysis and notes this will be the largest increase in ed spending in history.  With $12 billion more in Title I money, that program is now “fully funded,” he writes.  But Barone is underwhelmed by what he describes as programatic language in the bill that looks good on paper.

States must provide “assurances” that funds are being used to improve assessments, more efficiently collect data, and equalize the distribution of qualified teachers. But such assurances are worth about as much as the paper they are written on. States have already provided assurances on all these issues as part of their federally approved plans. All they will have to do is copy and paste language from their old plans and re-submit them. This means that with all the complaints we have heard about current assessment systems (the responsibility for which lies solely with the states) and the inequitable distribution of teachers (the responsibility for which lies with both schools and districts) and the promises for change, states and districts can take billions and billions in new federal education dollars and do more or less on these issues exactly what they are doing now.

 

Obama’s Inauguration and the Limits of Symbolism

by Robert Pondiscio
January 20th, 2009

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Posted in Opinion | 14 Comments »

“We will achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared knowledge to communicate effectively with everyone else.” — E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them

President Barack Obama spoke to two different groups of Americans today.  One group understood the deep historical significance of the words in his inaugural address and grasped fully the moment in history to which they were bearing witness. A second group, no doubt moved and caught up in the excitement of seeing an African-American take the oath of office, saw merely an historic “first.”  And that’s a shame.

“It’s an amazing event for our students who are under 18 and haven’t fully formed their consciousness,” one school administrator told the Los Angeles Times. ”They see Obama and say, ‘This is a president who looks like me, I can be president.’”  It’s a true and earnest observation that has been made many times in the last few months.  But as uplifting as that sentiment is, it’s bittersweet to consider that many students–indeed, many Americans–lack a full appreciation of the moment and their new President’s inaugural address.  President Obama’s speech was rich in historical, literary, and biblical references, lending meaning, resonance and emotional weight to his words.  Yet these allusions were almost certainly unfamiliar to many of those watching. 

To have endured an education where history was a second-tier subject was to be left to wonder today: Who were these people Obama mentioned, who “toiled for us in sweatshops and settled the West?” Who were these people who “endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth?”  If you were not taught our nation’s rich history, then the President’s description of those who “packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life” may have failed to move you.   If you do not know what happened at Concord, Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sahn, then the sacrifices of those who “fought and died for us” in those places is lost upon you.  As uncomfortable as it is to consider, if our children are ignorant of that history then at least some measure of that sacrifice was, alas, in vain.   

President Obama’s inaugural address placed us — all of us — in the flow of history.  With its references to the “rights of man,” our “common defense,” ideals that “light the world,” and a generation that “faced down communism and fascism,” the address was surely met with either nods or blank stares.  If our children do not know the events and phrases to which Obama referred, they cannot fully appreciate the significance of this moment or even what this President is asking of them.   How is it possible for them to be “the keepers of this legacy” — why should they value it and seek to keep it at all? — unless they understand the  thing they are being asked to keep?  Obama’s most poignant observation was that “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”  How many of his younger listeners fully appreciate the price that has been paid to make this moment possible?  How many of our children, instead of seeing mere novelty, comprehend fully and viscerally the improbable closing of a historical loop they have just witnessed?  A black man took the oath of office with his hand on a bible belonging to the President who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  He turned to deliver his inaugural address facing the site where another great American dreamed out loud of the day when his children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. He then delivered his inaugural address to millions of Americans who had rendered that very judgement.   

It in no way diminishes the significance of this day to observe with a touch of sadness that too many of our nation’s children — especially those who look with pride at this President who looks like them — were able to appreciate this day only on a superficial level.  Too many can appreciate the symbolism of the moment, but no more. Some saw history.  Others, poorer by far, saw a symbolic ”first.” 

President Obama called upon us today to enter a “new era of responsibility.”  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.  For educators, perhaps the noblest duty that we might accept ”not grudgingly but seize gladly” is to ensure that in the very near future our nation’s children are able to judge this President not by the color of his skin, or even the content of his character, but by the full weight of his words.

Reading War II: Content Knowledge vs. Reading Strategies

by Robert Pondiscio
January 19th, 2009

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy, Literacy, Research and Reports, accountability | 11 Comments »

If phonics vs. whole language was Round One of the reading wars, the new battle is shaping up to be reading strategies vs. content knowledge, says Dan Willingham at Britannica Blog.  “Like Round 1 of the battle, one side is mostly right (content knowledge) but there is some merit on the other side,” says Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Most of us think about reading in a way that is fundamentally incorrect. We think of it as transferable, meaning that once you acquire the ability to read, you can read anything. That is true for only part of what it takes to read. It’s true for decoding—the ability to translate written symbols into sounds….But being able to decode letter strings fluently is only half of reading. In order to understand what you’re reading, you need to know something about the subject matter. And that doesn’t just mean that you need to know the vocabulary—you need to have the right knowledge of the world.

Willingham produced a YouTube video that underscores the connections between content knowledge and comprehension.  His blog post points out what virtually every elementary school teacher knows: once children learn to decode, reading instruction is almost exclusively focused on comprehension “strategies”–asking students to find the main idea of passage, identify the author’s purpose, etc.  Reading strategies work “but it’s a one-time boost,” he notes.  “Fifty sessions of practice is no better than five sessions of practice” since strategies serve mainly to give students a better idea of what reading is for.

In early grades, there is tremendous emphasis on decoding, and there must be. But this emphasis leads kids to feel that if they’ve decoded a passage, then they have read it, whereas teachers want them to have the idea that they shouldn’t be satisfied with decoding—they need to understand. Reading strategies help drive home this new notion of reading—that it’s about communication. Small wonder that practicing reading strategies gives no added benefit. Reading strategies are an easily-learned trick, like checking your work in math. Useful, to be sure, but not something that needs to be practiced.  I’ve discussed this matter in more detail here.

This is important stuff, dimly appreciated inside schools and as a practical matter, not at all in the education policy and advocacy communities.  The message needs to be delivered early, often and loud: boosting class time spent on reading instruction is of little use, and could actively be damaging kids if that time is coming at the expense of a well-rounded curriculum.  The title of Dan’s video says it best:  teaching content IS teaching reading.

“The tragic irony is that schools desperately trying to meet AYP are reportedly cutting time from subjects like social studies and science to devote more and more time to reading. Unless they are using content-rich reading materials, that strategy not only won’t work, it will actually backfire,” Willingham writes.

Willingham is not sanguine about that “people will be persuaded by what is truly a mountain of data,” but if it takes Round Two of the reading wars to drive this point into the consciousness of parents, policymakers and educators, the fight will be well worth it.

Required Reading

by Robert Pondiscio
January 18th, 2009

Posted in Education News, Weekly Roundup | No 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

Teaching Content IS Teaching Reading
A remarkable YouTube video by cognitive scientist Dan Willingham demonstrates convincingly why background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension, and why a broad, content-rich education is the best way to ensure kids can understand what they read. 

We Need to Be A ‘Water Cooler Nation’ Again
America desperately needs to become a “water cooler nation” again, with a common set of cultural references, says historian Richard Norton Smith.  “It shouldn’t be Britney Spears or the latest celebrity divorce,” he notes in an interview on the Public School Insights blog, but rather ”Gettysburg and Rosa Parks–and an endless source of possibilities.”

Best of the Blogs

Early Education in the Stimulus at Early Ed Watch Blog
The House Appropriations Committee released an outline of spending priorities for an economic stimulus package. The plan would provide $550 billion in new spending to stimulate the economy, including over $52 billion in funding for PreK-12 education programs, including early education. Sara Mead provides an analysis

A Good Word or Two About Schools at Bridging Differences
“In my research, I have occasionally come across progressivist thinkers who dream of a day when work, play, and learning all wondrously merge, and “education” takes place in the fields and the activities of daily life,” writes Diane Ravitch. ”I have never succumbed to the lure of abolishing institutions, especially the institutions of schooling that we have.”

Risen Rising at DFER Blog
Fix schools or fix communities?  “From an outsider’s perspective, one of the most frustrating aspects of the education policy debate is that both sides are right,” notes The Atlantic Monthly’s Clay Risen.  “It seems bafflingly obvious that change must come both inside and outside the classroom.”

Teaching and Curriculum

Experts Eschew Narrow Reading of Early-Literacy Study
Education Week
Teaching the alphabet and letter sounds in preschool strengthens children’s chances of success in learning to read later on, according to the report of the National Early Literacy Panel.  But Kathleen Kennedy Manzo reports some experts worry that skills-driven instruction could become a dominant focus for 3- and 4-year-olds, much as it has for the early-elementary grades.

A Wake-Up Call for Science Education
Boston Globe
The latest alarm bell just rang and it’s official. The United States is once again missing from the list of top-10 science and math education countries. Long-term economic growth depends on a fully competent talent pool, including workers who can excel in a technology-based economy, writes Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But young people in many less-developed countries now outperform their American counterparts in both science and math.

Teachers at 2 Charter Schools Plan to Join Union, Despite Notion of Incompatibility
New York Times
The United Federation of Teachers announced it had organized teachers at two respected New York City charter schools, making inroads in a movement that has long sold itself as an alternative that is not hamstrung by union contracts and work rules.

Report: Divide Teaching Profession Into Levels
Associated Press
Alabama is considering a system that allows teachers to advance in their careers without having to leave the classroom for an administrative post. The Governor’s Commission on Quality Teaching recommends that the teaching profession be divided into apprentice teacher, classroom teacher, professional teacher, master teacher and learning designer.

Unexpected Twist: Fiction Reading Is Up
Washington Post
For the first time since the National Endowment for the Arts began surveying American reading habits in 1982 the percentage of American adults who report reading “novels, short stories, poems or plays” has risen instead of declining: from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in 2008.

Education Policy

Leaving My Lapel Pin Behind
National Review Online
Is No Child Left Behind’s birthday worth celebrating? Saying you “support” NCLB is shorthand for affirming a set of ideas, values, and hopes for the country as much as an expression about a particular statute, writes Mike Petrilli. ”Speaking personally, I’ve gradually and reluctantly come to the conclusion that NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair.”

Duncan hearing spotlights school reform
Associated Press
Barack Obama’s choice for education secretary, Arne Duncan, said at his confirmation hearing that the No Child Left Behind law should stop punishing schools where only a handful of kids are struggling.

Bush leaves gift of education reform behind
Politico
School accountability driven by disaggregated data is George W. Bush’s education legacy. “The notion that Obama would gut a law exposing the maleducation of millions of black children is a fantasy,” writes Richard Whitmire. ”The last laugh belongs to Bush, because his Texas-style accountability will survive.”

Homeschooling and Parenting

Educators Resist Even Good Ideas From Outsiders
Washington Post
“It is time to disclose a great truth about even the best educators I know,” writes Jay Mathews. “As much as they deny it, they really don’t like outsiders messing with the way they do their jobs.”  Too often, says Mathews smart educators “write off parents as interfering idiots, even if they actually have a good idea and data to prove it.”

Too Much Homework? Schools Look at the Load
Miami Herald
Parents complained that forcing a student to toil for hours a night takes away meaningful family time and opportunities for other educational and healthy activities.  But school districts say homework is important because it helps kids learn independence and responsibility, serves as a link between school and home and reinforces skills that students have learned in class.

Does handwriting really matter anymore?
Christian Science Monitor
In the great scheme of things, I refuse to get upset over my son’s lousy handwriting, writes Nell Musolf “Handwriting, like so many other things that were once deemed vital – such as ballroom dancing and learning Latin – doesn’t seem all that important anymore.” 

Et Alia

U.S. school segregation on the rise
Reuters
Blacks and Hispanics are more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement and many of the schools they attend are struggling, according to a report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California.

A Call for Direct Instruction

by Robert Pondiscio
January 16th, 2009

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Posted in Education News, Opinion, Research and Reports | 22 Comments »

A solution for the achievement gap was discovered four decades ago, writes John McWhorter in The New Republic, and it has nothing to do with raising low expectations, improving parental involvement, or demanding accountability.  Starting in the late 1960s, he writes, Project Follow Through compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results in more than 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade:

It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading was vastly more effective than any of the others for (drum roll, please) poor kids, including black ones. DI isn’t exactly complicated: Students are taught to sound out words rather than told to get the hang of recognizing words whole, and they are taught according to scripted drills that emphasize repetition and frequent student participation.

Subsequent studies found similar results, says McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Indeed, he notes, ”a search for an occasion where DI was instituted and failed to improve students’ reading performance would be distinctly frustrating.”  So why no discussion of Direct Instruction as a means of addressing the achievement gap?

Schools of education have long been caught up in an idea that teaching poor kids to read requires something more than, well, teaching them how to sound out words. The poor child, the good-thinking wisdom tells us, needs tutti-frutti approaches bringing in music, rhythm, narrative, Ebonics, and so on. Distracted by the hardships in their home lives, surely they cannot be reached by just laying out the facts. That can only work for coddled children of doctors and lawyers. But the simple fact of how well DI has worked shows that “creativity” is not what poor kids need.

Matthew Yglesias describes McWhorter’s piece as “somewhat overblown but essentially correct” and nails an even larger issue:

It’s both strange and unfortunate that the education system is so unresponsive to this research and also strange and unfortunate that “education reform” efforts have so much focus on administrative structure of school systems and so little on these kinds of curriculum issues.”

McWhorter meanwhile urges Arne Duncan, the next Ed Secretary to consider “taking the blinders off and forcing America’s urban school districts to teach poor kids to read with tools that we have known to work since the Nixon Administration.”

 

Unsafe at Any Read

by Robert Pondiscio
January 15th, 2009

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Posted in Education News | 3 Comments »

A quirk in consumer protection law could lead to children under 12 being banned from libraries across the country starting next month.  It sounds unlikely, but a senior official of the American Library Association has been raising the possibility in several interviews this week.

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) was passed last August in response to concerns over recalls of toys made in China because of lead paint.  As of February 10, the CPSIA requires that all products for children under 12 must be tested for lead.  The law is aimed at items for sale, however the American Library Association points out there is no official exemption for books loaned to children.  “Unless I hear a ruling in the next 10 days…I am going to recommend to my membership that they either remove [children's books] from shelves, or bar children 12 and under from coming into the library,” ALA Associate Director Emily Sheketoff said on Tuesday. 

Library books, since they are not involved in commerce, are not included, a Consumer Product Safety Commission spokeswoman told a Pennsylvania paper earlier this week.  But Sheketoff said that wouldn’t hold up in court if a fine were levied.   “If they could say that officially, I could rest easy,” she said.

Online Education’s “1984″ Moment?

by Robert Pondiscio
January 15th, 2009

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Posted in Higher Education, Students, Teaching | 4 Comments »

People in the advertising industry still talk about a commercial for Apple Computers that aired once — and never again — during the 1984 Super Bowl.  Even if you weren’t alive then, you know it: Bald, colorless drones march in and sit listening to a projected image of Big Brother addressing them from a huge screen.  An athletic young woman chased by uniformed guards runs in carrying a large hammer.  She hurls it, and the projected image explodes in a blaze of light.  “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh,” the ad concludes. “And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.“ 

Have you seen the new ads for Kaplan University?  They may not be of the artistic calibre of “1984,” which was directed by Blade Runner director Ridley Scott, but they certainly stop you in your tracks.  A professor stands before his students in a college lecture hall and apologizes.  “The system has failed you. I have failed you,” he intones. “I have failed to help you share your talent with the world, and the world needs talent more than ever. Yet it’s being wasted by an educational system steeped in tradition and  old ideas.” He continues to speak, but now we’re watching his moving image on laptops and iPods. He is speaking to students who are seated at a kitchen table, on a living room couch and a rooftop.  “It’s time to use technology to rewrite the rules of education,” the professor says.  Like the 1984 ad, it’s not until the very last second that you find out the spot is for Kaplan. 

Kaplan University's "Desks" TV Ad

A second ad, called “Desks,” consists of a series of images of old-fashioned school desks, either alone or arrayed in visually arresting settings – on a beach, lined up on a subway platform, on the lanes of a bowling alley, on city streets, and winding their way up a mountain trail.   ”Where is it written that the old way is the right way? Where is it written that a traditional education is the only way to get an education? Where is it written that classes only take place in a classroom?” an unseen narrator asks.  ”That’s just the thing.  It isn’t written anywhere.” 

Whether these ads are successful or not for Kaplan may be beside the point.  What makes them interesting and compelling is what they say about education at large.  They challenge you to look at something familiar with fresh eyes:  Where does it say classes have to take place in a classroom?  Why can’t college come to me?  What’s the point of parking in a lecture hall for hours on end?  This may be familiar stuff for educators, but for consumers conditioned to having every itch scratched on demand, I suspect the message behind the ads will seem simple, compelling and new. Very new.

Are we seeing online education’s 1984?  It’s all but impossible to see watershed moments as they happen, but it’s sure easy with the hindsight of 25 years:  Trivia fans will be interested to learn the Apple spot was not the only commercial for computers to run during the 1984 Super Bowl.  Bill Bixby pitched RadioShack personal computers in one; Alan Alda  hawked Atari computers in the other.

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