Archive for April, 2009

McClueless

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 23, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 18 Comments

If America had closed the achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher, notes a new McKinsey report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.  “If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher,” notes the Times’ Thomas Friedman. 

Two points:

1)  Duh.
2)  Teachers, raise your hand if you chose your profession because you wanted to raise GDP?  Anyone?? 

Look, everyone gets the connection between education, income and productivity.  But economic arguments, however troubling, will neither win hearts and minds among teachers, nor create  the “sense of urgency and follow-through” Friedman wants to see.  It recalls Oscar Wilde’s remark about cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

“Did you see Friedman’s column?” millions of teachers are not asking themselves today.  “Damn, we’d better get cracking before we turn into an economic also-ran!”

How Circles Turn Vicious

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 23, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 4 Comments

First, someone does a study showing all students benefit from taking algebra regardless of their mathematical interest or ability.  The media take note.  Some districts and states begin requiring all students to take algebra.  Meanwhile others point out that we’re not doing any favors for kids who have yet to master basic math by merely dumping them in advanced classes.  People begin to have second thoughts and question the wisdom of the algebra-for-all push.

Next, someone does a study showing all students benefit from taking algebra regardless of their mathematical interest or ability…

Performance Play

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 23, 2009 in Education News. 0 Comments

“Only the school district’s test coordinator can order tests,” says a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Education Department.  Make that test coordinators and ten-year-olds.   The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review tells how a boy recently managed to order a batch of state assessment tests. 

Rebecca Costello, director of pupil services at Hempfield, confirmed the student simply faxed an order from his home for the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests, commonly known as the PSSAs.  Costello said the Hempfield boy sent the order to Data Recognition Corp. of Maple Grove, Minn., the company that produces the exams for Pennsylvania, Ohio and several other states.

The boy reportedly meant no harm and was not attempting to cheat on the PSSA.  School officials say he simply wanted the test so he could “play school.”  The paper misses the obvious takeaway of this story, but Teacher Magazine’s Anthony Rebora does not.  “Does it say something about schools today that a kid who wants to play teacher thinks he needs to have authentic standardized tests on hand?” he asks.

When I was a kid and we wanted to play school, we wanted a chalkboard.

Trouble in River City

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 23, 2009 in No category. 0 Comments

Trouble, oh we got trouble,
Right here in River City!
With a capital “T”
That rhymes with “P”
And that stands for…..pants?

Align PreK and Elementary Ed Standards

Published by Alice Wiggins on April 22, 2009 in No category. 4 Comments

So far this week, I’ve discussed two ways to improve U.S. early childhood education—changing the way we evaluate preschools (and preschool teachers) and establishing clear and specific preschool learning standards.  The third item on my wish list is aligning preschool and elementary school standards.

Creating a seamless PreK to elementary school system is also the No. 1 item on the “to do” list of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE).  In a paper titled Promoting Quality in PreK-Grade 3 Classrooms by Dr. Mariana Haynes, NASBE’s research director, argued for aligning not just standards, but curricula, assessment and teaching practices for Pre-K through grade three, to reflect what research tells us about learning environments on children’s developmental outcomes.  “This is an important foundational step to creating the infrastructure for a coherent, evidence-based early learning system,” Haynes wrote. “States may want to examine how to create incentives for school districts and early education providers to partner in building a seamless prekindergarten through grade three system,” she concluded.

A New America Foundation report by Kristie Kauerz also makes a strong argument for advancing the alignment of PK through grade 3. Lack of availability of high-quality preschool for all children (we’ll talk about this later this week!) coupled with the absence of alignment between PK and subsequent grades results in classes that include some children who have the background knowledge and academic gains for preschool and some children who do not. As a result, Kauerz notes “teacher must focus on those children who do not have the relevant and necessary cognitive or social skills, thereby being forced to slow and level down the curriculum and pedagogy in order not to leave behind less well prepared children.”  The result?  Children who arrived well prepared are often hindered in their continued progress.

Kauerz goes on to cite a study of elementary school in California that “analyzed why some schools score substantially better on the state’s academic performance index than other schools with similar students. Practices found to be associated with higher performance included school-wide instructional consistency within grades, curricular alignment from grade-to-grade, and classroom instruction guided by state academic standards (Williams, Kirst, & Haertel, 2005).”

It’s safe to say that one unambiguous victory of the standards-based education movement has been a general rise in expectations, especially in schools serving low-SES children.  Clear and specific preschool learning standards would ensure that children transition more smoothly to kindergarten bringing with them social skills and foundational skills and knowledge for ongoing educational achievement.  Aligning those standards with a state’s existing K-8 standards would be better still.

Cassandra Warns the Trojans About Merit Pay

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 22, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Education Practice, Educational Policy and Teaching. 4 Comments

If you remember your Greek mythology, you’ll recall Cassandra, tragically blessed with the gift of prophecy but cursed by Apollo so that no one would believe her.  Think of her while reading Diane Ravitch’s latest over at Bridging Differences. 

Here is my prediction: Merit pay of the kind I have described will not make education better, even if scores go up next year or the year after. Instead, it will make education worse, not only because some of the “gains” will be based on cheating and gaming the system, but because they will be obtained by scanting attention to history, geography, civics, the arts, science, literature, foreign languages, and all the other studies that are needed to develop smarter individuals, better citizens, and people who are prepared for the knowledge-based economy of the 21st Century. Nor will it identify better teachers; instead, it will reward those who use their time for low-level test preparation.

“Is it possible to have an education system that mis-educates students while raising their test scores?” Ravitch asks. ”Yes, I think it is. We may soon prove it.”

Cassandra is speaking.  Are you listening? Do you believe her? 

I do.

Failure: It’s Not Just a Good Idea, It’s The Law

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 21, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Education News and accountability. 4 Comments

Texas school districts would no longer be allowed to mandate minimum grades for failing students under a “truth-in-grading ” law unanimously passed by the State Senate Monday.  Controversies over such policies have flared up here and there in the last few years, but I’m not aware of any states banning the practice to-date.

“Teacher groups, who have called such policies the ‘ultimate grade inflation,’ are strongly supporting the Senate bill,” the Dallas Morning News reports.  The Texas School Alliance, made up of large, urban districts is crying foul saying it usurps local control of schools.

I get the arguments that minimum passing grades provide a “safety net” for potential dropouts.  Still, it’s hard to preach high expectations out of one side of your mouth and no failures out the other.

What Makes a Good Preschool Good?

Published by Alice Wiggins on April 21, 2009 in Preschool. 7 Comments

If you were looking for the ideal preschool for your son or daughter, what would you look for?  You’d probably expect your child’s preschool to hire well-trained, qualified teachers, have small class sizes and maintain a low teacher-student ratio.  If so, your list might look a lot like the benchmarks of National Institute for Early Education Research (NIERR), whose mission is to support early childhood education initiatives “by providing objective, nonpartisan information based on research.”

NIERR publishes an annual yearbook that determines if a state’s pre-K programs meet ten benchmarks considered to be “minimum standards for educationally effective preschool programs.”  The criteria include teachers with a bachelor’s degree and specialized training in early childhood education; a comprehensive curriculum that covers domains of language/literacy, math, science, socioemotional skills, cognitive development, and other  areas; and a maximum class size that is less than or equal to 20 children, with a child-to-teacher ratio of 10:1 or lower.

There’s only one problem: none of the items on NIERR’S checklist, while important, appear to be the difference makers in student outcomes according to a study in the May/June 2008 issue of Child Development by Andrew J. Mashburn of the University of Virginia and others.

Findings indicate that despite their relevance to discussions of program development and quality, none of the minimum standards recommended by NIEER, or the nine-item NIEER quality index, were consistently associated with measures of academic, language, and social development during pre-K, among a large sample of 4-year-old children who attended state funded programs.

 But let’s get back to your hypothetical preschool.  If you’re like most parents, you would probably want your child to have a teacher who is nice to your child.  Someone who creates a warm, nurturing environment and shows affection and respect.  In that, your list would actually be a step ahead of NIERR’s benchmarks.  The Mashburn study would back you up.  It found preschool children benefit most when they experience instructionally and emotionally supportive interactions with their teachers.

“High-quality instructional interactions occur when teachers provide children with feedback about their ideas, comment in ways that extend and expand their skills, and frequently use discussions and activities to promote complex thinking. For example, teachers who provide high instructional support ask ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions to children to explain their thinking, relate concepts to children’s lives, and provide additional information to children to expand their understanding,”  Mashburn said. 

Thus the second of my list of five ideas to improve early childhood education:  If we want effective high quality preschools, we’re going to change the way we look at and evaluate early childhood education.  We need to recognize that preschool quality is a function of both process AND structure.   As Mashburn’s study concluded:

Results indicate that in state-funded pre-K programs serving 4-year olds, requiring teachers to have a college education or degrees in ECE and mandating small class sizes and child-to-teacher ratios may not be sufficient to ensure that children are learning in classrooms. Rather, these results confirm that for young children, learning occurs via interactions, and high-quality emotional and instructional interactions are the mechanisms through which pre-K programs transmit academic, language, and social competencies to children…Thus, we argue that program policies and regulations aimed at improving the effectiveness of children’s exposure to pre-K should focus more directly on improving interactions that children experience in classrooms.

In other words, success is not merely a function of what teachers have (a degree, a small number of students, etc.) but what teachers do.

Saving Catholic Schools

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 21, 2009 in Educational Policy. 3 Comments

The disappearance of Catholic schools from America’s inner cities is ”a national education crisis that needs a national response,” argue Checker Finn and Andy Smarick in a Washington Post op-ed.  To their credit, Finn’s Fordham Foundation has been a long-time, loud and too often lonely voice urging action to save Catholic schools.  They write:

Most urban Catholic schools were originally built to educate the children of European immigrants; today, they mostly serve poor African American and Latino students. With their long track record of successfully educating ill-served populations, these schools can play a central role in the nation’s effort to expand educational opportunity and reduce the achievement gap. But not if they disappear.

Reformers love scale, so try this comparison:  KIPP runs 66 public schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia serving just over 16,000 students.   Catholic schools serving 25 times that number of  children closed down from 2000 to 2006–nearly 1,200 faith-based urban schools closed, serving 425,000 students.  And these are schools that produce results.  Diane Ravitch recently noted that in New York City, the four-year graduation rate at Catholic high schools is 99.5%, with 98% of high school graduates enrolling in college.  Finn and Smarick want the Obama administration to “help turn this fatal tide” of Catholic school closings.

Stimulus funds could be used to shore up schools on the brink, provide assistance to their teachers and administrators, or expand and replicate promising local strategies. The president could support education tax credits or scholarships, which would help needy students and stabilize school enrollments. By simply underscoring his support and concern for these schools, he would indicate the bipartisan nature of this issue, thereby providing cover to others eager to act but wary of the political implications.

It’s fashionable (and facile) for antagonists in ed policy debates to frame arguments in terms of who’s on the side of children vs. who’s concerned about adults.  Here are schools successfully serving two million kids.  Who’s on their side?  And before one argues that there are church/state issues here, and that public dollars must not go to religious schools, remember that’s exactly what happens every time a Pell Grant pays a student’s tuition at Georgetown, BC, or Notre Dame.

This just in:  Eduwonk likes Catholic schools “but remains unpersuaded on the need for a public bailout of Catholic schools absent a lot of reciprocal accountability and transparency.”

More From Willingham

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 21, 2009 in Education Practice. 0 Comments

“The relationship of cognitive psychology to classroom teaching is like the relationship of physics to engineering,” writes Dan Willingham in his latest over at Britannica Blog.  “Knowledge of the mind gleaned from cognitive psychology experiments will not tell teachers how to teach children, any more than knowledge of physics can prescribe what a bridge should look like.”