KIPP & special ed

Defending KIPP, again

Harriet Ball: RIP

The EdWeek story quotes from her self-published "Fearless Math" manual. In it, she asserted that most students, particularly those at risk, "learn most naturally and best through play, songs, patterns, movement, imitation, imagination, and rhythm." Her method incorporated all those elements, the story explains. Ball insisted there's nothing wrong with drills—as long as they're presented in a fun and engaging manner. "Drill won't kill," she liked to say. "Boredom is the killer."

Teacher Who Inspired KIPP Schools Dies in Houston

running with the big dogs

from Work Hard. Be Nice. by Jay Mathews:

One popular slogan irritated [Harriet Ball]: “All children can learn.” That was not the right message, she thought. It ought to be “All children will learn.” The word “can” was too passive. It meant the child was capable. That was not enough. There was a big difference between capability and achievement. Many educators thought it was up to their students and their parents to summon the motivation to use their God-given talents. Ball took her responsibilities more seriously. She brought this up every time she saw the slogan: “Uh-uh, I don’t want no ‘can,’” she said. “All of us will learn. I will learn from the kids. They will learn from me. Ain’t no ‘can.’ We will all learn.”
p.37

"KIPP schools routinely outscore many that serve middle-class"

Report finds KIPP students outscore public school peers

Again.

I remember, 5 years ago, when I first started telling people KIPP kids were twice as likely to take algebra in the 8th grade and pass Regents as our kids.

Now here it is, 2010, and I'm still telling people KIPP kids are twice as likely to take algebra in the 8th grade and pass Regents as our kids.

Same deal with Scarsdale. Last winter our Interim Director of Curriculum reported that 80% of Scarsdale students take algebra in 8th grade.

Then she added: "We're not Scarsdale. We certainly don't have the resources of Scarsdale."

'We're not Scarsdale' explained why we can't have 80% of our kids taking algebra in 8th grade. If we were Scarsdale, we could, but we're not Scarsdale so we can't.

A parent in the audience logged onto the internet, pulled the data, and reported back to the board before the night was out that in fact Irvington has exactly the same per pupil dollar spending on instructional programming as Scarsdale, so: check.

But no matter.

Tonight the board will undoubtedly approve funding to enable our Interim Director of Curriculum and a generous contingent of teachers to devote a week or two this summer to rejiggering Trailblazers in consultation with a math person from up Bedford way. Bedford School District seems to be the last Trailblazers site in the county apart from Irvington (Scarsdale adopted Singapore Math 2 years ago), so obviously we Irvington taxpayers need to pay them, too.

Check back in 2015.

Joanne Jacobs on KIPP study

The study compared students who won the lottery to get into KIPP Lynn with students who applied but lost the lottery. To the extent that families who apply to KIPP are more motivated, there was no difference between the two groups.

The study also found that KIPP lottery winners were no more likely to leave KIPP schools than lottery losers were to leave their Lynn Public Schools placement.

Students applying to KIPP were more likely to be black or Hispanic and less likely to be Asian than other Lynn students. They were lower performers than the public school average.

Lynn G on whether KIPP kicks kids out

Public schools kick kids out. It is standard policy. They have to provide tutoring and/or pay for alternative placements, but they are quite happy to do that and bill the taxpayers for it. As the public schools struggle to show improvement in test scores, I expect to see more low performing kids shuffled off to alternative programs where their scores won't count against the sending school district.

I've looked at the expulsion and graduation rates at inner city schools, and KIPP does a better job of keeping kids in and getting them to graduation than the public schools they came from. KIPP has a lower expulsion rate than say, the Hartford public schools, where kids are expelled or encouraged to drop out at much higher rates than the charters.

Absolutely.

My $32K per pupil public school has some species of "zero tolerance" policy, which means the administration kicks kids out and pays for home tutoring. e.g.: If a student is caught smoking pot in the bathroom, he's gone. Period. I assume most parents support this policy, but that's beside the point. The point is: if a student in my district steps across the line, he's out.

I suspect my district has a higher rate of student expulsions than KIPP:

With children who had more serious behavioral problems, who would tell a teacher to f*** off without feeling any remorse, the Porch [in-class detention] had little power....Levin was resolved to expel students only in the most extreme circumstances, which, it turned out, happened only once or twice a year, far less than in many regular public schools that forced students to transfer to special programs for discipline problems. Levin and Feinberg considered each student they could not teach a failure on their part. They kept looking for ways to get the number of dismissals down to zero.

Work Hard. Be Nice. by Jay Mathews
page 171

KIPP doesn't do what it does by cherry picking students or kicking students out or having parents sign contracts.

It does what it does through excellent teaching and through the creation of an "authoritative" school culture that keeps kids in line the same way authoritative parents keep kids in line. Lemov calls this culture "warm/strict," and I recognize his account: he is describing the school culture of Hogwarts, my son's Jesuit high school.

special ed students at KIPP

Charter schools affiliated with the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education. These schools feature a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms and a focus on traditional reading and math skills. We use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of KIPP Academy Lynn, a KIPP charter school that is mostly Hispanic and has a high concentration of limited English proficiency (LEP) and special-need students, groups that charter critics have argued are typically under-served. The results show overall gains of 0.35 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at KIPP Lynn. LEP students, special education students, and those with low baseline scores benefit more from time spent at KIPP than do other students, with reading gains coming almost entirely from the LEP group.

WHO BENEFITS FROM KIPP?
Joshua D. Angrist
Susan M. Dynarski
Thomas J. Kane
Parag A. Pathak
Christopher R. Walters
Working Paper 15740

EduCrazy on urban vs suburban kids

The inner city kids face challenges and hurdles, but you cannot say the families have no culture or support of education (unless you've never met one). But you also can't assume the suburban schools and families are models of good behavior either.

I believe most parents are doing the best they can most of the time. But suburban parents tend to have more resources to remediate and reteach and there's the real issue. A failing suburban kid will get tutoring. A suburban kid's parents can (usually) correct the math mistakes and grammar errors or teach the material again if the child fails. Inner city families tend to lack those resources that are needed to compensate for the lousy instruction their kids get in school.

KIPP visitor's critique

KIPP for high-SES kids

in the comments thread

there may be a shortcut after all

Can you get fit in six minutes a week?

re: time & buckets (see comments)

Customer Review

Just left this review of Work Hard. Be Nice. on Amazon:

By the end of Work Hard. Be Nice., I found myself weeping in every chapter. I think this book may become a classic.

I hope teachers will include Work Hard. Be Nice. on summer reading lists for upper middle school and high school students. Boys especially may cherish this book given how feminized our public schools have become.

Mike Feinberg and David Levin are teachers, yes, but they are fighters, too. They broke rules and they crossed lines. In this era of character education and "collaborative learning environments," the story of two young men who refused to collaborate with a failed system is strong medicine.

I need to get my Amazon review of Dan Willingham's book written, too. (Preview: 5 stars)

a beautiful book

Work Hard. Be Nice.

It's incredible. By the end I found myself weeping in every chapter.

This book may become a classic.

Dan Brown on the Challenge Index

Scoring high on Mathews's Challenge Index has created an incentive for schools across the country to push students who have no shot at passing the exams into these high-intensity classes. On a large scale, kids reading below grade level are taking classes designed for above-grade-level students. You've got students that have great difficulty reading young adult books or writing complete sentences being assessed on independently reading novels like Jane Eyre and composing analytical essays on Bronte's style.

The argument that Mathews makes in an accompanying Newsweek piece is that AP classes are healthy "shock therapy" for lower-performing college-bound kids. I see his argument that a rigorous environment can be a motivator for some striving, low-skilled students to bump up their effort.

However, the widespread pushing of AP courses on struggling students -- with rewards of high scores on the "Challenge Index" -- is not in many students' best interest. I expect Mathews would view me as a stodgy defender of the status quo while he casts himself as a bold innovator. At least he quotes one dissenting voice from Professor J. Martin Rochester:

"Having failing students take AP courses as a solution to their academic struggles is like promoting a poor-hitting minor-league ballplayer to the New York Yankees in the hope that it will jump-start his career if he faces major-league pitching."

I'll go one better on the sports analogy; let's take the Boston Marathon. If you want to have a shot at finishing those 26.2 miles, let alone compete for a decent finishing place, it takes long-term training and serious dedication. If you are short on one of those two qualities, a surplus of the other may suffice to get you over the finish line. If you've got neither -- you're not in shape and you don't really want to do hardcore distance running -- then your school does you no favors by pressuring you to sign up for the race.

Newsweek's Top High Schools List is Off Base

I'm a huge fan of Martin Rochester.

I'm of two minds on the Challenge Index.

In fact, Mathews singlehandedly opened up Advanced Placement courses to disadvantaged kids.

He may have singlehandedly opened up Advanced Placement courses to advantaged kids caught in the sorting machine.

Now that it's become crystal clear that the original Challenge Index has served its purpose and, in my view, run its course, he's added the Equity and Excellence score.

Fair enough.

Speaking of Jay Mathews, go read Work Hard. Be Nice. Right now.

Wonderful!

Teacher YOU Training Institute

This is a good development:

Education Week
Published Online: February 5, 2008
Published in Print: February 6, 2008

College and Charter Groups Team Up to Train Teachers

Leaders plan to expand pilot to include educators in noncharter schools.

By Bess Keller

New York

David M. Steiner ricochets from one media device to another in a classroom here, coaxing his two dozen students through a lecture on Plato with jottings in English and ancient Greek, a map of post-Classical Athens, and a stick-figure diagram of the philosopher’s famous cave allegory.

It’s not your usual Saturday-morning fare, especially for these students, who Monday through Friday put in long hours as teachers themselves. They have come to Hunter College’s education school for the day. As the pilot group for a new program being devised by their charter school employers and Hunter, they expect to earn master’s degrees in elementary education down the road.

“Our single largest challenge is … people, the challenges around human capital,” said Norman Atkins, the chief executive officer of Uncommon Schools, one of the three charter-management organizations behind the venture.

To recruit, keep, and improve the best people, he said, the three groups needed to come up with a better way for their busy teachers to earn the provisional certification and later the master’s degree required by New York state. Leaders of Uncommon Schools, KIPP in New York City, and Achievement First are confident that such a program will have broad appeal in this city, and envision admitting some 500 students a year in 2011 to the two-year program. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has blessed the plan.

The venture, tentatively called Teacher YOU Training Institute, follows other efforts germinated outside universities to boost the power of teacher preparation. The High Tech High charter-management organization in San Diego has notably started its own teacher-licensing program and will soon grant master’s degrees, for instance.


True Collaboration

What sets the New York institute apart is the close collaboration between the entrepreneurial groups and Hunter College, the City University of New York’s premier teacher-preparation school. And, it might be said, the involvement of Mr. Steiner, the school’s dean and a scholar known for his cutting criticisms of the teacher-training status quo.

Five years ago, as an education professor at Boston University, Mr. Steiner unleashed a minor tempest with a study of the coursework required for aspiring teachers at 16 leading education schools. He concluded that it was mostly “intellectually barren,” often ideologically skewed to the left of center, and just not very useful in the classroom.

The Hunter dean now has a chance to show how it should be done. According to his collaborators, who said they approached just about every university with a teacher-preparation program in the New York metropolitan area, he singularly embraced the new approach.

“It was hard to find a partner,” David Levin, who heads the KIPP charter schools in New York City and helped found the Knowledge Is Power Program....

It’s Hunter’s gain to work with schools “that have among the best performance in the city,” offered the dean, who decided to teach the Foundations of Education course himself—his first go at it in seven years.

That course and the 10 others required by the state are being “redesigned from scratch,” say the institute’s leaders, to fit the needs of teachers in the high-expectations climate of the three charter groups, which together run more than two dozen schools serving children from low-income families in New York and other Northeastern cities.

[snip]

The teaching course included such in-the-trenches advice as how to distribute and collect papers in the least time possible (along with an analysis of the resources saved, such as 67 hours of teaching time in a year) and how to use disciplinary measures fairly and effectively.

[snip]

As the afternoon goes on, Mr. Steiner, who studied politics and philosophy at Oxford and Harvard, seems to overflow with ways long-dead Plato can speak to the teachers occasionally fidgeting in their chairs. Would the philosopher, he asks, countenance the image of teaching as pouring stuff into kids’ heads? [ed.: I would like more pouring, please] Not at all, he contends. On the other hand, Plato was certainly a “sage on the stage,” not the “guide on the side” often commended to aspiring teachers in education schools.

“Education is about the exemplar,” Mr. Steiner advises before rushing to his next point.

[snip]

Besides being tailored to hours available to the teachers, the program is almost free, thanks to an arrangement that the institute has made with AmeriCorps, the federal program for putting young people to work in community service.

[snip]

Reflecting the results-oriented, data-driven nature of the three organizations’ schools, the institute’s leaders plan to make the final condition of earning a degree proof that the teachers’ students have grown academically. [next project: getting rid of the word "grow" used in lieu of "achieve," "learn," or "progress"]

“We’re developing standards of student-learning gains,” Mr. Atkins of Uncommon Schools said. “We’re looking for meaningful data that students … are learning.”

[snip]

In addition to teachers from the three founding charter-management organizations, the students would include teachers in other New York City schools, both charter and noncharter, most of them from the New York Teaching Fellows program run by the district to bring in high-quality beginners.

“The people from our network were seeing the training needs of our teachers, but we also felt we were developing a level of expertise we wanted to share with as many teachers as possible,” said KIPP’s Mr. Levin.

Vol. 27, Issue 22, Page 10

k9sasha on holistic teaching
Teacher YOU Training Institute

trouble in paradise

uh-oh

Remember the mom who wrote about her 5th grade daughter entering KIPP?

Now she's going to meetings, emailing the Board, and finding teachers weeping in bathrooms:

Thanks for all your support on my ongoing KIPP struggle. The struggle continues, really nothing new to report, other than there are now 12 of 18 teachers who will not be coming back next year. I'm waiting for one of the Board members to get back in town and hopefully respond to some of my concerns. Reading your comments definitely helps me keep my determination to keep fighting. Thank you.

So I went tonight to the KIPP meeting after all. I wasn't going to go. I was going to give myself the night off. I was going to spend the time with my Riley, while Sylvia's still away on her field trip. We were going to have a quiet evening at home.

Wouldn't you know, Riley said she wanted to go. My 7-year-old daughter wanted to spend her evening in a Board meeting. I've corrupted my child!

So we went. I did learn some things. But, unfortunately, not many of them were encouraging. I'm Chicken Little. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs that the sky is falling, and while they listen (and don't laugh), I don't feel like they hear me.

I just made one more effort, one more attempt. I wrote a 1,240-word email. And somehow that's not enough. Once that was done, all I wanted to do was blog. No wonder my 7-year-old is corrupted; I'm seriously disturbed.

I haven't eaten dinner these last 2 nights. I've been in meetings, and when I get home, my appetite has been thoroughly drained. I'm tired, but I can't sleep.

Tonight, I'm having some wine to go w/ my whine. I may have to qualify this as a BUI post.

So here's my main concern. Because screw it, I'm putting it out there.

I have no confidence in the woman who has been hired to replace our Principal. I don't feel like she gives a crap about our concerns. She's treated the teachers poorly. As of tonight, 2 of them still don't know if they have a job next year! As of tonight, 9 out of 18 teachers will not be returning next year. After tomorrow, that number could rise to 10. I personally know only 2 teachers that are returning next year, and only one of them will be my daughter's. I think.

I don't know what the changes will be in the curriculum. I've heard that some subjects will be combined, but when my daughter's in school for nearly 10 hours a day, I don't see the need. Nor do I know what she will be doing in the times she used to take certain classes.

I don't like the sound of some subjects will be combined.

That is a directive straight from the BLOB.

The edu-world's blind faith in wholeism really is something. Here's a typical Statement of Core Belief:

We decided to create a unit plan on ocean animals for many reasons. One reason is the fact that children could have a lot of fun learning this information. It is a topic that sparks a child’s interest and makes them want to learn more. Children need to learn more about ocean life and how that ocean life relates to us. Because the loss of life in the ocean can and will affect everyone in the world it is important for the children to have a general understanding of the life that lives in the ocean, even if they do not live near the ocean.

In addition, this theme is being taught in many schools today and we felt that it was important for us as future teachers to understand that there are many subjects that could be taught using this general theme. The ideas using this theme are endless. Teachers should understand that children will feel that what they learn is important if it is relevant. Teaching subjects in isolation leaves the children feeling disconnected and bored with learning in general. Learning by using themes is a way to add some creativity and enjoyment to learning subjects. Students need to be actively learning and doing in order to grasp the concepts involved. These hands on activities will get the students involved and thinking critically about animals on land as well as those who live in the ocean.

Needless to say, this is not what is typically meant by "coherence." This teacher's Thematic Unit on Ocean Animals springs out of nowhere. It doesn't follow logically from what has come before, nor does it lead logically to what will come after. It simply appears, full-blown, sprung from the brain of Zeus.

Behold, children!

A thematic unit on ocean animals!

We have the universities to thank for this, I think. They got caught up in an interdisciplinary quest a while back, leading to the proliferation of programs ending in the word "Studies." Cultural studies was pretty much the apotheosis of interdisciplinarity, and we know how that turned out.

Interdisciplinarity at the college level is now a selling point in college promotion materials, and continues to have its adherents. (warning: If Robert Sternberg has his way, the middle school model will be coming to a college near you).

There are any number of problems with interdisciplinarity, all of which, for our purposes, can probably be boiled down to the observation that interdisciplinarity doesn't work:

For nearly a decade, I regularly start the semester by asking students in my upper-level interdisciplinary general studies seminar what distinguishes the sciences, social sciences, and humanities from one another. ... [F]ew can offer more than vague ideas of how they differ. Most can identify disciplines that typically fall under the sciences; the majority can situate psychology and sociology in the social sciences, but further categorization of disciplines eludes many of them, as do other distinctions about these areas of the liberal arts such as hallmark methodologies and primary objects of study.

Having significant exposure to disciplines in the liberal arts in conjunction with a primary area of study is a distinctive feature of higher education in the United States. Every spring and fall for at least four years, students throughout the country have to consider fulfilling general education requirements in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. But, for many, maybe most, their general education courses are blank slots to be filled by brief conscripted voyages into less familiar disciplinary waters. They graduate more well rounded, with more breadth of content, not just depth, but few leave with a conscious understanding of how scholarly inquiry is conducted outside of their major and how inquiry in the liberal arts illuminates timeless questions and pressing concerns of humankind. As undergraduates accept their diplomas and exit the stage, they leave with an inchoate awareness of what they have been a part of.

In teaching upper-level interdisciplinary general studies seminars I also have observed that my soon-to-be-graduates struggle mightily when they engage in scholarly thinking themselves. Specifically, they have difficulty forming an intellectual thesis that goes beyond the obvious and supporting it with scholarly evidence, a formidable task. When writing papers or giving presentations, the majority of students unwittingly inhabit the lower realms of epistemological taxonomies. To situate their position in terms of two well-established schemas of educational development, my students are generally more comfortable being asked to recall and comprehend knowledge, the first rungs in Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956), as opposed to being asked to apply, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate knowledge, the higher end of this taxonomy....

Fortunately, students are called upon to reach these upper realms of thought in their major discipline, perhaps many times but particularly in capstone courses, such as senior seminars. The challenge is to do likewise in a capstone general studies course, particularly when such a course is interdisciplinary. However, the extent to which undergraduates can engage in, not simply learn about, interdisciplinarity is uncertain. Some academics who contemplate pedagogical issues, including Howard Gardner, renowned Harvard professor of cognition and education, wonder whether students in undergraduate education have enough disciplinary knowledge to do genuine interdisciplinary thinking (2006, p. 73). In his recent book, Five Minds for the Future, Gardner considers:

"And what of genuine interdisciplinary thought? I consider it a relatively rare achievement, one that awaits mastery of at least the central components of two or more disciplines. In nearly all cases, such an achievement is unlikely before an individual has completed advanced studies" (p. 77).

"Interdisciplinary" courses in middle school aren't interdisciplinary.

Thematic teaching isn't interdisciplinary.

The only people who can actually do interdisciplinary projects -- let alone interdisciplinary teaching -- are people who are expert in more than one discipline, and there are about five people like that on the planet:

We have an enduring fantasy of a grand, unified theory of knowledge in which each discipline contributes building blocks to a seamless edifice. How can we know the ways we are unified if we don't talk to one another?

What we see in practice, however, when broad categories like the sciences, humanities, and social sciences are supposedly bridged, are a lot of courses on "Women and Health" or "Shakespeare and Art." Those are billed as interdisciplinary, and they are if you consider that an English professor who has some interest in visual arts is teaching the latter or a historian who has read about the history of medicine is teaching the former. But such courses aren't really interdisciplinary because both are taught by people trained in one discipline who are essentially amateurs in the other.

Can one person ever be a master of two trades? A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but a lot of knowledge can be even more dangerous. Careering off in varying directions isn't what our current educational system is about. After all, it takes a lifetime to learn a single discipline. In English, for example, to be expert you have to read a vast body of literature over a long period of time. If a physicist decides to teach an interdisciplinary course on literature and cosmology, will she really be proficient in both fields? Or if I decide to venture into medicine or science, will I have the training of a scientist or a physician? Obviously not.

A Grand Unified Theory of Interdisciplinarity
by Lennard J. Davis
Chronicle of Higher Education
June 8, 2007

These voices will not be heard. Even Howard Gardner, a man who has now written an entire book arguing that K-12 schools should devote themselves to teaching the disciplines, not the interdisciplines, will not be heard.

nope

Instead, we'll be hearing from the likes of Tom Friedman and Daniel Pink:

Pink: Once again, it goes back to integration. Or what I’ve called symphony, which is the ability to fit the pieces together.

Friedman: Absolutely. My friend Rob Watson — a great environmentalist who founded the LEED building concept — Rob likes to say that integration is the new specialty. The generalist is really going to come back. The great generalist — someone who has a renaissance view of the world — is more likely to spark an innovation than the pure engineer.

Pink: Let’s take this to the people who are reading this interview — school superintendents and administrators. Right now we frog-march kids from math to science to English — and too rarely make the connections among the disciplines. In your travels have you seen any examples of a smarter approach?

Friedman: I’ll give you one of my favorite examples: Rainforest Math. There’s so much one can learn from the laws of nature — not just biology, but Einstein, Newton, physics. And you drive both environmentalism and you drive math. So it’s those kinds of intersections that are going to produce the most innovative students.

Pink: So how do we bring that into the system? There’s team teaching, integrating the arts into the curriculum, writing across subject areas. What else?

Friedman: I think you’ve got to force it a little like Georgia Tech did and say: “You are going to study computing, and you are going to study screenwriting.” Then the assignment in the class is: Write an online play with what you’ve learned.

Pink: That makes sense. Instruction in the subject matter areas, but then leave the execution to the students. And give them a fair amount of autonomy along the way.

Friedman: Right. The assignment can be: “Mash these two together.”

Pink: And these kids get mash-ups.

Friedman: Oh, they get mash-ups. They do it naturally. And today, he who mashes best will mash most and be wealthiest.

Pink: Which country is the best masher on the planet?

Friedman: Oh, we are still. It’s not even close.

Tom Friedman on Education in the 'Flat world'
The School Administrator
February 2008

Tom and I see eye to eye on that one. When it comes to mashing up the liberal arts disciplines, American public schools lead the parade.

comments on "Knowledge School"

original post: what do parents want?

from Paul B.:

All of these isolated success stories seem to have a common thread. Kids go at different (appropriate) speeds. Kids have clear goals. Kids are measured against those goals. The teaching is directed. The focus is restricted to academic excellence not extracurricular social reengineering.

Makes me go hmmmmmm?

Note the technology creeping into this Swedish example. I'd bet that Kunskapsporten is a DI engine. I'd bet that kids are being taught in their 'zone'. Betcha' can make money at this on the $153K per teacher being spent in the U.S. of A.

from Allison:

It does definitely sound like Paul's model for technology that adjusts to rates, and it definitely sounds like they have some actual instruction behind it. I wish we could see the courses, to know what the instruction consists of, and what the assessment looks like. Anyone know anyone in Sweden?

le radical galoisien:

This looks promising -- but of course I want to know how these students compare with other students who aren't in the voucher programme.

former KS student:

Kunskapsskolan has a demo on its Swedish website, where you can at least get a feel for what the portal looks like:

As for results, statistics from 2007 show that Kunskapsskolan performs significantly better than the national average in English and Swedish. 2008 figures are expected to show a similar advantage in Maths as well.

Thank you, former KS student! (tell us more, if you have time)


Ben Calvin:

I assume something's been lost in translation with the "better to do things the same way than to do them well" line ?

I don't think so. It's a pretty common statement when talking about standardizing anything. If you do something the same way, you know how it's being done. There may be a better way, but it needs to be implemented across the board, and not just one person (or teacher) doing something different than what the system assumes.

I went to the Sports Orientation Night at C's new school last week.

wow

We are entering a different world. It's as if we're shipping C. off to Hogwarts. The new school feels magical, and I call myself blessed that my Muggle child will be allowed to attend.

I bring this up here because of Paul's comment about social re-engineering.

At the moment, I suspect that great schools often do have an element of "social engineering," or something akin to it, but I don't know how to describe what they do.

The Sports Orientation Night was all about character & culture. You ktm-ers will love this: "We play to win." That is a Major School Value. "We play to win, but academics come first." I must have heard that about 10 times over the course of 45 minutes.

I suspect that really good schools have a mission.

A new friend of mine, here in town, sent an email a while back saying that the more closely involved with religion a school is, the better that school will be. What he meant wasn't that good schools are churches. He meant that schools run by churches are better than schools not run by churches.

I had never heard that before. Never heard it; never thought it, although I did know something about the research on urban Catholic schools.

Nevertheless, his observation made immediate sense.

Why?

Because a school run by a church is likely to have a mission.

John (Ratey) used to talk about that all the time. Kids need a mission, he said. Parents, too. Everybody needs a mission.

Well, parochial schools have a mission. By definition. So do KIPP schools. So do many of the new urban charter schools. With public schools, it's harder. There are so many constraints on a public school, so many competing interests. I think a public school can have a mission - from afar, I would say that the schools Karen H's kids have attended have a mission. (The Race Between Technology and Education explains why, btw.)

And, of course, within any public school you always find teachers who have a mission.

But a teacher with a personal mission is different from an institution with a mission.

The school mission seems always to involve character and culture, but that's about as far as I've gotten with this line of thought.


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

algebra in 8th

I first got going with all this math folderol when I discovered, in the pages of Wayne Wickelgren's Math Coach, that algebra-in-8th-grade is standard in Europe and Asia. That was a revelation. I had thought algebra-in-9th-grade was the natural order of things, if I thought about it at all. Which I didn't.

I had no idea algebra-in-8th meant no-calculus-in-9th, a fact my district did not call to my attention when they tracked C. into "Phase 3" math back in the 3rd grade.

Fortunately, I figured it out for myself in June 2004.

Here we are, 4 years later, and C. is completing algebra in 8th grade, many thanks to all you ktm regulars. (How do kids who don't have blog collectives helping them with homework do it?)

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is waking up to the fact that American kids are on the slow-track algebra-wise, thanks in part to the National Mathematics Advisory Panel report, which states bluntly that: More students should be prepared for and offered an authentic algebra course at Grade 8.

Apparently, there are school districts out there taking this injunction seriously:

The notion that students can master high school algebra before high school is relatively new, said Francis "Skip" Fennell, an education professor at McDaniel College in Westminster, Md., who is past president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The share of students completing the course in middle school nationwide has gone from next to nothing a generation ago to about 25 percent in the late 1990s to about 40 percent today.^*

In my district (per pupil funding $25,000), the figure stands at approximately 30%, and it would be far lower if the district had its way. When C. was in 5th grade, the middle school succeeded in whittling enrollment down from the approximately 35% who were taking it at that time to today's 30%. The next fall, when C. entered 6th grade, the middle school principal told Ed and me he hoped to get rid of the accelerated course altogether; last year the new middle school principal tried to scuttle it but failed.

The district was successful in slowing the progress of kids in grades K-5. Math Trailblazers came in and acceleration went out. Gifted children were particularly hard hit. The accelerated track was gone and the regular track was far slower than it had been. Trailblazers teaches many topics a full year later than they had been taught prior to the Trailblazers era.

If this WAPO story is accurate, affluent American kids are "thriving" in the international track, while poor and minority students are having a harder time of it. Somebody should talk to KIPP, where 80% of 8th graders pass Regents Math A.

I read a story like this and feel as if I'm living in a bubble. Elsewhere in the country, at least some school districts are working to move teachers and students onto the international track. Here, with per pupil spending rising to $25,000 and median household income somewhere in the neighborhood of $100K, putting students on par with their peers in Europe and Asia isn't even a topic for discussion.

Instead, it's the middle school model; it's character education; it's Project Lead the Way.


^* How many of these courses are authentic algebra, it's hard to know.

a KIPP parent describes her daughter's school

by April McCaffrey

I am now a proud parent of a KIPPster and straight-A student. I am more involved in my daughter’s school than I ever have been before. KIPP, which stands for Knowledge is Power Program, understands how to truly work together as a team, and the program emphasizes the capabilities of our children.

[snip]

I knew right away that KIPP was right for us. Within 3 weeks, I saw a difference in my daughter, Sylvia. Prior to KIPP, she’d been an average student. She was a slow in understanding math concepts and not a great test-taker. I was forever frustrated by her old school’s fast pace and was told that Sylvia needed to learn much more quickly. Although she would score 100% on reading comprehension, the number of words Sylvia could read per minute was below average. I had a difficult time prioritizing the speed over understanding. Sylvia found relief from her difficulties with fractions only when the class moved on to another subject. The schools were so focused on end-of-the-year standardized testing that my sensitive daughter began losing sleep with worry. She was tired, stressed, and felt inadequate.

KIPP has changed how Sylvia feels about school and her ability to succeed by using a variety of learning methods including:

Longer school days. KIPP students begin school at 7:25 AM, and are released at 5 PM Monday through Thursday, with a half-day on Friday. Although that may seem like a long day, the additional time is a benefit to all. The teachers have more time to spend teaching their subjects, the students do not lose lunch or recess, and the extra-curricular activities, such as P.E., Technology, Art, and Music, are built into the curriculum.

Longer school year. KIPP students have 3 weeks of summer school. The teachers use that time to assess the students and divide them into classes according to their skill level.

It had never occurred to me that part of the reason for the long day wasn't (always) to catch kids up, but to give kids more time to learn --- !

And note: homogeneous grouping.

the Catholic schools of the 60s

Great, committed teacher/adviser/mentors, high standards, a focused curriculum, a culture of achievement, and plenty of hard work by students well aware that real consequences attach to their performance--what more does a successful school need? Yes, I'm talking about the Knowledge Is Power Program and Amistad, the Academy of the Pacific Rim and Stuyvesant, and others of today's super-schools. But I'm also talking about the Catholic schools of the 1960s and my own time at Phillips Exeter Academy, where by senior year I was awakening at 3 a.m. to study. It paid off, for me and lots of others. (I was able to skip my freshman year at Harvard.) But it was sink or swim--and those who treaded water were sometimes invited not to return for the next semester.

Lessons Learned

Are the Catholic schools of the 60s definitely gone?

Do we know?

"you won't be able to maintain a B average"

C's friends told me yesterday that, towards the end of last school year, Ms. K told their Phase 4 class^* that some of them wouldn't be staying in accelerated math in high school, because they "wouldn't be able to maintain a B average" in 8th grade algebra this year.

C's friends came away with the impression she was telling them they were bad students. They should "face facts."

Regardless of what she had in mind making this statement, the message the students got was: a significant number of you -- enough for me to bring it up in class -- won't be able to do algebra 1 next year.

You can't do it.

Well, she's probably right. After two years in her class my own child can't tell me what 10% off a price is,^** so where are we on algebra?

My experience is not unique, as I've mentioned on innumerable occasions in the past. A friend of mine, last year, whose son was in the 8th grade algebra class, asked her son to figure a 10% tip on a pizza delivery. He couldn't do it. Even with pencil & paper, he couldn't do it. He had no idea how to go about figuring 10% of a dollar amount -- and this kid hadn't had Ms. K for 2 years running as C's group has. He had spent one year with the erstwhile chair of the department, the legendary middle school math teacher who has retired and is now charging $80/hr (I believe) to tutor IMS students in math.


compare and contrast

Irvington Middle School has approximately 150 students per class.

We have 2 classes of 8th graders taking algebra this year, perhaps 40 students in all. 27% of the class

All of these kids tested into the program. For many, many years I've been hearing about "pushy parents" who get their children into Phase 4 when "they don't belong."

That's not the case here. These kids passed a difficult entrance exam and were recommended for the course by their teachers. The entire student body ought to "belong" in algebra in 8th grade as far as I'm concerned, but these kids definitely belong.

Apparently, after 2 years in the middle school accelerated math program, their ability to master algebra in 8th grade has declined.

Which brings me to KIPP.

How many 8th graders at the KIPP Academy will pass the Regents Math A exam at the end of this school year?

80%

25% of Irvington Middle School students master algebra in 8th grade, per pupil spending $21,000

80% of KIPP students master algebra in 8th grade, per pupil spending roughly $10,000

Speaking of KIPP, Here's David Levin:

And also what’s amazing is, our kids come in in fifth grade and we start with the time tables. We start with basic addition and subtraction and the eighth grade, all of our kids are learning algebra one. Last year [2003], 80 percent of our eighth graders passed the high school level exit exam in math here in New York, the Regents, the math A (ph). Eighty percent of our eighth graders passed the high school level exam, exit exam and less than 40 percent of our kids who are coming in in fifth grade on level. So it’s really, really exciting to see how this works.

We're running at about $9,900 per student, which is about $500, $600 less than what the Department of Education spends in New York City for middle school students. And part of what we try to do at KIPP is all the "buts" in education -- you know, but you can't do it with these kids, but you can't do it with this money, but you can't do it in this neighborhood, but you can't do it with this size class -- we're trying to take away all those "buts" in our schools. So you know, we're doing it with class size of over 30. We're doing it with the kids who, you know, traditional public schools may not have been successful with. And we're doing it with the same amount or less than the regular public schools.
Source: Interview, David Levin, Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Co-Founder
December 12, 2004 C-Span

^* accelerated math, 7th grade
^** At least, he couldn't tell me at the beginning of the summer. Now he can.


middle school cuts number of students in Phase 4 (2005)
Doug Sundseth's IMS-KIPP graphic