In the world of MOOCs, 2 + 2 is never 4

The statistical model found that measures of student effort trump all other variables tested for their relationships to student success, including demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter and student use of support services. The clearest predictor of passing a course is the number of problem sets a student submitted. The relationship between completion of problem sets and success is not linear; rather the positive effect increases dramatically after a certain baseline of effort has been made. Video Time, another measure of effort, was also found to have a strong positive relationship with passing, particularly for Stat 95 students. The report graphs these and other relationships between variables examined by the logistic-regression models and pass/fail.

While the regression analysis did not find a positive relationship between use of online support and positive outcomes, this should not be interpreted to mean that online support cannot increase student engagement and success. As students, Udacity service providers and faculty members explained, several factors complicated students’ ability to fully use the support services, including their limited online experience, their lack of awareness that these services were available and the difficulties they experienced interacting with some aspects of the online platform. It is thus the advice of the research team that additional investigations be conducted into the role that online and other support can play in the delivery of AOLE courses once the initial technical and other complications have been addressed.

Conclusion: The low pass rates in all courses should be considered in light of the fact that the project specifically targeted at-risk populations, including students who had failed Math 6L before Spring 2013 and groups demonstrated by other research to be less likely to succeed in an online environment. Previous studies (see Section 1) have found that these students do less well in online than in face-to-face courses. Further, student groups in at least one major study (Jaggars and Xu, 2013) who were found to experience the greatest negative effect from taking courses online share many of the characteristics found among the AOLE partner high school students in particular, a group with very low pass rates in Spring 2013.

Overall, much was learned during and from the first iteration of AOLE and improvements are already in progress in the second AOLE iteration. Perhaps most importantly, the faculty members who taught these courses, although they had to contend with major difficulties along the way, believe that the content that has been developed has tremendous potential to advance students’ critical thinking and problem solving abilities. One faculty member summed it up this way: "Udacity has brought to the table ways to make the courses more inquiry-based and added real life context."
PRELIMINARY SUMMARY SJSU+ AUGMENTED ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT PILOT PROJECT September 2013

Let's reprise.

• The clearest predictor of success in the course was the number of problem sets students completed. In other words, practice. 
• The online mentors, aka teachers-slash-tutors, didn't help. But they might have helped if students had a) had lots of internet experience (practice) & thus could figure out how to get to the mentors; b) known the online mentors existed; and c) been able to get the MOOC site to work.
• "Previous research" had found that weak students do better in face-to-face courses, so….SJSU opted to run a MOOC and fill it with weak students.
• "Most importantly," the teachers who taught the MOOCs think the "content" has "tremendous potential to advance students’ critical thinking and problem solving abilities."

Practice is what matters, so the instructors are focused on inquiry; weak students do badly in online courses, so the MOOC people put weak students in online courses; educational technology never works.

A person who lives in the world where two plus two equals four would be doing something else.

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

when things changed (vocabulary edition)

in the Wall Street Journal:

In the late 1970s I taught English grammar and literature in the 7th grade. I used the same literature book that my two daughters had used when they were students in the school only two years before. It included portions of books, single stories and poems written by authors including Carl Sandburg, Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Ernest Hemingway and Anne Frank. The themes were real life—loneliness, poverty, joy, broken homes, shame, pity. The first paragraph from one story included the words infatuated, distraction, periodicals and metaphorically speaking.

The next year the school was integrated with students bused in from downtown Columbus. These literature books were put in storage and replaced with short-story books about animals with human characteristics. Animals were used so that there were no blatant stereotypes of human beings, no hint of direct bias toward a group or idea.

I retrieved the former books, so sorry was I that these students could not also get lost in their incredible prose. But it was to no avail—so many words were unfamiliar to the students that there was no meaning to the sentences. OK, I tried reading the stories to the class. That lasted about a week. A whole class time could easily be used in delving into the background of one word to get the meaning.

And we wonder why students suffer from vocabulary inequality?

Lois Moor
Columbus, Ohio

Remember this?

Back in 1977, having watched SAT scores fall for 15 years, the College Board, which developed and administers the SAT, engaged a panel to try to identify the underlying causes of the decline. A first hypothesis to be checked was whether the test had somehow become more demanding. But, no, to the contrary, indications were that scoring had become more lenient. A second prominent hypothesis was that the decline was due to changes in the demographics of the test takers. Analyses shows this hypothesis to be largely correct, but only for a brief while. Over the early 1960s, changes in the composition of the tested population accounted for as much as three-quarters of the test score decline—and, no wonder, for during this period the number of students taking the SAT tripled. Over the 1970s, however, though the test-taking population stabilized, the scores did not. Instead, the decline continued, even steeper than before, while the extent to which it could be ascribed to demographic shifts shrank to 30 percent at most. Furthermore, the scores that dropped most were those of the strongest students, the students in the top 10 percent of their class; the scores of students toward the bottom of the distribution held steady or even increased.

Advancing Our Students' Language and Literacy: The Challenge of Complex Texts
by Marilyn Jager Adams
American Educator | Winter 2010 - 2011

AND SEE:
stop the multiverse, I want to get off

let them eat iPads

I've been talking to a teacher in Manhattan who seconds Barry's argument re: the destruction of education and the preservation of inequality via technology. The more 'technological' the school, she says, the worse it is, especially when the word 'technology' and/or its synonyms appear in the school's name.

She told me about a school so bad the city was going to close it and then re-open it as the Creative Digital Minds High School. (Of course, the original name appears to have been High School of Graphic Communication Arts, which isn't a whole lot better. Although the phrase "graphic communication arts" does signal, to me, an actual skill.)

Apparently the closing-and-reopening scheme is on hold for the time being.

I think somebody should start a brand new school & call it Old School.

Chart of proposed name changes for 24 struggling schools

Mumford High, RIP

A beautiful piece from Barry on The Destruction of Education and the Preservation of Inequity:

From the fall of 1964 through June 1967, I attended Mumford High School in Detroit.... My brother and sister also attended Mumford and graduated in 1962 and 1958. As I write this, Mumford is in the process of being demolished. The demolition is part of the $500 million Detroit Public Schools Capital Improvement Program started in 2009. Because of a shrinking student population, the state is in the process of shutting down almost half the schools in Detroit. The school district is attempting to sell the shut down schools for redevelopment, an effort that has earned over $10 million since 2009.

But although Mumford is being destroyed, a new version of the high school has been built on what had been the original Mumford’s athletic field. The new school cost $52 million to build, secured by a bond issue in a city where almost half of its schools have been shut down. From the web page for the new Mumford, it is described as a “LEED Silver Certified state-of-the-art facility and will offer academic core areas, a high-tech media center, modern science laboratories, a courtyard student quad, and a community health clinic.” Mumford is one of 15 schools that has been taken out of the Detroit Public School system and assigned to Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority–a statewide district set up for managing struggling schools. The new Mumford will open in the fall.

For those of us who grew up in a city that was at one time vibrant and had one of the best school systems in the country, it has been difficult to watch its decay.

[snip]

It is fairly easy to dismiss the decline of education in Detroit on its failing economy and its accompanying social ills and even for some to make sweeping accusations about the low cognitive ability of Detroit’s student population. But the decline of education is not limited to Detroit. It has been happening across the U.S. for quite some time, although not as catastrophically as in Detroit. The vision of education in this country for many decades has been education and equity for all. In fact, the history of the equity problems and their solutions in the U.S. has its parallels in the history of education in Detroit. It is a story of how the fight to eliminate inequity in education has actually increased it.

[snip]

During the period of the 50’s and early 60’s, Mumford had been one of the premier high schools in Detroit, competing with Cass Tech—a magnet school in the downtown area that had admission requirements—for the academic achievements of its students. Mumford was located in northwest Detroit which was a mix of working class, middle and upper middle class neighborhoods. Though predominantly Jewish, the northwest section was also home to upper middle class African Americans who attended Mumford (Graham; 1999).

[snip]

Mirel (1993) (an education professor at University of Michigan who has done much research in the history of the Detroit Public School system) points out that during the depression of the 30’s in Detroit as in the U.S as a whole, the push in education was to keep graduation rates steady and prevent drop outs. With the deficit of work, the thinking was that it was better to have young people in school than out with nothing to do. The general curriculum in Detroit at that time was experiencing a large number of failure rates. To keep the students off the streets, courses were made easier. “Descriptive” science courses were introduced in lieu of lab-based courses and focused on useful topics such as how vacuum cleaners worked. “Relevance” was the watchword just as “engagement” is now. Topics such as traffic safety were woven into classes such as civics, and schools offered courses in personal standards, focusing on topics such as diet, dress, etiquette and personal hygiene. Girls were offered courses on “Appearing to Advantage, “Homemaking”, “Use of Leisure Time” and “Bride and Trousseau”.

This pattern continued long past the depression, past World War II and into the 50’s and 60’s, during which time the influx of African Americans from the south into Detroit continued because of the well-paying factory jobs. Curricula in high schools had evolved into four different types: college-preparatory, vocational (e.g., plumbing, metal work, electrical, auto), trade-oriented (e.g., accounting, secretarial), and general.

[snip]

During the period of the 50’s and early 60’s, Mumford had been one of the premier high schools in Detroit, competing with Cass Tech—a magnet school in the downtown area that had admission requirements—for the academic achievements of its students. Mumford was located in northwest Detroit which was a mix of working class, middle and upper middle class neighborhoods. Though predominantly Jewish, the northwest section was also home to upper middle class African Americans who attended Mumford (Graham; 1999).

[snip]

Northwest Detroit started to experience the phenomenon of white flight starting in the late fifties. The flight began in the twenties, starting in a more central area of Detroit—an area that would be the site of the riots to occur in the summer of 1967—that had also been predominantly Jewish in the 20’s through the 40’s. The flight’s trajectory continued and by the 60’s included northwest Detroit where I was living, and would continue to the suburbs. The demographic of Mumford was changing as well. According to Mirel (1993), 22 percent of black students were in the general track by 1967 with whites making up only 2 percent of the general track despite it being one of the most academically oriented high schools in the city.

After graduation, most boys who were in the general and vocation tracks in Detroit were drafted and sent to Viet Nam. Boys in the college prep track who went on to college, on the other hand, were given a draft deferment status which students in the general and vocational tracks did not receive. The role of the draft policies at the time of Viet Nam played no small part in contributing to the recognition of inequity between white and blacks.

[snip]

The summer of 1967 brought the riots that ultimately escalated the white flight to the suburbs, and brought in its wake racial rifts from which some say Detroit has never recovered. In the years shortly following the riots, there were efforts to decentralize and desegregate schools—met with protest from the white communities that would be affected. A friend of mine attended Cooley High School (located a few miles away from Mumford). In 1968 he witnessed a race riot that occurred at the school in April of that year, shortly after Martin Luther King was assassinated. He described it as follows:

“It really was a travesty, particularly in that the kids fighting were the ones in tech programs, being streamed into Viet Nam. Cooley was half black, half white and a powder keg as long as I was there. I went back to visit a year after I graduated — the white exodus occurred and Cooley had become almost entirely black. Achievement was up, violence was down — it had transformed into a 50!s middle class school.”

My friend’s description is apt in a way that he may not have realized when he wrote it. To his eyes, achievement looked like it was on the rise as it did in many schools. Change had in fact come to Northern to address the protest of a few years back and it came to Cooley, Mumford and other predominantly black schools in Detroit. But the change came in the form of more “relevance”, focusing on black history, black culture, the arts, dance, and creative writing.

[snip]

The reforms in the Detroit schools were consistent with reforms brought about across the U.S. during the 60’s and 70’s, by the prevalent radical critics of schools at that time.... “Traditional” schooling was seen as an instrument of oppression and schools were recast in a new, “hipper” interpretation of what educational progressivism was supposed to be about. In moving away from the way things were, the education establishment’s goal was to restore equity to students rather than maintaining the tracking that created dividing lines between social class and race. The end product however was a merging of general track with college prep with the result that college prep was becoming student-centered and needs-based with lower standards, and less homework assigned. Classes such as Film Making and Cooking for Singles were offered, and requirements for English and History courses were reduced if not dropped. Social class and race were no longer a barrier for such classes as evidenced by the increasing numbers of white students who began taking them. With the requirements for graduation being diminished in the “general” track as a result of the student-centered fad, this track saw an increase in students from 12 percent in the late 60’s to 42 percent by the late 70’s. (Ravitch, 2003).

[snip]

Currently, high schools have an honors/AP track, and a general track. The general track consists of less rigorous courses and represents a lower level of education. Qualification for the honors/AP track starts before high school, and in elementary and middle schools, there is also a two-tier system. The higher tier (starting at about third grade) is the gifted and talented track. In general, this track provides teacher-directed traditional instruction at or above grade level. For students who do not qualify (and the criteria for qualifying vary, with differing definitions of what constitutes “giftedness”), they are placed in classes with students of varying abilities. As such, they are subjected to a one-size-fits-all curriculum that involves student-centered group activities, and project-oriented approaches to learning. This educational approach is guided by an undying faith led by the educational establishment that all we need to do is teach students how to learn, how to think critically and that facts and content are things they can look up (on Google) on a “just in time” basis whenever they really need to know. For many students, the approach is a guarantee that they will not be able to handle honors or AP courses in high school.

The elimination of inequity and tracking, therefore, has evolved to a two track system starting in lower grades and continuing on in high school. Those students not considered “smart enough for the gifted programs” are consigned to the lower track.

[snip]

In the meantime, there is a push for more technology in the schools, as if SmartBoards in every classroom and an iPad for every student is the answer. The tearing down of Mumford and the building of a state-of-the-art high school are indicative of what education has now become.

The complete article here.

dialect mismatch & the achievement gap

One current [research] focus is on the so-called "achievement gap," which refers to the lower achievement of poor and minority children in school, particularly in areas such as reading. We have begun a project that examines factors that affect African American children's early school achievement, funded by a significant seed grant from the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. This research is being conducted by Julie Washington and Jan Edwards (Comm Dis), David Kaplan (Ed Psych), Maryellen MacDonald, Jenny Saffran, and myself (Psychology), as well as several other faculty. The focus is on ways in which language background affects early school achievement. Most African American children speak the dialect termed African American English, whereas the language in the school is some version of "standard" (also called "mainstream") American English. This dialect mismatch has many effects on the African American child's school experience; it makes tasks such as learning to read literally more difficult than for children for whom there is no dialect mismatch. Our studies focus on young children's knowledge of the alternative dialects, factors that affect ability to switch between dialects, and ways that negative effects of the mismatch can be ameliorated. The idea is to provide supplementary language experiences early, when the child's plasticity for language is high. We can also use our computational models of reading to predict where dialect differences will interfere with progress, and how experience can be structured to improve performance.

Mark S. Seidenberg
Donald O. Hebb Professor
Hilldale Professor
Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Overview of Research

Seidenberg's "connectionist" model of language learning and grammar contradicts Chomsky:

[S]ince Chomsky's early work, knowledge of language has been equated with knowing a grammar. Many consequences followed from this initial assumption. For example, if the child's problem is to converge on the grammar of a language, then the problem does seem intractable unless there are innate constraints on the possible forms of grammar. What if we abandon the assumption that knowledge of language is represented as a grammar in favor of, say, neural networks, a more recently developed way of thinking about knowledge representation, learning, and processing? Do the same conclusions about the innateness of linguistic knowledge follow? The answer is: not at all.

Our goal, then, has been to articulate an alternative framework for thinking about the classic questions listed above. This is not easy: traditional grammarians have about a 40 year lead on us, and only a few linguists actually think the alternative approach will succeed. However, it's a very interesting moment in the study of language. For many years the study of language was dominating by theoretical linguistics, particularly syntax. More recently, there have been important insights coming from outside of traditional grammatical theory: from computational modeling, from studies of the brain bases of learning and neurodevelopment, from renewed interest in the statistical properties of language (which were ignored for many years following Chomsky's famous observations about the statistical triviality of sentences such as "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously").

Chomsky and his followers have always had their critics. However, there was never an alternative theory that could explain basic facts, such as how children acquire language under the conditions that they do. I think for the first time we have the major components of such a theory in hand. And they suggest the remarkable possibility that the standard conclusions about the nature of language and how it is acquired are just dead wrong. This would be an incredible turn of events, a major development in the intellectual history of the study of language.

That's why it's an interesting moment to be studying language.

publications

leafy

Last week’s speech by Mitt Romney, in which he presented his education reform plan to a group of Latino leaders in Washington, drew attention mainly because he criticized teachers’ unions and endorsed private school vouchers. But those points were perfectly predictable for a Republican candidate and not especially newsworthy.

But another part of his plan that potentially veers far from the usual conservative talking points received almost no attention: Mr. Romney would give poor students and those with disabilities the right to attend any public or charter school in their state.

Romney's School Surprise
By JAMES E. RYAN

So, first of all, this is a NONPARTISAN BLOG. (I mean it!)

Second: given what I've been dealing with here in the leafy suburbs, I experienced a moment of glee, reading this. A couple of them. No one's gonna be happy to hear that out here in the leafy suburbs---

Ed, on the other hand, was grumpy: "Obama could never get away with that!"

True.

... Mr. Romney’s proposal would target the real source of educational inequality in this country: school district boundaries, which wall off good school systems from failing ones. The grossest inequalities in educational opportunity today exist between school districts, not inside them.

White schools good, black schools bad: people take this as a given, and talk of busing is back. (Folks are really not gonna like talk of busing out here in the leafy suburbs, and, by the way, I agree.)

No one seems to understand what is actually happening inside suburban schools. Certainly no one seems to have absorbed the evidence that good teachers are everywhere:

...there was no relationship between a school’s demographics and its number of high- or low-performing teachers: 26 percent of math teachers serving the poorest of students had high scores, as did 27 percent of teachers of the wealthiest.
Teacher Quality Widely Diffused, Ratings Indicate By Fernanda Santos and Robert Gebeloff February 24, 2012

Mitt Romney can send urban kids to the suburbs; I hope he does.

But he better make sure they've got money for tutors.

News flash: my own extremely well-funded suburban school district is going to be implementing a rigorous and enriching 21st century curriculum.

The achievement gap: how our schools are working hard to make it go away

If you're concerned about achievement gaps of the sort recently reported on by the Times, you could either (re)instate rigorous, structured, direct instruction in line with the latest findings in cognitive science research, teaching each child in his or her Zone of Proximal Development, i.e., at his or her instructional level, with proper scaffolding, and furnishing each classroom with teachers who've mastered both their content areas and these best practices. Or you could:


I. Eliminate the ability of academically advanced students to get ahead in the classroom by:

1. implementing low level, one-size-fits-all instruction (for which there's no better model than Investigations math)

2. eliminating grade acceleration and individualized instruction

3. eliminating gifted programming or making it about time-consuming projects that supplement existing assignments rather about academic challenges that replace these assignments.

II. Reduce the ability of students to get ahead on their own time by:

1. assigning tons of homework of the low-ratio-of-learning-to-effort variety 

2. including massive summer projects and one-size-fits all reading lists.

III. Reduce the ability of grades to reflect achievement differences via"grade compression" and inflexible "rubrics" that:

1. employ subjective grading standards (elevating "creativity" and "engagement" over correct answers, clarity, articulateness, and solid analysis) 

2. take points off for unexplained answers, however correct 

3. give partial credit for "explained" incorrect answers 

4. keep the purely academic demands/expectations of assessments and assignments as low as possible 

4. minimize the opportunity for students to demonstrate work that exceeds those demands/expectations 

5. even if students find a way to demonstrably exceed expectations or go above and beyond academically, don't give them any extra points for it 

6. deploy "wild card" variables that partially randomize who gets what grade (e.g., trick questions; unclear directions; trivial requirements like including today's date on the title page of your report or using the word "I" in your science project abstract; rather than collecting homework, leaving it up to the students to turn it in and giving out zeroes for things not turned in on time) 

7. assign heterogeneous-ability group projects and give everyone in the group the same grade

IV. Reduce the ability of NCLB tests to reflect achievement differences, via:

1. low academic ceilings 

2. partial credit for explained incorrect answers; points off for unexplained correct answers (as above) 

3. wild card variables (as above)

V. Lobby colleges to pay less attention to high-ceiling standardized tests like the SATs and the Achievement Tests, and more attention to grades and "leadership" activities.



But then the next question becomes how to eliminate the growing achievement gap between U.S. students and those from other developed countries.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

Peter Meyer on MLK and education

beautiful

a good school is good for everyone

The report also included a finding that in every country surveyed, girls read better than boys — a gap that has widened since 2000. Also included was a finding that the best school systems are the most equitable — where students do well regardless of social background.
Western Nations React to Poor Education Results
By D.D. GUTTENPLAN
Published: December 8, 2010

I believe it.

Educated parents with the money to hire tutors can go a ways towards mitigating the effects of bad curricula and teaching.

I've seen that for years in my district.

I'm curious about the reading gap in countries with highly phonetic languages.

Closing the achievement gap: awarding points for diversity

From today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

Concerned that its top academic schools are not racially and economically diverse enough, Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman is proposing major changes in how students are admitted to them.

The plan would take admissions decisions away from principals and their committees, and select students for magnet and citywide admissions schools centrally, using a computerized system...

District officials suggest a 1000-point system, 600 points of which would be based on test scores and grades, according to the draft that was distributed to high school principals. Other factors woud include behavior and attendance, and, for the first time, 200 point for "diversity" as measured by the student's neighborhood or zip code and income level.

The proposal could upend a decades-old selection system for the magnet schools, long an educational refuge for the city's middle class where many powerful and influential leaders send their children.

According to John Frangipani, chief of schools operations:

District officers...want all neighborhoods and zip codes--from the richest to the poorest--to be fairly represented in magnet schools such as Masterman and Central, where student test scores are among the highest in the state.

As the Inquirer reports:

At Masterman last year, 28 percent of the students were black, compared with 60 percent districtwide. Whites made up 44 percent of the students, compared with 13 percent districtwide.

Districtwide, 76 percent come from low-income families, while at Masterman the number is 44 percent.

To ensure that this bold proposal works as well as its architects intend, I suggest the following additional measures:

1. A 20% wage tax surcharge on anyone who works in Philadelphia and moves his or her private residence outside the city limits.

2. A 20% tax on private school tuition.

3. Outlawing home schooling.

Curriculum for Democracy

I'm an unabashed fan of E.D Hirsch. Sol Stern does a tremendous job of summarizing Hirsh's contributions to the field of education in his article in the Autumn 2009 City Journal entitled E.D. Hirsh's Curriculum for Democracy. Stern follows Hirsh's academic path from chemistry student to Yale graduate school to English professor at the University of Virginia and finally his current status as a true education reformer. The article is worth reading in full. Here is what initially grabbed Hirsch's attention:

Though UVA’s admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”

The education establish has criticized him as elitist for years, but that's baloney.

Far from being elitist, [Hirsch] insists, cultural literacy is the path to educational equality and full citizenship for the nation’s minority groups. “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” Hirsch writes, and “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.”

I see Socrates

Niki Hayes sends a link:

When we consider constructivist teaching, or a constructivist approach to learning, what comes to mind? For me, I see Socrates standing not in the center, but to the side of his students.

I imagine him pondering their comments and questions, and carefully crafting questions of his own, which he contributes -- selectively. Most importantly, he doesn't lead, but follows the line of questioning of the students.

That's really what it's all about: being an questioner, an investigator side-by-side with your students. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have a solid lesson plan ready to go each day, but we should be ready -- and willing -- for the students to take the class into unchartered waters.

Let me give you an example from my own teaching experience. In an American Literature class I taught a while back, we had made our way through transcendentalism, stopping off at Henry Thoreau. Here, I had a few lessons on civil disobedience planned.

Day one, we watched a video excerpt on Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat...

[snip]

Then, the students began talking about racial profiling and wouldn't move on.

[snip]

Mostly African-American and Latino, my [11th grade] students began sharing stories of racial profiling from their own lives, and the lives of their families and friends.

One thing leads to another, and 2 weeks later students hand in their culminating projects:

• "One group made a brochure titled, 'How to Protect Yourself When DWB (Driving While Black/Brown).'"
• "Another group created a presentation poster on the history and statistics of racial profiling"
• "[Teacher's] favorite project was an instructional video for police officers on how to build trust with the community."

Letting Go in the Classroom by Rebecca Alber 10/6/09

So I guess the entire class is filled with visual learners.

Funny.

You'd think there'd be a couple of verbal/linguistic types mixed in somewhere.

Guess not.


update:

TerriW leaves this comment:

At what point do you really need to stop calling something an "American Literature" class -- what percentage of the class should be, I dunno, American Lit?

I mean, at a certain point, you have to start calling it "cheese food" instead of cheese...

achievement gap in northern schools

from the Times:

Historically, the achievement gap between America’s black and white students was widest in Southern states, where the legacies of slavery and segregation were reflected in extremely low math and reading scores among poor African-American children.

But black students have made important gains in several Southern states over two decades, while in some Northern states, black achievement has improved more slowly than white achievement, or has even declined, according to a study of the black-white achievement gap released Tuesday by the Department of Education.

As a result, the nation’s widest black-white gaps are no longer seen in Southern states like Alabama or Mississippi, but rather in Northern and Midwestern states like Connecticut, Illinois, Nebraska and Wisconsin, according to the federal data.

[snip]

By 2007, the state with the widest black-white gap in the nation on the fourth-grade math test (not counting the District of Columbia) was not in the deep South, but in the Midwest — Wisconsin. White students there scored 250, slightly above the national average, but blacks scored 212, producing a 38-point achievement gap. That average score for black students in Wisconsin was lower than for blacks in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi or any other Southern state, and 10 points below the national average for black students, the study indicated.

Wisconsin was the only state in which the black-white achievement gap in 2007 was larger than the national average in the tests for fourth and eighth grades in both math and reading, according to the study.

Racial Gap in Testing Sees Shift by Region
By SAM DILLON
Published: July 14, 2009

This brings to mind the Times article on Balanced Literacy in Madison, WI.

However, I don't know whether southern schools are more likely to use explicit instruction than northern schools. Given redkudu's (& evil math teacher's) experiences, I wouldn't assume so.

Nevertheless, I've had a hypothesis for a while now that the closer you are to Columbia Teacher's College, the worse things are. (I see the entire state of California as being really close to Teacher's College.)

The truth is, I have no idea what to make of this finding.

Hiding in Plain Sight

On April 28th NAEP results for 2008 were released. Sam Dillon has an article in the NY Times where he uses these results to bludgeon NCLB for failing to close the black/white achievement gap.

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

The article provides some great graphs that show black/white children's scores for reading and math for the last 37 years. Interestingly, the graphs show steady improvements for both subjects and both demographics that Dillon ignores. James Taranto has a provocative response questioning whether Dillon would have been happier had the data shown static white achievement and increasing black achievement.

So minority kids are doing better than before. But because white kids are also doing better, and therefore the "gap" remains, the Times suggests the law is a failure. By this measure, it would have been better to pass a law that only benefits minorities than one that benefits everyone.

To be fair, closing the racial gap was one of the stated goals of No Child Left Behind. But what a strange, uncritical attitude the Times has toward the federal government when it reports with a straight face that the law is a failure because it seems to have helped children of all races, rather than observing that this calls into question whether the goal made any sense in the first place.

Ouch!

It made me think of a more problematic question. The graphs show a gap that's been pretty stubborn for 37 years and although the article was written to criticize NCLB as ineffective law since it hasn't closed the gap it was written to address, there's a bigger story here. The only significant gap reduction follows school desegregation and then, essentially nothing. In fact you could use the graphs to make a pretty good case that the last 37 years have seen nothing but improvement in math while in reading, NCLB seems to have reversed a bit of white decline and black stagnation. The real question to ponder here is why the gap seems immune to change.

You certainly can't claim there hasn't been a lot of effort expended in trying to close the gap. I would argue that much of the curricular turmoil of the last two generations is driven in large part by these very attempts. Federal and state involvement in local schools has also been accelerated by this effort. The evidence says that pushing on teacher quality, curriculum, administration, pedagogy, unions, pay, charters, vouchers, and everything else in the kitchen sink has accomplished little by way of closing the gap.

The gap represents about a three year difference in grade level. Could it be that having classrooms populated with kids exhibiting this gap, being fed a curriculum designed for the median student in the room is a problem? The one thing I've never seen addressed (except in very limited settings) is this curricular mismatch.

The graphics lay it out starkly. These are two completely different sets of kids. Three years difference is huge. Keeping them together in the name of racial equality or equal access is never going to close the gap. Everything we've done is piddling on the edges of a conflagration. If you really mean to close the gap then that educational goal has to stand in line ahead of our social goals until it's fixed, doesn't it?

Could it be that the slopes we see on these graphs are due to all the piddling around the edges while the gap is due to ignoring the obvious need to provide appropriate curricula? Could it be true that the shallow slope is an artifact of having an inappropriate mix in the classroom. And finally, would the slopes of both demographics improve with more appropriate placement?

Once a child is identified as being three years behind it shouldn't matter whether they are purple, from the planet Ork; they need placement that is appropriate to get them back on track. Anything less is just child abuse disguised as political correctness.

stagnation at the top - Fordham report
Tracking: Can It Benefit Low Achieving Children?
Linda Valli on tracking in 5 Catholic high schools, 1
Linda Valli on tracking in 5 Catholic high schools, 2
"school commitment" in Valli's study of tracking in Catholic high schools
7th grade depression starts in 1st grade

ability grouping in Singapore
characteristics of schools where SAT scores did not decline
The Other Crisis in American Education by Daniel Singal
Hiding in Plain Sight: grouping & the achievement gap
tracking: first random-assignment study

SAT equivalence tables
SAT I Individual Score Equivalents
SAT I Mean Score Equivalents

chickens have come home to roost
the deathless meme of the high performing school
Allison on the naturals

Middle-school Math Classes Are Key To Closing Racial Academic Achievement Gap

ScienceDaily (Apr. 22, 2009) — More challenging middle-school math classes and increased access to advanced courses in predominantly black urban high schools may be the key to closing the racial academic achievement gap, according to a University of Illinois study.


"Although we've poured a lot of money and resources into trying to reduce inequalities between black and white students, we've mainly focused on test scores and that hasn't been successful," said Christy Lleras, a U of I assistant professor of human and community development.

Why target middle-school math? Lleras said there's a feedback loop between math placement, student effort, and academic achievement.

"Over time, these three factors affect each other. Students who take more advanced math courses in middle school lengthen their lead over time, and the positive school-related behaviors developed in those advanced courses lead to even higher achievement.

"But the opposite is also true. Lower math placement in middle school significantly lowers a student's chances of getting into higher-level math courses in high school, which translates into fewer skills and behaviors and greater achievement gaps in high school," she said.

These gaps are largest in high-minority urban schools. "For kids in predominantly black urban schools, the biggest predictor of the math course they took in high school was the math course they took in eighth grade. For all other students, the biggest predictor was their prior achievement, not the course they took," she noted.

Lleras used data from the U.S. Department of Education's National Educational Longitudinal Study to follow the effects of math placement, school-related behaviors, and achievement in more than 6,500 public school students as they progressed from the eighth to the tenth grade.

Transcript data indicated the highest-level math course the student had taken at these levels. Math achievement was measured via tests given at the end of these school years. And engagement and effort were measured by teachers' evaluations of the student's attentiveness, disruptiveness, and homework habits.

Lleras believes that increased access to more advanced and rigorous math classes in high-minority urban schools can have a significant direct effect on all students' achievement and particularly that of African American students.

"Being in a classroom where the expectations are higher, the course work is more rigorous, and the climate is more academic has huge effects on student effort," she said.

Lleras worries that lower-performing schools will concentrate on teaching to the tests mandated by No Child Left Behind.

"Instead of focusing on test scores, we may be better able to affect educational trajectories by improving teacher quality and reducing class sizes, which helps to create school climates that foster both academic learning and student effort," she said.

Because racial achievement gaps were already significant by eighth grade, Lleras believes educators must begin to address gaps in achievement and opportunities to learn much earlier.

She argues that universal preschool and expansion of Head Start would go a long way toward reducing early racial inequalities because early-childhood programs tend to affect student-related attitudes and engagement more than achievement test scores.

"Children can't learn new material until they have the toolkit of skills and school-related behaviors to do so," she said.

"Then we have to make a sustained effort to keep these children learning over time. We need a persistent and additional effort to support urban minority students through tutoring programs and improved access to challenging material and high-quality teachers," she said.

"This study was a snapshot of three years in these kids' lives, and in just three years, they were falling farther and farther behind," she added.

The study was published in a recent issue of the American Educational Research Journal.

Extracurricular gifted programs threatened as well!

I've just learned that the principal has faulted our Continental Math League for "widening the achievement gap."

It's been suggested that, instead of running a math club for gifted students, I instead run one for struggling students.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but I tend to think that it's the school's job, not mine, to educate struggling students.

A first step for the school would be to follow in the footsteps of the following school districts and drop the Investigations math curriculum: Framingham (Massachusetts), Inner Grove, Little Falls, Staples-Motley, Stillwater, & Waconia (Minnesota), Columbia (Missouri), Fairport, Greece, Penfield, Pittsford, & Syracuse (New York), Lebanon, Painesville, Three Rivers, & Wickliffe (Ohio), Gervais, Sutherline, & Chariot (Oregon), Arlington, Bellevue, Clover Park, Eastmont, Lake Stevens, Oak Harbor, & Richland (Washington), Black River Falls, La Crosse, River Falls, & Superior (Wisconsin).

If the Powers that Be have the guts to do this, I will be so grateful that I may, indeed, be willing to sacrifice additional time in the name of math education.

The more likely resolution, I'm afraid, will be that--for all our enthusiastic support among math-starved math buffs and their parents--said Powers will not grant us permission to resume our Continental Math League next year.

The "Global Achievement Gap" muddle

An editorial by Sandra Stotsky, member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, reveals misrepresentation in the author's "study" of MIT graduates. He supposedly found that only a few MIT students mentioned anything "more than arithmetic, statistics and probability" as useful to their work.

It's a great read!

under the bus

from Paul:

My take on this is that kids come in normal distributions, i.e. they come to your classroom with a range of capabilities. In low SES districts the spread, the standard deviation, is quite large. I've had classrooms with kids ranging from 1 year above grade to 5 years below grade.

If you are in a failing district, like mine, you are blanketed with consultants, coaches (of which I am one), tight curriculum maps, walk throughs, and on and on. The sum total of this is that you're asking teachers to teach to a really narrow portion of a theoretical distribution while, at the same time, you are 'delivered' children with a 5-6 year span in abilities.

This means that if you follow the rules, and it's perilous not to, you are by definition throwing 80% of your class under the bus. Teachers adjust the curriculum to try to push as many of the distribution as possible through the eye of the needle. They teach to their median. So by definition 40% of your class is bored and 40% don't get it.

My district retention policy is "We don't have one!" Even if they had one there is no remediation program so the miniscule portion of students who are retained are put back into the very same classroom that failed them with the expectation that the second time through will be magic.

"Just stand right there in the middle of center field, Stan, and I'll hit you a few balls," says Ollie, as he proceeds to spray 60 balls at poor Stan; all at once and all over the outfield!

help! help!

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded a report on schools that had successfully raised the achievement of their students.

What was interesting about this report was that it included charts showing that as black students' scores rose, white students' scores rose, too. I was planning to do a screen grab of the charts....and now, instead of posting a screen grab, I'm spending hours of my life doing Spotlight & Google searches.

Any idea what report I'm talking about?

(And, yes, I have come to a sorry pass. If anyone should know what I'm talking about, it should be me. You would think.)

palisadesk on Ruby Payne & poverty

I wanted to get this comment from palisadesk up front:

I found Ruby Payne’s Framework book and articles to be worthy of discussion and very thought provoking, but also to be taken with a large dose of sodium chloride. Two egregious errors that infuse her work are overgeneralizing and reifying abstractions. She speaks of “children in poverty” and “people in poverty” as if poverty is a singular entity with clearly defined boundaries and a shared ecosystem. This is simply not the case.

There’s a big difference between, say, multi-generational urban poverty and the poverty of new immigrant families. There’s a big difference between rural poverty and urban poverty – even a big difference between the way the rural poor in agricultural communities see the world, and the way the non-urban poor in mountainous or northern communities view things. “Poverty” looks different in these varying situations, too.

Her over-simplistic characterization of a “culture of poverty” can be insidious. She has some important insights, but her overgeneralizing weakens their power and does indeed lead to the kind of stereotyping she deplores.

The viewpoints she represents as characteristic of "poverty" are amalgams at best. Even in an urban, low-income school community, we see “subcultures” where there is a strong future-time orientation, an emphasis on effort and achievement, minimal reliance on physical force to settle disagreements, etc. Different cultures exist within the larger group which Payne characterizes as “people in poverty.” Poverty is not a place, and it is (thankfully) often a temporary condition for families.

I had many insights while reading her book, and so am disappointed I can’t heartily recommend it because it goes well beyond available data and tends to perpetuate generalizations about groups of people. Her point about resources available to kids is extremely well-taken, however. I was in one school where the classrooms had no books, pencils, paper – nothing. The library was a joke (nothing new since 1954). Sure, we could teach kids how to read by writing words on the (battered and cracked) chalkboard, and photocopying stories from the public library, but really, nothing the teacher could do would compensate for the fact that there was NO way for the students to practice the skills taught and their environment – including their school environment – militated against it. There are schools like this in every large metropolitan area, I’m willing to bet. Schools where rats scurry around and buckets catch rainwater from leaking ceilings.

It doesn’t need to be an either/or situation – the precision teaching motto, “do both” is good advice here. We should endeavor both to provide the needed supports outside of school (medical care, decent housing, recreational opportunities etc.) for children and also concentrate on what we offer them in school in terms of solid instruction that will help them determine their own destiny. As things stand, schooling tends to widen the gap, rather than narrow it. We have not really come to grips with this.

My understanding of the situation is that our schools are widening the gap. True of black and, I assume, Hispanic children compared to white peers; true of white children compared to their peers in Europe and Asia.