Miller presents past research showing that, during the school year, low- and high-SES students make similar progress on standardized tests. Between spring and fall, however, the scores of low-SES students either level off or decline, while those of high-SES students continue to rise. Research by Alexander and colleagues confirms this trend. Tracking 325 Baltimore students, they found that high-SES students gained a cumulative 47 points on reading test scores during the summer, while their low-SES counterparts lost 2 points.
We talked about "summer regression" at the old site (summer brain drain, summer reading question, time costs of spiralling curricula)
Reading Fordham's summary of the new research, I feel I'm watching a re-run. Maybe that's unfair, but isn't this the usual correlation equals cause-type reasoning that leads to busing and 5 gazillion initiatives to increase parental involvement in the schools?
Or am I missing something?
It seems to me that the common theme running throughout these studies is that middle class parents are doing a very large amount of incidental and not-so-incidental teaching of their kids - and that schools are failing to "disaggregate the data" concerning the parent contribution.
I think I've mentioned that this was a bit of a moment when we met with the new assistant superintendent who, as I've also mentioned, intends to use classroom and test data to drive instructional decisionmaking. ["drive instructional decisionmaking"?? I may be reading slightly too much Ed Week....]
I like most-to-all of her ideas, but she has a blind spot on the subject of tutoring. She herself hired a math tutor for her son when he was in high school, and she sees this as normal.
Of course, hiring math tutors - hiring tutors of all kinds in all subjects - has certainly become normal. It's the new normal. But that's the problem.
Even if you decide that you're going to have a public school system in which parents do a great deal of preteaching, reteaching, and tutor-hiring, you need to know what parents are doing if you're going to have data-driven decisionmaking.
Data is useless if you leave out major variables.
If an English teacher sends home a writing assignment that's over the students' heads, but a mostly-OK set of papers results because parents have walked their kids through the composition step by step, teachers aren't getting correct feedback on the assignment.
The data is going to tell you the assignment worked, when what worked was parents breaking the assignment down into component parts and teaching each part separately.
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Beyond this, why am I reading about summer camp?
Miller quotes an NCES study, for instance, which found that "42.5 percent of children in high-income households attended camp the summer after kindergarten, compared with just 5.4 percent of children in low-income" families.
Are these researchers suggesting that middle class kids routinely gain 47 points on reading tests at camp?
(How much is 47 points, anyway? How many points did kids gain during the school year? I may have to see if Ed can get a copy of the article...)
If summer camps run by distracted teenagers are producing major gains in reading, maybe we need some studies of the super-effective teaching methods known only to 18 year old, untrained college kids.
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Speaking of camp, C. and I played hooky Wednesday (though, as C. pointed out, you can't really play hooky from camp) and went to the city to see Summercamp!
You must see it.
Summercamp! is a laugh-cry-embrace-life sort of movie; I don't think I've cried so much in a movie theater since seeing Forrest Gump two weeks after giving birth to twins. [for newbies: my oldest son Jimmy, who was then age 7, is autistic]
An incredible movie - beautiful. There's no crying 'til the very end, and even then it's good crying. I promise.
from the NY Sun review:
In the summer of 2003, filmmakers Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price joined forces to tackle a documentary subject of almost unbearably powerful emotions and compulsively watchable conflict: a season at a Midwestern sleepover camp.
[snip]
The film's two stars are Holly, a charismatically energetic and wistful girl, and Cameron, an overweight kid with an unusual flair for challenging counselors' patience and making enemies among his peers.
[snip]
Holly and Cameron "are our main characters because they related more to adults and adult-type issues and they didn't have a whole lot of friends within their cabins," Mr. Beesley said.
[snip]
Something else the filmmakers discovered was how much prescription medication has permeated children's lives. "There was this group of kids going to the nurse's office every night," Ms. Price said. "It took us a few days to catch on to what was going on." Per their parent's wishes, campers diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and other behavioral maladies were reporting to receive their prescribed meds. Images in "Summercamp!" of what appear to be perfectly healthy children lining up to swallow pills like the mental patients in "One Flew Over the Cuckcoo's Nest" are disturbing; at the same time, a scene in which one boy flirts with a girl by bragging about the magnitude of his ADD is hilarious.
[snip]
"Summercamp!" also doggedly follows Cameron down a road of trials littered with obstacles of the boy's own devising. Cameron has an unfortunate genius for clumsily rebellious behavior; witnessing his steady failures and occasional triumphs will likely empower the inner outcast in anyone. "We're watching two kids go through growing pains and be open enough about it to sort of let us discover and experience it while they do," Ms. Price said.
Pure pleasure.
Just a note, I believe Fordham reviewed a book about this but didn't do the research.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there are some serious methodology concerns with the summer learning loss. Most of the studies test children at the beginning of, say, third grade with a test. And then the students take the same test at the end of third grade. At the beginning of fourth grade they take a different test.
Inevitably they do poorly on the fall test, and researchers say this is because of summer learning loss.
But....there is also research showing that overall students do better on a test when they take it a second time, as they did in third grade.
And...I don't think anyone has ever looked at the difficulty of, say, the third grade test and the fourth grade test. If the end of year third grade is much less difficult than the fourth grade test, well of course students perform poorly on the fall test. It's an artifact of testing, not the result of summer learning loss.
I've not seen an explanation that includes data about the tests used, and how researchers controlled for these test form changes from grade to grade. Until I do, I'm not sure how dramatic summer learning loss may be.
Hey!
ReplyDeleteMy God, she's everywhere.
My God, she's everywhere.
ReplyDeleteI assume you mean the person going to cali this weekend, and not Jenny D. And yes, this person is obviously keying in to summer achievement by telling us how we can close the income gap. Very useful! I think it's working at a Kumon Center; I'll check it out and let you know. Stay tuned.
I could use some summer cash!
ReplyDeleteThe movie sounds good, too.
Most of the studies test children at the beginning of, say, third grade with a test. And then the students take the same test at the end of third grade. At the beginning of fourth grade they take a different test.
ReplyDeleteIf this is how they are demonstrating/measuring summer learning loss, they we can't conclude *anything* :-(.
Plus, I'd be surprised if the 4th grade test wasn't harder than the 3rd grade test. It is pretty obvious that the test is being used to see how much the students learned in the given grade. Since they should learn more in 4th grade than in 3rd grade, the test should be harder (unless the school gives the same test to all grades ... which has some nice properties, but also some not-nice properties and I bet that this is not what they do).
-Mark Roulo
SPED kids - the severe ones, like mine - are entitled to summer school to "maintain" learning (i.e. so they don't come back to school in the fall having lost everything they've managed to learn the previous year).
ReplyDeleteSo...there's something to it.
The things I've seen (I think they're on the old site) led me to believe that math facts are especially vulnerable, whereas reading/vocabulary "sticks."
Engelmann is great on the subject of summer regression.
ReplyDeleteHe says it's an artifcat of not learning material to mastery, which I'm sure it is.
Speaking of Engelmann, I'm going Back to the Source.
ReplyDeleteThank God for Spotlight.