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As one colleague once put it simply, in politically incorrect terms, "Smart kids do well on tests."
p. 126
...these critics usually miss the flip side of the coin: ignoring noneducational causes of variations in scores--that is, assuming that scores are a direct indication of school quality--lets some high-scoring schools off the hook. Some schools have high test scores because of the students they serve rather than the quality of the education they offer, but those who are convinced that scores most reflect educational quality consider them good schools regardless. My own children attended some of the highest-scoring schools in our state. They did indeed have some truly superb teachers, but they also had some mediocre ones and a few I thought should not have been allowed to teach at all, including one English teacher whose grammatical and vocabulary errors during parents' visiting day were so egregious that they sparked repeated and audible protests from the parents sitting in the back of the room. Test scores were nevertheless always high, a reflection in part of the very high education level in the community, which was full of attorneys, physicians, academics, economists, foreign diplomats, biomedical researchers, and the like...Not only did these parents provide--on average--environments highly conducive to academic achievement, but many also provided supplementary instruction, either by reteaching material themselves or by paying for the services of neighborhood tutoring firms.
A concrete example: when my son was in seventh grade, took a math class that was not well taught. (I went and watched, to confirm my hunch.) One evening he told me that he was confused by his math homework, which was part of an introduction to probability and statistics. I first tried to clarify the homework, but I soon realized that he was missing a few key notions. I asked him for his class materials, looked them over, and retaught him some of the core concepts, and after that he was able to handle the homework. I went back to the kitchen to clean up from dinner, but he soon called me upstairs again. He had just auditioned successfully for the school's jazz band, and he was having trouble counting out rhythms in the piece he was supposed to practice. I counted them out for him, but he still found them confusing (as I had too, many years earlier, when I first tried playing jazz). So I fetched my own horn and played the music at about half tempo while he counted it out. That worked. As I resumed scrubbing pots, my wife turned to me and said, "There you have it: social class differences in educational achievement."
[snip]
Disappointing scores can mask good instruction, and high scores can hide problems that need to be addressed.
p. 119-120
Fonts can shape reality in intangible ways, as Phil Renaud, a graphic designer from Phoenix, discovered when he studied the relationship between his grades and the fonts he used for his college papers. Papers set in Georgia, a less common font with serifs, generally received A’s while those rendered in Times Roman averaged B’s.
While he acknowledges that his study was very unscientific, he wanted to remind all high school graduates heading for college that an element of surprise is important. “You don’t want to fall into the same pattern that the professor sees on every new paper,” he said.
When Comic Sans Isn't Enough, Sites Help Create Custom Fonts
by Peter Wayner
NY Times June 26, 2008
Most economic theorists have embraced the principle that certain kinds of education--the three R's, vocational training, and higher education--equip a man to perform certain jobs or functions, or enable a man to perform a given function more effectively. The principle seems a sound one. Underlying it, perhaps, is the theory that education enhances one's ability to receive, decode, and understand information, and that information processing and interpretation is important for performing or learning to perform many jobs.
[snip]
We shall consider now the importance of education for a particular function requiring great adaptation to change. We then propose two models which these considerations suggest.
II. The Hypothesis
We suggest that, in a technologically progressive or dynamic economy, production management is a function requiring adaptation to change and that the more educated a manager is, the quicker will he be to introduce new techniques of production. To put the hypothesis simply, educated people make good innovators, so that education speeds the process of technological diffusion.
Evidence for this hypothesis can be found in the experience of United States agriculture. It is clear that the farmer with a relatively high level of education has tended to adopt productive innovations earlier than the farmer with relatively little education. We submit that this is because the greater education of the more educated farmer has increased his ability to understand and evaluate the information on new products and processes disseminated by the Department of Agriculture, the farm journals, the radio, seed and equipment companies, and so on. The better educated farmer is quicker to adopt profitable new processes and products since, for him, the expected payoff from innovation is likely to be greater and the risk likely to be smaller; for he is better able to discriminate between promising and unpromising ideas, and hence less likely to make mistakes. The less educated farmer, for whom the information in technical journals means less, is prudent to delay the introduction of a new technique until he has concrete evidence of its profitability, like the fact that his more educated friends have adopted the technique with success.
Investment in Humans, Technological Diffusion, and Economic Growth
Richard R. Nelson and Edmund S. Phelps
The American Economic Review, Vol. 56, No. 1/2, (Mar. 1, 1966), pp. 69-75
Suggestive evidence exists that the magnitude of the indirect effects of education on labor productivity is substantial. For example, firms and establishments with more educated workers have long been found to be earlier adopters of new technologies and have been shown recently to garner greater productivity benefits from information-technology investments.
The Race between Education and Technology
Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz
p. 41
The film depicts the Indian and Chinese students as well-rounded and having much more parental support than the Americans. For example, Rohit sings in an American-style rock band, and Hu is learning the violin. Rohit's parents and sister routinely help him with his physics homework....
U.S. Schools: Not That Bad
by Vivek Wadhwa
Business Week May 28, 2008
About 40 years ago I had the pleasure of spending a week in the upper Mekong River delta. My boat was working out of this little village that was basically a mud island covered with tall grass. The 'business' of the village was selling sticks retrieved from the river to villages down stream. Every morning all the men got into little canoes and went foraging all day for sticks.
While they were gone every single person in the village, down to and including infants still nursing, spent the day squatting in a big circle knocking the waterlogged bark off yesterday's sticks. It was fascinating to watch. I can still remember thinking, "I'm over here in this hell hole of a war and I'm the lucky one."
My second most often thought was, "If these poor bastards ever get an education, we're (U.S.A) screwed." Well, I think that's happened, figuratively at least.
While we spent my lifetime Guccing and Dioring our politically correct asses off, the rest of the world has been figuring out how to get the max out of their assets, all of them. I fear they are poised to eat our lunch and we still don't get it.
My kids have two and three pairs of sneaks; one for the hood, one for school, and one for gym. They have Xboxes at home and two free meals a day at school. They can't compete with the stick kids from the mud island.
I remember having a class conversation once about why knowing percentages and how to apply them was important to good shoppers. My class thought me a fool. They just hand over the EBT card (our welfare debit card) and don't worry about discounts. They truly didn't give a hoot about discounts.
I keep hoping for some kind of perfect storm to wake people up but my instincts tell me we have passed a tipping point where there's just not enough people that give a rip about this.
For kids to do better in math, their teachers might have to go back to school. Elementary-school teachers are poorly prepared by education schools to teach math, finds a study being released Thursday by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Math relies heavily on cumulative knowledge, making the early years critical.
The study by the nonpartisan research and advocacy group comes a few months after a federal panel reported that U.S. students have widespread difficulty with fractions, a problem that arises in elementary school and prevents kids from mastering more complicated topics like algebra later on
Author Julie Greenberg said education students should be taking courses that give them a deeper understanding of arithmetic and multiplication. She said the courses should explain how math concepts build upon each other and why certain ideas need to be emphasized in the classroom.
Teacher candidates know their multiplication tables, but "they don't come to us knowing why multiplication works the way it does," said Denise Mewborn, who heads the University of Georgia department of math and science education.
General Track students invariably reported spending less time on homework than did academic track students. One possible explanation for the discrepancy is that since General Track students take fewer courses, they have more study time during school hours to work on assignments. They might not be counting this worktime as "homework;' it is work they complete during school.
Though one might wonder about students saying they work as hard as they can when they apparently do so little homework, the urban context of their lives needs to be considered. As one teacher from St. Catherine's said
...I don't really get into making a point of finding out what their home environment is like because I'm afraid I'm going to feel so sorry for them that I'm not going to put the academic demands on them that I would for someone else.
The context of students' out-of-school lives in all probability made lengthy, concentrated homework time an impossibility.
At Murphy High School, students noted how committed teachers were to helping them learn. They mentioned teachers' availability for tutoring or individual help, and the benefit of small class sizes. Teachers noted the importance of "starting where the students are and going from there," of re-teaching material in different ways, and of making sure everyone understood the material before moving on. In some of the more basic classes in particular, teachers kept students accountable by giving quizzes almost daily. They also provided students with positive feedback on their papers, saying "negative comments don't work with our kids."
STUDENT ATTITUDES
There is considerable concern in the literature about the self-esteem effects of homogeneous grouping on the lowest achieving students. But the "low achievers" we interviewed spoke favorably about being in lower tracks and even remedial classes. A St. Catherine 9th grader was grateful for the opportunity to take remedial courses which would help her get better by giving her "a little bit of extra help." A senior concurred: "I like the fact that they place you, how can I say, with people on your own level so that you wouldn't feel bad that people would be better than you." Students did not think their five level curriculum caused divisions in the student body or stigmatized lower achieving students: "We don't put on any airs. You do your work."
All the students in the senior group at Central Catholic similarly agreed that their tracking system had worked well for them. There was no indication that Track 3 students felt deprived of a quality education or unfavorably labeled. As previously mentioned, students said they sometimes deliberately tried to keep their grades low to get placed down a track where they wouldn't have to work so hard. But the faculty, who knew their students quite well, were alert to these efforts. Faculty often told students they were being lazy and would have to suffer with their higher track placement.
Those Central Catholic students who were in Track 3 said they liked the idea of homogeneous grouping because they were in with students at their own level. They thought this made it possible for hem to do better, to understand the material more quickly, whereas they might be failing in a higher track. One third track sophomore said the system gave him incentive to try to get up to the second and then the first track.
[snip]
Measures of school efficacy and climate again reveal no significant differences by track. Students who identify themselves as general or academic track rate their schools equally high. These three schools are apparently very successful in helping students believe in their ability and in creating a pleasant learning atmosphere for all students.
In contrast to these homogeneously grouped classes, mixed ability classes were described as unfair. Students said such classes would inevitably make it harder for students to understand and that they might fail. They favorably contrasted their tracked high school classes to their mixed ability elementary school classes where they often felt left behind with few resources to catch up. In grade school, Track 3 students never had a chance to get A's. At Central Catholic they did. As one sophomore said, "In grade school...the only people that learn are those that are quick."
This preference of low-achieving students for homogeneously grouped classes supports Berliner's (1985) and others' contention that young people, especially lower social class children, need to be in academic settings which enable them to experience success. High success rate is an essential component of learning:
...the necessity for high success experiences for young students, where curriculum has been carefully matched to the student so that the student can suceed, seems to be the precursor for the development of a positive academic self-concept (Berliner 1985: 9).
From years of commitment to low-achieving students, the teachers at Murphy, St. Catherine, and Central Catholic were highly aware of this necessity. The teachers consciously strove to develop positive self-images. They regarded this deficiency rather than lac of academic ability to be th critical factor in students' learning problems. Students knew their teachers believed they could learn:
Murphy gives you an 'attitude' that helps you do well in school. If I had had the attitude for eight years at my elementary school that I do here it would have been different. My test scores would have been a little higher and I would have learned more. I think they try to give one self-confidence, that is in getting the student to believe that he can be successful if he prepares himself correctly (Bauch et al., 1985b: 5).
Nowhere did we hear teachers say, "I don't know how to reach this type of student." Teachers were perceived as caring, even as friends. Poor academic achievement performance was not held against students as long as they were trying. As one student said, "They really do care, you know. It's not that you do well, it's that you try....They won't fail a student if he's trying as hard as he can. That's not the job here to fail kids. They want them to learn."
Only mythical thinking can picture low-achieving students in non-ability grouped heterogeneous classrooms receiving the same instruction as their higher achieving peers. We know from years of research on teacher expectations that students for whom teachers have low expectations are given less time to answer teachers' questions, receive less praise for successful performance, have their work interrupted more, are smiled at less, and are seated further away from teachers (Berliner 1985; Proctor 1984).
Tracking: Can It Benefit Low Achieving Children?
Linda R. Valli
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association
(70th, San Francisco, CA, April 16-20, 1986)
p. 21-26
My interest in tracking was re-kindled during a field study of Catholic high schools. Acquaintance with the labeling and stratification literature (Page 1983; Rist 1970) made me highly skeptical of the capacity of a tracking system to serve any students except the most privileged. My own research in a basically untracked comprehensive public high school reinforced my conviction that only such an environmnt could provide maximum opportunity for students (Valli, 1986). I was totally unprepared for students' invariably positive evaluations of their schools' tracking systems.
I first attributed St. Catherine's students' comments to the hidden, individualized nature of the school's sorting process. Classes, not students, were given level numbers; the word track was never used. I presumed that the private way in which course selection occurred muted students' criticisms and possibly tracking's negative consequences. Students, I thought, were simply not conscious of its detrimental effects.
But the next research site immediately destroyed that theory. At Central catholic a student's track was as public as his name. Every student could immediately give his track number, with Track 3 students specifying levels a, b, c, or d as well. Yet student interviews elicited the same positive comments about ability grouping heard at St. Catherine. Having explored and rejected the possibilities that students were giving us a sanitized view of their school experience or that only certain types of students were being sent for interviews, I was forced to begin to reassess my prior conclusion that tracking was nothing more than an insidious sorting mechanism for a class society. This paper is a product of that re-consideration.
Tracking: Can It Benefit Low Achieving Children?
Linda R. Valli
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association
(70th, San Francisco, CA, April 16-20, 1986)
p. 2-3
"The future of inequality depends largely on increasing the supply of educated workers," she said.
Goldin discusses economic disparity and wages
The Davidsonian online
4-23-08
DISCUSSION
The portrait of the five tracking dimensions of these three Catholic schools is not too different from that found in a national sample of public schools. The Catholic schools had just as many subject areas and courses ability-grouped. Catholic schools students were just as constrained in placement decisions and in their chances for higher track mobility. Nor do Catholic schools seem to avoid the racial differentiation endemic in tracking. Where the organizational differences emerge is in the curriculum and instructional quality. Because students in the lower tracks in the Catholic schools received about the same type and quality of instruction as their higher track counterparts, the negative consequences were mitigated.
Because teachers were committed to improving life’s possibilities for their students, a challenging learning environment was prevalent at all track levels. Teachers, students kept stressing, expected them to do their personal best. A St Catherine student commented that teachers wouldn’t just let them sit there “and don’t do anything. They know what you can do; they know your abilities…they say, ‘We expect much more from you.’ And they help and encourage you.” At Murphy, one student reported getting a C grade from a science teacher for the same quality work for which he had previously received an A. The student did not complain: “She realized how much better I could do if I applied myself.”
A Central Catholic parent reported a similar incident with his son, who was a good athlete. A teacher refused to turn a borderline grade into a pass even though the failure prevented the student from participating in sports the rest of that year. Though the parent complained at the time, the teacher would not be dissuaded, claiming that Raymond had been “getting by” for too long. At the time of our interview, a year later, raymond was an honors student.
Teachers cared that their students learned and believed they could learn. “For the first time I think these kids are on a level of their own, they can compete among themselves and I think the goal we are asking for is attainable all of a sudden.”
Many of the students we interviewed needed that extra dose of attention and belief. In their heterogeneously grouped grade school classrooms they had apparently been easy to overlook. When many students grasp the material, it is natural for teachers to move on to the next concept or unit—leaving behind those who are still baffled. But when an entire class is still floundering, teachers are much more apt to repeat the lesson, attempting to find alternate ways of facilitating student understanding.
Perhaps the reason why lower track classes in public schools appear to be so different from the ones we observed in Catholic schools is that in public schools low achieving but school-oriented students tend to be grouped with school-alienated students. This suggests it is not the tracking system in and of itself which lowers instructional quality, but the types of groupings which lower the quality. Until now, those factors have been confounded in criticisms of lower track classes.
This means that the seemingly similar track structures in Catholic and public schools had quite different effects on students because the different “meaning systems” they conveyed affected the student-teacher relationships which occurred within them (Cohen 1969). In many comprehensive public schools, the lower track is regarded as a dumping ground for society’s losers. In these Catholic schools, teachers believed in their students’ desire to learn, to be academically successful. Students knew their teachers were committed to helping even the slowest among them, and that they did not equate rank-in-class with moral worth. This shared meaning system created trusting social relations which facilitated classroom learning (McDermott 1977). Though the philosophy and selection mechanisms of Catholic schools might facilitate this meaning system, there is no reason to believe it is restricted to any one system of schooling.
Tracking: Can It Benefit Low Achieving Students?
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association
(70th, San Francisco, CA, April 16-20, 1986)
p. 29-32
For pubic schools to help the U.S. live up to its ideals of justice and equality, do you think it's more important that they focus on:
All students equally, regardless of their backgrounds or achievement levels -- 86%
Disadvantaged students who are struggling academically -- 11%
Not sure -- 3%
High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB (pdf file)
Intellectually stimulating low track classrooms do exist, however, and researchers have found the most productive of them in Catholic schools. Margaret Camarena and Adam Gamoran have described low track classrooms where good teaching, lively discussions, and ample learning take place. In 1990, Linda Valli published her study of a heavily tracked Catholic high school in an urban community. The school’s course designations publicly proclaimed each student’s track level. Textbooks and instruction were adapted for each track. Yet Valli discovered that "a curriculum of effort" permeated the entire school, even the lowest tracks. The school culture centered around academic progress, and the tracking system was but another facet of the school that served this aim. Students of all abilities were aggressively pushed to learn as much as they could. Every year, low track students were boosted up a level. By the senior year, the lowest track no longer existed. A judicious tracking system teaches low track students what they need to know and moves them out of the low track as quickly as possible
The Tracking and Ability Grouping Debate
Tom Loveless
07-01-98
Actually, I think that the good-academics and good-schools idea you have is all about trade offs and opportunity costs. And high performing organizations understand that, and recognize that the opportunity cost of losing talent is that Someone Else has that talent, and will beat you with it.
Selective schools need to find ways to attract the talented students. The trade off isn't between a good basketball player and a good student. The trade off is between spending the time/energy/money to recruit, coach, and challenge talent vs. spending that time/energy/money on something else. High performing orgs know that talent is an asset, and basically every thing else is a liability. You can't have high morale without talent.
But talent in high schoolers comes in the form not of pure, raw unmitigated strength or coordination, but in the form of Someone Who Can Be Coached. Someone who has the discipline to do what's expected, Someone who responds well to demanding expectations. Because unless you're Michael Oher, the single talent on a team sport still isn't enough to propel that team to the top. The whole team has to play together, and it's as weak as its weakest link. This is true in history class and on the baseball field. When you set out to recruit students who won't be disruptive to your mission, who will be leaders and optimistic about your mission, then it doesn't matter whether they are football players, dramatists or math whizzes--they are supporting the goal.
I think high performing organizations just admit their trade offs up front--they can't attract the best students without spending money on infrastructure; if you ignore discipline problems, it's easier in the short term but worse in the long term; if you want excessive teacher autonomy, you won't have all classes following the same curriculum. So they decide on which trade offs they can afford. It works because they've Got A Mission, and the Mission guides their choices.
In November 2006, Jack Li's father, a longtime Caterpillar employee in Beijing, was transferred to Peoria, Ill. Jack enrolled in high school as a ninth-grader. His parents, good friends of mine for almost a decade, weren't particularly worried about their son adapting to a new school in a foreign country -- at least not academically. They believed that China has better K-12 education than the U.S.
Jack didn't disappoint them: Three months later, he scored high enough on the SATs to put him in the top 3% in math and well above-average in writing and reading. Last fall, he transferred to Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a college-prep program for Illinois students. He took advanced chemistry last semester and will study basic calculus next semester.
Chinese students like Jack are examples of why Microsoft's Bill Gates asked Congress today to spend more to improve American education in math and science. Unless more students can be attracted to those subjects, Mr. Gates warned, the U.S.'s competitive advantage will erode and its ability to create high-paying jobs will suffer.
I know many Americans don't believe him. They argue that American kids may not be as good at math and science as Chinese and Indian kids, but they're more well-rounded. But that's increasingly untrue. For example, Jack isn't your stereotypical Chinese nerd. He's the captain of IMSA's sophomore basketball team and tried out for the tennis team today.
Bob Compton, a Memphis-based venture capitalist, ran into many kids like Jack when he was traveling in China and India. They were two and three years ahead of his two teenage daughters -- not just in math and science, but in almost every other subject, too.
Are Hard-Working Chinese Kids a Model for American Students?
Here's the post: A life less ordinary?: Mainstreaming: your experience.
I'm putting together a journalistic report on mainstreaming and autism, and I'm interested in your input. If you'd like, please tell me about your experiences, understanding of the law, opinion about its application, anything that is related to the subject of mainstreaming and autism.
You can
