Barry G on the meme

re: Ed Next article on School of the Future

The author, like so many who paint "traditional" education with the same brush does not define what is meant by “failing with the traditional curriculum.” What are the numbers of students who failed and the criterion for failing? If traditional teaching failed, was it because of traditional teaching done poorly... has the author considered that teaching at Schools of the Future may be done poorly because it is inherent in the progressive nature of the “student-centered” and “inquiry-based” structure? How does the author know that successful people did not learn by sitting in a classroom in front of a board? Have the successful people he has met been taught exclusively by inquiry based and student-centered approaches, with cooperative learning, and popsicle stick dioramas of World War II?

The Ed Next article reminds me of the writing I did for New Woman Magazine back in the day. New Woman employed zealous fact-checkers who scrutinized every quotation and factoid, except for the founding claim made in the opening paragraph.

e.g.: Because it was New Woman Magazine, there were certain truths we held to be self-evident. Women were oppressed; men failed to commit; divorce was skyrocketing. I remember, by the time I left the magazine, being amazed that it was OK to assert, in a first paragraph, that divorce was skyrocketing when divorce had been doing no such thing for at last a decade.

In fact, skyrocketing change of any kind was simply assumed to be real when it was the peg from which an article would hang. Skyrocketing divorce, skyrocketing STDS, skyrocketing single motherhood by choice, what have you. No one ever asked for proof that a given phenomenon was actually, truly, measurably, skyrocketing.

That is the issue with the Education Next book excerpt: "traditional" education is simply assumed to be bad, while progressive education is assumed to be good. No fact-checking required.

comp lit

High Tech High again:

The students, almost all African American, more than 80 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, came with skill levels all over the map; a majority read at a 5th-grade level or below. Used to worksheets, paper-and-pencil tests, and being asked to regurgitate information, many weren’t prepared to take control of their own learning. Some thrived on the project-based, interdisciplinary, and technology-rich model, and were finally able to connect to the purpose of school; others simply found it bewildering.

High School 2.0
By Dale Mezzacappa
Education Next

Last I checked, Education Next was a center-right, pro-standards, pro-accountability, pro-knowledge journal sympathetic to the arguments of E.D. Hirsch. And here we've got Ed Next excerpting a book passage that takes as a given the wrongheadedness of everything E.D. Hirsch stands for.

This is what you call your discourse speaking through the subject. Foucault was right.^*

Joanne Jacobs has a post.


critical thinking challenge

How much "information" is a high school student who reads at a 5th grade level able to "regurgitate?"


^* Either that, or the entire universe of edu-writing is being funded by Bill Gates.

next time, try Core Knowledge
Battling the Progressives
what do parents want? Sweden's "Knowledge schools"
comments on Knowledge Schools
project learning in Holland

One school's take on teacher certification

VickyS asked in another thread: "In my state, and I assume most others, you don't need state licensure to teach in a private schools. Are those teachers any less effective for it?

Here's one example that answers Vicky's question with a resounding "No!" Ridgeview Classical School is continually ranked in the US News & World Report as a top charter school in the country. One year, they were #15 overall. Their previous principal, Dr. Terrence Moore, (currently an Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College in Michigan) wrote frequently about teacher certification and the value of ed. schools. (And classical education, and phonics, and Core Knowledge...) He recommends two books for people seeking information on schools of education: Rita Kramer’s Ed School Follies and, even better, George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

From his article, Association of Teacher Qualification and Certification is a False One:

When I taught history at the university level, I noticed an extreme division in my classes. The history majors reveled in the subject, did all the reading, and had significant things to say in class. The ed-school students sat at the back of the class, had little to say, showed little sign of enjoying or mastering the material, and usually skimmed by with a C minus. Which group is more qualified to teach history to the nation’s children?

His thesis from A Monopoly on ’Relating to Children’?: Teacher Certification Further Refuted:

Certified teachers do not have a monopoly on being able to relate to kids but are very often the people least able to do so.

Ouch! The Ridgeview Classical School is well-known locally for seeking out non-certified teachers in the school. In fact, anyone seeking a teaching position in Fort Collins should consider the current open positions at Ridgeview:

(All emphases are mine)

Special Education Teacher

...The candidate does not need to have a degree in special education to be considered for this position. Any interested candidate who has a strong background in liberal arts, science, or brain-based fields will be considered, as long as there is a commitment to obtain appropriate CDE licensure. It is necessary that the candidate maintains high academic standards for all students regardless of background or learning differences. The special education teacher must demonstrate the ability to teach students (K – 12), who need additional supports and services beyond the scope of the classroom setting, and is also expected to participate in the identification process for students who struggle academically or behaviorally. Candidates should have experience in different kinds of classroom settings.

Humanities Teacher

Ridgeview is looking for a versatile teacher who can teach literature, Latin, and history (especially American) to students from upper elementary to high school. Applicants should have degrees in at least two of those subjects or be able to demonstrate their versatility in other ways. A teaching certificate is not a requirement. Teachers are expected to be content experts in their field. Applicants should be able to demonstrate excellent classroom control and considerable experience in teaching students of different ages.

Mathematics

Ridgeview seeks a math teacher for the middle and high school. Applicants should be expert mathematicians with a degree in their field and the ability to communicate their expertise to their students. Teaching certification is not required for this position. Applicants should be able to teach a wide variety of math classes from pre-algebra to high-level math electives.

Common Core Standards

The U. S. Coalition for World Class Math has posted their
comments on the Common Core Standards Initiative HERE

the way of proceeding

Thirty-five years ago, the nation's Jesuit high schools were reeling from an identity crisis. Jesuits were leaving both the schools and the Society; social action ministries seemed more relevant than teaching high school. Should the Jesuits continue to run high schools for upper- and middle-class students or focus on serving the poor?

Simultaneously, urban riots slashed enrollments at some inner-city Jesuit schools, and single-sex education seemed to some to be a chauvinistic anachronism. Replacing Jesuits with lay faculty raised tuition. Some of the nation's best Catholic high schools were in danger.

Fast-forward to 2006. The "long black line" of Jesuits is gone, with just a handful of priests and brothers remaining in most of the forty-nine American Jesuit high schools. However, the Society of Jesus is committed to its high schools, because Jesuits now realize that they provide outstanding opportunities for the spiritual formation of young people, says Fr. Ralph Metts, SJ, president of the Jesuit Secondary Education Association (JSEA). AMDG still rules at today's thriving schools. Consider these developments.

• Inner-city Jesuit Cristo Rey high schools, where low-income students work for their tuition, are opening rapidly. Two were added to the network in 2006, with more planned.

• Most of the traditional Jesuit high schools are at capacity, with competitive enrollments. This includes inner-city schools once threatened with closing.

• The schools are raising at least four hundred million dollars in capital campaigns alone to upgrade campuses and enhance endowments/financial aid.

• Jesuit schools all over the country are still academically and athletically elite.

What lies behind this turnaround?

That's what I sought to discover in writing this book.

They Made All the Difference: Life-changing Stories from Jesuit High Schools by Eileen Wirth

On the lighter side, sort of

Increasing Number of Parents Opting to Have Children School-Homed here.

I came across this rib tickler while reading a dismal report on my state legislature's continuing refusal to stand up to our teacher's union, Education Minnesota. The current issue is whether to permit alternative teacher certification.

Minnesota has one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation.

But here's a quote from the union president, from Politics in Minnesota:

“Why in the world, when we rightfully demand more from students, would we demand less of teachers?” Dooher wrote. “Minnesota is a national leader in teacher excellence. That’s why we’re speaking up against the Teach for America program, and why we believe parents should, too. This program, which has been around for years, puts people in charge of classrooms after only five weeks of training.”

Could he be more plain about protecting his turf? The bills in the legislature are about bringing qualified, experienced professionals into the profession. Reportedly, some include requirements such as having earned a bachelor degree with at least a 3.0 grade point average, or having at least 10 years of relevant experience in their subject matter, completion of a state-certified preparatory program, and passing all skills tests required of teachers before entering the classroom.

But nope, not acceptable to our teacher's union. Gotta get them when they're 23 and straight out of ed school, I guess, or you might end up with some disruptive influences.

Dehaene's Reading in the Brain

I thought I'd slapped a post up here in January when I got the book, but evidently not.

Fascinating interview with Stanislaus Dehaene, author of Reading in the Brain

On the shapes of letters:

In the case of reading, the shapes of our writing systems have evolved towards a progressive simplification while remaining compatible with the visual coding scheme that is present in all primate brains. A fascinating discovery, made by the American researcher Marc Changizi, is that all of the world's writing systems use the same set of basic shapes, and that these shapes are already a part of the visual system in all primates, because they are also useful for coding natural visual scenes. The monkey brain already contains neurons that preferentially respond to an “alphabet” of shapes including T, L, Y. We merely “recycle” these shapes (and the corresponding part of cortex) and turn them into a cultural code for language.

How literacy changes the brain.

We are starting to do brain-imaging experiments in illiterates, and we find that this region, before it responds to words, has a preference for pictures of objects and faces. We are also finding that this region is especially attuned to small features present in the contours of natural shapes, such as the “Y” shape in the branches of trees. My hypothesis is our letters emerged from a recycling of those shapes at the cultural level. The brain didn't have enough time to evolve “for” reading – so writing systems evolved “for” the brain!

On the scientific bankruptcy of whole-language (and balanced literacy)

In the case of reading, very concretely, as I explain in the book, we now have plenty of evidence that the whole-language approach has nothing to do with how our visual system recognizes written words – our brain never relies on the overall contours of words, rather it decomposes all of its letters and graphemes in parallel, subliminally and at a high speed, thus giving us an illusion of whole-word reading. Experiments even suggest that the whole-language method may orient learning towards the wrong brain region, symmetrical to the visual word form area in the right hemisphere! We need to inform our teaching with the best brain science – and we also need to develop evidence-based education research, using classroom experiments to verify that our deductions about teaching methods actually work in practice.

On dyslexia

This isn't fully known, but I was intrigued by recent research which indicates that dyslexic children and adults can be better on tasks of symmetry detection – they have a greater ability to notice the presence of symmetrical patterns, and the evidence even suggests that this was helpful in a group of astrophysicists to detect the symmetrical spectrum of black holes!

My theory is that mirror recognition is one of the functions that we have to partially “un-learn” when we learn to read – it is a universal feature of the primate brain that is, unfortunately, inappropriate in our alphabet where letters p, q, d and b abound. By somehow managing to maintain this ability, dyslexics might be at some advantage in visual, spatial or even mathematical tasks.

reading workshop

Headline and subhead in the March 31, 2010 issue of Education Week:

Added H.S. Science Courses Said To Yield Mixed Effect in Chicago
Policy did not boost college-going or grades, study finds

Critical thinking challenge: In the two lines above, which word seems out of place?^*


department of silver linings

Apparently, the term 'mixed' refers to the fact that after Chicago public schools required all students to take 3 science courses in order to graduate, many more students did indeed take 3 science courses prior to graduation.

Many students passed their classes with C’s and D’s, both before and after the policy was implemented, the researchers found. That suggests a low level of learning and engagement in the courses, they said.

Only 15 percent of students, the study says, completed three years of science with a B average or higher in those courses after the policy change. That was a modest 4-percentage-point increase compared with the period before the policy took effect.

Prior research, Mr. Montgomery said, shows that students who are truly gaining knowledge in courses earn grades of A or B.

“Before the policy, most students received C’s and D’s in their classes,” he said. “If they weren’t being successful with one or two years of science, why would we think they would be successful with three years of science, if we don’t pay attention to getting the students engaged?”

[snip]

In addition, the study found that students affected by the coursetaking policy were less likely on the whole to attend a four-year college, compared with their counterparts before the policy change. They were also less likely to remain in college.

“It seems clear to us that this was a first step. They now have students enrolled in these classes,” Mr. Montgomery said, noting the required science courses are the kinds that colleges look for on transcripts.

Effect of Chicago's Tougher Science Policy Mixed
By Dakarai I. Aarons
Education Week
Published in Print: March 31, 2010, as Added H.S. Science Courses Said to Yield Mixed Effect in Chicago

I'm sure college-going and grades will soar once they get students engaged.


^* answer: mixed

Life of Fred

How is it that in all these years I have not encountered the Life of Fred series by Stanley Schmidt until today?

Some arithmetic books omit the sugar—which is like lemonade without any sweetener. They give you a couple of examples followed by a zillion identical problems to do. And they call that a lesson. No wonder students aren’t eager to read those books. At the other extreme are the books that are just pure sugar— imagine a glass of lemonade with so much sugar in it that your spoon floats. The pages are filled with color and happy little pictures to show you how wonderful arithmetic is. The book comes with 1) a teachers’ manual, 2) a computer disc, 3) a test booklet, and 4) a box of manipulatives. And they are so busy entertaining the reader that they don’t teach a lot of math. This second approach is also usually quite expen$ive.

We’ll take the Goldilocks approach: not too sour and not too sweet. We will also include a lot of mathematics. (Check out the Contents on page 10.) How many arithmetic books include both forms of the Goldbach Conjecture? (See chapter 17.) The reader will be ready for algebra after completing this book.

Jennie on what parents know

I think most parents have NO CLUE that this is how reading is being taught in the schools. This approach is used even in schools that claim they teach phonics. After all, they do teach some letter-sound correspondences for consonants and vowels, and they do encourage children to use that information when looking at the first letter of a word, as you see this adult doing with the "c" in "cat."

Many parents therefore assume, when their child struggles, that the problem lies within their child.

Until a year ago, I was in the NO CLUE category. Just a couple of years ago I would have looked at this video and thought the mom was using phonics.

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

Molly on strategies used by adults who can't read

re: the balanced literacy video

About 20 years I ago, I took part in a training program for Literacy Volunteers of America. It was a fairly intense training for volunteers who would be working with illiterate adults. One thing we learned was the coping strategies that illiterate adults use. This video is a great demonstration of those strategies. Figure out the first letter and look at the picture to guess. We are actively teaching children to use the coping strategies of illiterates, rather than teaching them to read. There is something very wrong with the whole process.

Lynn G on grandma with a pencil

When my littlest kid was about this age, I remember going to a restaurant with my mom (a retired reading teacher). While we were waiting for the food, and everyone was talking about stuff, I saw my mom with a little notebook working through lists of words that she was handwriting and teaching my daughter to sound out.

She picked rhyming families and concentrated on a single internal vowel sound at a time. Then they wrote simple sentences.

By the time the food arrived, my daughter was reading sentences with no picture clues. And every now and then my mom would throw in a new word without warning that was similar and in the same family, but required my kid to look at the letters and think about what was happening.

Good teaching can take place anywhere, anytime, with the simplest of tools. You can keep your technology integrationist. I've got Grandma with a pencil.

John Hopkins

The "S" is out: We're "John Hopkins" now

Post-Doc Academy Charter School? "Academy of Wisdom and Learning"

(Although published on April 1, not a spoof.)

Michael Drout's dream high school, Academy of Wisdom and Learning

I would open a school staffed entirely with new Ph.D.'s, probably mostly from local New England universities, who wanted to get teaching experience. It would pay $42,000 per year with full benefits on two-year contracts. The idea would be that faculty would teach at the Academy as a way-station on their academic careers, kind of a teaching and research post-doc. They would receive intensive on-the-job training about how to teach (because there is no tougher audience than high-school kids), though even if they weren't great teachers at the start, they would have energy and excitement about their work and would become good teachers.

Everyone would be expected to do research as well. We would have weekly colloquia and presentations, part of the benefits would include Interlibrary Loan and access to academic databases, etc, and time would be set aside each week and within each day to do and present research. The headmaster (me, to start) would advise and support the staff in interdisciplinary research efforts, bring in speakers, etc.

The "catch" would be that the students would have to be included in this research in various ways--you'd have to design your projects so that students could help, and this working on cutting-edge research projects would be a way to focus student learning. If a student was helping, for example, on a 19th-century history project, then the teacher would be teaching the students the background they needed to understand the project and contribute to it.

OK, KTMians, what's your take? Go over to Prof Drout's blog to comment

Core Knowledge pilot study in NYC

here (pdf file)

6X Greater Literacy Gains for CKR Students than Students at Demographically Similar ComparisonSchools

Compared to peers, kindergarteners taught with the CKR program made more progress in all areas of reading tested: spelling, phonemic awareness, decoding, and comprehension.

Teachers’ Views:

“The Skills Strand is really very good for the students. Their reading levels are higher this year than last year.”

"At first, I felt that many teachers did not know if they agreed with teaching sounds before letter names. But by January, when teachers started to see their children reading, they became believers” became believers."

“The Skills Strand has exceeded my expectations. I think it is the best reading program I have ever used. We are thrilled with the results. I hope it is introduced into more schools. We plan to change the sequence of the Listening Strand.”

“After seeing how well Core Knowledge Skills worked for teaching my children to read, I would have a hard time teaching any other way.”

administrator views:

“This year with Core Knowledge Reading, all of the teachers are communicating more, they discuss the pacing and delivery strategies” pacing and delivery strategies.

“The CK pilot has honed the professional conversation.”

“There was resistance and suspicion on the teachers part in the beginning but they are ecstatic over the results— the children are reading! “

The finding that professional conversations amongst colleagues were 'honed' is interesting. Stuart Yeh reports the same phenomenon in his book Raising Student Achievement Through Rapid Assessment and Test Reform. Sound curriculum and testing programs are as good for the grown-ups as they are for the children.

Thanks go to Erin Johnson for supplying the link.