Creating Learning Disabilities???

This quarter our school established three cohorts in the 7th grade and three in the eighth that are based (primarily) upon academics. We also split our math blocks in half with one half dedicated to our grade level curricula and the other half dedicated to remediation of core number sense skills. The core skill blocks are further homogenized such that there are six distinct groupings that are independent of grade level. If you are in the seventh or eighth grade you are in one of three groups attending normal curricula for your grade and in one of six groups attending remediation, independent of your grade. These splits are the best we could do based upon scheduling, teacher, and room considerations. Our goal was to create the most homogeneous groupings possible.

After about five weeks with this schedule I've come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of learning disabilities. There are those that are inherent to the child and there are those that we have created. Each of my grade 7 cohorts are about a third of the class, with the highest being no more than one year below grade level, the middle group being 2 or 3 years below grade level, and the lowest group being more than 3 years below grade level. The really interesting feature of this schedule is that I see most of my kids in two entirely different academic settings.

One setting, the grade level curriculum, is fairly conceptual so you get to see kids working with new concepts and from that you can assess their prowess with connecting the dots in their zone. The other setting, core skills, is not big concepts or word problems. It is simply raw calculation of rational numbers in all their various forms. This skills component lets you see more of what they bring to the table from lower grades.

Here's the nut… My highest group is making progress in both grade level curriculum and their core skills training. My middle group is making progress in their grade level curriculum (subject to the limitations inherent with their lack of core skills) and little to no progress in the core skills block. My lowest group isn't making progress in either curriculum or core skills.

My observational shock is not so much with the lowest group as they have clearly identified, documented learning disabilities. The highest group is making progress across the board so they're not a big concern either. The real conundrum is the middle group. In their grade level curriculum they appear to have no problem attacking new material (as long as the computation is simple) but their core skills are every bit as resistant to improvement as those in the lowest group. For these kids in the middle, it's like they have two personalities, one of which has a learning disability.

One more relevant point of reference is that this middle group has a normal amount of enthusiasm and energy level in the grade level work but in the core work they have all the inherent joy of a glazed doughnut. They sit in the core class with obvious boredom and do not apply themselves at all. In this class you could easily mistake them for the kids in the lowest cohort.

I would argue (perhaps foolishly) that this middle group is capable, based on my assessment of their grade level work, but disabled when it comes to computation. I would further submit that this seeming disability is induced by their prior failure, i.e. we created it. Could it be that after enough exposure to 'failure' in a particular domain, kids simply give up on it, concluding that it is a skill that is beyond them? Remember that this skills stuff is what they've been getting for the six preceding years.

My anecdotal evidence is telling me that these kids have an externally induced learning disability. It's induced by too much early indulgence towards their early lack of mastery and the school's failure to address it before it has damaged them. As a result they level out at a place that is far below their full potential. Is it possible that at some point, the failure to master becomes a built in disability that impedes further progress? Is there a threshold, beyond which a lack of progress becomes viral, thereby blocking future attempts to improve?

Has anyone experienced this?

Am I drinking too much coffee?

how Paul teaches problem solving to middle school kids

I use an organizer that approaches this technique. I think it's adapted from an ELA template called four square. Here's what I have the kids do.

Take a piece of paper and fold into quarters. Open it up and draw a rectangle in the center. Now you've got four quadrants and a rectangle which is not exactly 'four square' but in the interests of marketing I guess four square sounds sexier.

Read the problem twice. Then in the rectangle restate the question in the form 'find blah blah blah in units of xxxxxx'.

Read the problem again and in the upper left quadrant identify and define all the symbols (variables and constants) you'll use in your solution.

Read the problem again and use the lower left quadrant for a diagram/picture.

Read the problem again and use the upper right quadrant to define your strategy. This can be words or preferably a set of equations to solve.

The lower right quadrant is where you show your arithmetic.

Finally, the back of the paper is used to justify your answer.

It works well for entry level problem solving of the kind you would encounter through maybe grade six. If kids master this it should instill some good habits for more complicated things.

Paul on military training

Paul: Having gone though a lot of military training myself I would note that it was excellent and every bit of it was DI [direct instruction]. Of course I didn't think much of it at the time but still it's amazing what it accomplishes in very short order.

Another point to ponder is the impact of military culture on the whole training system. From day one you're stripped of your individualism and made part of a group. It doesn't take long before your motivations are all about not letting your group down. You might even say that the last bit of remaining 'identity' that you have is your specialties and rank.

Powerful motivation, no fluff, intense focus, and high expectations, when brewed, create a potent drink. If all that doesn't work, there's the bad ass drill instructor/Master Chief/Master Sargent to provide 'direction'.

All of you.

Drop whatever you're doing right now.

Go read Work Hard. Be Nice.

dreaming

from Paul B --

I have an acquaintance who was taught Chinese in the Air Force. The training was even more intense than the article describes. He was immersed in Chinese language 24 hours per day, having to wear earphones, while sleeping, that continued the immersion.

Twenty years later, when he dreams, it's in Chinese.

I remember, years ago, a conversation with a woman whose sister was in the foreign service. She told me that the foreign service has precise ratings of people's level of fluency in foreign languages. (I think Concerned Parent knows all of this & may be rated or ranked herself. Hope she's around.)

As I recall, I think there is a very small group of non-native speakers who reach the level of native fluency.

(Is that right?)

Here are Foreign Service Institute courses in the public domain

And here's the book on second language learning Lefty recommended to me: Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning by Eli Hinkel.

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

unified theory

from Paul H:

It's instructive to put constructivism in context. I put it smack dab in the middle of; Spiraling Curricula, Curricula Bloat, ** Constructivism **, Inclusion/Immersion, and Grade Level Placement. I'll call these the five horsemen of the apocalypse.

Horse #1, Spiraling Curricula (the Trojan horse), lays the natural hierarchy of a subject on its side, preferring to teach everything in a strand as a set of increasingly complex parallel universes that never need to be mastered. We spend, on average, 6 years on concepts that other countries dispense with in 3.

Once you install horse #1 you observe that, without mastery, every stovepipe in the spiral is easier to achieve success in (because you don't really measure it anymore). This leads to the evolution of horse #2, Curricula Bloat, where you get to fill your newly invented extra time with bloated concept development (2-3 times more concepts per year than is common in the TIMMS countries that surpass us).

Horses #3 and #4, Inclusion/Immersion and Grade Level Placement, differ in motivation but produce the same noxious result, an enormous range of student capabilities in a single classroom, with an attendant reduction in the number and type of teachers that address them. And finally with horses 1,2,4, and 5 teamed up you're ready for the lead horse, horse #3,Constructivism.

With an exquisitely complex spiral, delivering an overwhelming number of concepts to a highly diverse population grouped by virtue of their hat size, there is no other choice but to have the kids teach each other. Horse #3 is inevitable.

Every argument you hear for constructivist philosophy is no more than rationalization, devised to make palatable, the misbegotten notion that kids can teach themselves the things that mankind learned over thousands of years, driven by the need to address the maelstrom created by the four horsemen that accompany it. Once you figure out where it comes from you're better able to appreciate why it's so popular. Unfortunately, it's very hard to change the direction of the lead horse when the rest of the team is not cooperating and these horses all tend to be discussed in isolation, where they can be made to sound plausible. Together though, they are undeniably toxic.

And yes I know there are only four horsemen but I'm invoking my 21st century skills to invent my own literary reality.

Red Meat

Here's a little red meat for DI carnivores. The blue bars represent the frequency of occurrence for various point totals scored on a test after 4 weeks of CMP discovery. Pretty sad, eh?

The red bars represent the frequencies on the exact same test after three days of DI remediation on the same topic. Makes me go; hmmmmmm!

I did remediation using a method described on d-edreckoning by Saul Axelrod using whiteboards for choral response. We spent the days doing word problems with kids answering on their own boards. Wrong answers were immediately corrected by pairing up kids who goofed with ones who got it. We only advanced to more complexity when 80% of the room was doing tasks error free and independently.

A funny aside is that I got caught. My VP heard the raucous class and came in to see what was going on. Kids were jumping up and down with excitement over getting correct answers. Kids who were often unresponsive and did no work in discovery mode were begging me to give them harder questions. The VP just smiled and walked out. He's pretty savvy so I was lucky.

My next task is to figure out a way to diguise this horribly boring, discreditied drill and kill instruction so that it looks like discovery. That way, I can keep doing it. Failing that, I'm seriously considering a surveillance system for the corridors. Then I can see who's coming and set up a system with the kids where I can give a high sign and they can hide the whiteboards. I'm going to cut them down so they fit in their binders. We'll set it up so they have a ready made discovery task ready to slap on the desk, just in time.

There's nothing the kids like better than a bit of conspiracy and rule breaking. I just have to make them feel like co-conspirators and they'll step up.

Robert P & Paul B on national standards

Robert:

At the risk of oversimplifying, I think it's possible to eat our cake and have it too. Here's how: national standards (content standards, please) ought to represent a statement of what we expect our kids to learn and know in school. What if we married those standards to national assessments, with reading comprehension tests tied to those content standards. In other words, the selections on the tests would be culled from the content standards, thus making it a test worth teaching to. Finally, tie federal funding to states adopting the standards and tests with NO SANCTIONS WHATSOEVER based on performance. Thus the federal role is limited to spreading sunshine--a pure apples-to-apples comparison among states, districts and schools. If everyone is taking the same test, it'll be pretty clear who is performing well and not, and up to states and districts to improve their performance. If you're serious about "decentralizing down to a few million Darwinian enclaves" as you put it, then the only way to credibly gauge performance and unlock what works is if everyone is shooting for the same target.

Paul H:

Standards don't stand in isolation to the rest of the Gordian knot. The way they're written can drive whether or not your curriculum spirals. They can drive pedagogy, phonics vs. sight words, for example. They can drive calculator usage, or not. Whosoever shall write the standards, shall tie the rest of the knot.

These things drive text book selection, which is driven by the ed schools and professional organizations with skin in the game. Don't forget the publishers and consultant community. Lots and lots of players converge on standards.

I would pose another question, perhaps more thought provoking... Why should the feds give a rats patootie (is patootie a word?)how a school performs? OK, it's rhetorical! They care because they've got their $$$ nose in the tent.

Why is their nose in the tent? It's not a constitutional mandate is it? I think the only people that should care at all are the parents. The objective measure (over time) is; are the graduates successful in their post graduate pursuits? This is far more important than a contrived test.

Until parents own the measurement, and take responsibility for the cost by paying for and having the freedom to not pay if the measurement flops, the camel wins every time.

By advocating for, and accepting federal or state money, schools and parents are making a pact with the devil. They are allowing a convergence of interests (not necessarily aligned with their own) to drive their children's future.

I guess I'm just not convinced that we're collectively smart enough to write a 'standard' that fits millions of kids to a tee.

Robert:

Point taken. Bad standards are worse than none. But parental interest is a strong reason to support nationalized standards and assessments. As a parent, it's impossible to know whether your child's school is terrific, atrocious or somewhere in the middle unless it's measured by the same yardstick as all the others.

My favorite statement re: parents comes from Joe Williams, who points out that parents have the best odds of making the right educational decisions for their own children.

I agree with Joe, and I believe that you could demonstrate historically that parents as a group have systematically been right where everyone else was wrong.

Paul H: doomed!

We are truly doomed methinks. Many of the names that I see on my roster have to be misspellings in the delivery room. I have kids tell me that I'm spelling their names wrong so I go and look up their intake docs and sure enough, I had it right.

I don't want to put up actual names but some examples are; ett where the intent was eth, cha where the intent was sha, cr where it should have been chr. That's just the beginning.

Then you have what I call the 'theme meme', like a daughter named Chastity with a mom called Virgin (should it be the other way around, perhaps).

I'm not sure if these things are coming from deranged nurses or parents who can't spell. Either way, doomed!

Jim the Realtor seems to agree.

Adams County School District 50 Eliminates Grades Levels and Grades

Read the news coverage from the Denver Post article.

I've long thought of grade levels as a subtle form of child abuse. Imagine if someone made you wear the wrong size underwear every day for 13 years; not very comfortable and not likely to turn you into a clothes horse.

Like it or not, we've become a highly diverse, mobile, and transient population and this means it's a roll of the dice getting your child in a classroom that is delivering a curriculum they can 'reach'. It's far more likely that your child is either ahead (and bored) or behind (and overwhelmed) their cohort. Kids are grouped by age, behavior, where their last school says they were, and IEP status, but almost never by academic or language need.

Adams County 50 has collaborated with Dr. Robert Marzano to create a pure standards based system where "Mastery of standards is the constant and time is the variable." In this system you get what you need regardless of age or other arbitrary non-academic measures. They're creating 10 mastery levels that students move through in order to graduate from high school and each level has its own measurement to determine whether or not you move on.

Here's the district's description of their Standards Based Education reform.

This has been done before in the Chugach School District with not too shabby results. Standard Achievement Test rankings moved from the 28th to the 71st percentile over a five year period.

The Chugach School District Office is based in Anchorage, Alaska. Chugach's 214 students are scattered throughout 22,000 square miles of mostly isolated and remote areas of South Central Alaska. With 30 faculty and staff, CSD is the smallest organization to ever win a Baldrige Award. CSD delivers instruction in education from preschool up to age 21 in a comprehensive, standards-based system. Education occurs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Instruction is delivered in the work place, in the community, in the home and in school. Half (50%) of the students in the Chugach School District are minorities (Alaska Natives).

As always the devil is in the details. Chugach is not Brooklyn and Adams County has only just begun, but for my money, this is real reform, not deck chair rearrangement.

I like snow and mountains, hmmmm.

Paul is back!

A while back we had a vertical meeting with math teachers from grades 4-8. The agenda was to familiarize ourselves with the standards for fractions outside of our own grade levels. The facilitators cut all the relevant standards into little strips, removing any identity as to the grade levels they came from. Our job was to put them back together again in the proper 3-8 sequence.

It couldn't be done except at a gross level. Each year, and within each year as well, there are nuances on the nuances on the nuances. It was a good exercise in cross polination. In hind sight it was also a dramatic demonstration of the ridiculous nature of those standards. If the teachers charged with delivering them can't see clear annual goals then how can the kids?

I have our cities math curriculum from 1958 (I was in middle school then) and it reads precisely like the A+ international standard in the link. Interestingly, it is riddled with demands for mastery at key milestones, something that is totally absent in our present day constructivist, spiral curriculum.

Funny how 50 years of 'research' has taught us how to do what we already forgot.

And here's Barry:

Also funny how the math of 50 years ago is said (by those pushing reform math) to have failed large numbers of students.

That is funny!

data driven loops and noise
data driven instruction redux

the stick kids from the mud island

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.

Assuming I'm understanding the implications of The Race Between Education and Technology correctly, and I think I am, countries need universal education to win: to be the most productive economy. The 20th century was the American century because of America's public schools.

Moreover, it's not just a question of providing universal education in the sense of doing today what we did yesterday.

Countries need universal education that becomes more universal as time goes on. More people getting more education.

What I can't tell, because I don't understand the issues well enough, is whether it's important to "win." What is life like for us when another country (and then another one after that) becomes the dominant economic power?

I don't know, but, like Paul, I have a feeling I'm going to find out.


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

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

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