If you want your children to sit in rows, you have to pay extra

Reading David Cutler's "The Private-School Stigma," I came across this:

In a Washington Post opinion piece last year about their book, the coauthors also wrote that private schools too often use their autonomy from state regulations to teach in such a way that may please parents but isn’t effective for learning. In the piece, the Lubienskis wrote:

For example, private school students are more likely than their public school counterparts to sit in rows, complete math worksheets and believe that mathematics is 'mostly memorizing facts'—a narrow view that captures neither the breadth of the discipline nor the reasoning that is central to it. In contrast, public schools have moved beyond traditional, repetitive exercises, and more often ask students to solve complex, real-world problems and to learn geometry, data analysis, and early algebra ideas, in addition to basic arithmetic.

So it's official.

If you want your children learning inside a teacher-centered classroom, you have to a) make enough money to pay for private or parochial school; b) live in an area that has a decent private or parochial school or two; c) hope your kids get in.


Can you spell 'hegemony,' part 2

The private/parochial school option may not be long for this world.

For one thing, the National Association of Independent Schools seems to come down on the side of progressive education, no surprise given that many private schools were founded as progressive alternatives to public school in the first place, at least here in New York:

The 70-odd private schools in or near Manhattan are a varied lot, but with few exceptions they share one notable quality: age. They have the mystique of wood-paneled privilege that is hard to manufacture anew and that continues to radiate the glamour that makes even pop divas like Madonna aspire to Scottish castles and English nannies. Many of these schools are housed in fine, old Upper East Side buildings or ivy-covered campuses; students often wear uniforms, including blazers or kilts; they honor traditions like teas and Founder's Days; they may even call teachers "Sir." History has given each of these institutions a unique character. Towne and Allen-Stevenson are small, traditional schools with a neighborhood tone; Little Red Schoolhouse and Trevor Day have a staunchly 1920s left-wing feel; Grace Church, Marymount, and Sacred Heart have proud religious affiliations.

But it is what Victoria Goldman, co-author of The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools, calls the Baby Ivies that are the million-dollar prize of this Survivor game. These are the crème de la crème, the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton of the K-12 set. Decades ago, these schools could easily be divided into two broad categories. The coed, progressive schools—Dalton, Fieldston, Friends Seminary, Horace Mann, Riverdale, and St. Ann's—appealed to New York's artistic and intellectual elite. The unisex traditional schools—Buckley, Collegiate, St. Bernard's, and Trinity (now coed) for boys or Brearley, Chapin, Nightingale-Bamford, and Spence for girls—educated the children of the Protestant establishment, at least until adolescence, when many of the boys went on to board at Groton and Choate. (St. Bernard's and Buckley still only go up to ninth grade.) These days, all the schools pride themselves on a progressive, multicultural curriculum that counts as today's conventional wisdom; you would be just as likely to find a first-grade "interdisciplinary project" on Eskimos at Collegiate as at Dalton and a tenth-grade African-American literature course at Spence as at Fieldston. All of them "respect different learning styles." Yet despite the trendy veneer, the curricula remain fairly rigorous, and the schools still turn out graduates who know the difference between a Van Gogh and a Vermeer, speak French, and play decent tennis.

Survivor: The Manhattan Kindergarten by Kay Hymowitz

And then there are the forces of hegemony, which are pervasive and powerful, and which explain why every reform is the same non-reform all over again, for the most part. The hegemon never quite wins, so the battle never (quite) ends.

That's one theory.

Hirsch has a different take on the one hundred years' war:

The history of American education since the 1930s has been the stubborn persistence of illusion in the face of reality. Illusion has not been defeated. But since reality cannot be defeated, either, and since it determines what actually happens in the world, the result has been educational decline.

And this:

In a conflict between ideology and reality, reality always trumps.

I think that's true.

"Reality always trumps" explains why our schools grind on and on, innovating and disrupting, disrupting and innovating, adopting open classrooms, flipped classrooms, station classrooms--any permutation they can dream up--but nothing ever sticks, and the conflict never ends.

Report from the front

The other day I was introduced to a dean at a progressive private school. We chatted, and at some point I asked how the school assesses student learning.

The dean was vague. He mentioned teachers "reflecting" a couple of times, and then said the school is moving more and more to students assessing themselves, which also involves reflecting.

Funny thing: just last week I talked to a friend of mine whose son attends the school. She says the school has rampant grade inflation, and her son has learned nothing but his grades are good. He learns so little at school that he had two full-time tutors all last school year. (This is a very smart kid, by the way. No learning problems, no behavior problems.) When she took him to the SAT tutor she used with an older child in the family, the tutor told her there's no way he can prepare her son to take the SAT Math Subject test.

I told my friend about "Teach Like a Champion" classes: rapid-fire, high-energy events, with cold-calling and choral response, and said we need charter schools for rich kids. Parents should at least have the option of putting their kids in classrooms where kids spend a a lot of time practicing, not just discussing.

My friend is athletic, and she sparked to the idea it instantly. She said her son would love it, and he would remember what's been taught because he would be practicing in class.

Grade inflation and no practice during class-time: that is a recipe for total disengagement in a lot of kids.

winner-take-all schools redux

more from the conversation re: public versus private school on College Confidential:

cpt of the house writes:

The fundamental reason for my sending my kids to a private school is that I could see that they got more opportunities for high level academics, sports, music and a lot of other things as compared to their highly regarded high school. Now some kids were able to get those same goodies at their public schools, and that is a wonderful thing. I did not enjoy those years of paying that tuition and if our public school, or any public school in the area could have provided the benefits that the privates could, I would have jumped on it. But they did not. I had kids who could not get into AP programs at our county school districts, but got into them in the private schools and got all 4s and 5s on the tests.

and:

Now in our case, we were taking chances since our kids were not the top grade academic kids in K-12 that are at these private schools and were in the bottom half and even quarter of their class in high school. They needed every bit of positive push we could give them....they would not have had those advantages and choices from our public school. They would not have gotten into the top classes there that are gate kept (I checked), they could not get the number of ECs in terms of performing arts, and they would not have gotten the athletic opportunities. Their peers would not have been the kids who were assuming they were going to go to college as our high school is very diverse in socio economic situations and since they would not be in the classes where college is the main goal.

This is what Paul Attewell documented in his study of elite public high schools. Kids who are capable of earning 4s and 5s on Advanced Placement exams are tracked out of the most advanced courses.

Paul Attewell's Winner-Take-All in bullet points
The Winner-Take-All High School: Organizational Adaptations to Educational Stratification. Paul Attewell. Sociology of Education, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), 267-295

public versus private high school

interesting discussion at College Confidential

I was struck by this observation:

One thing that I feel was so worth while at that private school where I sent my kids was the Composition course. Every Monday starting with freshman year until the end of first semester of senior year, they have to write an essay on what is usually an unannounced subject. THey have to handwrite the essay in those old blue books used for final exams at colleges. Those essays are scrutinized and corrected and graded. The student then has a chance to rewrite the essay--in class during the week to better the grade. So no out of school help is available for that part of the grade, and the kids really do learn to write. Sometimes a general topic is given and the kids have to research a subject and can bring a page of notes and cites to use for the essay, but still, the exact question is not known.

What makes this work are dedicated teachers who read and grade those essays. One thing I despised about our public school experience were teachers who did not follow up on corrected papers and tests. They would mark off the answers, sometimes not even reading the work carefully, and then just hand back the paper, If they bothered to look in their wastepaper basket, they would find those returned papers for the most part, thrown in there. The kids would learn nothing from the assignment. X School teachers read every single answer and would make the kids redo what they showed they did not know. But that is not always the case for even private schools. The top privates, the selective ones with the top reps tend to offer this as a matter of course.

And here's a parent talking about Rice:

I want to share with you the experience I had going to the last commencement for Rice, a Catholic all boys school in Harlem run by the Christian Brothers. The CB are a dying breed, their extinction accelerated by the priest scandals, and this school never did make any money. The school graduated a group of all African American young men from Harlem, none of them deemed smart enough to be accepted to any of the top magnet schools the NYC city offers to its brightest students. The graduation rate of this school is remarkable, given who goes there, and nearly every single one of those kids is going to college, even more remarkable when you look at the stats for inner city AA young men. Now this is not a school that most middle class folks would want for their kids, but when you look at the accomplishments for those young men, given what the alternatives are, the result are phenomonal. I do not support school vouchers, but this a case that really makes me pause, and would the type of exception that I would support.

I personally know a number of young men who graduated with my son. They did not do well in the NYC high school lottery, so their parents, came up with the money to send them to a Catholic high school. It was a difficult 4 years for these families, who even with discounts and transportation vouchers found it very difficult to go to this school that often required transportation transfers to attend. Some of the kids lived in far away boroughs. They were NOT the brightest or best by any public or private school standards. But every single one of them are going to college with enough merit/financial aid to make it work. I talked to the mom of one who told me that less than half her sons' peers who did not get into the great NYC magnet schools are going to college and if they are, are going to community colleges or at best the CUNYS maybe. What a difference in results.

$39,000 for tuition - $35,000 for tutors

Siddharth Iyer spent eight Mays cramming for finals, first at Stuyvesant High School and then at Columbia University.

Nine years later, it is still crunch time for Mr. Iyer, a top tutor at Ivy Consulting Group, as his clients face a deluge of end-of-year exams. “He’s been prepping my son all week,” said the mother of one, a senior at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, speaking on the condition that she not be named because Riverdale discourages both tutoring and talking to reporters.

“Prepping” — in this case for an oral exam in Riverdale’s notorious Integrated Liberal Studies, an interdisciplinary class laden with primary sources instead of standard textbooks — did not start the week before the exams, the mother pointed out. She said she had paid Mr. Iyer’s company $750 to $1,500 each week this school year for 100-minute sessions on Liberal Studies, a total of about $35,000 — just shy of Riverdale’s $38,800 tuition.

Last year, she said, her tutoring bills hit six figures, including year-round SAT preparation from Advantage Testing at $425 per 50 minutes; Spanish and math help from current and former private school teachers at $150 an hour; and sessions with Mr. Iyer for Riverdale’s equally notorious interdisciplinary course Constructing America, at $375 per 50 minutes.

Push for A’s at Private Schools Is Keeping Costly Tutors Busy
By JENNY ANDERSON
Published: June 7, 2011

Elite New York schools like Riverdale and Dalton hire teachers with Ph.Ds -- not Ed.Ds^*-- in the fields they teach. Very likely, what has happened here is that these teachers have created advanced college-level courses high school students can't handle.

We need micro-schools.

^* When we looked at private schools 3 years ago, we found that the math teachers in nearly every private school had Masters degrees in education, not math.

in Portugal

In the Wall Street Journal:

Just 28% of the Portuguese population between 25 and 64 has completed high school. The figure is 85% in Germany, 91% in the Czech Republic and 89% in the U.S.

Ireland

There is substantial evidence from elsewhere that education confers broad economic benefits. Ireland was one of the EU's poorest countries a generation ago. But it threw EU subsidy money into technical education and remade itself as a destination for high-tech labor, made doubly attractive by low corporate taxes. Ireland is now, even after a brutal banking crisis, among the richest nations in Europe.

"They had an educated-enough work force that they could move into a technology industry, and they rose out of nowhere," says Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University professor.

Portugal

Prof. Hanushek and a professor from the University of Munich have linked GDP growth with population-wide performance on standardized tests. They calculate that Portugal's long-term rate of economic growth would be 1.5 percentage points higher if the country had the same test scores as super-educated Finland.

Education long was an afterthought here. "The southern countries like Portugal and Spain and the south of France and Italy, we have always had some problems related with education," says António Nóvoa, a historian who is rector of the University of Lisbon. "That's been like that since the 16th century."

The repressive dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974 had the idea "that people should not have ambition to be something different than what they were," Mr. Nóvoa says. The result was widespread illiteracy and little formal schooling; just three years were compulsory. Huge leaps have been made since the 1970s, he says, but "it is not easy to change a history of five centuries."

Portugal has just begun phasing in 12 years of required schooling; now, Portuguese can leave school after ninth grade. Many do.

[snip]

A push to evaluate teachers triggered searing strikes and demonstrations in 2008, souring relations between powerful teachers' unions and the government. The political life of education ministers is measured in months: since the dictatorship ended in 1974, there have been 27.

parents protest cuts to quasi-private schools

To the system's critics, a fight that has developed over quasi-private schools is emblematic of what's wrong. With budgets tight, the government has imposed deep cuts on schools that are at the margin of the state's control—no matter that some are among the best.

[snip]

In one town, A Dos Cunhados, the local school isn't run or owned by the government. It is managed by the Catholic Church, in an arrangement that dates to the end of the dictatorship, when the new Portuguese state found it didn't have enough facilities.

At the school, Externato de Penafirme, as at 90 others with what are called "association contracts," the state pays a management fee to a private entity, which broadly follows the state curriculum but hires its own teachers.

The deputy principal, Carlos Silva, once taught chemistry in the public school system. He was shuffled through four schools in four years. Frustrated, he quit and enrolled in a seminary. Afterward, as a priest, he asked his bishop about returning to the classroom, and was assigned to Externato de Penafirme.

[snip]

Faced with the cuts, students and parents organized. In December, 4,000 people held hands in a big ring around the Penafirme campus. The pictures hit television. A Facebook group sprang up. In January, students walked out of dozens of the privately run schools for three days. To dramatize a claim the cuts would mean the death of their schools, students and parents from 55 schools ferried mock coffins to Lisbon and put them on the median strip outside Ms. Alçada's ministry.

Last month, the education ministry eased somewhat, agreeing to restore part of the lost funding for this semester.

A Nation of Dropouts Shakes Europe
By CHARLES FORELLE
March 25, 2011

parents of school-age children

I missed this part of the public school survey:

Public schools get slightly lower marks from those Americans with children living at home. Among this group, 41% say public schools provide the best education while 47% say public schools are the worst.

Most Americans (54%) know a family whose children attend private school. Among families with children living at home, 62% know some who are in private school. 

In 2005, 42% of all Americans surveyed by Rasmussen thought public schools provided the best education for children; today, 41% of parents with children living at home say the same, while that number rises to 50% when you include people who don't have children living at home.

That's the opposite of what I assumed would be the case.

Interesting.

What happens to the views of parents whose children have grown and left home?

Students Talking About Student Life

Over at The Atlantic a guest blogger brought up for discussion a study showing students don't really learn anything their first two years at college, then he posted for further discussion some of the replies he received Student Life: Still More Views. All of it was interesting, but these two three comments really caught my attention.

There were many students that were thoughtful, interested, and hardworking. They did assigned readings, asked good questions in class, were ready to debate and argue, etc. THE MAJORITY WERE NOT. My friend and I would complain. We always thought that, yeah, you have to put up with people who aren't really interested in learning in high school, but then they get weeded out in college. Not the case, at least not at [my university]. My friend has since gone on to law school at a top 40 program. He thought that by graduate studies, those TRULY uninterested would have gone another way. Yet he still finds himself, at times, sitting next to students who have no intellectual curiosity or even a strong work ethic. I had one political science professor, who in a moment of candor during office hours, noted that when he taught at Princeton, he taught the same identical class (intro to political philosophy) and in the identical way. It was no harder at Princeton, and he was no different. The only difference he noted was the caliber of the students. Whereas at [the state university] there was a bell-curve distribution of a few As, some Bs, and lots of Cs and Ds, at Princeton, there were hardly any slacker students.

A different commenter said:

I went to a private, top 20 liberal arts school in New England for undergrad. I now attend a large state university as a grad student, and what I have to say about the quality of undergraduate education between the two institutions is this: state schools suck.

A professor's point of view:

As a tenured professor with a 22-year career teaching history at a "comprehensive public university," here are my reactions to Mr. Tierney's interesting musings on Contemporary Student Life....Most of the negative changes I have seen in college education began in the period when college aid, which tended to be dependent on performance in school, but which did not burden students with heavy debts upon graduation, was converted to loans, which are not usually as closely linked to getting good grades, but do burden students with debts. Result? Students want to get through school as quickly and efficiently as possible, to minimize their debt, and they are less concerned about grades. So they put more time into work, to try to work their way through, or overload their schedules, to get more units for each semester's loan money, and less time into study. (He/she also mentioned two other possible reasons)

Is this true?

cheap private schools - ?

I've been wondering about something.

Is there a way to create cheap private schools?

Relatively cheap, I mean?

Relatively cheap private schools middle-class parents would be willing to pay for -----

I'm asking today because I just came across this passage from an editorial by Paul Peterson while scouring the internet for more spending x scores graphs:

Universal public high school is relatively new in this country. As late as 1900, more than two-thirds of all US high-school graduates got their diploma from private schools; public schools were turning out only 62,000 graduates a year. In later decades, school districts expanded the "public option" in education; by 1960, 90 percent of high-school age students were enrolled. When something is free, people will use it.

Today, though, only about 10 percent of elementary and secondary students attend a private school. Private schools now attract only two kinds of families: 1) the well-to-do, who are willing to pay the high cost of private schooling; and 2) those seeking to preserve their religious traditions.

Anything available on the cheap will drive out the more expensive -- except for those with hefty wallets or strong convictions.

Health lessons from schools
Paul E. Peterson
New York Post

fyi: Yes, this passage comes from an editorial about the health care bill (back when the public option was still on the table), but that's not the point.

The point is: the cheap drives out the expensive. I'd never heard it put so succinctly.

Public schools are fantastically expensive ($30K per pupil in my district last school year). Yes, we have special education and a zillion mandates, but from my perspective one of the main reasons public schools are fantastically expensive is that constructivism costs an arm and a leg.

If you're running a constructivist school, you have to have tiny little classes so the kids can work in groups without the decibel level breaking the sound barrier; you have to have mixed-ability classrooms because.....well, just because, which means kids move through the curriculum at a snail's pace; you have to have spiraling curricula which also means kids move through the curriculum at a snail's pace; you have to have SMART Boards and laptops and Smart Phones and lord knows what else because it's the 21st century; you have to have literacy specialists and math specialists because the failure rate with balanced literacy and fuzzy math is high; you have to have lots of parent reteaching at night and/or parent hiring of tutors because the kids aren't great at discovering and constructing knowledge.... I could go on.

I've been thinking about "cheap private schools" ever since reading about the Knowledge Schools in Sweden. It's true that, technically, a cheap private school costs more than a public school, but when you contemplate the many costs of getting a slow, fuzzy education instead of a fast, coherent education, the money you'd spend on a 'cheap private school' might start to look like a bargain.

A year ago I was talking about the issue of school spending and quality with a friend, and I said, "A good education costs less; a bad education costs more."

She pointed out that this principle is true on two levels: the school budget but also the life of the child. A bad education costs the child.

Suppose you put together a bare bones K-5 or K-8 school with the fundamentals parents want....

Could you do it?

What would it look like?

Cato on public vs private school spending

Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and reported in the media often leave out major costs of education and thus understate what is actually spent.

To document the phenomenon, this paper reviews district budgets and state records for the nation's five largest metro areas and the District of Columbia. It reveals that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.

Real spending per pupil ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23 percent in the Chicago area to a high of 90 percent in the Los Angeles metro region.

To put public school spending in perspective, we compare it to estimated total expenditures in local private schools. We find that, in the areas studied, public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school.

They spend what?
by Adam B. Schaeffer

I had no idea how much my own district was spending. I had been dividing the budgeted total by student enrollment, but it turns out we spend more than we budget because we borrow money to pay tax certs. (I think that's how things go - I'm still trying to master budget issues.)

I'd been thinking we were spending a couple hundred dollars over $28K per pupil.

Turns out the real figure is at least $30K and probably closer to $32.

And rising.

survey: best type of schooling

Forty-seven percent (47%) of all adults rate public schools as the best type of schooling for students. Thirty-five percent (35%) say private schools are best, while just nine percent (9%) think home schooling is the best way to go.

In August 2004, 42% of Americans said public schools provide the best education for children, but just as many (43%) said they offer the worst education.

Among those who now have children in elementary or secondary schools, support for public schools is even higher at 52%. Thirty-three percent (33%) of these adults think private schools are the best type of schooling for students, and five percent (5%) favor home schooling the most.

Seventy-two percent (72%) of these parents rate the performance of their child’s school as good or excellent, down nine points from September 2008. This includes 40% who say their children’s schools are excellent, but that’s a seven-point drop from the earlier survey. Just three percent (3%) now say their child’s school is performing poorly.

[snip]

Those who earn more than $75,000 per year view public and private schools equally in terms of which is the best type of schooling.

Women are twice as likely as men to view the performance of their child’s school as excellent. Younger parents have a much higher appreciation of the schools than those who are older.

45% Say Parents Less Involved

I wonder if it's meaningful that more people said public schools are best today than in 2004. I haven't seen other surveys showing that confidence in public schools is rising - ?

Women twice as likely as men to view their child's school as excellent: jibes with my impressions.

And: only 52% of those who currently have children in public schools think public schools are the best type of schooling? Five per cent of parents with kids currently attending public schools think homeschooling is best?^*

Wow.

Of course, that perception fuels overspending on houses in areas with nominally high performing schools.


^* Approximately 11% of US children attend private schools. (pdf file)

per pupil spending in private schools

I'd been meaning to get this posted for a while now:

The report finds that, on average, independent private schools spend $15,000 per pupil, Hebrew schools more than $12,000, and Roman Catholic schools $7,743, based on data from the 2006-07 academic year. U.S. Christian schools identified with one of two major associations, the Association of Christian Schools International and the American Association of Christian Schools, spend $5,727 on average.

Private Schools
Education Week | August 25, 2009

Full report here.


to do

palisadesk on private schools for the poor

Any idea what the % of students in poor and developing countries go to private v. public schools?

In some "poor and developing" countries" it is 100%, for the simple reason that public schools are a) not available at all, or b) not available in that region, or c) not affordable.

In those cases, however, families often have to select only one child to educate, and that child may have to leave school if the family needs his (it's usually a he) wages or cannot afford the fees.

Many families in my school population have immigrated from countries where public education is not available, period. If available, it is in the cities and not in rural or mountain villages.

An uplifting read on one American's campaign to change this situation is Greg Mortensen's Three Cups of Tea.

private schools for the poor

private schools for the poor

Schools for the poor are the obsession of James Tooley's book, "The Beautiful Tree." An education specialist with a severe case of wanderlust, Tooley had always believed that in developing nations, the upper classes attend private schools while the poor rely on public ones. But during a drive through the slums of Hyderabad, India, in 2000, he came across an unexpected phenomenon: an unending line of small, no-frills private schools catering to poor kids.

Tooley began seeking out and finding private schools for the poor across the developing world, interviewing students, principals, parents and officials in China, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Somaliland and beyond. Parents everywhere cited similar reasons for paying the small fees for private schools rather than sending their kids to state schools. For some, especially in rural areas, the public schools were too far from their homes. To others, teachers and administrators in private schools seemed more attuned to their concerns. And despite the foreign aid and state spending on public school facilities, many parents simply felt that their children learned more in private schools. "What's the point of having such nice buildings," asked a mother in a fishing village in Ghana, "if learning doesn't go on?"

The officials Tooley encountered in his travels often denied the existence (much less the superiority) of private schools for low-income children. "There are no private schools for the poor," a bureaucrat in China's Gansu province told Tooley, "because the People's Republic has provided all the poor with public schools. So what you propose to research does not only not exist, it is also a logical impossibility."

Undeterred, Tooley spent years surveying private schools across the developing world. He found that, on average, they had smaller class sizes, higher test scores and more motivated teachers, all while spending less than public schools. With the zeal of a convert, Tooley invokes the market's "invisible hand" to explain why private schools perform better: When parents pay the fees that keep a school afloat, he reasons, the school becomes more accountable to them. Tooley blasts development experts for recognizing the problems with public education and still insisting that more investment in public schools is the way to go. "Why wasn't anyone else thinking that private schools might be part of a quicker, easier, more effective solution?" he asks.

Schools, Weddings and Funerals on $2 a Day
By Carlos Lozada
Friday, June 19, 2009 8:27 PM

via Cato

house

One of the questions in my mind this year, with C. attending Hogwarts, has been: why is the place so happy?

Somehow, the school motivates the kids to work hard and strive, and yet the winner-take-all burnout culture that often exists in high-performing public high schools doesn't exist there.

Why is that?

I don't know the answer, although I think it has to do with the fact that the kids develop a group identity the first day they arrive, when they attend a formal induction ceremony held in a nearby chapel.

In the ceremony a senior escorts each of the new boys up the center aisle of the sanctuary to the chancel, where a priest holding a mace blesses him and presents him with a freshman pin he is to wear on his jacket. Then he joins his mentor group standing off to the side.

I assume the mentor groups are related to the house system in British boarding schools:


the house system

Can competition and camaraderie coexist? They do in Highlands Latin School’s house system.

At first it may seem that competition and camaraderie are at odds, and sometimes they probably are. But in Highlands Latin School’s house system, they seem to go together quite well. A traditional fixture of many British schools, the “house” system has enabled Highlands to accomplish a number of goals that can be elusive for many schools.

The Origins of the “House” System

The house system is widely used in British schools and schools that model themselves after the British system in countries with past British colonial ties, such as Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, and Singapore. The system began in boarding schools, where students actually ate, drank, and slept in individual houses during school terms. The house system still operates this way in prestigious British boarding schools, such as Harrow, Eton, and Winchester College.

But, perhaps because of its obvious merits, the system is now used even in day schools, where the term ‘house’ refers simply to groupings of pupils, with no buildings involved. The houses are usually named after Christian saints or for famous persons historically connected with the school.

[snip]

At Highlands Latin School in Louisville, Kentucky, the advantages of the house system have been manifold. The houses provide not only an increased sense of identity and belonging, they also provide students with a sense of tradition. Leadership opportunities also abound in the house system.

Highlands, which is an outgrowth of the work of Cheryl Lowe, founder of Memoria Press, has seen a marked change in the attitude of students as a result of the establishment of the houses. “Because of the competition and the identification of each student with a house,” says Martin Cothran, a Highlands instructor and a co-director of the school, “there are constant opportunities to cheer your fellow students on. The positive attitudes of students toward one another and toward the school have been quite amazing since we started our program.”

The sense of tradition is palpable too. The Highlands house system, which is only a year old, already has about it the sense of history.

[snip]

The feature of the houses most popular with students is the competitions. At Bingley Grammar School in West Yorkshire, England, houses compete on the basis of academics, attendance, and sports. Sports competition includes cross country, netball, rugby, and table tennis. At Highlands, students compete in academics, community service, and sports, including dodgeball, soccer, ultimate frisbee, kickball, and volleyball. They also compete in chess and Latin Scrabble.

Academic competition is based on GPA. Houses are given points on the basis of how house teams perform in academic quick recall competitions. Community service points might be given on the basis of which house turned out the most members to sing at a rest home.

House

If I were starting a charter school I'd want it to have a House system.


how to create a virtual culture
Anonymous on competition & "positive compulsions"

cranberry on advisories in private schools (& building good habits)

In my other child's private school, the advisor is a great system. It's one of your child's teachers. If you think your child is developing a social or academic problem, you raise the issue with your child's advisor. This is marvelous, because it provides a listener for the parent, who may very well have a legitimate complaint about the other teacher. Let's say, a child feels that the homework is assigned, but not collected, by a new teacher. The child's advisor can speak with the new teacher, encouraging him to collect the homework. The parent is not left in the position of having to complain either to the teacher, or to the principal, neither good options. As a parent, I don't want to make a stink about a small problem. In the public school, though, I've seen small problems balloon into huge problems, because there are no avenues for parents to provide rational feedback on their child's academic experience.

Hogwarts has "mentor group," which is similar -- although they don't seem to invite parents to talk to mentors, particularly.

C's mentor keeps track of the kids' grades and intervenes if grades start to slip. She also is a bear (that's a good thing) on the issue of kids using their planners. She checks their planners every day to see if they've written down their assignments; if they haven't, she has them do so.

She is building a habit. She isn't just haranguing the kids on the importance of being organized (which is what public schools do & what I've often done myself), she is teaching them how to be organized, and she is giving them practice each and every day until using the planner becomes automatic.

We have only recently realized our job as parents isn't just to produce a "good kid" and a good student, our job is also to build good habits. In the past couple of years, as C. has gotten older and more responsible, Ed and I have both taken to scolding him about his messy ways. We find his stuff all over the house, we get mad, we remonstrate.

That's not the way to do it.

We need to set a time each and every day when we have him do a quick clean-up of his room and his desk, and we need to keep doing this until it becomes second nature for C. to do a quick clean-up of his room and his desk.

Speaking of building habits, a commenter recommended Glenn Latham's The Power of Positive Parenting awhile back. I've only dipped into it, and don't know what he has to say on the subject of teaching kids to clean up their rooms and use their planners, but it is a fantastic book.

Wonderful.

middle school advisory

middle school advisory

Seeing as how CT has apparently mandated advisories in middle school, it's time to post this article by Daniel Deitte (pdf file):

When I was first hired as a middle school sixth grade teacher, I was thrilled. This was a position I had coveted for over four years....Soon after I started, however, I realized that one piece was missing; we did not have a strong advisory program. Yes, we had a structured advisory period for 29 minutes at the end of every day, but there was very little focus to our advisory. Something needed to be done about the lack of interest and focus during that time.

[snip]

As I spoke about this with several of my colleagues, something else became very apparent to me …none of us had a clear picture of what was supposed to happen in a true advisory program.

Good reason to institute an advisory program and pay teachers a stipend to advise!

The worst part about running the advisory I described above was that I found myself dreading the last 29 minutes of each day. Inevitably, I had students who did not want to participate in S.Q.U.I.R.T [Super Quiet Uninterrupted Reading Time], or who never had any homework to do. Additionally, somewhere, early in my first year of teaching, I had decided that my advisory time would be a quiet time with the students needing permission to speak.

"A quiet time with the students needing permission to speak" is not an advisory.

In order to achieve this, I found myself yelling and constantly getting frustrated with the students.

Definitely not an advisory.

My first plan of action in making my change was to do some heavy research over the summer. I did not have a clear understanding of what an advisor’s role was. The Internet provided me with resources that would help me move toward this goal.

Taxpayers, take note.

We are paying certified teachers to assume roles that have not been defined by their superiors or the school board and for which they have no training. No one in this woman's school knows what an advisor or an advisory is and yet they've got advisors and advisories up the ying-yang because the middle school model includes advisories.

I found this definition to be the following: “An organizational structure in which one small group of students identifies with and belongs to one educator, who nurtures, advocates for, and shepherds through school the individual in that group” (Cole, 1992, p. 5).

Bingo. That is what takes place inside an actual advisory group headed by a teacher in a private or parochial school. One educator nurtures, advocates for, and shepherds through school the individuals in that group.

Furthermore, I found that, “Advisories should help students develop meaningful interpersonal relationships” (Dale, 1995, p. 3). Lastly, “Activities should be provided … that lead to the development of positive attitudes, values, and emotional control” (Connors, 1990, p. 165).

oops

That's not an advisory.

An advisory (called a mentor group at Hogwarts) is focused on school first, relationships and attitudes second & then primarily as they relate to school. The mentor follows the kids' grades and steps in if grades start to slip. Since Hogwarts is a Catholic school, charity activities take place inside the mentor group, too, but the focus is academics and the kids' progress in their studies.

It bears repeating that the mentor advocates for the student. If the student is having a problem with another teacher, the advisor straightens things out. When we toured Rye Country Day, the student showing us around actually called the person heading advisory "your mom at school." Those were her words.

These definitions clicked immediately with me. It was that affective domain that seemed to need the most work with middle school students. It did not take me long to realize that my focus for advisory would be character education, teamwork, and community building.

Not an advisory.

Not worth the stipend taxpayers are shelling out.

As I delved deeper into my research, I found that out of 9,000 letters sent from middle school students to their U.S. Representatives, “Over 15% were concerned about their home and school environments” (Hoversten, Doda, & Lounsbury, 1991, p. 9). The question I formulated from all of my research, which would be the root of my year-long inquiry, was, “Will the development of character education, in the sixth grade advisory, create a strong sense of community, nurture teamwork, and help develop a sense of pride between each student and his/her fellow advisees?” This became my focus for the 2000-2001 school year.

The advisory is not a research project.

[M]y next task was to figure out how I would go about facilitating the implementation of character education into this advisory. I knew I did not want it to be in a lecture format. The last thing I wanted was to conduct lectures, and then to require them to take notes. My feelings were that I would quickly lose the kids if I tried this type of structure. Then I found a book written by Tom Jackson that discussed the importance of “Active Learning.”

Saw that one coming a mile away.

“Active Learning has people participate in their own learning process by involving them in some type of activity where they physically become a part of the lesson” (Jackson, 1995, p. 2). I knew I had what I wanted; I would use Active Learning to foster character, teamwork, and community building. I remember feeling the excitement building inside of me after having found a place to begin.

Character Education Provides Focus for Advisory by Danielle Deitte (pdf file)

There's plenty more where that comes from, none of it having to do with academics or responsible adults advocating for the students in their charge.

bonus points: Advocacy for Children by Siegfried Engelmann

Jeanne Chall on decline at the top

The 1970s and 1980s brought additional reasons for discontent. The first was the continuing decline of scores on the Scholastic Achievement Tests (SATs), the decline having begun even as early as the 1960s. Another cause for growing concern was the low achievement particularly among poor and minority children on the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]. Since 1969, NAEP (also known as "The Nation's Report Card") has conducted periodic assessment of the academic performances of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders in a range of subjects. At first it was thought that the SAT score decline resulted from growing number of low-income students taking the SAT for the first time. Later, it was found that the absolute decline in scores was even greater among the most able students (Chall, 1989). After years of debate as to whether SAT scores had significantly declined, the College Board changed its standards (permitting a "pass" with lower scores.)

Recommendations to improve educational achievement varied widely. Some championed a stronger focus on open education--calling for greater emphasis on student motivation and interest--while others called for more instruction-centered solutinos--higher educational standards and greater rigor. The most influential of the many proposals at the time was A Nation at Risk, the Report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE, 1983). Its proposed solution was largely teacher-cntered: a more rigorous curriculum, reintroduction of traditional courses of study, and more-difficult, challenging textbooks.

Other proposals for teacher-centered solutions appeared during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a series of studies that compared achievement in public schools with that in private and parocial schools, Coleman and Hoffer (1987) found that students in private and parochial schools tested higher on academic ahievement than those in public schools. The investigators attributed the differences to the heavier focus of the private and parochial schools on teacher-centered practices such as the use of discipline and assigning homework and grades.

The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom
by Jeanne S. Chall
p. 41-42

in a nutshell:

• Jeanne Chall's 1989 study of the 16-year decline in SAT scores (1964-1980) found the largest decline in scores amongst the top students
  

• A Nation at Risk recommended teacher-centered classrooms and the "reintroduction of traditional courses of study"
  

• Coleman and Hoffer found that classroom discipline and teacher-centered instruction were the reasons why private & parochial school students did better than students in public schools
  

Until tonight, I hadn't made the connection between classroom discipline and direct instruction.

Of course, it's obvious that if you're in favor of the latter, you're in favor of the former. You have to be; you can't do direct instruction without classroom discipline.

But it hadn't occurred to me that if you're opposed to "drill and kill" you might also be ambivalent about teachers maintaining law and order inside the classroom.

pick one

Lynn G and I watched the debate between Lisa Graham Keegan & Linda Darling-Hammond two nights ago, and now you can, too. The last 6 minutes are worth the time.

The debate was terrific, I thought, though the fact that curriculum and pedagogy, the twin issues that have driven my own family from the public schools, were barely mentioned goes quite a ways towards explaining to me why I've become an "Independent." I put "Independent" in quotation marks because I wasn't planning to become an Independent and don't consider it a badge of honor to be one. I am a believer in two-party politics, as a matter of fact; I just don't happen to have a party to believe in.

Of course, having become a person without a party and a parent without a public school, I'm thinking maybe now's the time to morph from small-l libertarianism to the real thing.

But I think I'll hold off on that. I can't be a libertarian; I have to carry on supporting NCLB if only to be the one parent in all of leafy suburbia who does.^* It's my job.

Speaking of leafy suburbia, on the video you'll hear Linda Darling-Hammond giving a shout-out to Scarsdale superintendent Mike McGill and his strategic use of resources or some such. That is horsepucky. The secret to Scarsdale Mike McGill's success is tutors. Lots and lots and lots of tutors.

And don't you forget it.



^* Me, and the hardy band of commenters and readers around these parts.

Loomis Chafee summer reading list

Just heard from one of the ktm regulars whose son attends Loomis Chaffee -- Animals in Translation is on the summer reading list! (pdf file)

Of course, they left my name off the "Author" citation....

sigh