kitchen table math, the sequel: code of silence, part 2

Friday, February 8, 2008

code of silence, part 2

more on why parents don't criticize their schools:


from Molly:
I have 2 in public school and 1 who now homeschools.

Once I pulled out of the neighborhood school, I suddenly started hearing all sorts of misgivings from other parents. It was as if they felt it was "safe" to talk to me about how they really felt about the school after I made my feelings public. Parents are concerned, but think that everyone else is happy with the school so they must be wrong.

from Tex:
Many people see their own kids as the problem, NOT the school. That attitude was enormously appealing to me. However, when I began to see the nonsense that sometimes passes as teaching, I changed my tune and started to consider that the school was not holding up their end of the bargain. I began to call them on it, and their response has been to do nothing differently. And, to sometimes ignore me.

Sense of futility.
and:

People who don't have kids in the schools need to get involved.

I absolutely agree. Unfortunately, I think people who don’t have kids in the schools usually cannot know the problems as well as the parents with school kids. They’re not as motivated and they view it as someone else’s problem. Of course, their protestations are often discounted by the powers that be and by the other parents.

Steve H on the same subject:
Many of the best advocates for change did have kids in the public schools. They got fed up and went elsewhere. Now they wash their hands of the problem.

Twenty to twenty-five percent of the kids in our town go to other schools. Some of the parents worked very hard to get the public schools to change or offer alternatives. They wouldn't. Now, these parents are accused of wanting an "elite" education and dismissed out-of-hand. The schools know that this is not true.

They just want to do what they want to do, and they try to focus all arguments on money. They would do more, but they just don't have the money.

concerned parent:
Of course, I know of a few people who do. We are, of course, the exception. People move here for the schools. It would never cross their minds that homeschooling would be an option-- a very good option, in fact.

Strangely enough, my daughter is promoting the value of homeschooling whenever she can. She has friends begging their parents to homeschool them. When parents hear all the interesting things my daughter has to say, how eloquently and coherently she can present her ideas, and that she is not socially dwarfed by being educated at home, whatever stereotypes they may have had about homeschooling are challenged.
In some way, this may open up a dialogue between parents are their own children about what is going on in school and what they are learning (or not learning). It just may cause parents to take pause and re-evaluate what's happening in our schools with a more critical eye.

I love it!

Excellent.


homeschooling in the D.C. area:
In the Washington, D.C., area, which is probably just as affluent as that of the above poster, homeschooling is very popular, attracting people of diverse educational philosophies. Many of the posters on this blog would be candidates for homeschooling. My wife and I homeschool our two daughters.

That is very encouraging to hear.

26 comments:

ms-teacher said...

I absolutely agree. Middle child (aka Son #1) is now doing an online high school program after we pulled him out of his high school. Youngest child (Son #2) was pulled out of the district I live in when he was in 3rd grade and put into the District I teach in because I can hand-pick the teachers I want. However, when it comes to high school, we will probably have him go through the same online program that Son #1 is currently doing.

Catherine Johnson said...

oh gosh, you MUST tell us about his online program

PLEASE!!!!

Instructivist said...

Trying to get parents to focus on issues like curriculum and instruction to achieve quality education is an uphill battle. There is a frightening lack of awareness of the issues involved in math and reading wars. Constructivism means nothing.

Here in Chicago we have a raging controversy involving a neighborhood school. In Chicago we have Local School Councils that have the power to fire principals. In the school in question, the LSC did just that. The reasons are unknown because the LSCs operate in closed sessions and everything is covered by a mantle of confidentiality. What agitates the parents has nothing to do with curricular and instructional matters but with pious concerns over diversity. An opportunity to grill the candidate for principal on vital curricular and instructional matters is lost.

Catherine Johnson said...

Trying to get parents to focus on issues like curriculum and instruction to achieve quality education is an uphill battle.

It is - because we don't know anything.

When I first put a toe into the water I had no idea what constructivism was, what a coherent curriculum was, what world standards for math education were - nothing.

The other issue, and I saw this again today at a birthday party, is that we've all had spotty educations ourselves.

I talked to a mom about the math class. She'd been in to the school, met with the principal, etc.

She's going to drop her child to a lower level math in h.s., and she's disgusted by the fact that teachers here never collect or correct homework. (She told me this practice begins - or ends, I guess - in 3rd grade.)

But she said she told her child that there are some parts of math you'll never get.

I insisted that can't be true at this point with high-achieving, high-scoring kids!

I convinced her, I think, mostly by pointing out that we are talking about beginning algebra.

But the fact is most people who aren't in math-related careers think "math is hard." It's universal. They expect their kids to have trouble.

No one has ever seen a curriculum and teaching that didn't leave dozens of kids "struggling."

I need a DVD of the KIPP kids doing algebra.

Just saying "80% of KIPP students take and master Math A in 8th grade is too abstract."

concernedCTparent said...

I've been doing some more thinking about the code of silence as it applies to my district in particular. I think it's very much what Richard Elmore refers to as the "unexamined wallpaper" phenomenon. "...things get done in routine ways, without much thought about how they affect the quality of instructional practice in the classroom. The routines are safe, comfortable, and often quite destructive to powerful learning in schools."

For the most part, the families with school age children in our town, are very transient. We have a number of very large employers in the area who happen to transfer employees nationally and internationally quite often.

A large number of parents in our district have experienced different school environments and have very concrete expectations of what education can or should be. They base their decision to move to our town on the district's reputation for academic excellence. In many cases they have moved from a school or district with an equally impressive resume. Expectations run high.

From what I've experienced, these transient parents begin noticing that the "wallpaper" is shabby right away. Those entrenched in the district and the community have lived with the "wallpaper" for a very long time and have become accustomed to it. They have little, if anything else to compare it to. Since the district performs well in relation to the state as a whole, it validates the false perception of quality.

The transient parents are in a unique position to see things more clearly because they have a larger frame of reference. Ironically, this is a double edged sword. They usually don't stick around long enough to effect meaningful change. The long-timers know this and disregard the sceptics concerns and choose instead to rally in support of the district as a matter of pride.

Richard Elmore says, "Bringing the regularities of schooling to consciousness around urgent problems of improving instructional practice is a key part of the process of improvement." He argues that you have to be fairly hard-nosed about examining "the quality of teaching and learning, the level of student work, and overall evidence of student performance".

Admitting that you need to change the "wallpaper" is imperative to making any headway in actually changing it. Unfortunately for our district, those parents rallying for change and raising the bar are in the weakest position to make it happen. They don't have the "juice". Most grin and bear until the next job transfer, some send their children to private school, or in rare cases, some homeschool.

In the meantime, the wallpaper gets shabbier and shabbier.

SteveH said...

We have a number of military families pass through our town for 1 year stays. They are the most vocal at our school. Part of it is that they see so many different schools and have a better idea of what they want. The other part may be that they will be gone in a year.

In our town, it's not just wallpaper. It's people who you see at church and the grocery store. The eighth grade teacher at our school who really, really pushed for CMP at our school goes to our church, along with two school committee members who seem to like the status quo.

In some sense it may be wallpaper, because many of the assignments my son does seem to have been done for the last 20 years. But how can I go in and tell my son's teacher that I forbid him to do a diorama for his next book report, or that I don't want him to do any more coloring, or that it's time to move on from poems to reading comprehension and writing? I'm not simply telling them that I like blue instead of red. I would be telling them that I don't like what they are doing.

Catherine Johnson said...

A large number of parents in our district have experienced different school environments and have very concrete expectations of what education can or should be.

Interesting.

It's true - when Ed and I made the rounds of private schools we were blown away.

We had no idea that things like "mentors" exist in these places.

ElizabethB said...

My husband is in the Air Force, and many of our friends are military. You see the gamut of schools. Evidently, Hawaii is horrible. Military parents do know they will be leaving soon, they know they are consumers.

Many of them have also seen DoD schools, which are apparently quite good. I had a friend who taught in the DoD schools, overall the DoD teachers seemed to believe more in facts and instruction from what she said. She was one of the few teachers I've met who it took less than one minute to convince that sight words were phonetic and shouldn't be taught as wholes. She already believed in phonics.

concernedCTparent said...

Elmore on "unexamined wallpaper":

Q: Could you explain the "unexamined wallpaper" phenomenon and how the network has witnessed its adverse effects on student learning?

A: Part of the process of getting better at the work is learning to reflect on the regularities of schooling that everyone accepts as traditional, ranging from how to group children, the use of time in the school day, the conventional way of structuring the job of the teacher, the principal, the superintendent, distribution of funds, etc. Most school systems operate substantially on autopilot—these things get done in routine ways, without much thought about how they affect the quality of instructional practice in the classroom. The routines are safe, comfortable, and often quite destructive to powerful learning in schools. You only see how they get in the way when you look hard at instructional practice and ask what needs to change in order for the practice to improve.

The analogy of the unexamined wallpaper is useful: you've lived in this house for fifteen years, and with time, you've grown accustomed to the wallpaper. Then suddenly one evening you look at the walls and you say, "This place is really grim—I can't stand it any more; either the wallpaper goes or I go." Bringing the regularities of schooling to consciousness around urgent problems of improving instructional practice is a key part of the process of improvement. Then you have to figure out what to do about it. That's where thoughtful strategy comes in—and we try to do both.

Catherine Johnson said...

Many of them have also seen DoD schools, which are apparently quite good.

Interesting.

DoD has a uniform curriculum - is that right?

(Uniform across schools, I mean.)

Catherine Johnson said...

"Wallpaper" is a good metaphor for Extra Help.

Of course everyone believes in Extra Help, including me. Ed provides Extra Help in the courses he teaches at NYU.

No one notices what Extra Help is in our particular school (or perhaps what it has become).

Here it has become the answer to all problems.

Any problem, of any kind, can be solved via Extra Help.

"Needs to come in for extra help" is practically a grade on the report cards. ("Needs to come in" is one of the comments in the Comment Bank.)

ElizabethB said...

"I need a DVD of the KIPP kids doing algebra."

A YouTube video would be even cheaper and easier to distribute.

Also, find some inner city Catholic children or a Protestant Christian school who uses A Beka, and show some of them reading from a newspaper article and then compare that to a wealthier school that uses a lot of sight words. In the Virginia area, according to Sol Stern, you could even compare most of the public schools in Richmond to a wealthy Fairfax county school that used sight words (there were a few schools in Fairfax county that used good phonics programs, including one that also taught phonetic spelling and explained phonetic spelling rules.)

Catherine Johnson said...

You're right!

That's what we need ----- (where's the Sol Stern article???)

ElizabethB said...

Here's the KIPP video, it's already online!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAVFBe3hlyw

And, the sol stern article: http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_reading_first.html

ElizabethB said...

I went to greatschools.net and sorted in the Fairfax area, the 10 worst schools for reading are scoring 53 - 65 % on the 3rd grade SOLs for reading:

http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/cs_compare/va/?level=e&area=c&county=Fairfax&sortby=reading&tab=acad&begin=0&showall=1

For richmond, There are 7 schools scoring from 78% to 93%, and 6 scoring 67% or below:

http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/cs_compare/va/?level=e&area=m&street=1211+Jahnke+Rd&zip=23225&miles=1000&lat=37.5210&lon=-77.4933&sortby=reading&school_selected=1461&ids=1461,2455,1439,2493,1987,1442,1433,1469,2363,1450,2303,1438,2868,1444,1437,2947,340,1929,1463,1435,2156,3161,3157,1459,2828&showall=1&tab=acad

ElizabethB said...

For New York, Just for the Kids has an area where you can see how schools are doing relative to SES and number of minority students. http://www.just4kids.org/en/

It also has several other states, but not VA.

ElizabethB said...

Here's a better list of Richmond schools:

Wow, they have 4 schools that scored 97% or more, the Fairfax district only had 2!

http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/cs_compare/va/?level=e&area=d&district=138&sortby=reading&showall=1&tab=acad

ElizabethB said...

Here's another great site I just found, schooldigger.com.

http://www.schooldigger.com/go/VA/schoolrank.aspx

Fairfield Court Elem., Richmond, 92.3% free lunch, reading sol 98.7, math sol 98.67

Clark Springs Elem, Richmond, 96% free lunch, reading sol 92, math sol 100!

There are more that outperform much wealthier Fairfax, those were the two best free lunch/score wise.

Catherine Johnson said...

wow - you are doing much better at figuring this stuff out than I am.

ElizabethB said...

Here's a few on the Fairfax side: McNair Elem, 37.7% free lunch, 63% reading SOL, Little Run Elementary, 14% free lunch, 78.8% reading SOL.

If you had housing prices, you would see even more differences.

ElizabethB said...

All this data is interesting, I didn't realize how much was out there!

As a former statistician (although badly out of practice since having two children), it is interesting to think of all the things you could do with it.

Now, if we could just get an army of people to call parents and/or teachers and figure out somehow for each of the classes at each of these schools and find out what books they were using for math and reading and how many sight words each teacher taught, we could really have something!

I'd love to have house prices and average income of parents for each school as well.

Catherine Johnson said...

Just for the Kids is a great site, but so far all the schools I've looked at are "below average."

Somebody has to be above average...

ElizabethB said...

You need to go the the great schools website first, you can compare a whole district there, or schools within a 30 mile radius of a certain school.

What district/zip code do you want to see?

ElizabethB said...

School, Math score, English score (grade 8)

Ardsley Middle School 94% 87%
Edgemont 91% 86%
Farragut Middle School 87% 90%
Irvington Middle School 81% 79%
Dobbs Ferry Middle School 77% 78%
Alexander Hamilton High School 75% 61%
Woodlands Middle School 68% 63%
Sleepy Hollow Middle School 54% 55%
Ziccolella Elementary/Middle School 3.8 27% 26%
Greenburgh Eleven Middle School 1.3 3% 5%
Abbott School 1.1 0% 0%

What's up with the 3% and 5% ? Is this a special ed school?

http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/cs_compare/ny/?level=m&area=m&street=40+N&zip=10533&miles=1000&lat=41.0289&lon=-73.8522&sortby=NYSA_MATH&school_selected=1259&ids=1259,4419,7747,696,778,777,5172,154,8470,1010,821,5042,4420,4243,4356,1091,5170,4355,784,5831,2977,4334,3834,973,8834&showall=1&tab=acad

Catherine Johnson said...

boy, I've never heard of that school

ElizabethB said...

"boy, I've never heard of that school"

With those scores, I'd try to keep a low profile, too.