Archive for February, 2008

Running Records

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 19, 2008 in Running Records. 0 Comments

Caught Being Good

Tom Wates
A British “maths” and PE teacher has solved the age-old problem of students tipping back their chairs and falling. He’s invented an untippable chair.

St. Paul Teaching Fellows
Since launching in late 2007, the alternative certification project has garnered applications from 430 prospective new teachers. The Minnesota program is seeking 30 to 50 new teachers for the fall; 250 in five years.

Names on the Blackboard

Ike White
The principal of Hamilton High in Memphis tells the local paper that other than two large fights last fall that resulted in multiple arrests each and a shooting this month, Hamilton is “not a den of violence.” Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play?

Will Okun
New York Times edublogger has important things to say about inner city schools, but quoting the mindless, juvenile rap of Dead Prez’ “They Schools” dulls the impact. Does your school teach kids they’re only three-fifths human beings?

Names on the Board With Checkmarks

Wonks!
My funder can whoop your funder’s @#$%!! Wait, your funder IS my funder! Can’t we all just get along?

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Critical Thinking About Critical Thinking

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2008 in Education Practice and Education Theory. 0 Comments

The Washington PostThere are two types of people in education: those who know the work of University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham, and those who should. A piece by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post examines education’s fixation on teaching critical thinking skills. Willingham has a different view:

“There is no such thing,” he tells the Post.

Willingham and other cognitive psychologists say critical thinking skills are developed in relation to the content area in which they are acquired. They are not skills that can be acquired—or taught—in the abstract.

“You may have these fabulous critical-thinking skills, but you don’t know when they are appropriate,” Willingham says. “If you think of thought as having two components, you have factual knowledge that you know and the processes that manipulate those facts,” he added. “Everyone understands that half is no good when that half is knowledge. People don’t seem to understand that it works the other way. Having processes alone doesn’t work, either. You can’t acquire these processes in the absence of facts.”

Willingham questions the value of educational programs that offer a way to teach critical thinking — sometimes through exercises and brainteasers — that are not rooted in any particular subject. “To understand the structure and the nature of poetry, you need to read a lot of poems,” he tells the Post. “It’s the same thing with mathematics and science.”

Willingham, who is Core Knowledge board member, stole the show at EdTrust last November with his presentation “Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading” (If there’s a better rallying cry for curriculum reform, I haven’t heard it). And his regular columns in the AFT’s American Educator are required reading for the kinds of teachers who prefer research to the pedagogy du jour.

He is also the subject of a “myth busters” piece in the Post on teaching to kids “learning styles” — visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. According to Willingham, “There is no evidence that the idea holds water.”

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E.D. Hirsch on “Educational Incoherence”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

ednews.orgA coherent curriculum trumps school choice in promoting student achievement, says Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in an interview with Michael F. Shaughnessy of EdNews.org. The interview was conducted in response to the Sol Stern/school choice dust-up. Hirsch and Shaughnessy delve deeply into curriculum and Hirsch’s concept of “educational incoherence.”

“Children go to school for more than a decade because learning is gradual, and there is a great deal to be learned — especially in matters relating to general knowledge and the build up of vocabulary,” Hirsch observes. “If the specific content for each grade level does not build on what went before and prepare for what will come after, there will be big gaps, and boring repetitions. Those are the conditions that now prevail in charter schools and regular schools. A great deal of school time is being used unproductively, and the hardest hit by this incoherence are disadvantaged children.”

Hirsch also takes issue with those who claim content knowledge must take a back seat to problem solving and critical thinking. “Critical thinking skills cannot be learned in the abstract,” he retorts. “They always pertain to concrete knowledge of subject matter. I review the scientific literature on this in The Schools We Need. Writing skills are obverse of reading skills. They both depend more on knowledge of the unspoken within the language community than on knowledge of the spoken. The main, somewhat revolutionary point I have been making is that teaching content is teaching skills, where as teaching formal processes is, in the end, teaching neither content nor skills. This is not only clear in the scientific literature, it is also clear from comparative results. Students who have had been taught coherent knowledge are more highly skilled than those who have been taught “skills.” See the (unfortunately repressed) book by the late Jeanne Chall: The Academic Achievement Challenge.”

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A Contract Hit

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2008 in Education Leadership. 0 Comments

Fordham FoundationA new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation looks at the ostensibly black and white world of accountability vs. union contracts, and finds a surprising amount of grey area. The ultimate responsibility for student achievement tends to fall to principals. But do they have the power to run their buildings like true managers? The Leadership Limbo: Teacher Labor Agreements in America’s Fifty Largest School Districts looked at labor contracts in three areas—compensation, personnel policies, and work rules—and concluded that more than half of the districts studied have labor contracts that are ambiguous. “The collective bargaining agreements and the formal board policies in these districts appear to grant leaders substantial leeway to manage assertively, should they so choose,” the report concludes. Only 15 of the 50 contracts studied are deemed “restrictive or highly restrictive.”

“Districts with high concentrations of poor and minority students tend to have more restrictive contracts than other districts, the report notes. “Another alarming indication of inequity along racial and class lines.”

In Fordham’s Education Gadfly, Checker Finn and Michael Petrilli opine that they tend to see the situation “as more good than bad, for it means, at least in the short run, that aggressive superintendents and principals could push the envelope and claim authority for any management prerogative not barred outright by the labor agreements. And it means that, for a majority of big districts, the depiction of The Contract as an all-powerful, insurmountable barrier to reform may be overstated.”

Stay tuned.

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Multiple Literacies

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 17, 2008 in Education Theory. 0 Comments

The Washington PostHoward Gardner, who has made a lucrative career labeling skills and talents like musical ability and athleticism “intelligences,” is now doing the same for literacy. In an essay in the Washington Post, the Harvard professor is untroubled by dire reports of declining literacy because — what else? — “an ensemble of literacies — will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can’t yet envision.”

Thankfully, Gardner observes that “even in the new digital media, it’s essential to be able to read and write fluently and, if you want to capture people’s attention, to write well.” He doesn’t foresee books disappearing, although the printed word bound up at length between covers may lose its most-favored format status.

“But whatever our digital future brings, we need to overcome the perils of dualistic thinking, the notion that what lies ahead is either a utopia or a dystopia,” Gardner concludes. “If we’re going to make sense of what’s happening with literacy in our culture, we need to be able to triangulate: to bear in mind our needs and desires, the media as they once were and currently are, and the media as they’re continually transforming. It’s not easy to do. But maybe there’s a technology, just waiting to be invented, that will help us acquire this invaluable cognitive power.”

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The Knowledge Connection

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on February 16, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Why has the No Child Left Behind law left so many children behind? According to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading achievement of eighth-graders has declined since the law was passed in 2001, and the large reading gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children — “the achievement gap” — has stayed where it was. Today’s eighth-graders had recorded gains in fourth grade, but these have not led to improvements in later grades — when reading scores actually count for a student’s future.

Those in Congress in charge of crafting revisions should understand that the law’s disappointing results owe less to defects in the law than to the methods and ideas schools use in their attempts to fulfill the “adequate yearly progress” mandate for all groups of students; this causes schools, as many complain, to teach to reading tests rather than educate children. But intensive test preparation by schools has resulted in lower reading test scores in later grades. “Teaching to the test” does not effectively teach to the test after all.

Studies of reading comprehension show that knowing something of the topic you’re reading about is the most important variable in comprehension. After a child learns to sound out words, comprehension is mostly knowledge. Many technical studies support the assertion that after students can fluently sound out words, relevant knowledge is the crucial difference between students who are good or poor readers. In light of the relevant science, an analysis of the textbooks and methods used to teach reading and language arts — for three hours a day in many places — indicates some of the reasons for the disappointing later results. These test-prep materials are constructed on the mistaken view that reading comprehension is a skill that can be perfected by practice, as typing can be. This how-to conception of reading has caused schools to spend a lot of unproductive time on trivial content and on drills such as “finding the main idea” and less time on history, science and the arts.

Continue reading ‘The Knowledge Connection’

Paging Dick Morris

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 15, 2008 in Opinion. 0 Comments

Both DFER’s Joe Williams and Michele McNeil of Edweek seem to think it’s a Very Big Deal that Barack Obama made comments yesterday that, while not exactly endorsing vouchers, didn’t slam the door on them either.   Speaking to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Obama said that he is skeptical of private school voucher programs, such as Milwaukee’s, but added if studies prove the programs are successful, “you do what’s best for kids.”

First, I need to get over the idea that a candidate proposing to do what’s best for kids is a revelation.  Williams characterizes Obama’s comments as what Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee called “a Holy S— Moment.”  That would be nice.  But it sounds more like a Dick Morris triangulation moment to me. 

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There’s No “A” In Whole Child

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 15, 2008 in Education Practice, Opinion and Parents. 0 Comments

New York TimesWriter and parent Maura J. Casey complains in the New York Times (So Is That Like An A?) about report cards in Hartford, Connecticut. The reports—clearly not cards—are up to seven pages long and grade a child on how he or she “establishes and maintains a healthy lifestyle by avoiding risk-taking behavior” and 57 other academic, social and behavioral criteria. In music class, for example, students are being graded on how they make “connections between music and other disciplines through evaluation and analysis of compositions and performances.”

It’s no mere rant. Casey points out that the academic measurements, which are designed to grade areas of student performance that are also measured on state standardized tests, seem more likely to confuse than illuminate. “I confess that as a parent, I’ve always focused on the basics. I want my children to be curious, enjoy learning, to read for pleasure, to be polite, to do their homework and to try not to hate school. If my kids got A’s or B’s, I got a pretty good sense that they were mastering the necessary skills. If they did much worse, I knew that it was time to call their teachers,” Casey writes.

In cities like Hartford, where many students come from non-English speaking homes, Casey points out that educational jargon like “uses numeracy and literacy skills to describe, analyze and present scientific content, data and ideas” seems destined to confuse, not clarify. “If report cards are weighed down with educational jargon that even native English speakers have to struggle to understand, ” she concludes, “it is fair to ask who the administrators are really reporting to: students and their families or the educational bureaucracy?”

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Singled Out

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 14, 2008 in Education Practice. 0 Comments

A Georgia school district has become the first in the nation to convert to single-sex education. The Greene County school district voted unanimously last week to make the move this fall in response to low academic achievement, among other problems.

In a statement on the district’s web site, Superintendent Shawn McCollough stated, “We have a wonderful community here in Greene County, but our students are not having the type of success that they truly deserve. By converting our schools to Single Gender Academies, we expect student achievement and college acceptance will increase, and discipline rates, teen pregnancy, and dropout rates will decrease.”

“Thinking outside of the box simply isn’t enough,” McCollough added. “You actually have to do something outside of the box. If the single gender format is good enough for our finest private and charter schools, then why wouldn’t it be good enough for our public schools?”

The move has plently of critics including, ironically enough, Leonard Sax, head of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. “This is the worst kind of publicity for our movement,” he tells the Associated Press. “It misses the whole point. Our movement is about choice, about giving parents a choice. One size does not fit all. Even a small school district needs to provide choice.” While districts nationwide have converted individual schools to a single-sex model, the small, rural district east of Atlanta is believed to be the first to adopt single-sex education across an entire public school district.

Federal law allows single-sex classrooms or schools but parents must also have the option of a publicly funded coeducational experience for their children, said Sax, who calls Greene County’s decision illegal. McCollough says he’s been advised by the district’s attorneys that the conversion is allowable under federal law. “This is entirely legal and we’re moving forward with it,” he said.

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Say It Loud! I’m Dumb and I’m Proud

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 14, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Review. 0 Comments

New York TimesA headline in the the New York Times today asks “Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?”

The piece that follows jumps off of Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason, which notes a “generalized hostility to knowledge.” Complaining about how uneducated we are is a hardy perennial, but according to Jacoby “something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that ‘too much learning can be a dangerous thing’) and anti-rationalism (’the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion’) have fused in a particularly insidious way.”

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she tells the Times, but they also don’t think it matters.

The Times illustrates this phenomenon with a reference to this cringe-inducing YouTube video that shows Kellie Pickler of American Idol fame on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” struggling with the question “Budapest is the capital of what European country?” She gets the correct answer from her 5th grade partner (the Republic is saved!), but not before saying on national TV before millions, “I thought Europe was a country.”

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