Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content
Frustrating report out of Hartford, where budget problems threaten the opening on a new Achievement First charter school. The state can’t find $2.1 million needed to open the school to 252 students in September. Has anyone in Hartford figured out the future earning power of well-educated students? The incremental tax revenue they might generate over their lives? $2.1 million is a rounding error.
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Every June, I and other teachers in my South Bronx elementary school, would go to great lengths to assemble portfolios of written work for students who were in danger of being held over. The point, as far as there was one, was to demonstrate that students who tested below grade level were in fact, making good progress, and that their test scores were not a reflection of their actual ability. It was an annual exercise in frustration and irrelevance. Say what you will about standardized tests, but rarely was a failing grade a poor indicator of a student’s ability. But more to the point, none of my students were in danger of being held over. Even those who scored a “1″ on their ELA exams (the lowest possible score) were shipped off to summer school and miraculously got up to speed in six weeks (I must have been some kind of lousy teacher not to have pulled that off myself) and “earned” promotion. In five years, the only time one of my students was held over was one whose mother insisted to the principal that he repeat the grade.
Social promotion, in short, is alive and well. Was my experience an anomaly? I’m curious as to the state of play elsewhere. Is social promotion happening in your school?
Nicholas Carr, in the cover story of The Atlantic, worries that the Web has damaged his ability to think:
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Carr’s cover story, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” notes that how we read matters as much as what we read. When you take most of your information from the Web “the ability to to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”
“My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” writes Carr. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
I need to go back and finish that article now…
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