One of the most revealing aspects of Fordham’s report on high-achieving kids in the era of NCLB is the accompanying teacher survey:
The national survey findings show that most teachers, at this point in our nation’s history, feel pressure to focus on their lowest-achieving students. Whether that’s because of NCLB we do not know (though teachers are certainly willing to blame the federal law). What’s perhaps most interesting about the teachers’ responses, however, is how committed they are to the principle that all students (regardless of performance level) deserve their fair share of attention and challenges.
This precisely describes my experience teaching 5th grade in the South Bronx. A teacher in a school where the majority of kids read below grade level is unlikely ever to be asked what he or she is doing for kids who are at or above grade level. The immediate concern is triage.
Continue reading ‘The Smartest Bears in the Zoo’
Want to know who will have the toughest time passing high school exit exams? Look at 4th grade test scores, grades and classroom behavior. A study Public Policy Institute of California, reported in the L.A. Times, will come as no surprise to 4th grade teachers:
The findings, based on an extensive study of student achievement in San Diego schools, call into question the effectiveness of aiming significant efforts and tens of millions of dollars at struggling high school seniors and older students to help them pass the exam.
The report recommends “moving a portion of these tutoring dollars to struggling students in earlier grades — when the students are still in school — could be a wise choice. An ounce of prevention could indeed be worth a pound of cure.”
Makes perfect sense, intervene early, and the earlier the better. I would wager real money that I could predict today which of my 5th graders are likely to graduate high school with a fairly high degree of accuracy based on their elementary school performance, and in most cases, the die was cast before they walked into my room. The battle is won and lost at an early age.
Update: Joanne Jacobs, who has probably forgotten more about education in California than I’ll ever know, is also on this.
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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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