Tag Archive for ‘achievement gap’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'achievement gap'

U.S. Education the Envy of the World. Really.

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 2, 2008 in Higher Education. 1 Comment

While the United States marvels at Asia’s test-taking skills, Asian governments come to the United States to figure out how to get their children to think. So says Fareed Zakaria, a Newsweek editor. His new book, The Post-American World, is excerpted in Foreign Affairs. Zakaria believes the U.S. can continue shaping the world, but only if it can overcome its political dysfunction and reorient U.S. policy for a world defined by the rise of other powers.

Zakaria’s thesis is broad, naturally, but his observations on education are worth noting. He describes higher education as the United States’ best industry, and notes “in no other field is the United States’ advantage so overwhelming….Depending on which study you look at, the United States, with five percent of the world’s population, has either seven or eight of the world’s top ten universities and either 48 percent or 68 percent of the top 50.”

Few people believe that U.S. primary and secondary schools deserve similar praise. The school system, the line goes, is in crisis, with its students performing particularly badly in science and math, year after year, in international rankings. But the statistics here, although not wrong, reveal something slightly different. The real problem is one not of excellence but of access. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the standard for comparing educational programs across nations, puts the United States squarely in the middle of the pack. The media reported the news with a predictable penchant for direness: “Economic Time Bomb: U.S. Teens Are Among Worst at Math,” declared The Wall Street Journal.

Poor and minority students score well below the U.S. average, Zakaria notes. “This will, over time, translate into a competitiveness problem, because if the United States cannot educate and train a third of the working population to compete in a knowledge economy, this will drag down the country. But it does know what works.”

The U.S. system may be too lax when it comes to rigor and memorization, but it is very good at developing the critical faculties of the mind. It is surely this quality that goes some way in explaining why the United States produces so many entrepreneurs, inventors, and risk takers. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, until recently Singapore’s minister of education, explains the difference between his country’s system and that of the United States: “We both have meritocracies,” Shanmugaratnam says. “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. We know how to train people to take exams. You know how to use people’s talents to the fullest. Both are important, but there are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well — like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority.” This is one reason that Singaporean officials recently visited U.S. schools to learn how to create a system that nurtures and rewards ingenuity, quick thinking, and problem solving.

Wendy Kopp Responds

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 27, 2008 in Educational Policy and Teacher Training. 13 Comments

Last week, I posted a memo to Wendy Kopp, suggesting a new way to deploy Teach for America corps members—and get top veteran teachers in front of our highest need classrooms. The Teach for America founder emailed a thoughtful reply over the weekend:

Many thanks for all the generous sentiments in your blog entry, which I appreciate. As for your recommendation, as you might guess, I don’t think this would be a good thing for urban and rural kids. It is a rare person who has what it takes to excel as a teacher in a low-income community, and it’s not at all a given that teachers who do well in more privileged communities will do well in urban and rural areas. The most important thing for kids in low-income communities is that we recruit as many people as possible — whether new or experienced — who have the personal characteristics that differentiate successful teachers in high-poverty communities, and that we train and support them to be effective in meeting the extra needs of their students. The individuals who come to Teach For America are coming because they want to work with the nation’s most disadvantaged children (and it is unlikely that most of them would decide to channel their energy toward teaching in more privileged contexts), and in fact their motivation to level the playing field for them is one reason for their success. The recent Urban Institute study that looked at the impact of high school teachers in the state of North Carolina over a six-year period provides evidence that our strategy has a positive impact for kids; the study showed that the incremental impact of hiring a Teach For America corps member was three times the impact of having a teacher with three or more years of experience. Moreover, in addition to providing a critical source of excellent teachers for disadvantaged kids, our strategy of channelling the energy of the nation’s future leaders into urban and rural schools is important for the long-term effort to ensure educational excellence and equity. Teach For America is building a pipeline of leaders who are deeply committed to educational equity and deeply understand what it will take to ensure that children in low-income communities have the educational opportunities they deserve. Their initial teaching experience in under-resourced communities is foundational to their lifelong commitment to effecting the systemic changes necessary to ensure educational opportunity for all.
Wendy Kopp
CEO & Founder
Teach For America

“We Are the Poster Child for NCLB”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 13, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

A sobering look at the intersection of policy and reality courtesy of the Associated Press. Juliet Williams visits Las Palmitas Elementary School and the Coachella Valley Unified School District in Southern California, where “99 percent of students live in poverty and fewer than 20 percent speak English fluently.” Las Palmitas and other schools in are just the type policy makers had in mind when Congress passed the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 to shed light on the disparities facing poor and minority children, she writes.

Nineteen of the district’s 21 schools — including Las Palmitas — have not met the federal law’s performance benchmarks for four years. Now the entire district faces sanctions for the first time. “We have hardworking, dedicated, trained teachers like everybody else. They’ve got to teach a language, they’ve got to teach the content, and they’ve got to counter poverty,” adds Foch “Tut” Pensis, the district’s superintendent. “We are the poster child for NCLB.”

“Over the next few years, hundreds more districts are destined to enter the next phase that California already has begun. The state has ordered districts to undergo everything from reporting how they are implementing the federal law to having a team of specialists assess every aspect of their operations. In the most extreme cases, California districts could be subject to a state takeover,” Wiliams reports. “How California and the other states will turn around those struggling districts is unclear.”

According to the AP, California has 97 school districts that failed to meet their goals under the law for four years, more than twice as many failing districts as any other state so far. Kentucky has the next highest number facing sanctions, with 47. Nationwide, 411 school districts in 27 states now face intervention.

“No one, on a large scale, has figured out how to solve the achievement gap,” Pensis said. “Everybody’s looking for that answer.”

High End Problems

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 15, 2008 in Education Practice and Educational Policy. 2 Comments

New research confirms what seems obvious to many teachers in inner city schools: the students who are at the greatest disadvantage in U.S. public schools are the brightest African-American children.

“As black students move through elementary and middle school, these studies show, the test-score gaps that separate them from their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills,” Education Week reports.

The reasons why achievement gaps are wider at the upper end of the achievement scale are still unclear, says Ed Week. But it was crystal clear to me in my South Bronx elementary school: every live, twitching nerve ending was aimed at getting kids who scored below grade level over the hump. The kids who were already there were viewed as finished goods. Such potentially high-achieving children, I was pointedly told by my AP once, were “not your problem.”

The “not your problem” kids walk in smart and walk out smart, largely by accident of birth. While they’re in school, they are nearly completely neglected, and as a result achieve not nearly as much as they would have (while still testing at or above grade level on dumbed-down state tests) had they not been starved for oxygen in an underperforming school, where they were constantly praised for being bright, but had few demands placed upon them, and where opportunities for enrichment, in or out of school, were non-existent.

“Some experts believe the patterns have something to do with the fact that African-American children tend to be taught in predominantly black schools, where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find,” says Ed Week.

Sure, that too. But mostly, its not-so-benign neglect.

In one of the studies, Stanford University professor Sean F. Reardon, looked at the test data for nearly 7,000 elementary students and found that the achievement gaps grew twice as fast among the students who started out performing above the mean than they did among lower-performing children. “The long-term implication of this is that, if these gaps continue to grow throughout their schooling career, even kids who enter kindergarten with high levels of readiness are going to end up falling below where they started,” said Mr. Reardon tells Ed Week.

Bringing Up the Rear

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 4, 2008 in Assessment and Testing. 0 Comments

Improvements shown in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, the first time eighth- and 12th-graders were tested in the subject since 2002.

The overall percentage of kids rated as “proficient” didn’t change, but both 8th and 12th graders saw upward movement on the percentage scoring at the lower “basic” level. “Large achievement gaps still persist, though,” notes the Christian Science Monitor “between white and minority students, higher-income and low-income students, and, far more than in other subjects, between girls and boys.”

“The overall improvement in 12th grade is the first good news out of high schools, and that’s great,” Ed Trust’s Amy tells the paper. “But our excitement about that is seriously tempered by the lack of national gap closing.”

In 2002, the average score for 12th-graders was 148; it’s up to 153 as of 2007. The percentage of students scoring at the basic level went from 74 percent to 82 percent. “The biggest gains among eighth-graders were also among low performers, with more students reaching the basic level. It’s a trend that has also emerged in NAEP tests on other subjects: the lowest performers are getting better, with little change at the middle or top,” reports the Monitor.

More coverage of the NAEP:

Los Angeles Times

California still lags in student writing skills

Denver Post

Students’ writing skills don’t change

Boston Globe

State’s 8th-graders score well in writing test, despite gender gap

New York Sun

Writing Mastery Eludes Majority In Eighth Grade

Detroit News

Writing scores edge upward

Wall Street Journal

Write Stuff Shown by More in Grades 8, 12

The New York Times

In Test, Few Students Are Proficient Writers

Above Average Babble

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 25, 2008 in Educational Policy and Preschool. 0 Comments

Children under five in Great Britain could lose the freedom to play thanks to a “toddlers’ curriculum” that imposes 69 learning goals on pre-school youngsters, teachers warn. According to the London Daily Mail, the Early Years Foundation Stage, which applies to all 25,000 private and state nurseries in England sets out 69 early-learning goals that every child should reach after a year at primary school, including writing simple sentences using punctuation, using the phonics system to attempt to read complex words and beginning to grasp addition and subtraction. “Children will be checked against more than 500 development milestones before they are five, including whether they babble and gurgle as babies,”the paper reports.

Britain’s National Union of Teachers, an organization in dire need of a new acronym, is arguing that the imposition of an overly formal academic curriculum can distort young children’s learning experience. “These occur most naturally and effectively through a subtle combination of free play, movement, rhythm, repetition and imitation.”

Sound and fury, signifying nothing, reply Education Ministers, who say it will help all children reach their potential and close the achievement gap between rich and poor. The Department for Children, Schools and Families added: “The early years foundation stage is about learning through play. It does not prescribe teaching methods for young children nor prescribe any testing whatsoever. It sets a series of goals so parents and nursery staff know whether a child is developing properly.”

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’

Guess Who

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 2, 2008 in Parents and Students. 1 Comment

Identify the socioeconomic group under discussion in this article about student achievement.

A mere 15 per cent master the “three Rs.”
Studies cite parental indifference and family break-ups as reasons they have slipped behind other groups.
Some are held back by a peer culture which encourages low aspirations and holds intellectual effort in contempt.

It’s not who you think.

Accountable Talk

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 18, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Massachusetts’ newly hired state education commissioner Mitchell Dan Chester tells the Boston Globe he’s “not interested in coming to Massachusetts to manage the status quo.” The state is often viewed as a bright spot, with solid numbers on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), but to his credit, Chester sound utterly clear-eyed about what he’s walking into. “MCAS is an important cornerstone of the reform agenda but the MCAS has its limitations, and is irrelevant to high-achieving suburbs where MCAS is not the driving force,” he tells the paper. “Passing the MCAS doesn’t mean you’re ready for college.” The Globe reports Chester’s youngest son “a 10-year-old with limited language and socialization skills, struggles in school.”

In Pennsylvania, high school students could have to pass a new series of state exams to graduate under a plan approved Thursday by the State Board of Education. A year of hearings will come first. “As a former principal and superintendent,” the state education secretary, Gerald L. Zahorchak tells the New York Times, “I know I shook the hands of a number of students at graduation who were really receiving an empty diploma.”

Blog: Moral/Spiritual Leadership For Multicultural Education

Published by CKF on November 20, 2007 in Education Leadership, Education Practice and Essay. 0 Comments

Barbara McCauley Lovejoy wrote to Linda Bevilacqua, President of the Core Knowledge Foundation:

Last spring I was accepted into BYU’s (Brigham Young University) Ed Leadership doctoral program. My focus is going to be on how to better serve our diverse learners. For this reason I am very interested in E.D. Hirsch’s work and support it wholeheartedly. In fact, my postings the last two days at www.principlecenteredme.blogspot.com are related to his work so thought you might like to see it.

Also, I have written and self-published a book called My Years As A Hispanic Youth Advocate… and The Lessons I Have Learned.

Linda Bevilacqua responded:

You articulated the underlying principles of Core Knowledge and Dr. Hirsch’s work beautifully in your blog posting. We need your help in making these concepts more widely understood and welcome your ongoing, active participation in advocating for social equity using these principles.

An excerpt from Barbara’s blog, Moral/Spiritual Leadership for Multicultural Education, Facts Plus, on Nov. 15:

If facts are important as a foundation, then the questions arise:

Which facts?

Who decides which facts?

The next post at Moral/Spiritual Leadership for Multicultural Education, E. D. Hirsch and Closing the Achievement Gap, on Nov. 16:

Before answering these two questions, the following are some other questions to consider:

Why does the learning gap for the haves and have nots grow wider as students move through the school in the U.S. while the opposite occurs in other countries?

Why do more 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant students drop out of school than 1st generation immigrant students?

What makes our schools unfair?

What does educational justice mean?

Some points to consider while pondering the answers to these questions:

Educational justice means equality of educational opportunity

Imparting a universally shared core of knowledge helps overcome inequality

Classroom learning can go forward more effectively when all students share some common points of reference

ALL children will learn relatively well in an effective school — High quality tends to be correlated with high equity

Some students are learning less than others because of systematic shortcomings in their schooling and social and economic differences rather than because of their own innate lack of academic ability

New knowledge expands exponentially

There is a “Matthew Effect” — the more background knowledge and the richer the vocabulary a learner has, the greater will be his/her ability to accumulate more knowledge

Detailed guidelines provide clarity

A diverse country has a greater need of a core-knowledge system than does a homogeneous one

The work of E. D. Hirsch’s, Cultural Literacy, has been criticized not only in the multicultural education arena, but also in the general education arena. Yet, before criticizing him too harshly and “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” it is my opinion that we need to have an understanding of why his work on core knowledge could be helpful to diverse learners:

It addresses the snowball effect that allows a small knowledge difference in kindergarten to become a huge gap in learning within a few years

It builds from year to year on the background knowledge learners need to be academically successful

A teacher can identify what background knowledge a learner is missing

It does not stipulate everything a learner should know. In fact, it is meant to comprise only 50% of the school’s curriculum leaving ample time to address other learning needs, including more ethnically-centered curricula

Because cosmopolitanism is a true friend to diversity, core knowledge has adopted a cosmopolitan approach to history and literature in order to reinforce the fact that no longer are Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic groups invisible in the past or the present

In order to be fair to diverse learners, it is critical that schools not neglect or reject the current dominant culture

The Hirsch core knowledge is not the work of one person, but the work of many, including multicultural advisors, who combined scholarly research with grassroots experience to develop this sequence consensus

It was empirical science and not ideology that originated cultural literacy and the core knowledge movement

There is evidence that supports the connection between core knowledge and educational justice. In fact, the correlations between fairness and core knowledge are 100 percent.

As the U.S. becomes more diverse it is critical that we find ways to not only acknowledge the diversity and benefit from the richness that diversity brings, but also find ways to bring us together. It is my opinion that the principles of Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and core knowledge can help do both.