Real Football For Thanksgiving

Tonight at 7pm (at the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif) the U.S. Women's National Team will play in the semifinals of the Women's Gold Cup against Mexico. If they win, they go to the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup.

North Carolina still wins for sending the most women to play on the national team, with 5 UNC grads on tonight's roster (I expect they'll win the NCAA title too this year). Also notable on tonight's roster is goalkeep Briana Scurry, who hails from my own alma mater UMass-Amherst and took a year off in 2005, but is probably best known for making good on her promise to run naked through the streets of Athens if the U.S. won the 1996 Olympics. They did
so she did, 20 yards on a side street with nothing but her gold medal.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Whac-a-Charter School

Joe Williams’ Ed Next cover article about charter school opposition put me in mind of my late, lamented Whac-a-Mole Game. About four years ago a home version of the Whac-a-Mole carnival game popped up in my Amazon.com recommendations, and I just had to have it. It was by far the best $10 I ever spent. Sadly, after a few years of serious abuse, Whac-a-Mole died this year and now sits forlornly in a corner of my bookshelf. Even worse, it’s apparently been discontinued, probably because it was a very dangerous toy—people got hurt playing Whac-a-Mole, which was part of what made it so darn fun. Milton-Bradley now makes a watered down, much less fun-looking but probably safer (and also more expensive!) version of the game, but it’s a pale imitation. Rather than a board of about 8 moles like my game had, where you have to be alert to all the moles and a true master wins by not only hitting her moles but also blocking the opponent from hitting his moles (that's how one gets hurt), the new Milton Bradley version has only four moles, and each player is assigned exactly one mole. Boring! If anyone reading this happens to know where I can get a version of my beloved and discontinued Whac-a-Mole, or has facility with electronics and might be able to help me fix it, I would be exceedingly thankful. To sort of pretend I'm making this post education-relevant: Read Joe's article!

Is Quality Preschool Good Enough?

Writing in the latest Education Next, UVA's Robert Pianta notes research showing that high-quality preschool classrooms can significantly narrow achievement and behavior gaps for at-risk 4-year-olds. But, he cautions, other research finds that:

Most children in pre-K, kindergarten, and grade 1 classrooms are exposed to quite low levels of instructional support and only moderate levels of social and emotional supports--levels that are not as high as those in the gap-closing, effective classrooms...

What's more, there is great variation in the quality of experiences and supports for children even within programs that meet the standards that are generally recognized as being necessary for preschool quality--small class sizes, credentialed teachers, and the like.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there is huge variation in children's experiences in preschool classes that meet similar quality standards. After all, virtually all K-12 teachers have bachelor's degrees and most are certified, but there's tremendous variation in the educational outcomes they produce for kids. A bachelor's degree might be a reasonable floor, but it's hardly a guarantee of effectiveness. Non-tangible or hard-to-measure teacher characteristics (and other characteristics of preschool programs) also matter a lot. That's why regulating inputs alone is never going to be sufficient to ensure quality, either in K-12 or preschool. We also have to look at outcomes in some fashion. Now, we can argue about different ways of measuring outcomes--although I think most reasonable people will probably agree that the way we measure outcomes for little kids will probably look different than it does for bigger kids--but that doesn't change the basic conclusion here.

Also, on a sort-of-but-not-really related note (Shameless Plug Alert!): While you're checking out the latest Ed Next, have a look at this piece I wrote on NCLB restructuring.

WaPost Goes to School Room, Misses Elephant

There's a kind of unreality running throughout today's front-page article in the Post about students who get good grades in school, and even end up on the honor roll, but fail state standardized tests:

Students and teachers offer an array of explanations for why test scores sometimes fail to match up with grades. Some students don't take the exams seriously. Some freeze up. Still others trip over unfamiliar language. And teachers sometimes are not prepped in what the exams cover, especially when the tests are new. Occasionally, some school officials suspect, classes aren't rigorous enough to prepare students adequately.

Occasionally, some suspect. You know, just maybe, every now and again.

Said one parent of an honors student who failed the state algebra exam:

"It's hard to understand a situation where you can have an Honor Roll student who doesn't pass the test. She's been an Honor Roll student since the sixth grade," she said. "I can't say I really hold her teacher accountable. . . . I just accepted the fact that Brittanie may not be a child that tests well."

The only mystery here is why everyone in the article is being so circumspect about something that should be pretty obvious: states create standardized tests because local schools, when left to their own devices, don't always hold students to high enough academic standards. They put students on honor rolls who don't belong there, pass them along to the next grade even though they haven't learned what they need to know, and ultimately hand them diplomas signifying the attainment of skills and knowledge that students haven't actually attained. Not all schools, certainly, or even most. But way too many.

How do we know this? Because every measure of what students who have graduated from public schools actually know and can do shows deep deficiencies. According to the National Assessment of Education Progress only 59% of seventeen year-olds can perform "moderately complex" procedures in math. 40% of all college students are forced to enroll in at least one remedial--that is, high school-level--course. 43% of all adults score at only the "Basic" level or below on a test of literacy. Etc., etc.

One could argue, I suppose, that the schools have set the standards right and the states have set the bar too high. But you can only make that case if you're willing to forgoe any and all arguments along the lines of "standardized tests are dumbing down the curriculum, hurting gifted students, etc."

You could also chalk it up to measurement error--inevitably, some bright students will score poorly on a given test on a given day. Then again, by the same token you would also expect the opposite to occur--students passing the standardized test who really didn't learn what they needed to know. Somehow, those students never seem to end up in the newspaper. And when you consistently come up with numbers like those cited in the article--between 12 and 25 percent of students who failed the state exam getting passing grades from their school--it's not hard to figure out what's going on. Unless, strangely enough, you're the normally reliable Post.

Update: AFTie Michelle offers a sensible take on the article.

In which Sara pretends to take the Onion seriously as an excuse to praise a favorite professor

So, apparently, the theater department at my alma mater has become more nationally recognized since I graduated. I was never a theater major, but I tended to hang out with a lot of theater people and managed to appear in a couple of shows and take a few classes. My Shakespeare professor, Robert Ball, was very demanding but also one of the best professors I had who had a lasting, positive impact on my life.

The Wire Week Nine: The Beginning of the End

After a couple of very good but not great weeks, The Wire launches into the final third of the season with a vengeance.

First, I hope the foolishness with sticking students in 90-minute test prep classes, but then turning up the heat in order to keep them docile in said classes, apparently without considering that the heat also means they're sure not to learn whatever meager test prep lessons are being presented, can help put to rest this whole argument about accountability and teaching to the test. Craig made this point last week, but it needs repeating: When people do stupid things in response to a sensible policy, that's not evidence that the policy is stupid, nor does it mitigate the responsbility of people who do stupid things.

For example, let's take the obvious parallel of the Baltimore police department. I think most reasonable people would agree that police departments have two mains goals: reducing crime and apprehending criminals. Most people would also agree that crime statistics are a pretty good way to measure success in accomplishing those goals.

Faced with the challenge of being evaluated by crime statistics, there are a number of things a police department can do. It can act strategically, tasking its best people with implementing a long-term plan to take down the high-level criminals. That's what Daniels' Major Crimes unit did, with much success. Or it can innovate, think outside the box, and try to reform the drug trade itself. Thats what Bunny Colvin did last season, also with some success.

Or it can be stupid and make a lot of meaningless low-level arrests, which will just antagonize people and do nothing to solve the problem--and thus, improve the crime statistics--in the long-term. That's what happened this week. I wonder if there's a Fraternal Order of Police blog out there somewhere pointing to this as evidence of how we need to stop holding police departments responsible for crime statistics? Probably not, because while we can criticize ineffective police departments, at least we respect them enough to hold them responsible for their own bad choices. Yet when it comes to teaching to the test--or messing with the thermostat--the refrain is too often, "No Child Left Behind made me do it."

The exchange between Colvin and the administrator about the goals of the special class was also interesting: "You're socializing them, but not educating them." I've been reading Diane Ravitch's history of 20th century school reform recently--back in the '30s and 40s, most leading progressive educators would have said that socializing Namond et. al. is educating them, that if the school can help them with practical lessons like learning to be a waiter or interacting with government, its job is pretty much done. Times certainly change.

But as has been the case all season, the most compelling storylines about the education of urban children on The Wire take place outside the school walls, as the writers constantly draw parallels between the fate of children caught between highly dysfunctional formal institutions and highly functional informal institutions. Take the unfolding tragedy of Michael's corruption by Marlo. Despite his unusual intelligence and integrity, the school system has all but ignored Michael. He turns in perfect homework problems and all Prez can do is look at them quizzically, like he's not quite sure what to do. Meanwhile, Michael and his brother have to live with a drug addict and a child molester.

Marlo, by contrast, sees Michael's potential in an instant (literally, with a shock of recognition in the first episode that I suspect will turn out to be the anchor moment of the entire season. While the writing on the The Wire is often and justly praised, many of the most significant passages this season have been dialogue-free, consisting entirely of silent moments of recognition and wordless shots of character's faces. Rawls' definitive break from Burrell happened in the mayor's office, with three consecutive half-second reaction shots--Rawls, the mayor's aide, the mayor. Or the lingering, Al-Pacino-in-the-Godfather-style shot of Michael's deadened face after he sent Chris and Snoop to do murder. Chilling.)

The lesson seems to be that highly efficient, well-managed organizations like Marlo's drug gang win out in the short-term--at least long enough to consume the likes of Michael, Namond, and possibly more. But in the long-term--and this is one of the meta-themes that runs throughout the entire series--the efficiency of untrestrained capitalism embodied by the Baltimore drug trade consumes everyone. When willingness to kill becomes just another competitive advantage, everyone dies in the end.

And so the The Wire's creators are caught between their frustration with the way politics and human imperfection diminish the value of vital public institutions--schools, police, cities--while at the same time acknowledging that reforming those institutions is the only thing that can save students like Michael. It's that combination of unforgiving realism and sustained hope that makes The Wire so great.

Something tells me...

That Mike Antonucci really wants to win Jay Mathews' "best ed. blog" poll.

Graduation Rates in Context

The new NCES report (“Placing College Graduation Rates in Context”) is worth taking a look at. While, as they note, there are major limitations to the Department of Education’s graduation rate calculations, the range in graduation rates among similar institutions is striking (and sounds vaguely familiar…). And, they found Black and Hispanic students succeeding most at institutions where they were most highly represented.

Some highlights:

- Among very selective institutions classified as low-income serving, graduation rates varied from 25% for institutions at the 10^th percentile to 75% for institutions at the 90^th percentile.

- Graduation rates were actually slightly higher for Black students compared with White students at the 16 very selective bachelor’s degree institutions with large low-income enrollments.

- Similarly, the smallest gap between White and Hispanic students existed among the moderately selective institutions with large low-income enrollments.

Also interesting is that NCES found that the "high performing" institutions were not easy to categorize based on structural differences. This is good news -- there is a lot ALL colleges can learn from institutions that both enroll a high number of low-income students and maintain high graduation rates.

Shameless Plug

Per Craig's post below (see also this and this), part of the problem here is that a lot of the tests themselves suck. Conventional wisdom aside, it's possible to design a standardized test that is a pretty good measure of what we want kids to learn--including higher-order thinking skills. The problem is that doing so is really expensive and time consuming, so a lot of states have decided to use crappy, off-the-shelf exams instead that test mostly lower-level skills and aren't aligned with state standards. These kinds of tests can create incentives for "teaching to the test." One way to address the problem would be by encouraging more states to pool their money and work together to develop higher-quality shared standards and test, like in New England. (Or, if you're Matt or the Fordhamites, National Standards.)

The Wire: Teaching to the Test Revisited

Matt Yglesias makes some thoughtful observations about yesterday's Wire post, generating a bunch of really interesting comments about NCLB and test prep over on his site. It's great to see some actual discourse on this topic—both because claims of "unintended consequences" often are unexamined and because they are sure to loom large when Congress gets around to reauthorizing the law.

I agree with Matt that my evidence doesn't prove drill-and-kill teaching to the test isn't happening in lots of places, but just to be clear I didn't set out to prove that. Instead, I'm arguing that teaching to the test is 1) a choice being made by school systems, 2) a bad choice, and 3) an unnecessary choice. It's a choice because there are other alternatives. It's a bad choice because those alternatives are better for kids and for society. And it's an unnecessary choice because research shows that good teaching—instruction that helps kids master basic skills and encourages deep understanding of math and language—actually produces higher test scores than narrowly teaching to the test.

I also agree with Matt that the solution is not to stop testing. Would anyone argue that Baltimore's elected officials and fourth estate should stop looking at crime statistics and putting pressure on the police system to improve public safety? Of course not. Any politician who argued they should stop doing that because it causes the police department to play tricks with numbers would be voted out of office (or should be). The key is to collect data and hold the system accountable while at the same time expecting the department to engage in good, authentic police work to improve public safety, rather than simply juking the numbers. And we should expect the same of school systems.

Of course, that raises some questions, too. Why are systems choosing to juke the numbers rather than doing their jobs more effectively? I would argue that some schools and districts do it because they believe that poor and minority kids really can't learn the math and language skills in question, so instead they help them game the tests without really mastering the content. Some are probably doing so out of ignorance: They've heard they are "being forced to teach to the test" and similar rhetoric so often that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy; I fear that many educators truly believe they have no other choices. In both cases, we should do more to "educate educators" that there are better alternatives and that those alternatives work just as well for poor and minority kids.

However, as some have argued over on Matt's site, other schools and districts might know there are alternatives, but feel forced to take shortcuts because they believe they lack the capital--human, material, intellectual--to work more effectively. For example, in the world of The Wire, school system leaders might have issued the test prep directive because they believe their teachers really are not capable of teaching math and reading very well. But even if that is the case, we should focus on that question and look to building capacity, rather than getting rid of tests and accountability, as the next frontier of public policy-making.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

AFT: He Who is Not the Enemy of My Enemy is My Enemy, Or Something.

AFTie Ed faults Education Sector's new Connecting the Dots about the Walton Family Foundation's support of the charter school movement for not being what it isn't--a report about Wal-Mart's anti-union activities. Why? Because, says Ed:

Wal-Mart attacks unions and those workers who want to form one. There is no reason to see their support for charter schooling as anything other than part of that attack.

Really? "No reason"? "Anything other"? There's basic aversion to empiricism here that runs throughout a lot of what gets written on the AFT blog. It's the main reason teachers unions are increasingly getting left out of real debates about education policy.

Look, Wal-Mart is, without a doubt, a stridently anti-union corporation. I think this is an inherently immoral position and Wal-Mart deserves pretty much all the blame it gets on this front. People have a right to organize and bargain collectively, whether you like it or not. Taking away that right is wrong, period.

So it's perfectly reasonable to wonder if Walton Family Foundation is pursuing an anti-union agenda through its philanthropic activities. It makes sense to use a gimlet eye in examining their motives and funding choices.

But having asked the question, you still have to answer it. Fairly, using actual facts and data. Particularly when it comes to an issue like charter schools, which are supported by people and organizations of all political stripes, including those who are as pro-union as they come. People should read the report and draw their own conclusions, but personally I find the idea that it's all just a stealth anti-union campaign to be ludricous and unserious. Choice, markets, entrepeneurship, innovation--these are really issues that deserve to be debated on their own terms. There's a certain narcissism to the belief that all your enemies think about is you.

Similary, AFTie Beth recently said of the North Carolina AYP growth model experiment:

What’s the point? Apparently, in NC, no schools made AYP just because of their growth model. It’s a lot of work for states and the feds to submit and analyze plans. If it is not helping, why continue with the process?

The point of growth models is to identify schools that are missing absolute performance standards but are making a lot of growth. What if the North Carolina didn't identify any such schools because there, you know, aren't any?

To say that it's not "helping" is to give the game away -- to AFTie Beth the issue isn't what's true or false. The issue is what helps the cause. If the facts support the cause, great. If they don't, that's their fault. This is why far too many education policy issues are hopelessly politicized, and why students get stuck with irrational systems as a result.

The Wire, Week Nine: Ain't No Jukin' It!

This week the writers ramped up the education subplot in a scene where Tilghman’s principal and vice principal order teachers to spend the next six weeks preparing students to take an upcoming standardized test. The word has come from downtown: Teachers are given test preparation materials and enjoined to drill students in how to answer “clone questions” that closely parallel the questions that will be on the test—and only the reading portion of the test, so Prez’s slowly improving math lessons must be put aside. Prez draws a parallel to his experience in the police department, where top brass, under pressure from politicians to improve public safety stats, periodically sent word to “juke the numbers” to create the impression that crime was going down and/or arrests were going up.

One way to read what’s happening is this: The No Child Left Behind law is putting pressure on educators to improve test scores, so they are “being forced” to substitute dumbed down, drill-and-kill test prep for real teaching and learning. That explanation has pretty much become part of the national discourse over the past five years. “Teach to the test”—It’s such a suggestive, seductive, even alliterative (four t’s!) phrase, one that critics of NCLB use quite effectively to conjure up outrage on demand. Fortunately for them, it’s also one bit of conventional wisdom that is very seldom questioned.

But it should be. Let’s break it down. In The Wire’s scenario, Prez and his colleagues are being told they must teach to the test, but not by No Child Left Behind. The directive is coming from the school’s administrators, who are, in turn, passing on a directive from downtown. Okay, perhaps the district administrators are being forced to force principals to force teachers to teach to the test. But that would be true only if one of the following conditions is true: 1) There are no other strategies Baltimore's schools could use to raise test scores, or, 2) If there are other strategies, teaching to the test is the only strategy that can raise scores sufficiently to meet the demands of NCLB.

But according to the best research available, neither of those conditions holds true. For example, researchers with the Consortium on Chicago School Research conducted a three-year study analyzing classroom assignments and student gains on standardized tests across more than 400 Chicago classrooms in almost 20 elementary schools. They found that students whose teachers assigned them more “authentic intellectual work”—tasks that called on disciplined inquiry, complex thinking, and deep conceptual learning—logged much higher test score gains than students whose teachers relied on “drill and kill” assignments normally associated with teaching to the test.

That means good teaching produces higher test scores than “teaching to the test”! Not coincidentally, it also produces better educated citizens equipped with a more powerful set of intellectual skills increasingly in demand in today’s workplace. Of course, a little test prep, such as helping students become "test literate" so they understand how tricky questions can prevent them from showing what they really do know, can be healthy in small doses. But there is no legitimate reason to spend months on the kind of soul deadening test prep materials Tilghman's teachers were given in this episode. (More on all this here.) Prez is right to question the school system’s choice about how to handle NCLB and standardized testing, even more than he realizes.

The police department has made a similar choice to juke the stats rather than to engage in authentic police work—such as the investigations conducted by the Major Crimes Unit over the first three seasons. (I won’t spoil it, but McNulty gets some screen time next week in small sub-plot that very effectively underlines the choice between juking the stats and doing real police work.) Like authentic instruction, authentic police work is better for better for the professionals as well as the citizens they serve, and better for the city of Baltimore as a whole because it promotes real improvements in the quality of life.

This makes for a much more complex storyline than the “forced to teach to the test” narrative that many viewers are reading into The Wire’s education subplot, and it leads to a much more compelling question: Why do these systems make the choice to game the numbers rather than promoting good teaching or good police work, especially when the latter will produce better results over the long term? To some extent, that is the single biggest overarching question The Wire has been exploring for the past four seasons. Unlike Tilghman’s teachers, the writers are unlikely to spoon feed us the answer.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Disappointment abounds

When I read the headline of this New York Times article (Leaving the City for the Schools, and Regretting It), I was excited – perhaps there was finally an article extolling some of the virtues of urban public schools. Yes, these schools have plenty of troubles and there are schools in NYC that any parent would run from (assuming they could), but there are also schools in NYC that provide a good education, and with a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds that can be an educational asset. Unfortunately, that is not what this article was about.

I won’t go on too long, since the article is clearly intended to fuel the anxieties and “beat the Joneses” impulses of upper-class parents. Suffice it to say that the concerns highlighted do not impact most people. For example, one parent’s pressing problem that “her husband’s Ford Focus had become something of a joke parked alongside his co-workers’ Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs, as the family has forgone fancy cars and vacations to afford the tuition [of an expensive private school].” Or the horror that “public schools, powerless to choose who fills the desks, often had less motivated students.” Which, by the way, is not true – those high property taxes parents in the article complain about work as a pretty effective filter for who gets to fill the seats at suburban high schools.

Is this 'trend' a new problem of failing suburban schools? I doubt it. It is more likely that there is a new echelon of parents looking to give their kids yet another edge over their neighbors, and that means forsaking public schools that would be the envy of most parents in this country. Any parent would do this. It is, in fact, very reasonable for parents to give their children the best education they can afford. The unfortunate thing about this article is that it feeds into the notion that public schools are inherently inferior - only meant for the average kid (and what parent would say that their kid is average?). And it wastes news space - those words could have been better utilized focusing on the similar plight of parents in the boroughs around Manhattan, where the choice can be much more difficult - to risk their child's future at a failing public school, or find financial aid and make sacrifices (beyond giving up their Mercedes) to give their kids a chance at a good education.

Britney Spears and College Rankings

I'm in Miami Beach this weekend, sitting out by the pool while my lovely wife attends a conference on utility regulation. It turns out that Britney Spears is also staying at our hotel (sans Fed-ex, naturally), which I guess makes me either famous or trashy by association, I'm not sure which.

As some of you may know, I've been spending a lot of time recently writing and talking about college rankings. This gist of the report we published on the subject: rankings--specifically the U.S. News & World Report rankings, have a big influence on how colleges and univerisities behave. And because the rankings are primarily based on wealth, fame, and exclusivity, they cause higher education institutions to focus on those things, instead of what's best for students. Rankings can't be eliminated--the public wants them, so someone will always publish them. Thus, we need new rankings based on better information, such as how much college students actually learn while they're in school.

Several critics have responded along the lines of, "The rankings aren't as influential as you think. Sure, universities pay attention, but they're not the be-all and end-all." I thought of this as I read the Miami Herald this morning, out by the pool (it's funny how they build a hotel next to the beach and then everyone sits by the pool, where you can't even see the beach), and came upon an article on the front page of the Metro section, beginning as follows:

University of Florida leaders have been so obsessed with rankings in college guide books that they initiated a national advertising campaign to persuade academics around the country to give the school more respect. But as the ads went out last year, the state's flagship university was racking up a multimillion-dollar debt in its College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, where most students take their core classes.

The fallout -- proposed cuts in math, English and other humanities teaching positions -- has critics arguing that UF is undermining its efforts to bolster its image. Cuts could lead to larger classes and the perception of diminishing quality, prompting the best professors to leave, critics say.''You're not going to become a top 10 school if you start gutting the humanities,'' said Donovan Hulse, a 32-year-old philosophy graduate student whose department is slated to lose a fourth of its grad student slots.

Actually, that's entirely wrong. You could gut the humanities 'til kingdom come and still become a top 10 school, because the rankings have nothing to do with the quality of education in the humanities, or anywhere else. The only real "academic" measure is a reputational survey, which is all about the research reputation of your faculty. As the article goes on to note:

T.K. Wetherell, the president of rival Florida State University, is promoting his own bold plan: to recruit 200 ''superstar'' professors within 10 years in an attempt to put the school in league with UF as a top research university.

How many of the those "superstars" attained that status because they're good at teaching? Without knowing anything about them, I'm confident that the number is, give or take a few, and accounting for the statistical margin of error, none.

I've also noted that the U.S. News rankings contribute to the endless escalation of college costs, because they're substantially based on how much money colleges spend. It doesn't really matter how they spend it, other than lowering class sizes, which is a crude measure with no proven link to learning at the collegiate level. The important thing is just that you get more money, and spend it somewhere.

Last week I made this point on the PBS Nightly Business Report, which also featured Brian Kelly, executive editor of U.S. News. He disagreed, saying, "We're not the problem." But here's what the University of Florida wants to do:

UF has argued that it cannot reach its own aspirations without a lot more money. President Bernie Machen has led the campaign among state university presidents to wrest power from the appointed Board of Governors and the Legislature to set the school's tuition -- and perhaps double it from its current $3,200 a year.

Maybe--just maybe--the rankings actually do have something to do with out-of-control increases in spending and tuition. Just a guess.

But the larger issue is that the U.S. News rankings, divorced as they are from the core educational mission of higher education, create strong incentives for colleges and universities to pursue unworthy goals--wealth, superficial attractiveness, and fame for fame's sake. That's what the rankings are based on, so that's what colleges try to acquire.

In other words, U.S. News makes colleges try to be like Britney Spears. As long as the rankings continue to be so influential, this pervasive and growing Spearsification of higher education is sure to continue.

Some of the Best School Films

Sid Davis died earlier this week. For folks who don't know, he produced some of the most popular "social guidance" films for youth in the 50s and 60s, also called "mental hygiene" films that praised the joys of conformity and domesticity and warned of the perils of drugs and reckless behavior anywhere and everywhere (on the road, on the bus and yes even in the lunchroom).

Davis' were low-budget films- most made for less than a grand- but he made enough money selling them to schools and police departments to keep making more and more of them. Some of the best include
Girls Beware in which a young girl, "Judy Miller", is murdered because she's careless about who she trusts (produced with the help of the Inglewood School District and Inglewood Police Department), only to be topped by Boys Beware, which actually came first, about a boy named Jimmy Barnes who also trusts a stranger who is "sick" ("you see he was a homosexual" and "one never knows when a homosexual is about- he may appear normal"). Davis was also big into the anti-drug message and although his films weren't as terrifically comedic as Reefer Madness, his Seduction of the Innocent (not to be confused with the more recent same-named song by KISS) is a pretty over the top account of a young girl whose experimentation with marijuana leads to addiction, death and destruction. Of course, the decade that followed its 1961 release is most known for drug use among youth, which makes you wonder about its effectiveness. And it describes the effect of pot as "everything speeds up to 100 miles per hour", which also clarifies that Davis was not himself experimenting with the drug. At any rate, Davis' films were seen by millions of public school kids in the 50s, 60s and 70s and were chock-full of societal ne'er-do-wells and blood and guts and violence. Reminding us that the good old days had its troubles too. As well as some great film-making.

The Wire, Week Eight: Does Not Compute!

A Wire-watching buddy tells me, “Man, I’d never teach in a city school. The eighth graders can’t even do fractions!” When I ask him why he thinks that is, he cites the usual litany of family and neighborhood challenges kids face in West Baltimore, the ones portrayed so vividly and heartbreakingly in The Wire itself. But the scene my friend was referring to illustrated what the real culprit is: Our schools often do a terrible job teaching math. When one of Prez’s students says he can’t complete the fractions worksheet because “we never did one-thirds,” Prez responds, “One-fourth, one-fifth, one-third: Follow the same steps.” He’s right in one sense: Certain steps will produce correct answers. But he’s doing nothing to address the much larger problem: Many of his students clearly have no grasp of what fractions are or what “doing arithmetic” with them really means. They've studied a set of steps, but they don't understand how those steps apply to different denominators or problems that don't involve food items.

To illustrate, let’s assume they were dividing fractions, e.g. problems like “10 / ½ =”. Most of the kids might recall from studying division by whole numbers that when you divide, you get a smaller number. Their elementary school teachers might even have encouraged them to check their work by looking to make sure their answer is smaller than the number they started with. But when you divide by a fraction, you get a bigger number, in this case 20. Instead of working with students to help them understand why, many teachers simply drill them in a rote, two-step procedure for dividing by fractions: “invert and multiply.” Students are asked to memorize the word “invert” and told that it means “to flip,” and then asked to memorize and practice those two steps. Sure, that produces the correct answer, but simply memorizing a procedure does little to develop real mathematical understanding. They’ve simply been drilled to follow a seemingly arbitrary set of steps that produces a counterintuitive result. No wonder they’re confused!

Math doesn’t have to be taught that way. In 1999 a young researcher named Liping Ma published a book that caused a huge stir in math education circles (though, sadly, very little buzz in the education policy arena). She found that Chinese teachers help their elementary students develop a much deeper conceptual understanding of math and offer them a broader repertoire of strategies for solving problems than do their American counterparts. That's partly because American teachers themselves tend to have a much shallower grasp of math concepts than Chinese teachers, despite spending more years in formal education to become a teacher. In fact, fewer than half of the American teachers in Ma’s study fully and accurately answered the problem “1¾ / ½ =”. It wasn't simply a matter of forgetting the steps but also a lack of conceptual understanding about what it means to divide by a fraction. Some teachers told her they divided 1¾ by 2 because they understood the problem as asking them to “divide something in half” rather than to figure out, say, how many halves there are in 1¾. One teacher admitted, “I can't really think of what dividing by a half means.” (Ma’s sample included only 21 American teachers, but others who have replicated her research with a larger numbers of teachers have found similar results.)

Ma’s book also sheds light on another perceptive element of that Wire scene. She found that poor conceptual understanding made it difficult for many American teachers to find helpful and accurate ways to represent fractions. U.S. teachers mainly used either food or money to represent fractions, while “those used by the Chinese teachers were much more diverse” and included many examples students would be familiar with from their daily lives, “such as what happens in a farm, in a factory, in a family, etc.” Recall that another of Prez’s students tells him she can’t do the fractions problems on the worksheet because they involve cars: “All that stuff we did in practice was about food!” Again, Prez's response isn't very helpful. He tells her it doesn't matter and to just “pay attention to the number.” Huh?

Such difficulties are not limited merely to teaching fractions in the upper elementary and middle grades; Ma documents how poor conceptual understanding can impede instruction in something as simple as subtracting two-digit whole numbers (e.g., 53 - 26 =). In fact, a hugely important study published last year (also summarized and discussed here) by several University of Michigan researchers found that teachers’ mathematical knowledge has a big impact on how much their students learn over the course of a year—even at the first grade level. They also documented that disadvantaged students—particularly minority youngsters—are more likely to have teachers with lower levels of mathematical knowledge and understanding, a finding they call “shameful.”

Although the full breadth of this problem and its implications have been largely ignored in policy circles, that might change soon. Liping Ma and Deborah Lowenberg Ball, one of the U. Michigan researchers, are both serving on the new, high-profile National Mathematics Advisory Panel. But getting traction won't be easy: This is an uncomfortable topic for many people, including teachers, who sometimes feel it amounts to “teacher bashing.”* Let's be clear: It’s the system that should come under fire. Teachers are themselves the products of the same shallow elementary math instruction they pass on to their students, and deficiencies in their mathematical understanding seldom get addressed later on, either during their time in ed schools or after they start teaching. In contrast, Ma says that Chinese teachers get lots of opportunities to build their math knowledge over the course of their careers. The good news? Another study by Ball demonstrated that “teachers can learn math for elementary school teaching in the context of a single professional development program.”

Of course, that would require a system that works thoughtfully to nurture knowledge and cultivate capacity. Ironically, says The Wire, Marlo and his colleagues are much better at doing those things in the system they run!

* Ball and a colleague discussed some of the negative feedback they’ve received for even conducting such research (e.g., testing teachers for research purposes is inherently wrong because it “de-professionalizes” them, etc.) in a must-read article for American Educator, the excellent magazine published by the American Federation of Teachers, last year.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Virtual Schools=Mainstream Reform?

I just returned from Plano, TX, where I spent the past three days with virtual school teachers, researchers, and program managers at the North American Council for Online Learning Virtual School Symposium. Virtual schools take a variety of forms, from district- or state-led schools that are primarily or entirely supplemental—offering students the option of taking one or more courses to supplement their traditional school experience—to fully online "cyber" schools.

I returned to Washington convinced that the growth in K-12 virtual schooling is even more dramatic than our recent Chart You Can Trust on state virtual schools detailed. And, I learned that growth is not the only reason that we need to pay attention.

Most interesting was the subtext underlying both the formal presentations and my informal conversations. If you think that virtual schooling is just about learning online, you've missed the real potential impact. While not explicit, it is clear that the technology is only a means that offers an opportunity to start from scratch and re-think many traditional assumptions. The end goal is school reform. Two anecdotes:

• In separate conversations with representatives from two different state-based programs, I learned how state-led virtual programs are exposing wide gaps in expectations for learning within a state. These program managers explained how students that were at the top of their class in their local schools were overmatched in courses at the statewide virtual school. It's hard to imagine a more concrete (and sad) example of accountability than when the virtual school teacher has to explain to the student and his/her parents that their ace student is woefully under prepared.


• Former classroom teachers, now managing one state's program, talked about the "culture change" required to teach in that state's virtual school: "In the online world, what they [the teachers] do is more transparent. There is an expectation that you can and will be observed....We will evaluate you....There is a quantitative goal for student achievement." Likewise, in the same presentation, a detailed program for initial online teacher preparation, mentoring, and professional development was also in place.

Many people have compared the virtual school movement to the charter school movement at a similar stage. While I was not involved in the early charter school movement, I can see parallels: The majority of persons I met this week were education entrepreneurs; there are fully-online "cyber" charter schools; and competition for funding is an issue. One lesson that the more experienced virtual school leaders understand is the critical need at this early stage to rigorously protect quality so that the field is not defined by its bad apples. Even the most ardent proponents concede that virtual schooling is still the "wild, wild, West."

But, there are also key differences that could allow the virtual schools to reach a higher level of impact than charters. While reaching scale is still difficult, it is much more possible in the virtual environment—Florida Virtual School may already offer more students classes than any charter management organization. And, choice can consist of a mouse click rather than a new school in a new place (and, as noted above, the comparison is very evident). Finally, the people leading and teaching in many of these programs are public school classroom veterans. And many of the new institutions are actually state- or district-run. These entrepreneurs have found a niche within the system. They are the ones talking about culture change—not union foes or voucher proponents. Very interesting.

Election Miscellany

Yesterday turned out to be an even bigger day than lots of pundits expected, with Democrats picking up 28 seats for a majority in the House of Representatives and a good chance at a majority in the Senate, too, if two races still in the balance come down the way it looks like they're going to. Dems also picked up 6 governorships. (btw, Mike Antonnucci is funny in re: wrong election predictions) DCEdublog has results for the D.C. races I mentioned Monday. Edspresso's got a run-down of races around the country they felt were particularly relevant to education. Ed at NCLBlog proclaims the defeat of all three state TABOR initiatives (but cut it out with the midwest-mocking, already!). CNN's got results for all races here.

Andy and Alexander Russo say the implications for education aren't much to talk about. I agree: a George Miller-led Ed-Workforce committee isn't going to eviscerate NCLB. Apparently Edspresso's Ryan Boots didn't get the message, though.

And, Joe Williams wonders why we close schools on election day. In D.C., at least, we didn't--yesterday was a school day for DCPS students. But most D.C. polling places aren't located in schools. As far as Joe's question is concerned, my guess is that it probably has to do with patronage, but also concerns about student safety with lots of random adults in a school and just general logistical hassels.

UPDATE: Ed had more to say this afternoon about TABOR (Ezra Klein also discusses TABOR over at TAPPED) and other state initiatives, including a failed "65% solution" initiative in Colorado, which reminds me that my former colleague Alexander Wohl has an American Prospect piece on the stupidity of the whole "65 % solution" idea.

Get Out the Vote

Most of the people I know in D.C. are so preoccupied with who'll control the House and Senate following tomorrow's election, you wouldn't even know that we're also voting on several important D.C. government races tomorrow. That's partly an artifact of political class transience, and also of Democratic dominance in D.C. politics that means most of the major D.C. government races are already decided. (Adrian Fenty will be the next mayor.) But tomorrow D.C. voters have a chance to decide on three very important non-partisan offices that are still very much up in the air. Voters city-wide are voting on school board president, and voters in wards 5, 6, 7 & 8 are voting for school board members to represent their school board districts (wards 5 & 6 are on district, and wards 7 & 8 are another). These races are important because the D.C. school board has substantial power to impact education for children in D.C. And this year the race is particularly important because DCPS is at a critical juncture: with more than a quarter of the city's kids in charters, troublingly poor academic performance, an ambitious but slow-moving reform plan from Superintendent Janey, and incoming Mayor Adrian Fenty proclaiming his intention to take over the schools, the new school board is going to face some serious challenges and major decisions. So, if you live in D.C., take a second away from the national races to learn about the school board race and cast an informed vote tomorrow. I can't tell you who to vote for (like you'd listen to me anyway), but I will suggest you heed the advice of the Washington Post on this issue.

Review!

This week's Washington Post Magazine features their semi-annual Education Review. The cover story relates the experience of African American students in Prince Edward County, Virginia, who were denied an education for several years in the 1960s when the county closed all its public schools as an act of massive resistance to Brown vs. Board of Education. Important reminder of how little space and time there really is between today and a shameful history of de jure segregation that denied opportunities to generations of African Americans. On a positive note, Jay Mathews tells how Montgomery County, Maryland, is using all day kindergarten to help close achievement gaps for disadvantaged youngsters early.