Markmaking

Meanwhile, in Teachers Union World...

Steven Brill struggles to contain his incredulity -- "Joel Klein vs. New York City teachers" : The New Yorker.

The evidence of Mohammed’s incompetence—found in more than five thousand pages of transcripts from her hearing—seems as unambiguous as the city’s lawyer promised in his opening statement: “These children were abused in stealth. . . . It was chronic . . . a failure to complete report cards. . . . Respondent failed to correct student work, failed to follow the mandated curriculum . . . failed to manage her class.” The independent observer’s final report supported this assessment, ticking off ten bullet points describing Mohammed’s unsatisfactory performance. (Mohammed’s lawyer argues that she began to be rated unsatisfactory only after she became active with the union.) 

This was the thirtieth day of a hearing that started last December. Under the union contract, hearings on each case are held five days a month during the school year and two days a month during the summer. Mohammed’s case is likely to take between forty and forty-five hearing days—eight times as long as the average criminal trial in the United States. (The Department of Education’s spotty records suggest that incompetency hearings before the introduction of P.I.P. Plus generally took twenty to thirty days; the addition of the peer observer’s testimony and report seems to have slowed things down.) Jay Siegel, the arbitrator in Mohammed’s case, who has thirty days to write a decision, estimates that he will exceed his deadline, because of what he says is the amount of evidence under consideration. This means that Mohammed’s case is not likely to be decided before December, a year after it began. That is about fifty per cent more time, from start to finish, than the O.J. trial took...

The majority of the transcript of the twenty-nine previous hearing days was given over to the lawyers and the arbitrator arguing issues that included whether and how Mohammed should have known about the contents of the Teachers’ Reference Manual; whether it was admissible that when Mohammed got a memo from the principal complaining about her performance, her students said, she angrily read it aloud in class; whether it was really a bad thing that she had appointed one child in her class “the enforcer,” and charged him with making the other kids behave; whether Mohammed’s union representative should have been present when she was reprimanded for not having a lesson plan; and whether the independent observer was qualified to evaluate Mohammed, even though she came from the neutral consulting company that the union had approved. 

When the bill for the arbitrator is added to the cost of the city’s lawyers and court reporters and the time spent in court by the principal and the assistant principal, Mohammed’s case will probably have cost the city and the state (which pays the arbitrator) about four hundred thousand dollars. 

Nor is it by any means certain that, as a result of that investment, New York taxpayers will have to stop paying Mohammed’s salary, eighty-five thousand dollars a year. Arbitrators have so far proved reluctant to dismiss teachers for incompetence. Siegel, who is serving his second one-year term as an arbitrator and is paid fourteen hundred dollars for each day he works on a hearing, estimates that he has heard “maybe fifteen” cases. “Most of my decisions are compromises, such as fines,” he said. “So it’s hard to tell who won or lost.” Has he ever terminated anyone solely for incompetence? “I don’t think so,” he said. In fact, in the past two years arbitrators have terminated only two teachers for incompetence alone, and only six others in cases where, according to the Department of Education, the main charge was incompetence.

L.A. Unified pays teachers not to teach - Los Angeles Times

L.A. Unified pays teachers not to teach - Los Angeles Times.

For seven years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has paid Matthew Kim a teaching salary of up to $68,000 per year, plus benefits. His job is to do nothing.   

Every school day, Kim's shift begins at 7:50 a.m., with 30 minutes for lunch, and ends when the bell at his old campus rings at 3:20 p.m. He is to take off all breaks, school vacations and holidays, per a district agreement with the teacher's union. At no time is he to be given any work by the district or show up at school. 

He has never missed a paycheck.

The achievement gap wins one - The Boston Globe

The achievement gap wins one - The Boston Globe.

THE TOP priority for state education officials in 2008 is to close the academic achievement gap between white and minority students. But given a chance to do so last month, the state Board of Education retreated...

The one school that got shot down - the International Charter School of Southeastern Massachusetts - was the largest and boldest. Its rejection raises thorny questions about just how hard the Patrick administration is willing to push to achieve equity in education... 

Acting Commissioner Jeffrey Nellhaus recommended approval of the SABIS proposal, but Board of Education chairman Paul Reville voiced sharp concerns. And the board listened to Reville, rejecting the Brockton SABIS school by a 7-2 vote. But when the board jettisoned SABIS, it also unintentionally abandoned minority families in more than a dozen communities. SABIS is one of the few educational systems in the state where minority students not only perform on par with white students, but outperform them, as well. That accomplishment, combined with the fact that there is little charter school activity in Southeastern Massachusetts, should have balanced out other concerns with the application. 

By high school, minority students in Massachusetts lag their white counterparts by more than 30 percentage points in math and English on the state's high-stakes Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test. But that is not the case at the Springfield SABIS school, where 94 percent of black 10th graders and 84 percent of Hispanics scored in the proficient or advanced categories on the English section of the 2007 MCAS. That compares with 77 percent of white students statewide. In math, the school's minority students are catching up nicely to their white counterparts. The board erred when it rejected an opportunity for minority students to traverse the gap that swallows so many...The 1,500-student SABIS school in Springfield has a waiting list of 2,677, the longest of any of the 61 charter schools in the state, according to the state's Charter School Association.

Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task - Los Angeles Times

The question is, should it take a full year's worth of dedication to get rid of a manifestly incompetent employee?

Judith Perez, principal of Hancock Park Elementary School in Los Angeles, recalled a situation in which a fellow principal had one more teacher than he needed. Under union rules, the teacher with the least seniority was to be transferred. Instead, the principal pushed out a poorly performing veteran by threatening to make her life miserable with frequent observations of her classes, Perez said. 

The teacher ended up at Perez's school. When Perez called the principal for information, he quickly apologized. "I'm so sorry," she recalled him saying. 

Perez soon found out why, concluding that her new teacher was "a total incompetent. . . . She had no idea how to conduct a lesson in reading or math." 

Perez committed herself to either making this teacher improve or forcing her out. 

"I was a [teachers] union leader," Perez said. "I believe in teachers' rights and protections. . . . But my bottom line is I'm in this profession for children. . . . Basically, I dedicated my year to getting rid of this teacher." 

She kept a detailed diary, conducted a series of formal meetings with the teacher and her union representatives -- all called for under the teachers' contract -- and finally persuaded the woman to quit.

Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task - Los Angeles Times

Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task - Los Angeles Times.

The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but a commission balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh. L.A. Unified officials were also unsuccessful in firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague in the metal shop, saying the district did not prove that the two were having sex. 

The district fared no better in its case against elementary school special education teacher Gloria Hsi, despite allegations that included poor judgment, failing to report child abuse, yelling at and insulting children, planning lessons inadequately and failing to supervise her class. 

Not a single charge was upheld. The commission found the school's evaluators were unqualified because they did not have special education training. Moreover, it said they went to the class at especially difficult periods and didn't stay long enough. 

Four years after the district began trying to fire Hsi, the case is still tied up in court, although she has been removed from the classroom. Her lawyer declined to comment on her behalf. The district's legal costs so far: $110,000. 

Classroom ineffectiveness is hard to prove, administrators and principals said. "One of the toughest things to document, ironically, is [teachers'] ability to teach," Wallace, the Daniel Webster principal, said. "It's an amorphous thing."

Education: Race to the top

Democrats for Education Reform comments on the education component of the stimulus:

To be blunt, the reality of state-level education politics in many states is such that there is tremendous pressure to pass legislation which assures a firewall-like separation between teachers and student performance. In New York (as well as other states such as California and Wisconsin) such legislation has been passed with very little opposition – making it now illegal to base teacher tenure decisions on student achievement. If this nation is to live up to its obligation to bring our education systems into the 21st Century, this type of progress-killing legislation should instantly disqualify a state from even being considered for ―"Race to the Top" funding..

D.C.: Titans Rhee the Excellent, Weingarten the Mediocre Gird Loins for Epic Battle

Education Heavyweights Prepare for D.C. Contract Fight.

"There are a lot of people in the reform community who want her to wipe the floor with Randi," said one Democratic education activist who asked not to be named so he could speak candidly. 

The record suggests that Rhee and Weingarten are far apart on core issues. Weingarten has supported merit pay based on schoolwide performance only and points to the program underway in about 200 New York schools. It is similar to one established by Rhee and the WTU that awards cash bonuses to staffs at schools posting the most dramatic gains on standardized test scores. 

But the D.C. program is based almost exclusively on scores, an emphasis opposed by Weingarten, who wants to see other schoolwide metrics, such as attendance, taken into account. It's also not clear that evaluating teachers as a group will be sufficiently groundbreaking for Rhee or for the private foundations -- yet to be publicly named -- that she says have committed $100 million over five years to underwrite the huge raises she has proposed.

After Bitter Campus Battles, the `Great Books' Rise Again (nyt)

Not surprisingly, students of all backgrounds are more likely to read in an open-minded and non-racialist fashion than are grievance-mongering racially-obsessed faculty ideologues 

Defying small-minded multiculturalist critics, Great Books programs achieve success.

"If I wanted to learn more about black writers, Hispanic writers, minority writers, I'd take a course in Aztec culture or Mexican culture," said Oscar Martinez, a 23-year-old Mexican immigrant who studied Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" with Professor Gans last semester. "I'm here to make myself a more intellectual person, regardless of my race, regardless of my background."

...

One of Professor Gans's students, Keith Morgan, 31, who enrolled at Wright after he left the Army as a sergeant in 1996, said he had seen much of himself in the story of another returning veteran: Jay Gatsby. No matter that "The Great Gatsby" and its creator, F. Scott Fitzgerald, were white, and Mr. Morgan is black.

"I have a dream, just like Gatsby, to be successful," said Mr. Morgan, who hopes to become a guidance counselor and thinks a knowledge of the Western classics will help.

"To me, as a black man, you have to get past your color and just appreciate what's being written," Mr. Morgan continued. "Professor Gans chooses really good titles."

Money and schools: A cautionary tale from St. Louis

Unreconstructed liberals, of whom the field of education attracts a disproportionate number, perhaps on account of its Rousseauian tendencies, like to imagine that funding disparities, and not dysfunctional urban underclass institutions, are at the bottom of differences in school quality and performance. 

Is this true?  The school system in St. Louis offers a test case. Today we read David A. Lieb's story in the Associated Press that the Missouri Supreme Court has completely rejected a lawsuit by the St. Louis city board of education to undo the district's takeover by the state.  The state took over the district because it was completely failing to do its job. Link: Missouri Supreme Court upholds takeover of St. Louis schools

If one were to base one's views on the sappy fairy tales told by mainstream entertainment and news media, one might expect this to be mainly a story of scrappy minority city kids battling against a heartless white suburban establishment.

The Genius of Singapore math

Using the "Primary Mathematics" textbooks, mathematicians and forward-thinking educators try to follow Singapore's lead and rescue math education from the mathematically incompetent.

Efforts in Los Angeles:

Singapore’s textbooks build deep understanding of mathematical concepts through multi-step problems and concrete illustrations that demonstrate how abstract mathematical concepts are used to solve problems from different perspectives.”

By contrast, the study said, “traditional U.S. textbooks rarely get beyond definitions and formulas, developing only students’ mechanical ability to apply mathematical concepts.”

Many eminent mathematicians agree. In fact, it is difficult to find a mathematician who likes the standard American texts or dislikes Singapore’s...

“American textbooks are handicapped by many things,” said Hung-Hsi Wu, who has taught math at UC Berkeley for 42 years, “the most important of which is to regard mathematics as a collection of factoids to be memorized.”..

...most American elementary school teachers – reflecting a generally math-phobic society – lack a strong foundation in the subject to begin with.

And in Philadelphia:

Deborah Wei, who still serves as principal of the K-8 school, liked that the texts were spare, with few bells and whistles, and that students rely not on tricks (carrying the one, or cross-multiplication) but on deep understanding of how to solve problems...

"This curriculum demands a lot of the teacher," Davidson said. "If you want to punch in at 8:20 and leave at 3, this will never be taught well."

Boston College vs. Northwestern for BCS Championship

At the New America Foundation, the top football teams are Boston College and Northwestern.

Questbridge Claus

Free scholarship to Yale via QuestBridge:

Simmons was home alone when the call came last week to tell her the good news. She started jumping up and down and crying. Her mom, Carrie Allen, joined in the celebration when she came home from her job as a librarian. Her dad, Peter Simmons, a waiter at Avellino's in Fairfield, baked the Yale admissions director a "thank-you" cake that his daughter presented to the admission's office last Thursday.

"I had to do something," the future Yalie said. "It's the least I could do."

McArdle on Anti-Voucherism

Megan McArdle responds to all of the most common (not to mention hypocritical, obtuse and idiotic) arguments against school vouchers.

[From the comments: Public school system graduation rates; vouchers in Sweden]

7)  Public education is vital to creating a common identity as American citizens

I would find this a slightly more compelling argument if it weren't made mostly by people who live in affluent communities where their fellow citizens are strongly discouraged from moving by zoning and other ordinances that bar the construction of cheap housing. You think some kid growing up in East New York, looking at the crumbling walls as an inexperienced teacher fumbles the lesson plan, thinks to himself "But at least I share a common identity with the kids in Bronxville's public school system whose cars I will someday have the privilege of parking"?

Actually, this makes me think that a lot of the opposition to vouchers is about that affluent suburbanite's need to maintain the delusion that they care about inner city public schools. Memo to suburban voucher opponents who "support public education": you're already sending your kid to private school. You're just confused because your tuition fees came bundled with granite countertops and hardwood floors.

McKinsey on Education

The McKinsey report on why Canada, Japan, South Korea, Finland and Singapore are the best:

You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries—Germany, Spain and Switzerland—would presumably be among the best. They aren't. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

...

South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers—11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.

Stephanie Groce for School Board

Support Stephanie Groce, in chap. 935 of Democratic Interest Groups vs. the Public Welfare, a continuing series. DFER explains how her support for a KIPP school, the one institution that could reasonably help poor students, is enough to get her iced by the local union thugs.  The newspaper editorial:

Union leaders are angry that Groce, an incumbent, would consider freezing teachers' salaries and privatizing food service and transportation as ways to help the district live within its means and adjust to the loss of revenue that has occurred as thousands of students have fled to charter schools.

County Democrats used these so-called attacks on labor to justify the political excommunication of Groce.

But Groce is rightly concerned that the district's food service, which runs in the red, and inefficient transportation operations are bleeding money away from the classroom and, therefore, hurting students.

Testing and NCLB: Mistaking the Cure for the Disease

Kevin Carey reviews Linda Perlstein's book on No Child Left Behind, and thinks she mistakes the chemotherapy for the cancer.

Perlstein drives from Tyler to Crofton Elementary School, located in a wealthy planned community just fourteen miles away. Crofton students spend their days writing in journals, making crafts, studying science and history, and so on. There's little test prep, but nearly every child passes the exam. The contrast is a gross injustice, Perlstein believes.  [...]

But then she immediately explains that, unlike Tyler students, youngsters at Crofton come to school from home environments "rich with logic and analysis, that stimulate the brain and saturate children with learning strategies." They're also less likely to have "brains compromised by pre-natal substance abuse, lead poisoning, and malnutrition" and thus have more in the way of "memory, attention span, and motivation." In other words, Crofton doesn't need to create a highly structured environment to make up for the lack of structure at home. It doesn't need to explicitly teach learning and study strategies, because students get those from their parents.

                                     

Measuring Teacher Effectiveness

Chris Cerf:

Let's start with two truths, one rooted in public policy and the other in social science. The first is that the only measure of success school systems should care about is how well students are actually learning. We can debate the most appropriate ways to evaluate student learning, whether graduation rates, test performance, or something else. But let's hope we are past the point of evaluating success based on "inputs"– how much we care, whether a particular program or approach appears compelling, how many students in a class feels like the appropriate number, how many degrees or certificates our educators possess, etc.

The second point, the scientific one, is that by far and away the single most significant determinant of student outcomes is the actual track record of a given educator in raising achievement (Because socio-economic factors are themselves a powerful determinant, a primary focus must be on progress relative to peers.) Life would be a good deal easier if we could predict on the front end which teachers (and principals) would be most successful at elevating student learning. A lot of good work is underway in this area. So far, however, the research is clear that factors such as a teacher's particular pathway to the profession, SAT scores, certification status, longevity, or post-secondary degree pale in predictive significance relative to his or her actual record with real live students.

Connecticut's Apartheid Schools

The New York Times upbraids Connecticut for the scandalous failure of its public school system.

Danielle K. Smith, a 22-year-old product of Waterbury public schools, is the kind of person educators speak of with pride: her hard work in high school honors courses and her desire to excel helped her gain entrance to the Ivy League. She graduated from Yale last year.

But Ms. Smith, who is African-American, wishes Connecticut would stop citing people like her as examples of all that is right with the state’s public schools. She believes the state would be far better off focusing on its routine failure to educate a large percentage of its minority students.

Connecticut’s “achievement gap,”which is the academic disparity between middle class and poor students, is the widest of any state, and the achievement gap between minority and white students is one of the worst in the country. Income aside, reading and math test scores among minority fourth and eighth graders in Connecticut are discouragingly low, ranking the state in the bottom half of the nation, anywhere from 25th to 43rd, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The state jumps in the rankings, from between third and 10th in the nation, when the scores of white students are measured. [...]

Dr. McQuillan, who came to Connecticut from Massachusetts, is blunt about the need to improve reading scores, especially among minority students. “The reading wars between phonics and whole language are over, and what works is not a matter of opinion,” he said, indicating that a phonics-based approach is the most effective. “There’s a lot of data about what makes sense and good policy for reading, and it is stunning how often it is ignored.”

He hopes to require training in reading education for those elementary school teachers who need it, and to raise course requirements for education majors who wish to teach in the primary grades.

Teachers' Unions Slowly Drop Opposition to Merit Pay

Ever since wider opportunities opened up for talented, educated women, schoolteachers as a group have been among the least-qualified, least-talented set of college graduates. On achievement tests, education majors tend to score lowest of all different majors. See also this table of LSAT scores, where education majors narrowly beat "pre-law" and "criminology" for last place. To quote Walter Williams:

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) compiles loads of statistics on education. The NCES "Digest of Education Statistics" Table 136 shows average SAT scores by student characteristics for 2001. Students who select education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any major (964). Math majors have the highest (1174).

It's the same story when education majors finish college and take tests for admission to graduate schools. In the case of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), education majors have an average score that's the lowest (467) of all majors except for sociology majors (434). Putting this in perspective, math majors score the highest (720), followed closely by economics in third place (625).

A culture of mediocrity sets in early, as everyone realizes that education school is a home for the least intelligent, lowest achieving academic students.

Thanks to teachers unions, this culture is vigorously carried forward into public schools, where the unions, in their vigorous efforts to keep all students and schools mired at the same equally low level, implacably oppose any attempts to pay teachers according to the laws of supply and demand -- to pay talented teachers more; to pay more to those who want to work in inner-city hellholes; or to pay math and science teachers more.

However, the New York Times reports that these efforts may slowly be crumbling, in spite of adroit rear-guard efforts in Texas, Florida, and New York City to maintain the inherited standards of universal mediocrity.  At this rate, teachers unions may someday potentially lose their status as the single most regressive force holding back millions of unlucky schoolchildren. Until the unions die their much-deserved dishonorable death to be reborn as genuinely progressive forces, however, the misery will continue.

Minnesota’s $86 million teacher professionalization and merit pay initiative has spread to dozens of the state’s school districts, and it got a lift this month when teachers voted overwhelmingly to expand it in Minneapolis. A major reason it is prospering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview, is that union leaders helped develop and sell it to teachers.

“As a Republican governor, I could say, ‘Thou shalt do this,’ and the unions would say, ‘Thou shalt go jump in the lake,’ ” Mr. Pawlenty said. “But here they partnered with us.”

Scores of similar but mostly smaller teacher-pay experiments are under way nationwide, and union locals are cooperating with some of them, said Allan Odden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies teacher compensation. A consensus is building across the political spectrum that rewarding teachers with bonuses or raises for improving student achievement, working in lower income schools or teaching subjects that are hard to staff can energize veteran teachers and attract bright rookies to the profession.

“It’s looking like there’s a critical mass,” Professor Odden said. The movement to experiment with teacher pay, he added, “is still not ubiquitous, but it’s developing momentum.”

Some plans still run into strong opposition from teachers and their unions, as in Texas and Florida this year, where skeptical teachers rejected proposals from school districts. An incentive-pay proposal by Chancellor Joel I. Klein of the New York City public schools has stalled, with city officials and the teachers’ union blaming each other.

Sowell on education

Similarly, Mr. Sowell says his interest in "international perspectives"--most notably demonstrated in his lengthy trilogy on cultural history published in the 1990s--initially came from reading Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1963 classic study, "Beyond the Melting Pot." "It was really the first book I read about different ethnic groups. There were many different patterns. And more than anything else, each group had its own pattern.

"The left likes to portray a group as sort of a creature of surrounding society. But that's not true. For example, back during the immigrant era, you had neighborhoods on the Lower East Side [of Manhattan] where Jews and Italians arrived at virtually identical times. Lived in the same neighborhoods. Kids sat side by side in the same schools. But totally different outcomes. Now, if you look back at the history of the Jews and the history of the Italians you can see why that would be. In the early 19th century, Russian officials report that even the poorest Jews find some way to get some books in their home, even though they're living in a society where over 90% of the people are illiterate.

"Conversely, in southern Italy, which is where most Italian-Americans originated, when they put in compulsory school-attendance laws, there were riots. There were schoolhouses burning down. So now you take these two kids and sit them side by side in a school. If you believe that environment means the immediate surroundings, they're in the same environment. But if you believe environment includes this cultural pattern that goes back centuries before they were born, then no, they're not in the same environment. They don't come into that school building with the same mindset. And they don't get the same results."

The Shame of U.S. Progressives

What is keeping people down? Is it The Man, or those who struggle against The Man? Arguably, those who struggle against The Man, by virtue of being completely deluded, are keeping their intended beneficiaries down.

Greg Kane, Baltimore Sun

What was the reason for abandoning the no-social-promotion policy? Our peerless leaders - peerless because there's not another group like them, and other school systems should be thankful for that - discovered that the policy meant not only that some students would have to repeat a grade once.

They might have to repeat a grade - horror of horrors! - twice. Oh, the humanity!

So rather than hold students back a second time, school officials promoted them. But they had a plan. Because the schools were unable to teach them what they were supposed to know in nine months, our leaders provided flunking students with summer learning packets, so they could master the material in a mere six weeks.

So social promotion is now "in" again in Baltimore. Apparently, it never went out of vogue in High Point. What drives it?

It's what some conservatives have called "the soft bigotry of low expectations." It's more like the hard bigotry of no expectations. Most of Baltimore's students are black, as is Fantasia. Can you imagine officials in a predominantly white system tolerating the social promotion of thousands of white students?

There are a number of culprits responsible for this hard bigotry of no expectations, and black leaders aren't exempt. Black students are passed not knowing anything because some school leaders figure - correctly - that black leaders will accuse them of racism.

There's also what I call the self-esteem racket. Students are promoted without knowing anything because, some folks figure, flunking them will harm their self-esteem.

Newoldschoolteacher at Schoolnerdblog:

Ok. So then we read a very inflammatory article about the "pedagogy of poverty." I won't go into it, because it was another one of those "our public schools are trying to control the students' minds. We should let them be free!" Really this is not the issue. Also, the guy says that if you want a highly disciplined school, you may or may not be a bigot. He actually used the word bigot.

We got onto the topic of cultural advantages that middle class kids have, such as listening to their parents discuss different issues, going to museums, having more books, etc. Everyone was decrying the fact that poor kids don't have the same things, and that they come into pre-K already behind. When they continue falling behind, middle school and high school teachers complain that "there just isn't enough time" to teach them, particularly with the mandated curriculum dictated by state exams.

I pointed out that, if what people were saying was correct, then that would mean that urban kids should have more time in the classroom, longer school days, and longer school years. This would allow them to catch up and give their teachers the chance to cover everything they wanted. I provided the KIPP schools as an example of a school system that does this, and gets amazing results. It works. More time in school and good instruction works.

My instructor was not pleased with this, though. He thought the idea was too "militaristic." He said, "I mean, what's the end goal?" I was flabbergasted, once again. Doesn't anyone get it? The goal is to give kids the skills and knowledge they need to choose the kind of lives they want to live. Period, end of story, I no longer want to talk to you, stupid idiot. But he has this whole notion of making people "good citizens" or getting them to "think critically" about the world. Ask yourself, what would you want for your child? Would you want her to get a great academic education and be able to do whatever she wanted, or would you want someone to teach her "how to be a good citizen" or "how to think critically"? I know, me too. And if the chips were down, my instructor would admit the same thing. The fact is that schools like KIPP are vaulting kids OUT OF POVERTY. They're giving them a fighting chance. And the concept of the schools is not that complex. Their motto is: Work hard. Be nice. And everything boils down to that in the end. There's no magic curriculum bullet. It's just hard work. This guy, this instructor, he so decries poverty and "keeping poor kids poor" and "the pedagogy of poverty" but it is HIS reluctance to accept WHAT WORKS FOR KIDS that keeps them where they are.

I really don't understand.  And I'm so angry about it.

Jia-Rui Chiong, Los Angeles Times

Researchers who study the issue of racial disparities in academic performance say that even they have to be careful how they present data.

Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, and his colleagues wanted to look at factors, including race, that affected student achievement several years ago. "We were nervous about how people would react, that we'd be accused of being prejudiced," he said. "There's nothing nice you can say about this that's going to make people feel good."

Steinberg and his colleagues found that even after economics were controlled for, Asian and Asian American students performed better on tests than any other racial group. Latinos and African Americans performed the least well.

Steinberg's research further suggested that an "attitudinal profile" influenced academic success, and that Asians tended to have the most students that fit the profile.

The first variable wasn't parental involvement, as Zhou concluded, but something more subtle: parental expectation. Steinberg asked students what was the worst grade they could get without their parents getting angry. For Asian children, it was a B-plus; for Latino and African American children, it was a C.

Another factor was that Asian children in the study were more likely to associate with peers who valued high marks in school, whereas Latino and African American students were more likely to have friends who put less stock in good grades.

Steinberg found two other differences that seemed linked to success. Asian children were much more likely to attribute their grades to hard work rather than aptitude. They also were more likely to believe that doing poorly in school would harm their chances for success in life.

"If you have these four things, it doesn't matter what ethnic group you're from, you'll do well in school," Steinberg said. "It's just more common among Asian kids and less common among black and Latino kids."

Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University, believes class plays more of a role than Steinberg does. He points to a mostly Asian high school in San Francisco with a high dropout rate. "They're not dropping out because they're not sufficiently Chinese, but mainly because their parents put an emphasis on work."

Noguera also suggested that Latino parents may be less adept at navigating the American school system and advocating on their children's behalf.

"It's not that they don't value education," Noguera said. "They're putting too much trust in the schools. That's a big mistake."

Schoolnerdblog:

I would like someone to guess the approximate grade level of the book the 11th graders in my school's humanities class are reading.

No, guess lower.

Barnes and Noble dubs it a "book for young readers," appropriate for 3rd-6th graders. 

I wonder: are there colleges nowadays that use books for young readers, or in the case of the more academic colleges, books written for grades 7 and 8? We should look into that.

Steven Pinker indirectly:

An understanding of the mind as a complex system shaped by evolution runs against [The blank slate, the noble savage, etc.]  The alternative has emerged from the work of cognitive scientists such as Susan Carey, Howard Gardner ,and David Geary. Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.... Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children may be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor skills, and explore the physical world, but they are not necessarily motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. A family, a peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term.

Schoolnerdblog: teaching a lesson in a progressive school

They are open to my suggestions, up to a point.

For example, the [11th grade] kids' writing is terrible. I mean scary terrible. One essay I just read was almost unintelligible, in that the students' words seemed to have been scattered randomly throughout the "sentence," which went on for like four lines and counted as a paragraph. The girl is bright and articulate, and to my knowledge does not have any type of learning disability.

I suggested I could do some mini grammar lessons in class, and my teacher thought it was a nice idea. She does support the idea of grammar, and recognizes that the kids are pretty weak writers. Although I don't think she has the same fear in her heart that I do for them. But the thing is, she won't let me give any grammar quizzes. The school as a whole is sort of "against" quizzes, although some teachers use them I guess. It's difficult to assess whether the kids have learned the specific principle you taught when you can't quiz them on it specifically. Also, there is every reason for the kids to tune out when I try to teach it to them, since they are not really accountable.

...

The themes for this unit (colonial founding through the early American period) are roughly as follows:

• the racialization of savagery
• race as a social construct
• what freedom means to different peoples

It's difficult to find room in there for things like a) the development of the colonies, b) events leading to the revolution, c) ideas leading to the revolution, d) dissent regarding the revolution, e) the war itself.

I would imagine that the kids have had many classes based around themes like this. One girl said in class today, "how come we always have to learn about race?" Not that it isn't an important topic, especially in American history, but I think the sentiment stemmed from theme overload.

Another hint that they haven't really learned a great deal of content, in the past or so far this year, is that they don't know a lot of content. I'm pretty sure a lot of them don't know what "Europe" is, or at least the difference between "Europe" and "England." When I talk to them, they try to reconstruct the facts of history logically, from the themes we learned about.

My teachers and others want kids to understand the "big ideas" in history, rather than memorizing facts and details. But I just don't think you can teach these big ideas directly. They are empty and meaningless by themselves. You teach the small stories, the facts, the dates, the chronology, the events, and then out of these, patterns begin to emerge. That's the beautiful part, when the students start to see them. It's like giving them tree after tree after tree, and suddenly they realize it's a forest. Or it's like that painting, by...Seurat? The one with all the little dots. There is no picture without all the dots!