Monthly Archive for July, 2004

All students learn more when “diverse” voices participate in class discussions, say proponents of racial and ethnic preferences. But minority students don’t necessarily want to speak for their groups. At the University of Colorado’s School of Education, a “school and society” class created a special section restricted to minority students and students who are the first in their families to attend college. Because the class has a long waiting list, that means some students won’t get in based on the color of their skin.

School of Education Dean Lorrie Shepard said the section requirements meet the state’s interpretation of federal law because they are not strictly race-based. In addition to minority students, the class includes those of any race who are the first in their family to go to college.

The course itself is open to all students, she said, and therefore is not discriminatory. But the section for underrepresented students was developed as an experiment last year after students of color found they were continually called on to represent a minority perspective, she said.

The class curriculum covers issues of race, gender and culture.

“Often a student of color would find they were the only non-white person in a given section and … very often their class would turn to them whenever an issue of race was discussed,” Shepard said. “They’d be asked if they agreed with a certain perspective or to defend a position. They’d be put on the spot in ways that made it feel like a hostile environment.”

. . . But for those who choose it, she said, it provides an “important intellectual opportunity” and a “much safer and open environment to be able to agree and disagree with each other without having to speak for their whole group.”

Being asked their opinions created a “hostile” environment?

Via Discriminations.

You can read John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education (2000) for free online.

A former teacher and long-time critic of the system, Gatto is the author of Dumbing Us Down, A Different Kind of Teacher, The Exhausted School and Educating Your Child in Modern Times: Raising an Intelligent, Sovereign, & Ethical Human Being.

Students taught directly by the teacher understand scientific concepts signfiicantly better than students who are asked to discover the science on their own, concludes a study by David Klahr, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon, and Milena Nigam, a research associate at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biomedical Informatics. Monitor on Psychology reports:

For decades, early science education has emphasized “discovery learning,” in which children, given experimental materials such as springs and pulleys, marbles and ramps, are expected to “discover” scientific principles on their own . . .

Klahr saw three main reasons to challenge discovery learning. First, most of what students, teachers and scientists know about science was taught, not discovered, he says. Second, teacher-centered methods (in which teachers actively teach, as opposed to observe or facilitate) for direct instruction have been very effective for procedures that are typically harder for students to discover on their own, such as algebra and computer programming. Third, he adds, only vague theory backed the predicted superiority of discovery methods — and what there is clashes with data on learning and memory. For example, discovery learning can include mixed or missing feedback, encoding errors, causal misattributions and more, which could actually cause frustration and set a learner back, says Klahr.

Seventy-seven percent of “direct instruction” third and fourth graders — but only 23 percent of “discovery learning” students — “were able to design at least three out of four experiments” without confounding factors.

About a week later, a different experimenter asked the children to evaluate two science-fair posters by suggesting how to make them “good enough to enter in a state-level science fair.” Both posters described deeply flawed experiments. Again, significantly more children exposed to direct instruction were able to critically evaluate experiments.

Critics of the research say that discovery learning used in today’s classrooms is not as unguided as the model studied. It sounds like teachers are sneaking in more direct teaching.

Via Education Gadfly.

Chicago is closing 60 failing schools, opening 100 new schools and letting private managers run most of the new schools with no union contract. Chicago business leaders used the prospect of federal sanctions under No Child Left Behind “to pressure the city to put many schools into private hands, outside union jurisdiction,” reports the New York Times. The local teachers’ union is distracted by charges of fraud in the recent election for union president. With nobody in charge, the union hasn’t done much to fight the plan.

Since pioneering educators raised student achievement by creating small schools in Spanish Harlem in the 1980’s, smaller-is-better has become a national mantra of reform, with New York and other cities, like Baltimore, Boston, Sacramento and San Diego, dividing large schools into smaller, more personal learning communities. But Chicago’s plan breaks ground not only because it is huge but also because no other city has proposed to replace large numbers of failing, unionized schools by allowing the private sector to create new schools operating outside of the teachers union contract.

Philadelphia contracted with Edison Schools in 2002 to manage 20 public schools there. But Edison was required to work under the terms of the existing teacher contract, which limited the company’s educational options, said Paul T. Hill, a University of Washington professor who wrote a 1997 book, “Reinventing Public Education.”

“Chicago intends to give the private groups creating these schools full freedom of action and control over hiring and firing,” Dr. Hill said. “That hasn’t been done anywhere on this scale.”

About 60 of the new schools — 10 percent of the entire system — will operate outside the union contract.

In 1995, Mayor Richard Daley took control of the city’s school system. Despite reform efforts, one third of the city’s schools are in danger of federal sanctions under NCLB.

“Chicago has a long history of tinkering with failed schools,” said Tom Vander Ark, executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has committed some $25 million since 2001 to school reform efforts in Chicago. “They’ve called it re-engineering, reconstitution, restructuring. They would change a few things, but not surprisingly, its never worked very well. What this new plan offers schools is a complete break with the past.”

Under the new plan, the 100 new schools would open by 2010, including 30 charter schools and 30 schools created by private groups under five-year contracts with the district.

As teen-agers revel in online pornography and videogame violence, they’re less likely to be reveling in the real thing. Glen Reynolds makes the connection:

When teen crime and pregnancy rates were going up, people looked at things that were going on — including increased availability of porn and violent imagery — and concluded that there might be something to that correlation. It turned out that there wasn’t. Porn and Duke Nukem took over the land, and yet teenagers became more responsible and less violent.

Maybe the porn, and the videogames, provided catharsis, serving as substitutes for the real thing. Maybe. And maybe there’s no connection at all. (Or maybe it’s a different one — research indicates that teenagers, though safer and healthier, are also fatter — so perhaps the other improvements are the result of teens sitting around looking at porn and videogames until they’re too out-of-shape and unattractive for the real thing.)

Or it’s just possible that “correlation isn’t causation.” Killjoy.