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How people think

March 25, 2009 By

Understanding is Remembering in Disguise, writes Dan Willingham at The Core Knowledge Blog.

Data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most-critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving-are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment). 

. . . So, understanding new ideas is mostly a matter of getting the right old ideas into working memory and then rearranging them-making comparisons we hadn’t made before, or thinking about a feature we had previously ignored.

In part 1, Willingham explains that the brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to let you think as little as possible.

Part 3 defends practice: Drill doesn’t always kill.

A psychology professor at University of Virginia, Willingham is the author of Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009).

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Charter students go farther with same scores

March 24, 2009 By

According to a Rand study, charter middle students who go on to charter high schools don’t have higher test scores than similar non-charter students, but they are more likely to graduate and go to college.

Researchers found that students from charter middle schools who attended charter high schools were between 7 and 15 percentage points more likely to graduate. They also concluded that students at charter high schools were between 8 and 10 percentage points more likely to go to college.

The study found no evidence charters “cream” the best students: Students who transferred to charters had below-average test scores.

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D.C. students cash in

March 24, 2009 By

Giving cash for grades (and doing homework, behaving and wearing a clean school uniform) is motivating some D.C. middle-school students to work harder in school, reports the Washington Post. But the Capital Gains program may work best for the best students.

Interviews with parents, educators and youths reveal that most students compare their earnings as soon as they’re handed out, excited by the financial reward. A few, in a show of apathy or rebellion, destroy checks intended to help them. And some walk home disappointed, envelopes closed.

Does it destroy the intrinsic love of learning? There are follow-up studies underway.

Flypaper wants ethics lessons so students won’t steal their classmates’ checks or tear them up in envy.

Direct deposit, used at some schools, might be more effective.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Inflated selectivity

March 24, 2009 By

Beware College Rankings warn Frederick M. Hess and Thomas Gift on National Review Online. Many more colleges are now ranked as “most competitive”: Barron’s lists 82 schools compared to 54 ten years ago.  There are more “highly competitive” schools too.

Grade inflation, and students’ applying to more schools than they used to, have juiced the numbers to make students look more qualified and schools more selective.

. . . A 2004 College Board study reported that the fraction of SAT takers claiming an A average had risen from 13 percent to 18 percent over the past decade, a time during which SAT scores declined slightly. The mean GPA of high-school graduates increased from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Education; meanwhile, twelfth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined between 1992 and 2007.

All the children are above average in Lake Wobegon; elsewhere in the U.S., they’re way above average.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , ,

Reading and knowing

March 23, 2009 By

Reading tests that measure grade-level knowledge as well as skills would help students build comprehension, writes E.D. Hirsch, Core Knowledge founder and author of The Knowledge Deficit, in a New York Times op-ed.

These much maligned, fill-in-the-bubble reading tests are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available. The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards. Children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.

Hirsch advocates using reading passages on tests taken  “from each grade’s specific curricular content in literature, science, history, geography and the arts.”

Test preparation would focus on the content of the tests, rather than continue the fruitless attempt to teach test taking.

In a 1988 study, researchers gave strong and weak readers in seventh and eighth grade a reading test with passages about baseball.  “Low-level readers with high baseball knowledge significantly outperformed strong readers with little background knowledge,” he writes.

This reform would push states to set specific learning goals, Hirsch adds. Teaching to the test would mean teaching the curriculum.  Disadvantaged students, who rely on their teachers to teach them knowledge and vocabulary they can’t learn at home, will have a chance to catch up.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Union blues

March 22, 2009 By

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers,  wants to be a reformer, write Ed Sector’s Andrew Rotherham and Richard Whitmire in Making the Grade.

In her (November) speech, she vowed to give ear to almost any tough-minded school reform, and, in a line that thrilled many reformers, promised that the AFT will not protect incompetent teachers: “Teachers are the first to say, ‘Let’s get incompetent teachers out of the classroom.

But Weingarten’s reform ambitions have foundered in Washington, D.C., they write.

Michelle Rhee, a hard-charging and high-profile reformer now serving as the chancellor of the city’s schools, has taken on the system with a strong hand, vowing to ramp up teacher-training and shuffle low-performing teachers out of the system. Her offer to teachers, buttressed by pledged funding from several foundations, is this: Give up tenure, and you will receive dramatic salary boosts measured in tens of thousands of dollars–or keep tenure protections, your salary increases will be far smaller, and you will still be subject to dismissal if you fail to reach performance standards.

The Washington Teachers Union (WTU) at first seemed willing to work with Rhee to craft a deal on her two-track system. But, in the end, the WTU rejected the offer without even putting it to a vote of teachers.

In New York City, UFT’s well-publicized attempt to unionize KIPP schools is in trouble.  Teachers at two KIPP schools are breaking union ties, reports Gotham Schools.  That may affect the union vote at a third KIPP school.

Eduwonk puts “the odds at one in three now that the UFT comes out of this with any KIPP schools in the city as part of their portfolio.”

More generally, while the UFT/AFT hoped this would highlight how hard KIPP teachers work and sustainability questions about  that, instead this episode now seems likely bring into stark relief some of the very real tensions between industrial-style unionism and professional work.

Look for “total war” instead of “healthy debate,” Eduwonk says.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Change pay, change teaching?

March 21, 2009 By

Would changing the way we pay teachers change teaching? The Christian Science Monitor looks at Denver’s experiment with performance pay.

Taylor Betz will make a lot more as a high school math teacher this year than her normal salary might suggest.

There’s the $2,300 bonus she gets for working at a “hard-to-serve school,” the $2,300 for filling a “hard-to-staff position,” the $2,300 that all teachers at her school are likely to get for raising student scores on state tests, the $2,300 “beating the odds” bonus she gets for significantly raising the math scores of her own students, and a few smaller bonuses.

Rookie teachers want their pay linked to results, reports NPR, looking at D.C.’s younger teacher corps. Experienced teachers tend to be dubious.

Update: Speaking to the National Science Teachers Association, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for differential pay.

“We need to respond to the market by paying more to teachers in high-need subjects like science and math,” Duncan told the audience. “I’m a big believer in differential pay. I want to reward excellence by paying teachers and principals who do a great job in the classroom.

“I want to reward them for going into struggling school districts,” he continued. “That’s where the challenge is. If you’re going to take on a tough job, you should be rewarded.”

Differential pay is much easier to implement than performance pay.

Filed Under: Children, Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Waiting for a heart

March 21, 2009 By

Jill Wolfson‘s Cold Hands, Warm Heart, aimed at young adults, is the story of a 15-year-old girl who needs a heart transplant to survive. Amanda, a 14-year-old gymnast, suffers a fatal accident.

Told mostly in Dani’s witty voice, the novel reveals her intimate thoughts as readers accompany her through her transplant, as she falls in love with a fellow patient and as she wrestles with the magnitude of receiving another girl’s heart.

I’ve heard the book is terrific.

Jill, who was a colleague of mine at the San Jose Mercury News back in the day, will do a reading at Books, Inc. at Town and Country Village in Palo Alto on April 3.

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: , , , ,

Against breast feeding

March 20, 2009 By

Breast-feeding may be a little bit healthier, concedes Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic’s The Case Against Breast-Feeding. But it’s not so wonderful that “breast-feeding fascists” should make formula-using mothers feel like trailer trash.

While thousands of studies link “breast-feeding with healthier, happier, smarter children,” they share a flaw, writes Rosin.

. . .  breast-fed infants are typically brought up in very different families from those raised on the bottle. In the U.S., breast-feeding is on the rise — 69 percent of mothers initiate the practice at the hospital, and 17 percent nurse exclusively for at least six months. But the numbers are much higher among women who are white, older, and educated; a woman who attended college, for instance, is roughly twice as likely to nurse for six months.

Rosin thinks breast feeding makes life too difficult for working women and should be seen as nice but not essential.

I thought it was easy, free and healthy, but I had a six-month maternity leave.

Of course, I also had a baby who spent 12 days in neonatal intensive care, while I frantically pumped in hopes that someday I’d be able to feed my baby.  And hold her and watch her grow up. I did a lot of pumping and crying. Then my husband rented an electric breast pump attached to a container big enough to milk Elsie the Cow. I actually laughed when I sat it, and those were not laughing days. Fastening that to my breast was an act of courage. So, once I could breast-feed a healthy baby it was a piece of cake — and a victory.

See 11D for more.

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: , , , ,

Reform for money

March 19, 2009 By

It’s not just the money, said President Obama, answering a question a his town hall meeting yesterday at a Los Angeles high school.

. . . you can’t just be talking more money, more money, without also talking about how are we going to reform and make the system better. (Applause.) There’s got to be a reform agenda in exchange for the money. (Applause.) There’s got to be a reform agenda in exchange for the money.

So don’t just say, give us more money or smaller classrooms — but you’re not willing to consider, for example, how are we going to do better assessments; or how are going to — how are we going to work to improve teacher performance; and if a teacher is not improving, how do we get them to choose a different career, right? (Applause.) I mean, there’s got to be — there’s got to be some serious conversation about that.

. . . Parents — (applause) — you can’t complain about the schools and complain about the teachers, but when your child comes home, they’re playing video games and not doing homework, and you don’t have time to go to your teacher and parent — teacher-parent meeting. Our parents have to instill a sense of excellence and a thirst for knowledge.

Chinese and Indian students “don’t have better facilities, but they’re out-performing us in math and science,” Obama said. Parents need to demand “higher performance from our kids,” he said.

To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, show me the reform! Show me the reform! In legislation, not just exhortation.

Obama spoke at Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, “touted as a model of urban-education reform” for its smaller classes, increased autonomy and innovative programs,” notes the LA Daily News.

The school is also set to lose half of its teachers and a large portion of its administrators next year, and only half of its seniors graduate in four years.

. . . Opened in 2006, Miguel Contreras is an experiment in creating small learning communities out of large urban campuses. Serving about 2,000 students, teachers work under modified union contracts that give them more decision-making power. The school also has more flexibility on how it spends its money.

Such innovation drew young teachers and administrators who ironically are now targeted for layoff for lack of seniority.

In its first two years, the school didn’t meet performance goals:  “Three percent of the student body is proficient or better in math, according to the district’s school report card, while 21 percent scored proficient in English.”

However, the school is “newly upgraded and beautiful looking,” writes Alexander Russo.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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