It’s been fun, but the adults are back so it’s time to stop playing with all the cool toys.
Many thanks to Joanne for this opportunity to blog once again at her site, and I’ll see you all in the comment threads.
Sincerely,
Michael
I do not think it proves what you think it proves
May 26, 2011 By
Newsflash: nature is full of all sorts of sex-bending diversity. (I will go to my grave refusing to consciously use “gender” for biological sex, though I sometimes slip up without noticing.)
A one-hour elementary school lesson on gender diversity featuring all-girl geckos and transgender clownfish caused a stir in Oakland on Monday, with conservative legal defense organizations questioning the legitimacy of the topic and providing legal counsel to parents who opposed the instruction.
On Monday and today, Redwood Heights Elementary School students at every grade level were being introduced to the topic of gender diversity, with lesson plans tailored to each age group.
The lesson on gender differences was one small part of a much larger effort to offer what parents last year said they wanted at the school: a warm, welcoming, safe and caring environment for all children, said Principal Sara Stone.
The school also teaches students about the variety of families at the school and takes on the issue of bullying.
“If we don’t have a safe, nurturing class environment, it’s going to be hard to learn,” she said. “Really, the message behind this curriculum is there are different ways to be boys. There are different ways to be girls.”
So, fourth- and fifth-grade students learned about the crazy world of gender within the animal kingdom with lessons about single-sex Hawaiian geckos, fish that switch genders and boy snakes that act “girly.”
“That’s a lot of variation in nature,” Gender Spectrum trainer, Joel Baum, told the students. “Evolution comes up with some pretty funny ways for animals to reproduce.”
And that same kind of diversity applies to people too, said Baum, the education director for the San Leandro nonprofit. For example, some boys can act like girls; some girls can have boy body parts; and some biological boys feel like a girl inside their hearts, he said.
“It turns out that there are not just two options,” he said.
Well, that’s true. There are hermaphrodites and other sexually anomalous phenomenon to be found in homo sapiens. But that’s not really the point, is it?
First, fish don’t switch genders. They switch sexes (and behavior follows with the biological change in sex). There’s usually a really good evolutionary reason for that: many schools of fish only have one male in them at a time, some fish in the deep sea are quite isolated from each other and so need to be able to “switch hit” for chance matings, etc.
This is absolutely not where you want to plant your flag if you’re trying to convince people — kids or not — that somehow transsexuality or the breaking of sex-based behavior (i.e., “gender roles”) is somehow natural. [Read more...]
It’s the lying that gets me
May 26, 2011 By
So I was scanning the inter-tubes this morning, looking for interesting things about which to blog, when what should attract my eye but an article about Amherst. Naturally, I stopped to read.
(Amherstorum hostis sunt. Universitas Wesleiana illos semper vincit!)
Except it’s not really an article about Amherst, but an article about colleges — particularly colleges with excellent reputations — opening their doors to the huddled masses. It’s essentially an opinion piece, with the main focus being a close look at someone with whom the author shares an opinion. Anywhere, here’s the geist:
On Sunday, Mr. Marx presided over his final Amherst graduation. This summer, he will become head of the New York Public Library. And he can point to some impressive successes at Amherst.
More than 22 percent of students now receive federal Pell Grants (a rough approximation of how many are in the bottom half of the nation’s income distribution). In 2005, only 13 percent did.
* * * *
The United States no longer leads the world in educational attainment, partly because so few low-income students — and surprisingly few middle-income students — graduate from four-year colleges. Getting more of these students into the best colleges would make a difference. Many higher-income students would still graduate from college, even if they went to a less elite one. A more educated population, in turn, would probably lift economic growth.
The Amherst model does cost money. And it would be difficult to maintain if Congress cuts the Pell budget, as some members have proposed. But when you add everything up, I think the model isn’t only the fairest one and the right one for the economy. It’s also the best one for the colleges themselves. Attracting the best of the best — not just the best of the affluent — and letting them learn from one another is the whole point of a place like Amherst.
That’s a lovely sentiment, attracting the best of the best. You could imagine a world where admissions decisions were purely merit-based. We could even call it “Need Blind Admissions“. And we could make it so that schools offer “full need” support. What a great idea! If only some school other than Amherst would do this… [Read more...]
His lips are moving
May 25, 2011 By
Secretary Duncan has expressly disavowed a national curriculum:
At a forum hosted by the National Center on Education and the Economy, Duncan was discussing lessons that can be learned from higher-performing countries, and he mentioned national standards and curriculum. But he said: “We have not and will not prescribe a national curriculum. I want to repeat that.” This remark prompted laughter from the audience, my colleague Stephen Sawchuk, who attended the forum, reports.
I confess that I suspect that the veracity of his statement is entirely tied up in the meaning of the word “prescribe.”
Duncan also said it would be against the law to prescribe national curriculum.
Yes, illegal to prescribe. But there are ways around that.
The new tracking
May 24, 2011 By
The old tracking was racist, classist and hurtful.
The new “tracking” is basically a roll of the die, but just as hurtful, according to Barry Garelick. It’s a long essay; some may not want to read the whole thing, so I’ll summarize what I see his argument as in five points:
- When we threw out tracking in the late 60′s and early 70′s, we accidentally threw out ability grouping, too. Not everywhere, but in significant quantity.
- When we threw out tracking in the late 60′s and 70′s, we quite purposefully threw out explicit, teacher-centered instruction, too, because we wanted to make things relevant. Again, not everywhere, but in significant quantity.
- Without these things — ability grouping and explicit instruction — it’s incredibly difficult to learn. As a result many students don’t learn the things they need to learn at their schools. But whether they learn these things or not is reduced to a bit of a lottery: did you happen to land in a school that was teaching well, or poorly? If so, you probably learned. If not, well…
- Those students who haven’t been properly taught are now by and large being written off as “not college material”, “not good at math”, or lacking in “cognitive ability”. (Uh oh… now I’ve gone and done it.) This is its own insidious form of tracking, cutting off futures just as surely as if a black kid was forced into general arithmetic.
And here’s the last paragraph, where the meaty conclusion is. If you read this in isolation, though, you’ll miss much of the argument:
But students who have been put on the protection-from-learning track fulfill the low expectations that have been conferred upon them. The education establishment’s view of this situation is a shrug, and—despite their justifications for the inquiry-based and student-centered approach that brings out all children’s’ “innate” knowledge of math—respond with “Maybe your child just isn’t good in math”. The admonition carries to subjects beyond math and is extended to “Maybe your child isn’t college material.” And while it is true that a “college for all” goal is unrealistic, the view that so many students somehow are lacking in cognitive ability raises serious questions. As Schmidt (2011) states in his paper: “To attribute achievement differences solely to differences in student efforts and abilities is grossly unfair and simpleminded and ignores the fundamental relationship between content coverage and achievement.” There is now an in-bred resistance to do ability grouping and to teach using explicit instruction. That such approach may result in higher achievement, with more students qualifying for gifted and honors programs, is something that the education establishment has come to deny by default. It is an inherent and insidious tracking system that leaves many students behind. And many of those disdain and despise education and the people who managed to achieve what they could not—the same hatred that I imagine Raymond must have felt many years ago.
It’s a decent essay, even if it does repeat itself several times. And his take on the history of what happened to schools from the 50′s to the 80′s is pretty fascinating, though I’m not vouching for its historical or interpretive accuracy. Garelick seems aware that what he’s advocating isn’t a panacea — but he does seem to believe that ability grouping and explicit instruction would do a lot more good than is promoted by their absence, and in that I’m inclined to agree.
Mythconceptions about the purpose of schools
May 22, 2011 By
(The mythtake would be thinking that these puns ever get old…)
So there’s this new, poorly argued, platitude-ridden, bit-o-pablum opinion piece by Paul Farhi in the Washington Post this morning: “Five Myths about America’s Schools”. Consider the source and the title and the article can probably pretty much write itself in your head. I had initially intended to blog about the article, but I got sidetracked by something I found myself writing. Part of Farhi’s argument about why Charter Schools aren’t great runs thusly:
Credit for (the academic success of some charter schools’ students) may rest solely with the students, however. Charter school students are among the most motivated, as are their parents, who sought an alternative education for their children and mastered the intricacies of admission.
And siphoning off those better students through choice may create the same disastrous effect as de facto segregation through the geography of poverty — it leaves behind those least able to advocate for themselves and most susceptible to falling through the cracks.
Now in the first place, Farhi’s not thinking clearly. Credit for something as complex as a student’s learning outcomes cannot — pretty much by definition — go solely to the student. Even if the student learns to duck from walking into doorway, the doorway deserves a little bit of the “credit”. So let’s stop with the “sole” responsibility bullcrap.
But this really got me thinking about “credit”, and about necessary and sufficient conditions for learning outcomes. It may be that schools not only don’t deserve sole credit (which seems obvious), but even that they don’t even deserve chief credit. What is the purpose of a school, after all?
“TO EDUCATE STUDENTS!” is the universal reply. [Read more...]
The medievals may have had it right
May 21, 2011 By
Back in the day, an education (for those who had one) consisted in great part of two things: the lectio and the disputatio, the lecture and the disputation. There wasn’t any group work, and the magister was, quite literally, the sage on the stage. Then somewhere along the line people decided that lectures, while apparently good for college students, were bad for younger children.
Well, hang on a second.
Newer teaching methods might be beneficial for student achievement if implemented in the proper way, but our findings imply that simply inducing teachers to shift time in class from lecture-style presentations to problem solving without ensuring effective implementation is unlikely to raise overall student achievement in math and science. On the contrary, our results indicate that there might even be an adverse impact on student learning.
You should read the whole thing, but here’s the skinny: for math and science classes, it seems like lecturing might, on average, be better than problem-solving in transmitting concepts.
Contrary to contemporary pedagogical thinking, we find that students score higher on standardized tests in the subject in which their teachers spent more time on lecture-style presentations than in the subject in which the teacher devoted more time to problem-solving activities. For both math and science, a shift of 10 percentage points of time from problem solving to lecture-style presentations (e.g., increasing the share of time spent lecturing from 20 to 30 percent) is associated with an increase in student test scores of 1 percent of a standard deviation. Another way to state the same finding is that students learn less in the classes in which their teachers spend more time on in-class problem solving.
I’m not convinced that this is limited to science and math (though it may be for practical reasons which I’m about to discuss). I’m supposed to lead “class discussions” about topics in philosophy in my role as a graduate student. But sometimes I realize that something from the Professor’s lecture just didn’t stick. I only have an hour. What am I going to do? I can have a “discussion” about it, but we’ll only get half way into the topic, and we’ll spend a lot of time working through theories that don’t quite get it right. Or I can just roll up my sleeves, walk into the classroom and say, “OK, no discussion today. Today you shut up and listen.” So that’s what I sometimes do. (Warning to instructors: you have to have a certain type of rapport with your students before you can get to the point where they don’t get offended at being told to “shut up and listen”. Do not do this on the first day of a new class under any circumstances!)
I’ve often thought that the reason a lot of people decided lecturing was bad was twofold: [Read more...]
Instruction and certification: the consequences of failure
May 20, 2011 By
I wanted to take a few minutes to ruminate more deeply on something I said in passing in a comment thread a few weeks back. Here’s what I said:
When a student has not been allowed to fail, they will learn that failure isn’t something that can happen. When a college professor gives them an F, the result is confusion.
Unfortunately, failure *is* something that can happen, regardless of the attitude one takes towards it in primary and secondary school. It happens with devastating results, sometimes. Now, school is supposed to be a place where you can fail without devastating consequences, where you can learn from your failures and become better at things, but failure in school is often seen these days as a devastating consequence itself. (e.g., YOU RUINED MY CHANCE TO GET INTO HARVARD!)
That’s a problem. Certification should be the secondary mission of schools, not the primary mission.
There are really three different points here.
First, there’s an assertion that failure is always a possibility. That’s probably true: one can avoid failure only by never attempting anything not guaranteed success, which is itself a sort of failure… at life. We’ll come back to this in a moment.
Second, there’s an assertion that school should be a place where failure is constructive. That’s a much dicier proposition. We all know the old saying: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” If you don’t know it, you should learn it, because it’s a good saying. But there’s another saying, too: “Insanity is trying the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” If you consider both of these sayings together, the resulting imperative seems to be something like “If at first you don’t succeed, keep altering your approach until you do.” And that’s really great advice.
Of course, there are times when you don’t want to have to try again. Operation Overlord comes to mind this time of year. No one wants to fail when they’re invading Europe; it’s too expensive, too much is on the line. Failure isn’t an option in such situations; if Eisenhower was pushed back into the sea and tens of thousands of soldiers died for naught, well, it would take great presence of mind to say, “Let’s try this again, but put the seventh division over here this time.” No, you drill and practice as best you can before the big invasion, and try to work out the possibilities of failure in a low-consequence environment.
Whether success is a must or merely a goal depends on the consequences. That last-second three-point shot isn’t a laboratory for experiment because the game rides on it; if you’re a professional NBA player, you’ve already had all the consequence-free practice money can buy. Now’s the time to succeed. [Read more...]
The new flexible rules of the future
May 19, 2011 By
Boys will be boys, the saying goes. Sugar and spice and everything nice…
Perhaps not, say experts.
With male-dominated fields like construction now stagnant, however, experts argue that the situation may be reversed: American schools don’t do enough to encourage boys to explore careers in traditionally female-dominated fields, such as health care and education.
* * * *
“My perception over the last 40 years is we’ve provided a lot of support and encouragement for girls to try and take on new things,” [Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar who studies male economic and academic achievement at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education,] said, “but I’ve also seen no special effort to encourage boys to take on different subjects.”
“I’ve tried to say to boys, ‘If you want a good job, think about becoming a nurse’ … but nobody ever introduces boys to entering these traditionally female occupations, and someone needs to do that,” Mr. Mortenson said.
I’m concerned that what’s driving this isn’t any real lack of opportunity for boys, but rather just the empirical lack of male nurses. In other words, I suspect that “experts” think the lack of male teachers and nurses is because (and only because) boys are discouraged somehow from taking these jobs. ( They probably are discouraged from teaching by the widespread view of every man as a potential child molester, but that’s another topic.)
But what if they aren’t discouraged, have the opportunity, and simply don’t want to do those jobs?
My suspicion is that experts would find such an explanation unsatisfying. [Read more...]
Illegal? I do not think it means what you think it means
May 17, 2011 By
Jay Greene has an interesting argument up over at EducationNext, in which he argues that the Federal Department of Education is breaking the law, that is, exceeding its statutory mandate. (And whatever mandates it has would have to be statutory; I think it’s pretty clear that the DoE has no Constitutional portfolio whatsoever.) Here’s the juicy bit:
The 1979 law by which the U.S. Department of Education is authorized in its current form clearly prohibits these activities. It states (in section 103b): “No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law.” (emphasis added)
So, the spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education says that they are funding development of curriculum, but the Department is expressly not authorized to direct, supervise, or control curriculum.
First let me caveat this by saying that this is my initial reaction, and does not represent any sort of studied legal opinion. What I’m about to say is based solely on the quoted statute and my background knowledge of the law. [Read more...]
Recent Comments