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Study: Algebra for all hurt high achievers

August 4, 2012 by

Chicago’s algebra-for-all policy hurt high achievers who were placed in mixed-ability classes, concludes a study published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, reports Ed Week‘s Curriculum Matters.

Before the 1997 policy change, one group of high schools separated ninth graders into different math classes, including remedial courses for low-achievers. The other group placed most ninth graders in Algebra I.

The study found that the rate of improvement on math tests for high-achievers slowed in those schools that previously placed students into different classes based on ability level.

“When eliminating remedial math classes, schools are likely to put lower-performing students in algebra classes together with high-performing students,” says the study, authored by Takako Nomi of the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. “Thus, peer skill levels declined for high-skill students.”

She suggests that what may be happening is that teachers are adjusting instruction to the “middle students” in a classroom, and so the declines in peer ability levels could result in “less-challenging content and slower-paced instruction.”

The switch to mixed-ability algebra classes wasn’t accompanied by training for  teachers or extra help for low achievers, Nomi points out, suggesting that might have helped.

Algebra-for-all didn’t help low achievers either, Nomi’s earlier research found.

. . . although more low-achieving students completed 9th grade with credits in Algebra I and English I, failure rates increased, grades declined slightly, test scores did not improve, and students were no more likely to enter college.

“Placing struggling urban middle schoolers into algebra, not only fails to improve their achievement on state math tests, but also reduces the likelihood that they will take and pass higher-level math courses in high school,” adds Ed Week, citing recent studies in California and North Carolina.

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Art, music haven’t vanished

April 13, 2012 by

Music and art haven’t disappeared from schools, despite the pressures of test-based accountability and fears of curriculum narrowing, according to a federal report by the National Center for Education Statistics. Music and visual arts instruction is widely available and has changed little over the past decade, the report concluded.

Music and visual-arts instruction are more widely available at high-poverty elementary schools, but less available at high-poverty secondary schools, notes Ed Week.

“When I look at the big picture, … I see a good-news, bad-news story,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in prepared remarks for the report’s release . . .

“The good news is that the last decade has not generally produced a dramatic narrowing of the curriculum in the arts,” he said. “But there is considerable bad news in today’s report, too—and especially for disadvantaged students.”

“Generally, what we really found is there is no consistent trend of decline in arts education in public schools,” said Jared Coopersmith, a project officer at the NCES.

“At-risk” students involved in the arts – in or out of school – do better in school, go farther in college and are more civics minded, according to a National Endowment for the Arts report.  ”Access to the arts” included “coursework in music, dance, theater, or the visual arts; out-of-school arts lessons; or membership, participation, and leadership in arts organizations and activities, such as band or theater.”

However, the report didn’t answer the chicken/egg question:  Do the arts create achievers or attract them?

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Why some black men succeed in college

February 11, 2012 by

Black males who do well in college have parents — and at least one K-12 teacher — with high expectations, concludes the National Black Male College Achievement Study.

Black male achievers typically come from working-class families, concludes Shaun Harper, an associate professor higher education at Penn who founded the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. Nearly half have parents with no college degree. “As a group they shun the idea that they are cognitively smarter than their less-successful friends or cousins or other peers (and their high-school academic records largely back that up),” notes Inside Higher Ed.

In addition to parents who considered college a “non-negotiable” goal, and a teacher who took a special interest, achievers had adequate financial support to pay for college and support from black juniors and seniors when they started college.

Sixty percent grew up in homes with two parents. “Census data show that 35 percent of black children grow up in two-parent homes,” reports Inside Higher Ed.

Harper asked each of the 219 black men to talk not only about themselves but about the experiences of their three best black male childhood friends — and these differences virtually jump off the report’s pages.

“When asked what differentiated their own paths from those of their peers who were not enrolled in college, the participants almost unanimously cited parenting practices,” the study states. “Their friends’ parents, the achievers believed, did not consistently maintain high expectations and were not as involved in their sons’ schooling. By contrast, most of the achievers’ parents and family members more aggressively sought out educational resources to ensure their success — tutoring and academic support programs, college preparatory initiatives, and summer academies and camps, to name a few.”

Like the well-to-do parents in the preceding story, the black male achievers’ parents invested in their children’s success.

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U.S. has the most high achievers

March 16, 2011 by

The U.S. produces many more high-achieving students in reading and math than any developed nation, write Mike Petrilli and Janie Scull in a new Fordham study, American Achievement in International Perspective. What’s our secret? Size. There just aren’t that many Finns.

Because of our size, the U.S. continues to turn out lots of “innovative scientists and entrepreneurs,” the authors conclude.  When China and India start taking the PISA exam, “we might discover that their high-achieving students outnumber ours many times over.”

The U.S. also produces more low achievers than France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom combined, and our domestic achievement gap is huge.

America’s white and Asian students perform among the word’s best; our black and Hispanic students are battling it out with OECD’s worst. Still, this report identifies an interesting wrinkle, and perhaps a ray of hope: In raw numbers, at least, our high-achieving Hispanic and black American students outnumber the high achievers of several other countries.

At the least, this indicates that they will have a seat at the international table—on prestigious college campuses, in the board room, and in the laboratory. It’s a start.

Fun fact: “Proportionally, Asian-American students are the best readers in the world, and white Americans are bested only by Finns and New Zealanders.”

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