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Vice President Bin Laden

February 5, 2012 By 16 Comments

Lunch Scholars, a video by two Olympia High (Washington) journalism students spotlights ignorance. Asked the state capital, students guess Seattle, even though they live in the capital city, Olympia.  What countries border the U.S.?  ”Canada?” says a girl. “That’s a state. Never mind.” In what war did the U.S. gain its independence? “That war,” the Civil War and the Korean War  get as many votes as the Revolutionary War.  Who’s the vice president? George Bush, Bill Clinton or “someone named Bin Laden.”

In a statement on Olympia High’s student newspaper site, filmmaker Evan Ricks admits the editing included the “funniest responses.”

“Though there were many correct answers to these pop questions, the comments in national forums concentrate on the negative, and, as usual, do not take into consideration the amount of editing it took to get these funny, incorrect answers. So, we are taking down our video.”

Taken down on Vimeo, the video was reposted on YouTube.

“Olympia High ranks as one of the best in the state in graduation rates, AP test results and SAT scores,” reports KXLY. The high school is the defending state champion in the Knowledge Bowl.

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Educational insanity

November 6, 2011 By

After 20 years of education reform focused on reading and math — and billions of dollars in spending — NAEP results show little improvement, writes Lynne Munson of Common Core. It’s educational insanity, she writes, using Einstein’s definition: “Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.”

We’ve tried to bring market pressures to bear through charters and choice.  We’ve attempted to set high standards and given high-stakes tests.  We’ve experimented with shrinking school and class sizes. We’ve focused on “21st century skills” and used the latest technologies. We’ve collected and analyzed data on an unprecedented scale.  We’ve experimented with a seemingly endless array of “strategies” for teaching reading and math and have tried to “differentiate” for every imaginable “type” of student. And we’ve paid dearly in tax dollars and in other ways for each of these “reforms.”

Interestingly, all of these reforms have one thing in common (aside from their failure to improve student performance except in isolated instances):  None deals directly with the content of what we teach our students.

Teaching knowledge “of things like standard algorithms, poetry, America’s past, foreign languages, great painters, chemistry, our form of government, and much more” works for all students, Munson writes, citing International Baccalaureate, Latin schools curricula and Core Knowledge. Ignoring curricular content is nuts.

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To stop the verbal drop, teach gist

September 22, 2011 By

The new low in SAT verbal scores reflects a sharp drop in high school students’ language competence that started in the 1970s, writes E.D. Hirsch. We can stop the drop in verbal ability by teaching knowledge that will enable children to understand what they read, Hirsch argues.

In the decades before the Great Verbal Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-centered approach.

Children who’ve developed strong language skills at home can learn easily, while the language-poor fall further and further behind.

The more words you already know, the faster you acquire new words. This sounds like an invitation to vocabulary study for tots, but that’s been tried and it’s not effective. Most of the word meanings we know are acquired indirectly, by intuitively guessing new meanings as we understand the overall gist of what we are hearing or reading.

. . . Clearly the key is to make sure that from kindergarten on, every student, from the start, understands the gist of what is heard or read. If preschoolers and kindergartners are offered substantial and coherent lessons concerning the human and natural worlds, then the results show up five years or so later in significantly improved verbal scores.

. . . By staying on a subject long enough to make all young children familiar with it (say, two weeks or so), the gist becomes understood by all and word learning speeds up. This is especially important for low-income children, who come to school with smaller vocabularies and rely on school to impart the knowledge base affluent children take for granted.

Current reform strategies aren’t enough, argues Hirsch, founder of the Core Knowledge movement and author of The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools.

Core Knowledge Blog has a longer version of Hirsch’s argument.

 

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Attack of the reading tests

August 9, 2011 By

Rachel Levy hoped to teach history and geography while developing her high school students’ reading and writing skills. But the principal of her inner-city D.C. school — pre-Rhee — told social studies teachers to spend one-fifth of class time teaching the reading test, Levy writes on Core Knowledge Blog.

Teachers were told to make a chart for each student showing how well he or she did on each skill, such as “context clues.”

Then I was supposed to target my lesson plans to teach and remedy each student’s individual weaknesses. . . . such instruction and data collection had to be documented in our lesson plan books and during classroom observations.

Teach and remedy each student’s individual weaknesses?

While testing doesn’t require such stupidities, few educators have the patience to rely on a “well-rounded and knowledge-rich curriculum” to raise scores gradually, Levy writes.

She tried to persuade colleagues that the way to raise test scores was to “teach content and have students read and write as much as possible.”  No one agreed.

Now raising three children, Levy blogs at All Things Education.

Update:  You need to know how to teach but you also need to know your subject very well, writes Michael Bromley, a social studies teacher who guest-blogged for Rick Hess on Ed Week.  “No matter the teaching strategy, if you don’t have something valid, interesting, and important to teach there will be no learning.”

In June, the National Assessment of Educational Progress released a report showing core historical illiteracy among American school children. In response, famed historian David McCullough told the Wall Street Journal, “People who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively because they’re often assigned to teach subjects about which they know little or nothing.”

Wait a minute, there, David, hold on: modern pedagogy states that qualified, education-proficient teachers can teach anything, so long as the correct strategies for student engagement are followed. Isn’t that the problem? David replies, “You can’t love something you don’t know any more than you can love someone you don’t know.” Amen, brother . . .

If you don’t know the subject, your students won’t either, Bromley concludes.

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Next-gen science education

July 21, 2011 By

Science education should be deep, engaging and coherent, declared a National Research Council panel, which issued a new framework for science standards. Achieve, a nonprofit, will design the “next-generation” standards, which advocates hope will be adopted by most states.

Common Core Standards, now adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia, cover English Language Arts and math only, notes Ed Week.

The framework is built around three major dimensions: scientific and engineering practices; cross-cutting concepts that unify the study of science and engineering; and core ideas in four disciplinary areas—physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences, and engineering, technology, and the applications of science.

Framers hope to return science to the K-3 curriculum and to add engineering and technology in the K-8 grades to “provide a context in which students can test their own developing scientific knowledge and apply it to practical problems.”

The report calls for focusing on core scientific ideas and teaching problem solving rather than “just memorizing factual nuggets,” the New York Times summarizes.

“That is the failing of U.S. education today, that kids are expected to learn a lot of things but not expected to be able to use them,” said Helen Quinn, a retired physicist from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., who led an 18-member committee that spent more than a year devising the framework.

The committee hopes “to ensure that by the end of 12th grade, all students have some appreciation of the beauty and wonder of science,” the report states.

Do our students know too many facts? It makes sense to focus on understanding core ideas and applying knowledge to solve problems, but it sure helps to have some knowledge to apply.

Update: The computer scientists want to add computer science to the curriculum.

 

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If it works, keep doing it

July 18, 2011 By

New York City wasted millions of dollars on bonuses for students and teachers with no effect on performance, writes Sol Stern in a New York Daily News op-ed.  Now a Core Knowledge reading program is succeeding in 10 Bronx and Queens elementary schools by teaching phonics and background knowledge to disadvantaged students. But there’s no guarantee the funding will be continued.

As chancellor of New York City schools, Joel Klein set up a comparison between the Core Knowledge pilot schools and similar schools using “balanced literacy.”

After the first year, Klein announced the early results: On a battery of reading tests, the kindergartners in the Core Knowledge program had achieved gains five times greater than those of students in the control group. The second-year study showed that the Core Knowledge kids made reading gains twice as great as those of students in the control group.

The third-year results will be released in the fall. If the gains continue, logic says the program should be extended. But logic doesn’t always prevail.

On the other hand, New York City’s Education Department has ended a three-year bonus program for teachers and administrators because a RAND study found it had no effect on students’ or schools’ performance.

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Teacher training in math doesn’t help

May 30, 2011 By

Intensive, well-designed training didn’t improve seventh-grade math teachers’ knowledge or their students achievement in a federally funded study by the American Institutes for Research and MDRC.  From Education Week:

The program studied was “far more intensive and extensive—and better—than the typical professional development” that teachers receive, noted Elizabeth Warner, an economist at the federal Institute of Education Sciences’ National Center for Educational Evaluation and Regional Assistance, and the project officer for the study.

Over two years, teachers were supposed to get 114 “contact hours” of training on how to teach about rational numbers, including summer institutes, one-day follow-up seminars, and in-school coaching visits.

Teachers with one or more years of training did score higher on “knowing what types of graphic representations will best convey specific ideas clearly, and knowing the common student misunderstandings.”

But training didn’t lead to higher student achievement.

Teachers’ general math knowledge, which wasn’t affected by the training, correlated to significantly higher student achievement, the study found.

A similar study on early reading, completed in 2008, “showed no statistically significant impact on student achievement after teachers were exposed to one of two year-long staff development program,” notes Ed Week.

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What does Bloom’s Taxonomy really say?

May 13, 2011 By

How many times have you heard people say that the idea of “higher-order thinking” comes from “Bloom’s Taxonomy”?

Well, in handbook 1 of the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, published in 1956, Benjamin Bloom and colleagues do not once use the phrase “higher-order thinking” or “higher-order learning.” The phrase “higher order” comes up only once, on page 10.

What’s more, the authors make clear that the more complex forms of thinking depend on the simpler kinds (such as factual knowledge). On page 16, they write:

One may take the Gestalt point of view that the complex behavior is more than the sum of the simpler behaviors, or one may view the complex behavior as being completely analyzable into simpler components. But either way, so long as the simpler behaviors may be viewed as components of the more complex behaviors, we can view the educational process as one of building on the simpler behavior.

Building on it? You mean we can’t just skip over it? Bloom and colleagues would say no. They devote considerable space to the discussion of knowledge–its justification and its different forms and levels. The justifications for teaching knowledge, according to the others, include the following (from pp. 32-34):

1. “Perhaps the most common justification,” they write, “is that with increase in knowledge or information there is a development of one’s own acquaintance with reality.” In other words, to know about the world, one has to learn something about it.

2. It is essential for all other purposes in education. “Problem solving or thinking cannot be carried on in a vacuum,” they write, “but must be based upon knowledge of some of the ‘realities.’”

3. Knowledge has status in our culture; it is often associated with maturity and intelligence.

4. Knowledge can often be taught and assessed simply.

They discuss each of these justifications at length. From there, they bring up questions of stable and changing knowledge; interrelated versus isolated facts; students’ immediate and future needs; and more. They describe three levels of knowledge (which they break down into subcategories): knowledge of specifics; knowledge of ways and means of dealing with specifics; and knowledge of the universals and abstractions in a field. Much of this knowledge involves and includes quite a bit of complex thought.

Nowhere do they imply that knowledge gets in the way of complex thinking or that the latter can do without the former. Of course, each new situation demands unforeseen combinations of knowledge and method; it is impossible to prepare a student perfectly for the future. “It is possible, however,” they write, “to help him acquire that knowledge which has been found most useful in the past, and to help him develop those intellectual abilities and skills which will enable him to adapt that knowledge to new situations.”

Bloom and his colleagues are not gods; the fact that the Taxonomy says this does not make it truth. But what’s clear here is that the Taxonomy does NOT encourage teachers to stop emphasizing knowledge. Those who claim that the knowledge emphasis belongs to the “industrial age” are welcome to say what they wish, but the Taxonomy, if given the floor, would likely disagree.

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Oviparous!

April 24, 2011 By

At our last tutoring session, my formerly slow reading first grader zipped through a book about ocean creatures. The child of college-educated parents, he’d visited an aquarium and gone fishing. In short, this is a kid with a lot of background knowledge.  When we read about “crustaceans,” he told me his father had caught a crab in a tide pool.

I thought of a sixth grader I tutored years ago at a high-poverty, all-minority school. We read a story involving a rowboat. He said he didn’t know what that was. I drew a picture. I acted out rowing. I asked if he’d seen boats on the bay. “No,” he said. We could have walked from the school to the bay in two minutes and seen sailboats, if not rowboats.

Now I’m tutoring at a middle-class school. It’s a different story. Still, I thought the first grader would need help with “mammal” when we got to whales and dolphins. He read the word easily.  “I know about mammals,” he said. “We learned it yesterday in science.” He explained how whales filter out food from sea water. Then he asked me a poser: “What do you call an animal that produces eggs?”

“A bird?” I said.  “The Easter Bunny?” I thought.

“Oviparous!” he said joyfully.

When I was in school, we didn’t learn about mammals till fifth grade. We never got to “oviparous.”

I guess “oviparous” is the sort of knowledge a person can look up on the Internet if he needs to know — and knows it’s out there. But it’s fun to know things.

I explained that ova is Latin for egg and some of our language comes from Latin. Now he knows.

My brother’s family is visiting. My almost three-year-old niece was thrilled to see rabbits nibbling our grass. She ran out on the lawn. “Where’s the eggs?” she asked.

“Oviparous bunnies,” I thought.

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Empty at the core

March 25, 2011 By

The new Common Core Standards will not guarantee “college and career readiness, predicts Will Fitzhugh of the Concord Review. A curriculum is needed to specify what students will read, write and know.

The education nomenclatura has been “reluctant to ask students to demonstrate any knowledge on tests, for fear they would not have any knowledge to demonstrate,” he writes.

So essay tests, for example, do not ask students to write about literature, history or science, but rather to give opinions off the top of their heads about school uniforms or whether it is more important to be a good student or to be popular, and the like.

. . . even though almost all of the state bureaucracies have signed on to the new Standards, the chance is good that they will collapse of their own weight because they contain no clear requirements for the actual academic work of students.

Fitzhugh is a fan of Albert Shanker, the great American Federation of Teachers leader. The Shanker Institute is among those leading the call for a “rich” curriculum to support the new standards.

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