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‘Teetering on the ninth-grade cliff’

September 9, 2011 By

Washington D.C.’s middle schools are the real “dropout factories,” said HyeSook Chung of D.C. Action for Children, a non-profit advocacy group at a city council hearing. More than half of D.C. students who quit school leave in ninth grade. “If we want to improve graduation rates, we need to catch students before they are teetering on the ninth-grade cliff,” said Chung.

Chung, citing research by Johns Hopkins University, said a series of predictive markers, visible as early as sixth grade, can identify dropout candidates: a final grade of “F” in math or English, attendance below 80 percent for the year or a final “unsatisfactory” behavior mark in at least one class.

Sixth graders with one of the four markers had at least a 75 percent chance of dropping out,” Chung said. More than one drove the likelihood even higher.

She proposed an “early warning system” for students at high risk of dropping out.  I’d guess kindergarten teachers could predict who’s likely to succeed or fail.  Once warned, what next?

The District’s graduation rate is 43 percent.

 

 

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What is this teacher stress study about?

May 27, 2011 By

I was a bit puzzled when I read the GothamSchools “remainder”: “Researchers in Houston are asking whether students can give teachers post-traumatic stress.” Post-traumatic stress? Is the study investigating whether teachers have bouts of depression, nightmares, etc. after they have stopped teaching?

I followed the link to the Edweek blog by Sarah Sparks, which bears the headline, “Can a Class of 7th Graders Give Teachers Post-traumatic Stress?” But the article itself made it seem as though this were a study of teacher stress, not post-traumatic stress. (Sometimes the headlines are written by someone other than the blog’s author.)

In diligent Internet-research style, I followed the Edweek link to the description of the study itself. There was no mention of post-traumatic stress at all, only stress.

So, what is this study about?

The study, to be conducted by researchers at the University of Houston, consists, at least in part, of a “prospective multi-method, multi-time scale investigation of the proposed mediational chain (i.e., stressors lead to teacher stress response which lead to teacher work and health stress outcomes which lead to teacher effectiveness which lead to student behavioral and academic outcomes).” It will follow 160 seventh- and eighth-grade math, science, or social studies teachers over three years.

The information gathered and analyzed during this project may be used “to guide future development of interventions to mitigate teacher stress and consequently improve teacher effectiveness and student behavior and learning.”

It’s pretty well known that teaching middle school is highly challenging, if not stressful from a medical perspective. (Granted, this depends a great deal on the school.) Moreover, it’s well known that certain kinds or levels of stress can affect the health. (A degree of stress can be a good thing.) So, what will the study uncover that is not well known or obvious? It seems that the researchers are most interested in the possible link between teacher stress and student outcomes (behavior and performance).

Because, you see, if teacher stress were bringing student performance down, then of course something would have to be done about that, and funds might appear. If teacher stress were not showing adverse effects on student performance, then it would be harder to convince funders and policymakers that any sort of intervention was needed.

My suspicion is that the findings will be mixed. Sometimes the teachers with the brightest outer face are the ones with the most stress. They may be delivering wonderful lessons and bringing their students to great heights–but they put intense pressure on themselves not to show their fatigue and bad moods in the classroom. Until they up and quit, they may seem to be doing fine.

Other teachers may let off a lot of steam in the classroom. They may seem to be under more stress than the others, but a medical test might show otherwise.

What if the study could not demonstrate a link between teacher stress and student outcomes? Or what if it correlated positively with student achievement? Or what if it were impossible to separate correlation from causation?

Stress (beyond a certain point) is a serious enough problem that it should be tackled for its own sake. A link between teacher stress and student outcomes may exist, but my guess is that it will be weak. We shall see.

I do hope that the study will consider curriculum, because it is much more stressful to teach without a curriculum (or with a bad one) than to teach with a good one. Some middle schools are curricular wastelands. I hope that it will also look at the schools’ discipline practices (not just policies). In other words, I hope it will look into the reasons for teacher stress in middle schools. Not all of this is inevitable, and not all of it is due to the kids’ ages.

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K-8 beats middle school in study

September 2, 2010 By

Students in K-8 schools do better than students who move from elementary to a stand-alone middle school, according to a Columbia University study published in Education Next. The study followed New York City students from third through eighth grade.

In the year students moved to middle school — sixth or seventh grade — math and English scores fell substantially compared to K-8 counterparts. Their achievement continued to decline through eighth grade.

The gap isn’t explained by spending or by class size, researchers Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood write. Cohort size — the number of students in the same grade — was a factor. The K-8 schools averaged 75 students in the same grade; the middle schools averaged more than 200.

Developmental psychologists have shown that adolescent children commonly exhibit traits such as negativity, low self-esteem, and an inability to judge the risks and consequences of their actions, which may make them especially difficult to educate in large groups. The combining of multiple elementary schools and their students also disrupts a student’s immediate peer group. And middle schools often serve a more diverse student population than many students encountered in elementary school.

Rockoff and Lockwood aren’t sure why the transition to a larger middle school is so difficult. But they believe New York City children aren’t much different from students elsewhere.

After interviewing the study’s lead author, Columbia Business School professor Jonah Rockoff,  Martin West observes that Americans rate their local middle schools far lower than elementaries in the EdNext-PEPG Survey. “Rockoff and Lockwood’s research suggests that parents are onto something – and that the emerging trend toward shuttering middle schools and replacing them with K-8s is an encouraging development.”

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Middle-school math and the graduation gap

August 10, 2010 By

On Community College Spotlight:  College math starts in middle school. To prevent the need for remedial classes five or six years from now,  Foothill College is working with middle-school math teachers to get students on track.

Also, the Education Trust looks at the graduation gap for black and Hispanic college students. At some colleges and universities, the difference is huge; at others, the gap is gone.

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Schools try to control cyberbullying

June 28, 2010 By

Schools — especially middle schools — are trying to figure out how to respond to cyberbullying, reports the New York Times. Educators are reluctant to assert authority over what students do on their own time. Some parents wants schools to intervene; others say it’s none of the school’s business.

. . . one 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization founded by two criminologists who defined bullying as “willful and repeated harm” inflicted through phones and computers, said one in five middle-school students had been affected.

The law is unsettled. So far, “rulings have been contradictory,” the Times reports.

The principal of Benjamin Franklin Middle School in New Jersey asked parents to ban social networking for their children. Meredith Wearley, the school’s seventh-grade guidance counselor, spends much of her time dealing with “cyberdrama.”

“In seventh grade, the girls are trying to figure out where they fit in,” Mrs. Wearley said. “They have found friends but they keep regrouping. And the technology makes it harder for them to understand what’s a real friendship.”

Because students prefer to use their phones for texting rather than talking, Mrs. Wearley added, they often miss cues about tone of voice. Misunderstandings proliferate: a crass joke can read as a withering attack; did that text have a buried subtext?

The girls come into her office, depressed, weeping, astonished, betrayed.

. . . They show Mrs. Wearley reams of texts, the nastiness accelerating precipitously.

“It’s easier to fight online, because you feel more brave and in control,” an eighth-grade girl tells the Times. “On Facebook, you can be as mean as you want.”

Online harassment can begin in fourth grade. By high school, cyberbullies are craftier but their victims tend to be more resilient.

A few families have successfully sued schools for failing to protect their children from bullies. But when the Beverly Vista School in Beverly Hills, Calif., disciplined Evan S. Cohen’s eighth-grade daughter for cyberbullying, he took on the school district.

After school one day in May 2008, Mr. Cohen’s daughter, known in court papers as J. C., videotaped friends at a cafe, egging them on as they laughed and made mean-spirited, sexual comments about another eighth-grade girl, C. C., calling her “ugly,” “spoiled,” a “brat” and a “slut.”

J. C. posted the video on YouTube. The next day, the school suspended her for two days.

Cohen, a music industry lawyer in Los Angeles, won a $107,150 in costs and legal fees  from the district after a federal judge ruled the video hadn’t caused the school “substantial” disruption.

Judge Wilson also threw in an aside that summarizes the conundrum that is adolescent development, acceptable civility and school authority.

The good intentions of the school notwithstanding, he wrote, it cannot discipline a student for speech, “simply because young persons are unpredictable or immature, or because, in general, teenagers are emotionally fragile and may often fight over hurtful comments.”

The lawyer father said he told his daughter the video “wasn’t a nice thing to do,” but kept it on  YouTube “as a public service” so viewers can see “what kids get suspended for in Beverly Hills.”

Filed Under: Children, Parenting, technology Tagged With: ,

Music students excel in algebra

June 17, 2010 By

Middle school students who study music do better in algebra, concludes a study by Barbara Helmrich of Baltimore’s College of Notre Dame. From Miller-McCune Online:

Students who studied a musical instrument did the best, followed by students who sang in a choir. Those who didn’t study music had the lowest algebra scores.  The effect was especially strong for black students.

Middle-school music instruction “takes place during a time (age 10-12) in which a proliferation of new synapses occurs in the developing brain,” Helmrich writes. She thinks music helps form and strengthen new synapses.

The particularly robust results for African-American students suggests “offering music education in middle school might present an alternative strategy for narrowing the achievement gap” between students of different races, Helmrich writes in the Journal of Adolescent Research.

Of course, there could be correlation-causation issues lurking.

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Unprepared to teach math

April 17, 2010 By

America’s future math teachers aren’t as prepared as future teachers in other countries, concludes the Teacher Education Study conducted by William Schmidt, a Michigan State education professor.

In the study, a representative sample of 3,300 future math teachers nearing the end of their teacher training at 81 colleges and universities in the United States were given a 90-minute test covering their knowledge of math concepts as well as their understanding of how to teach the subject.

On the elementary test, future teachers from Singapore, Switzerland and Taiwan scored much higher than those in the U.S.,  Germany, Norway, the Russian Federation and Thailand; Botswana, Chile, Georgia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Spain scored well below.

On the middle school test, American students outscored students in Botswana, Chile, Georgia, Malaysia, Norway, Oman, the Philippines and Thailand, the study found.

The study found considerable variation in the math knowledge attained at different American colleges, with students at some scoring, on average, at the level of students in Botswana, the study said.

Hank Kepner, professor of mathematics education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who is president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, was happy for mediocrity. “We show up pretty well here, right in the middle of the pack.”

Schmidt wasn’t so optimistic:

“A weak K-12 mathematics curriculum in the U.S., taught by teachers with an inadequate mathematics background, produces high school graduates who are at a disadvantage. When some of these students become future teachers and are not given a strong background in mathematics during teacher preparation, the cycle continues.”

In releasing the Breaking the Cycle report, Schmidt said that more rigorous common core standards “will require U.S. math teachers to be even more knowledgeable.”

His study found that while nearly all future middle-school teachers in the top-achieving countries took courses in linear algebra and basic calculus, only about half of U.S. future teachers took the fundamental courses.

Schmidt called for recruiting teachers with stronger math backgrounds, raising state certification requirements and requiring more advanced math courses in teacher preparation programs.

“Intensive, state-of-the art”  training for middle-school math teachers didn’t raise student achievement, concludes the “Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study,” by the U.S. Department of Education. In 2008, a two-year study of training for reading teachers also found no gains notes Ed Week’s Debra Viadero.

The results are already providing some intellectual ammunition for finding better ways to select and retain effective teachers—and shedding those who are ineffective—as the best way to improve instructional quality in schools.

In both cases, the training “spanned months and included summer institutes, follow-up seminars, and, in some cases, in-classroom coaching.” Participants received 55 more hours of training than teachers in the control group.

By the end of the school year, participants didn’t do significantly better on a test of math knowledge than the control group. Their teaching changed: They “were more likely to try to draw out students’ thinking by asking students whether they agreed with a classmate’s response, or inviting them to share their mathematical strategies.” But that did not lead to gains in student learning.

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Crazy, but it works

October 4, 2009 By

Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal’s Triumph in the Inner City is Ben Chavis’ book about how he turned a failing charter school into one of the highest scoring middle schools in the state, even though 81 percent of students come from low-income families.  Mark Hemingway writes on National Review Online:

It’s true that Chavis is a controversial figure — the book provides ample evidence of that. He’s profane, boasts of humiliating his students when they “act a fool,” and isn’t afraid to tell a teacher or a parent who he feels is out of line where to stick it. He’s beyond politically incorrect and talks about race with a frankness that would make Chris Rock blush.

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post points to Chavis’ decision to keep American Indian Public Charter School students with the same teacher for all subjects and for all three years of middle school.

Chavis says his kids, given all the turmoil in their lives, need the stable presence of one caring teacher. Whatever his method loses in content knowledge, because his teachers cannot be experts in all four subjects, is more than made up by the fact that the teacher knows those children very well. He or she can reach them in ways that teachers who have them just one period a day, for only one year, cannot, Chavis says.

Of course, it’s possible to set up such a system because the AIPCS principal can fire ineffective teachers quickly, easily and cheaply.

Thanks to commenter PM for the reminder to plug my book, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds.

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Ordinary failures

July 14, 2009 By

Compton middle school students went on a field trip to Bear Stearns to learn about careers in finance. But they didn’t know enough to understand what they saw at the investment firm, a foundation official told Sandy Banks, an LA Times columnist.

“We’re trying to teach them about portfolios and they can’t even spell the word, never heard of it!” Veronica Coffield told me in a voice shot through with urgency. “They’re still learning ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ in eighth grade, and they’re supposed to make it through high school?”

Singer Chaka Khan’s foundation sponsors a “Going to College” program for students at low-income, all-minority Drew Middle School. Originally, it was all about field trips:  “The preteens learned about the justice system in the television courtroom of Judge Judy, about health and fitness in Tae-Bo classes with Billy Blanks, about culinary careers at restaurants in Malibu and Beverly Hills.”  But Coffield realized students lacked basic reading, writing and math skills.

“We’ve got eighth-graders with an A in algebra who can’t tell me what six-times-five is equal to!” Coffield said. “Seventh-graders who don’t know the difference between a noun and a verb!”

. . . (Students) described math classes crammed with unruly students, some of whom could barely add and subtract; an English class with no permanent teacher but a succession of unprepared subs; teachers who ridiculed wrong answers in class and swore at students in the halls.

But it wasn’t as simple as poor schools or bad teachers. Students cut class and ignored assignments. At the project’s orientation meeting, one mother strode in cursing loudly, high on drugs.

The foundation recruited volunteer tutors from USC. But five of the 36 eighth graders in the program failed too many classes to graduate. They didn’t attend the graduation ceremony, but they’ll all go on to high school in the fall.

“They can’t stay here because there’s nowhere to house them,” a Drew teacher explained.

Not “educate,” Banks points out.  “House” as in warehouse.

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Keeping the smart kids down

February 18, 2009 By

Florida middle-school students are taking high school-level courses in search of an academic challenge, reports the Orlando Sentinel.  But the practice may be stopped because white students are more likely than Hispanics or blacks to choose advanced classes.

*At Lee Middle School in Orlando, 93 percent of the kids who take high-school geometry and 77 percent who take Earth-Space science are white. Meanwhile, 29 percent of all Lee students are white.

*At Maitland Middle, about 10 percent of the kids taking high-school-level Algebra I Honors and Earth-Space science are minorities. But almost 40 percent of the school’s total enrollment are minorities.

Denying motivated students a shot at higher-level courses wouldn’t help average and low achievers. But it would disguise the large disparities in achievement.

The Sentinel, which seems to have started this controversy, says scholars think middle school should be “nurturing,” not academic. (But let’ s not nurture the aspirations of the smart kids.)

Tracking students by ability (or performance) is out of favor — and possibly illegal, writes the Sentinel.

In some districts — including those in Georgia, Texas and Massachusetts — (tracking) led to action by federal civil-rights agencies. In New Bedford, Mass., the government forced officials to limit tracking in several junior highs.

 I think letting  students try advanced classes is quite different. from assigning them to no-hope remedial classes.

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