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Immigrant blacks outperform natives

December 20, 2011 By

Africans outperform African-Americans in Seattle schools: Even the children of destitute Somali refugees do better.

The district compared blacks who speak English at home with those who speak other languages at home but aren’t considered English Language Learners.

Amharic-speaking students from Ethiopia scored the highest, nearly reaching the district average in reading. Somalis did worse than other African immigrants, but much better than English-only blacks.

• Only 36 percent of black students who speak English at home passed their grade’s math test, while 47 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. Other black ethnic groups did even better, although still lower than the district average of 70 percent.

• In reading, 56 percent of black students who speak English passed, while 67 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. Again, other black ethnic groups did better, though still lower than the district average of 78 percent.

Black immigrants attend college at a much higher rate than U.S.-born blacks or whites, concluded a John Hopkins study in 2009. The immigrants were educated, successful people in their home countries, researchers said.

However, that’s not true of the very poor Somalis who found refuge in Seattle.

Seattle School Board member Betty Patu, who has worked for decades with community groups serving students of color, said she has noticed that all immigrant families, regardless of socioeconomic status, place high value on education.

“Their motivation is different,” she said. “When you leave your country, you come here to do something. You don’t come here just to sit around and do nothing.”

In short, it’s the culture, stupid.

However, Marty McLaren, a board member and former teacher, blames “a culture of low expectations . . .  dating back to the days of slavery” for American blacks’ poor performance. Faced with institutionalized racism, students give up, she said.

 

 

Filed Under: Culture, Education, Family Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Accountability shock is wearing off

December 17, 2011 By

Math scores rose dramatically in the “consequential accountability” era, but the accountability shock is wearing off, writes Mark Schneider, a former National Center for Education Statistics commissioner  now at American Institutes for Research. Texas, an early accountability adopter, saw an early rise in math scores and now a plateau, he writes. Progress is leveling off nationwide as well.

A graph of NAEP fourth-grade math scores show a “remarkable” growth in performance in Texas and the U.S.

Using the very rough rule of thumb that a 10-point change in NAEP scores equals about one year of learning, in 2011 our fourth graders are about two years ahead of where they were in 1992.

Texas improved first. The national average caught up when No Child Left Behind forced accountability on all states, Schneider writes.

Compared to the nation as a whole, Texas has more disadvantaged students. The state’s Hispanic, black and low-income students outperform the national average for similar students.

Reading scores did not improve in Texas or elsewhere in the accountability era, perhaps because reading “is far more dependent on what happens early in children’s lives,” Schneider writes.

What could provide the next shock? Schneider suggests the Common Core and the better measurement of teacher performance as possibilities.


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

Milwaukee, Fresno fail reading for low-income kids

December 12, 2011 By

If you plan to be reincarnated as a low-income student and you’d like to be literate, pick Tampa, New York City or Miami, writes Matthew Ladner, who’s been looking at the urban NAEP results. Avoid Milwaukee and Fresno, where very few low-income students reach proficiency in reading.

 

Washington, D.C. “has improved but is still horrible,” he adds, writing on Jay Greene’s blog. ”Everyone in Wisconsin ought to be horrified by the abomination that is the Milwaukee Public Schools.”

 

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

Study: Kids do well with pre-k and half-k

December 10, 2011 By

Children who attend pre-k and half-day kindergarten are better readers in third grade than children with no preschool but full-day kindergarten, concludes Starting Out Right by Jim Hull of the Center for Public Education. Third-grade reading is a strong predictor of school success.

The benefit was the greatest for the neediest students, children from low-income, Hispanic, black and immigrant families. English Language Learners showed especially strong gains. However, children of less-educated mothers did not  benefit as much as others.

The study didn’t try to evaluate the quality of children’s pre-K program, notes NCTQ, which speculates children of less-educated mothers were more likely to attend pre-K programs with ineffective teachers.

 The feds should require pre-k programs such as Head Start to evaluate teacher quality, NCTQ advocates, citing Watching Teachers Work, a study on observing pre-k and early elementary teachers in the classroom.

 Disadvantaged children rarely participate in ”stimulating, content-rich conversations that provide them with the cognitive and social-emotional skills they need to succeed throughout their years in school,” Watching Teachers Work finds.  “Observation tools allow for measurements that are far less subjective than many of the checklists and rubrics currently used today,” the report says.

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

Failing the test

December 9, 2011 By

After earning a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees in education, a school board member took Florida’s 10th-grade exam, earning a D in reading and an F in math. The test doesn’t measure essential skills, he told his friend, Marion Brady, who wrote about it in Answer Sheet. The school board member wrote in an e-mail:

“The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

His friends told him the math on the exam isn’t necessary in their professions. “A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life,” he writes.

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning.

He wonders who wrote the questions using what criteria and who set the cut score. Actually, he should be able to research this question by calling the state education department or going online.

Brady agrees with his friend that the exam writers are unaccountable idiots.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.

After Brady’s column ran, Rick Roach, a retired teacher, counselor and coach and a school board member in Orange County, Florida, courageously identified himself. While I admire his candor, I have to wonder about his reading and math skills.

Questions from past exams are available here.

Here’s a “low” question from the 2006 10th-grade math exam, which was answered correctly by 89 percent of students:

In 1995, there was a total of 7.2 million acres of pine forests in Florida. All of the forests were either natural or planted by people. Given that 4.4 million acres of these pine forests were planted by people, how many millions of acres of these pine forests were natural?

A “moderate” question, answered correctly by 72 percent of students,  provides the equation:

An artist sells earrings from a booth at a fair. Rent for the booth is $250. The artist makes $6 from each pair of earrings sold. The profit in dollars, P, can be found using the following equation, where n is the number of pairs of earrings sold.

P = 6n – 250

How many pairs of earrings must the artist sell to earn a profit of $500?

Roach says he couldn’t answer a single math question.

This reading question from 2005 is considered “moderate” in difficulty:

High peaks are especially prone to glacial erosion, because they tend to catch clouds that might otherwise drop snow onto lower mountains nearby.

What does prone to mean?
11% A. altered by
61% B. inclined to
11% C. resistant to
17% D. weakened by

Sixty-one percent of students got it right.

Brady says Roach is a success in life:

His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities.

If Roach could achieve all that — frequent flyer miles too — then D reading skills and F math skills must be OK for Florida 10th graders. But they’ll all have to go into professions that don’t require reading and math — like education.

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

Math gains show curriculum matters

December 7, 2011 By

If bad teachers are the problem, why are kids gaining in math? asks cognitive scientist Dan Willingham. His answer:  Higher standards backed by stronger curricula.

While reading scores have been flat for 20 years, math scores are up significantly. That’s true for fourth graders, who have the same teachers for reading and math.

States that aligned standards, assessments and accountability show the largest math gains, he writes.

Still, high standards are likely necessary but not sufficient to move student achievement. Standards set the goals, but they don’t tell you how to get there. For that, you need a curriculum. It may be that developing a curriculum to meet standards is easier in mathematics than in English; there is little controversy as to the subject matter to be covered, and the order in which one ought to tackle subjects is more obvious.

While we need “a more sensible method to usher hapless teachers out of the profession” and better teacher training, we also need to focus on curriculum design, Willingham writes.

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

‘Exemplary’ school taught only reading, math

November 23, 2011 By

A Dallas elementary school with “exemplary” math and reading scores taught no science or social studies to third graders, district officials charge. It was all reading and math all the time.  The music teacher taught math instead. Teachers were told to fabricate grades for students in courses they weren’t taught, reports the Dallas Morning News.

Field Elementary principal Roslyn Carter is on paid administrative leave for falsifying grades.

While the investigation has focused on third grade, other grades also may have been affected.

“I do not know of science being taught in 3rd or 4th grade,” school counselor Laura McMillin said in an e-mail to an investigator. “And I am unaware of social studies being taught at all.”

Third- and fifth-grade students who were failing certain classes were assigned to tutoring instead of enrichment classes such as music, art and P.E., the principal admitted. Ninety percent of third graders missed “specials” to prep for the state exam, a math coach said.

Once students had taken the state exam, teachers were allowed teach science, social studies and enrichment classes for the remaining three weeks of the school year.

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

Schools need better parents

November 21, 2011 By

Schools need good teachers — and better parents, writes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement,” he writes.

Surprise!

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has data to back up common sense.  Students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school earned much higher test scores at age 15.

(Andres) Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”

Reading, telling stories and talking with children raise scores more than just playing, the study found.

Not all parental involvement affects academic performance to the same degree, agrees a study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education.

“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” (Patte) Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”

OK, we already knew this. What we don’t know — and should be trying to figure out — is how to help poorly educated parents support their children’s learning at home and in school.

 

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

Santa grants child’s wishes

November 20, 2011 By

Santa grants student’s wishes, via Expat Tutor.

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: ,

Chicago fails to close achievement gaps

November 15, 2011 By

After 16 years of school reform, Chicago’s “racial gaps in achievement have steadily increased,” according to a study by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.  White and Asian students are making more progress than Latinos; blacks are “falling behind all other groups.”

Some initiatives, such as closing underperforming schools, may have hurt students, Jean-Claude Brizard, the new superintendent, told the Chicago Tribune.

If school closings destabilized certain neighborhoods, other efforts were ineffective — millions of dollars pumped into countless after-school initiatives and tutoring and mentoring programs geared toward African-American students, only to see math and reading scores languish and many students fall further behind.

The percentage of black students meeting benchmarks on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test has grown at a faster rate than whites’ progress. But the consortium looked at average scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.  “NAEP scores don’t just look at a percentage of students that pass a certain cut of points. It talks about the average scores, so it’s a much better way to look at trends over time,” (researcher Marisa) de la Torre said.

Over the last 20 years, graduation rates in Chicago have improved dramatically, the study found. Math scores improved slightly in elementary and middle schools while reading scores “have remained fairly flat for two decades.”

NCLB stands for No Chance for Latinos and Blacks, writes Coach G, who began teacher inner-city Chicago students in 1993. Even in the pre-reform era, two years before Mayor Richard Daley took control of the city’s schools, there was pressure to raise reading and math scores, Coach G recalls.

No Child Left Behind increased pressure to replace “rich curriculum with test prep,” he writes. Schools cut back on teaching writing: In many schools, the three Rs were reduced to two.  Other responses:

  • providing tutoring and other individualized services for on-the-bubble students who were just short of a proficient score the previous year, while neglecting the most deficient and most advanced students
  • preventing students from taking advanced classes if the content wouldn’t be on the test
  • enabling students’ self-defeating behavior
  • holding teachers accountable for results without providing them the support they need to achieve those results

Years ago, a testing guru told me the most effective way to raise students test scores is to teach writing. It even works for math scores, he said. Filling in bubbles? A waste of time after the first five minutes, he said.

 

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