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Why not honors courses for all?

June 2, 2011 By

Why not honors courses for all? asks WashPost columnist Jay Mathews.

High-scoring Fairfax County schools, which offer regular, honors and AP or International Baccalaureate classes in 11th and 12th grade plan to eliminate honors classes if AP or IB is available. Parents are protesting. They want an honors option — faster moving, more in depth but not college level — for their children.

Mathews suggests eliminating the regular track: Everyone would take honors or AP classes. He makes what’s now an old argument:

The qualities that make you ready for college—good reading comprehension, clear and persuasive writing, math through at least Algebra II, presentation and time management skills—are the same needed to get a good job or trade school slot upon high school graduation.

Detracking is a national trend, he notes.

When teachers “drag” average students into AP or IB classes, “the results are almost always good,” Mathews asserts.

What would happen if you added regular students to honors classes? Jack Esformes of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria mixed seven AP students with 21 regular students in each of the five government course sections he taught each year. Nothing was dumbed down for the AP students. The regular students received less homework, but once they discovered they were often as clever in class as the alleged smart kids, some of them switched to AP. Many of them told me they liked the challenge of being taught at such a high level.

Is Esformes an average teacher? Or a very good one in a school where the regular students aren’t way behind the AP students?

I went to an untracked elementary and middle school. Reading during class saved me from terminal boredom. Then we hit high school: Then there were three tracks in math, three in science, five in English. I loved it. Sophomore year, I dropped down to Level 2 geometry to avoid taking two Level 1 math classes at once, which was the only alternative. I got a lot of reading done in geometry class.

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Finland: Is it trust or teacher training?

April 25, 2011 By

Finland Phenomenon coverWhy do Finnish students ace international tests? The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System,   a 60-minute movie by Robert Compton (Two Million Minutes) and Harvard researcher Tony Wagner (The Global Achievement Gap), credits a “culture of trust” created by the absence of high-stakes testing, teacher-evaluation systems or homework.

Very smart, very well-trained teachers are the real secret, argues Gadfly’s Daniela Fairchild.

What is most interesting about the film, though, is its depiction of Finland’s rigorous, intense, and competitive teacher-training programs—a more probable explanation for the nation’s academic strength. These programs accept a mere 10 percent of applicants (akin to Ivy League acceptance rates in the U.S.)—and kick out teacher trainees who aren’t up to snuff. Candidates observe veteran teachers, co-design and execute lesson plans, and receive feedback from peers, mentors, and even students.

Finland tracks students in 10th grade: Half go to academic high schools and the rest go to vocational schools.

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From adult ed to a decent job

April 18, 2011 By

Eleven states will try to create career pathways that get adult ed students to a GED, a college job training program, a workforce credential and a decent job.

Also on Community College Spotlight:  How to link high school to careers — with academic rigor and without tracking.

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Beyond tracking

March 26, 2011 By

To eliminate bad tracking — dumping some kids in dead-end classes — reformers have eliminated honors classes and dumped “all agemates in the same class” regardless of their preparedness, writes Mike Petrilli on Education Gadfly. He hopes to get beyond tracking by customizing instruction.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist—or even a cognitive scientist—to know that kids (and adults) learn best when presented with material that is challenging—neither too easy so as to be boring nor too hard as to be overwhelming. Like Goldilocks, we want it just right. Grouping kids so that instruction can be more closely targeted to their current ability levels helps make teaching and learning more efficient.

Online-learning technologies and more targeted assessments should enable schools to “pinpoint exactly what students know and serve up instruction that meets them there,” Petrilli writes.

At School of One, a middle school math program in New York City, students are placed in specific learning modules based on their performance the previous day, and on a sophisticated algorithm. Some kids are sent to small-group instruction with similarly-abled peers; others head to one-on-one online tutoring; others work independently on a computer; others get more traditional classroom instruction. It’s all customized to match the students’ needs and abilities. (Read more about School of One and other models of individualized instruction in this excellent Education Next article.)

Teachers are struggling to “differentiate instruction” to meet the needs of students with a wide range of abilities and disabilities, performance levels and English fluency. Half the teachers in high-need schools say they’re not able to do it well, according to the MetLife survey. I think this is a major cause of teacher burn-out.

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Low expectations for other peoples’ kids

February 9, 2011 By

Stop Limiting Poor and Minority Kids with Low Expectations, writes RiShawn Biddle on Dropout Nation. The Harvard Ed report advocating multiple pathways — career tech as well as college prep — dooms low-income and minority students to dumbed-down curricula, instruction and expectations, Biddle believes.

He criticizes my call for  “realistic pathways” for struggling students.

What she fails to consider is that the reason why they are struggling in the first place: Low-quality instruction and abysmal curricula throughout their times in school, especially in the early grades.

The reading, math and science skills needed to earn a bachelor’s degree are the same skills needed to succeed at a community college or technical school, Biddle argues. Everybody needs a high-quality education whether they’re heading for Harvard or trade school. They’ll only get that on the college-prep track.

Expectations matter. If teachers and administrators think that poor and minority kids aren’t capable of college prep education, then they won’t actually put any work into even the most basic instruction and curricula. They won’t develop intense reading remediation for kids in the early grades.

. . . “Realistic pathways” in schools means ability tracking and denying poor kids entree into the college prep courses that teachers and guidance counselors often reserve for kids they think can learn. It means magnet schools that don’t actually reflect any sort of diversity. It means the lack of school choice in any form.

Biddle has a valid point. (And I appreciate the thoughtful way he makes it.) If expectations are low in elementary and middle school — if nobody intervenes to help the kid who’s not learning to read or multiply — then students will start high school so far behind that it will be very difficult for them to succeed in college-prep courses. It will be hard for them to succeed in vocational courses.

I see the risk of creating a separate, less demanding track for other people’s kids. But the “forgotten half” of students aren’t getting high-quality college-prep. They take classes with college-prep titles and dumbed-down content, because the teachers aren’t allowed to fail most of their students.  They go to community college and four-year colleges and fall into the black hole of remedial education, never to emerge with any credential.

Nearly all high school seniors plan to go to college; 89 percent think they’ll earn a four-year degree.  Expectations are high. Achievement is low. In a Florida study, 20 percent of high school seniors with C averages or below went on to earn a college credential of any kind, including a short-term certificate.

We need to do a much better job educating children in K-8 so they’ll have real choices in high school. But I think more students would succeed if they had the option of a high-quality career track or a high-quality college-prep track. Making sure those options offer strong academics will be a challenge. But it’s one we should tackle.

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Harvard: ‘College for all’ fails students

February 2, 2011 By

There’s one path to success — go to college to earn a bachelor’s degree — most high school students are told.  Only about 30 percent will earn a degree. “College for all” isn’t working for most students argues a new report by Harvard’s Pathways to Prosperity project.  Young people need alternative paths to adulthood, including better counseling, high-quality career education, apprenticeships and job training based at community colleges. Those who lack the academic skill or motivation to earn a bachelor’s degree should know about “middle-skill jobs” that pay middle-class wages.

. . . while the United States is expected to create 47 million jobs in the 10-year period ending in 2018, only a third of these jobs will require a bachelor’s or higher degree. Almost as many jobs – some 30 percent – will only require an associate’s degree or a post-secondary occupational credential.

The report asks employers to create more work-based learning opportunities for young adults.

“We are the only developed nation that depends so exclusively on its higher education system as the sole institutional vehicle to help young people transition from secondary school to careers, and from adolescence to adulthood,” says Robert Schwartz, academic dean and professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity Project.

In response to the “college for all” movement, districts and states are requiring a college-prep curriculum based on four-year universities’ admissions requirements   for all high school students. “Unless we are willing to provide more flexibility and choice in the last two years of high school, and more opportunities for students to pursue program options that link work and learning, we will continue to lose far too many young people along the path to graduation,” Schwartz says.

Career and technical education has been “the neglected stepchild of education reform,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan at the report’s Washington launch. “That neglect has to stop,” Duncan said.

Some fear disadvantaged students will be tracked into “watered-down programs that curtail their prospects,” notes Education Week. But Schwartz is “a prominent champion of higher academic expectations for all students” and co-author, Ronald Ferguson, director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, “is a national expert on improving learning opportunities for disadvantaged children.”

Rather than derailing some students from higher learning, their system would actually open more of those pathways, (the authors) say, by offering sound college preparation and rigorous career-focused, real-world learning, and by defining clear routes from secondary school into certificate or college programs.

“College for all” advocates say it’s too early to give up. The college-readiness agenda is very new, said Michael Cohen, who succeeded Schwartz as the president of Achieve, which works with states to raise academic expectations. “To say we’ve tried this and it failed seems a bit premature, like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” he said. Besides, Cohen said, “college for all” really means “some form of training after high school.”

“Every single time we create multiple tracks, we always send disproportionate numbers of poor kids and kids of color down the lesser one,” said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust.  College expectations are not the norm for black and Hispanic high school students, who are half as likely as white classmates to enroll in a “full college-ready curriculum.”

If we were teaching all of our kids to the levels reached by 10th-graders in Finland, students and their parents might have a base of knowledge and skills strong enough to make informed choices of the sort imagined in this report – real choices, rather than those forced on students who weren’t prepared for much of anything.

. . .  in the German system the authors hold up as an example of success, the three high school tracks have been deeply segregated by income and ethnicity, with mainly affluent Germans attending the college-prep schools while low-income and immigrant students are assigned to the two lower options.

Education Trust is working with ConnectEd California and several school districts on linking career-oriented learning with college-prep classes.

The report praises ConnectEd California’s Linked Learning initiative and Massachusetts’ network of regional vocational-technical schools.

At Construction Technology Academy at Kearny High School in San Diego, students  study architecture, engineering, and construction as well as the typical core curriculum. Some go on to construction apprenticeships, while others study at  community colleges or universities, said Gary Hoachlander of ConnectEd.

Update:  Everybody needs college-prep skills — including future welders, tool and die makers and elevator installers — argues Rishawn Biddle on Dropout Nation.

The 52-page report along wrongfully perpetuates a century-old philosophy — that poor and minority kids aren’t capable of high-quality, college-level education — that is condemning far too many young men and women to poverty and prison.

What condemns young people to poverty is the failure to learn reading, writing and math (and science, history and civics), followed by the decision to drop out of high school.  I think many low achievers could be motivated to learn academic skills in order to train for a job. If the only motivation is the chance to spend more years in a classroom — almost certainly a remedial classroom — with a better job as a vague hope for the distant future . . .  Maybe a few kids will catch college fever and go all the way to a bachelor’s degree. But not very many.

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Learning from Finland

February 2, 2011 By

Finland’s schools rank very high in international comparisons.  The secret is highly trained, well-paid teachers and few standardized tests, writes Samuel Abrams in The New Republic.

Today, teaching is such a desirable profession that only one in ten applicants to the country’s eight master’s programs in education is accepted. . . . High school teachers with 15 years of experience make 102 percent of what their fellow university graduates do. In the United States, by contrast, they earn just 65 percent.

In first through ninth grade, Finnish students take art, music, cooking, carpentry, metalwork, and textiles.

Instead of standardized testing for all students, the Finns give exams to a small sample of students.

Teachers in Finland design their own courses, using a national curriculum as a guide, not a blueprint, and spend about 80 percent as much time leading classes as their U.S. counterparts do, so that they have sufficient opportunity to plan lessons and collaborate with colleagues. The only point at which all Finnish students take standardized exams is as high school seniors if they wish to go to university.

Ability tracking doesn’t start till 10th grade.

Finland’s schools don’t fit Abrams’ agenda that neatly, responds Quick and the Ed’s Kevin Carey.

For example, Finnish teachers don’t make more than U.S. teachers. Finnish doctors, lawyers and other college graduates make less money.

It’s true that only 10 percent of applicants are accepted by Finnish teacher education programs, he writes. But . . .

I have never, ever heard a serious proposal from the anti-testing / school of education crowd to raise admissions standards into teacher preparation to anything approaching the levels that would result in a 10 percent admission rate — or, heck, a 50 percent admission rate.

The only U.S. program that sets the bar that high is Teach for America, which Abrams “predictably critiques.”

Finland has a national curriculum and administers a high-stakes national test to seniors who wish to go to university, Carey writes. Here, each state sets its own standards, which aren’t enforced.

I’ll add that most U.S. schools do not track students by ability before 10th grade or after, though there’s de facto tracking in high school. For that matter, U.S. students do a lot of art and music in elementary and middle school, though they’re less likely to have access to shop classes, cooking or sewing.

There’s a lot we can learn from Finland’s very successful schools, Carey writes. “But anyone arguing that the evidence from Finland cleanly supports either side of the American education reform debate is being dishonest,” he concludes.

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Teacher-led school groups by performance

January 19, 2011 By

Detroit’s first teacher-led school is regrouping middle school students by English Language Arts and math performance, reports Education Week.

At Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, a K-8 school, teachers decided to place students in one of three classes for English and math, depending on “whether they need more-intensive instruction on basic concepts or are ready for more in-depth instruction.”

Crucially, teachers are expected to target the same standards, but their lessons explore them in different levels of breadth and depth depending on the performance level. The extended learning time—a change that’s being tried across the district—helped usher in the final piece of the plan: professional development to help monitor students’ progress.

Teachers have common planning at the end of every school day, in addition to their regular prep periods. At those meetings, they’re able to discuss the results from their lessons and go over data generated from quarterly “benchmark” assessments. Then, they can decide whether a student needs to be moved to one of the other classes—something that can occur on a weekly or, potentially, even daily basis as necessary.

Grouping students by performance raises the dread specter of tracking, which educators abandoned in the ’80s and ’90s, believing low-performing students would be stuck in a dead-end remedial track.

. . .  teachers in Detroit note that the placements aren’t static, and students aren’t stuck indefinitely at a particular level of instruction. A student who succeeds in algebraic concepts but struggles with geometric ones could be regrouped for those specific lessons, while others whose performance rises steadily could move ahead.

“It is more about needing to know your objectives; it’s almost like mastery of skills—have you mastered them, have you demonstrated them,” (Ann) Crowley said.

“It’s like an [individualized education plan] for each child.”

The school’s lead teachers say students are more engaged and focused when they’re taught at their own level.

I think this kind of flexible tracking has got to work better than asking teachers to differentiate instruction for students who are way behind, at grade level and  ahead in the same classroom.

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Honors for all

November 27, 2010 By

Honors and Advanced Placement students at Evanston Township High, a large, very diverse school near Northwestern University, tend to be white and Asian. In hopes of preparing more black and Hispanic students for high-level classes, the school may eliminate honors-only freshman humanities classes for the top 5 percent of students, reports the Chicago Tribune.  Instead, teachers are supposed to teach the honors curriculum to all students; those who do well will get honors credit. If it works well, honors biology also will be eliminated.

The new humanities class would include all students able to read at the ninth-grade level, which the high school defines as scoring at or above the 40th percentile nationally on an achievement test given to eighth-graders.

A small number of students below the 40th percentile will be in a different class, to get more help. This year, 50 students are in that support class — about 8 percent of students enrolled in all freshman humanities courses.

Some parents of high achievers say top students won’t be challenged in classes with a wide range of abilities. Other parents complain their children are excluded from honors classes based on tests taken in eighth grade.

Evanston High spends more than $20,000 per student, one of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the state, reports the Trib. “But while white students have consistently scored high enough on state tests to meet the standards, black and Latino students lag far behind, according to state data.”

Without No Child Left Behind, which forces schools to break out the performance of racial and ethnic subgroups, Evanston High would look like a high-performing school, notes Alexander Russo.

My daughter was in a mixed English class in ninth grade at Palo Alto High. She did some extra work and got honors credit; a majority of students did not do the honors work.  It worked, mostly because the range of skills wasn’t all that wide.  However, if black and Hispanic students lag far behind in K-8, I doubt they’ll be transformed by sitting in class with honors students. It will take more work in K-8 to prepare students for true honors work.

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Finally, Superman

November 22, 2010 By

I finally got around to seeing Waiting for Superman.  The scenes of parents and children waiting for the lottery results were tear jerkers, but the movie was very simplistic in its depiction of education problems and solutions.  It assumed that the children of involved parents would be doomed by going to neighborhood schools but saved by going to charters. Maybe so, but reciting the statistics for all students doesn’t make that case. I wanted to see a lot more on how successful schools teach: What’s replicable? What depends on finding brilliant principals or young teachers willing to work  insanely long hours?

The depiction of Woodside High in California, the alternative for the girl who gets into Summit Preparatory Charter School, implies that the school serves middle-class and upper-middle-class whites, some of whom are tracked into low-level classes that don’t prepare them to go college.  A majority of Woodside High students are Hispanic or black; 43 percent qualify for a subsidized lunch.  All non-disabled students are placed in college-prep classes, says the principal.  The movie’s statistics on the number of students who go to college include only California state universities, not private or out-of-state colleges or universities or community colleges.

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