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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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Can differentiation work?

November 21, 2010 By

With the demise of tracking, teachers are supposed to “differentiate instruction,” tailoring instruction to advanced, average and struggling students in the same class.  It’s not easy, writes Mike Petrilli in Ed Next.

The idea, according to Carol Tomlinson of the University of Virginia (UVA), is to “shake up what goes on in the classroom so that students have multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn.” Ideally, instruction is customized at the individual student level.

Holly Hertberg-Davis, also at UVA worked with Tomlinson on a large study of differentiated instruction which included teacher training and ongoing coaching. 

 Three years later the researchers wanted to know if the program had an impact on student learning. But they were stumped. “We couldn’t answer the question,” Hertberg-Davis told me, “because no one was actually differentiating.”

Petrilli visits Piney Branch Elementary in Takoma Park, Maryland, a  high-achieving school with a very diverse student body.  How does differentiation work?

First, every homeroom has a mixed group of students: the kids are assigned to make sure that every class represents the diversity of the school in terms of achievement level, race, class, etc. Then, during the 90-minute reading block, students spend much of their time in small groups appropriate for their reading level. (Redbirds and bluebirds are back!)  . . .

For math, on the other hand, students are split up into homogeneous classrooms. All the advanced math kids are in one classroom, the middle students in another, and the struggling kids in a third. This means shuffling the kids from one room to another (a process that can be quite time-consuming for elementary school kids). But it allows the highest-performing kids to sprint ahead; one of the school’s 3rd-grade math classes, for example, is tackling the district’s 5th-grade math curriculum. . . .

The rest of the time—when kids are learning science or social studies or taking “specials” like art and music—they are back in their heterogeneous classrooms. Even then, however, teachers work to “differentiate instruction,” which often means separating the kids back into homogeneous groups again, and offering more challenging, extended assignments to the higher-achieving students.

. . . All kids spend most of the day getting challenged at their level, and no one ever sits in a classroom that’s entirely segregated by race or class.

The school also offers the ”highly gifted” curriculum for very bright students in the same class with students who are working at grade level. Completely integrating the gifted class didn’t work. The performance spread was too wide.

What Piney Branch calls “differentiated instruction” looks a lot to me like fluid ability grouping for academic subjects.  Teachers, how does differentiation work in your school?  

Differentiated instruction is a fad with no basis in research, argued Mike Schmoker in Education Week.  

When it’s done properly, differentiation helps students learn, responds Tomlinson, in  a letter.

But, again, can it be done properly by the average teacher with a class that includes a wide range of abilities and disabilities?

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Three tracks to success in Santa Fe

July 18, 2010 By

Tracking is out of fashion these days, but Santa Fe high schools’ three tracks give students a choice, reports KRQE News 13. Some take the most rigorous academic classes to apply for highly selective colleges, others aim for a less-selective college or university and some plan to pursue a technical career, go to community college or enter the military.

The third track engages students who’d otherwise be at risk for dropping out.

Welding teacher Al Trujillo said offering hands-on training is an important tool in keeping Hispanic students in school.

“Here, they learn a skill and their education becomes more valuable to them,” he said. “Without something like this, they may end up having a low-paying, low-skilled job.”

Moises Venegas, founder of the Quinto Sol research group, worries about lower expectations for Hispanic students.

Students who are pursuing a career in the military or a tech college are told to take a “workplace readiness” course, but they are not encouraged to take any AP classes and they take fewer language and science classes.

New Mexico raised graduation requirements this year, requiring all high school students to take four years of math and enroll in at least one AP or honors course or college-credit class. State policy — all students will be ready for college or a career — means that career-oriented graduates “need the same abilities as a college freshman,” says Melissa Lomax, head of the state’s career technical and work force education bureau.

Melecio Sanchez, 17, who just finished his junior year at Santa Fe High, has already received one welding certificate that allows him to work with heavy metals. He has a job with a welding company in Bernalillo and said he may attend college after he works and saves some money. He has several uncles who are welders.

“I like it because you get to work with fire, and you learn how to build things,” he said. “You will also make good money doing this.”

New Mexico students lag in reading and math skills compared to the national average; graduation rates are low. I prefer Santa Fe’s honesty to the pretense that all students will take the same classes and graduate with college-level skills.

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'Algebra for all' flunks the test

February 10, 2010 By

Pushing algebra for all students has failed to prepare low-achieving students for college,  reports Education Week.

• An analysis using longitudinal statewide data on students in Arkansas and Texas found that, for the lowest-scoring 8th graders, even making it one course past Algebra 2 might not be enough to help them become “college and career ready” by the end of high school.

• An evaluation of the Chicago public schools’ efforts to boost algebra coursetaking found that, although more students completed the course by 9th grade as a result of the policy, failure rates increased, grades dropped slightly, test scores did not improve, and students were no more likely to attend college when they left the system.

Students with very poor math skills are “misplaced” in algebra classes, concluded Tom Loveless in a 2008 Brookings Institution paper.

“No one has figured out how to teach algebra to kids who are seven or eight years behind before they get to algebra, and teach it all in one year,” said Mr. Loveless, who favors interventions for struggling students at even earlier ages.

Algebra-for-all policies were a reaction to research showing that remedial math is a dead end, especially for low-income and minority students, while algebra is a “gateway” to advanced math classes and then to college.

But putting all students in the same math class seems to have held back the high achievers without doing much for the low achievers, says Elaine M. Allensworth of the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

“Meanwhile, the kids who weren’t taking advanced classes before are taking them now,” she said, “but they’re not very engaged in them. They have high absence rates and low levels of learning.”

Some districts now are double-dosing, requiring low-scoring students to take a math “readiness” class at the same time they take algebra. In many schools, algebra teachers “spend a very large portion of that year on basic arithmetic,” said William Schmidt, a Michigan State education professor.

It seems obvious that schools should teach arithmetic in elementary school to give students a shot at learning algebra in eighth or ninth grade. Why isn’t this happening? And if detracking holds back the good students, frustrates the poor students and exhausts the teacher, why keep doing it?

Update: Students who worked in a computer lab on a pre-algebra and algebra learning program outscored similar students taught in a classroom, reports What Works Clearinghouse.

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Inequality in Hamburg

December 20, 2009 By

By the age of 10, most German children are tracked into a college-prep or vocational program.  “A child from a privileged background is four times as likely to reach a Gymnasium, the main route to university, as one with similar grades from a working-class family,” reports The Economist. To reduce inequality, Hamburg is delaying tracking and eliminating school choice.

Propelled by the Greens, Hamburg’s government wants to extend primary school, where children of all abilities learn together, from four years to six. “Social distance is diminished when children learn longer together,” says Christa Goetsch, Hamburg’s (Green) education minister. The reform would end parents’ right to pick their high school, because pushy middle-class parents advance their children at the expense of others. Less controversially, Hamburg’s half-dozen types of high school are to be melded into two, Gymnasien and “neighbourhood schools,” both of which will offer the Abitur, the exam needed to enter university.

Middle-class parents “worry that children will be held back by schoolmates destined to be social and economic laggards and by teachers who cater to their weaknesses,” reports The Economist.

Via Education Gadfly.

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Bring back differential diplomas

December 17, 2009 By

All New York students must pass Regents exams in math, English, science and social studies to earn a diploma this year.  Writing in City Journal, teacher Marc Epstein predicts a diploma drought.

Once only college-bound students attempted to earn a rigorous Regents diploma, he writes. Other students earned a general diploma; in some towns, schools offered a commercial diploma or vocational diploma to help graduates qualify for jobs. But that system was dropped when critics charged it directed minority students into the workforce rather than on to college.

The state’s new “one size fits all” diploma standard means that special-education students must pass the same English and history Regents as students attending Stuyvesant High. It also means that either the Regents exams have to be altered or the grading requirements adjusted to avoid a huge drop-off in passing scores.

Meryl Tisch, the new Regents chancellor, and David Steiner, the state commissioner of education, want to make the Regents tests more rigorous. The only sensible way to do that is to bring back the differential diploma, Epstein argues. That would require the political courage to “challenge the now-conventional bias in favor of routing all kids toward a college diploma of one kind or another.”

Update: Inside School Research reports on dueling studies on the effects of tracking students.  While a Fordham study found that higher math scores in tracked middle schools, University of Colorado Education Professor Kevin Weiner says “the research doesn’t account for differences in resource levels, teacher quality, parents’ education levels, and other factors that might explain the higher numbers of top-scoring students in schools with multiple tracks.”  His new study profiles three successful untracked schools.

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Untracked

December 11, 2009 By

Many schools have abolished the remedial track to provide more challenge for low achievers. Some have no advanced track either.  Tracking and Detracking: High Achievers in Massachusetts Middle Schools, a Fordham report by Brookings scholar Tom Loveless, finds “tracked schools did better, but there aren’t many of them left.” From Education Gadfly:

Loveless finds that most middle schools have done away entirely with tracking in English language arts, science, and social studies, though this practice endures in math, albeit with fewer tracks than two decades ago. Further, “detracking” — reducing the number of subject-area courses offered in a given grade in a given school — may adversely affect high-achieving youngsters in math. (That’s not the case in English; history and science achievement were not analyzed.)

Middle schools with more tracks have more advanced and proficient math students, while detracked schools have more failing and “needs improvement” students.

Loveless also found that, when schools’ socioeconomic statuses are held constant, each additional track in eighth-grade math (up to three) is associated with a 3 percentage-point rise in students scoring at the advanced level. That means the advantage for a school offering three tracks instead of one is associated with a 6 percentage-point gain in the number of students performing at high levels.

Because math achievement is so low overall, that’s a significant difference.

In the late ’60s, my high school had five levels in English, three in math and two in science. In history and foreign languages, I think only AP courses were Level 1. I loved tracking. The low-level classes may have been a rotten deal for the slower learners, but tracking saved me from terminal boredom.

Update:   On Flypaper, Mike Petrilli cites Caroline Hoxby’s research, which finds that students do best in “boutique” classes designed for their needs.  A little mixing — average students with above-average students, for example — but too much disparity causes problems.

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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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