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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: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Everybody writes a novel

November 14, 2011 By

San Jose sixth graders are writing their own novels for National Novel Writing Month, reports the San Jose Mercury News.  They favor “knights, talking dogs, ninjas and children embarking on quests to save their families — or the world.”

. . . Albert Joo is chronicling the adventures of a necromancer, a kind of wizard, told from the viewpoints of a knight, a vampire and a vampire hunter. That may seem complicated, but 11-year-old Albert said, “It’s honestly a pretty basic story.”

. . . While participation in NaNoWriMo has no prerequisites, J.F. Smith students come prepared. All classes at the Evergreen district school emphasize writing. Sixth-graders start the school year writing a personal narrative and learn about including sensory details and scenery. They progress to fiction, but it has to be based on a real problem — like an annoying younger sibling — so they can write in detail. Later they’ll write a speech.

Last month they started planning their novels, ranging from 6,000 to 35,000 words. That’s 24 to 140 pages — short for a novel, long for them, (teacher Linda) Ulleseit said. She has them depict their outlines as a roller coaster, sort of an inverted U, detailing plot, characters and goals.

It’s easy to get ideas,” 11-year-old Sahith Narala said, “but it’s hard to put it into words.”

Ulleseit plans to submit her class’s work to the self-publishing site CreateSpace to print an anthology. Royalties of 56 cents per book — she anticipates sales to “moms and dads and grandmas” — will go back into the classroom budget.

 

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Serving the praise sandwich

November 10, 2011 By

Sandwich criticism between two slices of praise, suggests Mr. Foteah. For example:

“Johnny, you obviously took a lot of time to write your letters really neatly, just like we have talked about doing. Now, I also noticed when I was reading what you wrote that maybe you could add some more details. I know that just like you’ve started writing neater, you’ll do a good job learning to add details to your writing.”

The praise has to be honest and specific.

I’m helping first graders with reading again this year.  One child is having lots of problems, but she has learned more sight words. I pointed out her progress, very specifically, and she glowed. An aide, who was sitting nearby, smiled her approval. The other child, who’s slightly behind the class average, would have been an advanced reader by the standards of yesteryear.

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The readiness is all

November 8, 2011 By

More community colleges take — and fail — remedial math than any other course. Now colleges are rethinking math instruction to boost success rates.

A Mississippi community college now requires low-skilled students to take an intensive schedule of basic skills and study skills classes to prepare — quickly — for college-level classes. The state is studying a shift from funding based on enrollment to funding based on “productivity,” such as graduation rates.

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A good school leaves a few behind

November 1, 2011 By

Despite years of high scores without really trying, Oyster River Middle School is trying test prep to meet No Child Left Behind targets, writes Michael Winerip in the New York Times. The school in a prosperous New Hampshire town “needs improvement” because some special ed students aren’t proficient on the state exam, he writes.

In September the school announced a new motto, “Fill the Box.” Students have been told that their best chance for a high score on the state English test is to use all the blank space allotted for the essay. “You have to write as much as you can,” says Jay Richard, the principal. “People have studied these things.”

Actually, writing well works too.

The school also makes sure students get a good night’s sleep and eat “brain food” before the state tests.

In hopes of raising reading scores, Principal Richard, a former special education teacher, has decided to pull special ed students from mainstream classes at times for individual instruction.

Will this be better or just different?

“I believe we can do better,” Mr. Richard said. “We have to. This is the law.”

OK, the principal thinks it’s better. Surely, that’s a good thing.

Under Arne Duncan’s waivers, schools wouldn’t need to focus as much on low-achieving subgroups, Winerip writes. Isn’t that a bad thing? Apparently not.

Winerip’s story shows why No Child Left Behind was necessary, responds Eduwonk. It’s easy to ignore special ed students (the school’s low-income students may be lagging too),  if nobody’s looking.  “What about the poor students or special education students there? Don’t they matter?”

 

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

Talk to write

October 2, 2011 By

If you can talk, you can write, I used to tell students when I was invited to speak to English classes. (As an op-ed columnist, I got many invitations.) Talking is using words to communicate. So is writing. If you get stuck trying to write, imagine telling a friend whatever it is you have to say. Then write it down.  You no longer have your voice, gestures or expression to carry the meaning, so you’ll have to rewrite it to make it clear. But you’ve got a start.

People don’t get talker’s block, writes Seth Godin. So why is writer’s block so common?

. . . we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap.

. . . We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker’s block after all this practice?

Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

Godin advocates writing in public on a blog or microbloging site, such as Squidoo or Tumblr.

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

If you know you have to write something every single day, even a paragraph, you will improve your writing.

. . . Write like you talk. Often.

Teachers should model writing often and publicly, adds Karl Fisch, a math teacher turned high school technology director.

I agre that writing for an audience ismore useful than writing a journal nobody will read. Writing is communicating.

Schools are so busy teaching the writing process — graphic organizers and topic sentences — that they don’t teach students to write, argues Paula Stacey in Ed Week.

She’s taught writing at every level from elementary school to college.

  . . . in the name of writing instruction (students) are being asked to jump through an ever-expanding and increasingly byzantine set of hoops, but who less and less often are being asked to write. They may be able to create thesis statements and topic sentences, find details, write conclusions, and follow Modern Language Association style, but somewhere in there very little actual thought is taking place. In our desire to help students engage in the process of writing, we have defined a process that really isn’t writing.

As a third-grade teacher, she was required to teach instructional, descriptive, expository, and narrative writing.

 To assist students and teachers, the publishers of the curriculum had included numerous graphic organizers, brainstorming worksheets, and step-by-step instructions on the process of generating and organizing ideas. . . . I wasn’t instructing students in writing so much as dragging them through the process outlined in the worksheets. “Just tell me what to put here!” students entreated. “Is this right? Is this what you want?”

At a local high school, all essays must contain “exactly three central paragraphs containing exactly eight sentences: topic sentence, detail sentence, commentary sentence, another detail sentence, another commentary sentence, a final detail sentence, a final commentary sentence, and a concluding sentence.”

Meanwhile, college professors complain their students can’t develop a complex idea in writing.

My proposal is modest, cheap, and deceptively simple: Ask students questions, read their answers, and ask more questions. Questions and answers. Nothing fancy. Much like home cooking, however, this kind of questioning takes time, it requires practice and honing, and the kitchen is a mess afterwards. But it is worth the trouble and the mess, for in this back and forth, this conference between teacher and student, real thinking and the work of real writing occur.

I spent four solid years of high school writing the 3-3-3 paragraph. Each topic sentence had to be supported with three “concrete and specific details.” Learning to support assertions is good. But you’ve got to have something to assert.

When my daughter was in school, she was required to draw a picture or diagram showing her creative process. It wasn’t a useful way to organize her ideas, but she could write the assignment and then draw idea bubbles to match.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

In college, but reluctant to read or write

September 14, 2011 By

College students who don’t like to read or write challenge English instructors.

Also on Community College Spotlight:  In deeply depressed Flint, Michigan, once known as “Buicktown,” the local college is dropping classes in auto body repair and painting. There are few jobs and even fewer that require college training.

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , , ,

High school was too easy, graduates say

August 31, 2011 By

College is great, say recent high school graduates, but they weren’t prepared for college-level math, science and writing.

College Board’s One Year Out (pdf) survey asked members of the class of 2010 how their high school experience prepared them for work and college. In addition to wishing they’d taken harder classes in high school, 47 percent said they should have worked harder, reports College Bound.  Thirty-seven  percent said high school graduation requirements were too easy.

Ninety percent agreed with the statement: “In today’s world, high school is not enough, and nearly everybody needs to complete some kind of education or training after high school.”

Those who went on to college found the courses were more difficult than expected (54 percent), and 24 percent were required to take noncredit remedial or developmental courses. Of those taking remedial programs, 37 percent attended a two-year college and 16 percent did not make it through the first year of college.

To succeed, 44 percent of graduates said they wished they had taken different classes in high school. Among those, 40 percent wished they had taken more math, 37 percent wished they would have taken more classes that prepared them for a specific job, and 33 percent wished they had taken more science courses. Others thought they would have benefited from more practical career readiness and basic preparation for how to engage in a college environment, including how to manage personal finances, the College Board survey reveals.

Curriculum Matters has more on the study.

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What Elroy Jetson needs to learn

August 12, 2011 By

We can’t predict the future, but we can teach “timeless knowledge and skills that all students must master to succeed in any environment,” writes Kathleen Porter-Magee on Flypaper. She doesn’t think much of Virginia Heffernan’s call for a “digital-age upgrade” to education in the New York Times’ Opinionator blog.

“…fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet…For those two-thirds of grade-school kids, if for no one else, it’s high time we redesigned American education.”

For example, teachers and professors should stop asking students to write research papers, Heffernan argues, citing Duke English Professor Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It. Davidson’s students write “witty and incisive” blog posts and terrible term papers. She blames the term papers.

“What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in school — the term paper — and not necessarily intrinsic to a student’s natural writing style or thought process?” She adds: “What if ‘research paper’ is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?”

Old fogies shouldn’t insist that students write if they’d rather make a video, Heffernan believes. It’s the 21st century!

Heffernan misses her own point, responds Porter-Magee. We can’t predict what today’s elementary students will be doing in 20 years. Therefore, “our job as educators is not hitch our wagons to the latest education fad in response to changing—and often fleeting—technology.”

After all, that students can produce “witty and incisive” blog posts for their peers on topics of their choosing says nothing about their ability to write and speak to multiple audiences or about a variety of topics. (Most multimedia products are necessarily limited and we need to ask more of our students.) And the ability to synthesize complicated information in a persuasive way—grounded in facts, research and reading—is critical and timeless.

Students need to learn to write about more than their personal feelings, Porter-Magee writes.

Amen.

Research papers went out of fashion long ago in high schools, points out Robert Pondiscio, who quotes Will Fitzhugh of the Concord Review. He also links to a thoughtful post on All Things Education by Cedar Riener, a college psychology professor, who assigns both long research papers and short responses.

Hanna Barbera thought that Elroy Jetson, age six, would study space history, astrophysics, star geometry and math at the Little Dipper School. No reading or writing in the future?

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

Life’s a carnival

July 27, 2011 By

The Hotter-than-You-Know-Where Education Buzz Carnival is on at Bellringers.

Mamacita thinks we’re overprotecting our children.

Our kids have never organized their own games, made their own friends, walked to the neighborhood store, jumped rope, been outside after dark, put lightning bugs in a jar, or gotten dirty without a scolding.

Today’s kids get passing grades without really passing, sports trophies without really playing, and attendance awards even when they’ve missed six days for orthodontia appointments. Bullies receive more sympathy and help than their victims. Disruptive students are allowed to remain in our classrooms, destroying the learning opportunity for other kids.  (Disability or not, no child should be included IF that student presents a danger to other children, or in any way prevents other children from learning.  I’m not backing down on this one.)

New blogger ICE.Teacher has a light bulb moment while teaching drama improv: Why not use the same techniques to free students’ creativity in writing class?

Mrs. Mama Hen is hosting the Carnival of Homeschooling.

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