More Waiting for Superman?

In The New York Times, Sara Mosle has an interesting review of Steven Brill's just-released book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools. Based on Mosle's read, Brill—perhaps best known for his Court TV and his New Yorker article that called out the Big Apple's "rubber rooms" for rotten, unfireable teachers—places the burden of guilt squarely on America’s teachers’ unions. As the book explains, it’s the heroic story of an "unlikely army—fed-up public school parents, Ivy League idealists, hedge-funders, civil rights activists, conservative Republicans, insurgent Democrats—squaring off against unions that the reformers claim are protecting a system that works for the adults but victimizes the children." But as to be suspected, there's no happy ending in sight and no side is totally innocent—or guilty. In fact, the book seems pretty reminiscent of the divisive film Waiting for Superman.

Mosle, who once riled teachers unions herself, points out that, well, things are complex. She ponts out that while teacher quality may be the most important variable within schools, there's plenty of research showing that that "most of the variation in student performance" is a result of factors outside the school: "not just poverty, but also parental literacy (and whether parents read to their children), student health, frequent relocations, crime-­related stress and the like."

As a teacher herself, Mosle points to one well-known study from 2009, which surveyed approximately half of all charters nationwide and was backed by the pro-­charter Walton Family and Michael and Susan Dell Foundations. The study found that more than 80 percent of students either do no better, or actually perform substantially worse, than traditional public schools—not a great record and perhaps a reminder that charter schools were not started to outperform traditional schools necessarily. The study concluded that “tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception.”

The Economies of Super Parenting (What Matters and What Doesn't)

Freakanomics Radio on NPR has a near hour-long program about the costs of parenting, with a roundtable of humorous, kid-rearing economists. Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and father of four, said he and another economist couldn't find evidence that parental choices based on the premise that quality activities lead to academic and later life success. The other big point: Parents don't matter all that much, nor do all those pricey activities. For the evidence (think nurture vs. nature), listen to An Economist’s Guide to Parenting.

In The New York Times Your Money section, reporter Alina Tugend also contemplates Levitt's work, along with that of other economists. In "Family Happiness and the Overbooked Child," Tugend points to research that suggest the costs -- both financial and otherwise -- simply aren't worth it, if a parent is after lasting impact in their child's life. From the article:

"[w]e have to move away from the idea that if we do not start children early, they will not reach their full potential. After all, we know the human brain doesn’t fully mature until around 25," said William Doherty, a professor of family studies and director of the marriage and family therapy program at the University of Minnesota.

Oh, and culture cramming and obsessive parenting don't work, either. What matters most is "who parents are, not what they do." Determination, apparently, can be inherited.

Sources: An Economist’s Guide to Parenting | Freakonomics Radio, The New York Times

The Cost of College for All

In The New Yorker this week, Louis Menand ponders why we have college and who learns the most. He explains that "a lot of confusion is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher education has been committed to [two] theories": a meritocracy and a democracy. Not surprisingly, these two theories are at odds. We, Menand writes, "want higher education to be available to all Americans, but we also want people to deserve the grades they receive." In other words, no inflation, no degree farms.

While Menand goes on to write about Professor X, his woes and his new book, he makes a fine argument for a liberal education. As he tells it, a particularly interesting finding is that "students majoring in liberal-arts fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities— [...] show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health." Menand also goes on to highlight the various reasons that liberal-arts students do well: They are "more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve." And the unsurprising kicker, echoed in The New York Times last April? Business majors are the students who score the lowest and improve the least.

Sources: The New Yorker, Professor X's 2008 article in The Atlantic.

History Shortchanged

Oh, the saga of low test scores in US schools. It's hardly a news story these days. Still, The New York Times, in response to the latest results of a nationwide test, found that most fourth graders are unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War. But, really, is that all too surprising? I am not so sure that most American adults could identify China as a North Korean ally in the 1950s, let alone, a crucial partner in the Korean War.

According to The Times' Sam Dillion, history advocates blame students’ poor showing on the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers and schools no longer have time for history — No Child Left Behind Act, with its requirement that schools raise scores in math and reading but in no other subject, allow time for little else. And if you are not being taught history, it's unlikely that you'll test well.

But as this Reuters story from 1995 shows, student declines in history knowledge is far from new. In fact, the decline even predates 1995. Still, in The Times article, Linda K. Salvucci, a history professor in San Antonio and chairwoman-elect of the National Council for History Education, explains one of the big issues around teaching history.

“History is very much being shortchanged,” Salvucci explains. Many teacher-education programs, she said, also contribute to the problem by encouraging aspiring teachers to seek certification in social studies, rather than in history. “They think they’ll be more versatile, that they can teach civics, government, whatever,” she said in The Times. “But they’re not prepared to teach history.”

Source: The New York Times

Developing a Gut Instinct, or Quick Grasp, for Problem-Solving

I often wonder where I went wrong with my own math education. Often, I'll blame Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. I found that book in the hallway of my elementary school one day and read it during math class for the next two weeks. I have no memories of learning multiplication during that time, though I did develop a long love of all book by Roald Dahl amid glances at the chalkboard and the front-of-the-class multiplication chart.

After months of personal book reading during math class, I still recall in painful, cringe-inducing memories of sitting crouched beside my dad's Lazy Boy chair. I was in tears and utter frustration, realizing that I knew little multiplication beyond the "sevens," and even then my "threes" and "fours" were shaky. I had allowed myself to be left behind in my learning for at least six months, maybe longer. But it wasn't my math grade that had revealed my utter lack of learning — amazingly (or perhaps pathetically), I had received either an A or B in class. Rather, my father had asked me a simple problem inv

olving fractions, which revealed how little I had learned. I now realize that it revealed far more — I missed the chance to develop a genuine, natural instinct for math. Fractions, graphs, and equations would go on to become my personal Vietnam, complete with post-traumatic stress disorder with all things math.

Today, The New York Times explains that a lot of American kids have a few holes in their academic game. Graphs and equations are included in these so-called holes. As reporter Benedict Carey explains the US education system is awash with computerized learning tools and pilot programs of all kinds. And while scientists still don’t understand the best way to teach "perceptual intuition," researchers and some teachers are convinced that "if millions of children can develop a trained eye for video combat games and doctored Facebook photos, they can surely do the same for graphs and equations."

Thus, a move from school curriculums that emphasize top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science, may be in order. Here's what typically happens (and, actually, the approach I took last night for a stats class that I am taking): "Learn the rules first — the theorems, the order of operations, Newton’s laws — then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter." But as Carey explains, recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against."

In response to this research, some cognitive scientists suggest that schools and students might do better with this "bottom-up ability," called perceptual learning. Carey writes that new studies suggest that "the brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle." In other words, the author writes, "there’s no reason someone with a good eye for fashion or wordplay cannot develop an intuition for classifying rocks or mammals or algebraic equations, given a little interest or motivation."

Bill Gates’ ‘Assertive Philanthropy’: Better to Give With Strings Attached or Not at All?

An article in The New York Times this past weekend tried to make sense of all the Gates Foundation funding for education (and, really, there's millions out there). Essentially, Gates' giving is all over the map, though The Times's initial hook zeros in on Teach Plus, a national organization largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that works to improve outcomes for urban children by — in the organization's own words —"ensuring that a greater proportion of students have access to effective, experienced teachers."

But the article points out that members of the group — promoting themselves simply as "local teachers who favored school reform" — helped persuade Indiana state lawmakers to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star, according to Times reporter Sam Dillion. One state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, explained in the article that the Teach Plus teachers “seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” Still, their efforts were largely financed by the Gates Foundation.

While the article points out that yes, indeed, Bill Gates has an agenda with education and the money to back it, he has spread his giving widely for education. In fact, his foundation has given to the two national teachers’ unions, as well to groups whose mission seems to be to criticize them. Interestingly, Randi Weingarten, a union president, offered a balanced statement regarding Gate's giving:

“Unlike some foundations that would rather just scapegoat teachers and their unions, Gates understands that teaching is a profession, that you have to invest in and support teachers. That doesn’t mean we agree with everything they do.”

The foundation’s 2009 tax filing, according to the article, runs to 263 pages and includes about 360 education grants. Clearly, it's tough to track all the money and organizations. Still, two other Gates-financed groups, Educators for Excellence and Teach Plus, have worked to increase the voices of newer teachers as an alternative to the official views of the unions.

So, the questions to consider: Is assertive philanthropy really all that new, and how would teachers, parents, and others feel if Gates simply stopped giving?

Survey Shows Hands-on Science Learning Valuable to Students

Science reporter Jeffrey Mervis writes about a new study suggesting that college students may learn better through — surprise! — an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor.

The study, by a team at the University of British Columbia led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman, that students in the "deliberate" practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. The research also showed that students were also more engaged and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.

The New York Times reporter Benedict Carey points out that study is far from perfect: "More than 150 of the students were absent from the test, most of them from the comparison class. The researchers had no way to know how those students, if they'd come, would have changed the overall findings."

Experts said, according to Carey, that it was "problematic" for a study to offer an intervention (in the form of enthusiastic teachers) that could sway results. "This is not a good idea, since they know exactly what the hypotheses are that guide the study, and, more importantly, exactly what the measures are that will be used to evaluate the effects," James W. Stigler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "They might, therefore, be tailoring their instruction to the assessment — i.e., teaching to the test."

The Social Animal in the Realm of Learning

I've been reading David Brook's Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, with mixed feelings. For instance, Harold and Erica, the author's fictional characters devised to hang all sorts of far-flung data, simply do not work for me. Actually, they annoy me. That said, Brooks does trot out interesting stats. Of course, as Thomas Nagel points out in The New York Times, Brooks seems way too willing to take seriously any claim by a cognitive scientist, however idiotic. Nagel's case in point: that since people need only 4,000 words for 98 percent of conversations, the reason they have vocabularies of 60,000 words is to impress and sort out potential mates.

Still, Brooks, a columnist with The Times, offers or, as in the marshmallow case mentioned below, reminds us of some truly interesting findings, particularly in the realm of education. (Oh, and of course, there are simply some nice Brooksisms, typically inspired by the British Enlightenment. Here's one: "Emotion assigns value to things," Brooks writes, "and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations." Here's another: "The adult personality — including political views — is forever defined in opposition to one's natural enemies in high school," Brooks explains.)

But let's get back to Brooks' interesting findings in the realm of education. Consider financial aid programs, for instance, designed to reduce college drop-out rates are based on the assumption that the main problem for students is material. "When in fact," Brooks explains, "only about 8 percent of students are unable to complete college for purely financial reasons. The more important problems have to do with emotional disengagement from college and lack of academic preparedness, intangible factors that the prevailing mindset found it hard to factor and acknowledge." While Brooks goes too far when saying that "the government had tried to fortify material development but ended up weakening the social and emotional development that underpins it," I do think people — parents, in particular — blame the costs of college for many students' failure to graduate (or graduate in a timely fashion) when other factors are at play.

Brooks also highlights the classic — and hilarious — marshmallow test from the 1970s, which suggests the value of self control. His point: Kids from "disorganized, unstable communities have a much harder time acquiring the discipline to succeed in life." The experiment showed 4-year-olds asked to postpone gratification by leaving a marshmallow uneaten for a time as a condition of receiving a second marshmallow. According to Brooks and others, this test of will was a "very good predictor of success in life": "The kids who could wait a full 15 minutes had, 13 years later, SAT scores that were 210 points higher than the kids who could wait only 30 seconds. . . . Twenty years later, they had much higher college-completion rates, and 30 years later, they had much higher incomes. The kids who could not wait at all had much higher incarceration rates. They were much more likely to suffer from drug- and alcohol-addiction problems." (Note: Most kids actually ate the marshmallow right away, but I'm not sure if "right away" was less or more than 30 seconds.)

Below is a video clip from a modern-day marshmallow experiment, and here's an excerpt from Brooks' book on decision making via The New York Times.

Teacher Pay and Classroom Success: Two Takes on the Pages of The Times Op-Ed

Recently, The New York Times has been running several op-ed article on how to redesign — er, save — American public schools.

Nínive Clements Caliegari and Dave Eggers, founders of the 826 National tutoring centers, compare what happens in the US when we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors to what happens when we get similar poor results in the classroom. The gist: Teachers get blamed, but the military typically gets better support.

Most interesting, however, is the info the two pull from the McKinsey report that looked at how the US might attract and retain talented teachers. The study looked at the treatment of teachers here and in the three countries that perform best on standardized tests: Finland, Singapore and South Korea. Here's the takeaway:

Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don't.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don't.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do. And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it's 1 percent per year. In Finland, it's 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.

While there's no magic number when it comes to teacher pay, McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a minimum of $150,000. Eggers and Caliegari point out that teacher salary is currently on par with that of toll takers and bartenders.

An earlier Times article by Barker Bausell puts forth some ideas about evaluating classroom success. While Bausell's recipe for success is easier said than done and overly general (keep close to the curriculum, maintain strict discipline, and minimize noninstructional activities), he does highlight the need for more online learning outside the classroom:

...schools could make online tutoring programs covering the entire elementary school curriculum available, both in school and at home.

This approach could mimic the characteristics that make human tutoring so effective, including the ability to immediately ascertain what a student needs to learn, to tailor instruction to those needs, and to provide immediate feedback regarding student progress.

Image: McKinsey, highlighting videos from the consultancy's report

Woodshop for Kids of Any Age (Really)

Today, The New York Times highlighted the resurgence of hands-on woodshop class for kids — little kids, like 3-year-olds.

How nice to see a consideration of shop class outside the mental — and school-day — confines of "streaming," or tracking, kids. Too often, it seems that kids are routed to shop and art classes, particularly in the upper grades, with the assumption that they can't hack academic classes. On the flip side, budding designers, engineers, and other hands-on learners are dissuaded from taking "easy" classes that may fall flat on a college application.

Times reporter Julia Scelfo interviewed Doug Stowe, an educator and woodworker in Arkansas, and he offers up several interesting tidbits. "Up until the early 1900s, there was a widespread understanding that the use of the hands was essential to the development of character and intellect," explained Stowe in The Times interview. "More recently, we've had this idea that every child should go to college and that the preparation for careers in manual arts was no longer required. ... we have forgotten all the other important things that manual training conveys."

Stowe's blog, Wisdom of the Hands, is named after a program he started a decade ago at Clear Spring School in Eureka Springs. (His effort to preserve and teach the craft of woodworking got him named a Living Treasure there in 2009).

Another interesting take comes from Abigail Norman, director of the Eliot School in Boston: "Children are so driven to find the right answer, to put their name on the right place on the page, to fill in the right multiple-choice question, to blacken the right dot. They're crying out for opportunities to use their creative mind to take creative risks. Woodworking and art supply that."

Of course, the article's author does due diligence in explaining that, y-e-s, power tools in the hands of both 3- and 16-year-olds can be dangerous. But as Brian Cohen, a former music industry exec and co-founder of Beam Camp, a "summer art and building" camp in New Hampshire, points out "tetherball is more dangerous than the shop."

Interestingly, Cohen explained that he started Beam Camp after noting the hours and hours kids were using iPods and laptops. Now, he has kids aged from 7 to 16 building geodesic domes "in the shape of virus protein shells" and parade floats with kinetic sculptures.

The article also offered me a nice reminder of a wonderful San Francisco resource: The Randall Museum, packed with rogue city critters, ceramic and theater courses, and a children (and adult) woodworking program. According to The Times, the museum has doubled the number of its classes and added one for preschoolers in recent years. Now that I think about it, as a leftie — surrounded by woodworking gear made for right-handers in the Randall, where I made a ridiculously sturdy oak bookshelf — shop could be just a dangerous as tetherball.

Photo sources: The New York Times, The Randall Museum (yep, that photo is from museum)