SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our genes, but in our environment

Today’s lesson is according to the gospel of Dan Willingham, Why Don’t Students Like School?, Chapter 8, pages 137-139. It concerns the question of fixed intelligence. Dr. Willingham begins by discussing James Flynn’s surprising discovery that over the last half-century IQ scores have shown considerable gains (think 20 points in just 30 years) - far too fast to be the result of evolutionary changes to the gene pool. What is causing this rapid IQ increase?

“No one is completely sure, but Flynn (along with Bill Dickens, his frequent collaborator) has a pretty good suggestion. He claims that the effect of genetics is actually fairly modest. It looks large because the effect of genetics is to make the person likely to seek out particular environments. Dickens offers the following analogy. Suppose identical twins are separated at birth and adopted into different families. Their genes make them unusually tall at a young age, and they continue to grow. Because each twin is tall, he tends to do well in informal basketball games around the neighborhood. For that reason, each twin asks his parents to put up a net at home. The skills of each twin improve with practice, and each is recruited for his junion high school basketball team. More practice leads to still better skill, and by the end of high school each twin plays quite well - not a future professional, perhaps, but still better than 98 percent of the population, let’s say.

“Now, notice what has happened. These are identical twins, raised apart. So if a researcher tracked down each twin and administered a test of basketball skills, she would find that both are quite good, and because they were raised apart, the researcher would conclude that this was a genetic effect, that skill in basketball is largely determined by one’s genes. But the researcher would be mistaken. What actually happened was that their genes made them tall, and being tall nudged them toward environments that included a lot of basketball practice. Practice - an environmental effect - made them good at basketball, not their genes. Genetic effects can make you seek out or select different environments.

“Now think of how that perspective might apply to intelligence. Maybe genetics has had some small effect on your intelligence. Maybe it has made you a little quicker to understand things, or made your memory a little bit better, or made you more persistent on cognitive tasks, or simply made you more curious. Your parents noticed this and encouraged your interest. They may not even have been aware that they were encouraging you. They might have talked to you about more sophisticated subjects and used a broader vocabulary than they otherwise would have. As you got older, you saw yourself more and more as one of the ‘smart kids’. You made friends with other smart kids, and entered into friendly but quite real competition for the highest grades. Then too, maybe genetics subtly pushed you away from other endeavors. You may be quicker cognitively, but you’re a little slower and clumsier physically than others. That has made you avoid situations that might develop your athletic skills (such as pickup basketball games) and instead stay inside and read.

“The key idea here is that genetics and the environment interact. Small differences in genetic inheritance can steer people to seek different experiences in their environments, and it is differences in these environmental experiences, especially over the long term, that have large cognitive consequences. For that reason, we shouldn’t assume that twins have experienced different environments even though they were raised in different households. The fact that their genes are the same may well have encouraged them to seek out similar environments.

“Now, why did I take you through this long story about intelligence? Because what we will consider doing for students who seem unintelligent differs depending on the nature of intelligence. If intelligence were all a matter of one’s genetic inheritance, then there wouldn’t be much point in trying to make kids smarter. Instead, we’d try to get students to do the best they could given the genetically determined intelligence they have. We’d also think seriously about trying to steer the not-so-smart kids toward intellectually undemanding tracks in schools, figuring that they are destined for low-level jobs anyway. But that’s not the way things are. Intelligence is malleable. It can be improved.”

In a subsequent posting, I will provide information about measures to increase slow learners’ IQ’s and learning.

Teaching on the Fast Track

SQE has often talked about alternative routes for teaching certification.  Rhode Island Teaching Fellows is an example of a non-traditional path for professionals to become teachers in their fields.

The program “recruits highly motivated professionals, some of them mid-career, into hard-to-fill subjects areas like math, science and special education.”  Instead of taking the two-year education degree, professionals are fast-tracked directly into the classroom.

While in Ontario there is probably a surplus of teacher college graduates and fewer job openings, there may be shortages in some areas of expertise.  It is worthwhile looking at developing similar programs here so that highly qualified professionals can impart valued knowledge and skills to students—especially in the sciences and in skilled trades.

Project Follow Through Didn’t

The latest addition to our lending library is Teaching Needy Kids in our Backward System: 42 years of trying by Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann. This is a great read, telling the story of Project Follow Through from the point of view of the author. Project Follow Through was conceived in the sixties - think Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson with their ideas of a just society and all that sort of thing - and it was designed as a sort of a contest to find out which teaching approach would best help five-to-eight-year-old disadvantaged children close the gap that Head Start was trying to narrow. Project Follow Through involved 180 communities and over 200,000 at-risk children. Twenty-two models were compared, from 1968 to 1977.

Zig Engelmann is a genius when it comes to instruction, and his Direct Instruction programs - when adequately implemented - actually managed to bring disadvantaged children up to the average. Direct Instruction won the contest hands down. It was the only program that showed gains in all three measured areas - academic, cognitive, and affective. The Direct Instruction children learned far more reading, writing, and math, they could problem solve much more effectively, and they felt way better about themselves than any of the others. When the results were announced, Zig braced himself for an onslaught of enquries about and orders for his programs. However, they never came.

Sadly, Direct Instruction is the unflavour of the month in education circles, because it is viewed as too prescriptive. Even though Project Follow-Through definitely proved that Zig's approach works best, even though Direct Instruction definitively proved that it could transform the lives of disadvantaged children, even though Direct Instruction was wildly popular with parents - the education establishment closed ranks and carried on with their failed approaches. Basically, the worse an approach did in Project Follow Through, the more popular it is with educators. 

Teaching Needy Kids in our Backward System: 42 years of trying pulls no punches. Here's a short passage (p. 71) that illustrates Zig's style.

"Just before the presentation was to start, Bob Egbert recognized that I was not in very good humor, pulled me aside, and told me not to use foul language when I presented to the assemblage. He cautioned, 'Don't say 'bullshit'.' Apparently this was my signature characteristic. A year earlier, Carl Bereiter had been interviewed by a reporter who asked, 'What was the most important thing you have learned from your association with Engelmann?' He thought a moment and then said, 'I learned to say bullshit. Earlier, if something sounded preposterous I would try to find something good in it. Now, I just say 'bullshit'."

Comic books are fine - but they’re no substitute for reading instruction

According to this This Magazine article, some educators are turning to graphic novels as a way to combat low literacy rates. The idea seems to be that kids would become better readers if only they would read more - and the way to make them read more is to give them comic books.

Personally, I doubt it. It would be interesting to track how many struggling readers progress from graphic novels to actual books - and how many never get past needing pictures. Chances are, we'll never know. Educators are notoriously reluctant to subject their experiments to data-driven scrutiny. 

My opinion is that the use of comic books and graphic novels is yet another of the many ways devised by educators to obscure the fact (from themselves as much as from others) that they have failed to teach so many of their students to read fluently.

Sunday at the Movies (Matt Damon)

It turns out that Matt Damon's mom was a teacher, and so he accompanied her to the recent Washington rally against high-stakes testing. I picked this video today just for light relief in these dog days of summer. I know everybody likes to watch movie stars, plus CNN's Anderson Cooper includes a healthy dose of sarcasm (by the end, you may think it's a good thing Mr. Damon has a day job) . Click here to watch the video (there's a short ad first).

It’s easy to do well - but much harder to do good

For most people, several hundred million dollars a year is a significant amount of money. There are a few exceptions, of course, and Bill Gates is one of them, having spent this amount of money every year over the past ten years in an effort to improve public education. In this interview in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Gates admits that his $5 billion dollars (and counting) has been largely wasted. As he points out, US governments spend a combined $600 billion a year on education, and philanthropic giving is merely a rounding error.

The Gates Foundation has realized that the only way philanthropic organizations can be effective is to influence governments to change how they spend their money. Unfortunately, right now the foundation is hung up on another red herring - identifying exemplary teaching practices - but ultimately they too will come to realize that school choice is the way to go.

In the meantime, those people who want better schools but don't have $35 billion to endow their own foundation would be wise to support organizations like SQE. Our DONATE button is conveniently located on the left side of your screen...

Schools can’t see the forest for the trees

Have you ever noticed how often troubling news is followed by cries for something or other to be taught in school?

• Household debt?   -   Financial literacy should be taught in school.
• Global warming?   -   Schools should encourage kids to think green.
• Fire-related deaths?   -   Kids ought to learn how to escape from a fire!
• Teen pregnancy?   -   Sex education is the answer!
• Gullible citizens?   -   Media literacy should be added to the curriculum.
• Obesity?   -   More school-based exercise programs should be introduced and also lessons on nutrition.
• Drug abuse?   -   Schools should educate students about substance abuse.

A recent example of this genre comes from the London Free Press which is recommending mandatory swimming lessons in response to 45 water-related deaths in southwestern Ontario so far this year. Of course, this is a knee-jerk reaction, but a moment's thought should lead to the realization that schools cannot teach everything.

There are nominally 178 days of mandated instruction in Ontario. At 300 instructional minutes a day, that translated into a maximum of 890 hours available for teaching. Of course, much time is lost to transitions, administrative chores, announcements, and activities like popcorn parties, assemblies, field days, and we can pretty much write off the entire month of June. Realisticallly, that leaves no more than about 700 hours of learning time a year. By the time you subtract all the units on homophobia and so forth, there isn't a whole lot of time left over for academics.

A further issue is the overabundance of curricular objectives. Teachers have so many equally-important missions that it is very easy for one or two (like, say, reading and math) to get lost in the shuffle. 

A final question is - why ever would we expect schools to do a good job teaching, say computer literacy or anti-smoking when they are demonstrably failing to teach what some see as the core subjects.

The peanut allergy epidemic

I am currently reading The Peanut Allergy Epidemic: What's causing it and how to stop it by Heather Fraser, a writer and historian who lives in Toronto and is the mother of a child who suffers from food allergies including peanuts. The author argues very convincingly that the huge increase in the number of children with potentially-fatal peanut allergies is due to the use of peanut oil in the vaccinations they received as babies.

A disclaimer: I am not a scientist and I have no way of evaluating some of the stuff the author writes. In fact, I would be very interested in reading a counter-argument if someone could draw it to my attention.

The author states that it is well known and acknowledged among scientists that vaccines can create various kinds of allergies, depending on the ingredients. Over the years, all kinds of ingredients have been used in vaccines, including glycerin, gelatin, cottonseed oil, and - ta da - peanut oil. However, pharmaceutical companies are not required to disclose vaccine ingredients, so it's impossible to determine who got what when. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that peanut oil has been used in some vaccines over the past 20 years or so.

There appears to be no question that allergies can be caused by vaccinations. For example, the book mentions an outbreak of gelatin allergy in Japan in the early nineties - with the outbreak being traced to the inclusion of gelatin in a new diphtheria-tetanus-ocellar-pertussis vaccine, as well as a measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. As a result, vaccine makers removed gelatin from these vaccines, and the incidence of anaphalaxis dropped accordingly. 

At present, there is no known way of ameliorating peanut allergy once it is present. However, if the vaccine hypothesis is correct, it should be possible to reduce the future incidence of peanut allergies by removing peanut oil from vaccines. 

Dyslexia breakthrough

Researchers at MIT were surprised to find that adults with dyslexia had difficultly recognizing voices and seem to think that the problem is not visual but auditory.   From the reporting on the study:

      According to researchers, this shows that dyslexia is not a problem with sufferers gathering the correct meaning of words, but rather with processing the correct speech sounds. This may help explain why children suffering from dyslexia struggle to learn to read.  In addition to the problems posed by not visually processing the written words correctly, dyslexics are also struggling to connect the auditory sounds that words and syllables make with the written word. Listening to a parent or teacher sound the word out correctly may not be helpful for novice dyslexic readers.

      This research is significant because it enhances scientists understanding of how the brain processes words. It suggests a greater interconnectedness between sound and sight when trying to understand language. This will guide further research into how dyslexics learn and how best to assist people struggling with the disorder.

This indicates that phonemic awareness and sight sound association with print is essential.  It will be interesting to see how this research prompts further investigation for the prevention of reading disabilities in general.    

An idea whose time has yet to come

In a comment to Educhatter's blog on teacher quality reform (one of 398 comments!), Sandy asks whether SQE has enough money to start a small private K-6 school in the hopes that the Ontario Conservatives will win the next election, enable charter schools, and allow our new school to convert to charter status.

I have often dreamed along these lines - you know, starting up a demonstration school that shows what's possible. Apart from helping the limited number of students in the school, it could act as a lighthouse to other schools, inspiring them to excellence.

Before long, however, reality sets in.

In the first place, schools are ruinously expensive. What with start-up costs, salaries, furniture, books, rental, etc., etc., the first year of operation for a school of 200 students would easily run you $350,000. Even if you managed to earn $200,000 in tuition fees - and that's a big if - you would still have to come up with $150,000. Trust me, SQE does not have this kind of money.

Next, let's say the Conservatives win the next election - probable, but by no means certain. Assuming they win, there is no reason to believe they will enable charter schools. In fact, if I were a betting woman, I would give you odds of about 10 to 1 against. And even if I lost THAT bet, there would be no guarantee that the charter school legislation would allow existing private schools to convert to charter status. I would say that starting up a private school that will succeed only if it can soon become a charter school would be courting disaster.

Third, it's really hard to create a good school. I think we could do it (although there is no guarantee), but it would take a huge amount of time and effort by a lot of very committed people. At this point in my life, I'm simply not willing.

But the final reason is the real killer. We all tend to think that a demonstration school which gets exemplary results, head and shoulders above existing schools, would serve as a wake-up call to the education establishment, encouraging other schools to find out how to do it themselves. But this demonstrably does not happen. I have written before about Ontario public schools that achieved excellence (St. Francis of Assissi in Stroud and Parkview Public School in Lindsay) - and they were quickly and savagely shut down by their school boards. The same thing has happened in many other places. The truth is - the education establishment hates and fears excellence, because it makes the other schools look bad. I am convinced that Ontario educators would have no interest in an exemplary private school, instead convincing themselves that the school was terrible in some way and publicly denigrating it - then carrying on with the status quo.

Other than that, starting a private school is a great idea, Sandy.