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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Making public schools competitive
One of the arguments by charter school opponents is that charter schools would induce the more able students to leave their conventional public schools, crippling those schools and making them even less able to serve the students who have been left behind. This is of course betrays their rather contemptuous view of conventional public schools.
However, a new study from Utah suggests that a contemptuous view of the teachers in conventional public schools is not justified after all. When Mike Martineau compared the progress of conventional public schools on the basis of how close they were to a charter school, he found:
- "School districts with 5 percent of their students attending charter schools showed a 1.2 percent gain in math proficiency, as compared to schools without charter school competition, within two years of the charter school existing.
- Traditional [conventional] public schools with at least four charter schools within five miles showed a 1.8 percent increase in statewide language arts proficiency within the same year.
- School districts with at least 6 percent of students attending charter schools showed a 2.0 percent increase in science proficiency within two years of the charter school existing."
It appears that competition makes schools competitive. Who'd a thunk it?
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It’s all about the adults
Following on from yesterday's posting about how good teachers are made not born, today I want to share another insight from Mission Possible.
Many (most?) educators fervently believe that there's not much they can do about demographics - you know, some kids are doomed - and I suppose that's a useful belief when it comes to letting them sleep at night. It's kind of like Lester Maddox, the former segregationist governor of George, when he explained his inability to improve the state prison system: "There's not a lot more we can do unless we start getting a better class of prisoner."
Educators with this attitude often also have the attitude that it's not fair to put all the responsibility for academic achievement on teachers - after all, if students don't care and won't try, then there's nothing teachers can do, and anyway students need to accept responsibility for their own growth.
Mission Possible emphatically rejects this attitude as well. In fact, one of the most important tenets of Success Academies is: "IT'S ALL ABOUT THE ADULTS". Excerpting from page 37:
- "This simple but profound idea is totally radical and at odds with almost every other approach that's been tried to fix America's schools. It's the basis, however, for everything we do at Success Academies, where we're showing that with world-class teaching, kids from distressed communities like Harlem and the South Bronx can compete with and even outperform children from New York City's wealthiest zip codes....Achieving excellence isn't about the students. It's about the grown-ups. When the grown-ups are running on all cylinders, they bring the kids along for the swift, exhilarating ride. There have always been isolated schools with inspiring teachers who help youngsters beat the odds in difficult circumstances. We're doing it in every Success Academy with hard work, study, perspiration, and inspiration BY THE ADULTS."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Creating Great Teachers
Beginning reading is taught poorly in most Canadian schools, and the results are much as you would expect. Some students, especially those with strong auditory abilities or superstar teachers, become good readers. Some students stagger along the road to literacy propped up by help from home or outside tutoring agencies - perhaps they become adequate readers but terrible spellers. The rest, perhaps 40%, never learn to read adequately.
This is the pattern you would expect in any learning endeavour with inadequate teaching. It applies to learning to play the piano, learning to swim, learning to ride a bicycle - and learning to be a teacher. There are some great teachers in Canada, but few of them got that way because of their professional development training. The instruction at Canadian faculties of education is almost uniformly awful. It's a crying shame, because - despite the widespread belief that good teachers are born, not made - good teachers can in fact be made.
Mission Possible: How the secrets of the Success Academies can work in any school by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia outlines how these 14 New York charter schools all transform their lottery-selected slum-dwelling students into college-going graduates. This seeming miracle is wrought by excellent teachers (how else?)
It's hard to convey the amount and degree of the training and support provided to the teachers at the Success Academies. New teachers receive an intensive four-week-long training session (principals go for eight weeks), and then receive the equivalent of nine more weeks of apprenticing and training during the school year. There is also frequent and ongoing classroom support. Here's a short excerpt of one very small part of the process (p. 55).
"New teachers get to witness highly effective teaching by observing live classes and by watching videotaped classes from our EduTube digital library (a repository of more than fifteen thousand YouTube-like videos of internal 'best practice' techniques). They also practice teaching under the eyes of master teachers and mentors and learn how to accept direct feedback."
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Identifying Good Teachers
It is by now well accepted in education circles that good teachers make a tremendous difference to their students' learning, such that the students of a superstar teacher can learn as much as four times more than the students of a poor teacher.
As a result, it becomes critically important to identify good teachers. Unfortunately, the usual suspects have argued - for the most part successfully - that it is impossible to be sure who is doing a good job and who isn't, plus performance probably changes from year to year. Now comes a study that suggests otherwise.
The researchers in this study took 1,181 teachers whom they had previously 'measured', and randomly assigned students to them. After one year, they looked at student outcomes to see whether their previous teacher effectiveness measurements correctly predicted the students' learning. There are a few caveats - the teachers in this study were volunteers so they may not have been completely representative, and the students were not switched between schools so teacher effects and school effects were not independently measured. Nevertheless, the results strongly suggest that the researchers' measures of teacher effectiveness are a powerful predictor of student outcomes. H/T TB
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (New Jersey)
Here's a peek at what's new in New Jersey. Governor Christie is determined to make it possible for all students to escape failing schools. Do we have any failing schools in Ontario? Nobody knows or cares, because of course school rankings are anathema in Ontario.
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Piano Disabled
New research shows a link between music and reading (more here), proving once again - as if it were necessary - that reading is sound-based and that systematic phonics should be used to teach kids to read.
Yet Ontario's official policy on reading instruction makes scant reference to phonics, let alone systematic phonics: no phonics, no phonetic readers, no sound charts, no systematic instruction, nothing. Instead, it refers to the discredited three-cueing system (there used to be only three cues (semantics, syntax, and graphophonics), but I notice that the Ontario Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat (OLNS) has added a fourth cue (pragmatics).
Graphophonics is supposed to be phonics, tarted up a bit and of course situated in third place after the more important semantics and syntax cues. Here's what the OLNS has to say about graphophonics: "Graphophonics refers to the relationships between the symbols and sounds of a language, as well as visual information on the page that helps readers to decode text. Graphophonic cues occur within words and may include letter or sound relationships, word patterns, and words recognized by sight".
If a piano teacher tried to teach her students the way Ontario grade 1 teachers are supposed to teach reading, she would play lots of CDs, model playing the piano, talk about how great music is, encourage the child to memorize pieces - and occasionally make reference to the relationship between the sheet music and the piano keys. Some kids (especially the kids whose parents were supplemening their music instruction) would learn to play the piano, but a great many would fall by the wayside.
Of course, no piano teacher would teach this way because she would quickly lose students - but that's another rant.
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March break math help
It's not too late to get in some math practice before the March break is over. Stairway to Math is a series of practical worksheets to help young students who are struggling with basic math skills. Best of all, it's free!
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Figures of Speech
A blogger, Blazing Cat Fur, has received a visit from the police after using what he calls a "rhetorical flourish" in one of his posts. Apparently, the Toronto District School Board has either a really thin skin or missed the English class on figures of speech. Sun columnist Joe Warmington writes about it here.
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Research for research sake?
Why doesn't education research filter down to classroom practice? Dr. Ben Levin explains why in this paper , To Know is Not Enough: Research Knowledge and Its Use, which reviews the current literature. His goal is to strengthen the ties between research and practice.
Although by this excerpt, why he can't explain the more than 50 years of solid quantitative research on beginning reading instruction contunually ignored by those who teach teachers is a mystery. Do we need a century to pass before systematic explicit phonics makes it to the classroom?
"In part the lack of evidence is a matter of time. As with any newly emerging field of inquiry, it can take many years for a significant number of studies to be done as the basis for reliable knowledge. The ideas in the new field of work must first come into wide circulation, then have to be adopted for study by active researchers, who then have to develop methods and programs of research, find funding for the work, conduct the studies and finally report the results. The challenges are greater in social policy fields such as education where the research effort as a whole is small, especially in relation to the size of the education sector."
I believe he underestimates how serious the effect of this actually has on student achievement, although he hopes for improvement.
Is much of the education research is irrelevant to classroom practice because researchers ask the wrong questions in the first place?
Indeed, the analysis here is based on the belief that the use of research is fundamentally a social and organizational process. Whether people are interested in, pay attention to and make use of research evidence depends much more on their organizational setting and social relations than it does on their individual background or dispositions.
It is also the case that influence can and does run in the other direction—from practice to research. Research topics and approaches can be and often are shaped by the interests of policy-makers and practitioners. Researchers who work closely with or in the other contexts are inevitably influenced in their ideas about appropriate topics, findings and methods. This relationship is much less studied and deserves more attention (Huberman, 1999; Bauer & Fischer, 2007).
Why is good, sound research, particularly the body of work by Adams, Stanowich, Chall, Johnson, et al. did on beginning reading for example, completely ignored by faculties of education and the powers that be that govern them?
"The reason that information alone does not change behavior is because policy and practice are shaped much more by interpersonal relationships and social contexts than by individual knowledge or dispositions. In other words, people's ideas and behaviour are much more influenced by their experience, their colleagues and the practices of their organziations than they are by external evidence (Cordingley, 2008; Mitton et al., 2007). Study after study (Landry et al., 2001;Williams & Coles, 2003; Coburn & Talbert, 2006; Cordingley, 2008; Behrstock et al., 2009; Coburn et al., 2009; Daly, in press) reports that practitioners in every field give greater weight to the views of their colleagues and their interpretations of their own experience than they do to research evidence. Or, to put it another way, research evidence is mediated through personal experience, collegial knowledge and organizational cultures."
The paper is a good general explanation of why education research takes particular philosophical direction, why fads spring up and persist, and why faculties of education, frankly, do an inadequate job of what Levin calls knowledge mobilization.
So, as an education researcher, is Levin is arguing against himself?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Cracks appear in the union fort
Seems a Richmond Hill teacher at the York Region school board has thumbed her nose at the union call not to particpate in extra-curricular activities. Read story and her open letter to the union here and here. What makes this more remarkable is that she was her school's union shop steward!
This brave teacher says the union will no longer control her choices or be bullied by intimidation: “You cannot compel me or any other member to withdraw from voluntary activities. I will attend monthly staff meetings. I will run my choir. I will plan field trips. I will attend meetings outside the instructional day, if I so choose. And I will not allow you or other executive officers to diminish or dismiss me.” Beattie also writes, "Stewards who do not conform are asked to step down, as I did. I have learned from experience that raising concerns about the actions of our union executive is greeted with hostility and disrespect. You claim that teachers want their “voices heard”, but sadly, the only voices that are welcomed in our organization are the ones that concur with the leadership.""
So take that union bosses.
Teachers should know that school choice would free them too.
PS to this post: More cracks are appearing as another teacher joins the fray.