SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all

Sunday at the Movies has been moved to Monday at the Movies because of the following important announcement.

The discussion in the comments section of our blog has got totally out of hand. We at SQE hoped that our comments section would be a place where people with an interest in education - educators, parents, taxpayers, trustees, administrators, book publishers, education professors, union officials, etc. – could come together and exchange views and information. Like the five blind men who touch an elephant to find out what it is like and then come to completely different conclusions on the basis of the body part they happened to connect with, we are all doomed to have incomplete information about the education beast – unless we can find a way to pool our points of view and knowledge of the system.

Genuine information exchanges are couched in language such as “I read what you wrote and I can see that it is valid in certain circumstances, but have you considered…..?” or “Wow, I never realized that a teacher might view this situation in such a way – thanks for this great insight – but here is how it looks from the point of view of a taxpayer…” or “Could you please elaborate on your statement about the usefulness of testing, especially with regard to how to evaluate the curriculum?” or “Would the following study (link provided) cause you to modify your views?” or “That’s an interesting argument, but how can you square it with the fact that…”

Starting immediately, any commenter who violates this protocol will be banned indefinitely. I’m going to be away all day today and so I won’t be able to act until tonight, but after that…..

The black box of teaching methods

Continuing with yesterday’s theme, bolstered by the unanimous agreement with my point of view (joke), I have been pondering why teaching methods continue to fly largely below the radar - despite their obvious importance. Here’s a posting that grapples with this puzzling phenomenon. In a nutshell, the author says that no one in the education world has an incentive to improve teaching methods. This is a sweeping claim obviously, but there must be some truth to it - otherwise, there would be a focus on better methods, which there clearly is not. Piranhas, attack!

There are none so blind as cannot see

Those who read the comments section of our blog will see ample proof of the entrenched attitudes of status quo educators - for example, the resistance to the research evidence that systematic phonics will enable students to become better readers. It turns out that this kind of resistance to new discoveries is not at all unusual. Of course, everyone knows about the creationists who to this day deny the validity of evolution or the persecution suffered by Galileo for teaching that the earth revolved around the sun. So I thought you might be interested in the discussion of the resistance to new discoveries about the cause of scurvy, found in Bill Bryson's latest book At Home: A short history of private life. After establishing the seriousness of the disease (as many as two million sailors died of scurvy between 1500 and 1850), Bryson begins by discussing efforts to discover what was causing it (pp 166-167).

• In roughly the same period, James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a more scientifically rigorous (and personally less risky) experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir - vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body.
• It fell to the great Captain James Cook to get matters onto the right course. On his circumnavigation of the globe in 1768-71, Captain Cook packed a range of antiscorbutics to experiment on, including thirty gallons of carrot marmalade and a hundred pounds of sauerkraut for every crew member. Not one person died from scurvy on his voyage - a miracle that made him as much a national hero as his discovery of Australia or any of his other many achievements on that epic undertaking. The Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific institution, was so impressed that it awarded him the Copley Medal, its highest distinction. The British navy itself was not so quick, alas. Even in the face of all the evidence, it procrastinated for another generation before finally providing citrus juice to sailors as a matter of routine.
• The realization that an inadequate diet caused not only scurvy but a range of common diseases was remarkably slow to become established. Not until 1897 did a Dutch physician named Christiaan Eijkman, working in Java, notice that people who ate whole-grain rice didn't get beriberi, a debilitating nerve disease, while people who ate polished rice very often did. Clearly some thing or things were present in some foods, and missing in others, and served as a determinant of well-being. It was the beginning of an understanding of 'deficiency disease', as it was known, and it won Eijkman the Nobel Prize in medicine even though he had no idea what these active agents were. The real breakthrough came in 1912, when Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist working at the Lister Institute in London, isolated thiamine, or vitamin B1, as it is now more generally known. Realizing it was part of a family of molecules, he combined the terms vital and amines to make the new word vitamines. Although Funk was right about the vital part, it turned out that only some of the vitamines were amines (that is to say, nitrogen-bearing), and so the name was changed to vitamins to make it 'less emphatically inaccurate', in Anthony Smith's nice phrase.
• Funk also asserted that there was a direct correlation between a deficiency of specific amines and the onset of certain diseases - scurvy, pellagra, and rickets in particular. This was a huge insight and had the potential to save millions of shattered lives, but unfortunately it wasn't heeded. The leading medical textbook of the day continued to insist that scurvy was caused by any number of factors - 'insanitary surroundings, overwork, mental depression and exposure to cold and damp' were the principal ones its authors thought worth listing - and only marginally by dietary deficiency. Worse still, in 1917 America's leading nutritionist, E. V. McCollum of the University of Wisconsin - the very man who coined the terms vitamin A and B - declared that scurvy was not in fact a dietary deficiency disease at all, but was caused by constipation.

The true value of teachers

A while back in our blog, there was a discussion of the legitimacy of judging teachers on the basis of the value they add to their students' test scores (how much teachers raise or lower their students' test scores, adjusting for the students' characteristics). The main objections were that (a) the use of value-added assessment may unfairly penalize teachers who are assigned hard-to-teach students and (b) that student test scores are not a valid measure of teacher effectiveness.

Now comes a Harvard study that looks at these two objections. Tracking one million children from grade 4 to adulthood, the researchers tracked the impact of teachers who had already been identified as adding value (VA) on their students' test scores and their students' long-term outcomes.

Objection #1
The researchers found that "when a high VA teacher joins a school, test scores rise immediately in the grade taught by that teacher; when a high VA teacher leaves, test scores fall. Test scores change only in the subject taught by that teacher, and the size of the change in scores matches what we predict based on the teacher’s VA."

Objection #2
The researchers found that "students assigned to higher VA teachers are more successful in many dimensions. They are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers."

Among other things, the researchers found that "overall, our study shows that great teachers create great value and that test score impacts are helpful in identifying such teachers". H/T LJCD

More Beat-the-odds schools

Yesterday, I promised more examples of schools that succeed with low-socioeconomic students. When I googled no-excuses schools, I turned up lots of examples in the US. Here's a site that leads to lots of such schools. And here's Marva Collins, a Marvallous educator who has been doing it for more than 45 years - proving that there's nothing new under the sun. Lastly, just to show the phenomenon isn't confined to the US, here's a link to a school in England that has been lifting up its mostly-immigrant, mostly-ESL, mostly-impoverished students for more than 10 years. I don't know of any current examples of Canadian no-excuses schools (although I'm sure they exist), but I found an article in our archives that is relevant.

Schools that beat the odds

In a comment to yesterday's blog, Andrew asked for examples of schools that are succeeding in teaching basic skills to low-socioeconomic kids. I will plan to give a few more examples tomorrow, but I decided to start with the KIPP schools since there are now 109 of them and all are apparently succeeding. Rather than provide some dull statistics (available on the KIPP website), I thought I would give a couple of excerpts from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. 

• KIPP Academy seems like the kind of school in the kind of neighborhood with the kind of student that would make educators despair - except that the minute you enter the building, it's clear that something is different. The students walk quietly down the hallways in single file. In the classroom, they are taught to turn and address anyone talking to them in a protocol known as 'SSLANT': smile, sit up, listen, ask questions, nod when being spoken to, and track with your eyes. On the walls of the school's corridors are hundreds of pennants from the colleges that KIPP graduates have gone on to attend. Last year, hundreds of families from across the Bronx entered the lottery for KIPP's two fifth-grade classes. It is no exaggeration to say that just over ten years into its existence, KIPP has become one of the most desirable public schools in New York City. (p. 251)
• The student's name is Marita. She's an only child who lives in a single-parent home. Her mother never went to college. The two of them share a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Marita used to go to a parochial school down the street from her home, until her mother heard of KIPP. 'When I was in fourth grade, me and one of my other friends, Tanya, we both applied to KIPP,' Marita said. 'I remember Miss Owens. She interviewed me, and the way she was saying made it sound so hard I thought I was going to prison. I almost started crying. And she was like, If you don't want to sign this, you don't have to sign this. But then my mom was right there, so I signed it.' With that, her life changed. (pp. 263-264)
• [Marita] has made a bargain with her school. She will get up at five-forty-five in the morning, go in on Saturdays, and do homework until eleven at night. In return, KIPP promises that it will take kids like her who are stuck in poverty and give them a chance to get out. It will get 84 percent of them up to or above their grade level in mathematics. On the strength of that performance, 90 percent of KIPP students get scholarships to private or parochial high schools instead of having to attend their own desultory high schools in the Bronx. And on the strength of that high school experience, more than 80 percent of KIPP graduates will go on to college, in many cases being the first in their family to do so. How could that be a bad bargain? (p. 267)

It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it

I don't know how many of our readers follow the comments in our blog, but just so's you know - an ongoing (and ongoing and ongoing) argument has been ongoing seemingly forever. That is the question of whether demographics are destiny - in other words, is it impossible to teach low socioeconomic kids to a high standard. 

Margaret Wente has just written an interesting column on this topic, showing just how intransigent the differences are between well-educated affluent Canadians and poorly-educated lower-class Canadians. Their entire lifestyles are radically different, including what they eat, their divorce rates, how they exercise, and what schools they send their children to. 

On the one hand, it is probably unfair and unrealistic to expect schools to completely overcome such entrenched problems. On the other hand, we can't just throw up our hands in despair and condemn unlucky poor kids to oblivion.

It seems to me that the best shot at lifting kids out of poverty is to equip them with good basic skills - especially the ability to read, write, and add up. Without these skills, they have virtually no chance. With these skills, other things become possible.

The good news is - poverty need be no barrier to teaching low socioeconomic young kids basic skills. While it may well be harder (they change schools much more, their vocabularies are impoverished, they lack familiarity with the conventions of print, and so forth), it is definitely possible. We know this because a handful of schools are doing it.

A modest proposal: schools should make teaching the three R's their number one priority.

Sunday at the Movies (Great teachers)

Here's a short clip about an important difference between great teachers and poor teachers. It ends with an important insight about bullying. YouTube link

The facts of the matter

Larry Summers has an op-ed piece in the New York Times talking about how the knowledge explosion should lead to changes in how kids are educated. His first point is that the increasingly easy access to facts (“the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalogue”) means that “factual mastery will become less and less important”.

Dr. Summers, however, has failed to take into consideration that, while much has changed in the outside world, the physiology of the human brain has remained the same for millennia (see yesterday’s blog), and our ability to apply information is still constrained by our very limited working memory storage capacity. Here’s an excellent posting from Kitchen Table Math on this topic. 

The bottom line: students still need to learn facts and students still need to learn basic skills to automaticity.

Moonwalking with Einstein

The latest addition to our lending library is Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything. The author is a journalist who got interested in memory training when he covered the U.S. Memory Championship. Although the author had no previous aptitude for or interest in memory training, he decided to train for the contest - which he ended up winning the next year. Most people assume that memory is memory (and it deteriorates as you age), but it turns out that this is not true. "The brain is like a muscle, ... and memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it'll make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble." The book reveals many techniques (ancient and modern) for improving memory, and along the way relates many interesting stories about the denizens of the quirky subculture of memorizers. Memory, it seems, is a gift we all possess but which all too often slips our minds.

The excerpt (pp 18-19) deals with mankind's shift in memory preservation away from the oral tradition of pre-literate societies (for example, India's priests who were charged with memorizing the Vedas or the Greek epics such as the Odyssey and the Iliad). These memorized passages were repositories of useful knowledge that could be passed on to successive generations. Today, much of our collective memory has been externalized.

• Physiologically, we are virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France, among the earliest cultural artifacts to have survived to the present day. Our brains are no larger or more sophisticated than theirs. If one of their babies were to be dropped into the arms of an adoptive parent in twenty-first-century New York, the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers.
• All that differentiates us from them is our memories. Not the memories that reside in our own brains, for the child born today enters the world just as much a blank slate as the child born thirty thousands years ago, but rather the memories that are stored outside ourselves - in books, photographs, museums, and these days in digital media. Once upon a time, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty millennia since humans began paining their memories on cave walls, we've gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids - a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world's ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.
• If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we've created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained.
• The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory. It's a telling statement that pretty much the only place where you'll find people still training their memories is at the World Memory Championship and the dozen national memory contests held around the globe. What was once a cornerstone of Western culture is now at best a curiosity. But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and for our society/ What we've gained is indisputable. But what have we traded away? What does it mean that we've lost our memory?