High school is much harder. All that no excuses schools are doing, at best, is taking motivated kids, teaching them longer, and stuffing in enough information to get them test scores equivalent to the grade level of kids who don’t need all that extra help. And then off they go to high school and lose it again.
It’s just my observation, but there were a few interesting comments in that thread backed by data and then a ton of speculation. Seems like we need more data (oh, there’s another false god again).
Interesting. Would be even more so if his blog or twitter account identified his real name.
Education Realist is completely correct and expresses the accurate point very well.
But …
It’s easy to see false myth of the magic of charters as a noble lie, and that efforts by some realistic non-progressives to keep it alive despite their awareness of this fact has become a forgivable sin.
Non-progressives perceive themselves as having nearly entirely lost political, cultural, and economic control of publicly funded education to the ideologues. There is no other way to escape the insanity. There is zero hope of changing anything through voice or activism, since the progressives have political, media, and legal ‘defense in depth’ many layers thick.
So the only affordable hope is exit to charters that somehow get unprincipled exceptions to do things these parents want and which they can’t get from the government schools.
And the only political language that seems to work to justify normal charters for middle class whites is to pretend they are in the and category as the very different No Excuses charters which one has to insist is better for minority kids at raising scores and closing the gap. Because that’s the only thing one is allowed to say anymore, and the only ‘argument’ one is allowed to make.
Playing lip service to a popular or PC myth as the only permissible method of achieving ones legitimate goals is morally fraught, but at the same time, it’s hard not to sympathize with parents or advocates who have little other rhetorical choice in terms of nudging the intellectual climate in a direction that tolerates this political indulgence.
It’s unfortunate that we don’t know who education realist is, but he has a web site and lots of posts there that have accumulated over the years, and he seems to (I think) always post / comment under his nomme de plume at various other sites and blogs. We don’t know who he is, but we can mostly ascertain his opinion on things and the forms of reasoning / argument / evidence that he gravitates to.
I have no idea who he is–I just read him because sometimes he is interesting and fairly often he writes well and is funny.
Yes, there was a lot of speculation there at that thread, and much of it was mine.
I think of the general idea / theme / topic as falling within “Null Hypothesis Watch.” We are just trying to figure out whether any policy intervention (statistical treatment in the case of No Excuses or KIPP schools) actually makes a difference in the long run. Or do those treatments “fade out”, as the intervention of Head Start fades out until you can’t tell the distinguish the treatment population from the controls.
I think Arnold believes that it’s hard to reject the Null Hypothesis when it comes to educational programs / interventions. However, there are some schools that are so bad that we improve outcomes just by eliminating them so that no students are subjected to them.
I interpret that as similar to saying that it’s hard to make your kids smarter as adults through child enrichment–we mostly see fade out by adulthood if not earlier. But, you can still derail your childrens’ development by tying them up with electrical cord and locking them in the closet, starving them, beating them unpredictably, never speaking a word to them, isolating them from peer groups and social interaction, etc. Enrichment may fade out, but gross flagrant abuse can hurt and result in long term measurable consequences.
Perhaps there are schools that are so bad that they can be classified as gross flagrant abuse.
Then the second part of the discussion is this. If the treatment of No Excuses or KIPP won’t take low income urban minority kids from low SES families and make them as smart as the UMC kids, then what is the underlying variable that the UMC kids have?
Educational Realist argues for genetic endowment (I think). genetic endowment drives near effortless good reading proficiency. I sympathize with that argument because it fits my own impressionistic evaluation of myself and some of my family members.
Getting back to the argument–In high school something else happens. I think that’s where the argument gets diffuse / unstructured (and my musings probably contributed to diffuseness).
What happens in high school?
I’m guessing that a lot of it is peer group dynamics. See Judith Rich Harris for details. Hormones kick in, peers are important, the whole setting changes.
I’m guessing a lot of it is is cognitive demands for “self-management” of time and attention. I’m not even sure how you measure that.
A couple things in the back of my head during this discussion are
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-7-tribes-of-intellect.html
and also
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/07/replacing-education-with-psychometrics.html
The idea that the totality of the “education process” is “nurture” may need to be reassessed.
Some recognition of the distinction of the functions of “teaching” and “learning” at differing levels of development need to be recognized and understood.
In the beginning stages of the process there is teaching, demonstrations of what is out there to be observed; what others have already learned; how it was leaned, etc..
By phases that has to move over into less teaching and more learning, which, except for the talented, requires some demonstrations of *how* to learn. [There are some complaints those tasks have been subordinated to attempts at explaining the “need” or benefits of learning (motivation).]
However, we find “teaching” rather than learning has become more and more predominant at the secondary and post secondary levels. Teaching often becomes no more than indoctrination displacing enquiry and learning in many conceptual fields.
Very well stated, and often think similar things about how one possible aim of schooling is in helping one learn to be an autodidact, and then providing resources and direction to support that behavior, as well as certification and credentialing.
Even the modeling and imitation style of learning does not reach the inefficiency of the class lecture. Read (or watch video of) the lectures, then come to a classroom (or online forum) to ask questions seems like the best innovation to emerge in recent years.
If you read _The Bell Curve_ there are some chilling passages about the growth of public institutions fulfilling a “custodial function.”
100 years ago in the USA, poor immigrants from Southern Italy pushed their children into the labor market at the earliest opportunity. Farm kids across the country did meaningful work by the time they were 7. No more than about 20% of the youth went to high school until about the 1920s if I understand the historical data correctly.
Now, kids are required to stay in school, and meanwhile the schools (so it seems to me) are hollowed out in part by teachers and staff with a “producer interest”–in part simply just wanting to hang onto their jobs so it can be a stable career with benefits and a pension.
This is one subtext of a lot of education–the educational system has this massive population of kids held in custody. The stated goal is education and child development. There are opportunities to experiment. We won’t allow the kids to do anything else–leave school and work for a living, go into the wider world. So we’d better be doing something productive. And how hard could that be? (pretty hard, actually, it seems).
But they have no excuses high schools… 4 of the US News and Report top ten schools were BASIS schools.
Basis Schools are charters, but not No Excuses. They cream off only the very top and their attrition rates are extremely high.
No excuses schools are like KIPP (North Star is another, also Rocketship) that have strict discipline, high suspension rates, long hours, and a heavy emphasis on the basics.
I admire Ed. He’s on the front lines, an actual high school teacher. His students are ethnically diverse and their parents aren’t high-income. He has good reasons to write anonymously. For example …
Deep down–or not so deep down–every high school teacher knows that there is far more in the curriculum than 95% of the students will even come close to learning. Every one of them knows that without extensive review, students will do substantially worse on mid-terms and finals than they did on the preceding “chapter tests.” And by the next year? Math colleagues used to tell me that they spent the first quarter of algebra II reteaching algebra I. So what can a teacher do?
You can “cover” all the material, make it obvious what will be on the chapter test, drill some, review the chapter right before the exam, and trust that enough students will remember enough on test day that your admin won’t think you are a bad teacher. Then drop most (or all) of that chapter’s material and go on to the next. (Fortunately, most text books are written that way.) By high school, this is what most students have come to expect. They more or less accept it as the way school is, and will put more or less effort into doing well. For many of them, that isn’t a lot. It seems pointless (“When am I ever going to use this?”) and it makes them failures because they don’t do well. Not surprisingly, students with more successful parents are more willing to put in effort.
Alternatively, you can make no effort to cover all the material. You can pick out parts that you think are exceptionally important and try to make students master them. Or you can spend a lot of time with the students’ using what they have learned to discover things in the curriculum–something that requires a tremendous amount of skill and patience on the part of the teacher.
I gather that Ed does the latter two. In so doing, he creates a lot fewer kids who feel like failures–and probably produces more lasting learning. But he can get into trouble if it is publicly known that he quite deliberately doesn’t try to cover the curriculum.
Thanks, Roger and Charles.
a) I’ve been writing on this topic for nearly five years, under the same moniker. So my identity is constant. A fair number of people know who I am, including reporters. As Roger says, I teach math at a highly diverse Title I high school. I came to teaching from tutoring, where I worked mostly with wealthy white kids, and Asian test prep, where I worked mostly with middle class Asian immigrant kids. I have experience with an extremely broad racial and socioeconomic range, far more than most teachers do.
b) Roger describes my priorities pretty accurately (the middle of the three particularly) but the reason I write anonymously is because I discuss both race and IQ, and that’s a dangerous thing to do.
c) I assume nature, not nurture, but the *cause* of the achievement gap is not something I’m terribly fussed about. What’s important to accept, in my view, is that the current excuses are wrong. It’s time to look for other possibilities, including methods of educating people with low IQs (again, regardless of cause).
In the comments, Richard made some comments about “teaching” rather than “learning”, and they are quite apt. I focus all my efforts on imparting information in a way that kids can learn. Nationally, this debate is often described as “traditionalist” vs. “progressive” (or discovery). That oversimplifies it. Both methods are terrible in different ways. Hence my desire for research to examine different possibilities.
Thanks for highlighting my comment.
There is a form of facilitation where one “works with” students (new to the subject) in those students learning.
The learning processes of individuals, while similar and sometimes congruent, vary from individual to individual and the very effective facilitators somehow find ways to identify those differences and adapt modes of working with each learning process.
And it always helps if the students want to learn what is being taught. Unfortunately, most high school students most of the time have no intrinsic interest in what the school says they should be learning.