expectations

What if schools/districts could deny service to kids they were unequipped for or just didn’t want to deal with? That boy who can’t stop his mouth, no matter what consequences are applied? Send him home. The girl who never follows any of the instructions and chats with her friends, dragging their performance down as well? Gone.

Now this is obviously a bad idea for all concerned. The children affected by this would be worse off. And parents have an expectation that when their otherwise healthy children reach school age, they’ll be in school.

But are there no expectations, other than an arbitrary number of birthdays, that determine eligibility for school attendance? If a child is interfering with other students’ experience — holding up the whole class for parts of the day, preventing lessons from being taught in an orderly, damaging materials — what recourse does a school or teacher have? At what point does the burden of failure point to the home and the lack of preparation/socialization there? Bearing in mind that students are only in school 6 hours a day, the same kids don’t get to school until they’re five years old. What work has been done to prepare them for

  • working with others
  • taking instruction from someone other than a parent
  • taking care of classroom materials, as opposed to easily-replaced household goods?

I’m not arguing for expulsion of the students who need school most: that would be cruel, both now and down the road. It would have consequences for the rest of their lives. But by the same token, what kind of shared responsibility can be forged between parents and teachers to help those who need it most? No expectations can be put on the students. But what of the parents’ responsibility to their children, to make them ready for the challenges ahead? Who knows them better on that first day? Who knows how they’ll react to the many new stimuli — bells, new routines, room changes, new faces and voices — better than their parents? And how do they pass along that information? I’m sure every teacher loves hearing how special little Johnny is or how Jane is surely gifted and will be moving on to a more challenging classroom/better teacher in no time.

But what practical issues of routine and ritual are shared? What kind of hours does little Johnny keep? Is he accustomed to sleeping til 9 and staying up til 10 or later? Does he eat meals or just graze through the day? How prepared is little Jane, academically: is she reading at all, writing, does she like to sing, does she know her colors or letters (the underlying question here is: how much time have her parents spent on these areas? How much will she be behind the other kids whose parents have done some of this?)?

The idea of a partnership between parents and teachers is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention. I think it should. When I realize my neighbors have declined to show up for curriculum night two years running, I wonder if they know what message that sends to the teachers and their only child? The teachers put a lot of work into their short but dense presentations, on top of a full day’s work, and with the promise of more work via the various online methods available today. We specifically went to see the teachers and get any insight we could into materials and subject matter, grading policy and other expectations. We came away pleased and prepared to work with them. Who wouldn’t want that?

Root causes

A veteran educator with 25 years of service shared some thoughts on student achievement with me the other day. As in many large cities, there are differences in socioeconomic status and educational attainment across the city. Here, we have a North/South divide: northend schools historically outperform their southend counterparts, just as the northern half of the city is in the higher end of the socioeconomic scale. We often think we know the reasons why students struggle and fail – lack of parental involvement, cultural differences, poor schools – but I heard a different take on this.

Lack of parental involvement — manifested by weak parent/teacher contact/communication, lack of support for homework, reading, good study habits or work ethic — is both cultural and economic. If several generations of a family can see that they have made no economic progress despite their efforts in school, they are not likely to value education as a way to improve the lives of the next generation. And some families who still believe in hard work are often unable to engage with their child’s school due to their own work demands. People making minimum wage often need more than one job to make ends meet if they have children and that additional work time is time they can’t spend at home supporting their child’s education or working with teachers to ensure their child is making progress.

But there is another aspect of this I hadn’t realized. An unstable or marginal family structure can undermine the work in those precious few hours in other ways. Two factors were laid out for me: mobility/school changes and summer vacation.

This veteran educator told me that, in his experience, kids who completed grades K-5 in the same school performed better on standardized tests than those who arrived in the school where they would be tested in the 3rd or 4th grade. There is a clear advantage to students having a consistent school experience, being able to make friends, to bond with teachers, to feel comfortable and confident (I mentioned confidence earlier and while it may not be a reliable metric, I think it’s an indicator/predictor of success). Early learners need to feel supported and know that people care about their education. This is missing in the lives of kids who move around between schools. It can also mean their home life isn’t stable. Varying custodial arrangements, different households, inconsistent parenting/role modeling can confuse and undermine a young kid. Not to say that older kids don’t need that, too, but building a foundation where kids know how to learn and that value of learning, the confidence that comes with mastery, can help the older student stay on course.

But what about summer vacation? What can be wrong there? It’s an anachronism, a relic of an agrarian past that is easily 100 years out of date. But how is it harmful? Turns out, it’s not so much what they do over the break, it’s what students don’t do.

Ten/twelve weeks of idleness for a latchkey kid with working parents, maybe working 2 or more jobs, can freeze a student in their tracks. Those few hours of school attendance and socializing are important in the intellectual and social development, their need to find their place and realize their potential. If their summer is unstructured and devoid of any enrichment, they can actually lose what they learned, like an athlete losing muscle tone or a musician losing their chops. Latchkeys kids with the TV for company aren’t prepared for returning to school like their peers who take vacations, go to museums or camps, and are supported while they’re out of school. Ten/twelve weeks out of the learning environment, when they are already at a disadvantage, will stop a kid’s progress and if it continues, will probably have a cumulative effect by the time they reach middle school. They’re in review/catchup mode while other kids are breaking new ground and that can eat away at their confidence and sense of belonging. It’s not to hard to imagine a young student starting to doubt school is for them, that there is a any point to it.

Proposed changes to the school calendar that would shrink summer break or distribute it through the year are usually framed as being more realistic, making kids more prepared for life. And that argument makes sense. Spreading the 36 weeks (more or less) of attendance around with 2-3 week breaks would be interesting to study. I never considered it as a serious disadvantage for poorer kids but it makes sense.

Making housing more stable for students, either through subsidies or other assistance, might make a big difference in the achievement gap. It sounds like meddlesome big brother-ish interference but these are kids who could use a big brother, someone to look out for them. I would like to see the test results for kids who are struggling with the state-mandated tests cross-referenced with changes in home address or custodial responsibility. If there is something to this and no one has acted on it, what a disaster.

speaking of testing

More MAP today. Very frustrating as the infrastructure seems to have been rolled out without any performance/scalability testing. Five and six year olds are generally not blessed with a lot of patience and when they are removed from their routine, their classroom, and made to sit in front of unfamiliar equipment which doesn’t work, they’re unhappy. And their teachers and other staff, less so.

Evidently, the purpose-built wireless networking equipment for the 25 or so laptops is insufficient. Response times are abysmal, with some of the units freezing to where some students had to be moved to a different station. Older wired equipment seemed to work fine, so the performance issues were not computational. Did no one roll out this system in a lab and test it? Have no other schools reported these issues? And how much taxpayer money is being spent on this? The loss of instructional time, especially given how early in the school year this comes, and the misuse of staff time as library specialists and teachers are forced to do technical support for this product is more of a waste. How hard would it be to send along the equipment to put this on a wired segment? Probably cheaper too. I think a wireless base station should support 25 clients easily, but again, was this ever tested? The old adage that “if you don’t monitor it, you aren’t managing it” rings true here, more simply expressed as “an unmonitored system isn’t in production.” Maybe too geeky for a discussion of education but it ties in with the notion of assessing performance and responding to what’s learned.

And this will be repeated in January and May. January is awfully soon anyway but consider: November is shortened by the Thanksgiving break, then we return for a 2-3 weeks before winter break, with some kids absent and many of them distracted by the upcoming holidays, then two weeks off for winter break. How much useful instructional time is in there? How much will these kids be expected to learn over that time? And will it all work any better?

high-tech or high-touch

Today was the beginning of MAP testing which is not really testing but since the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress®) is a replacement for the loathed WASL old names die hard.

So picture two dozen kindergarteners/1st graders seated at desks with laptops, mice, and headphones. Some of them had never sat in front of a laptop before. Imagine administering a self-guided assessment with students who had never seen a pencil or paper. Some teething troubles, as not all the stations were operational, missing headphones or a mouse, but easily fixed. Not so easily fixed was the design of the exercises. Given there were headphones, you know that questions and answers were read aloud to each student. Fine, though the language and terminology used by the assessment software is likely to differ from that used by the classroom teacher. Unlike a classroom teacher, a computerized test cannot alter the delivery of questions of answers to match the listener. So the assessment of the material may be skewed by how well the student can comprehend the language of the voice prompts and the written answer choices.

The MAP is intended to dynamically change the questions based on prior answers. So if a student presents strength in a given area, the questions will become increasingly more challenging, to assess their strength. Great idea, really. However, if the wording of the questions themselves is more challenging than the question’s content, how accurate can we expect the results to be?

Given the age of these students, some questions contained manipulable elements: put three apples on the plate, sort the ducks by length, for example. In the apple example, simply clicking on an apple made it appear on the plate. With the ducks, they had to be picked up and dragged into position with the mouse. Did I mention that not all of these children were experienced laptop pilots? In other questions, an equation would have a missing term and the student was to choose from a list. Rather than simply clicking on the desired element, they were expected to drag it into position. Some found the trackpad easier, or perhaps more fun, to use but the proctor/administrator wouldn’t let them: why not?

Most frustrating and possibly what makes the MAP design suspect is that there was no way for a student to indicate they didn’t know or were unfamiliar with a concept. They had to choose an answer to get to the next question. The questions I got indicated some of them understood the concept being assessed but had no way to choose from the bewildering answers. Again, how accurate can the results be?

I suppose some will argue that the fix for inadequate technnology is more technology: perhaps a touchscreen device like the iPad would work better. Color me skeptical. Teaching and assessing progress is a human activity that might be aided with computational power but I favor a high-touch over a high-tech approach. When adaptive technology can find ways to assess students with something other than a one size fits all approach, we might be getting somewhere.

Schools are a mirror of society.

:: a thoughtful public school teacher (that doesn’t narrow it down much, does it?)

confidence and competence

First day working with a class of kindergarteners and 1st graders and I am doing one-on-one assessments of reading sight words, knowledge of numerals, shapes, colors. I am struck by the poise and confidence of some of the students who can write their answers without hesitation, by the ones who misspell a word and catch their error when they read it back to themselves (those silent terminal e’s that lengthen vowel sounds are tricky). At the same time, there are some who grope for their answers with some uncertainty, as if they are unfamiliar. What makes the difference in these examples?

Preparation at home, conscious or otherwise, that demonstrates commitment to their child’s education is part of it. Perhaps some parents think the bulk of their work is done when their child walks in those schoolhouse doors. Sadly, that’s when the work really starts, when the teachers and librarians and other kids expand their exposure to all kinds of new knowledge in a new environment, purpose-built for learning. Teachers can only do so much with 20+ children and can use the support that a dedicated one-on-one parent/child relationship provides.

Children are in school 6 hours or so per day out of the 24. Consider than in those 6 school hours, children will eat lunch, have recess, engage in some other enrichment (music, art, health & fitness). That might leave only 4 hours or less of classroom time. They are capable of learning every minute they’re awake. So what happens in the 18 hours they’re not in school is at least as important as those focused and planned hours. Every child should have a family structure that treats learning as a lifelong activity and knowledge as a tool for understanding the world and one’s place in it. Too often we blame the schools for the failings of the larger society, for it’s inability or unwillingness to value each person within its care. Both society and the schools are ours to make to our requirements.

who was Robert Gibbs talking about?

If I read this right, the recent remarks by @PressSec Robert Gibbs were directed at the embittered rump who never let go of their dreams of President Hillary Clinton and at those who thought they could see Dennis Kucinich in the White House.

But Kucinich was instrumental in putting Obama on the road to victory by throwing his support to him instead to Hillary or keeping his campaign alive for ego’s sake. So those Kucinich supporters who claim their man is all principle and no pragmatism need to think that through. Or maybe the ire is because Obama owes his success to a compromise: which is it? The act or the man?

And the PUMAs who see the White House as Hillary’s entitlement for the rough ride she endured in the 90s may want to consider how lucky we are not to have Caribou Barbie a heartbeat away from the noo-kyoo-lar button. I don’t know how a McCain/Clinton matchup would have come out but I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.

Neither Clinton nor Kucinich are bad people, poor politicians, or bad Democrats. Far from it: they have both sacrificed personal ambition — no easy thing for the narcissistic personality required of successful politicians — for the greater good, for an end to the destructive policies of the first 8 years of this century that would likely have been followed or made worse by McThuselah and his sidekick.

And then there’s the pundit class whose very existence depends on attacking both sides, undermining any success, and generally doing whatever it takes to get on teevee, write OpEds and self-serving books. These people make their living stirring it up: political uproar is not incidental to their work — it is their work. These modern-day apparatchiks, like yesterday’s pols but unlike today’s, are friendlier to each other in their off-hours than when we can see them but just like today’s pols have nothing in common with the people who allow them a living.

The people who knocked on doors and collected signatures and manned phone banks and drove voters to the polls and who know that hard problems many years in the making are not solved with the stroke of a pen were not the target of Gibbs’s remarks: it’s the nattering nabobs of negativism, to coin a phrase, the naysayers who think clapping harder and wishing gets it done. Reagan/Bush pére/Clinton/Bush fils all contributed to this mess and if you’re giving up after 18 months after all these achievements, you’re letting yourself and everyone else down. If you don’t realize, after all this, that compromise and horse-trading, accepting that progress is a journey, not a place, you’re never going to be happy.

one of the more profound insights into human nature I have read

Italics added:

I don’t want to hear it about trust-fund hippie kids. Yeah, it is infuriating that they can use the safety of their middle class lives to tell themselves they are adventuresome. If they’re sanctimonious on top of that, that’s really frustrating. BUT. Think of it this way. This is what people do when they know they are safe. These kids have felt safe their entire lives and trust the world, and what do they do with that? They choose a lifestyle of openness and gentleness, of connectivity and consciousness. When you know your whole life that you can have what you want, what they want is to be in a tribe and care about nature and spirituality. (Maybe they care about nature and spirituality in an easily accessible way, but as far as cheap philosophies go, it is a kind one.) This is also what impresses me about Burning Man. When privileged people have everything they want, the next thing they want to do is build amazing things for other people (and celebrate and be nude and beautiful). People who have never been scared don’t want dominion. They want expressiveness and connection.

[From From the archives: Go to work!]

this is full of win

“The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.”

http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html