Category Archives: Performance Gap

I Got Schooled – Practice #1 – Effective teachers

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I Got Schooled Practice #1 – Effective teachers – hiring good and dropping poor

Through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan spent five years studying what is succeeding in closing the education gap that depended only on factors inside the classroom itself and that were scalable. He discovered closing the achievement gap can’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself; five things must be implemented together to have any substantive effect.

Shyamalan uncovers five factors present in schools he found were significantly closing the education gap for inner city children and children of color. He provides just tons of example schools, clinical studies, data and statistics, detailing each of these five factors.

These posts are highlights for each of these five factors for folks who might feel they are too busy to read the whole book … and strongly whet your appetite for doing so. The five factors are:

  • Effective teachers – dropping poor, hiring good
  • Right balance of leadership
  • Feedback that is timely and consistent
  • Smaller schools
  • More time in school

EFFECTIVE TEACHERS – dropping poor, hiring good

  • Are the engine that make schools run
  • Not all teachers perform equally (as do neither all salesmen, lawyers, accountants, basketball players, school principals, …)
  • Get the least effective teachers out of classrooms
  • You can discover who underperformers are
  • National studies find just 2% of teachers are rated unsatisfactory
  • Teachers in the middle, performance-wise, may be the most important factor for scaling success to 132,656 K-12 schools nationwide in 2010
  • One year with a great teacher is worth $20,000 in lifetime earnings for every student in that class
  • The effects of poor teachers in student learning outweighs the benefits provided by the good ones
  • Someone who barely graduated from Nowhere State is just as likely to be a great teacher as someone with a Summa Cum Laude from Harvard
  • Until you see them teach, you are picking blind; seeing them teach takes 2 to 3 years
  • After 2-3 years, tenure locks both good and bad teachers in place
  • Release procedures can take  300 days and cost $250,000, and so becomes too much trouble to take on
  • By replacing just 5 to 8% of the least effective teachers with average teachers, student overall achievement scores would rise to those of Canada or Finland
  • There is no evidence we can improve teachers’ performance by giving them bonuses or sending them to graduate school
  • Reliable tools must be used to determine teacher competence and effectiveness
  • Actual-versus-expected student progress can be a valid rating system (i.e., Value Added Method – VAM)
  • But … “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”  Voltaire
  • Hence the teacher evaluation problem: “Until someone comes up with a perfect tool for judging teachers, one that judges no teacher unfairly, there’s no point in using anything.”
  • If no one can be fired without a “fair” evaluation, and a fair evaluation needs to be error-free, then no one can be fired.
  • Multiple tests, as designed by the Measures of Effective Teaching project (MET),  are providing greater reliability and validity to teacher evaluation (see the MET January 2013 final report)
  • Good news: an inner city student having a great teacher for four years in a row will close the gap separating her from her suburban counterpart, without doing anything else
  • Bad news: three great teachers won’t make up for one poor one
  • The ratio of great teachers to poor teachers is nowhere near three-to-one
  • For schools on the wrong side of the achievement gap, these “roadblock” teachers effectively trap students
  • Eliminating roadblock teachers is a necessary first step toward closing America’s achievement gap, but it’s not sufficient in and of itself. “You can’t fire your way to excellence.”
  • Hiring good teachers and releasing bad ones is a scalable practice

Next up: The right balance of leadership

Closing the education gap – new book – “I Got Schooled”

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This summary, borrowed from Amazon:  I Got Schooled, offers a look at America’s educational achievement gap that could only have come from an outsider. 

Famed director M. Night Shyamalan has long had a serious interest in education. The MNS Founda­tion he and his wife started once gave college scholarships to promising inner-city students, but Shyamalan realized that these scholarships did nothing to improve education for all the other students in under-performing schools. When he learned that some schools were succeeding with similar student populations, he traveled across the country to find out how they did this and whether these schools had something in common. He eventually learned that there are five keys to closing America’s achievement gap. But just as we must do several things simultaneously to maintain good health— eat the right foods, exercise regularly, get a good night’s sleep—so too must we use all five keys to turn around our lowest-performing schools.

These five keys are used by all the schools that are succeeding, and no schools are succeeding without them. Before he discovered them, Shyamalan investigated some popular reform ideas that proved to be dead ends, such as smaller class size, truculent unions, and merit pay for teachers.  He found that the biggest obstacle to school reform is cognitive biases: too many would-be reformers have committed themselves to false solutions (*) .

This is a deeply personal book by an unbiased observer determined to find out what works and why, so that we as a nation can fulfill our obliga­tion to give every student an opportunity for a good education.

(*) Not the answer to closing the education gap:

  • small classroom sizes
  • master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers
  • paying teachers like doctors
  • funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil

Truly a book worth reading … and sharing … widely.

Here is a 58 minute video interview with M. Night Shyamalan that’s worth watching         [click here to watch].

For busy people, I am posting a summary at  tommilesabq.com  of each of the five practices MNS Foundation discovered that “moved the needle” in closing the gap.

 

Eight problems with Common Core Standards

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Eight problems with Common Core Standards

By , Washington Post,  Posted at 11:37 AM ET, 08/21/2012

Correction: The original post said incorrectly that the Common Core was written with no public dialogue or feedback from experienced educators. The post now says there was insufficient public dialogue and feedback from experienced educators.

This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” was published March 1, 1987.

So it was probably in March of that year when, sitting at a dining room table in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, my host — a publishing executive, friend, and fellow West Virginian — said he’d just bought the book. He hadn’t read it yet, but wondered how Hirsch’s list of 5,000 things he thought every American should know differed from a list we Appalachians might write.

I don’t remember what I said, but it was probably some version of what I’ve long taken for granted: Most people think that whatever they and the people they like happen to know, everybody else should be required to know.

In education, of course, what it’s assumed that everybody should be required to know is called “the core.” Responsibility for teaching the core is divvied up between teachers of math, science, language arts, and social studies.

Variously motivated corporate interests, arguing that the core was being sloppily taught, organized a behind-the-scenes campaign to super-standardize it. They named their handiwork the Common Core State Standards to hide the fact that it was driven by policymakers in Washington D.C., who have thus far shoved it into every state except Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia.

This was done with insufficient public dialogue or feedback from experienced educators, no research, no pilot or experimental programs — no evidence at all that a floor-length list created by unnamed people attempting to standardize what’s taught is a good idea.

It’s a bad idea. Ignore the fact that specific Common Core State Standards will open up enough cans of worms to keep subject-matter specialists arguing among themselves forever. Consider instead the merit of Standards from a general perspective:

One: Standards shouldn’t be attached to school subjects, but to the qualities of mind it’s hoped the study of school subjects promotes. Subjects are mere tools, just as scalpels, acetylene torches, and transits are tools. Surgeons, welders, surveyors — and teachers — should be held accountable for the quality of what they produce, not how they produce it.

Two: The world changes. The future is indiscernible. Clinging to a static strategy in a dynamic world may be comfortable, even comforting, but it’s a Titanic-deck-chair exercise.

Three: The Common Core Standards assume that what kids need to know is covered by one or another of the traditional core subjects. In fact, the unexplored intellectual terrain lying between and beyond those familiar fields of study is vast, expands by the hour, and will go in directions no one can predict.

Four: So much orchestrated attention is being showered on the Common Core Standards, the main reason for poor student performance is being ignored—a level of childhood poverty the consequences of which no amount of schooling can effectively counter.

Five: The Common Core kills innovation. When it’s the only game in town, it’s the only game in town.

Six: The Common Core Standards are a set-up for national standardized tests, tests that can’t evaluate complex thought, can’t avoid cultural bias, can’t measure non-verbal learning, can’t predict anything of consequence (and waste boatloads of money).

Seven: The word “standards” gets an approving nod from the public (and from most educators) because it means “performance that meets a standard.” However, the word also means “like everybody else,” and standardizing minds is what the Standards try to do. Common Core Standards fans sell the first meaning; the Standards deliver the second meaning. Standardized minds are about as far out of sync with deep-seated American values as it’s possible to get.

Eight: The Common Core Standards’ stated aim — “success in college and careers”— is at best pedestrian, at worst an affront. The young should be exploring the potentials of humanness.

You can read the full article  here.

One key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don’t

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Great article from Quartz Daily News – qz.com                   [Read the whole article here.]

“I’m just not a math person.”

We hear it all the time. And we’ve had enough. Because we believe that the idea of “math people” is the most self-destructive idea in America today. The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career. Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is harming underprivileged children—the myth of inborn genetic math ability.

Here are some summary points:

For high school math, inborn talent is just much less important than hard work, preparation, and self-confidence.

Again and again, we have seen the following pattern repeat itself:

  1. Different kids with different levels of preparation come into a math class. Some of these kids have parents who have drilled them on math from a young age, while others never had that kind of parental input.
  2. On the first few tests, the well-prepared kids get perfect scores, while the unprepared kids get only what they could figure out by winging it—maybe 80 or 85%, a solid B.
  3. The unprepared kids, not realizing that the top scorers were well-prepared, assume that genetic ability was what determined the performance differences. Deciding that they “just aren’t math people,” they don’t try hard in future classes, and fall further behind.
  4. The well-prepared kids, not realizing that the B students were simply unprepared, assume that they are “math people,” and work hard in the future, cementing their advantage.

Thus, people’s belief that math ability can’t change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The idea that math ability is mostly genetic is one dark facet of a larger fallacy that intelligence is mostly genetic. Academic psychology journals are well stocked with papers studying the world view that lies behind the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy we just described.

Convincing students that they could make themselves smarter by hard work led them to work harder and get higher grades. The intervention had the biggest effect for students who started out believing intelligence was genetic. (A control group, who were taught how memory works, showed no such gains.)

But improving grades was not the most dramatic effect, “Dweck reported that some of her tough junior high school boys were reduced to tears by the news that their intelligence was substantially under their control.” It is no picnic going through life believing you were born dumb—and are doomed to stay that way.

While American fourth and eighth graders score quite well in international math comparisons—beating countries like Germany, the UK and Sweden—our high-schoolers  underperform those countries by a wide margin. This suggests that Americans’ native ability is just as good as anyone’s, but that we fail to capitalize on that ability through hard work. In response to the lackluster high school math performance, some influential voices in American education policy have suggested simply teaching less math—for example, Andrew Hacker has called for algebra to no longer be a requirement. The subtext, of course, is that large numbers of American kids are simply not born with the ability to solve for x.

One way to help Americans excel at math is to copy the approach of the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans.  In Intelligence and How to Get It, Nisbett describes how the educational systems of East Asian countries focus more on hard work than on inborn talent:

1. “Children in Japan go to school about 240 days a year, whereas children in the United States go to school about 180 days a year.”

2. “Japanese high school students of the 1980s studied 3 ½ hours a day, and that number is likely to be, if anything, higher today.”
3. “[The inhabitants of Japan and Korea] do not need to read this book to find out that intelligence and intellectual accomplishment are highly malleable. Confucius set that matter straight twenty-five hundred years ago.”
4. “When they do badly at something, [Japanese, Koreans, etc.] respond by working harder at it.”
5. “Persistence in the face of failure is very much part of the Asian tradition of self-improvement. And [people in those countries] are accustomed to criticism in the service of self-improvement in situations where Westerners avoid it or resent it.”

Besides cribbing a few tricks from the Japanese, we also have at least one American-style idea for making kids smarter: treat people who work hard at learning as heroes and role models. We already venerate sports heroes who make up for lack of talent through persistence and grit; why should our educational culture be any different?

Math education, we believe, is just the most glaring area of a slow and worrying shift. We see our country moving away from a culture of hard work toward a culture of belief in genetic determinism. In the debate between “nature vs. nurture,” a critical third element—personal perseverance and effort—seems to have been sidelined. We want to bring it back, and we think that math is the best place to start.

Read the whole article here.

Follow Miles on Twitter at @mileskimball. Follow Noah at @noahpinion. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com

Common Core State Standards kerfuffle?

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In the last few weeks and days, I’ve come across a number of articles expressing pro’s and con’s  about Common Core State Standards (CCSS), with critics mounting a flurry of attacks and proponents working hard to shore up support. One pretty good overview article is Common Core Under Fire: How Strong Is Support for New State Standards? You can get as many details as you want by clicking on various links.

My Prezi presentation on New Mexico’s use of CCSS gives a pretty good overview of what they are, what their intent is, and how they are planned to be used in New Mexico.

The Common Core evolved from a 2009-2010 drive by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to delineate world-class skills students should possess. The standards, created with funding from, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, set detailed goals, such as first graders should understand place values in math and eighth graders should know the Pythagorean Theorem.

“We brought the best minds in the country together to create international benchmarks that, once mastered, would make our students more competitive, globally,” said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. He said his group has no plans to create national science standards.

Here is a brief summary of some of the pro and con positions:

Pro

  • A Kentucky fifth grade teacher said, “These standards take students much deeper into the subjects and force them to do more critical thinking,”
  • No Child Left Behind allowed states to create their own unique standards; which could give them the appearance of higher “scores”
  • A 2010 Fordham Institute study found CCSS Common Core to be “a great improvement with regard to rigor and cohesiveness”
  • CCSS do not dictate curriculum (e.g., textbooks and reading lists) or prescribe methods of instruction  
  • Education technology providers have already been designing products based on CCSS

Con

  • This is a federal intrusion into states rights via Race-To-The-Top via financial incentive
  • 5 states worry  CCSS establishes a de facto “national curriculum” (Utah, South Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Alabama)
  • Implementation may require more time than planned or allowed
  • Republican National Committee decided at their March 2013 approved a resolution condemning CCSS
  • Can standards-based education also be individualized?
  • Seeing children as education industry profit centers may be problematic

So, what do YOU say?

No Rich Child Left Behind

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This is a summary of a lengthy article in the New York Times Online, discussing why and how wealth and early child preparedness has affected, is effecting, schools and society.

Society … that’s you and me, by the way.       Click here to read the article.

  • Children of the rich perform better than middle-class or poor children (all grades, test scores, extracurricular activities, leadership, graduation, higher education).
  • While this has always been so, the test scores gap is 40% larger than in the 1970s.
  • NAEP scores (National Assessment of Educational Progress) have been rising for all populations since the 1970s.
  • The gap isn’t much affected either positively or negatively by K-12 school experiences.
  • It boils down to this: Rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference persists through to high school.
  • The rich have more money and can (and do) focus more of it on early childhood education/experience.
  • It would be supportive to somehow improve the quality of parenting and early child environments.
  • Expand Nurse-Family Partnerships for single parents.
  • Provide greater support for maternity leave and day care.

One commenter named Howard, summed it up nicely, ” … to use another metaphor, the odds are against the seeds that fall on stony ground, no matter how good their genetic makeup.”

Click here to read the article.