Category Archives: Testing; test scores

I Got Schooled – Practice #4 – Smaller schools

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Here is I Got Schooled  practice #4 – Smaller schools

M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has written this book to describe how, and how not, to close the education gap in the U.S. It should be very supportive in the current conversation and climate regarding what’s wrong with, and how to fix, New Mexico education.

For five years through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan studied what is succeeding in closing the education gap — that depended only on practices inside the classroom itself and that were scalable.

He discovered closing the achievement gap depended on five practices and couldn’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself.

These five practices must be implemented together to have any substantive effect:

•            Effective teachers – dropping poor; hiring good; why it’s important; how to do it

•            Leadership – how it’s important; what it looks like; how to do it

•            Feedback – critical: frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability

•            Smaller (high) schools –part of the “system” that turbocharges the other practices

•            More time in school – summers matter – children of low income and of color fall behind a month every summer; by the time they reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up

Covered: successful schools, programs, clinical studies, and data and statistics, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.

The study also found four popular, expensive practices contribute little 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

SMALLER SCHOOLS

  • Again, small size is only one part of the “system”
  • Smaller size turbocharges each of the other practices
  • The current school size debate is almost entirely focused on high schools, grades 9 through 12
  • National average elementary school size is 451 students; middle schools average 575; high school averages are 900 to 4,000 students
  • In the 1920s, the ‘high school movement’ promoted ‘comprehensive high schools’ that accepted everybody and required them to take mostly the same coursework
  • Before that time, exam requirements meant only 20 percent of kids attended high school and the rest were expected to go to work; even then, only half of the students graduated
  • Vocation training began to be thought of as a ‘less than’ education endeavor
  • This helped white suburban families a lot more than nonwhite urban ones
  • Weekly exam results for a thousand high school students’ produces an overwhelming amount of data which must/should then be analyzed, evaluated, and returned to instructors as meaningful, useable feedback
  • School size is a key part of any gap-closing strategy
  • It’s a lot easier to find principals who can effectively run schools with four hundred to six hundred kids (scalability and sustainability)
  • Attendance, graduation rates, and attitude toward learning rise as school populations fall – violence rates decline
  • Smaller schools are an environment in which other gap-closing practices can flourish
  • Implementation over some period of time, grade-by-grade allows teachers and faculty to acclimatize to the newness
  • And this practice is scalable

I Got Schooled – Practice #3 – Feedback

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So, here is Practice #3 – Feedback that is timely, consistent and teacher/principal-usable

M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has written a book (I Got Schooled) describing how, and how not, to close the education gap in the U.S. It should be very supportive in the current conversation and climate regarding what’s wrong with, and how to fix, New Mexico education.

For five years through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan studied what is succeeding in closing the education gap — that depended only on practices inside the classroom itself and that were scalable.

He discovered closing the achievement gap depended on five practices and couldn’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself.

These five practices must be implemented together to have any substantive effect:

•            Effective teachers – dropping poor; hiring good; why it’s important; how to do it

•            Leadership – how it’s important; what it looks like; how to do it

•            Feedback – critical: frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability

•            Smaller (high) schools –part of the “system” that turbocharges the other practices

•            More time in school – summers matter – children of low income and of color fall behind a month every summer; by the time they reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up

Covered: successful schools, programs, clinical studies, and data and statistics, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.

The study also found four popular, expensive practices contribute little 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

FEEDBACK

  • Some way is needed to improve the performance of teachers that are retained
  • To increase the value of existing teachers, some way to measure that performance will be needed
  • Value Added Method (VAM – in its ideal form) compares students’ actual progress to predicted progress, and assumes that differences are due to the instruction they received
  • While it is true, “kids can’t be reduced to a test score,” subjective grading is even worse; a flexible yardstick may not have created the achievement gap, but definitely perpetuated it
  • Measuring progress in literacy or math requires more than just observing reading or math level at age seven. It needs to include:
    • Family income
    • Parents’ educational background
    • Geographic location
    • Inner city versus suburbs
    • Past performance by other kids in same school
    • Past performance by the individual student
    • That is to say, some form of VAM
  • VAM works generally quite well so long as
    • good data are available, and
    • when it’s used to measure GROWTH rather than ACHIEVEMENT
    • important: these two measures are easily and frequently confused
  • The most effective schools are focused on GROWTH; based on their scores in the first grade, did our eighth-graders do better than predicted
  • An even more valuable way to use VAM data is for improving teachers and improving instruction; make the practice of teaching data-driven
  • Figure out the reasons for failure and success
  • A successful organization is one that goes through cycles of planning, doing, studying, and acting, over and over again, i.e., continuous Improvement
  • End-of-year tests tell a school whether it is doing its job, but not how to do it better
  • Value-added data adds value only when someone actually uses it
  • To work, data-based instruction can’t be just voluntary
  • Teachers and principals opting out of the feed-back loop system destroy the possibility of positive results
  • Data is collected everywhere, but no one has taught teachers and principals how to analyze, interpret, and use the data that are being collecting
  • Teachers at high-achieving schools receive some kind of feedback from classroom visits and student achievement between 16 and 13 times a semester
  • High-achieving schools make 4 interim assessments (tests) every semester in math and language arts
  • High-achieving schools have more strategies for using data to customize instruction for different students, i.e., different data-driven ways to create individualized lesson plans
  • The frequency of this feedback is critical
  • The effect size for employing effective feedback is twice as large as the effect size for reducing class size
  • The effect size for employing effective feedback is even larger for the estimated effect-size from replacing the lowest-performing 8 percent of teachers with average ones
  • Feedback and consistency are also important for empowering students
  • Feedback must be meticulous, frequent, and mandatory
  • Feedback must be produced in a form that is usable by teachers and principals
  • Keep realistic the number of teachers that every principal is responsible for; maybe schools need to be smaller
  • And this practice is scalable

The Heckman Equation – economic development and education

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This article in Businessweek January 20-26, 2013 is a wider public distribution of the concept, problem, and solution early child education speaks to that Governor Martinez spoke of in her State of the State address today. Heckman’s Equation brings hard, observable data into the realms of making public policy.

James Heckman, is a PhD economist at the University of Chicago and views education for 3- and 4-year olds as fix to a current serious market failure.  In terms of economic development, early child education is a hard-nosed investment that pays off in lower social welfare costs, lower teen pregnancy rates, decreased crime rates, and increased tax revenue, as opposed to  spending on prisons, health and adolescent special education remediation.

Through the Heckman Equation, he found that an initial investment in free instruction of $17,758 per child per year in 2006 dollars, yielded between $60 and $300  return on investment (ROI) in state and federal welfare monies, increased tax revenues, and, most significantly, savings in police and court costs. As an economist, he finds this is  a 7% to 10% annual ROI.

So, not only did this turn out to not be a cost, it more than paid for itself in annual ROI in improved human capital to business and society, he also found it consistently beat historical ROI on equity (the stock markets) of around 5.8%.

The data further show that the earlier a child gets help, the better the results continue to be through each stage of education. Literally, the greatest ROI or ‘bang for the buck’ exists in early intervention – early child education, and this effective ROI reduces throughout adolescence.

A big problem arises when kids ought to be in early education programs which most young parents can’t afford. Heckman says, “The accident of birth is a huge, huge imperfection in the (economic) market.”

The good news is, and data show, this is overcome-able through targeted early child education and it appears to be scalable.

As an aside, in a 2011 Heckman lecture, he points out that cognitive testing stressed by NCLB and Race to the Top, only speaks to one dimension of a multidimensional system that includes, at least: integrity, socio-emotional skills, character, collaboration, grit. Yet data strongly indicates these untested characteristics may account for the largest share of human development, effectiveness in life, and contribution to the economy and society. These are the “soft” skills that are so widely reported today to be both in short supply and increasing demand.

Beyond interesting, the data also show these “soft” skills even affect scores on cognitive tests!

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