Tag Archives: Education

The ‘Outside job’ would be everything else – community, parents, not-for-profits, foundations, health, transportation, PTA, unions, politicians, legislators, city-county-state government, business, and like that.

For the Inside Job, the best expression I have come across is M. Night Shyamalan Foundation’s recent book, I Got Schooled, which very clearly says that closing the gap is a multi-faceted, ‘systems’ challenge, requiring a multi-faceted ‘systems’ response.

Money for the Inside job comes mostly through property taxes, oil-gas fund, and equalization formulas. A perennial problem is, arguments for employing these funds tend to use one-dimensional single-issue practices, based on favored views of lobbyists or organizations for a particular ideology, concept, or anecdote – and interdisciplinary integrated ‘systems’ solutions get buried in this narrow focusing.

Many, if not most, single-issue solutions have been tried once or many times over the years. Many are still being supported or proposed. However, truckloads of data from multiple points of view reveal very little change has occurred over the last 30-40 years.. Indeed, the Shyamalan Foundation found that implementing single practices without other important integrating components consistently produced dismal results.

Over time, institutions too often and too easily fall into status quo thinking-acting-arguing, and many (most) substantive changes come from outside such institutions. I believe Shyamalan Foundation’s I Got Schooled could only have been written from outside the educational institution.

In their search for a systems-type solution for closing the education gap, the Foundation required that the practices had to:

focus solely ‘inside’ the classroom/school
exclude ‘Outside’ the classroom influences exactly because they are outside the control of the classroom/school;
demonstrate substantial ‘effect size,” that is, they must produce demonstrable, measurable, and significant results; and,
be scalable for implementation

And therein lies the power and utility of their findings.

They identified five practices that, working together in a systems context, satisfy all these criteria:

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 – frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability – all critical
Smaller (high) schools – this turbo-charges the other practices
More time in school – by the time children of color or low income reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up

If you don’t have time to read the whole book, these five practices are summarized at tommilesabq.com.

For the Outside Job, the best expressions I’ve come across in Albuquerque are the ABC Community School Partnership and Mission: Graduate. The ABC Community School Partnership is tasking itself with:

Working in the Early Child to K-12 and non-graduated adult domains;
Identifying ‘inside needs’ that can be addressed by ‘outside’ organizations, programs, and resources;
Creating coalitions and collaboratives for matching proper resources with proper students-parents-teachers-administrators in proper times and places;
Using schools as hubs for coordinating and delivering services and resources;
Creating and funding full-time action positions called ‘Community School Coordinators’ to foster and coordinate matching-up ‘inside needs’ with ‘outside’ programs and resources.

Mission: Graduate is focused on ‘who is not graduating and why,’ for Middle-School and High-School domains.

A really short summary for all this could be:

Shyamalan Foundation’s defines the ‘Inside Job;’
ABC Community School Partnership and Mission: Graduate describe the ‘Outside Job;’ and,
Community School Coordinators are the mechanism for effectively linking the two.

College Applicants Sweat The SATs – perhaps They Shouldn’t

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An NPR Morning Edition article on a large study puts SAT and ACT standardized test scores in a real-world, practical context. Read the full article here. Here are the highlights:

SAT/ACT testing is not exactly a fair way to show skills.
what happens when you admit tens of thousands of students without looking at their SAT scores – the answer is – if they have good high school grades, they’re almost certainly going to be fine.
There was virtually no difference in grades and graduation rates between test “submitters” and “nonsubmitters.” Just 0.05 percent of a GPA point separated the students who submitted their scores to admissions offices and those who did not.
And college graduation rates for “nonsubmitters” were just 0.6 percent lower than those students who submitted their test scores.
High school grades matter — a lot.
Kids who had low or modest test scores, but good high school grades, did better in college than those with good scores but modest grades.
The study covered 123,000 students at 33 institutions over eight years; the conclusion: test-optional admissions improves diversity [and] does not undermine academic quality.
SAT/ACT testing may be discouraging students who have great potential for success [from applying to] a particular school,
The private test preparation market for the SAT and the ACT is a $2 billion-a-year industry in the U.S. Critics of the tests have long said the exams better reflect a family’s income and a student’s speed at test-taking than aptitude, competency or intelligence.

I Got Schooled – Practice #5 – More Time in School

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Here is the final I Got Schooled practice #5 – More Time in School

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

MORE TIME IN SCHOOL

More time in school is needed to overcome the deficiencies inherent in low-income, inner-city family environments
Upper-income families use an average of 2,153 words every hour; middle-income families use 1,251; welfare families use 616
Average words per year for upper-income are 11.2 million; middle-income families 6.5 million; welfare families 3.2 million words
By age four that is a gap of some 30 million words
The number of words a four-year-old can understand and speak relates directly to the number of words they have heard
By the time poorer kids reach third grade, they are already so far behind it is virtually impossible to catch up
Early intervention (preschool) with significant hours of exposure closes the gap
Consistency and good quality here are critical
Our natural tendencies are to blame failures of others on something flawed inside them, and while attributing our successes to merit and our failures on chance
American families that tend to obsess about pre-K education are the ones that need it least
The children who would most benefit from preschools are the least likely to be enrolled in them
Even then, generally, preschool effects disappear nearly completely by the third year after the program
Lower-income and African-American kids stay more or less even with upper-income, white suburban classmates – so long as school was in session
They fell behind a month or more every summer!
Summer matters far more than any has thought
Student test scores change powerfully by what happens between June and September
Lower-income student families cannot compensate for middle- and upper-income families’ ability to continue to enrich their children’s experiences over the summer
Current standard in most places is 180 days of school a year, each one between six and seven hours long
Before the Civil War, Philadelphia’s schools were in session more than 250 days a year; New York’s were open all year except for a two-week break in August
While more classroom hours is a serious part of closing the gap, five hundred additional low-quality hours taught by a teaching staff full of below-average instructors who are neither observed regularly by their principals nor given the quantitative and qualitative feedback they need is a waste
Keep kids in school longer during the year and you won’t need superheroes to close the gap. Most teachers can do the job just fine
And this practice is scalable

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.

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

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.

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

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

TomMilesABQ

For parents, students, and teachers in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County

Tag Archives: Education

Question for a kid in school – video – 3:10

A quick STEM hit from Peru – short video

Closing the education-opportunity-achievement gap

Closing the education-opportunity-achievement gap

College Applicants Sweat The SATs – perhaps They Shouldn’t

I Got Schooled – Practice #5 – More Time in School

I Got Schooled – Practice #4 – Smaller schools

I Got Schooled – Practice #3 – Feedback