Tests
The purpose of learning should never be to simply pass a test, but that is sadly how too many students view their experience in school today. I remember, back in the day, when school could be fun! And I don’t mean misbehaving-fun. I mean devoting an entire math period in sixth grade to playing kickball, so that the next day, we could practice fractions and decimals by calculating our batting averages. Engaged in analyzing my own statistics, I learned much more in one day of stimulating learning than I would have in two days of going over multiple choice tests. “Quality over quantity” should always be kept in mind when it comes to testing and education.
Also in relation to the “quality over quantity” point, I was frustrated to read the following in a policy paper by Martha Coakley on education: “The traditional model of a six-hour school day is simply not adequate to equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed (page 6).” Really Martha? Ask any child if she wants a longer school day and she is going to respond with an adamant “NO.” I am all for afterschool enrichment activities and sports, but in my opinion, six hours of school, 180 days a year should be more than enough time for formal teaching if it is done right. And that should even leave enough time for a game of kickball once in a while.
Teachers
I have mixed feelings about the documentary Waiting for Superman. On the one hand, I loved learning about Geoffrey Canada’s work at the Harlem Children’s Zone. My favorite line from him was when he said that there is no “Superman” coming to the rescue, implying that it is our collective responsibility to improve our schools. On the other hand, I think the film came down too harshly on teachers unions. I just don’t buy the idea that if we de-unionize our country’s teachers, that will somehow make them better at their jobs. It is my belief that most teachers are doing the best they can with limited resources to prepare their students for what lies ahead.
So naturally, when I heard Don Berwick begin the explanation of his education policy by stating that we need to do more to support our teachers, I was hooked. Berwick knows firsthand from his systems-improvement work in healthcare that you can spend millions of dollars on ad campaigns and new technology, but if the hearts of the workers aren’t in it, the system isn’t going to improve. So let’s stop blaming our teachers for the failings of our public schools and do more to remind them why they decided to become teachers in the first place.
The Arts
Every student in every public school in Massachusetts should have access to a high quality arts education. One of the best examples of how the arts can transform the lives of students comes from Orchard Gardens K-8 Pilot School in Roxbury, MA. Orchard Gardens was featured on NBC Nightly News just over a year ago because of the principal’s success in introducing a new, high quality arts program at the school. How did he pay for it? He made the bold move of eliminating the school’s security infrastructure and reinvesting the savings in the arts. Would this work everywhere? Probably not, but the story does show how even a modest investment in arts education can pay huge dividends both in the lives of our children and our society at large.
My understanding is that we are way behind other developed countries in this regard, and frankly I’m not going to go by a child’s opinion on this. Our school schedule still accommodates a farming community and economy that most of us no longer adhere to.
As for kickball vs. tests, why are those mutually exclusive? If averages, fractions, and decimals are likely to appear on a test why not use kickball as a method? Granted I’m not that creative and would likely teach more traditionally, but I think it is a combination of laziness and fear that have led to the constant teach to the test mentality and not the tests themselves.
Children learn enormously important lessons while in the midst of unstructured play.
We already over-manage and over-supervise our children. The reason why we should not turn kickball into yet another lesson is that most of each child’s day is already filled with lessons about averages, fractions, and decimals — the same child has almost no time to learn how to get along with peers, how to seek out activities and associates that are enjoyable, what things are exciting and what things are boring.
Creativity is not a skill that can be taught in a classroom. It learned through experience, and the experience of being bored and finding a creative way to not be bored is best learned on a playground on a free afternoon with several hours before the dinner bell rings.
I learned an enormous amount about aerodynamics, weather, and physics by many many afternoons spent throwing toy soldiers with parachutes as high as I could. I learned what methods of folding the parachute worked and didn’t work. My friends and I invented elaborate contests to see how long our guys could stay up and how far they could travel. We learned about updrafts, and cheered madly when somebody’s guy would go up instead of down, and travel hundreds of yards across the school yard.
“Play” is one of the most important learning activities for children. It is vitally important for babies, and remains so throughout childhood.
I suggest that the premise that children learn best in structured settings with authorities carefully programming lessons and measuring “results” is deeply flawed. That approach is relatively good for producing compliant workers who fit well into assembly lines in factories where they dutifully do the same thing over and over until the bell rings releasing them for their half-hour lunch break. It does not do nearly as well at producing the innovative, energetic, and self-motivated professionals our society needs today.
I suggest that a far more productive way to improve public education is to dramatically raise teacher compensation, intentionally attract the highest caliber teachers we can find, allow class size to go up as needed while we consciously reduce the number of administrators and overhead, and that we keep the already too-long school day and school year as is.
Oh, and there is ample evidence to support the premise that we should delay the starting time of middle and high schools to reflect the biological reality that adolescents need to sleep later in the morning. If we care about our children, rather than our day-care schedules and school bus contracts, then this is an easy way to improve the lives (and educational outcomes) of every public school student.
Agree with all of this. One point to add:
One excuse I hear whenever this comes up is “sports scheduling”. My reply is, what are our priorities?
… learning machines. All children are like this. All of them. By the age of 5 the overall size of the brain is fixed: after the age of 5, and before the age of twenty, those brains are constantly being wired, re-wired, and re-wired again with layers upon layers of connections. Absent any parental or teacher involvement whatsoever, this still occurs and children learn… That is to say, structured setting or not, the children learn. Unstructured is, sometimes, how we end up with diabolically intelligent criminals.
Children are biologically driven to learn. And any diagnosis or attempt to put children in a box outside of this (with the actually very rare exemption of actual brain damage and reduced cognitive functionality) is never the fault of the child. It is always the fault of our expectations about the child. And our expectations about the child always start with our expectations about the teacher. That’s how we can, with a straight face, actually wait for a ‘superman’ to arrive and solve the problem… when in fact the problem would mostly likely not appear, in the first place, absent a too fervent interference in the process: we create the need for a ‘superman’ and then lament his absense…
The system, as it is presently constructed, rests upon some erroneous, and unchallenged assumpitions.
— That teachers don’t want to teach
— That students are unable to learn
— That a layer of administration is necessary for the teacher to teach and the student to learn.
When, in fact, very nearly the complete opposite is true:
— Teachers want to teach
— Children are biologically and socially driven to learn
— everybody else should get out of their way…
Disagree. As class sizes increase, no matter the skill of the teacher, the tendency is to teach to the mean. As the tendency to teach to the mean is emphasized, the extremes, both above and below the mean are both A) ignored, and 2) lumped into the ‘abnormal’ bucket without further regard. Or, put another way, as the ratio of teacher to student increases, the structure approaches crowd control rather than teaching. This is how we end up with very smart drop-outs who think there is something wrong with them. Increasing the size of classes, under almost any circumstance, is quite possibly the worst thing that you could do.
Or, put another way, did you ever wonder why, amidst the mantra of ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ the role of teacher is never included? There’s between 2 and 5 thousand teaching positions in the CommonWealth alone that could be created with the stroke of a pen, and just for the purpose of keeping class sizes in check. They are not, however, included in the ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ mantra because of a fundamental distrust both of teachers and students. It’s a clear winner. There are no downsides. A little extra expenditure of funds would reap fantastic future benefits… but it’s not done. Because why? Because teachers and students are not trusted. For some reason, unknown to me, government is allowed, even encouraged, to created thousands of casino jobs, or construction jobs, or any other kind of job that is tractable and malleable, but not teaching jobs… If we, as a CommonWealth, where to scope the ratio of students to teacher at, say, no less than 10 and no more than 18 per classroom, we’d have jobs to fill and we would, I guarantee, increase our educational metrics across any and all categories.
Several studies have confirmed now (when I get a chance, I’ll try and find a cite) that given a choice between larger classes with a good teacher and smaller classes with an average teacher, the outcomes with the larger class size and above-average teacher are better — even after being correct for demographics, setting (urban/suburban), and so on.
In most modern school systems, payroll costs dominate the school budget. The mistake that too many public school systems make is to go the route of low salaries, higher teacher count, and therefore smaller class sizes.
The point is that the same payroll can produce better outcomes by significantly raising teacher compensation, hiring and retaining higher quality teachers, and allowing class sizes to increase.
I agree with you that teachers are not trusted — perhaps partially because government knowingly underpays them. In my view, we should be seeking to recruit the best undergraduates for a career in teaching, and we should be consciously adjusting salaries upwards.
I envision a society where “retired teacher” is a term treated with as much respect and gratitude as “retired policeman” and “retired doctor” — and compensated (including pension) accordingly.
…I’ve thought for a long time I could handle 30-40 kids who are ready, willing, and able to learn. Problem is we generally don’t have that luxury. I think smaller class sizes are based on the premise that students can benefit from more attention and thus a teacher’s time divided among fewer students. Certainly if I have to give that kind of attention I would want my classes to be smaller, but I don’t see size and pay as being mutually exclusive. We should have enough teachers AND pay them well, and if that means getting rid of Prop. 2 1/2, do it for crying out loud!
I guess this is the one point where I differ from ST in his post and christopher has pretty much explained it. I’ve seen this first-hand in elementary classes. Some kids need one-on-one time (and the amount of time can vary from an occasional check-in to a considerable amount of time) yet do not qualify for an IEP and class aide. As the class size goes up, the number of kids needing extra attention goes up and eventually the math doesn’t work out to provide enough time for the teacher to meet the needs of the entire class.
Several years ago in the town in which I sub there was a 5th grade class of 34 students, 17 of whom (yes, for you math whizzes that’s exactly half!) were on IEPs. Most periods there was a second adult in the room, but the way the teacher handled it was to teach to those kids. That was probably the least bad option, but I would have been bored to tears if I had been one of the non-IEP kids in that class. When I was in elementary school we leveled the classes by ability, starting in first grade for Reading and in fourth grade for Math and I so wish we returned to that model.
Class size matters a lot for young kids, but less so for middle and high school aged kids.
… teaching to the mean: classes where both the lower end of the spectrum and the higher end can be ‘diagnosed’ out…. which is to say, all classes at present, where we have a distinct ‘special needs’ sub-category… ends up conflating the mean with teachability. Which is what you’ve done here. It’s commonly done. It’s so commonly done it is rarely remarked upon. If it is easy to label someone as ‘special needs’ (and it is) then the fault is not, therefore, of the teachers when the student doesn’t do well: we will have created the problem (large class size) and will have ended with blaming the students ‘special needs’ for the teachers inability to address the entirety of the class; which inability is not the fault of the teacher… You may very well answer with, ‘yes, but a really good teacher can…” and I’ll reply with, “no they cannot…” Larger and larger class sizes are the teaching equivalent of the Indy 500: nobody stays on top for very long.
Every student has ‘special needs’ and the smaller the class size the more their particular needs are engaged and, indeed, understood. The smaller the class size the lesser the distinctions between the extremes. The smaller the class size the quicker the needs of all students are served. A really good teacher could, as you point out, teach a lot of kids if those kids are all grouped around the mean. The best teachers, with the best will in the world, could not teach 40 kids if their respective needs are diverse.
I’m advocating a higher payroll and more teachers: better teachers with smaller class sizes. I don’t think we’ll amortize the teaching talent in quite the manner your describing… because, as the class sizes increase the percent of students who fit into that teachable mean you’ve already identified decreases.
I think you have that backwards. Teachers are not distrusted because they are underpaid. They are underpaid because they are distrusted. The pay is a symptom, or indication, of the esteem with which they are held (or not.) It has the added affect of perpetuating the problem but it is not, itself, the problem…
If higher payroll and more teachers can be accomplished, then I certainly agree the result will be better.
I think the trust/compensation thing is a cycle. I certainly agree that teachers are underpaid because they are distrusted. At the same time, along with that comes the certain knowledge on the part of hiring authorities that they are knowingly underpaying their employees. That knowledge produces guilt and creates, in the hiring authority, the expectation that they will be called out — that appropriate guilt destroys whatever trust (and respect) might be generated along the way.
A difficult lesson for many entrepreneurs to learn is that offering a product or service at a below-market price often — even usually — hurts business and destroys the reputation of the product or service. A more successful approach is to charge premium prices, raise customer expectations accordingly, and then take whatever steps are needed to meet those increased expectations.
The bottom line is that so long as teachers can double their salary by taking jobs in industry, we will not attract or keep the top-shelf teachers that we all want for our children.
…I would love to see the need for gifted students to be challenged to be classified as a “special need” and curriculum and workload modified accordingly. In my years of subbing I have once seen work modified upward and I suspect it was due to his mother being a very squeaky wheel.
Rather than classifying students as apart from some preconceived norm (the term “ableism” comes to mind), why not just face the fact that kids are all over the place regarding learning styles, abilities, etc. and design a classroom that works for all of them, as opposed to singling out certain kids (and all of the negative consequences of doing that). This approach would allow those kids whose are struggling in some way but whose behavior and/or grades don’t scream out problem to the teacher to also get the help they need.
All the same, my oldest son dealt with several related learning disabilities. The special needs program of his public school system (elementary, middle, and high school, two different towns) was invaluable in helping him (he will graduate from a four-year college next year).
My son is a success story for the special needs program of Massachusetts. I want to be sure we don’t imply that such programs are failures.
I also know of several success stories like you son’s. I also know of cases where the schools did not diagnose problems like ADD, dyslexia, processing speed, and depression which were hindering the progress of kids because they were doing “OK”. In all of these cases, the parents (who luckily had the means to do so) paid to have the testing done and then had to present their cases to the school systems. I think these kids deserve to have their needs met just as much as a gifted student deserves to be challenged.
… and the presence of such a program is often an excuse to extend the class size: anybody who doesn’t ‘thrive’ (for a very loose definition of ‘thrive’) is at risk of being shuttled into the ‘special needs’ program. That’s a systemic problem that is masquerading as assistance. The imprimatur of ‘diagnosis’ further re-enforces the systemic nature of the problem.
I don’t think that a smaller class size would have greatly impeded your sons progress: the notion that he either had to have specialized curriculum or had to succeed among the general population in a classroom of arbitrary size in order to escape the shadow of failure is a false dichotomy… and, indeed, pointing out this false dichotomy is at the core of what I’m trying to say here. I’m not trying to minimize or discount his struggles and his efforts. I”m well aware of the reality of learning disabilities. I am saying, a well trained teacher, with a proscribed load of students (class size) ought to have been able to attend as much to his needs as to any others. So I don’t think the programs are a failure, quite the opposite: many of the principles, techniques and practices given to your son should be available to all discrete units of schooling, that is to say, the classrooms.
My son was diagnosed at Children’s Hospital after a heads-up from an alert grade-school teacher. He was kept in regular classes at the suggestion of the special needs team, and “pulled out” for extra attention as needed. The team designed, each year, a customized program of accommodations during testing, adjustments during class, and similar specific items. His teachers were an essential part of his team.
I’m simply saying that while there are many aspects of public education in Massachusetts that I would like to see improved, the special needs program in particular is one where my own anecdotal experience has been totally positive. Two different towns, two different teams, same great response.
….which could be shown on your standard bell curve. Classrooms by definition are going to serve the greatest good for the greatest number. You absolutely need opportunities for students on both extremes of the bell curve to be neither left behind nor held back.
class sizes should go UP? I agree with everything else in your post, but cutting administrative and testing costs should make class sizes go DOWN. It’s a great idea!
I think we should be cutting administrative and testing costs so that we can significantly increase teacher compensation. We should allow class sizes to go UP in order to accomplish the same goal.
The best way to attract and retain top-quality teachers is to pay them accordingly.
While many other countries go to school for more days in a year than the US, American students go to school for more hours in a day. It generally works out that American students have more instructional time than most any other country. (Here’s one source)
We have enough time in school we’re just using it badly — on data and tests rather than instruction. Education has become a province of cowardly “expert consultants” telling everyone what to do because they don’t have what it takes to stand in front of children every day.
…that keeps us from being quite so embarrassed compared to other countries. My understanding is that MA itself actually does quite well in this regard, but the country as a whole not so much. That’s what motivates my greater support for tests than some. We need to somehow make sure in a standardized fashion that when one goes from grade to grade we aren’t just passing them along without making darn sure they know certain things. I believe most other countries have some sort of testing regime.
…are those who only read the headlines. Fact is, once you control for poverty, the United States is among the best in the world. We don’t have an education problem, we have a poverty problem.
This video is an excellent explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf9UVg-TdH0
Sure we need to address poverty, but I always thought one key way to do that was through education.
If we can solve the wealth concentration problem (which, after all, took less than a generation to create) then we can make great strides towards addressing poverty AND improving public education.
To quote a a famous Celtic Christian mystic: “The reason that so many have so much less than they need is that a few have so much more than they need.”
Where does Emmanuel send his little darlings? To the U Chicago Lab Schools. Where does Obama send his little darlings? To Sidwell friends and before that the Lab Schools. Where did inept former CRLS principal Paula Evans send her little darlings? To BB&N and Concord Academy. Where did several great Cambridge teachers I had send their own kids? To Cambridge Friends. This is because progressive education, without a barrage of tests and consultants is one of the best ways to get kids to learn. In small groups, with strong teacher-student relationships, grouping by ability and encouraging students to follow their strengths, talents, and interests. I would say the bulk of our students should be tracked into programs like this, and we should spend the money making our schools look like that (which are also what the Nordic and Finnish schools look like).
And if we really want to be idealistic, emulate France which has a full hour for lunch and recess, where the lunch is cooked by actual chefs utilizing local ingredients and is delicious and healthy. On the one hand, we need to set strong federal standards and start funding schools equally out of federal monies rather than rely on separate and unequal property tax bases, on the other hand, we need to start creating these strong local schools that follow these models and make sure everyone has access to them and not just those that can afford them.
I hope everyone takes a look. We should start to ask ourselves why we’re not getting better results across the rest of the country. If we have our kids in school longer than other countries that perform better, in what ways are we misusing our time?
And I’d add one more, admittedly subjective factor to the implicit argument it makes in favor of a different kind of ‘instruction’ and perhaps shorter school days. That factor is the enormous difference in the subjective rate at which time passes for a child as compared to an adult (of any age, though the rate of perceived acceleration clearly increases with age).
Do most adults completely forget the way 45 minutes was once an enormous, endless block of time? The bafflement at grown-ups notions of what “soon” meant? For a person to whom a single hour feels the way four or five hours feels to us (and I may be underestimating there) to pay attention to focus on schoolwork in a structured setting for a six-hour school day is already a considerable accomplishment. Adding another hour or two to the school day isn’t going to be trivial when time moves that slowly for you, and it might actually be counterproductive in terms of any genuine learning getting done.
WaPo’s timing is impeccable! We must be doing something right.
It tells me that we’ve become very good at testing to the tests used for benchmarks like this. We’ve certainly been working hard at that for some time now.
We may also be providing an excellent education for our children. I’m not sure I’m as ready to believe that we are first in the nation at this more challenging-to-measure aspect.
On this site we are constantly asking where is your evidence, what do the stats say, etc. Yet when it comes to education people seem gunshy about collecting this evidence. If I want to know if a third grader knows his times tables before moving him to fourth grade, which he should IMO, how else to find that out besides testing him on his times tables?
Massachusetts has proven itself ahead of the curve on many, many metrics. With pretty much any method of comparing us to other states or countries, we’ve fared well.
Where we have the problem is with consistency. There are too many districts that are lagging behind, largely districts that deal with high levels of poverty.
A lot of people seem to think improving outcomes in these areas is nigh impossible, or would prefer a strategy where we only focus on a few with one or two fancy, extremely well funded charters — and screw the rest.
Countries like Finland have proven that even poor areas and districts can have high performance across the board. We need to do whatever it takes to get there, as well. When 95% of New Bedford students are graduating instead of 59%, then we’ll really reach the next level.
I still think it’s important, though, to recognize that we are ahead of the curve and that even many of our poorer cities perform better than similar poorer cities in other states.
Seriously, where?
we just dumped the state’s core standards we had to join the inferior national standard.
That was a mistake.