Out in Oregon, the Smarter Balanced Assessment results were in this week, and various outlets raised the cry of dismay over the results. But Betsy Hammond at the Oregonian did an outstanding job of capturing everything wrong with SBA fever in her "8 Sobering Takeaways..." piece.
First, she reminds us that "the tests are designed to measure whether students are on track to be ready for college, starting in third grade." I'll remind us that while that may have been the intent, since A) we have no idea how to measure whether or not a nine-year-old is "in track" for college consequently, B) we have no idea whether or not SBA is doing so. It's a patently ridiculous idea-- can a standardized math and science test tell us if that nine-year-old is on track to earn any college degree?
But let's look at those eight sobering takeaways (and may I just add that I wonder, as I always wonder when someone tosses "sobering" into a conversation, what exactly Hammond thinks got us all drunk in the first place?)
1) 53% of Oregonian nine-year-olds aren't "on track" in reading and math. This could prevent them from graduating, because nothing that could possibly happen in the next nine years of their education could alter their destiny. It is set in stone, chiseled there by this single standardized test. One has to wonder if this fits with other statistics in Oregon-- has Oregon routinely been experiencing a mere 50% graduation rate, or does this pack of children represent a particularly low ebb in academic achievement. Id so, what could account for that?
2) The test result gap between students who are wealthy and/or white and students who are not-- well, that just hasn't been fixed yet. It's almost as if all the great reform ideas that have been pushed for the past decade-and-a-half aren't actually doing any good. Or perhaps standardized tests are still produced in a manner that favors wealthy and white students.
3) The worst results are in rural and small town areas, areas that are routinely ignored by policymakers and media, and which are also rough areas for employment prospects. This makes rural Oregon similar to rural America as a whole. Here's a tip-- when you shift systems (like schools or news media) so that instead of their traditional service missions, they are based on making money and turning a profit, those industries will tend to ignore the small markets where there is less money to be made. Perhaps the Oregonian will lead the pack by hiring a brace of reporters to get out there and cover Oregon's rural areas on a regular basis.
4) Latinos are Oregon's largest group, and nobody has done a very good job of teaching them to do well on the Big Standardized Test. It's almost as if the BS Tests are designed to favor students whose native language is English.
5) The Latino issues are actually two of the sobering data points.
6) Schools did not raise proficiency rates "even with another year of experience with Common Core standards and Smarter Balanced testing under their belts." Here's another problem with economic models of education-- we get to thinking that things can just get better every year forever, as if each class of students is somehow smarter than the one before. But the biggest problem here is staring Hammond right in the face. They've been doing Common Core and SBA for years, and things still aren't getting better. What could it be?? Also, I've been beating my television with a hammer for hours, and the picture isn't improving. Maybe I need a bigger hammer...?
7) 5% opt out in Oregon. "Many families see no value in getting test results for their children." In other news, many families believe the sky is blue and that the sun will rise somewhere in the East.
8) "An estimated 40 percent of high school juniors entered their senior year
unprepared for the reading and writing demands they will face in
college, with an even larger share unprepared in math." Nope. Sorry, state of Oregon, but you absolutely don't know that. First of all, many of your juniors didn't take the test at all, and you have no way of knowing how many who did take the test even tried. Second of all, there is not one teeny tiny miniscule scrap of evidence that SBA results tell you whether or not the student is prepared for the reading, writing and math demands of college. There is absolutely nothing in a standardized test that could measure those capabilities. No way that quickly reading a few disjointed paragraphs and immediately answering some bubble questions will tell you if a student can read, analyze and reflect on the contents of a full college text. No way that the little right-now writing smidges in response to baloney prompts measures a student's capability to write and develop a full scale college paper. Math is outside of my field, but have no reason to trust you on that one either.
So once again, a state's BS Test results keep the focus in all the wrong places, searching for all the wrong solutions to problems that are not the real problems. Oregon should be figuring out how to better serve its rural and non-white, non-wealthy students-- not trying to figure out how to get better test scores out of those students. Oregon should be trying to help students grow and develop to move toward a future of their own choosing, not pretending to know what the proxy for the formula for success is when officials know no such thing. And Oregon should be helping its students develop the kind of intellectual and mental skills built in the kind of depth and richness and humanity that a standardized test is not equipped to measure.
There's only one sobering takeaway here, and that's that the discussion about education in Oregon still involves a lot of people talking about all the wrong things. The depressing takeaway is that Oregon is not unusual in the nation.
After the two conventions, it began to look like public education would not have any champion in this Presidential cycle. So maybe now that the candidates have had a chance to put together clearer statements and assemble some advisors, has the picture changed? Are things looking up for fans of public education?
Well, okay. It impressed the Wall Street Journal, where editorial board member Mary Kissell gushed that no candidate had ever spoken out so strongly on school choice, and it impressed Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, whose desire to gut public education and replace it with profitable charter operations dovetails nicely with this week's version of Trump's education plan.
Trump's declaration about choice was a neat recycling of classic choicer points (civil rights issue, break up government monopoly, etc) and fits in well with his Watch The World Burn platform in general. But as Rick Hess (AEI) observed, "As I've repeatedly noted, there's no point in putting a lot of stock in
his speeches and utterances. Trump says stuff. It's mostly performance
art."
Trump's proposal is devoid of any meaningful details. He's going to get a pile of money from somewhere and make it available somehow for someone to let somebody have vouchers or choice or maybe charters. In fact, the very familiarity of his many points suggests that somebody has just googled school choice, then cut and paste some popular arguments, without making any attempt to understand what any of it means. (And some of that was cut and pasted directly from Jeb Bush, whose blood pressure must be epic at this point)
The only part of Trump's education policy that matters is his choice for secretary of education, because that person is the one who's going to set policy-- and that will in turn depend on how much spine Congress develops. The only thing to really take away from Trump's gumflappery is that he is not remotely a supporter of public education and would gladly do away with it, and we already pretty much knew that. So congratulations charter and choice fans-- Trump is your guy! Yay?
Clinton Sets Up Her Table
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's collection of education advisers saw the light of day, courtesy of Mother Jones.
Chris Edley Jr., the president of the Opportunity Institute, a California-based think tank that works mostly on early-childhood and college access initiatives
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers
Carmel Martin,
the executive vice president for policy at the Center for American
Progress and onetime adviser to former Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Catherine Brown,
the former vice president of policy at Teach for America and current
vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress
Richard Riley,
the secretary of education under Bill Clinton who's known for his views
that don't neatly fit into the pro-reform or pro-teachers' union wings
of the Democratic Party.
So Eskelsen-Garcia and Weingarten got that seat at the table, or at least at A table, that their stage-managed early endorsement of Clinton was supposed to get them. Yay?
People who are excited (or sad) about this may want to remember that the national unions have often looked pretty reformy themselves, from their love of Common Core to their reluctance to say Mean Things about Arne Duncan or his boss.
Nor is the rest of the line-up encouraging. We've got two CAP veterans here, and the Center for American Progress has been a huge fan of reformy baloney. Carmel Martin in particular has most recently served as the point person for #TeachStrong, the coalition of reformy groups that was nominally about uplifting the profession but always looked more like the incubator for Clinton ed policy.
It's worth noting that writer Kristina Rizga gets one thing wrong-- the Democratic party does not divide into pro-reform vs. pro-teacher union. In particular, a person's pro- or anti-union stance doesn't really predict where they are on support for public education. So where do we stand?
Where we stood before. If you want to vote for Clinton because you don't want to watch the world burn, that's fine. Just don't imagine that public education is going to have a friend in the White House.
If public education is your issue, pay attention to the other races. All the other races, because as we keep learning, reformsters are busily pumping money into a wide assortment of local contests. The Waltons have dumped a couple million into Massachusetts just to lift the charter cap. The judge who dared to point out that Washington State's charter law was unconstitutional is in the election fight of her life (contribute here). Reformsters are trying to pack every elected body from state legislatures to local school boards.
So don't get distracted by the shiny blather of the national contest. It's the less glamorous contests that will make significant differences on the local level. Reformsters understand that really well; the rest of us need to grasp it as well.
Finally, understand that come January 2017, the same debates and battles will continue. The elections may change the nature and focus of these debates, but we already know, right now, that after this election is over, the struggle to preserve, protect, and deliver on the promise of public education will continue. So let's get ourselves prepared for that as well.
This is a marathon, not a sprint, and the Presidential election is just another small hill along the way. Let's just keep moving.
Yes, I already aimed readers at this piece from Mother Jones earlier in the week, but if it was still parked on your "I've got to get around to reading that" list, here's your encouragement to do that today. It's an important piece.
From Slate, a detailed picture of how pre-emption is the new technique for conservatives to take control of cities (because local control is only cool when it does what you want it to). And-- surprise-- ALEC is all over this.
Bill Ferriter blogs a lot about technology and technique in the classroom, but he's also a father, and he takes the occasion to reflect on his concerns about his child's very wonderful school being branded with a C.
This is actually an old post from Peg with Pen, but Doug Lemov's little slice of teacher baloney has come up a few times this week, and this is a pretty good look at just why I would rather teach like a human teacher.
Facebook has been having trouble handling the news. Well, and history.
They censored the award-winning photo sometimes known as "napalm girl," an immediately recognizable Vietnam war photo both important in its role for driving public opinion about the war as well as a stunning record of the horrors of the war itself. But of course the algorithm Facebook uses says that a naked girl = bad, so they first got in a fight-by-deletion with a Norwegian news organization and the actual Norwegian prime minister before finally registering what a whole bunch of users were telling them and allowing the photo.
Facebook has also been having trouble with its bot-run trending news feature. On Friday it celebrated 9/11 by kicking to the top of the trending news a piece about how 9/11 was all faked. And that's only the latest way in which bot-managed news on Facebook has been...um... unimpressive.
Facebook's woes are reminders of some major flaws in technocrat thinking. If you get a well-constructed pipeline in place, the reasoning goes, and you set up an algorithm to run the pipeline, then you don't have to have any understanding of what is moving through that pipeline. This is the same kind of flawed reasoning that presumes that reading can be treated as a context-free set of skills, that reading skills are unrelated to the content of what is being read.
An algorithm can censor an important picture and promote a piece of junk writing because the algorithm does not grasp the context of either piece of "content."
What happens when we apply this kind of thinking to a school? We get a technocratic system, a pipeline through which students and educational content are supposed to just move through, with no recognition of the context of either. The pipeline algorithm does not recognize the idea of relationships between anything and anything else; to the pipeline operators, it's all just a uniform stream of stuff, to be moved through the system according to the system's rules.
And yet at the end of the day, because systems and algorithms are stupid in a way that actual humans are not, it takes humans speaking up to say, "Hey, your system made a very bad choice" to keep the system from making terrible and stupid mistakes. The degree to which that human voice is silenced and disregarded is the degree to which the system will screw up. That, of course, is the problem we face in the education world; though the system actual has teachers installed as gatekeepers at every significant point in the system, but rather than depend on their judgment, systems technocrats are determined to silence the "noise" of teacher input, to stop the disruptions to the smooth-running system that occur every time a teacher speaks up to say, "Hey, this is not right."
That's because systems technocrats ultimately want to be responsible only for the system. Facebook does not want to admit it is a media company, because it doesn't want a media company's responsibilities. Uber doesn't want to be responsible for issues with its the drivers and passengers. AirBnB doesn't want to be responsible for issues with its hosts and guests. They all just want to run a system, and their ultimate loyalty is to the system and not to the people who use it. "Hey, our system is working great-- if the results weren't that great for you, that's not our problem."
This approach is exactly wrong for a school, for education, for the growth and support of young humans. Removing human judgment from the system removes the system's ability to deal with the full range of human behavior, needs, and yes, screw-ups. It's no way to run education.
Here in Pennsylvania, we've had a potentially game-changing ruling come down that could create all new problems for school districts and their funding. This story has many moving parts, so you'll have to stick with me for a bit here.
The short version of the story is this. The Lower Merion School District raised taxes. Somebody sued them. The judge (Senior Judge Joseph A Smyth) in the case ruled that the tax increase was unnecessary and excessive, and he revoked it.
Arthur Wolk, retired lawyer, has fun new hobby
As the president of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association put it, ""I've never heard of this happening before . . . a judge substituting his/her judgment of financial needs of the district in place of locally elected school board members."In other words, this may be one not-large school district, but the ruling could be a very large deal.
So let's unpack some of the details. School Taxes in PA
As part of Pennsylvania's ongoing work to crush public education promote fiscal responsibility, for the last decade we've had the bi-partisan fiscal straightjacket that is Act 1, which declares that schools may not raise taxes above a certain index without either a voter referendum or state-level permission. Lower Merion has allegedly been going the state exception route for the last ten budgets by claiming a projected deficit that would affect pensions and special ed. Here's how the district put it in response to the decision:
In Lower Merion, recent enrollment growth has exceeded projections and the impact on staffing and facilities planning has been significant and unexpected. Additionally, the District faces increasing unfunded and underfunded state-mandated costs, including retirement and special education. Without the ability to plan ahead for its financial needs and maintain adequate reserves, the District will lose critical flexibility during a time of uncertainty and growth. The implication for school programs is enormous.
That's not an unusual claim in Pennsylvania. Districts are climbing up a mountain of pensions debt, a huge series of balloon payments on pension liabilities that have been accumulated by a decade of bad choice sand exacerbated by the financial collapse back in 2008 (thanks a lot, Wall Street). How bad is it?
Facing that kind of looming payment, lots of districts have adopted a policy of squirreling away as much money as they can. Maybe that's what is happening here, but Lower Merion is also one of the wealthiest districts in the Philly area, spending a whopping $22K per pupil and just dropped $200 million on two new high schools in 2009 and 2010.
And it would seem that Lower Merion may have the worst budget process ever. The lawsuit and the ruling both leaned on what appear to be some serious mistakes in the predicted outcome of the year:
For instance, in 2009-10, the district projected a $4.7 million budget hole but ended the year with a $9.5 million overage. In 2011-12, it anticipated a $5.1 million gap but wound up with $15.5 million to the plus side.
Lower Merion business manager Victor Orlando testified that the district has between $50 and $60 million in the bank. This is in itself requires some of the aggressive accounting that the lawsuit complains about-- Pennsylvania also has laws about how much money a district can park in its general fund.
So the answer here may be that the buttload of money is in designated accounts, set aside for capital improvements or future gut-wrenching pension payments. The district has been voluble and public in asserting that it has been transparent, followed proper budgeting behavior, and has managed resources for maximum flexibility. They've got a whole response on their website, and while it is forceful and unapologetic, it also skips over any sort of specific explanation of why the district appears to be essentially making millions of dollars of profit every year.
Lord knows the world is filled with people who want to sue their school district because they think their taxes are too high. Who is this guy who actually did it?
That would be Arthur Wolk. (Wolk's co-plaintiffs are Philip Browndeis, Lee Quillen, Catherine Marchand, and Stephen Gleason). Wolk is an attorney who has made a name for himself in aviation law, scoring some big-payday lawsuits against companies on the behalf of victims of various plane crashes. Wolk is semi-retired, seventy-two, and called in this profile article a " pugnacious pit bull." And when it comes to detractors, Wolk has a reputation for libel lawsuits (you can get a pretty good picture of that image from this blog post entitled "Has Arthur Alan Wolk Finally Learned That He Cannot Sue Every Critic?" Wolk is clearly neither shy nor backward-- you can read more about him on his wikipedia page, which was set for him by the marketing company he hired to give him more web presence.
Wolk's two children did not attend school in the district, but he has a big house there and pays more taxes than he thinks he ought to. When the district's superintendent released a letter accusing Wolk of trying to establish public schools as lesser than private schools by choking off taxpayer support, Wolk replied with a letter of his own (referring to himself in third person).
There was no need for a tax increase this year or any year in the last ten according to audited statements. We have the highest paid teachers, highest paid administrators, and too many of them, and the most expensive school buildings and the highest per student cost of any place in the nation. Our school performance is on par with districts that spend half of what LMSD spends which means that the administrators have failed in their jobs and the people supposed to provide oversight, the Directors, have done nothing.
He also brings up senior citizens on fixed incomes who are afraid of losing their homes, because no discussion of school taxes in Pennsylvania can occur without bringing up the spectre of senior citizens afraid of losing their homes. I am not sure exactly who in Wolk's uber-rich neighborhood could be worried about losing their home over taxes.
Wolk has been explaining himself on the subject for months. In May he wrote a letter to the editor complaining about the district's wild spending way, creating debt by building "two Taj Mahal high schools" along with bunches of busing.
Wolk's critics (and he has plenty) repeatedly accuse him of advocating a two tier system, with just the basics for public school students. Here's an oft-quoted excerpt from his lawsuit.
Public school education means basic adherence to the minimum requirements established and imposed upon school district by the State Board of Education, Public education is not courses, programs, activities, fee laptop computers and curriculums that are neither mandated nor normally part of a public education standard, and are normally provided only by private institutions at larger expense to individual patrons who prefer to afford their children education and opportunities that are neither required, nor offered, nor appropriate for public education paid for by the taxpayers.
Well, that's pretty clear. Some nice things are only for private school students, and taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for anything except the basics.
So what do the plaintiffs actually want?
We seem to be pursuing two different arguments here. On the one hand, the argument is that the schools are spending money wastefully on things they don't need. On the other hand, the argument is that the district is collecting more money than it spends and that extra money is the problem.
A poster under the name "John Q. Public" posted a short video/slide show to lay out the remedies sought by the plaintiffs. You can see it for yourself, but here are some of the highlights according to John Q.:
* They want their $55 million back
* They want the board stripped of authority and the district put under control of a court-appointed trustee
* They want the court to return the district to "basic public school" levels
* They want a higher teacher-student ratio (low ratios are for private schools)
* Pay teachers less, and provide cheaper benefits
* Remember the webcam lawsuit? They want everyone fired who knew about the webcam stuff.
* And they don't want the district to communicate with taxpayers unless the district also boosts the plaintiff's signal to the community as well.
So, basically, they would like to see the end of local control for the district and instead have the district run like a company by The Right Sort of Person, the kind of person who understands that public schools should be spare and simple and cheap.
Oh, and one other thing. As he promised form way back at the beginning of all this, Wolk has been beating the drum to start “Dump the Lower Merion School Directors,” through which he and others intend to “run a slate of responsible independent candidates whose mission it will be to restore honesty and integrity to the district.” Reportedly taxpayers have also been treated to bot-flavored e-mail on the issues.
Is there more to this story?
Some local friends of public education have been looking hard for a connection between Wolk and any of the many reliably reformy folks that can be found in the Philly area. And since Wolk clearly walks and talks and advocates austerity measures and wants to destroy local control like a duck, it seems reasonable to see if he hangs out with any of the other reformy ducks.
Wolk lives in Gladwyne, a community on the main line in Philly that was, in 2011, ranked the 7th richest zip code in the US. That makes Wolk neighbors with many of the finest rich folks in the region, but I live in a town where some residents have been arrested for dealing drugs and if you use that to suggest I'm a drug dealer. I'll object. In 2014 he represented families suing over a plane crash that killed Lewis Katz, co-owner of three Philly media outlets--the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com.
Philly.com's coverage of Wolk has certainly been friendly; the post-lawsuit profile is framed by discussing how he loves puppies and wrote a book about his last beloved pooch. So far, it appears that philly.com has not felt the need to either profile the school superintendent's pet preferences nor provide a platform for him to explain his position on the suit.
But as I'm sitting here right now, I have to say that while we seem to be playing a familiar game, none of the usual players are immediately apparent.
Despite all the twists and turns and layers in this story, the biggest possible implication here is the one sitting right on the surface-- if a judge can step in and supersede a local school board's judgment with his own, school districts in Pennsylvania could be looking at some serious, serious trouble.
That's the one new part of this story. Rich guys who think elected school boards should be done away with are, sadly, old hat at this point, as are rich guys who believe they shouldn't have to pay taxes to run a school for Those Public School Children. Okay, there's a slightly new wrinkle here because in the case of Lower Merion, Those Public School Children are mostly white and wealthy. So perhaps a few more people will wake up when they notice that this is an attempt to disenfranchise taxpayers and voters who aren't poor urban black folks.
And come on-- when your budgeting process appears to be $15 to $20 million dollars off, you have got to know that you need to explain yourself to the public, because people are going to get cranky if they think they are taking money out of their bank account just so you can park it in yours. Sure, charter and private schools can do this sort of thing and nobody has any way to know. This is precisely why financial transparency is a good idea-- it lets the public know what is going on. But it also gives the district a responsibility to let the taxpayers know what's going on (and no-- saying "Well there were budget meetings and if you had bothered to come, you would know" is not an acceptable communications plan).
This is also a reminder of what helps drive the privatization of education. Because as sure as some folks looked at those numbers and thought, "Well, damn, my taxes are too high," there were other folks thinking, "You mean they cleared $15 million in profit in just one year??! We have got to get into this business."
I have no idea what's going to happen next in Lower Merion schools, but I'll be paying attention, because this story is going to have plenty of implications for all of us.
Yesterday out of Texas we have a new version of an old story-- a school that found a creative-ish new way to cheat on the Big Standardized Test.
This is a predictable and, at this point, oft-noted phenomenon. If you take a bunch of numbers and tie them to high stakes, people will look for ways to manipulate those numbers. Which is kind of the point of making those numbers high stakes. But some people will manipulate the numbers with legitimate okay-by-the-rules, and some people will find other ways to do it. If a plant manager is told that everybody's bonus depends on low injury-on-the-job numbers, there are many ways to keep those numbers down, and only some of them have anything to do with making the workplace safer. Refusing to let anyone report injuries will work, too.
So NCLB ushered in the era of high stakes testing, and within a few years, the cheating began. With 2014 as the deadline to get 100% students above average, American schools were being steadily divided into two groups-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. It is of course particularly tempting to cheat when it's impossible to win by legitimate means.
Some cheaters were caught and suffered huge consequences, like the Atlanta teachers who had their lives and careers trashed. Some large cheating scandals, like the one in DC under former honcho She Who Will Not Be Named, don't seem to affect anyone's reputation in the slightest. And those are just the obvious examples. Other schools find less obviously-naughty ways to game the numbers, from the widespread charter practice of pushing out low scoring students (Success Academy got-to-go list, anyone?) to the many public schools that decided to spend less time on education and more time on test prep. Heck, we can go all the way back to the Texas Miracle under future Bush Secretary of Ed Rod Paige was actually a fraud (my personal favorite technique-- holding a potentially low-scoring student back for one year, then leapfrogging two year ahead so that they skipped the testing year entirely).
This story out of Texas is a new variation-- cheating with a side of privacy violation and abuse of data. The plan was actually pretty simple. In fact, I'll guarantee you that the Cora Kelly School for Math, Science and Technology is certainly not the only school to think of it, and probably not the only school to do it.
They just used the data to identify students whose numbers were probably going to be bad on the BS Test. Then they called those families and reminded them that they have the right to opt out of testing. Three dozen parents did so, helping the school skew its numbers a little higher.
The only nice thing you can say on the school's behalf is that nobody has popped up to try to justify this, which is appropriate because not only is straight-up cheating, but it's also using testing data to single students and their families out for not-so-nice special treatment. I have no quarrel with opting out, which is every parents' right and just generally a good idea because there are no useful benefits in the BS Tests. But to target some families like this is very Not Cool.
You will never hear me speak in support of cheating. You will never hear me say that the odious and indefensible BS Tests justify cheating. But while high stakes testing does not justify cheating, it certainly incentivizes it.If you tell your child that you'll give them fifty dollars for a rose, thinking that will encourage said child to start a garden and plant a rose bush and learn how to care for and water it, even though you live in a land frozen tundra-- well, you can't be surprised when your child goes and snags a rose from a greenhouse instead of teaching themselves horticulture.
One of the foundational theories of reformsterism is that rewards and punishment will incentivize the desired behavior in schools. By choosing a bad proxy (BS Test scores standing in for actual student achievement) they've created a system of perverse incentives. This doesn't make cheating okay, but you would have to be an idiot to be surprised that the system spawns cheaters.
Pre-K is the growth sector of the privatized school industry. There's no existing institutional structure to sweep aside, and there's near-universal agreement that a good Pre-K foundation is important for all future success, coupled with research indicating that many of our children are already behind on the first day of kindergarten.
Unfortunately, "good Pre-K foundation" is a phrase that has been interpreted in some not-very-helpful ways by not-very-clever people with a not-very-deep understanding of what is developmentally appropriate for a four-year-old. Google "kindergarten is the new first grade" and you get over 5,000 results. Because some folks are just certain that what three- and four-year-olds need is academic preparation, direct instruction, and, of course, tests that let us measure the outcomes.
The research on the effectiveness is a huge muddy mess (made more muddy by the continued absence of a reliable and meaningful measure of school effectiveness in general). Some of the research has been rather alarmingly headline-generating, like the Stanford study that suggests that delayed kindergarten enrollment reduces the possibility of developing ADHD.
Now the folks at Defending the Early Years have published a short piece by Lilian Katz that provides a useful framework for explaining and understanding why some approaches to early childhood education are not useful.
Lilian Katz is professor emerita of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as principal investigator for the Illinois Early Learning Project. Her study of and advocacy for early childhood education is extensive and spirited.
First, Katz establishes what the goal for early childhood ed must be beyond a mix of free play and formal instruction:
In the early years, another major component of education (indeed for all age groups) must be to provide a wide range of experiences, opportunities, resources and contexts that will provoke, stimulate, and support children's innate intellectual disposition.
And then, as the title suggests. Katz distinguishes between academic and intellectual goals.
Academic goals are centered on "mastery of small discrete elements" usually connected to reading; these skills are subject to worksheets, drill, and other exercises aimed at literacy goals. "The items learned and practiced have correct answers, rely heavily on memorization, the application of formulae versus understanding, and consist largely of giving the teacher the correct answers that the children know she wants." So all the sit in your desk, do the tasks assigned, perform behaviors that please the teacher.
Intellectual goals "are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense (e.g. reasoning, predicting, analyzing, questioning, etc.) including a range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities." This is about children making sense out of the world and pursuing their own curiosity. Asking questions. Figuring it out. Analyzing and understanding ideas. This is about learning how to be fully human, how to be in the world.
Katz is not arguing that academics have no place in the early ed classroom. But she quickly and succinctly puts them in their proper place.
An appropriate curriculum in the early years is one that includes the encouragement and motivation of the children to seek mastery of basic academic skills, e.g. beginning writing skills, in the service of their intellectual pursuits.
I've talked about this for years-- one of the major problems of the modern reformy era is that it turns schools upside down. Students are made to serve the school instead of the other way around. Students must master skills and properly perform on tests because the school needs them to produce the "outcomes" that will allow the school to survive. Katz reminds us that it's supposed to be the other way around-- that the school serves the student by providing them with skills that the student can use to become her best, truest self and to carve out a place in the world. The purpose of teaching students this stuff is not so the student can perform for the school's benefit, but so that the skill and knowledge can benefit the student by helping the student create a life.
Katz follows up with a couple of other important points.
First, while it may be true thatstudents from poor backgrounds may lack early exposure to certain academic skills, it does not follow that "they lack the basic intellectual dispositions such as to make sense of experience, to analyze, hypothesize, predict." Even if they haven't been read to at home, Katz says, it is still reasonable and helpful to assume "that they too usually have lively minds."
Second-- well, second is a really a two-fer. Intellectual disposition can be damaged by "excessive and premature formal instruction," but it's not going to be strengthened by mindless or banal activities (she cites a year-long sharing time built around teddy bears). Do meaningful stuff. Or as we like to say in my family, children may be young, but they aren't dopes. They're just tiny human with fewer skills and less live experience.
Katz next looks at short- and long-term effects of early academic instruction. She notes that while there is research to support the notion that early brain stimulation is good for early brain development, there is no real reason to believe that academic instruction qualifies as brain stimulation. The differences that show up in research about the long-term effects of early education seem to Katz to be linked to what kind of instruction we're talking about.
Short term "benefits" can be shown from formal instruction aka basic test prep; more test prep = better test results-- oops, I mean, of course, "increased student achievement." So short term this sort of crap-- oops, I mean, this instructional model-- looks like it's working, but in the long term, not so much. In other words, the damage isn't evident till later.
Also-- and this was a surprise-- it appears that early formal instruction is in the long run more damaging to boys than to girls. This could be neurological (girls brains grow faster) or social (girls are more often taught to be compliant and passive). We don't really know yet.
Katz' recommendation is brief and clear:
Early childhood curriculum and teaching methods are likely to be best when they address children's lively minds so that they are quite frequently fully intellectually engaged.
Katz makes a lot of sense, and while she's a specialist in her particular field, I can't help noticing that much of what she says here about four-year-olds also applies to the sixteen-year-olds that enter my classroom every day.
