Is school too easy or too hard?

School is too easy?

I could not believe how many news outlets found this a compelling story. Did they not feel even the slightest sense of cognitive dissonance? How many “low test score” articles would it have taken for them to stop a minute and wonder if maybe the students aren’t the best judge?

Meanwhile, in the opinion column, Patrick Welsh has the real story, arguing that we are pushing students forward in math when they haven’t mastered the previous class. For example, my algebra II classes, in which 90% of the students got below basic or worse in Algebra I.

Welsh argues that more of these kids would be successful in math–and love it, too!–if we just moved slower. Well, maybe. Some kids have the ability to learn advanced math and just haven’t reached the cognitive development stage. But many kids may never have the cognitive ability to master advanced math.

Of course, we could just make kids take earlier math until they show mastery. But that would be “leaving kids behind” and the racial balance of the kids who were left back would be distressingly imbalanced.

Repeat after me: every educational policy that makes no sense has “disparate impact” pushing it along.

It’s not that only Hispanic and black kids have trouble in math; all math teachers have seen white and Asian kids who have no business taking algbra by junior year. It’s just that there are so much more of them.

We can blame both eduformers and progressives for this one. No one wants to acknowledge that ability matters.

Quick, someone, blame the teachers.

Charter hypocrisy

I am not a blogger; I’m more of a writer who puts stuff on a blog. Well, actually, I’m an opinionator who is a decent writer and puts stuff on a blog. And at times like this, that’s irritating. I can’t write a pithy statement in a few minutes that get to the heart of the matter. With three different interesting things to write about, as well as a needed second half to my last post, which got a gratifying amount of attention, and a day job, I get overwhelmed and start watching reruns of The Mentalist. This is why I stopped writing for a year, and why I’m going to try and push past this.

Lots to think about in this Rick Hess post, but I wanted to focus on this complaint:

First up, people sometimes ask why I’m a little nervous about the Gates-sponsored urban “charter compacts,” pledges by charters to ensure their students are demographically representative of the community, or state efforts to apply teacher quality legislation to charters. Well, the problem is that each step along this path does a little more to import into the charter sector the pathologies and pettifogging bureaucracy that so hinder district schools.

And Hess gives an example of the Office of Civil Rights demanding that DC charters prove compliance in diabetes support, even if they don’t have any kids with diabetes.

Gotta admit, I don’t want teachers doing PD on diabetes services. I’d much rather they put the time into, you know, instruction. District schools don’t meet every need of every child, but use some schools to meet the needs of particular students. Rather than ask every charter to invest a lot of time and energy in training and planning that will apply to, at most, a tiny handful of children, I think it makes more sense to acknowledge that small, stand-alone schools aren’t equipped to meet every special need for every child, and to proceed accordingly.

Sure. That way, charter schools and their advocates could brag about how much more efficient they are than those loathsome, wasteful public schools.

I really don’t understand this sort of thinking. Charter schools are smaller and therefore can’t possibly scale. Many of their advocates are in favor of charters because the schools are allowed to skate the regulations that districts are bound by. Meanwhile, they continue their assault on public schools without acknowledging their circular thinking.

If charter schools had to follow the same crap that public schools did, they’d be less efficient. So they aren’t, in fact, more efficient, they are just designed to escape the inefficiencies, and have lots of powerful advocates to complain about the inefficiencies. Then, after getting those passes, they brag about the improved results, greater flexibility, and more effective cost structures of charter schools.

I’m not a fan of charters. They can’t possibly scale. They bleed off strong students in urban areas and middling students in suburban areas. Very few high school charters are any good, except the ones dedicated to academic excellence—actual excellence, not faked transcripts. (Think Pacific Charter, not Summit.)

But my contempt for charter advocates is in a whole different category. They are not willing, for example, to risk the wrath of parents with “disabled” kids by going after the mandates themselves. They are not willing to take on disparate impact by arguing that disruptive and unmotivated kids are a huge suck on the time and income of public schools.

So instead, they pretend that charter schools are superior simply on their own merits, not because they have a escape pod from the structural restrictions that plague public schools. Or they acknowledge these inconsistencies but nonetheless support charter schools as a “stopgap” of sorts (as Hess does).

By pushing for charters, these advocates pretend (or fool themselves) that they are interested in helping students, by getting around restrictions that were put in place to help students. Don’t like the restrictions? Argue against them and take the heat of millions of furious parents. But no, it’s much easier to argue for a magic bullet that conveniently, just as a total “wow, who’d have thought it?”, skates those same restrictions—and then, constantly denounce the schools that are bound by those restrictions as not caring about students.

Nice work if you can get it.

The myth of “they weren’t ever taught….”

A year or so ago, our math department met with one of the feeder middle schools to engage in a required exercise. The course-alike teachers had to put together a list of “needed skills” for each subject, to inform the teachers of the feeder course of the subjects they should cover.

One of the pre-algebra teachers looked at the algebra “needed skills” list and said, “Integer operations and fractions! Damn. Why didn’t I think of that?” and we all cracked up. End of Potemkin drill.

All teachers working in low-ability populations go through a discovery process.

Stage One: I will describe this stage for algebra I teachers, but plug in reading, geometry, writing, science, any subject you choose, with the relevant details. This stage begins when teachers realize that easily half the class adds the numerators and denominators when adding fractions, doesn’t see the difference between 3-5 and 5-3, counts on fingers to add 8 and 6, and looks blank when asked what 7 times 3 is.

Ah, they think. The kids weren’t ever taught fractions and basic math facts! What the hell are these other teachers doing, then, taking a salary for showing the kids movies and playing Math Bingo? Insanity on the public penny. But hey, helping these kids, teaching them properly, is the reason they became teachers in the first place. So they push their schedule back, what, two weeks? Three? And go through fraction operations, reciprocals, negative numbers, the meaning of subtraction, a few properties of equality, and just wallow in the glories of basic arithmetic. Some use manipulatives, others use drills and games to increase engagement, but whatever the method, they’re basking in the glow of knowledge that they are Closing the Gap, that their kids are finally getting the attention that privileged suburban students get by virtue of their summer enrichment and more expensive teachers.

At first, it seems to work. The kids beam and say, “You explain it so much better than my last teacher did!” and the quizzes seem to show real progress. Phew! Now it’s possible to get on to teaching algebra, rather than the material the kids just hadn’t been taught.

But then, a few weeks later, the kids go back to ignoring the difference between 3-5 and 5-3. Furthermore, despite hours of explanation and practice, half the class seems to do no better than toss a coin to make the call on positive or negative slopes. Many students who demonstrated mastery of distributing multiplication over addition are now making a complete hash of the process in multi-step equations. And many students are still counting on their fingers.

It’s as if they weren’t taught at all.

But teachers are resilient. They redouble their efforts. They spend additional time on “warm-up” questions, they “activate prior knowledge” to reteach even the simple subjects that have apparently been forgotten, and they pull down all the kaleidoscopic, mathy posters and psychology-boosting epigrams they’d hung up in their optimistic naivete and paper the walls with colorful images formulas and algorithms.

They see progress in the areas they review—until they realize that the kids now have lost knowledge in the areas that weren’t being taught for the first time or in review, much as if the new activity caused them to overwrite the original files with the new information.

At some point, all teachers realize they are playing Whack-a-Mole in reverse, that the moles are never all up. Any new learning seems to overwrite or at best confuse the old learning, like an insufficient hard drive.

That’s when they get it: the kids were taught. They just forgot it all, just as they’re going to forget what they were taught this year.

All over America, teachers reach this moment of epiphany. Think of a double mirror shot, an look of shocked comprehension on an infinity of teachers who come to the awful truth.

End Stage One and the algebra specificity.

Stage Two: At this point, some teachers quit. But for the rest, their reaction to Stage One takes one of two paths.

Blame the students: The transformation from “these poor kids have just never been taught anything” to “These kids just don’t value education” is on display throughout the idealistic Teach for America blogs. It’s pretty funny to watch, since on many sites you have the naive newbies excoriating their kids’ previous teachers for taking money and doing nothing, while on other sites the cynical second-years are simultaneously posting about how they hadn’t understood the degree to which kids could sabotage their own destinies, or some such nonsense. Indeed, I once had a conversation with a TFAer at my school, and she said this to a word: “I’ve realized I’m a great teacher, but my students are terrible.”

Not that this reaction is unique to TFAers. Many experienced teachers who began their careers in a homogenous, high-achieving district that transformed over time into a Title I area with a majority of low income blacks or Hispanics have this response as well.

It’s easy to denounce this attitude, but teaching has taught me that easy is never a good way to go. These teachers are best served at a place like KIPP, where the kids who don’t work are booted. It’s not that the kids learn more, but at least the ones that stay work hard, and that allows the blamers to reward virtue. At comprehensive schools, the teachers who saw their student body population change over time respond by failing half or more of their classes.

These teachers please both progressives and eduformers, because they have high expectations. Their low-achiever test scores, however, are often (but not always) terrible.

Acceptance: Here, I do not refer to teachers who show movies all day, but teachers who realize that Whack-a-Mole is what it’s going to be. They adjust. Many, but not all, accept that cognitive ability is the root cause of this learning and forgetting (some blame poverty, still others can’t figure it out and don’t try). They try to find a path from the kids’ current knowledge to the demands of the course at hand, and the best ones try to find a way to craft the teaching so that the kids remember a few core ideas.

On the other hand, these teachers are clearly “lowering expectations” for their students.

Which is the best approach? Well, I’m an accepter. Not that I was ever particularly naive, but despite my realism, I was caught off-guard by just how much low ability students can forget. But as I’ve said before, that’s the challenge I see in teaching.

I could go into more on this, but this post is long enough. Besides, I don’t want to lose sight of the opening story and the pre-algebra teacher’s mockery of the entire point of the exercise. Of course they were teaching integer operations and fractions. Of course they were doing their best to impart an understanding of exponents and negatives. They didn’t need the list. They knew their job.

Teachers know something that educational policy folk of all stripes seem incapable of recognizing: it’s the students, not the teachers. They have been taught. And why they don’t remember is an issue we really should start to treat as a key piece of the puzzle.