‘Fun repetition’ – I don’t think I used that word, so I’m not inclined to defend it. Repetition is necessary for memory. And I think we can both agree that a curriculum that teaches something and then doesn’t mention it again for three months is a bad curriculum. If the necessary repetition can be achieved without mindless drill I’m all for it, but I agree with you that if it can’t, the drill just has to be gone through.

Back in the day, if I had to take home a slip saying I had to stay after school, I’d hear about it, believe you me

My granddad’s policy was that if he heard one of his kids were strapped at school, then they would be strapped at home, no more questions. This did not stop my mum crashing and burning out of maths (and it wasn’t a learning disability, she went on to uni and got an honours degree in the humanities).

if I fail a student, particularly if I fail a student for nonperformance, it’s very possible I’ll get a call from an irate parent demanding to know what I did wrong.

This reminded me of my introduction to algebra. My school for that year was assessing maths using a system of fortnightly tests throughout the year on the topic that had been taught in the previous fortnight. We had to get at least 80% on each test to pass. I only failed one test the whole year – the first algebra one. In the fortnight we were taught about replacing numbers by letters and taught that a.b meant a times b. On the test, for the first time, I encountered the syntax ab. I guessed that this stood for a+b. The next schoolday the teacher stormed into the room, furious at us for failing the test. ab means a times b and a lot of my classmates had made the same guess I had. We pointed out that we had not been taught ab. The teacher maintained we should have deduced it. We asked how we were meant to deduce it. We got an answer that was not clear on that particular point but did make it fairly clear that any more questioning would result in a detention.

The temptation to blame others is not confined to parents.

No, we’ve got to be sure that the work is being done first or at least attempted first, for some reasonable length of time, before we try another strategy.

I find that I can ask what I can do better completely independently of anything else. Getting an organisation I work for to do better is harder work, but that’s hard regardless of whether you sit around and wait for outside factors, or just get on with it.

And the better a school does, the less critical parental involvement is.

Rote repetition can be awful in excess, but the movement against it has gone so far as to be knee-jerk. If we bring it back, though, we will have to find a way that is not punitive—or stupid, as in no-child-left behind. It is only the foundation, not the goal, of many subjects of study.

Significantly, there is no sentiment against mastery learning (repetition) in the field of sports, where its role is understood.

Everything in moderation (including moderation itself.)

I appreciate your reasoning and the study you made to back up your reasoning, however there is a crucial point missing here… many parents are not able to or just don’t help their children with homework anymore. I am in no way blaming parents or saying they are not doing their job. I am saying this is a part of what Dan is talking about.

My mother was a teacher for thirty years and she did not assign homework for the last part of her career because of the lack of home support.

My personal take on this is that traditionally, Mom helped with the book-larnin’ stuff; now that she in all likelihood has a job, she is considerably less willing to take on that chore (that’s also a big part of what’s causing the ‘obesity epidemic’ imho.)

And again, I sympathize, but that still doesn’t detract from the point that the work has to be done, however much extra effort on the part of the parent that may cost.

As for your other scenarios: yes, believe me, I do feel and sympathize with poor Johnnie. That’s why I advocated some sort of cash incentive, and transportation credits Johnny and his mom to school. Ideally, those incentives could replace one of Mom’s jobs, so long as Johnny keeps his grades up (hey, maybe Johnny’s mom can go back to school – at Johnny’s level – and they can learn this together.) As I said, this is not going to be cheap.

But I submit that your 4) is not going to work, no matter how well-funded or provisioned with resources unless the student is actually doing the homework, actually reading the textbooks outside of class, etc. Iow, my position is a floor position. Again anecdotally, but I’ve done the private education thing from grade school to college levels, and you’d be amazed at how many parents think that merely by paying a $20,000 tuition that their child is going to magically become a straight A student, even if all they’re doing is sitting for fifty minutes in class and doing nothing outside of that class.

I suspect that at least part of our differences stem from what grade levels we are thinking of, and what is being taught. Your option 4), for example, strikes me as a fine idea if we are talking about, say, pre-school through perhaps the third or fourth grade. Since I teach math, currently at the college level, less recently at the 7-12 level, that’s where I’m mostly coming from.

Also, I don’t mean to be elitist, but … have you had very much teaching experience? ‘Fun repetition’ is all very well, but the way you phrase it is rather vague, and in practice, most kids hate it; it’s almost oxymoronic for an activity they don’t particularly enjoy(if somebody has any proven ‘fun repetition’, I for one would love to hear about it. I’d pay to hear about it.) But . . . take for example two-digit multiplication. In my quasi-catholic upbringing, one of the things we had to do in the fifth grade was multiply fifty two-digit numbers together until we got a perfect score. If you couldn’t do it, you either tried again during morning recess, afternoon recess, or after school until you could get it right. Yes, we all hated it, hated the drill, the monotony, the need to demonstrate what we’d already done 600 times before. But at the end, we were very, very good and we had learned the material. Material, I might add, that is very important core material. Today’s program (I’m posting from Columbia, Missouri) is far different as far as these basic skills are concerned. There is ‘teaching the concept’ and little to no repetition. The material isn’t mastered, and the students go into more advanced classes extremely unprepared. Officially, this is to foster ‘deeper mathematical understanding’. Unofficially, most teachers here will tell you that they simply can’t get most students to commit to that level of drill, and they have little to no backing from parents who aren’t themselves particularly interested in enforcing any sort of study discipline. In any subject. And that goes back to the parents again, I’m afraid. Back in the day, if I had to take home a slip saying I had to stay after school, I’d hear about it, believe you me, none of this nonsense about meeting with the teacher to discuss ‘alternative strategies’ as if it were the schools fault. In contrast, forty-odd years later, if I fail a student, particularly if I fail a student for nonperformance, it’s very possible I’ll get a call from an irate parent demanding to know what I did wrong. Suggest to them that the student, their child, didn’t do the work (not did it poorly, just didn’t do it) and you have the records to back it up, and the likely result is either bluster that their child has told them that you had it in for the kid, or that it’s your fault for having such stringent demands.

No, we’ve got to be sure that the work is being done first or at least attempted first, for some reasonable length of time, before we try another strategy.

No, I’m not assuming it’s the schools fault, and wouldn’t unless there was a systemic across the board failure to perform.

Why not? If it is the school’s fault, and the school doesn’t fix it, the school is probably going to be stuffing up a lot of kids. Doesn’t this bother you at all?

But the truth is, the most important people in the equation to demand accountability from is the parents. Sorry, but that’s the way it is for large numbers of students.

If schools are incompetent, then it’s not surprising that parental involvement is the most important element in effectiveness.

I’m going to take you through some hypothetical situations. Let us imagine two boys. Richie Rich’s mum is a chemical engineer. Richie Rich’s Dad is is noted for his wide-ranging literary and historical knowledge. Poor Johnny’s Dad is in jail for dealing crack, Poor Johnny’s Mum works two jobs to keep the family afloat. Poor Johnny’s Mum was never much good at reading.

Now let’s imagine a series of education scenarios:
1. A hypothetical country in which there is a religious-motivated ban on educating other people’s children. No schools, no tutors, no governesses. The ban is kept to rigorously. Clearly in this case parental involvement is vital for children’s educational success. And Richie Rich is far more likely to succeed than Poor Johnny.

2. A hypothetical country in which there are schools, but they don’t do anything. The kids show up each day, the kids and the teachers spend all day watching TV, the kids go home. Clearly in this case parental involvement is vital for children’s educational success.

3. A hypothetical country in which there are schools and an education ministry, and they try to educate kids, but they are not that good at it. The national standards include everything that might be a good idea to teach kids, so teachers are trying to cover way too much. Teacher training schools spend their time on obscure theories of educational development that have never been tested in the classroom. School principals don’t have any system for monitoring individual students’ performance, let alone analysing it and adjusting lessons based on the results. New teachers are shoved in to sink or swim. The curriculum they are given doesn’t present material in a coherent way, but jumps around like a spider monkey. The textbooks were written by middle-class university-educated authors who are vaguely aware that children have smaller vocabs, but forget it occasionally, and are not aware of how well they are taught. New topics are introduced, then dropped for three months, then when most of the class has already forgotten about it, reintroduced as a key part of another complex skill. Teachers don’t know how to present new information unambiguously. Teachers are not supported by the school in maintaining discipline.

In this scenario, Richie Rich is far more prepared to deal with school. His parents are far more likely to use a wide, educated, vocabulary at home. He’s well-fed, has the best medical care, and is well-rested so his brain is well prepared for grappling with the vagrancies of the curriculum. His parents have probably read the right parenting magazines and are aware that Richie Rich should be taught his colour words and the alphabet and how to write his name before starting school. If Richie Rich comes home with some homework he doesn’t know how to do. Between his mum’s knowledge of maths and sciences, and his Dad’s knowledge of literature, they have a lot of ability to figure out how to do the homework themselves and then teach him how to do it. They also have more spare time to spend helping him.

Poor Johnny comes home with some homework he doesn’t know how to do. Dad’s not there, he’s in jail. When Mum gets home, exhausted, from her two jobs, she’s confronted by Johnny asking for help. Now Mum was never much good at reading, but she’s rather embarrassed about it and doesn’t want to let on to Johnny. So she distracts him, she says “no, that’s not important”.

Richie Rich and Poor Johnny’s teacher sees that Richie Rich has parental involvement and does great while Poor Johnny is failing. The teacher then draws the obvious conclusion, that parental involvement is vital. The teacher is probably not aware that scientifically this conclusion is invalid. The teacher doesn’t bother correcting Poor Johnny’s homework or finding out why Poor Johnny is failing, because she believes parental involvement is critical. Poor Johnny keeps failing at school.

So we get the same results of parental involvement being vital as in a country where there is no schooling, or as in a country where schools do nothing educational.

4. A hypothetical country in which the education system is on the ball. Poor Johnny shows up at school with a limited vocabulary, and absolutely no home support. His teacher tests him and Richie Rich on their first day and as a result of that testing, places Poor Johnny in a stream where he is taught the vocabulary necessary for school success explicitly. The curriculum is achievable for kids with a wide range of learning ability. The curriculum introduces new skills in a careful order that makes sure no skill is introduced without all the pre-requisite skills being taught. Lessons are presented in clear, unambiguous language that has been field-tested with a wide variety of kids. Lessons include plenty of repetition of skills that were taught earlier so they remain fresh in kids’ minds. The form of the repetition varies – words that were taught as part of vocab are repeated in future stories, games are used in maths class that repeat skills the kids learnt earlier, or older skills are used as a sub-set of new skills (for example, when you learn multi-digit addition you necessarily practice single-digit addition). The school’s experience is that some kids can’t be relied on to do homework for whatever reason – their parents are looking to them to babysit younger kids, perhaps, so the school doesn’t assign any homework that is necessary for progressing at school. (See http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=133) If either Richie Rich or Poor Johnny misunderstand something – perhaps they were gazing out the window during the explanation – the school picks up on it when they start handing back answers wrong and the teacher corrects their misunderstanding in the next lesson. If either boy’s grades start slipping, or they start playing up in class, the teachers and the principal gets together in a huddle to figure out an intervention strategy. If they can’t come up with a successful one, they can draw on experts at the Minstry of Education.

In this school, how vital is parental involvement to children’s success?

Throw all the outside resources that you like into education, but unless you address this particular problem, test scores aren’t likely to budge much; iow, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

I totally agree with this. We can fiddle with funding formula all we like, but as long as schools place all the blame on other people and refuse to think they might be doing something wrong, the Poor Johnnies of this world are stuffed.

I don’t like using science fiction as an illustrative example, but has anyone read Bujold’s “Ethan of Athos”? The (gay male) protagonist is astounded that other worlds can raise children so cheaply and that there must be some sort of hidden labor costs, and is then informed that on other worlds those labor costs are called “women’s work”.

Raising kids these days is an expensive proposition. I’d say in our own case at least half of our disposable income goes towards that activity. Of course ‘expensive’ is relative, I would guess that in the long run it would be more expensive not to make that kind of up-front investment.

But the truth is, the most important people in the equation to demand accountability from is the parents. Sorry, but that’s the way it is for large numbers of students.

Being a teacher, when my daughter has homework, nobody is watching TV or otherwise mindlessly entertaining themselves. The house is quiet, we’re all at the kitchen table, and if my daughter needs help that neither of us are able to give, which is rather frequently now that she’s in jr. high, we look it up on the computer or make a trip to the library.

Sorry about the anecdotal nature of my complaint, but in contrast, I’ve been in many homes where there is no tracking of the kids academic performance, and zero interest in doing so, even in homes that are obviously indicative of a much higher than median income. Those kids don’t do very well, big surprise.

And that’s what we’ve got to go after. None of this buzz from the parents about how school is not important, or school is only important to the extent that you need that piece of paper. Throw all the outside resources that you like into education, but unless you address this particular problem, test scores aren’t likely to budge much; iow, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

There are lots of different curriculum. There are no magic bullets.

Indeed not. Teaching is like the other professions (such as medicine and engineering) in that success depends on getting a vast number of details right. And we can’t just worry about the individual teacher – the whole school has to be set up to maximise success.

For parents whose kids have persistently poor grades, have them tested to see if there are any deficiencies, oddities, quirks or special needs. If they do, spend money to accomodate them, but still demand high performance. If there are no noted deficiencies – sleep, nutrition, stress at home, ADHD, dyslexia, etc, give the family a certain amount of time to improve those grades. If they don’t . . . fine them. Or put their picture in the paper, whatever it takes. If the students still can’t perform, either dismiss them from school, or more fine the parents more heavily.

Has anyone else noticed what is missing from this list?

If a child is failing at school, according to CW, they should be tested for deficiencies, oddities, quirks or special needs. Children may fail at school due to sleep, nutrition, stress at home, ADHD, dyslexia. If such a cause cannot be found, then the list assumes it is the parents’ fault that the child is failing. There is no step in here where the performance of the school is examined. The starting assumption is that the school is perfect. The teacher teaches perfectly, the curriculum is perfect, there is sufficient time allocated for everything. If a kid is failing to learn, the only possibility in this list is that there is something wrong with the kid or the kid’s parents.

I think this explains why schools fail. If the assumption is that it is always something wrong with the kid and you never even consider you might be to blame, it’s rather hard to improve.

Tracey et al, I have a solution, but I don’t think you’re going to like it – punish and reward the parents as regards to how much they participate in their children’s education. I have truckloads of personal anecdotes, not just mine, but many teachers over the years that illustrate this. The parents need to make sure the kids are doing the homework, and they should make sure that doing the homework is a family priority.

Don’t give me any guff about ‘parents too tired at the end of the day from making ends meet.’ I’m sympathetic to this, of course, but the solution is not to shrug your shoulders and say ‘what can you do?’ If you’re willing to spend the money, I’d say set up after school homework centers. Make the child and the parent attend them if their grades are not up to snuff. For the poor parents, give them the incentive of cash money up front, with the understanding that you just can’t sit there like a lump for three or four hours and then expect the jack (but include a transportation allowance to get to and from the school.)

For parents whose kids have persistently poor grades, have them tested to see if there are any deficiencies, oddities, quirks or special needs. If they do, spend money to accomodate them, but still demand high performance. If there are no noted deficiencies – sleep, nutrition, stress at home, ADHD, dyslexia, etc, give the family a certain amount of time to improve those grades. If they don’t . . . fine them. Or put their picture in the paper, whatever it takes. If the students still can’t perform, either dismiss them from school, or more fine the parents more heavily.

I’m sorry, but having taught a number years, this is what you’ve got to do. I should probably add that I teach math, a subject for which many students are notably lacking in enthusiasm, so perhaps that colors my perspective.

Oh – and finally – support the teachers. Every new school year, I meet all of my daughter’s teachers, and I tell both the teacher and my daughter that if the teacher has one story and my daughter another . . . I’m going to believe the teacher absent any other facts. I have no complaints, either from the teachers, who every year repeat that she is a model child, or about my daughter’s grades.

There are lots of different curricula, but only a very few that are capable of obtaining statistically and educationally significant results.

None of these are magic bullets because none of them are easy to implement correctly. They all require radical change, hard work, very skilled highly-trained teacher, much data collection, actually using the data collected, and political fortitude. All of these qualities are in short supply in our public schools.

The primary reason why this is so is because improving economic and social conditions does’t make you any smarter than you already are. And, as Tracy W has already pointed out, you need to be pretty smart to learn under the prevailing teaching conditions in most schools, both private and public. The primary cause of academic failure is poor teaching. this is easy to see once you actually look at the actual teacher presentations as opposed to the teacher’s good intentions.

Poor teaching occurs when a teacher attempts to teach principles that are capable of being placed into a meaningful relationships but either fails to display the relationships or has given an explanation that is hard to follow. The problem with ambiguous teaching is that it requires a high level of analytic ability on the part of the student to discern the correct relationships from all the possible relationships resulting from the ambiguous presentation. This is why historically only the smart have become educated. They are the only ones who are capable of learning from poor teacher presentations.

Today we try to teach both the smart and dumb. We contnue to have good success with the smart. But, for the most part have never been able to successfully teach the dim-witted. Teaching techniques remain at a primitive level. Pedagogical changes appear to be large, but improvement has been superficial—like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The upshoot today is that under these poor teaching conditions only the intelligent students have a chance of learning what they need to learn. This is why IQ tests, which measure high-level analytic ability, are such strong predictors of academic success. See here for more.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. We have a fair bit of data showing that improving teaching and instituting tight quality control measures to the teaching environment will result in improved academic performance of low-IQ students. These are the studies relating to DI that Tracy W referred to. The problem remains that most schools, especially public schools, have proved to be incapable of implementing these difficult measures with consistency and/or fidelty. The theories as to why are beyond the scope of this comment.

People get “obsessed” over DI beause it seems to be the only thing we’ve discovered which is economically feasible that can improve the educational outcomes of the lower half of the curve. Outside factors are not relevant. The student’s economic status, color of skin, country of origin, level of opression, and the like are irrelevant. With few exceptions, if a student comes to school on a regular basis he can learn at about the same rate as his smarter peers. (with supporting data at the K-12 level, mostly K-6.)

Everything else, including Rothstein’s bromides, rely on some form of magic to work. At least that’s what the data shows today.

Your final para is absoltuely right. There must be differences between the incentive effects of financial aid rules for college tuition and the effects of directly targetting funds to poor kids, but I’d need to see someone work up some models. I agree, though, that policy should be sensitive to such things. (Like you, I’m a saver…).

I don’t understand your obssession with “ambiguous” teaching. There is a lot more to teaching than presenting concepts and ideas.

I agree. That’s why I said “Obviously there is a lot more to teaching than removing ambiguity.” back in comment 1. That’s also why I supplied a whole list of things that could go wrong with schools in my comment 28, only one of which related to ambiguity.

I use the concept of ambiguity because it can be easily demonstrated to be a potential problem, and because it clearly can happen independently of how much money a school has.

I hope this explains my obsession with ambiguity to your satisfaction. Please let me know if you still have questions.

Are you suggesting that all underachiving kids should be taught a certain way? With DI perhaps?

I am not sure what you mean by teaching all underachieving kids a certain way. There are certain principles that I think should be applied to all kids because they reduce the risk of a kid becoming unachieving, such as continually seeking feedback on whether the kid understands the topic and doing something about it if they don’t. There are some differences that should clearly be taken into account – the most obvious being cases of disability like deafness – on which I assume you agree. I also think schools should teach to the actual existing knowledge of each kid – so if a kid knows their alphabet there’s no need to teach them again, or if a kid is meant to know how to write complete sentences by a certain age but doesn’t the school should teach them to write complete sentences. And some kids need more repetition than others before they remember something (I have a mild case of dyspraxia and am terribly slow at learning physical movements), and I think schools should take this into account.

I do think every kid should be taught to read, write and do basic maths if they are at all mentally capable of learning to do so. There are some difference between countries in which language they should be taught to read and write in. I am not sure if you count this as teaching every kid the same way.

I do think that schools should be achieving the best results they can for their student base. At the moment, DI appears to be the one with the best ressearch base. Do you know of any others?