On the other hand, feedback of some sort is essential for improving a system, and some criteria has to be used to decide which educational processes are the most effective.

This is not so much applying market criteria to education as applying medical research criteria – medical research is plagued by people who really believe that their favoured method works, and who are quite capable of self-deceiving themselves, or even consciously committing fraud, in order to make their favoured method look good. Consequently medical research includes a lot of protocols to reduce the chances of this happening. Sometimes these protocols are mandated by law.

I think education is heading down more the route of applying criteria similar to that for medical research and practice.

Now, Kozol, for example, makes a strong argument for the absolute necessity of integration – and personally, I’ve come to believe that the only thing which will stop society from letting poor, often (but not exclusively) brown kids drown is for (at least relatively) influential and privileged folks to be certain that their own precious and priceless offspring will be on those same leaky and neglected lifeboats.”

While I don’t disagree with this view, there are practical difficulties with it – first of all, parental choice is enshrined in human rights conventions. Second parental choice goes hand in hand with the marketisation of education which has consistently afflicted education in both the US and the UK - the view that students are products like sausages or bottles of cola. In response to this, in the UK, some educational authorities are using lottery systems to allocate kids to schools (Brighton & Hove has hit the headlines for this) and it has caused a massive outcry – the mantra is parental choice, and the parent as consumer is coming into direct conflict with achieving some kind of parity of experience for students from all social backgrounds.

The current use of league table data and from other commentators’ views re NCLB data fosters a continuation down the blind-alley of applying market criteria to a non-market sector. Education cannot be reduced to test results and productivity ratings but it seems to me that funding goes towards collecting data to support an agenda rather than collecting data to provide an honest, full and accurate picture of the educational systems operating in either the UK or the US.

Yes. This is because some schools are doing far better than others with the same intake.

It’s so easy to blame the teachers.

Indeed. It’s also easy to blame parents, the kids, poverty, the government, psychological problems, cultural problems, unequal life opportunities, TV, video games, the phase of the moon, and any other thing under the sun. Blaming is easy – you just open your mouth and say “I blame xxx”. However, once you’ve blamed your xxx, what then?

Somehow this usually comes from people with no first hand experience.

And it also comes from teachers with a lot of first hand experience.

See http://www.redeemingdaisy.com/redeemingdaisy/wordpress/?p=22 and http://roomd2.blogspot.com/2008/02/wrong-tree.html for some teacher blogs that focus on what schools can do.

Money quote from the second link:

Given equivalent external factors, why does performance differ across districts, across schools and classrooms? That’s the only question that matters. That’s the only debate we need, and the only investigation worth undertaking.

How can you ignore the poverty, the under achievement of the parents, the unequal life opportunities for those at the bottom of the heap?

I’m not ignoring it. I have a question for you however. What do you make of the achievement of those schools that are successful with the kids born into poverty, under-achieving parents, etc? Why do you think Direct Instruction works with disadvantaged kids? When you read a story like “The Lifelong Impact of a First-Grade Teacher”, what conclusions do you draw about how schools can improve their teaching?

Do you think blaming the teachers will fix things? I just don’t get it.

I don’t think blaming teachers will fix things. I think introducing good, effective, field-tested curriculum like Direct Instruction, arranging schools to support academic achievement, training teachers in what field-testing has showed to be the most effective ways of teaching under-peforming kids, is the way to fix things. There are no magic bullets, it involves a lot of hard work, but it’s a completely different answer to blaming teachers.

Can we leave aside the blame game and move on to focus on what improves the educational outcomes of students, despite them coming from disadvantaged backgrounds with disinterested parents and having psychological problems and any other factors you wish to include?

I could tell you an equal number of stories about failing kids with severe psychological problems whose parents won’t get them treatment (even if it is free).

It’s so easy to blame the teachers. Somehow this usually comes from people with no first hand experience. Why? Do you really think the problem is with the schools? How can you ignore the poverty, the under achievement of the parents, the unequal life opportunities for those at the bottom of the heap?

Do you think denying the problems of our society is a way to fix things? Do you think blaming the teachers will fix things? I just don’t get it. Either some people are living in a bubble or they refuse to admit that in a grossly unequal society directing more at the bottom means directing less at the top. How many of these social critics are actually in the top?

Why are you defending Warren Buffet? Are you worth $10 million or more? Don’t you know that there are only two classes in society – those who have to work to eat and those that don’t. Which class do you belong to?

Should be “aren’t taught it again”.

As far as I know the research base for DI is from elementary school students. I do not know if this includes 11-year olds in the USA. A programme called Corrective Reading has been developed for students in grades 4 to 12 who struggle with reading. This is a remedial programme and operates on different lines to a basic-teaching-to-read programme. The Gering School district has implemented DI district-wide, with the remedial reading programme in use in their high school. After one year of remediation, the high school’s scores went from a 39% pass rate to a 55% pass rate. See http://geringschools.net/vnews/display.v/ART/2008/04/01/47f24e91df297. I do note however that this is not proper research as there is no control group.

On a more general level, children in a DI programme are placed not by grade level but by lesson, in groups of about 6 to 7 students. Children are placed according to their prior knowledge and how much repetition they need to remember stuff (so a child who arrives at school already knowing their alphabet is placed in a lesson where they don’t need to learn it). Every day each group is directly taught by the teacher for a brief period of time. The other kids in the class may be looked after by aides while they do independent work, I understand that in one school where DI was implemented there was no money for these aides so every adult in the school was roped in to do the reading lessons in the morning.

If a child is having problems learning to read, and it’s not the result of some fixable problem like poor hearing, then they are placed in an earlier lesson in the sequence (if it is a fixable problem, of course it’s fixed). If the child already knows what they are being taught, then they are placed in a later lesson in the sequence. One kid may be at two different stages in reading and in mathematics In this situation, talking about “third-grade students” as a whole isn’t applicable.

My first question would be, are these kids, the ‘low-income disadvantaged kids’ doing their homework? If not, then you really can’t say anything about the efficacy of any program.
…
Finally, to the claim that the “the kids don’t do homework”: Let’s see the SAT/ACT scores that back up your claim that they do just as well.

Now you’ve gotten me confused. You are claiming in one breath that I can’t say anything about the efficacy of any programme if it doesn’t include homework, and then in the next breath you are wanting to see SAT/ACT scores that “back up your claim that they do just as well”. If you really believe that I can’t say anything about the efficiacy of any programme unless “low-income disadvantaged kids are doing their homework” then you’ve set me a task that you believe to be impossible.

You also appear to believe I have claimed some things about homework that I don’t recall claiming. I am not an expert on the US educational system, but I understand SAT/ACT tests are high school tests, not primary schools. The research base I know of for DI is based on elementary schools. It is possible that homework is essential for high school students but not for younger kids. If you want to argue about homework for high school students go and argue with Dy-Dan at http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=133 For a more general view on homework research, see http://www.huffenglish.com/?p=520

It does strike me that if kids don’t do homework, then that limits what a school can teach them compared to kids who do do homework, assuming of course that the school is operating reasonably efficiently in the first place. But, if our starting point is a school where kids don’t do homework, even then different educational programmes should have different levels of effectiveness, depending entirely on their in-school performance. If kids don’t do homework, that does not release teachers from their obligations to make the best use of the kids’ time at school.

No they don’t. The “old-fashioned holding kids back” is that if a kid has failed one year, then you hold them back and give them that year over again, on the basis that if it didn’t work the first time, let’s try again. Unsurprisingly this is seldom effective.

So, if an 11-year-old is reading at a third-grade level, they don’t get lumped with third-grade students in this class? Either this is just playing word-games or I’m confused.

This is weird. If a programme gets great results without homework, I am perfectly capable of saying things about the efficacy of the programme.

Since you are responding to this:

I think we’ve had this discussion before. If the kids don’t want to learn, and the parents don’t back you up, no program is going to be much better than any other.

My first question would be, are these kids, the ‘low-income disadvantaged kids’ doing their homework? If not, then you really can’t say anything about the efficacy of any program.

I’d say you were engaging in some rather disingenuous quoting.

Finally, to the claim that the “the kids don’t do homework”: Let’s see the SAT/ACT scores that back up your claim that they do just as well. From my experience, and the experience of many, many others, there is just no way you’re going to get enough practice in math just doing it fifty minutes a day.

But I’m willing to be convinced, let’s see what you’ve got.

This is weird. If a programme gets great results without homework, I am perfectly capable of saying things about the efficacy of the programme. I strongly suspect that if you gave it a try, you could also say things about the efficacy of any programme. Come on, man, don’t place artifical limits on yourself – give it a try!

Dan S, did you read the article?

a) It was 20 years worth of decent funding. Not just a few years.

b) The extra-funding not only didn’t work miracles, it did not have any noticable impact on educational outcomes. To quote from the link.

Year after year the test scores would come out, the achievement levels would be no higher than before, and the black-white gap (one-half a standard deviation on a standard bell curve) would be no smaller.(
…
The average black student’s reading skills increased by only 1.1 grade equivalents in four years of high school
…
Scores on standardized tests didn’t go up at all. And the average three-grade-level black-white achievement gap was as big as it always had been.

The extra funding didn’t work miracles, it had no effect on educational outcomes at all.

funding actually increased even a little above what would be expected at a ‘good’ school,

And of course that failure will be forever used as a club against any attempt (however modest or well-planned) to help get poor, often majority-brown schools funded at a non-shameful level.

Sigh. And this argument here will be forever used as a club against any member of the public who dares to suggest the idea that more money spent on schools is not the most obvious way of improving their performance.

Look, either increased funding translates into better educational outcomes by itself or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t (and no one has provided any evidence that it does), then it’s time to look at what has been shown to be successful. Not to imply that anyone who argues that more funding is ineffective is racist. You do not mention any school that has received a massive increase in funding and has had an improvement in educational outcomes as a result. Nor do you offer any suggestions for a well-planned effort to improve educational outcomes. I have – Direct Instruction. Dan S, can you please look at the material on Direct Instruction and tell me what you think of it?

Tracy, looking at your cite, it seems that one of the things DI advocates is good old-fashioned holding kids back if they don’t perform.

No they don’t. The “old-fashioned holding kids back” is that if a kid has failed one year, then you hold them back and give them that year over again, on the basis that if it didn’t work the first time, let’s try again. Unsurprisingly this is seldom effective.

DI works on the basis that if a kid is having problems learning and is not getting at least 90% of their answers right first time you move them to a slower approach with more review long before a year is up (and vice-versa for kids who already know everything of course). A year is a really long percentage of a school kid’s life. DI kids’ progress is monitored on a daily and weekly basis, not a yearly one.

I think we’ve had this discussion before. If the kids don’t want to learn, and the parents don’t back you up, no program is going to be much better than any other.

This is wrong. Direct Instruction does not depend on parental involvement. See http://www.prichardcommittee.org/Ford%20Study/FordReportJE.pdf
Direct Instruction does depend on getting kids to want to learn by: – starting when the kids enter school – providing each child lessons paced so the child learns something every lesson and is never in over their heads as success breeds motivation – a variety of other motivational techniques, like the teacher-me game where the teacher starts off telling the kids that what she/he is going to teach them is way too hard and they are not going to be able to learn it, and then acting that she/he is totally shocked when they do get the answers right, and sulking, and being a bad learner.

Whether or not children want to learn is down to the programme and the school. If the school doesn’t teach effectively, if it lets kids

On an individual-classroom level, individual teachers vary greatly in how effectively they teach kids. See The Lifelong Impact of a First-Grade Teacher., Pedersen, Eigil, Instructor, v89 n5 p62-63,66 Dec 1979,
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ213015&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ213015, written up in a more accessible way at http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/newsletter/archives/acorns.pdf.

The key to improving education is to give every teacher the tools that exceptional teachers use apparently without training, and to set up a school that supports those teachers in effective teaching. It’s not easy, there’s no magical bullets, but it is possible. It has been done. I am sick of people who say it can’t be done in the face of all the evidence.

“See for example this sad story of the Kansas school district http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html.”

Of course, cato is going to say what it’s going to say. Now, broken clocks are occasionally right, and ultimately claims have to be stand or fall on the evidence, not the fact of massive ideological bias – and of course, the ‘Kansas City proves that spending more money doesn’t help’ talking point is at best wildly oversimplified and rather misleading.

On a certain simple level, one can argue that Kansas City does demonstrate that yes, almost literally throwing money at a problem is unlikely to fix it, that thing like an “ an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room” is perhaps not the best use of resources when it comes to improving a troubled school system. I’m not sure that too many folks would really disagree with this general idea. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. My understanding is that many of the improvements were, perhaps, primarily aimed not so much at helping the students (thought I’m sure that was a hoped-for effect) as at luring white families back into the system, as part of a desperate (and court-ordered) attempt at desegregation.

Now, Kozol, for example, makes a strong argument for the absolute necessity of integration – and personally, I’ve come to believe that the only thing which will stop society from letting poor, often (but not exclusively) brown kids drown is for (at least relatively) influential and privileged folks to be certain that their own precious and priceless offspring will be on those same leaky and neglected lifeboats. I’m certainly not saying the aim was wrong. It’s just important to realize that much of this effort has very little to do with directly improving education in the Kansas City school district. To a fair degree, it’s less a story about ed funding and more one about desegregation.

But at the same time, it’s also true that some of the funding did get put towards genuine improvements, not just white-family bait, and surely even some of those more eyebrow-raising extravagances (“25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability“) could have had some effect, right? And so we get to the other point. The school district, at this point, had undergone some decades of neglect, underfunding, and general crapitude. Much of the population it served, for most of their time on this continent, would have loved to experience mere neglect, underfunding, and general crapitude, as opposed to slavery, segregation, white supremacist-terrorism, and unrelenting discrimination. (I’m familiar with exactly one despised and oppressed minority group that rapidly achieved mainstream academic success once conditions improved, and that culture was already obsessively stressing education back when most people in Europe weren’t quite sure what those little scratchy little lines on stones or hide were supposed to be).

So given this starting point, what we get is a very few years where funding actually increased even a little above what would be expected at a ‘good’ school, at which point the experiment – as ill-designed and defined as it was – was scrapped. Now, maybe they do things a lot quicker in Kansas City, but I know that here back East major construction projects – to say nothing of institutional and instructional overhauls – can take a little time. And of course, don’t forget that much of this was mostly niftyspecial daydreamy stuff mostly intended to draw white kids back from the suburbs.

So yes, surprise, surprise, a few brief years of decent funding (much of which went to desperate glitz and glitter and/or took years to fully come online) to fix decades of neglect and centuries of oppression didn’t actually manage to work miracles. And of course that failure will be forever used as a club against any attempt (however modest or well-planned) to help get poor, often majority-brown schools funded at a non-shameful level. Of course, the folks who ceaselessly push ‘thowing money at the problem never helps, look at Kansas City!’ (and even quite a few of those who obediently repeat it) work very hard – sometimes making real sacrifices – to ensure that their precious ones are educated in places usually far-better funded, non-leaky, with low student:teacher ratios, history textbooks were most of the 20thC chapters haven’t simply fallen off and been lost from wear and years, and etc., etc.

“The same dynamic can be seen in the trashing of sex education and its replacement by abstinence only. Workers in the field knew from experience what would happen, and (surprise!) that’s exactly what did.”

Actually the studies showed that abstinence only didn’t change much because it turns out that sex education doesn’t have much impact at all.

Why don’t you cite some of those studies? That’s certainly not what I’ve heard. The few studies I’ve seen that show abstinence-only programs to ‘work’ have been from, shall we say, institutions that back non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed publications.

I’m emphatically for that.

Schools can teach low-income, disadvantaged kids. Just most of them don’t know how. Or don’t care. That’s the fundamental problem with education, not society.

I think we’ve had this discussion before. If the kids don’t want to learn, and the parents don’t back you up, no program is going to be much better than any other.

My first question would be, are these kids, the ‘low-income disadvantaged kids’ doing their homework? If not, then you really can’t say anything about the efficacy of any program.

Btw, on teachers’ ratings, emphatically disagree that the in-class grades should receive much weighting. That’s not to say teachers shouldn’t be tested and evaluated. The fact of the matter is, by the very nature of what’s being measured, the evaluation will be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and involve the subjective judgment of someone who has made a career of doing one-on-one evaluations.

This comes up in specific fields all the time. Give me some time with a student and a checklist of what you want to measure vis-a-vis mathematical ability, and I think I can give you a pretty good idea of where they stand. But for me to do so would probably take a half-day for each student, minimum. This is not something you’re going to readily discern from a machine-scored multiple-choice test, or even directly from worked problems.

So don’t make the claim that California’s experience disproves the effect of school funding.