Class, Schools, and Research Literacy

I’m very familier with the analysis presented in this book and agree with it whole hartedly (Race/IQ fanatics should have to read this book before posting their usual blather). As for the soloutions, I think the hard question that needs to be asked is: are we willing to spend the money it would take to (maybe) solve this problem, and/or are the bennefits of the current effort woth the costs. Becasue one thing that poeple don’t realize is that in many districts the resources are already skewed in the direction of trying to ameliorate the achievement gap and this degrades the education of middle class students. This is definitely true in Madison schools (I have a daughter in 3rd grade here), where we have cuts in art and music every year. Where there is no gifted and talented program at all really. Where there is very little experimentation, almost no alternative classrooms. Even something like the amount of recess is effected. This is all due to the efforts and money we are putting into trying to bring the achieving students up to average. I support giving every student the best education possible, but I think we should really clearly understand the costs. And like Mr. Rothstien seems to believe, I think we need to discuss if the schools are the place where we should focus ALL our efforts. I think you have to confront this question dead on inorder to understand the true dynamics of the issue.

I meant to spell achieving right in that last post as well.

Is it about money and time, or about the way that the money and time is used?

For example, if a teacher presents a piece of information in a way that is ambiguous, then it’s likely that at least some of her class will pick the wrong interpretation. Read this passage about a teacher teaching the concept of “red”. The teaching is ambiguous, so it’s unsurprising some kids fail to learn. Obviously there is a lot more to teaching than removing ambiguity. But if you don’t remove ambiguity, then all the money and time in the world to teach won’t help.

If a child *already* knows something or is at least familiar with it, could that explain why they might not be confused by ambiguity? I believe that, to a large degree, parents of middle-class and above children are more educated and better able to give their children enrichment. .

Did Tracy W’s very interesting link make anyone else think of Philosophical Investigations?

About ambiguous teaching. Teacher quality has a big effect on learning. Poor kids have poorer quality teachers–in general–than middle class kids. Poor kids are harder to teach (for lots of reasons) so teachers–in general–don’t want to teach them. Good teachers get jobs in easier schools. That leaves the less good teachers to the poor kids.

The solution to this problem is attracting better teachers to poor schools. Teaching is an art. A person can’t be taught very well how to speak unambiguously in all situations. You can’t script the whole day. So you have to find ways to attract people with the teaching talent to the profession. As far as I can tell, this mostly means money or some other kind of compensation.

CW – if teaching disadvantaged kids can be fixed simply by giving them good teachers, then how come schools with good results overall tend to do badly with the kids from socio-economic groups that traditionally have poor outcomes at school?

http://d-edreckoning.blogspot.com/2006/04/jonathan-kozol-educations-greatest.html

You can’t script the whole day.

You can however script the maths and reading lessons. That’s what the developers of the Direct Instruction curriculum did, and that one was the most successful in educating low-income students in US schools in the 1970s. See http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm
(Incidentally, note the capitals in Direct Instruction, I am referring to a specific curriculum rather than to the general concept of direct instruction. How I wish they had applied their principle of non-ambiguity when they named their programme.)
Obviously they did a lot of things apart from scripting every reading and maths lesson to remove ambiguous language. The DI curriculum came top not merely in basic skills, but in cognitive skills (higher order thinking) and self-esteem of the kids.

I think the hard question that needs to be asked is: are we willing to spend the money it would take to (maybe) solve this problem, and/or are the benefits of the current effort worth the costs.

I wish I thought that formulation made sense, but I’m afraid I can’t. Here in Ann Arbor, the local district has been fighting the achievement gap for decades. It is a well-funded, high-performing district overall, but the achievement gap stubbornly refuses to close. My sense is that similar wealthy, integrated, liberal school districts (Madison, Evanston, Princeton, Berkeley, etc) have had a similar lack of success despite repeated efforts.

It’s tempting to think that the achievement gap exists because ‘we’ don’t really care and won’t spend the money, but even where the money has been available and there is little doubt that people really do care, progress has not been forthcoming.

If you want to close the achievement gap then it’s actually going to cost way more money than we are currently spending.

I don’t think there’s really any basis in reality for making that assertion. We have not discovered the curricula and teaching methods that would close the gap, so we have no way of knowing whether these undiscovered methods are much (or any) more expensive than what we’re doing now.

And finally, your post seems to suggest that you believe that no matter how much money we spend, the achievement gap will never be closed.

I didn’t say that — only that we don’t know how to close the gap, so we don’t know if money is the issue. The experience of wealthy, liberal, high-performing districts who’ve devoted money and resources to closing the gap over long periods of time are just not encouraging.

What if poor and minority kids had the same advantages that middle class kids had at home and at school? Do you think that these kids would still below average academically?

If under-performing poor kids had the same advantages at home, they wouldn’t be under-performing poor kids. It’s not the cash, it’s the family background. My kids went to school with the children of graduate students who lived in cramped university apartments, drove old junkers, and had little extra money for frills. Did these ‘poor’ kids under-perform at school because their parents couldn’t take them on fancy European vacations? You know the answer — no, of course they didn’t. They excelled.

Now you explain to me how you’re going to use money to provide poor children the advantages of having educated parents who read to their children extensively (and read extensively themselves), who discuss science, history, politics and economics with their kids. Who put a high value on education and follow through. Who will go to the school and do battle with teachers and principles if necessary. Who are able to help with homework even in advanced subjects in middle and high school? Who have gone to university and for whom, therefore, higher education is completely expected, normal, and not a big deal.

If so, the logical conclusion is then that they are somehow mentally deficient and you might want to google the writings of Steve Sailor. I’m not saying you believe this, but this is the logical extension of the import of your post. If I read it wrong, then I apologize.

No, that isn’t the logical extension of my post. The options aren’t only either:

A) The achievement gap can be solved with the proper application of will and large sums of money

or

B) Minorities are inherently mentally deficient.

If you believe those are the only possibilities, I’d say you need to expand your thinking about the subject.

harry b

In my experience with my daughter and as a student teacher in madison public schools, the time and effort expended to give the lower achieving kids education the need comes to some degree at the expense of the higher achieving kids. THis may not be the case in dollers, but it seems to me to be the effective case. In additon, NCLB causes schools to focus on getting the lower achieving kids to raise their scores. This means that less time is spent on the “frills.” like art, music, social studies, recess, drama, talaneted and gifted programs, experimental and alternative classrooms… This comes definitely at the expense of the average and above average student. I personally believe that we should give every kid the education the need at the expense of global hegemony, but our current system in some schools disadvantages middle and high achieving students. At least in elementary school.

slocum:

From your tone I believe I offended you. I wasn’t trying to. That was a quick comment and I didn’t phrase it well. I do want to ask you though, how can we close the achievement gap if it is not by spending more money. Maybe you are saying that we can’t close the achievment gap. That we would have to change deeply held cultural values. That it would be politically imposible. I think in a practical sense that is correct, but I do think we can close the achievemnt gap for a lot of kids by the correct application of money, money that we spend on other things I think are less valuable. It’s not necessarily through teaching methods and cirriculum, but more through the kinds of structural changes Harry B mentions, and help for families outside of schools. A decent job for a mom or dad would go a long way. Putting a drug addicted parent into rehab instead of prison would go a long way. Putting a lot more emphisis on vocational education for the current generation would help the next generation. And maybe parent education. Anyway, it’s a really well researched field. There are plenty of good books, Class and Schools seems like one, as are the Kozol books. It’s areally interesting field too, a mix of brain science, teaching art and science, politics, organizational methods, social policy, and a bunch of other stuff I’m not thinking of.

Well, cw, if you had the money, what would you spend it on then? I’m a math teacher, so my interest is not just academic, if you’ll pardon the unavoidable pun.

I tend to agree with posting #8, btw, Tracy’s. I believe that the number one predictor of academic performance has been shown over and over and over again to be . . . parental involvement. But as to whether there’s a direct causal connection, or whether that’s just a place marker for other, more physical factors remains somewhat of an open question. Again imho.

However, schools with high concentrations of advantaged/easy-to-teach kids have much higher ACTUAL teachers salaries. This is because when a spot is vacated, teachers are allowed to transfer by seniority (this is standard in almost all union contracts). This means that schools with high concentrations of easy-to-teach students have high concentrations of experienced, more expensive, and better teachers;

There’s something to this–the experienced teachers do tend to gravitate toward certain schools. And I suspect, too, that the more ambitious teachers may gravitate toward the schools with the more educated (but more demanding) parents.

However, here this happens only in the elementary schools, since the middle and high schools draw from wide areas. And the racial balance of the elementary schools is just not that far off. There are no ‘minority majority’ elementary schools and within individual elementary schools, one still finds the achievement gap.

slocum

we may be talking a little bit at cross-purposes, because what I’m interested in is just the gap n achievement between children from different socio-economic backgrounds (which in Madison has a high correlation with race, but not a perfect one). The black-white gap is a bit of a misnomer, because its pretty much all about class.

Here, too, the few High schools ave pretty similar socio-economic mix, but the elementary schools vary enormously, and the middle schools quite a bit and, to be honest, I’m inclined to think that once they’re in High School its ludicrous to think that any intervention costing any amount of money would help close the gap (magic, perhaps).

This discussion brings to mind a vivid memory of being 8 years old and cutting an apple in the kitchen while my father was cooking.

Having cut the apple in half, then half of that in half, I turned to my dad and asked him something to the effect of “Dad, if I keep cutting a half away from what I have left, then half of that and so on, forever, will I cut down to nothing, without having disposed of anything?”

My dad, who while not a Chemist worked in a lab and had a amateur interest in science, replied “Well, son, as far as I know you will eventually reach a limit, like atoms, which as far as I know means ‘uncuttable’ in ancient Greek – you can split atoms, but somewhere in the region of that scale you’ll reach a limit”

We chatted about it for a while and he reached what was clearly the limit of his knowledge and that would have been the end of it but my dad was unsatisfied with his incomplete answer, so the next day he came home with a book from the library about physics at an atomic level for me to read.

Since it was fresh in my curious mind I eagerly read the book, cover to cover, in the space of the next two days. By the end of the week I was boring my close friends with lengthy descriptions of the construction of atom bombs.

Years later, while working from home as a developer, a friend hooked me up with someone who ran a Montessori Method pre-primary school that was looking for a part-time computer-skills teacher.

I got a brief run-through of their self-directed learning technique which places a heavy emphasis on supplying information and tools for learning a about a particular subject when a child’s attention is focused on that subject, rather than trying to herd their attention towards the adult’s focus.

I was immediately reminded of the incident described above, from my own childhood, and many other incidents like it, and realised then that an attentive parent that reacts quickly and appropriately to a curious child can greatly enrich that child’s education.

Lessons learned eagerly by a self-focused child are far more effective even that lessons simply learned willingly by a disciplined child. And parents are generally in a better position to leverage that insight than school teachers.

But it doesn’t mean educational authorities can’t extract value from that insight. I don’t know what American educational budgets look like but here in South Africa the thinking seems to be that education budgets are set at the amounts required to barely achieve an assembly-line style education, while enormous amounts have been spent elsewhere on military facilities we don’t need – and misguided attempts at getting private enterprise to do more adult education.

It strikes me that methods like the Montessori Method, which in my limited experience is enormously beneficial to young students, actually do bring some of the enriching effects of intelligent parental involvement to the classroom. So there is a case to be made for much bigger budgets enriching the learning environment rather than ineffectively bloating the education system – properly spent, the extra money could be very effective.

(On review: Having struggled to articulate this previously I’m quite pleased with the result here, so I think I’ll replicate this comment on my own blog – that doesn’t violate some principle of netiquette, does it?)

My apologies for the mushed up list. I pressed enter twice between each entry and it looked fine in preview.

farren,
I think you’re right that students learn best when we utilize what they’re already interested in. Here are a couple of blogs from two teachers who are trying to do just that (in their math and science classrooms). It seems as though, after only one year, their classrooms have experienced a complete turnaround (for both the low and high achieving kids). Part of the reason is that they address non-academic issues in thier classrooms, and they promote overall flourishing instead of test-achievement (though, the test achievement usually follows anyway). They teach in a relatively wealthy district, but their middle school has typically been the lowest achieving and these two teachers are trying to change that. It’s interesting to note that the changes they are putting in place aren’t costing the district very much at all (once they are trained, they become the trainers for the district). It’s worth a look. (They are using the Choice Theory method, by the way)

slocum

not exactly. If you take free and reduced school meals as your measure of SES sure, you’re left with a big gap. But better measures of SES — that control for both parental income and wealth, and for garndparental income and wealth, indicate that once you control for that the racial gap nearly evaporates. This was already reasonably well understood when Ogbu’s book was published, and there is a lot of survey data, by the way, indicating that black students are not more alienated from school than white students. School districts often lack the relevant knowledge, and there is a cottage industry devoted to promoting the claim that its all about race, not class.

BUT….the truth is that the only measure of SES that school districts have readily available is free and reduced meals data (basically, a proxy for a snapshot of household income). So whereas we all know this is a very crude measure, it’s what districts have available to them.

tracy w — yes, the details really matter, absolutely. The details are extremely difficult for State-level action (still less Federal–level action) to influence directly, exp in the US where districts (and frankly individual classroom teachers) have so much autonomy. This is one reason that people throw money at the problem, which I agree is not a good idea — and in fact, the autonomy of districts and classroom teachers make the money worth less than it might otherwise be worth. I can’t imagine good out-of-school measures that would directly influence understanding of colour words. But its easy to imagine out-of-school measures that would influence general preparedness to learn. Not allowing neighbourhood zoning to ensure class-segregated neighbourhoods, eg. Having free and easily accessible health care for under-18s. More utopianly, having TV closedown at 9 pm, or at least a powerful public education campaign about the need for children to get 8-10 hours sleep. School breakfast programs (with healthy, nutritious food), which accepts the fact that parents who can afford to feed their kids before school just don’t (this may be an in-school intrvention, I know). Etc.

Tracy w — I think you are trying to argue, but I’m not very interested in arguing about these things, just tryign to figure it out. Experiment (like, really experiment, monitoring what is going on) is what we should do. The UK also has a lot of SES integrated schools too(the US has very few, or very few in the public sector — as I always tease my students, if you want SES-integration you’re just going to have to go Catholic), but the children come from SES-segregated neighbourhoods. Is that not true in NZ? (I agree there is a difficult problem with SES integrated schools, which is that it makes it hard to target resources — my children in fact do attend SES-integrated schools, and what happens is that the various resources that low-income children attract get dispersed among the kids, rather than going to the low-income kids — in-school competition for resources is pretty serious, and without very good principals its hard to stop it).

As a Wisconsinite and a Madisonian, I would favor getting rid of the budget caps altogether. It has done nothing to relieve the ordinary person’s tax burden, but it has hit the schools hard.

That said, the emphasis upon class and spending in these comments is interesting.

jim s — I understand that. I’m not sure that you’re right, though. It has, in fact, had a small but demonstrable effect on property taxes. Lifting the caps would simply result in runaway inequality between districts, and would, in all but the most wealthy areas, prompt property tax fights within districts. Demanding a return to the commitment to 65% spending from the State would be more promising, I think.

The reform of the formula I am most interested in is adding a substantial increment for low income children, going directly to the school. Madison has been hit especially badly because it has had increased proportions of low-income kids, while remaining a relatively high property-value district. Adding an increment for low-income kids would, I think, be the right thing to do and it would, incidentally, benefit Madison.

But please do brave the weather to come to the talk — its going to be great!

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?

slocum — no time now, but I’ll work up a set of reasons why what I have offered is a better measure of poverty than parental income (on non-race grounds). I don’t do this research, I just consume it, and the researchers trying to use fine grained measures don’t justify their particular choices. I think they’re right to choose what they do, but have never articulated why, so I’ll try to. Later!

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…).

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

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.

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.

Well, I was just about to say, Tracy :-) No, I’m not assuming it’s the schools fault, and wouldn’t unless there was a systemic across the board failure to perform. If Stanley Yelnats is a B student at one school but a C- student at another, and this happens over and over again, of course there is probably something at the school that needs fixing, not the individual student.

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.

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’m reading your link, the mrmeyer post, and Yes! From the comments section, this is _exactly_ what I am talking about:

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.

My very limited teaching experience is tutoring. My mum was an ex-teacher, in some rather rough schools, and she had strong opinions on teacher effectiveness. (She tended to be chair of the local school board, but due to timing reasons that tended to be at the school my younger siblings were attending). But teaching experience or no teaching experience, I don’t think schools can be effective if every problem is blamed on someone other than the school.

‘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.