08.07.07
Posted in Education
at 11:53 am
by Dave Badtke
Wandering the Internet, passing time while I was eating lunch, I ran across this article by Charles Wheelan, “Want Good Schools? First, Define ‘Good’,” who raises the issue of how we should measure education.
. . . schools with high test scores may or may not be doing a great job; perhaps their students are capable of much more. And conversely, some schools with middling or poor test scores may be doing a terrific job educating students who would otherwise be failing abjectly.
Obviously, we can spot the outliers — the school in the middle of Detroit that manages to send 95 percent of its students to college, say. If we give researchers enough time and enough data, they can try to answer the school-quality question using statistical techniques that take account of what kind of students are walking through the front door.
But even then the results are often equivocal. The bottom line is that it’s hard to evaluate school quality, which is why it’s even harder to make schools better.
What Wheelan is getting at is that not all entering students are equal. Some have vastly more potential than others, and a school district that has a preponderance of such students because of economic influences will score better than another school with fewer students with brainy parents. So we need to figure out what a good education is, but he fails to define what this is.
Yet the answer seems obvious, which is what I get for wandering the Internet when I should have been doing something more productive: The answer is to evaluate the change in each student’s abilities, not his performance on a fixed test.
That we do the latter isn’t surprising because, really, we don’t care about change so much as ability when we’re evaluating an adult who’s going to fly a passenger airplane or operate on our brains. But children aren’t adults, and our hope is as educators that we bring each child along as far as he or she can go during the semester or year.
If a student can’t write an essay at the beginning of the semester but can by the end, that’s terrific progress in 18 weeks. But that does not mean that this same student has become an accomplished writer, which is the performance measurement we apply when we assign a grade or give the student a normalized test.
The two aren’t incompatible during the education process, but they do present problems when it comes time to graduate, which is when society says that it’s time to make sure that students have certain minimum skills. The only thing that’s wrong with this is the nature of the test, which can be hard to fashion fairly in our diverse society, and the psychological impact the test has on students and their families.
But as long as we have a society that depends critically on critically skilled people, there’s no getting around the need for skills-based tests. Perhaps instead of exit exams we should have diploma classifications: first class, second class, etc.
But isn’t this exactly what grades are? If one were to always look at the grade the student achieved in getting his diploma, wouldn’t potential employers already know what they need to know? Certainly colleges already do this.
Ah, there’s the rub. The exit exams are given because some in our society believe that teachers are cheating by giving higher grades than they should. Grade inflation is the cause. So the tests aren’t about the students, but are about the teachers. Interesting.
On the other hand, these students who were said to be passing without being able to read — and the definition of “being able to read” is important here as well — probably did get their diplomas, but what were their grades? Do you really believe a teacher would give a high grade to someone who can’t read or write or do math well?
If they passed with a D, doesn’t that say something about their abilities. In other words, could we have solved this problem by just encouraging everyone to look beyond the diploma to the grade-point average that the student achieved?
There’d still be the problem that an A at one school is not the same as an A at another, so perhaps the exit exams could be used to normalize the grades, but they don’t need to be used to keep students from graduating. The teachers’ grades are perfectly capable of telling us who did well in school and who just got by.
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06.22.07
Posted in Education, People, Column Ideas
at 8:09 am
by Dave Badtke
Comparing some 60,000 IQ tests taken by male Norwegian military siblings, Norwegian researcher Petter Kristensen claims, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle (also in the NY Times), that the debate over the intelligence of the oldest in a family is over:
On average, the eldest child’s IQ is a measly 2.3 points higher than the second. But researchers say the difference is enough to give the first child a better chance — about 13 percent higher – of getting into the top college.
The researchers, whose work appeared today in the online issue of Science, analyzed IQ scores of 250,000 men starting mandatory military service in Norway. They found a significant difference in IQ scores in 60,000 pairs of siblings, making it the largest study to confirm that birth order affects intelligence, ending nearly a century of debate, said lead author Petter Kristensen, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oslo.
Even though the researchers looked only at men, Kristensen said previous studies say women are similarly affected by their birth rank in the family.
Maybe. Certainly if you’re the oldest in your family, this is confirmation of what you always knew, but if you’re not, it’s faulty research.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Liberia, West Africa in 1968, I was a Jean Piaget fan. In one of my classes crowded with elementary students sitting closely together, squeezed into the small classroom with arms and legs wrapped around each other, all listening intently to my lessons, I would perform little Piaget experiments to see whether Piaget’s Switzerland results applied in Palala. One that I remember involved an understanding of volume in which water from a squat vessel is poured into a tall thin vessel. When I asked my students which had more water, the squat or tall vessel, they knew that both contained the same.
“Duh,” these little kids seemed to say. “You just poured the same water from one into the other. Of course they’re the same.”
According to Piaget, at their age they shouldn’t have understood this conservation principle that older children, at least Swiss children at the time, had trouble with. My students were different from Piaget’s, it seemed, and while I continued to be interested in Piaget’s theories, I didn’t give them as much weight: Certainly a child’s understanding of the world changes as he develops, but that change is a complex mix of nature and nurture.
So perhaps younger siblings can have hope if they’re not Norwegian, which reminds me of the marvelous Norwegian movie Elling, in which IQ plays a complex, comical role.
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06.20.07
Posted in Education
at 5:09 pm
by Dave Badtke
Okay, this is a shocking story — NOT! — today in the San Francisco Chronicle:
About 500,000 teachers across the country give up on the profession every year — a persistent churn and burn that costs the public schools an estimated $7.3 billion annually, according to a national report released today.
“Schools are able to hire enough teachers, but they just can’t keep them in the classroom,” said Tom Carroll, president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, which conducted the study.
In San Francisco, the district spends an estimated $12 million to recruit, hire and train new teachers each year to replace those who’ve left, the researchers found.
The annual exodus is “draining resources, diminishing teaching quality, and undermining our ability to close the student achievement gap,” according to the report.
To stem the flow, districts must first determine the annual turnover rate and then focus on hiring well-prepared teachers who have a clear understanding of content, curriculum and how to manage a classroom, Carroll said.
What if they — who’s this “they,” anyway? — just gave this $7.3 billion to teachers as extra pay?
Nowhere in this article is there a mention of pay, which is awful, especially since we all know the profound impact teachers had on each one of us, and physical and social working conditions, which are deplorable in too many schools.
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06.12.07
Posted in Education
at 11:55 am
by Dave Badtke
While I’m not surprised that Angelica Chang’s kindergarten students have learned to speak, read and write some Mandarin, it’s encouraging that some schools understand the importance of language immersion.
Across the hall from Chang’s classroom on Monday, Principal Chris Rosenberg declared the inaugural year of San Francisco Unified’s first Mandarin immersion program — which includes Chang’s and one other kindergarten classroom taught by Cindy Lai — a success.
All 26 kindergartners from both classes are expected to continue with the immersion program in first grade, along with seven new students who will likely have some catching up to do.
“It was a fantastic year,” Rosenberg said. “Did the kids learn Mandarin while mastering the grade-level standards? Yes. It was a big success, a great success.”
Thirty-four students are signed up for the program’s next kindergarten classes in the fall.
The program is expected to grow by one grade each year through the fifth grade.
I wonder at times if replacing our K-3 reading, writing and arithmetic curriculum with languages — English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc. — music, storytelling, and hands-on geometric construction projects that include surveying might not better prepare our children to succeed in school. Such an approach would build skills that become increasingly difficult to master, especially languages and music, as students age.
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05.19.07
Posted in Education
at 12:17 pm
by Dave Badtke
The Composition Mastery Exam (CME) results for my two fundamental English classes were encouraging. For the most part, those who are ready to move on to English 1 passed the test, and those who aren’t, didn’t. This is a big change from a couple of semesters ago when even some of my best students didn’t pass or, which came next, some of my best students didn’t pass while others who weren’t strong writers, did. In other words, CME results seemed almost random. I interpreted that inconsistency as a problem with my teaching, which was easy to believe since I was new to teaching English.
I first worked at Solano in the Writing Lab to fulfill my practicum requirement when I was taking Ruth Saxton’s Theories and Strategies of Teaching Writing at Mills College. (Ruth was amazing and the course got me interested in teaching.) I continued on helping in the lab and sat in Sharyn Stever’s Creative Writing and Shari Pabst’s English 370 & English 2 classes. Bless Sharon and Shari for letting me not only sit in their classes but also for not getting too upset when I asked questions and generally was just as difficult and disruptive as their students. In Shari’s classes, if you can believe it, I was in class for the entire semester!
During my first semester teaching classes at Solano in 2006, I thought, even though I knew better, that I had some answers. I emphasized the creation of a writing arc, which I derived from the arc of a story, frequently called a checkmark story structure. With some modifications, the checkmark idea can be used effectively with a response, but I found that while my students could understand its elements, they had difficulty putting it into practice. Their confusion was exacerbated by my approach, which was overly theoretical. I talked of writing with particles and fields, which worked for me as a catchy idea because I’m a retired physicist, but which didn’t work at all for my students who didn’t necessarily find a structuralist’s approach helpful when trying to write a four- or five-paragraph compare-contrast essay.
That first semester as the CME approached, I felt my students sinking with me at the helm until I introduced a rather straight-forward outline approach to writing a response. That class was memorable because many students finally seemed to understand the they could always find something to write about with a structure that would work even if they were confused by the topic. All was well, I thought, with this prescriptive approach until I got the results back that first semester: Even some of my best students had failed to pass the CME.
The spring 2006 semester was followed by a summer 370 class that was way too fast for the majority of my students. We met for 2 1/2 hours four days each week for six weeks, and the students also were in the Writing Lab for a couple hours each day. For students who need to significantly change their reading habits and reasoning and writing skills, such a fast pace only works for the most dedicated. Many tried hard, but again the CME results were too random. I was so upset after getting the scores that I sat in the kitchen as my wife was cooking and read each essay aloud to her to get her opinion. I ended up overriding too many of those students, which is my prerogative as the teacher if I think the student can handle English 1, but I certainly didn’t feel good about doing it. I felt so bad, in fact, that I made copies of my students’ CMEs so that I could discuss them with other faculty to get a sense of what I was doing wrong.
If one has been properly prepared by failure to seek and listen to advice as I was, a few minutes can make a world of difference. One evening when I was working in the Writing Lab with Sharyn Stever, there were no students waiting, and I asked Sharyn if she would read some of those summer CMEs that I thought should have passed but didn’t.
“Analysis,” Sharyn said. “They’re not analyzing enough.”
Which made immediate sense to me, that my students weren’t relating ideas to each other with appropriate inferences, because in class I hadn’t stressed how cause and effect are used to create closure when responding to an author’s writing.
During the fall 2006 semester I began to spend a lot more time on analysis of readings and my students’ writings though I continued to emphasize the sentence-combining skills so many of the students need as well since they have difficulty constructing grammatically correct sentences that properly express logical relations such a compare and contrast and cause and effect. I also modified the repsonse template, but most of the corrective effort occurred in classroom discussions. The result that semester was most encouraging. Like this semester, those who were ready tended to pass the test, and those who weren’t, didn’t.
Since I’m now a convert to using templates to help students, an approach which is also stressed in the Writing Lab, I discovered, when rooting about the faculty text lists, a template-based book, They Say / I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, that may be exactly what my English 1 & 4 students will need to take them to the next level in their writing.
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05.17.07
Posted in Education
at 8:58 am
by Dave Badtke
Today the faculty at Solano College gets together at 1:00 to grade Composition Mastery Exams, CMEs. It’s a painful, stressful process not only because we’ll all be working together to read through some 800 essays but also because we’ll find out how our students have done, which, of course, is a reflection on them and us.
But even though it’s painful and stressful and gut wrenching, it’s a good process that should be extended beyond our fundamental English students to all those in beginning composition classes. It would be a good test for our students and a good process for the faculty since we’d better figure out what the goals for English 1, 2 and 4 really are in terms of a paper written in English 1 that would demonstrate the ability to research and sythesize multiple references, in English 2 that would show the ability to analyze a poem, story or play, and in English 4 that would demonstrate the ability to research and make an argument incorporating multiple viewpoints. Most of all, though, the faculty would get together, as we’re doing today, to discuss the papers the students were writing and what they should be doing better.
Regardless, today it’s our fundamental English students whose writing will be placed under a faculty microscope. And I’m wondering right now — feeling my gut tighten just a little as I write this – how my students, and I, will do.
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05.15.07
Posted in Education, Column Ideas
at 10:43 am
by Dave Badtke
There’s only one class left in the semester, my 370 students have taken their Composition Mastery Exam — which the entire faculty will grade on Thursday — and the Spring 2007 semester marathon is almost over. And while I submitted my text requests for the fall semester, I’m still looking for new texts and stories for my English 1 & 4 students. But the problem in doing this is always the same: the vast majority of my students do not read for pleasure. And they also struggle to read their assignments, which for them are decidedly not pleasurable.
The cause for this non-reading state would seem to be that they have too much else they can do. More than that, there seems to be so little silence in their lives, required to have a conversation with an author, which seems like a good topic for this week’s column: Reading and silence.
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