Playing the gifted-student race card

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 17, 2013

Oh, how I would welcome and laud a nationwide education regime in which every high-ability student has access—beginning in Kindergarten—to teachers and classrooms ready and able to expedite and accelerate that youngster’s learning; in which every child moves at her own best pace through an individualized education plan and readily gets whatever help she needs to wind up truly college- and career-ready, whether that happens at age fifteen, eighteen, or twenty-one; and in which every teacher possesses the full range of skills and tools necessary to do right by every single pupil for whom he is responsible, regardless of their current level of achievement.

Millions of high-ability, academically promising youngsters are not receiving the challenging education they need to reach their maximum potential. Photo by mrcharly

That’s what we should aspire to—and work to make happen. Alas, that’s not how many places currently function. Among the victims of our present dysfunction are millions of high-ability, academically promising youngsters who are not getting the kinds of “gifted-and-talented” education that would likely do them the most good and help them to realize their maximum potential. (Collateral victims are a society and economy that thereby fail to make the most of this latent human capital.)

There’s no agreed-upon definition or metric for “giftedness,” so

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Playing the gifted-student race card

A bad precedent for charter schools

Adam Emerson / January 16, 2013

Two years ago, teachers at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy voted to form a union by card check. Photo from ACTS Michigan.

(Updated January 17, 2013 for the Education Gadfly Weekly)

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools should be careful what it wishes for. Although a recent case before the National Labor Relations Board was decided in the direction favored by the Alliance, by vacillating opportunistically on the issue of whether charters are public or private the organization has weakened the charter movement’s long game.

Here’s what happened: Two years back, teachers at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy voted to form a union via card check—a power granted to public employees under Illinois labor law. In response, the charter school asked the NLRB to intervene, arguing that it was a privately run institution, not a “political subdivision” of the state—and, therefore, that attempts to organize its employees should fall under federal law and be done by secret ballot.

In March 2011, the Alliance, led at the time by Peter Groff, filed a brief supporting the Academy’s position. Charter schools are indeed public schools, the Alliance reasoned, but they’re run by private entities. Hence their employees should

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A bad precedent for charter schools

The progressive view of school choice

J. Martin Rochester / January 17, 2013

Should we trust the judgment of pre-adolescents to decide for themselves what makes educational sense? Photo by slightly everything

While visiting a local high school as a liaison between my department at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the high school’s Advanced Credit program, I had occasion to speak with its young principal—a newly minted doctor of education. I told him about a challenge facing those of us who teach in K–16 education: the difficulty of getting students to summon the patience, stamina, and will to read dense text, particularly book-length writings, in an age of instant gratification, sound-bites, jazzy graphics, and condensed versions of knowledge. In short, I asked him, do students still have the capacity for deep reading, followed by deliberation and reflection? Can they conduct serious discourse? The principal’s response struck me: “Today’s students are actually smarter and better than students of yesteryear, since students today get to choose their own readings.” Really? I immediately wondered whether we should trust the judgment of adolescents, much less pre-adolescents, to decide for themselves what makes educational sense. And for that matter, since when has the mere act of “choice” been a measure of intellect?

Bizarre as this principal’s comment seemed at the time, it was grounded in mainstream progressive thinking—the student-centered, active, discovery-learning

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The progressive view of school choice

Assault weapons are out, math is in

The Education Gadfly / January 17, 2013

On Wednesday afternoon, President Obama recommended a package of national reforms aimed at preventing tragedies like last month’s in Newtown, Connecticut. Amidst the high-profile ban on assault weapons and mandatory background checks on all gun buyers, he included a slew of proposals designed to help schools prepare for and respond to violent threats and improve access to quality mental-health services, including new money for new school counselors and training in identifying students with mental disabilities. And the President’s approval ratings leaped in response.

In the least surprising news since the New York Times told us that SAT scores correlate with family incomes, Arne Duncan has announced he will stay on as Secretary of Education during President Obama’s second term. (We can also blame the New York Times for tantalizing us with the faint hope that he would take on a much more surprising role.)

A new study found that students who struggle on college-readiness tests use different brain processes for simple problems than do high-achievers. Researchers asked forty-three students to perform basic arithmetic while having their brains scanned via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It turns out that low-performing students’ brains seemed to be performing calculations to solve the basic problems, while high-performing students appeared to solve the equations by rote memory. To our eye, this research buttresses the Common Core’s call for “automaticity” of math facts in the early grades.

A group of

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Assault weapons are out, math is in

Quality Counts 2013: Code of Conduct

Andrew Saraf / January 17, 2013

Now seventeen years old, Education Week’s annual Quality Counts (QC) report grades states (and the U.S. as a whole) on six indicators: K–12 achievement; standards, assessment, and accountability; the teaching profession; school finance; “transitions and alignment” (which investigates early-childhood programming and college and career readiness); and the ever-controversial “chance for success” index. In this iteration, only the latter three have been updated—which strengthens the feeling that we’ve read this book before: The top five states retained their positions (with Maryland at the head with a B-plus), as did the lowest (South Dakota, D-plus). The U.S. average crept from 76.5 to 76.9. Even the most notable shifts aren’t exactly page-turners: West Virginia bumped from fourteenth to second on the school-finance indicator by upping its per-pupil funding $1,000. And Georgia earned the series’ first perfect score on “transitions and alignment” by embracing QC’s fourteen pet policies (like defining school or work readiness). Beyond the state rankings, this year’s QC also explores the intersection between school-discipline policies and student learning, calling attention to a key tradeoff: How do education leaders balance the need for a safe environment (not just by keeping weapons out of schools but by keeping other violence and disruption out, as well) against the benefits of keeping kids in school? Conventional wisdom says that too many students are being suspended or expelled—but

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Quality Counts 2013: Code of Conduct

Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools

Andrew Saraf / January 17, 2013

For over a decade, and almost entirely under the leadership of the prolific Paul Hill, the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has promoted the “portfolio-district strategy,” in which districts manage a “portfolio” of diverse schools (charters, magnets, traditionals), each with a high degree of school-level autonomy and accountability. Since beginning this work, CRPE has written myriad reports on the PMM (portfolio-management model) and partnered with an ever-larger number of districts to help them roll out this strategy. Strife and Progress—a new book by Paul Hill and two current CRPE firecrackers, Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross—compiles their immense amount of knowledge and experience. First, the authors outline and explain the seven components that any successful portfolio-district strategy must embrace: school choice, school autonomy, equitable school funding, talent-seeking and retention, support from independent groups, performance-based accountability, and public engagement. Drawing on case studies of several portfolio districts (mainly New York City, New Orleans, D.C., Chicago, and Denver), it then probes both the strategy’s promise and challenges. Clearly, for example, it cannot succeed without political support: The book is admirable in its acknowledgement of past public-relations failures within districts of this sort (e.g., the contentious tenures of Michelle Rhee and Cathie Black), and it expends much ink on the need to build relationships with local organizations and clearly communicate such measures as school closings and openings. Further,

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Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools

Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, At Least Some of the Charges: Forgetting Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-Induced Forgetting

John Horton / January 17, 2013

Successful Common Core implementation will hinge on a number of factors. Among the largest of these will be getting the assessments right—in terms of both design and cost. Central to these issues are the controversial multiple-choice “bubble” tests, which are welcomed by some as fast and efficient means of gauging student knowledge and skills and derided by others as the cause for “teaching to the test” and superficial knowledge. This recent report found within the Journal of Psychological Science finds merit in the bubble test—if designed well. It explains findings from two small-sample studies (one had thirty-two participants, conducted out of UCLA, the other ninety-six, conducted out of Washington U.). The upshot: Both found that properly structured multiple-choice tests (those which offer plausible wrong answers alongside the correct response) “trigger the retrieval processes that foster test-induced learning and deter test-induced forgetting.” In other words, bubble tests with competitive responses trigger actual knowledge-retrieval processes rather than simple recognition processes—and do so better than cued-recall (fill-in-the-blank) tests. The bottom line is both cautiously encouraging. Multiple-choice tests—done correctly—can be a useful tool in an assessor’s kit (a point that we have previously argued). The CCSS assessment consortia would be wise to keep that in mind.

SOURCE: Genna Angello, Elizabeth Bjork, Robert Bjork, and Jeri Little, “Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, At Least Some of the Charges: Forgetting Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-Induced Forgetting,” Psychological Science 23, no. 11 (October 2012): 1337-44.

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Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, At Least Some of the Charges: Forgetting Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-Induced Forgetting