Icahn charter schools

I mentioned hearing Jeffrey Litt speak at a Fordham Prep luncheon.

Peter Meyer sent me a link to a post about Litt and the Icahn charter schools at Reason:

When students leave Success Academy schools for whatever reason, the administration stops replacing them with new students after the fourth grade, so the enrollment of each class dwindles over the years. Icahn, on the other hand, replaces the kids who leave with new students from the district schools. Generally, those students have a lot of catching up to do, and they bring down Icahn’s overall scores.

[snip]

And while Success has been widely criticized for often suspending students and stigmatizing low achievers, Icahn has a less punitive atmosphere. In the 2013-14 school year, 11 percent of students at the Success Academy schools were suspended at least once. At Icahn, half a percent were suspended, or a total of 10 kids among all seven schools.

After Litt's talk, I asked him how many students flunk out of the school.

The number was 0.

 He also told me they accept transfers all the way through.

I also spoke briefly with Gail Golden-Icahn, who said they had deliberately avoided media attention because they didn't want to become a target.

Here is Reason's take:

Though Ican was a runaway success, Litt’s (sic) was programmed early in his career not to antagonize the public education bureaucracy that he runs circles around. "We stay under the radar," he says. "Our culture is non-confrontational."

Litt told us he was the first principal in the country to adopt Core Knowledge, back in 1991.

Jeffrey Litt and the Icahn charter schools

Where have I been?

The speakers at this year's Fordham Prep Wall Street Forum were Gail Golden-Icahn (Vice President of Icahn Associates Holding LLC & Chairman Icahn Charter Schools); Jeffrey Litt (Superintendent of Icahn Charter Schools); and Julie Goodyear (Executive Director of the Foundation for a Greater Opportunity & Secretary of the Icahn Charter Schools).

(They were all incredible.)

Somehow, after all these years, I did not know that the Icahn charter schools were Core Knowledge schools.

Come to find out, the Icahn schools aren't just Core Knowledge schools, they are legendary Core Knowledge schools. Jeffrey Litt was the second principal in the country to adopt the Core Knowledge curriculum, and he did it in the South Bronx.

From the Core Knowledge blog:

When Litt took over P.S. 67 in 1988, it was as bad as a school in the U.S. could be. Litt had to spend a couple of years focused on rehabilitating the building, reopening the library-turned-storage room, and finding out which teachers would rise to the challenge and which had to be replaced. That made things better, but the education offered was still weak. As Litt explained in the webinar:

The surprising thing was that nobody knew what to teach. We had closets full of textbooks that were in sealed boxes. It seemed every year there was another series that was given to the schools by the district office….

I found that teachers who loved social studies would teach social studies every day and those who didn’t love social studies but loved science would teach social studies once a week. And I noticed that 5th grade teachers particularly were teaching completely unrelated units even though they were in the same grade. So right away I knew there was no curriculum in the school.

Instruction played a backseat to everything else. I was determined to fix that.

Soon thereafter, Litt attended a symposium in which E. D. Hirsch, Jr., was the featured speaker. At the time, the Core Knowledge Sequence was still being developed, and there was only one school in the nation using it. That suburban school in Fort Myers, FL, had, says Litt, “a magnificent building” and was “not even close to what I was facing in Mohegan.”

Could Core Knowledge, then a fledgling idea, actually work in the South Bronx? Litt knew that it would—that it had to:

The children had no knowledge of anything outside their immediate community. My kids could not understand the concept that they lived in a borough, which was part of a city, and part of a state, and part of a nation, on a continent. This was all foreign to them. They couldn’t name the five boroughs. I saw Core Knowledge … as the great equalizer. My kids did not have exposure to the arts. My kids did not have much in the way of travel. My kids didn’t go to museums or theaters, and they didn’t necessarily come from literature-rich homes…. I felt that Core Knowledge provided this background knowledge for them.

Instead of adopting Core Knowledge schoolwide, Litt started with just six classrooms. By February, more than a dozen more teachers wanted to use Core Knowledge. By June, the entire faculty voted to become a Core Knowledge school. Unlike today, few supports were available for implementing the Core Knowledge Sequence. But figuring out how to teach all the content specified in the Sequence was a productive undertaking. According to Litt, “We wrote our own curriculum guides, subject by subject, month by month, of what we were going to teach our children. That was the beginning of a complete renaissance of the entire school.”

Today, as superintendent of the six Icahn Charter Schools (the seventh is opening in September), Litt has that full-color picture of equity and excellence. He isn’t chasing each new fad; he remains focused on replicating and refining what works: knowledge-building curriculum, embedded professional development, and continuous tracking of achievement—not for tracking’s sake, but to inform curriculum, instruction, and professional development.

Litt ensures that “all Icahn charter schools follow the same Core Knowledge curriculum and the same procedures.” At first that may sound stifling, possibly even oppressive. But then Litt explains all the benefits. Principals meet every Wednesday to help each other solve problems. Teachers “are sharing their successes and they are going to their colleagues for help.” And, unlike what Litt found when he arrived at P.S. 67, the shared curriculum allows teachers to pursue their favorite subjects without students missing out on important content. Litt explains: “If you love science and math, and I love English language arts and social studies, and we’re both in third grade, [then]… I might teach your children English language arts and social studies. You might teach my kids science and math. Or at least we are going to share the lessons.” Teachers also collaborate across grades because the Sequence takes students deeper into academic domains as they progress.

And that stifling thing? It’s a myth. The Core Knowledge Sequence specifies content, not pedagogy. Icahn’s teachers, says Litt, “have a perfect opportunity to be innovative, creative, use their imaginations, share with their colleagues, use plays, use videos, and so on.” And, when taught with the type of refined, coherent curriculum Litt’s teachers have developed, the Sequence takes just 50% of the instructional time. So the Icahn schools really have developed their own shared curriculum. The Sequence ensures that all essential background knowledge is included, allowing educators to focus on adding content of local interest and importance.

Reading comprehension and knowledge and something else

I was finally reading Michael Goldstein's terrific blog when I came across this post:

E.D. Hirsch

If you teach English, or you're a school leader — and I'm particularly looking at you, friends in No Excuses charter schools, with our collective student gains in math that are 4x higher than those in English — I think a bare minimum threshold is that you can:

a. Explain E.D. Hirsch's arguments

b. Describe the degree to which your class/school adheres to or rejects his view

c. Justify why

I got turned onto re-reading Hirsch through Robert Pondiscio, who until recently worked for Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation as a blogger.

To the best of my knowledge, students at Morningside Academy make the same gains in reading they do in math: two years' progress in one year's time. That is the guarantee Morningside makes to parents. Their child will make two years' progress in one year's time or tuition is refunded.

More specifically, Morningside guarantees that each child will make two years' progress in one year's time in the child's most difficult subject. Since many of students there have diagnoses of dyslexia, presumably the worst subject is reading, often as not. Morningside's students are middle and upper-middle class, but Kent Johnson and his group have worked with disadvantaged populations, too. As far as I know, two-years-in-one applies to low-income students, too.

For (remedial) reading comprehension, Morningside uses Robert Dixon's Reading Success. Dixon's approach to teaching "main idea" is sui generis: his program teaches students to identify anaphora first. Dixon's definition of anaphora: "a pronoun or other words used to refer to some other word or name." (And here's a simple example of anaphora)

Morningside students become fluent at identifying anaphora and their referents in the text. As I recall, they then identify the main idea by counting the anaphora. The main idea has the most. (Still haven't read my Dixon handout...if I'm wrong about that, I'll correct.)

Once students have completed Dixon's curriculum, they continue to improve their reading within the subject areas.

We've talked about this before, so this is a repeat: the idea that you would teach reading comprehension by focusing very specifically on anaphora was a revelation to me. I've been teaching anaphora to my students ever since.

My experience at Morningside makes me skeptical of the claim that lack of background knowledge is the only meaningful explanation for the decline in reading comprehension in the U.S., or for the failure of the good charter schools to make much headway improving reading comprehension.

I was mulling this over, trying to think how one might separate background knowledge from some kind of 'textual knowledge' students also lack, when I remembered the fact that my students can have difficulty understanding fables.

One of my best students -- a bright, capable young woman -- did not understand this fable, which she had read out loud to the class:

A dispute arose between the North Wind and the Sun, each claiming that he was stronger than the other. At last they agreed to try their powers upon a traveller, to see which could soonest strip him of his cloak.

The North Wind had the first try; and, gathering up all his force for the attack, he came whirling furiously down upon the man, and caught up his cloak as though he would wrest it from him by one single effort: but the harder he blew, the more closely the man wrapped it round himself.

Then came the turn of the Sun. At first he beamed gently upon the traveller, who soon unclasped his cloak and walked on with it hanging loosely about his shoulders: then he shone forth in his full strength, and the man, before he had gone many steps, was glad to throw his cloak right off and complete his journey more lightly clad.

Moral: Persuasion is better than force.

When one of my students has trouble understanding a fable, the problem isn't background knowledge.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but the fact that Morningside Academy achieves such amazing results using a reading comprehension curriculum that teaches anaphora leads me to believe that, at a minimum, cohesion devices should be directly and explicitly taught in English class.

On that subject, here's Sally Hampton: The Importance of Writing Structures, Coherence, and Cohesion to Writing and Reading.

Kai Musing on Common Core

Comment left by Kai Musing (I added the passage from CC):

I haven't read the Moore book, but as a teacher in a major metropolitan school district I have had to read the common core.

I also used to teach at a Core Knowledge (E.D. Hirsch) charter. I think the problem is more that educationalists and progressives see what they want in the common core.

Hirsch has actually quoted from the common core and expressed tentative support for it:

Why I'm for the Common Core

He quotes from this part specifically in the common core as well (last paragraph on the page):

English Language Arts Standards » Anchor Standards » College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading

To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts. Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. Students also acquire the habits of reading independently and closely, which are essential to their future success.

The problem is, in my view, that progressive continue to co-opt whatever standards there are into reinforcing useless progressive pedagogy.

One more for the road:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.9
Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.

(Unfortunately, it shows up in the 11-12th grade band. In fourth grade, where I teach, it asks students to:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.4
Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology (e.g., Herculean).

Hirsch makes the point that the people who made the standards could not dictate content knowledge to be taught, because no one would have adopted the standards.

Take that as you will.

Information isn't knowledge

re: Ignorance is Blitz: Mangled Moments of History From Actual College Students, Education World reports:

[Henriksson] hastens to add, however, that the book is not a criticism of teachers. Society's interest in what is current tends to eclipse attempts to focus on history. "We are bombarded with an array of material, and it is hard for kids to sort out what's important and what's not. We are losing our common body of knowledge. Teachers are battling uphill against an information revolution that devalues the past."

Still, Henriksson, who teaches a world history survey course taken mostly by college freshmen, points out that many students lack the most basic historical and geographical background. At the beginning of a recent term, he says, he distributed a series of basic history and geography questions to 80 of his students. The majority did not know that Dublin is in Ireland. "Either they never absorbed what they were taught, or they were never exposed to it," Henriksson said.

Some students confuse periods of history in their essays, Henriksson notes, citing the following example from the book: "Wars fought in the 1950s and after include the Crimean War, Vietnam, and the Six-Minute War. President Eisenhower resorted to the bully pool pit. John F. Kennedy worked closely with the Russians to solve the Canadian Missile Crisis."

Some students are simply confused, however, including the one who claimed, "Judyism had one big God, named 'Yahoo.'"

Based on his own experience, Henriksson says, the following general understandings represent the basic accurate historical knowledge one can assume of U.S. college students:

• At some point "in the distant past," the United States fought a war of independence against a major European or Asian power.
• George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon were presidents of the United States. Washington was the first president and Lincoln was in office a long time ago.
• The United States still suffers from the legacy of slavery, whenever that occurred.
• The Civil War, which took place sometime between 1750 and 1930, had something to do with slavery.
• Adolf Hitler, "a foreigner of some kind," was a bad person.
• There was at least one world war but not more than three.

On the subject of common knowledge, I'm pretty sure I have only one student who knew what an adjective was when the semester began.

get the party started

My sister called earlier today to say the revolution has begun:

Horizon Charter Schools will not reopen a school it closed a month ago in Rocklin because it lacks community support, school officials announced this week.

The school had included an accelerated learning academy for third- through eighth-grade students and a science, math and engineering academy for high school students.

On Tuesday, Horizon officials confirmed they are closing their entire accelerated learning program, which also includes kindergarten through second-grade classes housed at a site in Lincoln. The program will end Dec. 21.

"It became clear that the program, in its current form, is largely unwelcome to the community upon whose support the program itself depends," Horizon said in a prepared statement.

[snip]

The announcement came after a month of acrimony between school officials and parents that started when the closure of the Rocklin school site was announced.
Parents were upset about the change, which came with less than a week's notice.

[snip]

The Rocklin school – which had 390 students – was shuttered after Placer County officials said only 75 students were allowed under current permitting rules to be in the facility being leased in an industrial park. School officials also cited traffic safety problems for the closure.

[snip]

In October, Horizon CEO Craig Heimbichner asked parents to be patient while school leaders sought a new site and to remain with the charter in a home-school program.

Since then, more than a third of the program's 200 students have left the program, according to parents. Many of those still with Horizon are meeting at homes, libraries or public meeting rooms in an attempt to keep classes together or to accommodate parents unable to home-school their children.

Keiko Chang said her son's class of 20 third-graders met at a library a few times, but had to split into two groups to hold classes at family homes. Her son's group moved from house to house on whatever days or times worked for the homeowners.

The group recently found a permanent home to use from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. each school day. Each family pays $3 a day to cover insurance, Chang said.

But the children may not be nomads for long; teachers are attempting to open a private school, while parents are working with another charter school organization to start a program in the Roseville area, according to parents.

The program is expected to use the same Core Knowledge and project-based instruction that Horizon had used in its accelerated academy, said parent Laura Daggett.
She said her first-grade daughter has made huge gains in the program. "You can't imagine the difference between August and now," Daggett said.

The only school that teaches with the Core Knowledge program is Rocklin Academy, which has a lengthy waiting list, she said.

Horizon has put administrator Dennis Craft in charge of helping families transition their students to their home school option or to help them find another school, Clark said.

Horizon Charter Schools won't reopen in Rocklin
By Diana Lambert
dlambert@sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 2B

letter to Andrew Rosenthal

re: Texas Republicans and "Knowledge-Based Education," I've sent this email to an address that I hope belongs to Andrew Rosenthal:

Hi -

I am a writer (Animals in Translation; Animals Make Us Human) and an instructor of freshman composition.

My class blog is here.

My husband, Ed Berenson, is Director of the Institute of French Studies at NYU (his new book is The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story).

Both of us strongly support “knowledge-based education,” and we are likely in the majority of parents, including liberal parents living in New York.

Although it’s not obvious from the platform’s wording, knowledge – not critical thinking per se – is the issue the Texas Republican Party has taken a position on. The phrase “critical thinking” means something quite different inside public education than out, and I’m hoping you’ll consider writing a follow-up to clarify.

Boiling it down, there are two fundamental issues in the ‘education wars,’ one involving values, the other involving empirical research on the brain.

In terms of values, a majority of parents (and taxpayers and liberal arts professors) want schools to transmit to students knowledge of the liberal arts disciplines.

The K-12 establishment disagrees. Education professors [tend to] believe knowledge is changing so quickly that material taught today will be obsolete tomorrow, so content doesn’t matter. Instead of teaching knowledge, schools should teach students to ‘think critically’ and to ‘learn how to learn.’

(If you're interested, I compare my own district's ‘content doesn’t matter’ 7th grade reading program to the Core Knowledge reading sequence here. My district spends $29K per pupil.)

In terms of research on the brain, the K-12 establishment believes that ‘knowing’ and ‘thinking’ are separate functions. In the age of the internet, they argue, there is no reason for students to 'memorize' and 'regurgitate' knowledge because you can find any information you need on Google.

That sounds logical, but cognitive science has shown that it’s wrong. In reality, it's not possible to think about content stored on Google. While you are thinking, content must be stored inside 'working memory,' and working memory for “external,” unlearned content is tiny -- while working memory for knowledge stored in long-term memory is much larger.

In short, “knowledge” stored in the brain is biologically different from “knowledge” stored outside the brain, and the difference matters to the quality of thought. Thinking depends on knowing.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham’s article for teachers is worth reading:
Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?

In closing, I’ll mention that Ed headed the California History/Social Science Project in the ‘90s. CHSSP was a state-wide effort by the superintendent of schools to remove professional development from education schools and put it in the hands of disciplinary specialists – in other words, to make professional development “knowledge-based.”

I’m sure Ed would be happy to talk to you if you’re interested.
Hoping you’ll look into this further and consider writing a follow-up –

Catherine Johnson

Of course, I've omitted the question of direct instruction in values...

instructivist weighs in

re: Texas Republican Party's purported opposition to 'critical thinking'

The indignation exhibited in the [NYT] comments is misplaced. In the bizarre Thoughtworld of educationists nothing is what it appears to be. Being indignant about a ban on "critical thinking" is like being indignant about a ban on "democracy" in The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).

In the Thoughtworld of educationists there is endless prattle about "critical thinking" but this "critical thinking" is taking place in a vacuum. Educationists are notoriously hostile to knowledge. They want "critical thinking" to take place without anything to think about. These so-called higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) are the pretentious upper parts of Bloom's Taxonomy with the lower parts typically cut off.

children choosing books

It goes without saying that when children choose their own reading material, they don't select "Charge of the Light Brigade."

pop quiz

from Tips for Teachers:

In the third of the Tips for Teachers series of Spring 2010, we read and discussed "How Knowledge Helps", by Daniel T. Willingham.... We started our discussion with one member stating that he heard from many high school teachers that a number of their students lack simple basic knowledge, such as being unable to complete the rhyme, "Mary had a little ____"
Does Knowledge lead to New Learning?Tuesday, 09 March 2010 18:38

I'm sorry to be a crank about this,^* but I distinctly recall, back on my home planet, everyone knowing Mary had a little lamb.

^* No I'm not.

Who is Christopher Columbus? (Ask an Aspie)

"I don't know."

The revelation in question happened in late August, but I share it today in honor of someone who appears to be fading from America's k12 classrooms.

I actually wasn't that surprised when, while reading with J about the Age of Exploration in The Story of the World, Volume 2, it emerged that he didn't know who Christopher Columbus was. After all, one of the main reasons I've been working my way through this four-volume series with him is that I know he's picked up very little world history in the course of his 15 1/2 years. But, while he's still mostly oblivious to the incidental factoids that float all around him, he's increasingly attending to school, and increasingly sitting in the same classes, doing the same assignments, and taking the same tests, as everyone else.

So while I'm guessing that most (all?) of his schoolmates not only have heard of Christopher Columbus, but also know something about what he's famous for, I'm also guesssing that none of them learned these things from a social studies class or reading assignment that made them their focus.

Indeed, in this age where it's anyone's guess which facts our schools are making it their responsibility to teach, it occurs to me that students like J--with their narrow interests and their tendency to tune out most of the ambient information that others soak up without deliberate instruction--are a valuable resource. Next time you wonder whether your school is actually teaching (rather than merely mentioning in passing) the Bill of Rights (say), or the Cold War, or the Silk Road, ask an Aspie. That is, look for a spaced-out, narowly focused child on the autistic spectrum who hasn't made the topic their personal specialty, and see what he or she can tell you about it.

(Cross-posted at Out in Left Field).

Telling truth from fiction

One of these stories appeared as a front page, May 18th Philadelphia Inquirer article. The other one is made up. Which is which?

Story A:

Some teachers swear that the best way to establish their authority is to avoid smiling for the first two weeks of class.

David Hall takes a very different approach with his students at North Penn High School by cracking self-deprecating jokes and pretending to be the dude who thinks he is hip but so is not.

In the classroom, Hall brings social studies alive, bypassing textbooks in favor of original sources and creating his own lesson materials. Inside and outside the classroom, he spends time getting to know students, hoping to connect with them and inspire them.

Now in his 13th year of teaching, Hall, 37, recently received a "Teacher as Hero" award from the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the latest in a long string of teaching laurels. The Liberty Museum cited Hall's field trips to courtrooms and prisons in Philadelphia and his work as an adviser for the school Gay-Straight Alliance. During summer vacations, Hall does corporate training on workplace diversity issues.

Lauren Ewaniuk, 28, who graduated from North Penn in 2001, called Hall her "all-time favorite teacher by far."

"The best thing about his class was we didn't use the textbook very often," said Ewaniuk, now a teacher in Cheltenham. "He taught us in different ways. The classroom was set up as a circle - it was all class discussion. We read court cases, we did interactive things, watched videos - it was very engaging."

Story B:

Some teachers swear that the best way to engage with students is to crack jokes and relate to them as peers.

David Hill takes a very different approach with his students at South Penn High School. He spends most of his time standing in front of the class and rarely goes off topic

Hill brings social studies alive by ensuring that students can make sense of it. His approach bucks what has become a common trend among award-winning teachers: creating lessons from scratch out of original source materials. Noting that students often find such materials confusing or overwhelming because they lack the necessary background knowledge, Hill makes teaching this knowledge his number one priority.

"My job is to get them ready for the kinds of serious, primary source research that occurs in college and graduate level courses," Hill explains.

Now in his 13th year of teaching, Hill, 37, recently received a "Teacher as Teacher" award from the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the latest in a long string of teaching laurels. The Liberty Museum cited the well-informed essays that Hill's students wrote about the history of prison reform in Philadelphia and Hill's own original research on Gay-Straight relations in Philadelphia high schools. During summer vacations, Hill seeks out the most informative, interesting history texts and conducts workshops for teachers in what he calls "Textbook Resuscitation."

Evelyn Lemaniuk, 28, who graduated from South Penn in 2001, called Hill her "all-time favorite teacher by far."

"The best thing about his class was how he renewed my interest in reading history," said Lemaniuk, now a teacher in Cheltenberg. "Most of the approved textbooks are incredibly low-level and boring, and so the better teachers tend not to use them. The problem is that, without a textbook, we're really at a loss when it comes to understanding primary source materials and how they fit into the bigger picture."

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

Robert Pondiscio on building a better Edsel

Robert writes:

A fascinating email found its way into my inbox last week describing a visit to a high profile, “no excuses” charter school.  The email was written by someone who is solidly pro-reform and strongly pro-charter.   She spent the morning visiting Big Name Charter and pronounced herself aghast.  “The school is fantastically well run, and the kids are on task —- and it is all fuzzery all the time. The reading curriculum is Fountas and Pinnell; the math curriculum is so bad it has sparked parent uprisings across the country,” she writes.

I've had an email from a person involved in public education who says KIPP is firmly committed to constructivist curricula. I'll post if the person who wrote gives me permission.

For now, I'll share my correspondent's analogy: giving excellent teachers bad curricula and expecting them to perform miracles (which they do) is similar to depriving the best doctors of antibiotics, diagnostic tests, and effective surgical techniques and telling them to "heal the sick."

From my perspective as a parent who values a traditional liberal education taught via direct instruction and deliberate practice, I find myself asking once again: why is it parents in my group can't have what we want?

Why do we have to have what other people want?

And why do we have to pay for it?

Speaking of what other people want, our board of education election was held last Tuesday. The candidate we supported lost.

The candidate who won pledged to keep Math Trailblazers and said we would not be replacing Trailblazers with Singapore Math.

One of the candidates who won last year made the same promise.

Meanwhile we've got parents in town who are paying to have their children take private classes that use Primary Mathematics.

Are there any parents anywhere in the country paying out of pocket to provide their children private lessons in Math Trailblazers?

More and more, I'm thinking micro-schools could be an answer for parents like me.


update: my correspondent's email is up

Michael Goldstein on teacher choice

Robert Pondiscio on college readiness

at the Irvington Parents Forum:

It seems to me that there is an obvious and probably unresolvable tension at work here.  Tie a high school diploma to a high and meaningful standard and you will have boxcar numbers of children who will not measure up now or in the foreseeable future.  Keep it low and you're essentially misleading a similar number to believe they have achieved a level of preparedness they have not.  Advocate for a two-tier system, and you risk (as others have noted) a return to the bad old days.

At present, "college ready" is little more than a bumper sticker.  The fact that only one in four kids (as based on the most recent ACT results) are prepared to do c-level college work in all tested subjects is ample proof that it's not an operative goal for high schools anywhere.  Given the range of colleges, it's a slippery concept.  Harvard ready is not the same as Hostos ready.  The only possible solution of which I can conceive is for state assessments to give families meaningful feedback not on the equally ephemeral concept of "on grade level" but whether or not a child is on track for acceptance within that state's university system--and guarantee a seat if so.  New York can't say I'm Harvard material.  But they certainly should be able to say if I'm SUNY material.

E.D. Hirsch: a brief history

Hirsch writes:

In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville wrote admiringly: “In the United States the general thrust of education is directed toward political life; in Europe its main aim is to fit men for private life.”

[snip]

The reasons for this communitarian emphasis were obvious to American leaders in the nineteenth century. Loyalty to the Republic had to be developed, as well as adherence to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and toleration. For without universal indoctrination by the schools in such civic virtues, the United States might dissolve, as had all prior large republics of history, through internal dissension.

The aim of schooling was not just to Americanize the immigrants, but also to Americanize the Americans. This was the inspiring ideal of the common school in the nineteenth century, built upon a combination of thrilling ideals and existential worry. By the end of the century we were educating, relative to other countries, a large percentage of the population, and this forward movement continued well into the twentieth century. In the post–World War II period, the US ranked high internationally according to a number of educational measures. But by 1980, there had occurred a significant decline both in our international position and in comparison with our own past achievements. Two decades ago I was appalled by an international comparison showing that between 1978 and 1988 the science knowledge of American students had dropped from seventh to fourteenth place. In the postwar period we have declined internationally in reading from third place to fifteenth place among the nations participating in the survey.

The root cause of this decline, starting in the 1960s, was a by-then-decades-old complacency on the part of school leaders and in the nation at large. By the early twentieth century worries about the stability of the Republic had subsided, and by the 1930s, under the enduring influence of European Romanticism, educational leaders had begun to convert the community-centered school of the nineteenth century to the child- centered school of the twentieth—a process that was complete by 1950. The chief tenet of the child-centered school was that no bookish curriculum was to be set out in advance. Rather, learning was to arise naturally out of activities, projects, and daily experience. A 1939 critic of the new movement, Isaac Kandel, described it this way:

Children should be allowed to grow in accordance with their needs and interests…. Knowledge is valuable only as it is acquired in a real situation; the teacher must be present to provide the proper environment for experiencing but must not intervene except to guide and advise. There must, in fact, be “nothing-fixed-in-advance” and subjects must not be “set-out-to-be-learned.”

By 1950, with new, watered-down schoolbooks and a new generation of teachers trained in specialized colleges for education, the anti-bookish, child-centered viewpoint had taken over the schools. The consequence was a steep decline in twelfth-grade academic achievement between 1962 and 1980, after which, despite vigorous reform efforts, reading and math scores on the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress have hardly changed.

With the current emphasis on testing and accountability it might be assumed that the days of child-centeredness are now over. But that assumption would miss an essential point. The schools still lack a definite, pre-set, year-by-year curriculum (though this is changing in math) and yet at the same time schools are being required to make measurable progress on year-by-year tests.

How to Save the Schools
New York Review of Books
May 13, 2010
by E. D. Hirsch Jr.

Core Knowledge pilot study in NYC

here (pdf file)

6X Greater Literacy Gains for CKR Students than Students at Demographically Similar ComparisonSchools

Compared to peers, kindergarteners taught with the CKR program made more progress in all areas of reading tested: spelling, phonemic awareness, decoding, and comprehension.

Teachers’ Views:

“The Skills Strand is really very good for the students. Their reading levels are higher this year than last year.”

"At first, I felt that many teachers did not know if they agreed with teaching sounds before letter names. But by January, when teachers started to see their children reading, they became believers” became believers."

“The Skills Strand has exceeded my expectations. I think it is the best reading program I have ever used. We are thrilled with the results. I hope it is introduced into more schools. We plan to change the sequence of the Listening Strand.”

“After seeing how well Core Knowledge Skills worked for teaching my children to read, I would have a hard time teaching any other way.”

administrator views:

“This year with Core Knowledge Reading, all of the teachers are communicating more, they discuss the pacing and delivery strategies” pacing and delivery strategies.

“The CK pilot has honed the professional conversation.”

“There was resistance and suspicion on the teachers part in the beginning but they are ecstatic over the results— the children are reading! “

The finding that professional conversations amongst colleagues were 'honed' is interesting. Stuart Yeh reports the same phenomenon in his book Raising Student Achievement Through Rapid Assessment and Test Reform. Sound curriculum and testing programs are as good for the grown-ups as they are for the children.

Thanks go to Erin Johnson for supplying the link.

Curriculum for Democracy

I'm an unabashed fan of E.D Hirsch. Sol Stern does a tremendous job of summarizing Hirsh's contributions to the field of education in his article in the Autumn 2009 City Journal entitled E.D. Hirsh's Curriculum for Democracy. Stern follows Hirsh's academic path from chemistry student to Yale graduate school to English professor at the University of Virginia and finally his current status as a true education reformer. The article is worth reading in full. Here is what initially grabbed Hirsch's attention:

Though UVA’s admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”

The education establish has criticized him as elitist for years, but that's baloney.

Far from being elitist, [Hirsch] insists, cultural literacy is the path to educational equality and full citizenship for the nation’s minority groups. “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” Hirsch writes, and “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.”

stop the madness

here is redkudu, writing on the Core Knowledge blog:

I am thankful some attention is being focused on the unreasonable expectations placed on teachers: that there is some acknowledgment that it cannot ALL be done. This is especially true when you look at what teachers should be able to expect – that because a student is in a certain grade they have passed certain benchmarks which are designated by the state to assure us the students have the minimum skills necessary to accomplish grade-level work. Unfortunately, this is often not the case.

As a high school teacher, I’ve been expected to conduct Socratic Seminars, but never trained in how to do so. I found and purchased a book on such, read up, developed a lesson plan, and presented it. I received poor marks on an evaluation for that, because the method I’d read and produced was not the same method (a modified version) that the school preferred.

Ditto Marzano’s 9, by which we are formally evaluated at my new school. No training, no available materials (his books) in case I want to read up on them. Ditto small group learning, the student portfolio, PBL’s, and a whole host of other programs brought in via 20 minute PowerPoint at staff training without any supporting texts or ongoing training. And I should be able to demonstrate these methods and techniques in a classroom with learning disparities ranging from semi-literate to college level in 90 minutes on Mondays, 70 minutes on Wednesdays, and 45 minutes on Fridays. (Actually, our school has 9 different schedules, which also impact Tuesdays and Thursdays, early release Wednesdays, pep rally days, testing days, Homeroom days (once a 6 weeks – I’m expected to provide a meal for 25 students to enhance our “bonding”), actual homerooms (once a day), and other events.) Band-aids for gaping wounds and all that. I’d love to have a classroom in which levels were as simple as below expected, at expected, and above expected. I’d like to able to say the only thing I do in the summers is relax.

Robert Pondiscio on Reading Workshop

Lastly, there’s the question of how valuable the 30 different books for 30 different kids approach really is. I was trained in Readers Workshop and had to use it in my classroom. It wasn’t effective, or satisfying. It becomes almost impossible to have deep, rich conversations about books. You can’t possibly be familiar with every book every kid is reading, so you’re encouraged to ask questions that are not terribly deep or interesting: Can you describe the setting? Which character are you most like? Are there any questions you wish you could ask the author? It’s a kind of cookie-cutter, paint-by-numbers way to teach literature. If today’s mini-lesson is “Good readers pay attention to what characters say and do” (yes, we actually teach that to 5th graders) it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about War and Peace or Captain Underpants. At one level, that’s true. At another, it’s just plain silly.

You can easily say “not every child participates in those rich, whole-class discussions.” But not every child is engrossed in reading in the reader’s workshop either. A lot of them are just going through the motions.

Reader's Workshop Mashup

how did this happen?

Lynne Munson at the Common Core blog:

New York City’s Board of Regents has chosen David Steiner as New York’s new education commissioner, EdWeek reported earlier this week. Steiner’s move to Albany comes after four years as dean of Hunter College’s School of Education.

Why are we happy with the regents’ pick? Because Steiner is widely known for his commitment to a rigorous, comprehensive curriculum, and he has published quite a bit on the subject.

Don’t take our word for it, though – read how Steiner describes his schoolboy days:

“I read the classics as they were then understood—Austen, Brontë, Chaucer, Conrad, Dickens (not a favorite), Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence, Milton (sampled, and put aside for years to come), Mann, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola—and many authors of the second rank. I recall Trollope, Webster, Spencer, “modern” novelists of every hue—Fitzgerald, Roth, Updike, Nicholas Monsarrat, Storm Jameson (a close family friend), John le Carré—and so many others lost to memory.”

We’ll be watching with interest.

Boy. Me, too.

Steiner was on the board of the Core Knowledge Foundation, he did the ed-school syllabus study a few years ago, and he worked with Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First to create Teacher U at Hunter College.

Steiner's appointment has happened at the precise moment I was gearing up to lobby for adoption of the Core Knowledge curriculum here in Irvington. The precise moment. Ed says we should see if he'll come to town to give a talk.

The press release describes Steiner as "a bold and provocative education reformer."

That's something you don't see every day.