Tag Archives: schools

Quick Review: Waiting for Superman

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I recently watched the documentary Waiting for Superman, a film that received a lot of media attention after it was released late last year. It does try to take on an important on-going problem: how to improve American schools? This is an issue that one can hear average citizens, politicians, college professors and others discuss frequently. Here are my quick thoughts about this film’s take on the issue:

1. The framing of the issue in the opening and conclusion of the film is quite effective. Toward the beginning, we meet several students who want to go to the better schools (often a magnet or charter school) in their school districts. But since they are not alone and these schools are attractive to many families, the students have to go through a lottery. At the end, we see the results of the lottery. This is the question that is raised: should a child’s educational opportunities be left to chance in a lottery? Get into one of these elite schools and life will likely be good; not get in, and children can be doomed to terrible schools that are termed “drop-out factories.”

2. While the documentary hits on some possible reasons behind the problems of American schools (No Child Left Behind, bad neighborhoods, tracking), the main emphasis here is on two things:

2a. Teachers are a problem. The idea pushed by the documentary is that the bad teachers need to be replaced and unions resist this process. Michelle Rhee, the attention-getting superintendent of the Washington, D.C. schools is followed as she tries to make a deal with the union involving merit pay for the good teachers. Interestingly, we don’t really see evidence from districts where teachers are not as unionized – does this help improve student performance?

2b. Parents deserve choices in schools. This involves magnet or charter schools within districts plus other operations such as the Harlem Children’s Zone and KIPP schools.

2c. I wish they had put these two ideas together more: so how do teachers operate within these “better” school settings? How are teachers trained and encouraged within these settings? What exactly about these schools boosts student performance – is it just the teachers?

2d. I also wonder how all of this might be scalable. Later, the documentary talks about raising expectations for children and Bill Gates talks on-camera about having the right “culture” in the schools. How might this fit into the idea about American schools being more of a competition-based system versus a country like Finland that pursues more equal outcomes across the spectrum of students?

3. Even though most of the documentary is about inner-city schools, it also follows one “average” suburban girl and the suggestion is made that even suburban schools are not doing that well. This is backed up with data showing that American students are the most confident among a group of OECD nations but their scores are behind those of many nations. Additionally, it is suggested that these suburban schools are not preparing students well for college where a good number find that they need to take remedial courses. Since many Americans likely are influenced by school district performance as they look to move, what exactly is going on in these suburban schools that needs to be fixed? Outside of the exemplar schools held up in the movie (magnets or charters, KIPP, Harlem Children’s Zone), are there any good schools? Is the whole system so broken that no school can really succeed?

Overall, I was a little surprised by the message and who I have seen support it: improve the pool of teachers (and fight the unions!) and offer parents and communities more choices of schools that are more effective in providing educations. Considering what I often see blamed as the problems of schools, No Child Left Behind or funding disparities, this is a change of pace.

At the same time, I wonder about whether these two solutions are really the answer. Are they band-aids to the issue or would they really solve educational problems in America? I keep coming back to the idea of residential segregation, the concept describing how races and social classes live apart from each other. Life chances are better for people growing up in wealthier, more educated settings but of course, these people can buy their way into such settings and avoid others. Would school districts near me, say in Naperville, a suburb that takes great pride in its schools, really go for the idea of charter or magnet schools? Do they even really need them?

At the very least, this documentary raises some interesting issues and a different perspective on a problem for which many wish to find a solution.

(This film was well-received by critics: it is 89% fresh at RottenTomatoes, 99 fresh out of 112 total reviews.)

What happens when even the schools in well-off sububs don’t meet the NCLB standards?

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With the increasing standards in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Department of Education recently suggested that the number of schools that are not meeting standards is likely to dramatically increase:

The Department of Education estimates the percentage of schools not meeting yearly targets for their students’ proficiency in in math and reading could jump from 37 to 82 percent as states raise standards in attempts to satisfy the law’s mandates.

According to this “Fact Check,” schools are not labeled as “failing.” Rather, there is a process such schools would go through if they do not meet the NCLB increasing standards:

Obama’s terminology wasn’t quite right, though. There is no “failing” label in the No Child Left Behind Act. And schools that do not meet growth targets — aimed at getting 100 percent of students proficient in math, reading and science by 2014 — for one year are not subject to any intervention.

Those unable to do so for two or more consecutive years are considered “in need of improvement.” The consequences then become stiffer each year, starting with offering students an opportunity to attend another school, and escalating if the targets remain unmet.

As more schools are unable to meet these standards, what happens when suburban school districts in fairly well-off suburbs don’t meet the standards? Many of these communities use their well-performing schools as a selling point. Suburban home buyers and businesses are influenced by school performance and perceptions about school districts.

Having schools labeled as “not meeting standards” (or in possible public jargon, “failing”) would be a blow to the idyllic image and high status of a number of suburban communities. Beyond schools, suburbs are supposed to be places where Americans can be safe and at least their children can get ahead. Suburbs could try to give a more technical explanation for the NCLB data but this could prove tedious or difficult to understand.

One possible outcome  of all of this (suggested to me by a colleague outside my department) might be that this is when NCLB will truly be done: when monied suburbs realize that the legislation says their good schools are not making adequate progress.

Americans blame parents for bad education

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A perpetual question in our country is who to blame for poor educational results. A recent poll shows a large number of Americans blame parents:

An Associated Press-Stanford University Poll on education found that 68 percent of adults believe parents deserve heavy blame for what’s wrong with the U.S. education system — more than teachers, school administrators, the government or teachers unions.

Only 35 percent of those surveyed agreed that teachers deserve a great deal or a lot of the blame. Moms were more likely than dads — 72 percent versus 61 percent — to say parents are at fault. Conservatives were more likely than moderates or liberals to blame parents.

Those who said parents are to blame were more likely to cite a lack of student discipline and low expectations for students as serious problems in schools. They were also more likely to see fighting and low test scores as big problems.

Figuring out how to improve education is always a difficult issue to address. I’ve always thought the discussion is compounded by the fact that people feel more control or duty to check on how their property taxes are being used for education. People gripe about paying money to the federal government or the state but when it comes to the more local level and education, everyone has an opinion (and often a solution).

As the story goes on to day, it is not all about blaming: “55 percent believe their children are getting a better education than they did, and three-quarters rate the quality of education at their child’s school as excellent or good.”

A final thought: the next question on the survey should have been: if you are a parent of a child in school, do you blame yourself for your child’s performance? Or do the people who blame parents really blame other parents?

A study looking at “the social cost to academic achievement”

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A psychologist writing in the Washington Post suggests that a new study sheds light on this long-standing issue raised by sociologist John Ogbu about high-achieving minority students who are accused of “acting white.” This study of 13,000 students was recently published in the latest issue of Child Development:

The study took measures at two time points and examined the change in social acceptance across the year. The question of interest is whether students’ academic achievement (measured as grade point average) at Time 1 was related to the change in social acceptance over the course of the year.

For White, Latino, and Asian students, it was—positively. That is, the higher a student’s GPA was at Time 1, the more likely it was that his or her social acceptance would increase during the coming year. It was not a big effect, but it was present.

For African American and Native American students the opposite was true. A higher GPA predicted *lower* social acceptance during the following year. This effect was stronger than the positive effect for the other ethnic groups.

Thus, it seemed that the simpler version of the “acting white” hypothesis was supported.

But the story turned out to be a bit more complicated.

Further analyses showed that there was a social penalty for high achieving African Americans *only* at schools with a small percentage of black students. The cost was not present at high-achieving schools with mostly African-American students, or at any low-achieving schools.

At the same time, there was never a social benefit for academic achievement, as there was for White, Latino, and Asian students.

So it sounds like the context of the school matters quite a bit: when African-Americans are a minority in the school, then high achieving Black students are penalized while this is not the case in majority African-American schools. In these majority/minority schools, African-Americans and whites (and others) are directly in opposition and the high-achievers get caught in the middle.

I wonder if there is a “tipping point” in schools where high-achieving African-Americans move from being called out for “acting white” to being accepted. Does the school need to be 40% African-American or higher? The problem may be that there are relatively few schools with somewhat equal mixes of races. We see tipping points in other areas: in neighborhoods, whites start moving out when the Black population reaches about 15-20% and in churches, it is difficult to keep whites in church once the percentage of Blacks reaches a similar amount.

I’d be curious to see what the authors suggest could be done to counteract this trend.

Schools don’t just teach academic skills; they also teach social and emotional skills

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The Chicago Tribune reports on widespread programs in schools to teach social and emotional skills to students. The state of Illinois is leading the way:

In 2004, Illinois became the first state in the nation to require all school districts to teach social and emotional skills as part of their curriculum and daily school life. That means students are expected to meet certain benchmarks, such as recognizing and managing feelings, building empathy and making responsible decisions.

The touchy-feely stuff doesn’t have to come at the expense of intellect. New evidence shows a strong link between interpersonal skills and academics, said Roger Weissberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who has studied social and emotional learning for more than 25 years.

Weissberg and his colleagues recently completed an analysis of 300 scientific studies and reached two important conclusions: Students enrolled in such programs scored at least 10 percentage points higher on achievement tests than peers who weren’t. At the same time, discipline problems were cut in half.

The article also suggests teaching social and emotional skills is tied to seeing students more as whole persons. This is all part of the broad program of socialization in schools. While academic skills are an important emphasis, so are emotional/social skills as well as other topics such as learning how to be a good citizen or acquiring skills needed for jobs.

Fantasy football in the classroom

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Fantasy football is not just for adults or for recreation.  Some teachers are now using it in the classroom to help teach math:

Empirical data show that classroom fantasy-sports programs help improve grades and test scores.

In a 2009 survey of middle and high school students by the University of Mississippi, 56 percent of boys and 45 percent of girls said they learned math easier because they played fantasy sports in class. And 33 percent of boys and 28 percent of girls said their grades improved.

This sounds like a fun way to learn math. And the story suggests that whole families got involved with the process and helped the children decide whom to draft and how to score.

On another front: will everyone will be playing fantasy football in the future?

LA Times portal on value-added analysis of teachers

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The Los Angeles Times has put together an information and opinion filled portal regarding their recent publication of a value-added analysis of Los Angeles teachers.

Measuring teacher performance is a tricky subject as there are a number of factors at play in a student’s academic performance. In an article, the newspaper summarizes how value-added scores are estimated:

Value-added estimates the effectiveness of a teacher by looking at the test scores of his students. Each student’s past test performance is used to project his performance in the future. The difference between the child’s actual and projected results is the estimated “value” that the teacher added or subtracted during the year. The teacher’s rating reflects his average results after teaching a statistically reliable number of students.

In addition to these methodological questions, there are number of other fascinating issues: should this sort of information be publicly available and how will affect teacher’s performance? Is it an accurate assessment of what teachers do? What should be done for the teachers who fall outside the normal range? How will the politics of all of this play out?

For those interested in education and measuring outcomes, this all makes for interesting reading.

(As a side note: I can only imagine what discussions would ensure if similar information was published regarding college professors.)