Category Archives: Education

Education, Poverty

This Is the Problem

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On Twitter, I posted the following:

2 guaranteed reforms reformers refuse to do: 1) give children books 2) give poor children’s parents money.

Both of these are supported by solid research—the need for access to books and choice reading by decades of research in literacy and the second point is powerfully supported by a recent study from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation:

The impact of increases in income on cognitive development appears roughly comparable with that of spending similar amounts on school [emphasis added] or early education programmes. Increasing household income could substantially reduce differences in schooling outcomes, while also improving wider aspects of children’s well-being.

Yet, here is a response I received:

I’m afraid some poor children’s parents do not spend money wisely.

And the person’s Twitter profile begins with “I love Jesus!”

This is the problem.

The default assumption in the U.S. about people in poverty is paralyzed by stereotypes and blind to the inverse of this person’s fear: In a world in which childhood poverty in the U.S. exceeds 20% and the new majority in public schools is students living in poverty, when the filthy rich buy gold-plated teeth, is that spending money wisely?

Mullainathan and Shafir, in Scarcity, caution against drawing conclusions from observable behaviors by people living in poverty:

Given that we hold highly negative stereotypes about the poor, essentially defined by a failure (they are poor!), it is natural to attribute personal failure to them….Accidents of birth—such as what continent you are born on—have a large effect on your chance of being poor….The failures of the poor are part and parcel of the misfortune of being poor in the first place. Under these conditions, we all would have (and have!) failed. (pp. 154, 155, 161)

To be clear, the overwhelming evidence detailed by Mullainathan and Shafir shows that the same people behave differently in situations of abundance and situations of scarcity.

People in abundance have enough slack to behave in ways that are productive while people in scarcity do not have that luxury.

Remove the scarcity, add slack, and people can and will behave differently.

But as long as we can love Jesus and hate poor people (or at least remain skeptical, if not cynical, about them), we will never address the systemic conditions that produce the evidence that we use unfairly against people in poverty.

Education

Teacher Quality, Wiggins and Hattie: More Doing the Wrong Things the Right Ways

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Update

The career of John Hattie: Plagiarism, misconduct, and the coarsening of education, Stephen Vainker

In a blog titled “To my critics” as a follow up to his critique of Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Errors, Grant Wiggins seeks to clarify his central arguments:

My point was merely to ask those who speak only of forces outside of our immediate control as educators to attend to what is not only in our control but can make a big difference….

Teachers and schools make a difference, a significant one. And we are better off improving teaching, learning, and schooling than anything else as educators because that’s what is in our control. Am I denying or tolerating poverty? Of course not. I decry the increased poverty and wealth inequality in this country. I vote democratic and give to liberal causes such as MoveOn and SPLC. I agree with Diane that there are nasty people and groups trying to subvert public education for their own ideologies and gain.

In this blog post, Wiggins returns to citing and praising the work of New Zealand scholar John Hattie. Wiggins has endorsed Hattie’s work in earlier blogs, such as:

I have been a fan of John Hattie’s work ever since I encountered Visible Learning. Hattie has done the most exhaustive meta-analysis in education. Thanks to him, we can gauge not only the relative effectiveness of almost every educational intervention under the sun but we can compare these interventions on an absolute scale of effect size.

I came to this debate and the connection between Wiggins and Hattie during a Twitter exchange with Wiggins. And as Twitter discussions go, I think we started off contentious, but eventually reached a genuine exchange; however, I could not fully or adequately explore what needs to be explored on Twitter so I began to research Hattie, and I want to place this recent exchange with Wiggins in a much larger context, one that includes the apparently growing interest in Hattie’s work.

My short and opening point is this: If in-school factors, notably teacher quality, are in fact the most pressing issues in education reform, and if in-school factors are the only things within our control, and if we are committed to accountability based on standards and high-stake testing as the only reform paradigm, then Wiggins (and maybe Hattie) would be credible.

Ultimately, however, Wiggins and Hattie represent even more doing the wrong things the right ways.

While I share the frustration expressed by Jersey Jazzman about the implied and direct claims Wiggins makes about teachers—in our Twitter exchange Wiggins was comfortable stating that many or most teachers use poverty as an excuse because he “hears it all the time”—and I also have grown tired of education reform punditry that seems imbalanced toward teacher bashing and marginalizing further the teaching profession, I want to focus on the limitations of in-school only reform and measuring teacher quality, and then highlight that the teacher quality debate fails for the same reason the push for Common Core fails (the real-world implementation has always failed, and it will fail this time also).

Now, let me go back to my first encounter with Wiggins, which was his co-authored Understanding by Design. As part of the process for my adding gifted and talented to my teaching credentials, I took a seminar that used Understanding.

Like many educators, I found the backward design model compelling at first. The best aspects of Wiggins and McTighe’s work, I think, are their criticisms of traditional practices:

  • Traditional approaches to teaching focused on objectives and teachers often were careless about matching their assessments to those objectives. In short, Wiggins and McTighe made a valid case that teaching was too often disjointed among objectives, classroom practices, and assessment.
  • The best point about traditional practices offered by Wiggins and McTighe was confronting that testing in many classes was essentially a “gotcha” experience for students. Students were left, they argued, either partially or completely blind to what was being asked of them.

I shared then and do now hold serious concerns about traditional pedagogy and assessment. In fact, I have been my entire career a strong advocate for systemic educational reform. I think we have failed and continue to fail the promise of universal public education as a foundational institution among a free people.

And there is the problem.

Wiggins and McTighe’s solutions—backward design, sharing detailed rubrics with students, etc.—are certainly the right way to do teacher-centered, standards-driven education based on measurable outcomes.

But teacher-centered, standards-driven education based on measurable outcomes is the wrong paradigm for democratic and liberatory education; thus, embracing understanding by design is simply doing the wrong things the right ways.

When schools have failed and when they do fail, they are teacher- and content-centered. The entire accountability era has intensified the very worst of education, and while the best way to do accountability education based on standards and testing is something like what Wiggins and McTighe offer, this commitment fails to step back even further and recognize what Ravitch and Wiggins’s critics are acknowledging: U.S. society and schools are plagued with inequity, and in order to overcome the negative consequences of inequity (one of which is low achievement by some students), social and school reform must address directly that inequity.

To put it in simple and direct terms: A powerful and identifiable problem in schools is inequitable access to certified and experienced teachers; instead of focusing on measuring, ranking, and rewarding teachers based on test scores (all shown in research to cause more harm than good), we should first address that students with the most need (high-poverty students, English language learners, special needs students, minority students) have equitable access to experienced and certified teachers as affluent and white students do.

Wiggins has positioned himself on some tenuous ground with claims that many or most teachers use poverty as an excuse, that outlier data somehow show what should be normal, and that Hattie’s research is justification for his positions. But the larger problem here is that Wiggins and the entire education reform movement over the past thirty years are trapped in a flawed solution model for a discounted set of problems.

Next, even if we conceded that we want to do the wrong things the right ways, Wiggins and Hattie represent the exact problem with Common Core: Once these grand ideas are implemented—and that implementation is guaranteed to be a failure—the good intentions do not matter.

For example understanding by design has become an industry for ASCD:

Thousands of educators across the country use the Understanding by Design framework, created by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, to get a handle on standards, align programs to assessments, and guide teachers in implementing a standards-based curriculum that leads to student understanding and achievement.

Harvey Daniels’s experience with the commodification of literature circles and best practice is a representative cautionary tale about the negative consequences of reducing pedagogy and educational research to programs, consultation workshops, and how-to guides. Daniels, speaking at a state English teachers’ convention, explained that the terms “literature circles” and “best practices” can be found splattered across books and on web sites to such an extent that the original intent of both has been lost.

And here is the crux of the problem with Hattie as well as Wiggins endorsing Hattie.

Wiggins and Hattie share the charge that in-school reform is the only thing in the control of teachers, but they also share central roles of influence —direct and indirect—in the education reform bureaucracy and industry.

Hattie’s influence in New Zealand, in fact, prompted this:

The political and media stir caused by professor John Hattie’s research on student achievement has prompted a group of academics to look closely at his work.

The authors were particularly concerned that politicians might use Hattie’s work to justify ill-informed policy decisions.

Hattie’s work [1] is poised to support in NZ and the U.S. increasing class size and implementing merit pay, for example—both of which are not supported by large bodies of research.

Wiggins and Hattie are trapped, then, in the measurable and the visible—paralyzed by a world in which we focus on control.

As Neil Gaiman has stated, however, “The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.”

Ultimately, Wiggins and Hattie are offering the right ways to do the wrong things, again. Just as Common Core and new high-stakes testing are digging a failed accountability hole that much deeper.

We can do better.

Part of better, then, is yet more moratoriums.

We need moratoriums on educational research, educational consultation, and educational materials—as well as an end to our fetish with testing and measurement.

If these moratoriums seem extreme, let me point out a couple things:

  1. In 1947, Lou LaBrant wrote: “A brief consideration will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods.”
  2. The exact same fact exists today: Every major element of the education reform movement is either not supported by research or is directly refuted by research.

We currently have ample evidence about the problems in education (and society) and we have ample evidence of how to address those problems.

Spending millions and even billions of dollars on more measures of teacher quality and student achievement is an inexcusable waste of time and money.

Inexcusable.

Poverty as one of the most profound aspects of scarcity cripples human capacities. As Mullainathan and Shafir detail, scarcity drains anyone’s bandwidth (mental capacty): “Scarcity captures the mind”:

Scarcity is more than just the displeasure of having very little. It changes how we think. It imposes itself on our minds….

Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth…

One cannot take a vacation from poverty. Simply deciding not to be poor—even for a bit—is never an option….

Our data suggest causality runs at least as strongly in the other direction: that poverty—the scarcity mindset—causes failure. (pp. 7, 13, 148, 155)

To place this research on scarcity/poverty in the context of in-school only reform:

Children cannot take a vacation from poverty during the school day. Simply deciding poverty is beyond our control during the school day is a myopic option for failure.

Claiming poverty lies beyond our control is simply false. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has evidence that ending money scarcity will eliminate poverty and by doing so academic improvement follows:

The impact of increases in income on cognitive development appears roughly comparable with that of spending similar amounts on school [emphasis added] or early education programmes. Increasing household income could substantially reduce differences in schooling outcomes, while also improving wider aspects of children’s well-being.

If we want better teachers and higher student achievement, let’s, then, stop wasting money on the unsupported array of in-school only, teacher-centered, standards-and-testing driven reforms, and directly address poverty in children’s lives and inequity in their schools.

Continuing down the path Wiggins and Hattie advocate, we remain mired in doing the wrong things the right ways. Let’s take a better path.

[1] See the following reviews and critiques of Hattie’s work:

CCSS, Charter schools, Education, education reform, grade retention, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, Segregation, Testing

The U.S. Formula for Children and the Choices We Refuse to Make

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The formula for children in the U.S. can be summed up in one word, I think: “harsh.” And the response we should have to this formula is “inexcusable.”

Let’s consider the U.S. formula for children:

If children in the U.S. can survive the gauntlet that is the national formula for children, as young adults they can look forward to crushing debt to attend college so that they can enter a nearly non-existent workforce.

But there is a caveat to this formula: The U.S. formula for children above is for “other people’s children,” that new majority in U.S. public schools and those children living in homes of the working poor, the working class, and the dwindling middle class.

Children of the privileged are exempt.

And what are the choices we refuse to make?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (UK) has released “Does money affect children’s outcomes?”—based in part on “many studies…from the US.” The key points include:

  • This review identified 34 studies with strong evidence about whether money affects children’s outcomes. Children in lower-income families have worse cognitive, social-behavioural and health outcomes in part because they are poorer, not just because low income is correlated with other household and parental characteristics.
  • The evidence was strongest for cognitive development and school achievement, followed by social-behavioural development. Income also affects outcomes indirectly impacting on children, including maternal mental health, parenting and home environment.
  • The impact of increases in income on cognitive development appears roughly comparable with that of spending similar amounts on school or early education programmes. Increasing household income could substantially reduce differences in schooling outcomes, while also improving wider aspects of children’s well-being.
  • A given sum of money makes significantly more difference to children in low-income than better-off households (but still helps better-off children).
  • Money in early childhood makes most difference to cognitive outcomes, while in later childhood and adolescence it makes more difference to social and behavioural outcomes.
  • Longer-term poverty affects children’s outcomes more severely than short-term poverty. Although many studies were from the US, the mechanisms through which money appears to affect children’s outcomes, including parental stress, anxiety and material deprivation, are equally relevant in the UK.

The third bullet point should not be ignored: The key to eradicating poverty and the negative consequences of poverty for children is to address poverty directly in the lives of children—money—and to address inequity directly in the education of children.

There is no either/or, then, in the education reform debate. It is imperative that we do both.

Ultimately, the U.S. formula for children is based on flawed assumptions. Before we can change that formula, we must change our views of poverty as well as people and children trapped in poverty.

Scarcity and abundance are powerful forces; in the U.S., both are allowed to exist as an ugly game of chance.

The choice of abundance for all is there to be embraced, however, if compassion and community are genuinely a part of the American character.

Education

Pop Culture and the Mutant Narrative: X-Men Endure

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The late 1930s and early 1940s birthed the superhero comic book fascination that despite several bumps along the way has endured into the twenty-first century where superhero films are huge box-office successes and pop culture gold mines.

In both the comic book and film universes, superhero reboots are common: Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man have all experienced revised origins in the pages of their comics as well as multiple cycles of films dedicated to the superheroes. The X-Men films from 2000 to 2006 may have had as much to do with the adaptation success of comic books to film as Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man.

X-Men: First Class in 2011 was one such re-boot and enough of a success that X-Men: Days of Future Past is slated for 2014.

Alexander Abad-Santos discusses how the mutant aspect of X-Men narratives can be found nearly universally in pop culture:

In about seven months, I along with a lot of X-Men fans will be getting to the theater an hour early, lining up, and then watching to see if Days of Future Past is what I’ve imagined it would be. What’s kinda great for an X-Men fans, though, is that we don’t have to wait until then to get an X-Men story. Pop culture is filled with them.

Recently, I was interviewed by a local journalist about zombie culture; the journalist was investigating why zombies are so popular. I tried to explain that pop culture has all sorts of cycles. Some periods when vampires are hot, some periods when something else is hot. But I also conceded that certain elements of pop culture trends are enduring; for example, something about zombies certainly remains captivating with the public.

I believe the same case can be made for mutants: mutant narratives are compelling and ripe for making important social commentary. And to that I wrote about X-Men and the Hunger Games trilogy as they speak to wider issues, such as education:

Separate, Unequal…and Distracted*

When research, history, and allegory all converge to tell us the same story, we must pause to ask why we have ignored the message for so long and why are we likely to continue missing the essential thing before us.

The New York Times and Education Week reveal two important lessons in both the message they present and the distinct difference in their framing of that message:

“Black Students Face More Discipline, Data Suggests [sic]” headlines the NYT’s article with the lead:

Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to new data from the Department of Education.

And EdWeek announces “Civil Rights Data Show Retention Disparities,” opening with:

New nationwide data collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office reveal stark racial and ethnic disparities in student retentions, with black and Hispanic students far more likely than white students to repeat a grade, especially in elementary and middle school.

One has to wonder if this is truly news in the sense that this research is revealing something we don’t already know—because we should already know this fact:

America’s public schools and prisons are stark images of the fact of racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequity in our society—inequity that is both perpetuated by and necessary for the ruling elite to maintain their artificial status as that elite.

The research, coming from the U.S. Department of Education, and the media coverage are not evidence we are confronting that reality or that we will address it any time soon. The research and the media coverage are proof we’ll spend energy on the research and the coverage in order to mask the racism lingering corrosively in our free state while continuing to blame the students who fail for their failure and the prisoners for their transgressions.

X-Men and The Hunger Games: Allegory as Unmasking

Science fiction allows an artist to pose worlds that appears to be “other worlds” in order for the readers to come to see our own existence more clearly.

In the re-boot film version of Marvel Comics superhero team, X-Men: First Class, the powerful allegory of this comic book universe portrays the isolation felt by the mutants—one by one they begin to discover each other and share a common sentiment: “I thought I was the only one.”

These mutants feel not only isolation, but also shame—shame for their looks, those things that are not their choices, not within their direct power to control. While this newest film installment reveals the coming together of the mutants, this narrative ends with the inevitable division of the mutants into factions: Professor X’s assimilationists and Magneto’s radicals.

It takes only a little imagination to see this allegory in the historical factionalism that rose along with the Civil Rights movement between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

In whose interest is this in-fighting?

Although written as young adult literature, The Hunger Games trilogy is beginning to spread into mainstream popular consciousness. The savage reality show that pits children against children to the death gives the first book in the series its title, but as with the research on racial inequity in our schools, I fear we fail to look at either the purpose of these Hunger Games in that other world of the novel or how it speaks to us now.

In Catching Fire, Katniss Everdeen, the narrator, confronts directly that her country, Panem, has created stability by factionalizing the people into Districts, ruled by the Capitol.

Panem exists because of the competition among the Districts, daily for resources and once a year personified by two lottery losers, children form each district.

In this second book, Katniss learns something horrifying but true when the winners of the most recent Games, Katniss and Peeta, visit District 11—home of Katniss’s friend killed in the Games, Rue: During the celebration, the people of District 11 repeat Katniss’s act of rebellion:

What happens next is not an accident. It is too well executed to be spontaneous, because it happens in complete unison. Every person in the crowd presses the three middle fingers of their left hand against their lips and extends them to me. It’s our sign from District 12, the last good-bye I gave Rue in the arena. (p. 61)

Then as Katniss and Peeta are rushed from the stage, they witness Peacekeepers executing people in the District 11 crowd. As President Snow has warned Katniss about the possibility of uprisings:

“But they’ll follow if the course of things doesn’t change. And uprisings have been known to lead to revolution….Do you have any idea what that would mean? How many people would die? What conditions those left would have to face? Whatever problems anyone may have with the Capitol, believe me when I say that if it released its grip on the districts for even a short time, the entire system would collapse.” (p. 21)

What maintains the stability of Panem? Competition, division, and fear.

What threatens the stability of Panem and the inequity it maintains? Solidarity, compassion, cooperation, and rebellion.

Separate, Unequal…and Distracted

U.S. public education has always been and remains, again like our prisons, a map of who Americans are and what we are willing to tolerate.

Children of color and children speaking home languages other than English are disproportionately likely to be punished and expelled (especially the boys), disproportionately likely to be retained to suffer the same grade again, disproportionately likely to be in the lowest level classes with the highest student-teacher ratios (while affluent and white children sit in advanced classes with low student-teacher ratios) in order to prepare them for state testing, and disproportionately likely to be taught by un- and under-certified teachers with the least experience.

And many of these patterns are distinct in pre-kindergarten.

We don’t really need any more research, or history lessons, or sci-fi allegory, or comic books brought to the silver screen.

We need to see the world that our children live in and recognize themselves (just ask an African American young man), and then look in the mirror ourselves.

Why do those in power remain committed to testing children in order to label, sort, and punish them?

Who does the labeling, sorting, and punishing benefit? And what are the reasons behind these facts, the disproportionate inequity in our schools and in our prisons?

We only need each minute of every day to confront what the recent data from the USDOE reveal, but it is always worth noting that this sentiment is often ignored despite its value:

…I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. (Eugene V. Debs: Statement September 18, 1918)

How and why?

Eugene V. Debs is marginalized as a socialist, a communist so no one listens to the solidarity of his words. Because this sentiment is dangerous for the Capitol.

If we persist in being shocked by the research or enamored by the exciting story of Katniss, we will remain divided and conquered.

Katniss in Catching Fire responds to the president with: “‘It [Panem] must be very fragile, if a handful of berries can bring it down.'”

To which the president replies, “‘It is fragile, but not in the way that you suppose'” (p. 22).

The fragility is masked by the 99% as separate, unequal, and distracted—fighting among ourselves in fear of what we might lose otherwise.

It is time to suppose otherwise.

Reference

Atwood, M. (2011). In other worlds: SF and the human imagination. New York: Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday.

* Originally posted at Daily Kos March 6, 2012