The test score gap between the richest 10 percent and poorest 10 percent of students has grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, according to a study by Stanford University sociologist Sean F. Reardon. That's twice the testing gap between blacks and whites, which shrunk significantly in all income levels, he said.

A separate study by University of Michigan researchers found the gap between students from rich and poor families in college completion also grew by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.

...

out of 55 countries in an Urban Institute study of countries that succeed in improving academic achievement of low-income children, the U.S. ranked 36th

"play" and "hard work" are not opposites: in fact, they can be seen as synonyms. Anyone who has ever played hard also knows how to work hard. There may be aspects of our play that we dislike, that are not "fun," but we do them because they are steps in the process we are teaching ourselves, the challenge we are undertaking. And young children tend to play hard, throwing themselves wholly into it, immersing themselves into it as they see fit, to the degree they feel comfortable, up to the point of their interest, until their driving questions are answered.

And this is where Hobbesians tend to interject: Ah, but what about the hard work of doing things they don't want to do? How do you teach them that through play?

The short answer is: you don't. 

There is only one kind of "hard work" we must do in life that we don't want to do: the hard work an external force imposes on us.

I love this entire post!

I had never heard of Mark Holmes so I googled him and found that he is an honorary patron with The Society for Quality Education (SQE). Here's what I learned.

Essentially, SQE believes the root of the problem in public schools is child-centered learning. They believe that progressive education that encourages children to play an active role in constructing an understanding from the inside out while interacting with others is nothing more than a fad.

Holmes and SQE are critical of the idea that learning should be customized to meet the individual needs and interests of each student. They are unimpressed that child-centered learning is designed to be fun, engaging and hands-on.

Schools still largely rest—overwhelmingly—on tax dollars. Foundations and the federal government are actually a drop in the bucket. How have we let them run the show?

The notion that the central problem in American education is lack of teacher motivation is ludicrous. The vast majority of teachers in this country are some of the most hard-working, dedicated people you’ll ever meet – folks who work their butts off in difficult conditions for little recognition. Pay for performance is a weak prescription in part because it’s based on a faulty diagnosis.

Basic Facts Come Before Deep Learning
This one translates roughly as, “Students must do the boring stuff before they can do the interesting stuff.” Or, “Students must memorize before they can be allowed to think.” In truth, students are most likely to achieve long-term mastery of basic facts in the context of engaging, student-directed learning.

Rigorous Education Means a Teacher Talking
Teachers have knowledge to impart, but durable learning is more likely when students talk, create, and integrate knowledge into meaningful projects. The art of a teacher is to construct ways for students to discover.

Covering It Means Teaching It
Teachers are often seduced by the idea that if they talk about a concept in class, they have taught it. At best, students get tentative ideas that will be quickly forgotten if not reinforced by a student-centered activity.

Teaching to Student Interests Means Dumbing It Down
If we could somehow see inside a student’s brain, its circuitry would correspond to its knowledge. Since new learning always builds on what is already in the brain, teachers must relate classroom teaching to what students already know. Teachers who fail to do so, whether due to ignorance or in pursuit of a false idea of rigor, are running afoul of a biological reality.

Acceleration Means Rigor
Some schools accelerate strong students so that they can cover more material. ICG schools are more likely to ask such students to delve deeper into important topics. Deep knowledge lays a stronger foundation for later learning.

A Quiet Classroom Means Good Learning
Students sitting quietly may simply be zoned out, if not immediately, then within 15 minutes. A loud classroom, if properly controlled, included the voices of many students who are actively engaged.

Traditional Schooling Prepares Students for Life
Listening to teachers and studying for tests has little to do with life in the world of work. People in the work world create, manage, evaluate, communicate, and collaborate, like students in ICG schools.

Hat tip: Valerie Strauss, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/seven-misconceptions-ab...

A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research may yield new insight into how districts should evaluate educational reform.

The study, conducted by Harvard researchers Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer, presents a controversial thesis, an approach to curricular reform suggesting that measures traditionally considered to be determinants of excellence in schools are in fact not correlated with educational effectiveness.

In an intensive evaluation of 35 New York City charter schools using a wide array of educational strategies, the pair discovered that standardized factors of efficacy such as class size, per-pupil expenditure, and the extent of a teacher's certification and education is not only relatively unrelated to the productivity of learning, but might even lower effectiveness.

...

Dobbie and Fryer's research places suggests that efficacy of the educational system from grades three to eight sees distinguishable improvement when intensive focus is placed on teacher-student feedback, increased instructional time, tutoring, and academic and behavioral expectations.

Using test results to drive teacher and leader effectiveness is akin to poking the raw batter with a toothpick. Which is why it hasn't worked and is not going to.

two faulty themes ... needlessly limit educational technology discussions.

The first misguided frame, expressed by Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio in USA Today, is whether technology, in this case digital textbooks, is a “magic bullet.” Pondiscio is right: Of course it’s not and anybody who claims so is foolish. . . .

The second faulty frame is the conspiratorial suspicion of nefarious intent: any technology initiative is just a cover for private profit-seeking. But let’s be serious. We wouldn’t be having this discussion around school modernization. Construction companies make a lot of money on educational projects. We understand though, that this is a reason to exercise strong oversight of public funds. It’s not a reason to oppose modernizing crumbling facilities.

It is clear that technology is increasingly seen as providing opportunities for personalization, flexibility, and differentiation, and the development of 21st-century skills.

It is less clear how technology can best be utilized in schools serving students who have struggled in school, fallen off track to graduation, or dropped out altogether. On the one hand, online credit recovery has long been a staple in alternative education. And all too often, it is the equivalent of an electronic workbook in a sterile computer lab with few opportunities for the development of the higher-order, critical thinking skills necessary for postsecondary success. On the other hand, blended learning holds promise as a strategy to help students develop exactly those skills. A blended learning classroom can incorporate the best elements of face-to-face classrooms and virtual learning environments for this population—accelerating learning gains, building next-generation skills, and ensuring college readiness.

[Jobs for the Future] is currently exploring how schools can implement blended learning in a way that delivers a rigorous, college-ready academic experience with proper social supports for their students, as well as an expectation for postsecondary completion.

Organized labor equals failing students. Because unions may resist the shedding of teachers who don’t conform to the standard model of constant testing and reducing education to a set of data spreadsheets. And why should teachers feel so entitled to job security when children’s grades are at stake?

That's the ideology of reformers who see radical restructuring, together with charter schools, as liberation from burdensome bureaucracy. Except this solution involves swapping an old bureaucracy for a new one: one that's more efficient at homogenizing public education and blaming schools for the deep inequalities that they often merely symptomize.

To hold teachers 100% responsible when they can account for only “10 percent of the variability in student test scores” is insane, especially in light of the fact that other factors such as “family income and education levels” account for 90% of the variability.

this isn’t really about politics. It’s about human decency. And when I read the word “apartheid” to describe our schools, it makes me livid…and I can’t say I disagree with the characterization

I am usually not a conspiracy theorist. But my scorecard shows 11 members of the [Georgia] English/Language Arts Standards writing team had ties to companies with a financial interest in the committee’s decision.

Adding insult to injury, no members of the Work Group were K-12 teachers and no teachers were mentioned in the Gates/Pearson curriculum announcement.

Education “reformers” have a common playbook. First, assert without evidence that regular public schools are “failing” and that large numbers of regular (unionized) public school teachers are incompetent. Provide no documentation for this claim other than that the test score gap between minority and white children remains large. Then propose so-called reforms to address the unproven problem — charter schools to escape teacher unionization and the mechanistic use of student scores on low-quality and corrupted tests to identify teachers who should be fired.

...

New York State’s black children made enormous gains in the 1990s, and much slower gains once the federal No Child Left Behind, and Mayor Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Klein’s test-based reforms kicked in. From 1992 to 2003, for example, black fourth graders’ math performance jumped 22 scale points (about two-thirds of a standard deviation). From 2003 to 2011, the gain was only 5 scale points.

We could vote for people with the guts to run and pay for our schools properly. But we don't. We vote for people who cut a billion dollars from education, then blame the victims.

Those politicians should be ashamed of themselves.

But so should we.

It's painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model.

...

The history of media and technology is an endless series of failed rearguard actions as industry leaders attempt to solidify their positions on a bed of quicksand.

Schools need to end their rearguard actions too...

Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating?  Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”

Supremely confident about all the positives of this policy (e.g., teachers and students working harder, scores rising), top decision-makers have not done due diligence on what experts in testing have said repeatedly about using test scores to evaluate individual teachers (see here and here) and the history of previous efforts to reward teachers on student performance. Had they done so, they might have heeded the record of perverse outcomes that have accrued to such policies. On this issue, then, smart people do dumb things.

Summarizing his study’s findings for The New York Times, Friedman said: “The message is to fire people sooner rather than later.”

Friedman was speaking specifically about value-added ratings of teachers—which use student scores on standardized tests to determine a teacher’s relative effectiveness—and whether they are sufficiently accurate and reliable to guide personnel decisions. His answer? An unambiguous “yes.”

...

The problem with the approach that Friedman and others advocate is that it assumes we have all these wonderful, high-quality teachers just waiting in the wings to take over the jobs of the bad teachers we fire. In reality, there is no such supply, even in a bad economy with high unemployment. We have a shortage, not a surplus, of great teachers—and so it’s naïve or shortsighted (or both) to think we can somehow fire our way to a great educational system.

There are almost four million K-12 teachers in the United States, which is more than twice the number of lawyers and doctors combined. Teaching is America’s largest profession. And so we need teaching to be a job that an average person can do reasonably well, which means we probably need to rethink how the job is structured.

A starting point would be to look at—and reconsider—the number of hours U.S. teachers spend at the front of the classroom each week compared to the time they spend planning lessons and collaborating with colleagues. It’s no secret that American teachers spend many more hours teaching than their colleagues do in higher-performing nations. Elsewhere, teachers often teach fewer lessons each week than U.S. teachers, but they spend significantly more time on planning and collaboration.

Understanding is based not simply on what is present, but also on how the spaces between what is given are seen, named, unnamed, ignored.  All are important.   The five statements that Iowa Commissioner Jason Glass is quoted as saying are overpopulated with intention and as such are more gate, than solid door.

To situate this as otherwise will not serve us (or children) well.  I tend to agree with Scott that the devil is in the detail and want to suggest it is a devil we need to know. Nonetheless, we are deep in pretense.  It makes me wonder why we continue to only privilege what is situated as obvious.  We need to look at the spaces not named.  For example, what would happen if we substituted school or school district for educator/teaching in Mr. Glass's five statements?  What would be the difference if we believed that the relative health of a system was critical as opposed to only measuring the relative "effectiveness" of each teacher? Would this dual view make a difference?

This'll keep me thinking for quite a while...

Let us assume for now that their contention is true, that you can assess a “good” teacher by their students’ test scores and that bad teachers adversely impact the futures of their students. Why, then, is “the message …to fire people sooner rather than later”? There is nothing in their research that proves firing bad teachers sooner rather than later is a benefit. First, with whom do you replace those bad teachers? First year teachers would be unknown quantities since they cannot be judged by student exam scores. Would it be beneficial to use them over bad teachers? Why fire anyone at all? The message of their research could just as easily be to mentor or support bad teachers so they can become good teachers. Or maybe the message is we need to do another study on what makes the “good” teachers so good and teach that to all the bad ones. There are literally hundreds of conclusions that can be drawn from this research. Out of all of those conclusions, it is curious that Friedman would choose to spout this one. Logically speaking, it does not necessarily follow from his research.

Dogma influences research interpretation?

let’s sum up what we know:

1. There is variation in educator effectiveness (teachers aren’t all the same).
2. The components of effective teaching are known.
3. Effective teaching can be validly and reliably measured.
4. Effective teaching has an impact on students’ lives.
5. We, for the most part, ignore all of the above.

I think most people might agree on these broad points. The devil is in the details, however. For example, people disagree on exactly which measures are valid and reliable for assessing teacher effectiveness. Similarly, there are squabbles over which of the many components of effective teaching are worth assessing or emphasizing. These disagreements are not just educational but also have become politicized.

If we focused on creating environments that kids would want to choose rather than loading our schools full of restrictive policies and if didn't over-regulate the curriculum, didn't make school so much pressure for both students and teachers, if we didn't set the path of learning down for students instead of letting them find their own way, if we didn't setup school to be a game of winners and losers competing for high marks, would we have such high figures of both homeschoolers and dropouts?

sometimes we must risk the danger of this dark course over the safety and comfort of the present lightened way.

We must risk all to gain all. Because to stay where we are gets us nowhere.

Many of us make the mistake of choosing comfort over possibility.

there is a place where human diversity is considered something quite negative... that's in the traditional school, in the traditional classroom. In those places we assume that all humans are essentially the same, that they develop at the exact same pace, that they have the same skills - and should have the same skills. This is not just an assumption, it is the law in the United States and many other nations. It drives almost all educational policy coming from Washington, Westminster, Canberra, Ottawa. It is even "built in" in most spaces, where matching desks line up in matching rooms and matching schedules move children through matching days.

And it is time for us, as we head toward the middle of the 21st Century, to stop all this.

Lecture, we now can see, most often leads to superficial understanding, and therefore we must have a superficial assessment instrument appropriate for superficial understanding -- the test.

For the past three years, real per-pupil spending in schools has declined in Florida and (I would guess) most states. During and since the Lesser Depression, declining funding and annual layoff notices comprise the status quo.

For the past ten years, there has been a federal mandate for annual high-stakes testing in seven out of 12 grades. High-stakes testing is the status quo.

For the past twenty years, there has been the creation and dramatic growth of quasi-non-governmental (or quango) schools we call charter schools. Charters are concentrated in large cities, some of which have been the focus of efforts to replace locally-governed public schools with charter schools (Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and Washington, DC). In a large number of cities, the growth of charter schools is the status quo.

1. We used to imprison the learning inside the classrooms… Now the whole school is our learning environment.

2. We used to find information in books and on the internet… Now we also interact globally via Skype with primary sources.

3. We used to control everything… Now students take ownership of their learning.

4. We used to think ‘computer’ was a lesson in the lab… Now technology is an integral part of learning across the curriculum.

5. We used to collect students’ work, to read and mark it… Now they create content for an authentic global audience.

6. We used to strive for quiet in the classroom… Now the school is filled with vibrant and noisy engagement in learning.

7. We used to teach everything we wanted students to know… Now we know learning can take place through student centred inquiry.

8. We used to set tests to check mastery of a topic… Now learning is often assessed through what students create.

9. We used to plan differentiated tasks, depending on ability… Now digital tools provide opportunities for natural differentiation.

10. We used to have an award ceremony for the graduating Year 6 students… Now every child will be acknowledged at graduation.

Schools CAN change!

If you wonder why the US education system is spir[a]ling downwards, I think we've spent the last 10 years breaking what worked and not fixing what was broken.