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Re: [Phys-l] Kozol fasts to protest NCLB




I came to teaching after a 22-year career as a naval officer, having,
every few years to face a selection board of my (only slightly more
senior) peers, who considered whether I was worthy of promotion (and,
I might add, I wasn't always successful, which is why my career ended
after 20 years rather than 30). What I observed was a system that,
while far from perfect, did an adequate job of promoting the most
competent and those with the highest chance of success at more
challenging positions.

The method is not dissimilar to that used in universities, but I
think it was less driven by politics than the university system seems
to be.

This is another solution which will probably not work well in education.
Since most teachers and principals adhere to a paradigm which supports the
current methods of teaching, this is unlikely to produce the necessary
changes required to achieve better results. This works well when the
current paradigm needs to be maintained. I makes the system stable, but may
block needed reform.

As I have pointed out numerous times the NCLB is very blunt as a weapon and
tends to smash reform more than incompetence. The problems of education are
built into the social, economic, and political system so many things that
work are blocked.

Consider if all incompetent teachers were removed. What fraction is
incompetent? If it is 1% then removal will have virtually no effect on
education and the original fraction had little effect. If it is 30% then
removal will cause a severe shortage or teachers and the system will still
be in bad shape. If the problem is that 90% of teachers are using an
ineffective paradigm for teaching, then this solution will have absolutely
no effect.

We do know that SES is a big determinant in success. This is true across
all nations. The minority groupt generally scores 10 to 20% lower on
general IQ tests. There are examples of this in Japan, US, Belgium...

What are some of the factors which impede success in the lower US SES group.
1. Nutrition, students come to school hungry. So the reduced and no cost
lunches were designed to attack this problem. But the parents are
embarrassed to sign up. The solution is simple. Give all students
breakfast and lunch.

2. Learning disabilities. High SES students are screened for problems
because the parents can afford to send them to good developmental
pediatricians. The solution here is simple. Screen all students early for
hearing, vision, and learning problems. Then commit the money to providing
the basic aids such as glasses, hearing aids... when the parents can not
afford it. Indeed this needs to be done before the students enter schools.
Then of course the necessary training to help students needs to be supplied.
Dyslexia is actually easily treated by Orton-Gillingham, but it needs to be
done before age 7 for complete effectiveness. However, some problems may
still persist after the students have been treated.

3. Low SES parents can not interact with their children enough, and often
interactions do not promote higher level thinking. The former problem is
solved by providing support for parents to stay home with children until
they enter school. Also a free quality pre-school program can have some
effectiveness. Then a free after quality school program can help.

These simple solutions are practiced in other countries. But the US has
such a great fear of "socialized services" or of spending money that many
aspects of these solutions are opposed. When I was growing up in NY State
the school did routine screening and even had free preventive dental care by
teeth cleaning. In addition all students got a physical each year. They
did not screen for LD because they did not know about it. This sort of
thing does cost $$$. But whipping the teachers and principals costs far
less and is easier to do.

If as I submit that the big problem is paradigm change on the part of
schools, administrators, state boards... then training needs to supplied in
methods that work. This is also expensive because you have to provide an
incentive for teachers to attend workshops that actually work. The other
problem is finding the trainers. Modeling has the most successful method of
training teachers, and is available in many states. Other programs which
also work well do not have widespread effective programs.

Just yesterday a student talked to me about what is going on in school. She
realized on her own that when she connected ideas and used cognition that
she could become an A student. She also said that most learning is dull
memorization, cramming for tests, and forgetting 2 weeks later. YESSS. She
has been in private schools most of her life.

Getting teachers to use standard research based evaluations to see what
students are doing is the first step. Then helping them to make the
necessary changes is the next step. They can not do it alone. Students
complain that I am asking them to do hard things. In actuality each step
requires the application of one concept. That is a hard thing for them to
start doing. Then state boards need to catch up with the research and
emphasize thinking rather than specific facts. Actually a lot of standards
are written with some of this in mind, but teachers never really know how to
teach to the standards. Again this costs $$$.

There are many issues that people rail for or against without looking at
facts.

Unions - It is doubtful that adding or removing them has any effect. Since
teacher evaluation is random, and non-union states are at the bottom of the
list, it is doubtful that they have much destructive effect on the process.

Teacher Pay - Just raising it will have little immediate effect because you
are just rewarding the same teachers. It may have an effect in the long
term by luring in people with higher thinking skills. Lowering it will
certainly drive out people who can get better jobs elsewhere. Leaving it
the same will keep the school system at competitive disadvantage with
respect to other jobs. But again, pedagogical knowledge is important and
more intelligent teachers do not necessarily have it. While higher teacher
understanding of content does not easily translate into higher student
learning, lower teacher understanding will certainly translate into lower
student learning. The Modeling program has produced both higher teacher
understanding, and better pedagogical knowledge that promoted higher FCI
gain for students. Differential pay will have no real effect unless the low
performing teachers are retrained.

Teachers colleges - While their effectiveness is low, one can argue that
this is true of most education. So doing away with them will not improve
things. They certainly need to train teachers in effective pedagogy rather
than teaching them about it. UTeach is the one effective model that I know
of. If the teachers colleges are deprecated, then we have lost a place
where reform can be promoted.

Textbooks - There is little one can say in favor of or against a particular
popular text because there is no research which shows one to be better than
the other. From the perspective of the research, the conventional HS texts
are monstrous, bloated, incomprehensible, and not coherent. The business
with sidebars, pictures... makes reading them difficult and distracting.
The large nuber of gee-gaws makes them almost impossible to proof read and
make them accurate. A totally research based text such as Minds on Physics
has some evaluations that show effectiveness, but it is primarily used by
teachers who do not teach conventionally. The research at Harvard by Sadler
showed that using no text produces the best results. Incidentally, Lawson
showed that just rearranging the text into a learning cycle dramatically
improved results, but virtually no conventional texts do that. If one could
get a teacher to use a research based book and take the recommendations in
the teacher's manual, there might be improvement. But since the majority of
teachers seem to divide the days in school by the number of chapters for
lesson plans, conventional texts can not work.

Technology - This seems to be neutral in most cases. But it can be used
effectively with appropriate curricula to yield better results. The seminal
research by Heather Brasell showed how labs with sonic rangers improved
understanding of graphs. There has been evidence that simulations can
improve student learning. But again this is when the technology is coupled
with appropriate curricula. Just dishing it out in conventional settings
does nothing expect raise the cost of education. ETS showed that computers
used for drill and practice have a negative effect, but when used for
exploration math understanding improved.

Class Size - The studies here have been somewhat ambiguous, but it is clear
that inquiry and the learning cycle are difficult to implement in large
classes.

School size - Here the verdict is unanimous. Any school which exceeds 150
students / grade level has increasing problems. The huge schools which TX
has promoted in the name of efficiency are poisonous. The research was done
in the 70s and then ignored. Large schools promote bad student behavior,
and high teacher burnout. It is only recently that psychogists have managed
to learn that a person can only relate well to a maximum of 150 people.

School vouchers - Negative. The recent metastudy showed that private
schools on average are no better than public, and the largest private
system, Catholic schools, is behind in math. Private schools do better than
public by screening out the lowest students. Once this accounted for they
do not do better.

Taking over low performing schools - Will this work???? We have no evidence
there. This is doubtful because the same methods and teachers will walk
back into the new school. Will private management work? Again the
metastudy showed that so far it has not. Adding more high paid
administrators is unlikely to effect change.

Competition - Unfortunately it is almost impossible for parents to gauge the
effectiveness of schools. High performing schools are generally good
because of high SES. The research of Shayer and Adey showed that all
schools were equivalent. Indeed how can you judge whether your MD is more
effective??? When your mechanic ruins your car, you stop going to them.
But what do you do when your doctor kills you? You often do not have enough
data to make an informed decision. Trust can be generated by incompetent
people. Studies have shown that parents approve of their schools even
though they are low performing.

Making schools work better is a complicated issue with many components. It
is also not clear that the schools are actually worse than in the 50s,
40s,.. you choose the era. Back then students just dropped out and only the
better ones went on to college. Now all seem to want to go to college.
Shayer and Adey in their book "Really Raising Standards" do not make any
claims that schools are better or worse than before. They do show that it
is possible to raise schools by implementing "Thinking Science" properly.
They also show in their experiments in the early 90s that all schools are
doing the same thing. Essentially the output is predictable from the input
independently of school. But TS raises schools significantly above the
usual curve.

However, Michael Shayer has recently documented a drop in thinking skills of
school children in England. Why has this happened? England implemented a
program similar to NCLB, but obviously it has not worked. It is one of the
factors in the drop? Is it television? Is it the removal of shop courses
from schools? Is it drugs? Or is it something else that we do not know
about? Some countries show a high steady increase in raw scores on IQ
tests, and overall raw scores have gone up since the early 1900s. Why does
this happen? Incidentally Japanese students score 10 points higher than US
students, and have twice the number of proportional reasoners. We do know
that countries with a more homogeneous population do much better than
heterogeneous countries, but it seems that all countries are failing their
minority students.

Improving schools is a multivariable problem which has been worked on
independently from before NCLB. It will take time, money, changes in
paradigms... NCLB has done nothing to change this, and there is evidence
that it is impeding the process.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX