Education is abuzz with buzzwords

By: Maureen Downey.

 

Settled academic practices often get reborn with new names

Rick Diguette is a local writer and college professor. In this guest column, Diguette discusses the recycling of educational concepts.

About 30 years ago, social psychologist Carol Dweck and a team of researchers began to study how students respond to failure. Based on her research, she coined the term “growth mindset,” which speaks to the idea that academic ability and intelligence can be developed with positive reinforcement, thereby increasing student motivation and achievement.

Dweck’s book, Mindset: the New Psychology of Success, was a best seller when first published in 2006. Her findings have since convinced many educators that how students think about themselves as learners is just as important as the grades they earn, their standardized test scores, and class rankings.

The opposite of a growth mindset, according to Dr. Dweck, is a “fixed mindset.” Fixed mindset students think success is dictated by their innate abilities. They tend to give up when encountering an obstacle, having decided beforehand they will never succeed at overcoming their inadequacies. Worst of all, students laboring under this mindset typically end up in a Catch-22 situation: lest others judge them harshly, they seek to hide the academic inadequacies that define them as students.

The discovery that we need to think we can succeed if we stand any chance of achieving success isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Two millennia ago the Greek philosopher Epictetus noticed that the way people think about what happens is more important than what actually happens. And it was none other than Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet who observed, circa 1602, that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Nevertheless, since 2006 growth mindset strategies have become a commonplace in elementary and secondary school curriculum.

I recently became aware that growth mindset has now made its way to the precincts of higher education via the University System of Georgia’s Gateway to Completion (G2C) initiative. And a bulletin board on the Georgia State University campus where I teach first-year composition is dedicated to growth mindset mantras like “Mistakes help me improve.” and “I’ll keep trying!”

This reminded me of the well- known children’s story involving a little engine that successfully draws a long train of cars up a steep grade, all the while chanting “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.” Once the little engine crests the hill, the chant becomes “I thought I could. I thought I could. I thought I could.” The moral of the story is that optimism coupled with effort will lead to success, which I’m sure you will agree sounds a lot like growth mindset.

However, this in turn reminded me of Chance the gardener in Jerzy Kosinski’s ferociously black comedy “Being There,” whose every statement―no matter how certifiably unremarkable―is considered visionary in import.

Although there is no question educators should be willing to embrace innovation, a fairly unremarkable concept like growth mindset tends to be too readily accepted as almost revelatory.

What typically happens next is that it gains currency and is quickly added to an already long list of familiar buzzwords like Differentiated Instruction, Student Progress Monitoring, Flipped Classrooms, and 21st Century Skills―one and all new ways of naming settled academic practices.

Most people like me, who actually spend time in the college classroom, are aware that just because a lesson or activity worked well one semester doesn’t mean it will continue to do so in perpetuity. That’s why when it comes to the needs of our students, we must be vigilant, flexible, and open to new ideas that may lead to improved learning outcomes as well as improved retention and graduation rates.

What we don’t need is a new buzzword handed down from on high by the University System of Georgia.

Source of the article: https://www.ajc.com/blog/get-schooled/opinion-education-abuzz-with-buzzwords/X2Lmei4LP67Ne1RcT1lW5I/

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We can’t retool U.S. schools based on Finland or China

Get Schooled recently ran an essay about Chinese education, in which “the goals are excellence, diligence and compliance.” This approach was valorized in the narrative provided by Amy Chua in “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” in which she argues on behalf of highly disciplined, harsh, authoritarian schooling and parenting.

The Get Schooled essay challenged readers to consider whether U.S. schools should become more like Chinese schools, and U.S. parents more like Chinese parents, in order for the U.S. to challenge the Chinese in their performance on international standardized tests.

The specter of falling behind has motivated school reform many times. When I was in first grade in 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, and we fell behind in the space race, prompting massive efforts to overhaul schools under the assumption our STEM education was inadequate.

By 1983 I was a high school English teacher in Illinois. That year A Nation at Risk was published by President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, opening with “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world …the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people…others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”

Around that time, it was common for Americans to lament our failures relative to Japan and its culture of worker compliance and loyalty, and academic excellence. I taught some Japanese exchange students back then, and they talked about how their teachers would hit them if they got too interested in someone of the opposite sex, which would take their attention from their studies. Further, suicide notes of Japanese teens often identified pressure to succeed in school as the cause of their decision to end their lives. But their tests scores were impressive.

It probably helped that Japan did not have a military and its enormous costs, and so could focus its resources and attention largely on commerce, education, infrastructure, and other domestic investments. That fact was mostly absent from appeals for the U.S. to be more like Japan, even though at the time we were still recovering from the costs of Vietnam and beginning the Reagan-era military buildup.

More recently, Finland has been set as the model for U.S. schools, again because of their comparative scores on international tests, and their unusually happy teachers.

It’s always tempting to see greener grass on the other side of the ocean, without getting close enough to notice how much manure lies at ground level or how different the weather might be to green up what’s visible. I think that looking longingly at other nations can be deceiving, and for a variety of reasons.

First, the nations we are encouraged to emulate tend to be culturally and racially homogeneous. Having a monoculture helps to focus on and perpetuate national goals and ways of being. I don’t say that to argue against cultural diversity of the sort we have in the United States. I think the multiplicity of perspectives across the social spectrum is healthy and invigorating, if often difficult to put into harmony. Diversity does work against common cause, however, including agreeing on the purpose and process of education.

Trying to be more like Finland, or China, or Japan, or the next shiny distraction overseas overlooks the critical issue that context matters in how social institutions function, and matters a great deal.

Let’s take Finland, a monocultural nation with a strong socialistic economic system. Schools are well funded, and children are protected by a range of social services that make them relatively healthy and school-ready. If you want U.S. schools to be like Finland’s, by all means vote to increase your taxes, because you can’t get their schools with our financing. If you want the U.S. to have schools like Finland’s, then you have to make the U.S. more like Finland.

If you want us to be more like China, then you have to reconceive a lot of American values. The Get Schooled essay includes the acknowledgement that the Chinese system produces “homogeneous and driven graduates” based on a “narrow and rigid approach [that] doesn’t yield a diverse, independent-thinking and inventive workforce…The Chinese system kills curiosity from a very early age…The Chinese [rely] on coercion and intimidation to establish order and routine.” They also have a culture in which test scores are indicators of both ability and character, and are highly prized as valid measures of success.

Within nations, there are local cultures that don’t often mix well. A few years ago, football star Adrian Peterson nearly lost his career when he disciplined his son by punishing him with a licking with a switch. That’s the way he’d been brought up in Texas, with the switch not spared. Culturally, Peterson was subjecting his son to a form of discipline that had been administered in his own family for generations. He thought he was being a good parent for doing what his parents had done to shape him up. But corporal punishment of children had become unacceptable to families working from other assumptions, and his career and public reputation were in tatters.

Peterson sounds as though he’d be a good fit in China, where according to the Get Schooled essay, “when 3-year-old Rainey begins an elite preschool refusing to eat eggs, his teachers force-feed him. When he balks at napping, teachers warn him the police will take him away. Other willful acts by children are met with threats their mothers will not return to pick them up at the end of the day.” But not in Minnesota, where his football career had taken him to, and where it nearly ended because of the severe disciplinary methods he used in his home.

I’m not here to attack or defend whipping kids with switches, being a Tiger Mom, or raising your taxes. (Well, I’d defend the last one, and I’m sure many of you would attack.) My point is simply to say that you can’t take something out of its national or cultural context, deposit it neatly into one that’s quite different, and expect it to work the same.

We may well have something to learn from how other nations educate their children. But ignoring why those practices work there will have consequences here. If you have Finland Envy, or China Envy, or Japan Envy, make sure that you envy the whole country and how it is structured and populated before you isolate a schooling practice and insist we should institute it here.

Source of the article: https://www.myajc.com/blog/get-schooled/opinion-can-retool-schools-based-finland-china/ZcqxE1BJcpUunJkMUdKXaK/

 

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Should you vote for Opportunity School District? Depends on how much you trust state’s charter school record.

By Maureen Downey

In this new essay from his blog, Apperson discusses reasons to vote for and against Amendment 1, the Opportunity School District.

Apperson graduated from New York University with a B.S. in finance and accounting and is pursuing a Ph.D. in economics from Georgia State University. I think both opponents and proponents of the Opportunity School District will consider this a fair analysis. Please note I could not reproduce the cool interactive charts Apperson created so I have repeated the link to his blog whenever he cites the charts. Go to Grading Atlanta to check out his charts.

In alerting me to his analysis, Apperson said, “I’m sure you are probably suffering from OSD fatigue at this point.”

While I’ve been hearing about the OSD from advocates and opponents on the front lines, I haven’t heard many “regular” Georgians raise the issue until this weekend when a half-dozen people asked me about it. I believe the blitz of pro and con TV commercials has increased awareness.  I even saw several yard signs around metro Atlanta.

With that, here is Apperson’s commentary:

By Jarod Apperson

Depending on which ad you’ve seen, Gov. Nathan Deal’s Opportunity School District is either a white knight coming to save public education or a headless horseman coming to pillage the state’s most vulnerable communities.

Such simplistic appeals are inevitable when the general population is asked to vote on an issue that is complicated and requires a great deal of background knowledge to engage with substantively.

As someone with expertise in this area, I feel comfortable saying that frankly we don’t know how this endeavor might turn out if it is approved. There is a real possibility the OSD will improve education, there is a real possibility it will have little impact, and there is a real possibility it will do harm.  An informed vote for or against the OSD depends on which of those possibilities you think is most likely and the extent to which you believe the state should take a risk.  Below I give my take on several key questions and lay out the best available evidence.  I will leave it to readers to weigh the evidence, which points in different directions, and reach their own conclusions about the OSD’s prospects.

What will the OSD do?

The gist: Turn over the management of selected schools from the local school district’s central office to a charter operator selected by an appointee of the Governor.

The detail: Voters will approve or deny the OSD by voting on Amendment 1, appearing on ballots statewide with the following language:

Provides greater flexibility and state accountability to fix failing schools through increasing community involvement. Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended to allow the state to intervene in chronically failing public schools in order to improve student performance?

Anyone with knowledge of the OSD will recognize this statement fails to paint a clear picture of what the initiative hopes to do.  Based on this description, one could be forgiven for believing Amendment 1 hoped to raise student achievement by encouraging more community bake sales.  That’s not the plan.  But the overly genial language alone doesn’t mean it is a bad idea.

The authorizing legislation spells out more clearly the tools the state will have at its disposal when intervening in schools. They include managing the school directly, stipulating changes the local school district must make, shutting the school down, and selecting a charter organization to operate the school.  It is clear the governor’s preferred course is to select charter organizations to operate the schools, a model used in Louisiana and Tennessee, states that inspired the proposal.

Now that we are clear on what the OSD hopes to do, the most pressing question comes down to whether OSD-eligible schools will be better off or worse off managed by charter organizations. I’ll come back to that discussion in a moment, but first I want to talk a bit about the identification of OSD-eligible schools.

Does the OSD do a good job of identifying low-quality schools?

The gist: Sort of, but it more consistently picks up high-poverty schools than low-quality schools.

The detail: Each year, the state puts out a score it calls College and Career Ready Performance Index (“CCRPI”), which is mostly based on crunching standardized test scores different ways.  This metric forms the basis for schools being selected for the OSD. Any school that scores below a 60 for three years in a row becomes eligible.  One reasonable critique of CCRPI is it doesn’t do a very good job of comparing schools to their peers — other Georgia schools that serve similar students.

Instead, it systematically ranks schools with poor students low and schools with relatively rich students high.  In reality, there are low-quality and high-quality schools at all income levels. (See Apperson’s interactive chart here that presents a better measure of school quality and poverty for all schools in the state.  Highlighted schools are schools that rank in the bottom 6% (the share of Georgia schools that are OSD-eligible) of student growth relative to peer schools.

It is clear the variation in quality at the high-income end is just as wide as the variation at the low-income end. Because the OSD relies on CCRPI rather than the school quality measure presented above, schools deemed eligible tend to systematically be poor schools, rather than schools that have achieved the lowest academic gains relative to their peers. I have created the same chart of quality and poverty, but highlighted the OSD-eligible schools rather than the schools in the bottom 6%.

There is no school without at least 35% of students in poverty that qualifies for the OSD. In contrast, one out of every three schools with more than 60% of students in poverty is on the OSD list. So having a sizable share of poor students is essentially a prerequisite for being selected.  Still, the schools chosen do tend to be below average quality. They may not be the worst schools in the state (and some even have high growth!), but they average around the 28th percentile.

This discussion so far about school quality – as measured by both the CCRPI and my own approach – relies on test scores.  But we ultimately care about whether schools prepare students for successful lives, not whether they can score well on a bubble test at the end of third grade. That brings me to the next question.

Are standardized test scores good metrics for measuring school quality?

The gist: Generally yes, but not always.

The detail: Over the past five years, the relationship between test score gains and long run outcomes has been a topic of great academic interest.  The most compelling evidence suggests teachers and schools that are able to achieve high growth on test scores cause their students to succeed later in life. However, it is also possible for schools to raise test scores using means that do not impart the skills necessary for later success.

There have been three major papers presenting high-quality evidence that schools and/or teachers who are able to raise test scores ultimately cause their students to have better long run outcomes.  Chetty et al. (2014) shows that high-growth New York City teachers reduce teen childbearing, increase college going, and increase earnings at age 28. Dobbie &Fryer (2016) shows that a high-scoring Harlem school reduces teen pregnancy and incarceration rates. Argrist et al. (2016) finds that Boston charters able to raise test scores also increase four-year college going.

A fourth study finds more mixed evidence.  Dobbie &Fryer (2016) analyze Texas charter schools.  They find schools that negatively affect test scores also negatively affect four-year college enrollment and earnings (consistent with findings from the studies above). However, in contrast to the other evidence, schools that are able to raise test scores do not improve long-run outcomes.  One possible explanation the authors provide is that the high-scoring schools in the study may have focused too narrowly on tested skills, taking time away from the development of non-tested skills important for long-run success.

Collectively, these papers suggest test scores are a good proxy for whether schools and teachers are imparting the skills students will need to succeed; however, they also suggest it is possible for schools to achieve high scores without developing those skills.

If test scores are a meaningful measure of skill development and OSD-eligible schools do not now succeed at raising test scores (recall that they on average rank at the 28th percentile in quality), the logical next question is should we expect the schools to do any better if they were taken over by the OSD. Since the governor’s preferred intervention is to select charter operators, the answer hinges on the quality of those operators.

What is the evidence on how charter schools currently operating in Georgia affect standardized test scores?

The gist: Local charters are slightly above average, state charters are significantly below average, and within both groups there is a great deal of variation from school to school.

The detail: Georgia now has about 60 start-up charter schools that operate in grades tested annually (grades 3-8 take Milestones End of Grade Tests).  Before they opened, those schools were reviewed and approved by either the local school board (“Local Charters”) or the State Charter School Commission (“State Charters”).

On average, the charter schools now operating in Georgia are lower quality than traditional public schools. Much like traditional schools, the quality varies a great deal.  Some of the best schools in the state are charters.  Some of the worst schools in the state are charters. Go here to see the same chart of school quality and poverty we looked at before, but now local and state charters are highlighted.

If the OSD could ensure the charter operators it partnered with would achieve results similar to the four KIPP schools (all are 98 or above on the quality measure, compared to 28 for the OSD schools), voting for the amendment would be a no brainer.  But that is probably optimistic to say the least. Most charter applicants don’t come with a proven track record, making it tough for authorizers to ensure quality at the time charters are approved.

If instead, the OSD were to partner with schools similar to the average state-approved charter, schools taken over would likely end up achieving at even lower levels than they are today (State charters’ average quality is 12, even lower than the 28 for OSD schools).  For me, this uncertainty about quality is what causes the most skepticism of Amendment 1’s prospects.

Will the OSD charter operators be like the shining examples of what is possible (KIPP) or will they be subpar (like the average state charter)?

There are some reasons to believe the OSD charter partners will be more successful than state-approved charter schools. First, the funding will be higher. State approved charters are funded at a rate lower than most nearby traditional public schools, and they have to spend part of their funding on facilities. The OSD will fund schools like locally approved charters and give them facilities. Second, the OSD will be tasked with seeking out high-quality charter operators. Depending on how savvy the OSD leader is, he or she may find partners with proven track records elsewhere in the country.

On the other hand, there are reasons to believe the OSD charter partners will be of similar quality to the state-approved charter schools (i.e. worse than the OSD schools themselves). First, there is a limited pool of people capable of starting a high-quality charter.

If anything can be learned from the gap between the results from locally approved charters and state charters, it is probably that good charters tend to get approved locally. It takes an incredible amount of time and dedication to run a successful charter school.

My sense is the size of the high-quality charter school community is more constrained by the number of leaders capable of developing and implementing a strong plan than it is by local districts unfairly rejecting great proposals. If that’s indeed the case, the OSD will likely struggle to find great operators. Those out there are already opening local charter schools.  Second, it appears the OSD may be biting off more than it can chew.

The proposal would allow the OSD to take over up to 20 schools a year (the agency could elect to take over fewer schools). The scope of that potential undertaking is striking given there are only about 20 good charter schools in the whole state today and it took almost two decades to get here. The notion the OSD could open 20 schools of good quality in a single year seems tenuous. I would feel more comfortable if the plan was two per year, rather than 20.

At the end of the day, I think the governor has good intentions and wants to see the OSD-eligible schools improve for the kids who attend them. I don’t buy the narrative he is looking to exploit children to profit his friends (though I do think there are organizations out there who would like to profit from the initiative). I also believe there is plenty of room for improvement at OSD schools.

But I am less confident the OSD will partner with charter organizations capable of delivering that improvement.

If Georgia had a history of holding its charter schools to a high standard, I would feel more comfortable supporting Amendment 1. But with the mixed reality that exists today, supporting the amendment would require me to trust Georgia will raise the charter quality bar in the future, partnering with high-quality organizations.

If that is a risk you are willing to take, vote yes.

If instead you believe the state needs to demonstrate more consistent results from the charters already operating before taking on a new initiative, vote no.

This measure of school quality is the three-year average Student Growth Percentile, with controls for observable characteristics of the students at the school. School performance on this measure is then used to rank schools by percentile. Percentile ranks are helpful for intuitively discussing one school relative to others; however, they may overstate differences around the center of the distribution. Schools between the 40th and th 60th percentile in the state probably differ from each other in less dramatic ways than schools between the 80th and 100th percentile.  If you want to see more about how this is calculated, you can access the data and the STATA code here.

Tomado de: http://getschooled.blog.myajc.com/2016/10/16/should-you-vote-for-opportunity-school-district-depends-on-how-much-you-trust-states-charter-school-record/

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