The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Dialing down the fanfare in education
It runs counter to the gushing about how learning should be exciting, but there’s a value in school routine. Knowing what to expect day to day from their teacher frees students to concentrate on the skills, knowledge and ideas they’re supposed to be learning. It’s easier to appreciate the scenery when you’re not preoccupied with figuring out where to make the next left turn.
That’s not to say that school is never exciting. There are those moments amid the hard, unglamorous work when the light goes on in students’ eyes. There’s also the commotion that descends from on high as experts and officials add their observations and initiatives.
Here’s a sampler of their recent contributions:
It probably doesn’t surprise most regular people that students who are absent a lot are less likely to learn much. Given policymakers’ fondness for holding schools responsible for things teachers and principals can’t possibly control, it shouldn’t surprise you that the impossibly titled Every Student Succeeds Act, successor to the equally impossibly titled No Child Left Behind Act, requires schools to address chronic absenteeism and designates attendance rates a “measure of school quality.”
Given education researchers’ fondness for belaboring the obvious, it also shouldn’t surprise you that a team drawn from Harvard, Berkeley and the Philadelphia school system joined forces to investigate.
The yearlong study tracked 28,000 K12 students who were absent at least three days more than the average for their grade. A control group of parents received only the standard report card accounting of absences. The remaining parents received either a series of five “generic” notes informing them that “students fall behind when they miss school,” or five similar notes that included how many days their child had been absent, or a third version that also included the average number of absences for students in their child’s grade.
Students whose parents received the extra notes were between 8 and 11 percent less likely to be chronically absent. Students in the report card control group were absent an average of 17.0 days. Students who received the additional notifications averaged 16.4 days, 16.0 days, and 15.9 days, respectively.
The moral of the story is that “informational nudges” like the extra notes can help some parents keep better track of how many school days their children are missing. Some of those chronically absent children will actually come to school more — but not much more.
Raise your hand if you’re surprised.
Universal preK and expanded early child care programs figure prominently in many candidates’ stump speeches. That’s why we should consider the “cautionary” conclusions of an extensive 2018 study of Quebec children who participated in “North America’s largest universal child care program.”
Analysts identified “significant negative effects” for participating preschool children, in both tested cognitive functioning and in noncognitive areas including “anxiety and aggression.” Between ages 5 and 9, participants subsequently displayed “persistent negative effects” manifested in heightened anxiety, aggression and hyperactivity. They were also “less likely to get along with their teacher.”
At the middle and high school level, investigators found “no clear impacts on test scores.” Overall results were described as “mixed,” with Canadian national testing results “negative in all subjects but not statistically significant.” Former participants reported “worse physical health and life satisfaction” as adolescents and adults, while national crime data documents “higher rates” of “criminal activity.”
This isn’t to say that all early child care programs are harmful or that they don’t sometimes benefit some children. The report’s authors note, for example, that “disadvantaged children from singleparent families” are more likely to experience “improved outcomes” than children from twoparent families. We needn’t universally reject preK education, but neither might it be wise for us to universally adopt it.
On the math front, you may recall the “algebra for all” movement that swept schools early in the millennium. Billing algebra as the “gateway to the middle class,” advocates argued that it should be taught to more, or even all, students and introduced in eighth grade instead of ninth. Unfortunately, owing to variations in readiness and ability, the frequent result of requiring algebra for all students, especially all eighth graders, was watereddown algebra for collegebound students and no relevant functional math for those who weren’t going to college.
By 2011, federal NAEP assessment results indicated that “the increased enrollment hasn’t led to higher math performance,” with data suggesting a negative impact. Multiple studies echoed those conclusions, and school participation in expanded algebra programs declined.
Now algebra is back earlier than ever. Given education reform’s fetish for acronyms, the new movement styles itself Project LEAP, for Leveraging Early Algebra Progression. LEAP practitioners favor introducing third graders to “algebraic thinking” like the idea that an equals sign means both sides of a problem are “equivalent,” not just that one side is the answer to the other.
This doesn’t sound like a bad idea, although I’m not sure how many third graders don’t intuitively know that. I do have two reservations. First, when reformers talk a lot about “thinking,” they usually aren’t talking much about content, skills and practice. Second, I remember horizontal elementary math problems where the missing number wasn’t always in the answer blank after the equals sign, so I’m not sure algebraic thinking for third graders is altogether revolutionary.
There’s a lesson here beyond algebra, preschool and absence notes.
Schools would be better off with less fanfare and more moderation.