Education 'group think' gets in the way of teaching kids to read
School administrators should end their obsession with average test scores and focus instead on an absolute standard: Can each child actually read?
Credit: New York State Dept. of Education
For more than two decades now, the Seattle school district has been telling us that its most important goal is “closing the achievement gap.” Nevertheless, it is not unfair to say that only incremental progress has been made.
Seattle, as everyone knows, is not alone. “Closing the achievement gap” has come to stand for the perennial problems of American K-12 education — though the inability of high schools to graduate more than two-thirds of their students has been running a close second.
Among the results of this frustratingly persistent problem is a vast, energetic industry of school reform, headlined in recent years by the involvement of powerful private foundations and the policy directives of the federal government: “No Child Left Behind” in the “Race to the Top.”
Over the years, a variety of structural changes have been proposed and, to one degree or another, tried: small schools, mayoral governance, charter schools, (more) intensive professional development for teachers, (more) leadership training for principals. Testing and more testing, along with the loss of federal funds and wholesale staff changes when schools have failed to improve scores (many states dumbed down their tests to avoid the consequences). And lately, paying teachers based on student test results, along with (more) federal money for states and school districts that promise to do a few favored things from these lists.
As for results, not much has changed.
The Seattle School District is no exception, tacking with the shifting winds of federal mandates, banking on teacher professional development and coaching, and vacillating between school-based management and greater central-office control, among other things. The results have been meager.
The effort has been huge. Why in the world can’t we make this thing work?
In every area of human activity, there are widespread accepted values and ways of doing things that are intrinsically resistant to change. That’s a truism, of course, and it certainly applies to schools, school districts, school boards, state school officials, and state and federal politicians — K-12 education’s regulators. (Looking at that list you get a glimpse of why small schools and decentralization of public school districts seems an attractive idea.)
With schools and their supporting school districts, there is a century of tradition as yet unbroken by the reform industry. Schools continue to deliver their services to classrooms full of kids and continue to measure success by the aggregate results in the classroom (average test scores) and by the aggregate results of all similar kids and classrooms (average test scores for the school). This is the system on which the federal No Child Left Behind law doubled down: Raise those averages or else!
Elementary-school reading and math scores were the big focus, and “closing the achievement gap” in each classroom and school was the goal — along with raising the average scores, of course. And, yes, some of those average scores rose, and in places those achievement gaps — the differences between average scores for groups within the school — narrowed.
But that doesn’t tell you anything about your kid, or any individual kid. Some kids in your daughter’s third-grade class probably read at the fifth-grade level and some barely adequately, as though they were just starting second grade. Despite that gap, though, from last year to this, the average might have risen a little. Thankfully. And on TV you saw the district superintendent and school board declaring — if not victory — a level of success for which they claimed credit while humbly announcing they would try harder next year. That’s been going on for a long time.
Statistics, then, tell us that on average things are a little better. “On average,” however, is not an answer that helps. A classroom or school’s rising average could belie the fact that roughly the same number of students might not (and likely will not) be proficient readers. Education managers can take credit for modest, sometimes almost meaningless, improvements in group averages while some members of the group (such as the students in some Seattle South End schools) continue to founder.
What we have is a system in which the progress of an individual child is actually unimportant. (Teachers, bless them, do not view it this way, but beyond the classroom door the system’s focus on averages takes over.)
What’s missing is a real standard — for example, the standard that EACH child will read at grade level by the end of third grade. For EACH child, a school or district should have to answer the question, “Can s/he read?” If for some the answer remains “no,” then the school and district and state have failed. You can’t hide that failure in averages.
It’s ironic, but to “close the achievement gap” we have to stop measuring and praising group gains. Schools have to focus on and deliver services — specifically reading instruction — to each individual child. K-12 educators need to measure not averages, but how many children at each grade level are actually proficient readers. And each child who is not proficient must get additional instruction sufficient to bring them up to grade level.
Surprisingly, the resources to do this are not out of reach. Kennewick School District accomplished this in most of its 13 elementary schools with a program that began in the mid 1990s. (WASL scores have declined, though, after peaking at the 80- to 90-percent level around 2005.) The story is told and methodology laid out in several books by the Children’s Reading Foundation, a citizens group that was formed to support the effort.
Consider a second-grade classroom where the median reading score is equivalent to “basic” ability. Half the children will be pretty much below basic. At the end of the year, the average will move up a bit. (Oh, yay! Tell the world!) But still nearly half the kids will be below basic. They won't be able to read very well. They will be headed for failure in school, and there’s a high probability they will drop out of high school. This is not success.
Then consider a different approach where success is measured by the number of children in the classroom who are reading at grade level. And suppose that you set a goal that nine out of 10 (90 percent or maybe 95 percent; see Kennewick) of the children will be proficient by the end of the year. This, in truth, is what it means to say “all children will succeed” or “every child a reader.”
With this approach, parents and the public (and politicians) will know exactly how well the school has done — and how many kids are destined for failure without more instruction. In other words, how many individual kids are on the wrong side of the achievement gap?
When the children in our classrooms are seen as individuals, counted one by one, and their individual success is what the school and the district value, they can’t be left behind. And if they are, it will be quite clear who’s responsible.
Instead of looking at average test scores, education bureaucrats should count kids. How many can read at grade level? How many can’t? What’s the percentage? What are you going to do about it?
The answer to that last question is much different from the answers education reformers have given us so far. Looking at averages, they’ve proposed over and over again various changes to the system, and there’s not much to show for it. Looking at individual children, however, the answer is pretty simple. Each child must receive instruction sufficient to bring them to grade level; each child less than proficient in reading must be brought to grade level through targeted individual instruction.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Mar 24, 9:13 a.m. Inappropriate
We need school choice. Let those who want to continue sending their kids and money to the Democrat/union/tribal indoctrination academies, do so. Let those of us who want our kids to grow to think for themselves send them, and our money, elsewhere.
Posted Thu, Mar 24, 3:39 p.m. Inappropriate
Mr. Lilly's work here is maybe the best reporting I've seen anywhere on the administrative policies that perpetuate the national education crisis.
Indeed Mr. Lilly focuses on the core issue of that crisis: whether school children are taught as "individuals" or depersonalized into nothing more than "average test scores"
What Mr. Lilly does not address is the underlying fact the policies he rightfully decries are dictated by school boards which – because money is this nation's sole determinant of outcomes – are dominated by the capitalist Ruling Class. The entire public education system is thus (like everything else in the United States) another aspect of the Big Business/Wall Street despotism that – whether we admit it or not – controls even the everyday minutiae of our (increasingly shortchanged) lives.
This bitter truth as it applies to public education is proven by the fact "school reform" has been a hot-button issue in the United States literally for as long as all of us have been alive.
I for example will be 71 in less than a week; the same sorts of school-policy fights that rage today were raging when I entered First Grade in 1946. While the vocabulary of conflict changes from decade to decade, the underlying issue – whether human children are to be taught and evaluated as individuals or ruthlessly bullied into conformity with some lowest common denominator of statistically sustained norms – is the same now as then.
The most relevant question is therefore why – after generations of parental anger and activism – nothing has changed save the ongoing deterioration of the national mind: our collective nosedive, since World War II, from one of the the best-educated populations on the planet to the most ignorant people in the industrial world.
Sadly, this is the one question Mr. Lilly fails to ask.
The answer, of course, is that parents – however much they might be concerned – are nevertheless powerless.
This is because education policy in the United States is dictated exclusively by the Ruling Class, whether directly through the federal, state and local school apparatus (including local boards of education) or indirectly via information-control more deviously total than even Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels might have imagined.
Public school instruction is meanwhile ever more deliberately structured to ensure fulfillment of the core mandate of capitalism – limitless profit – which now in the post-industrial era means the conversion of the U.S. into the ultimate slave state: absolute power for Big Business and Wall Street, total subjugation for everyone else – precisely what my parents' generation recognized as fascism.
To accomplish this purpose, children must be dumbed-down to the approximate mindset of the medieval serf: illiterate, ignorant, superstitious, readily seduced by celebrity, easily led, and above all submissive – precisely the “product” being turned out by our increasingly prison-like public schools.
Until this ugly reality is overthrown, there's no hope for the success of “No Child Left Behind” or “Race to the Top” or any of these other bumper-sticker programs.
Instead we'll only have more of what we've got: a Race to the Flop, and No Child Left with a Mind.
Posted Thu, Mar 24, 8:22 p.m. Inappropriate
"But with the way elementary school is structured, reading instruction must give way to other subjects; there’s not enough time on task for the kids who are below grade level."
I think that you're quite a ways off from the truth here. In my experience (8 years as a first grade teacher, 2 years in 5th grade) it's the other subjects that have been cut to make room for more reading and math instruction. The first grade team in my building has a solid 2 hour block for reading, phonics, and the other elements of literacy instruction--that should do it.
I also reject the idea that more time on the subject will necessarily increase the scores. Asking a 6-year old boy who is struggling to forgo other interests in order to fit in more literacy instruction is a recipe for creating a child who hates reading.
Posted Fri, Mar 25, 7:11 a.m. Inappropriate
Go through all of the measures used by Seattle Public Schools and you will not see any that consider individual students. The District is focused, almost entirely, on schools. The District identifies "successful schools" and "struggling schools". Then the District sends help to the schools in the form of teacher coaches, and data coaches, and, in extreme cases, transforming the school - whatever that means.
Not surprisingly, the successful schools are in affluent neighborhoods and the struggling schools are in low-income neighborhoods. It is not the schools which are successful or struggling - it is the students in them. And the students' success is not being determined very much by the school, but by a lot of other factors, most of which are either directly or indirectly linked with poverty.
The schools in Southeast Seattle are not struggling schools; they are schools with a lot of struggling students. It is not the schools that need help and support, it is the students.
Any serious effort to close the Academic Achievement Gap will have to consider the root causes of the gap and it will have to be focused on the under-performing students with an eye to get them to grade level.
I propose a program that is extended, intensive, and enriched.
It will require extended time on task - 90 minute blocks for each of the four core subjects - reading, writing, math and science. Since we're not going to skimp on other disciplines (history, music, art, P.E., etc.) it will require an extended day. That's fine. We'll need the extended day for other things as well. In addition, let's have an extended week and an extended year for these students.
It will be intensive because these students need their education accelerated. They have to learn more than the other students so they can catch up. They will need and will benefit from smaller class sizes - let's have 15 students in these classes. If that means that the regular classes have 35 students in them (for an average class size of 25), then so be it.
While 35 kids in a room may sound like a lot, remember that all 35 will be working at grade level and ready and able to engage with the grade level curriculum. There should be much less behavior issues and less need to differentiate instruction.
The program to bring students up to grade level should also be enriched. A big factor in the academic achievement gap is the opportunity gap. Middle-class students get exposure, opportunities, and supports that students from low-income households don't get. They will have to be replaced. So there will be lots of enrichment. Besides, this isn't a boot camp. It isn't punishment. The program will have breakfast in the morning, lunch at midday and a snack in the afternoon (extended day) to make sure the kids have proper nutrition (a contributing factor to the gap). They will use the extended day to have a stable, structured and supported homework time in the afternoon (another factor). They will have music and art instruction in the afternoon and at the Saturday school. They will also have field trips - lots of field trips (another factor). To the library, to the zoo, to the aquarium, to concerts, to live dance performances, to plays, to the beach, to sports events, to farms, to factories, to offices, and they will have exposure to all sorts of things like horseback riding that they would not otherwise experience.
The goal is to quickly bring these students up to grade level and then return them to their regular class ready and able to succeed with the grade level curriculum. The program will start out very big - and very expensive, but it will shrink rapidly as students are brought up to grade level and, within a few years, it will be very small.
Posted Fri, Mar 25, 7:12 a.m. Inappropriate
BlueLight, we are all so pleased that you were not subjected to any indoctrination and can think for yourself. Thank goodness your vision was not narrowed and you can rationally consider possibilities outside the constraints of the status quo or any ideology.
Posted Fri, Mar 25, 11:21 a.m. Inappropriate
Back a few years before Ryan started teaching in elementary school, the reading block in Seattle schools rarely exceeded a half hour. Lots of progress has been made since then. The two-hour literacy block described is an excellent base. But Ryan also says "that should do it." My question and the point of the piece is, "Does it?" At the end of the year can EACH and EVERY first grader in Ryan's read at grade level? It is not a question of absolute time, it's a question of absolute results, EACH kid a grade level reader or not. Two hour block or less or more, the responsibility of Ryan and his colleagues is to make sure EACH child reaches the grade-level reading goal. And this formulation of the problem regarding a struggling six year old: causing him to "forgo other interests in order to fit in more literacy instruction is a recipe for creating a child who hates reading" suggests a question framing the options: Isn't it the teacher's job to figure out how deliver instruction to that child, rather than suggest that boredom is a worse outcome than not learning to read?
Dick Lilly
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