Teach Effectively!

US education policy should reduce its emphasis on the entering characteristics of teachers and insist instead that teacher quality be determined by the fruits of teachers’ work: Student outcomes. Under the headline “From Qualifications to Results: Promoting Teacher Effectiveness Through Federal Policy” (28 January 2009), Robin Chait presents the case for stressing alternative ways of promoting teacher effectiveness.

Federal law should stop focusing on “quality,” as measured by front-end qualifications, and start focusing on “effectiveness,” as measured by whether teachers have actually helped students learn. Research now shows that most qualifications only weakly predict whether teachers will succeed in the classroom, and one of the best predictors of future performance is past performance. This means that increasing the share of teachers who are high performers will be a straighter path to improving student achievement than focusing on credentials.

Continue reading ‘Changing the meaning of ‘highly qualified’’

Could this be for real? Anyone seen any data? (Not likely.)

New iPhone Application to Help Children Learn to Read using Phonics

London, UK – Apps in My Pocket Ltd launches PocketPhonics for iPhone. Children can now enjoy learning to read using phonics on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Phonics is the reading system recommended by education specialists in both the US and UK.

Teacher, Sue Keen, said: “As a teacher of young children, I am always anxious that new resources for the classroom have a strong educational basis and actually work. I’ve used PocketPhonics with children aged 4 to 6 and the results have been very encouraging. You know you’re winning when the child doesn’t want to stop.”

John Friend, company director at Apps in My Pocket, said: “PocketPhonics starts by saying the sounds and showing children how to write them. It’s been developed from scratch with children in mind, for parents to use with their children or for use in the classroom. Children love to copy the writing on the handheld screen using their finger, and shake the iPhone to make their writing disappear. Sounds are taught in small groups so they can be quickly used together in a game to make short words.”

Pricing and Availability:
PocketPhonics costs $2.99 (USD) in the US and £1.79 in the UK, and is available to download now from Apple iTunes. It uses touch, graphics, animation and sound to make learning to read both fun and engaging for younger children. There’s also a free “lite” version so that people can see how it works before they buy.

Apps in My Pocket
PocketPhonics
PocketPhonics Lite (free version) Download Link
PocketPhonics purchase link
Main screen
Phonics game screen

Apps in My Pocket Ltd started in October 2008 to create useful and usable applications for Apple’s iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch. PocketPhonics is the first app to be launched. More information can be found at their website. Copyright 2008 Apps in My Pocket Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone and iPod are registered trademarks of Apple Computer in the U.S. and/or other countries.

[MacMegasite]

Gates Foundation 1st Annual Letter

I read with interest your statement about the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2009 Annual Letter from Bill Gates). Thank you for the efforts of the foundation in so many important areas (global health, agriculture, etc.).

Given my own focus, I was especially interested in your discussion about US education. I appreciate your candor in assessing the successes and failures of the foundation’s efforts in education, as reflected in this quotation:

Nine years ago, the foundation decided to invest in helping to create better high schools, and we have made over $2 billion in grants. The goal was to give schools extra money for a period of time to make changes in the way they were organized (including reducing their size), in how the teachers worked, and in the curriculum. The hope was that after a few years they would operate at the same cost per student as before, but they would have become much more effective.

Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way. These tended to be the schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.

Even so, many schools had higher attendance and graduation rates than their peers. While we were pleased with these improvements, we are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short.

Later in your statement, you rightly emphasize the importance of helping “teachers be more effective in the classroom.” I want to underscore this point, because I consider it critical to enhancing the strength of US education and, thereby, improving outcomes for students in our schools. For students to gain access to higher education, they must have the competence required in foundational areas such as mathematics, written expression, and content knowledge. Achieving that competence requires teachers who employ effective methods of teaching.

Indeed, the idea undergirding this Web site is that we know lots about teaching effectively. When they have the right tools and use them skillfully, teachers can have effects on students’ performance that may appear to be small but that, in fact, turn out to be changes in trajectory which play critical roles in improving students’ outcome in the longer term.

Students who, during their early schooling, become facile with the decoding aspects of reading, the computational aspects of arithmetic, and the more mechanical aspects of writing will have initial and sustained advantages in learning content later. Similarly, those who master the fundamental aspects of algebra during the later elementary and early secondary grades will have greater opportunities to pursue advanced studies in mathematics, science, and technology. Equipping teachers with the tools and skills to deflect students’ trajectories in these areas will help mightily in improving education.

Based on a large body of research, we know pretty much how to accomplish this. It is clear that systematic, explicit instructional practices (e.g., Direct Instruction) promote measurably improved outcomes for students. And, it’s important for teachers to be able to see the fruits of their efforts. It’s not enough to present lessons and hope that students will do well years later; we need to refocus on students’ progress at a more micro level if teachers are to be able to see progress, and adjust instruction quickly to meet students’ need (curriculum-based measurement or precision teaching). Interestingly, much of this research comes from special education, where the very nature of the population of students requires efficient teaching.

The formula is actually relatively simple:

1. Faithfully implement evidence-based instructional practices and curricula that systematically teach students requisite skills and knowledge from the get-go;
2. Initially differentiate instruction on the basis of students’ prior learning;
3. Frequently monitor students’ acquisition of skills and knowledge as they develop; and
4. Systematically adjust instruction on the basis of students’ learning.

I suspect that a relatively small investment per teacher (say, $5000/yr) in a key area (algebra, for example) aimed at preparing the teachers to provide instruction based on these four principles would yield valuable results. And once those teachers see the benefits to their students, I suspect few will go back to teaching in the comfortable-but-ineffective ways of the past. At the least, this proposition is a testable hypothesis. If one wanted to make a really powerful test, it would be good to focus on teachers from a few score inner city schools.

If you’d like to give this idea a whirl, let me know. Meanwhile, keep up the good works in those other areas.

Regards,

John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.
John [at] JohnWillsLloyd [dot] com

Over at Ed Week, Christina Samuels has a story about response to intervention. Under the headline “High Schools Try Out RTI,” she points out that using RtI with students in secondary schools requires adaptations: “Using the framework with older students poses challenges, but shows promise.”

“Response to intervention” as a model for boosting student achievement has taken off like wildfire.
When it comes to research on how best to implement the process for students in middle and high school, though, the flame abruptly fizzles out. There’s little RTI research that is specific to secondary schools, although it has been well studied at the elementary level.

Link to Ms. Samuels’ article (subscription required, but one can read a few articles every so often by adding one’s address to a mailing list). Also, for those who’ve not discovered it yet, Teach Effectively has a set of slides by Charles Hughes and Don Deshler that addresses how RtI may be applied in secondary schools.

Today marks beginning of “No Name-Calling Week,” an effort to promote civility and decrease bullying in schools and communities. A few days ago I posted a noted about this topic over on Behavior Mod Info, including a suggestion about a series of lessons aimed at increasing the frequency of polite interactions between students. Here’s a link to it.

In case you missed it in the news, the National Disability Rights Network (NDRN) released a report 13 January documenting the use of seclusion and restraint procedures in US schools. In “School is Not Supposed to Hurt: Investigative Report on Abusive Restraint and Seclusion in Schools,” NDRN tells terrible stories about things that happen to children at schools. Here’s is an excerpt from the press release by NDRN:

WASHINGTON (January 13, 2009) – The National Disability Rights Network (NDRN) today unveiled a disturbing national report on seclusion and restraint in U.S. schools. The report shows an unsettling use of seclusion and restraint tactics, which resulted in physical and emotional injuries as well as deaths, in schools affecting students from grades K-12.The report documents cases that range from students being locked in rooms or even boxes for hours to students who were encouraged to release their aggression by wrestling in “WWF Rooms.”
Continue reading ‘Seclusion and restraint: NDRN report’

Jim Wright, who is a school psychologist in New York and an author of multiple sources about current topics in education, has a Web site that some folks will likely find valuable. He calls it “Intervention Central,” and he’s populated it with guidance about teaching techniques. There are many specific recommendations, organized according to academic area (e.g., arithmetic, reading fluency) as well as by topic (e.g., RTI, classroom behavior). Mr. Wright has based many of his recommendations on published studies. Link to Intervention Central.

Perhaps my last post needs some clarification. I’ve run into more than one smart person who argues that all kids can, at least in principle, be high achievers. Why did I suggest that the idea attributed to Michelle Rhee is a statistical impossibility?

I think sometimes people are confused about the statistics of high achievement for two reasons. First, “all” must be taken literally to mean each and every student in school. Second, “high” is an arbitrary designation in a statistical distribution. Still, implicit in some federal laws and explicit in some people’s arguments, is that all students can be high achievers or meet some absolute standard of proficiency. But “universal proficiency” (actually, any designation of a universal achievement standard above the lowest in a distribution) is an oxymoron unless statistics just don’t apply to academic achievement (Rothstein, Jacobsen, & Wilder, 2006; see also Ho, 2008).

“All” used to encompass only a large subset of the population, but since the enactment of federal special education law in 1975 (now IDEA) “all” must include children with disabilities. Fine distinctions must be made in declaring children alive or dead and in judging them to be conscious or unconscious. And I have argued (see Kauffman & Krouse, 1981) that we should make the excruciating fine distinction between children who are educable and those who are not. Of course, we could argue ad nauseam about just what mental retardation is and the determination of different levels of it, even though most of us believe that it (MR) exists and that there are different degrees of it. But the fact is that federal education law does not allow (and I don’t think it should) schools to ignore children who can be taught important things but have cognitive disabilities—or can’t, because of any disability, achieve on average like those without disabilities.

Advocates for children with disabilities just don’t take kindly to the exclusion of students with disabilities from “all.” And I don’t think they should. They argue that the “full house” to which Stephen J. Gould referred in his discussion of statistical distributions (see Gould, 1996) has to be considered. Of course, someone could respond, “Well, I obviously didn’t mean to include students with mental retardation when I said ‘all’.” OK. The former meaning of “all” excluded some. But we’re still stuck with the statistical distribution of the rest of the students, even if we cut off and throw away (in our consideration of “all” or “high”) the left tail in a distribution of achievement that includes them. Problem not solved, even if the “obvious” cases who can’t be expected to meet a standard are excluded.

And we’re left with the statistical designation of “high” achiever. Why is everyone’s being a “high achiever” still statistically impossible? Let’s begin at the beginning.

Should we measure achievement to determine what’s “high?” You might argue that we shouldn’t. OK. Then someone’s achievement is “high” because you say so. I suppose that for those who reject the idea of measurement that’s just great! If we declare “high” achievement without measurement, we need go no further. Case closed. But, then, we’re after statistical possibility here, which does imply measurement.

Can we measure without getting a distribution of what we measure? As far as I know (and I suppose I could be proved wrong in my assumption), the only way to avoid a distribution is to measure so imprecisely that we end up with only one or a very small number of categories (e.g., high; high/not high; low/medium/high; not proficient/proficient/proficient +/extremely high) or don’t measure at all. OK. But we’re still stuck with the idea that everyone can—at least in principle—be judged to fall into a single category: “high.” Not likely at all, on a statistical basis, if your measurement is reliable and valid and if you measure a lot of individuals. Based on what I think I understand about statistics and probabilities, I’d say the probability of everyone’s falling into the same category is so remote that anyone would be wise to bet everything she or he owns against it if the sample is large (let’s say 1,000 or more) and the measurement of achievement is worth a hoot.

Should we use some sort of standardized test of achievement? Well, most of the talk of high achievement and accountability and gaps and so on is based on students’ scores on such tests. So, you may damn the tests we have, or you may come up with a better one, but still I’m supposing that the scores on whatever test is given would have a considerable range and that if you give it to a large and randomly selected group of students (say, all of the students in a medium-sized school district or more) you’d get something approximating the mathematically idealized “normal” distribution. That’s just because I’m assuming (perhaps falsely) that achievement is “normally” distributed. But, even if it isn’t, there are other statistical considerations that are important.

As far as I know, any distribution would have the four statistical “moments” to which mathematicians and statisticians refer (i.e., central tendency, including mean, median, and mode; variability, including standard deviation; skew, negative or positive; and kurtosis, lepto or platy). As far as I know, it’d be impossible, statistically, to find that all of the students are at or above a certain point on that distribution, except the lowest one. And as far as I know, this applies to all distributions, regardless of their statistical moments.

Now, we could, it’s true, pick any point on the distribution and consider everyone above that point a “high” achiever. But, unless I just miss something about statistical realities completely, the only point at or above which everyone can score is the lowest point on the distribution. If we pick a place on the distribution below any one of the points indicating the statistical moment called central tendency, then we’re likely to set ourselves up for ridicule (one reason Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon is obviously fictional and makes people laugh is the realization that all of the students being above average is impossible).

So, I’m left wondering what I’ve missed about what some laws and some bright people presume about academic achievement. I’ve suggested that eliminating all statistical gaps in achievement among groups makes about as much sense as waving to Ray Charles (Kauffman, 2005, in press). Maybe the analogy is flawed. Maybe it made (or still makes) sense to wave to Ray Charles. But I doubt it.

Someone might argue that it’s not an achievement test score itself that defines “high” but a gain score—a comparison of what a student has achieved to where the student started. As far as I know, gain scores will have a statistical distribution, too, and so we’re right back where we started. Or someone might say that it’s not really a test score or a measure of gain but whether the student learns all that he or she can that should define “high.” But, again, we’d have to have some way of judging (or measuring?) what a student can or can’t learn, and I think it’s a pretty safe bet that not all students can learn all things at the same level, so we’re again back where we started.

And, then, there’s the argument that we really just want to get more kids to achieve at higher levels so that the whole curve moves up—so that the central tendency is so much higher that what used to be average is now “high.” Problem not solved for two reasons. First, we could just compare today’s distribution to a distribution of long ago; we always want to make comparisons to current data. And we’d have some obvious statistical trouble even if we compared current to old data. Second, I don’t think it’s statistically possible to detach the low end of the distribution from the lowest score. Besides, we need to ask what will happen to the shape of the distribution of achievement scores if we move its central tendency higher (but that’s a question different from the statistical possibility of every student’s being judged “high” in achievement).

I’m all for improving education, including its outcomes. I think that’s possible, statistically and otherwise. I do think it’d be very difficult to achieve a system of education in which all children learn all they can, although it might be possible. But all children being “high” in achievement? I doubt that it’s possible statistically. Maybe I just need to get over the idea that statistics apply to academic achievement, but I doubt it.

Gosh, I hope I haven’t written something I didn’t (or shouldn’t) mean! Please tell me if I have.

Gould, S. J. (1996). Full house: The spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Ho, A. D. (2008). The problem with “proficiency”: Limitations of statistics and policy under No Child Left Behind. Educational Researcher 37, 351-360.

Kauffman, J. M. (2005). Waving to Ray Charles: Missing the meaning of disability. Phi Delta Kappan, 86, 520-521, 524.

Kauffman, J. M. (in press). The tragicomedy of public education: Laughing, crying, thinking, fixing. Verona, WI: Attainment.

Kauffman, J. M., & Krouse, J. (1981). The cult of educability: Searching for the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Analysis and Intervention in Developmental Disabilities, 1, 53-60.

Rothstein, R., Jacobsen, R., & Wilder, T. (2006, November). “Proficiency for all”—An oxymoron. Paper presented at a symposium on “Examining America’s commitment to closing achievement gaps: NCLB and its alternatives.” New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.