Teach Effectively!

David J. Hoff of Ed Week posted an article reporting that there appears to be increasing support among US government officials for a common set of standards for academic outcomes. For those of us who are concerned about effective instruction, this is very welcome news. To be sure, national standards would have to be conceptualized very carefully, ensuring that they describe important competencies (not recitation of bits). Given the way that states have manipulated local standards, it is important to identify those core areas where we want educated students to be capable of demonstrating facility.

Absent agreed-upon foci for teaching, American education is likely to continue to meander, wander, and be subjected to fads and whims. Agreement about common goals and specification of widely accepted indicators of those goals would go a long way to providing a measuring stick against which educational methods could be compared. Then, it would easier to determine what methods are relatively more effective.

Anyway, here’s Mr. Hoff’s lead:
Continue reading ‘National standards would help US education become more effective’

The IRIS Center will contribute expertise about curriculum-based assessment to a pending webinar about response-to-instruction.

WestEd’s SchoolsMovingUp website will feature another free webinar, “Response to Intervention: Online Professional Development Modules and Resources for Classroom Assessment,” on Wednesday, February 18, from 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time (1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time).

This interactive webinar will highlight free online professional development modules and resources provided by the IRIS (IDEA ‘04 and Research for Inclusive Settings) Center for Training Enhancements to support the validated practice of monitoring students’ progress and curriculum-based assessment, a cornerstone of Response to Intervention (RtI). The presenters – Silvia DeRuvo, Senior Program Associate at the California Comprehensive Center at WestEd; Kimberly Skow, Project Coordinator of The IRIS Center; and Debbie DeBerry, practicing School Psychologist in Hardeman County, Tennessee – will discuss how these online professional development resources have been used to assist teachers in the essential practice of progress monitoring. This webinar is cosponsored by SchoolsMovingUp, the IRIS Center, and the California Comprehensive Center at WestEd.

Jump to the IRIS Center for more.

Zig Engelmann, principle author of a sweet suite of instructional materials that cover the range from beginning language skills to core concepts in physical sciences, has revised his Web site, Zig Site. If you’ve ever heard of “Direct Instruction” (sometimes said, “Big DI”), you’ve heard of Zig’s work. The new site has somethings new and somethings old. Rather than précis the changes, here’s how Zig describes it:

Starting in 2009, Zigsite is going to have an emphasis on training through videos. The first will be a series of 13 video sessions on teaching English pronunciation to non-English speakers. It will be followed by a series of training videos on teaching our new program, Direct Instruction Spoken English.

The longer printed works on Zigsite include, Rubric for Identifying Authentic DI Programs, Low Performers’ Manual, and the log of the first formal study I did in education—Comparative Preschool Study: High and Low SES Preschoolers Learning Advanced Cognitive Skills. These are constructive. Most of the other works are constructive only in the sense that they help clarify why education has gone basically nowhere in the past 40 years. Only now are educators starting to “invent” some of the stuff we used back in the 60s.

Continue reading ‘Zig site morphs’

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.

After the note I posted about access trumping success, I’ve had some back-channel correspondence with colleagues who also lament the situation. Some of that correspondence focused on how important it is to determine students’ special education needs (i.e., complete an IEP) before determining the students’ placement (i.e., special school < --> full-inclusion). The discussion reminded me of a diagram that has appeared in each edition of Better IEPs by Barbara Bateman and Mary Anne Linden.
Continue reading ‘Special ed done the right way’

If you want to read a success story, and who doesn’t as the winter doldrums approach, take a look at Jennifer Dubin’s article entitled “Reading Richmond” from the fall 2008 issue of American Edcuator. Ms. Dubin recounts the story of how the Richmond (VA, US) schools improved the quality of reading instruction—using a combination of new curricula, assessments, and professional development—and helped many young children to become successful readers. Link to Ms. Dubin’s article in American Edcuator.

In “Pre-K Can Work: Needy kids could benefit, but only if we use proven pedagogy and hold programs accountable,” Shepard Barbash of the City Journal describes the conditions he sees as required if pre-kindergarten programs are to benefit the US. Actually, he devotes several paragraphs to describing what’s wrong with pre-k education. Noting that many children from relatively less-advantaged home environments come to pre-k with substantially lower verbal repertoires than their more-advantaged peers, Mr. Barbash indicts the perspective of many early childhood educators about these deficits:

Central to the typical early-childhood educator’s worldview are three ideas: that it’s better for young children to learn through play than through work; that children learn best and are happiest when they can help direct the pace and content of their own learning; and that a child’s mental abilities develop at a natural pace that adults cannot do much to accelerate. If a child fails to learn something, it’s not because the teaching is faulty, in this view; it’s because the child is either “learning disabled” or not yet “developmentally ready” to learn it—a notion derived from the theories of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that mental abilities developed in age-determined phases.

From these premises flow a host of others. Pre-K teachers learn that it’s not “developmentally appropriate practice” to seat children at desks; to give them worksheets; to make them work to master the alphabet, letter sounds, and math; to assess their academic skills (medical, dental, and nutrition assessments are okay); and to group them by skill level for instruction (because all children should receive equal treatment and because children learn as much from one another as they do from adults). Many things that parents would call common sense are, for the preschool professional, high-risk activities.

The alternative, Mr. Barbash proposes, is to provide Direct Instruction. He illustrates with anecdotes from his own observations of pre-k lessons. And he goes further, arguing in favor of consistent, systematic assessment of children’s competence during the pre-k years.

Read Mr. Barbash’s article at the City Journal.