Whatever you think about class and race, this will blow it out of the water.

[madmusic]

Yeah, it starts with BushCo's "No child left behind," but its gets good and there are some mind blowing studies in here that will rock your world (unless you already know about them). And, more important, the article will explain the limits and potentials of "No child left behind" as a beginning to really making some progress.

What It Takes to Make a Student

By PAUL TOUGH
Published: November 26, 2006

On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. “See, that’s a good sign,” the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. “Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.” He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading “well below grade level.” But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. “Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,” he said. “Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.”

Bush’s Woodridge trip came in the middle of a tough midterm election campaign, and there was certainly some short-term political calculation in being photographed among smiling black faces. But this was more than a photo opportunity. The president had come to Woodridge to talk about the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation his administration had enacted after almost six years in office: No Child Left Behind. The controversial education law, which established a series of standards for schools and states to meet and a variety of penalties for falling short, is up for reauthorization next year in front of a potentially hostile Congress, and for the law to win approval again, the White House will have to convince Americans that it is working — and also convince them of exactly what, in this case, “working” really means.

When the law took effect, at the beginning of 2002, official Washington was preoccupied with foreign affairs, and many people in government, and many outside it too, including the educators most affected by the legislation, seemed slow to take notice of its most revolutionary provision: a pledge to eliminate, in just 12 years, the achievement gap between black and white students, and the one between poor and middle-class students. By 2014, the president vowed, African-American, Hispanic and poor children, all of whom were at the time scoring well below their white counterparts and those in the middle class on standardized tests, would not only catch up with the rest of the nation; they would also reach 100 percent proficiency in both math and reading. It was a startling commitment, and it made the promise in the law’s title a literal one: the federal government would not allow a single American child to be educated to less than that high standard.

more: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html

So, how serious do we want to get about this shit?

[upi402]

1. You have to sign up to view the linked article n/t

[kath]

9. Try www.bugmenot.com to get a password. Or (I think this still works,

from back in the days when I used to post on TableTalk) try username Salon00 and password TableTalk.

[Stargazer99]

2. The way to help children learn is to have emotionally healthy

famalies and adequate paying employment for the fathers and mothers. This concept that leaning takes place despite family alchoholism, emotion abuse, financal stress on the family is stupidity born of the ease of the well-off. I suppose it will take another 100 years before it dawns on this culture how to really solve the problem.

[lonestarnot]

14. Not so.

[madmusic]

19. Agreed...

An alcoholic may be more likely to talk AT a child rather than have a real conversation. We can't ignore that.

[hfojvt]

3. I find it kinda interesting that in such a long article

and one that kinda opens with studies on early parenting, that he never once mentions - The Head Start program. Which seems to me would answer some of those gaps between middle class and poor children.

I'm too lazy to finish the whole article, but would also mention that Somerby (www.dailyhowler.com/ )has been discussing it a little bit (and I haven't read what he has said either)

[Igel]

8. Head Start helps.

It gives the disadvantaged students a push in the right direction. But by 4th grade most of the benefit's gone.

Once the added push from day care--supplementing the family's support for education--is gone, the kids are left with whatever support they get in the home. For some kids, it's a lot, and they do well in school on average; for other kids the support's lacking, and they fall increasingly behind so that the effect of Head Start or other day care becomes vanishingly small.

[EstimatedProphet]

10. That's why it's called 'Head Start'

Head Start is about getting disadvantaged kids a head start at education. By 4th gradeit's time for something else.

[saracat]

4. I think this is crap. No one can convince me that the

poor and middle class kids are somehow made stupider by respecting their parents. The author also cites a "sense of entitlement " that the wealthy kids develop as giving them confidence and aiding in achievement.Bull feathers. George Bush feels that same confidence and I don't for one minute believe he has an advanced IQ score and it is obvious he accomplished nothing. Many wealthy spoiled kids who are treated as "adults and friends" by their parents are like that.And I speak from experience.I was raised in an upper class family but was taught to respect my elders. Many very wealthy kids I knew weren't and they got through school and life on their "connections".It had nothing to do with being intelligent and an IQ developed by parental treatment. This is garbage!

[Nikia]

12. I didn't read the article, but I'll explain what I think they and you are talking about

Some poor and working class students feel pressure not to "rise above their station". They feel that by doing so that they are being disrespectful to their family.
There is also the issue of entitlement. Feeling entitled to go to college and get a good job might not make you smarter, but it makes you try to do well enough to get into college and get a good job. If you feel like you aren't entitled to college and are destined to work at Walmart anyway, you might not take school as seriously.
I have seen things from the poor side and know that both of these things are issues, amngst poor and working class students. As someone from an upper class family, you might not recognize this mentality.

[saracat]

20. Okay.Let me explain. My Dad's family was wealthy. My mothers family was poor.

My mother's family were Polish immigrants.My grandmother barely spoke English. My mother became a lawyer.Another sister graduated with a degree in Poli Sci and worked as an interpretor.Two other children just graduated from high school.The only son went into the Air Force.My "poor" grandparents were always disappointed that ALL their children weren't doctor's or lawyers.They had a tremendous respect for education and their friends and children were never pressured "not to rise above their station". I had many friends growing up that were NOT affluent and no one was afraid of bettering themselves.This is a ridiculous statement being used to justify a minority of people who may choose to be lazy. The phrase I heard the most from these folks was "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in one generation".That was their big fear, that they NOT do better than their parents.

On the other hand, I taught at a boarding school full of wealthy kids who didn't want to sound educated or speak well because they said they would be rejected by their peers. So you are right.I do NOT recognize that "pressure NOT to rise above their station" as anything but bogus and an insult to working poor families.

[Nikia]

22. It is different when your whole community is poor

It is not that everyone has that attitude. It is just the majority does. I think that the attitude does have a purpose. If everyone was encouraged to better themselves, it would mean that the majority would have to leave because of lack of professional jobs. It is better to keep some of the best and brightest in the community even if it means that they are working at low paying jobs. It is better to rely on what you value, family and community, rather than abandon them to the pursuit of ambition and wealth and leave them all behind.
From the experiences of those I know well, that attitude is present in rural Ohio (both Northern and Southern), rural Wisconsin, and urban Southern Wisconsin. I suspect that it is not isolated to these places.

[saracat]

23. My mother's whole community WAS poor. And none of them had that attitude.

They lived in the poorest section of Brooklyn and were a mix of all kinds of people. All were poor and many went on to become successful.I am sorry, I really disagree with you that the "majority" of the working poor have the attitude you think. I think it is an insult to those people to inflict that attitude of refusing to better themselves on the people. I think the blame needs to be put where it belongs, on the government that provides no opportunities for those who do want to better themselves! This type of thinking and conditioning is exactly the Bush propaganda about poverty being the fault of the victim and this article is tripe furthering that viewpoint.

[AngryAmish]

13. You may not be amenable to proof

(by your own statements).

How do you account for the consistent IQ differences and achievement differences? They exist (notwithstanding a refusal to look at the numbers).

[lonestarnot]

15. Woodamnwhoo! Saracat puts the last nail in the coffin!

[TahitiNut]

16. (From the article:) "treating them like apprentice adults"

I think this is a key to good parenting. It's not merely a matter of "respect for adults" as it's a matter of "respect for people" - reciprocity. We learn best that which is modeled, not that which is solely imposed.

I came from a blue-collar, low income family. No member of my family (parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts) had gone to college. My mother was a high school graduate and my father was a high school dropout (10th grade). At the same time, use of language was paramount. My maternal grandparents, Norwegian immigrants, lived lives that were saturated with language - learning English to a degree that made their 'foreign' origins unnoticeable. Verbal skills were uniformly valued - from playing scrabble to working crossword puzzles to conversational skills that NEVER shied away from "big words."

At the same time, I experienced the limited interactions described in the article. I vividly recall visiting with a friend whose economic situation was far higher than my own. I remember breakfast and being engaged in discussion by the father regarding news of the day - how intense it was to actually have him LISTEN TO ME and respond with rational regard for what I'd actually said. I recall the teachers who LISTENED and engaged me with direct eye contact, not as an intimidation ploy but with interest and evident respect.

Language. Engagement. Participation. The best teachers I had were gregarious, interested, and respectful. The worst were the ones whose self-interests were evidently disconnected with anything that benefited me.

[teach1st]

5. Gerald Bracey replies to the article

Gerald Bracey shared his letter to the author of the New York Times article cited in the OP. From the EDDRA listserve, 11/29. Mr. Bracey runs EDDRA (Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency).

Mr. Tough,

Your take on NCLB was as good as I’ve seen in confronting some of the issues that the President, Secretary Spellings, and the culture at large would just as soon not confront with their glib assurances about what NCLB can do. Still, you say that the president and others haven’t yet recognized “the magnitude of the effort that will be required.” There are in the end so many omissions in your own essay, I must conclude you have not recognized this magnitude either.

I will come back to this statement in the end, but first a sequential run-through of a few other important problems that afflict the President, the Secretary and the paper.

First, you quote Bush as saying “Some kids can read at grade level, and some can’t and that’s unsatisfactory.” It’s also inevitable. In addition to the natural variation of human beings on all characteristics, “grade level” is only meaningfully defined as the score of the average (median) child in a grade on a test. The median score for third graders is grade level. This means that, by definition, half of all children are always below grade level—to repeat, by definition. It is this definition that permits the existence of the “Lake Wobegon Effect” where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.”

It is theoretically possible to define grade level in some other way, but no one has ever successfully done so. Grade level seems to be meaningful only when reported in the same way as we report the height and weight of babies: for instance, this child of 6 months is at the 63rd percentile for height and 74th for weight, etc.

When the president and, especially the Secretary say that the law requires that all children be at grade level by 2014 they are uttering nonsense, gibberish—and the law doesn’t even mention grade level. It says “proficient.”

Which brings us to the second definitional problem: proficiency. When I address audiences I tell them that we can have a meaningful definition of proficiency or we can have 100% proficiency, but not both. Richard Rothstein has just published a fine essay on the absurdity of aiming for 100% proficient (“Proficiency for All: An Oxymoron”).

You and the president assume that the NAEP definition of proficient is meaningful (very dangerous that—accepting an assumption also accepted by Bush). It is not. It has been rejected by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the GAO, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing as well as by individual psychometricians. I have an essay in the queue (hopefully) at Education Week, “Why are we Still Using the NAEP Achievement Levels?” (Answer: because there is much political hay to be made by pointing to numbers that apparently show that the public schools are doing poorly.

Some examples of the NAEP goofiness: In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, American 4th graders finished 3rd in the world in science among 26 nations. NAEP, administered the same year, said only 29% of fourth graders were proficient or better. In a NAEP reading assessment, 71% of American 4th graders were labeled as scoring at “basic” or “below basic” (when kids are reading at the “basic” level, it is often implied that they are nearly illiterate. This is not true). In the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, Sweden topped the 35 nations and American students were significantly outscored by only three countries. But, if the Swedish kids took the NAEP reading test, 67% of those students in the #1 country would be declared at the “basic” or “below basic” level, almost as many is in the US.

There are many more things in the paper that could be critiqued but I will limit myself to just three: You report that there are 52 KIPP schools and say “KIPP is doing a great job of educating its students.” But you also report that Doug Harris could find only 23 “high-flying” schools. That means that more than half of the KIPP schools are not “high-flying.” So, are they great, still?

While the paper maintains a neutral tone for most of its exposition, there is some nasty, politically laden rhetoric (and an error) that slips in when you write that some states have “slashed their standards in order to allow themselves to label uneducated students educated.” What is your justification for using of the word “slashed?” Did you systematically compare the old standards with the new? This is a Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh word.

More importantly, in this sentence you buy into a false dichotomy, one that is perpetrated by the Bush administration as well, namely, there are two kinds of students: educated and uneducated. For the administration in the context of NCLB, you’re either proficient or you’re left behind. That is absurd. Achievement always falls along a continuum. If a score of 80 is needed to attain the designation “proficient,” does a score of 79 mean the child is “left behind?” Is the 79-kid’s future now foreclosed?

Finally, among the three criticisms, you say that educating poor children will take more money and effort than we have realized, but if we don’t make the effort it will be “the outcome we chose.” You do indeed call attention to needed resources in a useful way, but I don’t think you realize the money and effort required.

Is that poor six-year-old not paying attention to me, the teacher, because he’s sassy or ADHD? Or has he had repeated bouts of untreated media otitis and can’t hear me well? Is this other one lolling about because of high levels of lead in his brain? Is this kid absent because his parents don’t care or because he’s been felled by another bout of asthma (don’t forget, the Bush EPA tried to hide a study showing that slum air is dirtier than suburban)? There are oodles of pediatric problems that schools cannot, as currently constituted, attend to. Not to mention the prenatal and perinatal problems occurring because of inadequate attention to the pregnant mothers. To reconstitute them to include clinics would take big bucks.

Richard Rothstein argues that parents who send their kids to KIPP are not your average low-income parents—and he has presented more compelling evidence about this than what you cited. That begs the larger question: Do we leave these parents behind? What kind of community/school action project would it take to transform them to KIPP-like parents, motivated and willing to sign parent participation contracts? More big bucks.

You note that KIPP teachers are young and work 15-16 hour days (they are also mostly single since most marrieds won’t do that, esp. if they have any kids of their own, nor will they put up with the 24/7 intrusiveness of KIPP).

Again, you observe there are 52 KIPP schools. How many KIPP-like communities are there? Where will you find the hundreds of thousands of teachers and administrators to run KIPP-like schools? And if you can find them, can you recruit them at current pay levels to leave what are likely more comfy homes and neighborhoods to work in KIPP-like communities?

To leave as you do the whole job in the hands of just schools--which is quite amazing if you actually read Schools and Class—is to guarantee that success will not occur on a large scale.

You’d get closer to reality by making your next Magazine article about Richard Rothstein and throw KIPP a couple of lines.

Gerald W. Bracey
Alexandria, VA

Another post on the listserve:

The New York Times Sunday Magazine explored the issue of closing the achievement gap in Paul Tough's 11/26/06 article, "What it Takes to Make a Student." It focused partly on KIPP and the factors behind its schools' success. That prompts me to recount my amateur volunteer research on KIPP.

A dad at San Francisco's KIPP Bayview Academy mentioned proudly on a local school discussion e-listserve that his daughter had "tested into" the KIPP school. My question about what he meant by "tested into" got no response. I decided to see if KIPP was telling applicants they had to "test into" the schools. I took my 7th-grader to drop by a San Francisco KIPP school (KIPP SF Bay Academy, because we were nearby) and ask about applying. They said she did not have to "test into" the school itself, but were very clear that she would have to be tested to determine what grade she's in. I've visited many schools as a prospective applicant, and that's the only time I've even been given the message "don't assume that she'll be in her current grade, because only our tests will determine her grade level" (my interpretation, not a direct quote).

That raises the question of whether many incoming KIPP students are moved back a grade level. This seems feasible, as the KIPP schools are grades 5-8 and generally all the feeder schools are grades K-5. I don't know of any way to know that if KIPP isn't announcing it. It seems like a very legitimate way to help students catch up, but if so, shouldn't KIPP be discussing it publicly as one of its strategies? That wasn't mentioned in the New York Times magazine article.

I went fishing through demographics of California's KIPP schools on the Dataquest section of the California Department of Education website. There are several patterns at the majority of California's KIPP schools:

-- Most of them show changes in the number of African-American students, especially boys, from grade to grade, that seem to indicate that a large number are held back in the higher KIPP grades. The numbers show reductions in one grade and corresponding bumps in the grade behind.

-- The numbers at most of those schools also show significant attrition among African-American students, especially boys. Many who enter the KIPP schools do not finish.

Again, it's legitimate for KIPP schools to have high numbers of kids repeating grades, and it's legitimate for many students who start the school to leave before finishing. However, if those are strategies that help explain KIPP schools' successes -- especially high attrition of unsuccessful students -- they were not mentioned in the New York Times magazine article, and they have not been discussed in other commentaries on KIPP schools that I have seen. If those are successful strategies, they should be aired and explored so that all educators can learn from them.

A few other points from my unscientific research:

-- I learned in my visit to a KIPP school and from other research that KIPP schools have discipline policies built around a "shunning" system that to my middle-class eye is shockingly draconian. This might help explain the schools' high attrition.

-- The KIPP schools rely on a strategy of ongoing material rewards to students, who receive regular "pay" in KIPP dollars to spend on goods at a KIPP store. Again, if that is a significant part of the schools' successful strategy, it should be aired and discussed.

-- The numbers as gleaned from the California Department of Education website do not appear to bear out the unattributed claim in the New York Times magazine article that "all (KIPP schools) have long waiting lists." Incoming class sizes in most California KIPP schools vary in a manner indicating that they are not all full. As an aside, I also learned in my visit that KIPP rewards students and families for aggressively recruiting to the schools. They get KIPP dollars for bringing in an inquiry and Gap/Old Navy gift certificates for bringing in a new enrolled student.

I think a report on KIPP is incomplete without these pieces of information, so I'm adding them to the discussion.

[leftchick]

7. thank you for these fine letters

they should indeed be read in combination with the OP.

[madmusic]

21. I agree with Bracey.

Hence, "How serious are we going to get?" It will cost a bundle, but we might save money in the long run. Politicians don't like to think that far ahead, however, because by the time the policies pay off, they may not be seeking election anyway.

Will we put our money where our mouth is? Not only can we, but we should, and it will save us money.

Washington State was thinking of building 2 new prisons and they asked Washington State
Institute for Public Policy to do a study, and in part here is what they found:

A third example is a prevention program called Nurse
Family Partnership (NFP), a program that has also
been implemented in Washington. This program
provides intensive visitation by nurses to low-income,
at-risk women bearing their first child; the nurses
continue to visit the home for two years after birth.
Thus far, there is evidence that NFP reduces the
crime outcomes of the mothers and, many years later,
the children born to the mothers. Both of these
effects are included in our analysis of the program.
Our analysis of the NFP studies indicates that the
program has a large effect on the future criminality of
the mothers who participate in the program, reducing
crime outcomes by 56 percent. NFP also reduces the
future crime levels of the youth by 16 percent
compared to similar youth who did not participate in
the NFP program.

http://www.wsipp.wa.gov/rptfiles/06-10-1201.pdf

Are these mothers more attentive to their children? They must be. Washington State found they could better spend the money on this and other preventive programs rather than on new prisons. So maybe there should be educational programs in prisons for the inmate and ANY significant other, especially if they have children.

In their preview study, Washington State found:

Basic Adult Education Programs in Prison. We found seven
rigorous evaluations of programs that teach remedial
educational skills to adult offenders when they are
in prison. On average, these programs reduce the
recidivism rates of program participants.

http://www.nicic.org/Library/021136

So education across the board, including PRE-head start programs, will likely save a lot of money and suffering in the long run, but it may take a generation to really pay off. Though it will cost a bundle in the beginning (but no more than new prisons) it will start saving money after about 20 years (as the Washington State study predicts).

How serious do we want to get about this shit?

[Gwerlain]

6. If poor parents only knew this, I bet...

it would make a lot of difference. All you gotta do is talk. That's it. That's the single most important thing you can do for your child. It don't cost nothin.

I haven't read far enough in yet to see if they make the protein connection.

[Igel]

17. The problem is that child-rearing produces good or bad results

even where we don't want it to. Get professional couples with a bad child-rearing strategy, and you get lots of drop outs. In fact, cohorts of well-off parents have been idenitified whose kids pattern like their families were in the lowest 10% SES. Guess what they have in common? They come from poor families and their child-rearing attitudes sucked.

Protein, medical care, etc., etc., matters in many cases. But it's far from proven that they matter in most cases (in fact, the evidence is going in the other direction).

It means that the usual progressive, now-traditional solutions (higher income, less crime, better nutrition, better medical care, less racism, more respect, more teachers, better teachers, better schools), almost always things that "society" can be seen as responsible for, don't get to the crux of the matter.

Child/parent interaction isn't just the single largest factor, it's the dominant factor. We want to play the Grand Inquisitor and say that kids and parents aren't responsible, we are. We want to say we're important and know how we can solve the kids' problems. We don't know; all the evidence goes to show that we, society, aren't as important as we think, or at least aren't smart enough to have found a way to make ourselves that important.

If we're not that important, we can't do anything. The question is, Can we find a way to be important and make a difference? The jury's certainly out. KIPP has problems and isn't generalizable over the entire set of kids for whom poor educational outcomes are likely; but at least it's an attempt at a partial solution to the real, underlying problem, not just the rote proposing of solutions that even in the aggregate are almost certainly irrelevant to the majority of the problem.

[madmusic]

18. That's what I got out of it...

It helps explain why reading aloud to children is so beneficial as well.

It's a hell of a concept: talk to kids as if they are people, and talk to them often.

Sometimes common sense gets lost in the political shuffle.

[Blue_In_AK]

11. NCLB makes me mad...

...especially with all their requirements for "highly qualified" teachers and so on and the illusive "adequate yearly progress." Try to get some "highly qualified" teachers to take a position in some isolated Alaska Native village with maybe 200 residents, inadequate plumbing (i.e., "honeybuckets") and temperatures down to 40 below in the winter, where many of the kids live in highly dysfunctional alcoholic families, possibly suffer from FAE or FAS, and face almost insurmountable obstacles in obtaining adequate medical, dental and psychological care. This "one size fits all" approach just doesn't work in many places in America but especially in a state like Alaska.