Smaller Schools, Bigger Achievements?

They're talking about urban schools, but I choose to focus on Small Is Good, in Small high school reform boosts districtwide outcomes -- ScienceDaily

"Small school reform lifted all boats."

Small school reform, in which new, small high schools replace large, comprehensive high schools, has been adopted by major U.S. cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Boston. Studies in New York and Boston have found that small high schools deliver better outcomes -- including higher graduation rates -- than large high schools for urban students.

I'm convinced. :-)

Stand up to pay attention

One of many possible small improvements (or maybe it won't be confirmed; let's say one of many items worthy of exploration).. We think better on our feet, literally -- ScienceDaily

A study from the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health finds students with standing desks are more attentive than their seated counterparts. In fact, preliminary results show 12 percent greater on-task engagement in classrooms with standing desks, which equates to an extra seven minutes per hour of engaged instruction time.

I'm not sure how far to go with that "seven minutes per hour", simply adding on 12%, but if you can then it's a substantial increase to the school year....certainly my school years could have been stretched quite a bit with extra attentiveness, and maybe a standing desk -- like the one I'm typing this on -- would have helped with attentiveness as well as health. It's hard to say.

Research on Programs for Gifted Students

From the University of Iowa, U. S. schools are still shortchanging gifted kids, experts say -- ScienceDaily

This two-volume report is designed to "empower" parents, educators, administrators, and policy-makers with evidence and tools to implement 20 types of acceleration, which include early entrance to school, grade-skipping, moving ahead in one subject area, or Advanced Placement courses.

And just as important, A Nation Empowered aims to keep the conversation about acceleration going....

But it's not actually available quite yet; I follow links to Acceleration Institute

Coming Spring 2015

with a lot of other links, mostly having to do with the previous version of report that they're updating. Still, that's interesting too.

Share & Learn; iPad Usage Research

Science Daily reports on literacy testing of young technology users at Kindergartners who shared iPads in class scored higher on achievement tests -- ScienceDaily

a natural experiment where classrooms in one school had 1:1 iPads; classrooms in a second school had 23 iPads to share, where kids primarily used them in pairs; and classrooms in a third school had no iPads. She looked at the effect that using 1:1 iPads for one academic year (9 months), compared to the other two conditions, had on student literacy (as measured by the STAR Early Literacy Assessment).

Results showed that students in shared iPad classrooms significantly outscored their peers in 1:1 and non-iPad classrooms on the spring achievement test, even after controlling for baseline scores and student demographics. Blackwell found that shared iPad students scored approximately 30 points higher than 1:1 iPad students and non-iPad users.

Sometimes the best teacher is another kid -- and not necessarily an older kid, though it might be. I am reminded of some of what Sugata Mitra said in his TED talk at The child-driven education

In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching....

Yes, you do need grown-ups sometimes (that's why Mitra's later work has been on his plan to School in the Cloud with the "Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) toolkit". Mitra wants to involve professional educators as much as possible...but his most dramatic successes have been with kids together with raw materials, sometimes encouraged by a "granny" who may or may not be physically present and who may or may not be professional at all. I think we need more experiments on "self-supervised" sharing. (With a grown-up in the background. Usually.)

NSF EdTech

Reports on reporting about what we're learning about learning (and, of course, teaching about teaching) at the Huffington Post's 7 Cyberlearning Technologies Transforming Education | Aaron Dubrow

...NSF funds basic cyberlearning research and since 2011 has awarded roughly 170 grants, totaling more than $120 million, to EdTech research projects around the country.

The speakers in the lecture series, all leading cyberlearning scholars, ... represent the forces transforming what education may look like in the future.

1. Classroom as Virtual Phenomenon: RoomQuakes and WallScopes

HelioRoom simulates the orbital motion of the planets in the Solar system on a set of synchronized computer displays situated on the walls of the classroom, with planets "orbiting" around the periphery of the room. ...

... RoomQuake, an earthquake simulation system where the classroom itself becomes an active seismic area. At unpredictable times throughout the unit, rumbles emanating from speakers attached to simulated seismographs signal to the class that an earthquake is occurring....

Students rush to terminals around the classroom, read the data from seismograms .... Over the course of six weeks and dozens of earthquakes, students discover a "fault line" emerging. ...

Tablets adjacent to the walls of classrooms serve as viewports into an imaginary space inside the walls filled with the virtual fauna in Wallcology. ...

2. Games for Good: Learning While You Play

... in the game "Citizen Science," created by Squire and his team, players help restore Lake Mendota, a real lake in Wisconsin that, in the year 2020, has become polluted. As players explore the landscape, they take water samples, interact with a virtual, simulated watershed and talk with stakeholders....

... for a game that might reach even broader audiences, Squire and colleagues created Progenitor X, a zombie-themed tissue engineering game. In Progenitor X, players learn about the relationships between cells, tissues, and organs while trying to survive a zombie invasion. ... As a member of The Progenitor X Defense Force, you are a part of a highly trained squad of scientists who use highly advanced bio-medical technology to locate, seek out, and treat infected humans to contain the threat. ....

"These projects are not only using technologies that only recently became possible. They also build on decades of excellent research on how people learn," said Chris Hoadley, the program officer at NSF who leads the Cyberlearning program. "I believe it's only by advancing technology design and learning research together that we'll be able to imagine the future of learning."...

3. Teaching Tykes to Program: Never Too Young to Control a Robot

... Bers described her latest project, the KIWI robotic kit (subsequently renamed KIBO), which teaches programming through robotics, without screens, tablets, or keyboards. Using KIBO, students scan wooden blocks to give robots simple commands, in the process learning sequencing, one of the most important skills for early age groups. By combining a series of commands, kids make the robot move, dance, sing, sense the environment or light up....

4. Virtual role-play and robo-tutors

... Virtual role-play - where learners engage in simulated encounters with artificially intelligent agents that behave and respond in a culturally accurate manner - has been shown to be effective at teaching cross-cultural communication.

"You learn by playing a role in a simulation of some real life situation"

"We found in our military training that when soldiers use this approach, once they get into a foreign country -- let's say they're sitting down with local leaders -- they feel as if it's a familiar situation to them... Moreover, the software could address the shortage of qualified teachers able to teach Chinese, Arabic and other less popular languages... The first Web-based course was tested last year via Virtual Virginia, a statewide virtual school program, and received overwhelmingly positive ratings from the students....

5. Tools for Real-time Visual Collaboration

... "Computers have been individualistic devices," said Ramani. "But a new class of technology is emerging that allows us to engage in our individual learning process and also in a collaborative process." SkWiki ... allows many participants to collaboratively create digital multimedia projects on the web using many kinds of media types, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs....

6. Fusing data collection, computational modeling and data analysis

Simulation and modeling have come to be regarded as the "third pillar" of science... ... By embedding simulations and sensor data collectors in the classroom, Dorsey and Wilensky are able to aid students in gathering, visualizing and analyzing data from multiple sources. A principal innovation of InquirySpace is the integration of the Concord Consortium's CODAP data exploration software with the modeling environments. This integration enables students to plan extended investigations of models, to do sophisticated analyses of the model runs, and to engage in arguments from evidence. ...

7. Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality: Increasing ecological understanding

... Two decades ago, with funding from NSF, Dede started investigating head-mounted displays and room-sized virtual environments... At the beginning of the two to four week EcoMUVE curriculum, the students discover that all of the fish in a virtual pond have died. They then work in teams to determine the complex causal relationships that led to the die-off. The experience immerses the students as ecosystem scientists. ... At the end of the investigation, all of the students participate in a mini-scientific conference where they show their findings and the research behind it.

I don't know how well the experiments will scale up, but I would like to note that all of this seems to require ending the teaching-to-the-test that the last few posts have been about. They all seem to require teamwork, but none of them have much to do with traditional lectures. All of them have a learn-by-doing framework, where the computer facilitates the doing -- or even provides the universe for that doing to be done in.

Creation vs Current Curriculum

This is a rather more abstract level than I usually post about, but I want to link to Yong Zhao's recommendations at A World at Risk: An Imperative for a Paradigm Shift to Cultivate 21st Century Learners

• Stop prescribing and imposing on children a narrow set of content through common curriculum standards and testing.
• Start personalizing education to support the development of unique, creative, and entrepreneurial talents. ... ...
• Stop constraining children to learning opportunities present in their immediate physical environments by assigning them to classes and teachers.
• Start engaging them in learning opportunities that exist in the global community, beyond their class and school walls.
• Stop forcing children to learn what adults think they may need and testing them to what degree they have mastered the required content.
• Start allowing children the opportunity to engage in creating authentic products and learn what they are interested in, just in time, not just in case.
• Stop benchmarking to measures of excellence in the past, such as international test scores.
• Start inventing the excellence of the future. You cannot fix the horse wagon to get the moon. We have to work on rocket science.

A Final Word
To implement these recommendations, the first thing we need is to abandon ... the obsolete employment-oriented educational paradigm, the very mindset that both gave birth to and has been perpetuated by A Nation at Risk. After thirty years of experiments that have brought revolutionary, destructive changes to American education, without any measureable improvement, it is time to be freed from its spirit.

As Newsweek found almost five years ago, reporting on The Creativity Crisis

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class....

Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Training

On the topic of making teachers better...Arnold Kling, economist-who-is-skeptical-about-pretty-much-everything, notes in his "Null Hypothesis" series that Null Hypothesis Watch | askblog

On the bright side, TFA teachers appear to be at least as effective as regular teachers when it comes to teaching reading and math to elementary students. The fact that TFA requires only a five-week crash course in pedagogy — rather than traditional teacher certification — is another reason to question the value of an education degree.

I don't really doubt that "good teacher"/"bad teacher" is a very important distinction, at least in some situations, but it doesn't seem that education degrees have much to do with it. Not surprising, I suppose, since otherwise home-schoolers would perform substantially worse than those in public schools.

Charters etc up, reading comprehension level, null hypothesis?

Pro-charter school group estimates 14 percent enrollment gain nationwide - The Washington Post

The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools estimates in a new report that 2.9 million children now attend U.S. charter schools, up 14 percent from last school year.

Note that 14% increase per year corresponds to a doubling time of just under 6 years...quadruple in twelve...eight times as many in eighteen years...well, maybe not. I do think the proliferation of charters is a Somewhat Good Thing, partly because choice is a way to get people to be happy (even if actual results are no better, I think happiness is a good thing and if you don't, well....okay.) Mostly, though, because I like experimentation; each public charter (or in some cases groups of charters) is an experiment in doing things a bit differently than whatever failed in the area it's trying to serve. We don't know what works for which students in which kinds of learning, and we won't find out without trying, and that will involve a bunch of failed experiments and failed programs and failed schools, which is sad but necessary. (500 charters opened and 200 closed.) Here's Grant Wiggins, thinking about public schooling mainly, on the way that zillions of trials (and hugely rising expenditures) have utterly failed to improve average reading comprehension: Maybe we don’t understand what readers really do – and why it matters | Granted, and...

Numerous causes and their implied solutions, as readers know, have been proposed for flat reading scores: poverty, low expectations, inadequate background knowledge, an anti-boy bias in schools (especially in terms of book selection), IQ links to reading ability, computer games, TV, etc. etc.

The utterly flat national trend line, over decades, says to me that none of these theories holds up well, no matter how plausible each may seem to its proponents. Perhaps it’s time to explore a more radical but common sense notion: maybe we don’t yet understand reading comprehension and how it develops over time.

If we don't specifically know what it is we're hoping they learn, we don't know where they're going and it's hard to help them get there, even if we have tests that supposedly tell us whether or not they've arrived. Of course maybe some or most or all of the efforts really are working, but they're roughly balanced by negative effects: maybe the harder we try the more they fail. As Wiggins put it last month in A Post from Paris | Granted, and...

A 7th grade girl, when interviewed by teachers as part of our summer institutes, said the most amazing thing when asked how she felt about ‘typical’ teaching. “The more the teacher talks, the more I feel alone and useless.”

Or maybe the truth is close to Arnold Kling's "Null Hypothesis". The Null Hypothesis in Education is Hard to Disprove | askblog

In education, the null hypothesis is that nothing makes a long-term, scalable, replicable difference. That is:

1. Take any pedagogical innovation or educational intervention.

2. Subject it to a controlled experiment.

3. Evaluate the experiment’s outcome several years later.

4. If the experiment works, attempt to replicate the experiment in more situations.

By the time you reach step 4, if not sooner, you will be unable to show that the innovation makes any difference in outcomes. What this suggests to me is that in the long run it is the characteristics of the students that determine outcomes, at least on average. Think of an individual student as “predestined” to reach a certain outcome....

That's an extremely uncomfortable way to think, even at the margin. It's obviously false in extreme cases, such as urban poverty, but it's not obviously false for the programs at the margin, i.e. programs that are supported and opposed with reasonably thoughtful people on both sides. Kling notes an OECD report saying The Null Hypothesis Strikes Again | askblog

In practice, however, grade repetition has not shown clear benefits for the students who were held back or for school systems as a whole.

One interpretation of this is that the marginal benefit of an additional year of schooling is zero. However, that interpretation is not something that anyone wants to discuss.

I don't actually believe even the marginal version of the null hypothesis...I think that a sufficiently-responsive educational system could actually evaluate each kid and in almost all cases say "this is the group they fit in (diagnosis) and this is what worked on members of that group (i.e. what they should do next)." In software. On a cell phone.

But not this year. :-)

Depressed Teachers, Low Class Performance

I notice this morning a report on a Florida study: Elementary teachers' depression symptoms related to students' learning -- ScienceDaily

Teachers experience some of the highest levels of job-related stress, and such stress may leave them more vulnerable to depression. How do elementary school teachers' symptoms of depression affect the quality of the classroom environment and students' learning? A new study has found that teachers who reported more symptoms of depression than their fellow teachers had classrooms that were of lesser quality across many areas, and students in these classrooms had lower performance gains, particularly in math...

The researchers looked at 27 teachers and their 523 third-grade students (primarily White and from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds) in a Florida school district. Teachers reported the frequency of their symptoms of clinical depression, and students' basic reading and math skills were assessed throughout the year.

My first question, though, is: cause or effect or both (i.e., causal loop)? Do classes do badly because the teachers are depressed, or are teachers depressed because their classes are (or are expected to be) doing badly? (Or both?)

If the depression results from job-related stress, and if (low) classroom quality results from many factors which contribute to job-related stress in many ways, then it would be really surprising not to find a correlation between measures of classroom quality problems on the one hand, and symptoms of depression on the other. I suppose a mild depression that we see may actually be making visible classroom troubles mildly less bad, if we believe in Depressive Realism | Psychology Today

While people with depression can suffer from cognitive distortions, the scientific literature suggests that those with only mild-to-moderate depression can also have more accurate judgment about the outcome of so-called contingent events (events which may or may not occur), and a more realistic perception of their role, abilities, and limitations. This so-called 'depressive realism' may enable a person with depression to shed the Pollyanna optimism and rose-tinted spectacles that shield us from reality, to see life more accurately, and to judge it accordingly.

So it's not an easy call, if you want to know what influences which -- but either way, it does seem worth watching for symptoms of depression...and one of those symptoms, though far from conclusive, is a class that's not doing well. Interesting.

Teaching Tolerance?

It would be nice to think that niceness is improved by education; ignorant people are less nice, e.g. less tolerant, than the educated. But maybe that's not what matters. Does economic freedom lead to greater tolerance?

...the data shows that when a society has impressive scores on property rights security and low inflation ... these characteristics are strongly and positively correlated with tolerance of gays. It’s possible that low inflation, and the behavior of a central bank, are stand-ins for the general trustworthiness of a nation’s government and broader institutions, and such trustworthiness helps foster tolerance....

We are often told that education is an important remedy, yet it does not register as a meaningful factor in the cross-country data in this paper. Higher levels of education simply have not correlated significantly with higher levels of tolerance across countries.

I suppose that "I have a post-secondary degree" ... "I have a PhuD" might translate as "I have learned to absorb, echo and elaborate on whatever my culture/government wanted." That might be it. Sigh.

Timing the Vegetables

The Journal of Preventive Medicine (via TreeHugger) says that in elementary school, Kids will eat more veggies if you let them play first : TreeHugger

Moving recess to before lunch increased consumption of fruits and vegetables by "0.16 servings per child", which might sound small, but it represents a 54% increase, which is huge. Pre-lunch recess also increased the number of children eating at least one serving of fruits or vegetables by 10% points.
Another beneficial effect of this simple change was the dramatic reduction in wasted food, by about 40%.

It's the sort of thing that I would class as "worth a try", both for schools and households. Wouldn't you?

The Importance of Choosing the Right Superintendent

We need a new superintendent next year....but how much difference does it actually make? A former superintendent notes recent research at Superintendents and Test Scores | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Here is what the researchers found:

1. School district superintendent is largely a short-term job. The typical superintendent has been in the job for three to four years.
2. Student achievement does not improve with longevity of superintendent service within their districts.
3. Hiring a new superintendent is not associated with higher student achievement.
4. Superintendents account for a small fraction of a percent (0.3 percent) of student differences in achievement. This effect, while statistically significant, is orders of magnitude smaller than that associated with any other major component of the education system, including: measured and unmeasured student characteristics; teachers; schools; and districts.
5. Individual superintendents who have an exceptional impact on student achievement cannot be reliably identified.

Results, of course, are from only one study and must be handled with care. The familiar cautions about the limits of the data and methodology are there. What is remarkable, however, is that the iron-clad belief that superintendents make a difference in student outcomes held by the American Association of School Administrators, school boards, and superintendents themselves has seldom undergone careful scrutiny.

Well, maybe

Standing desks in elementary school

I'm typing this at a standing desk...maybe schools should use them too. Standing desks are good for school-age children too : TreeHugger

The research was conducted at three central-Texas elementary schools, and 374 students from different grades participated in the study.

Students who used the standing desks were found to burn 15 percent more calories than those using traditional desks. Younger students were found to be more willing to stand than older ones.

Researcher Mark Benden told Fast Company that teachers also reported that students concentrated better when using standing desks. However this variable wasn’t measured by the study—but came from follow-up interviews.

It might be worth a try.

Start School Later

I don't seem to have any posts on the Start School Later movement

The Start School Later movement refers to a series of efforts in the U.S.A. by health care professionals, sleep scientists, educators, economists, legislators, parents, students, and other concerned citizens to restore a later start to the school day, based on a growing body of evidence that starting middle and high schools too early in the morning is unhealthy, counterproductive, and incompatible with adolescent sleep needs and patterns.

Yesterday's Science Daily adds the (possibly) latest: Secret to raising well behaved teens? Maximize their zzzzz's

Recently published in the journal of Learning, Media and Technology, this interesting paper exposes the negative consequences of sleep deprivation caused by early school bells, and shows that altering education times not only perks up teens' mood, but also enhances learning and health.
...in puberty, shifts in our body clocks push optimal sleep later into the evening, making it extremely difficult for most teenagers to fall asleep before 11.00pm. This, coupled with early school starts in the morning, results in chronically sleep-deprived and cranky teens as well as plummeting grades and health problems.
There is a body of evidence showing the benefits of synchronizing education times with teens' body clocks; interestingly, while 'studies of later start times have consistently reported benefits to adolescent sleep health and learning, there [is no evidence] showing early starts have a positive impact on such things', add the researchers...

Algorithms learning about human learning

One consequence of the online-5-minute-lecture (e.g., Khan Academy) approach is that with lessons broken into bite-size pieces, each of which has associated exercises, it's easier to test the effectiveness of any given piece. Khan Academy, Video tasks on the learning dashboard

Many of our exercises are tagged with “curated related videos”—videos that are hand-selected as related to the exercise. Using this as a starting point, we looked at all the videos that were already tagged as related to any exercise. For each of these videos, we compared the accuracy on its associated exercise both before watching the video and after watching it. From there, we selected the top fifty most effective videos, each improving the accuracy on its associated exercise by at least twenty percent, and are now highlighting them on the mission dashboard. When the system recommends an exercise with an associated video on the list of our top fifty related videos, it will automatically recommend the related video as well.

Compare with a human teacher who is trying to see which explanations are most helpful, judging class reaction and then perhaps a weekly quiz...the algorithm is of course completely incapable of what the human does, but on the other hand it has immediate access to individual data about what works for whom. In the not-terribly-long run we should be able to have videos tagged as having different styles (highly compressed v. wordy, words v. equations v. pictures, rules v. examples, humor v. straight exposition...) and automatically choose whichever works for given students based on what has improved their scores in the past. I suppose in the very long run we're moving towards a time and motion study program for small units of learning-effort.

Or then again, maybe not.

Psychological Trends, Play, and Schooling

I've mentioned psych-prof (and author) Peter Gray both recently (School and Mental Health) and further back (Rethinking School Motivations). Here's a 16-minute talk he gave in June about "the decline of play and rise of mental disorders" in children and young adults, over the past 60 years.

And he says that children and young adults are more depressed than in the Great Depression, more anxious than during the Cold War (with its elementary-school air-raid drills). Narcissism scores (as far back as we have them) trend upwards with later generations, empathy scores trend down. The effects are substantial, and they don't correlate well with economics or wars -- the trends are roughly linear. Here he's thinking of research like Twenge's Birth cohort increases in psychopathology among young Americans, 1938–2007: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the MMPI - Twenge et al (2010) [10-page PDF], summarized at USA Today, and Twenge's own Psychology Today summary of narcissism research at How Dare You Say Narcissism Is Increasing?

The research findings fall into 5 main areas: 1) narcissism, 2) positive self-views and other traits related to narcissism, 3) cultural products such as language use, 4) positive trends connected to individualism, and 5) the validity of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI)....

It's not a cataclysm (yet?) but it's not a pretty picture, and of course Gray has an explanation. He's an evolutionary-psychology guy and he studies play in animals and in hunter-gatherer societies, and he notes that if you want to create high-anxiety depressed rats or monkeys with poor social skills and poor emotional balance, it's easy: just raise them without the opportunity to play. He believes that some or all of the negative trends he sees are due to the fact that self-directed play has been declining throughout those decades. Supervised "play" of the sort we see in gym class or in AYSO games is not a substitute. Well, I suppose that's obvious, or should be. We are raising our kids as if we want them to be emotionally crippled; it's surprising that the effect is not even greater than what we see.

Educational Video on Educational Videos

Derek Muller "completed a PhD in physics education research from the University of Sydney in 2008. His thesis, Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education, was the subject of his TEDxSydney talk in 2012..."

And the talk (6 minutes) is here:
The principal result seems to be that, at least for his subject (simple physics, e.g. of a tossed basketball) and his subjects (introductory university physics students), it can worse than useless to provide a simple, clear, comprehensible demo of what you're trying to explain, and then test them on it. Their answers will not improve, but their confidence in those answers will rise. Why? They will actually remember statements that definitely weren't in the short video they just saw, statements that accord with their existing misconceptions, and those misconceptions will be reinforced...

Huh? Does that even make sense? Sure: they report low engagement on the clear, comprehensible demo... They're not really listening as long as they think they understand the events (and annotations) in the video, so it just reinforces what they think they already know.

How to fix this? Muller's answer: cover the misconceptions first, and use dialogue. Yes, you will annoy people who think you're actively trying to make them feel dumb, but if you don't cover the misconceptions they will not engage.

Ok, it's interesting, and it could be crucial for almost all kinds of education of almost all kinds of students, too. Start With The Misconceptions. Have A Dialogue Character Representing the Teachably Wrong Point of View. Yeah. But for some reason I'm thinking of a dialogue that started with the misconceptions, started with a character named Simplicio, Galileo Galilei's

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII, thus alienating not only the Pope but also the Jesuits...

It is not always wise to clarify misconceptions, at least not from the perspective of wishing to avoid arrest.

Or then again, maybe it's worth it. 

Studying Studies of Studying

I like reading about the Latest (and greatest) Education Research...but it's worth remembering that a large fraction of all research is wrong, and even if it's right it probably doesn't mean what it seems to mean, and even if it means what it seems to mean, it still probably doesn't have the sort of practical application we'd like to see. So it goes...here's an article about how to look at the data, even assuming that the research wasn't wrong to begin with, at How to Read Education Data Without Jumping to Conclusions (Jessica Lahey & Tim Lahey) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

1. Does the study prove the right point? It’s remarkable how often far-reaching education policy is shaped by studies that don’t really prove the benefit of the policy being implemented. ...[A study might show that "doing X works in situation Y" but then we commit to doing X in all situations]... A key step in interpreting a new study is to avoid extrapolating too much from a single study, even a well-conducted one like STAR.

2. Could the finding be a fluke? Small studies are notoriously fluky, and should be read skeptically. Recently Carnegie Mellon researchers looked at 24 kindergarteners and showed that those taking a science test in austere classrooms performed 13 percent better than those in a “highly decorated” setting....

3. Does the study have enough scale and power? Sometimes education studies get press when they find nothing. For instance, Robinson and Harris recently suggested that parental help with homework does not boost academic performance in kids. ... For example, ...if some parents who help their kids with homework actually do the kids’ homework for them while others give their kids flawed advice that leads them astray, then parental help with homework might appear to have no benefit because the good work of parents who help effectively is cancelled out by other parents’ missteps.

4. Is it causation, or just correlation? It turns out that the most important way for parents to raise successful children is to buy bookcases....

But none of these are about studies which generate results which simply aren't replicable even when we try to do just what the original authors did. Science Daily recently reported on an analysis of "the complete publication history of the current 100 education journals with the highest five-year `impact factor' (an indicator of how often a given journal's articles are cited in other scholarly work)" at Study details shortage of replication in education research

Replication studies that were conducted by completely new research teams were found to be successful 54 percent of the time. When replications were conducted by the original authors in the same publication as the original findings, 88.7 percent were successful. When replications were in a new publication, but at least one author was on both the original and replicating studies, 70.6 percent of replications were successful.

So when the original authors try to repeat, they report success about two-thirds of the time. Not great, but not really relevant if we want to base policy for other people on the techniques tested...when new people try to do whatever it was that worked for the original people, it works about half the time. And then we can start asking the four questions above.

So, is there a bottom line here? Yes, I think so. The bottom line is "Proceed With Caution."

Income and expectations

A few weeks ago, the NYT reported on an international survey of principals, asking if their schools had lots of low-income students. Conclusion? Principals in U.S. Are More Likely to Consider Their Students Poor - NYTimes.com

This much is clear: American students from low-income backgrounds are more likely to struggle in school than low-income students in many other countries .... And American principals are much more likely to describe their students as disadvantaged than principals in many other countries — including some countries that are significantly poorer than the United States. Neither fact qualifies as good news.

It's actually a pretty dramatic effect; consider the graph:

It's put more bluntly at Idiosyncratic Whisk: Regulatory Predestination and the Right to Exit:

In short, we have school districts that are compulsory institutions, school leaders who attribute student failures to poverty, and school leaders who overstate the level of poverty in their schools. Is there a bit of constructed fatalism here?

He's not claiming that the "school leaders" are consciously dishonest. He is obviously thinking that many of the student failures being attributed to poverty must have some other cause, plausibly a cause within the school system, and that all of us have a pretty strong incentive for finding/believing explanations of failure that don't cast blame on us.

Aiming High

Sometimes, aiming high just means that you miss. Unintended consequences of raising state math, science graduation requirements -- ScienceDaily

Raising state-mandated math and science course graduation requirements (CGRs) may increase high school dropout rates without a meaningful effect on college enrollment or degree attainment, according to new research. To examine the effects of state-mandated CGRs on educational attainment, researchers looked at student outcomes in 44 states where CGRs were mandated in the 1980s and 1990s.

Bottom line: Looking at the article, it would seem that the main effect of enhanced requirements was that some students who would have finished high school but weren't going to college anyway still didn't go to college, but also didn't finish high school. (And my solution? I think they might be looking at the wrong problem....I'd be promoting German-style apprenticeship programs as more helpful to the students being affected here.)
update:What I'm talking about there is CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: Expanding Apprenticeships

Today apprentices make up only 0.2 percent of the U.S. labor force, far less than in Canada (2.2 percent), Britain (2.7 percent), and Australia and Germany (3.7 percent). In addition, government spending on apprenticeship programs is tiny compared with spending by other countries and spending on less-effective career and community college systems that provide education and training for specific occupations. While total annual government funding for apprenticeship in the United States is only about $100 to $400 per apprentice, federal, state, and local annual government spending per participant for two-year public colleges is approximately $11,400. Not only are government outlays sharply higher, but the cost differentials are even greater after accounting for the higher earnings (and associated taxes) of apprentices compared to college students. Given these data, at least some of the low apprenticeship penetration can be attributed to a lack of public effort in promoting and supporting apprenticeship and to heavy subsidies for alternatives to apprenticeship. ...

"Unlike programs in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, the apprenticeship system in the United States is almost entirely divorced from high schools and serves very few workers under the age of twenty-ive.

Worth thinking about.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.