Education is Your Business

The importance of non-fiction.

This should get your dander up. According to Renaissance Learning's "What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools, 2010", non-fiction is pretty much nonexistent:

"Nonfiction is largely missing from the most-read lists. Except for a strong showing in the books widely read by struggling readers, especially in grades 4 and 5, nonfiction is mostly absent."

Oh, sure, reading the classics is a rite of passage for school kids. But how much Hawthorne does the average person encounter after school? Most of what we read in our working lives is nonfiction. And yet, we don't do much to teach school kids how to navigate it before graduation. Once again, the school system has decided this is someone else's problem. But it's not. It's everybody's problem.

First, a lot of educational content is nonfiction. Think science, history, math. Kids are exposed to a lot of informational texts, but their reading teachers rarely provide them with the skills to effectively navigate them. Which may explain some of the achievement issues we see reflected in test scores and other assessments. And the performance issues we see in the workplace. That's because kids who don't learn to read informational texts are at a real disadvantage in a working world full of manuals, memos and reports.

What can you do about it? Encourage your child's teacher to encourage non-fiction reading in the classroom. And you can encourage it at home. We give all our nieces and nephews nonfiction books to read -- and the eldest just turned eight. And, of course, we have lots of strategies for non-fiction reading.

Here's one of the best: CRITICAL THINKING: IT'S AS EASY AS WHAT-WHY-HOW. This packet features a collection of materials based on the What-Why-Strategy. What-Why-How is one of our best strategies for helping students with logical arguments, expository and persuasive writing, thesis and support, essay questions, and constructed responses. It's also a terrific nonfiction reading strategy.

Preparing for the working world

Steve's been sharing his thoughts on the National Journal education blog. Here's his suggestion for how colleges can better prepare kids for life after graduation: http://bit.ly/TzIlN.

Also, Pres. Obama's script for today's school address: http://bit.ly/z2Bo6. How is this a bad thing?

Lacking innovation

Here in the business world, innovation is a highly valued commodity. It's the key to competitiveness. Companies that don't evolve in some way or another usually die. But in education, innovation is on life support. There's a great discussion about this going on on the EduWonk blog today that 's worth a read.

ACTION ITEMS:
1. Support schools which have philosophies or approaches that differ greatly from traditional public schools.
2. Support an increase in charter school limits as long as these schools use innovative methods.
3. Encourage your local school district to let a few teacher pilot new practices.

And if you don't want to read the entire thing, just read Steve's response:

Steve Peha Says:
July 13th, 2009 at 2:43 pm

By definition, we need innovation in schools, and if we want significant change, we need significant innovation. That means doing things that have never been done before or, as I will argue below, doing things that have been around for quite a while but have been pushed to the margins by the standards and testing movements.

Here’s an interesting personal metric on how standards and testing have hampered innovation. I started working in classrooms in 1995. By 1997, I felt confident enough to begin creating original “innovations” in my own teaching. I tested each of these original practices in front of multiple grade levels of kids and had them used by teachers other than myself. In a three year period ending around 2000, I created and validated about 100 separate original practices. Then testing and standards hit hard, with NCLB coming shortly thereafter.

Since NCLB started, I have created fewer than 10 original practices. I no longer have classrooms I can work in to validate them because schools simply won’t let someone come in and try something that isn’t “research-based”, and the new practices I create are not allowed to be used anyway — even when they work — because they are not “research-based.” (Even though I have often “researched” them successful in the same schools that won’t let me use them; the irony of “research-based” practice is that at some point someone has to let someone research them BEFORE they are research-based!)

A standardized curriculum and standardized tests have come to mean standardized teaching, And don’t think for a minute that most teachers are using research-based practices to begin with. I’ve worked in literally thousands of classrooms and believe me they’re not. My favorite consulting situation these days is to be in a room of teachers arguing the merits of one practice or another when I know I’m the only one who has read the research on it. Teachers and principals simply don’t pay attention to research and most don’t know what to do with it even when they have it front of them. Teachers aren’t taught to be teachers with research-based methods nor have their talents and beliefs been cultivated in ways that would lead to research being of much value to them.

So innovation bares a double burden as we move forward. First, many people in schools today have corrupted the concept of research to be a self-serving proxy for lack of change. Second, our system of testing and standards makes innovation impractical from the standpoint of teachers and administered worried about keeping their test scores up. Where’s the payoff for innovation in our school system? Nowhere. Even merit pay doesn’t reward innovation directly. (As a side note, I have seen a variety of documents describing teacher quality and never have I seen “innovative” as a noted attribute of successful teaching. Personally, I find this astounding on one level – and completely predictable on another.)

Finally, when most education experts think of innovation, they tend to suggest innovative “structures” like longer school days, or different aggregations of students, or perhaps — as they have in England recently — different structures for school buildings. But the real need for innovation is in instruction and administrative leadership. The ironic thing about these two areas is that they have been highly innovated already. The professional literature in teaching (though not considered research per se), explains in great detail how good practices can achieve spectacular results. A simple visit to Stenhouse, Heinemann, Jossey-Bass, ASCD, etc., will produce a wealth of solutions to even the most complicated educational conundra.

Case in point: Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop. This is probably the world’s the most successful model for literacy instruction — and it’s 30+ years old! Hundreds of wonderful texts exist on this subject. Yet it is used by perhaps 3% of all teachers and is often banned as unholy perversion of classic teaching in about half the districts I’ve worked in. Many people regard it as too innovative or otherwise unsupported by research. It stands out as an innovative simply because, to most teachers, it seems frightening or “too progressive.” But really it’s just a distillation into a system of all the best research on how children learn to read and write. It’s actually old hat. But it comes off to highly conservative fear-driven teachers and ill-prepared semi-paralyzed administrators as risky and unproven. Better to use a publisher-supplied program instead where everyone can teach from the same page on the same day, and all kids can do the same thing the same way. (This is the logic that prevails even though we know that differentiation is the key to leaving no child behind.)

So how will innovation get a foothold? Currently, at least in public schools, it will not. However, we always have innovative schools among us (and we actually have a large number of innovative classrooms filled by teachers who are strong enough to buck the system). For example, take a look at Nancie Atwell’s Center for Teaching and Learning. True innovators like this will fall within the private system; even most charters will tether themselves to the failed ideas of the past (which is exactly why so few do better than their public school counterparts.)

Innovation is anathema to school in its current form. And the more we rely on curriculum standards and standardized testing, the less innovative school will become. So how do we get out of this mess?

The answer is in the generation of new teachers coming into the system. In the next 5-10 years, demographic data suggests that we will turn over 50% or more of our current crop of teachers. That means they will be replaced by new teachers. If we could begin now to have a substantive national dialog (are you listening Arne Duncan?) about changing teacher training, we might at some point in the future produce teachers who are inclined toward innovation, rather than the type of teacher we produce today who is not only poorly prepared but emotionally uncomfortable with stepping outside the boundaries of traditional practice.

Innovation is not only possible, it is being practiced right now. We’re just not looking for it in the right places. We fly at too high a level. Education policy folks, who haven’t spent much time teaching kids, tend to favor structural reforms, when the truth is that we need down on the ground, in the trenches, cultural reform. You can’t have innovation in a system where the people are immune to or afraid of innovation. The big innovation in education will come when we are training educators in innovative ways that prepare them to achieve the results we’ve laid out for 21st century schools.

Culling the herd

The dialog on teacher quality continues over at the EduWonk blog (read entire post here). Steve's commentary is right on:

There are many aspects of ed reform that are patently senseless but one crucial aspect seems to be positively schizophrenic. On one side, we have years of research and the endorsement of people like Bill Gates to tell us that high quality teachers are the most important determiner of student learning and the key to education reform. On the other side, we have people, mostly teachers, who say that it is absolutely impossible (or at least ridiculously difficult) to figure out which teachers are better than others.

As someone who has worked in hundreds of schools and thousands of classrooms, and who has probably observed in some way or another the work of maybe 10,000 teachers, this seems to me a silly argument. Of course we can tell which teachers are better than others. Relative quality can be determined for almost any person or thing or trait.

One trait we use when working in schools and districts is the likelihood of that a given teacher will change his or her practice. We assess this because it tells us who to focus our training time on. We focus initially on “high change” teachers so we can quickly establish models of practice for other teachers farther on down the line.

To do this, we use two strategies: the standard “early adopter” model for consumer buying patterns and a simple multi-rater feedback system. Using these tools and an informal survey of teachers in workshops and in their classrooms, tells us with great accuracy who the most likely teachers are to benefit from training. Once given the training, these teachers tend to get superior results in many different aspects of their teaching.

Drop-outs and test-prep fallacies

Couple things in the news yesterday that really stick in my craw.

The first is a North Carolina bill working its way through the state legislature that would allow public high schools to improve their graduation rates by getting "credit" for drop-outs who attain their GEDs. (Read more from the N&O article). On the surface, this might not seem like such a big deal. But I think it's false advertising -- not to mention unfair.

By allowing high schools to add GED recipients to their graduation rates, the public is misled about a given school's ability to engage students and prepare them for life after graduation. That could create a false sense of achievement that can take the heat off districts to do better by their charges. After all, they didn't give kids instruction that was relevant enough to keep them in school. Yes, some kids drop out for other reasons, but many (if not most) leave because they'd rather get job training than academic training. And that's because there's a lack of context and connections that link U.S. history or algebra to skills needed to succeed in life, not just college. 

The practice also would be unfair to our state's community colleges, which do clearly connect high school equivalency requirements with real life. They're doing a great job getting drop-outs back on track and they deserve the credit.

How big is the drop-out crisis in our nation's 12 largest states, including North Carolina? Read this CNN article. For exhausting detail, you can click here for the full text of The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University's "Left Behind: The Nation's Dropout Crisis".

The next issue is a national one. Is anyone actually surprised at the results of yesterday’s National Association for College Admission Counseling’s report on SAT coaching? I certainly wasn’t. The study, released yesterday, found that test prep may add 30 points to a child’s score on the 2,400-point test. Test prep courses range from $100 for a short workshop to one-to-one tutoring starting at $200 per hour.

I’m pretty confident that paltry increase could be achieved by buying a book for 50 bucks and walking your kid through it a couple of times before the big test day.

The value of college admissions tests has been under fire for the last several years, and this latest development prompted the NACA to warn school admissions offices not to become too reliant on the SAT or ACT tests, as differences in scores could be the result of measurement error, unequal access to coaching, etc.

Inflated claims of effectiveness are nothing new in business. And test prep is a business – a huge one estimated at $4 billion. But what’s especially nefarious about this is twofold:

First, it preys on parents’ fears of their children’s academic success and ability to get into the “right” college. So they’ll invest anything to help give their kids a leg-up.

Second, and most importantly, it sets kids up. Despite some attitudes to the contrary, high school kids really do want to please their parents and meet their expectations. Many care a great deal about getting into college, too. Giving them false hope is just mean.

Want to know more about the report, which surveyed 11,000 college admissions officers, high-school guidance counselors and private advisors? Here’s a good article in the Wall Street Journal. And here's a link to the full report "“Preparation for College Admission Exams,”

A gathering storm

Interesting article in the Raleigh N&O yesterday morning about the state’s changing demographics. A new Census report estimates that minorities -- mostly blacks, Hispanics and Asians – comprise about one-third of the Tar Heel populace. And the non-white population is steadily growing -- almost half (45 percent) of North Carolina's children below age 5 are minorities.

North Carolina's 2008 population
Black: 21 percent
Hispanic: 7 percent

Orange County’s 2008 population
Black: 13.32 percent
Hispanic: 6.29 percent

This shift has all kinds of implications for business. I’m going to focus on just one: workforce preparedness. The state’s challenges with low-income and minority achievement are well-documented. And recently attention has been given to the problems we’re facing here in the cradle of public higher education, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools. We’re not doing a good job educating most of our minority kids. So how can we expect to have an educated candidate pool in the job market? We can’t.

Personally, I think education for kids – all kids – is a civil right, but that belief only gets me so far with business folks. So I’ll put that argument aside in favor of the more compelling back-pocket issues of competitiveness and bottom-line concerns.

The business community cannot continue to allow the schools it funds to pay lip-service to the growing problem of under-educating the fastest-growing segment of the population. The minority kids in school today will be the minority employees of tomorrow. And we need a workforce skilled in critical thinking and problem-solving (not to mention basic math, reading and writing) to remain competitive in the tight global economy. And putting the burden for remedial training on employers holds will have a huge bottom line impact. (The National Association of Manufacturers estimates it costs $1.4 billion annually to provide remedial courses to recent high school graduates in the workforce). From another angle, poorly educated people typically earn less, meaning they have less money to spend on consumer goods and services. Examined from a purely business perspective, then, it’s clear that businesses need to be more involved in ensuring that schools education ALL children.

ACTION ITEMS: 1. Contact your local schools’ superintendent and find out what the achievement gap is in your community. 2. Pressure your school board to investigate effective methods for differentiated instruction so that all children are pushed to their highest potential. 3. Encourage your district to explore programs and approaches that can accelerate learning for low-performing kids. 4. Contact us (Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc.) to find out how we’ve worked with schools and teachers to improve achievement of all children. margotlester@ttms.org

The price of the achievement gap

Last month, ginormous consulting firm McKinsey & Co. released The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools, a report that estimates the achievement gap's impact. The report found that the difference in academic achievement of high-and low-income students equals a $700-billion "cost" that is the equivalent to a “permanent national recession” in terms of its impact on GDP.

Here's a good take on disconnect between schools and the business world from Stanford (Former Foes Unite in Battle to Bridge K-12 Achievement Gap). Ouch.

Here in Chapel Hill-Carrboro, we're content to point to high graduation rates and rest on our laurels and the most successful public school district in the state. But buried in the data, and belying the reputation, is a widening gap between our low-income students and their more affluent counterparts.

The Daily Tar Heel reported the gap last month (Test Score Gap Keeps Growing). And Steve Peha wrote a scathing op-ed in the Carrbor Citizen last week (From Gap to Chasm).

All are worth reading -- and worth acting on.

32 million adults lack basic literacy skills

Back after a long hiatius with this:

Lack of Funding Compounds Adult Literacy Crisis in U.S. Among Hispanics and Persons Living in Poverty

SYRACUSE, N.Y., May 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is a statement by David C. Harvey, President & CEO, ProLiteracy, on the Department of Education report on literacy:

"The U.S. Department of Education National Assessment of Adult Literacy supplemental reports underscore the need for Congress and the President to address the adult literacy crisis in America to help more people move out of poverty and improve job skills important for the country's competitiveness.

The fact that 32 million adults lack basic literacy skills to read medicine bottles or utility bills or fill out job applications should set off alarm bells. This latest report estimates that there are 11 million adults living in the U.S. who are nonliterate in English--the equivalent of the populations of Connecticut, Oklahoma and Oregon combined. We need to help more of these Americans--a majority whom are Hispanic--get into English as Second Language programs.

The report also notes that adults with vision, hearing or learning disabilities are more likely to be at the lowest levels of literacy, making it important to address the learning needs of this group of Americans.

Congress should increase funding for the Workforce Investment Act Title II and allow more adults needing literacy and English as Second Language instruction access to community-based and other adult education programs. The high unemployment in the U.S. is affecting the least skilled Americans, many of whom are trying to get into adult education and literacy classes only to be put on waiting lists. We can't wait any longer to help more adults learn basic literacy and English skills needed for success in the job market and in life."

Editor's Note: To read the full Department of Education report, please visit: http://nces.ed.gov/

About ProLiteracy

ProLiteracy works with adult new readers and learners in partnership with local, national, and international organizations, providing training, professional development, and advocacy. It also develops and distributes materials used to instruct adults in reading, writing, math, and English as a second language through its publishing division, New Readers Press. ProLiteracy has 1,200 member programs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and works with 125 nongovernmental international agencies. For more information, go to www.proliteracy.org and www.newreaderspress.com.

Source: ProLiteracy

CONTACT: Tracy Carman of ProLiteracy, +1-315-422-9121, x 374, Cell:
+1-315-559-1717, tcarman@proliteracy.org; Lisa Johnson, +1-202-296-2002,
lmj@ecius.net, for ProLiteracy

Web Site: http://www.proliteracy.org/

The (non-)Politics of Education

Our latest column for the Carrboro Citizen, published 21 August 2008:

As we head back to school this fall, we’re also heading into one of the most important presidential elections in history.

The candidates are already running ads and the issues seem clear: the war in Iraq, the economy, healthcare, the price of gas, etc. But not education. As important as everyone seems to think education is, it barely rates a blip on a pollster’s radar. Why?

Think about the life-changing value of a good education. Where would most of us be without the educational opportunities we’ve had? Obviously, many of this year’s crop of issues are more urgent — but that doesn’t explain why education is never a top priority in a national election (or, for that matter, in state gubernatorial elections either).

For starters, neither candidate has a well-defined position on education. And even if they did, it’s unlikely those positions would differ much. The biggest educational issue is No Child Left Behind, and it has been enthusiastically supported by both Democrats and Republicans. Neither McCain nor Obama is likely to call for dismantling it entirely; and even if they did, that still might not get the people’s attention.

This is either because we can’t see that NCLB has made any significant difference in how well we educate our children or that no one has proposed a different solution. Even after seven years, the jury is still out on whether the most ambitious education reform in American history has accomplished much in the way of reform.

If we look at how our politicians treat education, and how the voters feel about it, we might conclude that people don’t think educational change is possible. Public school is free, everybody goes — and no matter what legislation passes or doesn’t pass, school remains pretty much the same. Our inability to change education leads to passivity among the general public about whether it can be changed at all. And things that can’t be changed don’t make good issues at election time.

But education can be changed. If the right policies were in place, we could begin to make progress. If candidates talked about a single national testing system that used challenging tests like the NAEP or SAT, we could make some change. If candidates talked about overhauling teacher training on a national level, we could make some change. If candidates endorsed universal pre-school and all-day kindergarten, we could make some change.

But no one is talking about these issues now and we suspect they won’t come up in any significant way in the near future.

When it comes to education, we are focused on the wrong things. Or, rather, we’re only focused on one thing – NCLB – that probably won’t make a difference no matter which way it goes during reauthorization next year. If we want to be as serious about education as we are about healthcare and the price of gas, we need to concentrate on big issues that cut cleanly across the electorate. Senator, are you in favor of universal pre-school? Yes or no? And if so, how would you propose to pay for it? It’s got to be that simple or education will never get off the ground as an election-year issue.

If we’re going to make real progress in education, we have to get real with our political leaders about the kind of progress we want. Right now, we’re giving them a free pass. That’s no way to run an election. If holding our kids accountable for test scores is such a good idea, why can’t we hold our political leaders accountable for policies that really make a difference?

Steve Peha and Margot Carmichael Lester own Teaching That Makes Sense Inc., an education reform, advocacy and consulting company based in Carrboro.

Economy, Crime, Healthcare: All Linked to Education

Here's a news release from the NEA that includes some interesting stats:

Economy, Crime, Healthcare: All Linked to Education

Voters' top election concerns have education tie that is ignored by pundits

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Americans have made it clear that they have major concerns going into November's elections. They are worried about the economy, crime, health care, energy costs, the housing crisis, and the war in Iraq. Just as people can be tracked by six degrees of separation, so can many of the top issues for voters. Their common bond is education.