In the New York Times last week, Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute and Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, responded to a study that found that the test scores of high achieving kids improved as a result of No Child Left Behind. They make short work of the study's methodology and maintain that high achieving kids have only made tepid progress.
They write,
So what does all of this mean? It is clear that No Child Left Behind is
helping low-achieving students. But it is also obvious that
high-achieving students — who suffer from benign neglect under the law
— have been making smaller gains, much as they did before it was
enacted. Alas, this drug is producing no miracles.No doubt, some will claim victory: We are closing the
achievement gap between our top and bottom students! But is that our
only national goal in education? What might happen if federal law
encouraged educators to improve the performance of all students? Our
analysis of the federal data identified tens of thousands of high
achievers who are black, Hispanic or poor. They are excelling at their
studies, often against great odds. Shouldn’t we be addressing their
educational needs?As we look for ways to improve No Child Left Behind, we must recognize that our top students still have much to learn.
If the research does show that this program has helped low-achieving kids, then shouldn't we cheer? I'm confused by the authors' conclusions. If NCLB helps the kids from Newark, then that's a great thing. Let's keep funding it and improve it. Yes, we need something to help my kids, but that's another policy and another day.
My oldest kid needs a rigorous curriculum. Please stop the trend towards group work in the classroom. Please stop assigning him novels for third graders, when he's going into fifth grade. My youngest needs classroom aides that are trained in ABA therapy and aren't just some moms from down the block. My kids definitely need attention, but addressing their needs should fall into a different program. Let's not muddy up NCLB with too many goals.
Apt. 11d 
Does Jonah’s school have tracked reading groups? Is the low-level reading the product of de-tracking or just a glitch?
The K-5 kids at C’s school were supposed to read or listen to Wind in the Willows this summer (fantastic book), last year’s summer book was D’Aulaire’s Mythology, and the year before last’s book was Kipling’s Jungle Book.
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I love D’Aulaire’s Mythology. It was my first exposure to religion, and I think I’ve been slightly polytheistic ever since. 🙂
Our school has an awesome librarian who really cares about challenging kids and encouraging them to read. I Couldn’t be more impressed by her, but then again, she thinks my kids are really great. 🙂
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His school has no tracks for reading, even for the lower grades. I miss the old SRA program.
Your kids ARE really great, Wendy.
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My school had SRA cards. Also, a science textbook letting us know that in the future people might make it to the moon.
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MH,
My school was just getting rid of those books as I came through.
I’m reading (and starting to blog) a couple of books on gifted education, and one of them suggests using math groups just like reading groups, so that at some point in the day, everybody would go to a math class at their level.
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When I was in school, tracking was still in vogue – we had 13 classes in our junior high, as I remember, and we were assigned pretty much by IQ. Big standardized tests in the cafeteria, and that was how they decided where we would go. I was in the over-120 group, and we got a very nice education, challenging books, high expectation. It was sort of corrosive in the hallways, we all knew who was a bluebird and who was a robin, and that this had consequences for what was expected.
In my high school there were four tracks, much less stratified. Very few blacks tested in to the top track, two or three per 25-kid class in a school, city which were half black. This was a huge political problem, and the school now has dropped tracking, except for self-selecting on taking, say, German or Latin, or engineer-level math. It’s harder to teach, when you have highly varied levels of preparation from your students.
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Our kids are about to start the typical three weeks of assessment that determine which reading groups they’ll join for the coming two quarters. I don’t know how much things start to smooth now that they’re in third grade, but until now, reading instruction has been pretty precisely targeted to specific groups of kids. No more than 5 kids in a reading group, I mean. They do SOME skills-based grouping for math, although not as much.
But I know from moms in the school that the training of classroom teachers, FOCAL teachers, and one-on-one aides for kids with special needs could be a LOT better. Not to mention better funded.
I imagine the argument for using NCLB to improve everyone’s scores would be that, in the absence of public belief in public schools for abstract reasons (safeguarding democracy, improving the economy as a whole), most people want to know “what’s in it for MY kid.”
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Laura, I am strangely and suddenly impressed by you. 😉 (JK, always was.)
I’ve been mulling over the issue of Asperger’s and education for obvious reasons, but I was struck by something E’s psych said. I asked her how, if he was so highly gifted, would the AS affect him academically. She said he would coast through 4th or 5th grade then hit a wall (unless there are interventions). The academic skills he has mastered already are the K-4 skills; starting in 5th, there are different kinds of skills needed.
Given what seems to me as a marked increase in the number of kids being diagnosed as AS or ASD, I wonder if this has implications for the classroom. I’m a big believer that we’re all on a spectrum/range. I am pretty sure I have AS qualities and I wonder if in 1973 I might have been diagnosed. I succeeded and thrived, and I wonder if it was in part due to the instruction I received in grades 4-6, which was mostly self-paced. See here for an explanation. I was talking on FB to a friend of mine from the class. She is now an elementary teacher, and she was saying that she now realizes that she needed more direct instruction. But I and some others thrived under that system. It’s just another reminder that there is no One Size Fits All solution.
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Actually, they’d stopped using the SRA stuff as a part of the curriculum before I was in school. But, they kept the materials and Sister A gave them to me to keep me out of trouble when I’d finished the regular work. I’m kind of astounded by the idea of ‘tracks’ in grade school. Granted, we may not have had them because there were a dozen kids in my year. Even in high school, when classes usually hit about 20 (people who went to one-room schools for K-8 had to come in for high school), the ‘college track’ was basically more advanced math and taking chem and physics.
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“I am pretty sure I have AS qualities and I wonder if in 1973 I might have been diagnosed.”
In 1973, only Dr. Asperger and a few others knew about Asperger’s. So, no.
“She said he would coast through 4th or 5th grade then hit a wall (unless there are interventions). The academic skills he has mastered already are the K-4 skills; starting in 5th, there are different kinds of skills needed.”
I’ve heard basically the same thing. I personally had an awful time academically in 4th grade. I had coasted happily along on just reading and doing a bit of arithmetic, when suddenly we started to have to do content. 4th grade was where I missed the boat, but I managed to crawl on a grade or two later. That’s one of the reasons why I’m very happy that my daughter has been doing content ever since she started kindergarten.
I’ve seen a couple of psychologists recommend Montessori for older Asperger kids, but I’m ambivalent. I don’t know exactly what Montessori for bigger kids entails, but it’s hard to work by yourself and stay motivated. I’m a success story in a way, since I did a distance learning program from University of Washington for Russian in high school and I transitioned to 2nd semester on-campus Russian very easily, but it was very hard to stay on track and keep motivated. I had much less happy results in high school French, where the upper years were taught at the same time as the 1st years which meant we weren’t. I just kept reading the textbook by myself and periodically taking tests. My spoken French never got anywhere and my interest in French fizzled. Languages are the worst-case-scenario, I suppose. I did much better in 3rd grade. The teacher had us read selections (I remember some very entertaining ones on the behavior of turkeys and the different kinds of lightning) and do some sort of follow-up, and if we did enough, we’d get a popsicle. I was very motivated!
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“Please stop the trend towards group work in the classroom. ”
Sigh. We met my son’s new teacher yesterday, and he announced proudly that he was going to be all. about. group work. He said, “I think they can learn more from each other than they can from me.” It’s his first year of teaching, so that may, alas, be true. And it’s also true that my son could use more experience with group dynamics. But I suspect it ain’t gonna be the most intellectually challenging year for my son, that’s for sure.
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I think it’s natural to think of full-class teaching as more engaging than individual seatwork, but my daughter can work like a little beaver on individual seatwork, but spaces out when the teacher is working with the whole class (all 13 of them) at once. I remember similar issues from my own career as a 4th grader, but it was a public school in the 80s, so the class was much larger and it was much easier to get away with spacing out.
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*sigh* Group work has a role, but it shouldn’t be the focus. My daughter did some terrific stuff in groups or pairs, and she was also immensely frustrated by some of those experiences. I find that problem solving often happens effectively in groups; collecting data and trying to make sense of it is also good in groups or pairs. (This carries over to my college students, as well. I have a mix of group projects and individual work for them, and I have different goals with each.)
Amy, by “content” what do you mean? Can you be more specific about the difference between “content” and the K-4 skills? E has trouble with things like inference and interpretation. I’m getting a preliminary report from the psych soon, and I should know more. (Like my son, I have problems remembering/processing what I’m told verbally, so I need to get it in writing.)
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“When I was in school, tracking was still in vogue – we had 13 classes in our junior high, as I remember, and we were assigned pretty much by IQ.”
I’m pretty opposed to tracking that happens based on IQ (and, that, in spite of the fact that my kids attend a school that has a strictly enforced IQ cutoff). We like the school anyway, but are convinced that the IQ criterion is used merely because it is easy. I do believe that IQ measures something, and even measures something useful. But, I don’t think it’s a stand-in for actually showing learning, and excludes the kid who may not be so cognitively “gifted” but can achieve well anyway, because they are focused, mature and competent, and includes children who may be smart but aren’t performing at that level (because of hidden learning disabilities/immaturity/whatever).
On the other hand, I do think kids should be able to achieve at their own level, and that tracking based on achievement is a good thing. Every adult I know who now reflects fondly on their elementary learning experience had some form of self-selected/assessment based “tracking.” Some speak of the time that they were allowed to work as far as they wanted on math cards (the 3 mathy scientists I know); I spent much of my elementary school reading, books of my choice. Math seemed to work fine when children worked individually at their own level. Reading requires some grouping, since part of the point of reading is to discuss what you’re reading, so other people have to have read the same things (the “book club” concept).
I’m not completely sure how much lower achievers benefit from having higher achievers n their groups — my gut suspicion is that they benefit if the higher achiever is in their same league, but not if they’re out of their league. It’s an issue to think through if lower achievers benefit, but not higher achievers. I’m fully open to the arguments that benefits can be non-academic, or that there could be academic benefits. I’m a big believer that explaining something can help people understand it, and that explaining something is a part of understanding it, even for someone who understands in a way that most people don’t. But, if someone makes the purely utilitarian argument for my child’s presence in a group (that is, it is for the benefit of the greater good, or everyone else’s benefit), I find myself getting very very touchy and defensive.
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Wendy:
I’m reading Temple Grandin’s “Emergence” now. It was written in 1986, before the autism/aspergers diagnosis starting becoming more common and it’s a fascinating read. I recommend it highly. I plan on reading Grandin’s more recent books, too. But what I like about Emergence is that it pre-dates the media information we all have about autism. It’s also very personal/first person, gave me a glance into what it might be like to be her.
The letters her mom writes (and her aunts) are also fascinating, because it shows the depth of understanding she was surrounded by — it must have made an enormous difference to her ability to cope, that her mother was such a strong advocate, not just for her child, in total, but also for Grandin’s special skills and abilities. Her mom recognized them and celebrated them. I’m guessing that such acceptance was unusual in that time.
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“Amy, by “content” what do you mean? Can you be more specific about the difference between “content” and the K-4 skills?”
At my daughter’s school, they covered everything from the early Viking explorers of North America to the U.S. Civil War during 1st grade. This summer, she was asking me to get her a book on U.S. history after the Civil War, because she wanted to know what happened next. In second grade, I think they’re doing a lot of ancient world history. This week the kids will be learning about Mesopotamia and Sargon (who’s that?) and making clay tablets. The class book display has a couple dozen books on ancient Egypt. Daughter dearest also knows way more about local trees and natural history than I do. I believe they did an overview of the Old Testament in K, and then an overview of the New Testament in 1st grade, and now they’re starting over in Genesis in 2nd grade. That dovetails nicely with the Mesopotamia stuff they’re studying in history. They also do art history, music history, Spanish, etc. I think of that all as content.
When I was in school, there was a very sharp transition between K-3 (which was dominated by reading instruction) and 4th grade on, where you’d have actual textbooks and needed to start learning information from print. I’d argue (and E. D. Hirsch and Daniel T. Willingham would, too), that that’s a mistake. In reading, decoding skills (i.e. phonics) and background knowledge are like the two blades of a pair of scissors. The more you already know about a subject, the more you get from reading about it.
This is sort of obvious, but I don’t think that the implications have sunk in. I always shake my head whenever I hear about some school district that is shelving content areas (science, etc.) in favor of test prep, because they’ve got the stick by the wrong end. After kids have mastered basic decoding skills and a few test taking skills (guess! fill in the bubbles neatly! check your work!), one of the best uses of time for preparing for a reading test is to study content (history, science, etc.).
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“Every adult I know who now reflects fondly on their elementary learning experience had some form of self-selected/assessment based “tracking.””
That is very interesting.
“I’m not completely sure how much lower achievers benefit from having higher achievers n their groups”
I’ve been reading on this stuff recently in Karen B. Rogers’ “Re-Forming Gifted Education” (2002). The results of the studies on tracking and grouping are pretty complex and the social and the academic results can point in different directions. When high-achievers are in mixed groups, they have higher self-esteem than when they are tracked with other high-achievers. Likewise, when low and average achievers are in mixed groups with high-achievers, their self-esteem suffers.
I’d be tempted to recommend a compromise by tracking some subjects, but not other subjects.
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Hold on. We’ve two different discussions going on: educated kids with Aspergers and the benefits of tracking. Keep talking about tracking here. I’ll make a separate autism thread.
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I clearly remember the joy of entering a tracked junior high school in 8th grade. In three weeks I made more friends than I’d ever had before, and I was also able to stop dumbing down all my work and could raise my hand in class without fear of teasing. OTOH, I also remember that it was a joyous thing for those of us in the “anointed” classes but not nearly so joyous for those who were consigned to lower levels.
As an exchange student to Germany in high school in the 80s I experienced an entire educational system that was tracked beginning in something like 5th grade? It didn’t allow for late bloomers at all, that’s for sure, and there was a palpable division among the students, quite similar to traditional blue collar/white collar stuff between adults. I guess we sometimes have that in the States too, but it seems like here we aggressively self-sort until we’re all going to school with kids from exactly the same socioeconomic background. The result is that you’re comparing yourself to the kids from the *next suburb over*, not the classroom across the hall. Whatever that means about us as a society.
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“Every adult I know who now reflects fondly on their elementary learning experience had some form of self-selected/assessment based “tracking.””
Oh, remember, this is anecdotal. Of course, you know that, but I’m very wary of repeating anecdotal information. I see it as information that should deserve further study, not that proves anything.
I’m being careful in saying “self-select/assessment” — in these cases, the kids were choosing to do the advanced level work. They were not tracked into a class based on testing, and asked to achieve at that level. The form of tracking I’m talking about does not help under-achieving high IQ/”gifted” kids.
I also think the form of achievement I’m talking about was not so public — working ahead on math/reading question/workboook/cards was something you did in private. And working ahead was a “reward” for completing the other work. For example, in my daughter’s 2nd grade class, if you get all the spelling words right, you get to pick new words for your spelling list for the week. If you’ve worked through enough of the required list, you get to pick new words from the dictionary. But, you only get to do this after you’ve demonstrated competence on the easier list.
I like this kind of tracking. But, my children are not under-achieving (in addition to being smart). They perform at their ability level. I know there are kids out there who don’t perform at their level of ability, and that sometimes, keeping them out of “honors” or other advanced classes because of that just makes the problem worse, not better.
I hate the solution to this problem of tracking based on IQ, though, ’cause I think that’s like choosing a pro-basketball team based on height. Height is clearly relevant, but it’s not the determining factor in how one plays basketball. IQ is relevant to education, but it’s not the determining factor on the work you should be doing.
I haven’t seen the “high achiever” self-esteem problem (neither in my children, nor in my adult group). But, I can’t rule out the possibility that those tracked high achievers were still very high achieving — they were at the top, rather than the bottom of their track. I’m hearing about the self-esteem problem in our tracked school now, second hand, from some families. At least one family has left the school, because they decided that being competant in a school full of high achievers was hurting their child’s self esteem. Others, though, have felt that their child would chose to do the minimum anywhere, and so the kid is better off in a place where the minimum is higher.
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I don’t know what to say about tracking. I was a high achiever, and I did better in classes with kids of my ability level. I would like to see E with more kids of his ability level, but I don’t think that’s encouraged in school except with reading groups. I did hear that tracking at the middle school is out. I guess I realize that might not benefit my child, but it might benefit many others, and I may need to pay out of pocket for the education I’d like for him. On the other hand, he’s only 7 and he’s not exactly solving Rubik’s Cube in 15 seconds or doing complex mathematical calculations in his head. He’s not a savant.
I’m just going to monitor him for now for signs of anxiety and/or unhappiness. It’s only second grade.
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“I did hear that tracking at the middle school is out.”
Yikes. Not even for reading or math? Elementary school may be OK untracked, but a totally untracked middle school sounds really risky, both socially and academically. I’d be planning my escape.
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Grandin’s Emergence looks great. Just ordered it.
Jonah is going into middle school. The only track is for math. And smart boy just got into the highest track. A perfect math score on his state tests! Sorry for the brag.
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Laura, Brag away.
I’m trying to stay away from the tracking, for two reasons.
(1) As we’ve experienced it so far in the classroom, assessment-based grouping hasn’t been fixed. I.e., some of the earliest readers have leveled off, while some of the later readers have sped ahead. Of course, this isn’t “tracking” in the strict sense of IQ-based assignment.
(2) My MIL taught for 35 years in a private school which was rigorously tracked. There were five “levels” and you took every single subject according to your assigned level. It took an act of God to get that level changed, and the material presented in class (at least, the material in HER classes) was markedly less engaging and exciting for the lower tracks. I believe she was reflecting the school’s ethos when she made certain assumptions about “track I” vs. “track V” kids — the assumption that who you are and what you can achieve as a 14-year old will determine your destiny forever, and that the schools exist to formalize that, just freaked me out.
What really blew me away about my MIL, though, was that, even as she raved about the value tracking, she also confessed that her son, the awards-winning student/tenured professor, was supposed to be in track II, and only because she was a teacher there did she insist that he be assigned to track V. She has never once, in the 20 years I’ve known her, though that her own experience as a parent might suggest she re-think her values as a teacher, when it comes to tracking.
I do know, having seen her curriculum, that if I started out as a track-II in her class, there’d be very little to encourage me to work hard enough to advance through the tracks.
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Aaah. Now I have a bunch of stuff to worry about when my son hits school.
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I don’t think I’d be too quick to dismiss certain pedagogical strategies out of hand. Most of them are good or bad in their implementation, not in and of themselves. Though I also think that overreliance on any one approach is a mistake. Different kids respond better to different approaches, which is one good reason to mix it up, and to give kids the opportunity to experience the material and produce responses in a variety of ways (some are better when they hear something aloud; others need to read it).
Group work is a good example of a strategy that can go either way. Much of it is implemented badly, in which case it’s not that effective, represents some wasted time, and can be socially damaging. But when done well it can be far more engaging, especially for certain kids (I’m with Wendy in believing that education is not one size fits all). Good group work takes a lot of planning and facilitating on the part of the teacher, and is much more difficult and time-consuming than direct instruction followed by individual practice. You need to ensure that every person in the group makes a meaningful contribution; when I did group work with my students (9th and 10th graders), I always gave both an individual and a group grade. In some projects, I had amazing success with kids who were incredibly reluctant under normal circumstances. But I alternated group work with a lot of other types of instruction; I would also give them options for some exercises–work alone or with a partner.
As for tracking, it’s pretty much anathema in NYC high schools, except for the very low-level (some go into a double-period English class) and the higher level (AP, though the level of AP varies widely depending on the school).
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bj, I read Grandin’s “Thinking in Pictures,” which was excellent.
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“Laura, Brag away.”
I second that — I just don’t think of this as bragging, in this discussion. Yeah, if you put a sign on your window that said “My son scored a perfect score on x”, that’d be bragging, because it’s sharing irrelevant information. People driving behind you don’t need to know that. Even a certain amount of that kind of bragging is OK in my book, ’cause it’s celebrating your kid. That’s a good thing.
But, in this discussion, it’s more than that, specially since I also remember you telling us about the discussion about Jonah’s math level, earlier, when you were trying to figure out what would be right for him.
My 3rd grader (to be, school hasn’t started yet) reads at a 12th grade level (according to her teacher). She comprehends at a 10th grade level. Saying this is not bragging, it’s a fact about her, just like her waist length hair, or her very big feet are. And, it’s a relevant fact if you are educating her. This summer, our reading lists have been largely overlapping (I like to read kid’s books). She basically reads as fast as I do, and with the same level of comprehension, for the texts that we’re both interested in. This reading level creates challenges we have to deal with in reading (most notably in trying to mesh content/reading level/interest). Reading levels are fairly easily dealt with (and, a book doesn’t have to be uninteresting just because it’s easy to read), so the teachers do find group books for the class that still work for my daughter.
But, the same level of difference in math (and, there are kids in her class who are doing middle school math) needs to be addressed.
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“Aaah. Now I have a bunch of stuff to worry about when my son hits school. ”
Hah. Hah. You were previously unaware of this 🙂
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“You were previously unaware of this :-)”
Yes, I was unaware that any of this stuff could start so young. It was in grad school before I’d started to notice that I’d had a very atypical primary and secondary education compared to others who nailed the GRE. And at that point, I really didn’t pay attention. Nobody at my school was tracked (formally), though I’m guessing the number of kids below the national median was trival. My parents had more degrees that the parents of all of my classmates combined.
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On a somewhat related note, this morning I had my first sighting of the phrase ‘Everyday Math’ in wild (i.e. not here). Apparently, that is what my son’s school will be using this year. (He’s in pre-school, so it doesn’t affect him yet.)
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MH,
Is this a private school? When we were in DC, every single school I looked at (public and private) used reform math. I was very disappointed when I was looking at schools in Arlington diocese and discovered that their elementary math curriculum had dozens and dozens of topics each year (there would be barely any time to deal with each), followed by a death-defying curricular leap into very traditional algebra. It was very disappointing.
Of course, the great thing about bad curriculum is that every 5 years or so, they decide that the last big thing wasn’t so hot, so they need to roll out something new. Then it will be fiddled with through a couple of editions before they shelve it and roll out the next big thing.
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Yes, this is a private school. I went to my first PTA meeting this morning.
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