Summary 4-21

Below is a summary of some of the most interesting research published in the last few weeks. More complete detail may be found by clicking on each link. More reports, and new reports as they become available can be found here.

The most interesting reports to me were the two below on writing:

New Report Finds that Writing Can Be Powerful Driver for Improving Reading Skills

Although reading and writing have become essential skills for almost every job, the majority of students do not read or write well enough to meet grade-level demands. A new report from Carnegie Corporation of New York and published by the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance) finds that while the two skills are closely connected, writing is an often-overlooked tool for improving reading skills and content learning.


Don't Restrict Children's Writing Sources

An approach to teaching young children the principles of writing and literacy that prohibits them from borrowing from our common cultural landscape is a problematic one, according to a University of Illinois professor who studies childhood learning and literacy development.

Anne Haas Dyson, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the U. of I. College of Education, says that excluding pop culture touchstones such as movies, TV shows, comic books and cartoons from composition programs in order to focus almost exclusively on the everyday occurrences of a child’s life is a contradictory notion, at best.

“Since the line between fiction and reality for younger students is often very thin, it’s inevitable that children will borrow from what they know, and that they will create stories where they and their friends interact with Spider-Man, the X-Men or Hannah Montana,” Dyson said.

Not to be confused with plagiarism, copying, which could be thought of as an adolescent version of what hip-hop artists call “sampling,” has a long history as a pedagogical tool for teaching younger students the alphabet and letter formation. It was once advocated as a method for helping them make sense of written language and its connection to meaning, and was considered an intrinsic part of the production process for beginning writers.

Now, with schools under pressure to teach basic composition skills because of the regulated curriculum mandates of No Child Left Behind, Dyson says there has been a curricular rejection of open-ended composing, especially in schools serving low-income children, in favor of writing instruction that is much more regimented.

In these programs, writing is conscripted as an individual task, one that requires diligence and independence, and doesn’t allow for community participation.

“Even in kindergarten, we have these regulated writing programs where the child is supposed to write their own story based on their own life,” Dyson said. “It’s a conception of writing that invokes this myth of the solitary genius, where the great writer sits alone at a desk and writes. If you think of writing only in those terms, it becomes something quite different than how it actually functions in the world, which is as a medium for communication and participation.”

Dyson argues that allowing children to copy or borrow plotlines, narratives and characters from popular culture for their writing is a good thing, because that’s where they find their identities and otherwise make sense of the world.

“A lot of the so-called stories young children are writing in schools are pretty banal and boring,” she said. “If they’re going to live in this highly mediated, increasingly global world, we want to prepare them to be a part of it.”

Although she’s not arguing for a return to any old-fashioned methods of teaching, Dyson says that children who “copy” or play with ideas from popular media are “using elements of known stories to populate and imagine their own worlds,” she said.

“Out on the playgrounds, children play together with characters and plotlines from media stories, improvising their own versions of these tales, sometimes putting elements of varied stories together,” Dyson said. “In their writing, they build on what they do in play.”

Sometimes, young children use writing to collaboratively imagine or play out worlds on paper. When young children get the idea that they can choreograph their papers with their friends, or if what this one is going to write is going to be a response to what their friends wrote, that’s pretty sophisticated thinking, Dyson says.

“Each child may have their own paper, but they choreograph their papers so that they are playing together, and they understand the idea that they’re joining a textual playground with somebody else, and manipulating them through words or stories,” she said. “That is the essence of what you want to teach, that writing matters in the world.”

Instructing young children to write only about the everyday occurrences of their own lives is just another version of the banning of the imagination in schools, Dyson says.

“This shoving down of highly regulated curriculum is cause for great concern,” she said. “In a lot of kindergartens, there is no more unstructured play. Kids are sitting at desks, doing work in a highly individualized way. And the more we push it down, the more kids there will be who are classified as struggling.”

I skipped third grade. I was younger (and smaller) than my classmates for much of my education. I have mixed feelings about that experience. But the research on the topic is certainly interesting:

How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students

America's schools routinely avoid academic acceleration, the easiest and most effective way to help highly capable students. While the popular perception is that a child who skips a grade will be socially stunted, fifty years of research shows that moving bright students ahead often makes them happy.

Acceleration means moving through the traditional curriculum at rates faster than typical. The 18 forms of acceleration include grade-skipping, early-entrance to school, and Advanced Placement (AP) courses. It is appropriate educational planning. It means matching the level and complexity of the curriculum with the readiness and motivation of the student.

Students who are moved ahead tend to be more ambitious, and they earn graduate degrees at higher rates than other students. Interviewed years later, an overwhelming majority of accelerated students say that acceleration was an excellent experience for them. Accelerated students feel academically challenged and socially accepted, and they do not fall prey to the boredom that plagues many highly capable students who are forced to follow the curriculum for their age-peers.

These reports highlight continuing education inequities in our schools:

School districts across the country are shortchanging low-income students


A new report documents how budgeting practices in school districts across the country are shortchanging low-income students and undermining the power of federal investments in high-poverty schools.

“Close the Hidden Funding Gaps in Our Schools” shines a light on these widespread and unjust accounting practices and offers Congress a straightforward legislative path: Fix the so-called comparability provisions of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

School Contributes to Pre-K to Prison Trend for African-American Youth

A disturbing thirty year trend has resulted in a disproportionate number of incarcerated African-American male youths in U.S. prisons. A new study from the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry shows that the conditions that contribute to this high representation (sixty percent of all incarcerated youth) begin early in life, and is often exacerbated by their experiences in school.

Many College Students Lack Needed Tech Skills

When students enter college, they either have it or they don't. And which side of the digital divide they fall on may well shape their identities and what route they take into careers, suggests a new study.

The research looked at the computer technology knowledge of 500 undergraduate students and how skills they brought from high school impacted their early college coursework.


Hybrid learning -Creating a new educational model to serve dropouts and at-risk students

The program uses a hybrid model, which combines elements of virtual learning and a traditional classroom setting. Students complete computer-based courses at dropout-recovery and credit- recovery centers under the direction of certified teachers. The program does not follow a daily class schedule. Instead, students may go to the centers to work on their courses at any time during the hours of operations.

Computer-based courses are the primary source of the learning content, which is advantageous for several reasons as it:

• Allows students to learn at their own pace and preferred time;
• Permits students to enroll or finish the program at any time during the year and not follow a traditional school calendar;
• Offers students a wide range of courses and course levels without requiring a dedicated teacher for each level and subject;
• Enables the use of a mastery-based curriculum that ensures students are learning as they progress through a course;
• Provides rapid, unbiased feedback that allows teachers to intervene as soon as students begin struggling with a concept.

The computer-based curriculum frees teachers from lesson planning and lecturing so that they can spend the bulk of their time providing students with individualized help with coursework on a need-by-need basis. Teachers also are responsible for making sure students stay on task and for grading essays and written assignments.


Problems inhibiting permanent change in low-performing schools

Manwaring documents how few states and districts use the tools provided to them by NCLB. Instead of closing schools or replacing personnel, districts and states most often choose other, less aggressive actions. So they hire consultants. They redesign the curriculum. They create smaller learning communities.

Markham Middle School has tried most of these reforms with no success. It has also received over $3 million in state and federal remediation funds. According to Manwaring:

"Markham Middle School is still, educationally speaking, a wreck. Sixteen percent of teachers are working under an emergency credential, 30 percent of classes in core academic subjects are taught by teachers who are not 'highly qualified' … only 3 percent of students scored proficient in math, and only 11 percent met that goal in English."

The Obama administration has made "turnaround" a major priority—vowing to fundamentally restructure and reshape the nation’s lowest-performing schools. And, with $3 billion in the stimulus and more promised through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, there is a unique opportunity in the months and years ahead to dramatically improve our country’s lowest-performing schools.


Model Effectively Engages Middle-Grade Youth in Quality After-School Programs

An innovative model in Providence, Rhode Island to coordinate after-school programs to attract middle-school youth through neighborhood hubs has succeeded in enrolling over 40 percent of the student population in the seven participating middle schools.

The new draft national math standards are indeed challenging - and I have often wondered how elementary school teachers can teach many of these concepts - and some will be challenging even to middle school math teachers. Yet these two studies seem to contradict each other:


Math teachers in the United States need better training if the nation's K-12 students are going to compete globally.

"A weak K-12 mathematics curriculum in the U.S., taught by teachers with an inadequate mathematics background, produces high school graduates who are at a disadvantage. When some of these students become future teachers and are not given a strong background in mathematics during teacher preparation, the cycle continues."


Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Useless?

Results after one year of providing teachers math professional development (PD) indicate no improvement on their students' math achievement when compared to teachers who did not receive the study-provided PD.