This comment came from a reader who signs as “NY Teacher”:
They can’t prove it because they are all barking up the wrong tree.
In fact their entire premise is wrong. The weakest link in the learning/achievement chain is rarely the teacher.
I have one hundred students this year. I teach a subject that is new to all of them. This puts all of my 14 year old students on an equal footing as far as course content goes. After a year of instruction, a few of them have been incredibly successful. Some have done quite well. Most have done ok, just not setting the academic world on fire, And a few have been abysmal failures. If student achievement rests solely (or even mostly) on the teacher, how can this be explained?
The premise behind the teacher bashing movement is based on the surrealistic notion that virtually all students are willing participants in the learning process. If all my students are eager to learn, attentive, inquisitive, organized, conscientious, and hard working (and had the necessary parental support), I will gladly take the blame for student failure. In school districts where this is largely the case, it is amazing just how highly effective teachers seem to be.
We are looking for reasons why students don’t learn, and the only rock we have not looked under is the only rock worth exploring.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This commenter explains things very well. Many of these reformer types assume that everyone else’s kids are just like their own. It’s nice of them to think that way, but they don’t have the slightest idea of what many of these struggling students’ life situations truly entail and how they negatively impacts their education. These students need way more than a “good teacher.”
Every teacher knows that there are children who make little or NO effort to cooperate in class or do what it takes to learn no matter how powerful the pedagogy—which is a fancy term for the method and practice of teaching.
In fact, it is arguable that the higher the rate of poverty is in a school, there will be a higher number of kids who fail because they don’t read, don’t do the class work, don’t do the homework and don’t cooperate while some will do all they can to destroy the learning environment in the classroom and no matter how powerful the teacher’s pedagogy is, the teacher’s work will be sabotaged.
For the evidence to support my argument that teachers are not to blame for children who refuse to learn, I offer my memoir—Crazy is Normal, a classroom expose—based on a daily journal that I kept for one complete school year at the high school where I taught that had childhood poverty rates of more than 70%.
For my first four ninth grade college prep English classes, I struggled daily to teach against a tide of resistance while ending the day with one period of journalism where all the students came from AP and honors classes and were willing to work up to eighteen hours in a day at school to learn without any resistance.
I think that motivated kids like those in my journalist class—9th grade through 12th—would have learned from a corpse without any of that fancy pedagogy present. They would teach themselves because they are lifelong learners with a passion for learning and a love of reading and writing. Thank God I wasn’t dead and I was there to enjoy working with these kids after fighting the education war for my first four classes where some of the students ran with street gangs and had killed rivals.
But similar to what combat troops experience in foreign countries, most Americans have no idea what’s going on in the public schools because other than being a student once, they have no idea what a teacher faces daily in the trench warfare of the public schools where not only are they under attack by belligerent parents, students and sometimes incompetent administrators, they are under attack by their own government.
And before someone like Harlan or TE—two who have little or no experience of what I talk about—can speak up and challenge my argument, I challenge those two and others who think like them to read my book so you learn something or are you unwilling to learn about a world you know nothing of?
You might be interested in this study of what matters for student learning (at least learning as measured by standardized test scores):
http://www.nber.org/digest/aug07/w12828.html
If you want to read the paper, here it is: http://www.caldercenter.org/PDF/1001058_Teacher_Credentials.pdf
While the main question the paper is trying to address concerns the importance of graduate degrees for elementary school teachers, the authors also look at the importance of various other teacher and family characteristics.
It’s certainly very plausible to me that the quality of the student is the most important single factor in education.
I think we could extend that to the quality of the parenting behind the student. It doesn’t matter if the parent is single or married. What matters is if that parent instilled a love of reading and learning early in the child’s life. Once that love is there, we have a life-long learner who will learn no matter what the quality of a teacher’s pedagogy is.
Case in point: our daughter had two parents who made sure the TV was off six days a week and only on for two to three hours on a Sunday, and that their daughter visited the library once a week for most of her childhood. Her recreation for most of her youth was reading—not TV, video games, texting, social networking, etc.She also had to be in bed by 9:30, but I know she stretched that to hide under the covers and read for an hour or two more before falling asleep. She admits it too. She also grew up resenting the fact tah6t she couldn’t’ stay up until two or three in the morning like most of her friends at school. And she resented that she couldn’t join the conversations her friends had about their favorite, mindless TV shows.
That young lady graduated from Stanford this month and already has a job in the health sector with pay that starts out more than the average teacher earns in this country after teaching for ten or more years.
Parental influences on children fade away fairly rapidly in adulthood. Resemblances between parents and children are in the long run mostly a result of shared genes.
Of course, Jim’s perspective of “quality of the student” is IQ and nothing more. Please ignore him.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx @Lloyd: tho I admire & respect the restrictions you placed on your daughter’s TV watching, & the library visits– it was not to be in our family; my husband was owner of one of the first TV’s on his block in the ’50’s & an avid connoisseur of pop culture, & an electronically-inclined gadget-lover.
However, the same principles applied in our media context. When we observed the age-inappropriate adrenaline-kick of video games, we created a family computer network loaded w/educational games. Violent games could be snuck at a friends’ house but were verboten at home [they bought into our values & even as young adults preferred playful & arty games– reinforced by home artwork w/mom since toddlerhood]. Hand-helds were off-limits until preteen years– but by then they’d already learned on the computer to seek out internet sources for games available in other countries, & learned some Japanese & French to communicate with global competitors.
They also learned much about hardware & software repair/ tweaking by watching their dad.
I read them stories from babyhood & was always pushing books (only 1 of 3 caught my book fever). When I wished aloud to my eldest, then 19, that he ‘read more’, he pointed out to me that he read constantly– on the computer. I learned to watch what he was doing more closely, & found that he, like me, was an avid researcher.
Teachers, please remember that not all students have the same academic abilities. People are not all endowed with the same academic aptitudes. For example, dyslexic students that have to survive in “regular” classrooms can easily get destroyed when they are told that they are just not trying hard enough.
Our sort by birth year system is the problem, not the teachers and not the students.
Can all of the readers of this blog sing on key? Are all of the readers that can’t sing on key just lazy and/or have bad parents?
“dyslexic students”
I was one of them. I know all about being severely dyslexic.
When your ability to translate is hampered by auditory reversals or drifting attention and reversals of what you read on the page, it’s easy to turn off and become a passive aggressive student who doesn’t cause disruptions in the classroom like some do but instead retreats into their imagination to escape.
Then the pedagogy coming out of the teacher’s mouth and from the material used for a lesson retreats into the background haze of life and is ignored by that sort of dyslexic student. Teachers have to deal with many students in each class, and the few who cause disruptions suck up a lot of a teacher’s time so the quiet dyslexic can escape and shut off external voices. In addition, when a lesson is working like magic and it appears that the students are actually involved, most teachers aren’t about to stop and deal with the quiet kid in the back who causes no trouble while doing little to learn what is being taught.
That’s mostly what I did K to 12. Then I joined the U.S. Marines out of high school and dyslexic or not, you better pay attention or suffer the consequences. I’m pretty sure that my experience in the Marines redirected pathways in my brain to overcome the challenges caused by being severely dyslexic—fear of a Marine Core drill instructor or hardcore lifer who accepts no excuses is a powerful motivator.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx @ Lloyd: the middle two of the 4 sibs in my family were profoundly dyslexic.
Brother, coming up in ’50’s & ’60’s, had your experience, though his uncanny & precocious mechanical ability helped him understand he wasn’t ‘dumb’. Still school was one long horrible experience. He has always read avidly as an adult– told me once (in his 30’s) that he kept no TV & was careful to read like taking vitamins– if he let it go for as long as 2mos, it was like a runner not running for 2mos.
Sis was just 7 yrs younger but it made a diff; same sch sys in ’70’s identified dyslexia & began teaching her compensations. This intrigued her enough that she ended up an award-winning SpEd teacher & now a hs principal.
I saw a similar progression in our local sch sys’ ability to deal w/cogn, more diff-to-identify LD. My eldest & youngest were afflicted w/’something’ unidentified & lumped into ‘add’. For the eldest, psychobabble dg & pills (w/hair-raising results); by 2004 we intervened to kibosh the psycho-pill approach for both (then in hs & ms). SpEd dept & teachers responded well; both flourished in ‘self-contained’ classes & were able to parlay their non-book-pencil high intelligences into good grades in ordinary colleges.
IDEA & IEP’s did very well by my family. In these tight times, they are being squeezed out, w/a high-5 from Duncan the other day.
A teacher shapes the distribution of achievement in their classroom based on teaching ability, differentiated instruction, and intervention strategies. We shouldn’t be comparing students to each other, but student growth and mastery against themselves. A good teacher does not mean all students meet the same standards but that students improve in standards over the year. However, at the end of the day whether or not a student gains in mastery can be placed at the feet of no one else but the teacher. It is the job of the teacher to find a way to move every student. This means finding a way to move EVERY student. Yes there will be outside factors that affect how much impact a teacher has on a student, but using those factors as an excuse to blame kids is ridiculous. If you choose to lay the responsibility of education at the feet of the students then what exactly is the job of the teacher? To educate the eager and talented? So we should write off all other students? Do you see them as merely seat warmers to pay our salaries? Would you like to see them removed from our classes? Then what?
I am livid. Stop it now. Stop blaming children. Yes kids come with baggage. Yes kids and families are not perfect. Yes disadvantaged kids will be harder to move than the privileged ones.
Moving ALL kids (not blaming them) is what makes teaching so remarkable. It’s why we should have job security and be paid well. That’s why teachers should be respected and not infantilized with dictated curriculum. But we can’t make those arguments if we are not willing to stand up and take responsibility for ALL kids, and be willing to have standards for ourselves and our profession. Standards that differentiate the talented from the ill performing. All teachers aren’t equal. We can’t be replaced with robots. There are good ones and bad ones. We need to stop being afraid of accountability and instead welcome it (and shape it). For the respect of the profession and for the good of the students.
“However, at the end of the day whether or not a student gains in mastery can be placed at the feet of no one else but the teacher.”
Really, the student him/herself has no part in this? The teacher is equally responsible for a student’s gains (or lack thereof) whether the student came to school fed, properly dressed, well rested and eager to learn or whether s/he didn’t sleep all night, had no breakfast in the morning, froze on the way to school because it was his/her sibling’s turn to wear the coat, and fell asleep in class? Really?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I didn’t read the post that way. Sounded to me like: the teacher takes each kid where he is at & moves him forward, each w/a different ending-up place.
A good teacher avoids the use of “standards” like the plague and treats each student as a unique human being with unique talents, interests, abilities, and potential happiness.
I don’t “move” my 6 year-old students to “mastery” of anything.
I teach them to love picture books and caterpillars and lizards and pumpkin seeds. I teach them that writing down what they think and feel is more powerful than using their fists and feet to bring about change in their community. I teach them to see the wonders of mathematics and how exciting it is to count things, add them together and take them back apart. I teach them that art and music are as important as reading and writing. I teach them that to be good human beings they need to learn to listen to what other people say and then think about what has been said means to them.
I teach them how to use laughter and humor to protect the innate wonder, curiosity, and joy they come to me with from such frightfully useless concepts as “mastery” and “standards” and to fight being standardized and forced to prove they have mastered anything for the sole purpose of ranking them for the nefarious plans of adults they may never see, meet, or care about and who live their whole lives in a pointless competition trying to win something by being first and better and more rigorous and more gritty and more ruthless and uncaring than anyone else in the world.
I know I will be forced out sooner rather than later.
I have to borrow this quote from Bob Shepherd (thanks!):
““I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929”
Thank you for teaching the children as opposed to teaching the curriculum.:)
“Stop being afraid of accountability and instead welcome it” — it seems, Casey, that you do not understand that the accountability we are talking about is to be a student “rank and sort” that brooks NO allowances for the “baggage” kids come with — your position would say that a teacher of a disadvantaged student is to have the same effect as one of an advantaged student. If the accountability were “do your job and do your best to reach ALL of the students and move them forward”, NO ONE would be complaining. That’s the job and WE ALL KNOW IT!
My point is that none of us needs a “talking to” by you, and you are very much in the wrong to take it on this way. No one is criticizing children — what we are doing is recognizing reality. There are kids who, for a variety of reasons, cannot be reached by a teacher who has them as one in a class of 32 for 45 minutes “some days” (since very often these kids have major attendance problems, and physical health problems, such as needing eyeglass corrections that they just don’t have). It sounds like you would like for teachers to beat themselves up for not being able to reach those kids (after all, that’s the job description, to hear you tell it — be a miracle worker, a magician!).
If you are a teacher, shame on you for being so un-collegial towards people who, as a group, work very, very hard to help our students move forward and who are also trying not to beat themselves up, but instead are trying to recognize that the job of “teacher” for those kids is a super-human one indeed.
At the very successful urban school where I teach, our wonderful principal has a motto based on the oft-told “starfish story” — that we should help the ones we can, because even though there may be many more we can’t help, we do what we can, not allowing ourselves to be demoralized by the times we are just not able to get it done. And the teachers I know do just that. According to you, they aren’t allowed to even talk about the ones that they find no realistic way to help. You sound like some TFA’ers one of my daughters knew, always clutching at the thinnest of arguments with which to criticize teachers. Ignorant, un-collegial, unpleasant, trying to make teachers feel bad because they are not able to work magic. As a successful and respected urban teacher, I believe your post above is much worse than merely shameful.
Any human being that has produced children knows the simple wisdom of this post. If you have more than one child the differences in their development can be amazing.
Children begin to sleep through the night at different ages. Not because the pediatrician tells the mother that her child must begin sleeping through the night by X date or else she will lose custody of the child.
Same goes with tooth development, potty training, weaning, crawling, walking, talking, etc.
Every child is a blessedly different creation. Every child has innate worth.
It is abusive and wrong to force children into a competition of being the “first” to do anything, be anything, achieve anything.
I am blessed to have a lot of contact with ESE children. They are as much a gift from God as the “highest achiever” in reading, math, writing, football, basketball, etc. even if they can’t yet (or never will) do any of those things well or at all.
I learned to swim at age 3 by jumping into the deep end of the pool. I went on to become a Red Cross certified lifeguard at the age of 16. My sister was terrified of water and did not learn to swim until she was nearly 30 and had 2 small children. Her impetus was to be able to protect and be with her children in the water because they both loved swimming.
She spoke a full 8 months before I chose to speak. She walked much earlier than I learn to walk. I was potty trained faster than she was.
We both have college degrees, meaningful, productive, happy lives where we contribute to the common good and are active in our communities. We are as different as night and day.
Yet we had the same mother and father. The same home environment. The same food, medical care from the same doctor, the same experiences.
The total nonsense of the reform movement and the blame the teachers cheerleaders is built entirely upon lies, obfuscations, mendacity, willful obscuring, and a total ignorance of reality, long-known facts about child development, and the lived experiences of millions of citizens. That’s why it cannot survive.
Right now it is politically expedient, convenient and easy to blame teachers for all of society’s ills and wrongs, and those with most of the money control the message.
Lies cannot and will not survive indefinitely though and eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, the lies will be exposed and truth will prevail. History has proven this over and over again.
Given this diversity in student development, why do we track students by age?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx damn good question. I’ll let the ed historians answer, but presumably growing size/ bureaucracy/ std measurement ideology had something to do w/it. we had ‘grades’ in my 1st-3rd one-room schoolhouse, but there were only 30 kids or so in total. & we moved on or skipped or stayed back at the pace we learned the material (that was in the mid-’50’s in rural upstate NY).
Because the current system of public education was designed on a factory model and factory efficiency requires simple mathematical progressions like age tracking to make “accountability” and record keeping more simple.
For over 100 years the highly successful Montessori system has rejected and avoided age tracking. Students are grouped in similar age groups, 2-5, 6-9, 10-12, etc. Children are allowed to progress at their own natural developmental pace. Other commonsense programs that achieve high success rates for the children of the wealthy in predominately private schools follow similar paths.
Oddly enough, Montessori designed her program as a public work to help the “retarded” inner city children of Italy. The amazing success led to expansion and replication and now it is almost exclusively offered to the children of wealthy white parents in private schools since public systems reject the autonomous nature of the program as dangerously freedom-building and producing too many free thinkers with the ability to question those in charge of things.
And it is that system, the traditional public school system, that folks here typically defend.
So, by middle school, we don’t. What I mean by this is, kids can begin pursuing accelerated classes (at least in most districts, although common core is going to reverse this practice in many places). I teach Algebra II Honors, which includes students from 9th, 10th, 11th and sometimes 12th grades.
In the younger years, age groups do make sense. So — as the author’s post makes crystal-clear, some kids are physically “ahead”, others “academically”, others “socially”. If we are going to separate them according to “levels”, we will have to pick one of these criteria — ONE. Which one ? I submit that you will not be able to get a group of parents to agree as to which one. The reformsters in general seem to think schools have one purpose: to turn kids into test-taking machines. Reality is otherwise — schools and education have multiple purposes (academics, social, enrichment, holistic creative problem-solving “does not mean math word problems or problems limited to one discipline at all”, and don’t forget that topic that is THE most important to many private school parents — ATHLETICS.
Finally, let me point out to you that if you do want to focus on academics (a majority of parents don’t, whether reformsters like it or not) teachers (almost all teachers) use differentiated instruction. Schools (almost all schools) have enrichment programs — some for physical issues (speech therapy), some have academic enrichment programs, including summer school enrichment programs, nearly all schools have classes that are combinations of academics and social (e.g. choral and instrumental music).
So to say “we track students by age” is to analyze with a tool that is too blunt to be useful (stated differently, the claim “we track students by age” is clearly so misleading as to force the conclusion that it must be denominated as simply “false”). You and I have debated before — you seem to want to cling to certain words / phrases “track students by age” even though such phrases clearly have no usefulness. Maybe we can get away from such inanity this time ?
I do want to focus on academics. I think mathematics is the most problematic area for students who are progressing at different rates. A gifted english student may write the finest poem ever written as the result of an assignment given in a creative writing class. A gifted mathematics student will not be given an assignment that will allow the student to do good work. Doing good work in mathematics requires students to leave the K-12 curriculum and attend university classes or work with folks at sites like this: http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/
Obviously for administrative convenience.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you did miss all of them te, based upon your selective reading of what you do quote.
Please show me the posts from Diane and the comments that specifically “defend” (your word) the factory model of education.
I’ll be happy to wait.
I can easily gather a few hundred comments from the last few days from parents, teachers, professors of education, and retired educators that speak of democracy, freedom of speech, civic awareness and involvement, citizenship, academic freedom, etc., none of which are defense of the factory model of education.
It is the system imposed upon us for over a century. We live with it because it is what we know and we are prevented from changing it. But we are still trying to change it and we will succeed, eventually.
teachingeconomist – There are extreme examples of precocity in mathematics. Pierre Deligne was reading Bourbaki when he was 11. Shafarevic read Hilbert’s Anzahlbericht when he was 14. He was not sure he understood it totally so he wrote a letter to a dozen or so of the world’s leading mathematicians asking them some questions about subtle points in it. Shafarevic started his university studies at the age of 16 and received a PhD in mathematics at the age of 20. His dissertation is a standard reference on the theory of central simple algebras. Vladimir Arnold solved one of the Hilbert problems when he was 14 or 16. Selberg independently discovered Rademacher’s formula for the partition function when he was a high school student. Both Milnor and Chevalley discovered important theorems as undergraduates.
We don’t track by age at public high schools in our area. Freshman may take advanced courses, seniors may be in preliminary courses. I grew up a middle schooler/freshman in senior level math courses. There is a strong developmental component that is important. For me, that accelerated situation was very difficult. Taxpayers and politicians do not want to pay for developmentally grouped content classes intersecting with social development. Instead, we push it on the teacher as a budget solution – differentiation. Note at the university level you will not often find a differential calculus student mixed with pre-calc and expecting the adjunct to teach both in the same section.
It may be that high schools in your area top out at a higher level than is typical for my state. The median size high school in my state has a little under 250 students and often has no AP classes or other advanced classes.
In any case I was thinking more about K-8 than high school, not high school, when talking about tracking by age.
You say, as to math, “Doing good work in mathematics requires students to leave the K-12 curriculum and attend university classes or work with folks at sites like this: http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/”
Many people, including myself, would say that much mathematics teaching is not very good. But — here’s the problem: many people disagree, including many universities (and it’s their decision, see ?)
In my own region, we have very progressive institutions of higher learning, who want good problem solving in their classes. Some of the classes I teach at my high school are dual-credited through one of these institutions (a very modern “precalculus” class, which will serve all majors except those requiring calculus or beyond).
The majority of institutions (in our region) offer only “college algebra” which is a cash cow for many institutions and provides nothing whatsoever of value for students [what I mean by this is almost no one uses this mathematics if that’s as far as they go — setting up kind of an interesting paradox “if you don’t need math in your field (beyond middle school level math which everyone needs) you take college algebra and learn lots of useless minutiae about algebraic manipulations, 100% of which is done by computers these days, and if you do need math in your field, you take calculus instead”].
Again, your primary problem in defending the positions you want to take (simple example being “focus on academics only”) is failure to respect the diversity of viewpoint in this country. No single person gets to say what the purpose of education is (well, at least until Bill Gates decided to put himself in charge) — bottom line: we need community schools, answerable to the community. I would not want to go to school or live in a community where everyone thought only academics mattered or that standardized test scores were the gold standard (or any standard really) by which academics were to be measured, and accordingly, I take my time, talent, treasure and family to a community where this is not the case (which isn’t that hard, because that’s most places).
I am all in favor of diversity of opinion and outlook, which is why I argue that choice schools are better than assigning students to a school based on street address. Community schools will be a compromise that ends up with mathematics instruction that simply ends up resembling the instruction the adults in the community vaguely remember having.
Math instruction can improve like anything else. First, ban the phrase “I hate math” from the vernacular of students, parents, and non-math teachers. If I had a nickel…..
Then, fund “catch up” classes during summer or regular school. The biggest problem I see are students who are missing the building blocks – factoring quadratics as a precursor to simplifying rational expressions, for example.
Get rid of these silly standardized tests. The don’t help students learn true math. Math should be taught with a strong “why?” component. Include more abstraction and proofs as soon as the child is developmentally ready to exercise that prefrontal cortex. Let math teachers teach. Give all students the freedom to fail.
I am always amused when universities claim pedagogical superiority over K-12 when they only teach a subset of high school students narrowed by self-selection, finances, and motivation – even at the community college level. Yet they still complain. Most 99%ers’ universities focus more on sink-or-swim “weed out” teaching. Rarely have I experienced an undergrad prof have the focus of a K-12 teacher or, more likely, an underpaid adjunct have the time. Grad school, maybe. The difference in the 1%ers’ universities is the students are allowed more freedom to fail. We all know about “gentleman C’s” for the well off and well connected. If you are not wealthy, the cushion is razor thin. Few supports, no free lunch, and one misstep and you are out.
I think that the university mathematics curriculum is compromised by the need to have lower division courses that teach to both beginning mathematicians and engineers. Generally students need to get to the upper division undergraduate classes in order to do something that mathematicians recognize as mathematics.
Our TE says “I think that the university mathematics curriculum is compromised by the need to have lower division courses that teach to both beginning mathematicians and engineers. Generally students need to get to the upper division undergraduate classes in order to do something that mathematicians recognize as mathematics.”
I don’t disagree that this is so in general — the problem though is that at least a majority of math professors don’t want to change this — in my region of the country, the majority of persons who are teaching math at the college level are doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to change the system (other than, as Math Vale correctly points out, complaining about the students, even though they really have the top kids! or to the extent that they don’t, they were warned by the high school teachers that these kids are not ready for math, not focused, hard working kids, etc.). So — one is forced to conclude that the “powers that be” don’t care about TE’s wishes or whether kids in college get to the upper division mathematics classes — indeed, it appears that these “mathematicians” are not remotely interested in providing quality math instruction to the masses.
However, TE, the news is not all bad: at my community / public high school, I am happily teaching higher mathematics in truly mathematical ways to mixed age groups with full support from our admin and parents even though that was “not the way they learned it”. Local control is what supports and allows this.
I suspect the concern is that the majority of students in the typical set of lower division university classes serve engineering students predominantly and mathematics students as an afterthought.
I should point out that at my institution these are the students most skilled at mathematics. About a third of the incoming class each year must take a remedial mathematics class before they can take college algebra.
Shared environment appears to have little effect and when children become adults the already minor effect of their home environment becomes less and less as they age. Adopted children as adults generally do not resemble their adopted parents any more than would be expected for two people chosen at random. But they very significantly resemble their biological parents.
In terms of the traditional “nature” vs. “nurture” argument the “nurture” side appears to have lost totally. It is not that genetics accounts for everything. Genetics accounts for about 50% with most of the rest of human variation attributed to “non-shared” environment. “Nurture” in the traditional sense seems of very little importance.
It is not known currently what “non-shared” environment is. One purely speculative suggestion I have relates to fetal development. Fetal development is a fantastically complicated process about which we know very little. There seems plenty of opportunity for glitches to occur in this process due to random perturbations. Viral infections of the mother (which could easily be totally asymptomatic) occurring at some crucial stage in fetal development might well impact the development of the fetus. Something like this might affect one sibling but not another.
We have a lot to learn regarding human development and differences but the environment factors traditionally studied seem to be a blind alley.
Jim, enough with the IQ prattle
Diane – Your comment somewhat puzzles me since in the above comment I made no mention whatever of IQ.
IQ is a tail chaser. People who determine IQ are enabled by people who determine IQ. Too self-referential. There are likely innate predispositions towards different ways of thinking, but to objectively measure requires understanding more of the actual functioning of the brain – assuming all thought really is limited to the brain. We are far from that noble goal. For me, doing math “feels good” in my mind while world language “hurts”. But I still am on a never ending quest to learn conversational Spanish. !Hola¡
I don’t know about that Jim. I’ve taught too many students who were adopted at birth to be able to say it’s strictly one way or the other with nurture vs. nature. I’ve also stayed in touch with these students as adults. Some may attribute development to situated cognition, and others may not.
Jim, this is utter nonsense.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx You give no cites for your peculiar stand that nature beats out nurture by adulthood. Sounds to me like someone using the same-era science could argue the opposite.
A pediatrician friend has patiently been explaining to me the latest wrinkle, epigenetics. Tho’ my paraphrase is no doubt clumsy, it appears that genetic instructions come with ‘off-on switches’ which are activated by environmental experience (nurture); often as not the proclivity, as refined by nurture, is passed along immediately to the next generation. It would appear that science can now look at physical proof that nature & nurture are intertwined & evolution reflects the combined result.
No, te, it is not. I have taught for over 20 years and during my entire career that spans 3 of the most populous states and largest school districts every other primary teacher I have met has decried the concept of grading students and their work.
We have experimented over and over with multi-age classrooms, looping, promotion based upon readiness and personal success, and various alternatives to the factory model and we are repeatedly thwarted and stopped from pursuing alternatives to the factory model not because we created it, love it, or believe it the best but because we are never given a voice in how to run our schools despite the fact that we do the primary work of the schools.
Who oppose us? The Business Roundtable. The Chamber of Commerce. The usual suspects who benefit most and stand to profit the most from the retention of the factory model by forcing it into failure as a means of eliminating it altogether.
The current public school system we defend is the public, free aspect, not the factory model that we have always chafed against and tried to work around.
Chris in Florida – The differences between you and your sister are an example of the relative lack of importance of shared environment.
Perhaps I missed all the posts here condemning traditional public school education. It is not the “free” aspect that is being threatened by changes in public education, it is the traditional structure of public education that is being threatened.
Sorry, Jim, that’s not what the original poster said. Environment is ALSO quite important in school. I have had children with a lot of innate intelligence who did very poorly because of environmental issues. People are MUCH more complicated than an IQ score.
But the environment that is important is “non-shared” environment meaning environmental factors that are not shared between siblings. “Shared” environment – more or less the traditional “nurturing” doesn’t seem very important.
It’s not an either/or thing, Jim. BOTH are important. In the examples of siblings above, notice that they are BOTH high achieving adults. A lot of that comes down to environment.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx @teachingeconomist: I take your point. In fact the DOE for the last 20yrs has been moving in the opposite direction of ‘the free aspect’. However I see no evidence in the school choice movement even as practiced in some states for one or two decades of any choices available for ‘the free aspect’ (except in the rare instances of a Montessori or Waldorf charters). In fact many states buying into expanded choice still require DOE std assessments…
A major premise of this writer, and many other writers who question “reform” rhetoric, is that reformers actually want to figure out why young people don’t learn. I believe that premise is mistaken. Reformers, at least those who receive the most public notice, have no desire in understanding why some children learn less than others.
What these reformers want is to reduce public expenditures on public education, and they find what evidence they can to support their goal. The evidence they use almost always comes from organzations funded by those who either want to profit from the education of our children or who simply think any public expenditure (except for war) is a waste.
And they don’t have to win the argument, they merely have to sow seeds of doubt about our public education system in the minds of the public.
Why do some kids fail to learn? One of the biggest factors is insufficient background knowledge. Background knowledge acts like mental Velcro. When I give a history lesson to my seventh graders, a few kids will catch and remember every last detail; it’s amazing. Sometimes they come back the following year and tell me they still remember everything they learned in my class. By contrast, some kids, even the ones who are straining to understand, catch very little. I don’t think there is a gap in mental “hardware” between these two groups of kids; I think the main culprit is disparity in “software” –i.e. background knowledge. To grasp what I’m talking about, think about a time when you became exposed to a whole new domain of knowledge; e.g. collective bargaining agreements. For a while you cannot grasp a lot of what people are talking about –there’s so much unfamiliar jargon, your brain just can’t keep up. At the end of a session, if you were asked to summarize what you’d heard, you’d realize you’ve gleaned only a fraction of what a more seasoned collective bargainer had gleaned. Another thought experiment: imagine your students gave a lecture about their Twittering and social networking: YOU might struggle to keep up whereas the 13 year old at your side would grasp every last detail and proceed on to higher-order thinking.
Read E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit or The Making of Americans, or Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? or Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths about Education to get much clearer and more detailed explanation of this thesis.
I agree with you to a point. I think it is ALSO a function of what else is going on in the lives of these young people. If a young person is being abused, or doesn’t have enough to eat, or is moving homes constantly, or has a toothache, or has a parent who was just diagnosed with cancer, or whatever, that young person probably won’t remember as much as another student without those issues. Just my two cents’ worth.
About 15 years ago or more, the NYTimes followed a teacher, who graduated from Columbia University, and his students. He was trained by Lucy Calkins and used the Columbia Teachers’ Workshop models in both reading and writing, yet 1/3 of his class failed the ELA. In all my years of teaching, I too had similar stats. Yet, even with those failed tests, no one seemed to care how much these same students improved from the previous year.
This just goes to show that there are more factors at play then just teachers. No one recognizes the fact that not all children learn the same way or on the same pace. Their brains need a bit longer to process the information before they eventually get to grade level. These students need time, not pressure.
Once, as a newbie teacher, I believed that all I had to do was deliver uniform and uniformly high quality instruction and everything else was up to my students. If they passed, great. If not, well that was their fault. It took a few years but I came to understand that it was, actually, my job to build relationships with my students, communicate with their parents, do whatever I could to understand and support their unique needs, and foster their individual success. I was a core academic teacher too–had upwards of 125 students a year. I had ELLs, special ed students, kids who wanted to sleep through school because they were working at night to buy diapers and formula for their newborn babies, the whole gamut. Some still didn’t make it, but many, many more did.
I sympathize with “NYTeacher” but I do not see anything in these comments that reflects an awareness of the power and importance of practices such as relationship building, parent communication, formative assessment, differentiated instruction or differentiated assessment and grading. If we don’t want “reformers” draping blanket blame over teachers, we can’t drape blanket counter-accusations over reformers either. We do have to look at our own practices too.
I agree. Relationships are KEY. I learned the same thing while teaching in an alternative junior high. I did MUCH better with those kids once I understood the kids and built relationships. The content, especially for those kids, was truly secondary.
NY Educator,
There is something to what you say, but the question is, how much? “Building relationships”, “differentiating instruction” –this has been boilerplate advice to teachers for at least the last ten years. Don’t you think these “solutions” might blind us to other aspects –perhaps more important aspects –of the problem? It worries me that our “knowledge” of these “solutions” places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the classroom teacher. Thirty percent of your ELA students are failing the standardized test? Oh, clearly you haven’t built relationships or differentiated instruction. In reality, the foundations of reading and writing ability are deep and complex, resting heavily on the amount and richness of vocab kids get at home. No individual teacher can fully remedy deficiencies in this foundation, though the “solutions” the “experts” tout imply the opposite.
While I think you make some really good points, “NYTeacher” was draping a “blanket of counter-accusations” against “the teacher bashing movement.”
There’s always room to improve, but I don’t believe teacher bashing is conducive to making things better. Many so-called “reformers” do indeed engage in the practice of teacher bashing. Since they seem to “know” so much about it, perhaps these so-called “reformers” (the ones who frequently disparage teachers) should find the worst classrooms at the worst schools in America, and have the teachers sit in the back and take notes while they (the so-called “reformers”) show the teachers how it’s done.
You bring up differentiated assessment, and that’s a great point! People seem to forget that “assess” does not always mean “test.” But that’s one of the problems with the combination of high stakes and testing. We may have differentiated instruction, but do we truly have differentiated assessments if the assessment that “matters” most is a high stakes test?
“They” don’t even believe teachers are the weakest link to learning – teachers are the deadbolt on busting the union. If they get rid of the teachers, they get rid of payers of dues to the unions, and without payers the unions are unfunded and go bye-bye.
Bashing the teachers and getting rid of credentialed, qualified, teachers opens the door to hiring the scab workers who drink the Kopp Koolaid, who stay for a year, maybe 2, and move on, no union, bad wages, often bad school circumstances. The ones who rise to the top, like crap does, become tfa workers, politicians, lobbyists or Supes, Admins, and principals, appointed by their own ilk.
Propaganda. No one should be entertaining their garbage nonsense, and its about time people woke up. We are waking up.
Spending time disproving their rhetoric may not be of importance, but getting the truth out, and spread, may put a bone in their reformist soup.
Not that I believe this, but the reformers’ answer would be, “The teacher failed to differentiate for diverse learning styles.” No raise for you!
Amen.
Ok, finally I am seeing a line of thinking that mirrors my own thanks to NY Teacher.
It goes like this:
“The teacher is the single most important factor in the education of a student.”
(Ah, yes, and those who became administrators or charter school advocates were the best of the bunch!)
“Teachers can’t figure out how to engage the kids, so were going to do it for them.”
Here comes the absolutely impossible Common Core State Standards.
“Oh, by the way, if we make teaching really difficult (by demanding everything of the teacher, but nothing of the student or parent) we might just divide and conquer.”
Here’s another good one, perpetrated by conservative reformers:
“We’re all about making people self-sufficient, rugged individualists….which is why we need to pull the rug out from under teachers and empower students to be even less accountable than they already are.”
Hmmmm….I wonder if anyone wants to tackle the notion that kids are being passed through the system without a solid knowledge base? And, by the time they get to high school, they are already set up for failure–and so are their teachers, by the way.
When teachers hold the line on grades, administrators begin to buckle and start to think “maybe the teacher can’t teach,” and little Johnny gets to dodge another bullet. Mrs. First Grade Teacher can start figuring out how she’s going to pay her mortgage because the non-teachers would rather divide and conquer than address the issue, as I have stated here before, about accountability that ends with the teacher. Yep, lots of responsibility but virtually no authority.
Now, who wants to be a teacher?
Thanks for the post, NY Teacher.
Earlier in this thread of comments, a paper written by Clotfeltor, Ladd and Vigdor was referenced. In the conclusion of the paper, the authors said, “Taken together the various teaching credentials appear to have quite large effects on math achievement…”
An NBER summary of what I think is the same paper, was titled, as I read it, “Teacher Credentials Don’t Matter for Student Achievement.”
I’ve asked the authors for clarification.
I am also in hopes they can provide information about Bureau funding sources.
I think the basic conclusions of the paper are fairly clear. Teaching experience matters, half of the gains coming in the first few years, but peaking with over 20 years of experience. Teacher license status seems to matter, as does the competitiveness of the undergraduate institution and a teacher’s standardize test scores. What does not seem to matter is having a masters degree.
Well of course NBER would take that position – that is exactly how TFA explains away that its 5-weeks of boot camp a teacher makes. Then TFA backdoor deals away the Highly Qualified credential hoops required by traditionally trained educators so their “best of the best” “smarter than smart” what-passes-for-teachers can get jobs before they are even posted to the general public, and where veteran teachers can be fired and replaced with these scabs.
@jim. I’m adopted. At 28 I met my uneducated birth parents, and my full blood uneducated sister. We look alike obviously, but my values and my educational level are exactly those of my adopted parents, as are those of my adopted brother.
I value education. My adopted parents did also. My biological parents did not, and they raised my biological sister, who also did not.
I physically look like them, that is all.
we have to stop calling them reformers. privatizers, corporatists, ethically challenged, without conscience: these are NOT reformers.
I use “fake education reformers”—-repeatedly.
And sadists.
Third grade reading tests, “Being held back: only two events were more distressing for a child, the death of a parent and going blind.”
Daily Kos opines, “If the (oligarchs) won’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep.”
Society is getting rather tired of [so-called] teachers excuses. It seems that finding those employed in the teaching “profession” who are willing to accept responsibility for their OWN actions (or lack thereof) is about as easy as finding hens teeth today.
They keep denying that they’re part of the problem. Well perhaps the time has come to find out….and start fresh. Because the fact is that we have to deal with the problem, and there’s little doubt that, with many of the “teachers” we have in hand now, it’s never really going to be dealt with. Instead, they’ll just give us more excuses.
Blog replies similar to the 6/29/2014, 11:25, entry were reviewed and analyzed. The replies were found not to come from paid trolls but, the activity was that of people who “enjoyed inflicting pain”. The recommendation was avoidance. I apologize if the study is already common knowledge, here and I know I wasn’t assigned hall monitor duties. I just found the research interesting and wanted to share it.
Boy are you on the money!!! How about looking under the rock for a correlation between the consistent failure to provide adequate funding for education?? How about the rock which refuses to provide consequences (at least at Los Angeles schools) for students accruing 27, 32, 48 tardies in a semester? Or perhaps under the rock which hides inadequate leadership for schools, leadership which promotes a political agenda instead of concern for providing top quality education for all children.