Arthur Goldstein is a veteran high school teacher in New York City. In this post, he asserts that every child can learn, but there are obstacles put in the way of teachers.
First, students must be willing to make the effort to learn.
Second, class sizes must not be too large.
Third, it is absurd to expect every student to learn the same things in the same way at the same pace.
He writes:
”There may be exceptions, actually, but I really believe this in general. The main thing that stands in the way of that goal, though, is often administration. Of course not every student will cooperate, and of course not all students will pay attention, study, or do homework. Of course some will fail. For the most part, though, it doesn’t mean they couldn’t have passed.
“Every teacher I know has heard about differentiated instruction. I know some supervisors have demanded multiple lesson plans for different students. Sometimes supervisors assume teachers have nothing to do and unlimited time. This is not a good approach. We have a lot to do, our work is important, and it’s sad when we’re burdened with wasteful nonsense.
“Differentiation is a tough demand when you have 34 students in a class. Of course, class size tends to be overlooked by administration, and in fact when I go to grieve oversized classes, they fight to keep them that way. It’s an ironic attitude from an organization that claims to put, “Children First, Always.” Of course, the real meaning of that slogan is demoralizing and devaluing those of us who do the important work of teaching the children (the very children Moskowitz Academies would not accept on a bet).
“I’d argue that differentiation is a fundamental human trait. Unless you are in possession of a remarkable lack of sensitivity, you treat people differently. I see, in my classroom, students who will challenge me. I’ll let them do it, and I’ll challenge them back. I have nothing to lose, really. If they manage to out-talk me, I must be doing a great job. I also see very sensitive and reserved students, students who need my understanding, students for whom a harsh word would be hurtful and damaging…
”There is spectacular irony in the fact that our system demands that every one of our students take the same tests. I mean, if we’re going to talk differentiation, how can it possibly exist when final assessment is exactly the same for everyone?
“Every kid can learn, but not necessarily the same things in the same way. I’m glad to see that NY State has finally allowed some leeway for different students with different needs. It’s a step in the right direction, but it isn’t enough. Every kid can learn, but every kid can learn differently at different times. Some kids need more time than others. Some have learning disabilities. Some don’t know English. A full 10% of our kids are homeless, and as long as we continue to ignore that, we won’t be serving them no matter how often we give them the meaningless label of “college ready.”
“Learning is not binary, and it’s not multiple choice either. It really is individual. The sooner administrators can understand that simple notion, the better we will serve our children.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I doubt very many parents would disagree with any of this. Anyone who has had a child in school for enough years and has been involved and talks to other parents about the good and bad, the problems and issues of their own kids, understands that everything Arthur Goldstein says is true.
The richest education reformers put their own children in schools with small class sizes that counsel out any child who can’t learn and provide differentiated instruction in even tinier groups to the rest.
One reason I find Eva Moskowitz so dangerous and abhorrent is that she fights against all of this by using lies that people like Andrew Tobias accept as truth despite the ridiculous
“evidence” she offers up. Small class sizes — she claims kids don’t need it and she has specifically stepped up to state for the record that her schools prove that small class sizes are completely unnecessary for any at-risk children if you only use her brilliant system and trained teachers.
Moskowitz hides the fact that her charters’ “retention” rate — flunking kids who aren’t learning fast enough — is extraordinarily high for at-risk kids. (I know this because the only time her schools were challenged on why one school’s 3rd grade class was missing over 1/3 of the at-risk 2nd graders from the previous year, one defense was that only 20% of the kids were “disappeared” and the other kid were still there but flunked — probably to be kicked out later).
Imagine a world where instead of Moskowitz’ Trump-like lies, she actually told the truth with the goal not just to promote her own bank account, but to promote good schools for ALL children. Imagine a world where she said “I have a lot of problems teaching at-risk kids in my schools and I have to flunk huge cohorts of them and others I have to simply force out because they can’t learn in their big class sizes even after being flunked a year or two.” How much would education reform be different if it was led by honest people instead of liars? How much good would it do for the children who need it most?
Instead we get dishonest reformers like Eva Moskowitz who tells us over and over again that small class sizes for at-risk kids are a luxury that is unnecessary and every kid should be able to meet the same curriculum “100%” of her students manage and that Betsy DeVos is a terrific and wonderful choice to run schools because she cares so much about all kids.
And we get gullible written like Andrew Tobias who hang on every world that Moskowitz says and treat it like it is coming from God.
I recently had Hattie’s research on the effect of class size thrown in my face at a meeting where I brought it up as a concern. That’s getting old. I have to point out that all of the things that have a higher effect size are done better with lower class sizes. I can’t take it anymore. 🤦🏻♀️
The premise that every kid can learn is flawed. Every kid DOES learn. The question is what they are learning. For instance, are some children learning that school is not welcoming, or that their school requires rote recitation while the schools of wealthy kids require inquiry and exploration, or that math is not for girls, or…well, you get the point. All people learn. Teachers’ job is to be what Frijtof Capra calls a meaningful disturbance — i.e. to meaningfully influence students’ learning to enhance their lwell-being and make the world a more positive place.
Memory is also important and how children remember what they learned each day depends on many factors. A child that goes to bed hungry and/or depressed in addition to a long list of other emotions, will not have as effective a memory as a child that goes to bed calm and happy and thinking of what he/she learned that day in class.
Once the child is asleep, there is a process where the mind gets very busy cleaning house and deciding what memories are important enough to transfer from short term to long term and even the memories that go into long-term can be revised so they are not accurate.
Brain research has discovered all of these factors regarding how our memory works.
What happens when a child is asked a question on a standardized test that the child was taught the answer to, but for whatever reason/factor, that child can’t access that memory or that memory isn’t there because it never transferred from short term to long term?
Oh, and what children learn doesn’t just take place in the classroom. They learn outside of school too. They learn more than just what teachers teach them. What happens when what a child learns from just living life outside of the classroom is considered more important by that memory transfer process while the child is asleep?
What happens when a child goes to bed hungry and that is all the child can think about?
What happens when a child goes home after school and no one is there so they tune in to TV and watch several hours of blood, gore, and sex and that is all they can think about when they go to sleep?
What happens when a child sees their parents arguing in the evening after school and that is all they can think about when they go to sleep?
What happens when a child gets home from school and mommy and/or daddy are both drugged out or drunk and that is what the child is thinking about as he/she goes to sleep?
All of these factors and much more have an impact on what that child will remember from day to day.
I love Arthur’s observations here. In my short time as a teacher, I was too young, confused and stupid to understand how special my situation was. I taught four classes a year, only once with more than 15 students (I think it was 22). My administrators gave me the freedom to do what I felt was right. I was allowed to let some brilliant students engage in supervised, independent studies and work with tutors of some of the students who needed extra help. Arthur is so correct. If we can’t treat and value teachers as professionals, we can’t expect students to benefit and thrive to become independent thinkers who understand the value of collaboration.
YES… we all gan from experience, chichis why tenure i so crucial.
Now, by the third year, the management begins to document incompetence and the young teacher never makes tenure…and the budget does not have to take hit to pay the salary and benefits befitting such a PROFESSIONAL PRACTITIONER…Layers and doctors who are experienced are treasured, becasue COMPLICATED TASKS can be accomplished by EDUCATED, EXPERIENCED BRIGHT FOLKS.
SIMPLY PUT the oligarchs that are running our government now, do not want an educated population that will grasp that they are LIARS and charlatans.
I GOTTA SPELL CHECK. ‘LAWYERS & DOCTORS”
I recently had Hattie’s research on effect size for class size thrown in my face at a meeting where I brought up class size as a concern. It’s getting old. I then asked…wouldn’t the things that have a large effect size be done better in a smaller class with a highly effective teacher? crickets Sigh.
I taught ESL in a small suburban NYC school district for many years. My students were mostly poor and came from Haiti, Mexico and Central America as well as a few Asians from India and the Philippines. The major difference between our students and yours is that most of the remaining students were middle class, and in this case trickle down education and opportunity worked, My students benefited a great deal from attending a well resourced public school with classes in the 20-25 student range. ESL classes were even smaller and capped at 20. I also differentiated instruction, but with manageable numbers and student materials. At times it was a three ring circus at times, but it worked.
For many years I took educators on school visitations when International TESOL or the Modern Language Association held their conferences in the city. The difference between the NYC schools and my school was stark. Not only were the classes in the city in the mid-thirties, classrooms were like “East Berlin.” We even saw some classes with students sitting on the heating units because there was no desks for them. There were not even enough books to go around whereas our suburban schools had many books and materials. Whenever our district tried to raise class size, the American parents showed up en masse along with the NAACP to pressure the Board of Education to reduce the numbers. These middle class parents also accepted the fact that their property taxes would be high in order to provide their children with what was needed to achieve. Schools with high numbers of poor students have few vocal advocates for them, particularly when the appointed Board of Education are wealthy friends of the mayor. With some of the highest real estate values in the world, I cannot believe that NYC cannot do better for its young people. Elected boards are more responsive to the needs of the community than mayoral appointees.
The whole charter movement has mostly focused on urban schools, particularly those with large numbers of poor, minority students. Rather than live up to their responsibility to fairly fund schools, our government is abrogating its obligation to our young people with the monetized scheme of privately run charters, a bait a switch marketing ploy, to avoid providing equitable funding to urban schools.
One caveat about differentiated instruction is that Gates and company are waiting in the wings so teachers no longer have fret about differentiated learning. Gates and his marketeers are ready to give their pitch for “personalized learning” to any school district tired of all those pesky teachers that cost money in salary and benefits. Taking humans out of teaching will not yield positive results, especially for young and poor students that require attention from a caring adult. “Personalized learning” is another step for us to devolve into the Banana Republic of the United States.
The system of sorting students by birthdate and giving them high stakes tests hurts everyone but the companies that sell the tests.Students intellectually mature at different rates.
Separating and dividing and labeling also helps those whose kids start with the advantages of wealth and home stability. Teach kids that the labels of “high test scores” vs. “test failure” matter and you automatically push some kids into power while keeping other kids far from power.
“Sometimes supervisors assume teachers have nothing to do and unlimited time.” How sadly true.
Eventually, the serious research and development of tools for schools will enabled differentiated learning for each student.
It is a big and difficult step that is technically within reach and even affordable given reasonable management of infrastructure.
Developing the institutional will is an ongoing struggle.
love it. Exactly. Smaler classes and the professional PRACTITIONER evaluates the needs of every child who sits in front of her for 10 months.
Then, this educated professional chooses the MOTIVATION that will convince the kids that they can do the work, and it will be a good thing… the reward for learning must be here, as well as THE CLEAR EXPECTATIONS from the person who will be leading THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE.
CLEAR EXPECTATIONS and AUTHENTIC REWARDS for GENUINE ACHIEVEMENT (not test grades) were the first 2 PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING, the harvard thesis which was the REAL standards research that PEW did i the mid-nineties.
Kids learned in all the classrooms of successful teachers when these things were present.
I know… I was the NYC cohort for the research, because my students, year after year, were at the top of the citywide exams, which in those days, were not part of the Core Curriculum Crap, but mirrored the state OBJECTIVES FOR LEARNING.
What were the other 2 PRINCIPLES of learning that appeared in the CLASSROOM PRACTICE of the most successful teachers?
Well, they were all educated and EXPERIENCED in their fields,
AND all were educated in HOW THE HUMAN MIND LEARNS– THEY ALL AHD A DEEP understanding of childhood psychology FROM THEIR EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE… LIEK A GOOD DOCTOR.
(have you ever tried to get a kid to do something?) NO TFA’s there.
Every kid can learn, but not necessarily the same things in the same way.” Just one of several points Goldstein makes that merit applause or amen or something.
I would turn to his assertions that administration does not consider time. The obsession with testing has created administration that insists on filling out forms relating to the so called standards that are required to be taught. The volume of work required of most teachers not only bleeds into time they should take with their own families and communities, but exceeds possible time due to the limited nature of that precious entity. If I was to teach my class the way I feel it should be taught, my day would look like this:
Get up at 12:00 AM
Grade 140 papers taking time to write suggestions.
(At ten minutes per paper, this would be 1400 minutes, or just over 23 hours later, I would be done)
Go to bed at 11:20PM
Repeat.
For those who think this is ridiculous, show me your math. Cut my time in half and there is still not time.
Someone in administration needs math skills.
The administration doesn’t need math skills because they only parrot from the script that they were given by their masters: For instance, Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the Walton family, ALEC, et al.
Former PS teacher here. That’s one reason why I homeschool. To differentiate and provide individualized instruction.
Seems pretty self evident: motivated students, teachers with support (small class size) and tailored/differentiated learning.
It’s what every parent should want! Unfortunately, Mr. Bernstein admits that differentiated learning is hard to do. And that is why I and many parents are fleeing from the public school system, to charter schools. Although this blog has highlighted many failures in unregulated charter schools, the best ones provide an advanced curriculum which is truly differentiated. In my experience, it also attracts motivated students and reasonably small class sizes.
Yes, you get a private school setting with public dollars and leave behind the “others.”
Really?
Point to countries where the teachers individualize instruction for every student they teach. If fact, if you find any, list all ofthose countries.
But if you discover there aren’t any countries where the teachers are expected to individualize instruction, prove the parents in those countries are also pulling their kids out of school and teaching them at home.
To help you discover the answer, here’s a link from OECD.org that points out the most common teaching strategies used today?
See if you can find “Individualized instruction”. I searched the entire OECD document and couldn’t’ find it. Not once … Because it doesn’t exist.
Click to access TALIS-PISA-LINK-teaching_strategies_brochure.pdf
I’m convinced that “individualized instruction” is the same as “choice”. Both are PR ploys from the pirates that are trying to destroy community-based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, public education in the United States. Those two bogus terms were designed to fool parents into thinking our Public Schools aren’t doing their jobs.
It’s all BS!
Here’s what I copied about Finland in that report.
©
OECD 2016
INSIGHTS FROM THE TALIS-PISA LINK DATA: TEACHING STRATEGIES FOR INSTRUCTIONAL QUALITY
15
3) Support school-embedded professional
development and professional learning
communities
As the results show, it is essential for teaching
strategies to be in tune with the context in which they
are applied. Teachers have reported that professional
development involving the participation in learning
communities, co-operation and peer observation has
a positive impact on their practices (Opfer, 2016).
Teachers collaborate and discuss their teaching
practices with each other, so it is not uncommon
to observe that teachers from the same school
“share” the same practices. Since strategies seem
to be more similar among teachers within the same
school than with teachers from different schools,
a school-embedded approach to professional
development is recommended. This would include
for example participating in professional networks,
undertaking collaborative research, and engaging
in peer observation in their school. Attempts to
inculcate good teaching strategies in one teacher in
a single school are less likely to be successful unless
his or her school colleagues also engage in these
strategies. Teachers who have participated in training
in classroom practices could work as mentors to
other teachers and share their experience. Box 4
shows an interesting example from New South Wales,
where professional development is used to promote
professional learning communities.
Finland’s special teachers fulfil a role of early
diagnosis and support, working closely with
the class teachers to identify students in need
of extra help and to work individually or in
small groups to give them the support they
need to keep up with their classmates. It is not
left solely to the discretion of the regular class
teacher to identify a problem and alert the
special teacher; every comprehensive school
has a “pupils’ multi-professional care group”
that meets at least twice a month for two
hours and which consists of the principal, the
special education teacher, the school nurse,
the school psychologist, a social worker,
and the teachers whose students are being
discussed. The parents of any child being
discussed are contacted prior to the meeting
and are sometimes asked to be present.
FINAL THOUGHTS from the report on page 17:
Teachers everywhere are committed
to helping their students achieve the
best they can. The TALIS-PISA Link
data show that teaching and learning
is a complex process involving a wide
variety of behaviours, attitudes and
practices. The study findings can
inspire teachers and school leaders
to co-operate using a wider palette
of techniques to meet the needs
of students with varying abilities,
motivation and interests. Meanwhile,
the insights provided here can inspire
education policy makers to design
teaching policies that are well suited
to teachers’ teaching environments
so that all students, whatever their
background, can flourish.
YOu got it right Lloyd. The balony out there is incredible. I was the cohort for the REAL major, 3rd level research out of Harvard on the PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING into what is present WHEN KIDS LEARN… and from day one, the question was WHAT DOES LEARNING LOOK LIKE?
It was NOT individual instruction. That is what TEACHING is supposed to look like, and the charlatans out here have changed the national conversation to telling folks that THEY BELIEVE TEACHING LOOKS LIKE.
Kids learn when they are motivated, when there are genuine intrinsic rewards for doing work, when they enjoy being with the teacher, an GRASP clear expectations. Kids learned when they trusted that this professional knows the subject, and how to present it… we call that motivation. A master teacher knows how to reach a child, not simply How to teach A SUBJECT.
I didn’t notice. My mind corrected the word without me knowing as I read it to fit the context of the sentence. I think that is a result of adapting over the years to my dyslexia.
LOL! Actually, most people read the context and know the needed words.
It is really hard for educational administrators and leaders to adhere to this idea posed in the article when they are shaped and influenced vastly by the government and it’s high stakes policies.
Of course. The government mandates very bad practices. But you must lose your own grip on what is best.
I agree. Easier said than done, but you learn how to do it as best as you can while still keeping teaching and learning purposeful and growth oriented.
You say “Every kid can learn, but not necessarily the same things in the same way.” Of course but what are those things or rather at what level?
Most kids can learn the basics, Elementary School. Fewer can learn at the Middle School or Junior High School level. Fewer yet can learn at the High School level and fewer at every level thereafter.
Whatever happened to IQ? There is just over 112 years of IQ data. Not everybody is a scholar in the same way that not everybody is an athlete.
We use school, secondary in particular, to discover what kind of a scholar, if any, we are.