The mainstream media loves to write negative stories about public schools. Here is a story featured in local news but mostly ignored by the national media.
The Society for Science and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals selected 40 high school seniors as finalists in their national science competition. Eighteen hundred students applied. Each of the finalists wins a prize of $25,000. The top ten winners will receive between $40,000 and $250,000.
The finalists will take part in a week-long competition from March 9-16, where they will undergo a rigorous judging process and compete for more than $1.8 million in awards. They will also interact with leading scientists and share their research during a virtual “Public Day” event on March 13.
Of the 40, nine went to elite private schools; three to charter schools; one was home-schooled. Twenty-seven are students in regular public schools. Seven are students at regular public high schools on Long Island in New York.
What is so impressive about the finalists is their topics, which display a remarkable range and depth of interests.
Here are a few project titles:
Project Title: Isolating and Characterizing Phosphorus-Solubilizing Bacteria from Rhizospheres of Native Plants Grown in Calcareous Soils and Sediments
Project Title: Evaluating Phragmites australis Wrack Accumulation in a Long Island Salt Marsh Ecosystem and Assessing Its Effect on Carbon Sequestration, the Nitrogen Cycle, and Sediment Biota
Project Title: Altered Development of Thymus in Tmem131Knockout Mouse Model of Down Syndrome
Project Title: Larvicidal “Trojan-Horse”: Experimentally Developing a Novel Low-Cost and Eco-Friendly Mosquito Vector Control Treatment
Project Title: Novel Fully MRI Compatible Nonmagnetic and Dielectric Pneumatic Servo Motor for MRI Guided Surgical Robotics
These are amazing students. Next time you hear a pundit ridiculing our schools and our teachers, think of these brilliant kids and their dedicated teachers. I feel better about our future after reading about them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We would have many more students reaping the rewards of science fair research & competition if teachers had more time and support in helping students with these endeavors. My doctoral research on ‘the decline in science fair participation’ uncovered these 2 factors as the main reason for the drastic decline in participation. Administrators are too worried about testing outcomes and teachers are overwhelmed with mandates to produce better test scores along with a multitude of duties that take them away from their main responsibility of teaching.
Sadly, the science teachers at my kids’ high school demonstrated that they had only a superficial grasp of actual science in their evaluations of science fair projects. I agree that testing and mandates are problem areas for science participation, but I think the problem goes further – back to how science teachers are selected and trained.
Bob posted Dr Olive’s 2017 research paper, focused on why Ohio student participation in science fair dropped from nearly 4900 students in 2001 to 2800 in 2015. 82% of the teacher respondents had more than 10 yrs experience, thus were involved during the years when participation was 75% higher. This doesn’t get at the question of the caliber of science teachers at your kids’ high school, of course. But the experience of these veterans indicates systematic changes that make it difficult for a science teacher of any caliber to provide the student guidance required. We have been reading here for a decade now how high-stakes testing accountability systems have narrowed curriculum generally, and in particular have undermined time available for longterm papers and projects.
Important and valuable work, Dr. Olive!
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=ysu1495707213528466&disposition=inline
I don’t disagree with your 2 factors for the decline in participation, but can we be honest and add the 3rd biggest factor. Helicopter/Snowplow parents who see the “Science Fair” project as a way for them (oops….their child) to game the system for college “resumes”. It’s the same type of parent who will also co-opt their child’s college essay for admission into the “dream school” that the parent wants. Sorry, but the Project titles listed above seem a little advanced for most students to actually think up on their own?
LisaM– I don’t think so. I was looking through the various requirements under the tabs here: https://www.societyforscience.org/regeneron-sts/2022-finalists/ It looks like a talent search is conducted to solicit applicants. And applicants must submit a previous research project meeting certain qualifications, have teacher recommendations, submit transcript et al to demonstrate ability for a ‘holistic’ evaluation. Also, during the course of the year-long project they work with an adult sponsor and a scientific sponsor. Probably just qualifying as one of the 1800 who submit would be a giant plus on a college application, but most likely a very high bar for your average helicopter/ snowplow parent to game.
Because of the decline in teacher participation and not including science fair in their curriculum, you are left with those students who are fortunate to have access to University and corporate labs. I’m sure you will find that most of those students’ parents are connected with the field of their children’s projects.
So the vast majority of students are deprived of learning the scientific process of critical thinking and research, while exploring and possibly solving a scientific problem. At a time when children need to think critically, more than ever, science fair should be available and promoted for all, not a select few.
Susan, exactly right. Schools are judged by their test scores, not their success in untested subjects.
Correction:
“Schools are WRONGLY AND UNETHICALLY judged by their INVALID test scores, not their success in untested subjects.”
the kids who are interested in science fairs are the type of students who are maxing any tests. if schools had more tracking, the the kids who can do great at science fairs would get more help. However, in 2021, the kids who do well in science fairs had parents who helped them get into STEM programs at universities, government labs, and other research centers. Those kids get exposed to graduate school level education and benefit.
OK, superdestroyer, you got me so exercised with this post that I have a long reply– I’ll put it down below under “general” to get more margin space…
If the Next Generation Science Standards live up to their billing, science fair participation should be starting to skyrocket about now. No more rote learning of science facts; kids these days are learning to “think like scientists “ and design experiments instead! But I fear NGSS will make participation plummet even faster. NGSS itself is probably a failed experiment.
NGSS is just Common Core for science. It’s garbage.
Expecting novice learners to “think like a scientist” without the requisite content knowledge and experience is a fool’s errand. NGSS authors (the disruptors at Achieve) conveniently ignored the fact that a professional, highly trained and specialized adult scientist can only conduct their work thanks to a “head full of facts” and years of experience in a field.
The only people that ever claimed traditional, content-based science instruction consists of “memorizing disconnected facts” are the ones selling a solution to a problem that never existed.
My job, as a science educator for 30 plus years, to ‘novice learners’ was to impart the scientific process of ‘thinking like a scientist’ to solve problems. Whether they be life problems, classroom problems, voting decisions, or solving a problem they would like to use for a science fair project. They all require the same critical thinking process in science of identifying a problem, researching the problem, forming a hypothesis from that research, testing that hypothesis and forming a conclusion. If more children employed those learned skills as adults, our society would not be where it is today, for in order for a democratic society to be successful you need a critically thinking citizenry and that is the purpose of our public education system.
The Scientific Method [for Conducting Experiments] differs significantly from generic, informal problem solving that kids might use in social or classroom situations or when making political or public policy decisions as adults.
One required element in a scientific hypothesis is a responding (dependent) variable that can be quantified through measurement (or counting). Formal experiments also require the use of two separate but nearly identical tests (an experimental and a control test) in which only one manipulated (independent) variable is changed while keeping all other variables constant. An accurate conclusion can be drawn when comparing experimental data because proper design isolates the effect of only the one manipulated variable.
These key parts of any classroom experiment are not possible to control for, as you suggest, in generic, informal problem solving in the types of situations you presented.
OTOH, Rage, the question of how well [or not] the scientific method can be used on questions of social policy would be a great one to pursue for highschoolers.
The topics alone! Incredible kids.
Congratulations to these wonderful students. Please watch the documentary movie, “Science Fair” for a truly inspirational journey. It follows high school students from around the world competing in an international competition. I always tell people that our children will change the world for the better. https://films.nationalgeographic.com/science-fair/
Thanks for the suggestion, Ms. Luchini!
I felt the same way about my students, Ms. Luchini. I taught in an ordinary, middle-class high school in Southern Florida until my retirement three years ago and was astonished by how progressive and thoughtful my students were. If we survive the next few years without a total fascist takeover of all the reins of the U.S. government, we might be just fine. The kids coming up rock.
yes, even with all the big societal noise about this or that issue, the kids don’t stop learning 🙂
Alternatively, you could look at this from the perspective of the people who relentlessly criticize New York City’s specialized high schools and ask: “But are they sufficiently diverse? Are black and brown students being unfairly excluded from this competition? That so few of these finalists are black and brown students is evidence that there is something inherently unfair in the selection process.”
OK Flerp I examined pix & counted them up for you:
Chinese/ Korean 16, White 10, South Asian 7, Mixed-Race 3, Black 2, Hispanic 1, Arab 1.
Exactly. Only 3 “black and brown” students in the whole group. Obviously the process is racist and unfair, by the standards of opponents of specialized high schools.
bethree5,
Among the 40 finalists, I counted 23 students who attended public high schools that were not selective but take all of the students zoned for it. I didn’t see any from the SHSAT-admissions specialized high schools, although some were among the 300 semi-finalists. I also saw one from Hunter High School, which uses a standardized test only as a baseline, and then will choose a lower scoring student over a higher scoring student based entirely on an essay they wrote.
You could look at this from the perspective of the people who relentlessly defend the SHSAT as the sole admissions criteria to New York City’s specialized high schools. I always thought it was nonsensical to hear people invoking that myth that very bright students who scored very high on a single day’s exam would suffer some academic disadvantage if they were forced to attend a high school that included bright, motivated, and academically strong students with lower scores on the SHSAT.
So many of these winners attended public schools that have many students who are academically strong and motivated and some who are not.
Opponents of SHSAT-only admissions are only pointing out that there are many African American and Latino students who are academically strong and motivated who could thrive in specialized high schools, and as this proves, the presence of academic strong students with lower SHSAT scores would in no way harm the students who have high SHSATs. In fact, these 23 public high school winners attend public schools that include academically disinterested and academically struggling students – some who aren’t even at grade level.
So excluding academically strong students because they have a lower SHSAT score is about politics, not about whether their presence in a school would force teachers to make their classes less rigorous causing all students to learn less than they would have had those students been excluded. I always found that to be the most objectionable and insulting defense of SHSAT-only admissions, and yet people actually believed it.
I guess no one told these 23 winners.
Must be that Asian Privilege they suffer from.
Rage, the “there’s no such thing as merit” crowd has come up with term for that: they say Asian-Americans are “white-adjacent.” Thus, these students have unfairly benefited from their “proximity to whiteness.” Not joking.
Flerp
What about children from India, Bangladesh, and other west Asian countries? No proximity to whiteness but lots of academic success especially in the STEM fields.
Rage,
Lots of academic success in public schools that don’t exclude students on the sole basis of one day’s standardized test score.
You left that out, Rage.
You forgot to mention that those students apparently had more academic success in public schools that did not exclude students on the sole basis of one day’s standardized test score than in public schools that do exclude students on the sole basis of one day’s standardized test score.
So it’s particularly mystifying when someone is invoking exactly those students to justify excluding academically strong and motivated students from schools based on a single day’s standardized test score. You just admired how much academic success they had when they aren’t in schools that exclude.
Rage, there is no “proximity to whiteness” beyond the ipse dixit of the clowns, who come up with these theories to justify discriminating against Asian students.
These great students are from regular public schools, but people will still use their triumphs to claim we need to specialize schools. Interesting.
This is a fascinating issue to me. A core principle of mine is that kids differ and that an extraordinarily diverse economic system NEEDS those differences. One of the things I detest about Education Reform is its attempt to fit kids to a Procrustean bed. I think of education as a landscape with many, many possible paths and dramatically various topographical features, flora and fauna. Knowing kids well enough to show them paths suited to them, that will fire their passion and build on their strengths seems to me a big part of the job. So, the question then becomes, how do we do that? How do we avoid one-size-fits-all education while at the same time avoiding the dramatic pitfalls in some supposed solutions to that problem?
A touchstone for me on this is one student I had who was captain of her cheerleading team, took it to a state championship, was universally loved by her classmates, was a great leader of them, but who struggled in her classes. School in the sense of the academic courses she was forced to take wasn’t capitalizing on her genius–and I mean that word, genius–recognizing it, building on it. She wasn’t failing. School was failing her. Kids differ. Roles in society differ. Tracks in schools should differ.
Bob,
I certainly agree with you about the need to avoid one-size-fits-all education. Where I think we disagree is that I do not see traditional catchment zone based schools as compatible with anything but one-size-fits-all education. School boards have every incentive to make sure that the schools in the district are as close to identical as possible and that no school does anything that would upset a loud minority of adults in the district. Can you point to any school district that has, for example, a catchment based Montessori school and a catchment based Waldorf school?
I attended a catchment-based public school, but because it was a laboratory school run by Indiana University, and because those in charge of it were strong leaders, the teachers in the school had enormous autonomy. So, not a Montessori or Waldorf School, but a catchment-based school very different from many public schools. The difference lay in the quality of the instructors (many of my teachers had PhDs) and the autonomy they had to develop curricula.
A fascinating post, TE. Unfortunately, my entirely moderate reply to it is in moderation.
Don’t get me wrong. I think that we have a great many outstanding educators in public schools who would be even more outstanding if they were relieved of bureaucratic micromanagement. But I think we need an overhaul of teacher prep:
This school was, btw, the sole public school for its catchment.
My comment will make sense when my previous response is released from moderation.
I think it is the issue. My take is that there is no such thing as a one-size fits all education. It doesn’t exist. There is one-size fits all clothing in some homes. There are one-path, two-lane roads leading to some homes. There is not one size fits all parenting inside or outside of any home. There is not one-path teaching in any classroom. Education, like parenting, is a two way street.
It’s at least two ways. It’s less like driving a two lane road and more like driving in Swindon, England, where the cars seem to circle around with one another in a sort of barely controlled chaos. Students don’t get from education what a school provides; they get out of education what they share. What they put into education depends on what they have to put, and they become part of a vibrantly complex, swirling, spiraling, sprawling ecosystem of humanity.
That’s where no excuses discipline goes wrong. That’s where standardized testing goes wrong. That’s where segregation goes wrong. It is the issue.
Well said, LCT!
This is a wonderful post, Bob. It reminds me of my first year teaching. I had 5 classes—French I through AP—none bigger than 18 students (it was a private hisch). The one I struggled with [classroom-mgt-wise] was a 9th-gr class dominated by a wisemouth– smart enough to do better in French, but too involved in the social paradigm to apply himself. I remember driving thro ridiculous snow to get advice from my psych-wise mom (an hour away). She suggested I take him aside and note his leadership qualities [he did seem to have the others in thrall], and ask him to corral this strength and put it to use for the good of the class’s learning French. OMG, it was magic. All he needed was to have his talents acknowledged: he immediately became my secret adjunct.
Full disclosure: there was a 10th-gr class dominated by a cheerleader & a couple of her henchwomen, which learned little thanks to them & my lack of savvy. I have to say I just understood the boys better: their mean-girls way so alienated me, I never thought to consider their strengths and apply the same lesson!
Spoken like a real teacher, Bethree!! xoxoxoxo
bethree5,
I love this story.
Every school needs a “mom” mentor like you had, to give truly insightful and useful suggestions for teachers with these kind of classroom problems to try.
No excuses schools would have taught you that you weren’t punishing the kid enough and making him feel enough misery.
LCT, love that description. Bob and TE, I don’t know about this “one-size-fits-all”pubsch ed. I haven’t seen it, so you have to show it to me. The pubschsystems which I’m most familiar, plus the ones my educator sis has updated me on over the years — 5 in total—range from urban (NYC) to both high- and middle-SES suburban to small city collegetown to rural sticks. Funding from great to just OK. All of them with wide-ranging offerings and pedagogy. From what I’ve read on this blog, the one-size-fits-all pubsch sounds like a creature of underfunding plus dogged/ rigid admin enforcement of the worst fed & state top-down mandates– yes?
By “one-size-fits-all”pubsch ed,” I am referring to the Ed Deform theme that all students need to be Commonly Cored and that there is one path to College and Career Readiness via test prep curricula and pedagogy. That there are teachers and school systems that have continued to teach and to provide diverse offering for diverse student bodies despite the state and federal mandates and the Deform occupation of our schools is a beautiful thing.
Bethree5,
I am thinking about my local district where there is a private Montessori school, a private Waldorf school, and a private progressive school. Those approaches to education are only available to the relatively wealthy in my district. I also can not see how a catchment based Waldorf school could possibly work as some parents in the catchment area would no doubt object to their children being sent to a Waldorf school while others outside of the catchment area would demand that their children be allowed to attend. The same would be true for Montessori schools as well. Do you think that the folks filling school board meetings to campaign against critical race theory would be happy for their children to attend a Waldorf School just because they lived in the catchment area?
I am also thinking about the opposition of many here to allowing students access to more advanced curriculums and classmates than is generally available in schools. Many years ago, for example, a highly respected poster and former school principal argued that BC calculus was sufficient mathematics for any high school student. I am very glad that she was not the principal of the high school my children attended.
It is possible to run schools within schools. That was, in fact, Shanker’s original vision, I believe. So, an optional Waldorf or Montessori class or track within a traditional elementary school is entirely possible., though why anyone would think, as the Waldorf people do, that it’s a good idea to delay for many years starting to learn to read is beyond my ken.
Bob,
I agree that it is possible to run a school within a school, but you must agree that it is typically not done. Again I think the politics of local school boards require school bored members to have as uniform an experience across the district as possible. They can’t have students in one catchment area have opportunities not available to students in all catchment areas.
These things change, TE. In the 1970s, it was quite common for public school systems to have alternative schools, for example. Often these were very small and ran out of a rented house.
cx: were run
It is typically not done, but it typically should be done. This was the original idea, that boards would issue a charter to run an experimental program within a school.
This notion that everything wouldn’t be absolutely identical, absolutely uniform, for every student just kills a certain kind of what we have come to call “conservative” (a weird name for folks who are so destructive) who has a rage, a need, for absolute order and compliance. But I keep hearing that there is another kind who actually does treasure differences–freedom, local control. LOL.
Bob,
Was admission to these alternative schools in the 1970’s based on geographic proximity? All in the catchment area must attend, no student outside of the catchment area allowed to attend?
These alternative schools were run by the catchment area high schools, TE. And no, students outside were not allowed to attend them. Some called these schools a version of Britain’s sending troublemakers to Australia. LOL.
So, the school would work with the parents of students who were having trouble in the regular school and get agreement for the kid to attend the school’s alternative school. So, of course, not ALL students in the area attended. These were very small schools with correspondingly small staffs, typically housed in a rented house.
So, the school would have, for students in its catchment only, this place where kids who needed an alternative could go, a place heavy on counselling and guidance and support services, with perhaps a couple core teachers and some who would rotate in and out.
Alternative schools of the kind I am describing eventually fell victim to budget cuts. It was cheaper, in those days before extraordinarily expensive federally and state-mandated standardized testing, just to let those kids drop out and go to work at Burger King or as opioid dealers.
Interesting to think about the economics of that.
Bob I was playing hooky yesterday reading at WaPo ed articles. Jay Mathews had a column that made me aware of the NYS “consortium schools” (NY Performance Standards Consortium)—very interesting! There are 38 member schools (36 in NYC). I was delighted to find that one of them is in my old hometown. Checking out its history, I found (as suspected) that it grew out of one of the first “alternative schools” in the nation, a junior high started in 1970 but eventually closed due to obnoxious conservative backlash. Its replacement has been ongoing since 1974, 300+ 6th-12th graders who apply via random lottery (100 on waiting list). [Proud to say we have another such alternative school in my local NJ district, a hisch within the hisch, started in ’76 (my middle son is an alum of the program).]
Will do, Ginny!
I loved hearing the one kid say, “I went from learning a different formula every day to learning why the math was even there in the first place.” Digging deeper. For everyone? Nope. For her? Oh yes, yes, yes.
The mainstream media “loves” to write negative stories because studies show that negative stories attract more readers and more readers sells more ads at higher prices.
“Psychology: Why bad news dominates the headlines”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140728-why-is-all-the-news-bad
The Republican Party has been an expert at using bad news to push their lies and conspiracy theories for decades. The GOP also works together to achieve its toxic goals more than the Democrats that are splintered between groups that bicker and do not always work together for a common goal, if they can find a common goal.
Unless the entire Democratic Party will come together and identify a common goal, the GOP will keep beating them in elections in areas where extremist conservatives should not be winning.
So, why can’t we learn how to counter that by learning how to wrap the news and facts we want readers to learn, inside a bad news wrapping.
Maybe we can use a PR technique I learned when I was earning my BA in journalism.
The teacher/instructor/professor (whatever term you prefer – I do not care) called it the sandwich technique where you use the top slice of bread to grab the reader’s attention probably with what sounds like shocking bad news, and then use the filler between the slices of bread to teach the actual facts ending with a powerful bottom slice of bread to trigger critical thinking and learning designed to overcome the propaganda from the toxic charter school industry.
Wow, I love this, Lloyd. There must be journalists doing this out there, but sadly most of what I read pales in comparison. Especially in the education/ social issues reporting I tend to read. It all sounds like the 3- or 5-para essay formula as compared to in-depth coverage.
The single worst thing about “ed reform” is how there’s no celebration or even grudging recognition of the good things in public schools.
Relentlessly and exclusively negative towards both public schools and public school students.
DeVos was the worst with this. To listen to Betsy DeVos speak one would think every single public school student in this country is not just “failing” academically, but violent and dangerous. It’s a smear and not one of the high profile ed reformers ever even objects to it, let alone defend public school students from the smear.
I don’t think they hear it themselves. It’s such a cloistered echo chamber it simply doesn’t occur to them that all of their rhetoric around public schools and public school students is negative.
It’s such a brutally unfair way to promote privatization. Couldn’t they market and promote charters and vouchers without smearing every public school and public school student in the country?
Scorched earth. The agenda must be promoted by any means necessary and if public school students are the collateral damage, well, who cares? It’s for the greater good.
Re: superdestroyer’s post on 1/22 at 1:53pm:
Do you imagine that teachers with higher “tracks” have less paperwork to complete— less stdzd testing, less stdzd-testing-prep, fewer “progress” analyses, let alone the latest wrinkle, SEL analysis—with all the assessment, data entry & reports involved? The “ed accountability systems” in place since 2001 and exacerbated in 2010 under Obama [and continued via ESSA in 2015, enforced by DeVos, now Cardona] may be targeted at “equity,” i.e., poorer/ lower-achieving students, but to satisfy these data-crunchers, ALL must comply, just so the econo-ed-metricians can get their “big picture.”
But let’s talk about “more” tracking. Ed achievement—at least as measured by stdzd testing– reflects zip code, thanks to residential segregation, which provides built-in tracking: whole schools full of poor, or average, or high SES students. At many of the average and all of the high SES schools we have further tracking via AP high school courses. And for poor/ low-middle class districts we “track” by offering charter schools. (They do not necessarily have better teachers, but they usually offer smaller class size with more feedback/ 1-on-1 from teacher regardless of caliber.)
There are those schdistrs which serve the entire community [poor to rich] with one high school (and maybe two middle schools)—towns of 30-ish k. That is a big enough district– about 1200-1400 hischstuds—to offer everything everybody needs. You may not see it as “tracked”, but I do. It’s enough kids to offer any number of sports, bands & fine arts for those who can handle the academics and other stuff too– and for those who lag academically but get out of bed in the am to do it because of the extras offered. It’s enough kids to offer robust SpEd & ESL programs. Enough to offer AP in every subject as well as at least one offbeat elective every other semester or so. Even enough to contain a small school-w/n-a-school project-based alternative.
One big caveat— the community has to be willing to pay for it. Many (esp red) states have taken on 50% of pubsch costs, then simultaneously slash funding to the tradls while promoting separately-funded charters, to the point where the traditional can afford no extras and are “mainstreaming” all their SpEd kids.
How dearly I would love to see a lot of control go back to teachers, including control to create “offbeat” electives (or offbeat, specialized courses for which kids get the credit they would for a core course). The public laboratory high school I attended took the latter approach, and that’s why I got to take classes in wave motion, paleontology, and Russian history. The passion of an instructor who has created a course goes a long, long way. Dystopian Literature, anyone? How about Crafting a Story in Film and Fiction? Race in America: 1616 to 2022? The Grasses. The Solanaceae. The Hymenoptera. Climate?
Climate Chemistry and Physics. LOL.
I think one could teach the entire high-school math curriculum from the deck of a sailboat, treating only sailing-related examples.
Or from a kitchen. Now wouldn’t that be interesting? Wow, this math stuff is really useful!
Hi Bob,
I agree. I think narrow certification rules hinder some teachers from teaching some really creative electives. For example, I’m certified in French but I have a very broad interest in literature, psychology and other areas. Teachers are usually only allowed to teach a certain number of courses (usually 1 course) outside their certification area. And even then, schools don’t like to let teachers do that. Also, students have required courses they have to take so it’s also a matter of scheduling. Then add the constant testing and test prep and there’s little room to do something creative in terms of exciting and creative course offerings. It also leads to a stultifying career for very intellectual type teachers.
a stultifying career for very intellectual type teachers
Imagine that. A place of learning being stultifying for an intellectual. That’s a clue that something is deeply wrong.
Part of this goes back to the principle that our primary function as educators must be to light a fire, not fill a bucket. The Ed Deformers want standardized curricula and pedagogy in which a particular bunch of slop is poured into each student bucket. I want students to find a path that they care deeply about. And that happens not via some depersonalized computerized curriculum but via quirky teaching by passionate, highly informed teachers. A very great but little-known poet and teacher named James Worley wrote that it isn’t the particular stuff one learns about Dante or Chaucer or whatever that was the greatest gift given by his teacher but, rather, the harvesting of the windfall of particular teachers’ passions.
Oh yes, yes, yes, says the student. Give me some of that.
Education isn’t something we undergo for a few years at the beginnings of our lives. It is something we undertake over a lifetime. The latter should be, I think, our Prime Directive: to produce students for whom that is true.
I submit that the high-school kid who would take Mamie Allegritti’s as-yet-unrealized half-semester course on Jung would walk away with a gift that would last a lifetime, not with a vague memory of having learned something way back when about something called the Binomial Theorem.
Like E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Ponderosa, and some others who comment here, I am a proponent of knowledge-based curricula. But unlike Dr. Hirsch, and because I think of this building of a fire within students as what should be our primary goal and because kids differ and we need and should respect those differences, I oppose any model that views education as pouring the same stuff into every kid’s head. We must seek to produce life-long, independent learners.
You don’t think all kids should learn about the Crusades? And how is a core curriculum antithetical to becoming an independent learner? You speak as if kids already have selves to express. But school gives them the material with which to build their selves, no? Homo fit, non nascitur.
I do believe that there should be a core, knowledge-based curriculum, as opposed to the Common Core skills-based defacto curriculum that has been foisted on the nation. However, I think that there can be extremely varied means for delivering that AND that there has to be plenty of space in the overall K-12 school career for differentiation based on particular student and teacher interests. In many cases, aspects of the core curriculum good be gotten at via nonstandard courses. It’s a balancing act. I definitely do not think that students have fully formed selves, like Athena born from the forehead of Zeus, LOL. That’s just silly. Homo fit, non nascitur, or as Simone de Beauvoir put it, On ne naît pas femme : on le devient.
As I mentioned above, I think that the entire core high-school math curriculum could be taught from a kitchen or from the deck of a sailboat. Actual descriptive and procedural knowledge as opposed to ridiculously vaguely defined skills. So, nonconventional mode of transmission of core knowledge.
and part of the curriculum in later years devoted to transmission of knowledge related to areas of interest and use to students with differing proclivities and interests.
Here’s the issue that I am grappling with: kids won’t really grok the core stuff, as represented in something like the Sequence, via superficial fly-bys. They need to become lifelong, independent learners who will explore these things in great depth, and much attention must be given to ensuring that there are opportunities in the curriculum for students who differ enormously from one another to become hooked. As it is right now, a student can have perfect pitch and go through 13 years of schooling, PreK-12, without anyone among their teachers and administrators knowing this and without it’s mattering at all with regard to what they get the opportunity to learn.
Another example: We know that some people are born with or develop very early on brains wired to do mathematics at a very high level. These are rare individuals, and it’s extremely important that their proclivity for mathematics be recognized and built upon with alternatives definitely not suited to everyone. There are little Mozarts and Lizts and Scriabins, little Fermats and Gausses and Ramanujans out there, I suspect, that are never recognized to be such. And we need both cosmologists AND cosmetologists.
All that said, I totally support and have long been an advocate for a knowledge-based core curriculum in the early grades, and I want to see an end to the state and federal mandates that keep such a curriculum from becoming the norm.
In other words, I think that a knowledge-based core curriculum is that base, but I think that the real fire comes from an in-depth plunge, something one does not get from a fly-by of a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long list of things everyone should know. So, I call for a balance of these. That said, I would be overjoyed if every school in the US adopted Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Sequence tomorrow.
Bizarrely, one still encounters the claim that the CK Sequence is a dead old white man’s curriculum outline. Clearly, those who make such a claim don’t know the CK Sequence. It’s far, far from that.
So, if it were up to me, public schools would chuck the disastrous, puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list of “standards,” adopt the CK Sequence for Grades PreK-8, and then have increasingly differentiated but still knowledge-based tracks and some core stuff thereafter.
I’ve been into Core Knowledge Schools. These are very exciting places, with kids passionate about learning. Why? Because actual knowledge is engaging. Endless random skills practice based on the CC$$ in prep for the standardized test isn’t.
Build Back Bitter?
Bob
THIS!
All we have to do is create a “school year” comprised of four, INDEPENDENT credit periods. No course runs longer than 10 weeks. Core academic courses are broken into four independent, but obviously related, topics.
Grade 9 Biology
CP#1: Classification; Biodiversity; Natural Selection
CP#2: Cells, Genetics, Reproduction
CP#3: Ecology; Life Processes
CP#4: Human Biology; Bio-technology
And, YES, to additional selected topis courses of interest.
This kind of thing flourished for a while back in the 1970s, enabled by Flexible Modular Scheduling.
You speak much truth in this post. It is difficult to teach a class in a way that everyone is met where they need to be met. It is difficult to keep funding for the arts in a poor community. It is difficult to teach certain students in a large class. No one really wants to find small classes and small student loads that would make guiding all students through the material possible.
Those one high school towns rarely, if every, produce science fair winners. I know because I judge such fairs. Those one size fits all schools rarely have any ability to help middle class and blue collar families get int mentoring programs. And such towns are usually too small to have charter schools.
Remember, NCLB exposed those school when the requirement to report test results broken down by demographics. Even those “good” suburban schools cannot close the achievement gaps even within the same school.
However those one high school towns can help some students by using tracking to put some students on the pathway to calculus, real physics and chemistry, foreign language. However, every school that tries to do that is called racist.
Attempting to meet AYP under NCLB within each of 8 possible *sub-groups was an unreasonable and often unattainable expectation when sub-group populations in many schools numbered in the low double digits. For scores to increase year after year after year in each sub-group when a little over a dozen students are being tested each year was asking the impossible.
*Subgroup categories: Students from major racial and ethnic groups, typically, African-American, Hispanic, white non-Hispanic, American Indian/Native Alaskan, and Asian/Pacific Islander; Economically disadvantaged students; Students with disabilities; Students with limited English proficiency
Well, my local pubschsys in NJ—which meets the description– produced a kid who “received several top awards and prizes at the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair (ISEF)” in 2019 while still a sophomore. We actually sent two that year (of a total of 6 in NJ). OTOH, the same-description pubschsys I attended in upstate-NY (where my sis is a hisch admin) has not produced such a winner in decades, though it’s a well-respected pubschsys in an Ivy League collegetown.
This makes my point, I think– perhaps I was unclear. “Tracking” is baked into my suburban area by virtue of high res seg. Our town is the “advanced track”– mostly high-income professionals [2.3% below poverty line]. The next town, middle-class, is “regular track.” The city beyond, poor/ working class is “slow track.”
By comparison, the pubschsys where I grew up—same size, serving one 30k-pop small city, equally small #’s of black and Hispanic—contains everyone from poor to upper-middle-income [13.2% below poverty line; median income 1/6th of my NJ town]. Why not call this schsys “tracked” already? It has all the bells/whistles: decent SpEd/ ESL, lots of AP courses, a good array of arts & sports & electives & extracurriculars. They have a robotics team and participate in Science Olympiad, but you won’t see them placing in something like the ISEF: there’s a much smaller proportion of high-income families with highly-educated professional parents. I can’t see where any further tracking of students than already provided via SpEd and AP changes that.
p.s. I just learned serendipity (via reading Jay Mathews latest article at WaPo ed) that my old alma mater also offers an “alternative” midsch/ hisch via lottery, which is one of only 2 outside NYC of the “New York Standards Consortium” schools– a group of 38 NYS hischs which substitute in-depth student writing and holistic evaluation for Regents/ annual stdzd NCLB testing. Another choice offered beyond the realm of “tracking.”
One way to increase participation in local school science fairs is to move beyond the category of original research/experiment. Expecting large numbers of novice learners to each design and conduct an original experiment or research is beyond unreasonable and unnecessarily constraining. Just read the titles above to see just how specialized original science has become. Younger or average students simply find this requirement too daunting, too frustrating, or too difficult.
Our local science fair included two additional categories that increased participation exponentially:
1) Presenting/Explaining a scientific concept, principle, law, or theory.
(Student becomes science teacher)
2) Presenting/Explaining how a technological device or system “works”, within
the trades or any branch of engineering
.
Yes, the purpose of science fairs should be to get more students interested, not just select the ones who are already interested.
My local school also had a Rube Goldberg device category, which encouraged students to come up with creative things that nonetheless took advantage of basic physical principles.
Maybe it’s time to call them STEM Fairs?
Unfortunately, most STEM programs involve putting kids through assorted trial and error challenges, that rarely if ever call for the use of measurement when designing, building, or testing.
STEM programs proliferate despite the fact that most teachers have little to no training or experience in engineering or technology.
the purpose of science fairs should be to get more students interested
I would make one small edit to that: The purpose of education is to get more students interested.
Opening young minds to the nearly endless possibilities that their futures hold should have been the goal.
Instead NCLB/RTTT/CSSS/ESSA have closed doors and shuttered windows; with the only pathway to (so-called) school success came in the form of two very narrow sets of standards and tests just two subjects.
Rage: Excellent suggestions!
Rage, it seems (from browsing internet) plenty of “regular” science fairs in pubschs and they are used as teaching tools and include very basic categories. There’s also criticism, and even a recent NSF study on how well they function in middle schools at getting students interested in science. The main issues seem to be around how well the goals/ reqts are communicated to students and parents, whether the work is integrated into the school’s science curriculum, how much time/ teacher guidance is provided. Also whether the competitive element should be eliminated.
As usual with projects, the honors kids do fine; the others flounder. Complex tasks put the cart before the horse for novice learners. There should be no shame in a curriculum of basics well taught and well learned, but there is. It’s crazy. Our fetishization of projects harms the majority of our kids.
Ponderosa
The terms “hands-on” learning or “project-based learning” are mostly just “sound bites” for parents, administrators, BOEs and others who have not carefully observed these practices being implemented in the classroom.
A mentor of mine summed it accurately when he told early on in my career as a new lab science teacher: “Kids don’t learn any better, and less if you’re not careful, but they definitely have more fun.”
There are a few exceptions (measuring skills, tactile experiences e.g. feeling forces or densities, and lab safety) but a teacher has to be very careful to make sure that students are educated by such experiences as opposed to being entertained. In science, that is the primary function of a well-designed lab report and explicit discussions with metacognition.
As a chem/physics teacher, I was far more effective when I conducted demonstrations accompanied by carefully crafted Q & A sessions. But having fun with science has its benefits too, so a careful and artful blend was the key to ensuring that learning was the priority.
Your point regarding novice learners is understated. Almost at every level in K to 12, the vast, vast majority of students are in fact novice learners and our failure to treat them as such has been disastrous.
Ignoring brain development and cognitive learning theory in favor of pushing kids beyond their developmental capability has done far more harm than good. Just look at NGSS in CA and you’ll see how treating even the youngest students as if they are adult scientists falls flat on its face.
A back-to-basics movement is sorely needed, and the eventual return to normal from the pandemic chaos is a great opportunity to make it happen.
thanks for the reality check, Rage.
I have been following your blog for years and it dawned on me that I hadn’t received an email from your blog in weeks. I looked on your blog directly and saw that you have been posting items. I thought I might have accidentally unsubscribed so I tried to re-subscribe, but when I entered my email address, I received a message that said I was already subscribing. Have you heard from other readers that they have not been receiving a copy of your blogs in their emails?
James, WordPress frequently drops readers without their knowledge. This has happened many, many times. When I complain, they insist there is no problem. It happened to my brother, to the person I live with. When they tried to resubscribe, WP says they are already subscribed.