Making Teachers Less Like... Windows Vista?

I'll give Bill Gates credit for directing a huge amount of money, through his foundation, at education reform. And I very much appreciate his effort to try to determine what works instead of resorting to fads or politics. But when he writes,

The private high school I attended, Lakeside in Seattle, made a huge difference in my life. The teachers fueled my interests and encouraged me to read and learn as much as I could. Without those teachers I never would have gotten on the path of getting deeply engaged in math and software. . . .

How many kids don't get the same chance to achieve their full potential?

I know he's not proposing that public schools be brought up to the standard of his private high school, currently costing well over $25,000 per year in tuition and fees. But his findings in relation to the most successful public schools, supported by Gates Foundation grants, are interesting.

But a few of the schools that we funded achieved something amazing. They replaced schools with low expectations and low results with ones that have high expectations and high results. These schools are not selective in whom they admit, and they are overwhelmingly serving kids in poor areas, most of whose parents did not go to college. Almost all of these schools are charter schools that have significantly longer school days than other schools.

Gates observes, "We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school" - I suspect that plays a role in why charter schools were more likely to be successful. They have the opportunity to start fresh with administrators who were better positioned to try something new, and perhaps also much more interested in doing so.

Honestly, I've seen school administrators in public school systems enact policies that seem designed to stifle innovation, and make the extraordinary more ordinary, either because they don't understand alternative models to education or (in my cynical view) because it's more work. Also, while charter schools don't discriminate in who they admit, there's going to be some self-selection both in terms of the parents and kids who are willing to tolerate extra rules or requirements, or even to overcome the lethargy that keeps them in the default neighborhood school. They also get to recruit teachers whose philosophies align with their own.

Consistent with the Washington Posts editorial stance, Gates argues that this means we need more charter schools.

Many states have limits on charter schools, including giving them less funding than other schools. Educational innovation and overall improvement will go a lot faster if the charter school limits and funding rules are changed.

Yet let's be honest here. School funding levels are only part of the picture. I suspect it's a "donut hole" phenomenon, and schools like Lakeside or Sidwell Friends establish that extremely high funding can bring additional benefits to their students, but there's a basic level of funding beyond which additional dollars don't seem to have much impact on student performance. The fact that charter schools on the whole aren't outperforming, or are underperforming, public schools has less to do with funding and more to do with the fact that the people who set them up don't always share Gates' zeal for quality and performance, or don't have the requisite skill set to turn that interest into reality.

When the idea of charter schools was first raised, I found it very intriguing. I saw real potential for experimentation and improvement. But the reality is, building and running a school is hard work. The amount of institutional lethargy behind institutions of higher learning (particularly schools with large teaching colleges) was perhaps not surprising, but was disappointing - I haven't seen any real leadership from that direction. Some charter school entrepreneurs seemed (and seem) more interested in providing an alternative culture (e.g., charter schools that follow a particular religious model) than a better educational model. Some appear to be driven almost entirely by profit. There are true believers out there, but there don't seem to be as many as Bill Gates appears to believe.

Also, unless charter schools have equal responsibility - no indirect subsidy by letting their students use sports facilities or play on sports teams at nearby public schools, equal responsibility for special education students, etc. - they shouldn't get equal funding. I'm not arguing that some states or school districts don't underfund charter schools, as that appears to happen with some regularity, but mere inequality of funding does not of itself mean that charter schools aren't equitably funded.

Gates speaks of improving teachers:

One of the key things these schools have done is help their teachers be more effective in the classroom.

It's no surprise that the best schools, public and private, support their teachers and help them achieve, maintain and build on their classroom effectiveness.

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school.

I hate "research shows" lines tossed out like that, with no indication of what the research actually means. If you compare an AP math class to a remedial math class, you're going to see a huge difference in performance between the two classrooms. But for all we know, they may be taught by the same teacher. And if they're not, it's not an indictment of the teacher who's working to bring the unprepared kids up to speed, but results from the fact that they're in a classroom full of kids whose math skills were far below grade level from day one.

The teacher in the remedial classroom may in fact be the better teacher. The worst math teacher I ever had taught honors math at my high school - I was stuck in her class for 11th and 12th grades. Our class performed despite her, not because of her, yet we still significantly outperformed the school's other math classes on standardized tests.

Whenever I talk to teachers, it is clear that they want to be great, but they need better tools so they can measure their progress and keep improving.

So teachers are like Windows Vista, but want to be more like Windows 7? I joke, but I agree with this:

So our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up.

I just hope they also spend some time looking at administrators.

I applaud the notion of having 90-100% of high school students graduate ready to enter college. However, I think it's more important to our nation that we help a young potential Bill Gates graduate from a public high school, as ready as Bill himself was to... drop out of college and co-found a cutting edge tech company. These goals don't have to be mutually exclusive, but I don't see any way to pretend otherwise: with enough time, energy and resources you may be able to get 90% of the kids in any given high school ready for college, but unless you're assuming that the smartest and most capable will "take care of themselves", you can't afford to lose them in the shuffle as you focus on raising the common denominator.*
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* Thomas Friedman argues in favor of an open door policy, bringing in more entrepreneurial immigrants. I'm all for trying to attract students and innovators from around the world, to study and set up shop in the United States. No doubt, even if we forget the role of education, particularly sciences, maths, and other difficult disciplines not directly associated with Wall Street riches, and the importance of nurturing the next generation of leaders in scientific disciplines, other nations will not.

High Achieving Students

The Fordham Institute has published a report on High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind noting that in the NCLB era, although there have been advances for the lowest-achieving students, the interests of gifted students are being neglected.

Dare I say, they're stating the obvious?

Charles Murray On Elitism

Charles Murray seems to be describing himself in this editorial, as a reasonably intelligent person who has absolutely no grounding in being a good citizen.

A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children's talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized--it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is amount of education, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children.

But of course, the issue is not the amount of education. What would be shocking if this weren't Murray speaking is that he appears completely ignorant of the importance of early education in the maths and sciences to foster the skills of children gifted in those disciplines and to lay the foundation for their pursuing careers in those fields. Chasing the almighty dollar is part of the equation, certainly, but the lack of support for gifted education in public schools affects how many kids end up pursuing careers in the hard sciences.

Moreover, Murray apparently doesn't know that high school dropout rates for gifted kids are no lower than average. Now, Murray may delude himself that that's a good thing - pretending that Google will hire college (and perhaps high school) dropouts if they're smart enough - but the rest of us live in the real world. The price of ignoring the needs of gifted children goes beyond their picking the wrong major at college.

The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens.

What does this tell us about Murray and his peer group when he was in school? It suggests that they were very full of themselves, scornful of those less intelligent than they were, and perhaps oblivious to those more intelligent than they. The gifted kids I knew growing up, and my school system used a cutoff significantly above the 120 IQ Murray would apply, were very socially aware. Now, some of them may have had ideas for resolving social problems that would seem bizarre to most other people, but such is the result of high intelligence crossed with limited life experience.

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them.

Again, going back to my own experiences, a lot of the gifted kids I knew had the opposite problem - lots of self-doubt, low self-esteem, a feeling of social isolation. Granted, some were gregarious and confident. But this mass of smart narcissists that Murray imagines simply didn't exist. That's not to say that I didn't know some kids like Murray describes, and they probably did have IQ's in the 120+ range, but with few exceptions they weren't smart enough to qualify as "gifted" under the criteria applied by my school system.

It's funny to hear Murray talk of "elitism" as if it's a good thing, because he of course attributes failures of social policy in the post-Civil Rights era to "elite white guilt". That, apparently, is elitism leading to egalitarianism - which to Murray is bad. What Murray seems to be endorsing is elitism leading to self-aggrandizement. So what Murray wants from public schools is not a program of gifted education that will nurture young scientists, mathematicians, and writers, but more of a 19th century British public school model, ("public school" in that context refers to what we call "private schools"), apparently with a similar sense of entitlement to rule:

All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.

In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty.

Given the way Murray seems to describe his younger self and his narcissistic peers, it's hard to see what impact this proposed "civics for the smart" class would have had on them. On the other hand, when you read his clumsy thoughts, it's pretty easy to see how a more rigorous academic education may have helped him produce better analyses (although, sad as it may be, without the racist overtones and glaring errors, Murray's readership would probably decline). For example, here Murray speaks of trying to significantly improve the English language skills of a child of average intelligence:

It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Here, in describing gifted children, he again appears to be describing himself:

Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this."

Apparently Murray "knows" he isn't smart enough for complex math because he has never tried.

Coming from Murray, this is almost laughable:

The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.

And in his quest to impose rigorous civics training on smart kids such that they "know what it means to be good", he is happy to have the next generation follow his lead and skip difficult math and science classes that might also provide a "setting in which their feet can be held to the fire".

Educational Romanticism

Charles Murray recently wrote an essay describing "the age of educational romanticism":

Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement.

It's a simplistic definition, particularly in relation to the last point - what does it mean to have "huge room for improvement"? But fair enough, there are people who adhere to this type of thinking. Of course its far easier to find people who do not. For generations, allusions to gender roles aside, people have been nodding their heads to Atticus Finch's argument,

We know that all men are not created equal in the sense that some people would have us believe - some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they are born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies bake better cakes than others - some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.

So I'm not going to give Charles Murray any great credit for coming to a similar conclusion almost fifty years later.

Murray then explains how and why, in his view, "Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right", commenting first,

Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education.

I'll present my usual challenge: Name one. Oh, he might be able to do so after some thinking, but it's sheer fiction to present this as representative of education reformers on the political left. But I've met a lot of teachers in my life, and I can't think of one who held this view. Instead, I typically hear about the impact of a child's home environment and parental attitudes toward education and classroom discipline.

Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.

Is this fair, either? I mean, truly? The advocates of vouchers and privatization claim to be concerned about school quality and choice, but they have no interest in extending onto private schools the supposedly "objective measures" they impose on public schools (such as "No Child Left Behind") even when allowing those schools to accept public money. When they talk about education the conversation usually seems to focus on cost, not quality. Breaking the unions seems to be much more a priority than quality. And here I include many of the proponents of "No Child Left Behind", despite Murray's seeing it as the "apotheosis of educational romanticism".

We probably could find a small number of "purists" on both sides of the ideological divide, who truly fit Murray's definition, but it seems Murray defines his terms more to suit his argument than to reflect reality. I will grant Murray this much: If we take G.W. Bush's words at face value, he fits the definition.

Murray speaks of the "common experience of parents", in seeing their children display various cognitive strengths and weaknesses even in their early years, as part of his "case that educational romanticism is in fact out of touch with reality". Are we to assume, then, that proponents of educational romanticism aren't parents? That their experience is uncommon? Or is this yet another false construct - "Look how obvious this is, and why don't the group of people who I am ridiculing not see how obvious it is?" The question is not so much, "Isn't it obvious that children achieve at different levels, and have differing levels of aptitude", as it is, "Who really believes otherwise". Murray has a remarkable ability to introduce and defeat straw men. And moving along to his next one:

That brings us to an indispensable tenet of educational romanticism: The public schools are so bad that large gains in student performance are possible even within the constraints of intellectual ability. A large and unrefuted body of evidence says that this indispensable tenet is incorrect.

Again, who says this? What you might actually hear is that improved schools can improve school performance, and in specific cases an individual child may show significant gains in educational performance. A good argument can be made that improved schools could be of particular benefit to gifted students. But, save for the worst of the worst schools, I can't recall ever hearing it suggested that improving schools may result in large improvements in performance for most or all students.

Moving back to the importance of the home, Murray writes about the findings of sociologist James Coleman following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Before Coleman’s team set to work, everybody expected that the study would document a relationship between the quality of schools and the academic achievement of the students in those schools. To everyone’s shock, the Coleman Report instead found that the quality of schools explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement. Family background was by far the most important factor in determining student achievement.

I'm not going to try to dig up the history of the report, or of reaction to the report, but I suspect Murray's claim of what "everybody expected" is just so much hot air. And now Murray gets to the definition of what constitutes a "bad school".

In thinking about the explanation for this counter-intuitive result, it is important not to confuse your idea of a bad public school with the worst-of-the-worst inner-city schools that are the subject of horror stories. When schools are as bad as they are in the inner-city neighborhoods of Detroit, Washington, and a few other large cities, they certainly have a depressing effect on student achievement. Getting students out of those schools should be a top policy priority. But only a few percent of the nation’s students attend such schools. In what might be called a “normally bad” public school, a lot of the slack has been taken out of the room for improvement. The normally bad school maintains a reasonably orderly learning environment and offers a standard range of courses taught with standard textbooks. Most of the teachers aren’t terrible; they’re just mediocre.

We're apparently grading on a harsh curve: by this standard, a mediocre school is a "bad school". Murray agrees that student performance can be improved in the worst schools by fixing their shortcomings. And I tend to agree with him that when we're talking about schools at various levels of mediocrity, ratcheting a school up a notch or two on the quality scale won't have a profound affect on student performance.

To sum up, a massive body of evidence says that reading and mathematics achievement have strong ties to underlying intellectual ability, that we do not know how to change intellectual ability after children reach school, and that the quality of schooling within the normal range of schools does not have much effect on student achievement.

I suspect we weren't supposed to notice the sloppy construction of this conclusion, and how Murray has elided the problem of truly bad schools. He retreats to his recurring theory, that IQ is all-important and is predictive of intellectual ability "for large groups", that we don't know how to raise IQ's, so what's the point in improving schools?

Although the subjects merit some comment, I'm going to skip over Murray's discussion of educational fads and Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. I'll just say this much: Murray provides an interesting look at the origins of the "self-esteem" movement in school. He does not appear to be aware of the fact that high self-esteem in the sense he scorns ("having a favorable opinion of oneself, independently of objective justification for that favorable opinion") appears to be negatively correlated with academic performance, and lots of low-performing kids think very well of themselves.

Following that discussion, Murray gets back into the sort of analysis that created so much controversy (and probably a huge number of sales) for The Bell Curve.

The effects of the triumphant Civil Rights Movement gave a special reason for white elites in the 1960s to start ignoring the implications of intellectual limitations.

Whose limitations?

The Civil Rights Movement prior to 1964 created a change in the consciousness of white elites that was felt viscerally, and it included an embarrassing awareness of just how unremittingly whites had violated every American ideal when it came to blacks.

Murray's still tiptoeing around the issue, but can you really doubt that he's reiterating his belief that African Americans are intellectually inferior?

Elite white guilt explains much about all kinds of social policy from the last half of the 1960s onward, but especially about education. Until the 1960s, white educators and politicians could look at a class of white children in which a number of students were doing poorly and shrug. The schools try to teach everyone, but some kids can’t handle the material. That’s just the way the things are; it is not a problem that can be fixed. But when the class consisted of black students who were doing poorly, that reaction was not acceptable. These were children growing up in a society where all the odds had been stacked against them, and their failings couldn’t be passed off as “just the way things are.” Elite white guilt made it impossible to say that a lot of black children were going to continue to fail in school and there’s nothing anybody could do about it. Once it could not be said of black children, neither could it be said of white children. In that context, educational romanticism did not just become fashionable during the 1960s. It became emotionally mandatory.

Wait a minute. After the Civil Rights Act was passed, looking at the big picture, the African American story is a success story. By what measure is that the product of "white guilt" as opposed to the fruit of extending better social and educational opportunities to African Americans? And by what measure are African Americans disproportionately enrolled in the worst schools in the nation, something Murray admits impedes student performance?

But that's "little stuff". Murray betrays something here - the fact that he knows essentially nothing about education, and has paid virtually no attention to changes in society between the 1950's and 2008. In the 1950's it was much less of a concern if a student "only" got a high school diploma. The student could reasonably expect to get a job and support a middle class lifestyle on the basis of that diploma. That is no longer true. The reason people are much more concerned about academic performance across the board is that the threshold for entering into the workforce at a middle class wage is enormously higher. This isn't "white guilt" - it's self-interest. People want their kids to do well in school, because they know that education has become the best path to the middle class.

Murray presents a cutesy comparison of "No Child Left Behind" to Soviet economic policy, but actually what he's proposing is a lot closer to Soviet or communist-style educational policy than the worst of G.W.'s reforms: test kids, sort kids by the test results, channel them into vocations or college based upon test results, and pick their future careers for them.

Toward the end of the piece, Murray makes an interesting concession - that "hardly anybody really believes in educational romanticism even now". The "then", when people believed in Murray's construct would have been... when, again?

No one but the most starry-eyed denies in private the reality of differences in intellectual ability that we are powerless to change with K-12 education. People are unwilling to talk about those differences in public, but it is a classic emperor’s-clothes scenario waiting for someone to point out the obvious. Starting that process can be as simple as more articles like this one.

Does blogging count as "in public"? I don't have to look very far to find arguments about the need for, and neglect of, education for gifted students. I openly argue that public schools cater to the lowest common denominator, and that we owe smart kids a lot better than that.

Murray concludes,

For the good of our children, educational romanticism needs to collapse, and quickly. Its effects play out in the lives of young people in devastating ways. The fourth-grader who has trouble sounding out simple words and his classmate who is reading A Tale of Two Cities for fun sit in the same classroom day after miserable day, the one so frustrated by tasks he cannot do and the other so bored that both are near tears. The eighth-grader who cannot make sense of algebra but has an almost mystical knack with machines is told to stick with the college prep track, because to be a success in life he must go to college and get a B.A. The senior with terrific SAT scores gets away with turning in rubbish on his term papers because to make special demands on the gifted would be elitist. They are all products of an educational system that cannot make itself talk openly about the implications of diverse educational limits.

For that fourth grade class, the kid who can't read is probably getting substantial academic support, testing for learning disabilities, and perhaps even one-on-one assistance. The gifted kid? Gets to be bored. I don't know what that has to do with "educational romanticism" - I doubt that there's a person in the world who would see those two kids as having equal aptitude for reading. It has more to do with social promotion, and concern that the weak reader might become totally discouraged if he's kept in first or second grade until his reading skills reach grade level. Murray, of course, offers no solution. Take the poor reader out of the class and the gifted kid is still bored.

The eighth grader? Does Murray not recognize that a kid who has a "mystical knack with machines" might in fact benefit enormously from having a college degree? That in fact it might be a requirement for many jobs he would find enormously rewarding? Murray seems to again be taking us back to the 1950's, where the kid could take "auto shop" classes in high school, graduate, and get a middle class job as an auto mechanic or on an assembly line. Realistically, what job would the kid get now based upon a (presumed) high school diploma? A factory job at $10 - 15/hour? Where, to put it mildly, his abilities are neither challenged nor appreciated?

Here, Murray seems to be displaying the same sort of contemptuousness for manual labor that he projects onto others in relation to intellectual capacity. He seems to believe that the manual trades are something that "anybody can do" and "anybody can succeed in". He also seems to believe that math and computers aren't invading the manual trades, just as they are with every other workspace, such that more advanced skills are needed even for many entry level workers. He seems to believe that a manual trade is a good trade, for now and forever, and is apparently completely blind to the layoffs and downsizings that are leaving many people once able to support a middle class lifestyle struggling to find work at even half of their former wage.

The last example is just plain silly. It's also contrary to his entire thesis, that academic performance is tied to innate ability and cannot be significantly improved. If in fact schools are full of slouching seniors, it really shouldn't take much cracking of the whip to attain significant improvements in pretty much any school.

"Labels Aren't What Kids Need"

A week ago the Washington Post ran a peculiar editorial about education written by Patrick Welsh, a high school teacher, complaining that gifted kids have it too good. Really. Describing a fifth grader who isn't sufficiently challenged at school, the author writes,

"It's an ongoing comedy trying to get the school to challenge him," she says. "The school keeps saying, 'Don't worry. Your child's needs will be met.' Then his teacher says she can't give him challenging work because 'We were told not to assign above-grade-level work to anyone who isn't labeled TAG.' "

That's TAG as in Talented and Gifted. And who is and who isn't - or at least who's designated such and who isn't - has been one of the most contentious issues in Alexandria since the school system raised the bar for the TAG program two years ago. The new rules have cut out about two-thirds of the students who once qualified: At George Mason, the size of the fourth-grade program went from 17 to six last year.

Which means that a substantial number of students will now be relegated to the "regular" curriculum, where the emphasis is on ensuring that lower-income children who lag far behind in basic skills will pass the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) exams. In Alexandria, the first group is mostly white, the second mostly black and Hispanic. Some white parents at George Mason are now demanding a special class, between regular and gifted, for the "nearly gifted" -- as they call the children who missed the TAG cut.

The problem appears to be that in its zeal to "bring up the bottom" (can you say "No Child Left Behind"?), Alexandria slashed its "Talented and Gifted" program and implemented an absurd, dare I say brain-dead policy that children who aren't "Talented and Gifted" should never work above "grade level". Is the solution to this, as some parents have suggested, offering enriched education for the near-gifted? Welsh answers, certainly not....

But of all the labels that we so-called educators give students, none seems more absurd -- and few more destructive. When we apply this tag to a tiny group of children in third, fourth or fifth grade, we are in effect saying that the rest are ungifted and untalented. We're denigrating hard work and perseverance, telling children that no matter how much effort they put forth, they just can't measure up to their special peers.

Just as bad, we're telling those on whom we deign to bestow the coveted label that they have it made; we're giving them an overblown sense of their intellectual abilities and setting them up to fall short when they face real challenges later.

So the solution is to throw gifted kids back into the same classes and programs as everybody else, where they too can enjoy the privilege of being denied permission to work above grade level?

What schools need to do is not to single out a small group as special, but push all kids to work to their fullest potential.

Which in reality means boring TAG kids out of their skulls so as to minimize the likelihood that they will reach their potential. Nice.

Welsh, though, is happy to substitute his own labels for "talented" or "gifted":

For a fairly bright child, the SOL exams aren't much more than a minimum-competency test. To allay parental anxieties, Superintendent Rebecca Perry has said that the students at the top of the regular classes - i.e., the white kids who didn't get into TAG - will help to "challenge, mentor and coach" the students struggling with the SOL material.

I see. We'll save children from the "stigma" of being told that they aren't "Talented and Gifted" by instead telling them that they aren't very bright, and need to be led by their bright and even their "fairly bright" peers. (To his credit, though, the author does see the Superintendent's cop-out as just that, describing a parent's reaction, "What else could these students be doing instead of reviewing material they already understand as they challenge, coach and mentor their classmates?")

Alexandria's school administrators are caught in a political and moral trap. They have to assure mostly white middle-class parents, who provide most of the tax dollars for the schools, that their children can progress academically without being held back by lower-income kids. At the same time, the school system cannot create exclusive schools-within-schools for upper-income students.

Beyond the question of why "gifted" is an elitist, destructive label and "bright" is not, for an author who doesn't like to label kids, we sure are seeing a lot of socio-economic and racial labeling in this piece. Once you accept that kids can be classified as "bright", "fairly bright" and implicitly "not so bright", you've given up any ground that you once had for attacking the "TAG" label. What you're left with is the objection that "TAG" kids are disproportionately white, a recurrent theme in this editorial.

Research shows that KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools are the most successful in the country at closing the gap between low-income black students and middle-class white students. But the philosophy of these schools is geared to the needs of poor children. The schools operate on the belief that to close the learning gap, children from poor homes need an education that's not just equal, but superior, to that of middle-class whites.

No "school within a school" for "upper-income" and "white middle-class" kids, but maybe separate, superior schools for "low-income black students"? But no labeling.

The funny thing is, I don't think Welsh recognizes the contradiction in his editorial. He truly seems to believe that if you don't tell a child, "You're 'Talented and Gifted'", the child won't figure out that he's (to use Welsh's word) bright. It doesn't seem to occur to him that even the "fairly bright" kids who yearn to work above grade level are implicitly able to see that (in some or all subjects) they are academically ahead of their peers. And Welsh believes that if you tell kids that they're "talented and gifted" you will destroy their motivation to learn, citing a single 1998 study to support his thesis.

Dweck conducted an experiment in which she gave two evenly matched groups of elementary school kids the same nonverbal IQ test. When one group of children did well, they were told that they must have worked very hard to get their results. The students in the other group, meanwhile, were told that they must be very smart to have done so well.

Dweck found that as time went on, the kids who were told that they were smart "fell apart when they hit a challenge. They lost confidence in their abilities. Their motivation dwindled and their performance on the next IQ test dropped." By contrast, the children in the group praised for working hard tended to seek out challenges and persist at difficult tasks and ultimately learned more.

The primary lesson to be drawn there would seem to be, "Don't lie to kids about their abilities, and don't mislead them about the work they must do to succeed." There is, of course, no evidence provided that this holds true of the Alexandria "TAG" program, save for one anecdote:

I've seen Dweck's theory proved time and again in my AP English classes. When an Asian student who has spoken English for only four or five years gets an A on a test and an American kid labeled gifted gets a D, the American will often do one of two things: denigrate the Asian's grade because it was achieved through hard work, or bring in his mother to argue that the test was unfair and that I should change his grade because I "know how smart he is."

Funny... I went to high school with a lot of kids who had been labeled "gifted and talented" and, even when they hit a class in which they struggled, didn't once see that happen. (I grant that there have since been some changes in how students and parents approach schoolwork and teachers, but those are hardly unique to smart kids.) Welsh is missing the most obvious explanation - the kid didn't need to be told he was smart, because he was able to coast through school and get A's without ever working. The "D" comes as a surprise because, lo and behold, he thought the AP class was going to be "more of the same". It's the consequence of never challenging a smart student, not a consequence of his being able to figure out that he's smart.

A counter-example? The author of the cited study had a sixth grade teacher who seated her class in order of IQ, highest to lowest, and overtly discriminated in favor of the higher IQ kids. (Really... some things you can't make up.) Yet she somehow managed to survive being told she was smart, and even managed to get a Ph.D. Go figure. The teacher's tactics left the smarter kids "scared of taking another test and not being at the top anymore," which explains why Ms. Dweck is so interested in this subject, but cuts agains the thesis that if you're told you're smart you become a slacker.

Welsh also cites to a student who didn't like being conspicuously pulled out of class to participate in the TAG program, and felt "set apart from other kids". There's a surprise - after all, it's so rewarding in public school to be known as "the smart kid". That's a problem of implementation, but also one that inevitably results from growing up smart in a society that doesn't much value intelligence. If Welsh has his eyes open he will have seen, time and time again, smart kids who intentionally blow tests in at least one class so that they don't suffer the stigma of... having "straight A's". Welsh's other student voice?

Shep Walker, a T.C. graduate about to enter the College of William and Mary, says the problem is that "gifted-and-talented programs get filled with white kids who have pushy parents, leaving a lot of black and Hispanic kids out in the cold and creating de facto segregation in the classes."

It's like Thomas Friedman interviewing a taxi driver - somehow Walsh managed to find a student to quote, whose views miraculously mirror his own.

Welsh has a "solution" to all of this:

But the solution isn't to mark fewer students as gifted and talented. It's to challenge all our kids, all the time.

Right. Except for the smart ones.

At least Welsh makes sense when he attacks the absurdity of Virginia's approach to its SOLs (cute name?), its standardized "Standards of Learning" tests.

When Priscilla Goodwin complained that her third-grader was bored, the principal of George Mason told her that the mandate from the central office was to get all students to pass the SOL exams. "Principals are running scared," Goodwin says. "Their reputations and promotions depend on the SOLs; they think that as long as bright kids pass these simple tests, they're doing fine. They're giving kids worksheets on facts that most children already know because they go at the pace of the slowest kid in the room. TAG or regular classes, kids aren't being challenged."

It seems that everybody in the system is SOL.

Hot Off The Presses - No Child Left Behind Isn't Good For Smart Kids!

The Washington Post, or at least a guest columnist, has finally noticed. It's been more than three years since it was observed that NCLB was resulting in the defunding of programs for gifted students, and more than two years since I stated the obvious:

... when we make No Child Left Behind the mantra of our national drive toward academic mediocrity, we consistently ignore, underfund, and underutilize initiatives that might let the best students get ahead.

so I am impressed by how fast the Post was to pick up on this story.... Is it in fairness to the Washington Post that they observed almost three years ago that it was not the children most in need of services who were transferring out of "failing" schools, or is that in fact indicting them for failing to notice the implicit effect of NCLB on smart kids?

In any event....

These parents are fleeing public schools not only because, as documented by a recent University of Chicago study, the act pushes teachers to ignore high-ability students through its exclusive focus on bringing students to minimum proficiency. Worse than this benign neglect, No Child forces a fundamental educational approach so inappropriate for high-ability students that it destroys their interest in learning, as school becomes an endless chain of basic lessons aimed at low-performing students.

These predictable problems were reported as early as 2003, when the Wall Street Journal warned that schools were shifting their focus overwhelmingly toward low achievers. Expressions of concern from distressed parents and educators of gifted children have come in increasing numbers ever since.

And I again congratulate the Post for being so quick to get on top of this story.

The column also notes one of the absurdities of vouchers:

Ironically, the private schools to which President Bush and his allies are so anxious to hand public funds are also exempt from the standardized testing these politicians declare to be the critical measure of educational success. Private schools need not impose upon their students the drudgery of preparing for and taking weeks of standardized tests and can offer an enriching curriculum beyond the basics without worrying about No Child sanctions. Given these one-sided constraints, no one could honestly claim that vouchers do anything but drain resources from the public schools this act was supposed to improve.

Cynics, of course, argue that this is part of a larger scheme to undermine and defund public education. I might be convinced to extend NCLB standards to any school which accepted vouchers... except first I would want NCLB's standards to be reformed such that they did not reward "teaching to the test", or have absurd definitions of a "failing school" such that high quality schools can be deemed "failing" because their average test scores aren't improving at an acceptable rate.

No doubt the Bush Administration, which seems to favor benchmarks for everything except it's own political and military actions, would complain that such reforms would undermine NCLB's benchmarks and thus remove accountability.

No Child Left Behind

When I hear columnists wringing their hands over Bill Gates' criticisms of American high school education, or lamenting that Bill Gates finds himself unable to hire high school graduates (as if that was his point), I hardly know what to say. The punditry's love of "No Child Left Behind", a "reform" which probably sets back what I would estimate to be Gates' vision of what U.S. public schools should achieve, seems inconsistent with its acceptance of Bill Gates' critique. That is, if you seriously want high schools to be able to produce graduates that Bill Gates would immediately hire into Microsoft, you shouldn't be standing behind a bill which aims instead to promote a culture of uniform mediocrity.

I am reminded of Harper Lee's narrative, as presented by Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbord:

One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious - because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe - some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others - some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of men.

Bill Gates, for all of his quirkiness (what do they say, again, about genius and madness), falls into that last category of person. And I can't help but believe that he wants our schools to identify and foster genius. He seems to want high schools which prepare kids for college, as opposed to preparing them for college remedial programs. And he probably does feel that there are kids like him in our nation's high schools who need to be identified and fostered, such that we can hear of a few six and seven figure salaries given to high school graduates for reasons other than their ability to consistently place a round ball through a small hoop suspended above their heads.

So when our nation's educators literally spend weeks testing even a single special education student, so severely mentally disabled that his regular classroom focus is on learning to feed himself or sit up properly, while the gifted continue to be told to fend for themselves - their test scores are plenty high already, thankyouverymuch - no matter how staunch an advocate you are for the rights of the disabled, can you regard that as a wise use of time, money, and resources?

No Child Gets Ahead?

NewsHour questions whether the "No Child Left Behind Act" is resulting in a nationwide trend to defund programs for gifted education. (Programs that are typically woefully underfunded to begin with.)