Trying to drive home for Thanksgiving but this.

Although it clocks in at 40+ pages, this is a worthwhile and relatively fast read for anyone in education policy on the future of assessment if we’re serious about college and career readiness. There is a ton to unpack, with a fair amount it agree with and a lot I am quite a bit less sure on.

I think this paper is meant for national and state level policy-makers, and so my major quibble is I think this is much more valuable for a district-level audience. I am less bullish on the state’s role in building comprehensive assessment systems. That’s just my initial reaction.

The accountability section is both less rich and less convincing than the assessment portion. I have long heard cries for so-called reciprocal accountability, but it is still entirely unclear to me what this means and looks like and the implications for current systems.

“We are trying to work towards late-exit ELL programs so (students) can learn the concepts in (their) native language,” Lusi said. Administrative goals have recently shifted to a focus on proficiency in both languages because bilingual education is preferred, she added.

But instituting district-wide bilingual education would require funding to hire teachers certified in both languages and to buy dual-language materials, she said.

I am pretty sure this is new. I am surprised there has not been a stronger effort to pass a legislative package in Rhode Island that provides both the policy framework and funding necessary to achieve universal bilinguage education for English language learners in RI schools.

One of the great advantages of transitioning to common standards¹ is there should be greater availability of curricular materials in languages other than English. I suspect most of what is needed for bilingual education is start up money for materials, curriculum supports and developments, and assessment materials. There are a few policy things that need to be in place, possibly around state exams, but also rules around flexible teacher assignment, hiring, and dismissal staffing needs dramatically change.

Someone should be putting this package together. I suspect there would be broad support.

De Blasio and his advisers are still figuring out how much rent to charge well-funded charter schools, his transition team told me. “It would depend on the resources of the charter school or charter network,” he told WNYC, in early October. “Some are clearly very, very well resourced and have incredible wealthy backers. Others don’t. So my simple point was that programs that can afford to pay rent should be paying rent.” (In an October debate with the Republican candidate Joseph Lhota, he put it more bluntly: “I simply wouldn’t favor charters the way Mayor Bloomberg did because, in the end, our city rises or falls on our traditional public schools.”)

My impression of DeBlasio was that he went around collecting every plausible complaint from every interest group that was mad at Bloomberg and promised whatever they wanted. There didn’t really seem to be a coherent theory or any depth whatsoever to his policy prescriptions.

Already working hard to confirm this impression.

To recap, the first study discussed above established that children from disadvantaged backgrounds know less about a topic (i.e., birds) than their middle-class peers. Next, in study two, the researchers showed that differences in domain knowledge influenced children’s ability to understand words out of context, and to comprehend a story. Moreover, poor kids — who also had more limited knowledge — perform worse on these tasks than did their middle class peers. But could additional knowledge be used to level the playing field for children from less affluent backgrounds?

In study three, the researchers held the children’s prior knowledge constant by introducing a fictitious topic — i.e., a topic that was sure to be unknown to both groups. When the two groups of children were assessed on word learning and comprehension related to this new domain, the researchers found no significant differences in how poor and middle-class children learned words, comprehended a story or made inferences.

One of the “old” divides in education, from before the current crop of “edreform”, is whether or not content matters. Broadly, there are two camps, let’s call them the “Facts” and “Skills”, with the “Skills” camp clearly ahead in terms of mind share.

“Skills” is based on a fundamentally intuitive insight– students need to know how to do things not about the things themselves. In many ways it is built on our common experience of forgetting facts over time. We need 21st century skills, not an accumulation of specific, privileged knowledge that fades over time. Whatever the latest technology, from encyclopedias to calculators through to Google, each generation decides that the tools that adults use end the necessity of knowing about things rather than knowing how to find things.

This is very attractive. It seems to match our adult experiences accumulating knowledge and using it in our work. It seems to address students' boredom with learning irrelevant information. It leaves space for groups to advocate for teaching whatever content they want since everyone can argue that content is fundamentally limited in value.

In classic turns out sense, however, the evidence keeps mounting that one must teach from the “Facts” approach to achieve the goals of the “Skills” position.

Turns out: skills and knowledge do not transfer well across domains. There is little evidence that learning how to read literary fiction translates to reading technical manuals with comprehension. In other words, critical thinking is not really an independent ability free of domain context ¹. In fact, experts are able to learn more quickly, but only in their domain and only when they have prior knowledge to use as scaffolding ².

Turns out: reading comprehension is strongly connected to whether or not students have prior knowledge (“Facts”) about the topic of the passage ³. Reading techniques only provide modest assistance for comprehension.

Turns out: privileging skills over content may have a serious differential impact on disadvantaged children. A well-intentioned goal of achieving equity through equality has led many to advocate that we do a disservice to children of color and children in poverty because their schools have not as completely embraced a “Skills” world and are too focused on “Facts”. The problem is that deep disparities we see when these students enter schooling point to having less prior knowledge than their peers ⁴.

What is remarkable, and tragic, is that the “Skills” camp has maintained its dominance through the demonization of “Facts”, with dramatic misinterpretations like:

1. The “Facts” folks are just White colonialists seeking to maintain existing power structures through teaching the information of privilege.
2. The “Facts” folks privilege memorization, rote learning, and recall-based assessment over other pedagogy that is more engaging and authentic.
3. The “Facts” folks can only ever teach what was important yesterday; “Skills” camp can teach what matters to become a lifelong learner for tomorrow’s world.

None of these are true.

This post is largely brought to you by: E.D. Hirsch, Dan T. Willingham, and Malcolm Gladwell via Merlin Mann.

1. More schooling, reoriented calendar
2. Wider range of higher education
3. Cheaper four-year degrees
4. Eliminate property tax-based public education

This is an interesting list. I don’t agree with number four. There are several benefits to using property taxes not the least of which is their stability and lagged response during traditional economic downturns. However, there are many things we should do to reform our revenue system for education. I am keen on more taxes on “property”, using land value taxes that are levvied either statewide or regionally to address some of the inequities traditional, highly localized property taxes can lead to.

If I had to point to the key fissure in the education policy and research community it would be around poverty. Some seem to view it as an inexorable obstacle, deeply believing that the key improvement strategy is to decrease inequity of inputs. Some seem to view it as an obstacle that can be overcome by systems functioning at peak efficacy, deeply believing the great challenge is achieving that efficacy sustainably at scale. Both positions seem to grossly simplify causes and suggest policy structures and outcomes that are unachievable.

Paraphrasing Merlin Mann, always be skeptical of “turns out” research. In this case, are the results really that surprising? If they are, I might suggest that you have been focusing too much on the partial equilibrium impact of poverty and ignoring the bigger picture.

Not that I think integration is likely, easy, quick, or magically fixes things.

Oops. I should probably tell Elsa.

It’s always clear when bed time is.

#everyevening

#everymorning

Waking up to the sun over desert mountains is my favorite. iPhone 5s just can’t capture this right.

Also the ring-bearer.

Super groom and groomsmen.

Bride and groom

Elsa looking lovely

My favorite.

Katie

Brothers of the groom

Phil

Elsa and I