When I was in grad school, I took a class on addressing the needs of English Language Learners (ELL). We learned that if kids get instruction in their native language while transitioning into English, they don’t fall behind in academics. Then came the immersion movement, with the argument that students would learn English faster if they sat in English-only classrooms all day. That sounded so EASY! And it resonated with American rough-and-ready attitude. “Let ‘em sink or swim like my ancestors did.”

So, after years of all this, Seattle schools just got a report slamming the quality of support for ELL kids. And what do they recommend? More instruction in students’ native languages.

That’s expensive, perhaps prohibitively so in districts with a hundred or more native languages. Still it makes so much sense.

Think about reading, for example. For English speakers, reading provides automatic feedback: if you’re doing it right, the text makes sense. For ELL kids, no feedback. It’s all gibberish. You can imagine it would take a long time to learn to read. You might be hopelessly behind your peers, and you didn’t understand any of the math instruction either.

While we figure out how to provide real native language instruction, there ought to be native language support we could offer right now at lower cost. The problem seems easier to address for kids old enough to have learned to read in their native language. To start, can’t we issue native language textbooks where they exist, so that upper-grade students can check their understanding in their own language? How about technology - could we have centralized native-language homework help offered via school computer labs after school or by phone? I’d be interested to know what school systems already do along these lines.

Jay Mathews joins the crowd of people making this argument: Those who try to close the gap do it by dumbing down the curriculum, and the high achievers  - or all kids - lose out. Better to try to help each child grow every year, and not worry about helping those who start out behind catch up. In short, achievement gap goals and high achievement gap goals are at odds.

This argument makes me crazy. It is founded on the premise that the only achievement that matters is reading and math test scores. We measure the kindergarten readiness gap in terms of math and (especially) reading. And it’s true that well-off kids often (but not always) come in with reading measures years ahead of low-income and just-not-ready kids.

But what if we lose the emphasis on early reading and math achievement, and instead emphasize knowledge, science, vocabulary, motor development, and literature. You’d simultaneously raise the level of the curriculum far beyond what it is today, and shrink the achievement gap by giving kids who don’t know how to read time to grow up or catch up.

That wouldn’t solve the whole gap problems. But early division of kids by reading and math skills  is a policy that increases the gap, because the rich get richer and the poor get phonics.

Hooray for Steven A. Farber, the director of BioEYES. The New York Times published a conversation with him about his organization. BioEYES brings zebra fish to inner-city schools to help kids study genetics. This sounds so cool - the kids study live zebra fish, which produce transparent embryos. The kids can actually watch the fish develop.

At the end of the piece, the reporter asks a good question - does this week-long project really make a difference? Farber answers it’s a start and that he hopes it will inspire kids to become scientists.

I hope so too. Schools can up the odds by embedding the zebra fish unit in a long stream of science and a long tradition of intellectual curiosity in the classroom. Unhappily, neither is common in most classrooms.

Here’s the BioEYES curriculum (4th grade unit)

http://www.jefferson.edu/bioeyes/pdf/BIOEYES-microguide.pdf

After all these years of NCLB, it’s you’ll understand if I’ve come to equate “accountability” with “punitive authoritarian soul-sucking.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and oddly, New York City (which has done plenty of punitive authoritarian soul sucking) has some surprising cutting-edge practices that show what accountability could look like.

I found this out looking up the New York Harbor School, a public high school that uses hands-on learning at the New York Harbor as a unifying instructional theme. The school was recently profiled in the New York Times. Kids get to go on sailing excursions, build boats, and do lots of water testing and other environmental science.

Well, that sounds pretty good, I thought, but are the kids getting enough of a general education to be prepared for college? What’s it like to go there? Is the instruction focused and content-rich?

It turns out the district Office of Accountability has quite a lot of information for me on the web. Most interesting to me was the Quality Review Report.

In this report, live human reviewers go to each school, and actually observe and talk to people there. That’s exciting to me, because it’s always seemed to me that all the test score data and survey data is a muddy way of expressing what you can tell within 5 minutes of walking into a school. But these people clearly spend more than 5 minutes, and they have a format for covering various aspects of instruction and school management.

If I were thinking about sending my child to the Harbor School, I think this report would be extremely helpful. Not only that, it’s possible that it was also helpful to the school staff.

As eduwonk wisely points out, making everything a priority is the same as making nothing a priority.

So, after a new report showed less growth for high-achieving students than low-achieving students during the NCLB era, the calls for more “ability grouping” are ringing from the rafters. Grouping, so the thinking goes, will save our GT kids from the blandness of NCLB-era instruction.

As if that’s the only solution.

Everyone needs a straw man, and for those who like ability grouping, the straw man is “differentiation.” That means that teachers attempt to teach multiple levels in one classroom by giving them different things to do, again based on perceived ability. Teachers complain that differentiation is hard to do. Well, it sounds hard to me too - preparing multiple lessons every day, and then juggling small groups like a mad circus clown.

Back to eduwonk’s piece. Eduwonk says our choice is between groups of students - focus on the high achievers or the low?

Well, the problem with that line of thinking is that it betrays a theory of teaching and learning that says you can’t learn anything interesting until you complete years of dull skill work.

But evidence indicates that all students accomplish more in an enriched environment than in an impoverished one - whether we’re talking about school or home. So what if we gave up on the idea of accounting for each speck of learning in each student, and instead held schools accountable for the richness of learning environment they cultivate?

The idea is, kids can’t learn what isn’t offered. So instead of passing out basic skills like so many miserly crumbs (and then testing to make sure each child has consumed his or her crumb), why not offer banquets, and accept that different kids will consume different food at different times, but everyone will be well fed.

That means one big, content-packed, thought-provoking, hands-on lesson for teachers to teach at a time. One class full of kids contributing many different talents and skills. A teacher who has time to push, guide, and challenge each kid, because no one is bored.

There is a choice and you can’t have it both ways. But the choice isn’t between children who achieve differently. It’s between learning-as-crumb and learning-as-banquet.

Guess what - I was quoted in the Washington Post last week in an article on math acceleration in our county (I’m on page 2).

According to the article, a few schools in our county have achieved something pretty amazing - no upper grade students are taking grade-level math. All the 5th graders at Potomac Elementary are taking either 6th or 7th grade math.

Oh, the trials of life in upper-class suburbia. The kids are too smart! How did we get into this mess?

There’s no evidence that, at this level, the curriculum has been “dumbed down,” compared with earlier generations. And though teaching has certainly improved over the years, achievement nationwide has been essentially flat. Nope, it’s pretty clear that the religion of “high expectations” and corresponding test score mania is driving this.

So the question everyone asks is, “what’s wrong with that?” Isn’t it good to expect more of kids? Shouldn’t we push them as hard as possible, as high as possible, as fast as possible?

To which I say, “Sure - if you want a nation of neurotic kids with poor self-image who hate math and don’t know anything about anything else.”

According to many parents I talk with, we are making some kids crazy, expecting very grown up things of them in the name of pumping up their achievement. As the article noted, the only way we have of teaching more, faster, is to dump young kids into curriculum written for older kids - older kids who’ve had time to learn to read better, develop greater general knowledge, and gain developmental maturity necessary to understand abstractions and handle higher homework loads. Lack of age-appropriateness makes a lot of kids see math class as unpleasant and math itself as difficult.

Suppose it’s true that we’ve improved math curriculum and teaching so much that most kids are bored spending an hour a day on grade-level curriculum. Then there are at least two responses. Response #1 is what we’re doing - spend an hour or more each day on more and more advanced curriculum.

BUT that’s not the only possible response. What if we did this:

Cut back on math instruction to a half-hour, or an hour 3 x per week, and go at a pace that will get kids to algebra by 8th grade. HERESY???? Well, isn’t everyone complaining about narrowing curriculum? What if we spent that extra time on real world math applications with additional curriculum content - building scale-size log cabins to learn about history, taking and analyzing data in science - you get the idea.

Wouldn’t school be a lot more, well, educational? Wouldn’t the kids love school more?

Wouldn’t kids, when they finally get to algebra-geometry-calculus, feel old enough to get down to real abstraction with gusto instead of fear?

We have to get over the idea that “high expectations” only applies to math - the more abstract the better. We should have high expectations that our kids have broad and deep general knowledge and the know-how to put that knowledge to work.

I’ve been on hiatus for a bit, but I’m eager to start writing again. Check back in the next couple of days.

Grist magazine has an interview with Richard Louv about why kids don’t play outside. He reports this telling incident:

I went with some gang members up to a nature preserve in the mountains near San Diego. These were really tough guys in their late teens, early 20s. They were with the Urban Corps and had been brought up to cut trails. The first morning in the woods, I realized these guys were terrified. People in these kinds of programs often report that phenomenon. One guy said, “It’s too noisy out here.” I said, “What are you talking about? You’re from a neighborhood where you hear gunfire in the background.” He says, “Yeah, but there’s about four or five sounds in my neighborhood and I know what they all mean. There are a lot of sounds out here and they seem to mean something, but I don’t know what it is.”

This fear of the outdoors goes far beyond urban neighborhoods. What’s your reaction to the newish forest kindergartens, where children spend their entire morning outdoors, regardless of the weather? Perhaps that it can’t be healthy for 5-year-olds to be out in rainy 40-degree weather for hours on end?

Well, the research on these places indicates that these kids are actually healthier and happier than their classroom-bound counterparts.

Although the idea isn’t for everyone, its success does add to mounting evidence that we’re excessively sheltering our tough little kids from outdoor experience. Because of fear.

Its not as if we’ve found a safe alternative in organized sports. According to Louv, doctors report that broken bone injuries are down of late, but repetitive motion injuries are way up. And, as Louv points out, a host of other childhood maladies have skyrocketed as outdoor time has plunged.

So, while we’re contemplating cancellation of recess, mandatory summer school, and higher test scores, let’s not forget this most basic of educational imperatives: every child needs first to be at home with his or her place as an organism on Earth. At stake is everything from individual health and happiness to the very future of the planet.

Louv’s story of the urban tough guys ends happily:

Watching these young guys was wonderful — as the day went on, the cynicism left their eyes and the flat affect fell from their faces. By the end of the day, these were 8-year-olds jumping over a creek. The people who work in these programs see that little miracle all the time. No kid in America or anywhere else should go without that miracle.

Amen.

Here’s one of those loaded fake-poll questions for you: Would you support renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act if you knew high schools avoided sanctions through dirty tricks on students that pushed them to drop out?

While poverty surely accounts for a lot of the America’s high dropout rate (at least 30%, though many estimates are much higher), NCLB sanctions surely bear some of the blame. Research shows that high school principals systematically held back low-performing 9th graders to keep them out of the 10th and 12th grade statistics. Schools looked better, but the improvements were entirely an illusion. In some schools, kids who failed a single quarter of a single course in 9th grade were forced to repeat the grade. Many dropped out rather than do that.

That’s according to a January 2008 study, Avoidable Losses: High Stakes Accountability and the Dropout Crisis.

The study looked at dropout rates in Texas during the first years of high stakes testing there 1995-2002. In addition to tracking 271,000 students through the system, the study included years of in-school observation and interviews with 122 students, plus 38 administrators and teachers in 7 different schools. What they learned is at once shocking and yet predictable, given the sanctions under which schools operate these days.

The study reports that high school principles faced with termination over test scores passed along a loophole through their network: they could apply for a waiver that allowed them to institute impossibly-strict requirements that retained low-performing students in 9th grade, where the students wouldn’t be counted in either test scores or drop-out rates.  One administrator explains:

All the schools had it. In fact, we were one of the last schools to accept the waiver [allowing them to retain more 9th graders] because philosophically we thought [to do so] would be cheating. But Fine Oak High School is… the other high school in our [area]. We were always having our noses rubbed in the fact that our scores were not as good as Fine Oak. Fine Oak wasn’t testing everybody, but we were testing everybody, we felt we had no choice but to move to that waiver in order to save face and get our scores up.

Principals came and went in that school, and they all said they hated doing the waver but felt they could not possibly bring scores up enough in one year to avoid losing their jobs. Many kids languished in 9th grade for years, trying to pass a single course. Schools tried all sorts of things to get the 9th graders to pass the stricter standards, but nothing made enough of a difference to risk releasing a glut of years of low-performing retained 9th graders all at once into grade 10.

The system all but gave principals explicit instructions to push kids out of school to make scores rise. That’s so much easier than educating them.

So, that’s one more piece of mounting evidence that when money, jobs, and prestige are at stake, we can’t always count on adults to do the right thing, even when they are charged with children’s welfare. NCLB makes it both tempting and easy to game the system, using the children as pawns.

Will Okun’s March 27 piece describes Hoops High, a hugely popular program in which Chicago students produce a weekly TV show covering high school sporting events. At the heart of the piece is this quote from the program’s teacher, Jeff McCarter:

“School does not have to be fun, but it should be interesting,” opines McCarter. “All these students have potential; we just have to figure out how to spark their interest. I think there is a great need for us to show these young people that we respect and believe they are capable of achievement. We should encourage them to express themselves and listen to what they say.”

The piece drew a range of comments that pretty much reflect the range of public opinion about high-tech or creative electives in inner city schools.

Some respondents agree with Okun, that programs like Hoops High are essential for getting kids to come to school at all. Research backs up that such classes do boost attendance. School has to be meaningful in the here-and-now, they argue, because inner city kids don’t have much access to visions of interesting futures.

But other respondents said that if kids produce a sportscast but can’t read or write, the experience hasn’t prepared them for a successful future. These kids, they suggest, need to buckle down and learn the real stuff that will prepare them for college and economic success.

Missing from the analysis is the accountability movement’s life-sucking impact on the regular curriculum. It used to be that good teachers freely mixed creative projects and real-world applications with the standard curriculum. As in, “While we’re learning about Vietnam, go interview one of your relatives, and we’ll make a web site of local heroes.” These projects built traditional knowledge and skills in the context of immediately-meaningful experiences.

But more and more, anything with a remote chance of engaging students is crowded out of the standard curriculum in the name of covering more material. That means that if school is fun at all, it’s only fun during electives, which are criticized for not building traditional skills.

School should be interesting - but not just during electives. We should be looking to electives to teach us how to do better with the regular curriculum, and not count on them to do all the heavy lifting of engaging students.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the always eloquent John Holt:

“It is a serious mistake to say that, in order to learn, children must first be able to ‘delay gratification,’ i.e., must be willing to learn useless and meaningless things on the faint chance that later they may be able to make use of some of them. It is their desire and determination to do real things, not in the future but right now, that gives children the curiosity, energy, determination, and patience to learn all they learn.”