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.

OK, according to my friend at San Francisco Mom of One, I’m supposed to reach for the nearest book, turn to page 123, and type sentences 5, 6, and 7 (why not 4?) into my blog.

Well, I went to the nearest shelf, and decided to pull out The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky. I cheated a little, picking a book in less-than-random fashion. How could you go wrong with Vygotsky, the eminent Soviet psychologist whose research on learning forms some of the pillars of Big Learning?

And I wasn’t disappointed. On page 123, Vygotsky is in the midst of describing a breakthrough in the way vocabulary learning was studied. In sentences 5-7, he critiques previous experiments:

It [a word presented to a child in a typical experiment] is isolated in a congealed and static form from the actual processes of thinking where it is encountered. It is isolated from the process of thinking where it is born and lives. The experimenter selects an isolated word and the child must define it.

Good thing we don’t do that anymore - Ha! Sounds exactly like your basic standardized test, doesn’t it? Words are isolated from the context and processes of thinking, and yet we feel confident making inferences with life-changing implications, knowing exactly nothing about the child’s reasoning leading up to the filled-in bubble on the answer sheet.

In “America’s ‘Failing’ Schools,” researcher James Popham gives this example of a 5th grade test item, which asks children about the meaning of the word “field” in this sentence: “My dad’s field is computer graphics.”

Advantaged kids do better on that question, because kids whose parents work in car washes don’t have “fields,” Popham explains. They have jobs. But you wouldn’t know why the child got that question wrong, because the test was asking the question out of context of the child’s thinking and the broader culture. See why these tests are so insidious?

The Education Week headline declares, Class-Size Reduction of Limited value on Achievement Gap, Study Finds.

Well, that sure deserves a look - can such a finding, counter to both intuition and previous research, be true?

So I looked. And concluded three things:

1. It’s so sad, what the accountability movement has done to the quality of educational research. Now, most of the money goes to crunch numbers to find trends in student test scores. As this article shows, number crunching is next to useless by itself. It can uncover an effect - small classes not closing a gap - but it won’t tell you why. So you’re left with no idea how to fix the problem, or even a clear sense of what the problem is. To find out what’s really going on, you need researchers IN the classroom, using rigorous techniques of observation, looking at student work, and interviewing teachers. These methods, referred to collectively as “qualitative,” provide a clearer picture of what’s going on and better direction for solving problems.

2. The article noted that achievement did improve overall and for minorities when class sizes were reduced. So it’s not like lower class sizes have been shown not to work. The study in the headlines was just saying that achievement gaps within each classroom didn’t shrink.

Princeton’s Mr. Krueger found in a 2001 study that African-American students and students from poor families had larger gains in scores than other students when they were assigned to Tennessee’s small classes.

“Since these groups of students consistently have lower achievement scores than white and [non-low-income] students, I conclude from the experiment that smaller classes benefit those in lower-achieving groups the most,” Mr. Krueger wrote in an e-mail.

Even if gaps persist among the students within a class, as Mr. Konstantopoulos suggests, others argue that reducing class sizes has an overall positive effect on groups of students that usually trail behind in academic achievement.

That’s a good thing, right? So small classes are good for everyone, even if they don’t close the achievement gap with particular classes. Which brings me to my third point:

3. The article was awfully misleading. All the finding said was that small class size doesn’t erase the gap between the highest and lowest achieving kids in Mrs. Jones’ fourth grade class, for example. Other analyses have said that lower class sizes do seem to close the overall achievement gap. Why the disparity? We don’t know - see point #1.

I’m eager to read Eric Weiner’s book, The Geography of Bliss. But not because of this op-ed he wrote for the Washington Post, titled “Why Republicans Are So Darned Happy.”

He says of “liberals,”

If this isn’t depressing enough for liberals, it turns out that some of their own pet policies are to blame for their unhappiness. Once in power, Democrats tend to focus on issues that, according to the science of happiness, have little effect on our contentment — income equality, for instance, and racial diversity. Neither is linked to greater happiness. Countries with large disparities between rich and poor are no less happy than more egalitarian ones, studies have found. And the happiest countries in the world tend to be homogenous ones, such as Denmark and Iceland, not the ethnic melting pots that liberals celebrate.

Well, Eric, all I can say is, it’s tough work advancing the human race, but someone’s got to do it. I mean, that’s an old argument: “Weren’t we all happier when the races were segregated?” And it’s an ugly argument that has new currency as desegregation policies are struck down in court.

Sure, it’s rough going, changing the mindset of a culture. But seeing kids in mixed schools happily playing together gives you hope that we might actually one day free ourselves of old provincialisms and prejudices. I’ll take the discomfort of fighting the good fight over happiness tinged with the shame of not even trying.

I’m having fun making my way through the archives of Rethinking Schools. This 19-year old publication has remained through its history,

“firmly committed to equity and to the vision that public education is central to the creation of a humane, caring, multiracial democracy. While writing for a broad audience, Rethinking Schools emphasizes problems facing urban schools, particularly issues of race.”

And so we come to algebra. So juicy a topic. First, this is where math gets “hard,” meaning more abstract. Second, algebra has traditionally played a gate-keeping function — kids who take algebra tend to go to college and get higher-paying jobs. Third, there’s a line of ugly thinking that goes, “Why bother teaching algebra to poor kids? They won’t need it to flip burgers.”

All up-ended by this article from the Spring 2006 issue, “Living Algebra, Living Wage.” The author, Jana Dean, is an 8th grade algebra teacher. She wanted her low-track students, who tended to be from low-income families, to see algebra as relevant and stick with it.

She uses real wages from her community’s service sector to teach graphing of linear equations. Students graph equations for different wages (y=7.95x) over time and see how an extra dollar an hour effects monthly and yearly income. Then she teaches y=mx-b, where b stands for things like housing expenses. Throughout, students use their newly-acquired math to address questions of what constitutes a living wage and what kinds of jobs provide it.

This is a fine example of algebra in the tradition of The Algebra Project, where algebra is considered both a civil right in itself and a means for advocating for change.

Malcolm Gladwell has an online interview about his review of James Flynn’s, “What is Intelligence.” He properly trashes the arguments of racist intellectuals like Charles Murray, by pointing out how maliable IQ is and how dependent a person’s score is on culture.

But I don’t think Gladwell goes far enough.

Gladwell goes on at length about how IQ is a function of the cognitive complexity of your environment, and how a child from a single-parent home (or a black child in general) does not have the same cognitive complexity as a 2-parent white child’s home. This after talking about how cultural differences determine how you categorize and make inferences on the types of questions asked on IQ tests.

In modern urban society, pretty much all kids have complex lives to negotiate. In poverty, the challenges are different. But plunked down in the middle of it, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t look as smart as most kids who live them every day.

Gladwell and others who talk about improving the prospects of children of poverty and discrimination use terms like “cognitive.” Like the white people have smarter environments than the black people. That view is at the bottom of a lot of failed educational policy, because it treats the problem as a simple matter of schooling rather than a more complex problem of acculturation. Economic success in the modern world means deep understanding of its culture, and you get that from childhood on.

There are plenty of thinkers, like Lisa Delpit, who attack the problem in cultural terms. They have learned to teach the culture of economic success without denying the real skills and intelligences kids develop when they live in a different culture. Calling it “street smarts” perpetuates the myth that you are more intelligent by virtue of which culture you happen to navigate successfully.

When you read interviews of people who rose out of poverty into success, they always talk about how the skills they developed and the responsibilities they shouldered in childhood supported their success. It seems like we’d all be better off if we helped more kids leverage their skills, instead of telling them that their childhood lives are worthless.

When it comes to the chicken and the egg, you can’t have it both ways. Do you believe that rich spoken vocabulary, varied life experiences, and informal early literary experiences are the critical pillars for learning to read and succeeding in school? Or, do you believe that learning to read, via early, formal, intensive phonics, is the critical path to rich spoken vocabulary, making more of life experiences, and succeeding in school?

Here’s what I think the research says. There’s no evidence that early phonics and formal math does anything to close the gap between rich and poor. The pressure that the NCLB law puts on schools to clog kindergarten, even preschool, with formal reading and math seals the fate of children in poverty by robbing them of a chance to learn to read AFTER they’ve had crucial supporting life experiences. I’ve written before about what a real gap-closing kindergarten would look like.

Now Michael Winerip of the New York Times is sadly shaking his journalistic head with this article, “In Gaps at School, Weighing Family Life,” about a new report by ETS, makers of the SAT:

The E.T.S. researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.

With so many important variables outside of school control, Winerip says, it’s no wonder that the achievement gap remains stubbornly stable.

But take another look at those four variables. The ETS report doesn’t say that poor kids have trouble reading because their parents aren’t teaching them their phonics. Poor kids aren’t failing at math because their parents aren’t teaching them their math facts. The ETS says that parents in poverty often don’t have the time or money to provide their kids with varied life experience, early informal literacy (like reading to kids), and complex conversations (hard for parents to get in a good talk about world events between shifts at three jobs).

So, why aren’t we working on providing these things in early childhood and kindergarten? Instead, we’ve virtually stripped school of everything except formal academics. That’s going in exactly the wrong direction.

These are dark days in science education. Nanette Asimov of the San Francisco Chronicle reported recently that in many Bay Area schools, science education is nearly “extinct.” The article reports that according to a study from WestED, 80% of surveyed teachers teach science less than 1 hour per week. 16 percent have quit teaching science altogether.

And yet, I find it interesting that somehow, 47% of Bay Area 5th graders scored at grade level (whatever that means) on state science tests. Isn’t it stunning that almost half the kids passed a test for which the subject matter isn’t being taught? Where are they getting their science, if not in class?

Well, some are getting it in class, but it takes a creative rebel to put it there:

“..you shoehorn it in, sneaking science into reading and math lessons.

Second-grade teacher Bernadette Ison is a master at that.

Her classroom at Bessie Carmichael is filled with children who are learning English and who come from lower-income families - just the kind of challenges that policymakers say is why basic reading and math should trump science and social studies.

“So we integrate science into our literacy,” Ison said. “Our reading curriculum is called “Nature Walk,” and we have a theme called “Animals.”

On Friday, the students will take a nature walk around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. Afterward, they’ll write an essay on what they saw and learned, Ison said.”

Ok, so a few are getting some hit-or-miss science in school. That means the rest is coming from outside of school. It’s us: parents taking their kids to museums and buying them science toys, teachers teaching after school clubs, libraries stocking their science collections, summer science programs filled to bursting.

It’s heartening in a way - this unseen groundswell of public science-love. Here that, policy makers? WE CARE ABOUT SCIENCE! All across America, individuals are stepping up to do what schools have stopped doing - providing basic science education.

But, in the same way that charities can’t fix poverty, we can’t fix this alone. According to NAEP, we’re losing: only 32 percent of 4th graders scored “proficient.” And the racial achievement gap, while narrowing somewhat, is still large.

It’s time to make sure every kid gets a good science education.

Here’s a school with great test scores. Aren’t you intrigued? Well probably not.

But what if I told you the City Neighbors Charter School has a play-based kindergarten, a heavy arts emphasis throughout, and a diversity profile that matches most other Baltimore public schools?

A few children were playing in a sandbox. A couple of girls played with dolls. Two girls sat at a table drawing pictures. At another table, three boys slapped down mega-sized playing cards on a table, taking turns collecting the tricks they’d won.

“We have a play-based kindergarten,” said Bobbi Macdonald, a co-founder of the school who also volunteers as the board president of City Neighbors. “We believe 5-year-olds learn best through play.”

You cannot imagine how happy I am to hear about this school, because there’s a hurricane-force wind blowing the other way. Nearly everywhere else, principals trumpet their victories using new all-day kindergarten programs to get children reading before first grade.

But intensive reading programs for 5-year olds can do incredible damage. They magnify differences in experience and readiness that kids have when they enter school, setting the stage for a lasting achievement gap.

I know lots of parents who want their kids in separate kindergartens, or first grade, because their kids can read chapter books while their classmates are still learning their ABC’s. Their battle cry: “Stop holding our kids back!”

Then there are the kids who aren’t reading at 5. Some have limited exposure to books before school. But here in my relatively well-educated enclave, I know several families whose kids just weren’t ready to read in kindergarten, or weren’t ready to sit still and do formal academics. Those kids are all reading very well now, a couple years later. But oh, the misery in between, trying to hammer literacy into them before they were ready! And the kids hated school - cried every morning! - and felt like failures. The parents, who had read diligently to their kids and provided them with good preschool experiences, also felt like failures. Because their 5-year-olds couldn’t read.

So you’ve got inexperienced kids and not-yet-mature kids, and any of them might just be as smart as those chapter book readers. So don’t you think it’s a little premature to separate them out? At 5?

What to do? Teach something else for a year. That’s an alternative to teaching nothing, or teaching some kids while giving the others anxiety disorders. Also an alternative to grouping that ends up having a high correlation to race and income. Otherwise known as segregation.

I think kindergarten now is both too fast and too slow. Too fast to start formal reading instruction - it should be minimal in kindergarten. But much too slow in introducing kids to the wonders of knowledge - science and nature, vocabulary, historical tales, local geography, life skills, music, and art.

From an educator’s point of view, kindergarten should be focused on building general knowledge, vocabulary, fine motor skills, social skills, and number sense. Methods should include a wide range of concrete, hands-on, playful activities based in literature, art, life skills, and science.

From the students’ point of view, school should be highly stimulating and interesting on many levels. Kids should leave school each day with “guess what I learned” grins on their faces. To me, that’s a successful kindergarten experience. We have to ask ourselves if racing ahead on the measurable skills is worth missing out on those that are harder to measure, but just as important.

I think a curriculum like this would ameliorate differences in experience and maturity by giving a whole year of print exposure and a lot of vocabulary enrichment to kids who haven’t had much. BUT, because the curriculum would be infused with actual content that few 5-year-olds know, more-experienced kids wouldn’t be bored. They wouldn’t have to sit through elementary phonics instruction they didn’t need. And everyone would get a year to grow up.

I understand that this wouldn’t solve all differential needs. A few kids really are ready for first grade at 5. But I think it would avoid turning artificial and temporary differences into real, persistent, and soul-crushing ones.

Learning to read and do math have gone from being a means to an end - indispensable tools for learning - and become THE end in itself, the standard by which every child is measured, even in kindergarten. These skills ARE vital, but they don’t have to happen in kindergarten. Finland doesn’t start school until age 7, and they score at the top of the international heap in reading. That’s with a 15-minute recess every 45 minutes, and lots of arts instruction. Just saying.

NOTE: I had to close comments on this post, because it drew a lot of spam. Please e-mail me and I’ll post your comment.