http://www.news8austin.com/content/headlines/?ArID=181350&SecID=2http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070409/NEWS/704090360/1008/NEWS03

Big Learning is, of course, wildly in favor of the idea of parents being “involved” in their children’s education.

It’s not as if parents , the first-best-teachers, could somehow avoid being involved. Children learn from their parents every day, even when no particular effort is made by either party. And of course most parents do make the effort to teach their kids things they know and care about.

But leave it to school and government bureaucracies to take this most beautiful, natural, and exciting aspect of parenting, perhaps the core of parenting itself, and turn it into another dreary obligation that few parents will ever get right. “Parental involvement” has become a code phrase for things like enforcing the homework policy, showing up at conferences, and joining the PTA.

I’m not against most of these things. But few would claim that these behaviors alone help kids learn. I think the evidence is more correlational - the kind of parent who joins the PTA is also more likely to be educated, have books in the home, go to museums, etc. And THESE things do help kids do better in school.

I wish parent involvement efforts were aimed at making it easier for parents and kids to spend time together learning things - reading books of their choice, using the Internet together, making things, going on trips, exploring mutually interesting hobbies.

Governments have other creative ideas though. According to this article,

“Rep. Wayne Smith, R-Baytown, has filed a bill that would make it a crime for parents to not show up for parent teacher conferences.”

Great, maybe if we jail the parents and give them a criminal record, their kids will do better in school.

Even articles with a more reasoned tone have a way of making parent involvement sound onerous. This article suggests (quote):

- Creating a one-page “performance dashboard” on schools for transparent information about student achievement, customer satisfaction and financial management.

- Offering leadership and advocacy training for families.

- Having family liaisons in schools.

- Establishing more online tools and outreach programs to inform parents about what children are learning.

Yup, advocacy training. That’s going to pack ‘em in.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be advocacy training, though I sure wish we didn’t need it. I’m just saying our view of parent involvement is way too narrow and way too focused on the mechanics of schooling - rather than on promoting real learning.

Keep all this in mind next time you’re at a PTA meeting and the topic of parent involvement comes up. Maybe you can suggest the PTA sponsor some activities that will enrich family life AND intellectual life for the school community. That’s a movement worth starting. Maybe we just did.

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-09-17-1.html

Oooh, everyone is jumping on the anti-homework bandwagon, and I’m a-lovin’ it. Could we be gathering steam for a parent-driven rebellion?

This article is a great rant about homework by science-fiction author Orson Scott Card. He begins by questioning whether long hours slaving over homework are akin to a violation of child labor laws, and then he really gets going, tackling the ineffectiveness of homework, the way it intrudes into a child’s life, the way it can destroy parent-child relationships, the burden it places on teachers, and the way it can ruin a child’s interest in learning. And this essay is titled Part 1. Part 2 is going to be about what we can do to change things - I’m looking forward to it. But I think there’s more to do than just cancel homework. Schools can make a positive contribution to out-of-school learning, in ways that are respectful of families and even enhance family time - by supporting Big Learning experiences for families.

The fact is, homework interferes with Big Learning - learning during meaningful real world activities. And Big Learning really does help school achievement, whereas homework has never been shown to help. For example, this study concludes that the difference in what wealthy and poor kids achieve comes down to the Big-Learning type experiences they have in the summer, not what they do in school.

And countless studies have concluded that background knowledge, the kind gained outside school, improves achievement in many subjects, particularly in reading comprehension.

So if schools really want to improve achievement, they should facilitate Big Learning experiences for families instead of interfering with them. They should offer weekend family field trips, evening science clubs, and parent-kid book groups. Wouldn’t that be better for everyone? Better family bonds, better education too, and no more homework fights.

Some of my colleagues developed a series of workshops along these lines. These workshops help parents recognize the math in everyday activities that they can use to help their middle schoolers. I think it’s a great example of the kind of things schools could do to benefit both families and student achievement.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2006/09/post_17.html

This commentary, written by a high-school teacher, describes how educational resources are split between remedial instruction and accelerated instruction, leaving average-achieving kids to choose between boring remedial classes or AP-type classes that are too hard for them. His solution: Bring back more tracking, creating a third track in the middle. He explains that tracking was eliminated over the past couple of decades, but says that doing so was a big mistake.

Aaaak! It just drives me crazy, how invested we are in the idea of sorting and labeling children. Researcher Jeannie Oaks specializes in the study of tracking. Last year she published a new edition of her book, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. Her points about tracking are worth trumpeting:

- Tracking perpetuates racial and economic inequality: Minority and low-income students populate low tracks, while white and affluent students populate the high ones. Once in a track, it’s rare to move. This is just as true, and in some places more true, than it was 20 years ago.

- Tracking doesn’t even do what it’s supposed to do. Summarizing her research, Oaks writes, “Tracking does not meet individual needs. Moreover, tracking does not increase student achievement.”

That second point is hard for many people to believe, since it seems so logical to group kids whose achievement levels are similar. Oaks and her team went into classrooms to see what was going on, and found that low and average-tracked classrooms tended to shut off students from exposure to high level concepts, actually constraining their achievement (people call this “dumbing down.”). Even more significantly, high-tracked classrooms still had so much variation in student ability and learning styles that those students didn’t achieve more than similar students in mixed classes. In short, the idea that there is a large group of identically-brilliant kids being held back by their not-so-bright peers is nothing more than an illusion. And because we are so fond of that that illusion, we’ve lost precious years we could have been using to help teachers zero in on what each student needs and get it for them quickly.

So back to the USA Today commentary. In today’s assessment-heavy schools, sorting students takes tremendous time, money, and energy. If we put that energy into developing curriculum and teaching styles that help teachers teach a highly-varied population, and put that money into reducing class size and teaching load, then you’d see some real gains in achievement and improvement of opportunity.

http://www.slate.com/id/2149593/nav/tap1/

This article from Slate Magazine reviews three recent books about homework. Not how to get kids to do it, but whether homework is all it’s cracked up to be.

Well, the answer is, no it’s not, at least at the elementary level. Homework has never been proven to increase achievement or improve study skills, responsibility, or discipline. It has been proven to cause untold angst in families, but I bet you don’t need research to tell you that.

If I were Queen of Education, this would be my proclamation about homework.

1. All regular homework-for-the-sake-of-having-homework hereby canceled.

2. Teachers encourage regular reading for pleasure at home, and schools supply books for kids who need them. I’d like to see a free-or-reduced-book program like the free-or-reduced-lunches we have now.

3. Teachers, if they desire, can send home practice at critical times on skills that require independent practice - for example, during the few weeks when kids are learning new math facts.

4. Instead of wasting hours each week correcting needless homework for the whole class, teachers can apply their professional expertise to help parents help kids who need extra study at home.

As kids get older, I’d add some independent projects (ones that kids could really do themselves).

Beyond that, teachers would be free to use their professional expertise to decide if a class could benefit equitably from an assignment and if the assignment would truly add educational value to the classwork.

For example, a teacher might assign students to ask their parents or caregivers about their childhoods, and use the stories to enhance a unit on growing up, history, or technology. If a student didn’t do the assignment, no big deal. But the stories that came back would enhance the experience for everyone.

That’s what I would do if I were Queen of Education.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060812/ap_on_re_us/paying_for_grades

For a Big Learning advocate, I’m not as much of a purist against external rewards as you would expect. I think we all need them now and then to get through a long learning task.

Say your kids need to learn their math facts. It’s not that they exactly object to knowing their math facts. They just don’t have a strong enough personal goal to get them through the unappealing practice.

This is an example of a situation your child will face throughout life: the goal is reasonably appealing (it feels good to know your math and be mathematically competent in the world) but the means of getting there requires discipline and rote work. So to keep going, you give yourself little interim external rewards.

Faced with helping kids learn math facts, you tell them, “I’ll help you get started. Let’s think of a reward for learning the first table of facts. Once you get through the first one, the facts won’t seem so hard anymore and you’ll know how to work on learning them.” In this way, you’re portraying an external reward as a strategy a child can use on their own to reach a similar goal next time.

But paying for grades - I think that’s bad news, all around. For one thing, the time span is too long, especially for young children. I just can’t see extracting a lot of motivation out of a reward that’s nine weeks in the future.

Even if your child can stay motivated over nine weeks, paying for grades doesn’t teach anything. Much better to use external rewards to teach kids how to organize their work or monitor their progress. Then you’ve actually taught them something worth knowing. And, if all that organizing and monitoring results in a higher grade, the grade reinforces the value of the hard work instead of immediately diverting attention to the external reward: “See, you did all that work and look how good your grade is!” rather than “You got an A, here’s your new X-Box.”

Worst of all, paying for grades (and grades, by themselves) can kill whatever internal motivation to learn your child already has. Read this cautionary article - it retells the 1973 experiment in which preschoolers were given markers to play with. Afterwards, half the groups got “Good Player Awards” at the end of the activity. The kids in the groups who got awards didn’t want to play with the markers next time they were offered. The kids who were never offered a reward did play with them. The reward made kids feel controlled into doing a behavior they would have otherwise found appealing in its own right, so they fought the behavior.

Alfie Kohn takes a hard line against any kind of reward or praise (see “Five Reasons to Stop Saying ‘Good Job!’”) and his writing is interesting even though I don’t always find it practical or even desirable in real life - what fun is parenting if you can’t cheer for your child?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12705167/from/ET/

The education press has been complaining about those fat, boring textbooks ever since I was in school - probably longer than that. But since so little progress has been made, it’s nice to hear someone shouting about the problem now and then. If nothing else, it motivates those of us who care about Big Learning to read lots of truly interesting books with our kids over the summer.

This article blames the state textbook adoption process, which put unwarranted power in the hands of Texas and California. These states have so much purchasing power that publishers essentially write their books to Texas and California requirements (I’ve heard New York also has a big influence). It amounts to, as the article observes, a de facto national curriculum, and a bloated, dull, and inaccurate one at that.

http://www.rescuingrecess.com/
http://www.pta.org/ne_press_release_detail_1142028998890.html

Can ya’ believe it? Forty percent of elementary schools have either curtailed recess or canceled it outright to make more time for academics. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot - research shows that, like adults, kids do better with a break. Not to mention the health, emotional, and social benefits of unstructured physical activity outdoors.

The PTA and the Cartoon Network have launched a new initiative to put recess back in the school day. Check out the two sites above to find out how you can help advocate for this important initiative.

Anyone interested in preventing the high-pressure craziness being inflicted on kids in the name of achievement should also check out this book:

What Happened to Recess, and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? by Susan Ohanian ( McGraw-Hill, 2002)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek/

Everyone’s talking about this article, it seems. It says that boys are falling behind girls in school, and it’s because they have to sit still too much and besides, their brains develop differently.

I don’t really like the article’s take, that a narrow, test-driven definition of academic success harms primarily boys, and that boys need to be taught differently, even if it means segregating kids by gender (that separate-but-equal thing - where have I heard that before?). One-size-fits-all education and narrowly-defined assessment systems harm everyone, and I don’t think you can predict a student’s needs based on any one characteristic, including gender.

The article has seemed to touch a nerve though.