If we can accomplish that much in eight sessions, imagine what we could do in a whole school year!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.