Poverty and Educational Achievement: the importance of having enough

Everyone knows that, on average, poor kids do worse in school and on reading tests. Poverty is highly correlated with school success, and in fact despite the perennial search for unicorn schools that can magically bring poor kids up to the level of rich kids, I have never seen any evidence of a school that can bring a non-cherry-picked population of poor students to the level of achievement of many schools full of non-poor students. I've written about this here and here. Today I want to highlight a couple of studies that point to why poverty has such powerful effects. But first, I want to highlight a few common but misguided responses to the fact that poverty plays a huge role in educational achievement. 

The first response is to write off the difference as simply genetic, and therefore impossible to change. Beyond being probably just wrong, this response is not socially acceptable, so you don't see it said explicitly very often, but I do think it's an unspoken assumption that underlies some of our inaction.

Another response is to blame the individual students or their families. If they aren't rich, it's their fault, because they didn't follow Benjamin Franklin's precepts: work hard, be abstemious, and save money. Like the genetic response, this is a mostly unspoken excuse for inaction.

A third response is to blame teachers, or teachers' unions, or schools. This is absurd, since there is literally no school that actually manages to overcome poverty and educate non-cherry-picked students up to the level of low-poverty districts, but its absurdity doesn't prevent its being a favorite idea of education reformers everywhere. They get to cloak their elitism and greed in the guise of social justice.

A fourth response, which is in some ways the most interesting, is to suggest that what sets the rich kids apart is that they are given extra help and cultural "enrichment" by their families. I hear this one all the time from well-meaning colleagues. Rich kids get trips to Europe, and to museums, while poor kids go to the broken down playground down the street. Rich kids go to artsy summer camps in Maine, while poor kids go to the Y. Rich kids get tutoring, while poor kids sit in front of the TV. There may be something to this, but it makes it seem like the difference between poor kids and rich kids is that the rich kids get something extra, and I don't think that's true. 

It's not that rich kids are getting something extra, it's that poor kids aren't getting enough.

When I was a kid, my family did not go to Europe. I didn't attend expensive summer camps. My mom was on food stamps for a while. My parents worried about money. They ended up doing fine, but they were always incredibly frugal. I never had a tutor (though to be fair I did have highly educated parents who were around a lot). What I did have was about a million books, and lost of time to read them, and not many worries about my material comfort. I was pretty sure I was going to get enough to eat.

Two recent studies show the importance of getting enough:

1) Study 1: Kids read better when they're fed better

SNAP is the government program that gives low-income families a debit card with which they can buy food (people still refer to the program as "food stamps"). This is a great program, but it doesn't provide all that much money (less than $150 per person per month). The debit card is credited once a month, and families often find themselves running out of money as the month goes on.

In North Carolina, the money is credited to different families at different times, depending on the last couple of digits of the recipient's social security number. This allows for cool natural experiments like the one in the paper I read. A study by a Duke professor compares students' standardized test scores to when the students' families received their SNAP benefits. It turns out that scores are at their worst just before and just after the benefits are credited, and the scores are best about two to three weeks after the money arrives.

In the words of the study authors:

Student reading test scores appear to peak in the period from the 15th to 19th day post-SNAP receipt, and student math test scores appear to peak in the period from the 20th to 24th day post-SNAP receipt.

This interesting result suggests that nutrition matters to testing--and, by extension, very likely matters to learning as well. It doesn't matter a huge amount (something like 3% of a standard deviation), but it is easy to imagine a relatively small effect snowballing over time and creating a reverse Matthew effect, since if you fall behind by even 0.5% every year, by the time you're a senior in High School you will be behind by 6%, and it's likely that even at peak performance, kids whose families receive SNAP benefits will be less well-fed and more stressed in general.

2) Study 2: The stress of poverty takes up mental bandwidth

This study, by a few economists, two of whom wrote a book about this effect, is a bit further from education, but has larger effect sizes. These scholars did experiments designed to study how the stress of worrying about money affects cognitive performance. The results were more dramatic than I would have expected.

In one set of experiments, the authors asked shoppers at a mall in New Jersey to consider how they would handle a financial issue--for example, “Your car is having some trouble and requires $X to be fixed. You can pay in full, take a loan, or take a chance and forego the service at the moment... How would you go about making this decision?”)--and then, while they were considering the financial issue, to perform some basic cognitive tasks. If the financial issue was relatively easy (e.g. the car only required $150 to fix), then rich and poor people performed equally well on the cognitive tasks. If the issue was more difficult (e.g. the car required $1500 to fix), then rich people scored much, much better on the cognitive tasks, probably because the poor people were worrying about how they would come up with the $1500.

In another experiment discussed in the same paper, the authors gave cognitive tasks to small-holding sugarcane farmers in India before and after the harvest. This is a naturally randomized experiment, since different farmers harvest their sugarcane at very different times, over a several month period, according to when the sugarcane mills, which have a limited capacity, can process their cane.  The time before the harvest is not a time of poor nutrition, but it is a time of financial pressures (for instance, the farmers pawn items at a much higher rate). In this time of financial pressure, the farmers were much, much worse at cognitive tasks than they were during the relatively flush period after they harvested and sold their crop.

In these experiments, poor people who were thinking about money pressures performed far worse on cognitive tests than when they weren't thinking about money, and worse than people who had enough money that they didn't have to think about it.

Fortunately, these studies point to a relatively simple solution: reduce poverty!

It seems obvious to me that the solution to the poverty problem is not better education; rather, the solution to the education problem is less poverty. Just as we know, from studying public health, that the most important factors in a population's physical health and longevity are not the quality of the hospitals and doctors, so, in education, the most important factors in academic performance are not the quality of the schools and teachers. Just as my cousin wants to be an excellent doctor, so I want to be an excellent teacher. But as a society, we need to pay more attention to educational public health, and restructure our society so that, as in other rich countries, poor children are less poor. As a bonus, these policies would make us healthier, too!

Informing parents about missing student work raises GPA and raises test scores for Math--but not for English

I read an interesting study yesterday. Here's my take:

The Study
A New York Times article yesterday referred to an interesting study suggesting that getting more information to parents about their kids' education is low-hanging educational fruit.

According to the study's author, Peter Bergman,  a professor at Columbia, there are three basic problems in this area:

1) parents don't have high-quality information about their kids' grades and work completion

2) parental bias means that parents think their kids are doing more homework than they really are

3) the short-term bias of children (Bergman says they have "higher discount rates") leads them to conceal poor performance and poor homework completion from their parents

The literature about parental involvement has been ambiguous, according to Bergman, because it has been difficult to distinguish between cause and effect. Studies have even found negative correlations between parental monitoring/involvement and student achievement. This could either be because parental nagging is counterproductive or because parents tend to monitor and nag kids who are underperforming. Bergman thinks it's the latter.

Bergman models the situation using some fancy-looking game theory, but his experimental design is simple: the treatment group, at a California school serving mostly poor kids, got messages about missing assignments, including specific information like the date and the page number of the textbook. The control group got the default amount of information that school and teacher provided parents: report cards four times a semester and teacher contact as the teacher chose (usually very little).

Positive Results: GPA goes up; math test scores go up
The results were positive: in the treatment group, both overall GPA and math test scores increased by about .2 standard deviations. That's a pretty big increase.

This is not surprising, but it does point to an obvious lesson: schools and teachers should move to as transparent a grading system as possible. Parents should have continuous access to their children's assignments and grades. As a teacher, this will push me to be more timely and thorough about updating my gradebook, but that's a good thing. Or--it would be a good thing if I were a math teacher.

Unfortunately--as usual--English test scores don't change
Another interesting result of the study--for me, more interesting than its headline finding--was that the English test scores of the treatment group did not go up. (Well, they went up .04 standard deviations, but that's not much).

As Bergman notes, this disparity is typical--many studies find it easier to raise math scores than English scores (2). But it is nevertheless a real puzzle, one that calls into question the effectiveness of English class.

Informing parents about missing work seems to have had some direct effects. Parents who were informed about missing assignments were in better touch with the school, and more of them attended parent-teacher conferences. Parents in the treatment group took away twice as many privileges from their children (mainly access to screens and friends). Students in the treatment group skipped class less, completed more of their assignments, and attended after-school tutoring more often.

Therefore, this experiment found that a group of students who had more engaged parents, who went to class more often, who did more of their schoolwork, and who went for help after school, nevertheless did not make any more improvement on their English test scores.

This is a striking result.  Going to math class and doing your math homework really matters. Going to English class and doing your assigned English work seems to matter much less.

Results like this should make English teachers very uncomfortable.

How might English teachers respond?
An English teacher at this school could interpret these results in three ways:

1) the purpose of English class is not really to improve reading ability, so this result is irrelevant, and I am going to keep doing what I'm doing.

2) the purpose of English class is to improve reading, but coming to class and doing the assigned work does not seem to serve that purpose, so I am going to change my practice.

3) the purpose of English class is to improve reading, and although coming to class and doing the assigned work does not seem to serve that purpose very well, changing my practice would be inconvenient, difficult, and unnatural, so I am going to keep doing what I'm doing.

I think most English teachers respond, if unconsciously, in the third way. Here's why:

Education is conceptualized in a way that fits math, not English
English teachers work within a system that is set up for teaching subjects, not for getting kids to read a lot. The other academic subjects, including math, are about teaching discrete concepts and techniques, while English is about continual gradual improvement in the exact same activity students have been practicing since they were in first grade. In English there is no proper "content," and the usual ways of thinking about education are inappropriate and inadequate for thinking about reading.

The usual way of thinking about education is that the teacher teaches a skill or concept, and then students practice or conceptualize on their own and get feedback from the teacher about their performance. For me, this model was most vividly represented by the Australian researcher John Hattie, who in his book Visible Learning says that the "heart of the model of successful teaching and learning" is like rappelling in that "the goals are challenging, specific and visible," the skill being taught does not come naturally, the experience of learning is "exhilarating," and "it is abundantly clear what the success criteria are". This may be a good model for learning a single skill like rappelling off the top of a building, and it may work to some extent for subjects like math, science, history or foreign languages, in which there is "material" to be learned or "skills" to be mastered, but it is not a good model for improving your performance in an activity, like reading, that you have been doing over and over for many years.

The best way for students to get better at reading is probably to spend a lot of time reading interesting material, and to spend some time discussing the meaning of interesting or difficult texts. Unfortunately, neither the reading or the discussing fits easily into education's standard conceptual framework. So instead English teachers often assign work and plan classroom activities that are neither actual reading of texts nor discussion of texts, and it doesn't really matter if our students do the work or take part in the activities.

Bergman's study shows that we should be more transparent about missing student work, but it also shows that we English teachers should be rethinking our practice.

(1)
"Parent-Child Information Frictions and Human Capital Investment:
Evidence from a Field Experiment" by Peter Bergman

(2) This phenomenon is discussed somewhat in Bergman's paper, and in more detail in a 2010 paper by Eric Bettinger. It's also touched on in a 1996 meta-analysis of summer learning loss by Cooper et al. The paper about summer learning loss is interesting, since it finds that although on average the summer learning loss is greater in math, for poor kids it is greater in reading. Food for thought.

The new Common Sense Media report on reading

(I have been taking a year off from blogging while I think things through on (maybe) a deeper level, but I wanted to record a quick take on a new paper on reading that's been in the news.)

A new report by Common Sense Media reviewing the data on how much kids read has been getting some press recently. In the Times, Frank Bruni used it as the jumping off point for a column celebrating reading. My department chair sent us a link to the report, and asked what we thought. Here are my quick thoughts.

The standard takeaway from the report seems to be that kids are reading less now than they were 20 years ago. My department chair used the phrase "hell in a handbasket," and Bruni calls the change "marked and depressing." I'm not sure it's as bad as all that. But if the data the report discusses is somewhat open to interpretation, it does seem clear that our society can do better at helping our schoolchildren read. Because reading seems clearly to be the most important academic skill, this matters a lot.

The report's first two "key findings" are what have gotten the most attention, and they also seem most important to me. The report's other key findings are either of less general interest (gender gaps, racial/ethnic gaps, impact of e-readers, etc.) or kind of obvious (kids whose parents read aloud to them and have books in the house are better readers). The first two key findings are:

1) all kids, but especially older kids, are reading less for fun than they used to;

2) while reading comprehension scores for elementary-age kids are higher than they used to be, reading comprehension scores for older kids have not improved.

What's interesting about these two findings, if they're accurate, is that there are two apparent contradictions: kids in the younger grades are better at reading than they used to be, but kids in the older grades are not; and the reduction in pleasure reading is not translating to a decrease in reading scores.

Two possible (but I think unlikely) interpretations:

One way to interpret these findings is to think that reading for pleasure doesn't matter much. That's possible, but unlikely, given the high correlation between pleasure reading and reading scores.

Another possibility is that the findings are not accurate, that older kids are reading just about as much as they used to, but that some of their reading is not showing up in the data. As far as I can tell, there is some possibility that some of what teenagers are doing on their screens is not being counted as reading, even though it is practically the same as stuff that in the past, when it wasn't done via a screen, used to be counted as reading. A lot of what my son does on his iPod touch is reading about professional tennis and rock climbing. When I was his age, I spent hours every week reading bicycling magazines. Reading an online article or blog post and reading an article in a print magazine are basically the same activity, but I looked like I was reading, and he looks like he's on facebook.

My take:

While these studies may not be catching all the reading that's really happening, I think they're probably mostly accurate. Older kids probably are reading less. Some of this may be due to the improvement of competing non-reading activities like youtube, instagram and facebook (technologies that can be seen as improved versions of the telephone and the television). But this wouldn't explain why younger kids are getting higher reading scores now, so I think there is something else going on, too.

What I think has happened is that we have put a lot of energy into trying to teach, through direct instruction, the "skills" and "strategies" of reading. There has been a huge push, at all levels, to turn reading instruction into a mechanical process that can be broken down and implemented piece by piece. What there has not been is a huge push to encourage reading as a pleasurable and valuable activity that people might want to engage in on their own, either for entertainment or (like my son's reading about tennis and rock climbing) for information about the world.

The increase in direct instruction in skills and strategies may have boosted reading scores on the NAEP in the elementary school years, but they have not made 17 year olds better readers. We seem to be having short term success, but the short term success is not translating into long term success.  This is a pattern that I noticed last year in data about the reading scores of students in Waldorf schools. Waldorf education doesn't teach reading at all until kids are 7 or 8. As you might expect, Waldorf students score poorly on reading tests in early elementary school. By eighth grade, however, they have caught up. By the end of high school, they may be pulling ahead.

It also strikes me that the direct instruction that may produce higher scores in elementary school could be having a counterproductive effect in the long term. It's very possible that the way reading is now taught discourages reading for pleasure.

So if it were up to me, I would try to spend more energy on encouraging pleasure reading, especially at the high school level, when pleasure reading drops off precipitously.

********************************************************************************

The report: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/file/csm-childrenteensandreading-2014pdf-0/download

The Times column: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/opinion/bruni-read-kids-read.html

$150 million of Gates money later, we're still clueless

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post reports that Bill Gates has given over $150,000,000 to promote and develop curriculum for the CCSS.  This is a lot of money. But we are still mostly clueless.

Yesterday my curriculum coordinator was asked what our department was doing to align our curriculum to the Common Core, and she didn't have a quick and easy answer, because there is no quick and easy answer. The Common Core English Standards demand an ability to read complex texts, ability to make coherent arguments grounded in evidence from text, and an increased familiarity with academic language and "content-rich non-fiction."  The most important things students need to be doing, in other words, is meaningful reading and writing--just what we should have been doing before.  The only new thing here is the emphasis on "informational texts," but the best way to learn to read non-fiction is to read a lot of any old text: I am pretty good at reading informational texts, but I read hardly any non-fiction as an adolescent; Malcolm Gladwell is a master of reading, synthesizing and writing informational texts, but the main thing he reads now, just as, no doubt, when he was in high school, is junky airport fiction. Again, the main job of English teachers should be ensuring that their students are doing as much meaningful reading and writing as possible.

Things may look different in other subjects.  The math department at Leafstrewn has apparently done all sorts of work on Common Core "implementation."  This is probably appropriate; in math, you have to decide which skills to teach when. In English, we should be doing similar things over and over again, just with different texts, and different types of writing.  Trying to teach to the Common Core's "Shifts" (yes, the word is capitalized--it is, in the eyes of the Common Core people, that important) is, as I have tried to show, very likely a mistake, since it will lead to a narrow focus, boring curriculum, and not enough reading.  What we need is reading and writing--provide kids with books, time, and a humane, caring community in which they can do their work.

How many books have our students read this year so far?

My assumption has long been that our students are not reading enough, and that the most important thing we could do to help them improve in this essential area would be to help them read more.  I just did a quick check of their reading logs and my own records, and we put up some stickers on our chart--so I'm going to spend a quick post on how it's going.


Last Year's results
Last year I asked this same question about the students in my own classes and the students in the academic support program I was working in, and the results were interesting:

Students in the academic support program (from both Honors and Standard classes): 6 books in ten months (on average)

Students in my classes (all Standard classes): 8.5 books in ten months (on average)

Both groups were reading, on average less than a book a month--far from ideal.  (I'd say the average should be three books a month, but I would be happy with two.  My 12 year old reads four or five every month, and it doesn't take up much of his spare time.)

This year: slight improvement

I have made an even more concerted effort this year to get my students to read more.  We have done more independent reading, and less reading of whole-class texts.  I am pretty sure there has been a real opportunity cost to this focus, but it has at least resulted in somewhat more reading.  This week my students and I calculated their reading, and the results were:

Ninth graders in my (standard-level) classes this year so far: 8.2 books in 7 months (on average)

(This average is skewed a bit by a few kids who are reading a lot (over 20); the median is 6.)

This is better than last year--by the end of the schoolyear, the average should be up to 11 or 12 books--but it is still not great.  Two of my 32 ninth grade students have only read two books all year.  (On the other hand, one of those students is actually a success story, having read zero books in the first three months and two books in the second three months.)

Does more reading mean increased vocabulary and improved skills?
So, I have been somewhat successful at getting my students to read more.  What remains unclear is how much benefit my students have gained from the increased reading.  My assumption is that the increased reading volume will mean increased vocabulary, improved reading comprehension skills, and perhaps even improved writing--but I don't know if that's true, and I can't check in a very reliable way, because I really only have a good baseline for their vocabulary.

Interestingly, whether their skills are improved or not, the reading is not obviously correlated to how well the students do in school.  One of my students, who has failed ninth grade twice already and is now taking both my grade English class and a tenth grade English class, has read 14 books this year.  He tells me he didn't finish any last year.  Nevertheless, he is failing both my class and the tenth grade English class--because he never does any written work outside of class.  In fact, as I write this, I am waiting for him to show up for an afterschool appointment to do some of his missing work.  He's not going to show; we need a new system to help kids like him!  Success or failure in school has less to do with skill than with being able to get the work done--we need to figure out how to help them do it.  I've figured out how to get this kid to read books; now I need to work on the writing piece.

I'll look into this again in June. Until then, I'll keep trying to get them to read, and I'll get the Dean to help me get my failing students to come after school to do their work.

Thousands of little countries that don't read

There's an interesting op-ed in the Times today about reading in Mexico ("The Country that Stopped Reading").  Its author, David Toscana, an eminent Mexican novelist, argues that his native country, which took next-to-last place in a Unesco survey of reading habits, ought to encourage a love of reading by providing students with enjoyable and compelling texts and giving them time to read in school:

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”

...

A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” I explained the difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between deciphering street signs and accessing the literary canon. He wondered what the point of the students’ reading “Don Quixote” was. He said we needed to teach them to read the newspaper. 

When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology textbooks,” she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the same time.”

The US is very different from Mexico, but I'm afraid that the Common Core and other Ed Reform efforts are taking us in the wrong direction.  We, too, can learn from Toscana's prescription: give kids enjoyable books and time to read.  Thousands of our children are not getting that, and thousands of our kids are, in themselves, little countries that don't read.

Guys Read--but may not like the books they're assigned in high school!

A "Read In"
Today our school had a "Read In"--a whole day, in between midyear exams and the second semester, in which we shared books, read, and talked about reading. During one of my free blocks I was on a panel of four male teachers; we talked to an audience of about a hundred and fifty students about our own reading, we read to them from a book we liked, and we took their questions.

Even future teachers don't like assigned reading
In the course of the discussion, every single one of us let it slip that he had not liked much of the assigned reading in high school--that we liked reading, but not the books we were given in our English classes.  I remembered that the same thing happened on the panel I was on last year, and I asked a friend who was on another panel today, and he said he and the guys he was up on stage with had said the same thing.

Does high school discourage reading?
At a certain point in the discussion, when we were asked when we had really been turned on to reading, I turned the question back around to the audience and asked them to raise their hands if they read more now than they did in elementary school.  A few brave souls raised their hands.  Then I asked them to raise their hands if they read more in elementary school than they do now.  eighty percent of the audience raised a hand.

We need to change this
One day is a nice start, but we high school teachers really need to think about how we can change the way we encourage-- or discourage--student reading.  What we are doing now is not working very well.  I think the way to go is toward more independent reading and group discussion and analysis focused on shorter passages (and of course a lot of writing); in any case, what we are doing now, and what has been done at most high schools over the past fifty years or more, is not very inspiring.

An interesting question in regards to teaching

News flash: new research shows that if you run, you get better at running
To me it was news that this was ever in doubt, but a recent post on a New York Times blog (okay, not so recent, but a smart education professor just sent it to me) tells us there is a hot debate over whether running should be taught, and that scientists in England have done a study showing that runners develop more efficient form "just by running more."

Apparently the runners in the study increased their "running efficiency" (oxygen used at a given pace) by nearly ten percent over a ten week period in which they were given no instruction, they just ran.  The scientists say that the runners all learned to bend their knees and ankles more at certain appropriate points in their strides, and all learned to be less "wobbly in the rear foot," whatever that means. 

The post made me think, naturally, about reading; perhaps, like running, reading can be improved just by doing it? Hm...

An interesting question
The most eye-opening thing in the post was not the (somewhat predictable) result that regular running made people better at running, but a little paragraph near the end of the post in which the researcher who led the study said that the results ""raise an interesting question in regards to teaching people to run."

What was this interesting question?  The next sentence in the article began: "'If runners can self­-optimize,' as the women in this study seemed to do, then..."

Okay, how would you finish that sentence?  What interesting question does the study raise in regards to teaching people to run?  I myself thought the question was going to be: "Why bother?"

But no!  The interesting question about teaching running that this study raises for the researcher is not, "Why bother?" but instead: "maybe we should teach runners to learn to understand how the movement feels to them."

Ha!  This woman has done a ten week study showing that people can improve on their own, without instruction, and her conclusion is that maybe we should teach people to learn to understand how the movement feels to them?!

I mean, I am not against mindfulness.  Far from it.  I recently spent a weekend at a Buddhist monastery, and it was great!  Pay attention to the way things feel to you, by all means.  It will help you in many ways, and it might even help your running, and your reading.  But if non-teaching works well for some things, why not just leave it at that?

Interestingly, non-teaching doesn't work well for everything...
The runners in the experiment all learned to bend their joints more efficiently, and all learned to be less wobbly--so maybe those aspects of running aren't worth teaching. None of the runners in the study, however, learned to land on the middle or front of the foot, which some scientists (and, if I remember correctly, the running tribe in the book Born to Run) say makes the stride more efficient and the runner less injury-prone.  So maybe people do need to be taught that?

This result goes along with what I've been thinking about "Visible Learning" and "Direct Instruction" and so on.  There are very likely some things (math?) that require more explicit instruction, and some things (reading?) that require less explicit instruction, and even within a discipline, like reading or running, there may be some things that require more or less explicit instruction. 

One might think that this conclusion--use direct instruction when it's helpful and don't use it when it's not necessary--would be obvious to everybody, but it's not obvious.  We are, I hope, nearing the end of a counterrevolution against the progressive education of the seventies and eighties, and we have gone so far that people like the researcher in the running study cannot imagine anyone learning anything that is not taught--even when she has herself just completed a scientific study showing exactly the opposite.

Teaching or no teaching, you can't run better if you don't run at all
Again, no matter how we are teaching, we need to make sure kids are reading enough.  So I'll close with this old chestnut (table from Allington, numbers originally from here):

Reading Volume of Fifth Grade Students at Different Levels of Achievement

Achievement                         Minutes of                                       Words per

Percentile                            Reading per day                                     year

90th                                           40.4                                             2, 357, 000

50th                                           12.9                                                601, 000

10th                                             1.6                                                  51, 000

 

Teachers, Instruction, Relationships

(A quick post--I'm thinking through these issues--the brain surgery analogy makes sense to me, though it may come out of left field for some other people... Also, I'm not sure why the font switches size or style--I wrote it all out at the same time, I think!)

Teachers are not brain surgeons--we are much more important...
Teachers are not brain surgeons.  I sometimes wish we were.  Surgeons get paid a lot, and surgeons get to feel like they're DOING something, get to feel like there is a clear problem and they are going to fix it.  Plus, their job is a lot easier than the jobs of regular doctors or of teachers, because they don't have to deal with difficult people.  The people they deal with are easy to deal with, because they are asleep.

While we teachers may wish we had anaesthetists to put our students to sleep before we worked on them, and while we may wish that what made the difference was the actions we ourselves did directly, rather than those we helped other people do, our lives are not so simple.

A lot of teacher discourse sounds like we are like surgeons, focusing on what the teacher does to, not with, the students, just as much of the discourse about reading education avoids the term "reading" and relies heavily on terms like "instruction",  "skills", "strategies", and so on. These terms--like the term "teaching" itself--make it sound like we are either conveying information in a gradgrindian way (filling little vessels with facts!) or else instructing children in a step-by-step process, as if we are ambulatory instruction manuals.  

But English teachers are not instruction manuals.  What's ironic is that just as teachers in other disciplines are getting away from "instruction" by, for instance, flipping the classroom, so that the teacher works instead as a coach, we English teachers, who arguably have less to "teach" than teachers in "the content areas", are constantly being told about "instruction."

Why would we want to be instruction manuals?  Instruction manuals don't actually work very well, because most people don't like to use them. Most instruction manuals, like the one in the John Ashbery poem, lead not to understanding, but to our dreaming of Guadalajara, or of some other place we have never been.  

Teachers are neither surgeons, operating directly on the brains of etherized students, nor ambulatory instruction manuals, mechanically dispensing information.  We are people dealing with other people, and the important things we do are to create conditions in which kids will want to read and write, and to help kids pay attention to their own reading and writing.  This may involve instruction, but often it does not.

Relationship before task
I once peeked at the "Course Expectations" a wise colleague of mine was handing out on the first day of the year.  My colleague told his students that when people were doing difficult tasks, studies had shown that they could do them better and longer if there were only another person in the room.  His goal that year, he had written to his students, was to be, for them, that "other person in the room."

I thought about my colleague's words when I was talking with my wife the other day.  My wife has been doing a fair amount of SAT tutoring recently, and she tells me that parents often talk as if what she will be doing with their children is sharing with them the "strategies" and "tricks" that she learned in her time as a high-achieving student at ivy league colleges and her stints as a college instructor at elite universities.  The truth is, she said, that when she and her students work on the reading sections of the SAT, what she mainly does is sit with the students while the students figure it out for themselves.  What I really do, she said, is to help them to see their own thought processes.  In order to help them do so, she needs to build a strong relationship with the student--so she always spends some time chatting with her students about what's important to them, what's going on in their lives.

My department chair is right to be fond of the dictum, "Relationship before task."  The task is the responsibility of the students; the relationship is our responsibility. 

Building Relationships (more wise colleagues!)

In today's department meeting, we were treated to a presentation by a couple of our colleagues who have been systematically investigating the ways in which they build relationships with their students.  Relationships with students, they said, are built through the many small moments, the micro-interactions, that we have each day with individual students.  They offered a set of helpful guidelines for handling these little moments, many of which may present themselves to us as difficult or annoying.  Many of these guidelines were familiar from parenting books I've found helpful in dealing with my own kids at home (acknowledge, validate, try non-verbal response, give benefit of the doubt, start with observation, not judgment, offer student choice to provide solution, etc.), but I realized that I hadn't given much conscious thought to how they applied to dealing with students, and it was helpful to have them made explicit.

As these guidelines may show, our wise colleagues encouraged us to detach ourselves from our annoyance, see our students with compassion, and use these sometimes-difficult moments to build stronger human relationships with our students.  To illustrate their wisdom, our colleagues told a few stories and showed us some video they had taken.

One wonderful story was this: when one of these colleagues was a student teacher, she went with her mentor teacher and their students on an overnight trip early in the year.  At a certain point late in the night, one student went missing.  The mentor teacher was annoyed and upset, and clearly, said my colleague, angry with the student who had slipped away.  When they finally found the student, my colleague expected her mentor teacher to light into the kid, or at least show that she was upset.  Instead, she told us, the master teacher opened her arms, gave the kid a huge hug, and said, "We were so worried about you!"  For my colleague, this was an eye-opening experience--and as she told the story, we were right there with her.  A good teacher doesn't let her students off the hook, but always shows that she cares about them.  If she doesn't, they won't learn.  According to my colleague, that kid, who was going through a difficult time, had a good relationship with her teachers for the rest of the year.

The video that our colleagues shared was also really interesting.  The clips we watched were only a minute or two each, but it was amazing how much was happening in those minutes.  I've never seen so clearly how a good teacher can have a dozen meaningful interactions, with a dozen different students, in the course of only a minute or two.  A look, a wave, a few words--each time this happened, a relationship was strengthened and a student was helped to, as my wife says, see his or her own thought process.  My colleagues were holding up a mirror--a compassionate mirror--to their students, and their students clearly felt supported, cared for, and encouraged.

Not brain surgeons, not instructors, but people!
These colleagues have also spent a lot of time working together on planning classroom activities (how to introduce books, how to facilitate discussions, structures for bringing out responses and helping students to organize their thinking, etc.), but very little of what they do is what I would call "instruction".  They are not brain surgeons, not instruction manuals, but people, helping other people.

The Common Core is not "evidence-based"--but maybe that's okay!

My Curriculum Coordinator just got a subscription to the Marshall Memo, which may be bad for my mental health--I'll be reading a lot more Ed. research. This post came from reading an article in EdWeek that Marshall refers to in this week's memo.  I'm sorry the post is so long.  I think it served to clarify my thinking...

The Common Core is Not Evidence-Based
There's an article in a recent EdWeek with the remarkable headline: "New Literacy Research Infuses Common Core."  The article's subtitle reads, "In the 15 years since the National Reading Panel convened, the knowledge base on literacy has grown." As far as I can tell, both the headline and the subhead are essentially false.  The Common Core standards are not really evidence-based, and the knowledge base on literacy has not grown much in the 15 years since the now-discredited National Reading Panel --except perhaps in the Socratic sense of knowing how much it doesn't know.

This is interesting only because it points up the farcical nature of so much of today's educational discourse.  While most of what happens in schools today is worthwhile, the way people talk about it is just ridiculous.  One of my colleagues suggested that our schools would be better off if all the Graduate Schools of Education disappeared from the face of the earth (he used stronger words), and I think he might be right. Education research is like Hollywood: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.  Of course, this isn't true, either of schools or of Hollywood, but it's partly true. 

The article itself is somewhat better than its headlines, and if you read it carefully you can see that the Ed. professors are basically just as in the dark as we teachers are--if not more so.  What is most amazing about an article that claims to be about "new literacy research" is that it describes very little actual research.  The article quotes many academics, but often they say things as questionable and non-evidence-based as the following paragraph, which manages to express the same simple idea, an idea that has been a truism for many decades now, over and over:

"In our knowledge-based economy, students are not only going to have to read, but develop knowledge-based capital. We need to help children use literacy to develop critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, making distinctions among different types of evidence," said Susan B. Neuman, a professor in educational studies specializing in early-literacy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "The Common Core State Standards is privileging knowledge for the first time. To ensure they are career-and-college ready, we have to see students as lifelong learners and help them develop the knowledge-gathering skills they will use for the rest of their lives. That's the reality."

Privileging knowledge is a new idea?  Helping kids become life-learners is a new idea? Critical thinking in literacy is a new idea?  What?  Not only are these old ideas, there is not a the slightest bit of research or data to be found in that paragraph.

The recent history of "evidence-based" BS
The EdWeek article goes on to discuss the National Reading Panel of 2000, which was a much-ballyhooed effort to establish the most advanced and scientific thinking about how children learn to read and how we can help them.  The Panel's report came down decisively on the side of explicit instruction in skills: phonemic awareness; vocabulary; comprehension strategies; etc.  The panel's recommendations formed the basis of a $1 billion-a-year effort, "Reading First" by the Federal government to improve reading in the early grades.  Eight years later, there was a comprehensive assessment of the program, to find out how much difference this explicit instruction in skills had made.  The answer: zero difference.

The assessment reported three key findings: (1) Reading First did indeed result in students spending more time on reading "instruction" (phonemic awareness, vocab, etc.); (2) Reading First did indeed result in more professional development in "scientifically based reading instruction (SBRI)"; (3) however, "Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two or three" (page v).

Another finding, that the assessment did not consider "key," but that may have had some impact, was that the increased instructional time and the emphasis on skills did not result in any increase in students' actually reading.  As the assessment puts it: "Reading First had no statistically significant impacts on student engagement with print" (page xii).

This is remarkable: in 2000, only twelve years ago, the state of the research (the "knowledge-based capital," in the vapid phrase of the Michigan professor), which the panel of eminent experts claimed to hold to the "highest standards of scientific evidence," was utterly and completely wrong.

After being so wrong, the education experts tried to reposition themselves--but not very clearly.  One of them is quoted in the EdWeek article as saying that after the National Reading Panel, "comprehension became the 'next great frontier of reading research.'"  This is odd, since "comprehension" was one of the central topics of the NRP itself. (1)

Reading Next:
One of the ways the experts tried to reposition themselves was in a report called "Reading Next," which according to the EdWeek article "helped spark the common core's approach. Education professor Catherine A. Snow and then-doctoral student Gina Biancarosa of the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that explicit comprehension instruction, intensive writing, and the use of texts in a wide array of difficulty levels, subjects, and disciplines all helped improve literacy for struggling adolescent readers."

Reading Next focused on an array of fifteen "powerful tools" for improving literacy.  In an improvement on the NRP's exclusive focus on skills instruction, many of Reading Next's recommendations were so vague that no one could object ("Effective Instructional Principles Embedded in Content"), and many sounded fairly old-fashioned (Strategic Tutoring; Motivation and Self-Directed Learning; Extended Time for Literacy).  But when you actually looked more deeply into what the specific recommendations were, it became clear that the report was, like the NRP, trying as hard as possible to avoid mentioning the very simple strategy of having students actually read.

Avoiding all mention of actual reading:
Here is the passage from the Reading Next report that discusses "Extended Time for Literacy," which I had thought from its title might mean more time for students to actually read.  That may be what is meant, but the authors seem to twist themselves into jargony knots so as to avoid discussing actual "reading":

Extended Time for Literacy
None of the above-mentioned elements are likely to effect much change if instruction is limited to thirty or forty-five minutes per day. The panel strongly argued the need for two to four hours of literacy-connected learning daily. This time is to be spent with texts and a focus on reading and writing effectively. Although some of this time should be spent with a language arts teacher, instruction in science, history, and other subject areas qualifies as fulfilling the requirements of this element if the instruction is text centered and informed by instructional principles designed to convey content and also to practice and improve literacy skills.

To leverage time for increased interaction with texts across subject areas, teachers will need to reconceptualize their understanding of what it means to teach in a subject area. In other words, teachers need to realize they are not just teaching content knowledge but also ways of reading and writing specific to a subject area. This reconceptualization, in turn, will require rearticulation of standards and revision of preservice training.

This passage is amazing.  Despite the fact that it seems intended to promote spending more time having students actually reading, the language in this passage and the whole report seems to avoid saying that straight out. Instead we hear about "instruction" (four times), "literacy-connected learning," "interaction with texts," and "instructional principles designed to convey content." The word "reading" appears twice, but never on its own, never with the implication that the students might be actually reading; instead, we read that time should be spent with "a focus on reading" and in "teaching... ways of reading."  

This passage, like the whole report and indeed like so much of the discourse of reading experts, makes me think of Pearson and Gallagher's "Gradual Release of Responsibility Model."  These experts, perhaps because they are so far removed from teaching actual children, are not willing to release responsibility...

Much of the data that does exist is obvious
Much of the "research" that the EdWeek article mentions is super-obvious.  For instance, here is some expert wisdom:

"research showing that there is no bright line for when students start to read to learn"

"Kids have to read across texts, evaluate them, respond to them all at the same time. In office work of any sort, people are doing this sort of thing all the time."

"a student's depth and complexity of vocabulary knowledge predicts his or her academic achievement better than other early-reading indicators, such as phonemic awareness."

Didn't we all know these things already? But here is my personal favorite piece of obvious data:

"students who practiced reading, even when it was difficult, were significantly better 20 weeks later at reading rate, word recognition, and comprehension, in comparison with the control group."

Wow--if you read more, you get better.  Who knew?!

Education is like medicine, circa 1850
I have read that at the end of John Hattie's 2009 Magnum Opus, Visible Learning (I've ordered the book, but it hasn't come yet), Hattie compares the state of research in education to the state of medical research in the nineteenth century. In other words, we teachers might be better off with home remedies or folk wisdom.  And in a sense this makes me feel a bit better about the Common Core.  The Common Core is in no real sense, as far as I can tell, evidence-based (saying that students will one day have to write non-fiction is not scientific evidence for making them read it a lot when they are eight), but given the state of education research, maybe that's okay.  What matters is that students read a lot, think and talk about what they read, and look carefully at their own writing.  We English teachers can facilitate this process, but we shouldn't worry too much about the standards, which are, as Tim Shanahan says, in an expert opinion I can agree with completely, "a little goofy."

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Footnotes:
(1)  In fact, one of my favorite passages from the NRP report is the following piece of meaningless verbiage: "Comprehension is critically important to the development of children’s reading skills and therefore to the ability to obtain an education. Indeed, reading comprehension has come to be the “essence of reading”."  This is as absurd as if one were to say, "Movement is critically important to the development of children's running skills and therefore to the ability to compete in many team sports.  Indeed, movement has come to be the "essence of running"."

Literacy by any means necessary: the Malcolm X method of learning vocabulary

As an American literature teacher, I'm used to thinking of classic American literature as a treasure trove of extremely thoughtful meditations about almost everything, so I'm very interested in what the American canon has to say about education in general, and about reading in particular.  I've written about To Kill a Mockingbird's caustic portrayal of school and its loving celebration of a Frank Smith-like culture of reading, and about the great scene in which Huck Finn's father castigates his son for learning to read.  American autobiographies are full of wonderful descriptions of coming into literacy (in Smith's words, of joining the literacy club)--sometimes by reading books on your own (Ben Franklin), by reading aloud as a family (Henry James), by using the library (Richard Wright).

These American autobiographies are especially good on reading as a form of self-definition and self-discovery.  Most of the richest and most poignant examples of this that I can think of happen to be from autobiographies of Black Americans--from Frederick Douglass to Richard Wright to Barack Obama. I love Frederick Douglass's story of deliberately making friends with poor white boys and bribing them with bread so that they would teach him to read--but Malcolm X's story is the one I'm going to focus on today.  I'll talk about Malcolm's efforts in more detail, but I want to note first that for all of these extraordinarily gifted and amazingly determined men, the journey to literacy was, in Douglass's words, "a long, tedious effort for years."  We should not kid ourselves; even as we try to help make the process as easy and painless as possible, we need to remember that learning to read and write well is not always easy, especially for those suffering from their place in an oppressive social system.

The Malcolm X method of vocabulary instruction
If we want our kids to learn vocabulary, maybe we should think about people who have actually done it.  We've probably all read the part of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in which Malcolm describes teaching himself to read, but I hadn't reread it for years, and it's worth looking at again.  In prison, Malcolm (I call him by his first name with all respect) had started corresponding with Elijah Muhammad, and he became frustrated with his inability to express himself clearly.  He also found that when he tried to read, he didn't know many of the words.  He ordered a dictionary from the prison library and looked at it.  Not knowing what to do--since there were so many words he needed to learn, he just started writing, and he copied the down the first page of the dictionary: definitions, punctuation and all.

It took him all day to copy out that first page.  Then he re-read what he had written down.  He was fascinated.  He liked the word "aardvark."  So he copied down the next page.  And he filled tablet after tablet of paper, and in the end he COPIED OUT THE ENTIRE DICTIONARY!

According to Malcolm X, copying out the dictionary was a great way to learn words, and as he learned more words, he was able to understand the books he tried to read, and as he could understand the books better, he came so to love reading that he read non-stop, and you couldn't have gotten him "out of books with a wedge." And the famous clincher: reading was liberating. Although he was in prison, he had "never been so truly free."  For Malcolm, every page of his books was what Richard Wright called it: a "ticket to freedom."

When the work becomes their own
Copying out the entire dictionary worked very well for Malcolm X.  Should we have our students do it?  Maybe. But I think, looking at this story, the main lesson I take away is that of motivation.  Malcolm was obviously gifted--but he had always been gifted.  He had a lot of time--but so did every other prisoner.  The determination to improve his vocabulary came only when he was (a) highly motivated and (b) face to face with his own poor ability (1).  He was very interested in writing to Elijah Muhammad, and he realized that he could not, in his letters, say what he wanted to say.  When motivated to read and write, and aware that he needed to improve, he figured out a method that worked for him.

Is it possible to create, for our students, conditions similar to those that led Malcolm X to copy out the dictionary?  (Our students are certainly not imprisoned, but they are under the supervision of the state for several hours a day, for many years.)  How can we ask them to do writing that they actually care about doing?  The student newspaper is an excellent way--for the kids who work on it. What can we do in our classes? Creative writing?  Sure--for some.  Have them write letters?  Have them write opinion pieces?  We do that stuff...  How can we have them do more writing that they actually really want to do?  The second condition--that they be confronted with their own poor ability--we arguably already try to do, in our grades and comments.

So one thing we could try is giving the students more freedom in what they write and harsher grades on their writing.  Another thing we could try is giving significantly less feedback on their writing and how to improve it.  This would feel extremely unnatural to us, and would probably be really difficult, and our students might hate us for it--but it might work.  (Is that crazy?  Maybe.  It's been a long week...)  I remember my father's telling me he only learned to write when he was a freshman in college and had a choice: learn to write better, or fail out.  My wife, too, only really learned to write when she was a freshman in college and had to work really hard on revising her own papers.  The burden needs to be on the students, not on us.  How do we put it there?

I don't know how to do it, but I have seen the results. Tonight I watched the Shakespeare play at my school. It was wonderful.  The students did amazing work, and they took full responsibility for it.  In fact, they took so much responsibility that in the talk-back after the play, the teacher who directed the play was not even mentioned--not even once.  Now that is a triumph of teaching! The play couldn't have happened without her, but for the students the work became their own.



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Footnote:

(1)
These two factors are exactly parallel with the ones that spurred Ben Franklin to extraordinary efforts at self-improvement.  Franklin was having a debate in letters with a friend of his on various hot topics of the day--like whether it was worth educating women (Ben said yes)--and his father happened to see a few of the letters.  His father told Ben that while Ben often had stronger arguments, the friend was a better writer.  This criticism so wounded Ben's vanity that he went to extraordinary lengths to try to improve his writing: first he took articles from his favorite magazine, the Spectator, made notes on their content, and then tried to reconstruct the article from his outline; second, he took Spectator articles and tried to turn them into rhyming verse; third, he took the rhyming verse versions of the articles and put them back into plain prose.  This is not even to go into the lengths he went to obtain books (after he "borrowed" one in the evening he would stay up all night to read it by candlelight so as to be able to return the book before it would be missed in the morning, and he became a vegetarian and subsisted on a "bisket" or "a handful of raisins" in order to save money to buy books).  Ben Franklin, like Malcolm X, had a powerful practical reason to want to be good at writing (to best his friend Collins) and was confronted with his own poor ability (when his father said Collins wrote better than he did).

Election Special: Presidential Prep Schools (Part II: English Department Goals)

I have suggested that what comes naturally to us as teachers may not always be the best practice, and I often think that teachers can learn a lot from looking beyond our own classrooms: from looking at the way our literature portrays reading; from looking at homeschooling; from looking at good educational research; and from looking at medicine and doctors (and the health care field more generally).

Another place we should look is at schools that might be different from our own.  Leafstrewn High is a public school--a relatively privileged one (our community has, I think, the most graduate degrees per person of any in the United States), but still a public school.  Anybody who can get an apartment in the town, we enroll.  In this we are distinctly different from private schools, which can select, filter, exclude, hand-pick, etc.  So I thought I'd see if private school English departments speak about their practices in the same way we do--or the same way public schools that serve less privileged students do.  Because it's election season, and because our two candidates both went, as do their children and most of the other super-elite in this country, to private school, I looked up the English department web pages for the two presidential prep schools, the Punahou Academy and the Cranbrook School. 

Interestingly, what I found was in many ways similar to what Leafstrewn's English Department says and does.  The mission statements at these elite private schools, however, go far beyond the skills and standards-based philosophy that is in effect at many schools serving less privileged student populations (1). Whereas schools for the less privileged often describe a narrow view of reading, describing skill development and little else, schools to which the elite send their children seem to consider reading quite broadly, mentioning skill development but quickly moving on to morals, imagination, ethics, spirituality and passion.

The mission statement of our English Department
Several years ago, the Leafstrewn English department took a month or so and wrote a mission statement.  Here it is:

We teach all students to think critically and creatively, to read carefully, and to write well.  In our classes we foster relationships, engagement, independence and confidence.

That's a pretty good statement.  I like the attention to things that are not English-specific: thinking, relationships, engagement, independent, confidence.  I could wish that the reading and writing were more clearly tied to these aims, but as a short statement, it's good enough for me.  The Presidential prep school English Departments have websites with much longer statements, statements that draw out the connections more clearly.

Cranbrook: Reading as a "lifelong habit" that "transforms the individual"
The Cranbrook School, Mitt Romney's alma mater, seems to be fairly traditional.  Though it has progressed beyond the days in which gay students were baited and bullied and given impromptu tonsures, it still, even in its English Department, "remains committed to gender segregation."  Like Leafstrewn, it has core texts and doesn't offer elective English courses until Senior year.  It also, however, unlike many public schools, is willing to openly state goals that go beyond mere academic skills.

Cranbrook does talk about explicit instruction in vocabulary, grammar, and reading "rigorous training" in written expression, but it also talks about how its faculty will share their "passion" for literature. Cranbrook's English faculty "believe that the study of literature is a life-long habit"; they also believe that "reading transforms individuals beyond the development of academic competency," helping them "gain the capacity to take reasoned positions on complex questions and develop an appreciation of other cultures" and thus become "better citizens."

Punahou: Reading as a spiritual and ethical pursuit
The Punahou Academy as a whole is interested in more than just academics (and does not see that interest as limiting student freedom); the Punahou English department seems to be at the center of this endeavor.  As the course catalog explains: "In order to educate the heart as well as the mind, Punahou students are asked to explore their spirituality, examine their ethical systems, and develop their roles in communities." To fulfill this requirement students must take a course in which these issues are directly addressed; among the regular offerings with a Spiritual, Ethical and Community Responsibility (SECR) credit are only two Social Studies courses, but nine English courses.

The Punahou English Department's statement of its own goals (1) is also remarkable, saying nothing about reading fluently, or with comprehension, or with proficiency.  No, Punahou has something much more ambitious in mind: "The goal of the Academy English Department is to teach students to read compassionately, think exactingly, write clearly and gracefully, and act with the compassion, exactitude, clarity and grace they derive from their engagement with the English language and with literature."  To read compassionately!  And then to act!  Despite a faint tinge of noblesse oblige (remember "compassionate conservatism"?), these are admirable aims. I am troubled by the fact that both candidates, like so many others in the ruling class, went to fancy private schools that are cut off, even more than places like Leafstrewn, from the masses. Nevertheless, if I had to vote for a candidate based solely on his prep school's English department mission statement, I would have to vote for Obama (despite his continuing war-making, extra-judicial executions and willingness to cut Social Security and Medicare).

What do these goals imply?
I'm interested in these goals in and of themselves--good reading may make us more compassionate, though I wonder if other things are more important!--but I'm also curious about whether having a focus that goes beyond skills (what someone a colleague of mine was reading called "authentic" reading and writing) might actually improve skills more than a set of aims that remained focused primarily on skills.  Some research suggests that this is so, and it would make sense.  That also seems to be our thinking at Leafstrewn; I hope we keep it that way.

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Footnotes:

(1)

I looked at the websites of twenty or so high schools across the country that serve less privileged students.  At most of these high schools the websites were terrible, and even at those that did have a substantial web presence, there was often no information about academics at all.  Some promised information and then didn’t give it; the high school my mom and several of my grandparents attended, in Southern Ohio, had a page on its website entitled “Curriculum”, but this “Curriculum” page showed only the Bell Schedule and the grade scale (A: 93-100; B: 86-92; etc.).  At most of the high schools that did describe their curriculum or mission, the English department statements put a great emphasis on skills, saying nothing about passion, imagination, morality, or spirituality.  Here are two representative statements:

KIPP NYC College Prep

The English Department at KIPP NYC College Prep offers a rigorous four-year course of study that fosters critical thinking, reading and analytical skills, technological proficiency and creativity, and sophistication in writing. With the skills gained through this course of study, Students graduating from KIPP NYC College Prep will be prepared for success in the academic and  professional areas  of  their  choice.

Brighton High:

 The Language Arts Department offers a standards-based curriculum which offers a variety of required courses and electives. These courses not only meet the Massachusetts State Frameworks but also prepare students to be successful in English at the college level. The Boston Public Schools curriculum is taught in all grades (9-12). Students in grades 9-12 have over 7 hours of instruction per week in Language Arts.

Students read literature of various genres and are asked to carefully analyze and respond to literature through key questions, as well as developing their fluency through reading independently selected texts. Writing is taught as a process; students are encouraged to revise and rewrite as frequently as necessary, and representative samples of student writing are published on a regular basis. Vocabulary and language skills are integrated throughout the language arts curriculum. 

(2)

From the Punahou course catalog, available here:

The goal of the Academy English Department is to teach students to read compassionately, think exactingly, write clearly and gracefully, and act with the compassion, exactitude, clarity and grace they derive from their engagement with the English language and with literature. We believe that offering students a wide variety of curricular challenges with language and literature will increase their capacity for perception, feeling, reason, and tolerance; nourish their imaginations; and inspire their actions.