If we keep some form of remote schooling next year, don't blame teachers' unions

It looks like next fall will not bring the paradise regained that so many teachers and parents were hoping for. The lost Eden of pre-pandemic school--no masks, no deafening air filters, no Zooming and muting and shifting from one bad tech platform to another, just the good old-fashioned human work of people in a room together, reading and writing and talking and seeing one another's faces. If we're lucky, the Delta spike will abate, as it has already done in the UK, in time for September, and we will muddle through with our masks and our air filters. That would be fine with me. As long as I'm in the same room with my students, things should be more or less good.

That might not happen. If our Delta spike extends to Labor Day, or if some new, more devious variant of the virus arrives, we could be back to remote or hybrid schooling. I have seen some people worrying that teacher's unions will use the Delta spike "as an excuse" to keep their members from going back to the classroom, to the "enormous detriment of students." (That language comes from Joe Nocera, a journalist who is himself the son of two union teachers and should know better, but who seems to have strange ideas about teachers' unions.) I could be wrong, but what from what I've seen I think there is very little chance teacher's unions will push for remote school. Teacher's unions follow the desires of their members, and most of us teachers hated teaching online, hated seeing so many of our students fall through the cracks despite our extraordinary efforts, and would rather do almost anything than go back to the miserable, makeshift, stopgap schooling of the past year and a half.

Teachers hate online school

Since the case numbers in Massachusetts started to turn upward in late June, I have been worrying that we won't get all of our students back in person next fall.  Last week, I texted some of teacher friends and asked if I should be worried that we hadn't gotten the official word that we wouldn't be hybrid or remote. Some of the people in the group chat were sanguine, because they were paying attention to state policy; nobody mentioned the union; and nobody felt anything but horror at the thought of teaching remotely again. 

One friend wrote: “I will. BURN. THE. BUILDING. DOWN. If we do remote hybrid. So we are either in person or not teaching.”

Another friend wrote: "“I’m already on record with my department chair that I’m taking a year off if we’re teaching remotely again. I will literally go dig ditches somewhere—whether or not anyone pays me will be beside the point.”

Now, I was always much more eager to return to normal schooling than the average teacher at my school, and since the teachers I just quoted are friends of mine, they are not a random sample, but my sense is that almost all teachers really, really want to be back in the classroom with all of their students.

Why, then, was the union so cautious last year?

Teachers' unions came in for a lot of criticism last year. My own union, in Leafstrewn, was the subject of a long piece in a national magazine, a piece that played almost everyone, including our Union President, for comedy (she made the mistakes of wearing a Bernie Sanders T-shirt and referring to her gentrifying neighborhood, which is indeed much, much less elite than Leafstrewn, as "working class"). The writer of the piece interviewed administrators, parents, School Committee members, union officials, but only one teacher, me. What I said then still seems true: teachers reacted to a deadly and poorly understood virus in exactly the same way other demographically similar groups of Americans (i.e. educated and/or liberal): most of them wanted to stay away from other people so they wouldn't get the disease. The fact that teachers were being tough on negotiating their return to the workplace was because they were unionized, so they could be tough in their negotiations. Most low-wage workers couldn't negotiate at all; most white collar workers didn't have to, because it was relatively easy for them to work from home.

I myself was always eager to go back in person, mostly because from very early in the pandemic I thought that with masks and open windows it just wasn't very risky, but I see the trepidation of many of my colleagues as of a piece with the trepidation many other people felt. The union simply allowed that trepidation to be taken into account, and that is probably a good thing. If people are worried that their job isn't safe, the way to convince people to do it anyway is not to force them back to work even though they think it will kill them, the way to do it is to convince them that it's actually safe. The public health communications on COVID-19 has been generally terrible (the early idiocy on masks, the oddly enduring pandemic theater of sanitizing hands and surfaces when it should have been clear from the beginning that this was airborne), and blaming teachers for not wanting to go back to work when every other white collar professional was doing the same is just crazy. I have a lot of friends and family who have white-collar non-teaching jobs, and literally the only one who went in to a crowded workplace earlier than I did was my cousin who's an ER doctor. ER doctors were a special case: when you become a doctor, you are basically signing up for hazardous duty--and even so, many doctors did work from home last year.

So, yes, schools should have re-opened earlier than they did, and schools should be open this fall, but the fact that teachers unions expressed and supported the feelings of their members, feelings that were identical to the feelings of their non-teacher peers (i.e. "I'm scared to go spend my days in a crowded room in a pandemic") is fine--that is exactly what a union is supposed to do. Fortunately, with the experience of last year showing that we can return in person with very little risk, and with vaccination providing another layer of protection, we all seem to be feeling very different from the way they were a year ago, and teachers really want to be back in the classroom.

The Null Hypothesis: Boring, but usually true?

As an English teacher, one of my main goals is for my students to become better readers. I've been doing this job for twenty years now, and I have read lots of books and articles about it, and I have tried to figure out how to help students become better readers, and it is truly surprising to me that there is not a clearer consensus about what works best. But there isn't consensus, and as far as I can tell that is because there is no really clear evidence showing that if you do X in your class or in your school, rather than Y, kids will be better at reading.

Like everyone, I have my opinions about what should work, and yet I have to acknowledge that there is the evidence is not very strong that my preferred approach is better than other people's preferred approaches. This uncertainty and lack of clear evidence in support of one approach is in a sense not that surprising, since it's true in a lot of other social science fields (for example, people argue about whether, if you want to win an election, you should spend your money on door-to-door canvassing or on TV ads), and it's easy to imagine reasons for this uncertainty. But at the same time, it is truly remarkable that even in the face of such uncertainty about the best way to proceed, people still, including me, get into highly charged debates about how schools should teach reading. And we all believe our approach is, not only the best, but also is supported by solid evidence.

Some approaches people wrongly claim there is clear unambiguous evidence for

I have seen arguments for each of these saying that there is clear evidence that it works better than current practice at improving reading comprehension:

       a) Lots of free voluntary reading (this is my preference, and scholars like Krashen and Allington have made the case, but the evidence is, I have to admit, not as strong as I would expect. Krashen's go-to stat is that in 51/54 studies, FVR does "as well as or better than" comparison programs; I'd like 54/54 to show it's better!)

       b) Explicit vocabulary instruction (this is often, as in the What Works Clearinghouse's advice on improving adolescent literacy, the very first recommendation, and yet to me the evidence seems weak that explicit vocabulary instruction is any better than just reading and learning words incidentally as you read. People often cite studies showing that if you teach kids key words from a passage beforehand, they will do better at reading the passage--but that seems obvious!)

       c)  Reading non-fiction (the Common Core made this a key feature of its standards, and prominent scholars like Tim Shanahan and Nell Duke have argued that evidence shows that being assigned more non-fiction will make you better at reading non-fiction. This sounds reasonable, but last I checked there was no evidence for it.)

       d) Instruction in reading strategies (Metacognition, using prior knowledge, making predictions, asking questions, identifying the main idea--teachers are told that explicit instruction in these "strategies" will help their students become better readers, but the evidence for this is pretty thin. Natalie Wexler has a lot of fun skewering reading strategy instruction in her book, The Knowledge Gap.)

       e)  Instruction in content knowledge (Natalie Wexler's sharply written book argues, I think correctly, that instruction in reading strategies is mostly useless and argues that what we need instead is to teach facts and content; unfortunately, the evidence for more instruction in content knowledge is not great either. Among other things, there are whole schools devoted to E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge approach, and as far as I can tell they do not get significantly better reading achievement outcomes.)

       f) Systematic phonics instruction, aka the "Science of Reading" (Many people claim that our early grade literacy instruction is outrageously ineffective, is dooming many students to failure, and is a leading social justice issue. And yet, here as in the other examples, including my own pet theory that children should be spend much more in-school time reading books, there is, to my knowledge, no really clear evidence yet of a school or district adopting this practice and obtaining dramatically different results from those of other schools or districts. I am still looking into this question, and there's a chance I'm missing something, but so far it looks a lot like it follows the same pattern as these other approaches.)

Pointing out that someone's evidence is thin is not a way to win friends

By now, I have a lot of experience, in blogs, in person, and on twitter, with asking for good evidence that a particular approach works. It usually follows the same pattern as my remarkable exchange with Tim Shanahan about non-fiction several years ago, or , more recently, of my Twitter exchanges with some education professors about vocabulary or with Natalie Wexler about content. 

Shanahan had written on his blog that kids should read more non-fiction. I said that I wanted to see evidence, and he said:

"Actually there is quite a bit of research showing that if you want students to be able to read expository text, you have to have them read (or write) expository text."

When I suggested that there wasn't great evidence, he responded, with admirable candor:

 "You are correct that there is no study showing that increasing the amount of the reading of informational text has had a clear positive unambiguous impact on reading achievement or student knowledge. "

I still don't get why he and Nell Duke were claiming that there was a lot of good evidence for reading non-fiction, when the only evidence I ever found was against it, but what he was doing is pretty common. People often make exaggerated claims about their preferred curriculum or instructional approach. This makes sense: there's a lot of upside to exaggerated claims about data and evidence, and extremely little downside, since editors and readers don't seem to push back very hard. In fact, I often get the feeling that I am considered rude for pointing out that the evidence is weak. After seeming to admit that I was right and he had been wrong to claim that there was good evidence to back up his claim, Tim Shanahan told me that I didn't understand how research worked or how causal claims were put forward. By that I now think he maybe meant that everyone knows that there's no "clear positive unambiguous evidence" for any particular approach to reading. I just think he's wrong--everyone definitely does not know this--and I am still trying to make sense of this fact myself.

Why don't any of these new approaches yield dramatically different results in the real world?

None of these different approaches seem to make much difference in students' reading abilities--but why not?! It seems to me that a school that builds a strong culture of reading, a school in which students read a lot during school, a school in which they talk about what they read, and read more than students in other schools--it seems to me that such a school should have dramatically better results than comparable schools. And yet the East Side Community School, a wonderful school (with a bad-ass principal) that truly values reading and seems to be doing everything I would want it to, including having its kids read an average of 40 books a year (?!), has test scores that are only somewhat above average. Its test scores are arguably evidence of huge success, given that it has a higher than average number of poor kids, but it isn't totally clear that it's the reading program, rather than the schoolwide culture of caring and engagement or the fact that parents had to apply and send in a letter of interest (which means that its student body is not randomly selected) that leads to the higher than average reading scores. Also, despite the school's apparently amazing culture, its students are still not achieving at the level of a place like Leafstrewn, the district with the most educated parents in the entire country. And the academic literature on what Stephen Krashen calls "Free Voluntary Reading" is pretty good (see his book), but it is not a slam-dunk. I think it's somewhat better than the evidence for the other later-grade approaches I listed above, but I wish it were better. If somebody wanted to argue that my preferred approach didn't have unambiguous empirical evidence, I'd have to agree, just as people like Tim Shanahan admit, when pressed, that their preferred approaches don't have "clear positive unambiguous impacts on student reading achievement." But... why? Why can't we show that any new approach is clearly better than the current practice? The answer, I think, is threefold.

1) Reading is the complex result of many factors

Some of the factors that go into reading skill include: genetic abilities of one kind or another (it seems reasonable to think that there might be some genetic component to a child's verbal aptitude, to their ability to sit and concentrate, to their auditory processing, to their working memory, etc.); the language environment in which a child grows up (conversations with caregivers in early childhood, number of books in the classroom and in the home, examples of literacy in the neighborhood and among peers, traumatic events, etc.); the specific instruction a child receives in grapheme/phoneme relationships; the amount of reading the child does on their own; and probably more.

2) Most of these factors are outside of the purview of school

Children spend far more time outside of school than in it, and even what they do during school hours is largely influenced by their lives outside the schoolhouse. A student's reading ability in 10th grade, or 8th grade, or even 3rd grade, is mostly the result of out-of-school factors. Many of these factors are in place before a student even reaches Kindergarten.

3) Most teachers are trying to do a good job, and the important stuff is pretty obvious

Most teachers are smart, caring people who love their students and want to help their students learn, and most stuff teachers do with kids is basically fine. These preferred strategies are obviously not bad. If you teach them vocab, that's probably good--they're thinking about words! If you teach them reading strategies, that's probably good--they're reading! If you teach them content knowledge, that's probably good--they're thinking about the content you're discussing! If you have them "just read", that's probably good--some of them will actually do it, and reading is very worthwhile! If you teach them phonics, that's probably good--it is true that the relationship between letters and sounds is fundamental! 

And even if you do the opposite, you are probably doing something that's worthwhile. If, instead of phonics, you use the much-reviled "whole language" approach,  you probably, unless you are really out of your mind, will spend at least some time on grapheme-phoneme relationships, since it is totally obvious that those matter. And even if, instead of doing, as I would suggest, a lot of in-class storytime and independent reading, you spend your class time discussing a book that kids are supposed to read at home (and many won't), those kids will still probably read a little bit in class and will still hear everyone else discussing the book in class.

It is obvious that reading is good. It is obvious that the grapheme-phoneme relationship is fundamental to reading. It is obvious that learning new words is good. It is obvious that learning about the world is good. So it is not surprising that most teachers, in their classrooms, do at least some stuff that is useful. That may not be a very high bar--"do at least some stuff that is useful"--but it is high enough, along with the out-of-school factors, to mean that it is really, really hard to show that one particular change will make a significant difference.

 What's the takeaway? Maybe we should be more modest and less certain of our rightness, and maybe we should be focusing more on what matters most?

For me, the fact that no particular change in practice can be shown to have "clear positive unambiguous impacts on student reading achievement" means not that we teachers shouldn't try to do a good job in our classrooms, nor that we shouldn't research and talk and write about the effects of different approaches to literacy, but that we should be more modest and understanding in our discourse. Over the last decade and a half, Bill Gates poured billions of dollars into education reform ideas that were founded, he thought, in solid "scientific" data, but all of which went absolutely nowhere. Gates money and influence has probably had a positive impact in other realms, like the fight against malaria (malaria has killed a large fraction of all humans ever to have lived, and yet between 2000 and 2015 deaths from malaria went down by 60%). Bill Gates should probably be focusing his efforts on public health, not education.

So maybe we too (and by "we" I mean "I") should be spending our time thinking and talking about other stuff--stuff like, for instance, climate change. Our planet is heating up, it's having major impacts on human life and well-being, and we should all be doing what we can to raise awareness of the problem and its potential solutions. I do hope to work on that more*, but I'm still an English teacher, so I will keep thinking about teaching and reading and writing; I will just try to do it, all the more, in a spirit of humility and good cheer. And I will keep reminding myself and others that a lot of what really matters is outside of the schoolhouse. 

*Personally, I have tried to help by advising the Environmental Action Club at my school, by adopting a mostly vegetarian diet and talking about why I did it, by riding my bike to work and telling everyone else how convenient it is and how great it makes me feel, by putting solar panels on my house and telling everyone I know to do the same, by planning a switch to solar-driven electric heat pumps for heating and cooling and telling others how great this will be, by supporting housing and zoning reform that would allow more people to live in great walkable neighborhoods like mine, and by giving money to Environmental causes and political candidates who support them. But none of this is enough, and I should probably be spending my time thinking and writing about climate change rather than literacy education.

Deus Ex Scholia Redux: Is Education the Biggest Social Justice Issue?

Someone I know and respect tweeted out yesterday the following: "The biggest social justice issue is education."

This is an interesting contention. As a teacher, I would like it to be true. When I do a good job as a teacher, I like to feel that I am making the world better, that I am helping people. As an American, I want to believe that our schools, arguably our largest communal endeavor, can be a force for good. And as someone who loves ideas, conversations and books, I want education to help everyone love those things.

But I'm not sure what follows from thinking that school is important. The tweet that I saw went on to say that "it has nothing to do with who gets into Yale or Stanford. It's what's happening in the early grades. Always shocking to me how little activists outside of the ed world talk about this." The presumption here seems to be that one really good way to work for social justice would be to do something to change the structure or implementation of early grade education. Again, that feels reasonable, even important. But I don't know what it means in practice, and whatever it means I am skeptical about its impact. 

It's hard to improve society by improving schools, mainly because it's hard to improve schools

In the years I've been a teacher, NCLB failed, the Common Core failed, and the Gates foundation spent billions of dollars on various initiatives (small schools, measuring teacher effectiveness, hyping the Common Core, etc.) and, by its own account, failed. And these recent failures are not surprising, since education reform basically always fails.

And yet, we keep trying to change our society by changing our education system. Partly, perhaps, because hope springs eternal in the human breast, but also because making direct, material changes to our society would cost material resources (i.e. money and power), and we want to make changes that are about changing techniques, not about shifting resources. In other words, we want to fix poverty by doing a better job of teaching poor people how to fish, even though their local streams have few fish in them, rather than by changing the ecosystem so that there are more fish everywhere, and/or (especially in the meantime), just giving them some fish directly. 

Effective Ed Reform might actually cost a lot of money

Arguably, one ed reform measure that didn't fail was my own state's much-lauded 1993 Education Reform Act. This is interesting history, and I want to think about it more, but my working hypothesis (and I'm sure lots of people have made this argument) is that while the 1993 law is remembered (even in its wikipedia page) as being mainly about introducing new state standards, new charter schools, and new standardized testing, in fact the most important thing it did was dramatically increase state funding for poor school districts. Unfortunately, these funding levels weren't maintained, and some of the improvement (in testing gaps, for instance) seems to have been lost.

What about the Science of Reading?

I'm not sure (because it's Twitter, the argument wan't spelled out), but I think the tweet that prompted my musings about Ed Reform may actually have been about reading instruction. There are a lot of people out there who believe very strongly that the early-grade reading instruction in US schools is almost universally terrible--that kids simply are not being taught the fundamental relationship between letters and sounds. There is probably some real truth to this. While my own children's schools certainly seemed to put a fair amount of focus, in the K-2 years, on grapheme-phoneme relationships, there also do seem to be some crazy ideas circulating widely (e.g., three-cueing). The questions, for me, are: (a) How much would a switch to best practices in K-2 reading instruction improve reading ability in, say, 10th grade? and (b) How much would an improvement in reading ability make a difference in social justice?

I am not super optimistic on either point, partly because large-scale ed reform has a history of not living up to its hype (see above) and partly because I don't see much evidence of shifts in reading scores either at the school level (when I've asked for examples of districts that have adopted science of reading practices and seen significant score improvement, the examples I've been offered have been few and, in my view, not super impressive) or at the national level (for example, both England and California have tried to make some changes systemwide, to very little noticeable effect, though I'm sure it's true, as always, that implementation has not been great).

But I hope to look into the reading question a bit more deeply over the next few weeks, and maybe what I will learn will change my mind. It would be great if we could change some stuff in our schools and make our society better and more humane. Unfortunately, I think our best hope is to try in a more direct way to make the society better. (In the same way, while I am not against anti-racist education, and I am even on my English department's anti-racist committee, I think it's much more promising, if we want to reduce the harmful effects of historical and structural racism, to try to make some structural changes in our society--e.g. do some things that less unequal societies do, like higher minimum wages, stronger unions, easier voting, national health care, anti-pollution regulation, etc.)

In the meantime, if anyone has good stories about ed reform or SoR success stories, I'm looking for good reading material.  On SoR, I've read books or many long pieces by Gillingham, Stanovich, Seidenberg, and Hanford, but I know there's more stuff out there...

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!

New study of universal preschool has confusing results...

I've been thinking a lot this past week about reading, vocabulary, and poverty, but I haven't gotten my thoughts in order. In the meantime, I want to note an interesting recent study of universal preschool that raises some interesting questions about what school is good for. The pandemic has taught me that school is important in all sorts of ways, and this study goes along with that lesson.

Preschool leads to more schooling, but test scores don't go up

The new paper, which came out last month, is about the long-term effects of a universal preschool program in Boston. The study finds that preschool enrollment significant boosts high-school graduation, SAT-taking, college attendance, and reduces juvenile incarceration. Interestingly, the study finds that preschool enrollment does NOT have a detectable impact on state achievement test scores. This is an interesting paradox: universal preschool keeps kids in school longer and gets kids to college, but it does not measurably increase their test scores. How could this be?

This finding--that increased attachment to school does not have a detectable impact on test scores--is extremely counterintuitive. School is supposed to make you better at reading and math, and if preschool makes you more likely to stay in school, more likely to go to college, more likely to take the SATs, more likely to stay out of trouble, those behaviors should lead you also to get more of schools benefits, and you should do better on reading and math tests. That this apparent increase in attachment to school does not lead to higher scores seems to suggest, disturbingly, that school itself does not necessarily lead to higher scores. This uncomfortable suggestion reminds me a paper from a couple of years ago about the "summer slide."

The summer slide is famous, but it might not really exist

The "summer slide" refers to the idea that students--especially less privileged students--not only fail to make academic progress over the summer, but actually slide backward. This idea has long been accepted as an established truth. Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, states the idea this way:

"America doesn't have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem." (Outliers, 260)

The idea is that the gap between rich kids and poor kids narrows during the school year, and then widens during the summer. According to a 2019 paper (von Hippel and Hamrock), this isn't actually true: 

"If summer learning gaps are present, most of them are small and hard to discern."

The 2019 paper is an interesting reminder of how much measurement matters. Learning gaps were thought to widen over the summer not only because testing regimes used different tests for different grades, and scores on the different tests were hard to compare, but also because how you measure the gap affects how much a gap changes. Scaling test results in different ways results in dramatically different accounts of how much a gap widens or narrows:

Ultimately, von Hippel and Hamrock's paper suggests that "reading and math gaps grow substantially more in the first five years of life than they do in the nine years after school begins." 

If the gap is established in early childhood, shouldn't preschool help?

Von Hippel and Hamrock's 2019 paper concludes with a call for investment in early childhood: 

"The growing interest in early-childhood programs—such as preschool, home visits, and new-parent training—is justified. It is vital to invest in early-childhood programs, and it is just as vital to understand why some early-childhood programs succeed in shrinking gaps, whereas others fail to realize their potential."

This makes sense. But, to come back to the paper about preschool, if preschool can help, why didn't universal preschool in Boston raise test scores?

What is the point of school, after all?

Right now, we don't know why the test scores didn't go up. But one deep question this study raises is: What is the point of school?, is the purpose of school to raise test scores, or is it to help students attain other skills or qualities (persistence? obedience? cooperation? organization?). Is it maybe okay that test scores didn't go up? I don't really like that idea, since I think academic skills are fun and useful, but I am open to the idea that school has different kinds of benefits as well, and maybe those are more important.

Deus Ex Scholia (or, Michael Lewis has a bad idea)

Post-pandemic, I'm coming back to this blog as a place to think through questions about education and literacy. Because education matters, but it's not always obvious how it matters, nor how it can be improved.

Deus Ex Scholia

It's always amazing how many fairly sophisticated people have naive and simple-minded ideas about school. I listened not too long ago to an interview, about America's pandemic response, with the writer Michael Lewis. It was mostly smart and interesting, but there was a moment that stopped me short.

Lewis and the host were talking about whether or not different policy responses to COVID actually made much difference, given that states like Florida, whose policies were quite lax, didn't seem to have much higher rates of transmission. Culture is, it seems, at least as important as policy. But what can you do to change the culture? This is an interesting question, so I started listening more carefully.

Talking about policies that might actually make a difference, Lewis said, "I’ll be God for a minute and institute reforms that sound kind of technical, but I think would have massive consequences." The first two things Lewis would do as God could conceivably actually make a difference: first, turn many leadership positions in the Federal government from political appointments to civil service positions with a longer tenure, and second, reward the little people who are doing the hard work. 

So far, so good: those things wouldn't be easy to accomplish, but they are interesting and slightly unusual ideas. But when Lewis offered his third suggestion, I laughed aloud. I'll quote the paragraph in full:

Number three, I reintroduce civics into the American curriculum. So every kid needs to know — you can’t get out of the eighth grade without knowing what the Department of Energy does and things like that. We start to educate again the population about what the public sector is. There’s such a branding problem right now. There’s such a screwed up notion about what it’s for and what it’s not for.

This ought to be self-evidently absurd, but unfortunately it's the kind of thing you hear a lot from people who want to change the culture.

When little children or simpletons think a cultural phenomenon is dangerous, they say, "There ought to be a law."

At a somewhat higher level of sophistication, people realize that maybe a "law" is a crude form of coercion, or they think that a law won't be passed unless people's beliefs change first, so they say, "Let's teach about this in school." As if this would be easy, as if you could make sure that the teaching on the subject that ended up in school wouldn't be the exact opposite of what you want, and as if, even if you could teach what you wanted, the teaching would be effective. I'm skeptical about each of these assumptions (and I'm not alone)!

Is school material or cultural? (Yes.)

School is important, but it's not always important in a simple, straightforward way, and it can't always be changed in a simple, straightforward way. We want kids to get better at reading, so we spend a lot of time "teaching" them to read. When this doesn't work as well as we want it to, we critique the way we're teaching them, but not whether direct instruction is the best way for kids to learn. When kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds perform dramatically differently on tests, we decide that it is school's job to fix this difference and we introduce new layers of programming, or we de-track our classes, or we change the curriculum. When this doesn't work as well as we want it to, we critique the way we are teaching, but not whether school can actually be expected to compensate for large inequities outside the schoolhouse.

The deus ex scholia method of solving social problems in the world is as absurd and unsatisfying as deus ex machina method of solving plot problems in a narrative. In fact, it's much less satisfying, since the deus ex scholia method just puts off the solution into the future.

I tend to see cultural problems as downstream of material problems. If we want to solve cultural problems, let's make sure people have good-paying jobs, reliable health insurance, and housing that doesn't cost a fortune (and smaller-bore material changes like the ones Michael Lewis mentioned could also be helpful).

Does that mean that schools aren't important? No, of course not. Schools can make a difference, but in schools, too, the material is as important as the cultural. Direct instruction in literacy or rhetorical techniques is useful, in small doses, but most of what students need is actual practice in reading and writing and speaking. Don't ask, what is the teacher saying; ask, what is the student actually doing?

I'll be thinking about these questions more in future posts. For now, it's summer, and I'm going for a bike ride.

Three Days at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project

Some take-aways from my recent three-day "institute" about student book groups at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. More on some of these later...

• Stickies are a cool presentation tool

• Notebooks are good, and other people are amazing at making their notebook pages look great, even if I'm not

• Reading in class is still a revolutionary act

• We can create the culture we believe in--but it takes real planning and work
• TCRWP believes in a culture of reading, and they have a clear plan for how to create it

• Reading in class for extended periods is very important
• Teachers are incredibly resistant to this practice
• The entire TCRWP "workshop method" can be seen as a clever, round-about way to try to make teachers comfortable with just letting their students read

• * Our culture demands that we back our claims up with "research" or "science"

• * It's hard to come up with good questions about literature
• The "workshop" format the TCRWP promotes seems excellent (it minimizes, and maybe sharpens, direct instruction and group discussion, while maximizing time in class to actually read), but the questions they used in their mini-lessons just weren't that great (level 1 and 2 questions, mostly, if you use the 4QM framework, and, more importantly, not phrased very crisply) 

• * It's hard to run a good class
• The leader of our smaller group, when she was setting up our book groups, said, "It's important not to just put the books on a table at the back of the room and say, Okay, go find a book you like and get in groups" -- but then she did exactly that. Teaching is hard!

• The street food in Morningside Heights is way better now than when I lived there in the late 90s.

Day 2: Two high points and a low point

I had an interesting day at the institute, and then I had a cup of coffee with my aunt, Hannah, who used to be an elementary school teacher and then a math coordinator, and we had an interesting talk about the culture of education. I was saying something about the reading wars and the way The Knowledge Gap vilified Lucy Calkins, and I said, “It’s funny, all educational debates follow the same basic structure, but I’m not sure I know what that structure is, exactly.”

“I know,” Hannah said: “taking two things that are both necessary and pitting them against each other."

She’s exactly right!

That was one high point. Another was when we had twenty minutes to just sit and read quietly, and our facilitator said, “Most importantly, you’ve got to protect your reading time!”

I agree, we have to protect our reading time, so I was less happy with the amount of time we spent looking at screens, images, and video. Ugh.

I guess I should have known this was coming after Mary Ehrenworth said yesterday, about using video in your classroom (I think she called it, in a strange phrase, “digital read-alouds”): “This is a game-changer,” and added, “You should be using it in your classrooms as much as humanly possible.”

Yikes!

Are educational researchers more "analytical" than teachers? I doubt it.

Educational research has a lot of problems--statistical incompetence, a tendency to leap to generalizations, and the Kuhnian inability of all scientists, even when the data is decisive, to "renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis", among many others.  Why these weaknesses?  Is it because many of the people doing this research used to be teachers, and teaching makes you less "analytical"?  No! This is not the reason!  Teachers can be analytical too!

Stanford's David Labaree
David Labaree, a sociologist by training and a longtime Ed School professor, is always provocative and interesting.  I've read a number of his articles, and I like what he's written about statistics in Ed research (he suggests Educational researchers use statistics because, working in the least respected field in the academy, and perhaps the only field that is both "soft" and "applied", they're grasping for authority), and I am very interested in his work on education as a public good (he uses Hirschman's distinction between exit and voice as a helpful lens, and he makes useful distinctions among the different purposes schooling can have, from educating citizens to training workers, both clearly public goods, to allowing for individual social mobility and competitive advantage, which Labaree sees as a private good, though I think this too has a public good aspect).  I'm also interested in his writing about ed schools, but that writing seems a bit more muddled to me.  Perhaps it's the subject.

Are practical-minded teachers to blame for the problems with educational research?
Labaree suggests, in a 2003 article, that educational researchers are more "analytical" than teachers. He claims that one of the tensions in Ed schools is the cultural shift that doctoral Education students must make when they enter Ed school and have to shift from the practical exigencies of teaching to the scholarly culture of being an educational researcher.  It seems to me, however, that a more important problem is the way educational researchers shift from being analytical and scholarly in their professional papers to being polemical and unscholarly in their popular writing and their policy advocacy.

The 2003 article I'm focusing on here appeared in Educational Researcher, a publication of the American Education Research Association.  The article discusses the cultural initiation undergone by educational researchers-in-training. Labaree claims that these graduate students, who are nearly always former teachers, must make a difficult transition from the culture of the practitioner to the culture of the scholar.  According to Labaree, these students' reluctance to think in analytical, scholarly ways "leads students in education doctoral programs to shift the discourse about educational issues from what is to what should be, looking for practical solutions before explaining the problem." In other words, Labaree seems to be blaming the tendency of educational research to be always chasing after the next fad in educational practice on this cultural divide.  As Labaree puts it:

The idea is to pick an intervention that promises to improve education—a new teaching technique, curriculum approach, instructional technology, reform effort, or administrative structure—and study it in practice. The desired outcome is that the intervention works rather well, and the function of the study is to document this and suggest how the approach could be improved in the future. This often leads to an approach to scholarship (and eventually to a kind of scholarly literature) that is relentlessly, unrealistically, sometimes comically optimistic—one that suggests that there is an implementable answer to every educational problem and that help is always on the way.

I love this focus on the way education research often puts the cart before the horse, and I think Labaree's urging of modesty on the often-hubristic educational researchers is right on.  In another article Labaree calls on education scholars to adopt the Hippocratic "First, do no harm" as a slogan, which strikes me as exactly right.  For the first few years of my teaching career, that slogan was my daily mantra.  Nevertheless, I think Labaree is putting the blame in the wrong place here.  Rather than blame first the culture of the working practitioner for the intellectual hubris of ed research, I would put most of the responsibility on the culture of the scholars and professors.

Part of the problem is one that Labaree himself has written about extensively: education research is the lowliest academic pursuit.  Because education research is marginal and low-prestige, ed school professors have chips on their shoulders, are even more susceptible to political and cultural influence than scholars in more prestigious disciplines, and are statistically incompetent. But the real problem is that this is an "applied" social science, and applied social sciences struggle mightily because they are up against an essentially impossible task. The old poem I quoted yesterday is relevant again:

No known way of human seeing

Can clearly see the human being.

If social science is a well-nigh impossible task, and if Doctoral students in Education are insecure because they see legions of doctoral students in Economics about to take their jobs, then why should they be any more scrupulous about curbing the many types of researcher bias than any other social scientist? For the truth is that social science has been for years in the throes of a crisis: a study published in Nature found that more than a third of a group of peer-reviewed social science papers published in top journals (Nature and Science) couldn't be replicated. Researchers in other social sciences are, clearly, also swayed by the hope of finding meaningful and applicable results.

On the other hand, teachers can be and are often quite analytical, and are in fact more truly scientific than many social scientists. One key element of science is maintaining an open, skeptical, humble mind, and few people are more humble in my experience than working teachers.

Two recent critiques of the education establishment, and teacher practice, are Natalie Wexler's book, The Knowledge Gap, and Emily Hanford's many radio stories, op-eds and film about the "science" of reading. Both Wexler and Hanford are reporters who base their critiques on supposed "science" that they got from academic researchers (Mark Seidenberg in Hanford's case, and Daniel Willingham (mostly) in Wexler's case); and both Wexler and Hanford cast Lucy Calkins, an ed school bigwig, as their main villain, with the teachers in the role of mostly unwitting dupes who need to be informed that they are doing everything wrong. In these feuds, it is absolutely not the ed school people (and of course it's not the teachers), who are "relentlessly, unrealistically, sometimes comically optimistic."  Instead, the people who most wildly overstate their case and pretend that "there is an implementable answer to every educational problem" are not only the journalists, no doubt incentivized by the pressure of coming up with a good story, but also the scientists themselves. After all, the hubristic subtitle of Seidenberg's book is "How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It", and Willingham's book has a whole table of implementable solutions. In both of these cases, the problems are ones that Labaree points out, but the fault lies not in teachers, nor in ed school.

The next question, for me, is how much any of this really matters. Fortunately, none of it is probably all that significant. Even what I was worrying about today--the crazy numbers of screens we have these days in English classrooms that are supposed to be helping kids get better at reading and writing--probably doesn't matter all that much. But more on that issue later.

Two Cultures: “Science” vs. “Research” (Reflections on Day 1 of the TCRWP Institute)

I’m still curious why this is called an “Institute.” Having spent my undergraduate years at the world’s most famous “Institute,” I may be particularly sensitive to the word, but it’s also, as Stephen King knows, just objectively uncanny.

I didn’t learn anything about that word, but I did get a better picture of how people here at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project use the word “science.” The answer is: they don’t.

I didn’t hear the word “science” once all day. On the other hand, I did hear, quite often, the word “research.” Several times, presenters talked explicitly and at some length about “research”—“Reading Research” or “Non-Fiction Research” or “research on the reciprocity of writing and reading.”

Mary Ehrenworth, the lead organizer of the Institute, gave an hour-long talk over half of which was an overview of the “research” supporting her approach. Interestingly, she presented this research not as specific studies or types of inquiry or categories of interest within the field, but as individual researchers within the field. When talking about “Reading Research,” for instance, she listed six particular scholars and discussed one or more of their books. Organizing the talk this way was interesting, subtly prioritizing both the book (over the “peer-reviewed paper” that is the lodestar of the “Science” folks) and also the human. Organizing a discussion of the research by researchers is a way of valuing the human and cultural nature of educational scholarship, and, the “science” people would say, completely ignoring the “scientific” nature of it.

I remember Mark Seidenberg--a cognitive scientist who is so annoyed by the TCRWP’s insufficient embrace of the “science” supporting systematic phonics that he more or less implies that the TCRWP’s Lucy Calkins is herself the reason Americans can’t read (ironically humanizing what is after all supposed to be an objective debate)—I remember Mark Seidenberg saying that there were two distinct cultures, and that Calkins and her ilk (the whole literacy establishment, including Allington and Beers and others) were part of an “educational culture” which was distinct from the “scientific culture” to which Seidenberg belonged. In Seidenberg’s view, the reason Americans lag in reading (if they do) is that educational culture is interested in culture and socialization and wholly uninterested in science. Based on what I saw today, I think Seidenberg is half right. The people here are not really interested in science.

Where I differ from Seidenberg is that I think he vastly overestimates the extent to which the “science” of education is settled or helpful. Part of this may be that the people here are focused on all of K-12 education, while he is for various reasons more focused on the basics of learning to read. Part of this is because scholarship around education is itself anxious about its status as “science” (you can see this even in the work of a researcher cited twice today, John Hattie, whose work claims way more than it delivers). But a lot of it is that, as an old poem has it, the human and social “sciences” are still in their infancies:

     No known way of human seeing

     Can clearly see the human being.

In any case, I'm looking forward to Day 2!