Waldorf Schools are an interesting natural experiment showing that explicit reading instruction in the very early grades may be unnecessary

We have some family friends whose kids used to go to a (private) Waldorf school nearby.  The kids were wonderful, but I didn't know much about the school or its methods.  A few days ago, when I was saying something about whether children needed to read "informational text" in the very early grades, my wife said, "That's silly. Waldorf schools don't teach ANY reading until second grade, and those kids end up just fine."

I looked this up, and, as usual, my wife was right: Waldorf schools generally don't teach reading until second grade, use a whole language approach and avoid much explicit strategy instruction when they do teach it, and their students apparently end up reading just fine.  This is an important result, because it would seem to show that explicit reading instruction in Kindergarten and first grade may not be necessary, and that students certainly don't need to read much informational text to themselves in kindergarten and first grade in order to learn to read well later on.

Recent Studies
Until recently, most Waldorf schools were private, so skeptics could argue that if Waldorf students ended up being good readers, the students and families at those schools were distinctly different from the norm, so no comparison was possible.  Over the past couple of decades, however, a number of public Waldorf schools have opened, most of them in California, and two recent studies in the U.S.(Oberman 2007(pdf); Larrison et al. 2012) compare the results at these schools with those at traditional schools with comparable student demographics. The two studies find the same result: when it comes to reading on their own, students in the early grades in Waldorf schools are dramatically worse than their peers in regular schools, but by the later grades, the Waldorf students have caught up or surpassed the regular-school students.

The graphic below shows some of the results obtained in the 2012 study. The scores of the Waldorf students start well below average, then catch up by fourth grade, then seem to pull ahead.

These results are striking. When the same researchers looked only at the California Waldorf schools, so as to avoid issues with cross-state comparisons, the same pattern was seen, though with less dramatic divergence in the upper grades. When Oberman did a similar comparison on a more limited scale and with data from two years earlier, she found a somewhat similar pattern--Waldorf students starting out behind and catching up, if not pulling ahead.  A New Zealand study comes to the same conclusion: Waldorf students do badly on reading tests when they are 6 and 7, but by the time they are entering adolescence, they have caught up or even pulled ahead.

Conclusions
Now, of course the students and families at these schools are self-selecting, and of course there may be other ways to explain away these results, and of course this is not a very large body of scholarly literature.  Nevertheless, I can't find any studies that contradict these three, and these results are consistent with thinking that what is important is not explicit instruction in discrete reading skills, and not reading a minimum proportion of informational text--but, instead, developing students minds by engaging their imaginations, creating a culture of engaged intellectual inquiry, doing lots of reading stories aloud and having them sing songs and repeat poems.

So these studies aren't definitive, but they are enough to call into further doubt the blithe assurances of people like Tim Shanahan and David Coleman that their preferred approach is consistent with the available empirical evidence.

Front-page NYT article on raising reading scores never mentions actually reading

Today's paper of record has a front-page story about how much "easier" it is to improve student scores in math than in reading.  Predictably, the article mentions many specific skills and "concepts", but never explicitly mentions what would seem the most important factor: time spent actually reading.

The story describes lessons on close reading and inferences, it discusses acting out the dialogue in books, and it mentions narrative perspectives, subtext, character motivation, vocabulary, background knowledge, sentence length, text density, and cultural deficits.  It talks about the enormous differences in how much "literacy" children are exposed to outside of school.  But none of the teachers and experts quoted in the article suggests that perhaps the best way to raise reading scores is to have kids actually read.

A few months ago the same newspaper published an op-ed by a Mexican novelist, David Toscana, who asked a very important question:

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.” 

Too often, this is true in America as well. Our schools have our children six hours a day for twelve years. That is a lot of time. Let the kids read!

Krugman on Ed Reform

Paul Krugman has a good piece in the NYRB discussing the ill-judged move, over the past few years in the west,  to "austerity"-- that is, cutting government spending and raising taxes.  The article is worth reading even for people who aren't usually terribly interested in economics, both because this is one of the major stories of our time and because Krugman's analysis of how the opinions of the elites and the policymakers could be so wrong is more broadly applicable.  In particular, I think the analysis applies pretty well to the Ed Reform movement of the past decade.

According to Krugman, the move to austerity has a few notable features:

* It found support from scholarly studies that are, despite fancy pedigrees (Harvard!), shaky and dubious
* It had a simple moral and psychological appeal
* It did not demand anything difficult from the elites themselves

All of these fit the Ed Reform movement as well:

Support from dubious but ivy-league scholarship
Educational research is, like economics research, anything but conclusive.  A lot of pretty basic questions are surprisingly unclear: whether homework is worthwhile, whether class size makes a big difference, how reliable or valid standardized test scores are as measures of teacher effectiveness, whether vocabulary instruction is useful, and many , many more.  Nevertheless, you would never know this from the self-assured pronouncements of people like Bill Gates, who can move with dizzying fickleness from demanding small schools to demanding Common Core Standards to demanding that teachers be evaluated by test scores to demanding larger class sizes, citing studies for each new "evidence-based" proposal despite the fact that none of these proposals has more than the slimmest of empirical evidence in its favor.  

In fact, the Ed reformers' emphasis on standardized tests is striking in its radical departure from what has long been understood: that what matters is student engagement with the material in as authentic a way as possible.  But just as radical proponents of austerity economics have, on the basis of thin scholarship and simplistic moralizing ("We must tighten our belts!"), left behind the accepted wisdom of John Maynard Keynes--just so have the Ed reformers radically left behind the legacy of John Dewey on the basis of thin scholarship and similarly simplistic moralizing ("We need to get tough!").

Crude moral and psychological appeal 
Blame and punishment have an eternal appeal.  Just as the Germans blame the Greeks, and demand cuts and austerity from the Greeks even though cutting the Greek economy off at the knees means it won't ever get back on its feet, American Ed reformers blame teachers and schools, and demand punishment.  Never mind changing the larger system of inequality and poverty, never mind the fact that punitive measures never work, blame and punishment are appealing--especially if you can put them onto other people, not yourself or people you know.

Few demands on the elites themselves
Because cutting taxes on the rich helps the rich, cutting government spending doesn't hurt them directly, and failing to tackle high unemployment keeps wages down and corporate profits high, the wealthy proponents of government austerity are remarkably insulated from the bad effects of the policies they propose.  In the same way, the Ed reformers are very far from personally connected to the reforms they propose.  Not only have none of these people (Gates, Broad, Duncan, Obama, Bloomberg, Klein, Coleman, Emanuel, etc.) ever actually been a teacher, not a single one of them, as far as I know, has kids in public school.  The fact that all of the ed reformers send their kids to private school is significant for two reasons: (1) because private schools like Lakeside, Sidwell Friends or the Lab School do not follow an ed reform model now, and (2) because they will never have to.  New standards, new testing regimes, increased class sizes, teacher evaluation based on test scores--all of these dubious reforms will be imposed on those of us in public schools, but their architects and proponents are sheltered and insulated from them.  It is infuriating.

Conclusion
What Krugman says about proponents of austerity economics is, I think, appropriate to Ed Reform as well (and reminds me why the wonk is an invasive species).  Here's Krugman:

"It’s a terrible story, mainly because of the immense suffering that has resulted from these policy errors. It’s also deeply worrying for those who like to believe that knowledge can make a positive difference in the world. To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in general have made use of economic analysis at all, they have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination. Papers and economists who told the elite what it wanted to hear were celebrated, despite plenty of evidence that they were wrong; critics were ignored, no matter how often they got it right."

Who knew: Singapore is a den of Dewey-eyed hippies!

On this snow day, I'm about to get down to the business of reading what my students have written about the books they're reading, but I just spent about ten minutes psyching myself up by reading a bit of Pasi Sahlberg's book about Finland.  I haven't looked much into Finland, because it seemed to me that a lot of people who hold it up as a model are ignoring the huge differences between Finland's relatively equal society and our relatively cutthroat one, but Sahlberg's book is interesting.  One thing I learned from it has nothing to do with Finland at all, but with a country I think of as dramatically different: Singapore.

I always thought Singapore was a super-conservative city state that kept its culture business-friendly by such illiberal practices as cracking down on freedom of speech, executing a lot of people, and caning schoolchildren.  It may be that way, but this morning I learned (maybe everyone else already knows this?) that its Ministry of Education has been, over the past fifteen years, promoting a vision of education that even A. S. Neill might have admired.  Singapore's initiative is called:

TEACH LESS, LEARN MORE

That is a beautiful slogan, and it's elaborated with a full-on liberalizing zeal that must be partly necessitated by Singapore's history of cane-wielding Gradgrindian severity but was still inspiring even to me.  We in Leafstrewn are, I think, with them in theory, but not always in practice.  So during this week in which Mother Nature seems to be offering her own critique of high-stakes testing, here are some Singaporean lessons (from the Ministry of Education's website):

Remember Why We Teach -

More… Less… For the Learner   To Rush through the Syllabus  To Excite Passion  Out of Fear of Failure  For Understanding  To Dispense Information Only  For the Test of Life  For a Life of Tests

Reflect on What We Teach - 

More… Less… The Whole Child The Subject Values-centric Grades-centric Process Product Searching Questions Textbook Answers

Reconsider How We Teach - 

More…	Less…
Engaged Learning	Drill and Practice
Differentiated Teaching	‘One-size-fits-all’ Instruction
Guiding, Facilitating, Modelling	Telling
Formative and Qualitative Assessing	Summative and Quantitative Testing
Spirit of innovation and enterprise	Set Formulae, Standard Answers

Election special: Presidential Prep Schools (Part I)

Our presidential candidates, like most of the US plutocracy, attended private high school.  I'm interested in the differences between the education and literacy of the elite and the education and literacy of the masses, so I spent an hour or so looking at the Presidential prep schools: the Punahou Academy (Obama) and the Cranbrook school (Romney), and another hour or so trying to think about the differences between these schools and public schools.  I find it troubling that our elites are withdrawing more and more from the spheres that the rest of us inhabit, and the private school/public school divide is just one rift among many.  What does this divide look like, and what does it mean?  I'm not really sure, but I've written two posts trying to explore the matter.  This first post is about Punahou and Cranbrook in general, and I'll post something tomorrow about what the schools' English departments say they're doing.

General differences between private high schools and public high schools
These high schools are different from public high schools mainly in their student populations.  The main reason Obama, Romney, Gates and other elites go to private school is that private schools are allowed to exclude kids who are less docile, less privileged, and less able.  Good public schools are mostly "good" because they enroll more docile, privileged and able students, and low-performing public schools are mostly bad because they enroll less docile, less privileged, and less able students. Elite private schools take this difference between "good" public school and "bad" public school to a whole different level, since even at Leafstrewn we don't actively select our students. Punahou and Cranbrook are able to hand-pick their students, and their enrollments are made up almost entirely of extremely privileged and genetically fortunate children (according to an interesting study differences in academic ability among rich kids are at least 50% genetic, whereas among poor kids environment accounts for 90% of academic ability).  At Punahou or Cranbrook, the few scholarship kids, like the young Barack Obama, are rare birds completely unrepresentative of their poorer peers (and Obama was hardly poor).  This hand-picked student body is by far the most important difference between a private and a public school, since students are the most important factor in student achievement at any school, more important than the curriculum, the teachers, or even the budget. .

Non-academic factors also matter
The student population is also important for non-academic reasons, of course. Just as I myself prefer public schools (as a teacher and a parent) for non-academic reasons, many people prefer private schools for non-academic reasons.  Having different populations means that the friends children make are different; the parent population is different; and the culture is different.  But the differences go beyond population.

For one thing, the physical plant is usually dramatically different.  My son goes to public school in a scary, depressing, prison-like structure:
 

Our President and his opponent, on the other hand, went to lushly landscaped academic chateaux.  (Cranbrook's campus, below left, was called, by the New York Times's architecture critic, "one of the greatest campuses ever created anywhere", and Punahou, at right, reminds me somehow of the Hearst castle at San Simeon):

Academic differences beyond the student population
Aside from the populations, and aside from the culture and the architecture and the groundskeeping, these private schools are also dramatically different from public schools in two ways: (1) they have lower student-teacher ratios; (2) they are not bound by governmental curriculum and testing requirements.

The student-teacher ratios at wealthy private schools are dramatically different from those even at public schools in wealthy towns.  The public schools in leafy Bloomfield Hills, where Cranbrook is located, are relatively well-funded, and have extremely low numbers of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch.  While nationwide about 50% of students are eligible for Free or Reduced Price lunch, the number in our own wealthy Leafstrewn is 13%, and in the Bloomfield Hills public schools it's even lower, somewhere between 2 and 8%.  Nevertheless, whereas the public schools in Leafstrewn and Bloomfield Hills have student-teacher ratios of between 11 and 15, Cranbrook has a student-teacher ratio of 8.

Private schools are also not bound by nearly as many government rules.  Punahou and Cranbrook both require standardized tests to get in, and both brag about their SAT results and their National Merit Semifinalists, but neither school subjects its students to the battery of standardized tests that are a yearly disruption of the routine at Leafstrewn and every other public school in the country.  They are also free to run their schools, including their English departments, however they wish--but I'll wait until tomorrow's post to address that.

What do these differences mean?
One thing they mean is that when politicians or billionaires talk about school reform, it is hard for me to take their words at face value.  If standardized testing is so important for improving schools, why don't elite parents push for their own children's schools to give the same tests?  My son went to a private quaker school for a couple of years in between public schools, and he did not take the MCAS.  Malia and Sasha do not have to take standardized tests every year.  Why not? And if class size doesn't matter much, as Bill Gates is so fond of saying, why is it that Punahou and Cranbrook and Lakeside (Gates's alma mater) have dramatically lower teacher-student ratios than public schools do? (In fact the data is pretty clear: as you would expect, class size does matter, and it matters more for poor kids. The chair of Obama's council of economic advisors, Alan Krueger, has done great work on this--see his 2003 article, available here--but Arne Duncan has said that larger classes in high school might be a good idea.)  So in my eyes, neither Presidential candidate has much credibility on education, and both ignore the most important factors in our country's educational health.

Another thing these differences mean is that we public school teachers might look at the curriculum and teaching at private schools, since they probably do things slightly differently.  I've been thinking a lot about how we English teachers can learn from looking at doctors, at literature, at homeschooling, at international differences, and so on; prep schools are another interesting outside comparison. So tomorrow I'll say something about the way the two Presidential Prep schools say they handle reading, and I'll say which candidate I would vote for if all I knew was their high school's English department mission statement.