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.

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!

The New York Times Discovers Educational Public Health!

I'm racing to read my huge stack of student papers before Wednesday's grading deadline, but I have to note an excellent post that went up at the NYT this past weekend.  It's from a Stanford professor who's doing good work on income inequality and education--good work that would fit well into my fantasy graduate school of educational public health.  The post is called "No Rich Child Left Behind", and it makes the very important points that:

A) Educational outcomes are and have always been very, very dependent on class.

B) The disparity in achievement between rich and poor has increased over the past fifty years, with the big difference coming because the performance of rich kids has significantly increased since the 1980s, so that whereas in 1980 there wasn't much difference between the rich and the middle class, now there is a significant gap.

C) Test scores of poor kids are not dropping--on the contrary, they are increasing, and the widening gap between rich and poor is because the test scores of the poor and middle class are not improving as quickly as those of the rich.

D) School narrows the gap: over the nine-months of the school year, the gap narrows, but then it increases again (and a bit more) in the summer.

E) According to the author, some of the growing gap comes because of the significant increase in inequality over the last few decades, but some of it also comes because the rich have been devoting ever more resources to the support and have been engaging in, to borrow a phrase from other researchers, "concerted cultivation" of their children's cognitive resources.

In a wonderful section of the post, Reardon writes:

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

[...]

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this.

Yes, we do need to start talking about it, and Reardon starts talking about it in a very important way: rather than talking about how schools can narrow the gap, for instance by using schools to provide social services (something I've argued is silly), he talks about, not only  investing in quality early childhood care for  kids of working parents, but also on providing families with the time and resources to take better care of their own kids.  "Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children," he writes, and goes on to suggest the eminently sensible idea of providing more support for parental leave from work. In this spirit, I have suggested that raising the minimum wage and having a better national health insurance system should also be seen as important educational initiatives.

Reardon also mentions that the American Educational Research Association has decided to make the theme of its annual conference this year be "Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis."  That is of course good news, and although the conference's theme is a bit mealy-mouthed, some of the responses to the theme are interesting--my favorite of the ones I've read so far is the obvious but necessary "The Poverty of Capitalism" by a UCLA prof named Peter McClaren, who says important things even as he conforms touchingly, as I think Noel Coward once wrote, to type (check out his picture in the appendix below), but I also like the idea that we have conversations with our poor students about how "poverty is a prejudiced construct sustained by those who are led to believe that “venerated” institutions are the preferred, superior and normative legislator for values and morals because of their power to grant and reproduce intellectual, academic, able-istic, gendered, classed, religious, environmental, ethnic, linguistic and heternormative capital within dominant culture."

Overall, however, what I'm seeing on the conference website looks a bit more like a backwater of clever theory than anything that will build the institutions we need to combat either capitalism or its constructs.  Again, what we need is a proper, scientific graduate school of educational public health. I think we need to speak the language of the society we live in, not plan for a revolution that may never come, and which, if it did come, would have nothing at all to do with our planning.  That's why I prefer Sean Reardon over Peter McClaren.  But I could be wrong!

In any case, I'm very glad to see the post at the Times, and I'm glad that some people are thinking and talking about the way poverty matters.  I look forward to reading some of McClaren's research.

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Appendix:

For those who like visuals and want to be touched in that Noel Coward way, here's Peter McClaren, the revolutionary critic of Capitalism (or has Tom Petty found a second career?):

Peter McClaren

And, in a picture conforming a bit less touchingly to type, here's Sean Reardon, the Director of Stanford's Interdisicplinary doctoral Training Program in Quantitative Educational Policy Analysis and my hero for this week:

Sean Reardon