From my earlier post on the Texas Tribune interview with Michael Marder, in which he questioned the assumptions that monkeying with teacher discipline, accountability, pay, training, vacations, or anything else, can produce better results in educating students, especially students from impoverished backgrounds.
Marder is the director of the University of Texas’s program to encourage much better prepared teachers, UTeach.
Michael Marder’s numbers show that it’s not the teachers’ fault that so many students are not ready for college, and not learning the stuff we think they should know.
Texas Tribune said:
In the popular 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman, former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee said, “But even in the toughest of neighborhoods and circumstances, children excel when the right adults are doing the right things for them.”
After looking at the data, Marder has yet to be convinced that any teaching solution has been found that can overcome the detrimental effects of poverty on a large scale — and that we may be looking for solutions in the wrong place.
[Reeve] Hamilton’s interview of Marder takes up three YouTube segments — you should watch all three.
For the record, Michelle Rhee is probably right: In the toughest neighborhoods, children excel when the right adults do the right things for them. But the right adults usually are parents, and the right things include reading to the children from about 12 months on, and pushing them to love learning and love books. Teachers get the kids too late, generally, to bend those no-longer-twigs back to a proper inclination. The government interventions required to boost school performance must come outside the classroom. Michelle Rhee’s great failure — still — is in her tendency not to recognize that classroom performance of a student has its foundations and live roots in the homes and neighborhoods who send the children to school every day.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
We got the scores from the state yesterday, for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). Most of my students are juniors, so this is a big deal. If they pass these tests, in mathematics, science, English language arts and social studies.
Preliminary results gave me a 100% pass rate with 41% commended, out of 134 students whose scores counted (don’t ask about those formulae). Considering that our students’ poverty rate, as measured by school lunches, is well north of 85%, that’s good.
It doesn’t mean all these kids are ready for the Ivy League, though.
I know the preliminary results err somewhere. I can find two students in special education categories who did not muster the scores I had hoped, and to me, it looks like they may need to retake. Two failures wouldn’t be bad, either. I’ll let the state and our administrators fight that out.
So, I’ve done an okay job of teaching our kids bubble guessing. That’ what the TAKS test does, focus teaching on bubble guessing. Are we getting these kids ready for life and college? I have more doubts. The TAKS curriculum is limited, and shallow. Dallas District has two other tests, but again the curriculum tested is limited and shallow.
Each year I discover most students don’t remember what they studied of Paul Revere, and almost none know the famous Longfellow poem about him. They don’t know about Joyce Kilmer, either his poem or the sacrifice of his life.
Reading political cartoons proves difficult for many students, because they don’t understand the symbolism, sometimes of easy stuff like, “who does the Statue of Liberty represent?” or “why is that guy dressed in a star-spangled coat, striped pants and striped top hat?”
They don’t know about Route 66. They don’t know the National Parks. They don’t know Broadway, nor Stephen Foster. They are convinced Utah has some big river that led the Mormons to settle there, “on or near a waterway,” instead of the real reasons the Mormons settled there, for religious freedom in a desert.
Despite their remarkable test achievements, their teachers are all on the chopping block this year. The Texas Lege still quibbles over whether to lay off 10,000 or 100,000 teachers over the summer. We leave the academic year knowing only that the legislature as a collective hates teachers and teaching and schools, and they probably don’t like the students much, either, but they can’t say that because they want the students’ parents’ votes.
Jonathan at JD 2718 sent me a note a couple of weeks ago alerting me to a story in the online Texas Tribune, by Reeve Hamilton. Hamilton interviewed Dr. Michael Marder, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin who in his spare times runs UT’s UTeach Program, which encourages the best students in science and math to consider teaching elementary and secondary classes. Marder has a strong case to make that it’s not the teacher’s fault when students in some schools do not measure up to the standards promulgated by the state tests, inadequate and inappropriate as those standards are.
(Personal note: Reeve Hamilton is a very good reporter who often does great work on otherwise mundane issues; he’s also the son of a woman I met in graduate school at the University of Arizona, the first woman who ever gave me a highly contingent proposal of marriage, which as you see we did not carry out — probably much to the benefit of all of us, with Reeve doing such great work, and all our kids being basically sane and sound. I smiled when Jonathan said such good things about Reeve’s work, and the subject of the story. Nice to hear unasked-for compliments about people you know and like.)
Marder knows numbers. Marder got the statistics on schools and their preparation of students for college, as well as we can get those numbers without an expensive and expansive study.
Michael Marder’s numbers show that it’s not the teachers’ fault that so many students are not ready for college, and not learning the stuff we think they should know.
Texas Tribune said:
In the popular 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman, former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee said, “But even in the toughest of neighborhoods and circumstances, children excel when the right adults are doing the right things for them.”
After looking at the data, Marder has yet to be convinced that any teaching solution has been found that can overcome the detrimental effects of poverty on a large scale — and that we may be looking for solutions in the wrong place.
Hamilton’s interview of Marder takes up three YouTube segments — you should watch all three.
Marder indicts those who blame teachers first, with the data. By implication, he also indicts the state legislatures who appear bent on continuing the daily flogging of teachers until teacher morale improves.
In Part I of the interview with Hamilton, Marder shows the statistics that demonstrate poverty of the student is a greater influence on student achievement than the teacher:
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Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
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