Tag: Reading

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Latest Edu-Reads

Robin V. Harris has a great story about Polly Williams, considered the “mother of school choice,” a Milwaukee-area Democrat, black activist and community organizer, and the longest-serving woman in the Wisconsin state legislature.

Last year Galileo Learning reached a record-breaking goal, offering scholarships to upwards of 15 percent of their campers. Here’s how the Bellwether team helped.

Here’s a cool data visualization tool from the Urban Institute that lets you look up individual schools to see how student demographics have changed over time.

Speaking of diversity, a new study finds that voters in local school board elections often look very different than the student body in their school district. As Matt Barnum notes in his Chalkbeat write-up, part of the problem is due to school board elections being off-cycle from national presidential elections. The smaller, less-diverse turnout in school board elections tends to elect less-diverse school board members who, in turn, support policies that are less likely to benefit black and Hispanic students.

Timothy Shanahan on the “last mile problem” in reading instruction.

Brandon Lewis on how districts can differentiate their own local school rating systems from the ratings put out by their state.

Checker Finn compares the quality checks on test-based accountability systems versus subjective evaluations of student work:

When we seek alternatives to the proctored and monitored exam form of high-stakes accountability, however, the challenges multiply. Nearly always, those alternatives—whether classroom work, teacher-administered exams, student projects, performances, portfolios, you name it—are judged subjectively, almost always by adults who know the kids’ identities and academic track records, and most of the time by adults who also have reasons to seek student success, whether it’s because they care about a kid passing and graduating or they’re being hassled by parents or principal or they know that the school’s passing or graduation rate is on the line.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Latest Edu-Reads

Education Week has a big new report on reading instruction. For example, here’s Liana Loewus on how reading is really being taught in schools:

Our new survey showed that 75 percent of teachers working with early readers teach three-cueing, an approach that tells students to take a guess when they come to a word they don’t know by using context, picture, and other clues, with only some attention to the letters.

Similarly, more than a quarter of teachers said they tell emerging readers that the first thing they should do when they come to a word they don’t know while reading is look at the pictures—even before they try to sound it out.

And Sarah Schwartz looks at the evidence behind and, in many cases, missing from popular reading programs.

Bellwether has a new deck out this week on rural schooling in America.

Dale Chu has an interesting look at the intersection of finance, choice, and accountability reforms in Indiana.

David Kirp writes, “The goal is not to lure high-schoolers into college with zero tuition, it’s to assure that those who do enroll graduate.”

James Shuls wants to ask what people mean when they say charter schools should be held to the “same standards” as traditional public schools.

As I warned earlier this week, we should be careful about ascribing Mississippi’s rising NAEP scores to any one thing. Here’s Todd Collins on Mississippi’s student retention policies.

Finally, this Matt Barnum and Gabrielle LeMarr LeMee Chalkbeat piece on GreatSchools.org is a must-read. It’s sparking a lot of debate over whether it’s better to share information that might not be perfect, or whether imperfect information will inevitably lead to imperfect decisions.

I don’t have a particular dog in that fight. I respect GreatSchools’ incredible reach–43 million annual site visitors!–and think the organization deserves praise for attempting to improve their ratings over time. The remaining flaws in their rankings–they’re still highly correlated with student demographic factors–are often true in other rating systems as well. Moreover, I’d much rather have a free rating system that’s open to all (and which is working to improve and reach all audiences) than no information at all. GreatSchools is waaaay better than relying on word-of-mouth or other snap judgments of the “best” schools in a neighborhood. We’ve seen what that looks like, even in today’s world, and it isn’t pretty.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Latest Edu-News

The Bellwether Policy and Evaluation team is starting the search for paid summer interns. Please send good candidates our way!

Robert Kelchen and Zhuoyao Liu find that the release of gainful employment data led some low-performing for-profit colleges and programs to close.

The new Denver School Board tilts the membership balance toward teachers’ union issues for the first time in years. Read Lynne Graziano on what that means for the city.

Anne Wicks on a new tool designed to help education leaders implement their vision and adopt research-based interventions.

I’m all for better reading instruction, and the declines in NAEP reading scores are certainly troubling. But is there any evidence that the recent NAEP declines were caused by some recent change in reading instruction? If so, what was it? As I’ve written in the past, we have a decent research base on how students learn to read, but we’ve been unsuccessful so far at translating that knowledge base into actual teaching.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

 

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Are We Sure We Know How to Teach Reading?

As I pointed out last week, we know a fair amount about how students learn to read, but much less about how to deliver reading instruction. That’s an important distinction and has implications for how we think about fixing the problem.

To wit, Matt Barnum gets at this question in the middle of this Chalkbeat interview with Natalie Wexler about her new book, The Knowledge Gap. In full disclosure, I have not read Wexler’s book yet, but one portion of their conversation gets at the problem I highlighted above:

[Barnum] In your book you say, “There aren’t yet any reliable studies showing that [a coherent knowledge-rich] curriculum will outperform either a skills-focused curriculum or a content-focused one that lacks coherence,” but “it’s reasonable to assume that’s the case.” The fact that there aren’t any reliable studies about this seems like a really big caveat at the heart of your book.

[Wexler] There is evidence that focusing on content can boost kids’ reading comprehension scores. They’re not randomized controlled studies, but there is some evidence of that. What is harder to find evidence of is that you need a curriculum that builds logically from one grade to the next. And that’s hard to get because kids move around, especially in lower income levels, and there aren’t that many schools implementing that kind of a curriculum.

One that comes to mind — there’s a curriculum called Bookworms, and there was a study of a school district that implemented that curriculum. After just one year of implementation, schools implementing that curriculum did better than demographically similar schools in the districts that weren’t implementing that curriculum.

This is an important distinction. There’s a large and convincing body of evidence that students read better when they have content knowledge about the subject. It’s not enough to just teach students generic “reading skills,” because reading is context-dependent. Similarly, there’s also a large body of evidence on the gaps in content knowledge across students, and that those gaps contribute to gaps in reading.

However, these findings do not necessarily translate into practice. We do not yet have a large body of evidence on whether we can take the findings about content knowledge and implement them in schools. That is, can we create a coherent, content-rich curriculum, implement it at scale, and produce better readers? I’ll need to read Wexler’s book to see if she has an answer. But this question strikes me as a harder one to resolve, and from what I’ve seen so far, we’re not there yet.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Latest Edu-Reads

In a new piece for The 74, I argue we know a fair amount about how students learn to read, but much less about how to deliver reading instruction. That’s an important distinction and has implications for how we think about fixing the problem. I conclude:

Another lesson might be that reforms focusing on individual teachers aren’t the right lever to change reading instruction. It seems at least plausible that improving the instructional materials schools use to teach reading might be more effective than trying to shift the opinions and lesson plans of millions of individual classroom teachers.

On that front, this new deck from Bellwether synthesizes a broad body of research on the science of learning and takes a deep dive into what it would take to put that research into practice. I can’t do it justice here, so please go read it.

This Jill Barshay piece on critical thinking skills strikes a similar chord. People don’t just think critically; they have to think critically about something.

Teacher residency programs face unique financial and programmatic challenges. Read how Bellwether supported Kansas City Teacher Residency through a strategic planning process.

There’s a cottage industry of think pieces about a coming “retirement security crisis,” but the truth is that as a group the elderly are doing comparatively well. In contrast, Matt Bruenig writes that, “when looking at disposable income, children are the largest group of poor people in the country.”

Paul Tough on the welders versus philosophers debate. He writes, “The [welder] salaries that make headlines in The Wall Street Journal are somewhere between rare and apocryphal.”

A new study on the Tennessee pre-k expansion found important differences across participants, concluding that, “Among children living in high-poverty neighborhoods, those who took up an experimental assignment to attend preK scored over half a standard deviation higher on average than the control group in third grade. In contrast, preK enrollment had, if anything, a negative effect on third-grade reading achievement among children living in low-poverty neighborhoods.”

Sarah Whiting reflects on pledges as a way to extend internal practices around diversity, equity and inclusion.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

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Latest Edu-Reads (and Edu-Listens)

Science advances one funeral at a time? That may sound morbid, but a new study finds evidence it may be true.

“Today’s average public school board member is a white male with a family income of over $100K a year.” That’s Beth Tek on the demographics of school board members.

There’s supposedly a retirement savings crisis in this country, and yet Gary Burtless reports that, “Census statistics show that the average real income of elderly households climbed 82 percent between 1979 and 2017 while the average income of households headed by someone younger than 65 increased just 37 percent.”

If you liked my short excerpt from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, I’ve got two (old but still good) podcast recommendations. I recently stumbled upon this episode of the Getting Smart podcast where Tom Vander Ark spoke with Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer at Renaissance Learning about the science of deliberate practice and what it means for education. Similarly, I enjoyed this episode of the Mr Barton Maths Podcast with Doug Lemov, especially the examples of “tells” teachers use in the classroom, as well as ways to deliver professional development for adult colleagues.

Speaking of podcasts, I strongly recommend Emily Hanford’s deep dive into the research on how children learn to read. I’ll have more to say on it soon, but you can read the full thing yourself here.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman