Teachers look for solutions. That’s what we do. But data collection often fails when it comes to solutions. You can collect all the information in the world, but if you don’t know how to use it, or it can’t be translated into something meaningful, the information is worthless.
That’s how I feel about yesterday’s article in U.S. News and World Report, “Where Poor Students Are Top of the Class” telling about students who are top test takers in schools along the Rio Grande River in Texas. Poor students are outperforming students from high income households. Ninety-five percent of students there are poor and 33 percent are still learning English. They also boast of a 90 percent graduation rate. The report looks at three school districts: McAllen, El Paso, and Brownsville.
When I see an article that says poor students are doing well in school, I want to know why. How are educators, parents, and these communities making this happen? What are they doing differently that other school districts can learn from?
The report, called the Education Equality Index, originates from researchers from Great Schools, a nonprofit backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Waltons, and other foundations, and Education Cities, another nonprofit backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Waltons, and other foundations, says little as to why students are doing better.
In fact, here is what’s stated in the article: The dataset doesn’t help explain why certain cities are doing a better job preparing low-income students, and researchers don’t attempt to answer the question.
Well, why not? What’s the point of the data if we can’t figure out from it what worked? Teachers and school districts have always been able to report how their districts did on tests. Learning that students get good test scores doesn’t mean much if we don’t know what was done to help students do well.
They go on to say: Such school districts typically rely on collaborations with nonprofits and businesses to provide the types of supports the schools cannot afford on their own. I guess they are taking credit. But that still doesn’t tell us what those businesses did to help students do better on the tests! Perhaps it was supportive parents. Maybe teachers did a great job teaching.
They also say: Researchers hope policymakers will look to the cities where poor students perform the best to pinpoint what other school districts with similar profiles can replicate. But how will they determine what really worked? What kind of bias will be involved? Will they pick their pet projects even though there’s no proof they work?
What’s missing? Information that gets to the heart of what reform should really be about—finding out what works! For all the micromanaging these foundations do, spending money on data collection, and don’t forget the time and resources teachers spend putting together and examining data walls, finding solutions to teaching the poor seems to escape all involved.
The superintendent of Brownsville says they “work hard,” and the principals are “great.” But most superintendents of poor school districts will tell you the same thing! She also says, The understanding of data is critical. You must be able to desegregate [sic] (disaggregate?) the data early enough to know what the kids need. Early. So where’s the understanding part of the data?
Here is what I was able to extract from the article, which might lend a clue to the real reasons poor students are doing well—but the data doesn’t tell us this. It leaves out the most important details.
- Students attend Head Start.
- Head Start professionals get training.
- Many teachers are “homegrown” and understand the child’s culture.
- They have wraparound programs.
- Teachers may use particular instructional strategies.
- They use social-emotional learning.
When we know children live in poor environments, don’t we already understand all the above are important?
My favorite reason why students likely did well—children are provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner due to an extended school day. The kids are able to learn because they aren’t hungry. The data didn’t tell us this. It didn’t need to.
I do think it’s especially important for schools to have teachers “‘who understand the nuances of the cultural and language difficulties that students face, and who see biliteracy and biculturalism from a strengths-based perspective,'” The other wraparound services and quality early learning provided these children also make a difference. We didn’t need an analysis of data to tell us this. And then, “such school districts typically rely on collaborations with nonprofits and businesses to provide the types of supports the schools cannot afford on their own.” Why is it that public schools do not have the resources to provide the vital services that teachers know students need, and must instead rely on nonprofits and businesses to provide services?? What strings are attached? And if the progress of the students is measured by standardized test scores, how do we know that the achievement is not the result of a focus on drill and kill skill-building? Will these students continue to do well as they move through their school careers? I certainly hope so, but wish that public school teachers who know what students need (like proper nutrition and health care) would be provided the services from public money that is accountable to the public.
Great points! Thanks, Sheila. I think everyone’s tired of hearing about test scores. If they are great, why? And if they have no proof of the worth of any program, I can easily see the conversion to digital devices.
When I read about “great educational innovation” brought through the invasions of Big Money Oligarchs I keep in mind that for almost two decades I’ve heard that the Denver School District, where I live and where I know actual truth, is often lauded in national press as a model for “turning things around” through test-score reform invasions. Cherry-picked schools, statistics and students are endlessly highlighted — facts about the looming teacher shortage, the so many failed, restarted and refailed/closed schools, the multiple low-income neighborhoods divided and then heartlessly sold out to gentrification, and the widening achievement/opportunity gap are simply never mentioned…..
They only make privatization sound good. Thanks, Ciedie.
The improvement in education outcomes is myopic, in that the “success” is based on a test-centric, teach to the test curriculum. That is not education in the true liberal-arts, well-rounded student/citizen sense of what a real, beneficial education is. You will notice that the elite, Barak Obama, Arnie Dunkin, Rahm Emanuel, Billy-Boy Gates, betsy DeVos, the Walton (wallmart) family would NEVER allow their precious children to have anything but a full, enriched liberal-arts education, yet for the children of color and poor students it high-stakes, test prep garbage. BTW, how much data do you really need to understand what a student needs and where their strengths are. It’s all about doing education “on the cheap”!
Thank you, Paul. I agree.
I have a rule of thumb. If is is too good to be true, it is usually false. Come back as see how,the kids are doing in thirty years or so. That is the true test. Are they having kids that do well in school when they grow up? Then you did a good job.
This is what everyone is worried about. Thanks, Roy.
Nancy,
What data do schools collect? What data can schools release?
Data is my bread and butter. I design databases, data entry forms, and reports. I can take multiple data systems and get them to work together. I know how to analyze data to provide meaningful answers. And I know how little most people understand data. I regularly get requests to provide reports on data that isn’t collected.
It often seems that school districts do not have anyone who can understand and manipulate data. The presentations given at BOE meetings are numbers copied directly from the state or i-Ready reports and usually too general to actually be helpful. If i-Ready reports that 32% of students did not make a year’s growth, that isn’t really helpful. Which 32% didn’t? Is it mostly kids at the top of the class? Or the bottom of the class? In a certain school or with certain teachers? Kids on free or reduced lunch? If analyzed, this information is kept secret from the community.
And then there is the data that is never collected or, if collected, kept at the teacher level. How many hours of reading per week does your child do? Athletics? Clubs? TV? In the past year, how many times did you visit museums? The library? Do you eat together as a family? What is the family structure? What are the parents jobs? Are the parents PTA members or classroom volunteers? The important questions are rarely asked. The data mining that could give answers cannot be done.
Since schools don’t have the personnel to perform the data mining, I don’t think they are able to release the personally identifiable information to a third party under student privacy laws. Even if they can, the important data is still missing and difficult for an outside organization to obtain as the trust is not there.
As long as we continue to collect the wrong data and ask the wrong questions, we have little chance of impacting our schools.
Joshua, we need to get you a job overseeing school data programs! As a teacher, relevant data included observation of student work. There’s a place for data, of course. But constantly collecting test score information isn’t very useful.
Also, there are many privacy concerns with survey questions. Do educators really need to know if a family sits down and eats together? A teacher’s focus is the student and their learning. I always found that most parents shared family problems at IEP meetings.
My TN Momma Bear friends got pretty mad a few years back when it came to such survey questioning. http://www.mommabears.org/blog/not-with-my-kids-you-dont
But thanks for your insight. Always appreciated.
When John Hattie began the research for his effect size list, he didn’t know which ones would be large effects and which would be small. I’m sure there are things he didn’t even know would be on the list, as his new list has additional items.
Does a family eating together affect learning? Very likely, but who knows to what extent. Our dinner table conversation is about how things are going at school, reviewing anything that needs it, and exploring math, science, history, and books they are reading. I think that is a plus for learning, but I don’t know how much.
I would suggest asking the parents the questions and not the students. I can understand parents getting upset if their kids are asked these questions.
We know parental involvement makes a huge difference, but what matters most? If we can use data to explore this, we can make concrete suggestions to parents about how to help their children succeed in school. We can also know which kids have factors endangering their education.
John Hattie already quantified factors in the classroom, but that is only half of learning.
I don’t think asking parents personal questions has gone over well either. I recall a survey asking their income level and how big their house was!
And not to knock family dinner time–I agree it’s important–but is it something teachers need to know about? I would want to know if my student wasn’t eating!
When I was teaching, if a student displayed behavioral issues, I wanted to know if something was wrong at home. I don’t remember surveys to collect personal information for the heck of it.
Joshua: Collection of data from tests is worse than no data. Collection for data from questionnaires is time consuming and of questionable worth. The answers to,all of our driving questions are obvious already. I will pose some of them.
1. What approach to learning yields the best results?
The best approach is to learn a lot for a long time. Study and read for all your life. Then you will be the best educated person you can possibly be.
2. Who is primarily responsible for your learning?
The individual. It is inescapable truth that teachers spend only a fraction of a child’s life with them. A typical teacher will see a child for about 160 hours for one year.. There are about 6600 waking hours in a year. That comes to 2.4% of the child’s waking hours for a year. As relationships go, that is pretty high compared to a shoe salesman or a bank teller, but it is not very much time. Over 60 years, the fraction becomes vastly diminished, about .0004 of the child’s waking lifetime. We are all ultimately responsible for our learning over time.
3. How can we maximize what time teachers have to spend with students?
We can give the teachers fewer students so that they develop more In-depth conversations about their subjects. We can assure that teachers love their subjects so that they want to talk about Napoleon instead of the latest hockey game or Pokemon movie.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Give teaching back to the teachers. Take data and let it inform scientists about measurable phenomenon. Learning is not one of these.
Roy,
I’m glad the answers are obvious to you. However, what is ‘obvious’ isn’t always correct.
In your second point, you downplay the worth of a teacher. If teachers are such a minor influence on students, we might as well replace them all with computers with educational programs and someone to make sure the students don’t leave their computers.
I happen to believe quite differently. I saw my eldest daughter’s fifth grade teacher teach her sixth grade math so she wouldn’t have to be bused to the middle school. I saw my youngest daughter’s second grade teacher not provide anything for her because she was already ahead of grade level and the i-Ready tests confirm that she didn’t learn anything in second grade. So I believe the teacher matters greatly.
Even the middle school and high school teachers matter greatly. They’ve had some great teachers who have piqued their interests in subjects and some abysmal teachers who think that reading directly from the textbook to the class is education. Studying the Middle East? Let’s show Aladdin to explain the culture! But my middle daughter’s science teacher? Wow! The last 15 minutes of class are spent exploring the subject far beyond the curriculum.
Does class size matter? A small amount. John Hattie gives it a 0.21. Collective teacher efficacy is second in his list at 1.57. Also ranked above class size is pre-term birth weight at 0.59, socio-economic status as 0.54, home environment at 0.52, parental involvement at 0.49, pre-school and Head Start programs at 0.33, home corporal punishment at -0.33, drugs at 0.32, early intervention in the home at 0.27, and divorced or re-marriage at 0.25.
So you might want to find out about the kids in your class, particularly since you are only 0.0004% of their time and they are responsible for their education.
I want great teachers for my children and I want to pay those great teachers very well. If you think that you don’t matter much to my child, I don’t want you as their teacher.
Joshua,
I like a lot of what you say here. But I don’t think Roy was downplaying the worth of a teacher. I think he was implying they don’t have enough time to cover everything.
I do agree that some data matters, especially if it can be translated into action.
I also disagree with Hattie about class size. My favorite study and one that is considered one of the best in education research was the STAR Study in TN. It indicated that small class sizes for students in the early grades, especially poor kids, matters. It still bothers me that little effort is made to lower those class sizes.
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/STARSummer99.pdf
Thanks again for commenting. Hope your program is coming along!
Joshua,
“socio-economic status as 0.54”? What a whopper of a statistic that is. Out of school factors, which the effects of poverty is significant part of, account for a little over 80% of student out comes. Certainly teachers have a big impact, but I would guess that a huge part of the influence is igniting inspiration and motivation of a student, not so much teaching all the “facts”. Students impacted with poverty receive so many adverse effects from diminished healthcare, poor nutrition, traumatic events, lack of role models, no legacy wealth to rely on, police state environments to live in, environmental pollution, I could go on and on. Statics and data can be manipulated to deceive and have been by the elite establishment, pushing blame on public school and teachers. Data is a tool and not the complete answer to the education of student outcomes. We must address out of school factors, especially poverty, and out politicians and the moneyed interests that want to deflect their responsibility to fix the ridiculous inequities in our society and push blame on our public education system. Data is a weapon that they are using towards the privatization and profitization of education in this country.
“Statics and data can be manipulated to deceive and have been by the elite establishment, pushing blame on public school and teachers.” And, “Data is a weapon that they are using towards the privatization and profitization of education in this country.”
Absolutely! Thank you, Paul.
Joshua: my point was that all of our data about whether a student has progressed or not is not as good as our intuition. It is not that teachers are unimportant, but that the things they do cannot be measured. If you think your daughter had a bad teacher, you are probably right, at least about your daughter. But I caution you against thinking that you are universally correct.
As a math teacher, which I was for 29 years, I was constantly reminding the children that statistics are only as good as the research that produces them. Replication of sample is a requirement for any experiment. We rarely rise to the appropriate level of rigor in educational,studies. Hence, as Nancy pointed out above, stats can be manipulated.
Finally, I pointed out the obvious when I showed how little we see the kids. Of course I see teaching as important, why else would I have spent the last 35 years doing it. But we do not need to suggest the heroic view of teachers. To one kid I might be a hero. To,another, I might be an impediment. I might give one student precisely what he needs, while inadverdantly punishing another with my malpractice.
One year, I was closing the last day of class with some thoughts about the history of the world. I knew it was too much for most of the kids, and ended quickly as I could sense I was losing them with my short summary. So I ended with a statement that tied it all up, thinking I had just wasted my breath. Near me, a student exhaled, “I could just listen to you forever,” she said quietly. You never know.
My biggest problem with the data-centric educational paradigm, is the harm it does to young children. They know they are being grouped into four categories and it shapes them as students for their whole k-12 experience. I child should not think of herself as a red or a yellow or a green student, especially when those groupings dictate abusive test prep and lack of recess and elective courses.
The data paradigm is a sham on so many levels.
Well said, Jo. I think of all the unnecessary information collected that’s never put to good use. What a waste of time and money!