Blog Archives

I Was a High School Dropout -Part 2

29/3/2018

This is the rather uninteresting cover of the report in which I am a guinea pig.

With today’s brouhaha about high-stakes testing, I was curious about the outcome of the Ford Foundation Early Admissions program that lasted from 1951 to 1955. (I was in the penultimate group admitted). A little online research brought me to this study: They Went to College Early. There I was — a guinea pig data point in a five year study that ultimately involved about 1,300 students. I found the motivations and the outcomes very interesting, particularly in light of what is happening in schools today.

Why did they do it? The overall purpose was to addressed the future supply of “.... what is variously termed ‘high ability manpower,’ ‘specialized talent,’ or ‘leadership.’” Mostly they were afraid that if bright students were not put in challenging environments they would be lost as highly productive members of society, including teachers. “The most critical requirement, of course, is to attract into teaching enough of the Nation’s finest quality manpower, for it takes talent to produce talent.” [italics, mine] They feared that the American educational system, which kept students in lock-step with their chronological peers, would ultimately “frustrate young talent...for whom the pace is too slow and the academic diet too thin.” In other words, they knew that students needed to be challenged and happy for learning to be successful. [This applies regardless of class ranking by any standards.] They thought early admission to college for able students might help.

How did they do? The program was deemed a success. Most Ford Scholars did slightly better than assigned “comparison students” who had similar backgrounds and aptitudes but had finished high school. The programs live on today with Advanced Placement programs and early admittance for college courses for credit for bright high school juniors and seniors. A few schools, including Shimer, still admit 11th and 12th graders for a college degree.

What conclusions did they come to? “The important lesson from the Early Admission experiment is that the American educational system cannot afford to overlook the individuality of the students with whom it deals. [italics, mine] Whether these students are normal age or underage, or whether they have completed a formal program in secondary school is probably of less importance than their capabilities and aspirations as individuals.

Students are now facing weeks of Standardized Tests. My question: why are we now oppressing students with formalized standards that are the same for everyone and creating school environments from which students want to flee?

Clearly, no long-terms lessons were learned from this grand experiment of which I was part of the data. In fact, the standards for teachers have now been formalized to the extent that they have little classroom autonomy--a privilege extended to professionals in all fields and one I enjoyed as a teacher. I have felt for a long time now that sadly, education is going backwards.

It is very interesting that at this moment, teachers in red states are organizing and marching, not just for a living wage for themselves but for money to repair crumbling school buildings and for updated instructional material for students.

I Was a High School Dropout (It’s Not What You Think) Part 1.

29/3/2018

This is the picture of me from the local newspaper article announcing my scholarship. Do I look ready for a Big Ten school? By the way, I made the dress I was wearing thanks to my home economics class. In my upper junior year, I transferred to Barnard College, near home and graduated on time in 1958.

On a spring morning of 1954, nearing the end of my sophomore year of high school, I sat down to take an exam. It was for an experimental program sponsored by the Ford Foundation — they were taking bright students out of tenth and eleventh grade and plunking them into college. My guidance counselor thought it would be a good experience for me to just take the test.

I walked into that exam cold. No test prep. I found it very difficult. I remember repeatedly reading three paragraphs on economics and trade that I twisted my brain to comprehend. I guessed at my multiple choice selections. I had very little prior knowledge about much of what was asked of me. I walked out thinking I had not done well. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I shrugged and didn’t spend much time dwelling on it. I had no fear of tests because through most of my educational experience I had not taken very many.

My elementary education, from kindergarten through sixth grade was at the Little Red School House, a private, progressive school in Greenwich Village. I LOVED school. I received no grades; twice a year my parents received written and oral reports on me. Learning was experiential as much as possible — we hunted arrowheads in Inwood Park, ate tacos (my first!) at a local Mexican restaurant, ground corn between stones, made soap and candles and made puppets and put on puppet shows. We read books, wrote poetry and did independent art projects. We also sang a lot..

In seventh grade my family moved to the suburbs and I went to public school where I received grades for the first time. I loved it because my grades were high. But my father was unimpressed. He didn’t see me doing much work. So the stakes were very low for me when I sat down to do my best on what is now known as a college entrance exam.

To my surprise, I was accepted by the Universities of Chicago and Wisconsin, Shimer College and Goucher College, four of the 12 institutions of higher learning involved in the Ford Foundation experiment. Now I had to make a decision. When I weighed what I might learn during the upcoming two years of high school against the possibilities offered by college, I decided to go. (I found high school boring.) So in September of 1954, two weeks after my 16th birthday I entered the University of Wisconsin, 1000 miles from home, as a Ford Foundation Early Admissions Scholar. By today’s standards I had been deemed “college and career ready.”

Obviously I lived. But with today’s brouhaha about high-stakes testing, I was curious about the outcome of the Ford Foundation Early Admissions program that lasted from 1951 to 1955. (I was in the penultimate group admitted). A little online research brought me to this study: They Went to College Early. There I was — a guinea pig data point in a five year study that ultimately involved about 1,300 students. I found the motivations and the outcomes very interesting, particularly in light of what is happening in schools today.

In the interests of keeping these posts short. I will give you the evidence in my next post. If you're impatient to know what they learned, please feel free to follow the link and make your comments.

The Light in Their Eyes

25/3/2018

By Ted Eytan from Washington, DC, USA - 2018.03.24 March for Our Lives, Washington, DC USA -wikimedia commons

For educators and parents, the most treasured moments are when we see that light in a child’s eyes when s/he grasps a concept. Sometimes the concept is about the world and sometimes it is about oneself. In the case of the March for Our Lives on Washington on March 24, 2018, students showed that they saw the light in both cases.

The tragic lesson about the world came from the shooting at Parkland High School on Valentine's Day. Six minutes of unmitigated violence by a shooter with an automatic rifle mowed down fourteen students and three teachers. The emotions of survivors ran from disbelief, to horror, to fear, to relief, to grief, to guilt, to anger. The magnitude of each emotion was on a scale no one had ever experienced before.

The second more individualized lesson slowly evolved and then gained momentum. Through social media the students reached out in an ever-widening network, connecting with others across the land who had also survived horrific gun violence and life-shattering grief. The network included the survivors and loved ones of victims of past mass-shootings-- Sandy Hook, Pulse Night Club, the Las Vegas concert and more. None of them are afraid to name guns as a crucial part of the problem.

There are lots of statistics about gun ownership but the number that stuck in my head is that for every 100 Americans, men, women and children, there are 88.8 guns. After every shooting, people organized and lobbied congress and their local politicians to do something about the lax gun laws. The pace of the news cycle was their enemy. It did not take long for Gabby Gifford, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Every town for Gun Safety, Women Against Gun Violence and more to discover that their efforts to change gun ownership laws have been stymied.

But the students of Parkland High School were not stopped by what everyone else learned was true-- that lobbying congress doesn't work. They were already a close-knit society and they were old enough to think for themselves. The seeds for a peaceful uprising were present. The baby steps they initiated towards the formation of a potentially effective activist organization produced results that lit up their eyes with possibilities. Nay-sayers were ignored. The students found their voices as they recruited help. By the time the March for Our Lives took place, five weeks later, practice had made the leaders articulate, powerful and irresistible in recruiting others. The streets were jammed with tens of thousands catching the momentum. Millions showed up around the world to join their cause.

I have been worried that we are losing our democracy. The good life, here in America, has lulled us into complacency as special interests have purchased our lawmakers and Russia has infiltrated our social media to shape opinions. But now I have hope. These near-adult children have started a movement focused on a single issue just as the Children's March in 1963 galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. Grown-ups beware. These young people have time, strategies, and determination on their side. There is light in their eyes. If they sustain and grow their numbers, we have a simple choice: we either join them or get out of their way.

A Taste to Whet the Appetite for More

21/3/2018

Full disclosure: I am about to review a book that is a collection of Nonfiction Minutes, which have been published on the Nonfiction Minute website. This is the second collection of Minutes published by Seagrass Press Imprint, Quarto Books, pub date: April 3, 2018. The first one, 30 People Who Changed the World  was named a Notable Social Studies Trade book by the NCSS and the CBC. iNK Think Tank, the nonprofit company I founded in 2009, has the mission to bring high-quality children's nonfiction into the classroom so that children and teachers rediscover the love of learning. So obviously, I'm giving this book high marks. Let me give you five reasons why:

1. It's a PRINT book, beautifully illustrated and formatted, with suggestions of links and other books to follow up each selection. Books have a sense of permanence that shows in the care the publisher took to make something you want to pick up. It's an honor to see that others validate our work and our mission. So thank you to our far-seeing publisher, Josalyn Moran, who had the vision and creativity to take a piece of the Internet (where publishing costs nothing and writing is ephemeral) and turn it into something familiar and established but with a new twist. It is astonishing to see how much format contributes to value. And hats off to our intrepid editor, Jean Reynolds, who has pulled together a disparate collection that makes cohesive sense.

2. Students are being overwhelmed with Too Much Information. It's positively numbing and eye-glazing. The bite-sized essays in 30 Animals that Share Our World are true hors d'oeuvres. Delicious, unique, a lot of what you didn't know you didn't know. Yes, it's a book but you don't have to read it from beginning to end, you can skip around, put it down, pick it up. No rules. Lately, when I go to a restaurant, appetizers are my dinner. Yum!

3. We learn from many voices. Fourteen authors, all iNK members, created these Minutes. We all have different passions and we filter our writing to create memorable presentations of content.
This is not the sterile, everything-you-need-to-know encyclopedic treatment of information. It is not the once-over-lightly, cover-the-subject with the obvious and mundane. In rereading these Minutes I learned about a fish that sees red, many instances where wild animals ask for help, an animal that is now sadly extinct and another that has been saved from extinction. Make no mistake, this is a book about LIFE and DEATH writ large.

4. Revealed humanity is behind all good writing. When a fiction writer grabs your attention, you make note of the author's name. In fiction, the author's name is his/her brand. All of an author's books are shelved together. Nonfiction is cataloged and shelved by topic. We're all over the nonfiction part of the library. So when a student returns a book he/she liked and asks for another one like it, librarians usually pull out another book on the same topic. It seldom occurs to give them another book by the same author.   We're hoping you rethink that. In colleges, the most popular professors' classes are standing-room-only, regardless of the subject.

5. And finally, when it comes to food, an appetizer is supposed to get your digestive juices flowing for what is to follow. 30 Animals that Share Our World  is a like dazzling tray of culinary morsels, and maybe one of them is soooo good you'll run to the library to dish up more.

Just ‘Cause It’s a Proven Fact Doesn’t Mean They’ll Believe It

21/3/2018

Galileo Galilei ( 1564-1642) was imprisoned under house arrest for the last eleven years of his life for suggesting that Earth moved around the sun.

Galileo is considered the father of modern science, now a huge body of knowledge that has been accumulating incrementally by thousands of people. What gives science its power? Each tiny bit of information, every publication, every experiment can be challenged by asking an author, “How do you know?” And each contributing scientist can answer as Galileo did when he took his telescope to the dinner party guests to show them the moons of Jupiter: “This is what I did. If you do what I did, then you’ll know what I know.”

In other words, scientific information is verifiable, replicable human experience. How we know determines what we know. Science has grown exponentially since Galileo. It is built on a huge body of data. And its power shows up in technology. The principles that are used to make a light go on were learned in the same meticulous way we’ve come to understand how the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen over the past 100 years leading to ominous climate change.

Yet there are many who cherry pick science — only believing its findings when they agree with them. Documented proof doesn’t fare much better. In a recent post, I cited two studies that showed the effectiveness of good writing on student learning that somehow haven't found their way into data-driven instruction.

What’s going on here? Believe it or not, science has taken a look at so-called “motivated reasoning” where people rationalize evidence that is not in keeping with deeply held beliefs. Here are some of the findings:

A large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs.
People rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views — and thus, the relative risks inherent in each scenario.
Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts — they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.
The problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context or “narrowcast” and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences.

“Those basic human survival skills of ours,” says Michigan’s Arthur Lupia , are “not well-adapted to our information age.” The echo chamber is way too comfortable and we ignore new and challenging facts at our own peril.

Good scientific information comes in large part from challenges to procedures and data collection. In the soft sciences, such as those used by educational researchers, the measurement can be fuzzy and the procedures themselves can influence outcomes. Recently there are challenges to the data-driven school. Doubts are rising about the worth of all the assessment at the expense of real learning. I'm a scientist but I'm also a teacher. Art has often preceded scientific discovery.

<<Previous

I Was a High School Dropout -Part 2

I Was a High School Dropout (It’s Not What You Think) Part 1.

The Light in Their Eyes

A Taste to Whet the Appetite for More

Just ‘Cause It’s a Proven Fact Doesn’t Mean They’ll Believe It

Vicki Cobb

Archives

Categories

Links

Company

Contact

I Was a High School Dropout -Part 2

I Was a High School Dropout (It’s Not What You Think) Part 1.

The Light in Their Eyes

A Taste to Whet the Appetite for More

Just ‘Cause It’s a Proven Fact Doesn’t Mean They’ll Believe It

Vicki Cobb

​​​​Archives

​Categories

Links

Company

Contact

Archives

Categories