The Treasure Hunter

Hello again, faithfull readers.  I hope you missed me as much as I missed you. Today’s post was born when I read an article in the New York Times on July 30th entitled “What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages,” by Alison Gopnik.  The article described a number of scientific studies that examined the learning processes of infants and young children. I found the results fascinating and only wished for more experiments to explore children’s abilities when they were not taught that there is only one right way to reach a desired goal.

Right at the beginning Ms. Gopnik reminds us that human learning is not the product of schools: “Young children were learning thousands of years before we had ever even thought of schools. Children in foraging cultures learned by watching what the people around them did every day, and by playing with the tools they used. New studies show that even the youngest children’s brains are designed to learn from this simple observation and play in a remarkably sensitive way.”

She also suggests that traditional teaching methods are far less effective than learning by observing real people in action. In a number of studies, even babies could repeat strange adult actions that worked, also detect mistakes or wasted efforts and correct them in their own actions. For example, when 14-month-old toddlers watched an adult turn on a light inside a box by tapping the box with her head, they did the same. But when they next saw a person whose arms were wrapped in a blanket tap with her head, they figured out that  there was a better way. When given the chance to perform, they tapped with their hands.

Even more amazing was a study with four year olds in which a demonstrator tried several different actions to get an unfamiliar toy to play music.  Most of those actions had no effect; only turning the toy over and pressing a tab produced music. When the children got a chance to manipulate the same toy, they ignored all the failed actions of the demonstrator and went immediately to the turn-over-and-tab-pushing technique that worked.

Sadly, the one type of experiment I hoped to see was not mentioned. I can only assume that it has never been tried or it was tried without success. Such an experiment would be one in which the demonstrator tries several different actions to get an unfamiliar toy to work, but is unsuccessful and ultimately gives up. After watching that demonstration I would hope to see children testing the failed strategies for a short time, but then trying out some ideas of their own. From my own experience with children, as a mother and a teacher, I believe that such an experiment would show their ingenuity when given the opportunity to move on from what has been taught to demonstrate their own innovativeness and self-confidence.  I would also hope that some of the children would would quickly discover a real solution to the problem, and that many others would keep on trying for a long time, even come back the next day to try out something new. Either way, those attempts would be examples of children’s natural learning ability.

I am optimistic because I have often seen children invent things they were not taught to do. In fact, studies show that explicit instruction, the sort of teaching that goes with school and parenting, can be limiting. When children are formally taught by an authority figure, they are much more likely to simply reproduce what that person says or does, instead of creating something of their own that is far more interesting and supportive of intellectual growth.

I have chosen to post an Op-Ed from yesterday’s N.Y. Times in its entirety, rather than just take some quotes from it, for two reasons. First, it gives a different picture of an experiment in  N.Y. City than an article I read a few weeks ago and wrote about on July 22nd, in a piece entitled “The Problems with Large School Districts”.  Second, it describes the success of something I believe in deeply: community schools. 

I must also tell you that I will be taking a break from writing for the next week or so.  Our oldest son and his family are  coming to visit, and I want to spend as much time with them as possible.

To Teach a Child to Read, First Give Him Glasses

David L. Kirp AUG. 6, 2016

Half a dozen police cars ring the entrance to the Morris Educational Campus in the Bronx. To enter this venerable Gothic-style building, I have to make my way through a phalanx of policemen and be scanned by a metal detector.

But the show of force doesn’t signal that the high school students inside pose a threat. It is intended to protect the students, who fear getting mugged, or worse, in a high-crime neighborhood situated in the nation’s poorest congressional district.

No one could confuse the Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies, one of four small schools that share this building, with the powerhouse Bronx High School of Science, just five miles away. Some students who arrive at Morris Academy for the ninth grade are reading at the third-grade level. A quarter of the 463 students are classified as special-needs students and a fifth are learning English as a second language. Eighty-seven percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

But compared with demographically similar high schools, Morris Academy is doing well. The rate of chronic absenteeism — students who miss more than 10 percent of school days — dropped to 41.1 percent from 56.5 percent in one year. The graduation rate is 67 percent, an eight percent increase in the past two years, and the school is closing in on the citywide average. In the context of the neighborhood and its cohort of schools, Morris Academy feels like another world.

The main explanation, says the principal, Matthew Mazzaroppi, is that Morris Academy is among the 130 schools that have been converted into “community schools,” a cornerstone initiative in the crusade by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Carmen Fariña, the schools chancellor, to improve public education.

A community school is both a place and a set of partnerships with local organizations intended to deliver health, social and recreational supports for students and their families. The idea of a school that serves as a neighborhood hub holds widespread appeal, and 150 school districts, including Chicago, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Albuquerque, Tulsa, Okla., and Lincoln, Neb., have bought into the idea.

The community school is the contemporary version of the 19th-century settlement houses founded by the progressive activist and sociologist Jane Addams on the theory that social ills are interconnected and must be approached holistically. The mission of community schools is to confront the dogged persistence of conditions like untreated asthma, vision and dental problems, and emotional trauma, which mar the lives of children in hardscrabble neighborhoods.

“You wouldn’t think it’s acceptable to send a child to school without having glasses or without dental care, but it’s O.K. for that child to take a reading or math test,” Mark Gaither, the principal of Wolfe Street Academy, a justly renowned community school in Baltimore, told Maryland lawmakers. “But that’s the situation poor parents face.”

A growing body of research establishes that community schools can have an outsize impact. City Connects, which operates in 79 elementary schools mainly in the Northeast, has erased two-thirds of the achievement gap in math and half the achievement gap in English, compared with the Massachusetts statewide average. Students were substantially less likely to be chronically absent or held back, and the high school dropout rate was cut nearly in half. Other nationwide models, such as Communities in Schools, have succeeded in substantially reducing dropouts and raising graduation rates.

City Connects costs less than $800 per student annually — about 6 percent on top of the typical cost to educate one. An analysis of the program carried out by the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education at Columbia found that it generates a return of at least $3 for every dollar spent. “Providing the program to 100 students over six years would cost society $457,000 but yield $1,385,000 in social benefits” — higher incomes, lower incarceration rates, better health and less reliance on welfare, according to the analysis. If City Connects were a company, Warren Buffett would snatch it up.

Morris Academy opens early — breakfast is provided, along with before-class tutoring. It’s open until 6:30, as well as on some Saturdays and during the summer. Students can choose among clubs for chess players, step-team dancers and bloggers. The robotics team competes with high schools nationwide. During lunchtime and after school, tutors offer one-on-one help to struggling students. An in-house clinic provides medical, dental and psychological services.

Community school funds enabled Mr. Mazzaroppi to deliver the emotional support that battle-scarred children badly need — recruiting a squadron of social workers, training teachers to counsel students and teaching older students how to mentor their younger classmates. “Our problem wasn’t lack of an academic strategy but our inability to answer students’ pleas for help,” he says. Now, remarkably, Morris Academy students are more likely than their peers citywide to say they feel safe in school and believe that their teachers care about them.

After-school and summer programs not only keep poor kids off the streets, but they also give them the academic leg up and the array of opportunities that better-off families can afford to buy. When he was the chief executive of Chicago’s public school system, Arne Duncan, the former United States secretary of education, opened 150 community schools. “Making every school a community school — that’s got to be our collective vision,” he asserted.

Results-hungry policy makers expect test scores to rise overnight, but getting students engaged in their own education must come first. A recent evaluation of Baltimore’s community schools concluded that the schools whose students did best academically were those in the program longest.

“The key is perseverance,” says Mr. Gaither. “When you hold the course, you get more than what you pay for.” His experience bears him out. Since adopting the community schools strategy a decade ago, Wolfe Street Academy has moved from being the city’s second-worst-performing elementary school to its second-highest.

New York rarely does things by halves, and community schools are no exception. In the span of just two years, 51,616 students started attending schools like Morris Academy — more students than in the entire District of Columbia school system. Most of them go to one of the 94 “renewal schools,” the city’s lowest-performing schools. Patience is in short supply in New York, however, and these troubled schools have just three years to show substantial progress.

“Ailing schools often struggle to turn around, even with an influx of new energy, resources and staff,” says Aaron Pallas, a Columbia Teachers College professor. An evaluation of 602 Communities in Schools programs reinforces this point. The model increased grades and graduation rates — but only in schools that followed it with “a high degree of fidelity,” with closegrained assessments of students’ diverse needs and high-quality supports to match those needs.

New York’s experiment is drawing attention among educators nationwide. If the venture succeeds, other cities may follow suit, but if fails, the community schools movement will take a hit. The impressive evaluations will recede in significance, and critics will dismiss the strategy as just another failed fad. Fingers crossed, then, that the city gives the experiment enough time before rushing to judgment.

David L. Kirp is a professor at the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer.

Every Sunday I make sure to read the opinion section of the New York Times, which is filled with op-eds on various topics. Two Sundays ago I read a piece entitled, “The Right Way to Bribe Your Kids to Read” by K.J. Dell’Antonia, which I  quote from extensively below. Then, I will add my own thoughts about the best way to get children to read more all year long.

 Ms. Dell’Antonia begins by explaining why she believes her own children need to read over the summer vacation: “Kids who read over the summer lose fewer skills than kids who don’t. This is especially important for children from low-income families and those with language problems, like my younger daughter. “

Sharing the same beliefs, many parents bribe their children to read. Some pay their kids by the book, others by the time spent, and one parent Dell’Antonia knows gives her girls a penny a page for reading. A survey she found reported that “60 percent of parents of 3- to 8-year-olds admitted offering their children rewards for reading.”

However, most researchers believe that paying children for reading is not a good idea: “Research, though, suggests that paying children to do things they once enjoyed can backfire. Study after study shows that kids who are rewarded for activities like coloring or solving puzzles, set the coloring books or puzzles aside when the reward dries up, while those who aren’t rewarded carry on with the activities just for fun.”

Finally, Dell’Antonia concludes that “Money may be motivating, but so is living in a home where books and reading are part of family life — and it’s that, rather than the various reward programs, that I plan to focus on at our house.” “Reading together, choosing books, talking about words and stories, or even going to the library is a lot harder than taking a dollar out of our wallets,” she says. Ultimately, she believes, children come to think of reading as a part of their lives.

Although I agree with Dell’Antonia and the other parents who believe that continuing to read over the summer is important for all children, I am opposed to bribery of any sort. Not only does it tend to bring on the problems that researchers have cited, it suggests to children that reading is a chore not worth doing for its own sake. I’m also not convinced that the  solution the author has chosen is the best alternative.  It may be too onerous a ritual for many families. I think there is a better way to achieve the important goal of making reading a part of children’s lives.

From my own experience I have come to believe that reading aloud to children at home and in the classroom is the best way to encourage them to read on their own. My parents read to me and I read to my children.  We all turned out to be avid readers.

When children listen to fascinating stories or absorbing non-fiction, they want more of the same. Also, they may be moved to read the materials an adult has read aloud in order to enjoy them again. Reading is not just a skill; it’s also an addiction—a healthy one—for those of us who were first introduced to it by adults reading aloud.

As often happens, I got the inspiration for today’s post from an article in the New York Times written by Julie Bosman and published on July 9th. This time it was about the re-naming of public schools as “government schools”.  Since I cannot think of anything to add or reject in this article, I am posting the article as-is.  My only comment is that if our schools were financed and managed by their own communities–as they once were– we could accurately call them “public schools.”

LEAWOOD, Kansas — Erica Massman, a moderate Kansas Republican, refers to the building where her daughter attends fourth grade as a public school.

Ms. Massman’s mother, whose politics tilt further to the right, calls it something else: a government school.

“My mother, who is a Tea Party person, started saying ‘government schools’ all the time,” said Ms. Massman, recalling when she first heard the phrase around 2010. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow.’”

Kansas has for years been the stage for a messy school funding fight that has shaken the Legislature and reached the State Supreme Court. Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, and his political allies threatened to defy the court on education spending and slashed income taxes in their effort to make the state a model of conservatism.

Somewhere along the way, the term “government schools” entered the lexicon in place of references to the public school system.

“Our local grade school is now the government school,” State Senator Forrest Knox wrote in an op-ed article last year, echoing conservative concerns that the government had inserted itself unnecessarily into education.

The intent was obvious to her, Ms. Massman said. “They are trying to rebrand public education,” she said.

The use of the term has set off alarms even among some Republicans, who fear that it signals still less support, financially and otherwise, for the public schools in a state that had long felt pride over the quality of its education system. The recent adoption of a school finance plan that was acceptable to Mr. Brownback, the Legislature and the Kansas Supreme Court has not entirely assuaged those concerns.

Davis Merritt, a columnist for The Wichita Eagle, said in a column in May that state legislators’ “deaf and blind” ideology was threatening public schools.

“Some have begun to call public schools ‘government schools,’ a calculated pejorative scorning both education and anything related to government,” he wrote.

That elicited a response from Bob Weeks, the host of “Wichita Liberty TV,” a show about Kansas politics and public affairs.

“It is surprising to me that liberals and progressives object to the term ‘government schools,’” he said on the show. “They like government, don’t they? These people want more taxation and government spending, don’t they? Well, when we think about our public schools, we find they have all the characteristics of government programs.”

Dave Trabert, the president of the Kansas Policy Institute, which advocates limited government, said in an interview: “It’s certainly something that some people use to kind of separate between what’s government and what’s not. Technically, it’s accurate.”

It would not be the first time that conservatives have used semantics to sway public opinion, experts said.

George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has been tracking the trend for decades. He pointed out that the right has been more successful than the left at framing issues related to abortion, health care, labor unions and the concept of government itself, among other issues, with carefully contrived catchphrases: “Tax relief.” “Pro-life.” “The Democrat Party.” “Death panels.” (“Obamacare” was originally an attempt by the right to saddle President Obama with the repercussions of the Affordable Care Act, until he embraced the term himself.)

Besides coining phrases, Dr. Lakoff said, the right has co-opted certain words — a practice that was demonstrated, he said, in President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, which used “freedom,” “free” or “liberty” 49 times in 20 minutes. “The right has taken over the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty,’” Dr. Lakoff said.

Debora Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, recalled the 1986 speech in which President Ronald Reagan framed perceptions of “government,” to great effect. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” he said.

“People tend to trace the demonization of government to Reagan,” Dr. Tannen said. “That’s kind of iconic, how he was using it. He set the government up as the enemy.”

Conservatives in Kansas have extended the semantical positioning of “government” to education, conveying the message that public schools are a form of government imposition, Dr. Lakoff said.

The phrase “government schools,” a common reference overseas to national school systems, has been around for decades as a way to differentiate them from privately financed schools. It has also been a label for schools on Native American reservations, and long used to influence debate.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York used the phrase in 1978 to make the case for federal aid to private schools. “We have succeeded in providing equality only to those who enroll in government schools,” he said in a speech in New York. “We have failed the parents who prefer to send their children to the schools that are descended from the older, private school systems.”

The Libertarian Party borrowed that for its party platformm in 1980. “Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals,” the platform said.

But only recently — and mostly in reliably conservative Kansas — has the term been used regularly and clearly as a political wedge. Education advocates in Kansas said they had heard it in conversations with state legislators (though few use it in public statements), in discussions about public schools on Facebook and on some conservative news sites.

The use of the term “government schools” is part of a broad education agenda that includes restraining costs. The far-right and libertarian wings of the Republican Party are pushing the state to loosen its laws to allow more charter schools. They oppose programs that offer free or reduced-price breakfasts and lunches, believing that schools have become part of the “nanny state” — another politically charged term — and are usurping the role of parents.

Last year, Mr. Knox lamented in his op-ed article, published in a southern Kansas newspaper, that the government had become too intrusive in education. “Our children have become government children,” he wrote.

John Locke, a professor of linguistics at the City University of New York, said that in some contexts the use of the word government had a positive connotation: government bonds and government-backed programs, for example. “But among those archconservatives who, by nature or disposition, want less government, it can have a negative effect,” he said.

He suggested, somewhat tongue in cheek, that swapping “government” for “public” could become a trend, with references to “government libraries,” “government parks” — even “government universities.”

“It’s austere,” Dr. Locke said. “It has an oppressive ring to it. It sounds rigid, the opposite of open or friendly or charming or congenial. The people who use that term are hoping those words will come to mind.”

An unedited version of the article I wrote today was published by mistake. Please see my site for the corrected version.