- In Raising Scores, 1 2 3 is Easier than A B C [KIPP mentioned]
- Duncan: More HIspanic children need to enroll in preschool
In Raising Scores, 1 2 3 is Easier than A B C [KIPP mentioned]
The New York Times
By Motoko Rich
May 29, 2013
TROY, N.Y. — David Javsicas, a popular seventh-grade reading teacher known for urging students to act out dialogue in the books they read in class, sometimes feels wistful for the days when he taught math.
A quiz, he recalls, could quickly determine which concepts students had not yet learned. Then, “you teach the kids how to do it, and within a week or two you can usually fix it,” he said.
Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. “It could take months to see if what I’m teaching is effective,” he said.
Educators, policy makers and business leaders often fret about the state of math education, particularly in comparison with other countries. But reading comprehension may be a larger stumbling block.
Here at Troy Prep Middle School, a charter school near Albany that caters mostly to low-income students, teachers are finding it easier to help students hit academic targets in math than in reading, an experience repeated in schools across the country.
Students entering the fifth grade here are often several years behind in both subjects, but last year, 100 percent of seventh graders scored at a level of proficient or advanced on state standardized math tests. In reading, by contrast, just over half of the seventh graders met comparable standards.
The results are similar across the 31 other schools in the Uncommon Schools network, which enrolls low-income students in Boston, New York City, Rochester and Newark. After attending an Uncommon school for two years, said Brett Peiser, the network’s chief executive, 86 percent of students score at a proficient or advanced level in math, while only about two thirds reach those levels in reading over the same period.
“Math is very close-ended,” Mr. Peiser said. Reading difficulties, he said, tend to be more complicated to resolve.
“Is it a vocabulary issue? A background knowledge issue? A sentence length issue? How dense is the text?” Mr. Peiser said, rattling off a string of potential reading roadblocks. “It’s a three-dimensional problem that you have to attack. And it just takes time.”
Uncommon’s experience is not so uncommon. Other charter networks and school districts similarly wrestle to bring struggling readers up to speed while having more success in math.
In a Mathematica Policy Research study of schools run by KIPP, one of the country’s best-known charter operators, researchers found that on average, students who had been enrolled in KIPP middle schools for three years had test scores that indicated they were about 11 months — or the equivalent of more than a full grade level — ahead of the national average in math. In reading, KIPP’s advantage over the national average was smaller, about eight months.
Among large public urban districts, which typically have large concentrations of poor students, six raised eighth-grade math scores on the federal tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 2009 to 2011. Only one — in Charlotte, N.C. — was able to do so in reading.
Studies have repeatedly found that “teachers have bigger impacts on math test scores than on English test scores,” said Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia Business School. He was a co-author of a study that showed that teachers who helped students raise standardized test scores had a lasting effect on those students’ future incomes, as well as other lifelong outcomes.
Teachers and administrators who work with children from low-income families say one reason teachers struggle to help these students improve reading comprehension is that deficits start at such a young age: in the 1980s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley found that by the time they are 4 years old, children from poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children with professional parents.
By contrast, children learn math predominantly in school.
“Your mother or father doesn’t come up and tuck you in at night and read you equations,” said Geoffrey Borman, a professor at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin. “But parents do read kids bedtime stories, and kids do engage in discussions around literacy, and kids are exposed to literacy in all walks of life outside of school.”
Reading also requires background knowledge of cultural, historical and social references. Math is a more universal language of equations and rules.
“Math is really culturally neutral in so many ways,” said Scott Shirey, executive director of KIPP Delta Public Schools in Arkansas. “For a child who’s had a vast array of experiences around the world, the Pythagorean theorem is just as difficult or daunting as it would be to a child who has led a relatively insular life.”
Education experts also say reading development simply requires that students spend so much more time practicing.
And while reading has been the subject of fierce pedagogical battles, “the ideological divisions are not as great on the math side as they are on the literacy side,” said Linda Chen, deputy chief academic officer in the Boston Public Schools. In 2011, 29 percent of eighth graders eligible for free lunch in Boston scored at proficient or advanced levels on federal math exams, compared with just 17 percent in reading.
At Troy Prep, which is housed in a renovated warehouse, teachers work closely with students to help them overcome difficulties in both math and reading, breaking classes into small groups. But the relative challenges of teaching both subjects were evident on a recent morning.
During a fifth-grade reading class, students read aloud from “Bridge to Terabithia,” by Katherine Paterson. Naomi Frame, the teacher, guided the students in a close reading of a few paragraphs. But when she asked them to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text.
Later, in math class, the same students had less difficulty following Bridget McElduff as she taught a lesson on adding fractions with different denominators. At the beginning of the class, Ms. McElduff rapidly called out equations involving two fractions, and the students eagerly called back the answers.
Because the students were familiar with the basic principles — finding the greatest common factor, then reducing — they quickly caught on when she asked them to add three fractions.
New curriculum standards known as the Common Core that have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia could raise the bar in math. “As math has become more about talking, arguing and writing, it’s beginning to require these kinds of cultural resources that depend on something besides school,” said Deborah L. Ball, dean of the school of education at the University of Michigan.
Teachers and administrators within the Uncommon network are confident that they will eventually crack the nut in reading. One solution: get the students earlier. Paul Powell, principal of Troy Prep, said the school, which added kindergarten two years ago and first grade last fall, would add second-, third- and fourth-grade classes over the next three years.
Over time, teachers hope to develop the same results in reading that they have produced in math. Already, students at high school campuses in the Uncommon network in Brooklyn and Newark post average scores on SAT reading tests that exceed some national averages.
“I don’t think there is very much research out there to say that when you can take a student who is impoverished and dramatically behind, that you can fix it in three years,” said Mr. Javsicas, the seventh-grade reading teacher, who also coordinates special education at Troy Prep. “But I do think the signs seem fairly positive that if we can take kids from kindergarten and take them through 12th grade, I think we can get there.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 30, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the percentages of children who scored at a proficient or advanced level in math and reading after attending an Uncommon school for two years. Eighty-six percent, not 90 percent, score that high in math, and two thirds, not just over a third, reach those levels in reading.
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
May 29, 2013
Record numbers of Hispanic students are staying in high school, graduating and enrolling in college, but they lag behind other groups in preschool attendance, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday morning.
“Less than half of Hispanic children attend any kind of preschool – that’s kind of staggering,” Duncan told reporters at a breakfast meeting. “This is the fastest-growing population and a lower-than-average participation rate.”
In the past decade, Hispanics have made significant gains in later grades. In 2010, 78 percent of Hispanics graduated from high school, compared to 64 percent in 2000. During the same period, the high school dropout rate for Hispanics was cut in half from 28 percent to 14 percent.
And, for the first time, Hispanics enrolled in college in 2012 at higher rates than white students. According to a Pew Research Center analysis released this month, 69 percent of Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall compared to 67 percent of white students.
While all of that is cause for celebration, Duncan said, policymakers, community leaders and educators need to increase the rates of Hispanic children who attend preschool.
The achievement gap between poor and privileged children shows up as early as kindergarten, with poor children starting school one to two years behind more affluent 5-year-olds. “You’re 5 years old and you’re entering school 1 to 2 years behind and you wonder why we have an achievement gap.”
By age 3, children of white-collar parents have a working vocabulary of 1,116 words, while children in working-class families know 749 words and children whose families are on welfare know 525 words, according to an oft-cited 2003 study by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley.
Poor children who attend quality preschool programs are less likely to end up in the criminal justice system, more likely to be employed and earn higher incomes, and less likely to receive public benefits as adults, when compared to at-risk children who do not attend preschool, several studies have shown.
“We can keep trying to play catch-up or we can have an effect on the front end, by leveling the playing field from the beginning,” he said. In some cases, Hispanic children don’t have access to preschool and, in other cases, Hispanic families are reluctant to take advantage of available opportunities, Duncan said.
“These are real issues but they can be overcome,” he said. “At the end of the day, parents want the right thing for their kids.”
In his fiscal 2014 budget, President Obama has proposed a new federal partnership with states to offer universal preschool for all 4-year olds. The federal government would help states pay for “high quality” by nearly doubling the federal tobacco tax from $1.01 to $1.95 to raise $75 billion over 10 years. The federal government would provide matching funds to enroll children in families with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level in preschool. States would have to enroll at least 50 percent of their low-income and middle-income children in order to qualify. The state’s contribution would start at 10 percent for the first two years, increasing to 40 percent by the fifth year.
The president has also proposed a $15 billion long-term investment in a home visiting program, which pays for nurses and social workers to visit low-income families and help them support the development of their infants and toddlers.
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