NEWS
- How one DC charter school is "changing everything" to give kids knowledge [Center City PCS mentioned]
- Education Reform Not Enough to Close Achievement Gap: Report
How one DC charter school is "changing everything" to give kids knowledge [Center City PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
June 15, 2015
For decades, elementary schools have focused on building skills at the expense of instilling knowledge. One DC charter school network, Center City, is in the forefront of a movement to reverse that approach.
Most elementary schools in the US teach reading by focusing on skills like "finding the main idea" or "making predictions." Especially in high-poverty urban schools, where kids often struggle with reading, teachers spend hours every day on these skills and don't teach history or science in any systematic way.
But to understand what you're reading, you need a certain amount of relevant background knowledge and vocabulary. Just try finding the main idea of this abstract of an article in a scientific journal. Unless you're well versed in cellular biology, chances are you'll be stumped.
That's what it's like for many kids who try to tackle high school level material after spending years practicing reading comprehension skills on simple stories. And low-income kids, who are far less likely to acquire knowledge at home, start out at a disadvantage and fall farther behind with each passing year.
The Common Core State Standards, adopted by DC and dozens of states, aimed to correct this situation. The authors of the standards included language about the need to build knowledge systematically starting in elementary school, by implementing a broad and coherent curriculum.
But few have noticed that fundamental aspect of the Common Core, which doesn't actually require schools to focus on any particular content. In fact, many have blamed the Common Core for the very thing it was trying to remedy: the narrowing of the curriculum to basic skills in reading and math.
Some schools are undertaking the shift
Still, some schools and school districts, including DC Public Schools, have undertaken the challenging shift from a focus on skills to one on building knowledge. One is Center City, a DC network of charter schools with six preschool-through-8th-grade campuses primarily serving low-income students.
Center City is "light years ahead of most schools around the country" in implementing the new approach, according to Silas Kulkarni. Kulkarni is on the staff of Student Achievement Partners, a group that supports teachers in adapting to the new demands of the Common Core.
A few years ago, teachers at Center City, like many elsewhere, would decide what to teach by working backwards from the skills that would be assessed on standardized tests. Center City would give students tests called "ANet" (short for Achievement Network) every couple of months.
"Whatever ANet's assessing in the next nine weeks, that's what I'm teaching," says Center City's director of curriculum, Amanda Pecsi, summarizing the old approach.
But in 2013 Center City got a new CEO, Russ Williams. After hearing teachers complain they were all teaching different things and couldn't collaborate, Williams put Pecsi, then a classroom teacher an assistant principal, in charge of creating a coherent network-wide curriculum.
Pecsi, now aided by two other staff members, has put together a program that incorporates elements from various sources. For kindergarten through 2nd grade, Center City uses the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum. In the upper grades, the school borrows from free resources available on state websites like EngageNY and Louisiana Believes has created its own unit plans.
Teachers also get lists of text sets, groups of books or excerpts all focused on a particular subject, like astronomy for first-graders. The texts in the set get increasingly more difficult, and the idea is that as students read they'll build knowledge that enables them to handle more complexity.
Kids find acquiring knowledge more engaging than practicing skills
One criticism often leveled at the Common Core is that it's unrealistic to expect young children to handle the kind of "complex text" the standards call for. But as a visit to Center City demonstrates, kids not only can handle complex ideas, they actually enjoy them.
For one thing, reading isn't the only way for kids to get information. Before asking students to read a text on a given subject, teachers can orally introduce ideas and vocabulary that are beyond kids' reading levels.
In one 1st grade class at Center City's Brightwood campus, for example, the teacher held 25 children rapt as she animatedly read to them about igneous rock. Pointing to a large drawing of the interior of a volcano, she asked the kids where the fire comes from.
"Magma!" they chorused, drawing on knowledge they'd gotten in a previous lesson.
Gradually, the teacher led them to the conclusion that igneous rock—whose Latin root, she explained, comes from the word for "fire"—is magma that has cooled. The children greeted the revelation with cries of wonder.
That's another advantage of a knowledge-based approach: if it's done well, kids find it far more engaging than spending hours practicing finding the main idea. Schools with challenging populations may feel they have to establish order before they can shift to focusing on knowledge, but that could be a mistake.
If kids are excited about learning, "the behavior problems fall away," says Samantha Flaherty, Center City's curriculum manager.
Adopting a curriculum is only half the battle
But adopting a curriculum is only half of what a school needs to make the shift successfully. It establishes what you teach, but just as important is how you teach it.
Providing a teacher with a script about, say, different kinds of rock relieves her of the burden of acquiring all that knowledge herself. But if she just reads the script in a monotone, "the kids will go crazy after ten minutes," says Flaherty. Each teacher has to own the material, teaching it in a way that is both engaging and suited to her own style.
Another challenge is weaning teachers from a focus on data and test scores. Skills alone don't mean much, but it's easier for teachers to measure whether kids are acquiring them than whether they're building knowledge.
And the new Common Core tests that DC and other schools across the country have switched to this year will continue to measure skills, not knowledge. But because the new tests call for greater analytical abilities, kids will only score well if they've acquired enough knowledge to become good general readers. For low-income kids, that could take years.
Williams has a laid-back attitude toward testing. "I tell teachers, don't chase the test," he says. "If you have a strong curriculum, the test will take care of itself."
That's a sentiment you won't hear from many school leaders these days, unfortunately. And at schools where there's pressure to increase test scores, teachers will have an even harder time adjusting to a focus on knowledge.
"People are just beginning to realize that we need to change everything," says Flaherty. "It's not for the faint of heart."
But building knowledge is the only way to make elementary education meaningful for all kids, and it's our best chance of narrowing the achievement gap.
Education Reform Not Enough to Close Achievement Gap: Report
The Washington Informer
By Freddie Allen
June 15, 2015
Education reform alone isn’t enough to close achievement gaps between Blacks and Whites, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
The study by EPI, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank focused on the needs of low- and middle-income families, analyzed how key social and class factors work to diminish student achievement. Those characteristics include parenting practices, single parenthood, irregular work schedules, lack of access to primary and preventive health care and lead exposure.
Leila Morsy, a lecturer from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, said that even though politicians understand that family and community characteristics affect student performance, they don’t understand how to address its impact.
“Though not all lower-social-class families have each of these characteristics, all have many of them,” Morsy said in a statement. “Pushing policies that address these social class characteristics might be a more powerful way to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children than school improvement strategies.”
Educators should still be encouraged to support strategies such as improving access to early childhood care and education, school-based health centers and after-school and summer opportunities, the report suggested, but those programs must be pursued in conjunction with “macroeconomic policies like full employment, higher wages, and stable work schedules,” that also help to nurture children.
Parental engagement and an educational home environment are critical to fostering student achievement.
According to the Education Department’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011), Black parents reported an average of 44 books in the home, less than half the number given by White parents (112). Black parents also spend about 40 percent less time reading to their young children compared to Whites and Black mothers are “two-thirds as likely as White mothers to read to toddlers daily,” according to the EPI report.
Parental engagement and home environment can be life-changing in those preschool years and research shows that poor families, independent of race, can take steps to make sure that their children don’t lose ground to their financially-stable peers.
“Low-income parents of children in Head Start who spend more time reading to their children, visit the library more often, keep more children’s books in the home, and begin reading to their children at an earlier age have children with higher literacy skills,” the report said. “These children are more ready to read when they reach school age, have better vocabularies, are better able to identify words and letters, and know more story and print concepts – the title of a book, the author, reading from left to right, understanding characters’ feelings.”
More than half of Black children under the age of 18 live in homes with absent fathers, compared to just 18 percent of White children.
The report said that single parents are more stressed and that single mothers who suffer from depression at higher rates are “more likely to abuse children, causing worse outcomes for children themselves.”
That stress is compounded when parents have irregular or nighttime work schedules.
“For example, for low-income African American mothers of preschool children, each additional nighttime hour of work is associated with a decrease in cognitively stimulating mother–child activities,” the report said.
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