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Someone suggested today that I would make a good school counselor. I guess they saw my interest in and willingness to connect to kids — people really but kids mostly. I don’t know. The thought of going back to school is daunting and really it’s far too early on this little experiment.

Why are we importing skilled workers, instead of growing our own?

The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa category in the United States under the Immigration & Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H). It allows U.S. employers to seek temporary help from skilled foreigners who have the equivalent U.S. Bachelor’s Degree education. H-1B employees are employed temporarily in a job category that is considered by the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services to be a “specialty occupation.” A specialty occupation is one that requires theoretical and practical application of a body of specialized knowledge along with at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent.

The H1B is a visa category for skilled workers, in industries that originated here in the US. Look at the top 100 companies who use this to get the employees they need. I wonder how many of them lobby for lower taxes (that would go to help schools educate the workers they need) while spending money on the legal process and recruitment that allows them import that knowledge. And there are non-immigrant visas: these workers come to the US, use their knowledge to our benefit but also learn from us and undoubtedly use that knowledge when and if they return home. It looks like a losing proposition in the long-term, as we don’t develop home-grown expertise while we subsidize our possible competitors in the markets that US companies will be trying to expand into in years to come.

Quality education for me, but not for thee

Link: Quality education for me, but not for thee

If Bill Gates is adamant that American public schools are broken, why doesn’t he look at the schools where his H1B visa holders have come from? Do they use his DVD player model, where one good teacher’s lectures are recorded for use in many classrooms? Or do they still do things the old-fashioned way, with basic skills, standards and rigorous testing and assessment?

mixing and matching

You learn something new everyday in this gig, especially working with experienced, creative teachers and energetic students.

Trying to get some reluctant learners (fidgety insecure/unconfident boys) on track, we tried pairing with strong learners (girls, as it happens) but it showed mixed results. The girls were quite capable of completing the tasks on their own and expecting them to corral some squirrelly boys was too much. The lack of confidence shows through as the stronger partner sails through the work, even if they are kind and patient about explaining and encouraging. Better-prepared students are often more willing to just do the work, without wondering about its purpose (pin-punching as a key to manual dexterity/fine motor skills, for example).

Next option was to pair peers. That worked pretty well to start with, as the confidence that comes with mastery wasn’t an issue 😉 There were some clever insights and solutions to a task that required a pattern to be built from some materials. I could see there weren’t enough color variations in a bucket of connecting blocks to make a pattern of color but one of the boys suggested setting them so the connecting faces were opposed, alternating right or left. I was surprised as the idea was completely intuitive and the problem hadn’t even been framed.

But as often happens, a group hums to the lowest vibration and with only two of them, chaos was never far away. Score it a partial victory.

I’d like to see Bill Gates’ DVD collection handle these kinds of challenges. Can a TV screen really offer the kind of focused attention or variation of technique that a teacher can?

File under: more money than sense

Why I should care about what a guy who went to private school (Lakeside) then dropped out of harvard thinks about public schools eludes me. Bill Gates thinks he can replace dedicated, committed passionate teachers with DVDs? That all kids are motivated and ready to learn from such a sterile medium?

Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch)
10/14/10 9:18 PM
Read this great letter to Bill Gates, by NYC teacher http://tinyurl.com/2fseghd

numbers

Numbers I would like to know:

  • percentage of parents who don’t go to parent-teacher conferences, even after the many out-of-hours accommodation teachers offer
  • comparison of standardized test performance between kids who stay in one school/at one or two addresses during their elementary school years vs kids who have been more mobile
  • percentage of kids who change households more than once a week, due to parents who have split up or other unusual custodial arrangements
  • percentage of elementary-age kids who get to bed before 9PM or who are in bed at least 10 hours a night
  • percentage of elementary or middle-school students who have access to a TV, computer, smartphone or other networked distraction after they are in bed
  • percentage of elementary or middle-school students who have a library card and who have books checked out on it
  • percentage of elementary or middle-school students who have a bicycle and can ride it
  • percentage of elementary or middle-school students who have taken swimming lessons or can already swim
  • percentage of elementary or middle-school students who are on a sports team or have a physical activity they regularly pursue (cycling, skating, skiing, ultimate frisbee, hiking)
  • percentage of elementary students whose parents bring them to school and are regularly late

expectations

What if schools/districts could deny service to kids they were unequipped for or just didn’t want to deal with? That boy who can’t stop his mouth, no matter what consequences are applied? Send him home. The girl who never follows any of the instructions and chats with her friends, dragging their performance down as well? Gone.

Now this is obviously a bad idea for all concerned. The children affected by this would be worse off. And parents have an expectation that when their otherwise healthy children reach school age, they’ll be in school.

But are there no expectations, other than an arbitrary number of birthdays, that determine eligibility for school attendance? If a child is interfering with other students’ experience — holding up the whole class for parts of the day, preventing lessons from being taught in an orderly, damaging materials — what recourse does a school or teacher have? At what point does the burden of failure point to the home and the lack of preparation/socialization there? Bearing in mind that students are only in school 6 hours a day, the same kids don’t get to school until they’re five years old. What work has been done to prepare them for

  • working with others
  • taking instruction from someone other than a parent
  • taking care of classroom materials, as opposed to easily-replaced household goods?

I’m not arguing for expulsion of the students who need school most: that would be cruel, both now and down the road. It would have consequences for the rest of their lives. But by the same token, what kind of shared responsibility can be forged between parents and teachers to help those who need it most? No expectations can be put on the students. But what of the parents’ responsibility to their children, to make them ready for the challenges ahead? Who knows them better on that first day? Who knows how they’ll react to the many new stimuli — bells, new routines, room changes, new faces and voices — better than their parents? And how do they pass along that information? I’m sure every teacher loves hearing how special little Johnny is or how Jane is surely gifted and will be moving on to a more challenging classroom/better teacher in no time.

But what practical issues of routine and ritual are shared? What kind of hours does little Johnny keep? Is he accustomed to sleeping til 9 and staying up til 10 or later? Does he eat meals or just graze through the day? How prepared is little Jane, academically: is she reading at all, writing, does she like to sing, does she know her colors or letters (the underlying question here is: how much time have her parents spent on these areas? How much will she be behind the other kids whose parents have done some of this?)?

The idea of a partnership between parents and teachers is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention. I think it should. When I realize my neighbors have declined to show up for curriculum night two years running, I wonder if they know what message that sends to the teachers and their only child? The teachers put a lot of work into their short but dense presentations, on top of a full day’s work, and with the promise of more work via the various online methods available today. We specifically went to see the teachers and get any insight we could into materials and subject matter, grading policy and other expectations. We came away pleased and prepared to work with them. Who wouldn’t want that?

Root causes

A veteran educator with 25 years of service shared some thoughts on student achievement with me the other day. As in many large cities, there are differences in socioeconomic status and educational attainment across the city. Here, we have a North/South divide: northend schools historically outperform their southend counterparts, just as the northern half of the city is in the higher end of the socioeconomic scale. We often think we know the reasons why students struggle and fail – lack of parental involvement, cultural differences, poor schools – but I heard a different take on this.

Lack of parental involvement — manifested by weak parent/teacher contact/communication, lack of support for homework, reading, good study habits or work ethic — is both cultural and economic. If several generations of a family can see that they have made no economic progress despite their efforts in school, they are not likely to value education as a way to improve the lives of the next generation. And some families who still believe in hard work are often unable to engage with their child’s school due to their own work demands. People making minimum wage often need more than one job to make ends meet if they have children and that additional work time is time they can’t spend at home supporting their child’s education or working with teachers to ensure their child is making progress.

But there is another aspect of this I hadn’t realized. An unstable or marginal family structure can undermine the work in those precious few hours in other ways. Two factors were laid out for me: mobility/school changes and summer vacation.

This veteran educator told me that, in his experience, kids who completed grades K-5 in the same school performed better on standardized tests than those who arrived in the school where they would be tested in the 3rd or 4th grade. There is a clear advantage to students having a consistent school experience, being able to make friends, to bond with teachers, to feel comfortable and confident (I mentioned confidence earlier and while it may not be a reliable metric, I think it’s an indicator/predictor of success). Early learners need to feel supported and know that people care about their education. This is missing in the lives of kids who move around between schools. It can also mean their home life isn’t stable. Varying custodial arrangements, different households, inconsistent parenting/role modeling can confuse and undermine a young kid. Not to say that older kids don’t need that, too, but building a foundation where kids know how to learn and that value of learning, the confidence that comes with mastery, can help the older student stay on course.

But what about summer vacation? What can be wrong there? It’s an anachronism, a relic of an agrarian past that is easily 100 years out of date. But how is it harmful? Turns out, it’s not so much what they do over the break, it’s what students don’t do.

Ten/twelve weeks of idleness for a latchkey kid with working parents, maybe working 2 or more jobs, can freeze a student in their tracks. Those few hours of school attendance and socializing are important in the intellectual and social development, their need to find their place and realize their potential. If their summer is unstructured and devoid of any enrichment, they can actually lose what they learned, like an athlete losing muscle tone or a musician losing their chops. Latchkeys kids with the TV for company aren’t prepared for returning to school like their peers who take vacations, go to museums or camps, and are supported while they’re out of school. Ten/twelve weeks out of the learning environment, when they are already at a disadvantage, will stop a kid’s progress and if it continues, will probably have a cumulative effect by the time they reach middle school. They’re in review/catchup mode while other kids are breaking new ground and that can eat away at their confidence and sense of belonging. It’s not to hard to imagine a young student starting to doubt school is for them, that there is a any point to it.

Proposed changes to the school calendar that would shrink summer break or distribute it through the year are usually framed as being more realistic, making kids more prepared for life. And that argument makes sense. Spreading the 36 weeks (more or less) of attendance around with 2-3 week breaks would be interesting to study. I never considered it as a serious disadvantage for poorer kids but it makes sense.

Making housing more stable for students, either through subsidies or other assistance, might make a big difference in the achievement gap. It sounds like meddlesome big brother-ish interference but these are kids who could use a big brother, someone to look out for them. I would like to see the test results for kids who are struggling with the state-mandated tests cross-referenced with changes in home address or custodial responsibility. If there is something to this and no one has acted on it, what a disaster.