STUDY: Helping Some Students May Harm High Achievers

Parents Forum
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<p>So not on a local level, but on a global one, isn't this the alternative to affirmative action that so many are in favor of? Obviously I am making some wild assumptions here (that while these programs are not racially selective they may include a disproportionate amount of first generation, low income and URM students), and there are ways to improve implementation (which of course need to avoid increased cost to tax payors who may not benefit from the services), but the idea of putting the emphasis to work in elementary school rather than in the college admissions process is how I read it.</p>

<p>Disclosure; I am a self-employed but high earning URM with bright kids in private school,( but one has "issues"), and every day I work with kids who I must decide whether to help advocate for help that I know increases my (already high) taxes, if indirectly.</p>

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<p>At the risk of beating the already dead horse, I'd like to reiterate that the referenced study "proves" nothing -- other than apparently there's money available for really shoddy research. It might even be true that "higher scoring" students improve in NCLB environments. If so (and I'm not saying that it is), was that due to NCLB programs? Was it due to the natural mental and emotional development that comes with kids getting older? Was it due to parents becoming more involved with their children's education due to lack of support at school? When current students were compared to previous classes were efforts made to assure the different populations were equivalent? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.</p>

<p>Our school district hired a new Superintendent four years ago to stabilize the school system. (Trust me, when citizens vote down the education budget eleven times in a row, the system needs stabilizing.) The new Superintendent is a fabulous administrator, but he doesn't have one educational bone in his body. Interesting times.</p>

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<p>Here's how it works, from one teacher's perspective in a poor public elementary school who had 23 students in a class, plus her own gifted children to raise in the same school district. (Why only 23? A little-known federal program from the days of President Bill Clinton for extreme poverty schools. The grant could only be spent to reduce student:teacher ratio. That's why I didn't have 33 kids, and it was a blessing.)</p>

<p>Professionally: went to meetings where the superintendent gave us feedback on our district's statistics in a 4 bar graph. From left to right, students were</p>

<ol>
<li>extremely lacking in proficiency</li>
<li>somewhat lacking, </li>
<li>average </li>
<li>exceptional</li>
</ol>

<p>In that particular district, the stats were very bottom-heavy with l's and 2's, but the largest # fell into category 2.</p>

<p>As general regular classroom teachers, we were told that group 1. had the specialists working with push-in and resource programs. Our goal to bring up the school was to get as many of the 2's into the 3 category by year's end. The 4's weren't even mentioned by the super, so I raised a hand to ask what to do with them and was basically told they could teach themselves. But there was nowhere upward for them to go to advance the NCLB agenda, in that school anyway. As for the 1's, well have you heard of "unfunded mandates of NCLB"? That's the problem for the 1's. Money for their needs comes from state and local, and the whole town was poor, so there goes that tax base to really help them. </p>

<p>As a teacher, that's where I put most of my teaching energy, on the ones just below the average, hoping to get them to grade level by year's end.</p>

<p>We were trained to teach in small groups, so there was individual instruction at the group level for all 4 groups. However, there was only l kid each year that might have the academics of the kids I imagine as CC readers. </p>

<p>It doesn't serve the majority of the school district to pay excessive attention to gifted children. I say that with regret, and as someone who spent all her spare time enriching her own family because I knew how bad our district was. Special teachers who knew something about giftedness knew it because of their own lives,families and interests. I had little respect for the traveling gifted specialist who taught the entire class of 2nd graders Tangram puzzles, looking for candidates to test for 3rd grade weekly pullout 45 min/week. More upscale schools have better gifted programs than that, thankfully. Personally I'm for congregated gifted classrooms or don't even bother me with it. Wasted money, IMHO, a bone to the pushy parents of gifted kids. </p>

<p>I sent home extra materials to the gifted kid or 2 each year, and counted on partnership with the parents. The disinterest, by some of the gifted kids' parents towards everyone else's progress was apparent. Sometimes they spoke to me as if I was thick-headed, because I was just an elementary teacher and they were professionals. </p>

<p>I stopped counting on our district to educate my own children, respected them for tending to the needs of the majority, and used the money saved from private school to create wonderful summertime enrichment when I could be with them. </p>

<p>I'm just being honest about what I remember. Make of it what you will.</p>

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<p>I once picked apart the equation used to calculate one of the California school ranking scores--possibly the API (academic performance index), IIRC, maybe something specific to Los Angeles Unified. What I do remember is that the student scores are sorted into five bins. The scores setting each bin were fixed, e.g. getting up to 20% of the questions on the test right meant a kid was in the lowest bin, getting 40 to 60% of the questions on the test right meant the kid was in the middle bin. There were more points for being in a higher bin, fewer, possibly negative points for being in the lower bins. </p>

<p>If one student scored 41% on a test, and another student scored 59%, they both "earned" their school the same number of points, since they were both in the "standard performance" bin. But if another student scored 61%, that student was in the next highest bin, and earned more points for the school. </p>

<p>It might have taken the schools one go-round to figure out what to do, but what started happening was that certain students were targeted for additional tutoring. If you can get those kids just below the cutoff for a higher scoring bin to answer just a few more questions correctly, then the school's scores show a dramatic improvement. You may want to shore up your gains on the students who are near the lower edge of a scoring bin, but for the kids in the middle, why bother working with them? Go for the low-hanging fruit. As for the tippy-top kids, they're already in that top scoring bin, there's no more funding juice to be gotten from them.</p>

<p>My little piece of guerrilla warfare on the high-stakes tests was to tell the kids to put down that their parents' highest educational level was a high school diploma. The schools are compared to "similar" schools across the state with "similar" socioeconomic makeup. But the schools are depending on the kids to report this accurately, or they send a form home for the parents to complete. Parents are only human: people feeling ashamed that they didn't finish high school put down that they have a high school degree; people who had a few years of college put down they have the degree. Which ends up pushing the school into a "higher" socioeconomic group than it really belongs to, which ends up making the school look worse when compared to those not-really-similar schools. So we went downwardly mobile, for the sake of the children :)</p>

25

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</p>

<p>I can readily appreciate that even very resource-rich private schools, as well as public schools, have their limitations and any given school may not be the best solution for a particular student, and surely your daughter's subsequent success does indeed demonstrate that she didn't suffer from the move.</p>

<p>I would be interested in hearing why you say that moving your daughter from her old school to the local public school was the "best move" you ever made. Was it because she encountered a broader spectrum of society or learned more problem-solving skills in dealing with a more bureaucratic administration or because she encountered teachers with a different world view and motivation for teaching or ....?</p>

<p>You've made the case that the move didn't hurt her, but why specifically, do you think it helped her?</p>

26

<p>^^interesting, Slithey Tove! (cross posted w/wisteria, sorry there) </p>

<p>Kids in a bin. Sounds like "snakes on a plane" ! </p>

<p>Just wordplay; guess I'm softwired to lst and 2nd grade Phonics. I really did love the kids.</p>

27

<p>Interesting that we have the same experince with 2 kids at my D's private HS moving to public schools. However, results were very opposite. Both of them could not stand it there, had to be forced by their parents to finish school year at their public schools and came back to our private school next year. They indicated the lack of attention and lack of challenge as main reasons. They were truly missing their teachers!!!</p>

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<p>wisteria,</p>

<p>The short answer is that she went to a more flexible, more responsive environment. </p>

<p>Part of why this worked was that she went from middle school at a private school to HS at the public school. Most of us no doubt have seen the strong opposition to tracking kids in public schools before HS. Yet HS classes are heavily tracked, with honors, AP and such. In fact, our local HS had at least 4 levels of math! So, in moving to the local public HS, she gained a good deal of curriculum flexibility she would not have had at the prep school.</p>

<p>In addition, it turned out the HS teachers were much more responsive than the prep school teachers when I as a parent had a question. By and large, these teachers really cared. The HS also had less teacher turnover and a pretty dedicated staff (although the AP Chem teacher was old enough that he should have turned over. :) )</p>

<p>Fundamentally, I found that the biggest difference was one of attitude. The prep school's attitude was "we're great, we know what's best, parents stay out of the way" compared to "what does your kid want? how can we help?" Curiously, the local PS administration was less bureaucratic in many ways than the prep school!</p>

<p>We also found the broader spectrum of society at the PS to be refreshing (good friend one year living in public housing, for example). We did not miss the prep school atmosphere of "what country did you spring break in?" which one year included Costa Rica, Kenya, and China if I recall correctly. </p>

<p>To sum, it helped her by letting her be more "her". She was able to "get lost" in a class of 450 and be herself in ways that she could not in a prep school class of 60, growing to 100.</p>

29

<p>I should add that our local public schools may not be completely typical. We lived in Brookline, MA. It is an unusual community because it has an unusually broad range of incomes, a huge number of immigrants (1/3 of the kids in the schools come from families where english is not the native language) and a huge number that head to ivies. For example, 13 kids from my D's class went to Harvard, 3 to Stanford, and about 15 to other ivies. At the same time, 20% did not go to 4 year colleges and a full 5 % entered the military most years. So it was a fascinating, rich social environment.</p>

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<p>Hey, wasn't Brookline that city in some article about the college search?</p>

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<p>You believe that it is fair to compare JH teachers to HS teachers and their attitudes? They are dealing with very different age group that should be treated very differently by adults. It seems that it would be more fair to compare one HS to another and one JH to another.</p>

32

<p>miamiDAP,</p>

<p>How is an 8th grader "very different" from a 9th grader?</p>

<p>Given the way kids mature at different rates, how can you make such bold generalizations.</p>

<p>Finally, I can't compare one HS to another. She only went to one. I made no effort to be "fair". I only have one data point.</p>

33

<p>p3t, we must have cross-posted. Amusing that you had to get by with a mere four bins instead of the clearly superior five-bin metric ;)</p>

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<p>I did not mean 8th grader is very different from 9th grader, I meant 7-8th graders are very different from 9-12th graders. It is hard to compare JH and HS schools in regard to the same points. It would be hard to let 8 grader to leave to college (although sometime it happens), but we do it with 12th grader. They work, drive, date in HS, in your opinion they are the same as in JH? Law does not let them work or have a driver license in JH, so it is oficially recognized that they are different. HS and JH are different by nature.</p>

35

<p>MiamiDAP, This is rather silly to debate the fine points of a comparison between two institutions. I am sorry that I did not have twins so I could send one to each institution to do a more valid comparison. </p>

<p>I only stated what I observed. You don't like it? Fine. Ignore it. I was not engaged in a search for truth and am not interested in universal generalities. What I found may well not apply to you. So what?</p>

36

<p>For what it's worth, I had a similar experience to newmassdad with my kids moving from an excellent private school to a large urban public academic magnet high school. There was more of a mix of positive and negative, and the subsequent history has not been quite so spectacular. But overall I believe the public school did a perfectly good job of educating its most able students and helping them achieve their potential.</p>

<p>To some extent, it was a matter of personality. The private school discouraged and suppressed overt competition (while fostering a rich environment of covert competition). At the public school, EVERYTHING was a competition. The private school had a modicum of income and cultural diversity, but to a large extent that masked an almost complete lack of diversity in the values and attitudes of families there. The public school was shockingly diverse; there was practically nothing on which everyone agreed. </p>

<p>Some students would thrive either place, some more one place than the other. The public school was great for well-rounded, but primarily math/science types who were self-motivated and good at playing within rules. It would not have been great for rebellious, artistic kids, or for those who needed to be coaxed out of their shells, or who didn't appreciate instant, quantitative feedback on everything they did.</p>

<p>In terms of intellectual ability and accomplishment, the students at the top of both classes were essentially equivalent. Both schools had some great teachers and some less-than-great teachers.</p>

37

<p>NCLB is not the whole problem. Students need to be grouped according to ability early on. My son doodled his way through elementary school getting straight A's. It didn't help his study habits. We worked hard with his teachers to keep him challenged but how much could they do when they were having to focus on bringing the low achievers up? High school has been better now that he's with students who are more or less at the same level but he still struggles with maintaining good study habits. I still kick myself for not seeing this problem sooner in elementary school - I would've found a more challenging environment for him.</p>

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<p>Lilmom - totally agree. The whole level of difficulty at US schools including HS is lower than most other countries, even underdeveloped. I heard this from many immigrants (including from Africa!!). Some communities in the USA like Japanese, Russians, et... organize their own schools where they teach their childeren math + sciences in addition to their regular schools just to keep up with job market demand of current economy. However, once you realize that there is not enough challenge, you should address it as you mentioned, as soon as possible. You can hire tutor, for example, to go over more challenging material or insist on placing child ahead in some classes. Private schools are more open to issues like this, but it all depends on individual sircumstances. Nobobdy compalins about college education, which is awesome in the USA.</p>

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<p>JHS,</p>

<p>Well put. I agree that matching the kid's personality to the school environment is a critical factor in the public/private/prep school decision. A highly motivated individualistic kid could well be stifled in a lot of private/prep environments, many of which focus on a particular approach or curriculum education-wise. Yet a "go with the flow" kind of kid, especially one easily influenced by peers, could well flounder (or worse) in a lot of public school settings.</p>

<p>This is just not an easy arena in which to generalize, which is why I made my original post. Parents need to consider their choices carefully, taking both the kid and the school choices into consideration. Just the fact that one pays a lot of money for something (like prep school tuition) does not automatically make it better. (but for many it will be, of course)</p>

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<p>"she just graduated last weekend from U. Chicago not just PBK but with an academic honor/scholarship that without question put her at the top of her class."</p>

<p>Congratulations!</p>