Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, who has taught English and history for 30 years and writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
It’s the end of September, and most classrooms have settled into their routines. It runs counter to all the gushing about how learning should be creative and exciting, but there’s a value in school routine. Knowing what to expect day to day from their teacher frees students to concentrate on the skills, knowledge, and ideas they’re supposed to be learning. It’s easier to appreciate the scenery when you’re not preoccupied with figuring out where to make the next left turn.
That’s not to say that school is never exciting. Hosting a scrum of adolescents guarantees excitement, and there are those notable moments amid the hard, unglamorous work when the light goes on in students’ eyes. There’s also the commotion that descends from on high as experts and officials add their observations and initiatives to the mix. Here’s a sampler of their recent contributions.
It probably doesn’t surprise most regular people that students who are absent a lot are less likely to learn much. Given policymakers’ fondness for holding schools responsible for things teachers and principals can’t possibly control, it shouldn’t surprise you that the impossibly titled Every Student Succeeds Act, successor to the equally impossibly titled No Child Left Behind Act, requires schools to address chronic absenteeism and designates student attendance rates a “measure of school quality.” Given education researchers’ fondness for belaboring the obvious, it also shouldn’t surprise you that a team drawn from Harvard, Berkeley, and the Philadelphia school system joined forces to investigate.
The yearlong study tracked 28,000 K-12 students who were absent at least three days more than the average for their grade. A control group of parents received only the standard report card accounting of their child’s absences. The remaining parents received either a series of five generic notes informing them that “students fall behind when they miss school,” or five similar notes that included how many days their child had been absent, or a third version that also included the average number of absences for students at their child’s grade level.
Students whose parents received the extra notes were between 8% and 11% less likely to be chronically absent, with the notes that provided more information slightly more effective. Students in the report card control group were absent an average of 17.0 days. Students who received the additional notifications averaged 16.4 days, 16.0 days, and 15.9 days, respectively.
The moral of the story is that “informational nudges” like the extra notes can help some parents keep better track of how many school days their children are missing. Some of those chronically absent children will actually come to school more – but not much more.
Raise your hand if you’re surprised.
Shifting our focus to the years before kindergarten, universal pre-K and expanded early child care programs figure prominently in many candidates’ stump speeches. Before we adopt their grand designs, though, we should consider the “cautionary” conclusions of an extensive 2018 study examining the short- and long-term results for Quebec children who participated in “North America’s largest universal childcare program.”
Analysts found “significant negative effects of universal childcare” for participating preschool children, both in tested cognitive functioning and in non-cognitive areas including “anxiety and aggression.” Between ages 5 and 9, participants subsequently displayed “persistent negative effects” manifested in heightened anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity. They were also “less likely to get along with their teacher.”
At the middle and high school level, investigators found “no clear impacts on test scores.” Overall results were described as “mixed,” with Canadian national testing results “negative in all subjects but not statistically significant.” The study also details continuing non-cognitive “negative results.” Former participants reported “worse physical health and life satisfaction” as adolescents and adults, while national crime data documents “higher rates” of “criminal activity.”
This isn’t to say that all early child care programs are harmful or that they don’t sometimes benefit some children. The report’s authors note, for example, that “disadvantaged children from single-parent families” are more likely to experience “improved outcomes” than children from two-parent families. We needn’t universally reject pre-K education, but neither might it be wise for us to universally adopt it.
On the math front you may recall the “algebra for all” movement that swept schools early in the millennium. Billing algebra as the “gateway to the middle class,” advocates argued that it should therefore be taught to more or even all students and introduced in eighth grade instead of ninth. Unfortunately, owing to variations in readiness and ability, too many students aren’t adequately prepared in eighth grade, or any grade, so the frequent result of requiring algebra for all 13-year-olds was watered-down algebra for college-bound students and no relevant functional math for those who weren’t going to college.
Between 2005 and 2011 as 45 states increased their enrollment in eighth grade algebra, federal NAEP assessment results indicated that “the increased enrollment hasn’t led to higher math performance,” with data suggesting a negative impact. Multiple studies echoed those conclusions, and school participation in expanded algebra programs declined for a while.
Now algebra is back earlier than ever. Given education reform’s fetish for acronyms, the new movement styles itself Project LEAP, for Leveraging Early Algebra Progression. LEAP practitioners favor introducing third graders to “algebraic thinking” like the idea that an equals sign means both sides of a problem are “equivalent,” not just that one side is the answer to the other.
This doesn’t sound like a bad idea, although I’m not sure how many third graders don’t intuitively know that. I do have two reservations. First, when reformers talk a lot about “thinking,” they usually aren’t talking much about content, skills, and practice. Second, I remember horizontal math problems from my old elementary days where the missing number wasn’t always in the answer blank after the equals sign, so I’m not sure algebraic thinking for third graders is all that revolutionary.
There’s a lesson here beyond algebra, preschool, and absence notes.
Schools would be better off with less fanfare and more moderation.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: Belaboring the obvious.