One of my readers sent me a Boston Globe article that I found to be fascinating. Harvard Professor Roland Fryer applied statistical analysis on successful schools to see why they worked, then applied the resulting 5 principals to failing schools in Texas with dramatic results in just one year.
The magic recipe
- Frequent feedback to teachers
- Use data on individual students to guide their instruction
- Heavy tutoring
- Increase instructional time
- Maintain very high expectations
Results
But we can’t afford more tutoring and increased instruction time
From the article:
The way forward for Massachusetts and Middleboro
What we are doing now in Middleboro, and have been doing for many years is simply, undeniably, measurably not working. What do we have to lose by making drastic yet sensible changes?
The idea that we simply need to throw more money at the schools is a non-starter. Lots of schools are performing far better and spend much less per student. Getting more money for Middleboro schools can only happen via an override and that is just not going to happen. Forget it.
We need to find another way to improve the schools, and this article suggests one way of doing it.
Themocracy
Hooray! What a great article! Now the next steps is how to get more parents involved in this thought process and to speak up to administration. I seem to be spending a lot of time analyzing the schools, particularly my kids grade levels. My children are all over the spectrum in learning abilities and am finding that it is the more-able child that I am having to go up to bat for. What amazes me is how many children are able to do more, but parents and teachers are accepting status-quo. There is no raising the bar or challenging those kids that are unchallenged at school. The goal seems to be to get them to ‘average’.
My question is why this is needed particularly for states that have charter schools. I am not seeing the relevence but am quite curious, as I have been looking into that option. How do charter schools come into play with this issue?
They’re needed in states that have charter schools because charter schools are not an option for everybody. The ideal would be great public schools and then charter schools for kids that are particularly suited for art, music, cooking aardvarks, whatever
Every student should have an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) and not just the SPED kids.
I have tutored the last four years at a program I use to work in so that is what I will post about. It is a self contained program for high school students who cannot cope with or have been dismissed from the “regular” high school for a variety of issues. The tutoring is strictly designed for students to pass MCAS and is done in conjunction with other academic intervention programs within the school. The idea is to target selected students who have failed previous MCAS tests and need specific areas addressed outside the standard classroom curriculum. Simply put it is additional support.
In four years every targeted student has passed MCAS math (about 20) and all but one has passed ELA. Most moved into the needs improvement category and a few advanced into the proficient range. These were academically needy students who had an extensive resume of academic failure and also coupled with a variety of learning disabilities, emotional problems and behavioral issues. So it can be done with the most needy imagine what can be done with those with less needs?
Now comes the most difficult of MCAS tutoring and that is biology where our collective rate is in the 60% range although we did have a student score a 254 on the spring retest.
Now when I tutor it is individual or with two students and it is all grant driven and is not cheap. But options do exist and a volunteer network is one possibility.