What happens when I’m not there to hold their hands?
Posted: September 24th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 11 Comments »
Super math teacher Paul F asked me what is perhaps the most fundamental question for no excuses schools.
Many of our kids, when they leave our middle school and attend various high schools, struggle with work ethic.
And in other charters, which go through high school, graduates struggle with work ethic in college.
At issue:
Lots of young and/or new teachers + ridiculously high expectations –> teachers take on a lot of responsibility for the kids’ learning (staying late to tutor, test prep). I think this may be “taking too much responsibility.”
When our kids graduate from our school, they often don’t / can’t take responsibility for their own academics when we aren’t there to hold their hands and push.
Do I keep tutoring (so they learn and I look good)? Or do I let them flop (to give them incentive to learn how to learn more independently)? In the former, perhaps I’m feeding their addiction to help. In the latter, at the very least I look crappy in the short term, and there’s no guarantee the “flop” will generate new habits.
* * *
Great question. We know very little about the choice here.
ie, if you had 100 total kids, and to 50 you introduce “controlled failure,” and to another 50 you provide “max help,” which kids are more likely to succeed in long run?
if the normal college grad rate for poor kids is 9%, and the kipp rate is 35% (and rising), and the YES prep rate is 40% (and rising), let’s take that as the “max help” rate. That’s a 3x or 4x multiple over the 9% regular public school “uncontrolled failure” rate.
But nobody knows what a “controlled fail” rate would be like, or even the exact processes involved. It’s unclear, beyond anecdote, how often failure leads to the sort of behavior change we seek.
“The burned hand learns best,” says Gandalf. “After that advice about fire goes to the heart.”
This is after Pippin steals the all-seeing crystal globe and almost reveals the whole melt-the-ring plan to the Dark Lord. Does the burned hand teach best? Does a kid who was allowed to slack off, and then fail the course, do better next time?
Even if this were true, it’s not even clear that controlled failure is a practical strategy. In many charters, kids who repeat the year are tempted to leave — because they’re typically offered automatic promotion at the nearby traditional school, effectively overruling the teachers at the charter school. This “automatic promotion elsewhere” option puts enormous pressure on the charter school staff, because one way charters are held accountable is by departure rates. Therefore there is always pressure to “max out” extra help provided to each kid.
So
a. at the very least, a teacher might want to hammer home / activate the most knowledge possible for the years you’ve got the good relationships with kids and the ability to more directly influence them….because even if they regress in work habits after departure, they’ll know more stuff….
and
b. it MAY be the best way to increase future independent effort IS actually to get kids to learn via coerced effort. ie, Paul is seeing the slippage rate in many kids. But it may be a glass half full / half empty situation. It’s entirely possible that “letting kids fail” rarely changes future habits. Nobody knows.
Thought experiment:
Take 100 folks who don’t exercise much.
a. Fifty people get:
1 hour/day of personal training during Month 1.
2 hours/week of personal training during Month 2. (weaning).
2 hours/month of personal training during Month 3. (more weaning).
Then that’s it.
b. The other 50 people get:
1 hour/day of personal training during for 3 full months.
Then that’s it. No weaning.
*
So, a full year later, which 50 people exercise more?
The group who got a little help (and weaning)? Or the group that more training, reached a higher level of actual fitness, but then had no weaning?
Plenty of middle class kids lose their motivation when they get to high school or college. Does it make more sense to try to figure out how to keep providing hands-on help and nudging for as long as possible, or does it make more sense to offer educational options that are intrinsically motivating to students. Probably a little of both. Lower-income students receive neither in most schools.
Okay, I know the writing style/mindset is inflammatory, but the points raised here seem important:
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html
Not saying that KIPP’s rate isn’t better than public, but it comes with a lot of outside funding, a lot of attrition and a lot of not reviewed or well explained numbers.
Also, the selection/attrition factors would affect the area public schools in the opposite direction, driving down their college completion rates as a percentage of their population with concerned parents and higher performance is siphoned out.
*I do know that this doesn’t address the hand-holding vs. allowing failure issue* ;-D
I think the bigger problem with “allowing” failure is how it’s handled on the other side. That is, the failure is clearly not necessary for great performance — plenty of kids do very well without ever having failed.
But, teaching kids (and showing by results) the payoffs of hard work, practice, and continued effort when something isn’t fun or engaging or intrinsically motivating to them is an excellent life lesson. I’m guessing that it’s a not minor part of KIPP and others’ successes. That is, kids learn that sitting in a classroom and not talking out, not disrupting, etc. while not exciting in the moment can lead to skills and abilities or initially rewards and field trips that ARE more rewarding.
EB, good point
Jen,
2 quick thoughts and then I gotta put the kiddos to bed
1. The more money theme. In most cities, the charters get 15 to 20% less than the sending district per student. Depends on how you calculate. Fair questions there.
But there’s no way Kipp is fundraising enough to outspend the district. The question is just how far they’re behind.
2. The way to control for the selection issue would be to examine the college completion rates of Kipp lottery losers, and then compare.
Tat is, since it’s random admission lottery, the kids who win the lottery and attend Kipp have exactly the same amount of “parent support” etc as those who lose the lottery.
To my knowledge, alas, that data is not available for Kipp to study.
However, when they have gotten outside evaluators to look at the lottery losers’ test scores (Mathematica study most recently), those scores seemed to show that the losers did terribly; no different from the sending district.
This would suggest, at least, that it’s highly unlikely Kipp lottery losers do well in college, since they don’t do well in middle or high school.
Paul here….
Don’t want to let my kids fail for the year, but I do want them to take more responsibility for their own learning on a daily and weekly basis so that I am not pulling what’s left of my hair out every night. The question is whether failing quizzes and tests will motivate them to work harder than they are right now.
If there were a way to track the kids this closely, it would be interesting to track the kids who “wash out” before 8th grade from KIPP and compare to the lottery losers.
One could assume that some of the lottery losers could have done better at KIPP, but it also seems like there is a number of kids approaching half of the population that don’t make it at KIPP. It’s easy to forget that — and that KIPP doesn’t get judged by kids who enter in, say, 11th grade, because they don’t have those kids.
Here’s one of the funding articles:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/03/31/135014989/kipp-charter-schools-have-funding-edge-study-says
Also, many districts and probably all larger districts have some astronomical costs that aren’t borne by charters. In my suburban district growing up, with ~4000 students, there was one student with a severe enough disability whose parents found a suitable placement for her — across the country. At the time, decades ago, her education cost > $100k per year.
My current district runs a school just for kids with severe disabilities — obviously the staffing and costs for that add enormously to the “per student cost.” Add in the school for kids with severe behavioral problems…
It’s like health insurance — surely it’s easier to provide low-cost health care if you’re not taking the sickest patients and you can drop clients pretty easily.
Hi Jen,
Good stuff as always.
At least in Massachusetts, here is how the funding formula works.
ALL of the funds spent on ALL out-of-district placements for special ed students are SUBTRACTED proportionately from the charter schools, even if they’ve never attended our schools.
Example.
1. Let’s say Boston district spends $900 million on 56,000 students. And $40 million of that is for the types of extreme special needs students you describe above.
2. The entire $40 million in subtracted from the $900 million before a charter dollar is ever calculated.
3. Put another way, if the district spends 4% of its funds on kids with severe disabilities who go out of district, then the entire 4% is automatically lopped off the charter school per student formula.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining myself well. Here’s a link to a more lengthier explanation of how the charter funding works in this state.
http://www.masscharterschools.org/schools/myths.html
Thanks, I’ll have to look up my state’s funding equations. Massachusetts is likely a bit more in the forefront than my state, though we’re still, you know, a more northern, more east, more blue state than lots of others. ;-D
Another great question, Mike. Isn’t this really the question that pervades ALL of education? What is the proper amount and type of scaffolding that teachers/schools need to provide so that students ultimately become independent thinkers, citizens, etc. Too much scaffolding and you can stunt individual growth. Too little and students flail.
Rather than think of it in terms of controlled fail, I’d think in terms of really thinking carefully about what the “curriculum” is for building independence and shifting more of the responsibility to students over time for their own learning. How can teachers and the school gradually reduce the amount of support over time in smart ways that actually build independence and ownership. This is absolutely crucial because of something I wanted to write in response to your earlier Grit, Luck, and Money post.
A key challenge that we place in front of many students (and a reason why in the short term its imperative to develop independence is students) is that there are
2 huge organizational shifts that occur in the course of most students’ educations. One is the shift from elementary school, where most students are taught in a self-contained classroom with 1 teacher responsible for them to middle school where they have many different teachers across multiple periods. The second is from high school to large college or university, where there is a radical shift in responsibility for doing the work to the student and a radical increase in time spent out of class. Professors don’t generally check up on you to see whether you did the homework. And in large lectures you as a student may have absolutely no relationship with the teacher–indeed he or she may not even know who you are–and you may get very little feedback on the quality of your work beyond a score on a midterm and a final exam. I think we underestimate the magnitude of these transitions, and how hard it is to navigate them for students. These organizational arrangements (and disjunctions) can have huge implications for which factors come into play in terms of low income (or any student) making it to the next stage. Grit, perseverence, self-motivation, independence, etc., are especially important when you have a lot of non-classroom time and no one is really checking up on you.
I’ve long thought that one of the underappreciated strengths of the US higher education system are the liberal arts colleges. I know so many middle of the road students from relatively affluent backgrounds who attended liberal arts colleges and really thrived. That’s because they are more similar to high schools, emphasize teaching, and offer much more personalized attention and support. In many ways they are better choices for low income students than large research or comprehensive universities. BUT, on the downside, these colleges tend to be very homogeneous, which can make it difficult for working class kids to feel they fit in. Which is where programs like POSSE come in–a smart strategy for placing cohorts of working class kids in liberal arts settings.
This raises an important final thought. In interpreting social science research results we need to always remember that they reflect the existing organizational arrangements and sorting patterns. The results cannot predict what would happen if we changed these conditions more dramatically.
Agree wholeheartedly that real stakes are a pre-requisite to developing perserverance in kids.
Definitely not saying it’s a panacea but it seems to me that part of the solution here is creating meaningful feedback cycles that have real outcomes for kids that are faster than the promotion/retention one. Have been floating the idea of making trimester-ly outcomes feel more like yearly ones for kids — imagine that after T1 and T2 you took NWEA MAP, conferred with your adviser on your growth (esp. as it related to effort/inputs in the student’s control), and started the next trimester in a new math class/section (possibly with another teacher!)
Probably requires a move toward ungraded math, and would require condensing a grade level’s curriculum into a more modular chunk that expressed a big idea with students. This means less focus on *when* content is presented (you may have a 6th grader sitting in a ’5th grade’ math mod) but more emphasis on eventual mastery. May give up some short run gains on the 6th grade test but pick up something in the long run?
Worth an RCT, anyways…
Andrew – I think Mastery Charter Schools in Philly used a model like this in their original HS at some point. Not sure if they still do.
Ed – thank you for writing exactly what I was thinking about plans for easing kids off the support they get from us. If you hear of anyone that does this really well, let us all know. I think the hardest point is that it’s different for all kids. Some kids are ready for independence early and others maybe never
.
Reminds me of a kid who I taught at Boston Collegiate whose mom did not want him to go to Boston Latin in 7th grade. Very overprotective. Anyway, he set up a shadow day and figured out how to get there from Southie on the T by himself (remember, he was 12 at the time). When he told her about his plan, she knew he was ready and let him go.
Andrew’s point is well-taken. Ungraded classrooms (also called Continuous Development) require less hand-holding because the students are taught in their ZPD. I experienced this many years ago in a Catholic school that was ungraded from K-3. Very effective.