In Practice

Next live-blogging event will be from 5:15-6:15: “Eight Strategies for Using Humor to Improve Learning”. Please join us!

The event below was hosted by Spence Rogers of Peak Learning Systems. Some of the exhibitor’s sessions are like long infomercials: this one was excellent, full of quality content and take-away ideas.

It has to be a special occasion for me to be coherent, much less posting a blog entry, at 8:00 on a Saturday morning. And special it is. I’m at the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s annual conference in Orlando. It’s much more interesting than it sounds.

I am honored to be covering the event as a member of the press for the In Practice blog. Because of the blog’s outstanding reputation, its contributors were invited to attend the ASCD conference as members of the media. So in a wonderful stroke of providence, I have the opportunity to represent the blog and cover the event as a journalist. Ahh, the benefits of living three hours from the conference location.

I’m currently in a rather dull general session (which, so far, has been only a bunch of awards and acceptance speeches). I understand the New York Times #1 bestselling author Greg Mortensen (3 Cups of Tea) is about to speak, so I’m sticking it out.

HOWEVER this morning I attended an amazing presentation about counteracting the effects of poverty in the classroom. I live-blogged the event using it Cover It Live, meaning that readers can follow along with the conference session as it happens. And because most of you have more relaxing ways to spend your weekend, each live-blog event is archived so you can peruse my notes at your leisure. It’s unedited, so you can read exactly what I was learning and thinking as the session progressed.

The preview you see below is NOT my session. Click it to view my actual notes.

The presenter was absolutely amazing, deeply grounded and focused on her vision and helping others create their own. We had an immediate connection, and I am thrilled to have secured an interview with her tomorrow morning! I’ll post info on that later.

Be sure to check back for other live events, summary recaps of conference sessions, and more as the weekend progresses. I’ll also be posting some reflections on my own blog, The Cornerstone.

These two words are not typically seen as positive. However, as Geoffrey Canada uses them, in regards to his Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), they are quite hopeful.

The book about his work, Whatever It Takes, by Paul Tough has gotten a lot of press in a range of places. (I’ll link to some at the end of the post.) Tough spent a significant amount of time with Canada and in the various HCZ programs in the process of researching the book. He is an editor for the New York Times Magazine and has written quite a bit on education and on poverty. He knows his stuff.

The book follows the HCZ from fairly early stages through its first couple of years. You can find brief or detailed summaries in many other locations. Amazon’s page has quite a few readers’ reviews as well as brief interviews with Paul Tough and Geoffrey Canada.

NPR’s Fresh Air has an interview with both men from September of last year. It’s about half an hour long and quite powerful because Canada is passionate about his topic. At one point near the end he says, about children living in poverty, “We’re trying to save them in groups of twenty, or forty, or one hundred while we are losing them by the tens of thousands.”

He wants to save them by the tens of thousands and he has created his ‘conveyer belt’ to achieve that end. It begins with Baby College, designed for expectant parents through parents of two-year-olds. At three, there is another program for parents designed around the developmental needs of their children. At four, children will enter the Harlem Gems pre-school program followed by Promise Academy for kindergarten on. Obviously not all children will be able to benefit from all of this. However, Canada’s goal is to get children from the beginning and support them all the way through college.

He is aware that not all children in Harlem will be lucky enough to have their parents attend Baby College or they might not win the lottery to get into Promise Academy, a charter school. Canada’s expectation is that enough children and families will be participating in parts of the HCZ that it will ‘contaminate’ Harlem with its set of values. He expects to see attitudes towards learning and intelligence changing as a result of his work.

One aspect that fascinated me was Canada’s take on KIPP schools.

“If Canada’s model was one of contamination, in which positive ideas and practices spread within a family and throughout a neighborhood, the KIPP model sometimes seemed by contrast to be one of quarantine, walling off the most promising kids from a sick neighborhood’s contagion. As Canada often said, he was tired of programs that helped a few kids ‘beat the odds’ and make it out of the ghetto; his goal was to change the odds, and to do it for all of Harlem’s kids. The idea of success in the middle of Harlem’s ocean of failure – that felt entirely wrong to him.”

I think his work has many implications for schools serving students living in poverty. I have heard criticisms of him and his work in Harlem, but I have to admit, I am quite impressed. He made decisions during those first few years that I did not agree with, but typically they were decisions he did not want to make. Some decisions were made to ensure that the money kept coming in. He also puts significant weight on test scores. His reasoning is that the children in Harlem must be able to compete with middle-class children on standardized tests if they are going to get into colleges. While the focus on testing frustrates me, I am able to see his point.

Geoffrey Canada’s programs cost a lot of money. They require significant time and energy from a lot of people. However, I think that is what is necessary to create real change in the academically neediest areas. Investing in those areas is the only way those children have a fighting chance, on a grand scale. The book is definitely worth reading.

Links:
PRI’s This American Life episode narrated by Paul Tough This half hour segment gives the basics of the book and includes clips of events at the HCZ and interviews of involved individuals. The quote that most hit me referred to a young mom at Baby College, “For most middle class kids, the path that Taisha struggled to find is so straight and well paved that they barely even notice it’s there.”
Geoffrey Canada on The Colbert Report
Paul Tough’s website and blog
Harlem Children’s Zone’s website
Geoffrey Canada’s autobiography, Fist Stick Knife Gun, on Amazon

In my first post in this series on poverty and education, I introduced this work by economist Charles Karelis, Economist’s View: Is Poverty Caused by Irrational Behavior? which got to an underlying truth, that when you are poor, you may not be capable of making “rational” choices, because you have too many problems to deal with. Now is the time to introduce another concept, the poor may not be like you and me, but they aren’t always like each other either. There are poor folks that are able to make rational decisions. Some probably do a better job of raising their kids than you or I. There was a lot of talk of resiliency a few years back. Some people bounce back from adversity, some poor families are not suffering as much as their neighbors, some have more resources in themselves and in their families. Not everyone who is poor is living a retched life, and wallowing in misery. Those folks can make rational choices. Their idea of rational though may be different than conservatives though. In general, I think most families in the “failing” schools I’ve taught at would rather have functioning local schools than to send their kids on a bus to another school to get a better education.

Eduwonkette has touched on this frequently when she discusses differences between charter and non-charter families that can be summarized here:

First, that students selected into a charter lottery makes them different from those who did not. It may be that their parents are more involved in their education, that they are having a particularly bad experience at their neighborhood school, or that their parents can no longer pay for private school. Whatever the reason, families selecting in, even if they are all poor and minority kids, are different by virtue of choosing a non-neighborhood school.

There are folks that don’t always get that difference like this reporter at the Washington Post doing a piece on District charter schools. A whole study was done that is talked about here, eduwonkette: Cool People You Should Know: Stefanie DeLuca, which shows Karelis’ theory in practice. Parents were unable to make the “rational” choice of moving their children out of a neighborhood school because of the complexities of their lives.

The opposite side of the choice coin and a significant issue in low-SES schools is transiency, the frequent movement of students from school to school. My school has a 30% turnover rate. Each year, leaving out kinder, about 30% of our students leave, and are replaced. Some families circle around, and come back after a hiatus. There are many reasons for these moves. They have housing instability, income instability, and any other kind of instability you can name.

This transiency is not good for a child’s education. Part of the argument for scripted programs with pacing guides like the one we use is that it was supposed to make this transiency meaningless for a child’s education. At this point many of you are probably having a ironic chuckle that somehow keeping that one little piece of normalcy, being on the same page in your basel reader, will make up for a 7 year old who has been in 3-6 different schools already. Since I’m on the site student study team, I’ll share another problem that occurs. The district is VERY careful about starting special education testing, they want a minimal number (3) of SST meetings or three 8 week periods of intervention before doing testing. Some sites like mine are on RTI, so kids get services without qualifying, but others do not. We have a fourth grader who is new to our site who cannot decode at a second grade level, or add and subtract with carrying. She has not yet had special education testing, but she has moved around a bit, so that’s not surprising. What can be done? At my present site, the principal is very helpful about giving families permits to stay at our school, and some families travel pretty far to keep coming there, but that doesn’t work for everyone.

But there is another dark side to transiency, which is movement by choice. I’ll share a story from my son’s school which is a Title One school, but not whole school free-lunch (75%+ in poverty), but does have a growing population of poor students as the downturn goes on. The principal was discussing a situation with my my husband about a first grader that had a lot of behavior problems. They had a couple of parent conferences, but the mother and the school were not of the same mind. The parent still had a VERY high affective filter up. The child was missing a lot of school too. They went on a home visit, and the parent had moved. I’ve seen that pattern in various places I’ve worked and it fits with Charles Karelis’ theory that he illustrates with this analogy

A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The … poorer one is … the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

I would add, let’s say a corollary to this. It’s like having multiple medical problems and trying to figure out what to fix. You’re not a doctor, so you pay attention to what is bothering you the most (like taking care of a stubbed toe, but ignoring high blood pressure), and not being a doctor, you may do something that’ll take care of it in the short run (take some pain reliever instead of having the foot x-rayed) but won’t resolve it in the long-term.

To these families, the frequent complaints and requests for intervention with their child from schools is like a stubbed toe, and the best way for them to deal with it is to move. Schools don’t help because they are usually happy to see the backside of those families going out the door. And there is an incentive in California for “driving” a family away (which, btw, I don’t think this principal intended, but I have seen some that do this as an unofficial policy getting into some real snake and mongoose conflicts with parents). You see, to be fair the state only counts test scores for kids you could reasonable have affected, so if kids arrive after what’s called the CBEDs date, they are not computed in your AYP or API (state measure). This was intended to prevent issues with getting a kid right before testing (which happens) that you had NOTHING to do with educating, and having their scores on your test. Since CBEDs is the first Monday in October, this is a little over generous perhaps, but you can see the incentive for schools.

What is the answer to these “choices”? The obvious answer is more housing stability. That would definitely involve moving federal policy in the opposite direction than it’s been going for a long time. Some of what I will talk about in the next and last post will address this issue. In the meantime, we need to do the things to minimize transiency. Work with those parents to lower their affective filters (what I addressed in the last post), let families stay at your school after they move, and give families a stake in your school community (my next post).

What about choices for kids? I remember a point that Mathew Needleman made in a presentation about video in the classroom, that when computers were used by low-SES vs. high-SES children, the low-SES children were largely engaged in being told what to do by the computer (test prep quizzes), while the high-SES children told the computer what to do — e.g. LOGO, ALICE, Scratch (Towards Digital Equity, Neuman). This doesn’t just happen with computers. Based on recommendations from the feds, more time is spent on Direct Instruction in Title One schools. Students are being told what to do, but are not given a lot of choices. Students need to learn how to work and learn independently, otherwise you are just preparing them to be a line worker.

Is this always easy? No, but it is possible. I’ll point to two examples, one with a what, the other with a how. The what is the subject matter you give students. I have students look at rights and especially inalienable rights. This can be a bit difficult for students to grasp, so I have them look at their own rights. Last year I did assignments on the Rights of the Child, and had students come up with some rights of their own. The year before that, I did it to help make the unit on the American Revolution more comprehensible. The how comes from Mathew Needleman who has a series of posts were about independent work time, and how to make it effective, which took on the frequently given excuse for avoiding doing it, with “My Students Just Can’t Work Independently This Year”, and what you’ll need to do when you have kids who don’t know “how to work independently”, (hint–you’re the teacher, so you teach them how).

Further useful reading on parents and school choice:

eduwonkette: Cool People You Should Know: Brian Jacob

eduwonkette: Cool People You Should Know: Cecilia Rouse

Dangerously Irrelevant: Beware outside consultants? – Part 2, Ruby Payne started a whole slew of arguments about poverty. Can education “fix” poverty? Can eduction be effective without addressing the underlying poverty of the poor? There were a lot of assumptions, especially among those with a deficit view, that I’ll sum up as “poor folks, have poor habits”. The lefties in the bunch had arguments that seemed divorced from the reality of teaching in high poverty because their answer was, you need to address poverty first, which most teachers do not feel they are in a super position to address. I just think they don’t know how, and that school leaders have not yet recognized that the importance of schools to do just that.

Here is an example of that vagueness:

“The best possible thing we can do for low-income students is to fight for their basic human rights, such as equitable access to fully-equipped schools, healthcare, safe and affordable housing, and the sorts of things their wealthier peers take for granted.”– Paul Gorski

I’ve decided to do a series on poverty. The posts will start with theory, look at an anecdote from my or another teachers experience, and last, will finish with approaches that can be used in those situations. While the “solutions” may not always work, but they are more helpful than talking about how lacking poor parents are, or saying the answer is to fight poverty. This first post will be on the overall theories of poverty, next up will be on choice, and the third will be on parents and communities…

“Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money. “– George Carlin in brain droppings

George Carlin has a point, and that’s not just my opinion by the opinion of an interesting economist, Charles Karelis that I ran across here at Economist’s View: Is Poverty Caused by Irrational Behavior?

Karelis’ view is actually the opposite of the title, in that he finds that poverty causes people not be rational actors (and make rational choices), because they have too many problems simultaneously to give attention to any one of those problems (like say, their kid’s education).

If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we’re far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before…

In recent decades, experts and policy makers all along the ideological spectrum have worried that the more aid the government gives the poor, the less likely they are to work to provide for themselves. … It was this concern that drove the Clinton administration’s welfare reform efforts. But, according to Karelis, that argument is exactly backward. Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. …

Those problems become stressors (lack of money, violence, etc.) that lead to brain damage that we see in some of these reports, Study: Poverty dramatically affects children’s brains – USATODAY.com, Poverty may impair growth of brain : News-Record.com : Greensboro, North Carolina I remember seeing a post somewhere after these news reports coming out, saying, yeah we know this is true, now what do we do? Karelis says we need to quit being afraid to fix the problems of the poor directly, but there is something else that Karelis talks about that I think can be extremely helpful and a foot in the door for teachers dealing with this.

Karelis discusses the economic theory of marginal utility with regards to this behavior. It’s similar to an idea in behavior science called the affective filter, and specifically having what’s called a HIGH affective filter.
When families are stressed out, they can’t always hear what you are offering, or accept help. You have to lower that filter to work with them. You all have been very patient while I outlined my theory, so here is where I show how this can work in a school…

My principal is on a mission (he’s that kind of guy). He wants to build relationships with some of our most “difficult” families. He spends a lot of time talking to them, and more importantly listening to them and their concerns. I facilitate our site SST meetings where students having problems are discussed with their parents. He is trying to implement this long term relationship building plan. I was resistant at first because my background working in a behavior school led me to trying to develop discipline and behavior plans that were not parent dependent. The problem with my approach is that kids who are acting out will keep pressing things until you have to involve their parent, so then your alternative becomes suspending them, which doesn’t resolve the long term problem. I think his approach will probably be better for this. In a sense I’ve been doing a lot of this stuff over time as I’ve sat on the student study team.

When parents have a kid with a behavior problem, I share my son’s horrible first grade year. This lets them feel like they are talking to someone who is a mother, and not a teacher who is judging them. With my son having ASD (autism), and the school nurse having two adopted kids on ADD meds, we have a lot of the behavior issues that come up covered. This is not easy. I will share that the hardest thing I have to do is see parents wrestling with a child who may have a language disorder (and the possibility of an autism diagnosis). Those parents always seem to end up in tears, and I feel that because I’ve been there. I never cry with them, but I try to convey to them that I’ve felt that pain. This all helps lower their affective filter. I also try to give them things they can do that are possible, and probable, like behavior plans, etc. I give tips on how to structure those so they are effective, and are not a complete pain in the butt. I tell them it can be hard, but I tell them it’s possible.

Does this work every time? No, but it works better than sitting in a circle around the parent saying, this is what you need to do. Does this address Paul Gorski’s points about addressing the underlying problems of poverty, no, but it is a precondition to doing that which I’ll cover in my last post. So readers, what do you do to lower the affective filter of parents?