The Education Gadfly Weekly

Education reform has been a specialty of Jeb Bush’s, and his track record on this issue in Florida is unbeatable. He knows the topic up, down, and sideways. But he’s never had to deal directly with federal policy before, so I picked up his “education vision” paper with interest to see how he and his team would approach it.

In my view, it deserves at least two and a half cheers—which is a cheer or two more than any other candidate has earned on this issue, mute as they’ve been on the topic. He has perfect pitch on K–12 issues and the (limited) federal role therein. Here and in the pre-K realm, the quality of what kids end up getting will depend—as it must—on how states manage their newfound authority and how well parents select among the choices before them.

On the post-secondary side, Governor Bush has made some smart and creative suggestions, such as replacing student loans with lines of credit that college-goers pay back over time with a set share of their future income, as well as eliminating defaults and collection agencies by using tax withholding to collect repayments. I applaud his wisdom in looking beyond just paying for what we have today and asking what different options tomorrow’s students need.

Why the missing half-cheer? The Bush paper is fine on Washington’s continuing obligations in education R&D. But it appears to be silent on the crucial federal role in generating reliable statistical and assessment (NAEP) data—and on the urgent need to rein in an Office for Civil Rights that’s run amuck in recent years, even while ensuring that individuals are shielded from illegal discrimination. Finally, here’s my own hobby horse: I would have loved to see him offer something forceful regarding the absolute need for students to acquire content knowledge, especially in history and civics.

So, yes, I’m cheering, but not quite as boisterously as I would like.

My wife and I both spend time working with our kids on their homework. We have also made a family tradition of “Saturday School,” a routine that my wife and I instituted a couple of years ago because our kids’ school was using a pre-Common Core math curriculum that wasn’t keeping pace with the standards. It has become a weekly exercise for the whole family’s brain. On my personal blog, I’ve shared some of the math problems that I’d written for Saturday School so that other parents could use the problems at home if they wished.

On busy nights, most parents (including me) are hard-pressed to find time to help with daily homework. That’s why my first piece of advice for parents is that they help strengthen their children’s work ethic and accountability by ensuring that homework is completed. My kids have their own dedicated space at home for schoolwork. When they get home from school, the next day’s homework has to be complete and correct before there is any screen time or other activities.

Parents can also help at home with skill building and fluency practice—things like memorizing basic math facts. When it comes to skills, practice is essential. It helps students to have someone to flash the cards or pose calculations to them. I have made flashcards that we use at home, and my kids sometimes use digital apps like Math Drills.

If you’re surprised to hear me recommending flashcards, it’s likely because the Common Core has been mischaracterized as “a move away from all of that.” However, according to the Common Core, students are expected to know their sums and products from memory and to be fluent with the standard algorithm for each of the four basic operations (the traditional “carry” method, in the case of addition). These expectations are unlikely to be met without extensive practice. Parents should never feel that they are doing something wrong by doing math at home.

Sometimes I make up math games for my kids. After Christmas, we were all bored during a long drive, so we played a doubling game. My younger daughter went first by doubling small numbers: 2, 4, 8, 16. Since she doesn’t yet know multi-digit multiplication, and she’s still working on two-digit addition, there was a limit to how high she could go. When she got as far as she could, my elder daughter took over. When she got as far as she could, my wife went next. (I went last, because I have lots of powers of two memorized.) I’m also known to make “Dad jokes” about math. Why were 10 and 11 mad after the race? Because 20 won!

Parents can and should be involved with their children’s learning at home; this includes being involved with homework when they have time. When I look over my kids’ shoulders and see an error on their homework, I ask them to do the problem again. If everything is correct, I select a problem and ask them to tell me how they got the answer. If a question is left blank, then I pull up a chair and we talk about it. A useful conversation starter is, “Tell me what you know so far about this problem.” If it’s a word problem, we might act it out; if it’s a computation, we might warm up with a simpler version of the problem.

What if a parent is unsure about what a homework assignment is asking the student to do? For example, an assignment might use terms that were defined in class and that are specific to the textbook in use. Faced with an assignment that isn’t immediately clear, I try to model persistence and productive struggle to my kids. The underlying message I want to send is, “We can figure this out if we keep at it”—not, “If you aren’t sure, just quit and wait for an authority figure to tell you what to do.”

If I still have questions about what an assignment is asking for, I ask the teacher about it. Parents might try asking the child to help write the question to the teacher. Then let the child know that you are eager to hear what the teacher has to say.

Some readers may have seen online articles suggesting that my advice to parents is not to help their children with math homework. Nothing could be further from my belief. Home can and should be a place where children strengthen their skills and learn to enjoy mathematics. I don’t always have as much time or energy to participate in my kids’ learning as I would wish, but I consider it one of many important jobs that I have as a parent. I hope some of the ideas I’ve provided here will be helpful to other parents as well. 

Jason Zimba was a lead writer of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and is a founding partner of Student Achievement Partners.

Urban school governance is a moving target, in part because it’s pretty clear that there’s no best way to handle it and in part because no change in a city’s arrangements ever works as well as its promoters hoped. This inevitably leads to a down-the-road push to change it again or change it back or…well, do something different because we’re not getting the results we need and a lot of people are unhappy.

This short issue brief from analysts at the Pew Charitable Trusts is meant to help the powers that be in their home town of Philadelphia consider the governance options ahead by examining those presently in use in fifteen urban districts.

It seems to have been prompted by the fact that Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf and former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter are pushing for an end to the fifteen-year-old state takeover of the School District of Philadelphia and a return to some form of local control. It’s not clear that new Mayor Jim Kenney has staked out a position on this issue yet, but citizens indicated in a (non-binding) referendum vote last year that they generally agree with Messrs. Wolf and Nutter.

The most interesting factoid in the paper is that Philadelphia has never had a locally elected local school board. Prior to 2001, its board was appointed by judges or the mayor. Since then, the school system has been ruled by a five-member “School Reform Commission,” with three members designated by the governor and two by the mayor.

So another change may be in the offing for the perennially troubled public school system of the City of Brotherly Love. But what form should it take?

The Pew paper doesn’t even try to settle that question. Indeed, it states bluntly (and I think accurately) that while “State takeovers of local districts have, at least in some cases, cured financial ills created through mismanagement…there is no indication that any particular system for governing urban school districts is superior to another in improving long-term academic performance.” The authors did, however, find “broad agreement on at least one conclusion: Governance systems that produce uncertainty, distrust, and ambiguous accountability can impede districts’ progress on any front.”

Along the way, we find here a useful summary of the current governance arrangements of fifteen other urban districts—plus descriptions of which districts do and don’t have taxing authority and the different forms that state involvement and interventions have taken.

Note, though, that this paper really only addresses state-district relations and the formal structures of traditional districts. It doesn’t even get close to some of today’s most interesting governance innovations, such as the “portfolio” arrangements emerging in a number of cities (including a version in Philadelphia itself), the “parallel system” of traditional and charter schools (such as we see in Washington), or the “recovery district” model found in New Orleans (with versions operative in Memphis and Detroit, too). For insight on the latter, be sure to check out Fordham’s own analysis, written by veteran reformer Nelson Smith—especially since some Pennsylvania lawmakers are eager to try out a version of this in their state, too.

SOURCE: “Governing Urban Schools in the Future: What’s facing Philadelphia and Pennsylvania,” the Pew Charitable Trusts (January 2016).

A new study from the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences provides results for fourth-grade students on the 2012 NAEP pilot computer-based writing assessment. The study asks whether fourth graders can fully demonstrate their writing ability on a computer and what factors are related to their writing performance on said computers.

A representative sample of roughly 10,400 fourth graders from 510 public and private schools composed responses to writing tasks intended to gauge their ability to persuade or change a reader’s point of view, explain the reader’s understanding of a topic, and convey a real or imaginary experience. Students were randomly assigned two writing tasks (out of thirty-six) and were given thirty minutes to complete each one. The study also references results from a 2010 paper-based pilot writing assessment and 2011 NAEP results for eighth- and twelfth-grade computer-based writing assessments—all of which came from different groups of kids. They also present results for an analysis of fifteen tasks that were common to both the paper and computer-writing pilot.

There are five key findings. First, 68 percent of fourth graders received scores in the bottom half of the six-point scoring scale on the computer-based pilot. Second, the percentage of responses in the top two levels of the scale was higher on the computer than the paper assessment. Third, high-performers scored substantively higher on the computer than on the paper assessment. Low- and middle-performers, however, did not appear to benefit from using the computer. Fourth, the number of words produced by fourth graders was smaller on the 2012 computer pilot than on the 2010 paper pilot. Low-performers produced fewer words (sixty) than middle- and high-performers (104 and 179, respectively). Finally, having access to the Internet at home is associated with text length, use of editing tools such as spellcheck and backspace keys, and certain demographics. Specifically, the longer a student’s response, the higher a score it is likely to receive. Moreover, fourth graders were more likely to say that they preferred to write on paper if they had no access to the Internet at home; those who said that also had lower average scores.

There are many more stats in this very long paper, but the bottom line is that low-performers have less exposure to writing on the computer and produce shorter texts—so perhaps they’re simply struggling with keyboarding, which takes time away from the cognitive work of developing an essay.

Analysts don’t suggest returning to paper-and-pencil tests for little kids—for the NAEP or for high-stakes state assessments. That ship has sailed. Rather, they recommend a commonsensical solution: teach all kids—but especially low-performers—how to compose at the keyboard, including the use of common editing functions such as spellcheck. It’s a good suggestion—but it’s also rather perplexing; one would think such instruction was already commonplace in elementary schools.

SOURCE: Sheida White, Young Yee Kim, Jing Chen, and Fei Liu, "Performance of fourth-grade students in the 2012 NAEP computer-based writing pilot assessment," Nation Center for Education Statistics (October 2015).