KIPP and the Teach(er) for America (or you don't know Jake)

Sometimes the most instructive passages are the most painful to read. This account from the New York Times had me wincing every third word (though I will admit to a little schadenfreude at seeing the top of her class at Stanford being outmaneuvered by Jake from Two and a Half Men).

Time permitting I'll do a post on why this was such a disastrous lesson and how a better, more experienced teacher would have done things differently. For now, though, let's approach it from the other side: what would happen if we kept Ms. Nguyen and lost Jake. Putting aside for a moment peer effects, assuming no one else steps up to take the role, how would the Jake-less class be different?

The lesson plan would still be weak, but this is a math class and most of the actual learning in a math class takes place after the lesson when the students start on their worksheets and homework. With more time and a less adversarial relationship with the class, the teacher can go from desk to desk, checking to make sure that problems are being done correctly and helping the students who are having trouble.

Now let's add in the peer effects. Jake has reset the norms of behavior for the class. He has also established that it is possible to jerk the teacher's chain and create great entertainment value with few negative consequences. In a Jake-less class this wouldn't be an issue. The inability to assert authority is only an issue when someone questions it.

In short, losing Jake should produce a substantial gain in student performance and classroom metrics.

Charter schools are designed to be Jake-free zones but none of the effects of removing Jake are likely to show up in the lottery-based analyses so favored by charter school supporters. This creates a fatally flawed set of metrics.

Worse yet, it creates a system of reforms that have, too often, based their claims of success on leaving behind the very students who needed the most help.

A day in the life of a Teach(er) for America -- posted for future comment

I've been meaning to post this for a long time (from Michael Winerip's NYT article on Teach for America):

The 774 new recruits who are training here are housed in Rice University dorms. Many are up past midnight doing lesson plans and by 6:30 a.m. are on a bus to teach summer school to students making up failed classes. It’s a tough lesson for those who’ve come to do battle with the achievement gap.

Lilianna Nguyen, a recent Stanford graduate, dressed formally in high heels, was trying to teach a sixth-grade math class about negative numbers. She’d prepared definitions to be copied down, but the projector was broken.

She’d also created a fun math game, giving every student an index card with a number. They were supposed to silently line themselves up from lowest negative to highest positive, but one boy kept disrupting the class, blurting out, twirling his pen, complaining he wanted to play a fun game, not a math game.

“Why is there talking?” Ms. Nguyen said. “There should be no talking.”

“Do I have to play?” asked the boy.

“Do you want to pass summer school?” Ms. Nguyen answered.

The boy asked if it was O.K. to push people to get them in the right order.

“This is your third warning,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Do not speak out in my class.”

Lots of interesting jumping off points here about Teach for America, classroom life and how not to handle a math lesson. Now if I can just find time to write them up.

A better-late-than-never edition of reasons not to trust Naomi Schaefer Riley

As we used to say back in the Ozarks, I've been busier than a one-legged man at in an ass-kicking contest, so I still don't have time to go through the logical and factual problems with this piece in the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed section, but I have to take a moment to point out that Riley defines 'impossible' in much the same way that Newman defines 'rarely.'

In the spring of 1989 Wendy Kopp was a senior at Princeton University who had her sights set on being a New York City school teacher. But without a graduate degree in education or a traditional teacher certification, it was nearly impossible to break into the system. So she applied for a job at Morgan Stanley instead.

"Nearly impossible' in this case means 'mildly inconvenient.' It was no big deal. Lots of people did it. I know this because at around the same time Ms. Kopp was cranking out spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3, I was teaching high school despite the fact that I had neither an education degree nor traditional teacher certification.

I'm not saying Ms. Riley is woefully ignorant in her area of supposed expertise. I'm not saying that she's a liar. I'm just saying we've got the possibilities narrowed down.