I just stumbled across this lovely blog post about last month's Lexicon evening in Brookline. Larry Davidson teaches math at Weston High School, where he taught two of my kids. He's an enthusiast of linguistics, and he also has a sister who teaches at both the college and elementary school level. It was Ellen Davidson who introduced a club of fourth grade readers to Lost in Lexicon, and it was the boys, now my favorite fourth graders, who invited me to bring Lexicon to their school.
Larry, as he explains in his post, staffed the village of Irrationality, helping kids use measurement to approximate pi.
Because of a promise made by the Mistress of Metaphor, I owe each of those boys a manuscript copy of The Ice Castle, which is still in draft form. I'll send the copies out tomorrow, I promise!
Showing posts with label PISA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PISA. Show all posts
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Raising the prestige of the teaching profession: can we do it?
At the end of last week I had the privilege of attending (as an observer) an international summit on the teaching profession in New York City. The summit, hosted by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, invited delegations of 15 countries that are either high performers or fast improvers on the international PISA exam. PISA tests 15-year-olds on broad measures of literacy in reading, science, and mathematics. US performance on PISA, as on other international exams, is mediocre.
The purpose of the summit was to discuss strategies for building a high quality teaching force. All the countries agreed that the quality of teachers has the biggest in-school impact on student learning. Virtually all of them agreed that one important way to build quality in the teaching force is to build the prestige of the teaching profession.
Building the esteem in which teachers are held creates a virtuous circle. Top-performing countries such as Finland and Singapore draw their teaching candidates from the top third of their high school classes. In Finland, there are ten applicants for every available space in national teaching colleges. Both countries work to make sure that teaching salaries are competitive with salaries of other college graduates. In Singapore, teachers are paid a competitive stipend while in training, along with regular bonuses and performance bonuses while they teach. In both countries, teachers are given a lot of autonomy. They mentor and evaluate one another to maintain high quality within their schools.
So the cycle becomes: stipends while in school and competitive salaries afterward ---> highly selective entry criteria ---> highly qualified, ambitious teachers ---> training and opportunities for advancement ---> teaching becomes a sought-after and respected profession, leading to stipends, high salaries, good working conditions, rigorous peer standards, and top applicants.
Singapore and Finland are small countries with centralized decision making and only one (Singapore) or eight (Finland) teacher training institutions, so common decisions about standards and compensation are possible. In the US we have hundreds of teacher training institutions along with alternate pathways; teacher training is often regarded as a low-cost "profit center" for universities, which motivates them to keep entrance requirements low and enrollments high. We train more elementary teachers and gym teachers than we need while we have systemic shortages of qualified math, science, and foreign language teachers.
The public knows that many US teachers come from the lower half of the class. Because the public lacks faith in these teachers' knowledge and professional skills, we often ask them to adhere to a lock-step curriculum. We spend lots of time trying to figure out how to weed out bad teachers, we imagine that they don't work hard, and we resent their benefits. Who would want to become a teacher?
How can we change this picture, especially in a time of constrained funding? One thing I think experience shows is that raising the bar to entry makes a course of action more attractive to high performers. Being chosen for Teach for America, which accepts only about ten percent of applicants, has become a mark of prestige for high-achieving college graduates. The same applies to the rigorous Boston Teacher Residency, a year-long, stipend-paying master's degree program in teaching that accepts only 13% of applicants.
After the conference, my family took the subway to Brooklyn to see a play. We got talking with a young African-American woman who sat near us. It turned out she was a math major who worked in industry doing statistical analysis for a couple of years before deciding to go into teaching. She was recruited by Math for America, a non-profit that is working to build a corps of excellent math teachers in cities around the country. This young woman is receiving a full scholarship along with a stipend during her training year. Then she'll receive mentoring, professional development, and a supplemental stipend during her first four years of teaching in New York City.
This young woman, who is going to be a middle school math teacher, was bright, bubbly, and enthusiastic. She bonded quickly with my seventh grade son. He would love to have her as a teacher. Coming out of Math for America she should have no trouble being hired, and she has a good chance of becoming a leader in her profession. I already hold her in esteem.
I used to think programs like Math for America were an expensive, piecemeal approach to improving teaching and learning in the US. Now I'm beginning to think that these programs may be the pilot lights showing what we can accomplish if we focus on recruiting, supporting, and rewarding teachers of the highest quality.
[For more on this topic, check here.]
The purpose of the summit was to discuss strategies for building a high quality teaching force. All the countries agreed that the quality of teachers has the biggest in-school impact on student learning. Virtually all of them agreed that one important way to build quality in the teaching force is to build the prestige of the teaching profession.
Building the esteem in which teachers are held creates a virtuous circle. Top-performing countries such as Finland and Singapore draw their teaching candidates from the top third of their high school classes. In Finland, there are ten applicants for every available space in national teaching colleges. Both countries work to make sure that teaching salaries are competitive with salaries of other college graduates. In Singapore, teachers are paid a competitive stipend while in training, along with regular bonuses and performance bonuses while they teach. In both countries, teachers are given a lot of autonomy. They mentor and evaluate one another to maintain high quality within their schools.
So the cycle becomes: stipends while in school and competitive salaries afterward ---> highly selective entry criteria ---> highly qualified, ambitious teachers ---> training and opportunities for advancement ---> teaching becomes a sought-after and respected profession, leading to stipends, high salaries, good working conditions, rigorous peer standards, and top applicants.
Singapore and Finland are small countries with centralized decision making and only one (Singapore) or eight (Finland) teacher training institutions, so common decisions about standards and compensation are possible. In the US we have hundreds of teacher training institutions along with alternate pathways; teacher training is often regarded as a low-cost "profit center" for universities, which motivates them to keep entrance requirements low and enrollments high. We train more elementary teachers and gym teachers than we need while we have systemic shortages of qualified math, science, and foreign language teachers.
The public knows that many US teachers come from the lower half of the class. Because the public lacks faith in these teachers' knowledge and professional skills, we often ask them to adhere to a lock-step curriculum. We spend lots of time trying to figure out how to weed out bad teachers, we imagine that they don't work hard, and we resent their benefits. Who would want to become a teacher?
How can we change this picture, especially in a time of constrained funding? One thing I think experience shows is that raising the bar to entry makes a course of action more attractive to high performers. Being chosen for Teach for America, which accepts only about ten percent of applicants, has become a mark of prestige for high-achieving college graduates. The same applies to the rigorous Boston Teacher Residency, a year-long, stipend-paying master's degree program in teaching that accepts only 13% of applicants.
After the conference, my family took the subway to Brooklyn to see a play. We got talking with a young African-American woman who sat near us. It turned out she was a math major who worked in industry doing statistical analysis for a couple of years before deciding to go into teaching. She was recruited by Math for America, a non-profit that is working to build a corps of excellent math teachers in cities around the country. This young woman is receiving a full scholarship along with a stipend during her training year. Then she'll receive mentoring, professional development, and a supplemental stipend during her first four years of teaching in New York City.
This young woman, who is going to be a middle school math teacher, was bright, bubbly, and enthusiastic. She bonded quickly with my seventh grade son. He would love to have her as a teacher. Coming out of Math for America she should have no trouble being hired, and she has a good chance of becoming a leader in her profession. I already hold her in esteem.
I used to think programs like Math for America were an expensive, piecemeal approach to improving teaching and learning in the US. Now I'm beginning to think that these programs may be the pilot lights showing what we can accomplish if we focus on recruiting, supporting, and rewarding teachers of the highest quality.
[For more on this topic, check here.]
Friday, March 11, 2011
Gender and reading scores
Worldwide, boys lag behind girls in reading. The 2009 PISA reading exams for 15-year-olds show boys' performance trailing girls' in all 65 participating countries. The average score difference was 39 points, reported as equivalent to about one year of schooling.
How does the US do in this regard? Interestingly, though US students scored in general at the top of the middle rank (about 17th of 65 overall), we had one of the lower girl-boy differences, ranking 5th with a score difference of 25 points.
The 2010 report on PISA offers some intriguing hints about the differences in how boys and girls read. For example, almost 30% of test items consisted of non-continuous text such as maps, tables, graphs, and diagrams. On these items, girls still scored better than boys, but the score difference fell by about six points. That is, boys scored relatively better on text that asked them to examine a diagram or table and extract information than they did on reading and interpreting chunks of continuous literary or informational text. Maybe boys rely more on visual or spatial clues, or maybe they have shorter attention spans.
To dig a little deeper into trends in boy-girl reading gaps, I looked at NAEP scores for 1998, 2000, and 2009. Anyone can do the same with NAEP's very useful Data Explorer tool. NAEP, commonly called "the Nation's Report Card," tests samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in reading, mathematics, science, and sometimes other subjects. Looking at reading results over the past ten years, three trends are evident.
1. Girls score higher than boys on reading at every grade level tested, and the score differences increase as students move up in grades. For example, here's how much better girls scored than boys at the different grades in 2009.
4th grade 6 points
8th grade 10 points
12th grade 12 points
What do these differences mean? Although converting score differences to instructional time is somewhat shaky statistically, NAEP is a continuous scale with an average score difference between grades 4 and 8 of 43 points and between grade 8 and 12 of 24 points. Therefore, we could estimate that the 4th grade gap is equivalent to about 5 months of school time and the 8th and 12th grade gaps are equivalent to between 13 months and 2 years.
2. Girl-boy reading score differences have narrowed over the past decade. The boy-girl gap has fallen by 20% to 45% since 1998.
3. The reason for the gap decrease, though, is mixed. At 4th grade, everybody's scores have gone up, while boys have gained more - cause for celebrations. At 8th grade, boys improved while girls' performance remained essentially flat. And at grade 12, girls' scores fell while boys' scores hardly budged. This is part of an overall trend in reading: we're making progress in the younger grades, but that progress hasn't translated into more proficient reading at the higher grades.
There's a lot to think about in delving into these data, and I hope to keep delving in future posts, so tune in again tomorrow. I promise fewer statistics and more ideas about what might help.
How does the US do in this regard? Interestingly, though US students scored in general at the top of the middle rank (about 17th of 65 overall), we had one of the lower girl-boy differences, ranking 5th with a score difference of 25 points.
The 2010 report on PISA offers some intriguing hints about the differences in how boys and girls read. For example, almost 30% of test items consisted of non-continuous text such as maps, tables, graphs, and diagrams. On these items, girls still scored better than boys, but the score difference fell by about six points. That is, boys scored relatively better on text that asked them to examine a diagram or table and extract information than they did on reading and interpreting chunks of continuous literary or informational text. Maybe boys rely more on visual or spatial clues, or maybe they have shorter attention spans.
To dig a little deeper into trends in boy-girl reading gaps, I looked at NAEP scores for 1998, 2000, and 2009. Anyone can do the same with NAEP's very useful Data Explorer tool. NAEP, commonly called "the Nation's Report Card," tests samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in reading, mathematics, science, and sometimes other subjects. Looking at reading results over the past ten years, three trends are evident.
1. Girls score higher than boys on reading at every grade level tested, and the score differences increase as students move up in grades. For example, here's how much better girls scored than boys at the different grades in 2009.
4th grade 6 points
8th grade 10 points
12th grade 12 points
What do these differences mean? Although converting score differences to instructional time is somewhat shaky statistically, NAEP is a continuous scale with an average score difference between grades 4 and 8 of 43 points and between grade 8 and 12 of 24 points. Therefore, we could estimate that the 4th grade gap is equivalent to about 5 months of school time and the 8th and 12th grade gaps are equivalent to between 13 months and 2 years.
2. Girl-boy reading score differences have narrowed over the past decade. The boy-girl gap has fallen by 20% to 45% since 1998.
3. The reason for the gap decrease, though, is mixed. At 4th grade, everybody's scores have gone up, while boys have gained more - cause for celebrations. At 8th grade, boys improved while girls' performance remained essentially flat. And at grade 12, girls' scores fell while boys' scores hardly budged. This is part of an overall trend in reading: we're making progress in the younger grades, but that progress hasn't translated into more proficient reading at the higher grades.
There's a lot to think about in delving into these data, and I hope to keep delving in future posts, so tune in again tomorrow. I promise fewer statistics and more ideas about what might help.
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