High-Stakes Testing

A new book about high-stakes testing collects essays, speeches, poems, and interviews by teachers, students, parents, and administrators: More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing (Dec. 2014). The editor, Jesse Hagopian, is a teacher at Garfield High in Seattle. Hear KUOW's interview with him here.

Also of interest is this essay by a professor of education at UCLA: Mike Rose, School Reform Fails the Test, American Scholar, Winter 2015. (If you want more of Rose, see Mike Rose's Blog.)

Educating Homeless Kids

Nearly a quarter of homeless people are children.* Over a million children were homeless at the start of the 2010-2011 school year. And being homeless can make it tough to get an education. To address some of the problems, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (1987) set up the Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program.

The ABA Commission on Homelessness and Poverty just published Educating Children Without Housing: A Primer on Legal Requirements and Implementation Strategies for Educators, Advocates and Policymakers (Gallagher Law Library Classified Stacks KF4217.H6 D84 2014). One of the coeditors is Casey Trupin, the Coordinating Attorney for the Children and Youth Project at Columbia Legal Services and also a lecturer in UW Law's Legislative Advocacy Clinic.

Here are some links if you want to learn more about these issues:

• U.S. Dep't of Education, National Center for Homeless Education
• National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth
• Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Homeless Education
• Seattle Public Schools, Health & Safety—Homelessness
• Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness

(I copied this from a post I wrote for the UW Law Library's blog. There's usually not much overlap!)

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* See p. 1 of HUD's 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress.

How People Learn

Curious about what psychologists and educators have learned about learning?

The National Academy of Sciences assembled a group* to pull together the best information about learning. It's all in a book that you can download as a PDF (free!): How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (expanded edition, 2000)

This popular trade book, originally released in hardcover in the Spring of 1999, has been newly expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This paperback edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning.

Like the original hardcover edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods--to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb.

How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system.

Topics include:

• How learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain.
• How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn.
• What the thought processes of experts tell us about how to teach.
• The amazing learning potential of infants.
• The relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace.
• Learning needs and opportunities for teachers.
• A realistic look at the role of technology in education.

* Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning with additional material from the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice, National Research Council

People of Color Missing from Kids' Books

Shockingly few children's books published in the United States are by or about people of color.

The Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin's School of Education has been counting since 1985. The Center studied 3200 children's books published in the U.S. in 2013. Only 253 were about people of color. That's, um, just under 8%. Let's combine those numbers with this data from the Census Bureau about the population in 2010.

Children's Books in 2013
	Africans or African Americans	American Indians	Asian Pacifics or Asian Pacific Americans	Latinos
Children's books about someone from this group	93	34	69	57
Percent of the total books studied (3200)	2.9%	1.5%	2.2%	1.8%
Children's books written by or illustrated by someone from this group	68	18	90	48
Percent of the total books studied (3200)	2.1%	0.6%	2.8%	1.5%

Population in 2010
	Black or African American	American Indian or Alaska Native	Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander	Two or more races or another race other than white)	Hispanic or Latino (of any race)
Percent of total population	12.6%	0.9%	5.0%	9.1%	16.3%

It's not quite as bad as the numbers look. Some of the books that are not about people of color are not about white people either: they're about dinosaurs or trucks or trains or penguins or something else. Not all children's books are about people at all. Still, the imbalance in the numbers is disturbing.

The Cooperative Children's Book Center offers Multicultural Literature lists to help people find some of the good children's books that are about people of color.

Learning English

Chapter 4 of Learning a New Land (see my last post) is "The Challenge of Learning English." It offers a lot to think about. Here are some quotations:

[I]t takes longer than most would imagine to develop the English-language skills necessary to be competitive academically. By most, we mean those who have not gone through the process of intensively learning another language—the average voter, teacher, or politician—who make naive assumptions about language learning and impose unrealistic expectations based on a lack of first-hand experience. Researchers in the field of language learning have long known that acquiring an academically competitive level of language acquisition takes a significant period—from seven to ten years of strong academic environments and frequent second-language exposure.


* * * *

A general assumption is that the younger people are when they arrive in a new country, the better they will learn the new language. The evidence on this issue is complex and debated. Older learners, who have developed literacy in their native language and have greater cognitive maturity, seem to learn the rules of language more efficiently than do younger learners. Indeed, perhaps counterintuitively, assuming an identical quality of instruction, older learners learn a second language more quickly (though younger learners catch up over time). Younger learners generally acquire better pronunciation, however, which makes them seem more fluent and competent in the second language. Further, adults must master a larger vocabulary in the second language to appear "fluent."

The information about age surprised me: I had always heard that younger the better for learning languages. But, having studied a couple of languages as an adult, I do know that I was able to apply to the task knowledge and study skills that I just didn't have the first time I studied a language (7th grade). I'm always totally impressed by anyone who develops fluency in a second language, because I know how weak I am in the foreign languages I've studied. Sure, I can say "What time is it?" or "Where is the library?"—but I know I am far from being able to work or go to college in any language but English.

I think the point about younger language learners having good accents and yet lacking fluency in academic English is really important.

I think about the students I've known in my eight years as a volunteer tutor, and I wonder how many seemed to have mastered English but had the accent and day-to-day vocabulary without having a good understanding of academic English. The student who functions every day in English—talking to friends, playing basketball, going to the store, watching TV, texting, etc.—doesn't know that he or she doesn't know enough English to do well in high school and college. It seems to me that some of the following school issues might have to do with English rather than the subject the students are complaining about:

• I'm not good at Science. (Is the student's ability to read and understand complex material getting in the way?)
• I don't know what the teacher expects us to do for this assignment. (Was the student paying attention in class but not able to understand the complicated instructions about a social studies project?)
• Everything we have to read in English class is boring. (Does the student lack the vocabulary and sophistication to make reading Dickens or Steinbeck anything but a chore?)
• I don't know how to answer the questions in my history book. (Does the student lack the language skill to read the material, integrate it with what the student has already learned, think about relationships, and reason about the questions?)
• I hate story problems! (Does the student get confused by the English that's describing quantitative, special, or causal relationships?)

What can we do to help?

I'm not talking about totally reforming the way English-language learners are taught in schools. That would be nice, but it's a big project. Let's think about how our tutoring program can help. I am not trained in language acquisition, so these are just my thoughts.

• I think it's important for the staff and volunteers to engage the students in conversations. Give them practice talking and practice listening.
• We can encourage them to read, read, read—including a wide variety of material that will give them practice with academic English (not just fiction, but also news stories, science, business, history, and more).
• We can also encourage them to take in academic English aurally—watch Ted talks, watch National Science Foundation videos, listen to NPR, listen to podcasts about science or current events, and so on.
• And we can help them work through all of those homework challenges that might have a language component.

Large-Scale Study of Immigrant Children

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, allegedly committed by two young immigrants, two researchers wrote an op ed piece about the challenges immigrant children face: Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco & Carola Suárez-Orozco, Immigrant Kids, Adrift, N.Y. Times, April 22, 2013.

Whatever motivated the Tsarnaev brothers surely is not the fault of the schools and may never be known. Among some of the distinctive features of their case are family estrangement, multiple relocations across countries and, possibly, religious radicalization. But the broad lesson—assimilating immigrant students into the fabric of society through academic, psychological and other supports—should inform educators and policy makers in the decades ahead, when immigrants and their children will account for most of the nation’s population growth.

The op ed's byline cited their book: Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco & Irina Todorova, Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society (Harvard U. Press, 2008, paperback 2010). The Kindle edition is just $9.99 so I started right in, and I've been fascinated. Here's the publisher's page for more information. And here's the Amazon page, in case you're also an Amazon shopper. (Seattle Public Library has two copies, but they're both checked out.)

The Suárez-Orozcos are co-directors of the Institute for Immigrant, Children, Youth , and Families at UCLA. In the book's introduction, the authors characterize Carola as "a cultural psychologist with strong developmental interests," Marcelo as "a psychological anthropologist with a long history of involvement in the field of immigration and refugee studies, and Irina as "a cultural health psychologist." So you can imagine that their research is interdisciplinary.

The book presents the results of a five-year study of about 400 recently arrived immigrant children. They only included children who had spent at least two-thirds of their lives in their original country, not the ones who immigrated as babies.

The children were in seven school districts in the Boston area and the San Francisco Bay area. There were about 80 children from each of the following countries or regions:

• Haiti
• Dominican Republic
• China
• Mexico
• Central American countries (e.g., El Salvador, Guatemala)

Bilingual research assistants from the relevant communities interviewed the children and families, made observations in the schools, talked to teachers, and so on.  They also looked at the children's environments: the quality of the schools, the poverty rate, street crime, and so on. It's really an impressive project. A fuller description is here: Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone who works with immigrant students (and, for that matter, for people who care about the quality of American society).

If you don't have a taste for social science research, the first chapters, where the authors describe their methodology and report statistical results, might seem dry (even though they do illustrate the statistical generalizations with examples of individual children). You might like to jump to chapters 5-8, which tell the stories of 21 students. They are grouped according to their academic trajectories.

Of course, each immigrant life is unique and irreducible. Nonetheless, each portrait demonstrates the many ways that immigrant youth are propelled to become high achievers or conversely to become disengaged low achievers.

I found the first chapter of these portraits very disheartening, because these were the children who disengaged from school, failed, or dropped out. I looked at the table of contents and was relieved to see that the chapters ahead would have more hopeful stories. The chapters are:

5. Portraits of Declining Achievers
6. Portraits of Low Achievers
7. Portraits of Improvers
8. Portraits of High Achievers

There are many factors that make the difference between the sad stories and the hopeful ones. Maybe the factors won't surprise anyone: the high achievers "tended to be enrolled in supportive schools, to have caring teachers, and to develop informal mentorships with coaches, counselors or ministers." (quotation from the op ed piece)

This reinforces my commitment to the Youth Tutoring Program. Whatever else is going on for these students, we know each child has the attention and concern of the center supervisor and two tutors.

Children's Choice Book Awards

Children's Book Week is coming, May 13-19, 2013. Kids can vote on the Children's Choice Book Awards, in categories for K-2, 3-4, 5-6, and Teens. There's also a place for teachers, parents, and librarians to vote. Maybe you haven't had a chance to read the new books published in 2012. You might like go look at the lists of winner from 2008-12 (and nominees from 2011-12) to find other good books to check out.