Crack learning, the achievement gap and Sisyphean struggle.

Pruned Blog’s  "The Crack Garden"  post captured my attention right from the start –

 “The interventions into the site of The Crack Garden were primarily actions of removal rather than the addition of new layers and material. By eliminating portions of the existing concrete and exposing the soil beneath, potential is released, and new opportunities for the garden arise.”

“The design is conceived as an intervention that functions as a lens, altering perception of a place rather than completely remaking it.”

This made me think of “crack learning” and how we might understand learning based on actions of removal rather than by constantly adding new layers and materials to our schools, classrooms and students.

I wanted to ask ..

What would happen to learning if we removed "the din"?

“We approach our technologies through a battery of advertising and media narratives; it is hard to think above the din.”  Turkle, Sherry. (Ed.). The inner history of devices. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. p4

What would happen to learning if we removed the expectation that "progress" requires unrelenting change and innovation  

One of the most critical problems our schools face is ... “not resistance to innovation, but the fragmentation, overload, and incoherence resulting from the uncritical and uncoordinated acceptance of too many different innovations” Fullan & Steigelbauer 1991 p197

What would happen to learning if we removed "the rush", if we slowed down, learned how to see and took time to realise that all things connect?

Crack gardens/learning made me think of a return to; slow pedagogy, to observation (see think wonder), to Geetha Narayanan like learning spaces squeezed into cracks between city buildings, to looking carefully at exploring and knowledge building around the local (existing) rather than all that costly rip snorting through the screen activity we favour to get to the global, to looking at ways to discover and develop all learning identities of the child rather simply addressing learning identities for the 9am to 3pm child.     

And I wondered if the coherence provided by the stripped back nature of "crack learning" would provide new opportunities for understanding individual potential.    

Whenever I read the latest policy initiative aimed at reducing disparity in New Zealand schools I have high apple pie in the sky hopes ... I imagine the MoE policy makers in Wellington as Pratchett’s “great minds”

These are great minds he told himself.  These are men who are trying to work out how the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion but by inserting their brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart.  p199 in Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

and I hope that this time round we will be brokering something that makes a real difference to New Zealand’s alarmingly disparate achievement outcomes.   

That is undoubtedly why it was a little discomforting to read Gladwell's "Outliers" over the weekend.  Now Malcolm Gladwell has been accused of cherry picking his references in Outliers but I could not help but be affected by his description of Karl Alexander’s five year longitudinal analysis tracking the city of Baltimore’s profile of results for 650 first graders on the Californian Achievement Test math and reading skill exams. (pages 255 to 259)

Reading Gladwell made me fret that all our MoE sanctioned interventions to reduce our achievement gap are perhaps a Sisyphean struggle – made me think that perhaps we are doomed to always struggle because in targeting schools we are targeting the wrong intervention.

As Gladwell frames it, when we have disparate achievement outcomes from kids with different backgrounds we are tempted to attribute causality to either

1.  Kids from background X do not have the same inherent ability to learn as kids from background Y.

2.  Our schools are failing kids from background X.

This is certainly what has happened in the conversations about disparity in New Zealand – option 1 – deficit thinking - is rightly rejected leaving us with option 2 – our schools are failing [insert gender, socio economic status, ethnicity] students. Our latest solutions to not failing [insert gender, socio economic status, ethnicity] students is focussing on improving teacher student relationships, engagement, and feedback.

Gladwell makes me ask ... when we focus on reducing disparity in learning outcomes by changing the stuff happening in schools have we misidentified the contribution school makes?   

If for the purposes of this post I accept that The Californian Achievement Test measures something valuable in terms of learning outcome [and I know this may be unwarranted]  ... then using Alexander’s data below I can suggest that the achievement gap between students from “rich” and “poor” homes is exacerbated by attending school.

Californian Achievement Test Data from start of school year (June)

Socioeconomic Class	1st Grade	2nd Grade	3rd Grade	4th grade	5th Grade
Low	329	375	397	433	461
Middle	348	388	425	467	497
High	361	418	460	506	534
Achievement gap between low and high	32 points	43 points	63 points	73 points	73 points

 

Gladwell next reveals additional results from the same CAT testing carried out at the end of the school year (September) – This testing that excludes the summer holidays – and allows quite different conclusions to be drawn about the same group of students.

Socioeconomic Class	After 1st Grade	After 2nd Grade	After 3rd Grade	After 4th grade	After 5th Grade	Total - Cumulative classroom learning
Low	55	46	30	33	25	189
Middle	69	33	34	41	27	214
High	60	39	34	28	23	184

     

It seems that by testing at the end of the school year - the data showing “within school” learning gains between children from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds are not as “gappy” as we first imagined.

Which causes us to ask is “gappiness” due to what is happening in classrooms or is “gappiness” due to  what is happening outside of classrooms?

Is Glawell right?

Should our focus on reducing disparity look at the effect on learning of time spent outside of school rather than what happens within school?

To ask ...Does the break in schooling over the summer holidays differentially affect learning outcomes for children from lower, middle and high socioeconomic homes?

Look at Gladwell's data comparing student reading skill test scores before and after the summer break.

Class	After 1st	After 2nd	After 3rd	After 4th	Total
Low	-3.67	-1.70	2.74	2.89	0.26
Middle	-3.11	4.18	3.68	2.34	7.09
High	15.38	9.22	14.51	13.38	52.49

 

Now Gladwell, using Alexander’s data suggests that ..

 “When it comes to reading skills poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session.  The reading skills of rich kids by contrast, go up a whopping 52.49 points.  Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn   when they are not in school.”    p258

Leading me to wonder - Do we simply need to increase the number of days students attend school to reduce disparity?

Trying to validate Gladwell’s claims led me straight to Hattie’s Visible Learning meta-analyses where I checked out the number crunching on Summer Vacations (d=-0.09) p80 and 81.  

Hattie’s metanalyses on summer vacations confirmed that students “lost some achievement gains over the summer” and that “middleclass students appeared to gain on grade level equivalent reading tests over summer compared to lower class students".  And he also notes that the “negative effect of summer did increase with grade level.”  

However, Hattie doesn’t call this like Gladwell does - he suggests instead that the magnitude of these effects when compared to other achievement influences “are minor indeed”

Hattie concludes

“It may be that if teachers were more attuned to the proficiencies that students bring into their classrooms, then the first month of the school year could be used to recapture the losses from the school break reasonably quickly.”

I hope Hattie is right because, whether it is happening within schools or outside of school over the summer break, we have an awful lot riding on the inequality we are building into New Zealand society.