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.

 

Comments

[Greg Carroll]

Interesting to ponder on the 'out of school' gains children are making with respect to the underlying assumptions of the National Standards debate we are currently just embarking on. The things like - end-point assessment assessment being a key indicator of school quality (really!!??); there being no disparity between entry levels of schools (see your post above on that one!); ignoring completely the 'trajectory of learning'; the list goes on.
I have already been 'corrected', through messages via other people, for things I have written in my blog over the last couple of days on this stuff so the MoE are obviously very sensitive about the whole issue! And also not prepared to have a 'discoverable' trail as they try to massage the message on National Standards?
cheers
Greg

[Artichoke]

Most of us would argue that it is important to respect the right of others to hold an opinion Greg. However, and I forget who said it, the right to be heard does not (and probably should not) necessarily include the right to be taken seriously.

Having an opinion and sharing it online holds both promise and peril for the day job when in the day job we expect to be taken seriously. Something I always take care to be upfront about when teachers ask me about starting their own edu_blog.

Can you ever opine as an individual when people know your institutional affiliations and authority?

When you and Suzie Vesper came out so strongly against the introduction of national standards online ... aka “Having seen them in action in the UK, I think they can be a very destructive force in education.” Susie Vesper ... your opinions were given credibility and taken seriously because of your connection both past and present as National Facilitators with CORE Education an organisation that relies upon a close working relationship with the Ministry of Education.

The plus to being affiliated to a position of authority in education is that people read you.

For example, there are many educational bloggers to choose from in New Zealand but when push comes to shove I choose to read your opinions rather than those of other more institutionally anonymous bloggers because of your connection to CORE (ditto for Suzie).

The minus occurs when you hold views not espoused or acted upon by the institutions you both work for - especially when your opinions run counter to those that employ you in the positions that give you institutional authority.

It is kind of like trying to “have your cake and eat it too” blogging – Given that your readership is based to degree upon your institutional authority your readers may not understand the blurring of the two positions you are trying to hold in the one blog space – which means there are bound to be tears before teatime.

I think the summer vacation stuff is interesting but not resolved ..

Because of the summer reading clinics run by Tom Nicholson I am enjoying re-reading his opinion piece Lagging in the reading stakes in the Dominion Post, 8 February, 2008 pdf

Nicholson notes that for reading this ever widening gap thing in New Zealand is a comparatively recent phenomena

• In 1970 New Zealand came 1st in a Reading survey of 15 countries. The gap between the best and worst readers was no different from other similar countries. In 1990 our place had slipped to 4th and suddenly we had one of the larger gaps between the best and worst readers.

• That meant we had a situation where we had this big tail of under-achievers. In 2001 we had slipped to 13th and the gap was still there. In 2007 we were 24th and the “rich and poor” gap is still around. This is precisely what was predicted by Massey University researchers several years ago.

He asks

• “How can a centralised education system (a good thing), with many thousands of really wonderful teachers and schools, a system that gives out free reading materials to all schools, and that puts so much money into education, still keep slipping behind?”

And although he works hard to offer summer reading clinics he doesn’t suggest the summer vacation as the answer, suggesting instead that

• A number of researchers have been arguing for some time that the cause of the increasing reading gap is that we do not offer differentiated teaching, that we only offer a whole language approach and we do not offer phonics. Whole language privileges the middle class and discriminates against children who start school less well prepared.

Hattie’s overall comments, on the reading met-analyses supports phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension note that “the least effective methods whole language, sentence combining, and assuming that students will learn vocabulary incidentally when reading.”

And it is the 10X bit that electrifies me

• “Another way of summarising the typical debate is that a teacher using the whole language method needs to be at least ten times more effective in his or her teaching than a teacher using the phonics method to attain the same outcomes in developing reading vocabulary skills and comprehension. A teacher using a combination of vocabulary , phonics, and comprehension methods will be much more effective that either a phonics or whole language teachers.” P140

Now if national standards helped us identify the schools and the teachers who were making huge differences in their students reading comprehension achievements and we could identify the approaches they were using and share these with schools where students struggled to meet the national standards – wouldn’t that be something?

[Dave Winter]

Little bit hard to jump in where your writing is so articulate and well researched.Want to be part of it because I valued the read. I believe that organisations are about shared values, learning, culture and community.Organisational views may differ from the individuals within them (a good thing). It is hard to work out exactly what should or shouldn't be said in personal blogs when you work for an institution espousing its own positions or working for policy makers. I believe that education is at the core of societal ambition and organisation and therefore both a personal and organisation viewpoint can be made without ethical compromise. I do agree that there may be "tears before bedtime".
The use of data in your thinking it is helpful to bring clarity and impartiality. I also like the conclusion of looking at the approaches taken to effect comprehension achievements. I remember from John Hattie's video conference/debate with Rob Oram his rejection of the idea of addressing the long tail and aiming to increase the performance of each student. Do you think this might mean diffentiated programmes for reading improvement? The whole language approach may need adjustment for different groups. If we have the information about the influence of types of reading programme let's act on them. It is of concern that students would have there attainment compromised by lack of phonic based activity. Perhaps my own privelege leaves me emotionally in favour of whole language. With an eleven year reading age need for independant internet research let's get their the best way we know how. Thank you for the learning I have got from your blog and comments. Dave (somewhat institutional blogger)

[Artichoke]

Thanks for the comments about Artichoke Dave,

I agree, it would be good to believe that we have (or should have) the freedom to express/ broadcast our personal viewpoints online. And if I had to take sides I would argue for the “we should have the freedom” brigade.

However, if you stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board, shouting !!!! slogans through a megaphone, handing out leaflets on topics that fall within the scope of the day job, you would have to be fairly naive to think that your employer/s would not have an opinion about it.

Is a little like when student voice sites encourage students to share their opinions about the effectiveness of their learning experiences in “Rate my teacher” or “Rate my school”.

Whilst philosophically we may defend and even applaud the freedom of students to participate, collaborate and construct knowledge online – (aka “I believe that organisations are about shared values, learning, culture and community. Organisational views may differ from the individuals within them (a good thing).”) - when it comes to students collaborating to critique our teaching – (students acting as individuals who express views online that differ from those of the organisation) - our enthusiasm is a little more muted.

I don’t see any schools who link to these sites off their school websites along with their ERO reports. Here is what the Educational Review Office thinks about us ... and here is what our digital natives think about us ....

And I am sure that like me you know edu_bloggers who have suffered “push back” from the day job in response to viewpoints they have expressed in online blogs.

It just seems plausible to accept that no-one, not even the boss, gets to blog with impunity.

So yes no surprises if blogging from the heart means we experience “tears before bedtime.”

As to the reading stuff Dave – I don’t know – is why I wrote the post – each post is my way of talking about and collecting evidence about things I do not understand. So I am searching for reading research and I am listening to teachers in the schools I visit talk about reading/ literacy ...

From what I am hearing from teachers there may well be something in Nicholson’s critique

I quite like Tom Nicholson’s work – for instance I like the way he takes what he believes in into the lived worlds of the kids who struggle with literacy

and I like how his PISA PIRLS comparison he helped me understand one reason why the recently released PISA and TIMMS Science results can be so different –

• Who do we believe – PISA or PIRLS?
  What is going on? In the last two weeks we have celebrated the success of New Zealand’s 15-year-olds in an international survey of Reading, Numeracy, and Science called PISA.

  In Reading we were 4th equal, out of 57 countries which is a fantastic result. But then a week after the PISA results were published the Ministry released results of another international study called PIRLS which found that New Zealand’s 10-year-olds came 24th out of 45 participants which is a very average result.

  The first government press release with the good news from PISA attracted most of the media attention. My question is: why are the results so different? What is the point of doing these surveys if they come up with such hugely variable results? What is more disturbing to me is that the media did not question the discrepancies at all.

  The big question we have to ask is: why are our 15-year-olds so good and our 10-year-olds so average? A possible answer is the effect of exclusions in that many of the problem children in our schools have left school or been stood down or suspended by the time they are 15 years old. School Leaver statistics show that 14 percent of the lowest achievers have left school by the time they are 15. That’s a lot of children. The number could be higher than this because the statistics do not include those 15-year-olds who make up a sizeable proportion of the 20,000 or so pupils who are regularly stood down or suspended each year. So probably the PISA survey over-estimated the reading abilities of the 15-year-old children we have at school and made things look better than they are. The discrepancy is really puzzling.

  I have more faith in the PIRLS results because they are focused on 10-year-olds who can’t leave school and because PIRLS studies have been taking place for over 37 years whereas PISA is only the last 7 years." Tom Nicholson Dominion Post, 8 February, 2008

[Artichoke]

I am wondering if I can better understand the debate over student achievement & national standards by breaking it down into different ontologies – realists, empiricists, positivists & post-modernists.

For example

• The Realists respect factual information and argue that the data on student achievement exists and we just need to collect it
  
• The Empiricists respect factual information when it is linked to observation – and argue that we can only understand the data on student achievement in the context of teacher observations of students.
  
• The Positivists respect observation over factual information and argue that teacher observations about student achievement are more important than the data.
  
• The Post-Modernists respect only observation and argue that student achievement data is without meaning and we should instead focus on claims made from teacher observation alone.

[Artichoke]

Ahh I needed a nudge from cj to realise that in focussing on categories and classifying I am privileging the nodes

Ulises Ali Mejias’s post on The Tyranny of Nodes

My thesis is that the network undermines productive forms of sociality by over-privileging the node. It might be difficult to see this because nodes are not anti-social (they thrive by forming links to other nodes), nor are they anti-local (they link to nodes in their immediate surrounding just as easily as they link to other nodes). But what I am trying to say is that to the extent that the network is composed of nodes and connections between nodes, it discriminates against the space between the nodes, it turns this space into a black box, a blind spot. In other words, networks promote nodocentrism. In this reconfiguration of distance, new 'nears' become available, but the 'far' becomes the space between nodes. To ignore this dark matter is to ignore the very stuff on which the network is suspended, much like the fish ignoring the water around it. The Tyranny of Nodes: Towards a critique of social network theories http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2006/10/the_tyranny_of_.html

I need to look at the alliances between the nodes.

[Dorothy]

The "Summer drop-off" as we call it is a very real phenomenom for those of us who work with the students who not only appear to learn nothing when school is not in session, but also go backwards. In the EHSAS project I am working with (well for 6 more months anyway) I have an anecdote from a very talented junior school HOD. Last year she worked with a group of Year 1 students on our literacy project; a group she chose because they didn't look like potential Rhodes Scholars. Over the course of 2008 they turned into great little writers, putting pencil to paper and churning out stories to entertain their fans online. In 2009 this group was disbanded and spread through 3 classes, but the same teacher continued to work with them for the EHSAS literacy project. She was most alarmed to get feedback from the new class teacher that Child A shouldn't be in the project in 2009 because said child was incapable of formulating one written sentence and had to dictate for the teacher to write. So over the 6 weeks of the Summer holidays the child had regressed from a confident little writer to someone who was dictating a single sentence to the new teacher (who BTW is a competent experienced teacher).
I know that many of our schools are not failing the students from lower socio-economic homes, and I fear you have confirmed what I have been thinking for several years now.... we should keep our schools going through Summer for these kids..... if only I was prepared to sacrifice my precious weeks in a tent at the beach!

[Artichoke]

Hi Dorothy,
Thanks for affirming (albeit thro anecdote) that Alexander’s research findings on the differential effects of the summer vacation (as cited in Gladwell) are not unknown in New Zealand.

I know that "gross demographics" – those things that are easy to characterise – are an unbelievable trap. For example things like class and locale, age, race, sex, sexuality, physical and mental characteristics, culture, languages, gender, family, affinity, personality types are easily called BUT within any one demographic characteristic you have life world attributes - life experience/ interests and orientations/ values/ dispositions sensibility/ communication interpersonal styles etc etc all of which can introduce differences within demographic groups that are greater than any difference between demographic groups

However, I guess it is still possible to argue (since we can cherry pick arguments as well as the next commentator) that one of the problems with educational research is that educational researchers often clump all students when they generalise about the effects of different interventions on student achievement – that is they assume that the achievement effects they find will hold across all groups of students –

It could be a bit like finding that the average temperature suggests that the effect is perfectly comfortable when in truth you are standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket –– or perhaps the man who drowned crossing a stream whose average depth was 6 inches or my personal favourite – finding that the average human has one breast and one testicle.

This is why I sometimes get anxious about claims made for the effect of integrating ICTs in learning experiences on student achievement –

I have never forgotten the research I read in 2003 when I was working with the gifted and talented iPAint ictpd cluster – it seems that integrating ICTs does not effect all students learning outcomes in the same way - I referred to Nikolova, & Taylor’s research in the original draft article and then had to edit it out of the final article that was published in CNZS. I have not tracked gifted and talented research wrt ICTs for a while so I don’t know how these ideas have developed ..

The deleted text was as follows

• An added complication occurs when research starts to take account of ability. Significant ICT facilitated student learning outcomes for high ability students may not be assumed for all students and vice versa. For example, Nikolova and Taylor (2003) reveal that high ability students performed significantly better for immediate and delayed vocabulary recall and comprehension on the computer mediated foreign language learning task. However, average ability students showed no difference in immediate vocabulary recall and substantially lower scores on delayed recall and reading comprehension.
  
  Nikolova, O. & G. Taylor. (2003). The impact of a language learning task on instructional outcomes in two student populations: High-ability and average –ability students. The Journal of Secondary Education. Vol. XIV, No. 4, Summer, pp. 205-217.

[Mark Walker]

What an interesting debate on two issues as I understand them: blogging about your work with a critical lense as a member of the leadership in that organisation and being sanctioned by the organisation heads for expresing counter views and perhaps the impact of summer holidays and whole language on the disadvanteged in reading.

Reasoned arguement rather than political statements is something people need to hear. There is not always a simply answer to real issues and our quest to research, reflect and reason an arguement about any topic should inform us rather than than be used to sanction us would be my stand.We also have to accept that we will be criticised for making an arguement but its better than staying silent.

The second point about the data raises an interesting point for me. We are using some software where we are able to plot our, as teachers whether we have added value to students learning at the mimium level of growth over a time frame - no matter what the starting point and some interesting results are showing up. I have yet to blog about this and link this to my schools website but soon will. We are looking at this with reading data.

Thanks for the debate It's a post I will have to come back to and reread I think

Mark

www.mwalker.com.au

[sonjanz]

My understanding was that is why PAT's are done in March - to give children 6 weeks back at school to "recover"the summer vacation. And the "summer reading loss" is becoming part of the middle class parent understanding of how they support their children's learning - books for Christmas! In fact maybe it is that we buy so many books and have Christmas in summer that helps our reading acheivement.

I also think the population of our schools has changed quite a bit from 1970's - and I seem to recall that one of the issues with NZ is that we are more inclusive than most countries e.g. we include children still gaining confidence in English. Which probably relates to the 15 year old results as well - good point about the dis-engaged kids dropping out. But couldn't it also be that at 15 we are assessing a more wholistic picture? The cumulative connections of ten years? When you think about it our system is general until Year 11 with kids specialising further once they have done the basic science, maths and english of NCEA Level 1.

What upsets me about the parents reports for National Standards is how is knowing your child is in "the long tail" going to be at all helpful? Or empowering?

[ailsa]

Great post Arti, thinking above the din and looking between the nodes leaves me hoping that the quiet places might be important for other reasons. Might not do much for reading levels but i live with the hope that other measures might demonstrably increase in the gaps.

[Claudia]

It is really much easier to learn when you have all the money and no problems. Parents make their kids learn off-school because they are more disciplined and the kids have no worries. How do you expect a kid facing a lot of personal problems and not given the proper medium to study such as noise from scandals, to learn the same way a rich kid does ? In plus, when not being rich you try to find other cheap methods to entertain, to spend the time... And again, that doesn't mean that these type of kids aren't smart. It's just that it's a proven fact that wealthy people have more space for creativity because of the given conditions...

[Get Your Ex Back]

Money is power , and this fact is present even in our kids' life. It's a scary and disturbing fact but it's actually the truth

[Holly Chun]

In your post, there was a suggestion that school should run all year round in order to minimize disparity. However, if I were the parent of prestige children, I would not allow my kids to go to school! At a glance, the results of the Glawell study are not logical. I would go back to examine the methods and sample size of this study. Thanks.

Holly

[Allison]

studying continuously without vacations would be a killer, nobody would accept it...anyway there will never be a perfect system and everybody knows that

[Holly Chun]

A preliminary research of year-round education yielded mixed messages. While the majority felt positive about the modified school calendar, I have the following thoughts:

• One of the primary objectives of year-round education was to solve the overcrowding school facilities problem (Winter, 2005)
• Year-round schools are gaining popularity in the States. US president Obama supported this concept, according to the Johnson’s (2010) article.
• Most common advocates for year-round schools
o Students forget what was learned during the long summer vacation
o Performance of under-privileged students suffers while prestige students gains during summer vacation
o Leaning is less stressful because workload is spread evenly (Wat, 2009)
• In some year-round schools, number of school days is the same as traditional schools, while others have increased school days (Johnson, 2010; Winter, 2005).

The year-round routines are beneficial for young children. While it makes sense for young kids to reduce a block of learning into 10 weeks instead of a full semester, I am not sure this is a good idea for older students.

I am a doctoral student. I have a three-semester-year of 16 weeks to each semester. It is year-round, and there is absolutely no way to forget after a one or two week term break. But this is preciously the point. School work is so demanding I still feel exhausted after each break. Older students or young adults can work during the long summer vacation. It is sometimes essential for affording school. Even if the student does not need to work for tuition fees, it would be advantageous to gain working experience, to volunteer, to take summer courses, or just to take some rest. It is the best opportunity for family gatherings especially if people need to travel to do so. For adults (or older students), it is how they make use of the vacation that matters. If people think only rich people can enjoy summer vacations they have missed the point.

References
Johnson, A. (2010, October 17). Year-round school gains ground around U.S. Msnbc.Com, Retrieved from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39748458/ns/us_news-life
Wat, J. (2009) Extended Year-Round Schooling, Extended Success. National Association
For Year-Round Education. Retrieved from http:/www.nayre.org/jeanette_wat.htm
Winter, E. C. (2005). A modified school year: Perspectives from the early years. Child Care in Practice, 11(4), 399-413.

[Donna]

kids are hard to motivate nowadays, everywhere you look there is a crisis..

[Angela]

it's true Donna, and no matter how hard you try to explain to them what who and where...they'll still find something to bother you with

[Artichoke]

Hi Donna and Angela,
Thanks for thinking about and responding to this,

Perhaps it is not that kids are harder to motivate per se - but rather that they are not motivated to engage in the stuff of "doing school" - the stuff educators want them to look at.

I am not sure that this is any more true of students today than it was of students in the past. There are many quotes online that suggest this "perception" is nothing new.

• "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
  authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
  of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
  households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
  contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
  at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

  ATTRIBUTION: Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato, according to William L.
  Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p. 277
  (1953)."