Artichoke

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.

 

Fear is fungible.

I felt like an extra in Richard Scarry’s Busy Busy World yesterday morning.

Filling up with gas at the local garage I shared the forecourt with a huge red fire truck packed with firemen. Given the cell phone risk signs posted all around I was disconcerted to see one of the crew leap down from the truck and start texting in the pump bay.

Lowly Worm insight: The public’s perceived risk of taking or making any calls in a gas station forecourt is less than the actual risk.

Leaving the gas station I went to our local GP to pick up a script for one of the kids living off the corridor, only to be greeted by a laminated notice and a closed door.  To paraphrase - “Before you open door pause and consider whether you are feeling dodgy in a way that could be ‘flu like – if this is possible remain outside and Tom Jones like “knock three times” at a window to alert us inside of your possible H1N1 incubating self outside.”

Lowly Worm insight: The actual risk of catching something serious in GP’s waiting room is high enough to abandon those too enfeebled to knock three times and those too short to reach the window but not so high as to exclude those without the literacy and or the language to make meaning from the text.  [that is the 380,000 New Zealanders without the literacy to understand the instructions on a fire extinguisher and anyone else without the ability to make meaning from English]  

I then visited a friend who had a Richard Scarry “Great Pie Robbery” experience on Wednesday, where all her electrical goods stolen.  The home and contents insurance was up to date, the burglary happened when she was out, the forced windows and doors were quickly repaired and the police visited and detectives Sam and Dudley dusted for fingerprints.  But she feels vulnerable in a place that the week before had been her refuge.

Lowly Worm insight: The actual risk is not important – the perceived risk of Horace Wolf and Croaky Crocodile revisiting the house creates high levels of anxiety and outrage.  

To understand how we use risk management and risk communication, [or how it uses us] I reckon you cannot better reading Max Brook’s World War Z  but reading Peter Sandman  Talking about “Risk Communication Before and During Epidemics”  provides a framework that has helped me analyse our response to “swine ‘flu”, national testing and all the other stuff that frightens us. 

For example, I didn’t know that “how much harm a risk does” and “how upset people get” has a correlation coefficient of only 0.2. 

Those of you who remember your statistics know you can square a correlation coefficient to get the percentage of variance accounted for: If you square 0.2, you get 0.04, or 4% of the variance.
That is, the risks that kill people and the risks that upset people are completely different. If you know that a risk kills people, you have no idea whether it upsets them or not. If you know it upsets them, you have no idea whether it kills them or not.

Sandman frames these two as “hazard” and “outrage” and goes on to show that

“It doesn't seem to matter what your measure of harm is. Whatever your measure of harm, across a wide range of risks, the correlation between how much harm [a risk is] going to do and how upset people are going to get is this absurdly low 0.2 correlation.”

He elaborates on this research to show that “the correlation between hazard and perceived hazard is also very low, but the correlation between outrage and perceived hazard is very high.”

This analysis interests me as I try to understand the high levels of outrage at the Minister Anne Tolley’s suggested introduction of National Standards – outrage that is based on the “perceived risk” of league tables.

Sandman is smart ... he knows that correlation is not necessarily causality ... but that when it is ... then the directionality is contestable. 

Now, as soon as you have a high correlation, of course, what you want to know is: What's the direction of the causality. That is the question we're asking when we look at the high correlation between whether people get upset and whether they think [a risk is] dangerous. Are they upset because they think it's dangerous, or do they think it's dangerous because they're upset?
That's an important question, because if you want to manage the system, you have to know which one is the cause and which one is the effect. You don't want to be in the awkward position of trying to manage a cause by manipulating the effect. That's not likely to work. So you need to know the direction of the causality. This is much studied, and as usual in social science, it turns out to be a cycle, but one of the arrows is very robust and the other arrow is very weak. The strong arrow is from outrage to hazard perception. That is, for the most part, it is not true that people are upset because they think [a risk is] dangerous; it's much more true that people think [a risk is] dangerous because they're upset.

And I love the way he explains the negative

The same is true in the negative: It's not true that people are calm because they think [a risk is] safe; it's much more true that people think [a risk is] safe because they're calm. It follows, [therefore], that if you want people to think [a risk is] dangerous, then you'd better get them upset, and if you want them not to think [a risk is] dangerous--if you want them to think it's safe--then you need to calm them down.

If the outrage is the driver ... and the hazard perception is the result the message to Anne Tolley is quite clear – introduce communication strategies to reduce the outrage. The message to the NZEI is equally clear – introduce communication strategies that increase the outrage. 

However, it was the second part of Sandman’s analysis that I most enjoyed reading.

Here he talks about how risk management is also used by those with institutional authority to shelter the public from high risk information on the grounds that the ensuing panic will be more damaging than the risk itself.

All those “damage control”, “on a need to know basis” conversations that obscure transparency within institutions

The Argument: If we scare people this fear will escalate into panic.  Panic will exacerbate the situation.

However Sandman counters by arguing that our experience in New Orleans and 9/11show that we overrate panic. He distinguishes “feeling panicky” from “acting panicky” and he introduces a new idea – that of “panic panic”

Panic, in short, is rare. But official "panic panic" is common. That is, officials often imagine that the public is panicking or about to panic. And in order to allay panic, officials sometimes do exactly the wrong thing from a crisis communication perspective: They withhold information, they over-reassure, they express contempt for public fears, etc.

And this is a problem because in risky situations fear is tolerated, has an “adjustment reaction” which because it is a rehearsal has positive outcomes in terms of appropriate future reaction ...

• The underestimation of the frequency with which fearful people rise to resilient, pro-social, and even heroic behavior. We had ample evidence of that in 9/11, and I won't belabor the point.
• The failure to recognize the positive value of fear in encouraging preparedness, vigilance, tolerance of inconvenience and expense, and so forth.

And it seems contrary to what we commonly hold as true - that communication that makes people fearful in risky situations is a good thing.

So it's completely inconsistent to say we want the public to prepare, [but] we don't want the public to be frightened. The main incentive for people to prepare is becoming frightened.

The bit I liked best was Sandman’s notion that fear is fungible.

Greenpeace wants us afraid of genetically modified food, and the Christian Right wants us afraid of gay marriage, and I want us afraid of H5N1. You should not think of any of those three as trying to make people more afraid. What we are doing is competing with each other for our slice of the fearfulness pie.

Which brings me right back to thinking about  – what are the things that are currently competing for a slice of the fearfulness pie in education?