New Hope for School Integration

From All Walks of Life: New Hope for School Integration is a powerful article on school integration and diversity by Richard Kahlenberg. If you are interested in Inclusion, then I think you'll find this enlightening.

Here are a few highlights:

• Racial integration is a very important aim, but if one's goal is boosting academic achievement what really matters is economic integration.

• Finland - often held out as an education success story - had the lowest degree of socioeconomic segregation of 57 countries participating in PISA.

• The only educational intervention known to have a greater return on investment than socioeconomic integration is very high-quality early childhood education.

• The KIPP model, which relies heavily on self-selection and attrition, reinforces the idea that the peer environment may matter a great deal.

• Many families now believe - as do virtually all leading colleges and universities - racial, ethnic, and income diversity enriches the classroom.

• In high poverty- schools, a child is surrounded by classmates who are more likely to act out, more likely to move during the school year, and less likely to have large vocabularies.

• The major problem with American schools is not teachers or their unions, but poverty and economic segregation.

Knowledge is power, power is money, and I want it

Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is a charter school system in the United States. Mathematica Policy Research Inc. has released a study on KIPP in relation to attrition rates and test scores.

The Washington Post summarized the study:

Mathematica studied 22 KIPP middle schools, including AIM and KEY, comparing test scores of charter students to scores of selected students in regular public schools who matched their academic and demographic backgrounds. Researchers examined test data starting in third grade. KIPP middle schools begin in fifth.


By seventh grade, half of the KIPP schools studied showed growth in math scores equal to an additional 1.2 years of school. Reading gains for KIPP were not as dramatic but still significant, the researchers reported, reflecting an additional three-quarters of a year of growth.


Mathematica said it found no evidence that KIPP schools were systematically drawing students with more economic advantages from surrounding school systems. But attrition rates at the KIPP schools, measuring the portion of students who failed to complete four years at the schools, varied widely. In a third of the schools studied, attrition was significantly higher than in other local public schools. In another third of the KIPP schools, the rate was lower. Skeptics say that students who can't function in the rigorous school culture are often pushed out -- a claim that KIPP rejects.

Despite KIPP's attempts to sell this study as a feather in their cap, Gary Miron, Professor and Director at Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, explains some shortcomings, omissions and distortions that arise from this study:

However, an initial analysis of the report by Professor Gary Miron of Western Michigan University concludes that this initial study report misrepresents the attrition data. According to Miron, "While it may be true that attrition rates for KIPP schools and surrounding districts are similar, there is a big difference: KIPP does not generally fill empty places with the weaker students who are moving from school to school. Traditional public schools must receive all students who wish to attend, so the lower-performing students leaving KIPP schools receive a place in those schools."



In contrast, Miron explains, "The lower performing, transient students coming from traditional public schools are not given a place in KIPP, since those schools generally only take students in during the initial intake grade, whether this be 5th or 6th grade."

The KIPP study's description of attrition only considers half the equation, when comparing KIPP schools to matched traditional public schools. The researchers looked at the attrition rates, which they found to be similar - in the sense of the number of students departing from schools. But they never considered the receiving or intake rate. Even though the researchers agree that the students who are mobile are lower performing, they do not take into account the reality that KIPP schools do not generally receive these students.

Professor Miron conducted his own quick analysis, using the Common Core database, and concluded that there is a 19% drop in enrollment in KIPP schools between grades 6 and 7 and a 24% drop in enrollment between grades 7 and 8. (This analysis only included KIPP schools that had enrollments in all three grades). In comparison, traditional public schools in these grades maintain the same enrollment from year to year.

Aside from the controversy around KIPP's attrition rates, I find it important to reflect on any study that uses test scores as it's primary tool of evaluating any learning environment. We know that measurable outcomes and standardized tests may measure some of the least important aspects of education, that standardized tests encourage a great deal of shallow thinking, and that standardized tests are at best unreliable indicators of anything that resembles good learning - so what does that say about any teacher, school or charter system that holds high test scores as a badge of honour?

Perhaps we should be more than a little skeptical of schools that owe their name to a chant by Harriett Ball: “…Knowledge is power, power is money, and I want it.”

The power of context

Intelligence can be a very difficult thing to quantify and it can be equally as difficult to properly attribute the cause of such intellect. Why are some people so much better at something than others. The classic argument between nature and nurture is at the heart of this discussion.

Here is an excerpt from Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code: Greatness isn't born. It's grown. Here's how.

De Groot, who was born in 1914, was a Dutch psychologist who played chess in his spare time. He experienced his own version of the holy shit effect when a handful of players from his chess club, people just like him in age, experience, and background, nevertheless were able to perform superhuman feats of chess mastery. These were the sort of T.Rex players who could casually destroy ten opponents at once, blindfolded. Like Anders Ericsson decades later, de Groot puzzled over his losses, which led him to ask what exactly made these guys so great. At the time the scientific wisdom on the issue was unquestioned. It held that the best players possessed photographic memories that they used to absorb information and plan strategies. Master players succeeded, the theory went, because they were endowed with the cognitive equivalent of cannons, while the rest of us made do with popguns. But de Groot didn't buy this theory; he wanted to find out more.


To investigate, he set up an experiment involving both master players and more ordinary ones. De Groot placed chess pieces into positions from a real game, gave players a five-second glimpse of the board, and then tested their recall. The results were what one might expect. The master players recalled the pieces and arrangements four to five times better than the ordinary players did. (World-class players neared 100 percent recall.)

Then de Groot did something clever. Instead of using patterns from a real chess game, he set the chess pieces in a random arrangement and reran the test. Suddenly the masters' advantage vanished. They scored no better than lesser players; in one case, a master chess player did worse than a novice. the master players didn't have photographic memories; when the game stopped resembling chess, their skills evaporated.

De Groot went on to show that in the first test, the masters were not seeing individual chess pieces but recognizing patterns. Where novices saw a scattered alphabet of individual piecs, masters were grouping those 'letters' into the chess equivalent of words, sentences and paragraphs. When the pieces became random, the masters were lost - not because they suddenly became dumber but because their grouping strategy was suddenly useless. The holy shit effect vanished. The difference between chess T. Rexes and ordinary players was not the difference between a cannon and popgun. It was a difference of organization, the difference between someone who understood a language and someone who didn't. Or, to put it another way, the difference between an experienced baseball fan (who can take in a game with an ascertaining glance - runner on third, two out, bottom of the seventh inning) adn the same fan at his first cricket match (who spends the game squinting baffedly). Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework. The name psychologists use for such organization is chunking.

Attributing intelligence to a natural ability is a far too simplistic explanation, and equally insulting to those who work so hard to achieve greatness.

Disclaimer: The Talent Code is a schizophrenic book. Please be careful: the first and last third of the book are phenominal - but the middle third is absolutely crap. For some reason, Coyle ends up falling in love with KIPP (knowledge is power program) schools - even though it is common knowledge that KIPP is the equivalent of military boot camp for poor children of colour.