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 |
1st |
2nd |
3rd |
4th |
5th |
|
Low |
329 |
375 |
397 |
433 |
461 |
|
Middle |
348 |
388 |
425 |
467 |
497 |
|
High |
361 |
418 |
460 |
506 |
534 |
|
Achievement |
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 |
After 1st |
After 2nd |
After 3rd |
After 4th |
After 5th |
Total - Cumulative |
|
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.
Source: Artichoke