The New and Improved...Great Gatsby

I haven't seen the movie yet, and I know it's had very mixed reviews, but I thought this article was interesting, so I thought I'd link to it.

This is Water . . . This is Life

I think I needed to watch this today.

No Rich Kid Left Behind

This is a disturbing article, but in my my personal experience, it is oh so spot on.

APRIL 27, 2013, 6:15 PM

No Rich Child Left Behind

By SEAN F. REARDON

Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.

Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.

What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.

One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.

These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.

In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?

We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.

Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.

Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.

The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.

The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.

It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.

If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.

The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.

We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.

But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.

This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.

It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.

The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.

Sean F. Reardon is a professor of education and sociology at Stanford.

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Thoughts on the Common Core

Fellow English blogger Brian Kelley recently had some interesting things to say about the new Common Core and assessment.

4th Annual Yearbook Post

This is the annual yearbook post. We just finished today, and frankly, whew, I'm glad to be done. So much work!! It's looking good, I think. Here is a sneak peek:

Our beautiful cover: the tree is printed with a texture

One of our five dividers: this one is for staff and student mugs

Our photosynthesis bar: we tried to carry this through the book and did a pretty good job

This is one of the wow pages that I made: Student Council

One of my favorite pieces: Senior Profiles

Another wow page that I made (but Teya drew the amazing drawings): yearbook staff

One of our section layouts: here you see the modular design and photosynthesis bar

Another wow page I helped with, Kawin drew the UCAS apps

Our colophon: I love this end of the year design

Thoughts on Cars

I know I was meant for greater things than this. I mean I was born on an assembly line in Detroit, or maybe it was Korea, or Japan, or…but I digress. I rolled off the assembly line looking sharp and fine—a beautiful green 1972 Dodge Dart. I thought I’d be leading the pole at the Indie 500, or escorting beautiful young ladies and their dates to Senior Proms, or at least driving a semi-normal person somewhere. Instead what I got was a whole family full of insane teenagers, mostly boys, who took turns driving me into the dirt. If it wasn’t one thing—backing into the high school Poli-Sci teacher in the school parking lot—it was another thing—leaving me unlocked in front of the high school with the key inside so that anyone from anywhere can just hop in and take me for a ride. The crowning insult was when my speedometer, gas meter, and pretty much else had stopped working. Instead of giving me my well deserved rest, they just kept driving me. Everywhere. And, most embarrassing, if I ran out of gas, they just left me on the side of the road. It happened often enough that people began to laugh about the Decker Green Machine, out of gas again. I finally gained revenge. One day as I was driving down to Show Low for the big football game, my driver made the mistake of attempting to go over 40 miles per hour in me. In protest, I broke my fan belt and propelled my fan blade 20 feet in the air, right out of the green hood, leaving a lovely little hood scoop where a fan had once been. It was a noisy protest, but it finally got results. They never drove me again.

ReStealing

Hey, if Joe can steal, I can too. Joe, I'm stealing the link to your post. I love this book intro!

Another Letter of Recommendation

Since I posted son # 2's Eagle Scout recommendation letter here, I thought I would pull out son # 1's and add it. The Eagle Committee Chairwoman told me at the time that it was the best one she'd ever read:

Eagle Scout Recommendation for Ben

When we look around at all the young men that we know, there are always those that stand out.  They are accomplished, talented, wonderful young men.  Everyone is always pointing to them as examples and guiding lights for the other young men around them.

Well, Ben is not one of those fortunate young men.  He has struggled with challenges his entire life.  As a young elementary student he was diagnosed with a learning disability.  He could still not read at the beginning of third grade.  Sheer will, determination, and the help of loving teachers and a (sometimes) patient mother got him through that hardship.  Unfortunately, he also suffered from a profound lack of fine motor skills, which led to extremely bad handwriting and not a lot of success in athletics on the playground. Due to the stigmatism of those years, he had problems with developing friendships.  He always seemed to be the odd one out.  It is a hard thing to feel like you have no one to invite over to your house.  However, he stuck it through those years and kept on going.

As he entered junior high, he continued to struggle.  He was the butt of many classroom jokes and ridicule.  He developed a strong thick skin which was actually contrary to his original loving nature as a child.  He became angry and hard to manage, and it only continued to get worse and worse.  Finally, we as his parents felt that there was something more to this than just teenage angst.  We took him for a professional analysis.

The diagnosis was not good.  Ben suffered from Bipolar disorder and suspected Aspergers.  His world was spiraling out of control.  He experienced bouts of euphoria and very little sleep followed by episodes of depression and suicidal thoughts.  If this wasn’t bad enough, he also suffered from ADD, which was not treatable while he was on the medication for Bipolar.

Amazingly enough, throughout all of these problems, many of which were overwhelming even to his adult parents, Ben continued to try to do his best.  And honestly, sometimes his best is not anywhere near as good as the best that some of those more fortunate young men seem to achieve almost without effort.  However, Ben’s best, although it may be seem a more paltry offering, is truly an effort born of more desire, will, and sheer gumption than anyone will ever know.  Every little success he has ever had has been born of years of failure.  Every C and B has been a triumph over adversity that his teachers do not even begin to understand.

As we look back on our son’s mighty struggles and the few accolades that he has to show for them, we feel that he has truly been an example in our lives of the importance of doing your best, even when it seems like it doesn’t change anything or that it doesn’t make much of a difference.  Ben will never be the star quarterback or the homecoming king.  In fact, sometimes we wonder if he will graduate from high school.  But the one thing that we don’t wonder about is whether or not he is doing the best that he can.  Because we know that in his own quiet, unheralded, uniquely Ben way, he is, and for that, he is a hero and worthy of this Eagle Scout Award in our eyes.

Mom and Dad

Just For Laughs

Walk and Write

Here is my writing from the walk and write I did during a CUWP session on the BYU campus. Enjoy!

As I sit here looking at this broad expanse of windows, I can't help but think--why? What is so beautiful on the other side that merits such an expansive view? I guess it all depends on where your point of view lies. Directly opposite there is a building that is nondescript and really unremarkable. Here in front there is a lovely courtyard--but nothing too incredible.
But if you let your gaze move upwards, you are suddenly gifted with an amazing view of majestic mountain peaks punctuated by the rather large and conspicuous Y above BYU. This brings back memories of clear mornings as a freshman here when you could suddenly see the mountains again and realize what a beautiful setting this really is.

Where is he going--this young man with guitar in hand, striding purposefully across the campus at 10:30 AM on a Saturday morning? It's a little too early to be going to a rock concert and a little too late for waking your true love from bed with a morning serenade. Perhaps he is heading somewhere as mundane as a Saturday morning guitar session, or perhaps he is on his way to try out for a position in the latest group. His heart is in his throat and pounding as he thinks about this chance, perhaps his last chance, to make it big--or at least as big as you can get here in the sleepy berg of Provo, Utah.

Letters of Recommendation

As a high school teacher, I write a lot of letters of recommendation. Today I had the special privilege to write one for my own son:

February 5, 2013

To Whom It May Concern:

Caleb has always been a unique person. He has gone his own way and chosen his own path. Along the journey, he has developed and shown many qualities that I think will both help him in his upcoming adult life and qualify him to become an Eagle Scout.

Caleb has always been a tenderhearted child. He hates to see or hear fighting in his family, so he has always been a peacemaker between his siblings. He has a loving, trusting nature that I have always admired as a mother. He also has a heightened sense of fairness and kindness for the downtrodden and picked on (it may have something to do with his status as the baby in the family). In any case, he is a champion for many rights and causes.

He is a good, loyal, and faithful friend. He has developed some very close friendships in high school, and he and his friends do a lot of things together. Most of them are just normal teenage things such playing video and board games and eating everything in sight. But, they have done some very remarkable things, too. Last year, Caleb and a group of his friends planned, prepared, and worked for a week to put on a Camp Halfblood for the kids in one friend’s neighborhood. The kids had an amazing time, and Caleb and his friends gained valuable experience.

That is not to say he doesn’t have a few traits that drive me crazy. For one thing, he is as stubborn as a rock pile. However, this stubborn streak also makes him willing to keep trying and toiling at things long after many people would have given up and moved on. For example, he has been working on creating his own computer game for years. He’s designed all the backgrounds, characters, and music for it. He’s put it out for comment a few times, and some of the feedback has been less than complimentary. Rather than giving up, he just keeps working on it to make it better.

Caleb is also a bit of a perfectionist. Sometimes he struggles to get things done because the finished product is not quite up to his standards. As we all know, perfectionism can be a blessing and a curse. This is something he has to deal with, and I admire him for the gains he has made (and hopefully will continue to make) in this area.

Caleb is just an ordinary teenage boy. He has areas where he struggles; he is an infamous procrastinator, he occasionally stays up too late; he forgets to do his homework. He is far from being the poster child of ideal behavior. That said, he is a kind, thoughtful, loving son; a sweet and only slightly spoiled brother; a valued and humorous friend; and a motivated student with two years of college under his belt.

As a high school teacher, I write many letters of recommendation. In this case, I can say without reservation that I feel that Caleb has the qualities of and has spent the time and effort necessary to be an Eagle Scout.

Mom

Science Fiction . . . or Fact?

Wow. I've got to try this with my science oriented kids -- Lab Lit: Writing Fiction Based on Real Science.

Remembering the Man in the Water

This is a very good blog post at KBYU that I think I'll use with "Man in the Water" this year.

Thoughts on Freezing to Death...

I had my students read an amazing informative article, "As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow--First Chill--Then Stupor--Then the Letting Go:  The cold hard facts of freezing to death" by Peter Stark today in preparation for a unit on informative writing. I love the story that frames the information and how he uses the story -- from beginning to end -- to point out how the freezing person (who he appropriately calls "you" throughout -- what a great way to draw the reader into the story) feels and reacts physically and mentally. Then Stark tells us the name of the phenomenon and explains exactly what is going on inside your body that causes the reaction, from pre-shivering muscle tone to paradoxical undressing. He also adds interesting little tidbits of information throughout the paper -- historical tales of freezing people, adaptations of Australian aborigines and Inuit hunters, Nazi Dachau prison experiments, etc. And to make things even more serendipitous, we will be reading "The Man in the Water" as part of our hero unit. Perfection! Anyway, as preparation for reading, I had the students write about experiences they had with the cold. As usual, I wrote along with them. Here are my two efforts:

I know this gets old and you think that everyone says this, but it really was a lot colder 20 – 30 years ago here in Utah when I was a college student here.

I lived down below the BYU campus in some rinky-dink little apartments. Every day I would walk up a long, steep hill to the main campus. I’m a natural early riser, so this would be for eight or even seven o’clock classes. At that time in the morning, the sun hasn’t even come up here in Utah, so everything was bleak and cold and . . . icy.

I am from Arizona. You know, that warm place down South. I was not used to cold. Snow. Ice. Precipitation of any kind. Walking on snow and ice. Hmmm…

Well, one day I was gingerly making my way up the cold and snowy, icy hill that I traversed on my way to Organic Chemistry, Anatomy, Phrenology, or Psychology, or whatever class it was. I was naturally in a hurry and . . . I slipped. Hard. On the cold, dark ice right on my butt. Now, I had a big black splotch on my behind, but even worse than that, I had injured my tailbone, and when I went to stand up – I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I could only lay there on the snow and ice and wish to die . . . because at least then I would be warm, because I was probably going to the hot place.

Anyway, I lay there for about ten minutes until some hunky boy rescued me and carried me to the student services office… but that is a tale for another time.

Back in 2012 I was a volunteer for the Winter Olympics. I did one nighttime shift at the Peaks Ice Arena in the back where we checked in and out dignitaries, athletes, VIPs, etc. The problem was this was women’s ice hockey at the Peaks, so we weren’t getting too many of these big shots. What I did get was an eight hour experience of working in a freezer. We were right next to the ice, and it was around 5 degrees in the room that we were in. All night.

The only perk of that experience was checking in a male athlete. I would give them a dish to put their metal objects in while they were scanned. Usually we got keys, wallets, change. That night I got a gold medal. So . . .  I can say I got to hold a 2002 Gold Medal in my hand. The sad thing is that I can’t remember any more whose gold medal it was. Ah well.

A Day of Silence in Memorium

"How It Feels to Be Colored Me" Ideas

As it is the end of the year, I wanted to make sure that my students have exposure to writing by women, people of color, etc. We spent a little time on the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the pieces that is in our book is "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" by Zora Neale Hurston. I love this essay because she is so positive in it, despite the obvious discriminations she experienced from being a black woman in the 1920s. Anyway, after reading the essay, I had my students watch this TED talk, and then we all wrote a positive experience journal. It was kind of fun to get upbeat for a while, because so much of what we read in English is, let's face it, a bit of a downer.

Pretty Good is Not Good Enough

I think I'll share this with my students today:

How to Amaze Your Students

My students are always awed and amazed that I can read Chaucer and sound just like this. Such fun.

Anger

I thought I'd post a little more of the writing I've been doing with students. My subject (chosen by my writing group) was anger. I decided to mimic the style of J. Ruth Gendler's The Book of Qualities.

Anger

When Anger walks into a room, everyone is instantly on guard. You never know quite what to say and just how to act around her. It’s not just her face, heavily scarred from adolescent battles, or even her reputation as a fighter that silences everyone. No, it goes deeper than that.

Some even say that she has a split personality, because at times she is cold and hard as year-old ice cream and just sits back and stares and stares and stares, while at other times, she is a lit firecracker and only the slightest word or touch will set her off.

Anger spends her days sharpening knives at the local hardware store. All day, every day, grinding, grinding, grinding. She’s very good at what she does. She can put a long, slow edge on a knife or a quick, sharp one, but in the end, they all cut about the same.

She is meticulous about everything she hears and sees and does. She remembers every little detail and insists on bringing those little details up over and over again. She definitely never forgets a wrong, perceived or real. She likes truth but insists that the truth be her own truth. She has no room for anyone else’s point of view.

Sad to say, Anger’s never been very popular.  Nobody wants to see Anger drive up to the house, especially right before dinner.  All the same, she seems to show up frequently, and no one is ever quite sure how she got there. Even though Anger doesn’t have many friends, Pain and Regret do follow her around and often seem to arrive just as she’s leaving.

Discussion vs. Argument (or Just Plain Put-Downs)

For everyone I know and love--keep this in mind this election season:
http://rambleramble.com/2012/08/30/to-everyone-i-know-during-this-election/
I really don't think I could say it any better than she does.