Friday, April 29, 2022




The False Narrative That Ethnic Studies Courses Improve Student Learning

When Gavin Newsom signed California’s Ethnic Studies (ES) requirement into law, he indicated one reason why was that “a number of studies have shown these courses boost student achievement.” But the reality is that there is no significant evidence these courses boost student achievement.

The most prominent studies regarding the positive effect of ES are from Stanford researchers who studied an ES program that was implemented in five high schools in the San Francisco Unified School District, before being required in all district schools in 2016. But the positive conclusions drawn from these studies are erroneous, reflecting a flawed experimental design and inappropriate inferences. I was never a fan of the old saw, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics,” because the peer-review process within academic publishing roots out deficiencies and mistakes in research. But in this case, it didn’t. Not even close.

Long story short, ES was supposed to have been taken by students with a GPA of less than 2.0 in the five San Francisco schools. The researchers believed that they could draw sharp statistical inference about the impact of ES by comparing future outcomes of students just under the 2.0 GPA threshold with those students who had a GPA just over the threshold but who didn’t take the course. Their main finding was nothing less than shocking. They concluded that taking an ES course raised the overall GPA of students by 1.4 points, in effect saying that the ES course turned a sub-C student into a B+ student. The magnitude of this treatment effect from a single intervention is literally unheard of in education circles.

But as is often the case when something is too good to be true, it turns out the Stanford analysis does not support such a conclusion. Research conducted by Richard Sander of UCLA and Abraham Wyner of the University of Pennsylvania highlights serious deficiencies of the Stanford study, so large that virtually no conclusions can be drawn from the research regarding the impact of ES studies on student learning. They note that so little can be learned from the study that it is possible that ES courses can lead to lower achievement.

One key problem with the Stanford study is that the both the treatment group—those students with GPAs under 2.0, and who were supposed to have taken the course—and the control group—those students with GPAs over 2.0, and who were supposed to have been omitted from the course—were polluted. The treatment group included those who should have been in the control group, and about 40 percent of students who should have taken the course did not.

Losing 40 percent of those students with a GPA under 2.0 created a very small sample, with only 67 students with a GPA under 2.0 in the treatment group. Nearly twice as many students with a GPA greater than 2.0 took the course as an elective. This means that the treatment group was primarily made up of those who should have been in the control group.

By omitting so many of the low-GPA students from the treatment group, particularly those near the threshold, and by including so many students in the treatment group who should have been in the control group, particularly those near the threshold, the analysis loses its ability to draw these comparisons. Moreover, only four teachers taught the ES course. This makes it difficult to separate out the impact of a teacher from the impact of the course curriculum. And if you are wondering if the high schools implemented any other educational interventions to help students with low GPAs? Well, they did, which means that the researchers would need to control for those effects in trying to measure the individual contribution of ES. But they did not try to do this, even though they were aware of other types of programs and student support being provided. Just like that, this natural experiment that was supposed to shed light on the effect of ES on student outcomes became anything but that.

For a moment, put aside the various weedy details here, and ask yourself the following: If an intervention is so remarkably successful, as the Stanford study concludes, something that could turn a C or below student into a B+ student, then shouldn’t it be readily apparent within the data? Shouldn’t the impact jump out at us?

It should, but it doesn’t. The researchers sorted students into groups by GPA, ranging from 1.2–1.3 up to 3.9–4.0, and reported GPA for these students the following academic year, after the ES course. As you might guess, students with very high GPA continued to have very high GPA the following year, and students with very low GPA continued to have very low GPA the following year. The students who had a GPA just above 2.0 had a subsequent GPA that was nearly identical to students who had a GPA just below 2.0. Nothing amazing about the impact of an ES course jumping out at us.

So where is the big effect that the study reports? Part of this comes from that the fact that students who began with a GPA between 2.2 and 2.3 had a GPA between 1.6 and 1.7 the following year. And the students with a GPA between 1.7 and 1.8 on average also had a GPA between 1.6 to 1.7 the following year.

All these students (a small number in any case) had a lower GPA the following year. It is just that the ones who began with a GPA between 1.7 and 1.8 declined less than those who began with a GPA between 2.2 to 2.3. Voilà. There you have it. In other words, “Hey mom, I know my grades declined this year, but hey, it could have been worse!”

Professors Sander and Wyner describe the Stanford research as “shoddy” and state that “California parents are not being told the truth about the education of their children.”

More broadly, ES courses have been required for the last five years in all San Francisco high schools. But if taking an ES course was a game changer, then it should be obvious in student learning outcomes. It is not. Test scores among SF high school students since 2015, the last year before all SF students were required to take ES, haven’t budged.

Requiring ES will fatten the wallets of those whose business is to teach ES and to train new faculty to teach ES. But there is no reason to believe that it will improve student learning outcomes in a state where more than 80 percent of Hispanic and Black students lack proficiency in mathematics and science.

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California’s Math Framework Lacks Research to Justify Its Progressive Agenda

The California State Department of Education has released a new draft of its curriculum framework for K-12 mathematics. While it is notably improved regarding opportunities for advanced work, the document is still woefully laden with dogma about politics and about how to teach math.

The framework promotes only the progressive-education approach to teaching math, calling it “student-led” instruction, “active learning,” “active inquiry,” and “collaborative” instruction. But evidence from the 1950s through recent times shows that this way of teaching math is ineffective. That evidence comes from scrutinizing carefully designed studies featuring randomized control and what are called quasi-experiments, which approximate the effect of a randomized assignment of students to different groups. Quasi-experiments look at cases, for example, where two adjoining districts with similar populations or two adjoining similar schools adopt different policies. Both sorts of studies are much stronger evidence than the case studies that progressive educators rely on.

In the spring 2012 issue of American Educator, the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers, top educational psychologists Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller summarized “decades of research” that “clearly demonstrates” that for almost all students, “direct, explicit instruction” is “more effective” than inquiry-based progressive education in math.

Clark, Kirschner, and Sweller conclude that after “a half century” of progressive educators advocating inquiry-based teaching of math, “no body of sound research” can be found that supports using that approach with “anyone other than the most expert students.” Evidence from the best studies, they emphasize, “almost uniformly” supports “full and explicit” instruction rather than an inquiry-based approach. Yet when explicit, direct instruction is discussed in the proposed math curriculum (chaps. 3 and 6), it is deprecated.

To be more specific, the framework uses the term “struggle” (or “struggling”) over 75 times, typically in phrases such as, “Students learn best when they are actively engaged in questioning, struggling, problem solving, reasoning, communicating, making connections, and explaining,” or “Teachers should also underscore the importance and value of times of struggle.” While the former is a mouthful and includes essentially everything and the kitchen sink—with a notable exception of “practice”—the latter is a direct pitch for “struggle.” It is as if the authors were guided by Mao Zedong’s old exhortation, “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win.”

Is it true that student struggle is such a critical component of learning that it should be singled out and treated as primary? The framework offers a variety of cherry-picked citations supporting this idea. Yet, it carefully avoids mentioning that research warns against excessive struggle as time-wasting and discouraging, often leaving students with incorrect understanding. In the absence of such cautions, teachers are likely to walk away convinced that the more they let their students struggle—and struggle is common with the inquiry-based pedagogy promoted by the framework—the more they will learn. This is like saying a child should be tossed in the water rather than taught to swim.

This illustrates two related major flaws that underlie this draft framework: what does “research-based” mean, and the quality of its citations.

State-adopted education programs and recommendations are supposed to be “research-based.” This does not just mean an article or two in a peer-reviewed journal. It means there is a consensus or strong evidence of effectiveness in the published research. If no strong evidence exists, a practice should not be broadly recommended. If there is no consensus, both pro and con evidence should be cited. An example of that can be seen in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Practice Guides, which identify practices as having strong, medium, or weak evidence.

None of this is indicated for “struggle,” or the framework’s push for “inquiry learning” over explicit instruction that is effectively unmentioned in the framework, or its ignoring of highly effective engagement with worked-out problems, or the framework’s lack of any recommendations regarding the proven effective spaced (or distributed) practice—the use of homework and quizzes intentionally spread over a period of weeks after learning a topic, to maximize retention. The focus on inquiry learning, which relies heavily on students’ struggles, has been discouraged by strong research. Distributed practice and use of worked-out examples are supported here and here, yet are ignored in the framework. Instead, the framework offers us “trauma induced pedagogy,” teachers who are considered exemplary for promoting “sociopolitical consciousness,” taking a “justice-oriented perspective,” and embedding “environmental or social justice” in the math work given to children. This is not even a weakly research-based pedagogical framework—this is an ideological manifesto.

In fact, poor and selective research citations undermine much of this framework’s recommendations. Dozens of citations refer to unpublished works on the website of Jo Boaler, one of the framework’s authors. More than five dozen citations of her published works exist in the framework, far more than anyone else’s, yet only a single one of her references was published in one of the top 100 influential education journals. Her 2008 study, cited seven times in the framework, had its accuracy and methodology called into serious question in an analysis by two California math professors and a statistician.

If the framework writers had wanted solid evidence, they would have relied on the final report and subgroup reports of the 2008 federal National Mathematics Advisory Panel. They would have made even more use of the federal Institute of Education Sciences practice guides, which are designed for teachers and curriculum writers. Instead, the framework’s writers pretend this high-quality evidence doesn’t even exist.

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Dad tells teacher to 'f*** off' after she pleaded with him to invite all 24 of his son's classmates to his birthday party

A dad has unleashed on his son's teacher after she insisted he invite the entire class to his birthday party.

The man turned to Reddit to ask if he was in the wrong for losing his temper and swearing at the teacher after she demanded he host the whole class so no one feels left out.

The 38-year-old said while the teacher had 'no business' telling the family who they can and can't invite to their party, he worries he took it too far by swearing at her.

The man said his son Al's teacher called him up after she found out he was having a birthday party and had invited nine of the 24 kids in the class.

'She tells me that she understands he is having a birthday party and that he invited a few of his friends from class, but not everyone. I said yeah, there are a few kids in there that he has problems with and also I don't think we can really handle hosting 24 kids and their parents,' he wrote.

The teacher proceeds to tell the disgruntled dad she has a rule that if any children in the class are invited to a birthday party, then everyone has to be invited.

'I told her it is an event off school hours on private property in my home. She can no more tell me what I do there and who I can and can't invite anymore than I can decide who is invited to her Thanksgiving dinner,' he said.

However the teacher was insistent saying she enforces the rule so no kids 'get their feelings hurt if they get left out'.

'I pointed out to her that there are 24 kids in the class. If their parents attend the party with them then that can be upwards of 72 people and I told her that's just not a reasonable thing to ask,' the man said.

He also said he asked if he then would need to invite the entire classes of his son's other friends who had been invited but the teacher stood her ground.

'She then said "Al is in my class. He is under my supervision. This is my rule." I then told her that Al is only under her supervision while he was in class,' he said.

'I am the one throwing the party, and she doesn't get to make rules for my house or me. She then said if it involves her class, she does.'

After a 'bit of back and forth' the dad said he 'lost his cool' telling the teacher her authority doesn't go further than the end of the school day and the 'schoolhouse gates'.

'If you think you're the one to make the rules for me, in my home on which I pay the mortgage on, you can go f*** yourself and there isn't a goddamn thing you can do about it,' he said he told her.

While he said his wife agrees the school can't tell them who they can and can't invite to their home outside school hours, she thinks he may have taken it too far by swearing.

'I am very comfortable with telling her that she has no right to tell us who we can and can't invite into our home and that it is crazy I might have to invite up to 72 people for my son to have any friends from his class attend but in truth, I do kind of wish I left that last "go f*** yourself" part off,' he admitted.

The post drew in thousands of comments from Redditors many of whom agreed with the dad and defended his heavy handed approach.

'Several different ways were used to politely tell her 'no'. She seems to have gotten the message with profanity,' one person wrote.

'You declined her request, which was your right to do. Instead of accepting that, she argued with you. Some people won't take no for an answer until you get more forceful with it' said a second.

A third commented: 'She is ridiculous. My kid's school policy is that if you don't invite kids to your kid's party, don't expect to get invited to theirs. Common sense.'

While the dad confirmed his son had not been handing out invitations in class for those not invited to see, some said the 'everyone or no one' rule was a common one at many schools.

'The reason behind it is that if kids are left out, you're basically throwing a grenade into the middle of a teachers classroom and then leaving them to clean up the mess,' one user explained.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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