The Myth of “They Weren’t Ever Taught….”
3rd July 2012
At some point, all teachers realize they are playing Whack-a-Mole in reverse, that the moles are never all up. Any new learning seems to overwrite or at bestconfuse the old learning, like an insufficient hard drive.
That’s when they get it: the kids were taught. They just forgot it all, just as they’re going to forget what they were taught this year.
All over America, teachers reach this moment of epiphany. Think of a double mirror shot, an look of shocked comprehension on an infinity of teachers who come to the awful truth.
The bell curve is there, like it or not, and by definition half of all kids are below average.
Teachers know something that educational policy folk of all stripes seem incapable of recognizing: it’s the students, not the teachers. They have been taught. And why they don’t remember is an issue we really should start to treat as a key piece of the puzzle.
July 3rd, 2012 at 11:58
It has been demonstrated (I can dig up the study if anyone really cares) that there is no significant difference in subject mastery between lower-income and higher-income students at the end of the school year; however, at the beginning of the next school year when tested on last year’s material significant gaps appear. Low-income students start the school year a quarter-lap behind their higher-income age peers, and lag further and further as the years progress.
The obvious conclusion is that lower-income children forget during the summer break more of what they learned than higher-income children forget. The causes can be debated, but evidence for the phenomenon’s existence is indisputable.
The solution is year-round school. When there are no significant gaps in the learning cycle, there should be less of a significant gap in achievement. There will always be some difference (as Tim says, the bell curve is always with us), but this nagging “campaign to close the achievement gap” should disappear.
In Ann Arbor there was a study released about the achievement gap between blacks and whites, with a rallying cry to Close the Gap by 2000. When I looked at the data sets as published, I noticed that students of Asian descent scored significantly higher than blacks, latinos, or whites. My question at that time was, “Hey, why don’t we find out what the Asians are doing right and have everybody do that?” Needless to say, my queries went unanswered. (I guess public education never heard of Best Practice analysis.)
Of course the simple answer is ‘cultural differences’. But since schools are not equipped to deal with home culture and everyone is shouting at them to Do Something, they chose to treat the problem like a nail.
There are significant failings in the education system we now have, some of them systemic, and some really beyond the scope of schools. But at least year-round school would be a step forward in addressing the problem.