[Documentary] – ABC’s Four Corners’ Revolution in the Classroom

by Prashan Paramanathan on February 17, 2012

 

 The ABC’s Four Corners program lived up to its tagline – ‘Investigative journalism at its best’ – last week with a fantastic, balanced and thoughtful piece on what makes effective schools effective.

‘Revolution in the Classroom’ tells the story of three school successes – two public and one private – and tries to draw out the insights on what have made these success stories such a success.

In a space that’s typically public vs private, the ABC, to their credit, managed to showcase public and private schools in the same show without pitting them against each other or lingering too long on the funding disparities.

Instead, they used the simplest of recipes – just tell the stories and let the audience make up its own mind.

On a personal note, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Mark McConville, one of the heroes of the ABC story, quite a few times and spending time up at his school, Toronto High. What he’s done to transform that school has been truly wonderful and the passion he brings to his team and his community is just infectious. His story is one that needs to be told. And listened to.

‘Revolution in the classroom’ is a must watch piece of journalism. It’s available on the ABC website here.

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[Analysis] – Teach for Australia has twice the retention as traditional pathways

by Prashan Paramanathan on January 22, 2012

Fairfax newspaper, The Age, delivered an absolute panning last week to the new employment-based teacher training pathway, Teach for Australia. In a bizarre twist of editorial position (The Age has previously supported the program) the newspaper narrowed down on one criterion for its F-grade: attrition.

First, a little context:

Teach for Australia is a highly selective 2-year teacher training program composed of:

  • A PostGradDipEd from the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education studied across the 2 years (bye bye holidays) – which normally takes a year full time of study; and
  • 1.6 years of classroom teaching supported by an in-school mentor (another teacher), a training and leadership coach from TFA and a clinical specialist from UMelb

Following the ‘graduation’ of the first 45 TFA Associate teachers, The Age took the position that the program was a failure because not enough of them continued as teachers into their third year. For reference, of the 45:

  • 25 will continue as teachers (56%)
  • 9 will remain in education (20%)
  • 9 will go into another profession (20%)
  • 2 dropped out during the 2 years (4%)

Let’s ignore for a moment that The Age gave no consideration to the quality of those being recruited into TFA (they did acknowledge that other teachers, principals and parents love them) or to the fact that the graduates who go into other professions often create social change in education far beyond the impact they would’ve had in the classroom – The Age didn’t ask the most obvious of questions – is 56% really all that bad for a teacher training program?

The best Australian data that I could find was from an unpublished report for the Victorian Institute of Teaching which is referenced in this Federal Government DEST report  and this OECD report .

So here’s the comparison. For every 100 students who start a teacher training program (eg. BEd, BTeaching):

  • 76 will complete the degree and graduate (76%)
  • Of those, 56 will be available for full time employment (56%)
  • And of those, 37 will be employed as teachers in schools (37%)

And they’ve just started day 1 of their first year of teaching. We’ve still got to add drop-out of teachers in their first 2 years of teaching. University of Sydney’s Robyn Ewing believes that 25-40% of teachers leave in their first 3-5 years, while Monash University’s Philip Riley believes that 50% drop out before year 5 and 25% drop out in their first year.

Even if we took Riley’s 25%, we’re already down to 28 teachers from our initial 100.

That’s a 28% retention rate, quite neatly half of Teach for Australia’s 56%.

Any teacher training program that can double the percentage of high-quality teachers who get into and stay in the classroom gets an A-grade from me.

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[Analysis] – Private School enrollments are growing faster than public schools

by Prashan Paramanathan on January 22, 2012

It won’t come as a surprise to many, but more and more Australian parents are choosing to send their kids to private schools. In 1989, only 28% of children went to private schools in Australia. By 2009 (the most recent data), that percentage has jumped to 35%.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interestingly, the big switch occurs from primary to secondary – only 31% of Australian children go to private primary schools, but as soon as Year 7 hits, 41% of children go to private secondary schools.

So, is this a bad thing? Well, that depends on who you are…

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[Video] – The best education promotion videos

by Prashan Paramanathan on January 6, 2012

Kinetic Typography, while sounding like a liberal use of the English language, I’m told is a real thing.

It’s the name used to describe the style of the wildly successful ‘Girl Effect’ video – which if you haven’t watched, you should.

I came across the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership’s (AITSL) recent go at the style and was quite pleasantly surprised. It’s not often you describe something that a Government’ish body produces as cool - particularly a body in charge of standards – but this video, was well, cool.

Here it is, along with two of my other education favourites by ‘Teach for Australia’ and ‘Waiting for Superman’.

AITSL: Great Teachers are Great Learners

Teach for Australia: Educational disadvantage in Australia

Waiting for Superman: The Future is in our classroom

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[Video] – Fourth graders find the answer to world peace

by Prashan Paramanathan on September 11, 2011

In one of the most wonderful TED talks that I’ve seen, educator John Hunter, finds an amazing way of engaging his fourth graders to solve the problems that our global leaders struggle with:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_UTgoPUTLQ

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[News] – NSW Government starts charging for public preschools

by Prashan Paramanathan on September 7, 2011

Premier Barry O’Farrell’s NSW State Budget had a sting in it not just for 5,000 soon-to-be-redundant public servants but also for parents who send their kids to one of the hundred odd public pre-schools in NSW. They’ll soon be charged fees.

While this would bring them into line with other community and private providers, it’s a bit like creating consistency in the school sector by getting public schools to charge private school fees. Its consistency in the wrong direction.

Respected social researcher, Professor Tony Vinson, has come out in today’s SMH slamming the changes, describing them as ”absolutely terrible”. They disadvantage poor families, the kids of whom benefit the most from preschool.

The changes will eventually cost taxpayers much more in the long term in extra incarceration and welfare costs. That and it won’t actually even save them all that much money in the short term.

All up, a very shortsighted move on the part of the O’Farrell Government.

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[Research] – What is going on in poor schools? An ACER Report to the NSW Department of Education

by Prashan Paramanathan on August 28, 2011

There is no doubt that poor kids are performing worse than rich kids in our schools. The latest PISA data indicated that the average poor 15-year old is 2-3 years behind the average rich one. But what is happening in these poor schools that’s so different to the rich ones?

Well, a recent report by ACER to the NSW Department of Education, looked at student surveys of their teachers – a reliable indicator of teacher quality, according to the MET analysis – and found something very strange going on. The data from the international testing set, PISA, showed that teachers in poorer areas behaved very differently towards their students that teachers in richer areas.

The teachers in the richer areas demonstrated five practices, which if used, could raise a child’s literacy score by over a year. The teaching practices were (taken from here):

  • Giving students the chance to ask questions
  • Asking students to explain the meaning of texts
  • Telling them in advance how their work would be judged
  • Giving them time to think about their answers and
  • Asking questions that challenge them to better understand a text

Less than half of teachers in the bottom quarter of schools followed these practices, whereas over 70% of teachers in the top quarter did (as reported by their students).

There could be several explanations for this, including the obvious one of the low SES teachers focusing on getting their kids to read and behavioural issues in their class, rather than debating meaning and having a discussion around interpretations.

The other possibility that the report alludes to, is who is teaching in these schools. According to the data, 20% of vacancies in hard-to-staff areas are filled by first-year teachers – many of whom, even if they are capable, are likely to be under-supported in these challenging environments.

Source: SMH.com.au

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[Opinion] – What’s the point of school?

by Prashan Paramanathan on June 26, 2011

I had the chance this week to look across the top education non-profits in Australia and ask the question of what they thought the point of school was. It’s by no means a simple question, but instead of stewing in the complexity, a really simple proxy is looking at what they keep track of for students in their programs.

Broadly, these “measures of success” fell into four categories:

  1. Attainment: How far along the school journey you get (eg. Year 12 completion rates, Year 11 transition rates)
  2. Achievement: How well you do in school, normally against some curriculum (eg. NAPLAN scores, Year 12 exam scores, ATAR/UAI/TER scores)
  3. Skills: How well do your transferable skills develop (eg. communication skills, hypothesis testing skills, numerical reasoning skills)
  4. Personal development: A slight catch-all for improvements in things like how engaged you are with schooling (normally measured by attendance rates), your ‘well-being’, your persistence in the face of adversity, your belief in the possibilities for your life, etc.

The rationale for collecting the first two is clear – they’re easier to measure, the Government and funders think they’re important and the labour market values them. But is completing Year 12 really the most important thing for a kid from a disadvantaged background? Or is being able to structure an argument and persist when things go wrong something that will serve them longer term?

In the US recently, wildly successful charter school operator, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), put out a report on how its kids fared once they left the program. KIPP is beyond-belief successful in getting low-income to complete high school and enter university. Despite its kids being overwhelming from low-income families, it posts a stunning 95% high school graduation rate and an 89% university entrance rate.

What happens next though is fascinating.

When KIPP surveyed a cohort of its students who were at least 10 years out of its program, only 33% had completed their bachelors degree. Yes, that far outpaces the nation-wide average for similar students (8%) but what happened to all those kids who entered university? Why were they working so well in the KIPP system but dropping out once they entered university?

Clearly, getting a Year 12 certificate and university degree is important – you can’t argue with the economics. But I suspect – as Wesley Yang argued in a previous post - that only measuring success in the school years based on attainment and achievement sets kids up to succeed magnificently right up until the point where they have to leave the confines of the school gates.

The secret mixture of the other things they need for life are much harder to pin down and measure  (and that’s probably why they’ve become the subject of numerous self-help books). Having said that, those Australian non-profits , in true Australian style, have had a crack.

Are they on the right track? Do you think that’s what schools should be doing? Or is it all just wafty non-profit parlance that gets away from what’s important?

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[Article] – Being Asian in a White world

by Prashan Paramanathan on May 18, 2011

Tiger Mum, Amy Chua, has set just about everyone commentating on the difference (and effects) of “white” parenting vs “Asian” parenting. I originally posted about it back in February here.  But the title for the most thoughtful response I’ve read so far comes from Wesley Yang in the New York Magazine (accessible here).

Yang manages to capture the essence of what I think many Asian-Australians feel (and what Chua alludes to) – that the way they were raised helps them succeed immensely, right up until they graduate college. He explains the top-white heavy, bottom-Asian heavy nature of most American (and arguably Australian) organisations as not the result of overt racism, but an unconscious bias driven from a set of behaviours taught from a very young age (which, by the way, can be broken).

It’s an important set of insights not just for how we design our education system, and what we think of ‘coaching colleges’, but also for the parents who have become a little enchanted by the Tiger Mum. It also, for me, forces the question of why there are so few Asians (and women, for that matter) on the executive and Boards of the organisations around us.

I’d like to say that Yang’s article perfectly captures it all, but he is unfortunately, a little self-indulgent towards the end and confounds sexual success with life/career success.

Despite this, I would strongly recommend it. It’s (very) long but fascinating.

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[Opinion] – The power of holding yourself accountable: the KIPP story

by Prashan Paramanathan on May 14, 2011

If the current education reform movement played a game of buzzword bingo, ‘accountability’ would definitely make the list – I assume alongside ‘teacher effectiveness’ and ‘high stakes testing’. It’s a favorite of anyone who likes to manage or has a corporate background – accountability after all is the supposed logical precursor to performance.

The problem with accountability is that although people think it’s a good idea, when it comes to schools, there’s a whole lot of confusion about just what teachers, principals, the bureaucracy or even government should be held responsible for.

In the 1960s, the US Department of Education commissioned a report on educational equality in the states. It was one of the largest education studies ever, looking at over 150,000 students and is widely known as the ‘Coleman Report’ after its chief author James Coleman.

Coleman found that a student’s background and socioeconomic status were the biggest predictor of a student’s performance (rather than the funding level of the school). And so began the ‘school’ vs ‘student’ effect debate – how much of a student’s performance is determined by the student and how much by the school?

Renowned researcher John Hattie, later added data to this debate claiming that a student’s individual motivation and talent accounts for 50% of a student’s performance and for the real data nuts, the latest international testing results from PISA indicated that in Australia, differences in socioeconomic levels at a student level explain only 6% of the variance in performance but differences at a school-level explain 68%. (As an aside, it’s interesting to note that in Finland, these percentages are only 7% and 23%).

The question this debate keeps coming to is this – if the performance of a school is determined so strongly by who walked through the gates, what should a school be reasonably held accountable for?

I unfortunately don’t have a great answer to this, but do want to share a report that US charter school network KIPP recently released.

For those unfamiliar with KIPP, it was originally started as a middle school program by two former Teach for America grads who wanted to start a program with the express aim of helping disadvantaged kids graduate from college. KIPP has now grown to 99 schools in 21 US states and currently enrolls 27,000 disadvantages students in elementary, middle and high schools.

Although it sounds like many successful charter school models, KIPP has a very unique goal – that their students will not only enter college but also graduate from college.

If KIPP held itself accountable for high school graduation or even college entrance, it would be extraordinary – 95% of its middle school students graduate high school (regardless of where they attended high school) and 87% entered college.

But that’s not the data KIPP headlined in their report.

Instead KIPP published 33% – the percentage of middle school’ers who completed a KIPP middle school more than 10 years ago and have a bachelors degree. Despite this number being well above the 8% average for students with similar backgrounds nationwide, it was well below KIPP’s target of 75%. In its report, KIPP is quite explicit that it has fallen short of its own mark.

Holding yourself accountable for a goal that’s so far into the future with all the other factors that could influence it is commendable. Acknowledging publicly that you failed takes balls.

But what impresses me most about KIPP is neither of these. It’s how they’ve dealt with the failure. Rather than disguise it or explain it away, the body of their report outlines their plans on how they’re going to change their program to get to that 75%. It’s an action plan for the future.

With their willingness to hold themselves so publicly accountable and to make such productivr use of their failure, I suspect they’ll make it. And along with their success, they’ll do one more thing – they’ll force us to question just what schools should be held accountable for.

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