Showing posts with label Brian Lehrer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brian Lehrer. Show all posts

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Debate on high-stakes testing and opting out on today's Brian Lehrer Show

Check out today's interview with CEC District 6 President Johanna Garcia on the Brian Lehrer Show. Johanna did a great job of explaining why students should opt out of these unreliable exams and the negative impact of high-stakes testing on our schools and the quality of education in a debate with Richard Buery, former Deputy Mayor under de Blasio and now chief of public affairs at KIPP charter schools.  Please listen to the entire segment -- but for a quick recap, my tweets are below.  Rarely do real-life parents or education advocates get on this show, let's hope that Brian will do this more often in the future.




Image result for johanna garcia cec nyc  Richard Buery   






















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Sunday, October 13, 2013

Teachers: do you agree with Malcolm Gladwell that class sizes below 25 are TOO small?



On WNYC radio, Brian Lehrer is asking teachers to call in on Monday morning, and comment on Malcolm Gladwell's claim that classes shouldn't be too small  -- such as 25 students and below, since individual students are MORE likely to be able to disrupt the class and struggling students feel isolated at the bottom of the class.
You can tweet @brianlehrer, post on the comments page when the segment is on the air, or call 212-433-WNYC. 
 
The podcast/interview from last week with Gladwell is here; at 27 minutes in, he explains why he thinks classes can be too small:
“I got this idea from teachers, I spoke to countless teachers...I found it hard to find, particularly middle and high schools teachers, who thought that it was a good idea to have a class in the mid-teens….When a class gets too small it hurts the poorest students.”

I have never heard any teacher say this myself and don't know any research to back it up.  In any case, Lehrer doesn’t want to hear from me, but from teachers to express their views. 
Actually the research says the opposite: the larger the class, the more disruptions tend to occur. 
And there are MANY studies showing that poor, disadvantaged, and struggling students benefit the most from small classes, because they are able get more attention from their teachers, tend to be more engaged in a smaller class, and CANNOT hide at the back of the class. 
Though there may be class sizes so small that they inhibit debate and discussion, there is no research I know of that reveals what the cut point may be.  I was quoted in the WSJ last year that I don’t think schools should be organized with class sizes of one, because the social interaction and debate among students is important, and they do indeed learn from their peers. 
Yet elite private high schools such as Exeter have class sizes of eight to twelve, and Harvard limits its Freshman writing classes to ten students.  I would conjecture that average students, and especially poor and immigrant students like most of those who attend NYC public schools, could benefit from classes just as small.   
Here is an excerpt from the New Statesman review of Gladwell’s latest book, called David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, in which he makes the same claims:
One early story Gladwell tells is about classroom sizes. A large class is usually thought to be a “disadvantage” (the abstract equivalent of a “giant”) for pupils, and smaller class sizes are assumed to be better. Surveying studies, Gladwell observes that though really big classes are a problem, there is a happy medium, and smaller classes don’t necessarily lead to better outcomes. This, he explains, is because teachers don’t usually adjust their teaching style to smaller class sizes; instead, they just work less. So, the “disadvantage” of moderately big classes isn’t one after all. 
A bizarre coda to this story shows the weaselly potential of Gladwell’s method. Up the road from the state school where he has been talking to a nice teacher, there is a private school, which boasts that its average class size is 12. Oh dear, thinks Gladwell. “Why does a school like [this] do something that so plainly makes its students worse off?” The odd thing is that he simply doesn’t know whether the students there are worse off, because he doesn’t know whether the staff teach in a way that suits their small classes. If they do, then the students won’t be worse off at all. So does Gladwell talk to anyone at the school to find out? He does not. Perhaps he fears ruining the story.
Here is what one teacher wrote, after Gladwell made similar claims that class size didn't matter at a conference in Toronto:

Advice to Mr. Gladwell: stick to what you know. Teaching K-12 is not like speaking to a university lecture hall full of grown-ups. Teachers negotiate diverse levels of academic ability, facility in English, behavioural tendencies, and home-environment influences in classes of children from ages 4-18. In his book, Outliers, Mr. Gladwell states it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert in any field. I have my 10,000 hours in teaching K-12; he has about 10,000 to go.


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Sunday, December 11, 2011

A Brooklyn parent reports on the WNYC/Schoolbook forum on "school choice"


See also NY Times/Schoolbook and GothamSchools on this forum. Here is the account from a Brooklyn parent who wishes to remain anonymous:
Last night I attended the WNYC/Schoolbook forum on “school choice” which turned out to be mostly about promoting Schoolbook--no surprise. Jodi Rudoren of the Times kicked off the evening by telling us all to go on Schoolbook and add comments on our children's schools. 
The Walcott conversation with Brian Lehrer was about what you'd expect. Some gentle probing, but they filtered out any slightly difficult questions by having the audience submit them on index cards or via Twitter. I didn't hear any Twitter questions answered. An OWS person tried to disrupt things and was hauled away after a while. Walcott just kept hammering away on the world as he sees it, where choice and small schools are all that matter.  A 12-year old who attended summed him up nicely: "He just keeps talking about how hard his job is." 
Walcott left and was followed by the panel discussion, led jointly by Beth Fertig and Brian Lehrer. This was a lot more interesting, and I came away impressed by several of the panelists. Kelvin Diamond, the Dist. 13 CEC member, struck me as a decent guy, very committed to building schools and community. His daughter attends Philippa Schuyler, a good middle school in Brooklyn, and he's been in the thick of the high school search. He spoke about how frustrating it was for parents to try to get sense out of the DOE, either about their children's situation or in a more activist role, i.e. through the CEC.
 The 8th grade teacher, Laura Klein, and the principal, Rashid Davis, both of whom have been blogging on Schoolbook, were terrific, actually, and seem like professionals who are very aware of their students and what they can and can't do for them. They both mentioned the fact that by the time kids get to high school, they've had ten years in the system already, and there are limits on what they can achieve. The charter school operator, Miriam Raccah of Achievement First, formerly of Girls Prep, said very little. The parent, Carla Trujillo, is a Mexican immigrant who spoke via a translator. She spoke about the difficulties of negotiating the process without knowing English, of the limitations of having one's child translate at school fairs, and so forth. They also ran a video that showed kids who'd been through the process talking about what had happened: honest and engaging teens.
Lots of bloggers and journalists were there, in addition to parents, quiet a few of whom were from the neighborhood.  But not enough to fill the auditorium, which was quite large and I wondered if they'd expected more of a crowd.  [Note from LH: Despite the frequent announcements on WNYC about how this event would help parents navigate the choice process, the event occurred the week after the high school applications were due.]  
They had perhaps a couple of hundred people, a mix of middle-class parents and those who looked as if they might be school employees. Walcott came in with Tish James, *the neighborhood's* city council rep, who has been dedicated to fighting for local schools. Anyway, I attended mostly because I have a 7th grader, and because it was a few blocks from where I live. It didn't tell us much about the high school process that we did not already know, but it was interesting to see Walcott as the face of mayoral control, with no acknowledgement of what real parents and children face every day.
And we all came away thinking a lot about the difference in choices--and likely outcomes--for our middle-class, high-achieving children and for those young people who have been born with very different opportunities.
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