Do kids of gays do well in school?

In a recent parsing of census data to look at kids held back a year in school, the answer is yes, if you control for parental education. Having straight parents didn't help compared to gay parents, but what did help was

• having parents, foster or real, not a group home, 
• there being two parents, and 
• the parents being married to each other. 

The number that struck me in this article was that Those who were awaiting adoption or placement in a foster home were held back about 34 percent of the time, compared with 7% of kids of straight married couples. That's 5 times higher. Some of it maybe cortisol secreted during the stress that brought them to foster care, but for whatever reasons, we're really failing our foster kids.

And it's another argument for gay marriage. As though I needed another one.

Two rules of life

I was reading this story headed "Moms Who Don't Breastfeed More Likely to Develop Type 2 Diabetes," and it said pretty much what the headline promised. It does it by reducing mom's belly fat. That got me thinking about other cases where an event changes a little thing with  unexpected results, such as that selecting for tame foxes makes their coat variegated, their tail curly, and their vocalization a bark, by  reducing the generation of adrenaline, and an increase in water temperature is killing some frogs, because it's now just warm enough for some fungus to grow.

And that got me to thinking about the two fundamental insights I have had, and that I have formulated into my two rules of life:

• Rule 1: Everything is more complicated than you think it is. One little thing here affects a big or little thing over there in a way you don't expect. Sometimes it's a good thing; an unexpected effect of legalizing abortion was a moderate influence on the reduction in the crime rate years later, when the unwanted babies would have been prime crime age. Sometimes it's a bad thing; political strife in Congo forces an army to live largely on bushmeat, and chimps and gorillas edge closer to extinction.
• Rule 2: People vary. This is the same as saying people are more complicated than you think they are. Growing up in the same family, brother David becomes a social worker, and brother Ted becomes the Unabomber. Two kids in an abusive household; one becomes an abusive parent, and the other doesn't. Or one kid gets out of the neighborhood, and another doesn't. Or two rich kids, or two anything. People vary along so many dimensions, and our genetics and especially our epigenetics vary in how much cortisol is released, and how one reacts to the cortisol, or oxytocin, or seratonin, or dopamine, or any hormone or neurotransmitter. We can say statistically that, say, experiencing certain things as a child is associated with hitting or not hitting your kids, but we can't say in any individual case, this will cause that, and we know that in some cases it won't; we just don't know which ones.

The policy implication of this is that one size does not fit all. Helping some kids probably means hurting others, and policy making is balancing the helps and hurts.

• If you change the kindergarten age in order to make sure all the kids in the class are old enough for the curriculum, then some kids who were ready younger will have to spend an extra year in the minors. 
• If you teach pretty much only math and reading in 4th grade, the smart kids will be held back. If you don't teach pretty much only math and reading, some kids will not learn to read well enough to follow the class work and will be lost to formal education.
• Kids do better if they have smarter kids in the room, so separating the really smart kids into a single class is good for the one class and bad for everybody else. 
• Any expensive special program, however justified, takes money away from whatever the money would have been spent on. If it is categorical money, then that just means the decision how to divvy up the money was made at a higher level of government.

More on measuring teachers in LA

I've been reading the LA Times articles on measuring teachers, and I wrote about  it briefly. I've also written about another way to measure quality in teachers.

The problem is the thing you're measuring. If short-sighted superintendents or boards of education base salaries or advancement on test scores -- or, put another way, if teachers know that how much money they make depends on teaching kids to do well on a test -- more teachers than we would like will teach nothing that will not be on the test, and a few will cheat.

So how should you evaluate progress in kids? And progress at what? As I said in the post linked above, this system is limited to regular cognitive progress, thinking and learning stuff. Art, music, athletics, leadership, socialization, writing poetry or fiction-- None of these is captured in the test the State of California uses to measure elementary school kids. Measuring any of them is possible, but probably not in a system that can be reduced to numbers. "Your brush strokes are 10% better than last year, but your imagery is 5% more derivative."

Another problem is that the value added system, as I wrote before, "assumes that the student’s life is steady, that the only difference between this year and the last three is the teacher. If a kid’s score was down last year because his brother was shot, then another brother will be shot this year, and the next. If his dad wasn’t in jail two years ago, he won’t be this year. Sometimes that’s true."

I guess the answer here is that if you look at scores of kids for every teacher, every teacher will average the same number of kids with brothers who got shot.

Prediction: In sum, we have a good tool to measure one aspect of kids' progress. It is cheap and easy to use and to understand. Every other part of measuring progress is difficult and would be very expensive. Therefore, school districts will inevitably slide toward using it as the sole measure, to the detriment of kids and teachers.

Some school districts will use the opportunity for bad teachers to learn from good ones. Others will use it as a way to prune the payroll when they have to make budget cuts.

And I think our only hope is to have the test reflect at least all the cognitive things we want kids to learn.

Measuring teachers

Sunday's LA Times had another big article on Sunday, telling which 5th grade teachers in the LA Unified School District are good and bad, with names and pictures of a couple of the best and worst.

The Times got LAUSD to give them 7 years of math and English test scores and gave them to a moonlighting researcher from the Rand Corporation, who applied a statistical approach called value-added analysis.

They looked at test scores as percentiles, to control for home-life issues. If a kid scored int he 30th percentile because his mom is single, poor, and uneducated, so he got to kindergarten knowing half as many words as the other kids, he's probably going to score in the 30th percentile next year, too, unless he has a particularly good or particularly bad teacher.

The Times found that in some teachers' classrooms in the same school (which controls for neighborhood and local events), kids consistently raised their percentiles, and in others, kids consistently lowered them. Kids got better or worse compared with the other kids. The difference is attributed to teacher quality.

This has good and bad aspects to it. I think the methodology is nicely done. It's similar to an idea I had, but much simpler and cheaper. I've written before why and  how I thought we should measure teachers. And we already knew from a twin study and other research that some teachers are better than others at teaching reading.

This analysis I think accurately tells which teachers are good at having their kids score well on California's standardized 5th grade tests. To the extent that scoring well on those tests measures the quality of a kid's education, the analysis is valid to measure teachers. The Times' experts said they thought it should account for  a fraction of the measurement. (I forget what fraction they said, and the newspaper is all the way in the living room, and I can't find it in the online version. If I find it, I'll insert it, delete this sentence, and pretend I knew it all along.)

But you know that the cheap, easy, incomplete measure will become the sole standard in practice. And teachers will have even more incentive to teach to the test.

One thing I wonder about. Perry Preschool's educational advantage was all in girls. Boys showed improvement in not receiving social services as an adult, not being arrested, and owning their own home at age 27, but income and educational advantages were pretty much all for girls. So I wonder how the LA Times analysis would look if you separated girls from boys. And if you looked at boys arrest records after 10 years.

And so to work, with images of failing teachers and lost kids in my head.

$320,000 kindergarten teachers

A reader sent me a link to a New York Times article on the incremental monetary effect of good kindergarten teachers. It reports on some a report at a conference saying that, while the test score improvement provided by high-quality early education fades by middle school, test scores are not well associated with good adult outcomes, such as going to a good college, making more money, being married to a high wage-earner, or having a retirement plan, but the quality of one's kindergarten teacher is related to them.

The dataset was a study from the 1980s where they had randomly assigned 12,000 kids to kindergarten classes. The kids are now about 30, and how much they learned in kindergarten (a proxy for teacher quality) was related to how much they earned at age 27. And kids with some teachers learned more than kids with other teachers.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

They say that 1 standard deviation in improvement in teacher quality raises students' annual earnings by 2.9%, so the incremental lifetime increase in earnings for a classroom of 20 kids from moving out a 25th percentile teacher and moving in a 75th percentile teacher is $320,000.

They looked at all the other things, like teacher experience and class size, and they had minor effects, but this one stood out.

If this scales with good teachers later on, quality of P-5 education could have an enormous effect on lifetime income. It is the educational version of the miracle of compound interest. You have more to build on for longer.

It's not an argument for paying kindergarten teachers $320,000 a year, but it is an argument for starting them at $50 or $60,000 and the good ones working up to $100,000 (or some numbers; I don't actually know how much we should pay them, just more).

And it is an argument for figuring out which teachers are good and which are not and either teaching them to be good or helping them find another career.

Middle school start time

It's been known for some time that, starting about puberty, kids need to sleep more and later. Well, now it's been partly quantified. In this study, 200 high school kids changed class start time from 8:00 to 8:30. Lots of good stuff followed:

• Kids averaged 45 more minutes of sleep a night
• Many fewer kids got less than 7 hours a night, and many more got over 8.
• Significantly fewer kids said they went to the Health Center for fatigue-related problems
• Kids felt less depressed
• Students and faculty "overwhelmingly" voted to keep the later start time.

The one thing missing from here is either of the two things that will make a school board change: money and test scores. If they could show that starting later saved money by using less lighting, or air conditioning, or heating, or maybe buses use less fuel when traffic is a little lighter, school boards would listen. If the kids who started later got higher scores on standardized tests, school boards would jump on it. But that piece has not, as far as I know, been shown. It seems likely to be true, but I don't think anybody has actually made the link.

So why are school boards unlikely to change just because it's good for kids? After all, don't we always say we always do what's best for kids? Yes, we do say that. No, it's not true.

I spent a lot of time on a lot of committees when my issue flowed through public elementary and middle schools, especially elementary. I skipped the committee part of high school. But I spent a great deal of time with k-8 teachers and administration, some of which involved whether this one middle school could and should start an hour later. It could not by itself, because within a district, schedules are entirely run by the bus dispatcher. Any change you ask for, they say you can't do it because of this or that bus scheduling issue. The entire district could not, because teachers like to get out early. They like leaving in mid-afternoon, so they can run errands and do stuff they wouldn't have time to do if they left the campus at 5. They dance around it, but that's the fundamental reason schools don't start at 9.

On the general idea of "we do what's best for the kids," I was on a committee to decide how to spend Prop 63 mental health money. The local county mental health chieftan decided before we started that the child care piece would be parent education. The child care people went in hoping for mentors to go to sites to help providers learn to deal with kids with disabilities or challenging behaviors, as they're euphemistically called. No, that part was already decided, and we could see what we could salvage. 

Okay, we decide we're going to go into centers, identify kids with challenging behaviors, and do a dual training for parents and providers. Cool. Which centers? The people on the committee who worked for the mental health chieftan suggested Head Start. We said, no, Head Start already has a pretty good referral system. The ones who need it are Title 22 centers. They said, no, it's easier to get one MOU with Head Start than MOUs with all those little Title 22 centers. It's administratively easer.

Then, when the plan was announced, the lady in charge talked about how at every stage we were just concerned about what was best for the children of our county. I wanted shout, "You lie! You were concerned about administrative convenience."

Another good thing about play

This study looked at how kids negotiate with each other during play.

The study looked at children aged two and three. In their negotiations they demonstrated invention, creativity, enthusiasm, industry, involvement, activity and problem-solving strategies.

The results show that children's negotiations form part of their play, and that these negotiations have a clear purpose: to agree on both how they can be together in their play and the content of their play. ...

"A pedagogical consequence of the results is that adults shouldn't intervene too early in children's negotiations," says Alvestad. "Just give the children time!"

This is the sort of thing where I say, yeah, I knew that; I've seen it. But it's clearer when someone points it out.

The meaning for child care is that kids should have lots of unstructured play where they can do this sort of thing. Three kids putting blocks together are learning a more useful skill than three kids separately doing worksheets.

The little teacher who could

These researchers say preschoolers do better at language if their teachers are confident in their own abilities, and it helps if  the classroom emphasizes emotional support for the kids.

I suspect the principle in the first part is true of every human occupation. On average, people who think they can do something well are likely to do that thing better than people who do not think they can do it well. What I'm not so sure about is the extent to which the confidence causes the difference. It could be that they are confident because they are better. The only problem with this is the research showing that people who are not good at their jobs think they are.

But it does point out again that the single biggest school-related factor in a kid's development is the quality of the teacher. Parents, peers, and genes are important, too, but of those things that take place at preschool, the quality of the teacher-child interaction is the most important. ECERS, teacher education, staffing levels, and all those other easily measured things clutter up the view of that fact. What matters most is what happens between the teacher and the kid.

And I sometimes think this is one of those things you either get or you don't, that after two weeks on-the-job training in a high-quality center, you could separate the keepers from those whose gift is not early childhood education by watching them with the kids. But I also think an AA in ECE is enough to teach 4-year-olds, so what do I know?

Are some friends better for your grades than others?

This feels a little odd, but maybe not. A researcher has found that high school GPA is related to the proportion of friends a kid has who go to the same school. But the comments by the researcher are odd.

This is partially because in-school friends are more likely to be achievement-oriented and share and support school-related activities, including studying, because they are all in the same environment.

I'd say the out-side school friends are of two kinds, those in different schools and those not in any school. For the first group, why would going to the same school rather than a different school make a kid more or less achievement oriented? Wouldn't each school then be more achievement oriented than the other?

For friends who are still in school compared with those who are not in any school, whether because they're older or because they have dropped out, you would expect this result because of engagement.

But I think this guy did his research in gifted programs. I know some schools where you'd have to search to find achievement oriented kids.

So I don't doubt that the researcher got his data right and so on, but I also doubt that it tells a parent anything about how to raise their kid.

Stimulative home and school are equally necessary

An NICHD longitudinal study of 1300 kids looked at the kids' homes, preschool or child care, first grade classroom, and math and reading scores through the fifth grade. When they controlled for socioeconomic status, they found that the kids that did best academically in school were the ones that had stimulative home life, stimulative preschool, and stimulative first grade. Having all three was important. That's not much of a surprise. And since preschool and first grade are sequential, what it means is that home and high-quality school are equally necessary.

It's good to know we can have an effect, but only high-quality child care has this effect. Much of Title 22 does not. So we policy geeks need to work on getting more professional development, including for family child care.

I don't care if they have a BA. I don't care if they have an AA. But I would really like to see all family providers get the content of a community college class in child growth and development spread over a series of workshops held in the evenings or weekends, and I'd like to see all Title 22 center teachers have 12 units of ECE. I think that would make me content with the overall workforce.

ESL not working well in California

Nearly 60% of English-language learners in California's high schools have failed to become proficient in English despite more than six years of a U.S. education, according to a study released Thursday.
In a survey of 40 school districts, the study found that the majority of long-term English-language learners are U.S. natives who prefer English and are orally bilingual. But they develop major deficits in reading and writing, fail to achieve the academic English needed for educational success and disproportionately drop out of high school.

So it's not immigrants. It's native-born children of immigrants, who come from Spanish-speaking homes and themselves speak English just fine but can't read or write it well.

My guess is it is because we teach them to read in English, when it is their second language, even if they speak it well enough. There is research I don't have at hand right how showing that little kids with non-English home languages learn to read English better if they learn to read first in their native language and then transfer that skill to their second language rather than trying to develop the skill in the second language, where they have to translate as they learn to read.

I wonder how well these kids read and write in Spanish.

When talking with kids, it's how as much as how much

It turns out that talking to 3- to 6-year olds as full-fledged conversation partners helps the kids develop what the researchers call "academic language."

Children at a primary school need a certain type of language proficiency: academic language. Academic language is not an independent, new language, but is the language that teachers use and expect from the pupils. It enables children to understand instructions and to demonstrate their knowledge in an efficient manner. Academic language is characterised by difficult, abstract words and complex sentence structures. The language often contains a lot of clauses and conjunctions and due to the methods of argument and analysis it has a scientific appearance.

Henrichs demonstrated that children are already confronted with academic language in the nursery school. They already hear a lot academic language from the teacher and are often expected to use academic language themselves. The extent to which academic language is used at home was found to differ strongly between families. An essential aspect is how parents approach their children during conversations. If children are given the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to conversations, they often use characteristics of academic language proficiency naturally. In addition to this, the knowledge of academic language depends on the extent to which parents read to their children, tell them stories and hold conversations about interesting subjects. 

I guess this study tells us something about why kids in high-quality preschool are better prepared for kindergarten than other kids and why kids from higher socio-economic status (to a point) know more words when they get to preschool than poorer kids. The second factor is more important than the first.

I guess it's not surprising that a mother with more education will talk to her kids differently than a mother with less, and the topics of conversation will be different. I wonder if there is a difference in amount of conversation as well.

But for child care providers, the message is to do what they've been doing, converse with the kids.

Kindergarten gifted programs

A couple of months ago, I talked about what I saw as the pernicious practice of IQ tests for entrance into private kindergartens in New York. Well, it's not just private schools. Public kindergartens in New York have gifte programs where they take only kids at the 97th (or in some cases, the 99th) percentile on the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment. There are now tutors to prepare preschoolers for public kindergarten entrance exams.

This is just crazy. Besides the fact that, because "school readiness" by kindergarten age is so closely tied to language development, which is closely tied to socio-economic status, so it's going to be almost all white and Asian kids, the worst thing is that these tests are not reliable at that age. A kids who tests as gifted at age 5 may or may not do that in third grade. In preschool the environmental effects on intelligence test scores are greater than in third grade, and the heritabilty is lower. So determining school entrance by test scores at age 5 is silly, and it's harmful to those who are slower to develop and so get put on a lower track.

I wonder what a gifted kindergarten program would look like. My guess is Title 5 child care, with a group size of 20, plus reading and sitting still longer. No, in the public schools, it's probably more academic.
 
To be clear, I am not against gifted programs. I personally benefited from them, based on test scores, as did my partner and my offspring. I like smart kids being put with other smart kids. I just don't think it is useful to start it in kindergarten.
 
And to compare this with my previous post this morning, we are making kindergarten too hard for some kids, so we are raising the entrance age in case some kids aren't ready for first-grade curriculum, and we are starting gifted programs for kids who are highly ready.

Kindergarten entrance age

I've talked about this before. SB 1381 is the latest attempt to raise the entrance age cut-off date for kindergarten from December 2 to September 1. The reasoning is that some kids are not ready for kindergarten curriculum at 4 years 9 months, so no kids should be allowed to enter at that age. I'm agin it* for two reasons:

1) Kids vary. In particular, they develop at different rates. Some are ready for kindergarten at 4 years 9 months and some are not. Our system should allow the ones who are ready to begin kindergarten to do so and not force those who are not ready.

There are two obvious ways to decide who can and cannot enter at 4.75 years. We can give everyone the DRDP or some other developmental evaluation. Or we can let the parents decide. I choose letting the parents decide. In fact, I'd allow a much wider window (maybe 4 years to 5.75 years) and let the parents decide. They already decide whether a kid enters public schools in kindergarten or first grade.

2) The trend in elementary school has been to push curriculum down. The current kindergarten curriculum is what used to be taught in first grade. So we make kindergarten harder, and then we say it's too hard for kids that age, so we have to make kindergarteners older. We push the 6-year-old curriculum down to 5-year-olds and then won't let them take it because they're too young. This is crazy.

The answer is to push first grade curriculum back up to first grade, and let kindergarten be kindergarten. Otherwise we are just keeping the same system but renaming the parts. We rename first grade kindergarten, and we rename kindergarten preschool.

*Should I disclose that I entered kindergarten at 4 years 6 months and two weeks, when the cut-off was March 1, and have been glad all my life I did so? My mom is not. She thinks I was too young, but she had to go to work, and kindergarten was free child care.

Good teachers help; bad teachers hinder

A study comparing monozygotic and dizygotic twins shows that good teachers can make a kid read to her entire potential, so the heritability of reading ability in their classrooms is 100%.* Bad teachers, on the other hand, can keep kids from reaching their potential, leaving a smaller heritability factor.

*For an explanation of this idea, see this post.

Teachers don't really like creative kids

I found this at Andrew Sullivan's blog. Some researchers did a two-part study. First they took a bunch of personality characteristics associated by psychologists with creativity, things like individualism, risk-seeking, accepting authority or not, and asked some teachers to rate their most and least favorite kids based on those characteristics. They liked creative kids less and uncreative kids more. No surprise. I remember junior high.

But teachers claim they like working with creative kids. So they looked at the characteristics that teachers associated with creativity, and they were not the same. They like kids who match their idea of creative.

Early in my senior year in high school, our 150-year-old civics teacher was talking about civil dissent and asked how it would be appropriate to say bad things about or to the government. The correct answer was apparently to petition the government for redress of grievances. I piped up instead with going to Hyde Park, the spot in London where crazy people stand on milk crates and harangue passersby. She thought I meant Hyde Park, New York, where her hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, lived and is buried in the rose garden. My senior year went downhill from there.

Was the race to the top fixed?

Calitics has an interesting post about Race to the Top.

The reason states like California didn't win is because they were never intended to win. The purpose of Race to the Top wasn't to award money, but to force policy changes. Now that the policy changes have been approved, there's no reason for Arne Duncan to want to get money to those states. He got what he wanted.

Sigh. I don't have any idea if this is true, but it's sad that it's so plausible. Maybe we can repeal our changes, and make the feds give us something if they want us to follow their rules.

Who gets the most out of college?

The increase in economic value of a BA over a high school diploma is greatest among those least likely to go to college.

Frankly this is obvious. It's like preschool. The incremental educational value of a good preschool is greater for poorer kids than richer kids, because richer kids get many of the elements of preschool at home, such as talking and reading to them.

In this case, those kids who fit the profile of people going to go to college, but who don't go, still have all the advantages of the profile: having parents and friends who went to college, attending a good high school, and so on. Some kids put in applications at fast food and retail. Others ask their dad's friend for a job.

How to teach 3 year olds to write

The software behind this blog tells me how people get to it, including what search terms lead them to me. There are two consistent patterns. If I write a post on food porn or flower porn, I get a lot of people who, based on the rest of their search words, aren't the least interested in flowers or meyer lemons.

The second real common search is for some variation on "teaching 3-year-olds to write," which Google points to me because some time ago, I wrote a post on a plan in Britain to start teaching 3-year-old boys to write.

At the time, I said that was a stupid idea, but I've had second thoughts. Now I think you can teach a 3-year-old boy to write, and best way  is to read to him every night before bed until he's 5 or 6 years old.

Kindergarten entrance age

I've just been reading Tim Fitzharris's CDPI Information Bulletin.

The LAO is also recommending a change in the age of Kindergarten entrance, beginning in the 2011-12 school year. Research suggests children who are older when they start kindergarten tend to perform better on standardized tests. Some research suggests this change also may lead to other positive student outcomes, including less chance of grade retention and higher earnings as an adult.

Of course, they do better on standardized tests. They're a year older! This is like the parents in Texas who keep their kids back in Kindergarten so they will be a year older in middle school and high school, so they can excel in football, except the LAO wants to keep all the kids of a certain age back so they will be older and do better when they take a certain type of test.

Kids vary. Some are completely ready for kindergarten at 4, and some are barely ready by 6. Myself, I'd like to see the age-date limit of December 2 pushed back to the first of March, as it was when I started kindergarten. Not all kids of that age are ready, maybe not even most, but some are, and the parents (in conjunction with the preschool teacher, and even with the kindergarten teacher, if need be) should be able to tell if a kid born between September 1 and March 1 is ready to enter kindergarten.

 And it is mildly annoying that standardized tests are the measure of success in schools. I know we have to use generated data, and there are times I defend them, but I still don't like the way they are used in schools. And don't even get me started about AP classes.