K12 education has long been an EconTalk theme, and in this episode, host Russ Roberts welcomed author, teacher, ad education reformer Robert Pondiscio. Pondiscio shared his experience both as a second-career inner city teacher and a year spent in one of the (in)famous Success Academy charter schools in New York City.
Pondiscio introduces his work by saying he occupies a strange place in the education policy sphere, focusing on what kids do all day rather than the structure and institutions of schooling. He rejects the common assumption we only need to measure outcomes. So what should our elementary schools focus on? And how- and who- should we prepare to teach in them? We’re sure this conversation arouses strong feelings in a lot of you, and we’d love to hear about it! Use the prompts below, or simply tell us, as Roberts asks Pondiscio at the end of the conversation, about any of your own priors that may have changed after listening.
1- Throughout the conversation, the theme of how schools of education do a disservice to the teachers in training continues to emerge. What is Pondiscio’s biggest criticism of what is and is not taught in pre-service teacher programs? What’s your reaction to Pondiscio’s avowed love for a prescribed curriculum?
2- Much of the conversation was about Pondiscio’s experience at Success Academy, and leaves us with lots of questions. What are some of the things that make the chain so controversial? Success Academy students share many of the same advantages of suburban kids, according to both Roberts and Pondiscio. Do you agree? Is this fair? What about the downstream effects on public schools, which Pondiscio readily acknowledges?
3- Pondiscio likens teaching reading as using either a mirror or a window. What does he mean when he says, “The problem is if you’re not leading kids to the stuff they don’t know about, you’re kind of forcing mediocrity upon them. You’re limiting their literacy,”and what does it suggest about what literacy really means?
4- What makes the parent experience at Success Academies so unique? How does this compare to your own experience? Why DON’T we have more expectations of parents with regard to elementary education generally?
5- What are the challenges with scalability for schools such as Success Academies? Should schools focus on getting the best teachers or making teaching accessible to average people? (Consider the McDonald’s analogy offered by Roberts in the conversation.)
READER COMMENTS
Cole Bennett
May 24 2020 at 9:23am
I really enjoyed this episode. I work at a university, and any time I mention school choice to a colleague, the usual response I get is, “But [private/charter schools or vouchers] would take funding away from public schools, so I don’t support them.” This implies that THE problem of public schools is “not enough money.” The real problem is that parents are not able to effectively shut down public schools or fire teachers. Imagine paying taxes to operate a school in the most expensive way possible only to never hold it accountable.
SaveyourSelf
May 24 2020 at 3:30pm
I’ve done some homework with regards to this podcast. I started reading How the other Half Learns. I’ve made it to chapter 10. A few details I picked out so far:
Success Academy has a culture that requires staff to evidence a “maniacal level of noticing and addressing”. They have unapologetically high expectations. They cultivate parent involvement in enforcing and rewarding behavior expectations, getting kids to school on time, getting kids appropriately dressed, and reading 45 minutes daily outside of school. Most of the classrooms have classroom assistants. The rooms without classroom assistants seem to perform less well in my reading of this book so far. The Success Academy schools have this fascinating feature to their model where administrative staff are part of the teaching team. Administrators will enter classrooms randomly throughout the day. The interruptions are used as opportunities to reward targeted behaviors set by the school in advance or to express disappointment when students (and teachers) were caught not demonstrating those behaviors.
I’d like to expand a little on each of these.
1. “A maniacal level of noticing and addressing” seems consistent to me with what I have read about modern behavioral therapy. Behavioral therapy is based on the observation that behaviors rewarded within 3 seconds of their occurrence are more likely to recur in the future. Behaviors punished within 3 seconds of their occurrence are less likely to occur again in the future. Noticing behaviors and praising or discouraging them in real time as a regular part of every lesson with administrators popping in randomly but regularly to do more of the same strikes me as good design.
2. Unapologetically high expectations were always part of my household growing up. I remember my teachers in elementary school were always aghast when I told them what was expected of me at home. Literally their jaws would drop, for example, when I told them I would get grounded for a week if I scored a B on quiz or how I was held back for a year because I got a C on a report card. I didn’t mind the high expectations I faced as a child. In fact, I was always mystified that everyone else was held to such low standards. Now I earn a fortune and command leadership positions in every organization with which I interact. The same can be said of all my siblings. Reading Robert Pondiscio’s book, it seems people, pundits, and government actors, on hearing about the Success Academy’s high expectations, have a similar reactions to my old teachers. ‘“The founders of the new paternalistic schools believe that disorder, not violence or poverty per say, is the fatal undoing of urban schools in poor neighborhoods,” Whitman wrote, describing schools that devote inordinate attention to ensuring students tuck in their shirts, track teachers with their eyes, and maintain a clean and orderly environment.” (Ch 4 [quoting “Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner City Schools and the New Paternalism”])
3. Intentional cultivation of parent involvement seems more of the same as unapologetically high expectations. Because sitting still is hard and reading is hard, sitting still and reading is doubly difficult. By getting parents actively involved in supporting and rewarding kids reading, the Success Academy is setting up a situation where every adult in the child’s life is on the same page with regards to reading. Reading is important. It matters. It is worth doing. No question, the kids will believe reading is important under such conditions. And with regards to reading: “Urban charter school provide additional annual growth in math and reading compared to their public school peers…A 2007 Credo report estimated that students in CMO [Charter Management Organizations] run schools receive the equivalent of 97 additional days of school in math over traditional district run schools and an extra 46 days of instruction in reading. Although the sample size was quite small, Success Academy students gain the equivalent of 228 days in math and 120 days in reading instruction compared with their peers in traditional public schools. By far the most substantial gains among New York City Charter schools.” (chapter 4)
4. Most of the classrooms mentioned in the book had assistants. This is a no brainer. Even when my wife and I only had one child, we quickly realized that we had to double team her to get her to respect our wishes. And she was one! It was so consistent among all my three kids that I now think it is a universal truth: Healthy, effective discipline requires ganging up on kids. Good classroom discipline likely requires a second adult imho. Additionally, a second adult–like having more than one referee in a sporting event–allows for more opportunities for noticing and responding to target behaviors with praise or punishment. It’s a win-win-win proposition.
5. Administrators intentionally entering classrooms during lessons took me a while to process. My first instinct was that their appearance would distract students and stress out teachers. And it does. But then I remembered reading in Behave by Robert Sapolsky that dopamine—the brain’s reward chemical—is enhanced when rewards are applied randomly. Sapolsky reported that significantly more dopamine is released in studies where reward is provided only 50% of the time a lever is pressed compared to controls where the reward is provided every time the lever is pressed (chapter 8). This is because, apparently, anticipation of rewards creates a rise in dopamine levels when the rewards are not guaranteed. So I am thinking the random introduction of potential rewards throughout the day by administrators may actually be more effective at influencing behavior than adding a third adult to each room. The application of rewards to behaviors are less consistent that way, but less might be more in some cases of behavior management.
Amy Willis
May 25 2020 at 7:59am
These are super observations. I’ll add just a couple from my own experience teaching 10 years in a public high school.
I love the point about high expectations. I always told people (I was not terribly popular with many colleagues) that students will rise to the level of expectations you hold. Cue Adam Smith here… people desire to be praiseworthy, not just praised. Presumably, there is some recognition when expectations are met. I also believe the same holds when you keep expectations low. That’s the bar to which most kids will rise. (Having expectations at home like SaveyourSelf is antidote to this with some kids. The amount of child development that has been ‘outsourced’ to schools is a topic for another time… But I’ll leave it by saying for better or worse it has become a deeply ingrained part of our culture. Again, why DON’T we have higher expectations of parents, as I wrote above.)
With regard to administrator’s entering a classroom un-announced, that never bothered me. What did bother me were evaluations written by individuals who literally did not understand the substance I was teaching. (To be fair, if the person had a background in say, physics, I would not understand the substance of what they were teaching, either.)
Paula C
May 27 2020 at 11:26am
I wanted to add comments about Q1: the idea of a prescribed curriculum is interesting, if it’s at a school or district or group level. If you go any higher, how would we ever allow innovation or improvements? In order to get a standard curriculum at a regional, state or god forbid, federal level, you’d get into committees, bureaucracy and politics. You’d cement something in that would be mediocre. I look at how long common core took and how badly it rolled out (at least locally).
You can go online and find teacher curriculum for any topic, aligned to any standard. Teachers do this now.
I wonder if there are good examples of a ‘standardized curriculum’ in other industries that’s flexible enough to adapt as society adapts.
SaveyourSelf
May 28 2020 at 3:55pm
I finished the book. It was good all the way through. There were quite a few interesting ideas in addition to what I wrote about previously.
Robert Pondiscio made an argument in the beginning and again at the end of the book that a pre-set curriculum improves teaching. He didn’t have any evidence for the claim outside of an appeal to logic and a noted correlation that Success Academy Schools use a pre-set curriculum and they are very successful in spite of enormous teacher turnover. His argument sounds highly plausible. My one gripe with that argument was the absence of what has already been beautifully addressed by Paula C in a comment above.
Ch 17: “Rowe has persistently called out education reform for its unwillingness to confront and address the role that family structure and stability play in school. And, more pointedly, the reluctance to tell low income children what we have known since the Coleman report. That personal choices related to education, employment, and family formation impact life outcomes and prospects for upward mobility.”
Ch 17. “When a low income person graduates from high school, finds full-time employment, gets married, and has children in that order, the chance of remaining in poverty as an adult drops to a mere 2%. There is no public policy that comes even close to those results.”
Ch 17. “A compelling argument can be made that its [Success Academy] practices are either a proxy for family stability or a significant challenge to keep up with in its absence.”
Ch 22. “No authoritative study exists and the New York City Charter School Center keeps no data on the question, but it is widely assumed among the City’s charter school operators that much of the demand for seats is driven by the perception that charter schools are safer and more orderly than district schools. It’s a mixed blessing. When I visited one well regarded network of classical charter schools not far from Bronx 1, the founder said that one of his goals was to attract parents who explicitly choose his schools for their unique curriculum, but safety and proximity remain the primary driver of his parents’ choice.”
Success academy uses suspension sometimes for disorderly contact, especially violent disorderly conduct. This strikes me as interesting because suspended kids can’t learn when they are not in school. And not being in school is not a punishment, it is vacation! But, then again, it is not possible for anyone else to learn when there is violence ongoing. So it’s not fair to other students to not suspend. On the plus side, using suspension as a tool reveals that school, at least for violent kids, is optional. This is interesting from a libertarian standpoint because for a libertarian, school, in a perfect world, is voluntary for everyone. Also central to the Libertarian ethos is the prominent role of justice as the sole legitimate restriction on individual freedom. The conclusion seems to suggest that in spite of its incredibly strict and structured behavior culture at Success Academy, it is a fundamentally sound Libertarian organization which is chiefly run, oddly enough, by a Democrat.
Ch25 “We must also recognize that aspiration is a poor substitute for rational policy making and ask whether we have accidently conspired to undermine the very outcomes to which we aspire. There is no moral reason for government at any level to prevent the children of engaged and invested Americans of any race, ethnic group, or income level from reaping the full rewards of their talents and ambitions, nor interfering with parents best efforts to do what they deem best for their children. Yet the last several decades of education policy have set equity and excellence at war with each other.”
Ch25 “…If this end [raising academic achievement] is disproportionately influenced by whom students go to school with and their parents attitudes, beliefs, and commitment to education, then it is a thorny issue for education policy makers to solve for.” Because, he says later in the same chapter, “Success Academy is fundamentally a well-run shadow school district serving a small but significant percentage of New York City’s 1.1 mil school children. Its muscular adult culture and intense focus on test scores might be generally replicable, but it would be impossible to make those features the default setting for every American school or to get similar results even if we did so. You could not compel the level of parental support or compliance that Success demands and mostly appears to receive from its parents and which contributes significantly to its school culture and outcomes.”
In retrospect, I loved this book and learned a great deal from it. One of the understated lessons in the book is the importance of choice, freedom, and competition in good outcomes in education though he does not use those words often. Also he touches on the impossibility of predicting who will succeed in any given system ahead of time, making “effective policy” an oxymoron. And, even more subtly, the utility and limitations of “scalability” in general. [Scaling to large necessarily reduces choice, freedom, and competition which leads to undesirable outcomes].
One thing I did not learn from reading the whole book, which was my main impetus in reading it in the first place, is why the turnover for teachers at Success Academy was so high in spite of the fact that the model works as promised. My best guess after reading the book is the hours are long, the stress is high, and the rewards too far off—which is a rather nice summary of the incentive problem school kids face in general. The kids, according to the book, are constantly incentivized with coins, play money, raffle tickets, prizes, stickers, applause, public recognition, and any other gimmick the administrators can think of to motivate kids. The teachers, though, don’t have anything like that. Perhaps they need something like that. Something like profit sharing perhaps.
Alice Temnick
Jun 2 2020 at 10:46am
To your ending point (above), I am also wondering how teacher buy-in could be cultivated. High teacher turnover impacts the work environment, often feeding into a low morale. Are teachers fearful of being dismissed, or do they leave for work-overload/pay circumstances? Is Exit-interview data shared in the book? (I’ve not read it). This podcast brings up so many complicated and pertinent topics and is deeply relevant to the transitional digital school experience as well.
Al McCabe
Jun 6 2020 at 1:37pm
The parents matter. More accurately, the parents’ attitude toward education matters. The parents don’t have to have a high school education — they just need to value education strongly and instill that into their kids. There was no clearer example than the Vietnam Boat People — completely broke foreigners with no modern education come to the USA just to save their lives. Their kids had no advantages and every disadvantage. And a huge number of them because doctors and PhDs because their parents valued education so much.
The parents main competition for their kids’ priorities are the kids’ peers. If the peers don’t do their homework, then it will affect the kids a great deal. Likewise, if the peers come from similar families that value education, it reinforces and magnifies the parents’ priorities. Almost everybody knows this, yet we do so much pretending that it isn’t true.
Comments are closed.