Waiting for SupermanMelanie Tannenbaum, Ph.D.SOC 463/663Spring 2015

The Stupidity Epidemic Joel Best, 2011

– The Stupidity Epidemic, p. 2

If we’re dumb, it must be because schools aren’t doing their job teaching us what we need to know.

❖ The Stupidity Epidemic: Nostalgic claims that during “better times” in the past, teachers really taught and students really learned, the current generation is stupid, and our country is dumber than ever.

❖ “There was a time when a teacher did not hesitate to demand personal, unaided effort and research on the part of her pupils, but now the attitude is: ‘Will you please listen to what I am about to tell you and I will make it as interesting as possible?’ The mental nourishment we spoon-feed our children is not only minced but peptized so that their brains digest it without effort and without benefit and the result is the anemic intelligence of the average American schoolchild.” - Written in 1900

– The Stupidity Epidemic, p. 7

For more than a century and a half — or about as long as Americans have been requiring children to attend schools — people have been warning that

those schools are not nearly good enough.

Evidence?❖ Overall Educational Attainment

❖ Rising.

❖ Test Scores

❖ When applicable, staying the same or improving.

❖ Popular Knowledge

❖ Staying the same or (slightly) improving.

❖ IQ Scores

❖ Rising.

Plausibility Reasons

Convenience Reasons

Knowledge-Ignorance Paradox

Expectations evolve

Range of abilities increasing

Scapegoat for broader social problems

Fear is persuasive, especially for our kids

Why are we concerned?

Better Ways of Thinking

❖ Specify what (exactly) to improve

❖ Understand education within broader social context

❖ Understand that social change is necessarily gradual

❖ Understand competing visions of the same values

How Schools Really Matter Downey & Gibbs, 2010

– How Schools Really Matter

There’s an old joke about a man on a street corner, down on his hands and knees searching for his lost wallet.

A passerby stops to help, asking, “So you lost it right around here?”

“Oh no,” the man replies, “I lost the wallet several blocks ago. I’m just looking on this street corner because this is

where the lighting is good.”

❖ Schools with higher-income students have higher standardized test score averages

❖ Schools with higher-income students have more money to spend on textbooks, teacher salaries, recreational facilities, extracurriculars…

❖ Schools with higher-income students have fewer children with behavioral problems and more involved parents.

Why We Blame Schools

❖ Children spend only 1/4 of their waking hours in school each year

❖ The typical 18-year-old American has spent only 13% of his/her waking hours in school

❖ With children spending so much of their time outside of school, it’s important to think about the entire context.

Why We’re Misguided

The “Piano Lesson” Example

Let’s say we want to compare the effectiveness of two piano teachers who will both teach 10 weeks of piano classes for

beginners.

The teachers are randomly assigned to different locations:

Place A and Place B.

The “Piano Lesson” Example

❖ Higher average SES

❖ Most students have pianos at home

❖ Most have tried playing before

❖ Easy for students to practice on their pianos at home every day

❖ Lower average SES

❖ No students have pianos at home

❖ None have ever tried playing

❖ Hard for students to find a place to practice between lessons.

Place A Place B

The “Piano Lesson” Example

Is there really any fair way to compare the teachers from

Place A and Place B at the end of the 10-week session and use the students’ performances as a judgment of how good (or bad)

they are as teachers?

❖ Children begin school at very different skill levels

❖ Some home environments complement what happens at school better (parents help with homework, talk with teachers, reinforce lessons, attend to medical needs…)

Complicating Factors

❖ Massive analysis of American schools

❖ 4,000 schools, 645,000+ American school children

❖ School characteristics weakly related to academic skills

❖ Parents’ SES was the strongest predictor of school skills

1966 Coleman Report

❖ Evaluated students in both the fall and the spring for three consecutive years.

❖ High- and Low-SES students gained academic skills at about the same rate during the academic year; gaps in skills developed during the summers.

Schools were not the primary reason

for group-level inequalities

Heyns, 1978

❖ Compare the rate of improvement when not in school with the rate of improvement when in school.

❖ Calculate difference between (a) 1st grade learning rate and (b) learning rate during summer before 1st grade.

Not all schools deemed as “failing” under traditional criteria were really failing.

The “Impact” View

❖ Would modifying the school year to get rid of the giant “summer break” gap make a difference?

❖ Probably not, if more vacation days throughout the year.

Overall exposure is more important than distribution.

It would help more to have kids in school for more of the year than to keep the number of days but spread them out .

Combatting Summer Setback?

❖ Children attending summer school gain fewer academic skills than expected.

❖ BUT…

❖ Programs could be lower quality

❖ The kinds of students attending summer school would likely be those suffering “summer setback”

❖ It could be that “staying the same” could actually be better than the alternative (getting worse).

Does Summer School Help?

❖ What can be done to change the effects of low-SES on education? Would teaching parents how to foster learning at home make any difference?

❖ Do year-round schools encourage more equality in education? Would the benefits to learning outweigh the strain of sudden implementation of a no or reduced summer break school year?

❖ Is there any point in trying to improve student's environments outside of school, or should the focus be on increasing how much schools influence students?

❖ Since we know early intervention programs work but the funding is hard to find, what if we test smaller interventions? Would it work if we offered free stipends for educational TV programs, educational apps, etc.?

❖ Other than elusive, vague “equality,” how else might we improve student learning outcomes during the summer gaps?

Downey Discussion Questions

❖ Given the statistics, why is the misperception that we’re “getting dumber” so widespread? Why are these facts not common knowledge?

❖ How much learning is enough? Should we be satisfied when we fill we have learned what we need to be successful in our chosen career?

❖ What sorts of evidence do critics point to when they argue that Americans education is failing?

❖ Why is it that so many of us turn to blame shifting instead of problem solving?

Best Discussion Questions

Debate!

Schools Really Matter

Waiting For Superman

Schools Don’t Matter

Downey & Gibbs, 2010Best, 2011