Month: October 2012

Minority Students and Private Schools

I just finished up at the Summer Changes Everything conference in Pittsburgh, held by the National Summer Learning Association.  I was a skeptic coming in but it was a great experience, and I got some great ideas for staff training, fund raising, and family and alumni involvement in SPMPS.  Also some crazy ideas about starting year-round math circles in kids’ schools.  We’ll see what comes of that.

There was a lot of talk at the conference about Paul Tough’s new book and non-cognitive skills in general.  It’s fun watching these fads go through the ecosystem!

On my reading list for the way home was this article in the New York Times about minority students and their struggles at integrating into private schools.  Despite schools’ best efforts, minority students often feel left out.  Even though schools provide much more than full scholarships by paying for books, clothes, and so forth (so that scholarship status is not obvious), it’s not enough.  Backgrounds are different, stereotypes are strong, skin color is different, and cliques persist.

This is a well-known problem, and my program, the Summer Program in Mathematical Problem Solving, seeks to counteract this by preparing students socially and emotionally for high-performing math environments so that they can integrate more easily and feel less different.  (For example, we teach them games like Set and Ultimate Frisbee, and we give them camp-like experiences such as games, hiking, and a trip to Six Flags.)  The Times’ article just goes to show what a big challenge this is, and I can only hope that our efforts will be successful.

Still, I have to admit that I was shocked at what the article describes.  Thinking back on my own high school experience, it makes sense that high schools are so “hands-off” when it comes to socialization.  But in contrast, at SPMPS and at Canada/USA Mathcamp, the counselors meet regularly and discuss what students seem isolated and how to help them integrate.  They look at cliques that might be forming and consider how they might subtly help those cliques open up to more students.  They find lonely students, befriend them, and introduce them to their peers.  If either of the programs saw race-based or scholarship-based cliques forming, we’d certainly take action to help students integrate.

Perhaps this is the difference between a summer program (where social/emotional growth is an explicit priority) and schools (a more laissez-faire environment).  Perhaps the summer programs have an advantage because they have undergraduate counselors who are role models and friends to the students, so it is easy for them to integrate into social groups and help students mix.  Regardless, I wish that schools considered taking a more proactive role in helping students integrate and meet the full diversity of peers available to them.  I wonder what such a school might look like!

What should we teach young students?

Recently, Paul Tough released a new book about non-cognitive skills (link to a highly-recommended This American Life episode where Tough discusses the book).  Tough emphasizes the importance of things like grit, the ability to deal with setbacks, the ability to postpone gratification (whose importance can be seen in the remarkable Stanford Marshmallow Experiment), curiosity, self-confidence, and so forth.  The book is meant to present a new view of education: that, like KIPP schools, we must focus on teaching kids these essential skills for success.  It also emphasizes that kids generally have to learn these skills quite early.

There was also recently a New York Times story about admissions for the specialized high schools, emphasizing the word gap: that kids with higher socioeconomic status just plain hear a lot more words growing up.  Like any social science experiment, it’s hard to formally establish a causal link, but it’s intuitively clear that a word gap would impact their vocabulary, comprehension, and communication skills from kindergarten on up.

In E.D. Hirsch’s review of Tough’s Book in Education Next, Hirsch emphasizes that Tough has only part of the story.  He says that vocabulary—and also basic information (such as if a student can locate Africa on the map)—is the major determinant of a student’s outcomes.

Everyone agrees that good early education is essential.  Many kids do start kindergarten well behind their peers.  They’re behind in reading and math.  Even in early childhood, there’s an illusory IQ gap (I say “illusory” because it becomes smaller when adopted students from low-income backgrounds are raised in more affluent homes).  Underserved students do worse in school and often act out more.  In the end, they have just an 8% graduation rate from college.  (Compared to the population at large, an also-depressing 33%.)

So what should we teach kids?  Should we teach them non-cognitive skills, or should we focus on building their vocabulary?  Is the bigger challenge that underserved students have few non-cognitive skills, or less basic knowledge?  What are the raw materials that allow students to learn better later?

Tough’s answer is to focus on non-cognitive skills.  The New York Times editorial seems to suggest just the opposite: focus on building vocabulary.  Hirsch would add that we must focus on cultural literacy, which enables communication and further learning.

A better answer, though, is obvious: the “all of the above” strategy.  There’s evidence that all of these kinds of early learning are important, and so we should design early experiences that develop all of them, either through direct work with students or through parent education, like what Geoffrey Canada does with the Harlem Children’s Zone’s Baby College (another great This American Life episode).

I claim, further, that this whole argument is a red herring.  The best way to teach both non-cognitive skills and basic knowledge is to do both at once.  In fact, I’ve never seen a content-less effort to build skills succeed.  You learn to study hard by studying something hard.  You learn to solve hard problems by tackling a real problem—but real problems require serious background knowledge.  In other words, these different skills are not in conflict at all.  They are best taught together, with conscious awareness of all the elements that are being incorporated into a curriculum or program.  You still need a rich environment to impart simple facts that do not come from traditional studying: the location of Africa or a large vocabulary.  But beyond that, deep material learning should be paired with skills building, and any other way is a major failure of education.

A real education requires learning facts and learning skills to learn more facts.  While it is possible to design a class that teaches facts without teaching skills to learn more facts, it’s dumb and it doesn’t work in the long term except for a select few students who pick up the necessary skills.  Cognitive and non-cognitive skills must come together, and by putting them together in a conscious way we will develop the strongest educational experiences for students.