John Merrow Writes a Commentary

I'm a big John Merrow guy. Everyone should be; the videos that he puts out for the NewsHour on PBS are a great resource and an important voice in the chorus.

In the December 3rd issue of Education Week John gets the back page commentary to talk about some of the things he's witnessed in the New Orleans Recovery District. He talks fondly about a classroom he observed where the 1st graders were reading fluently from Nate the Great; he contrasts that with another classroom in the city where the kids droned through what little reading they could do. It's a nice story, and you can watch the video the article is based off of here.

The bridge too far that he goes, though, is towards the end:

Our national goal—all children reading by the end of 3rd grade—is a ludicrously low floor that may have become a ceiling. Children don’t learn to walk to get somewhere more efficiently. So too with reading: Children want to learn to read so they can make sense of the world around them. Good teachers capitalize on that intrinsic motivation.

This is an assertion that sounds great on the surface, but doesn't always stand up to the reality of the classroom.

This is my 8th year of teaching first grade. In my time I've bent over backwards to try to get some of the kids to read, but it doesn't always happen despite the best efforts of every adult in that child's life. The trick is that for a good percentage of them, by the time they got to 3rd grade they were doing....OK. I've never had a struggling first grader become an advanced reader by 3rd or 4th grade, but I have had bad readers become average readers, and sometimes that's a laudable accomplishment in and of itself.

I reject the idea that Merrow puts forth, then, of 3rd grade as a floor. It's a realistic goal with some legitimacy behind it that acknowledges the different rates that kids develop at, and it's something that I think teachers can legitimately get behind. Where Merrow is going above--"If we'd only build on their motivation, they'd all be reading like the one class I saw!"--is a dead-end path.

Read more here, if any.

John Merrow on Gay Teachers

This podcast from the always excellent John Merrow is an incredibly interesting look into the past when a teacher could be fired for being homosexual. It's from a radio program that Merrow did in 1976; they've reposted it in light of the recent dust-up over Proposition 8 in California. The recent release of the Harvey Milk bio-pic, and the new light that it's brought to Proposition 6, also make the podcast a timely piece.

This is the sort of education history that I can't get enough of. I'd love to see more of these old reports re-issued as podcasts in the future; it's a great way to preserve the voice.

Read more here, if any.

John Merrow and Jim Webb on the GI Bill

If you use ITunes, subscribing to the John Merrow Education Podcast (see here) is a great way to spend your time. I've praised their work before, and the newest posting where they interview Senator Jim Webb on what the GI Bill means for our veterans is a brilliant program.

Man, I love podcasts. I wish Terry Bergeson and the EFF would pick up the pace.

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John Merrow is teh Awesome

Over at YouTube the folks from Learning Matters have been posting videos from John Merrow, the PBS education reporter. Currently there for your viewing pleasure is a 19-part series on school reform in Philadelphia that is absolutely gripping viewing for anyone involved in education.

You can get to the videos directly from the subpage off of YouTube, here.

Read more here, if any.

John Merrow on the Value Added Model

I think pretty highly of John Merrow; the podcasts that he puts out are always well worth listening to, and the segments that he does for PBS are quality education journalism. In the June 13th edition of Education Week he has an interesting commentary on using growth models to measure the progress that schools and the students in them make; a part that resonated with me was this:

...to have a valid growth model, schools need what families have: a common yardstick. But schools also need a generally agreed-upon (and nourishing) curriculum. So if we want to develop a valid “growth model,” we first need to debate what belongs in the curriculum and figure out what sort of performance measures make sense.

It’s perhaps the most important question since the rise of NCLB: should the testing drive the curriculum, or should the curriculum drive the testing? The limitations and strengths are nearly identical with either approach:

*If we base our tests off of the curriculum, we can accurately measure how well they learned what was taught. This allows for discussions of teacher effectiveness, because they’re the ones who taught the material. The weakness in this approach is that the curriculum might not cover everything that is believed essential for that grade level, which creates gaps in learning that can have a terrible cumulative effect if allowed to grow over time.

*If we base our curriculum off of our tests, we can help to ensure that kids are being shown what has been deemed important, because what’s tested is what’s taught. If we believe that’s what tested is important, this is a good thing. This allows for discussions of school effectiveness, because the yardstick is the same for everyone statewide and we can see which buildings “get it” and which don’t. The weakness in this approach is the overwhelming number of learning requirements, more than can realistically be taught in most grades, which perhaps leads to a narrower curriculum.

This is why I’d like to see more school around the state using the MAP assessment from NWEA, and school-wide scores being made more readily available for study. One of the biggest weaknesses I see in the WASL is that a 1, 2, 3, 4 scale doesn’t tell you nearly enough about where you’re at as a school. The MAP breaks the scores out into the basic areas of reading and math and can be used to measure their growth from the beginning of the year to the end, which is also much more useful than the WASL, which comes back 5 months later.

Growth models: I like ‘em!

Read more here, if any.

More John Merrow Podcast Love

Week in and week out Merrow delivers the goods. This time there's a great pair of podcasts talking about effective teaching in the community college ranks, an accompaniment to his recent 1-hour special Discounted Dreams which has been running on stations locally.

The podcasts are called A Right To Fail?. They're each about 12 minutes long, and both very thoughtful. Highest recommendations!

Read more here, if any.