ed policy Archives

April 5, 2018

Pass or Fail: The Importance of Early Intervention Programs

In this multi-part series, I provide a dissection of the phenomenon of retention and social promotion. Also, I describe the many different methods that would improve student instruction in classrooms and eliminate the need for retention and social promotion if combined effectively.

While reading this series, periodically ask yourself this question: Why are educators, parents and the American public complicit in a practice that does demonstrable harm to children and the competitive future of the country?

If a child is behind developmentally, do you feel our current early intervention programs do enough to get them “up to speed” prior to entering school?

The importance of early intervention cannot be emphasized enough. Young minds are constantly learning new behavioral, emotional, physical and social skills. When the ability to function appropriately in one or more areas is hindered, challenges in other areas often follow. How the child interacts with their environment will have a direct impact on their academic success. Early intervention seeks to address developmental delays and disabilities before a child begins school, as a step toward advanced preparedness.

School Supports

In some cases, delays and disabilities are not identified until a child is of school age. In this case, the primary objectives for intervention in a school-based setting would be twofold. The child would require assistance to address their diagnosed delay. They would also need to maintain an appropriate standard of academic performance and help keeping up with peers. Any knowledge that had been lost in the time between the developmental issue becoming apparent, and the point at which it was actually addressed, should be focused on with appropriate interventions.

Due to the natural logistics of the system, there is often at least a sixty-day window before adequate data can be collected about the needs of a student. Sufficient information is needed for school teams to create Individualized Education Plans. Data collection is the general purpose of the 504 document that serves as a monitor for a child’s academic progress and general developmental growth.

Early Childhood Intervention

Early intervention should be considered together with the system’s objectives. From birth to pre-kindergarten-aged children, those objectives are to develop IFSPs or IEPs that target the development of positive socio-emotional skills, the ability to apply appropriate behaviors to meet needs, and the development of skills related to knowledge and skills acquisition.

For children birth to pre-K, knowledge and skills in the general areas of early language development and communication are emphasized. Language and communication skills serve as a foundation for more advanced developmental learning. Other proficiencies targeted for children in this age range include problem-solving skills, basic number concepts, and basic reasoning skills.

Intervention Goals

In child-centered terms, the goal of early intervention is to ensure that children entering school have the necessary skills to succeed academically: to meet the demands of the classroom learning experience, as well as the specific demands related to knowledge and skills acquisition. Students are often retained because they have failed to master some level of knowledge or certain skills, especially with regard to basic literacy. If early intervention helps to reduce the number of students who are retained, its use is justified. Early intervention is a crucial tool for the development of literacy and communication skills. Intervention also focuses on development of appropriate socio-emotional and behavioral skills, all of which have an important, if indirect, impact upon educational experience.

Indeed, early intervention does what the No Child Left Behind Act cannot do: it does what is necessary so that no child is left behind. Whereas NCLB demands that schools demonstrate that students are learning, early intervention serves to transfer skills to students to ensure that they can learn, identifying those students who have not developed particular skills, or who are likely to need assistance in developing specific skills.

Early intervention also removes ideas of student accountability, at least insofar as it is applied to students before they enter school, when learning is very much a natural process, undertaken in the natural environment, most notably, in the home. From the perspective of early intervention, the fact that certain children do not develop certain skills or acquire certain knowledge is not necessarily the fault of the child or their environment. It may be that fundamental developmental processes and various foundational skills must be developed before a higher level of learning is possible.

Do you feel our current early intervention programs are truly effective at preparing children with developmental delays or disabilities for elementary school life? What changes to intervention programing would you make to illicit more successful outcomes?

November 28, 2016

Will guns on campus lead to grade inflation?

Jessica Smartt Gullion, Texas Woman’s University

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published on April 27, 2015

Texas college professors may soon face a dilemma between upholding professional ethics and protecting their lives.

On Thursday, December 10, a task force at the University of Texas at Austin recommended restricting guns in residence halls, at sporting events and in certain laboratories, but allowed them in classrooms.

The 19-member task force was set up following a “Campus Carry” law passed by the state in Spring 2015. The law, which will come into effect on August 1, 2016, will allow people with handgun licenses to carry concealed firearms on college campuses.

With the recommendation to allow firearms in classrooms, a question coming up for many academics is whether they would be forced to give As to undeserving students, just so they can avoid being shot.

This is not as far fetched as it sounds. In my five years as a college professor, I have had experience with a number of emotionally distressed students who resort to intimidation when they receive a lesser grade than what they feel they deserve.

Threats on campus

Here is an example of one such threatening experience: one evening in a graduate course, after I handed back students’ papers, a young woman stood up and pointed at me. “This is unacceptable!” she screamed as her body shook in rage.

She moved toward the front of the class waving her paper in my face and screamed again, “unacceptable!” After a heated exchange, she left the room, and stood outside the door sobbing.

All this was over receiving a B on a completely low-stakes assignment.

What followed was even more startling. The following week, the student brought along a muscle-bound man to class. He watched me through the doorway window for the entire three hours of the class, with his arms folded across his chest.

And if this wasn’t enough, the young woman’s classmates avoided me on campus because, they said, they were afraid of getting caught in the crossfire should she decide to shoot me.

After that, every time she turned in a paper I cringed and prayed that it was good so that I wouldn’t have to give her anything less than an A.

Guns on campus could create an environment of fear.
Gun image via www.shutterstock.com

Learning from this experience, now I give papers back only at the end of the class or just “forget” to bring them with me.

I was lucky that the student didn’t have a gun in my classroom. Other professors have not been so lucky.

In 2014 a student at Purdue shot his instructor in front of a classroom of students. In another incident in 2009, a student at Northern Virginia Community College tried to shoot his math professor on campus. And, in 2000, a graduate student at the University of Arkansas shot his English professor.

In each of these states, carrying handguns on campus was illegal at the time of the shooting, although a bill was introduced in Arkansas earlier this year to allow students to carry guns.

Grade inflation

Despite these and other shootings, a new trend has emerged across the US that supports guns on college campuses.

Nine states allow firearms onto college campuses and 11 states are now considering similar legislation.

We know that some students will carry guns whether it is legal or not. One study found that close to five percent of undergraduates had a gun on campus and that almost two percent had been threatened with a firearm while at school.

Allowing students to carry weapons to class strips off a layer of safety. Students are often emotional and can be volatile when it comes to their GPAs.

Who would want to give a student a low grade and then get shot for it?

Many majors are highly competitive and require certain GPAs for admission. Students on scholarships and other forms of financial aid must maintain high grades to keep their funding. It’s no surprise that some might students resort to any means necessary to keep up their GPAs.

An international student once cried in my office and begged me to change his F to an A, as without it, his country would no longer pay for him to be in the US. I didn’t. He harassed me by posting threatening messages on Facebook.

So, the question is, will we soon see a new sort of grade inflation, with students earning a 4.0 GPA with their firepower rather than brain power? And if so, what sort of future citizenry will we be building on our campuses?

Jessica Smartt Gullion, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Texas Woman’s University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

September 27, 2016

How community schools can beat summer learning loss for low-income students

Laura Bronstein, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is a part of The Conversation’s series on summer learning loss. For other articles in this series, read here and here.

My children spent summers reading Harry Potter, playing chess, swimming and hiking the Adirondack high peaks in upstate New York.

As a single parent with a career as a social worker and academic, I wasn’t rich. But I had enough to make sure that my children had what they needed to excel in education and enrichment outside of school.

While middle-class homes can often provide for summer enrichment activities, studies show a different reality for children from low-income families. These children and youth often lose months of reading and math skills over the summer, widening the achievement gap between the classes.

What can schools do to address this learning loss?

Summer slide

The learning loss for youth in low-income communities adds up dramatically over the years. By ninth grade, about two-thirds of the academic achievement gap between disadvantaged youth and their more advantaged peers can be explained by how they spend their elementary school summers.

What makes this of concern is that a majority of U.S. students in public schools are now from low-income families. A 2013 study found that for the first time in U.S. history, a majority (51 percent) of public school students in the United States were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch, indicating that they fell below the government’s low-income cutoff.

The majority of these students lack quality summer activities.

A majority of kids do not have quality summer activities. Children image via www.shutterstock.com

Furthermore, these issues do not exist in isolation. Children from low-income communities who often experience summer learning loss also often face multiple related challenges that impact their ability to attend school or focus when they’re there. These challenges include insufficient access to health care, poor nutrition, community violence and lack of adult supervision, among others.

Partnerships between schools and communities can help students’ academic success. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law in December 2015, addresses the achievement gap between children from low- and middle-income families.

Title IV of the ESSA under the program, “Community Supports for Success,” calls for a range of partnerships between schools and communities so students (especially those from low-income families) can gain access to services they need for academic achievement (e.g., physical and mental health care, adequate nutrition, supervision and access to healthy activities beyond school hours).

How can schools implement these partnerships?

Earlier this year, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a US$175 million plan that demonstrates a way to enable such partnerships. Cuomo’s plan aims to convert schools with the lowest test scores and graduation rates across the state into “community schools.”

Providing comprehensive services

So, what are community schools? And how do they help with student learning?

Community schools pursue a unique learning model whereby they supplement classroom-based instruction with out-of-school (before school, after school and summer) learning. They provide support to students whose families do not have access to academic support beyond the classroom. Their support is not limited to the school term, but continues all through the year.

My research on community schools across the U.S.and the world shows that they look different in each community as they develop in response to each school’s specific needs.

The idea behind this learning model goes back to the late 19th century. The first set of school-linked services (precursors to community schools) can be traced back to the 1890s. Back then, they were developed in response to the massive changes being brought about as a result of immigration and industrialization.

As teachers struggled with new sets of challenges in their classrooms, this model provided additional support. For example, in 1894, doctors visited Boston schools on a daily basis – a practice that helped bring down rates of communicable diseases.

The amount of school-linked services and their gold standard – community schools in the U.S. – have ebbed and flowed over the years. In the last few decades, there has been a marked increase in the number of community schools.

Many individual schools, several counties and an array of cities have incorporated the community school model to reduce the achievement gap between students from low- and middle-income homes. These include Multnomah County (Portland, Oregon), Broome County (upstate New York), Cincinnati, Chicago, Hartford, Tulsa and more recently, New York City, among others.

What’s the impact?

The community school model has shown numerous successes.

For example, Oyler School in Cincinnati had fewer than 20 percent of its students reaching 10th grade in the late 1990s. After implementing a community school model in 2010, 82 percent of students graduated high school.

Many of these schools provide extra outreach efforts to involve families that may be hard to reach in the education of their children – a critical component of the partnership. A recent study of the impact of family engagement in elementary and secondary schools found positive correlations between engaged families and improved academic achievement.

Oyler School in Cincinnati. Sean Biehle, CC BY-SA

School-based health centers are another frequent component of community schools. Studies indicate when there are school-based health centers, lost class time as a result of sickness reduces by as much as three times.

Summer programs are often part of community schools. These programs provide enriched summer activities for students, such as music, dance, crafts, athletics and academics. This enables teachers in high-poverty neighborhoods to begin teaching new content at the start of the school year, without losing months backtracking over content forgotten from the previous year.

Why we need community schools

The community school model has been so successful that universities too are making this a focus of college students’ civic engagement efforts.

In 1985, the University of Pennsylvania took the lead in developing a university-assisted community school approach. College students work with the community schools to integrate knowledge gained in their UPenn classrooms.

An example is the Moelis Access Science program where UPenn faculty and students provide STEM (science, technology, math and engineering) professional development to teachers serving students in West Philadelphia neighorhoods, which are marked by extreme poverty, violence and low educational attainment.

Over 20 universities are now part of the network of university-assisted community schools including Binghamton University (SUNY), Columbia University and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

In an increasingly diverse society facing more complex social problems, the traditional model where education occurs completely within the school building, provided solely by teachers from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and from September to June, needs reviewing.

That calendar was designed long ago to leave youth free to work in their families’ fields in the summer. Since farming is no longer a major role for the vast majority of students, time outside the classroom can either enhance academic year learning or diminish it.

Do community schools that offer year-round programming and supplemental services cost money? Of course they do. But they have also been shown to save health care costs. They can also save funds that are now being spent on residential treatment facilities for youth, prison and remediation.

With too many youth dropping out of school, the jobs and workforce necessary to compete in a global economy are at risk. Community schools make sense in a country that is committed to opportunities for educational success for any and all students, irrespective of their family income or their zip code.

Laura Bronstein, Dean of the College of Community and Public Affairs Professor, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.