Mind in the Making

It’s Not Just the Teacher—It’s What the Teacher Teaches, Including Life Skills!

July 28, 2010

A front-page story in the New York Times today (July 28) by David Leonhardt is provocatively titled “The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers”. In what is described as an “explosive” new study, Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have shed new light on the importance of quality early childhood teaching. The researchers examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who were part of a Tennessee experiment, Project Star, that took place in the 1980s. In this study, students from similar socio-economic backgrounds were randomly assigned to different kindergarten classes. At the end of the year and into the first, second, and third grades, some classes made more progress than others. These differences were statistically significant, yet like other studies, as the children grew older, the difference began to fade out by junior high school, when assessed by test scores.  

Importantly, the forthcoming study by the economists looked beyond test scores.  The children in the study are now about 30 years old and so other indicators of life success can be used. The economists found that the students who learned more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college, were less likely to become single parents, were more likely to be saving more toward their retirements, and importantly, more likely to be earning more. And therein is the title of the article. As Leonhardt writes, $320,000 is the “present value of the additional money that a full class of students [with a standout teacher] can expect to earn over their careers.”

As Leonhardt makes clear, the economists don’t know exactly what these good teachers did to make the difference. While smaller class size and the composition of the class did make some difference, these factors don’t come close to explaining the results. So what does?
 

Seven Ways to Help Your Children Thrive During Summer

July 27, 2010

The Time magazine cover story (August 2, 2010) declares “The Case Against Summer Vacation” and it gives us as parents one more thing to feel guilty about.  Saying that summer is romanticized, the words on the magazine cover continue: “all that downtime is making our kids fall behind, especially those who can least afford to.”

If you can get past the headlines and read the story by David Von Drehle, it is really quite good. It makes a point that is often lost in the debates about the achievement gap in the U.S. For example, there are studies conducted by Harris Cooper of Duke University revealing that all students lose about a month in math skills during the summer, while low-income students slip as many as three months in reading comprehension compared with middle-income students. Another study conducted at Johns Hopkins finds that while lower-income students and higher-income students make similar progress during the school year, lower-income students tend to fall back during the summer and these differences begin to add up over time. This explains about two-thirds of the achievement gap between more and less advantaged students by the ninth grade.
 

The Promise of Play: A Report from the 2010 Aspen Institute Ideas Festival

July 19, 2010

Sometimes when a word in our language slips out of favor, the marketers among us look for another word to reframe and replace it. There is no doubt that “play” is under appreciated, even misunderstood, especially when it comes to children. So it was significant to me that the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival organizers not only boldly embraced the word play, but added a whole track to its 2010 agenda called “the promise of play.” And even more significantly, the nine sessions in this track were very well-attended, some with standing room only, despite the fact they were competing with sessions at the same time on global health, the next economy, or world affairs.

Some Recent Buzz on Birth to Thrive

July 19, 2010

Parenting blogger, Paul Nyhan, has written a couple of pieces in the past week featuring Ellen Galinsky's blog post on education reform/transformation and a review of Mind in the Making on Birth to Thrive Online. If you haven't read it before, go check it out.

Education: Reform or Transformation? A Report from the 2010 Aspen Institute Ideas Festival

July 13, 2010

If there was a consistent theme reverberating through many of the sessions at the 2010 Aspen Institute Ideas Festival, it’s that the educational system is out of sync with the realities and needs of today and tomorrow. Picture this: while photographs of scenes from the past would look quite old-fashioned, photographs of classrooms from the past and from today look unmistakably the same—desks all in rows, facing the teacher, or what Constance Yowell of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation calls “the sage on stage.” The educational system that emerged in the factory era, New York Times’ David Leonhardt says, does not work today.

The message that our educational system needs fixing is a time-honored one. I have only to think back to the publication of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform by the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983 to recall how this drumbeat has been sounding for years. But in the 27 intervening years since this report was issued, the urgency for change has greatly intensified. For example, whereas the United States was once first in the world in college graduation rates, we are now 14th. What was surprising to me is how many well-known speakers from very diverse fields at the Aspen Institute see the need for educational change as a societal, economic and moral imperative or as Kati Haycock of The Education Trust terms it, “the civil rights movement of our times.