The Harlem Miracle | Hacker News Reader

The Harlem Miracle

nytimes.com

52 pointsrobg33 comments

> The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results... you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results...these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.

That's because a large percent of people (and a HUGE percent of folks who are drawn into the non-profit world) care more about how much they care, and how hard they work, than they do about what they accomplish.

In that world, measuring and comparing two programs against each other are both unacceptable things to do.

There's a reason that "New Math" and "Whole Language Reading" have persisted in the schools for decades, despite their demonstrable failure.

There's a reason that the DARE program is still running decades later, despite the fact that it has no results.

There's a reason that all politicians love Head Start, even though all effects dissipate a few years after the program graduates a child.

There's no profit motive in this world, and there's no mindset of measurement and continuous improvement.

Go read some of Phil Greenspun's posts on how frustrating it is to try to work with non-profits.

They don't want results; they want to build empires, and feel like they are doing something.

"There's a reason that "New Math" and "Whole Language Reading" have persisted in the schools for decades, despite their demonstrable failure."

New Math, at least if you are talking about the version espoused by the 1989 NCTM, is currently considered the best practice. And Alfie Kohn debunks the idea that whole language is a failure in his book "The Schools Our Children Deserve."

Amazon describes the books as "an attack on the back-to-basics movement..."

Publishers Weekly calls him an advocate.

The data showing that Whole Language and New Math are widespread and repeated.

I'll take that over one partisan guy (who is a teacher, and dislikes anyone else telling him to use PROVEN methods that he doesn't enjoy as much) who argues in his screed based on anecdotes.

And I'll take a book I've read over a review of a book by some guy who hasn't read it.

New Math, at least if you are talking about the version espoused by the 1989 NCTM

The preferred term for that would be "reform math," and "new math" is best reserved for the kind of math instruction I had in school in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But, no, Alex, reform math is not universally regarded as best practice. I'm a member of NCTM (by virtue of winning the Mathematical Association of America's Edith May Sliffe award for middle school mathematics coaching) and I am appalled at the approach NCTM takes to curriculum reform. Much better math instruction can be found in Taiwan (I read Chinese, and I own the textbooks), the urban parts of China, Japan (I have seen translated textbooks), and Singapore (I USE the Singapore textbooks to teach my own children, and their approach to coach the children whose performance helped me win my coaching award).

The United States could do better in math by setting aside "reform math," and it could definitely do better in reading by setting aside "whole language" reading instruction. I think the author you cite sincerely believes what he wrote, and I like what he writes about some other subjects, but I think he is sincerely wrong about the overall effect of "whole language" reading instruction and "reform math" math instruction.

Have you read that book? Because his definition of "whole language" reading is different than the one used by most critics.

If the take-away point of his book is that current practice in schools where "whole language" is the label for what is being done is bad practice, then he is helping along education reform, but if the take-away point of his book is that "whole language" (whatever the heck that means) is better than "phonics" (whatever the heck that means), he isn't helping improve reading instruction.

A typical problem in education reform discussion is ambiguous terms for broad, ill-defined movements or programs.

He basically says that the goal of both whole language and phonics is to teach phonics, but whole language teaches phonics differently. That is, if students can figure out what the word is by looking at the picture then they then can learn the sounds of the phonemes that make up this word. Some phonemes still have to be taught by rote, but kids can learn most of them by actually reading. He compares this to phonics, where he says kids memorize sounds on flash cards and then read workbooks filled with sentences like "mat hit the cat." He says that if students start by reading real books then they retain much more of their intrinsic motivation to read, rather than learning to read the way we learn to type.

Further, he says that whole language is not currently used in more than 1% of classrooms, so it's impossible that whole language has caused the decline in reading skills.

if students can figure out what the word is by looking at the picture

Oh gosh, that's terrible. There is a very great response to the whole look at the picture nonsense in the book Education's Smoking Gun by Reginald Damerell.

http://www.amazon.com/Educations-Smoking-Gun-Destroyed-Educa...

There is an illustration of a cat, not so different from this image,

http://spoilurpets.com/images/Thermal%20Cat%20Mat.JPG

and the illustration is labeled in Chinese. I burst out laughing as soon as I saw the illustration, because I can read Chinese, so I knew the punchline. The children are shown the illustration, and asked to guess the meaning of the Chinese characters in the caption. In the illustration that Reginald Damerell commissioned his graduate student from Taiwan to produce, the Chinese characters did not say "the cat is on the mat," but rather "the cat's eyes are open."

One thing that I really like about the book Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach, by an eminent linguist and an equally eminent lexicographer, is that the stories have no illustrations whatsoever. Indeed, the final story in the book, called "The Picture Country," is beautifully evocative and remarkably visual story told entirely in words, which makes the point to children that once they know how to read, they can see more beautiful pictures in their mind than one could find in all the book illustrations in the world. That is genuine reading.

Thanks, grabbed a copy of the first book on Amazon and bookmarked the second.

everyone is motivated by profit. in this case the people running the program are receiving profits in the form of feeling good about themselves. are the intended beneficiaries profiting? I'll take a "no".

Be suspicious of people who claim to have altruistic intentions. Their claims should be examined with 10 times more rigor.

While I'm in no way an expert on this subject, there was a really interesting piece about this on This American Life, which you can listen to for free: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=3... . It's Act One, which is most of that week's show.

I want to ramble about how interesting this is, but it would be best if you just go listen to this. Obviously, it's still early on and while it looks like they've captured lighting in a bottle, extraordinary results demand extraordinary skepticism. However, especially for people with extremely limited resources trying to do big things (e.g. entrepreneurs), I think it's an interesting piece on thinking big.

Anyway, we should all hope this turns out well, and we can look forward to a more educated next generation in the US.

When I click a link and see David Brooks's face, I have the same exact feeling as when I fall for a rick roll.

I've actually read the book the article is based on. This school is essentially a giant test prep factory. All the kids do for 10+ hours a day is learn how to guess correctly on multiple choice tests. Then the entire measure of school performance is how well the kids have done on these tests. The whole program is designed to separate black kids from their parents and communities; the NYT admits as much actually. In Paul Tough's original NYT Magazine article, which the book is based on, the central question posed is:

"Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on?"

(Changing the culture is defined as extending the school day to keep kids away from their parents, and also changing the qualitative school experience. The idea being that poor black kids are qualitatively different than poor white kids, and they need a qualitatively different school system based on rote memorization and frequent testing.)

"Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school."

Yeah I don't really see whats magical about this program, its just really intensive. If you took all the underachievers from other schools and tutored them for 6 hours a day then those school's scores would rise too.

It's sort of like the "epiphany" of clear-build-hold in Iraq. No shit - the secret to progress is focusing on fundamentals and working your ass off? But then again, maybe common sense in bureaucracy is magical.

You sound critical. Is black culture in America a success? The basic approach to reverse a bad culture is to take its saplings and replant them. Academics don't like this for one reason or another, maybe it seems too easy, but hey, crazy thing, reacculturation works.

I also got the feeling from the article that the methods of the school seem to be contrived to please the metrics used to evaluate them. The high amount of rigor seems very Prussian of them, a paradigm is particularly uninterested in teaching kids but instead in disciplining them and making them do well on tests, and more generally in making them comfortable with the future that has been predetermined for them.

However, I honestly don't see anything bad about transplanting people from a seemingly negative cultural surrounding to one which is more likely to make them have a more successful and fulfilling life, even if it seems hostile to parents and condescending to poor neighborhoods.

In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap.

It's only repeating if those were the same statements. They aren't.

The unasked question is how the black/white achievement gap came about in the first case. It actually started fairly recently, say the late 50s/early 60s. (I'm not saying that black schools had equal resources. I'm saying that black schools did very well with the resources that they had.)

I don't think there was any standardized testing before the 60s.

College Board testing began in 1901, and the first SAT was administered in 1926.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#1901_test

And in 1901 black kids were going to "normal" schools and they achieved the same results as white kids?

Did I say anything about black or white kids?

Not you, but a post further up the tree made the claim that differences in performance between white and black kids only started appearing in the sixties.

Nope. Many black kids were going to black schools, which did not have equal resources. (Not all schools were segregated.)

However, I was writing about results. For economic reasons, black kids couldn't afford to stay in school as long, but while they were there, they did pretty well.

This shouldn't be surprising. The players and teams in Negro Baseball League was every bit as good as those in "the majors" even though they played on very different fields.

Very interesting, but I would be interested in a link from a more objective (less political) source.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/15084297/Are-HighQuality-Schools-E...

More here: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/papers_fryer

I've previously said

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555734

that I admire Hacker News participants who can grapple with factual statements, regardless of who made them. It doesn't really interest me who said something, if what was said might be true and is worth considering. As robg, the original submitter of this thread points out, the submitted article cites the research work of a researcher whose political opinions may be very different from the columnist who wrote the submitted article.

Well, the problem is that you can't take David Brooks' statements of "fact" at face value, as he's been known to provide rather one-sided arguments. I could undoubtedly read the original papers, but my interest isn't that high and I don't necessarily have the right background to appreciate them. What I need is a precis produced by a knowledgeable, relatively unbiased party.

That's not an uncommon situation. The idea that we should all evaluate statements "regardless of who made them" is naive.

my interest isn't that high

That's too bad. I look things up when I am curious about things, which is often.

I am relieved to see that David Brooks has finally gotten off the pro-iraq war bandwagon and is now boosting school programs that teach harlem schoolkids... "how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands."

Sigh. The program actually sounds pretty cool, but I really dislike something about the tone of the article. But yeah, if I was a broke-ass welfare mom in harlem I'd probably try to get my kid sent to this school. It would be a bit like winning the lottery though... hey... why is that?

Neoconservative answer to social injustic: We have this special school that proves we can solve these deep social programs, we just have to get off our butts and do it! Yuppy jobs for all, even black people!

Socialibertarian answer to social injustice: Uh. Are you sure? Why does it keep only working for a tiny minority of the fucked population? Why are things not necessarily getting better? Don't people ultimately have to solve their own problems? And isn't this what you're proposing more of an illusion of that?

If you rely on a team of academics from harvard to boost your solution, your broke ass welfare moms are not... solving... their own problems!