What I Learned while Teaching Secondary Science (Final)

This is the final installment of a series of essays I've written on the top ten things I learned while teaching high school biology and integrated science. It's taken a good amount of research and reflection to get all of these ideas out there into a coherent format, but I'm pretty happy with the way they've turned out. It is also good timing, as I need to catch up on studying for my next adventure into science and higher education.

I've recapped the first 9 items of my top ten list below. Click on their links to bring you to that specific essay for more detail, and if you liked any of these essays please click the Digg badge to the right:


#10) “Weekends were made for teachers” 

#9)“If you fail to plan, you're planning to fail” 

#8) "What it means when someone doesn't follow directions" 

#7) “A student's unique needs can be defined by his English fluency, reasoning ability, and intrinsic motivation” 

#6)“The history and importance of state standards and standardized testing” 

#5)“Science is a method of begetting knowledge / What is Scientific Literacy” 

#4)“Teach For America is making progress toward ending educational inequity” 

#3)“The history and causes of the achievement gap” 

#2)“There are 3 main obstacles to closing the achievement gap”

...and the #1 thing I learned while teaching secondary science:

#1)“The achievement gap can be closed”

There is evidence of instructional strategies in place that are producing real results in real schools. For example, research study upon study detail the successes of many charter schools with a reliance on heightened student/teacher/parent expectations and accountability in bolstering student achievement levels. Improved school choice with the addition of effectively run charter schools may also have a positive effect on eliminating segregation in schools, a long-lived artifact from a recent era of race relations.

The recent NAEP report referenced in an earlier post gave some examples of national successes in closing the Black-White achievement gap.

Other research highlights the power of effective instruction in making gains in closing achievement gaps (Cite and Cite). Good teachers matter and do have a measurable impact on increasing student achievement.

The real question, then, is not if these disparities can be fixed, but when we will see ultimate success toward this aim. Pinpointing a date is difficult, but it seems we are continually moving in the right direction, with increasing national focus and federal funding being channeled toward the bottom percentile of schools and a spreading movement of standards and accountability.

Finally, I learned from my classroom experience that all students do enjoy and can attain academic success, but it is a matter of presentation and advocacy for getting those select kids, who have grown comfortable to detention and see failure as inevitable, invested in their education. This is decidedly a difficult endeavor (and I saw my own share of successes and failures in investing kids) but rests entirely in the hands of the teacher, with unyielding patience and unending love, in making this success a realized possibility for all students.

Testing Comments...

The last essay will be up shortly, but before then I wanted to test out the new Blogger comments....

What I Learned while Teaching Secondary Science (Part 9): Obstacles to Closing the Achievement Gap

This is a continuation of my Top Ten List of Things I Learned while Teaching Secondary Science:

#2)“There are 3 main obstacles to closing the achievement gap”

With some history and causes on the table, the next question follows suit: how is it that we still have an achievement gap? Over 40 years have passed since that monumental Coleman Report concluded that our schools were failing many kids, and longer still have we been aware of a deep divide in schools and culture that allows many students to slip through the cracks. If we know some of the causes, surely the next step ought to have been fixing what is broken. This has been a tougher chore than it sounds.

The obstacles encountered in movements aimed at closing achievement gaps between subgroups of students are numerous, but I believe the three that give the most impedance to said goal (and ironically the ones easiest to change) are lowered expectations for students, reluctance to embrace effective research-based strategies, and opposition to school and teacher accountability.

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Lowered expectations for students

In the period of heightened expectations for all students with the somewhat recent introduction of standards as tangible learning goals, it is surprising to hear how expectations continue to factor into the achievement gap. Research shows that self-fulfilling prophecies related to expectations (the “Pygmalion effect”), where a teacher's perceptions of a student's academic prowess impact the future academic success obtained by that student, do occur (cite). When a teacher expects that a student will not succeed, this lowered expectation negatively impacts the quality of time and instruction that teacher will give the student, providing an outlet for teacher biases to affect student achievement. Students understand when little is expected of them, and respond by adapting their work ethic to fit these lesser goals. Low expectations thus cause even lower expectations, and this downward spiral continues.

Lowered expectations can be found on a more systematic level, too. Despite rigorous standards enacted to help ramp up the expectations of curriculum in all schools, there are still educators who do not base their curricula on the standards. That the rigor of curriculum in underperforming schools is lower than in more well-to-do schools is a product of learning deficiencies those students have accumulated from past years, the sentimental excuse is for such practices. Particularly in the later grades, often times students at underperforming schools like these are lacking by a number of years in reading level and math skills, making grade-level instruction nigh impossible. The stressed teacher decries, How can grade-level standards, then, be useful in these circumstances?

Teachers need to have high expectations for all students, even those with abilities below grade-level. If the standards encompass skills and knowledge hitherto unobtained by the class, the standards have succeeded in defining what skills and knowledge need to be taught. For instance, if the goal is “Z”, the teacher must make sure that “A” through “Y” are taught and reviewed along the way. As an example, noting the importance of reading in every subject, every teacher is in essence a primary language instructor who needs to work with students to make up for any given reading deficiencies. Grade-level standards can thus be a goal for all students, although the path toward that goal can be dictated differently depending on what interventions the students need most.

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Reluctance to embrace effective research-based strategies

The importance of education research cannot be stressed enough. Utilizing the scientific method to determine correlations and potential causal factors between different factors, like student achievement and teacher effectiveness, gives educators unbiased advice for how best to teach their students. Good research studies, with a solid experimental design and strong external validity, give an account of the successes and failures a teaching strategy likely will have in a given environment, and are the best way to determine what will help close the achievement gap. The trouble is, they aren't often effectively used.

Stanford university professor Caroline Hoxby writes of this troublesome trend:

“Most interventions in education (class size reductions, pre-kindergarten programs, classroom technology, paying students for performance, drop-out prevention) are based not on evidence that they work, but rather on the “cardiac test” (e.g., “we just know in our heart that this is right”). Moreover, the interventions are not scientifically evaluated, sometimes because advocates oppose evaluation, but more often because no one bothers to set up pilot, randomization, or baseline data in the first place.

Thus, even though almost every popular intervention has been tried many times in American schools and is probably being started by some district today, we know very little about what works. If we did nothing other than analyze the effect of every intervention that is going to be tried, we would be far more likely to close the achievement gap.”

The opposing strategy to using research-based methods to determine what works is relying on intuition, or belief, that something is or is not working. There are teachers out there who would rather use intuition than data to inform their instruction, but we simply can't continue this trend. It is foolish to assess student achievement using our own teacher opinions rather than with objective data, in that it accentuates the impact of any known and unknown biases we have in the assessment process. And while data includes more than just test numbers, it certainly doesn’t include a vaguely defined “intuition”, especially when experiences from one teacher cannot be adequately compared to another, as intuition is not a standardized benchmark.

We don't ascribe belief any power in other sciences and we certainly won't make steady progress toward closing achievement gaps if we keep doing so in education.

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Opposition to school and teacher accountability

As talk of merit pay and linking teacher evaluations to student scores increases, many teachers reveal themselves as opponents to such accountability. These teachers list out a number of arguments against such accountability measures, some addressed in the above two obstacles. They argue against standards, against standardized tests, against being evaluated on if their students succeed or fail, and this resistance is problematic for education.

As teachers, we take on the job for a lot of reasons, but most at least want to be responsible for our students’ learning and growing desire to learn, and we feel that if we put our hearts into teaching then we will help our students learn better. Every teacher has at least an ounce of self-confidence in this matter, and asserts that he or she can help all/most/many students reach higher learning goals and maybe even that elusive “knowledge is power” state of mind . It just doesn't follow that then a teacher would decry testing and evaluations based on student achievement. Simply put, if our job is getting kids to learn more, we should be evaluated on if the kids learn more.

***

Lowered expectations for students, reluctance to embrace effective research-based strategies, and opposition to school and teacher accountability are likely the three largest obstacles that we currently have in closing the achievement gap, and ironically, they are the easiest to close. Schools and teachers simply have to hold themselves accountable to teaching rigorous state standards and to utilizing objective data and research-based methods for effective strategies and practices.

What I Learned while Teaching Secondary Science (Part 8): Achievement Gap History and Causes

This is a continuation of my Top Ten List of Things I Learned while Teaching Secondary Science:

#3)“The history and causes of the achievement gap”

In the early stages of the application process to Teach For America, I was given a few articles to read about the achievement gap in anticipation of discussing them during a phone interview. For me, it was a subtle beginning to learning more about what the achievement gap entailed, and why different subgroups of students reach such different levels of academic achievement and success. My opinions on the causes of these gaps changed as I experienced more of teaching, and thus learning more of the history of achievement gaps in education seemed an important step to learning how to approach these gaps.

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The Coleman Report

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, with the intent to end racial segregation in society. Part of this legislation required that a survey be conducted of the educational opportunities available to Americans, to determine the lack of availability of such opportunities based on race, class and gender.

Shortly after, in 1966, the Equality of Educational Opportunity Study (EEOS) was released, also referred to as the “Coleman Report,” after its principal investigator James S. Coleman. The study focused on measuring student outcomes, a new idea in education research, to determine at what level students were actually learning. The conclusions were damning: large achievement disparities existed between Black and White students that schools were unable to close, and despite it being more than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” most schools remained segregated along racial lines.

“The achievement disparities the report documented were troublingly large. In 6th grade, the authors found, the average African-American 6th grader lagged 1.9 years behind his or her white counterpart. By 12th grade, the statistics suggested, the average gap had widened to nearly four years.

As expected, the report also showed that black children typically attended schools that were more poorly equipped than those attended by whites. They had less access to physics, chemistry, and language laboratories, for instance, and fewer books per pupil.”

The existence of an achievement gap along racial lines was more or less realized. At the time, student achievement was linked largely to family backgrounds and “a student's sense of control over his or her own destiny,” but having good teachers also correlated with increased student achievement, particularly for Black students. Recently, more in-depth analysis of the data collected by Coleman accentuated the impact of schools and teacher biases on this achievement gap:

“Even after taking into account students’ family background, a large proportion of the variation in student achievement can be explained by school characteristics. Fully 40% of the differences in student achievement can be found between schools.

...

Inequalities in student achievement within schools are explained in part by teachers’ biases favoring middle-class students and by schools’ greater reliance on academic and nonacademic tracking."

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Success and failure in closing the gap

Following the Coleman Report, school desegregation efforts intensified, and these achievement gaps narrowed over the next couple decades, but the narrowing eventually stalled in the late 1980s:

“In the decades following the report’s publication there was a dramatic drop in school segregation in the Southern U.S. There also was a significant decline in the proportion of Black students attending 90-100% minority schools in the nation as a whole. But the gains in desegregation peaked in the 1980s and were practically reversed in the 1990s. ”

Gains made in closing these achievement gaps up until the 1990s may have been caused by the increased efforts of schools to desegregate and a national push for racial integration. One study suggested that the integration of hospitals and better access to quality healthcare for Black children contributed to this effect:

“We test one such explanation, which we call the infant health hypothesis. This hypothesis states that an improvement in black infant health during the mid- to late-1960’s had long-term effects on human capital accumulation for the cohorts that experienced these improvements. ...The specific timing across states suggests that improvements in infant health in the first 1.5 to 2.5 years of life had long-term effects on human capital accumulation and explain a significant portion of the narrowing of the black-white test score gap during the 1980’s. ”

Another hypothesis explains that the narrowing of these achievement gaps in the 1980s may have been caused in part by the narrowing socioeconomic gap between Black and White families that occurred at the same time, which also stalled during the 1990s:

“Black-White gaps in socioeconomic and family conditions continuously narrowed from the 1970s through the 1990s, but that this narrowing slowed down in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The acceleration of a narrowing of the Black- White gap in socioeconomic and family conditions in the 1970s and early 1980s parallels a significant drop in the Black-White achievement gap during the same period. Moreover, the deceleration of the narrowing of the Black-White gaps in socioeconomic and family conditions since the late 1980s coincides with a flattening of the achievement gap since that time. Because achievement and socioeconomic conditions covary without any time lag, it appears that they are related to each other.”

Notwithstanding the reduction of the Black-White achievement gap throughout the 1970s and 1980s and the possible explanations for the slowing of these academic gains, the achievement gap endured throughout the 1990s and even widened by some measures:

“In 1990, however, black-white convergence in educational attainment stopped. “Among men and women ages 26 to 30 in 2000, the black-white educational attainment gap is slightly larger than the corresponding gap in 1990,” he said.

Scores on standardized tests follow a similar pattern. “From the late 1970s through the late 1980s, black children made striking gains in achievement while scores for white children remained relatively flat,” Neal said, but test score gaps among 9- and 13-year-olds stopped closing in the late 1980s.

Other measures of trends in educational achievement since 1990 tell the same story. Among 21- year old black men, high school graduation rates were lower in the late 1990s than they were in the mid- 1980s. The opposite is true among young white men. Further, the ratio of white to black college graduation rates among young adult men rose between 1990 and 2000 after falling for decades.”

To place these events into context, it was during the 1980s when the culture of standards-based reform became widespread, as I've discussed before. This movement, along with the subsequent debates over state and federal roles in education that ensued throughout the 1990s, succeeded in firmly taking root not because of specific disparities between subgroups of student achievement, but mainly because of underperforming student achievement as a whole, something “A Nation At Risk” had warned of. Businesses helped lead the movement to ensure that future workers would acquire necessary reading and computational skills in schools, since at the time many companies were funding remedial programs for workers to learn what they hadn't yet learned. These efforts created positive change in our schools, but were not specific to any achievement gap.

Throughout this history, despite correlations between lower academic achievement of students of color and fewer opportunities for challenging classes, less rigorous curricula, and more inexperienced and ineffective teachers (cite), there have been assertions that biology plays some part in these achievement gaps.

The eugenics movement of the 1930s along with faulty statistical analysis of I.Q. test scores and standardized test scores in 1969 and again in 1994 gave rise to assertions of a biological basis for the disparities in student achievement, as people of color were supposedly genetically (and culturally) inferior to White people (p. 228). Claims like these have been discredited, but the racist undertones of their impact is lasting.

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The “Education Debt” and how it creates achievement gaps

It is worthwhile to keep the above framework of some of the history and causes of the achievement gap in mind, particularly when the million-dollar question in education today is, “How do we close the achievement gap?”

Gloria Ladson-Billings argues that focusing on the current achievement gap alone to define the disparities of our education system does not address the long-term circumstances that initially engendered the gaps. She briefly delves into an economics example, explaining that the national debt, the sum total of all government debts obtained to finance previous annual budget deficits, cannot be solved by simply balancing the budget. A national debt continues to accrue interest payments even during a budget surplus. Using this analogy, Ladson-Billings refers to an “education debt” that requires an historical perspective to understand, and how achievement gaps are just the logical outcomes of such an education debt.

Ladson-Billings asserts that this education debt has been created by historical, economic, sociopolitical and moral decisions and policies made in our nation's past. To summarize:

Historical Debt: Race, class and gender initially prompted educational inequities. Slavery and segregation, forced assimilation and exclusion from educational opportunities, legal apartheid, all remnants of our history that contributed to the education system we have today. That Black students in the South did not see universal secondary schooling until 1968 is only one example of how rather recently this history existed (and in some cases continues to exist) and how it shapes our education debt.

Economic Debt: Funding disparities between urban and suburban schools have always existed, the result of an education system with seperately run schools and districts. It is a telling fact that there is a strong correlation between school funding and the percentage of White students at a school, even if not a causal link. Median incomes of Black males also still remain less than that of White males, adding another factor in how families occupy varying socioeconomic positions and thus varying access to higher-quality education.

Sociopolitical Debt: Minority communities have been historically excluded from the civic process, from authentic opportunities to create positive change in their schools and communities. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 drastically improved the lot of minority communities looking for positive changes in local schools, but afterward and even today there are still obstacles to these communities exercising political power, such as limited access to lawyers and legislators compared to their White counterparts.

Moral Debt: People of color have historically experienced barriers to social advancement and educational opportunities, and this exclusion creates a moral debt that the nation has for oppressed communities. While it can be argued that individuals simply ought to take personal responsibility for their plight, a democracy such as ours hinges on ideals of social responsibility, of extending a helping hand to those most in need, particularly when the oppression had been caused by its own policies.

Ladson-Billings states that this education debt is accruing its own kind of interest, or “the distrust and suspicion about what schools can and will do in communities serving the poor and children of color.” Knowing that we need educators and communities working together with mutual respect and trust, our education debt and our nation's history should be a prime focus when considering how to close the achievement gap.

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The achievement gap today and tomorrow

Although progress has been made in closing these gaps, achievement disparities persist. In July, the NAEP released a report summarizing the performance of Black and White students on national and state assessments in reading and mathematics at different time points between 1978 and 2007. Here are some of its findings:

Mathematics score gaps for [both 9- and 13-year-old] Black and White students were narrower in 2004 than in the first assessment in 1978, as scores of Black students showed a greater increase than those of White students. The gaps in 2004 were not significantly different from the gaps in 1999. (p. 6)

Average mathematics scores were higher in 2007 than in 1990 for both Black and White eighth-graders. The 31-point gap in 2007 was not significantly different from the 33-point gap in 1990. (p. 7)

The Black-White mathematics gap among the nation’s public school fourth-graders was narrower in 2007 than in 1992, as Black students’ scores showed a greater gain than White students’ scores. (p. 14)

The [Reading] score gap [for 9-year-olds] in 2004 did not differ significantly from the gap in 1980, but was narrower than the gap in 1999, due to a greater increase in Black students’ scores as compared to White students. At age 13, reading scores for ... Black students were higher in 2004 than in 1980, resulting in a narrowing of the gap. (p. 28)

The reading gap for Black and White fourth-graders narrowed in 2007 in comparison to both 1992 and 2005. Although scores for both Black and White students were higher in 2007 than in either comparison year, a greater increase in scores for Black students caused the gap to narrow. The 27-point gap in 2007 was narrower than in any previous assessment year except 1998. (p. 29)

The national eighth-grade reading gap has not changed since either 1992 or 1998. ... From 1998 to 2007, the Black-White score gap did not change for any state. (p. 44)

The report is a mixed-bag of results, with certain gains being made toward closing gaps at one grade level but not the other, and alternating successes in math and reading. Still, the successes measured do show progress since the Coleman Report was first released, even if there is still a lot more work to be done.

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A better understanding of the achievement gap and the history that has created it (our “education debt”) needs to be the goal for our citizenship if we still value justice and the ideal of a land of opportunity, as a long-term solution to the achievement gap, where equal educational opportunities for all truly exists, will require that all of the nuances of its history be fully realized.

What I Learned while Teaching Secondary Science (Part 7): Teach For America's Mission

This is a continuation of my Top Ten List of Things I Learned while Teaching Secondary Science:

#4)“Teach For America is making progress toward ending educational inequity”

As a Teach For America alum, I've seen some of the inner workings of this nonprofit and experienced the ups and downs of teaching as a corps member, and I mean it when I say that this program is doing a heckuva job in its mission of ending educational inequities.

Teach For America is a national teacher corps of recent college graduates. Through a rigorous selection process, it selects individuals that have the highest potential to become great teachers in classrooms for schools that may be under-resourced, in a struggling low-income community, or modeled on lower expectations of students. Its selection process (as are its efforts to train and support corps members) is based on its Teaching As Leadership framework, which links the ability to be a great teacher to characteristics of great leadership, like propensity for setting an ambitious vision for success and masterfully planning, executing, and reflecting on progress toward this vision.

Wendy Kopp, CEO and founder of Teach For America, proposed the creation of such a national teacher corps in her 1989 undergraduate senior thesis, seeing that many in her generation (as it is now) wanted a chance to be a part of something meaningful, and while our educational system was in the midst of a standards-based reform movement, achievement gaps were persisting, and the window for leading a social movement toward ending educational inequities was wide-open.

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There are many positives that Teach For America brings to education, some of which include:

* Making teaching in challenging areas desirable to recent college graduates

A movement of future leaders fresh out of college competing to be the best teachers for the most troubled schools in our nation. Wendy Kopp was a genius for envisioning this. As they get closer to graduation, many university students are planning out their futures and thinking of how they might give back to their respective communities. Will they volunteer? Will they donate money? The idea of giving back by being the best damn teachers they can be for children who have had less opportunities to succeed than they did is surely tempting.

The program is as prestigious as a top-tier university—and just as difficult to get into. Teach For America successfully makes the case that good teaching and good leadership go hand-in-hand as evidenced by the successful partnerships made with top graduate schools and employers, running the gamut of future opportunities in everything from law and business to science and engineering. It all comes down to this: if you want to be an effective leader, you need to learn how to teach.

* Enlisting people outside of education majors, such as scientists and mathematicians

Teach For America runs on an alternative credentialing program, which is in accord with NCLB for being a process toward becoming “highly qualified teachers”. Alternative credentialing programs allow a person without a background in education to pursue a teaching credential while teaching. Here where I live, I had to take a general math and English proficiency test, a science proficiency test, and a US government test. After passing all three, I then went through an intensive training with Teach For America over the summer, and immediately after took a teaching foundations exam. After all of that, I was allowed to enroll in a 9-month credentialing program that allowed me to get an intern (emergency) credential and teach in a classroom, working toward the next step of teacher credentialing.

What makes this such a great strategy is that it can pull people into teaching that would have never thought it to be a career. This holds especially for the math and sciences. After all of our focused coursework at the university level, it would be a huge barrier to teaching if we then had to pursue an additional degree before being able to utilize our math and science understanding in the classroom. Most would then more rather go on to science and math-specific graduate schools, since at least we know what science and math is like, but education? Alternative certification allows those with science and math degrees a more realistic path toward becoming teachers.

* Modeled on data-driven accountability and a part of the nation-wide accountability effort

Teach For America holds all of its corps members accountable for making academic gains with their students, and teachers are pressed to use data to inform instruction and make decisions on how best to serve our students. This use of student data will help impact the greatest change because good data can give an unbiased assessment of student learning, and it can allow the teacher and his Teach For America director evidence for what changes to implement in the classroom. Teach For America's efforts here mirror the national education accountability effort that is gaining traction, with monies from the recently passed stimulus plan going toward programs like Race to the Top, Obama's competitive grant program that allows schools extra funds if they hold teachers accountable to their students' data.

* Intensive summer training allows teachers to hit the ground running when they get to their placement schools

Everything about Teach For America is urgent, as is its pace during the summer Institute that all corps members must attend before beginning their 2-year teaching commitment. During that summer, teachers live, breath, and sweat education, by putting in long hours in education classes, discussion panels, and of course, teaching summer school classes. Every minute of a corps member's life is observed by someone who knows what he or she is doing, and constructive criticism comes at a brisk pace without rose-colored glasses. There is a lot to learn about teaching, and the summer is certainly not enough to learn it all, but the training ends only after that sense of urgency is completely diffused into the work ethic of its inducted corps members, and the pace for excellence carries on well into their teaching careers.

* Stellar alumni retention efforts to keep the movement alive in those finished with their 2-year commitment

After finishing a commitment to teach, even those who chose not to continue teaching will always have that inner fire burning to advocate for underprivileged children and to have a positive impact on our education system. This sense of urgency carries on after leaving the classroom, and Teach For America alumni bring their educational insight into many different roles and positions in the workforce. Alumni directors of Teach For America claim that the alumni movement is equally important to Teach For America's role in ending educational inequities, and I would agree, as changes needed to improve education must come from both inside and outside of the classroom.

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Despite these positives, there are some in education circles who criticize Teach For America and blame it for perpetuating many educational woes, but these critics seemingly do so in bad faith:

Claim: “Teach For America brings teachers who have no real teaching experience to classrooms where students desperately need good teachers.”

This claim rallies the troops against alternative certification programs in general, but specifically is an elbow designated for Teach For America. Just recently a district court threw out an appeal in the lawsuit against Teach For America (PDF) over the “highly qualified” NCLB teacher provisions, a lawsuit that asserted this very claim. The assumption that this allegation makes, that teaching experience is required for a teacher to be successful in his first years, is flawed.

Individuals who are accepted into Teach For America are likely to show great leadership and thus likely to become great teachers as evidenced by the Teaching As Leadership framework, which was formed after analyzing the qualities of many successful and mediocre teachers. Before even getting into the program a person must exemplify these desired characteristics that they can utilize as a teacher later on.

The research we have would also tend to disagree with the allegation. A Mathematica study in 2004 found that students of Teach For America teachers scored as well or higher than students of non-TFA teachers in reading and math, and the authors concluded that “the success of TFA teachers is not dependent on their having extensive exposure to teacher practice or training.” General comparisons between university-based credentialing programs and alternative certification programs have shown mixed conclusions, leading us to believe that teacher effectiveness does not likely hinge on extensive teacher preparation programs prior to teaching, but falls on other teacher qualities.

All students need and deserve good teachers, but teaching experience should not be a barrier to teaching as it is not the underlying factor in effective instructional practice.

Claim: "Teach For America is not helping retain teachers for the long run."

“Teacher retention” is indeed absent from Teach For America's mission statement, but that is likely a good thing. The vision that the program works toward is closing achievement gaps between different student subgroups throughout the nation, which doesn't require making teaching a career choice. TFA teachers all throughout the nation are making significant progress with their students in their first 2 years of teaching. Adding additional years of commitment would hurt the program's appeal to college graduates uncertain of more time away from other career choices they may be drawn toward. And indeed, the program actually puts a lot of value on its alumni as they are the ones promoting the mission in other aspects of society.

Even despite this 2-year commitment, 61% of TFA teachers choose to continue teaching into the third year, a retention rate similar to that of other non-TFA new teachers. While teacher retention may not be the underlying goal, Teach For America is not harming current teacher retention rates, either.

Claim: "Teach For America is a bandage, not a cure, for the problems facing our educational system."

This one I never really understood, as I think Teach For America itself would also agree that it is not any type of “cure” for what ails our education system. Just as the achievement gap had been engendered and persists for a multitude of reasons, so plentiful are the needs of public education that have to be filled to close these gaps. Getting good teachers into places that desperately need good teachers is one logical way to help close these gaps. Making teaching a more valuable option to future leaders from top-tier universities is another logical way to help close these gaps. Empowering future leaders with a burning desire to advocate for their students' successes in many different arms of society is yet another logical way to help close these gaps. Teach For America seeks to fix what is broken on a number of different levels, and to attack it for what it doesn't do would be foolhardy.

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Overall, Teach For America is making a lasting impact on education, and the program will only increase in scope and impact on today's, and tomorrow's, schools and students.

What I Learned while Teaching Secondary Science (Part 6): Scientific Literacy

This is a continuation of my Top Ten List of Things I Learned while Teaching Secondary Science:

#5)“Science is a method of begetting knowledge / What is Scientific Literacy”

I can't say I was in the dark about this fact, as you learn a thing or two about science as you go through college (hopefully). What amazed me is how important this fact is for our students today, and upon personal reflection, how poorly it has been emphasized in education.

As a student in grades K-12, most of what I remember from science classes was reading textbooks and filling out worksheets, the occasional dissection, and science fair projects without much in-class emphasis other than the evaluation. Seldom did we approach scientific phenomena presented in class as scientists do, and allow for an inquiry-based, self-discovery of scientific principles rather than teachers dictating the facts and the reasons for those facts. I wrote before about using the scientific method to uncover the purpose of a mysterious pile of cardboard pieces. That the pieces combined to form a jigsaw puzzle would be the “science” taught in schools, when the process of questioning and uncovering their purpose is actually the essence of science itself.

Science state standards like the ones referred to in my previous post are modeled after National Science Education Standards (NSES 1996), which “spell out a vision of science education that will make scientific literacy for all a reality in the 21st century.” The NSES focus is on maintaining inquiry-based instruction, as it explains:

“The Standards call for more than "science as process," in which students learn such skills as observing, inferring, and experimenting. Inquiry is central to science learning. When engaging in inquiry, students describe objects and events, ask questions, construct explanations, test those explanations against current scientific knowledge, and communicate their ideas to others. They identify their assumptions, use critical and logical thinking, and consider alternative explanations. In this way, students actively develop their understanding of science by combining scientific knowledge with reasoning and thinking skills” (p. 2).

As I said before, I believe reasoning ability, being one of the “Big 3” of student needs, should be a prime focus of science education. Inquiry-based instruction as spelled out by the NSES is a path to targeting this reasoning ability and promoting scientific literacy for all. But what is scientific literacy, and does inquiry-based instruction help students attain it?

Scientific literacy, as defined by the National Research Council in the National Science Education Standards, is “the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes required for personal decision making, participation in civic and cultural affairs, and economic productivity” (NSES p. 22). A scientific literate person applies an understanding of science to choices made in his or her daily life, whether that is through positing and answering questions through the scientific method or making informed choices about policies that impact the environment. Yet promoting scientific literacy for all students is a daunting task, and research shows that typical, non-constructivist (not inquiry-based) approaches to science education lead science educators further and further from this lofty goal of literacy for all students.

In one research study, Buxton (2001) focused on the scientific literacy of university undergraduates in different social spheres, and noted that students were most able to bridge the gap between science concepts and real world applicability in informal science settings like study groups, where students could collaborate in asking questions and piecing together concepts learned in lecture to construct individual understanding, rather than in rigid, traditionally taught lectures (the norm for some K-12 science classrooms). Buxton’s conclusions highlighted four ways for promoting scientific literacy in K-12 classrooms, all of which coincide with an inquiry-based approach: (1) give students opportunities to reflect on what is learned in class and how it relates to their community; (2) allow students to collaborate in learning; (3) empower students with control over what they learn and how they learn it; and (4) focus on strengthening scientific literacy throughout the year.

The goal of scientific literacy for all can be reached if educators utilize inquiry-based instruction to allow students to learn what science really is all about, and as Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg writes in “A Nation at Risk Revisited,” even the health of our democracy hinges on our meeting this goal:

The vitality of a democracy assumes a certain “core of knowledge” shared by everyone which serves as a unifying force. It is fundamental to the effectiveness of our democratic system that our citizens be able to make informed judgments on the more and more complex issues of scientific and technological public policy.