Denver turnaround schools show “unreal” improvement in students’ math scores
Denver’s largest school turnaround effort is already producing student achievement that has surprised even early supporters of education reform in the city’s far northeast.
“The math tutoring has been unreal. It’s big,” said Allen Smith, executive director of the 11 new and turnaround schools in far northeast, now called the Denver Summit Schools Network, or DSSN.
Community concerns made Smith have his doubts about the turnaround plan, but data presented to the Denver Public Schools board Thursday night show that from August through February, 30 percent of students had improved by as much as a grade level in math.
When the DSSN schools opened under new orders this fall, the seven that enroll fourth-, sixth- or ninth-graders started the year with a math-tutoring program.
In addition to hour-long math classes daily, students were assigned in groups of two or three to a tutor — or a math fellow, as the program calls them — for another hour during each school day.
Tutors collaborate weekly with math teachers. Each student takes a 5-minute online assessment daily that gives tutors and teachers data about what the student has retained.
“There was a lot of resistance at first,” Smith said. “Kids had never been asked to participate in their own education like that. Now that those relationships are developed, they want to go to tutoring. They feel their voice is being heard, so it’s also transferring to other classes.”
On the most recent round of tests given every six weeks at the seven schools using the tutoring program, 370 students scored unsatisfactory, down from 594 at the beginning of the year, and 241 students tested proficient, up from 66.
The percentage of students scoring advanced in math increased to 10 percent of all students.
Data from interim assessments taken in the mainstream math classes show similar progress.
Besides tests, some students are asked to write about what they learn. It’s writing practice but also gives tutors an idea about how students process what they learn.
“We are really about a meta-cognitive approach,” said Stuart Ritchie, the math fellow coordinator at Collegiate Prep Academy. “We want to get away from the idea that there is one answer and one way to get there. Not every student is going to learn that procedural way. It’s about understanding the concepts.”
Collegiate Prep Academy student Abigail Venegas, 15, said math was a subject she never thought she would like, but she is surprised at how much the tutoring has changed that.
“I really have a good grade in my class this year,” Venegas said. “Last year I gave up. Math was hard, and it was embarrassing having to ask questions.”
Building math confidence is a large part of what math fellows are there to do, officials and tutors said. In every tutoring cubicle, individual student scores are graphed out and displayed on the wall labeled with student identification numbers.
“We’re not ashamed of it,” Ritchie said. “It helps students really see where they’re going.”
Yesenia Robles
All those people who down-rate schools for their students’ math scores should read that article. The small, tutoring groups are terrific, but public schools don’t have the funding to provide them for all students. High school students who want and need tutoring spend a lot of time with their teachers after school, but those students aren’t the ones who drag the schools’ scores down. That “honor” belongs to the students who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do their homework or to seek help from a teacher. Elementary school kids are more tractable. When will the education reformers wise up and realize that students (and their parents) have to participate in their own education in order to raise test scores? The ones who do, don’t need remediation. As long as all the onus rests with the schools and teachers, scores will stagnate. Ask any student whether s/he cares about the results of those tests. The test results neither benefit nor hurt students, but the hours spent drilling the students prior to the test dates detracts from solid education.
It’s funny, I was a student in what sounds like an identical program forty years ago.
It was extremely controversial because the tutors were college and graduate students and the teachers union was opposed to them being allowed to teach in the public schools on a part time basis. Plus the head of the program was openly gay.
The worst part was that the students in the program quickly outperformed their peers in the regular public school curriculum.
People need social support to succeed; no surprise there. Popular culture piped over the tv, or however kids are getting it these days, seems to be eroding social support. Is marketing and mass media to blame? Maybe in some ways… so when I read about piracy of mass media my recent counterpoint is ‘you reap what you sow.’
Gee- positive individual attention from an older person results in achievement.
In the last 30 years:
1) the training requirements for teacher accredidation have increased.
2) requirements for in-service teacher training have increased.
3) the use of technology in the classroom and study-based teaching methods have increased.
4) parent involvement in education has decreased.
Which factor do you think has resulted in lower student achievement scores?
Another important aspect of this program is the writing reflection: asking students to engage in a complex cognitive task (writing) to describe another (math). Writing about nearly anything forces us to slow down and articulate and evaluate our own thinking and processes. I’m really impressed with what this school is doing.
Parent involvement in education has decreased but what is the root cause of that? (Hint: wages have remained stagnant for ~ 30 years).
Another factor is that many parents are not good in Math. So they are unable to help their kids with Math.
How do you know it has really decreased overall? How do you explain the well-publicized phenomenon of “helicopter parents”? When my kids went to school in recent years, I saw parents much more involved in things like writing their kids’ papers than when I went to school – and it even continues on to college nowadays.
Now, it may be that there is a lack of parental involvement in the schools that are struggling, but that is a small subset of schools, mostly in urban areas where there is high poverty and other social problems. And in that segment of the population, I don’t know that there was ever parental involvement in education – many of these kids, even if they don’t graduate from high school, are at least going farther than parents who may have been allowed to drop out in middle school, and grandparents who may not have been educated beyond elementary school.
Parental involvement is not necessarily the be all and end all anyway – many of the best schools in this country have long been boarding schools, where by definition parents turn everything over to teachers and school staff; and many high-performing local private schools (I went to one, and have first hand experience) operate on a similar if less obvious basis, where parents are so busy with demanding professional jobs and social obligations that they have little to be involved in their kids’ education, and once again expect to be paying (often exhorbitantly) for the school to handle the demands. What is perhaps central, however, is that in these circumstances parents provide an environment and expectations emphasizing education and achievement, even if their actual personal involvement is lacking.
I’ve had some experience volunteering in an inner-city school, and besides parents not necessarily having the educational background themselves to be of much help in their kids’ education, the poor – like the rich, as I cited above – often have work and social factors that prevent them from being able to be very involved in their childrens’ education. The possibly key factor of expections is, however, something a lot of innovative programs seem to be focusing on.
As a retired math teacher/principal, I now tutor privately and know the great results that can come from tutoring with individuals and small groups. I applaud your achievements with your intervention with tutoring and daily assessments. (I confess it’s nice to see that frequent testing isn’t to be abhorred, as it has been for decades.)
However, I question the following quote (if it’s indeed accurate): “We are really about a meta-cognitive approach,” said Stuart Ritchie, the math fellow coordinator at Collegiate Prep Academy. “We want to get away from the idea that there is one answer and one way to get there. Not every student is going to learn that procedural way. It’s about understanding the concepts.”
There may be more than one way to get an answer, but in mathematics’ solutions, there is only one correct answer. Also, if students aren’t learning standard “procedures” (especially internationally accepted algorithms) that will prepare them for future math courses, especially at the college level, you may simply be helping get them through this year. If that’s the goal, that’s okay, but it needs to be clearly articulated for the students and their parents.