Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The Good School educates parents about education. What prompted you to write it?
I’ve been an education journalist for many years and I’ve frequently stumbled on a nugget of knowledge, 10 pages into an academic article, that made me think, “I wish I had known this when I was making decisions about my own children’s schooling.” So I decided to write a book that takes research out of the academic silo and puts it in the hands of the people who need it the most, the parents.
School choice is the basis of a lot of school reform in the United States. Parents are supposed to choose the best school for their child. Money follows the child under state systems so the idea is that good schools thrive and bad schools wither. Improving schools by turning free market forces loose on them was an idea introduced by economist Milton Friedman.
The fatal flaw with that way of thinking is that our educational system is not a rational market. Far be it from me to second-guess Milton Friedman, but we don’t comparison shop for schools the way we do for air conditioners. We know more about air conditioners than we do about education. We don’t know what to look for in schools, let alone how to obtain that information. That’s got to change if we’re going to persist in this idea of unleashing free market forces on schools as a way to improve them.
Your own book is an entertaining introduction to education. The books you’ve chosen could be part of the advanced course. You’ve named five that every parent should read to get smarter about education. Let’s start with Proust and the Squid.
It’s a book about the neurocognition of reading by child development professor Maryanne Wolf. It’s about neuroscience, but it’s also about the history of communication and how we evolved as readers. Parts of it are pretty dense but parts are enormously rewarding. If you read this book, you will never hand your iPhone to your child again when you’re pushing the stroller. You will start talking to them and pointing out colours. If you understand what is happening in their little heads you understand that you can have a major role in their language and reading development.
What does the book teach us about how reading should be taught?
Neurocognitive scientists have built a consensus. They know that the way we naturally learn to read is the way reading was taught in the 1950s – sounding words out, understanding the sounds that letters make and how to blend those sounds through phonics. Phonics allies closely with how our brains learn to read. If your child is not getting phonics, it’s a problem.
About a third of kids learn to read spontaneously, a third need some phonics instruction, and another third need systematic instruction. What third your kid falls in is not necessarily an indication of whether they’re smart or not. It’s just that some kids need a certain kind of instruction and unfortunately a lot of kids do not get it.
Let’s move from reading to arithmetic. Tell us about The Number Sense by mathematician-turned-neuropsychologist Stanislas Dehaene.
Dehaene is the godfather of a new wave of thinking about math instruction. More and more neuroscientists believe we’re born with “gut number sense”, an ancient and unlearned sense of numbers. All kinds of animals have it, pigeons have it, monkeys have it. It’s an evolutionary skill, the ability to quickly size up bunches of bananas and know which one contains the most. Gut number sense is the ability to rapidly estimate numbers and add, subtract or even divide in your head. Gut number sense is the rebar for math. It’s not the ability to execute algorithms, it’s the underlying understanding of basic principles.
What insight does Dehaene offer into how we teach maths?
When schools teach math they tend to ignore that number sense. Dehaene argues that the way math is taught must be better aligned with the way we naturally absorb arithmetic. We know that kids have varying degrees of gut number sense. We know that the kids who have the strongest gut number sense end up doing very well in math. But researchers now are investigating what role gut number sense should play. This wave of research is cresting and it will start coming into the classroom and if you read The Number Sense you will understand what has inspired the new wave of math instruction.
Progressive thinkers are already trying to build on top of the math sense we’re born with, by giving equal emphasis to the concepts behind the algorithm and the execution of the algorithm.
In your book you make the point that maths is not a talent, and being good at maths is a product of hard work.
In countries where kids perform much better on math tests, they don’t see math as a talent, they see it as a muscle that you build. Research bears that out; it shows that practice builds math ability.
Peg Tyre is a writer who has spent two decades in journalism, including at Newsweek and The New York Times. She was part of a group of reporters who won a Pulitzer prize and she was twice nominated for a National Magazine Award. A graduate of Brown University, her bestselling first book The Trouble with Boys won the Books for a Better Life award in 2009. She teaches a course on “covering education” at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her latest book, The Good School, is a guide for parents on how to get the best education for their children
"Sure hope you become a writer." From those six plain words, written by his teacher at the bottom of a high school paper, Eggers drew strength and inspiration. "It was as if he'd ripped off the ceiling and shown me the sky"
Passionate plea for change from long-serving school teacher. "We’ll administer the standardized tests that don’t really tell us what you say they do, and in the process we’ll kill our kids’ natural curiosity and joy of learning"
Story of education website that offers free video tutorials tailored to students of differing abilities. “We’ve always known that one-on-one is the best way to learn, but we’ve never been able to figure out how to do it"
Children learn about science by building mousetrap cars, not memorising vocabulary. Super blogpost by LA biology teacher blasting unhelpful, misleading "Teach for America" tests. Thanks to Emily Skehan for the emailed recommendation
Student loans have now overtaken credit cards as US's single biggest source of debt. With the cost of tuition soaring, and high graduate unemployment raising doubts over ability to repay, is this a debt bubble about to burst?
