Some researchers at Berkely have found that taking naps can improve learning.  I could use some learning about now.  From USA Today:

Naps make you smarter and boost your ability to learn, say researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, they’re the brain’s way of making room for new information.

The longer we stay awake, the less able our brains are to learn. But just 60 minutes of shut-eye can boost learning ability significantly, says Matthew Walker, a Berkeley professor of psychology and the lead investigator of a study presented over the weekend at the American Association of the Advancement of Science conference in San Diego, Calif..

The research could be interpreted to mean that a biphasic sleep schedule – a good night’s sleep and a solid midday siesta, could increase intelligence.

Compare that with pulling an all-nighter, which previous research by this group showed can decrease the ability to learn by 40%. This learning deficit is caused by a shutting down of brain regions due to sleep deprivation.

In the study, a group of 39 healthy young adults were divided into a nap and no-nap group. Each were given a difficult to-learn task at noon, designed to push hard on the hippocampus, the region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Research has shown that fact-based memories are first stored in the hippocampus, then moved to the prefrontal cortex for long-term storage.

Both groups did about the same.

At 2:00 PM in the afternoon the nap group got a 90-minute siesta.  Then at 6:00 PM both groups got a new set of learning tasks. The ones who hadn’t gotten any shut-eye did markedly worse. Those who had caught 40 winks did much better and improved their capacity to learn.

Walker says this helps confirm his group’s hypothesis, that sleep clears the brain’s short-term memory storage to make room for new learning. Walker presented his preliminary findings Sunday at the AAAS Conference.

“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” Walker said in a release.

On Tuesday the Democrat led U.S. Senate failed to reauthorize the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, despite pleas and support from Senators Feinstein, Nelson, Warner, and Lieberman.

Local chumps Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln voted against the program. Lifted from the Wall Street Journal, here’s a letter to them and other Democrats from Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, the former president of the University of Notre Dame.

A Setback for Educational Civil Rights

By THEODORE M. HESBURGH

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked me to become one of the founding members of the newly formed U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, African-Americans drank at separate water fountains and our schools were segregated. A decade later, when people came together to march against these injustices, the idea that a black man could ever be elected president of the United States was still something for dreamers. My experience with that great movement gives me a particular appreciation for the historic importance of the presidency of Barack Obama—and the new dreams that his example will inspire in our young.

If Martin Luther King Jr. told me once, he told me a hundred times that the key to solving our country’s race problem is plain as day: Find decent schools for our kids. So I was especially heartened to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan repeatedly call education the “civil rights issue of our generation.” Millions of our children—disproportionately poor and minority—remain trapped in failing public schools that condemn them to lives on the fringe of the American Dream.

For all these reasons, I was deeply disappointed when Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) successfully inserted a provision in last year’s omnibus spending bill that ended one of the best efforts to give these struggling children the chance to attend a safe and decent school.

That effort is called the Opportunity Scholarship program. Since 2004 it has allowed thousands of children in Washington, D.C., to escape one of the worst public school systems in the nation by providing them with scholarships of up to $7,500.

Despite its successes, it is now closing down. On Tuesday the Senate voted against a measure introduced by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) that would have extended the program. Throughout this process Mr. Duncan’s Education Department and the White House raised no protest.

Much has been written about the crisis in education, and the effective resegregation of our public schools. It’s clear who is paying the price. A study a few years ago from Johns Hopkins University highlighted the terrible disparity of the current system: Nearly half of our nation’s African-American students, nearly 40% of Latino students, but only 11% of white students attend high schools in which graduation is not the norm.

Many of the parents using Opportunity Scholarships chose Catholic schools for their children even though they are not Catholic themselves. That’s no coincidence. When others abandoned the cities, the Catholic schools remained, and they continue to do heroic work.

At Notre Dame we launched our own efforts to bolster this mission. Our Alliance for Catholic Education, for example, takes talented young men and women, trains them to see teaching as a career, and then sends them into struggling inner-city schools such as Holy Redeemer in Washington, D.C.

But these inner-city schools can’t do it themselves. Recently the archdiocese of Washington announced that Holy Redeemer would be forced to close its doors at the end of the year because the families who send their children to the school are unable to afford it without the financial aid they receive from this program. The archdiocese stated that “decisions last year by the U.S. Department of Education and by Congress to phase out the federal D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program . . . negatively impacted Holy Redeemer’s financial situation.”

Of Holy Redeemer’s 149 students, 60 were on Opportunity Scholarships. Unlike so many of their peers, these kids were on their way to college. Now they have to find some other safe haven. Others will never get the chance at all.

I know that some consider voucher programs such as the Opportunity Scholarships a right-wing affair. I do not accept that label. This program was passed with the bipartisan support of a Republican president and Democratic mayor. The children it serves are neither Republican nor Democrat, liberal or conservative. They are the future of our nation, and they deserve better from our nation’s leaders.

I have devoted my life to equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless of skin color. I don’t pretend that this one program is the answer to all the injustices in our education system. But it is hard to see why a program that has proved successful shouldn’t have the support of our lawmakers. The end of Opportunity Scholarships represents more than the demise of a relatively small federal program. It will help write the end of more than a half-century of quality education at Catholic schools serving some of the most at-risk African-American children in the District.

I cannot believe that a Democratic administration will let this injustice stand.

Father Hesburgh is the former president of the University of Notre Dame.

Here’s the currently ubiquitous Diane Ravitch, speaking to National Review about public charter schools: “Some of them are absolutely awful and should never have been chartered and should be closed.”

But here she is in February writing about other public schools: “Closing Schools Solves Nothing.” And from her Twitter account just the other day: “What genius thought that closing schools would lead to better schools? Where has it worked? No anecdotes, please.”

Public charter schools? Bring down the hammer and close them if they’re not performing. But traditional public schools? Ah, they all have that secret magic ingredient that prevents them from ever being bad enough to close.

There’s an . . . interesting argument being circulated in the education world, to the effect that because a handful of schools or teachers are motivated to cheat on standardized tests, the real blame should be laid on the fact that we have tests in the first place.

Here’s Diane Ravitch (formerly a staunch defender of testing), speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on March 10:

There’s a front page story in the Chicago Sun-Times Today about thousands of test scores being erased and altered to raise them. This is what the pressure for proficiency has created: institutionalized fraud.

Similarly, there’s this from a March 5 article on possible cheating in Houston:

“Cheating on tests has been rampant,” said Tom Haladyna, professor emeritus in the College of Teacher Education and Leadership at Arizona State University. “Many of us think the culprit is tying accountability to a single test score. It is a bad policy. It motivates a few to cheat so they can look good.”

By this logic, such as it is, we should abolish medical boards for potential doctors, tests for commercial pilots to get licensed, bar exams for attorneys, and tests to be licensed as a nuclear engineer, if it turns out that cheating ever occurs. After all, if any of these poor souls are so stressed out that they cheat on an important test, it’s really our fault for asking them to meet performance standards in the first place.

Needless to say, this is one of the weaker arguments against testing.

On the heels of the much-publicized change of heart by Diane Ravitch and the accompanying joyful outbursts by anti-testing and anti-accountability people everywhere, we can provide a bit of a reality check from right here in Arkansas.  Hot off the presses of the popular teacher magazine Phi Delta Kappan is an article by a few University of Arkansas colleagues and me. The article is available here.

We visited several schools last year to talk with teachers about standardized testing and the “teaching to the test” concept. The surprising results can be seen on page 51:

In the end, teachers said many good things about various aspects of the testing process and, overall, gave a very positive impression of the effects of the annual assessments on classroom teaching. After we sifted through all of the comments from all of the teachers at all of the school sites, five positive themes emerged. The consensus of teachers with whom we spoke was that the tests provide useful data, that the testing regime helps create a road map for the year’s instruction, that the standards and tests don’t sap creativity or hinder collaboration, and, perhaps most surprising, that the accountability imposed by the testing regime is useful.

Here’s just one example of the pro-testing sentiments we uncovered:

Many teachers noted that before testing, it was easy to teach idiosyncratically — perhaps spending “six weeks on the dinosaur unit and just totally ignor[ing]” other topics. With increased focus on testing, however, teachers have focused on matching their instruction to a coherent set of standards. Thus, one math teacher said that while she had initially “hated” the Arkansas benchmark tests, she has since changed her mind: “I’m OK with it now, to be honest; I see where knowing the standards and knowing what’s going to be tested can help me plan the whole year and make sure I’ve covered everything.”

Education scholar Diane Ravitch has been making headlines (including a mention on Max Brantley’s blog) with a new book in which she reverses what had been long-held beliefs in favor of competition and choice in education. Now she says that schools should be like families:

“There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition,” Ravitch says. “Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works; schools are supposed to get together and talk about what’s [been successful] for them. They’re not supposed to hide their trade secrets and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the block.”

But without competition — in the sense of there being a wide variety of different schools (charter schools, private schools, etc.) — there’s less room for experimentation and diversity, and hence less possibility that different schools will find out what works.

Moreover, one of the strongest rationales for educational competition is that “what works” isn’t the same for different children — some children need more of a focus on the academic basics, some are more interested in the arts, some are more interested in a science and math-based curriculum, some want more structure while some thrive with less direct guidance, some do well in a large school that has lots of different clubs and activities while others get lost in the crowd.  No one school can be everything to every child.

The NPR story linked above also has an excerpt from Ravitch’s book, in which she describes how she came to oppose the No Child Left Behind Act:

My support for NCLB remained strong until November 30, 2006. I can pinpoint the date exactly because that was the day I realized that NCLB was a failure. I went to a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. — a well-respected conservative think tank — to hear a dozen or so scholars present their analyses of NCLB’s remedies. . . .

Choice was not working, they all agreed. The scholars presented persuasive evidence that only a tiny percentage of eligible students were asking to transfer to better schools. . . .

As I listened to the day’s discussion, it became clear that NCLB’s remedies were not working. Students were offered the choice to go to another school, and they weren’t accepting the offer.

So the whole point here is that very few students took the opportunity to choose a different public school farther from their home. “Choice” was not working, because there wasn’t enough of it.

But Ravitch immediately flips the rationale for opposing choice:

I began to question ideas that I once embraced, such as choice and accountability, that were central to NCLB. As time went by, my doubts multiplied. I came to realize that the sanctions embedded in NCLB were, in fact, not only ineffective but certain to contribute to the privatization of large chunks of public education.

As excerpted by NPR, Ravitch’s book doesn’t seem to make sense. She criticizes NCLB’s choice provisions both for having no effect (because so few students avail themselves of choice) and for privatizing “large chunks of public education.”

The Department of Education announced the finalists for the first round of the Race to the Top competition this morning, and Arkansas is not among those listed.  Here is the Department of Ed announcement and the Ed Week blog post.

Sixteen of the initial 41 applicants were named as finalists. That so few of the applications made it to the final stage is telling. The Obama administration may really be serious about education reform. The Department of Ed will be posting score sheets and reviewers comments here. The winners for round one will be announced in April.

Here in Arkansas we are holding out hope for round two.  Applications for round two are due in June.

UPDATE: So maybe the administration isn’t so serious about education reform.

Others around the web are expressing displeasure with the list of finalists. There is this from Flypaper

The list includes Kentucky, a state with no charter law and New York, which brashly rejected reform legislation–including a critical cap lift provision–in advance of the deadline. It includes Colorado, which backed off of important reforms related to teachers, and Ohio, whose proposal was weak in a number of areas.

And this from Eduwonk

First reaction*: With the obvious caveat that not all these states get money in the first round, still sort of an “uh oh.”   Some states with good apps here but OH and NY is not a great sign…and IL and CO were arguably bubble states at best and not sure what SC means given how out of step they are with parts of the administration’s agenda.   Hard to argue the political fix is in if SC is here though…And surprised that IN didn’t pop more, they had an interesting approach to this.

And this from Jay Greene

The Race to the Top finalist states were announced today.  15 states are in the hunt for some portion of $2.3 billion, which is less than one-half of a percent of annual K-12 education spending.  It is rounding error.

The contest may shape state and local education policy debates where something might actually happen, but no one should be fooled into thinking that this money is going to have any significant, direct effect.

And this from Ed Week’s Politics K-12 Blog

We’ll have more analysis on the winners—and losers—later, but our first take on the list of finalists is that many of them are Southern, right-to-work states. New York is a surprise because many argue its student-teacher data law is weak, and its attempt to loosen restrictions on charters failed. Kentucky made the list, but has no charter law. Also, Colorado is the only Western state to make the cut.

Mid-Riffs contributor Stuart Buck has a book coming out in May.  The book titled “Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation” investigates the origins of the pejorative ”acting white” slur. You can pre-order the book here at Amazon, and you can find Stuart’s author pages here and here .

Monday’s Atlanta Journal Constitution had a good op-ed about the book. Stuart’s thesis is summed up in the following excerpt from that piece.

“The analogy I would draw is treatment for cancer,” said Buck, speaking by phone from Arkansas. “Segregation is like a cancer that we had to get rid of, but the treatment that saved our lives had unintended side effects.”

While black students often attended segregated schools that lacked the resources of white facilities, Buck says the schools served as the connective tissue in a community that historically valued education.

“In segregated schools, black children had consistently seen other blacks succeeding in the academic world,’’ he says. “The authority figures and role models — teachers and principals — were all black. And the best students in the schools were black as well.”

While black parents welcomed integration, they had hoped for a merger of black and white schools. Instead, they witnessed the destruction of black schools and the erasure of the culture, community and closeness that the schools had created. Their children marched off to white schools where they experienced hostility and were tracked into lower-level classes. In his research, Buck found many examples of new facilities that had housed black schools being abandoned because white parents weren’t willing to send their kids to black schools.

“They did not want to send white schoolchildren into black schools, to be taught by black teachers and disciplined by black principals,” he says.

*******

Once reassigned to desegregated schools, black students “were sitting in a classroom with mostly other black students in what they believed to be the ‘dumb’ class, watching as the white students headed to the ‘smart’ class down the hall,” writes Buck.

Dispirited, black students began to associate achievement with white students and ostracize peers who joined the white kids in the “smart” classes.

Stuart also did a radio interview on Monday. You can listen here. The book should be a good read. I encourage you all to check it out.

On the matter of grade-inflating high schools and the Arkansas lottery scholarships, the state legislature is poised to take a step in the wrong direction.  At issue are eligibility requirements that, under current law, require students who attend identified grade-inflating high schools to jump through additional hoops in order to receive scholarships.

Currently, in order to qualify for a scholarship, high school students must complete the Smart Core curriculum and either obtain a 2.5 GPA in high school or score a 19 or better on the ACT.  Students from grade-inflating schools, however, must have both a 2.5 GPA and get an ACT score of 19 or score at a proficient level or better on the state’s End-of-Course exams to qualify for a scholarship.

Concerned members of  the state leg, such as State Sen. Joyce Elliot, are on the right track by insisting that the requirements amount to “blatantly unequal treatment” and that in effect the policy amounts to punishing students for the actions of adults.

The leg’s planned move is to delay the additional requirements by a year.  Under that scheme, any high school student with a 2.5 GPA will qualify for a scholarship.

Lame.

Removing the additional requirements isn’t the answer. I agree that punishing students for what is ultimately a failing of the adults running their schools is a mistake.  But removing additional measures of achievement and ability is not the answer.  If anything, they should make the tougher requirements proposed for students of  grade-inflating schools apply to everyone.

Using GPA as a sole indicator of eligibility is problematic.  Making it possible for every student in Arkansas to get a scholarship with a 2.5 GPA is only going to lead to more grade inflation in Arkansas’ high schools.  Teachers will be put in the uncomfortable position of having their grading decisions mean a great deal more than they already do, and the pressure to inflate grades will be even higher.  Just look at the situation in Georgia, where scholarships are based on GPA.  Grade inflation there is rampant, and USA Today reports that 40% of college freshman lose their scholarships after the first year.

Another problem with basing scholarships on GPA is that it gives students an incentive to take less challenging courses.  This is especially problematic when one considers that future scholarship renewals will be based upon college GPA.  Again, Georgia provides an example.  A study by Thomas Dee and Linda Jackson found that:

“students whose major course of study is in engineering,  computing, or the natural sciences are 21 to 51% more likely to lose their HOPE Scholarships than students in other disciplines. These results suggest that the eligibility standards used in Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship program may have some important and unintended consequences. In particular, such standards appear horizontally inequitable in that they financially punish those HOPE Scholars whose chosen course of study provides fewer opportunities to earn high grades. This differential may also be noteworthy since it could constitute a strong incentive that influences the course and major selection of subsequent college students. Such a change in the incentives facing college students could be particularly relevant to policy given the recent evidence on the growing importance of science and math skills for the distribution of wages.”

In other words, students will have an immediate financial incentive, in both high school and college, to take easier classes.  In Arkansas, students with a C- average while in college will lose their money, while students with a C+ won’t.  Bad news , unless maybe you think the world needs more communications and marketing majors.

The bottom line is that, at a minimum, all students who receive Arkansas lottery scholarships should have at least a 2.5 GPA, AND be able  to score at least proficient on End-of-Course exams, AND score a measly 19 on the ACT.  Such a policy might actually curb grade inflation while diminishing the incentivisation of mediocrity.

UPDATE: The bill that passed the House and Senate yesterday removes the extra requirements for grade-inflating schools. Only Reps. Burris and Hobbs voted against removing the restrictions. To my knowledge, no one in the legislature suggested making the requirements universal.

A new study by respected economists finds large academic benefits from a KIPP school, especially for minority children:

Who Benefits from KIPP?

by Joshua D. Angrist, Susan M. Dynarski, Thomas J. Kane, Parag A. Pathak, Christopher R. Walters

Charter schools affiliated with the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education. These schools feature a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms and a focus on traditional reading and math skills. We use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of KIPP Academy Lynn, a KIPP charter school that is mostly Hispanic and has a high concentration of limited English proficiency (LEP) and special-need students, groups that charter critics have argued are typically under-served. The results show overall gains of 0.35 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at KIPP Lynn. LEP students, special education students, and those with low baseline scores benefit more from time spent at KIPP than do other students, with reading gains coming almost entirely from the LEP group.

.35 standard deviations in math improvement per year is HUGE. That’s enough to eliminate the achievement gap in just 2 or 3 years of schooling.