gt.dad retweeted
Alpha principal here—I fully believe in selection effects.
Schools should be designed to select the students they’re best equipped to serve. Our sports academy selects for students who love sports, while gt (gifted and talented) school selects for students who love academics for academics’ sake.
Good educational product design REQUIRES selection effects.
gt.dad retweeted
Rebecca Winthrop, whom Ezra Klein interviewed here, is going to be talking to MacKenzie Price, founder of Alpha. Next week, live (virtual).
Discussion is: disaffection from education and its solutions.
gt.dad retweeted
I’m on a panel tonight, with @Austen, on AI and education at the Capital Factory in Austin. Come!
gt.dad retweeted
We've enrolled Riva as a student at the Montessorium. We toured several schools and this was the school she liked best. Excited to see how Riva grows, and how the school grows.
Announcing a new kind of Montessori program.
Short version: Montessori elementary, with 2 Hour Learning (viz. Alpha) platform on the shelf as a material.
Pilot this fall in Austin. Guide is the fantastic @annamorgsmiley. @drlauramazer and I leading development.
Long version:
Really good essay from Dan Willingham that is nominally about the science of reading but is actually about the wider issue of how to conceptualize education research.
New substack: What is the science of reading? And why the definition matters....
dtwuva.substack.com/p/what-i…
Ensuring children have mastery of prior material before moving on to more advanced material is the bedrock of quality education. It’s both braindead obvious and consistently validated by learning science.
If we get rid of STAAR, we get rid of mastery.
Why is this good?
STAAR is a grade level assessment pegged to Texas state curriculum standards.
Do Texas state standards not matter to Texas? Is the STAAR being replaced by something that better checks those standards? Rather strange.
Our students literally ace these tests btw
> The strangest thing about the ability group conversation – which is everywhere lately
Major advance in the theatre of discourse
The strangest thing about the ability group conversation – which is everywhere lately – is that it ignores the prevalence of ability grouping (based on reading level), which was the norm for elementary reading instruction in the Balanced Literacy era (~2002-2022ish).
Approximately 70% of US elementary classrooms were organized to group kids by their reading level, starting in kindergarten, as part of a Balanced Literacy approach.
There is no evidence that this specific approach ever worked, for a lot of devil-in-the-detail reasons, including the fact that reading levels in K-2s are not always easy to measure, and Balanced Literacy pushed crummy methods of assessment and also group instruction on teachers. I wrote about it years ago (link follows).
I note that grouping by skill does have an evidence base. I’m not anti-ability grouping in the least. I just follow the evidence.
Why do I bring this up?
There seems to be a narrative forming in some quarters that schools refuse to group by ability. This simply doesn’t fit the reality.
Some forms of ability-grouping managed to become absolutely ingrained in classrooms.
The real question is cultural: why do some forms of ability-based grouping become embraced and entrenched and other forms resisted?
@mattyglesias @tracewoodgrains
gt.dad retweeted
GT School test results are too high to be precise, but they indicate what is easy to observe: that students are an average of something like 5 grade levels ahead.
They do standard academics for 2 hours a day on apps. Rest of the day is nerd fun with phenomenal cohort.
We’ll be switching our assessment paradigm for GT School to be less MAP-centric (other than setting “see how fast you can get max out the MAP math at 300” as a fun goal). NAEP until 8th grade mastery, then PSAT/SAT/ISEE.
A fuller writeup from @AustinScholar, with a bunch of fun AI analysis of the MAP summary, and a narrative analysis of how the platform works and why it is so effective.
austinscholar.substack.com/p…
gt.dad retweeted
why don’t all private school publish academic results? do any have comparable results to this?
99th achievement percentile for EVERY subject and EVERY grade
one exception: 5th graders got 93rd achievement percentile in math
“The dose makes the poison” is also why many people are wrong about school.
Most school is overdose on academic time. So people think “structured, deliberate practice with academics” is “6 hours of classes daily for 12 years”.
"The dose makes the poison" is almost universally the reason that people are wrong about anything to do with substances or foodstuffs having impacts on health.
People just don't have a slot in their minds for "dose". They only have room for "yes/no", but in reality dose is actually the only thing that matters.