FIXES

Fixes

Reaching Math Students One by One

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Like middle school math teachers everywhere, the seventh-grade math teachers at Middle School 88 in the southern part of Brooklyn’s Park Slope have an impossible job. At this high-poverty school, which not long ago was considered failing, students enter with levels of math skills ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade. How can anyone teach to them all?

Middle School 88 in Brooklyn is part of a broad evolution in teaching math, employing technology to provide each student with a personalized lesson.

Emily Reisman, who’s been teaching math at M.S. 88 for six years, said that until three years ago, the school taught math the way virtually everyone did. “We would create work sheets at different levels,” she said. “For adding and subtracting fractions, we’d create low, medium and high-level activities for kids to do. The lower level was more straightforward, with a picture. The higher level had word problems.”

Math teachers also try to personalize instruction by grouping students by ability and spending more time with groups that need extra help. They have students work together and teach one another. They offer bonus activities.

But none of these strategies allows students to learn at their individual levels. And that is imperative, because math is cumulative: basic skills are necessary for building advanced ones.

The American educational system, then, creates a permanent math underclass. A student who fails at fourth-grade math will be likely to fall further behind each year. If he is missing essential early skills and concepts, he may spend the rest of his years of school learning nothing at all in math.

“For any subject, any room, it can’t be true that one teacher teaching 30 kids is the best way,” says Joel Rose, an education expert who in 2009 worked for the New York City Department of Education. There, he and Chris Rush, a consultant, developed School of One, a method for math teachers to personalize instruction, and brought it into three middle schools.

Rose and Rush then left the city department and established New Classrooms Innovation Partners, a private nonprofit organization that now works with schools to use Teach to One, a program that evolved from School of One. (It’s still called School of One when used in New York City, where the schools do not pay licensing fees since it originated at the Department of Education.). So far, the program is used in only 30 schools in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., North Carolina and Georgia. Results are positive but not uniformly so. It’s a work in progress – but one with great potential.

M.S. 88 has been using School of One in one of the three academies into which it is divided. The program requires a large-upfront investment. The school knocked down three walls to create a giant classroom, and Ailene Altman Mitchell, the principal, said she also spent $140,000 to buy a laptop for each child, along with screens and tables.

A School of One pilot program in Manhattan. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

The classroom is the size of four rooms, its divisions marked with shelving and different colored carpet and chairs.   When I visited last month, all four seventh-grade math teachers and some aides circulated, teaching 120 students as a team.

As math class begins, students find their names on airport-style monitors outside the room, which tell them where to go. The different areas are named for high schools in Brooklyn. (Peter Russo, the assistant principal, said that last year the school made the mistake of using New York sports teams. They were dropped when this proved too depressing.)

The monitors also tell the students which of several learning modalities they will use. That day, some answered questions at a computer. A few feet away, others did work sheets in pairs. Five students sat at a table with a teacher, solving equations. At one end of the room, Reisman worked with 23 students on a multiday probability project.

Subject matter varied — simplifying equations, subtracting negative numbers, graphing expressions on a number line, and solving story problems about probability.

At one table, Tianna, Romel and Danielle were hunched over work sheets of probability problems involving gumballs. Work sheets also offered wrong answers, and asked students to identify the mistakes that led to them.

The three were discussing the errors, and endorsed the method. “It engages kids,” said Tianna. “You don’t get bored listening to the teachers. And the computers make it more fun.” Romel and Danielle said they liked working in groups.

M.S. 88 is part of a broad evolution in teaching math, employing technology to provide students with a lesson personalized for each.

The first step, now widespread, was the digital lesson, usually a computer game or video. The best-known web provider, Khan Academy, is free. But there are many other sources of digital lessons, from pricey packages created by education companies to rudimentary videos that teachers make at home.

Computers can also administer and grade math quizzes; some choose the next question depending on how the student did on the previous one. If a student tests her mastery with a short exit quiz every day at the end of the lesson, the teacher and student can know quickly whether the student is learning, and how the student learns best.

School of One has both components. New Classrooms has a library of 12,000 lessons, some created by its staff, but most bought à la carte from companies like Pearson and IXL. About a third are online, and the rest are taught live. And every math class ends with each student taking an online quiz that tests whether she has mastered today’s lesson.

But the next step is the real innovation: the educational equivalent of an air traffic control system. Each student’s daily exit quiz is fed into an algorithm, which produces the next day’s schedule for each student and teacher. (Teachers get a preview, and can override the schedule.) If a student has mastered a skill, on to the next one. If not, she gets another day’s instruction, this time through a different modality. (The algorithm is aware of which modalities work best for her.) It’s an enormous departure from traditional teaching.

Justin Reich, a scholar on educational technology at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said other digital learning platforms try to integrate all the pieces, but School of One is the most comprehensive. “Technology has proven to be good at assessing students’ computational abilities very, very quickly,” he said. “But we’ve had a lot of difficulty translating that model of what students know into actionable information.   The information we give teachers is either too coarse or too fine. It’s either ‘Johnny can’t do math’ or ‘here are 186 characteristics on seven dimensions of proficiency’ and the teacher says ‘I can’t look at all that.’ The value proposition of School of One is: by telling you what the next instructional step is, we’ll help you thread between that.“

Many brands of technology save teachers from spending time making up and grading tests. School of One also regroups students and matches them with the just-right lesson. “In a regular classroom, you do the best you could,” said Reisman. “But this does it every night for you.”

Is School of One a timesaver overall? Not necessarily, said Yaron Bohbot, M.S. 88’s math coach, and a former coach with New Classrooms. The collaboration School of One requires takes extra time, he said, but teachers can spend less time on rote work.

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Fixes

The Excitement of Learning From Profit and Loss

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It’s often been said that the key to success is being able to handle failure. For example, from Winston Churchill: “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Or C. S. Lewis: “One fails forward toward success.”

How can educators incorporate this wisdom to produce deeper learning? As many students, teachers and parents will attest, that’s not the way most schools operate, particularly public schools. The pressures on educators to use prescribed materials and teach to the test often leave little scope to allow students the freedom to learn through real-world experiences and to “fail forward.”

This is a big reason why 500,000 young people drop out of high school each year; they feel disengaged and uninspired; they fail to see how school is relevant in their lives.

The flip side is an opportunity. When students are given chances to take learning into their own hands, the results can be impressive. That’s been the experience of an educational program called Build, which makes it possible for low-income students, as part of their high school studies, to work in teams, conceiving, testing, and ultimately operating their own small businesses. In the process, they discover — often to their surprise — their potential to deal with unexpected problems, persist through failure, and create something that the world values.

Build works in partnership with 23 public schools in Boston, Washington, D.C. and the San Francisco Bay Area, and plans to launch a program in New York City next year. It targets students who are perceived to be at risk of dropping out of school. The program begins with a full-credit class in entrepreneurship in ninth grade — a pivotal year that predicts school persistence. The program can end there, or continue through to 12 th grade and include after-school advisory meetings with mentors. This year, Build will work with about 1,460 students. So far, schools report that three quarters of the students who complete the ninth-grade course opt to stay with Build through to high school graduation. Last year, Build reports, 84 percent of those students were admitted to a four-year college.

“As important as academics are for kids, that’s not where the treasure is,” said Suzanne McKechnie Klahr, an attorney who founded Build in 1999 in East Palo Alto, Cal., after she helped four Latino high school students start a small business and saw that the process inspired ambitions to improve academically and enroll in college. “Resilience, the ability to overcome obstacles, that’s what matters most. And entrepreneurship might just be the most powerful way to take risks and fail and pick yourself up and try again.”

Build’s program is designed to be embedded in schools. Its ninth-grade course is taught by a teacher and meets every day during regular hours. One day a week it also meets after school, when students receive additional help from volunteer mentors, typically local business people. From 10 th grade on, the students develop and run their businesses exclusively after school hours, with guidance from Build teachers and mentors. Build’s new school partners are now locating designated rooms as “youth business incubators.”

A business plan competition in Oakland, Calif. Diane Bezucha

The course is not a simulation. Students, in teams of four or five, divide up responsibilities, conceive a product, design it and produce a prototype. They write a business plan, create budgets, do market analysis, think about promotion and customer service.

“The curriculum ties literacy with mathematics with public speaking and the ability to argue,” says Alexander Laser, an English teacher, who instructs the course at Eastern Senior High School, in Washington, D.C. “It ties together the pieces of the common core to a real world situation. And there’s almost childlike excitement, because the students are not just doing it for a grade. They have this goal of a real outcome, either financially or just contributing to society.”

The 14-year-olds come up with neat ideas: “Lock-It” socks that attach with buttons so you never lose one in the drier; teddy bears with hidden pockets (to keep cell phones out of the hands of siblings); bracelets with motivational slogans, made from melted toothbrushes; a pen that can hide gumballs for clandestine consumption.

Once the students have made progress with their business plans, they make pitches to venture advisers, who are frequently professional investors. “They have to ask for startup money,” said Diane Burbank, the principal of Woodside High School, in Woodside, Cal. (The typical seed financing ranges from $50 to $250, repayable without interest to Build out of proceeds from sales.) “They determine how much money they need. Everybody in the team speaks. They do the “ask” or pitch and they’re called back in and we give feedback. If we don’t grant the full amount, why not?”

The stakes are real. “Sometimes, they’re completely deflated,” said Klahr. “But the older kids who’ve been successful will tell them that the first six iterations of their product failed.”

Later, they have opportunities to sell products in the community or at holiday bazaars or other events organized by Build. And the learning continues. “Some kids discover they’re selling their product for less than their costs,” added Klahr. “Or they thought it would be popular but hadn’t done a survey, and find out it doesn’t sell.”

Along the way, the students pick up soft skills: how to dress professionally, how to create a meeting agenda, how to give a firm handshake. And, crucially, they learn how to ask for help from adults when they need it. (Build has recently instituted a tool to assess student growth in six areas that researchers say are critical to life success: collaboration, communication, problem solving, innovation, grit and self-management.)

The process helps students gain a genuine feeling of competence, says Burbank. “Students that don’t as a matter of course think ‘I’ll make a PowerPoint presentation for my social studies class’ now have that expertise. The first-year course has a huge ripple effect on the rest of their schooling.”

“I’ve seen students who were too shy to answer a question in class standing up in front of a panel of strangers and giving a complex presentation,” added Mr. Laser, the English teacher.

And, of course, if the businesses are successful, they get to keep the profits.

Herbert Castillo, a graduate of Woodside High School who is now a senior at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., told me that Build changed his life. He and his parents came to the United States as political refugees from El Salvador in 1995. “Before Build the idea that I would go to college was very loose,” he said. “It was hard to imagine.”

When he entered ninth grade, his main concern was just getting through English and math. Then he learned that his team had to come up with a business plan. “At the time it was so daunting,” he said. “A 35-page business plan, with market analysis, and we were going to have to pitch it to investors.”

Step by step, they figured it out, with encouragement and advice. They ended up deciding on a business selling “eco-scarves” fashioned from organically grown cloth and dyes. They found a company to supply the cloth, and approached residents of a retirement home in Menlo Park, who were pleased to sew hems at the rate of $3.50 per scarf. With a unit cost of $6, they discovered they could sell the scarves for $18. By the time they graduated, the team had earned a few thousand dollars, said Castillo, making them one of Build’s most successful businesses.
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Fixes

A Town Where a School Bus Is More Than a Bus

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For the bulk of her career, Lavonda Thompson, a 48-year old bus driver and school custodian in Hartsville, S.C., never questioned either her role or the larger system she was serving. “My job was to drive the bus and clean the buildings,” she said. “The child’s job was to act respectful and follow directions.”

Today, however, Thompson and her fellow drivers understand they are uniquely positioned to play important roles in children’s experience of school, beyond getting them there and back home safely. As the literal transition guides between home and school life — and the first and last adults with whom children interact before and after school each day — bus drivers can help recognize how children are faring emotionally, respond to behavior problems in thoughtful ways and set a welcoming tone for the day.

There are many other adults beyond teachers who regularly interact with children — and who are often overlooked as potential contributors to the educational mission.

Recent research in fields ranging from developmental psychology to neuroscience has confirmed that optimal learning environments require a safe and welcoming space for children, a sense of belonging, and an emphasis on forming healthy relationships. Yet there are many other adults beyond teachers who regularly interact with children — and who are often overlooked as potential contributors to the educational mission.

Take Hartsville. Until recently, no one there had ever asked Thompson or her colleagues what they noticed about their child passengers on the bus, or thought to connect their observations to the behavior teachers might witness in the classroom. Moreover, while Hartsville’s teachers were expected to be knowledgeable about their students’ academic standing, they were not expected to be attuned to their psychological states.

That began to change in 2011, when the community announced a five-year plan to transform its elementary schools. It partnered with Yale University’s School Development Program, which helps schools identify and meet the developmental needs of children. It began to evaluate its schools by a broader set of measurements – including the number of disciplinary referrals a bus driver had to write each morning. And it started to coordinate its social services to ensure a more equitable set of support structures for Hartsville’s poorest families. Read more…

Fixes

Empathy, not Expulsion, for Preschoolers at Risk

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CHICAGO — A few years ago, a boy here was on the verge of being expelled because his teacher felt he was a danger to his classmates.

He was 4 years old, in preschool.

This situation is all too common. Preschoolers are expelled at three times the rate of children in kindergarten through 12th grade, with African-American boys being most vulnerable.

This boy — I’ll call him Danny — was lucky, though. His teacher received assistance from a specialist, Lauren Wiley, an early childhood mental health consultant. Wiley started off by listening. The teacher had said she thought Danny (not his real name) needed to be medicated for attention deficit disorder, or A.D.D. Then she admitted she was angry with him. Her job was to keep her students safe, she said, and the boy’s aggression made her feel like a failure. Read more…

Fixes

How to Topple a Dictator (Peacefully)

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Several years ago, before their protest movement was co-opted by violence, a group of young Syrians looking for a way to topple President Bashar al-Assad traveled to an isolated beach resort outside Syria to take a weeklong class in revolution.

The teachers were Srdja Popovic and Slobodan Djinovic — leaders of Otpor, a student movement in Serbia that had been instrumental in the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. After then helping the successful democracy movements in Georgia and Ukraine, the two founded the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (Canvas), and have traveled the world, training democracy activists from 46 countries in Otpor’s methods.

These two Serbs start with the concepts of the American academic Gene Sharp, the Clausewitz of the nonviolent movement. But they have refined and added to those ideas. In a new book, “Blueprint for Revolution,” Popovic recounts Canvas’s strategies and how people use them. Read more…

Fixes

Investing in Energy Efficiency Pays Off

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A junior and senior economist are walking down the street. The junior one spots a $20 bill on the ground and says, “Hey, look, 20 dollars! Should I pick it up?” The senior economist replies: “Don’t bother. It can’t be real. If it were, someone would have taken it already.”

The idea that money is available for the taking defies economic logic. But sometimes it’s true. That’s the case with a vast opportunity that’s routinely overlooked by institutions across the country — from universities to hospitals, companies to governments.

Retrofitting buildings for energy conservation in the United States could save $1 trillion over a decade, reduce American greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent, and spur employment across the country.

The opportunity is investing in energy efficiency. “The returns are tremendous, and there’s virtually no risk,” said Mark Orlowski, the founder and executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, an organization that is building a network to advance research, education and practical tools to help institutions, primarily universities and colleges, make investments that mitigate climate change.

Consider the example of Burton D. Morgan Hall, a 48,000-square-foot building completed in 2003 on the campus of Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Even though it’s only a decade old, energy conservation technologies have advanced so rapidly in recent years that significant savings were possible. In 2012, Jeremy King, Denison’s sustainability coordinator, explained, the college invested about $108,000 to install new sensor-controlled heating and cooling systems and energy efficient lighting throughout the facility. The combined savings from reduced gas and electric bills have remained roughly $28,000 per year, the initial estimate. (The rate for natural gas has gone down but electricity prices have increased.)
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Fixes

For V.A. Hospitals (and Patients), a Major Health Victory

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Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the United States is making modest progress in bringing down rates of hospital-acquired infections.

The implementation of four simple but effective measures has resulted in a dramatic and sustained reduction in hospital infections. But it has little effect on practices at most hospitals.

Progress is good, but modest is not. Hospital-acquired infection is one of the country’s leading causes of death, killing 75,000 people per year — more than car accidents and breast cancer combined. As antibiotic resistance increases, we are already seeing infections no drugs can cure. And these infections are preventable. Still, one in 25 patients who goes into the hospital without an infection will get one there.

Yet hospitals have only started to take prevention seriously in the last decade, most in the last five years. The bulk of the effort, and the progress, has come with infections associated with devices, especially central vein catheters. But device-related infections make up only a quarter of hospital-acquired infections. Hospitals have had far less success with other types of infections.

One hospital group, however, has done more than all others. It is not the Mayo Clinic’s hospitals, nor the Cleveland Clinic’s, nor Kaiser Permanente, nor Sutter, nor Geisinger. These are all hospital chains known for their quality, but another big name leaves them in the dust: the V.A.

Veterans Affairs Medical Centers have been in the news lately, but not for their high quality of care. It’s for endless waiting times, falsification of wait-time data and labyrinthine bureaucracy. Yet in the matter of “first, do no harm,” the V.A. stands out. (Here and here are other studies showing the V.A.’s edge in patient care.)

The C.D.C.’s survey of (non-V.A.) hospitals nationwide found the following improvements: in the last five years, bloodstream infections associated with a central line fell by 46 percent, and surgical site infections fell by 19 percent. Infections associated with a urinary catheter rose by 6 percent, although they may now have started to decrease.
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Fixes

In Egypt, Sowing Seeds of Gender Equality

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CAIRO — Sara was supposed to marry young. She was supposed to get a job teaching at the school a few minutes’ walk from her family’s apartment in Cairo so she’d always be close to home, safe from sexual harassment, keeping her reputation as a virtuous, Muslim woman intact.

But Sara — I’m using that name to protect her privacy — took another path. Today, she is 35 and unmarried. For her work teaching Arabic to foreigners, she travels across Cairo giving private lessons. Her choice has made relations with her family dangerous and drawn severe criticism from her conservative community, where it’s unusual for women to leave the house without a trusted male companion, and women are labeled promiscuous if they fraternize with men outside the family — particularly foreigners who, according to Sara’s family, “have no morals.”

In patriarchal societies, years of efforts to change male attitudes towards women have failed. But there is hope, and it lies with the young.

There’s an apple-size scar on Sara’s chest where, she said, last year one of her brothers threw boiling water on her during an argument about her lifestyle. Several months ago, the same brother beat her with a wrench and wrapped an electric cord around her neck, leaving an angry red welt that made it difficult for her to turn her head for days. Neither Sara’s mother or other siblings offered help, she said. Instead, they chastised her for being rebellious.
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Fixes

For Better Crime Prevention, a Dose of Science

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What causes young inner-city men to kill each other?

Where do we start? At the root causes of poverty, discrimination, family breakdown, childhood toxic stress? With concrete societal failings such as bad schools, unsafe housing, lack of health care and few jobs? With a gang culture that accords respect to those who commit brutal crimes and serve long prison terms? With the easy availability of guns?

All contribute. But we can’t wait until we solve these enormous problems to keep young men alive. “Maybe you don’t have to solve poverty,” said Sara Heller, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Maybe you can attack more proximal causes. So much violence comes out of arguments. If you can get a kid to look away instead of throwing the first punch, you can avoid violence.”

On its face, this seems absurd. But consider the Chicago police’s analysis of murders. In 2011, of the murders for which researchers could identify a motive, only 10 percent were the stuff outsiders imagine: ruthless drug dealers vying for territory. The vast majority of homicides — 70 percent — were the result of altercations.

“A couple of young guys plus a stupid beef plus the presence of a gun equals dead bodies,” said Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago and co-director of its Crime Lab, an organization founded in 2008 that conducts gold-standard randomized controlled trials of promising interventions to prevent crime. Jens Ludwig, Crime Lab’s director, calls these arguments “Seinfeldian” — about nothing.
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Fixes

The News We Need to Hear

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John Minchillo/Associated Press

Happy 2015, our fifth year of Fixes.

When we began writing the column in late 2010 we hoped to show that serious reporting about responses to social problems could both provide useful insights for society and engage readers. We aimed to distinguish Fixes — an example of what we call solutions journalism — from uncritical “good news” reporting by examining approaches to social problems that show results and focusing on the specifics of how they work and what we can learn from them.

The news offers countless opportunities to highlight the ways people are tackling major problems.

Just before the holidays, I took a look at the major stories of 2014 as compiled by various news organizations. Rather than writing a retrospective column, as I’ve done the past few years, I wanted to look ahead with the question: How could a solutions journalism angle complement news coverage in 2015?

Reviewing the news of the year is not a happy job. The top stories are typically about death and destruction. In 2014, they included the Ebola crisis, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israeli bombardment of Gaza, beheadings by ISIS, the shooting down or disappearance of two Malaysian airlines flights, the grand jury decisions in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island and ensuing outrage, and the suicide of Robin Williams. There was, of course, much coverage about the Winter Olympics and the World Cup.
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