A Positive Feedback Loop from Hell

How poor academic performance leads to poor behaviors

Scarborough’s Rope, courtesy of Brainspring.com

My previous two education-related newsletters focused on the behavioral problems that I have faced in school and the corresponding lack of disciplinary actions taken by school administrators against repeat offenders. You can read them here and here, respectively.

Today, I want to write about why some of those behaviors exist in the first place. There are several reasons, some of which I delved into in the first of the two linked newsletters above, but there is one that I neglected to mention that actually interests me far more than the problems of the culture that these students are brought up in. While that is certainly an important topic, and perhaps the root of all the behavioral problems that teachers have to deal with in schools, it is not something that teachers themselves can work to fix.

One area in which teachers do have some control is in the educational proficiency of their students. And it might not surprise you to learn that most of the kids with behavioral problems have very low reading and math scores.

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There is an organization called the Nation’s Report Card that measures students’ understanding of the most basic concepts of education: reading and math. Every year, they conduct the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which shows the level of proficiency in those two vital subjects. This year, the NAEP found that nine-year-olds dropped five points in their average reading scores and seven points in their average math scores.

This represents the largest drop in reading since 1990 and the first-ever drop in math scores since the NAEP began keeping track in 1969. Unsurprisingly, this data comes in the wake of the Covid-19 shutdowns, which clearly affected children’s literacy and numeracy more than perhaps anybody could have predicted.

Students’ scores dropped across the board, but already lower-performing students did much worse than higher-performing ones. On the English test, the lowest students dropped 10 points on the scaled score for reading, while the highest students decreased only two points. For math, the difference was similar: a 12-point drop for the lowest students and a three-point drop for the highest.

When I first started teaching, our then-principal showed us state-testing data from the previous year for our school. The results were abysmal: Only about 10 percent of students were proficient in math, while about 15 percent were proficient in English. Even after a full year of in-school instruction, the data was not much better. Moreover, something like half of our students are below the 35th percentile nationally for reading. That means that half or more of our students are worse readers than 65 percent of students nationally.

(That number is actually somewhat misleading. The percentile benchmark is a fixed number, so it won’t reflect the recent downturn in the whole country. In a normal percentile system, everyone is measured against the top performers at the time, and those top performers can fluctuate depending on the circumstances. In this case, the top percentile was fixed at a certain number some years ago. Still, the uphill battle we have to fight is very real.)

As you can expect, when half or more of 7th graders are worse at reading than 65 percent of students nationally, that means that many of our 7th graders can’t really read. That is, they can’t read anywhere close to grade level—which is terrible for them, since they are encountering texts at grade level. Therefore, many of our students cannot truly read or comprehend anything that they have to read in school.

You can see how this lack of comprehension can lead to poor student behavior in class. Let’s say you’re a 7th grader who reads at a 4th-grade level and does math at a 3rd-grade level. You go to English class, where your class is reading an article about, say, hurricanes. You understand and can read the basic words and phrases in the article—the, storm, windy, etc.—but everything else is beyond your comprehension. And yet, your English teacher has a curriculum to get through, and your class is supposed to move onto the next story six days after you begin, and you have five skills to learn along with the text that you’re supposed to be able to fully comprehend. In Social Studies, you are supposed to be learning about the ancient Indians, and you need to memorize maps of a foreign land, and all the Buddhist concepts and facts about India are presented in a text that’s at grade level. In math, you are supposed to be learning about graphs and solving one-step equations with fractions and decimals, but you haven’t memorized your times tables and you still have to count on your fingers to add and subtract.

You go to all of these classes, but you can’t really understand anything that happens in them because you don’t have the skills to access the material. Yet your teacher moves on before you are ready, and you do poorly on the test, and you get stressed about your grades, and nothing is really working out for you in school. How else would you react other than to rebel? Wouldn’t you get frustrated and embarrassed, and instead of publicly displaying your lack of knowledge, cover it up with over-the-top behaviors?

I don’t write this to excuse those types of behaviors. Many of the kids with low comprehension do not misbehave. Plus, many of the kids who read and do math at high levels misbehave as well. Two of my most challenging students are definitely in the top 20 percent of my students in terms of their abilities. But it does show one reason why behaviors can be so terrible in schools—especially low-performing schools like the one I teach at. It also creates a positive feedback loop: Low academic performance leads to poor behaviors, which leads to time spent out of the classroom, which further lowers academic performance. Once you understand this link, you begin to see why teachers have to deal with such horrendous behavior from their most academically-challenged students.

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One question you might have is: How did we let it get this bad? What are elementary schools doing that causes 7th graders to read at a 4th grade level? I don’t have all the answers to those questions, but I do know that educators are waking up to the problems with how we teach reading in the first place.

Natalie Wexler is a journalist who wrote an incredible book called The Knowledge Gap that explains why reading scores are so low in the U.S. As the name implies, the test-score gap between high- and low-performing students has a lot to do with the amount of background knowledge students are privy to. Students with lots of background knowledge do much better on reading comprehension tests than students without that background knowledge. One way that students acquire background knowledge is through outings with their parents to museums and historic battlefields, or a general immersion in knowledge by their history-buff parents, or through their own reading outside of school. As you can imagine, students with that type of experience typically come from wealthier families, which is perhaps the main reason why students from wealthy families do better in school than their poorer peers.

To see how background knowledge is very important to reading, consider the following study as described in The Knowledge Gap. Students were chosen for a study based on two criteria: their reading comprehension scores and their knowledge of baseball. The researchers constructed a model baseball field with miniature players. They then asked the kids to read a paragraph describing a half-inning of the game. Finally, they charged the students with moving the players around the field in a manner that matched the description given by the paragraph. Here is a brief description of the paragraph given by Wexler in her book:

Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop, the passage began. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late. Churniak is on first with a single, Johnson stayed on third. The next batter is Whitcomb, the Cougars’ left-fielder.

When the students moved the players to match the description, the kids with high knowledge of baseball did way better than the kids with low knowledge of baseball, regardless of the reading comprehension abilities. In other words, it’s the background knowledge that matters, not the score on the reading comprehension inventory.

The main point of The Knowledge Gap is that schools don’t teach reading in a way that reflects the cognitive science behind that very vital skill. That science is typically represented by Scarborough’s Rope, a concept invented in the late-90s by a woman named Dr. Hollis Scarborough. Scarborough’s Rope is a visual representation of how different “strands” of reading are “woven together” and together create a “rope” that is the basis for reading comprehension. There are two main strands of the rope: language comprehension and word recognition. Word recognition is basically sounding out words, recognizing the words that appear often and don’t need to be sounded out, and being aware of what letters and pairs of letters create which sounds. Language comprehension includes background knowledge, vocabulary, and other critical skills.

The important thing to know about Scarborough’s Rope is that both language comprehension and word recognition are required in order to be able to read. So even if your ability to read and recognize words is high, you can’t read at grade level if you can’t comprehend the words themselves. You’d be surprised at how many kids can read an entire passage with relatively complex vocabulary but are vexed when you ask them a basic question to test their comprehension of that material.

For various reasons, schools turned away from the “science of reading,” as it’s called, in favor of what’s often known as “whole language theory,” or its later iteration, “balanced literacy.” Suffice it to say, these alternative theories on how to teach literacy do not work for kids who have little to no background knowledge on any subject. Therefore, elementary schools have been teaching a form of literacy that does not work to increase students’ reading ability unless those students have a lot of background knowledge to begin with. Moreover, when schools want to juice their reading scores on state tests, they strip away social studies, science, and art—all of which provide essential background knowledge—and focus more on reading. This actually decreases reading scores—a counterintuitive claim until you understand that kids aren’t learning what they need to in order to build the language comprehension strand of Scarborough’s Rope.

I highly recommend reading The Knowledge Gap for the complete tale. Of all the things I’ve learned about education in my year-and-one-month of teaching, this has been the most illuminating and interesting. It reveals why kids’ reading scores are so low, and it helps to show why some kids behave so poorly.

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As I said earlier, I don’t have all the answers. If I did, my school would probably be doing much better than it is. I still firmly believe that much of what ails schools and poorly-behaved students is the lack of value placed on education by these students’ families.

But what I do know is that elementary schools—and the people who advise them on what to teach—are a major part of the problem. If middle schools get students who can’t read beyond the elementary-school level, it’s impossible to expect them to behave, much less improve their performance. Luckily, the tide seems to be turning. My district is taking the first steps towards implementing a more knowledge-rich reading curriculum at the lower level, as are school districts around the country. Hopefully, this trend will help to bring every student up to par with their reading abilities—which, in turn, may improve their behaviors.

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A disclaimer: I should say that I took advice from some of my family members who were concerned that my newsletters could cause consternation with my school district if members of the administration became aware of what I had written. This was particularly the case after my most recent education-related newsletter, “The administrators have no clothes.” (By the way, I think that’s my best one yet—you can read it here, if you haven’t already.) I emailed a fellow teacher who also works for the teacher’s union that I belong to and asked him what I should do about this possibility. He recommended that I refrain from using the district’s or the school’s name when I write future editions of the newsletter. (He still hasn’t gotten back to me about whether my employment contract has any free-speech protections built into it, but my cursory glance of the 160-page contract yielded disappointingly little fruit.) This is mostly moot, since most of my readers are my family members or friends who know what school district I work for, but in the interest of protecting my employment status, I will follow that advice in the future. If I can, I will go back and edit my previous newsletters to scrub the names of the school district, the school I work for, and any teachers or administrators whom I have mentioned by name. So if you are wondering why I didn’t mention the name of the school or district that I work for in this newsletter, that’s why. Thank you for your understanding as I try to balance my competing interests.