Alumni Success AI, Video Game Addiction, and the Excellence Gap
Issue 3 of 7Plus, an education news and critical theory bulletin
This week’s issue covers an AI chat bot solution to summer melt, the promising growth of mental health curriculum, the recognition of video game addiction as a mental health disorder, a shift from the achievement gap to the excellence gap, and the social construction of school quality.
Local Education News
Effect of Supreme Court’s Janus decision on Philadelphia’s teacher unions
June 27, 2018 | Avi Wolfman-Arent & Hannah Melville | WHYY & The Notebook
Summary The US Supreme Court has recently made a decision that has allowed public employees to stop paying the unions that represent them. The Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, represents about half of the state’s public-sector union employees and one fifth of its union workers. Many school improvements in city schools have been a result of union negotiations, including class-size and lead-free drinking water. Some have celebrated the decision as a step forward for free speech, freeing up those who are “forced to pay for political speech and policy positions with which [they] disagree, just so [they] can keep their jobs”, as well as serve as a “wake-up call” for unions to prove their worth. Others believe the decision will have more negative consequences, reducing the economic and political power and impact of unions and “further diminish[ing] the collective rights of working people”.
Significance While unions might step up their efforts to retain membership through making more aggressive reforms, the decrease in stewardship for the commons could likely result in less state level reform. This would disproportionately affect schools without the resources to address their own issues individually and negatively impact the communities that Philadelphia educational equity organizations work with.
Regional Education News
Summer melt: why aren’t students showing up for college?
June 18, 2018 | Shankar Vedantam | National Public Radio
Summary Over twenty percent of students who report continuing to college but fail to show up on the first day in the fall. This phenomenon has been dubbed ‘summer melt’, and has occurred largely due to little obstacles that trip up first generation college students, that are otherwise fully capable and deserving to go on to college, at the last mile. This podcast episode looks at Georgia State’s solution, an artificially intelligent chatbot named Pounce, and an RCT of its effectiveness in reducing summer melt. Pounce reduced GSU’s summer melt by 22% from 2015 to 2016 and handled 99% of messages that would have otherwise gone to counselors.
Significance Part of the primary operations education equity organizations include helping students complete college applications, which extends to its current work in communicating with alumni to ensure that they are set to begin college on the first day. It might be worthwhile for them to make a similar AI chat bot to assist with more basic tasks like acquiring financial information or specific deadlines. The bot can also similarly redirect unfamiliar requests to those coordinating alumni success, while being ‘trained’ to tackle some of those tasks in future. This investment would also free up additional resources the more it is used, becoming more comprehensive each year.
Should schools require mental health education? Two states say yes
June 22, 2018 | Christine Vestal | Education Week
Summary While most states require health education in public schools, New York and Virginia are the first to add mental health instruction to the curriculum. In New York, public school teachers are encouraged to incorporate mental illness topics into other subjects, and health teachers to develop lesson plans detailing the identification and treatment of mental illness. Virginia has implemented a statewide educational program that would explain the brain science behind mental illness, help students learn how to improve their own mental well-being, and reduce the stigma around mental health.
Significance Most academic or social engagement with students have an additional positive side impact on students’ mental health, through providing them with love and support. However, there can be a bigger impact on the mental health landscape in schools if we implement similar workshops/programs that directly educate students on how to identify mental illness, care for their own and their peers’ mental health, and be aware of the mental wellness resources they can access.
Outraged by kids in cages? Look at our entire juvenile justice system
June 24, 2018 | Cara H. Drinan | Huffpost Opinion
Summary Following the family separations at the border which has been compared with the Nazi regime, this piece picks up on another parallel it has with current juvenile justice practices — they target those typically traumatized and vulnerable, and have affected mostly poor and minority communities, aggravating their existing trauma and causing (further) psychological harm.
Significance Education equity work helps kids avoid ending up in this cycle, but as an institutional problem, it will be hard to address this inequality through solely interacting with them. One thing nonprofits and smaller organizations could contribute might be the collection of data from the schools they work with on incarceration rates over time. This could also lead to more funding opportunities.
Educators turn to programs for top students to narrow the ‘excellence gap’
June 25, 2018 | Dana Goldstein | The New York Times
Summary Education reform have been shifting their focus from closing the ‘achievement gap’, bringing “the academic performance of struggling students from low-income backgrounds, many of them black or Hispanic, up to the average level of their middle-class or more privileged peers”, to closing the ‘excellence gap’, getting “more students from diverse backgrounds to perform at elite levels”. This shift came about from the test score gaps that have persisted despite years of effort. Some have stressed the need for sufficient deviation from ‘tracking’ practices in the past, with differentiation being derived at the inter-school level, separated by subjects, and with the provision of many chances to gain access throughout school.
Significance While making room for students from lower-income backgrounds in high performance domains can help to address the inequality in education, this could lead to further disenfranchisement of the bulk of such students. Proponents could justify stratification and a starker difference in resources and performance between schools with the establishment of setting up a few token individuals at the top. Education equity organizations should also be aware of this tension between allowing exceptional individuals to flourish and making sure all individuals are being elevated, especially in our current social mobility paradigm.
Other Relevant News
WHO recognizes video gaming addiction as mental disorder
June 19, 2018 | Here & Now | WBUR
Summary Gaming disorder is the newest addictive disorder listed in the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases. Dr. Hilarie Cash, a psychologist and co-founder of reSTART, a residential facility for adults and adolescents addicted to the internet and video gaming, shares about the new classification and the facility. The disorder has led to severe depression from failing out of high school, work, and in relationships, as well as school refusal in kids between the ages of 13 and 18. The designation can lead to an increased willingness to get treatment as well as get insurance coverage for treatment.
Significance Establishing gaming addiction as a disorder capable of causing significant impairment in social, educational, and occupational functioning can legitimize funding for programs to address it. I’m unclear whether this is a problem among the communities we work with, but organizations working directly with students could consider doing a survey to get a sense of this, and/or address it in future programming. Programs on it could be linked with material on stress, anxiety, and depression as well as drugs and addiction.
Examining Education Critically
Buying homes, buying schools: school choice and the social construction of school quality
2002 | Jennifer Jellison Holme | Harvard Educational Review
Summary Holme’s research findings depicts the school choice problem as a twofold one: [1] high income parents are able to select good schools through purchasing homes in their vicinity, while low-income parents do not have the same option (economic inequality); [2] while high-income parents have the ability to select better schools for their children, they do not seem to be in fact selecting ‘good’ schools based on school curricula or instructional quality, but “stated that they based their judgments about the school quality primarily on information from individuals in their social networks” and not just communicate but construct the reputation of ‘good’ schools (irrationality and arbitrariness).
Significance We typically view the school choice problem as just an economic inequality perpetuator, and Holme’s finding that parents are essentially creating this inequality through their social networks is fascinating and important to consider when thinking about how to rectify the issue. Ideally, I think redistributing taxes at a higher scale would help to equalize the funding the schools receive, and incentivizing cultural competency through collegiate admission requirements or community building events across demographics would hopefully diversify social networks and help construct a paradigm of a ‘good’ school as a diverse one. educational equity organizations might be able to assist with organizing such community events or facilitating more interactions across different demographics.
Please share this with education equity actors you know that would find it useful; as always, feedback and comments on how I can make this more useful are much appreciated!
