For real education reform, take a cue from the Adventists

[The Straight Story]

For real education reform, take a cue from the Adventists

Riverside, Calif.

Education reform has taken center stage lately as Americans struggle to close the oft-condemned achievement gap. But quietly in our midst, the second largest Christian school system in the world has been steadily outperforming the national average – across all demographics.

The Seventh-Day Adventists' holistic curriculum serves as a model for how to overcome that gap – the disparity in academic performance between low-income and minority students and their peers in higher-income communities. But even more, it shows how to narrow the gap between mind, body, and spirit, truly educating students for success.

Now, I'm not advocating for religious instruction to be included in school curricula. Rather, what my research indicates is that holistic learning – an education that doesn't erect artificial barriers among disciplines and between mind, body, and spirit – does indeed result in greater student achievement.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/1115/For-real-education-reform-take-a-cue-from-the-Adventists

[Dr Fate]

1. Can I get pepper with that? n/t

n/t

[jwirr]

2. This is interesting and it does seem to work. I have always thought

that a holistic approach is the best on any level. One question though. In my experience many private schools keep out the troubled students. In your research did they talk about special ed or just plain kids who misbehave? How do they treat that group? From what I know about their religion I would think that they would do well with these groups.

[MattBaggins]

3. Holistic? Spirit?

Mumbo jumbo?


Ahhh the key to it all reveals itself

Elissa Kido is a professor of education at La Sierra University, a Seventh-Day Adventist college, where she directs the CognitiveGenesis Research project.

So an Adventist proponent "researches" her own schools and comes to the unsubstantiated conclusions she set out to find.

[madinmaryland]

4. Funny how that works. Notice how the CS Monitor puts it in the "Opinion" section.

[Igel]

5. Most ed research is crap.

It's just a question of how runny and stinky.

There were comparisons and factors it sounds like she didn't look at but should have. That's usually the case: Often you find what you look for. Esp. in soc. science research, where the factors in play are very numerous, often intercorrelated, sometimes derived from another factor or set of factors. Messy stuff.

On the other hand, it also sounds like she's saying some things that are controversial but probably true (controversial because people don't like the results, not because they're incorrect results). She's saying them in odd, culture-internal ways. Strong family on average, forward thinking/optimistic culture that encourages discipline and hard work, compliance with delimited authority, and a fairly homogeneous set of students in the ways that count for education. That they're not homogeneous in ways that don't really count for education is meaningless, except that a lot of people assert that they have to be meaningful because if those aren't the primary variables then they are forced to reach controversial conclusions. The urban/rural divide isn't the crucial one, either.

These conclusions aren't unsubstantiated, once translated into the usual terms--it's just hard showing that they're fully substantiated, that they're both necessary and sufficient to account for the data when so many people don't want them to be necessary in the first place and completeness is a difficult goal.

Who she is doesn't really matter if her data are sound and methodology no less rigorous than the norm for her discipline: 7th dayers can do research, too. (Note that most researchers in teaching methologies tend to come up with some program, implement it, and report on how wonderful "their schools" are--or research sucky schools that aren't theirs and then report on how sucky they are and how the schools need to follow the researchers' recommendations to become unsucky. By that measure few researchers meet your criterion, virtually none that say anything even potentially useful.)