Middletown, PA – Phoenix Contact engineers head back into the classroom this week to teach sixth-grade science class at Middletown Area Middle School in Middletown, Pa. The classes are part of Phoenix Contact’s National Engineers Week celebration.
Phoenix Contact has worked with the school every February since 2007. The engineers lead hands-on lessons that make science fun. The goal is to inspire young people to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
The lessons include:
Building catapults
Racing cookie tins down ramps
Building an electric motor
Learning about static electricity with the Van de Graaff generator
“Our engineering team created this outreach program many years ago, and the partnership with Middletown Area School District has stood the test of time,” said Patty Marrero, interim vice president of human relations at Phoenix Contact. “National Engineers Week is a special time for them to share their passion for technology with students. It’s also our chance to thank our engineers for the creativity and innovations that drive our company forward.”
About Phoenix Contact
Phoenix Contact is a global market leader based in Germany. Since 1923, Phoenix Contact has created products to connect, distribute, and control power and data flows. Our products are found in nearly all industrial settings, but we have a strong focus on the energy, infrastructure, process, factory automation, and e-mobility markets. Sustainability and responsibility guide every action we take, and we’re proud to work with our customers to empower a smart and sustainable world for future generations. Our global network includes 22,000 employees in 100+ countries. Phoenix Contact USA has headquarters near Harrisburg, Pa., and employs more than 1,100 people across the U.S.
For more information about Phoenix Contact or its products, visit www.phoenixcontact.com, call technical service at 800-322-3225, or email [email protected].
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
In the words of Carol Dweck, “Becoming is better than being.” As novice sixth grade math and English teachers, we’ve learned to approach our mid-year benchmark assessments not as final judgments but as tools for reflection and growth. Many of our students entered the school year below grade level, and while achieving grade-level mastery is challenging, a growth mindset allows us to see their potential, celebrate progress, and plan for further successes amongst our students. This perspective transforms data analysis into an empowering process; data is a tool for improvement amongst our students rather than a measure of failure.
A growth mindset is the belief that abilities grow through effort and persistence. This mindset shapes how we view data. Instead of focusing on what students can’t do, we emphasize what they can achieve. For us, this means turning gaps into opportunities for growth and modeling optimism and resilience for our students. When reviewing data, we don’t dwell on weaknesses. We set small and achievable goals to help students move forward to build confidence and momentum.
Celebrating progress is vital. Even small wins (i.e., moving from a kindergarten grade-level to a 1st– or 2nd-grade level, significant growth in one domain, etc.) are causes for recognition. Highlighting these successes motivates students and shows them that effort leads to results.
Involving students in the process is also advantageous. At student-led conferences, our students presented their data via slideshows that they created after they reviewed their growth, identified their strengths, and generated next steps with their teachers. This allowed them to feel and have tremendous ownership over their learning. In addition, interdisciplinary collaboration at our weekly professional learning communities (PLCs) has strengthened this process. To support our students who struggle in English and math, we work together to address overlapping challenges (i.e., teaching math vocabulary, chunking word-problems, etc.) to ensure students build skills in connected and meaningful ways.
We also address the social-emotional side of learning. Many students come to us with fixed mindsets by believing they’re just “bad at math” or “not good readers.” We counter this by celebrating effort, by normalizing struggle, and by creating a safe and supportive environment where mistakes are part of learning. Progress is often slow, but it’s real. Students may not reach grade-level standards in one year, but gains in confidence, skills, and mindset set the stage for future success, as evidenced by our students’ mid-year benchmark results. We emphasize the concept of having a “growth mindset,” because in the words of Denzel Washington, “The road to success is always under construction.” By embracing growth and seeing potential in every student, improvement, resilience, and hope will allow for a brighter future.
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There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Americans have been getting dumber.
Across a wide range of national and international tests, grade levels and subject areas, American achievement scores peaked about a decade ago and have been falling ever since.
Will the new NAEP scores coming out this week show a halt to those trends? We shall see. But even if those scores indicate a slight rebound off the COVID-era lows, policymakers should seek to understand what caused the previous decade’s decline.
There’s a lot of blame to go around, from cellphones and social media to federal accountability policies. But before getting into theories and potential solutions, let’s start with the data.
Until about a decade ago, student achievement scores were rising. Researchers at Education Next found those gains were broadly shared across racial and economic lines, and achievement gaps were closing. But then something happened, and scores started to fall. Worse, they fell faster for lower-performing students, and achievement gaps started to grow.
This pattern shows up on test after test. Last year, we looked at eighth grade math scores and found growing achievement gaps in 49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 large cities with sufficient data.
But it’s not just math, and it’s not just NAEP. The American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus has documented the same trend in reading, history and civics. Tests like NWEA’s MAP Growth and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready are showing it too. And, as Malkus found in a piece released late last year, this is a uniquely American problem. The U.S. now leads the world in achievement gap growth.
What’s going on? How can students here get back on track? Malkus addresses these questions in a new report out last week and makes the point that any honest reckoning with the causes and consequences of these trends must account for the timing, scope and magnitude of the changes.
Theory #1: It’s accountability
As I argued last year, my top explanation has been the erosion of federal accountability policies. In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. That timing fits, and it makes sense that easing up on accountability, especially for low-performing students, led to achievement declines among those same kids.
However, there’s one problem with this explanation: American adults appear to be suffering from similar achievement declines. In results that came out late last year, the average scores of Americans ages 16 to 65 fell in both literacy and numeracy on the globally administered Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies.
And even among American adults, achievement gaps are growing. The exam’s results are broken down into six performance levels. On the numeracy portion, for example, the share of Americans scoring at the two highest levels rose two points, from 10% to 12%, while the percentage of those at the bottom two levels rose from 29% to 34%. In literacy, the percentage of Americans scoring at the top two levels fell from 14% to 13%, while the lowest two levels rose from 19% to 28%.
These results caused Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, to comment, “There’s a dwindling middle in the United States in terms of skills.” Carr could have made the same comment about K-12 education — except that these results can’t be explained by school-related causes.
Theory #2: It’s the phones
The rise of smartphones and social media, and the decline in reading for pleasure, could be contributing to these achievement declines. Psychologist Jean Twenge pinpointed 2012 as the first year when more than half of Americans owned a smartphone, which is about when achievement scores started to decline. This theory also does a better job of explaining why Americans of all ages are scoring lower on achievement tests.
But there are some holes in this explanation. For one, why are some of the biggest declines seen in the youngest kids? Are that many 9-year-olds on Facebook or Instagram? Second, why are the lowest performers suffering the largest declines in achievement? Attention deficits induced by phones and screens should affect all students in similar ways, and yet the pattern shows the lowest performers are suffering disproportionately large drops.
But most fundamentally, why is this mostly a U.S. trend? Smartphones and social media are global phenomena, and yet scores in Australia, England, Italy, Japan and Sweden have all risen over the last decade. A couple of other countries have seen some small declines (like Finland and Denmark), but no one has else seen declines like we’ve had here in the States.
Other theories: Immigration, school spending or the Common Core
Other theories floating around have at least some kernels of truth. Immigration trends could explain some portion of the declines, although it’s not clear why those would be affecting scores only now. The Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli has partly blamed America’s “lost decade” on economic factors, but school spending has rebounded sharply in recent years without similar gains in achievement. Others, including historian Diane Ravitch and the Pioneer Institute’s Theodor Rebarber, blame the shift to the Common Core state standards, which was happening about the same time. But non-Common Core states suffered similar declines, and scores have also dropped in non-Common Core subjects.
Note that COVID is not part of my list. It certainly exacerbated achievement declines and reset norms within schools, but achievement scores were already falling well before it hit America’s shores.
Instead of looking for one culprit, it could be a combination of these factors. It could be that the rise in technology is diminishing Americans’ attention spans and stealing their focus from books and other long-form written content. Meanwhile, schools have been de-emphasizing basic skills, easing up on behavioral expectations and making it easier to pass courses. At the same time, policymakers in too many parts of the country have stopped holding schools accountable for the performance of all students.
That’s a potent mix of factors that could explain these particular problems. It would be helpful to have more research to pinpoint problems and solutions, but if this diagnosis is correct, it means students, teachers, parents and policymakers all have a role to play in getting achievement scores back on track.
