On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Alina Adams, a New York Times best-selling author, joins Mike and David to discuss the parenting lessons she learned from watching “Young Sheldon.” Then, on the Research Minute, Adam examines a new study investigating the rigor (or lack thereof) of online credit recovery courses.
Recommended content:
“I watched the parenting on ‘Young Sheldon’… and did the exact opposite” —Alina Adams, Education Next
“Fun fact: ‘Young Sheldon’ provides insight into parenting bright children” —Jonathan Plucker, Education Next
“Time to press ‘pause’ on credit recovery” —Adam Tyner, Fordham Institute
Jennifer Darling-Aduana, Carolyn J. Heinrich, Jeremy Noonan, Jialing Wu, and Kathryn Enriquez, “Failing to learn from failure: The facade of online credit recovery assessments,” Education Finance and Policy (March 2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at dbuck@fordhaminstitute.org.
This transcript was created using AI software.
David Griffith:
Welcome to the Education Gadfly Show. I'm your host David Griffith of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute filling in for Mike Petrilli. Today, Alina Adams, a New York Times bestselling author, joins us to discuss the parenting lessons she learned from watching "Young Sheldon." Then, on the research minute, Adam Tyner reports on a news study investigating the rigor of online credit recovery courses. All this on the Education Gadfly show,
Are these tests that are taken in some sort of secure environment? Do you just take them? I mean, like at home?
Michael Petrilli:
Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at fordhaminstitute.org. And now please welcome our special guest for this week, Alina Adams. Alina, welcome to the show.
Alina Adams:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Michael Petrilli:
Alina is a New York Times bestselling author, and also the creator and editor of NYC School Secrets. It's great to have you here with us. Alina also joining us as always, my co-host, David Griffith.
David Griffith:
Morning, Mike.
Michael Petrilli:
Well, Alina, we really appreciate you being on the show. You have written a fantastic kind of review slash critique of a television show. We don't talk about TV on the podcast here very often, but this is an exception because this TV show is about a highly gifted student and gifted kids is something we talk about. So let's do that on Ed reform update.
Okay, Alina, well, this piece that you wrote, it followed on the heels of an education Next Review by Jonathan Pucker about the TV show. Young Sheldon, right now, for those of you that haven't watched the show, this is a spinoff of the Big Bang Theory sitcom. So this is a prequel and like the title says, young Sheldon, we get to see Sheldon Cooper growing up as a boy in East Texas and becoming the man that he will become later on the show, the Big Bang Theory, and on the show, he is a kid who is highly gifted. I think we meet him, he's something like nine years old and he's already in high school. As Jonathan Pucker pointed out, that's actually pretty unusual because our schools these days are so opposed to actually allowing kids to skip grades, much less to do this radical acceleration where you'd put a grade school kid in high school. But otherwise, Jonathan thought that there was a lot in the show that rang true to him. In your piece, you didn't necessarily disagree with Jonathan, but what you said was that as the mother of a highly gifted child yourself, you looked at everything Sheldon's parents did and you did the opposite. So tell us about that.
Alina Adams:
Well, unfortunately, the first thing that I did the opposite was unlike Mary, I couldn't find a way to accelerate my child. It's interesting that you said at the beginning, to me, the most fanciful element I found the family very believable. The idea that a school system much less a public school system, accelerated a nine-year-old into high school. That was the fantasy part for me because when my own son, he has been begging to drop out of school since he was in third grade saying he could do a better job teaching himself all of those things. And I did look into some other possibilities, and at least in New York City where I live and where I work and where I even wrote, I wrote two books. One called Getting into NYC Kindergarten, one called Getting into NYC High School. So I know the system and I could not figure out a way to work the system because here's something that I found out, Mike. So I tried to see to just get my son into City College. I wasn't trying to get him into some elite private university, but here's the thing. And
Michael Petrilli:
At what age, Alina, how old was he when you were doing
Alina Adams:
It was at 14 when the idea was we would try to skip high school and go straight to college based on things he had done. He had taken tests for CTY Center for Talented Youth. He had been working professionally as a computer programmer since he was 12 years old, as I like to say. There were days he made more money than I did. At 12 years old, he was working as a computer programmer, managing a team of college interns. So we thought based on that, we thought college at 14 would be an appropriate fit for him. And so I just tried to get him into City College or Hunter College or one of the Cooney in New York City. But here's a fun fact about New York City education, 50%, almost over 50% of students who graduate with a New York City public high school diploma cannot pass the placement test at a cuy so that they don't need remediation.
But being able to pass that placement test is not enough to get you into a cuy because those schools would not take him with a high school diploma. But in New York City, you could not take your equivalency until you were 17 and not just the day you turned 17, but at the end of the academic year when you turned 17. So for my son, that would've made him almost 18 because of where his birthday fell. So the first part about young Sheldon that I felt bad about is that unlike Mary Cooper, I could not make this happen for my son. But then everything else that Mary Cooper did, not as much of a fan.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah. Alright. Well, and as we said, this is unusual in allowing a young student to be able to accelerate like that. It sounds like cuny, that somebody wrote those regulations on purpose to keep sons children like yours out,
Alina Adams:
And the fact that you can take your GED, it's called something else now that you can't take your G and D until a certain age is rather clearly to me and to my son a way of keeping you by force in the system for the money that the state sends per student. I can't think of any other reason, although my husband, who has also been a teacher for 30 years says to me, when given the choice between malice and incompetence, always assume incompetence, but in this particular case, it's not malice. But I do have to think it's a deliberate choice to keep kids by force in the system.
Michael Petrilli:
Well, look, the system has this ideological predisposition to be against any form of grade skipping. They just don't like it. Alright, but let's get to the article. I mean, you say in here that Mary Cooper as well as the father, as well as the grandmother, that their parenting of this highly gifted boy was basically atrocious.
Alina Adams:
Well, what I had a problem with is they were constantly giving into him, but where my big issue came into is I think they tied two things together that don't necessarily need to be tied together. Now, we as viewers had the advantage of having seen adult Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory where he is an absolutely horrible, horrible human being. No matter how many times we're told, oh, that's just how he is. But the issue is this, there is this assumption made on the Big Bang Theory, which starts on young Sheldon with Mary Cooper's parenting that Sheldon is a horrible human being because he is brilliant. And to me, Sheldon is a horrible human being. Despite being brilliant, they connected these two together that had nothing to do with each other. Sheldon became a horrible human being because he was never told not to be one.
He was never told not to behave the way that he was. And the fact is, my daughter and I actually just yesterday, we ended up watching a clip because she wanted to show me something and it's the first episode and it's where Sheldon reads the student handbook and then his first day of class, he points out she's breaking the school rules and he's breaking the school rules and he's breaking the school rules. And we were told, well, there's nothing we can do about that because he's brilliant and he sees the bad things that are out in the world. But just five minutes earlier in Showtime, we were told Sheldon is a rule follower and that's why he's calling out people who are breaking the rules in the student handbook. But my approach to raising kids, and I have three who are completely different people, is that you approach each child where they are. So Sheldon is a rule follower, so all you had to do in this case was say to him, Sheldon, the rules are you don't call people out for breaking rules in public. That's it. That's all you had to do. There was a way to take who he is and use that to, I don't want to say control his behavior, but guide his behavior.
Michael Petrilli:
Yeah, no, so interesting and well settling and I agree. I remember one of the episodes we enjoyed the most. It was contrasting Sheldon and his academic brilliance, but his antisocial behavior with his sister Missy, whom they showed her having just this wonderful T with people and ability to connect socially and emotionally in a way that was sort of off the charts. She had a perception of what was going on. She was able to understand people's feelings in a way that he couldn't and the implication at the time I was thinking, oh, it's kind of a nice way of showing how giftedness can show up in different ways, but maybe it was also in the show they were just accepting that there was a trade-off when what you're saying is there didn't have to be a trade-off that with good parenting, these brilliant children can also learn to be kind and to can learn to how to connect with their peers and all of that as well.
Alina Adams:
It's perfectly understandable that Sheldon had some issues with reading social cues and other things because as we all know, asynchronous development is a thing, especially in bright kids at our house. We like to call it the smarter they are, the dumber they are. So they have trouble with some aspects, but the fact is his parents did very little to fix that or to help him, and in fact, that's the other thing, his parents just assumed, oh, he's smart, he knows what he's doing, but you know what, he's still nine years old, even if he were a 9-year-old of not incredibly high intelligence, nine year olds are not known for their social skills. A couple of years ago, I think actually a while ago maybe when he was 10 or 11 and he had won some prize for something, we were at a gifted children's conference and I remember walking down the rows of where they have the vendors.
I don't remember what prompted it, but I remember saying to him, it doesn't matter how smart you are, I will always have more life experience than you, which means there are some things I will always understand better than you and a person walking by. I have no idea who they were. I have no idea why they were there. They felt a need to stop and tell me what a terrible thing that was to say to my child, I should be supporting him. I should not be putting him down. And obviously life experience was not more important. I beg to differ and I beg to differ with the Cooper family as well because that was the issue. They assumed that because he could do math and he could do physics. By the way, we never heard about his skills in any other subjects, but the fact is his parents just assumed that because he was good at math and physics, he must be good at figuring out what he needs in life. So they stopped parenting. The fact is a nine-year-old, no matter how bright still needs to be parented and that was the biggest mistake.
Michael Petrilli:
David, you are in the early phase of your parenting journey and I think you maybe haven't seen the show either, but tell us what's on your mind, if anything.
David Griffith:
Well, I can only agree, and as I was listening, I was thinking it isn't just smart kids. Some version of this applies to kids of most descriptions. There are all these kind of popular narratives that we have that, let's be honest, they're kind of fun. I mean, Sheldon is entertaining and perfectly nice. People on television are not as entertaining in my experience. Nevertheless, they support these cultural myths about, well, he's a jerk because he's smart or he can't do that because he has this or that characteristic. It's not just smart kids. No matter what your background is, you can find people who are nice, who have that background, who are well raised and people who are not. And so I just think it's a pretty good general life lesson that adults need to be parents and not seed too much ground to their kids. I do think that there is an increasing narrative out there that we should, and I am not quite sure how to characterize it, but it feels like it has become, and I think people have written about this in different ways, but it feels like it has become less popular to sort of tell your child that they don't know everything in the world and maybe aren't the best at everything and maybe didn't win the track meet or aren't good at that subject.
We have elevated self-esteem, for lack of a better word, and sort of validation above everything else, and I tend to agree. I don't think it's great parenting.
Alina Adams:
Well, I wanted to share a story that actually works on a couple of levels here. So in addition to academics, my son was also passionate about dance. He participated in this amazing organization called Ballet Hispanic Go where he learned ballet flamenco and modern. And what was great is he was not naturally talented in dance, which was terrific because every day he went to a place where things didn't come easy for him the way that academics did, and it was fabulous for him. Also, ballet Hispanico is a wonderful, it's sort of a very known nonsense, kind of gritty place in the sense that they expect a very high level of behavior from the kids. He was in the pre-professional program where they expect you to act like a professional. So it was terrific, and every year they do a dance recital and they have all the kids of all ages performing, and when you're not performing, you're supposed to sit quietly.
Then we went to a dance performance at another dance school. What happened was when the kids who weren't performing were in the audience, they were getting up, they were moving around, they were making noise, they were running up and down the aisle, and at 1.1 was literally bobbing in front of my face. And so when I mentioned to an usher, could they have these children sit, she said, oh, you can't have kids that age sitting still for that long. Well, you know what Ballet Hispanico could, and I don't think the kids at Ballet Hispanico are anymore gifted at sitting than the kids at this other school, but at Ballet Hispanico, it wasn't a question and it wasn't a request, it was an expectation, and I see that across the board, whether it's academics, whether it's sports, whether it's just getting kids to sit. If you don't expect a kid to do that, why should they do that? They're not stupid. They know what they can get away with. So why in the world would they do something they don't want to do? At first, they weren't asked to do it, then they weren't told to do it. And third, if there weren't consequences for not doing it, which comes hand in hand with an expectation that you are capable of doing it.
Michael Petrilli:
Alright, well Alina, we are going to have to leave it there, but thank you so much for these insights on parenting Highly gifted children, and of course, young Sheldon. These television shows over the years, they have an impact I think on our culture and on parenting, and so it's important to notice when they get things right and when they get things wrong. Again, Alina Adams, creator of NYC School Secrets. Alina, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Alina Adams:
Thank you. This has been really fun.
Michael Petrilli:
All right, now it's time for everyone's favorite Amber's Research Minute
David Griffith:
And filling in for Amber today, Fordham's own Adam Tyner. Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Tyner:
Always a pleasure. David,
David Griffith:
How are you doing today, man? How's Oklahoma going?
Adam Tyner:
I'm doing great. It's hot. I saw it was hot in Maine.
David Griffith:
I know, I know. Isn't that
Adam Tyner:
Where people go to escape the hot?
David Griffith:
Yeah, apparently Europe was not hot, but I think pretty much everywhere else on planet Earth was hot. It's almost like this climate change thing is real. Adam, what you got for us today?
Adam Tyner:
Well, today we've got an early working paper that gives us some of the first empirical evidence of the quality of so-called Credit Recovery Programs, which as listeners may know, have become the kind of go-to way for districts to help struggling high schoolers get a diploma and have sometimes been at the center of local scandals. The working paper, which is still under peer review, is from Carolyn Heinrich and her co-authors, and it includes an analysis of every assessment item from a widely used online credit recovery algebra one course. Now, for those who don't know what I'll be calling credit recovery is not retaking classes or summer school or something. It's basically students clicking through computer modules and then taking quizzes or other assessments within those computer programs in order to eventually earn high school credit for courses that they had not completed or had previously failed.
As we at the Fordham Institute have done research on these credit recovery programs over the last few years, we've noticed that there are some moral hazard problems with regard to the programs and assessments because districts often hire vendors to offer these credit recovery computer platforms, but then there's no incentive for anyone to promote learning or academic rigor. The incentives are mostly just to make it easy to pass, and that's why this new research is so interesting. It's one of the first to examine the academic rigor of these credit recovery programs. Now, the paper approaches credit recovery by focusing, as I said on the assessments in particular the assessments for an algebra one course offered by one of the nation's largest credit recovery vendors. After compiling 1,408 assessment questions, they analyze all of them, including for quizzes and final exams using Bloom's Taxonomy, which is a rubric that helps you to understand how rigorous a test item is and what they found is pretty troubling, although maybe what you would expect. David, you want to guess what percentage of the testing items were multiple choice?
David Griffith:
I'm going to say 90%.
Adam Tyner:
Yeah, you're right. In the range is 83% of the questions were multiple choice questions. More than 90% of the questions did not require students to engage in any higher order tasks such as analyzing or evaluating something. There were a few word problems that did require that higher order thinking. So these questions generally pretty basic, but then one, if a student doesn't feel like answering even those, the researchers discovered that 91% of the questions could be answered based on a Google search alone. Many of the questions had been online since 2015 and answers to questions were available on up to 20 different websites. They also talk about how some of the test retakes work, and it's definitely not how I ever retook tests in normal classes. For example, if you have to repeat a unit exam, they call it a post-test. In the study, the student gets to see all their answers and the correct answers for all the questions, and then they take the exam again with the questions in this exact same order as before.
So even if you're not cheating, which they're basically begging students to do, it's still made to be easy to pass without really learning the content. Finally, and I'll end with this, they look at state policies on credit recovery and they find that a minority of states has any regulation at all. Only one state New York includes state regulations for the type of curriculum and type of provider offering credit recovery, and that includes a regulation stating that there has to be some continued interaction between students and teachers. In other words, it shouldn't be completely virtual, but even that is kind of a low bar for having a rigorous state policy on these programs, which are obviously really prone to misuse.
David Griffith:
Wow, okay, so basically they give you the answers. Is that a fair summary?
Adam Tyner:
Yes.
David Griffith:
Okay, and also the answers are available online. I guess I'm a little confused, so the tests we're talking about here, are these tests that are taken in some sort of secure environment like the SAT, or do you just take them? I mean, at
Adam Tyner:
Home, David, they talk specifically about this, and the vast majority of these tests are taken without any kind of observation from anyone, so there's no proctoring, there's no screen recording, so some assessments that are really credible, like the assessments you're talking about or the TOEFL or something, they will do screen grabs. Some testing. Companies even require you to have cameras that show what the whole room looks like while you're doing the testing. If it's virtually, there are none of those safeguards in place for this program that they're looking at, and by and large for these credit recovery programs, and that's actually one of their recommendations besides higher quality tests, is to have more legit proctoring going on. So I mean, you're really just encouraging students to cheat and you're really teaching them a pretty lousy life lesson by putting them through this exercise that is to get them high school credit, but really is really incentivizing them just being dishonest,
David Griffith:
And maybe you said this, but if not, just remind our listeners what percentage of credit recovery do we think online credit recovery accounts for? It's something at least 50 or 60% at this point, right?
Adam Tyner:
Yeah. Okay. So I've been using the term credit recovery to describe these computer based, and in the paper they call them online credit recovery. The truth is that when people say credit recovery, that's normally what they mean. Of course, you can technically recover credits in other ways. You could take summer school or you could repeat a class or something. Those would be other ways of getting credit that you missed the first time. But a lot of the attention and the majority now of that kind of thing for high school is these kinds of computer modules. You're clicking through the computer modules and you're getting the credit that didn't get because you failed the class or whatever.
David Griffith:
Okay. All right, so then answer me this, and it's an honest question. If this is what online credit recovery is like why would anyone ever go to summer school for real? Who are these kids who aren't just going online and finishing it in, I don't know, however many half hour sessions that you can do in a weekend?
Adam Tyner:
Yeah, I'm not sure. There could be Legacy several school programs in some places where they continue to do certain types of remediation through summer school. Obviously for elementary and middle school students, this is not nearly as popular as it is for high school students who are doing this. They need credits to graduate, and so it's the pressure on graduation rates. I think in this era of accountability that we have where we have very little high school testing and we really incentivize graduation rates going up for schools and districts, it's that era and those incentive pressures that have created this situation where the districts benefit because they get to say their graduation rates went up, the families and the students benefit because they get to get credit where they didn't really put anything into it. Then there's vendors and a whole bunch of private actors that are lobbying for this stuff and that are garnering their own profits from providing this stuff. No one has an incentive to make this rigorous to make sure that students are actually learning any skills. Okay.
David Griffith:
So do you think this is fixable an online setting, or do you think we just need to stop the whole thing?
Adam Tyner:
Well, I think if I were the king of a state or a district, I would say just stop it until you can get a system that is proven to be rigorous. I mean, with so much abuse of this and it's just baked into the process, not even, I mean, the corruption is almost like the point of it. I think it has to just be stopped and we have to rebuild something that's credible and it probably has to have external assessments, and it has to have something that isn't where these incentives aren't all aligned towards just trying to pass kids through regardless of whether they learned anything. So I would say just stop for now and then obviously there's no reason that students shouldn't have extra attempts to learn stuff. That's very important, but we need to make that real, not just this farce that it is under these credit recovery programs.
David Griffith:
Yeah, I have to say, just hearing about it and thinking about it, I can't shake the feeling that we don't really want to solve it. I know we're going to do this probably again in another year, but it just seems like this exists because we want it to exist and we want to have the fiction that the kids go through, and I'm struggling to figure out how we can change that. Whose incentives do we need to change in order to actually get the political will to do this? This is not a hard technical fix, right? It's entirely a political problem.
Adam Tyner:
Yeah, I mean, lowering academic standards is something with a lot of social costs. I think at least that's our kind of theory of action at the Fordham Institute and lots of us who believe in standards and accountability and knowing something at the end of your educational experience, but the costs are very diffuse. They're to society. I mean, the individual actors in this all have incentive to just pass kids through, and this isn't just unique to Credit recovery. I mean, there's lots of places where this is the logic of accountability, but it's something that you need policies around to create guardrails and external assessments. The most obvious one, states ought to go in and audit these things if they want to take it seriously. If they want society to take these credits seriously, they ought to go in and audit some of them and find out if the kids are actually learning what they supposedly learned.
Districts ought to have their own assessment that is separate from what the vendor provides and make sure that the students really learn the stuff they were supposed to learn in the class, but unfortunately, nobody has really caring about that. They care about rising graduation rates and all this other stuff, and there's not a lot of reason to do it unless people get together and say, Hey, this is actually costing us in a much broader sense of just debasing the public education system. You think about it, David, you got all these teachers who are working their tails off trying to get kids to learn stuff. You got students who are up at late at night studying, and then you see there's this whole parallel system. It's just kind of makes a mockery of people's hard work in some ways. It really, I don't know, really, really gets me.
David Griffith:
Yeah, great stuff, Adam. Not exactly uplifting, but it felt real. That's all the time we have for this week. Until next week,
Adam Tyner:
I'm Adam Tyner.
David Griffith:
And I'm David Griffith of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Signing Off
#926: What “Young Sheldon” teaches about parenting, with Alina Adams