Teaching Kids ≠ Catching Rats

At the holidays, teachers don’t expect lavish gifts but it is always nice to receive thanks for your hard work with students. When I was teaching, the best gift I ever received was a Christmas card from a parent thanking me for teaching her son how to read. Doesn’t get much better than that, though who can say no to a festive holiday sweater?

Don’t get me wrong—teaching is often challenging, frustrating, and really really hard. As a new teacher I spent my share of evenings crying while writing lesson plans. That said, I don’t think teaching is nearly as unpleasant as being a rat-catcher or proctologist for example, as a British journalist suggests. It’s disconcerting that some people think that teaching urban minority students is such a terrible disgusting task.

I do think however, that people often underestimate the challenge that teaching presents and it would be useful for federal, state, and local policymakers to spend more time in public schools than a photo-op walkthrough where the dog and pony show is in full swing. The emphasis today (rightly) is on data-driven decision making, but I think the value of first hand experience can’t be overestimated. Watch or lead a classroom for even an hour and I suspect you’ll learn more about the joys and challenges of teaching than countless hours of research can ever convey.

Intra-Q&E Foreign Language Smackdown Continues

Alright, back to the foreign language intra-Q&E debate, sparked by Kevin's commentary on the questionable utility of studying a foreign language in high school and then another to highlight a reader's view, and then Sara's bust up of Kevin's so-called consensus of two, followed by Margie's idea to start with Chinese.

So I have to weigh in...

Kevin's lament about his own French-taking experience aside, he and Sara and the-one-who-wrote-in are all right that we need to teach foreign language earlier, but it's not so simple.

First of all, a few hours a week at any grade will offer, at best, mere exposure to language. This isn't a bad thing if exposure is the goal, but it will not ensure proficiency. In the early grades, we need full immersion where kids are taught the language not as a separate "language class" but as part of content learning throughout the day. Critics say that this approach delays achievement in English and research backs this but also shows that this lag only happens in the very short term and, in the long run, these kids score as well or better than their peers in all subjects and test higher on cognitive tests.

Secondly, our public schools are woefully under-prepared to teach foreign language well- not to mention bilingualism and biliteracy, which is really what we should pay attention to as our population changes and our approach to language (hopefully) evolves. So we have a big job ahead of us in developing a teaching force- elementary and secondary. I think it’s a task worth taking on but have to point out that we are behind the curve.

Finally, I think Margie and Sara are right that Arabic and Chinese and other languages would be good to teach and learn, but wrong to suggest that the demographic changes in this country shouldn't be the driver for its foreign language curriculum. In some places, this will mean Chinese. But in most, it means Spanish. This is most practical, not only for the nation but also for me. Consider a place like Oakland, CA- with a large Chinese population. It has several English-Chinese dual immersion programs that teach both English and Chinese. This makes perfect sense. Native English-speakers learn Mandarin or Cantonese, while Mandarin or Cantonese-speakers learn English. Both emerge able to communicate and participate more fully in the community. And in the Fruitvale area of Oakland, where the population is largely Vietnamese and Spanish, the elementary school rightly offers bilingual classes in these two languages. There are kids in this area that speak at least 20 other languages but these are the dominant ones, the ones that drive the community, and the ones that schools should teach.

The Bay Area, being the Bay Area, has immersion programs in French, German, Swedish, Armenian, Farsi and many other languages. And I agree it's good for any child to learn other world languages (by the way, the $114 million next year for critical language learning in Farsi and Hindi and others should help). But the fact remains that the practical second language in this country is Spanish (Chinese is a very distant third, albeit growing along with Vietnamese and Russian) and most populations and school programs should and will reflect this. If a choice is to be made for public school curriculum, Spanish is the right one. The fact that Spanish is not a language of power outside of this nation does not change the reality that it is a language that has a strong history and an inevitable future in this country.

Higher Ed Revolution From the Lower Ranks?

A NYTimes front-page story earlier this week focused on the strenuous efforts of the University of Florida's flagship Gainesville campus to ascend in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. A few days earlier, the Charleston Daily Mail reported on how a growing number of West Virginia colleges and universities are trying to figure out how well they're teaching students and how much those students actually learn. Of the two, I'm guessing the Times article attracted a lot more attention. But West Virginia is where the really interesting and important story lies.

For an institution like the University of Florida, climbing the U.S. News rankings creates all kinds of conflicts and contradictions with their obligation as a public university to provide an accessible, affordable education to a broad array of students. That said, it's a fundamentally rational thing for them to do. They're 13th in the rankings now, so getting to the Top 10 isn't out of the question. In the elitist, status-driven context that governs the way people think about higher education quality, it would undoubtedly help them.

Public universities in West Virginia, by contrast, are never going to be in the upper echelons of the U.S. News hierarchy. Unlike the University of Florida, it wouldn't make sense for Glenville State College, where 59% of students receive Pell grants and the median incoming SAT score is 905, to launch a huge effort to become wealthy, famous, and exclusive, which is what it takes to look better according to U.S. News.

For an institution like Glenville, and the hundreds of other public and private universities like them, the only way to truly distinguish yourself is to add value, to show that you do a really good job teaching the students you enroll, and that they learn a lot between the time they arrive and the time they leave (hopefully with a degree). That's exactly the kind of information that National Survey of Student Engagement and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which are referenced in the article, provide.

At the moment, most of the NSSE and CLA results are kept close to the vest. Universities use them for internal evaluative purposes, but don't release them the general public. Insitutions are nervous about how they data might be interpreted, particularly if it indicates that they need to improve in some areas.

But in the long, I think the Glenvilles of the world are going to figure out that it's in their best interests to release this information, to create new terms of competition and status in higher education. If you can't beat the likes of the University of Florida at the current game, then change the game. Tell people that you're good at doing the job you're meant to do. Challenge the institutions that have a monopoly on all the money, status, and acclaim in higher education to prove that their reputations hold up when it comes to educating students.

There are a lot more Glenvilles than Gainesvilles in higher education. Eventually, they're going to figure out what's good for them. Then the institutions that have worked so hard to get to the top of the U.S. News rankings may find that they picked the wrong mountain to climb.

The Last Day of Christmas

Here's your final picture of Mary Brown in her festive Christmas garb, accompanied once again by her AP Senior English class--and Santa! As you can see, everyone is very excited by the prospect of the coming week of winter break.*

Vote for your favorite festive holiday photo here.

Thank you, Mary, for sharing your holiday spirit with us this month and, more importantly, for the great work you do all year long teaching Honors French, AP English, and SAT Prep to students at Clear Spring High School in Washington County, Maryland. On top of all her other work, Mary is working towards her National Board Ceritfication.

Special thanks, also, to Mary's Clear Spring colleague Nadine Fox for her excellent photography and for uploading and sending me these pictures every evening. In addition to working with Clear Spring's students with special needs, Nadine and her husband run Buck Valley Ranch, a bed and breakfast in Warfordsburg, Pennsylvania.

Thanks also to Mary's AP students for joining in the festivities the past few days.

Finally, thanks to my sister, Rachel Kurtz, who teaches English along with Mary at Clear Spring and who helped set this whole thing up. I'm looking forward to seeing Rachel this afternoon as we head home to celebrate Christmas with family in Michigan and Indiana!

Merry Christmas, y'all!

*The Quick and Ed team is also looking forward to a winter break next week, so expect light posting until January 2, when we'll return rested and feisty for the new year.

Alternative Lifestyles

In an attempt to create more opportunities for charter schools and/or improve the quality of charter school authorizing, some states are allowing "alternative" authorizers--such as state level charter boards, institutions of higher education, mayors and other municipal officials, and nonprofit or philanthropic organizations--to approve charter schools in addition to or instead of the local and state boards of ed that approve and oversee charters in most states. A new Progressive Policy Institute report by Louann Berlein Palmer looks at how these alternate authorizers are performing.

Holiday Sweater Bonanza!

I couldn't resist adding to the Q&E holiday festivities (thanks, mom!). I narrowed it down from about 20 pictures (just a normal day of holiday wear at a Virginia elementary school) to three runner-ups (see below) and this one - my top choice. As my mom says, "The kids love them" and so do we!

Some Top Contenders

Holiday Cheer - Coming and Going

The Rich Get Richer

The Education Trust released its annual Funding Gap report yesterday, just in time for New Year's. (Disclosure: I used to work at Ed Trust and wrote the 2003 and 2004 editions of the report.) As always, the report exposes the basic resource inequities that hamstring many educators and disadvantaged children. Despite the fact that low-income children need more resources, many states are giving them less.

As the Post wrote this morning, this year's report features an expanded analysis of an issue that previous reports have touched on: flaws in the Federal Title I formula. The essential problem is that while Title I provides more money to poor school districts than wealthy school districts within each state, it actually provides more money to poor districts in wealthy states than it does to poor districts in poor states. That's because it adjusts per-student funding to states based on how much money the states themselves spend on education. States that spend more, get more.

This seems to reward states that make the effort to support their schools. But as the analysis shows, state funding levels are less a function of effort than they are of wealth. States that have more tend to spend more. So we end up with a situtation where Massachusetts gets more than twice as much Title I money per poor child than Arkansas, even though education funding effort in Arkansas, measured as education spending divided by taxable resources, is greater.

This issue hasn't received a lot of attention, but hopefully that will change as discussions heat up around the reauthorization of NCLB. The federal government should ameliorate inter-state differences in resources, not make them worse.

Twenty-first Day of Christmas

Only one more day left until our teachers get a well-deserved winter break!

Here's our special holiday guest teacher, Mary Brown, with her senior AP English class helping share the holiday cheer. Check in tomorrow for our final festive Christmas photo, more information about Mary and her school, and a chance to vote on your favorite festive Christmas outfit!

In the meantime, catch up on previous days of Christmas here.

College Rankings Return

The NYTimes goes to Florida to explore the problems and contradictions of public universities trying to climb the greased pole that is the U.S. News & World Report rankings system. Leaders from the University of Florida explain why it's important to jack up tuition by $1,000 in order to move from being the 13th-ranked public university in the country to the Top 10:

“Florida wants a top-10 university because it’s clear that our economic development is increasingly tied to research,” said Dr. Machen, the president.

Manny A. Fernandez, chairman of the board at the University of Florida, talks as frankly as Dr. Machen about rankings.

“I want to be on the cocktail-party list of schools that people talk about, because that influences the decisions of great students and great faculty,” Mr. Fernandez said. “I don’t apologize for trying to get the rankings up, because rankings are a catalyst for changes that improve the school.”

As is always the case when higher education leaders try to explain why the want to move up in the rankings, these comments say a lot about where their priorities truly lie. What you won't find in this article, and this is very typical, is anyone saying something along the lines of, "We're doing this because it will result in a higher quality education for our students." It's always, "the state will benefit from the research" or "we'll get 'better' students to enroll" or "the alumni will donate more."

The unquestioned assumption is that if faculty with great research reputations work there, and students with high SAT scores enroll there, it's a good school. The problem is that this assumption is plainly illogical--faculty often build up their scholarly credentials at the expense of teaching, and colleges should be judged based on how much their student learn while they attend college, not how much the learned before they got there. Institutional selectivity as a mark of quality is completely self-reinforcing--students will go to whichever institution is hardest to get into, because that's what selective universities are selling: a diploma that tells the world, "I got in."

For an explanation of why the U.S. News rat race is bad for higher education and how we could create a new rankings system to channel the ambitions of institutions like the University of Florida to more productive purposes, click here.

Twentieth Day of Christmas

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Nineteenth Day of Christmas...and the Fourth Day of Hanukkah!

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Caption provided by our photographer: "We are looking tired....the break can't come soon enough..."

I bet a lot of teachers agree with the second half of that statement right about now!

A Teachable Moment in Fiji?

There's been a lot of discussion on this blog and elsewhere recently about the value of teaching foreign languages and otherwise exposing students to cultures other than their own. On the latter point especially I'm inclined to agree that we must do more. For example, did you know that the government of Fiji has been overthrown via military coup four times since 1987? The latest coup happened just a few weeks ago, led by someone named--seriously--"Commodore Bananarama Bainimarama." I totally missed that. This could be used as the launching point for a lot of important school discussions, such as:

• What does it say about human nature that people living in an island paradise can have such problems that their government gets overthrown by coup more often than some governments turn over via actual election?
• Given that the head of a military dictatorship can call himelf pretty much anything he wants, has any anti-democratic strongman ever adopted a less imposing title than "Commodore"?
• Can you imagine the restraint exercised by the reporters and headline writers who didn't work the phrase "Cruel, Cruel Summer in Fiji" into their coverage?

Don't Ban "Blankets"

The AP published a variant on the tried-and-true "libraries ban books" story today, focusing on parental objections to children having access to certain graphic novels. Among them: Craig Thompson's "Blankets."

Most of the graphic novels you'll find in the book store are compendiums of multiple, previously-published comics books. "Blankets" is a single, book-length (582 pages) volume based on the author's experiences growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household in Minnesota. The story revolves around his adolescent struggles with faith, family, and the intense feelings of his first romantic relationship. A few pages contain exceptionally tasteful portrayals of semi-nudity, causing one concerned Missouri parent to ask, "Does this community want our public library to continue to use tax dollars to purchase pornography?"

I have a lot of sympathy for parents who are concerned about their children being exposed to a popular culture that seems to grow more vulgar, exploitative, and unavoidable by the year. This is true of some mainstream comic books, which tend to feature a lot of consequence-free violence and anatomically improbable women runing around in skin-tight spandex.

But here's the thing: "Blankets" is exactly the opposite of that. It's as honest, touching, and humane as one could imagine. Here are some reviews:

"...a first-love story so well remembered and honest that it reminds you what falling in love feels like...achingly beautiful." -Time

"In telling his story, which includes beautifully rendered memories of the small brutalities that parents inflict on their children and siblings upon each other, Thompson describes the ecstasy and ache of obsession (with a lover, with God) and is unafraid to suggest the ways that obsession can consume itself and evaporate." -The New York Times Book Review

"...recreates the confusion, emotional pain and isolation of the author's rigidly fundamentalist Christian upbringing, along with the trepidation of growing into maturity, with a rare combination of sincerity, pictorial lyricism and taste." -Publisher's Weekly

"...an impressively concrete portrait of emotional emphemera, captured with talent, disarming humor, and a gentle sincerity that glows through on every remarkable page." -The Onion

Children absolutely need to be protected from pornography, but doing so means applying a reasonable definition of what that word means. At its worse, pornography stimulates the basest human impulses with graphic, dehumanizing depictions of violence and sex. It's ironic that the word itself has become debased in a way that seems allow the worst imaginable kinds of violence while drawing a bright line at the portrayal of specific, fairly innocuous elements of female anatomy, regardless of context.

Libraries shouldn't be banning "Blankets," they should be handing out free copies at the door.

The Eighteenth Day of Christmas

Only a week left in our series! Catch up on previous festive holiday outfits:
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English-Only Island, (Korea)

In a fairly strong approach to second language acquisition, the government of Korea is planning to create an entire English-only town on the island of Cheju, complete with elementary and secondary schools and colleges. It’s a way to boost students’ language skills, while also saving a chunk of the $3.3 billion that Korean students spend to study abroad each year. It could be related to the ever increasing numbers of Korean students coming to study in the U.S., which jumped 10% just in the past year.

I see at least two main ways to think about this—one that Kevin is right and current U.S. dominance allows us to assume most people speak English and focus on other areas, or two, that if people from other countries can speak English and increasingly do our jobs for less, maybe we should start developing new skills and flexibilities to compete. My vote is to start with Chinese. There’s no reason that academic content can’t be taught in dual language academies so that we aren’t removing anything to teach language skills.

On a broader level, I think we overestimate the number of people who speak English, and fail to recognize the importance of being able to communicate with the 4 billion people who don’t speak English (including over 20 million in the U.S.) both in terms of being able to compete economically and valuing global citizenship. Obviously, we can’t all learn one language that will open global communication, but I don’t think learning Chinese (1 billion speakers) or Spanish (330 million speakers) is a bad place to start. First up? Rosie O'Donnell.

Fifteenth Day of Christmas!

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The Clip that Caused All the Trouble

By now you've probably heard about the Virginia teacher who's been placed on administrative leave for his apparently lucrative side business painting with his posterior. But have you seen the YoutTube clip that landed him in trouble with his school board? If you've got the stomach for it, you now can, here.

Meet Ms. Pappas

Pre-K Now recently launched a new teacher blog by New Jersey pre-k teacher Sophia Pappas. It's well worth your time to check out. I find a lot of people are confused about what we mean when we talk about high-quality preschool and, in particular, early literacy and school readiness teaching for young children. If you're one of those folks, a glimpse in Ms. Pappas' classroom can help you get a better sense of that.

With this new blog and Richard Colvin's Early Stories, I'm pleased to see early childhood gaining ground in the edu-blogosphere, which has generally seemed dominated by K-12 and higher ed bloggers. If readers know of any other good early childhood or preschool blogs I'm missing, I'd appreciate if you'd send them my way.

Intra-Q&E Debate!

Not to bust up Kevin's emerging consensus, but if we're going to start making foreign language a mandatory part of the elementary school curriculum (which I think IS a good idea), I don't think we should make it mandatory that the language taught be Spanish. I don't disagree with Kevin that Spanish is useful to know (it comes in very handy for me all the time), but as a Romance language it's much easier to learn as an adult or teen than lots of other languages. So why not teach elementary school students Mandarin Chinese, which I keep hearing is going to be increasingly useful in the business world as China's economy grows, or one of the Dravidian languages, in light of the growth of India's economy, or Arabic, which, given the many problems in the Middle East right now, I can't imagine our national security aparatus isn't going to have growing demand for for some time to come. These languages are all extremely difficult to learn well as an adult, and there's a real shortage of speakers of them for both business and government. Obviously, you'd run into major teacher supply issues trying to make any of these languages mandatory, but that's not a reason not to encourage schools to include them in the mix of languages being taught to young children, or to experiment with innovative ways to draw on the many native speakers of these languages already in the U.S. to help children learn them.

The Fourteenth Day of Christmas

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The Thirteenth Day of Christmas

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The Rapidly Growing National Consensus on Reforming the Teaching of Foreign Language

A Quick+ED reader writes in about my post on teaching foreign languages:

I agree completely about language education in the early grades. I wasted a great deal of time in high school Spanish classes and had to learn it years later in Mexico. My daughter, on the other hand, has been in a dual language program since first grade (she's in fifth now) and is fully bilingual.

It's idiotic to wait till kids are teenagers, which is precisely when their aptitude for language acquisition begins to deteriorate. Studying a foreign language has the added benefit of making you think about and analyze your own, if you're fortunate enough to have a good teacher.

Consensus!

Tough on the 16 Hour KIPP workday

Alexander Russo has posted an interesting interview with Paul Tough, author of the much-discussed recent NYTimes article on the achievement gap. A sample:

AR: One of the things that folks have glommed onto is the idea that KIPP teachers work 16 hours a day. Where’d you get that from, and does it really matter?

PT: Dave Levin, one of the co-founders of KIPP, said that to me. I wish in retrospect that I’d made it a bit more conditional, and Dave might wish that, as well. (I don’t know that he does, I should say; I’m just guessing.) I think KIPP teachers work really hard and work long hours, and I think that was the point Dave was making. But I don’t think they all work 16 hours a day every day. I think both points are important to understand – and it’s obviously a critical question because of the debate over the replicability of the KIPP model. I do think there are a lot of really good and really committed teachers and potential teachers out there who would be (and are) eager to teach in a school that is well-run and is achieving great results, even if it means a lot of hard work and long hours.

AR: Sixteen hours a day or no, not everyone’s willing to go what I’m going to call the “KIPP route.” Where did you come out from your reporting on the topic of broader, non-instructional approaches- health insurance, living wages, affordable housing, financial incentives to attend and complete school, and – most timely – integration efforts?

PT: When you say “not everyone,” do you mean not every parent, not every child, not every teacher or not every administrator? I think the one thing we know is that there are many more parents and children willing to go the KIPP route than are now going the KIPP route. So I think that’s the first problem to solve. That seems like a good first principle, in fact: if there are poor children and poor parents willing to put in the kind of effort and hard work that KIPP students exert, we shouldn’t be denying them that opportunity.

Buy Now! College On Sale!

I couldn’t resist noting the synchronicity of today’s front-page New York Times article, “In Tuition Game, Popularity Rises with Price” and the Chart You Can Trust we released today. The New York Times piece did a good job of getting at the red flags of tuition discounting—merit aid going to well-off students, the increasing uniformity of pricing in higher education, and high sticker prices that are used as a marker of quality and at the same time dissuade qualified, low-income students from applying. But, the BIG reason tuition discounting is disturbing was summarized in the last line of the article, “We don’t know.”

Students and their parents don’t know the true price of a college when they apply, or how much of a discount to expect in their financial aid letters. In our Chart You Can Trust, we focus on a subset of colleges—small, lower tuition private colleges—which, on average, offer a discount to 92% of their freshmen. When 92% of students receive a discount, what is the real price of the college? And who receives those discounts? While some colleges limit aid to students with financial need, others use discounts to boost the SAT scores and average GPA’s of their incoming class. One thing is certain: with the growing use of tuition discounts by both public and private colleges, tuition discounting needs to become part of the conversation on tuition pricing and affordability.

Tuition discounting also ties in with the conversation on transparency and accountability in higher education. As is apparent in the New York Times article, price is currently used as a proxy for quality when students and parents evaluate colleges and universities. An increase in price, however, does not necessarily mean an increase in quality. Often, the revenue generated from price increases simply goes to providing discounts to more students and is not invested in educational resources. Judgments on higher education quality need to be more sophisticated. They need to be about teaching and learning and not simply how much you paid.

Foreign Language Redux

Sherman Dorn takes me to task for generalizing from personal experience in questioning about the value of learning foreign langugages. Totally fair, as I thought I made clear when I said that my question was based "on what is admittedly the worst of all sample sizes of one: myself." He also makes a point that was raised by my colleagues here on the Education Sector policy team, who are generally a lot smarter about these issues than I am: it's dumb to wait until late middle school or high school, as I did, to start learning a foreign language.

So how about this: make foreign language a mandatory part of the curriculum for students in elementary school, since that's when children are in the language acquisition and development stage. Moreover, don't make it any old language. Make it Spanish, for everyone, since that's far and away the most commonly-spoken foreign language in this country, by at least a factor of ten. Then when students get to secondary school, include a mandatory curricular element focused on learning about diverse cultures, global geography, etc., which might or might not include additional instruction in a variety of foreign languages, depending on student interest.

In other words, concentrate foreign language instruction during the stages of development when students are most likely to benefit, in the language that they're most likely to use. Then give them the chance to continue that course of study later on, but only if they want to. This seems better than the way things worked when I was in school (and I'm pretty sure my experience was, and is, fairly typical), which often involved spending a lot of time studying French, German, and/or other languages that relatively few people in this country or the world at large actually speak.

The forseeable objections of Lou Dobbsian nativist crazy people aside, would this be a good idea?

The Twelfth Day of Christmas

Catch up on days one, four, and five.

(For more fun photo viewing not in any way related to this series, check out this one from D-ED Reckoning and this one and this one from NYC Educator, who always has lots of fun and interesting photos and pictures accompanying posts.)

The Wire Season Finale

Season Four of The Wire comes to a close. I think Craig's take on the strengths and weaknesses of the show's examination of the Baltimore school system and contemporary education policy is exactly right and better than I could have written. Many thanks to Craig for his insightful analysis and commentary.

As to the finale and season as a whole, it's worth stepping back for a moment to consider what David Simon, the show's creator, has called the overriding theme of The Wire's entire multi-season run:

Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We're worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of capitalism.

Most of the drama and character development in The Wire ultimately comes down to the many characters confronting this reality. It's a narrative of individuals struggling against irrational, destructive larger forces, of trying to retain their humanity in an indifferent, dehumanizing world. Some succumb to it completely, while others save enough of themselves to keep living.

Growing into adulthood is partly a matter of understanding life's most difficult realities— obligation, limitation, unfairness, tragedy. Using the maturation of children to demonstrate the overriding theme made Season Four compelling in ways that exceeded even the tremendously high standards of seasons 1-3. Adults at least have the benefit of some kind of self-determination. Watching children fall into the maw of the West Baltimore drug culture was very hard to take.

But Simon's commitment to his viewers has always been one of truth above all else, so it wasn't surprising that Season Four ended largely in tragedy, disillusionment, failure, and loss:

Bubbles, hanging from the police room ceiling, later collapsing in Steve Earle's arms, shattered by the realization that despite his good heart and best intentions, drug addiction had consumed his life and led him to accidentally kill the boy he was trying to protect.

Carver, unable to save Randy from the group home, his guilt made all the worse by Randy's forgiveness.

Norman, seeing that Carcetti is no better than all the rest of the politicians when it comes to putting his interests above those of children who can't vote.

Colvin, realizing that his attempt to reform education was destined for the same fate as his attempt to reform policing, understanding that sometimes speaking truth to power makes things worse, not better.

Bodie, acknowledging that the game is rigged, but holding onto his identity as a soldier and choosing to die on his feet rather than live on his knees. Bodies's death was harder to take than I thought it would be. I kept saying to myself, "He killed Wallace…" but somehow that didn't make it any better.

Dukie, approaching the new high school and then, in a moment, walking away, back to the corner, closed off from whatever small chance he might have had.

Prez, watching Dukie slinging, all his attention and care and teaching undone.

And Michael, now a murderer, waking from a vision of better days with his brother. "Now you can look anyone in the eye," said Chris, but of course Michael was always able to stand up and look people in the eye. That was his strength; that's what doomed him. This is the essential lie of the game, the one that Bodie realized too late: it promises you respect, family, wealth, but all it ever does in the end is take those things, everything, away.

Still, it wasn't all loss and tragedy. The Wire always gives viewers enough hope to get through. I suspect Randy will survive the group home and start that small business yet, and Namond—least deserving by far—has a fighting chance to make something of himself. Given the odds facing students in West Baltimore, one out four was probably generous in the end.

And some of the other characters seemed more hopeful still, with McNulty returning from a better place to the major crimes unit, Cutty together with the nurse who misjudged him, the police who matter more supported and valued than at any time before. And there's always Omar, the one man who lives outside the system on his own terms.

The Wire lets its characters have victories—they just have to earn them. And as pessimistic as David Simon's worldview may be, it's less hopeless than I suspect even he realizes. He lets his characters find decent lives and a measure of happiness because in the long run all is not lost and reform is not impossible. People can be worth more, not less, as long shows like The Wire continue to tell the truth.

The Wire: Craig's Final Grades

At the beginning of the season, I wondered if The Wire would break the entertainment industry’s record of getting urban education wrong by reducing it to a string of hackneyed set pieces about cardboard kids (either saints or hard-cases-with-hearts-of-gold) and heroic teachers (usually white) who swoop in to save them. I expected it to accomplish that by “spending a full year taking a close look at urban education.”

Were my hopes realized? The answer is both “yes” and “no.” The Wire gets a “B-” as an educational documentary, but an “A+” as television drama.

First the bad: It turns out that the writers never intended to give viewers the kind of complex, comprehensive picture of the education system they’ve presented of the criminal justice system. Yes, we did get a more realistic peek into a corner of the education world few ever see. And the writers nailed some things with enough realism that even briefly-glimpsed props could enrich the narrative. But by spending too little time on how adults interact with adults in that system, and doing that mostly through the eyes of a novice teacher and some outsiders running an alternative “pull out program,” we got a black and white snapshot rather than a rich tapestry.

Unfortunately, that limitation reduced other aspects of the education subplot to black and white, too. My inner ed wonk was disappointed that The Wire too often presented uncommonly simplistic takes on complex topics like the impact of No Child Left Behind and the phenomenon of “teaching to the test.” And my inner Wire fan was disappointed that it sometimes resorted to dramatic shortcuts and lazy writing for that purpose. How many times did Cutty’s ex-wife show up in the teachers’ lounge only to tell us, yet again, what Ed Burns thinks of NCLB?

Now the good: While my inner ed wonk will have to keep waiting for a TV show or film to tackle urban education systems in the nuanced way The Wire has tackled police work, my inner Wire fan is more than satisfied with the season we got. In fact, considered as a whole, this might be my second-favorite season of the four. (Time, and another full viewing, will tell.) Yes, some adult characters never transcended expositional cardboard, but the new kid characters shattered the mold. Brilliantly written and acted, those characters were literally “transcendent”—re-writing the rules for adolescents on television.

And their stories were devastating in the best tradition of The Wire—both dramatically and thematically. I’ll be haunted by Randy’s question to Carver in the hospital: “You gonna help, huh? You gonna look out for me?” I’ll be haunted by Prez watching Dukie selling drugs on the corner after bowing to his boss’s advice not to get too involved. I’ll be haunted by the look Michael gives his mother to let her know he’s had Bug’s father killed, the moment he loses not just his future but his soul.

I’ll even be haunted by the final shot that lingers on Namond’s new “corner,” symbolic of all the opportunities open to him now that Bunny and his wife have adopted him. In a show as carefully plotted as The Wire, it’s no accident that the least sympathetic kid character of the four is the one who’s saved. That’s the point: We can talk about America being a meritocracy all we want, but for kids in West Baltimore that word is mostly meaningless.

If America were a true meritocracy, one that rewarded talent—and developed talent for the common good—Duquan would attend an excellent school with a great math teacher, not a rookie who has no idea how to help him, let alone teach him. If it were a true meritocracy, budding and innovative capitalist Randy would be treated like the next Michael Dell, or at least someone who might actually own a store of his own someday. And in a true meritocracy (heck, even just in a halfway rational society) a kid with Michael’s practical smarts and immense leadership skills would be treated as a future business or civic leader—even a future mayor of Baltimore—and educated accordingly.

But for children in West Baltimore, making it has far more to do with luck than with merit. If The Wire is right, it has nothing to do with merit at all. How can we live with that?

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Why Is It So Important That American Students Learn a Foreign Language?

I ask this after reading the summary of the new Time magazine cover story, "How to Build a Student for the 21st Century." In quoting the chairman of UPS it says that country needs:

workers who are "global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages" -- not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.

Now, I'm not against global literacy, being sensitive to foreign cultures, etc. I think they're important. But I'm not sure that means it's a problem that only half of high school students are taking a foreign language. I base this on what is admittedly the worst of all sample sizes of one: myself. I took French for six years, starting in the seventh grade and going all the way through high school. In retrospect, it was pretty much a waste of time. I've long since forgotten most of it, and what I remember has been useful only when travelling in French-speaking countries, of which they aren't very many.

Not that I think studying language is a waste of time. I just would have been better off spending that time studying this language, doubling up on English literature, writing, rhetoric, etc. I know that students in other countries around the world are generally much more likely to study multiple languages. But that's partially a function of geography--places like Europe are much more multi-lingual. And it's partially because they're not here. If there was a huge country somewhere else that dominated the world's economy, culture, and commerce, I'd want to learn their language. But I live in that country, so I don't have to. English has become the world's lingua franca. I once stood in line in a Parisian department store behind a German tourist arguing with French saleswoman about the price of a purse. They bickered in English--it was the only language they could both speak. I can see how foreign languages are important if you're running a huge multinational corporation like UPS, but that's not exactly a typical case.

None of this means we should stop teaching foreign languages in public schools. It seems like an important choice to offer, and it wouldn't make sense to shut people off from the opportunity. All else being equal, students are undoubtedly better off knowing multiple languages than just one. But there are lots of things they're better off knowing than not knowing, the question is which of those things are most important. If foreign languages go onto that list, something else has to come off. It's not clear to me what that should be.

The only exception I could see is Spanish, which is spoken by a large and growing number of Americans. If students were required to take a least a few years of Spanish, they'd have a stronger connection to many of their fellow citizens, as well as most of the rest of the Western hemisphere. They'd also have a good jumping off point into other romance languages. That seems like a more logical policy than saying that students should be required to study any foreign language in-depth, but not saying what that language should be.

KIPPing up with the Joneses?

Conor Clarke at TNR considers whether or not selection bias accounts for KIPP's impressive academic results. The allegation that KIPP and other high-performing charter schools "skim" off higher-performing students from the public schools is pretty much as old as the charter movement itself and a lot of evidence suggests it's far from accurate. But lately an interesting spin on this argument--the assertion that the now well-known success of KIPP and other high-flying charter networks has caught the attention of more engaged parents and resulted in more higher-performing kids applying to these schools--has been popping up in lots of places, and deserves some attention.

First, neither the original skimming allegation nor more recent concerns suggests that the "above average" kids these schools might be attracting aren't still disadvantaged, predominantly minority kids who are generally below grade level academically. We're not talking about affluent kids here. We're talking about kids who may be above the average for disadvantaged kids because they have parents who have slightly more cultural capital and are slightly more engaged in or savvy about their kids' education than the average disadvantaged urban parent. Like Ezra, I'm not sure that's something to get too upset about. Sure we might feel that kids with the least-engaged parents need intensive, high-quality KIPP-style schooling more than those with more engaged parents. But engaged low-income parents are making the effort to send their kids into schools like KIPP because they know many of the other educational alternatives available suck and often present real risks to their kids. Considering all the ways our economy and urban organization make to unnecessarily difficult for engaged, low-income urban parents to raise their kids well, shouldn't we be cheering anything that helps them out?

Schools like KIPP are never going to attract substantial numbers of middle-class or affluent applicants. Partly that's because of where KIPP schools choose to locate and the population of students they currently serve. But it's also a matter of what I call (probably somewhat inaccurately) "aesthetics." I know several education types (all middle-class or affluent professionals) who admire what KIPP does but admit that some aspects of KIPP--the level of disciplinary regimentation, the explicit teaching of visual tracking (sp?)--make them uncomfortable, and that they wouldn't choose to send their kids to a KIPP school. They know that KIPP works, but it's not really to their tastes. I think that's probably going to be the case for most middle-class parents. As Paul Tough wrote in the NYT Magazine, kids who attend KIPP need the kind of discipline and explicit teaching of cultural skills it provides because of differences in childrearing practices and attitudes between middle-class and low-income families. But because KIPP is designed specifically to serve the needs of kids whose families don't tend to practice a middle-class approach to childrearing, it's probably not going to appeal to (or necessarily be a good fit to the needs of) families that do practice middle-class childrearing behaviors.

Finally, imagine that we're not talking about KIPP or a charter school at all, but a run-of-the-mill public school, one which is serving its disadvantaged, minority students so well that middle-class and affluent non-minority families start trying to send their kids there. Would we see this as a problem? I think not. Instead, we'd see it as good evidence the school is delivering a high-quality education. We'd also probably be pleased to see greater economic and racial integration that many folks believe can contribute to improved outcomes for disadvantaged kids. So why would it be a problem if the same thing were occurring in a charter school?

Starlets: The Real Achievement Gap

Slate recently published "a rambling, semi-literate" (in the words of the NY Post's Page 6, which broke the story) e-mail sent by starlet Lindsay Lohan to 18 of her closest friends and lawyers. A sample:

I am willing to release a politically/morally correct, fully adequite letter to the press if any of you are willing to help.

Simply to state my opinions on how our society should be educated on for the better of our country. Our people...

Also because I have such an impact on our younger generations, as well as generations older than me. Which we all know and can obviously see.

While I'm psyched to learn about Ms. Lohan's interest in improving the education of our society, I can't help but wonder if there might be some serious gaps in her own. It appears there's some doubt of whether Ms. Lohan, or simply someone claiming to be her, actually wrote this story. Count me skeptical, anyway.

But if Lohan did write it, this is her second rather curious epistolary episode in less than a month, following a similarly confusing, though clearly heartfelt, letter of condolence to the family of the late director Robert Altman, who passed away in late November. Lohan had appeared in his final film, A Prairie Home Companion. Both letters are rife with sentence fragments, weak in organization, and suggest that in addition to misspelling "adequate" Ms. Lohan is also somewhat confused about what the word means.

I don't mean to make fun--heaven knows I've made my share of embarrassing gramatical and spelling errors in the webpages of this blog. But I am deeply concerned about the apparent and troubling "starlet crisis" within our education system. Clearly we need a No Starlet Left Behind Act, stat. In the meantime, I'm suggesting that Ms. Lohan could benefit from some supplemental educational services. Rachel and our sweater model could certainly whip her writing into shape, and I bet I can think of some male writers with mad verbal skillz who might rise to the challenge.

Schoolhouse Rocks

AFT's launching a new initiative to draw attention to decrept and overcrowded condition of too many of America's public school buildings and urge policymakers to invest in renovating and building new, adequate* public school buildings. Good work, guys and gals! School facilities are an issue near and dear to my heart, and one on which I've written several articles. The Clinton administration put a lot of effort into trying to establish federal help for states and school districts for school construction, but the issue has pretty much disappeared from the public radar since then. So I'm really glad to see the AFT taking up the school construction. I think their recommendation to incorporate a "learning environment index" into NCLB is a little silly, and I think there's more room for innovative thinking about how to help states and school districts pay for buildings than they talk about here, but these are minor quibbles. It's an important issue, so check out what they're doing.

BTW, one of the complaints that seems to come up a lot from the teachers AFT surveyed about problems with their school facilities is the prevalence of rats and mice in many school buildings. Jelly, who's still waiting for her call from NYC, now expands the offer of her services to children and schools throughout our great nation.

*Lindsay: Note spelling.

Score One For The Aardvark

In researching English-language learners I checked the What Works Clearinghouse- our Dept of Ed's "central and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education". They list ELL as one of the WWC's areas of focus.

Topping the list of the four studies that meet all of the WWC's standards for sound research on ELL students was a single study on Arthur, the 8-year aardvark that appears for 30 minutes each morning on PBS.

The study involved 108 kindergarten students who were randomly assigned to watch 54 episodes of Arthur or its competitor Between the Lions, another PBS show that features a family of lions that reads together.

Finding: Aardvark does a better job of teaching English to English-language learners than the family of lions.

Personally, I like Arthur, even if my 2 1/2 year old prefers the lions and now thinks that "aardvark" is another word for "big mouse with glasses". So i'm happy to know that we have research that proves it's what works, at least for ELL kids. But I wonder just how many teachers are grappling with the difficult choice of which television programs they should show their ELL classes.

At a cost of roughly 25 million dollars (from 2002-2006), the WWC, described on its website as "a decision-making tool" that "helps the education community locate and recognize credible and reliable evidence to make informed decisions", features an aardvark among its most worthwhile national evidence of what works in education.

Score one for the Aardvark.

Boys and Girls: A Blast from the Past

Washington Post Magazine celebrates its 20th birthday this week with an issue of excerpts from noteworthy articles it's published over the past two decades. Interesting stuff, from dispatches from war zones in Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, and Iraq; to the Monica Lewinsky and Jessica Cutler scandals; to the Great Zucchini. But one 1993 article in particular caught my eye with its subtitle: "The trouble with being the smart girl."

The article, a profile of an incredibly smart and academically successful high school senior named Elizabeth Mann, was written at the peak of the early 1990's "girl crisis," following the 1992 publication of the American Association of University Women report How Schools Shortchange Girls, and it has most of the hallmarks of the girl crisis genre. There are the opening paragraphs, in which Elizabeth waits patiently to get a word in during class while her more aggressive male peers interrupt and ignore her efforts to speak (or course, when she's finally able to speak, she offers the right solution to the question they've been hashing out). There's the obligatory reference to research that places Elizabeth's story in national context:

Every year, every month, every week seems to bring another study detailing how dismal things are for females in math and science and how they need to be encouraged. One study says that the number of women going into either field is "disproportionately low." Another says that "gender differences in science achievement are not decreasing but increasing." Another says that although girls have as much ability as boys, they often start developing sour attitudes toward math and science in middle school and soon lose all interest. Others say that's because in classrooms boys dominate, that girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong, that eventually girls reach the point where they not only don't do well but decide they're incapable.

On and on the studies go, endlessly on, all making the same points about how lousy things are for females. Math, it seems, eventually becomes nothing more than a skill to balance a checkbook, while science, horrible science, becomes a nauseating memory of formaldehyde and some frogs.

There's the description of how Elizabeth's school, a magnet math and science program at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, is trying to foster girls' interest and achievement in math:

[The math and science magnet program] had been structured to mirror a boy's emotional development, he realized, which in many ways was at odds with a girl's. For instance, an early emphasis on physics, rather than life sciences, was something many of the girls said they didn't like. They also didn't like the strong emphasis on using computers. "Why?" Haney remembers asking a girl one day as they looked at some boys in the computer lab who were busy typing away. "They like it," he said. "They'll sit there all day." "Yeah," the girl said, "but look at the social skills of those boys."

So the program was recast to seem a little friendlier toward girls -- competition was de-emphasized, group work was stressed -- and by the time Elizabeth arrived four years ago, things were humming nicely along. The number of girls still hadn't come close to 50 percent (and hasn't so far), but at least the migration had stopped.

And then there's the emotional fallout of "being the smart girl" for Elizabeth--her sense of insecurity (in contrast to the apparently confident boys) and nagging questions about her own intelligence and achievements, as well as a fair amount of emotional brutality from male peers who resent her success.

"I feel like 'The Girl' in the class. It's something I'm very conscious of, almost every minute in there." She says, "I have a certain fear that somehow when I'm in that class, I'm this impostor who doesn't really understand."

The only thing that's missing is a dire story about depression, an eating disorder, promiscuity, substance abuse or self-mulitation. In fact, Elizabeth is "obliging" and "obedient," seemingly well-adjusted and "has never smoked a cigarette nor drunk the first drop of alcohol, rarely fights with her parents and doesn't yell at her younger brother."

***
Having spent a lot more time than I ever intended to reading, writing and talking about the "boy crisis" that has recently supplanted the girl crisis in the public and journalistic imagination, I couldn't help but be struck by the both the similarities and contrasts between this "girl crisis" article and many of the "boy crisis" pieces I've been reading lately. The 1993 article told us that: "girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong." Compare that to Newsweek's boy crisis cover story earlier this year:

Middle-school boys will do almost anything to avoid admitting that they're overwhelmed. "Boys measure everything they do or say by a single yardstick: does this make me look weak?" says Thompson. "And if it does, he isn't going to do it."

(Would it be too radical if I suggest that everybody, regardless of gender, really dislikes and tries to avoid appearing wrong, foolish or weak?)

The section on how Montgomery Blair tried to make its school more "girl-friendly" in the early 1990s also has eerie similarities with proposals to make schools more "boy-friendly" today. Both suggest that boys are more competitive but girls prefer cooperation and group projects, and that girls like people (or at least living critters) while boys prefer objects and computers. The difference is that while Montgomery Blair added group work and downplayed competition to attract girls, schools are now being urged to do the opposite in order to better serve boys.

Most significantly, both the boy crisis and girl crisis stories seem to rely heavily on rather dubious research and anecdotal reports about individual boys and girls whose experiences, while they make for compelling narrative, are often not representative. Today the girl crisis issues that garnered so much attention in the 1990s are often dismissed as wrongheaded analysis based on bad research that has since been debunked, or folks say that the achievement gains girls have made mean whatever problems there were have been resolved. Reading this 13-year-old article, I couldn't help but wonder if, 13 years from now, we'll see today's boy crisis hype largely the same way.

But there are contrasts between this article and the boy crisis stories that catch my eye, too. Most notably, it's no coincidence that Elizabeth Mann is an extremely high-performing--by all accounts exceptional--young woman. Much of the efforts to address the girl crisis in the 1990s seemed to focus on opening up opportunities for the highest-performing young women. To some extent, this makes sense: There have been real ceilings placed on women's opportunities and achievements (and in some places there still are) that need to be shattered. If you think it's important to build the next generation of women leaders and to make sure women have key leadership roles in politics, business, the sciences, it makes sense to focus on encouraging high-aptitude girls to do into these fields. In this respect, though, the boy crisis and girl crisis conversations are radically different. The boy crisis, to the extent it exists, is about the problems of a subset of low-performing boys--particularly but not exclusively low-income, African American and Hispanic boys--who do seem to be disproportionately concentrated in the lowest portions of the achievement distribution and who as a result of this low-performance aren't obtaining the basic skills and knowledge they need to make a decent life for themselves in the mainstream economy today.

Both the boy crisis and girl crisis narratives have considerable flaws, particularly when they're cast as broad, dramatic social problems that impact virtually every adolescent member of a particular sex. But beneath the hoopla both include significant truths that demand public and policymaker attention. The problem is that these truths are point to very different types of problems, but public conversation about both the boy and girl "crises" have been couched in strikingly similar (and largely useless) terms. There are significant, in some ways different, social, educational, and economic opportunity problems facing both male and female teenagers in the United States today. But I don't think we're doing a very good job of having public conversations about them.
***
Finally, a personal note. I am three years younger than Elizabeth Mann. I would never claim to be anywhere near as accomplished as Mann, but by the standards of my school I was also "the smart girl," which, along with having my dad as principal, carried lots of negative social consequences. But I never felt dominated in class by boys, never felt like my achievements were discounted or in any way treated differently because I was a girl, never was made to feel the kind of intellectual insecurities Mann mentions in this article. I was a freshman in high school when How Schools Shortchange Girls came out. I'm sure I benefitted from some of the things that were done in response to it and other studies suggesting girls were in trouble (but I mostly remember wondering why everyone seemed so dead set on convincing me to become an engineer just because I got good grades in math and science). I didn't know then about How Schools Shortchange Girls, but if I had, I wouldn't have recognized it as matching my teenage reality.

Fifth Day of Christmas

See days one and four.

The Wire Week Eleven: Everything Goes Wrong

This week on The Wire, poor, anonymous Sherrod dies of accidental cyanide poisoning while trying to get high in the middle of the night in his homeless drug-addict uncle's unheated hovel. Randy's foster mother is burned alive and nearly killed after their house is fire-bombed by neighborhood kids angry that Randy helped the incompetent police with a murder investigation. Namond has nowhere to live because his Mom is angry that he's not enthusiastic enough about following his dad in the family drug-dealing business that will quickly lead to prison or the grave. Dukie is promoted to high school, cutting him off from the only adult in the world who really cares about or pays attention to his welfare. Michael, who started the season as the strongest and most virtuous of the group, goes into training to be a drug gang assassin, beats up a small child, beats up Lamond, and stands by while his well-meaning boxing coach is shot and almost killed by his new drug gang buddies.

Growing up in West Baltimore really sucks.

We shouldn't be surprised, of course, the hallmark of The Wire is unflinching honesty. And lest you non-viewers out there (could there possibly be any left?) worry that the show is so depressing as to be unwatchable, it made for great, compelling television.

I'll save most of my final thoughts for next week after the season finale, but a quick note on the theme of circularity this season. There's a point near the end of the opening credits where there are five or so shots in a row that are about circles or cycles -- the revolving plastic thing in the convenience store where patrons exchange money for cigarettes, a spinning tire rim, drugs being packed in a circle around a spare tire in the trunk of a car, a child spinning an old tire around in an alley. The season has also followed a round object--Marlo's ring--on a circular path, from Marlo to Omar to whathisname the bad cop to Michael, who is now involved with Marlo.

On one level this is all kind of obvious--the pathologies of drugs and violence are visited upon children, who quickly grow up to perpetrate them on the next generation. The cycle of poverty, etc., etc. But in the hands of the The Wire's creators, this kind of symbolism, as well as the constant drawing of parallels between various individuals and institutions, is never trite and often kind of profound. As Saul Austerlitz said recently in Slate, The Wire is "a didactic show in the best possible sense."

Fourth Day of Christmas

Missed day one?

Jon Chait, Wrong About Education

The good thing about articles like Paul Tough's much-discussed NYTimes piece about the achievement gap is that they get a lot of people talking about an important educational issue. The bad thing is that many of those people don't really know what they're talking about.

Take, for example, Jonathan Chait's new column in the LA Times. Chait usually writes a great column; he's one of the few New Republic writers that I'll read based on the byline alone. But this column is full of shallow analysis and one major factual error. Chait says:

There are two main problems with our pool of teaching talent. The first is that it's badly distributed. Schools are mostly funded locally, which means rich districts can easily afford to pay teachers more than poor ones. Tough cites a study of schools in Illinois that found the highest-quality teachers concentrated in the richest schools and the lowest-quality teachers concentrated in the poorest schools.

This is the unavoidable result of making schools raise most of their funding locally. The only way to change this insane system would be to fund schools at the national level

Schools do not raise most of their funding locally. On average, a litle more than 40 percent of school funding comes from local sources, with about 50 percent coming from state revenues and 10 percent from the feds. This isn't news; as this table shows, the last year schools got most of their revenues from local sources was 1974.

He's right to point to the problem of teacher distribution in Illinois (I worked on the project that produced the report he cites). But Illinois has the worst school funding system in the country. They're the exception, not the rule.

Chait also repeats a point that I've seen a lot in the last week, that schools like KIPP are un-scaleable because the teachers there work "16 hours days." I remember being startled when Tough threw that assertion into his article--for the record, teachers in KIPP schools do not average 15-16 hours days, as at least one KIPP teacher notes in the comments section here. Can Mike Feinberg and David Levin please post something on the KIPP website to clear this up?

Chait also says:

My wife spent a few years teaching in a mostly low-income elementary school. The main thing I remember her telling me was that parental involvement was a near-perfect predictor of her students' performance. The kids with active parents did well, and the kids with disengaged parents did poorly.

Maybe Chait's wife was a great teacher, maybe not, I don't know. But this kind of deterministic thinking does poor children no favors. Schools are rarely successful when adults look at where children have come from and think they can see for certain where they're going.

Finally, Chait re-commits Tough's error of getting the politics wrong. Chait specializes in exposing the fallacies and illogic of conservative policies, which is, frankly, one of the reasons I normally like reading his stuff. But he's starting to become a hammer who only sees nails. The fact that the Heritage Foundation, which has very little to say about education policy, happened to write a report years ago titled "No Excuses" doesn't make that position conservative orthdoxy.

In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any reputable conservatives in the education policy world who hold the simplistic beliefs Chait criticizes. Like a lot of political commentators, Chait knows less about education policy than he thinks he does, but is perfectly comfortable stepping into the arena only occasionally as a means of fighting larger ideological battles. People like the teachers and students in KIPP schools deserve better.

First Day of Christmas...

Welcome to a special Quick & Ed feature celebrating the spirit of the holiday season weekdays during the month of December. Who is this woman? Stay tuned for more information (and pictures!)...

Dropping Harvard

The Civil Rights Project is dropping Harvard to move across the country to its new home at UCLA, where it will focus its efforts on immigrant and Latino issues.

A win for California and UCLA, who picks up not only CRP co-founder Gary Orfield but also Orfield's new wife, UC-Davis professor and associate director of the UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute Patricia Gandara.

A disappointment for CRP co-founder Chris Edley's hope that the CRP would become bicoastal when he dropped Harvard in 2003 to lead Berkeley's Boalt Hall. Edley said he was leaving the project knowing it would continue to flourish at Harvard and would become "bigger, better, and bicoastal" as he moved to develop a Berkeley-based center. It's clearly getting bigger in California, and better for taking on immigration issues, but sadly no longer a bicoastal endeavor. Not all bad..more reason to travel back to California.

Culture Club

Over at EdWize, Peter Goodman complains that "the pathology of poverty" makes it difficult to motivate and educate kids like those on The Wire: "Poverty, the culture of the streets is not shed at the classroom door!! As teachers we can’t make the streets safer or construct better housing or more stable family life … we can only teach and nurture and care …"

Whenever I hear sentiments like that, I think of what teachers and principals in high-performing and rapidly improving urban schools have to say. For example, Barbara Adderley, the principal of Stanton Hall Elementary in Philadelphia, made some compelling observations when she accepted an award at the Education Trust's national conference a few weeks ago. She talked about driving to work every day through blighted neighborhoods and seeing the drug dealers on the corners, and dealing with a situation in which children walk to school past crack houses and hear gunfire many nights. (As the Philadelphia Weekly describes it, "On her first day in September 2002 Adderley was greeted with madness: children running and screaming, teachers showing up late if at all, parents cussing and students overwhelmingly failing. Surrounded by drugs, neglect, poverty and violence at 16th and Cumberland in North Philadelphia, Stanton was one of the city’s worst-performing schools.")

Her response, Adderley told the conference crowd, was not to adjust academic expectations downward and focus exclusively on caring and nurturing, but instead to re-build her school around the assumption that its students were destined to become the next generation of business and civic leaders---the future Director of the Education Trust, the future U.S. Secretary of Education, etc. (she was citing the “big names” in attendance at the awards ceremony to add rhetorical flourish)---rather than the next generation of neighborhood drug dealers and addicts. Then she and her teachers began to TREAT THEM LIKE THAT by fashioning a new school culture and a new set of educational practices around that assumption. “Drugs are worse, guns are everywhere,” she told the Weekly, but "We can’t worry about any of that. We can only make this a climate where kids wanna be here, and where they’re learning."

Similarly, when Goodman asks "How do we convince 'corner boys' to pass Regents exams?" I think of June Esserly, principal of the University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts. At a session hosted by the Alliance for Excellent Education last year, Esserly talked about a three-week long August Academy she and her teachers provide for entering middle school students. (Contrast that with the chaos attending the first day at The Wire's Tilghman Middle School when the doors opened and kids simply swarmed into the hallways.)

The Academy helps kids bone up on study skills, she said, "But the most important thing is they get to understand the culture of the school. They get to understand that we are serious about education and that we are serious about them going to college. They need to start thinking about it now to get where they need to be." The Academy accomplishes that in ways both overt and subtle. For example, "I wanted the kids to be reading a book they could finish in three weeks, because in my experience a lot of urban kids don't finish what they start, so I want them to learn right from the get go, you start it, you finish it."

Adderley and Esserly recognize that "the culture of the streets" is out there and that their students, for now, must live in it, but also believe they don't have to go to school in it. Excellent schools for poor, urban students (public schools, not just charters like KIPP), purposefully shape the culture inside the school and wield it in very instrumental ways to influence expectations, aspirations, and behavior. In that sense, the culture becomes a tool in the educational toolbox, not something that is accidental or random or---as Goodman seems to imply---something that just inexorably seeps into the hallways and classrooms through the school's doors and windows.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Blogroll Addition

Richard Colvin's got a new blog about early childhood education and media coverage of it. Good stuff, now in our blogroll. (Thx to Andy for pointing this out to me.)

Paradise on the Potomac? Or a State-like Solution?

Commenting on Mike Casserly's Sunday Washington Post op-ed, Andy writes:

...The redundancy in education governance in Washington is almost comical. D.C. could do a lot worse than look to Hawaii for some ideas on having a unified state/school district structure since there is only one school district in Washington in the first place.

I've got to disagree here. If we were having this conversation in, say 1995, the last time Congress considered major legislation aimed at reforming DC schools, I'd probably agree with this analysis. But the problem is that, thanks to the DC School Reform Act of 1995, we don't actually have only one school district in Washington. We've got more than 50, and most of the are public charter schools, which, in DC, are legally their own local education agencies, or LEAs.

Because DCPS has both state and local education agency roles, it actually has to carry out state-level responsibilities--such as distributing some federal grant funds and running the "statewide" accountability and assessment system--that impact charters as well as traditional schools, including charter schools authorized by the Public Charter School Board (PCSB), over which DCPS, as an LEA, ought to have no authority. This can create serious conflicts of interest, because DCPS as an LEA competes with charter schools. The controversy over Supt. Clifford Janey's suggestion, earlier this year, that he wanted to use his authority as State Schools Officer to intervene in low-performing charter schools , including those authorized by the PCSB, is a good recent example of how the combined state/school district role for DCPS is problematic when charters are involved. There are also legitimate concerns that it's a conflict of interest for DCPS to have state responsibilities for holding itself accountable as a local school district.

Making DC a single state/school district like Hawaii would only exacerbate these problems. While Hawaii has charter schools, its charters are substantively different from those in DC: They are authorized by the Hawaii LEA/SEA, not an independent authorizer like the Public Charter School Board, and they do not have the legal and financial autonomy that DC charters do. And because of a relatively low charter cap in Hawaii, that state's charters are not currently the competitive threat to existing public schools that they are in DC.

In 2000, Mayor Williams established the State Education Office under his control to help deal with some of the new complexities that emerged in public education in DC as it moved from a single LEA system to one offering both DCPS and a host of public charter schools. The SEO monitors enrollment for both DCPS and charters, develops the uniform student funding formula used to allocate funds to the schools, oversees school nutrition programs, and also carries out some state-level higher education functions. But the combination of programs it carries out is rather eclectic, and it doesn't have most of the powers of a regular state education agency.

Based on some of the discussions floating around town right now, I wouldn't be surprised if what we saw happen with DC school governance in the next year or so would be creation of a real , separate State Education Agency, under the control of Mayor Fenty, that would have the responsibilities of a typical SEA with regard to both charters and DCPS. (This is pretty similar to what Casserly's op-ed is calling for.) Such an arrangement would have a number of benefits. It could give Mayor Fenty a significant role in holding DC's schools accountable and influencing education in DC without creating the huge operational and political disruption that shifting the day-to-day management of DCPS schools to the mayor would do. A smart plan to create a Mayor-controlled SEA would shift traditionally problematic areas in DCPS, such as out-of-district special education placements for high-needs students, and facilities, to DCPS. Legislation could also be written to give the Mayor, as SEA, power to take over chronically low-performing schools, with or without the Board of Education's consent. And, considering the vacuum created by the Board of Education's recent decision to surrender its role as a charter school authorizer, a Mayor-controlled SEA would be a great potential replacement for the board as a charter school authorizer. Although relatively few Mayors have chartering authority, those who do, like Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, have a promising record. DC could benefit from following this lead.

It's also increasingly looking like this is an idea most of the key parties could get behind politically, possibly avoiding the "donnybrook" Casserly fears a bid for full-out mayoral control would spark. There's already legislation in the U.S. Senate that would require the Board of Education to develop recommendations to shift its state-level functions to another entity, which observers seem to think in practice would most likely be the SEO. The Council's held hearings on the idea. At the same time could also been framed as a token step towards making DC more like a "real state," which might appeal to DC-statehood advocates. It would preserve a role for the elected school board, mitigating home rule concerns, but still give Fenty much greater control. It would give newly-elected reformist school board leaders like Robert Bobb and Lisa Raymond a chance to work for reform, while also building a foundation for a mayoral role that could be more easily expanded to full control if reform efforts on the board fail.

Update: Andy clarifies his comment a bit. I'd just like to add that, despite my skepticism a Hawaii-like model per se makes sense for DC, if anyone would like to fund some research travel for me to go to Hawaii this winter, investigate the state/district model in practice, and bring back recommendations for what DC can learn from it, I'd be all over that.