Summer Daze

Ok, I have to admit that I've had a bit of a case of spring fever lately. The weather's gotten warmer and suddenly all I really want to think about is how soon my pool will open, when I can get in that first weekend trip to the beach, and how long I'll have to spend in the sun to get rid of the ghastly pasty white color now covering my arms and legs. I love summer, even hot, sticky, humid D.C. summers.

But the reality is that, for education policy wonks, summer should actually be a pretty grim time. During the summer months, we see a significant widening in achievement gaps between poor and affluent children. That's largely because, while summers for middle-class kids mean organized sports, day- and sleep-away camps, horizon-widening family vacations, parentally-encouraged reading for fun, and lots of other brain-stimulating and school-reinforcing activities, for lower-income kids, like many of those in my neighborhood, summer mostly means boredom, opportunities to get in trouble, and losing a lot of educational ground. Another casualty of the outdated agricultural model of public schooling.

Former Clinton economic wonk Gene Sperling writes about this in his latest column, as well as two recent policy proposals--one from Princeton economists Alan Krueger and Molly Fifer for Brookings' Hamilton Project, the other from New Vision Institute smarties Scott Winship, Matissa Hollister, Joel Horwich, Pat Sharkey, and Christopher Wimer, who are working with the Center for American Progress--that would establish government-funded summer opportunity scholarships to give disadvantaged youngsters access to the same educational opportunities middle-class families take for granted during the summer. (It's also worth noting that a number of high-performing charter schools already have created some type of summer institutes, extended school years, or summer enrichment connections to help their disadvantaged students get up to speed and stay there.)

Stay tuned for this topic--along with the weather--to heat up in the coming months.

Thanks to reader CC for the tip on this article.

More Kid Lit and a Book for Grown-ups, Too (Special Notice Readers in D.C. and Philadelphia)

Q&E's comrade-en-blog Joanne Jacobs is touring to promote both her recent book, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School that Beat the Odds. The book tells the tale of Downtown College Prep, a high-performing San Jose, Calif., charter school that serves academically disadvantaged students and prepares them to succeed in four-year-colleges.

Next week, on Thursday, May 11 at 5:30 P.M., Jacobs will be speaking and signing copies of her book in Washington, D.C., at the William E. Doar Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts (click link for address and contact info), a very cool performing-arts themed charter school in Northeast D.C. that currently serves children in pre-k through fifth grade. (WEDJ eventually plans to expand to serve students through high school). Attendees will also be treated to a musical performance by the school's students.

Then, on Wednesday, May 17, also at 5:30 P.M., Jacobs will speak and sign books at the Russell Byers Charter School in Center City Philadelphia (click link for school address and info).

Both events are open to the public free of charge, and no advance registration is required. Jacobs does request, however, that guests bring a children's book to donate to the schools' libraries. Here are a few ideas.

The Yale - Taliban Connection

The NYTimes reports that Rahmatullah Hashemi, a former spokesman and roving ambassador for the Taliban who is currently taking classes at Yale, has formally applied for admission to a degree-granting program at the university.

There appear to be two arguments for why Hashemi belongs at Yale. The first is that he would benefit from a Yale education. Well, sure. Who wouldn't? There are a thousand times more people for whom that is true than Yale has space for. Why choose him? Why not give the golden ticket in the American education lottery to someone less morally compromised, like one of the countless Afghan women the Taliban barred from school?

That leads to the second argument, which is that Yale would benefit from having Hashemi as a student:

In a statement issued in March, the university said: "We acknowledge that some are criticizing Yale for allowing Mr. Hashemi to take courses here, but we hope that critics will also acknowledge that universities are places that must strive to increase understanding, especially of the most difficult issues that face the nation and the world."

Mr. Hashemi worked for the Office of Foreign Affairs under the Taliban, serving initially as a translator and then as a diplomat in the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. He was named a roving ambassador in 2000, traveling to the Middle East and Europe. He toured the United States early in 2001, speaking at Yale and several other universities and appearing on public television and radio; he defended the abridgement of women's rights by the Taliban and the destruction of huge Buddhist statues, among other things.

The "abridgement" of women's rights? Abridgement is a, shall we say, somewhat muted way of characterizing things like shooting women in the back of the head with a rifle in a soccer stadium full of cheering spectators. Just to take one example of many.

The supposed benefits of Hashemi's presence seems to be animated by the idea that only through communication and understanding can we ultimately come to reconciliation and peace. As a principle of human relations, I agree with this idea wholeheartedly. But where is the supposed lack of understanding here? Is there any outstanding ambiguity left to resolve regarding the Taliban, any uncertainty as to what it's done or what it stands for? This is an organization that has defined itself in the most unambiguous terms imaginable.

Some would say principles of diversity and tolerance are only meaningful when defended at unpopular extremes. But this is a case of worthy principles extended to illogical lengths, to the point of obvious self-contradiction. It's clear that the relatively small number of universities with the luxury of choosing the composition of their student bodies have a powerful--if somewhat vague-preference for diversity along a large number of dimensions. Again, a good thing. But does it make sense to extend the principle of diversity to people who have aided and abetted regimes that are ruthlessly preoccupied with stamping out diversity by deadly means, particularly when it comes at the expense of some other student?

Kid Lit Is the Answer to Everything

This hillarious Slate article by Jacob Weisberg,* about how impossible it is to comprehend, let alone sing, our national anthem, put me in mind of this episode from one of my favorite children's books:**

Next Miss Binney taught the class the words of a puzzling song about "the dawnzer lee light," which Ramona did not understand because she did not know what a dawnzer was. "Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer lee light," sang Miss Binney, and Ramona decided that a dawnzer was another word for a lamp.

Once again reinforcing my belief that you can learn everything you could possible want to know about a culture from reading its children's books and childrearing manuals.

*Hat tip to Matt Yglesias.

**The first person who e-mails me the title and author of this book gets a free copy of A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom, which, sadly, is not children's literature but is, according to Amazon, a $49.95 value.

UPDATE: Congrats to Marjorie Cohen, who was the first to correctly identify the source of this excerpt as being Ramona the Pest, by Beverly Cleary.

The Lou Dobbs Award for Shameless Opportunism

So there I am last Friday, on vacation, sitting with my lovely wife in a bar about 100 yards from the beach on Grand Cayman. Temperature in the low 80s, sun starting to set over the clear blue-green ocean waters. Thoughts of upcoming snorkeling trip (see right) make me happy. A warm tropical breeze is blowing through my hair as I drink my second (third? fifth?) glass of the local rum/pineapple/coconut concoction.* I am relaxed, and (not coincidentally) education policy is far from my mind.

Then I glance at the television hanging above the bar, and what do I see? CNN, and the regularly scheduled broadcast of "Lou Dobbs Hates Foreign People." Lou is talking about high school graduation rates for Latino students.

My shoulders tense. Hard-won relaxation drains away. Quickly, I beckon to the bartender, a deeply-tanned ex-pat Australian scuba diver named Nigel, for a third (seventh?) concoction. But it's too late.

Lou explains to his audience that because the borders are broken, our great nation is being overrun by illegal Mexican immigrants who are overwhelming our hospitals by selling computer technology to the Chinese, who then outsource IT jobs to Bangalore, which inevitably leaves us vulnerable to infiltration by Al Qaeda agents entering the country in uninspected shipping containers arriving at foreign-owned ports. This can be proved by the fact that the nationwide Hispanic high school graduation rate is barely 50%.

Lou's mostly right on this last point--on-time Hispanic high school graduation rates are much too low. He just didn't bother to mention that most of those Hispanic students aren't immigrants, illegal or otherwise, or that graduation rates for black students are equally low. Or that these numbers were bad long before the current wave of immigration. (For some more actual data on education and immigration, see this month's Charts You Can Trust).

But in briefly entering the education arena in pursuit of another, non-education agenda, Lou isn't breaking any new ground. This kind of thing unfortunately happens all the time. From creationism and school prayer to sex education and "self-esteem instruction," people with all manner of axes to grind use the public schools as a convenient forum for other cultural and societal debates.

Thus, we at the The Quick and The Ed are hereby instituting the "Lou Dobbs Award for Shameless Opportunism," given to people who thoughtlessly wade into education policy debates for reasons that have nothing to do with actually helping students or improving schools. Nominations for future awards are welcome.

*Concoction Recipe:
2,3, or 4 parts dark Caribbean rum (depending on circumstances, i.e. need to counteract effects of Dobbsian television broadcasts)
4 parts pineapple juice
1 part cream of coconut
1 part orange juice
Serve over ice, top with shavings of fresh nutmeg

The Best We Can Expect?

I don't want to overplay the reasons why I don't think Newsweek's "America's Best High Schools" list lives up to it's name, but, now that I've had a chance to look at this year's list, I've got a bit more to say.

One of the things I found most striking, when Andy and I were putting together our analysis of schools on last year's list, was that several schools in the "Top 100" reported half or fewer of their African American students graduating. All of those schools are still on Newsweek's list this year. (I haven't had a chance yet to see if any addition schools on this year's list have similarly low graduation rates.) Considering that a lot of states are still grossly underreporting the percentage of students who fail to graduate, this troubled me. Certainly, we know from research by the Manhattan Institute and Urban Institute that only slightly more than half of African American students nationwide graduate in four years, but shouldn't the schools on a list of the nation's "best" be doing better than that, rather than a little bit worse?

Now, Jay Mathews, who created the list, argues that including graduation rates in the analysis would mean high-poverty, high-minority schools will never make Newsweek's list of Top 100 schools, because their populations ensure they will have high drop-out rates. But I think that gives some of the schools on his list more credit than they deserve.

For example, Atlantic Community High School, in Delray Beach, Florida, ranked #25 on Newsweek's list, reported a 50 percent graduation rate for its African American students in 2004, according to its detailed NCLB report card from the Florida Department of Education. About 45 percent of the school's 2,000+ students are African American, and about 35 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. That's not an affluent, lilly-white suburban school, like many on Newsweek's list, but it's not "high-poverty, high-minority," either. In fact, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at Atlantic Community is lower than the statewide average in Florida, which is 46 percent. Now, I think it's a scandal that nearly half of Florida's kids are economically disadvantaged, but does that mean we shouldn't expect the state's high schools to get more than half their black students to graduation?

Further, there are schools on Jay's own list that prove him wrong. For example, this year's school #87, YES College Preparatory School in Houston, Texas, has a student enrollment that is 92 percent Hispanic, 5 percent black, and has 75 percent of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch--a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students than all but one other school in Newsweek's list. But YES reports a 93.9 percent graduation rate, and 100 percent of its graduates are accepted to four-year colleges.

Atlantic may be doing great things for some of its students, but a method that ranks it higher than YES seems to defy common sense.

There's no May 1 Heffalump, either

But there is a series of immigration-related protests taking place nationwide, as some advocates have called for immigrants to boycott work and school to participate in protests and demonstrate their economic significance to the country. The "boycott" isn't universally supported within the movement. Schools and a number of pro-immigrant leaders have urged students to attend classes rather than participating in protests, and many districts have put parents and students on notice that those who skip school to attend the rallies will be disciplined. Nevertheless a reported quarter of middle and high school students in the predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles Unifed School District are absent today.

I'm torn about this issue. On the one hand, education is key to the opportunity that immigrants come the this country to pursue, so their children should be attending school today to help them take advantage of that opportunity. On the other hand, what could be a more American lesson for children to learn than how, through grassroots organizing, a large group of people with little individual power can make those in power listen to them? Of course, the corrolary to this lesson is that true civic disobedience means accepting the consequences of one's actions, so students who do violate compulsory attendance laws and school policies to participate in protests deserve to be punished.

But there's something else that troubled me, too. We know that many of the schools that enroll large numbers of immigrants or their kids are not succeeding. There is a large achievement gap between white and Hispanic students; drop-out rates for Hispanic students--especially males--are abysmal; and overall we're not doing a great job educating English language learners. And organized, empowered parents and communities are critical to addressing these problems. Wouldn't it be cool if these protests generate longer-term political organizing that gives parents a voice and the skills to advocate for their kids? Then we might start to see more of this kind of thing happening. I'm not holding my breathe, though.

In Related News:

Alexander Russo notes that, in contrast to past waves of anti-immigration sentiment, this time around there's not as much talk about the cost of educating illegal immigrant students.

Of course, that might be partly because, as Kevin Carey points out in the latest Charts You Can Trust, undocumented immigrants are just a teensy percentage of children in our public schools. Kevin's got lots of other interesting factoids on immigrants in public education, so be sure to check out his timely piece.

(Over)Simply the Best?

Newsweek's annual list of America's Best High Schools is up online now. Earlier this year, Andy and I wrote a piece raising some concerns with Newsweek's methodology--particularly how the list ignores schools' graduation rates and equity between student subgroups in a school. Jay Mathews, who creates the list, has been kind enough to engage with Andy and me in a dialogue about those concerns, which he mentions in this story.

This year there are two changes in Newsweek's rankings. First, Mathews et. al. opened the list up to include more schools that admit students on a competitive basis (previously, schools that selected more than half of their students competitively were excluded). Second, each school's information is now accompanied by an "Equity and Excellence Percentage" (E and E%), which reflects the percentage of a school's senior class that passed at least one AP exam. The E and E% is an interesting idea, but I think it would be more useful if Newsweek allowed readers to look at the two different pieces of information that comprise it--1.) across what share of a school's students the AP tests that contribute to the school's ranking are distributed, and 2.) how students performed on those tests--separately, since they are very different concepts. (Just to be clear: Newsweek doesn't have these two separate pieces of information and combine them to create the E and E %. But the E and E %, as calculated, conflates those two pieces of information into one statistic.)

And, if you want to know what I really think, check me out on Newsweek radio, here.

What Did the National Charter Schools Week Heffalump Bring You, Sara?

Ok, so there's really no such thing as a National Charter Schools Week Heffalump, and I didn't wake up and find a backpack full of jelly beans and school supplies on my doorstep this morning, nor has the charter community received any great policy treats so far this week. But this week is National Charter Schools Week, anyway. Learn more here.