Today marks the 34th anniversary of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. I didn’t realize that I was a Title IX baby (the law passed just three months after I was born), until I was an adult. But I know I reaped the benefits, along with millions of other little girls who were given new opportunities to play hard and learn more.
I hope by now there’s some common knowledge about Title IX, but just in case, here’s a quick reminder. Title IX is not just for girls. The law actually protects male and female students and employees from sex discrimination at all elementary schools, high schools, and colleges and universities that receive federal funding, as well as educational programs and activities that are affiliated with any of these schools.
And it’s not just about sports. Title IX covers all arenas of public education. Enforced by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, Title IX covers recruitment, admissions, course offerings, financial aid, scholarships, housing facilities, and the list goes on… It is intended to guarantee equal access and opportunity for both genders for the entire educational experience. It is wide-reaching, and that’s why it has made such a difference.
So I hate to return to sports on a Title IX blog, since most of the public attention to Title IX has been chronicling the woes of “at-risk” men’s wrestling teams rather than the many other more important educational issues. But I watched the U.S. men’s team sadly lose to Ghana in yesterday’s World Cup match (Ghana, by the way, seems like the underdog team to cheer for now that the U.S. is out of it- this is Ghana’s first World Cup appearance and they are now the only African team remaining).
I know U.S. soccer fans are really depressed. But all is not lost for four more years. The women will be back next year for the FIFA 2007 Women’s World Cup, to be held in China.
And thanks to Title IX, the U.S. women’s team is a pretty good shot on goal.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Thursday, June 22, 2006
David Brooks on Higher Education: First, Maybe Second Stomach of Cow
David Brooks' column($) about higher education in today's NYTimes doesn't sink to the fourth-stomach-in-cow level of his previous piece on gender and education. But it still misses the mark. For some reason, Brooks thinks higher education systems should be judged on their success in achieving every conceivable goal except...education.
After trying (and mostly failing) to set up the piece with a World Cup hook, Brooks proceeds to his main contention: the American higher education system is the best in the world because, unlike its inferior European counterparts, it's unregulated by the government:
There are two words missing from this long list of virtues: learning and teaching.
Universities compete for "ideas, status, talent and donations." That's basically true. Competing for ideas and status means recruiting faculty who are distinguished in their academic field. Talent means recruiting students with high SAT scores. Donations means begging for money. None of these things have much to do with how well universities teach students or how much students learn while they're there.
Brooks' further list of good things universities do--character building, extracurricular activities, business incubation, retiree attraction, community integration, sports--is also accurate, and full of admirable qualities. But none of them matter when it comes to the most important thing universities are supposed to do: educate students.
Brooks sinks to fourth-stomach mode in blithely asserting that "8 out of the top 10 universities are American." The criteria used to generate that list are as follows:
Number of alumni winning Nobel Prizes or Field medals: 10%
Number of faculty winning Nobel Prizes or Field medals: 20%
Number of faculty who are "highly cited researchers": 20%
Research output (articles published): 40%
Size: 10%
Again, I'm glad we've got lots of big universities that are filled with highly-cited Nobel prize winners. The more the better. But again, these things have nothing to do with teaching students. Nor does the presence or absence of the top eight in the world have any impact on the 99% of American college students who don't attend one of those institutions. Saying we're the best because we have Cal Tech is like saying New York City has the best K-12 system in the nation because it has Bronx Science.
Brooks is right to celebrate the lively competition in our higher education market. But when the terms of competition aren't related to learning, institutional incentives are skewed. Colleges and universities have every reason to engage in morally dubious practices like giving more financial aid to rich students and less to poor students, and no reason to make sure that faculty actually know how to teach. As long as higher education is judged by every factor except learning, too many students won't get the education they need.
After trying (and mostly failing) to set up the piece with a World Cup hook, Brooks proceeds to his main contention: the American higher education system is the best in the world because, unlike its inferior European counterparts, it's unregulated by the government:
[American universities are] spirited competitors in the marketplace of ideas, status, talent and donations. The European system, by contrast, is state-dominated and uncompetitive. During the 19th century, governments in Spain, France and Germany abolished the universities' medieval privileges of independence. Governments took over funding and control, and imposed radical egalitarian agendas. Universities could not select students on merit, and faculty members became civil servants. The upshot is that the competitive American universities not only became the best in the world — 8 out of the top 10 universities are American — they also remained ambitious and dynamic. They are much more responsive to community needs.
Not only have they created ambitious sports programs to build character among students and a sense of solidarity across the community, they also offer a range of extracurricular activities and student counseling services unmatched anywhere else. While the arts and letters faculties are sometimes politically cloistered, the rest of the university programs are integrated into society,performing an array of social functions. They serve as business incubation centers (go to Palo Alto). With their cultural and arts programs, they serve as retiree magnets (go to Charlottesville). With their football teams, they bind communities and break down social distinctions (people in Alabama are fiercely loyal to the Crimson Tide, even though most have not actually attended the university).
There are two words missing from this long list of virtues: learning and teaching.
Universities compete for "ideas, status, talent and donations." That's basically true. Competing for ideas and status means recruiting faculty who are distinguished in their academic field. Talent means recruiting students with high SAT scores. Donations means begging for money. None of these things have much to do with how well universities teach students or how much students learn while they're there.
Brooks' further list of good things universities do--character building, extracurricular activities, business incubation, retiree attraction, community integration, sports--is also accurate, and full of admirable qualities. But none of them matter when it comes to the most important thing universities are supposed to do: educate students.
Brooks sinks to fourth-stomach mode in blithely asserting that "8 out of the top 10 universities are American." The criteria used to generate that list are as follows:
Number of alumni winning Nobel Prizes or Field medals: 10%
Number of faculty winning Nobel Prizes or Field medals: 20%
Number of faculty who are "highly cited researchers": 20%
Research output (articles published): 40%
Size: 10%
Again, I'm glad we've got lots of big universities that are filled with highly-cited Nobel prize winners. The more the better. But again, these things have nothing to do with teaching students. Nor does the presence or absence of the top eight in the world have any impact on the 99% of American college students who don't attend one of those institutions. Saying we're the best because we have Cal Tech is like saying New York City has the best K-12 system in the nation because it has Bronx Science.
Brooks is right to celebrate the lively competition in our higher education market. But when the terms of competition aren't related to learning, institutional incentives are skewed. Colleges and universities have every reason to engage in morally dubious practices like giving more financial aid to rich students and less to poor students, and no reason to make sure that faculty actually know how to teach. As long as higher education is judged by every factor except learning, too many students won't get the education they need.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Contraband!
Via the Education Wonks (who also add some amusing comments of their own), NEA has a silly list of odd things teachers have confiscated from students in their careers. Since I'm pretty sure that every watergun I had as a kid had been confiscated by my dad, a high school principal, from some student or other, this made me happy.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
The Unbearable Randomness of Policy
Per the AFT blog, the Indianapolis Star reports that policymakers in Indiana are once again talking about funding full-day kindergarten for all Hoosier students. Considering that many states have done this for decades and are now concentrating on giving all students access to pre-kindergarten, this is welcome, if belated, news.
It also reminds me of one the formative "A-Ha!" lessons I've learned : education policy, and public policy generally, is often a lot more random than you'd ever want to believe.
In 1999, I worked as a fiscal analyst for the Democratic caucus of the Indiana Senate. I've had jobs with better titles and more responsibility, but never one that was as much fun--it was basically a front-row seat for politics and democracy in all their messy, fascinating glory.
Indiana was writing a new, two-year state budget in 1999. Tax revenues had swelled due the stock market run-up and long economic expansion, and the state had accumulated a huge budget surplus. Most of it would be gone within a few years as Indiana would be hit particularly hard by the 2001 recession. But we didn't know that then, so the session was dominated by one big question: "How the heck are we going to spend all this money?"
Republicans, being Republicans, wanted to cut taxes. But they only controlled the Senate; Democrats had the House of Representatives and the governor's office, which was occupied by the late Frank O'Bannon. He was a popular governor with a genuine committment to education, and his announced number one budget priority for 1999 was full-day kindergarten.
Officially, the Indiana budget process starts in the December prior to the budget year with the submission of the governor's proposed budget. The legislature convenes in January and over the next four or five months each chamber holds lengthy hearing and debates considering that proposal before passing their own versions of a budget bill.
In reality, that's all prelude to the start of the real budget-writing process, which begins about 48 hours before the session is scheduled to end, and continues for two straight sleepless days and nights of non-stop negotiating and wrangling. Sweaty lobbyists lurk behind the Indiana Statehouse's huge granite pillars trading gossip and looking for last-minute chances to put a word in for their clients while staff members run marked-up budget bills and spreadsheet printouts back and forth from one chamber to the other across the top, fourth floor of the building, as well as up and down to the governor's office two floors below. The whole thing runs on adrenaline, caffeine, and--when things start to get really tense--the occasional bottle of rejuvinating spirits strategically located in the bottom of legislative desk drawers.
The 1999 negotiations wore on into the second night, until eventually nearly everyone involved was crammed into a back room in the fourth floor office of the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He was an old-school Democrat from South Bend form a political family who would eventually go on to to become Speaker of the House. While it was late and the governor had already left for the night, his representatives were in the room and insisted on full-day kindergarten. But the price tag was high--at least $100 million in year one and upward from there--and despite projections of robust future revenues (which would turn out to be wildly incorrect) there were problems getting all the budget numbers to add up.
And then--and I've never quite been able to figure out exactly how this happened--some process of missed, botched, or willfully ignored communication led the chairman to leave the room for a final, one-on-one, no-staff-present deal-making session with his equally crusty, old-school Republican Senate counterpart, thinking that full-day kindergarten was off the table. A few hours later the deal was done.
The governor was woken and notified, at which time he came back to the building for an emergency 3AM staff meeting where he reportedly used language that to this day I can't fully believe given that he was, both in public and in person, one of the most decent, genial, down-to-earth people I've ever met in my life. But it was too late; 5-year old Hoosiers were stuck with substandard education policy for what turned out to be seven years and counting.
The point being that it all could just as easily gone the other way. Everyone was tired, emotional, frustrated, honestly not thinking particularly straight or well. The policymaking process in extremis is like an billiard ball with dozens of cues pushing on it from different directions all at once. It sits static under all that countervailing pressure until the slightest shift sends it flying off in a direction that not one of the cue-holders can completely predict or control.
That doesn't mean that organized efforts can't do a great deal to position the ball and increase the odds for students. But as in all things there are moments where circumstances shift unpredicatably for good or--unfortunately in this case--ill, and it can take a long time to get those moments back.
It also reminds me of one the formative "A-Ha!" lessons I've learned : education policy, and public policy generally, is often a lot more random than you'd ever want to believe.
In 1999, I worked as a fiscal analyst for the Democratic caucus of the Indiana Senate. I've had jobs with better titles and more responsibility, but never one that was as much fun--it was basically a front-row seat for politics and democracy in all their messy, fascinating glory.
Indiana was writing a new, two-year state budget in 1999. Tax revenues had swelled due the stock market run-up and long economic expansion, and the state had accumulated a huge budget surplus. Most of it would be gone within a few years as Indiana would be hit particularly hard by the 2001 recession. But we didn't know that then, so the session was dominated by one big question: "How the heck are we going to spend all this money?"
Republicans, being Republicans, wanted to cut taxes. But they only controlled the Senate; Democrats had the House of Representatives and the governor's office, which was occupied by the late Frank O'Bannon. He was a popular governor with a genuine committment to education, and his announced number one budget priority for 1999 was full-day kindergarten.
Officially, the Indiana budget process starts in the December prior to the budget year with the submission of the governor's proposed budget. The legislature convenes in January and over the next four or five months each chamber holds lengthy hearing and debates considering that proposal before passing their own versions of a budget bill.
In reality, that's all prelude to the start of the real budget-writing process, which begins about 48 hours before the session is scheduled to end, and continues for two straight sleepless days and nights of non-stop negotiating and wrangling. Sweaty lobbyists lurk behind the Indiana Statehouse's huge granite pillars trading gossip and looking for last-minute chances to put a word in for their clients while staff members run marked-up budget bills and spreadsheet printouts back and forth from one chamber to the other across the top, fourth floor of the building, as well as up and down to the governor's office two floors below. The whole thing runs on adrenaline, caffeine, and--when things start to get really tense--the occasional bottle of rejuvinating spirits strategically located in the bottom of legislative desk drawers.
The 1999 negotiations wore on into the second night, until eventually nearly everyone involved was crammed into a back room in the fourth floor office of the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He was an old-school Democrat from South Bend form a political family who would eventually go on to to become Speaker of the House. While it was late and the governor had already left for the night, his representatives were in the room and insisted on full-day kindergarten. But the price tag was high--at least $100 million in year one and upward from there--and despite projections of robust future revenues (which would turn out to be wildly incorrect) there were problems getting all the budget numbers to add up.
And then--and I've never quite been able to figure out exactly how this happened--some process of missed, botched, or willfully ignored communication led the chairman to leave the room for a final, one-on-one, no-staff-present deal-making session with his equally crusty, old-school Republican Senate counterpart, thinking that full-day kindergarten was off the table. A few hours later the deal was done.
The governor was woken and notified, at which time he came back to the building for an emergency 3AM staff meeting where he reportedly used language that to this day I can't fully believe given that he was, both in public and in person, one of the most decent, genial, down-to-earth people I've ever met in my life. But it was too late; 5-year old Hoosiers were stuck with substandard education policy for what turned out to be seven years and counting.
The point being that it all could just as easily gone the other way. Everyone was tired, emotional, frustrated, honestly not thinking particularly straight or well. The policymaking process in extremis is like an billiard ball with dozens of cues pushing on it from different directions all at once. It sits static under all that countervailing pressure until the slightest shift sends it flying off in a direction that not one of the cue-holders can completely predict or control.
That doesn't mean that organized efforts can't do a great deal to position the ball and increase the odds for students. But as in all things there are moments where circumstances shift unpredicatably for good or--unfortunately in this case--ill, and it can take a long time to get those moments back.
Margaret Spellings, World Traveler
Speaking of thinking about the problems facing children in other countries...CNN.com reports on the seven overseas trips Margaret Spellings has taken since becoming U.S. Secretary of Education a year and a half ago. Some conservatives are criticizing these trips as "junkets;" other commentators say the importance of education to America's global "competitiveness" requires education leaders to pay more attention to what's happening abroad. I'm in no position to judge the merits of Secretary Spellings' foreign travel, but I do think there are important lessons we can learn from other countries.
UPDATE: Alexander Russo and the Edwonks have a bit more to say about this.
UPDATE: Alexander Russo and the Edwonks have a bit more to say about this.
World Refugee Day
I spend most of my time thinking about problems with public education and other services for children here in the U.S. and how to solve them, so it's easy to forget sometimes how serious the problems are facing children and families in many other parts of the world. Every so often, though, I get jolted with a troubling reminder of how bad the circumstances are for many children around the world.
Today is one of those days. It's World Refugee Day--a day set up to draw attention to the plight of the over 20 million people around the world who are refugees. Nearly half--more than 9 million--are children. Many of these children are orphans or separated from their families, many have survived truly horrific experiences, and many are struggling to survive on a daily basis. And many face bleak futures, without any homes to return to or clear legal status and limited or no access to economic opportunities or education (this is particularly the case for girls).
As we work to improve education in this country, it's important not to forget these children. Click here, here, here, or here to learn about some of the many opportunities--through donations of money or good, volunteering, or advocacy--to support work on behalf of refugees. In addition, the UN Commission on Human Rights offers a variety of resources for educators to help the children they work with learn about these issues and how they can make a difference for other children.
Today is one of those days. It's World Refugee Day--a day set up to draw attention to the plight of the over 20 million people around the world who are refugees. Nearly half--more than 9 million--are children. Many of these children are orphans or separated from their families, many have survived truly horrific experiences, and many are struggling to survive on a daily basis. And many face bleak futures, without any homes to return to or clear legal status and limited or no access to economic opportunities or education (this is particularly the case for girls).
As we work to improve education in this country, it's important not to forget these children. Click here, here, here, or here to learn about some of the many opportunities--through donations of money or good, volunteering, or advocacy--to support work on behalf of refugees. In addition, the UN Commission on Human Rights offers a variety of resources for educators to help the children they work with learn about these issues and how they can make a difference for other children.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Another One Bites the Dust?
WaPo reports that the District of Columbia Board of Education is thinking of getting out of the charter authorizing business in D.C. My colleague Andrew Rotherham and Mark Lerner both think this is a good thing. I'm not so sure.
Don't get me wrong: Quality authorizing is critical to the success of charter schooling, bad authorizers do the movement no favors, the Board of Education has some significant problems as an authorizer, and if it has neither the will nor the capacity to become a top-notch authorizer, then it should get out of the business.
But I would be sorry to see that happen because I think that, if the Board of Education would get its act together, chartering could become a powerful part of an overall strategy to help reform DCPS.
Bear with me here: Fixing DCPS is a Herculean task, and I'm increasingly convinced that the system is just too dysfunctional in too many ways for any kind of top-down, one-fell-swoop reform to solve the underlying problems there. The best chance of achieving real, positive educational results for D.C. kids may be to hive off large parts of the system until what remains is a manageable, semi-functional core into which the Board of Education and DCPS leaders can pour reform energies. The ultimate result would look like the portfolio model Paul Hill has been talking about. And chartering--specifically converting traditional schools to charter status, or closing them down and opening new charters in their place--is the obvious tool for achieving this kind of radical paring down the system needs to thrive.
Moreover, there are a lot of gaps in D.C.'s current educational system--neighborhoods with no good schools, lots of kids who need alternative placements but have nowhere to go, and the like. High-quality chartering--in which the Board of Education would request proposals and recruit successful charter operators to open the kind of schools the city currently lacks--strikes me as an efficient way to address this problem.
It's important to note that both of these functions are ones that the Board of Education is uniquely situated to perform. The D.C. Public Charter School Board is a good (though not perfect) authorizer, and it has been critical to the growth of D.C.'s strong charter sector. But it can't help DCPS pare down or diagnose and fill gaps in the existing DCPS options. The Public Charter Schools Board's strength is its ability to independently create space for new schools in the District. The Board of Education's potential strength as an authorizer would be using chartering to complement and support DCPS reform efforts.
That's not to say it would be easy for the Board of Education to shift to this role. Even though it's become much more effective since the institution of the hybrid board in 2000, the Board of Education still behaves too often as if it were designed to be dysfunctional (and, in some ways, it is). Moreover, the Board still has an "us versus them" attitude towards charter schools, seeing them as competition rather a potential complement to DCPS reform, and its charter monitoring responsibilities as a distraction from running DCPS, rather than a potential tool to help the system work better.
While there are some very smart and talented board members who support high-quality charter schools, I'm not sure the Board of Education overall has the will to change its perspective on charter schools or the capacity to manage charter school oversight effectively. If this is the case, then it would be best for the Board to get out of the business entirely. But I'm still holding out hope they can find the will and ability to prove their critics wrong.
UPDATE: Andy Smarick at Charter Blog has some good comments on this. But I also think he's wrong about the KIPP deal. (Sorry, Andy!)
Don't get me wrong: Quality authorizing is critical to the success of charter schooling, bad authorizers do the movement no favors, the Board of Education has some significant problems as an authorizer, and if it has neither the will nor the capacity to become a top-notch authorizer, then it should get out of the business.
But I would be sorry to see that happen because I think that, if the Board of Education would get its act together, chartering could become a powerful part of an overall strategy to help reform DCPS.
Bear with me here: Fixing DCPS is a Herculean task, and I'm increasingly convinced that the system is just too dysfunctional in too many ways for any kind of top-down, one-fell-swoop reform to solve the underlying problems there. The best chance of achieving real, positive educational results for D.C. kids may be to hive off large parts of the system until what remains is a manageable, semi-functional core into which the Board of Education and DCPS leaders can pour reform energies. The ultimate result would look like the portfolio model Paul Hill has been talking about. And chartering--specifically converting traditional schools to charter status, or closing them down and opening new charters in their place--is the obvious tool for achieving this kind of radical paring down the system needs to thrive.
Moreover, there are a lot of gaps in D.C.'s current educational system--neighborhoods with no good schools, lots of kids who need alternative placements but have nowhere to go, and the like. High-quality chartering--in which the Board of Education would request proposals and recruit successful charter operators to open the kind of schools the city currently lacks--strikes me as an efficient way to address this problem.
It's important to note that both of these functions are ones that the Board of Education is uniquely situated to perform. The D.C. Public Charter School Board is a good (though not perfect) authorizer, and it has been critical to the growth of D.C.'s strong charter sector. But it can't help DCPS pare down or diagnose and fill gaps in the existing DCPS options. The Public Charter Schools Board's strength is its ability to independently create space for new schools in the District. The Board of Education's potential strength as an authorizer would be using chartering to complement and support DCPS reform efforts.
That's not to say it would be easy for the Board of Education to shift to this role. Even though it's become much more effective since the institution of the hybrid board in 2000, the Board of Education still behaves too often as if it were designed to be dysfunctional (and, in some ways, it is). Moreover, the Board still has an "us versus them" attitude towards charter schools, seeing them as competition rather a potential complement to DCPS reform, and its charter monitoring responsibilities as a distraction from running DCPS, rather than a potential tool to help the system work better.
While there are some very smart and talented board members who support high-quality charter schools, I'm not sure the Board of Education overall has the will to change its perspective on charter schools or the capacity to manage charter school oversight effectively. If this is the case, then it would be best for the Board to get out of the business entirely. But I'm still holding out hope they can find the will and ability to prove their critics wrong.
UPDATE: Andy Smarick at Charter Blog has some good comments on this. But I also think he's wrong about the KIPP deal. (Sorry, Andy!)
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