Separate by Sex

Well it looks like Michigan will soon be set to try out single-sex public education. There are some important caveats, that entrance to classes be voluntary and that a school that offers single-sex classes must provide "substantially equal" co-ed classes.

In its best light, it seems that parents and students will have choices. Who's against choice? If you think your kid will do better in an all-boy environment, you ought to have that as a publicly-funded choice. And if you think your kid will do better in an all white environment, well you ought to have that as a choice too….Well, wait a minute. Starting to get uncomfortable now.

My problem with publicly funded single-sex schools is two-fold. First, there's no real evidence that it's better and second, we are racing forward with no attention to the past.

Regarding evidence, I thought we were focused on rigor and empiricism. The U.S. Department of Education research on single-sex education calls its own results "equivocal" and concludes that:

"There is some support for the premise that single-sex schooling can be helpful, especially for certain outcomes related to academic achievement and more positive academic aspirations. For many outcomes, there is no evidence of either benefit or harm. There is limited support for the view that single-sex schooling may be harmful or that coeducational schooling is more beneficial for students."

Translated, we don't know much, and taken with a grain of salt, we do not expect that any children will be harmed by single-sex education and we think that maybe they might like it. But then again maybe not. Hard to say.

A recent study in the UK revealed similar findings- no discernable educational benefit from single-sex schooling. Important to note that the UK is experiencing a reverse trend in single-sex schooling (30 years ago the UK had 2,500 single-sex schools and now has only about 400 remaining).

In sum, there are no major rigorous research studies that find single-sex works better. Still, we're plowing ahead and a lot of people are pushing hard for this, including parents who understandably are desperate for better education for their children. My concern about our attention to history is quite simple: "separate but equal" means something in this country for a reason. If single-sex public schools feel uncomfortably familiar maybe it's because we're recalling that we used to segregate by sex and race and decided against that path for very good reasons. I'm not against alternatives to traditional public schools. I'm against quick fixes that ignore what we do know and rely on what we don't.

Voucher Madness

The most important thing to know about the new $100 million voucher proposal trotted out by Republicans in the House and Senate earlier this week is that it fails the accountability litmus test.

If you're willing to propose a voucher plan that requires private schools accepting voucher students to be held accountable for their success in educating those students, using the same tests and same proficiency standards used to judge public schools, then as far as I'm concerned you deserve a seat at the table for a serious conversation about funding, choice, and how to help students trapped in chronically under-performing schools. I might not agree with all of the specifics of your approach, but we can talk--particularly if you might be so bold as to make part of that funding contingent on performance.

If you're not willing to tie funding to accountability, then you're just grandstanding, trotting out the education equivalent of constitutional amendments to ban flag-burning or discriminate against gay people. That's all this recent proposal really is.

Tortured Logic from Teachers Unions, Cont'd.

The National Education Association has been circulating some talking points trying to refute findings in the paper Education Sector released last week describing how the NEA has been giving money to a wide range of organizations, not always in a transparent manner, in its fight against NCLB. (See the comments section here). Some are absurd on their face ("Myth 1: The NEA opposes the No Child Left Behind Act), others adhere to the time-honored strategy of "refuting" allegations the report doesn't actually make.

But one point is worth discussing at more length, because it sheds some light on the logic and psychology governing the way teachers unions engage with those who disagree with them. It says:

MYTH 7: Education Sector is an independent think tank.

FACT: Contrary to its claims, it is not an independent think tank. One of Education Sector’s founders and a co-director is Andrew Rotherham. Formerly with the Progressive Policy Institute at the Democratic Leadership Council, Rotherham regularly wrote pieces highly critical of NEA. The other cofounder and co-director, Thomas Toch, has also written many pieces critical of NEA and teachers unions. Education Sector’s board of directors also lacks the representation of teachers or other public school employees.

Last week the AFT blog made the unfortunately familiar assertion that people who disagree with teachers union positions on public policy issues are, by definition, anti-union.

This goes a step further down the rabbit hole. It seems to say that an organization staffed by people who have been critical of teachers unions are, by definition, not independent. Since the NEA's positions are apparently infallible, any disagreement with them is, ipso facto, a sign of being compromised or unduly influenced.

What accounts for this mind-bending logic? I think the culprit is what I'll call "moral altitude sickness."

Teachers unions, by their nature, have extremely strong moral standing. First, by being a labor union, and thus being on the right side of history when it comes to the struggle for worker's rights. Second, by being supporters of public education, and thus strong advocates for one of society's most important and egalitarian institutions.

To be clear, I don't dispute that status. But the rarified air on that moral high ground appears to be pretty oxygen-poor, leading to bizzare flights of logic like the one shown above. The downside of being above everyone else is that there's nobody else to talk to, nobody to let you know that you're steadily cutting yourself out of the mainstream discourse. Everyone else starts to seem smaller, lower, and far away. Eventually you stop listening, and nobody can hear what you have to say.

Ritalin Madness

Sunday's much-discussed NYT front-page story on kids taking their ADHD/depression drugs to summer camp really bothered me, in particular the graphic accompanying the story. The graphic appears to indicate that 40 percent of kids at camp this summer are taking prescription drugs and, given the article's almost exclusive focus on drugs for ADHD, depression, and psychiatric disorders, this understandably freaks people out.

But there are some problems here. For starters, the graphic NYT used to show that 40 percent of campers take prescription drugs came not from a rigorous research study but from data supplied by a company called CampMeds that distributes prepakaged medication to summer camps. Leave aside for a second the obvious interest CampMeds has in overhyping the number of kids taking drugs. Its data is based on the limited sample of 100 camps it serves (the American Camp Association has over 6,700 members and accredits some 2,300 summer camps nationwide), and it's quite likely the camps that find it worth their $$ to hire CampMeds have a disproportionate number of kids taking prescription medication.

Further, the data provided by CampMeds and the NYT graphic don't match with public data available from other, more rigorous sources. For example, NYT's graph has 8 percent of kids at camp taking ADHD meds. But a study from the Centers for Disease Control found just under 8 percent of kids ages 4-17 had ever had ADHD diagnosed, and only 4.3 percent of kids were currently taking meds for it.

And then there's the fact that the chart itself doesn't match with the angle of the article, which starts with this humdinger:

The breakfast buffet at Camp Echo starts at a picnic table covered in gingham-patterned oil cloth. Here, children jostle for their morning medications: Zoloft for depression, Abilify for bipolar disorder, Guanfacine for twitchy eyes and a host of medications for attention deficit disorder.

Funny how not a single asthma or allergy drug is mentioned, despite it being far more common for kids to take drugs for these conditions than for depression or ADHD. But I've given up expecting problems that disproportionately affect poor and minority kids to make the front page of the NYT. That just doesn't sell papers like the "they're drugging the [white, affluent] kids" hysteria does.

It's not that I think we should be handing out meds like candy. When the numbers of kids taking psychiatric drugs have increased dramatically and we now have more kids diagnosed with ADHD than asthma (despite rapid growth of both), I think we should wonder what the heck is going on. I'm particularly concerned if, as the NYT article suggests (I'm taking the whole thing with a grain of salt), a lot of kids are getting prescribed these meds from their family doctor or general pediatrician, rather than a psychiatrist. Some of these drugs can have serious side-effects and/or haven't been tested in children. People taking them need good medical supervision by a psychiatrist who can adjust dosages, address side-effects, monitor for signs of trouble, etc. Of course, psychiatrists are damn expensive, and most insurance companies (if you've even got health insurance) are very reluctant to pay for mental health care, to say the least--all factors that work against kids or adults getting good care for these conditions. I'm also a bit concerned the "overmedication" hype may make some parents hesitant to get their kids treatment they need--with potentially tragic results in some cases.

It also bothers me that media, policymakers, and educators are paying so much more attention to the "overmedication" issue than the at least as, if not more, serious problem of kids who aren't getting enough maintenance medication and other treatment for their asthma. Asthma is the third leading cause of hospitalization for kids under 15, it accounts for 14 million days of missed school annually, and the number of kids dying from asthma has trippled since 1979. Many of these negative consequences could be avoided with proper preventative health care and maintenance education and medication for kids with asthma, but since poor and minority kids are both disproportionately diagnosed with asthma and less likely to have access to good health care, a lot of them don't get the preventative treatment they need. There are some interesting things going on around the country to build awareness and help address this problem, but it's still a big one, both for schools and for health care policy. It's also the kind of issue I'd love to see a front page Times story about--but I'm not holding my breath.

The Boys and Girls Debate Rages On

You may have read Christina Hoff Sommers' Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing my paper questioning the "boy crisis" in America's schools. A letter-to-the-editor I wrote ($-sorry) responding to some misinformation in Sommers' piece ran in last Thursday's WSJ.

A number of people who don't like my take on the boy crisis issue have made arguments something along the lines of "So if you don't think the boy-girl achievement gap matters because both genders are increasing but girls are increasing faster, does that mean you don't think the male-female wage gap matters?"

I think this is a silly argument for multiple reasons, most significantly that it's completely divorced from what's really happening with male-female wage gaps, which have been declining recently, but because of falling average male wages, rather than increasing wages for women. Women's groups have, rightly, not been celebrating this kind of gap narrowing, which is a win neither for men nor women. Gaps are important--but this situation illustrates the problems with looking at them alone, rather than looking at how the achievement of both groups between whom a gap exists have changed over time, too.

This argument also seems to undercut itself--if men still earn more than women, why should we be that upset about gender achievement gaps? Remember, gaps favoring girls in reading are longstanding. Men currently in the workforce did worse than the women they currently outearn on school reading tests by pretty close to the same margin as today's boys do worse than today's girls in reading. And even the supposedly aimless young men right out of college are earning more, controlling for field, than their female peers. Until we have much clearer evidence that these gaps produce negative results for men and society (which we do for specific subgroups, such as low-income and African-American men, but not for men overall), I'm just not going to panic.

Change in D.C.?

Because of D.C.'s unique situation--it's neither a state nor part of any other state--many D.C. agencies carry out both state and local functions. The D.C. Board of Education, for example, fills the role of local school district for Washington, D.C., residents, but it is also responsible for functions carried out by state departments of education in most states (such as designing and managing the accountability system and administering certain federal grants). This is problematic for two reasons: First, there are instances when the responsibilities of local school district and state department of ed conflict, such as dealing with charter schools or sanctions for low-performing DCPS schools. Moreover, the D.C. Board of Ed. hasn't exactly proven itself competent at carrying out either set of its responsibilities.

WaPo reports that the Senate Appropriations Committee is trying to address these issues with a provision in the D.C. Approps bill that would require the D.C. Board of Education to shift some of its state-level functions to another (new or existing) agency. (Full text here, about 2/5 of the way down.)

Normally, this is the kind of thing that would set off a home rule controversy, but at least some Board and Council members quoted by the Post appear amenable to the idea. Clearly, the Board of Education and its governance and oversight of D.C. schools have their problems. Shifting state-level functions to another entity may help a little (although there are also potential problems), but it doesn't address the fundamental issues in D.C. schools.

I'm interested to see what implications this might have for the Board of Education's future as a charter authorizer in the District (Could the entity that takes over state functions also assume the Board of Ed's chartering authority?). And, while I doubt this issue would have much impact on the mayor's race, it's interesting that the Post floats the mayor-controlled State Education Office (run by the excellent Deborah Gist) as a candidate to take over the state-level role. I'm also linking to Nathan at DC edblog, even though he hasn't posted on this yet, because I assume he will at some point and his opinions and analysis on D.C.-related education issues are valuable.

Also of note in the Senate committee version of D.C. approps: The bill would fund the D.C. resident tuition support program (which allows kids graduating from D.C. schools to attend universities in other states at in-state tuition rates) at current funding, maintain the current cap on attorneys' fees for special ed, and allow students currently receiving vouchers under the federally-funded D.C. voucher program to continue to receive vouchers if their family incomes rise to up to 300% of poverty (currently students are out once their parents earn more than 200% of poverty).