Rothstein Continued

Ed from AFT disagrees with my criticisms of Richard Rothstein.

He starts with a charge that is, unfortunately, quite common among left-leaning folks concerned about poverty: Because NCLB is designed to help improve the education provided to poor children, it takes away pressure to make those children not poor. As evidence of this, he cites the fact that child poverty increased from 2000 to 2004. In other words, because we've decided that schools can help poor children, we're less concerned that they are poor, and thus more have become poor.

Let's put aside the fact that NCLB wasn't enacted until 2002 and didn't really get up and running until well after that. 2000 was a historic low for child poverty, a fact that's almost entirely a function of larger economic trends. Here are child poverty rates from 1995 to 2004, according to the U.S. Census:

1995: 20.2%
1996: 19.8%
1997: 19.2%
1998: 18.3%
1999: 16.6%
2000: 15.6%
2001: 15.8%
2002: 16.3%
2003: 17.2%
2004: 17.3%

I'm by no stretch of the imagination a supporter of the economic, taxation, wage, or spending policies of this administration or Congress. But the recession that began in 2001--and the resulting, inevitable increase in child poverty that followed--wasn't their fault, any more than the previous expansion was of their making. They could have done a lot more to help those poor children, but they by and large didn't make them poor to begin with. If you believe otherwise, than you'd logically have to give the current Congress credit for the overall reduction in child poverty over the last decade, even though their attitudes toward welfare, housing, nutrition, the minimum wage, etc. are no better now than they were then.

More to the point, I think Ed's characterization of the essential debate here is mistaken. He says:

...the policy disagreement that reformers like Kevin have with reformers like Richard is over the role that maximizing the quality of a given minute of instruction can play in closing the achievement gap vs reforms that add minutes or otherwise address poverty head on.

Why is it maximizing quality vs more minutes and addressing poverty head on? I'm whole-heartedly in favor of doing both, and there is no reason that both cannot be achieved. I'm not saying that increasing the minimum wage is getting in the way of holding schools accountable for performance or increasing the quality of classroom teaching, because if students' parents can earn a fair, decent wage, it doesn't matter if their schools are any good. Why Ed and Rothstein believe the converse is puzzling, to say the least.

Ed asks for evidence: how about all the data from the urban NAEP and the Council of Great City Schools that show that some big-city urban schools systems are much more effective than others when it comes to student learning, even though they have similarly poor students, and that some systems have already succeeded in improving performance for poor students despite the barriers that Rothstein says are insurmountable? Or the myriad studies that show that some teachers are far more effective than others, and that poor students are amost always more likely to be assigned to the least experienced, least qualified, and least effective teachers? Or the incontrovertable success of schools like KIPP? Or plain examples of school mismanagement, incompetence, and--rarely, to be sure--illegal conduct, like that perpetrated by the leadership of the AFT's affiliate here in Washington, DC?

Strong leadership, recruiting and supporting good teachers, more appropriate reading instriction, aligning curricula to teaching, effective unions--all these things can, and do, help poor students learn. But they're not easy to implement, and they're made harder still when people like Rothstein argue that they won't matter much in the end, or might actually hurt poor students by diminishing the imperative to alleviate their poverty. This kind of attentuated argument of perverse consequences is a staple of reactionary discourse, and simply makes the hard job of educators harder still.

Nauseating

Alexander Russo writes pretty much what I've been thinking for a long time about these anecdotal reports of kids throwing up from the pressures of high-stakes testing: It's not the fault of NCLB, or testing; It's the fault of adults in the schools who are creating an environment where kids feel so much stress and pressure about tests that, in many cases, don't even have consequences for them. And adults doing that to kids really is nauseating, IMHO.

Not only that, it's irrational and counterproductive. If you want kids to take on a challenge and do well on it, you don't freak them out. You try to create an environment where the kid feels comfortable and supported, make him feel like it's no big deal, tell her you know she can do it. Getting a kid all worked up and stressed about a test is like spending the whole time in the car taking your kid to get his shots telling him how much it's gonna hurt.

Universal Coverage, but not Universal Preschool

So last week Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney vetoed a bill to create universal preschool for all three- and four-year-olds in the state, arguing that the proposal would be too costly. Right now Massachusetts is sort of in the middle of the states in terms of preschool--about 8 percent of Massachusetts 4-year-olds and 7 percent of 3-year-olds currently attend state-funded preschool programs, but the quality is not particularly high, with the major weaknesses related to teacher credentials.

The bill Romney vetoed passed both legislative houses unanimously and had the support of a very strong preschool advocacy coalition, which suggests there's a good chance it will be resurrected--and potentially passed--next year.

I generally support expanding public investment in early childhood education, and hope Massachusetts does move next legislative session to expand and improve the quality of publicly-funded preschool there. But I think Romney may have done the right thing. Although this legislation would have required the state to establish a universal preschool access program, it didn't actually provide funding for it. This made it an easy vote for legislators because they get to look like the good guys who support preschool right now while putting off the hard decisions about how to fund it for later. I don't think this is a responsible approach or one that's all that likely to result in high-quality programs or good results for kids. Case in point: Florida, where voters passed a referendum requiring the state to put in place UPK without creating a mechanism to fund it. When the state legislature there had to actually put the program in place they did it on the cheap, and many outside observers fear the quality standards for the program are too low. It's also worth noting that Massachusetts just committed to making universal health care coverage available to all its citizens (something that should also help youngsters there), and putting another massive initiative like UPK on top of that would have been a lot for the state to handle.

For reasons I don't understand (other than the lack of celebrity involvement) this hasn't gotten a lot of attention outside Massachusetts, despite Romney's political ambitions beyond the state.

Guess All that "Learning to Think Critically" Didn't Pay Off for You, Huh?

Continuing her guestblogging stint on Eduwonk, Newoldschoolteacher rips into common "good liberal" arguments (in this case, typed by Peter at Schools Matter) against KIPP and other high-performing, highly-structured urban charter schools, with both righteous anger and humor. I'm kinda surprised, though, that she missed this doozy:

KIPP schools are basically charged with raising these children. That in itself may or may not be a good thing, e.g., should a publicly-funded educational institution overseen by the state be charged with unofficially raising children? Maybe yes, maybe no. But if yes, what kinds of parents are these KIPP schools? And whose interests do they have in mind? Biological parents have an investment in the well-being of their children that differs on several different orders of magnitude from the interest that a state-controlled parent might have. In some instances, the KIPP parent might actually be better than the biological parent. But in other cases, the biological parent might do a better job inculcating in the child the values that are important to his/her family, race, religious tradition, and practices of ethnic origin.

Did Peter somehow miss the fact that because KIPP schools are schools of choice, BIOLOGICAL PARENTS ARE MAKING A CHILDREARING DECISION TO SEND THEIR CHILDREN TO THESE SCHOOLS (in some cases, of course, family breakdown means foster parents, grandparents, and other relatives are the ones making this decision, but you get the picture)? Does he think parents can somehow be simultaneously too dumb to choose a school that supports "values that are important" to them and better at inclucating those values?

There's also incredible irony in the fact of a blog entitled "Schools Matter" making the following argument:

Until we look at the totality of education reform and stop insisting that education reform should be exclusively about school reform, we will never come close to closing the gap.

Maybe they should retitle their blog "Lots of things matter more than schools."

I think there are reasons to wonder how broadly the KIPP model can really be taken as urban school reform. The resources it requires are very intense; it's not clear how large a supply of high-quality teachers exist that are willing to do the work KIPP demands; and some families are, unfortunately, too dysfunctional to live up to the parent side of the KIPP contract. But that is no excuse to dismiss the incredible blessing KIPP is for large numbers of children and their families.

Rothstein Redux

In today's NyTimes, Diana Jean Schemo writes about a "growing body of evidence" supporting one side of an argument that doesn't actually exist. But she also, perhaps inadvertently, provides an important glimpse into one side of a debate that's all too real. She writes:

The No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, took a stand on this issue. The law, one instance in which President Bush and Congressional Democrats worked together, rests on the premise that schools make the crucial difference. It holds a school alone responsible if the students — whatever social, economic, physical or intellectual handicaps they bring to their classrooms — fail to make sufficient progress every year.

Yet a growing body of research suggests that while schools can make a difference for individual students, the fabric of children’s lives outside of school can either nurture, or choke, what progress poor children do make academically.

Schemo frames No Child Left Behind as one side of an argument between people who believe that factors outside schools affect students, and believe who don't believe that factors outside schools affect students. There is no such debate. No reasonable person believes that students' economic, social, and family circumstances are irrelevant to educational progress.

To say that NCLB "holds a school alone responsible" for student progress is to ascribe far more power to the law than it, or any law, could possibly have. There are whole worlds of responsibility for the dire circumstances of disadvantaged students who aren't learning well. All No Child Left Behind does is create a system that identifies which schools those students attend, and insists that we should try to make those schools better.

The real debate is whether trying to give disadvantaged students better schools is worth the effort. Some people clearly think the answer is no:

In his 2004 book, “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap,” Richard Rothstein, a former writer of this column, argues that reforms aimed at education alone are doomed to come up short, unless they are tied to changes in economic and social policies to lessen the gaps children face outside the classroom.

A lack of affordable housing makes poorer children more transient, and so more prone to switch schools midyear, losing progress. Higher rates of lead poisoning, asthma and inadequate pediatric care also fuel low achievement, along with something as basic as the lack of eyeglasses. Even the way middle- and lower-class parents read to their children is different, he writes, making learning more fun and creative for wealthier children.

“I would never say public schools can’t do better,” Mr. Rothstein said. “I’d say they can’t do much better,” unless lawmakers address the social ills caused by poverty.

That's the whole issue in a nutshell. The debate is not between those who thinks schools can do almost everything and those who don't. It's between those who think schools can do hardly anything and those who don't.

Rothstein presents an essentially defeatist, anti-school reform argument. At its core, it's an attack on the value and efficacy of educators. It's also simply divorced from reality--what reasonable person could spend even a little time in one of the deeply dysfunctional schools that many urban students are forced to attend and say "they can't do much better," or spend time in one of the great schools serving those students and conclude that they already have?

Creating better schools is one part of a larger challenge to give marginalized, disadvantaged students better nutrition, housing, health care, and ultimately better lives. To set those individual goals against one another -- to argue that one should be ignored until some far-off day when all the others are solved -- harms no one more than the students themselves.

Obstructing Preschool on Capitol Hill

Kevin, fresh from demonstrating that he is soooooooooo much cooler than I can ever hope to be, offers such a spot-on and funny take down of this week's WaPo article on one slightly hysterical mom's quest to get her two-year-old into the "right" preschool that I hate to add anything to it. But I gotta. You see, the mom in question, Petula Dvorak, indicates she lives on Capitol Hill where, apparently, she and other yuppie moms are encountering a shortage of preschool slots for their offspring. But Capitol Hill is exactly the neighborhood where NIMBY neighbors are trying to prevent the creation of additional preschool spaces that parents like Dvorak crave!

AppleTree Early Learning Charter School (full disclosure: I'm on AppleTree's board), which owns property on 12th Street NE near Lincoln Park and wants to build a charter preschool there (expanding on the high-quality charter preschool it already operates in my Southwest DC neighborhood) has been locked in a costly battle with so-called Northeast Neighbors for Responsible Growth, a group of neighborhood homeowners who do not want the school there. And emergency DC zoning commission enactedearlier this year would make it harder to open charters, private schools, preschools, or daycare programs in residential neighborhoods throughout the city. It sure would be nice to see moms like Dvorak spending a little less time trying to figure out how to game the system to get their kids in existing preschools and a little more time speaking out against restrictions that keep the supply of high-quality preschools on the Hill (and elsewhere in the DC metro area) artificially tight.

Parental High Anxiety

In addition to the usual materials about nutrition and health care, new parents are apparently also getting glossy four-color brochures titled "Your Child is Only in the 30th Percentile and Getting Dumber By the Day," which opens up to a second page headlined "25th Percentile...20th....Panic Would Be Appropriate Right About Now" and concludes with "Don't Even Bother, He's Going to Be Living in the Basement Until You Die."

Or so I would guess from reading articles like this one from last weekend's Washington Post magazine, which chronicles one mother's travails in finding the "right" preschool for her 20-month old son. Typically, the article starts with this scene:

It felt like I finally had the working mom thing nailed. Then one morning this past March, when my son, Milo, was 20 months old, I overheard a conversation at the neighborhood playground among some mom acquaintances that ran a Mack truck through my bring-home-the-bacon-and-fry-it-up-in-a-pan reverie.

"What lists are you on?" one of the moms asked.

"We're definitely trying for Aidan," said the one whose weekend outfits always matched.

"Hill Preschool sounds great; we're in for that one," added the one whose child was always too well-dressed for the park.

Umm, what lists?

In all seriousness, I don't mean to belittle the struggles of working parents, of which I am not one, nor the very serious problem of giving parents and children access to high quality early education and child care.

But these articles are always written from the same perspective: a college-educated women struggling to hold on to her values and sense of self as she confronts a strange, upper middle class, child-obsessed surburban culture. The cues are right there: "the one whose weekend outfits always matched," that is, one of those mothers.

The key is to give the reader permission to mock people like that while not feeling ashamed to follow their lead, to tell them it's possible to play the child competition game without internalizing, or representing, the values the little person rat race embodies.

That's a comforting message, which is why articles like this are such a staple of the parent- anxiety-stoking literature. But I'm not sure it's particularly honest. Personally, I'd rather read a first person account from the parent who decided not to blow a gasket trying to find the perfect preschool and is fine with the decision. Or I'd like to hear what the mom with the too-well-dressed child has to say, someone who's perfectly comfortable working hard to give her child every opportunity and doesn't feel the need to apologize for it. I don't know if I'd agree with her, but I'd probably learn from what she has to say.

Is Our Students Learning?

New article in The Washington Monthly from yours truly focusing on the wealth of new data about how well colleges and universities are educating their students--and why you can't see it. Part of the Monthly's annual alternate college rankings issue, already causing a ruckus at The Political Animal.

Dispatch from Lollapalooza

People who work in Washington, DC are sometimes accused of having a warped, inside-the-beltway perspective on things. So I decided to get in touch with the mood of America's youth with a weekend in Chicago at Lollopalooza. In summary, most of the music was great and the kids are generally all right, albeit defaced by too many bad tattoos.

Day One

We amble around Millenium Park and gawk at reflection of selves, city, in the giant stainless steel jelly bean. Arriving at Grant Park around 4PM, we walk to see Ryan Adams play by far the worst set of the entire three days. A few good songs from "Cold Roses" are interrupted by frequent inaudible and (I assume) stoned ramblings from Ryan, who gives the music less energy than the guy who sold me beer a few minutes before.

Things pick up when we walk to the other end of the park (almost a mile!) and catch the last half of The Secret Machines, who rocked hard and made me want to run out and buy their album. Next were The Raconteurs, with Jack White more than living up to his reputation as a not-to-miss live act. Unfortunately we had to leave 20 minutes early to walk back and get a good spot for the greatest band of their generation, Sleater-Kinney.

Having seen them less than 24 hours earlier at the 9:30 Club I was a little worried that the one-hour time limit and outdoor venue would dull their effect. How wrong I was. If anything, they were better, giving some of their more epic songs like "Entertain" more room to expand, ditto other songs from The Woods like "Jumpers" and "Rollercoaster." "Sympathy" killed, as always. At 9:30 they finished with "Dig Me Out," here they capped the show with "Turn It On" and both were worthy codas. The only song I really missed from both shows was "One More Hour," which would have been appropriate given the band's tragic, imminent demise.

The downer mood of the impending S-K breakup made the immediate start of Death Cab For Cutie an easy transition. I like Death Cab but they're essentially a studio band and hearing them live doesn't add to the music, enjoyable though it is. The encore is "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," and as the first chords play all the teenage girls nearby squeal in high-pitched unison.

Day Two

We spend the morning at Art Institute (favorites: Daumier sculptures, Natalia Goncharova's Spanish Dancer) before heading to the park. There's a scene in "The Devil Wears Prada" where Meryl Streep explains how a few people people of influence in the fashion world made a decision years before that resulted in the eventual mass-marketing of cerulean blue. I can only assume a similar thing happened at some point in the last decade when Tom Ford or someone said "cargo shorts," which were worn by roughly 90 percent of the male Lollapaloozans, myself included. Narrow wicker cowboy hats and plastic garden clogs also seem to be in fashion these days.

The musical day starts well with a solid set from Built to Spill, including much from their very worthwhile new album. Although one guy in the band makes a halfhearted attempt to note that while, yes, the band is playing on the "Bud Light" stage festooned with the logo "Delivered by AT&T," he is personally still down on the corporate man. You made that decision when you decided to play, dude, you can't have it both ways.

Our next band is Sonic Youth, not that young but still as loud and uncompromising as ever. We watch The Dresden Dolls for a while, who I hadn't heard but were interesting -- think Ben Folds meets Cabaret. Then back to get a good seat for The Flaming Lips. A typical Lips shows, meaning it featured copious ballons and streamers, huge inflatable astronauts, scores of dancing space aliens and Santa Clauses, and Wayne Coyne rolling through crowd in a giant inflatable ball. Making the sensible decision that the best way to please a crowd is to play lots of crowd-pleasing songs (sort of the reverse-Ryan Adams approach) Wayne sings liberally from the last two albums, with the highlight being a huge, sung-along-to "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots."

We run across the park to get a good seat for The New Pornographers, who after three nearly flawless albums can fill an hour set with nothing but great songs and do, although the absence of Neko Case turns songs like "The Bleeding Heart Show" from transcendent to merely awesome. We stay for the first three songs of Kanye West before admitting once again that we don't really get hip-hop, and leave for dinner.

Day Three

A note on tattoos: I've got nothing against them, believing that it's a free country and people should be who they want to be. I do, however, object to really bad tattoos of the neo-Frank Frazetta school. Getting a picture permanentally attached to your body is a big decision, people -- pick a good one! Shell out out for someone who knows what they're doing!

After a late start we arrive for The Shins, who may or may not have played a good show, but we'll never know due to some kind of catastrophic sound mixing failure. Like Death Cab, the Shins don't have a built-in live act advantage, and even the Garden State anthem "New Slang" fails to win over a frustrated crowd. Later that night we run across the band drinking tequila in our hotel bar, they seemed to have gotten over the disappointment.

Wilco, by contrast, sounds terrific, even mixing in a liberal helping of new material with no dampening of crowd enthusiam. Although Jeff Tweedy is starting to look like he watched a Blues Traveller video circa 2001 and said "Hey, that John Popper looks sharp--ditch my Norelco and super-size those fries!" After walking by the actual Blues Traveller (Popper looks less like Popper than Tweedy does these days) and an enthusiastic if over-loud Broken Social Scene, we settle in for the Red Hot Chili Peppers festival finale.

Closing a show of this magnitude is no easy task; your set not only has to be worthy in it's own right but worthy of all the bands that came before you. The Chili Peppers pull it off and then some, with high energy and great Flea-Frusciante back-and-forth. The show wraps up and the 60,000 plus crowd leaves in a good mood. All in all a worthy show; we may have to check the pulse of nation's students again next year.

Blog post on blog posting

It's become fairly commonplace within the edublogosphere for teachers to keep weblogs about the ups and downs of education in the trenches; to name just one example, NewOldSchoolTeacher, temporary Eduwonk-in-residence, kept a very funny record of her trials and tribulations during ed school and while student teaching. But it's not every day that you see a school superintendent keeping a daily blog.

Well, the times they are a-changin'. New Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools superintendent Peter Gorman, newly arrived from California this summer, is shaking things up not only by winning school board support for potential forced teacher transfers this school year, but also by launching his very own blog on the CMS website. He blogs about his family, the community members he's met with each day, and some of his ideas about how to improve the school system, and he does a surprisingly good job at updating every business day. His updates for August 3 and 4 were a few days late, but perhaps he can be forgiven, because his calendar, which is also publicly available, shows that he had a State Board of Education meeting. His calendar also verifies what the Charlotte Observer has attested to anecdotally: Gorman's making quite the effort to establish a connection with community members and leaders. Last Tuesday he had ten different meetings on his calendar, and this week he's launching a series of public forums in each of the county's six electoral districts.

Sure, there's probably some political calculation to Gorman's blogging efforts. And the blog isn't perfect; for one thing, there's no syndication feed to allow you to subscribe, which means you have to check back every day for updates. On the other hand, getting a blog up and running (and even knowing what a blog is) shows some technological savvy and a genuine desire to be accessible to the community. Even more, it seems to me like another step towards transparency and accountability when an urban school superintendent is publicly describing and archiving what he's doing every single day to make his school system better. And that can only be a good thing.

-Laura Boyce