The Great "H" Debate

So, Ryan at Edspresso, Joe Williams, AFTie Michele and NYC Educator are engaged in a lively debate about whether or not public officials who have some responsibility for public education and send their kids to private schools are hypocrites. Several people also wrote to me and Tom about this issue in DC following our Post piece about the problems facing DCPS. I tend to react negatively to these kinds of arguments because I don't think it's fair to kids to use them as a debating props simply because you disagree with their parents.

It is disconcerting, however, when policymakers actively oppose efforts to give disadvantaged families access to better education options that the policymakers already enjoy. Something feels terribly insensitive when the person arguing that children from poor families must be forced to remain in crummy public schools, because allowing them to leave would hurt the public school system, is someone who has no similar compunctions about removing their own children from the same system. But I think Ryan has chosen the wrong thing to focus on here. The issue really isn't whether or not policymakers send their kids to public schools--even if policymakers do choose to send their kids to public schools, this still reflects a choice--a choice that disadvantaged families don't have.

This is also an issue I see playing out on a more personal level because many of my friends are people who work in education policy and care about public schools, but as the ones who live in DC are starting their families, they struggle with the issue of where to send their children to school: should they move to Virginia of Maryland? try to afford a home in one of the DC neighborhoods fortunate enough to be in a "good" school attendance area (and hope the lines don't change too much)? look into private schools? do any charter schools provide good enough options? I know many people who've found ways to craft a good education for their children from charters and options available in DCPS, but it requires effort, savvy, and in some cases a good bit of luck. These decisions have implications that extend beyond education because DC's civic and fiscal health and growth require it to retain stable, professional families. And it's hardly an issue unique to DC.

Finally, I want to disclose that this issue--should people in charge of public schools be required to send their children to those schools?--is one I have a somewhat unique perspective on, because, as readers know, I am the daughter of a public school principal. Because my dad's contracts required him to live in the school districts he worked for, in practice that meant my sister and I had to go to the high school of which my dad was principal. Fortunately for us, it was an excellent school. But it's not always easy having your dad for the principal, even when he's a good and popular principal and you love him a lot. I'm not complaining, but I think it's worth pointing out that sometimes there are good reasons for people who run public schools to choose not to send their kids to the schools they run, because being in a school your mom or dad's in charge of can have its own problems.

Diploma Mills? Or Something Else Altogether?

This month's installment of Education Sector's ever-popular "Charts You Can Trust" series describes the startlingly large number of doctorates in education being handed out by a trio of universities--two based in Florida--that provide most of their services to mid-career educators via distance learning and the Internet. (Thanks to This Week In Education for the link).

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Fort Lauderdale-based Nova Southeastern University granted 447 doctorates in education in 2005. To put that in perspective,that's three times as many as the university that granted the fourth-largest number of education doctorates, Teachers College at Columbia. It's fives times as many as the number 10 university, the University of Virginia.

It's tempting in discussions like this to start throwing around phrases like "diploma mill." But that would be unfair, primarily because schools of education generally do a terrible job of rating the quality of their programs and graduates in any kind of objective, comparable way. You can get a bad education in a traditional classroom and a good education via non-traditional means. Until established ed schools step up and demonstrate what they're really worth, speculation about quality-for-quantity tradeoffs at places like Nova remain just that: speculation.

That said, it's hard not to wonder what the degrees earned by the legions of new Nova doctors really signify. A friend of mine earned an Ed.D. from a top-ranked Ivy League school last year. It took her seven years--classes, teaching assistantships, lengthy dissertation written under the supervision of a well-respected researcher, the whole nine yards. I imagine her experience was so dissimilar to that of a typical Nova graduate that giving them both a degree with the same name is inaccurate in a fundamental way.

Perhaps that's what's really needed--more differention and variety in degree designation, so that everyone knows the difference between people who completed a classic doctoral program and those who simply completed a lengthy course of study. Without that--or objective, outcomes-based measures of program quality--we're sure to see further commodification of college degrees.

The Wire, Week Five -- Ain't Misbehavin'!

This week The Wire took us inside one of the toughest jobs you could ever have: establishing order and discipline in a middle school classroom. But there’s something making it much tougher in Prez’s case—the dismally low-level classroom assignments he’s asking students to complete and the depressingly low expectations that such assignments embody. (As Stephanie Robinson—one of the nation’s foremost experts on teaching and a principal partner at the Education Trust—often puts it, “The classroom assignments teachers give students are a very accurate proxy for exactly what and how much they expect students to learn.”)

However, as is often true of The Wire, you have to watch very carefully to catch all of this. For viewers with Tivo or some other way to pause the action, take a careful look at the worksheet the camera focuses on for a few seconds. It contains 20 numbers. The directions read, “Move the decimal point two (2) places to the left.” The objective of the worksheet is written at the top: “IDENTIFY THE LEFT DIRECTION.” Knowing how to move decimals is important, but odds are that that these thirteen-year-olds already know their left from their right. Even if Prez has a few who aren’t quite sure, there are better ways to teach it.*

It often seems paradoxical to non-educators, but mindless worksheets like that are actually more likely to cause kids to misbehave in class—and eventually to drop out of school—than challenging assignments. At one point Prez asks Michael why he’s not working on the problems: “Come on, this is easy. I know you can do it.” The look on Michael’s face tells us everything we need to know about the relationship between student behavior and academic expectations: We need to give students something to behave for if we want them to work hard and take school seriously.

* Put your hands in front of your face, palms outward. Point your thumbs at each other. The hand that makes an “L” shape is your left.

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

School Safety Summit

What Catherine and Leo said. Seriously, as Alexander Russo points out, recent tragic events notwithstanding, school violence rates are down, and schools are actually among the safer places kids can be. (And while you're there, check out the Colbert Report clips)