Conor Clarke at TNR considers whether or not selection bias accounts for KIPP's impressive academic results. The allegation that KIPP and other high-performing charter schools "skim" off higher-performing students from the public schools is pretty much as old as the charter movement itself and a lot of evidence suggests it's far from accurate. But lately an interesting spin on this argument--the assertion that the now well-known success of KIPP and other high-flying charter networks has caught the attention of more engaged parents and resulted in more higher-performing kids applying to these schools--has been popping up in lots of places, and deserves some attention.
First, neither the original skimming allegation nor more recent concerns suggests that the "above average" kids these schools might be attracting aren't still disadvantaged, predominantly minority kids who are generally below grade level academically. We're not talking about affluent kids here. We're talking about kids who may be above the average for disadvantaged kids because they have parents who have slightly more cultural capital and are slightly more engaged in or savvy about their kids' education than the average disadvantaged urban parent. Like Ezra, I'm not sure that's something to get too upset about. Sure we might feel that kids with the least-engaged parents need intensive, high-quality KIPP-style schooling more than those with more engaged parents. But engaged low-income parents are making the effort to send their kids into schools like KIPP because they know many of the other educational alternatives available suck and often present real risks to their kids. Considering all the ways our economy and urban organization make to unnecessarily difficult for engaged, low-income urban parents to raise their kids well, shouldn't we be cheering anything that helps them out?
Schools like KIPP are never going to attract substantial numbers of middle-class or affluent applicants. Partly that's because of where KIPP schools choose to locate and the population of students they currently serve. But it's also a matter of what I call (probably somewhat inaccurately) "aesthetics." I know several education types (all middle-class or affluent professionals) who admire what KIPP does but admit that some aspects of KIPP--the level of disciplinary regimentation, the explicit teaching of visual tracking (sp?)--make them uncomfortable, and that they wouldn't choose to send their kids to a KIPP school. They know that KIPP works, but it's not really to their tastes. I think that's probably going to be the case for most middle-class parents. As Paul Tough wrote in the NYT Magazine, kids who attend KIPP need the kind of discipline and explicit teaching of cultural skills it provides because of differences in childrearing practices and attitudes between middle-class and low-income families. But because KIPP is designed specifically to serve the needs of kids whose families don't tend to practice a middle-class approach to childrearing, it's probably not going to appeal to (or necessarily be a good fit to the needs of) families that do practice middle-class childrearing behaviors.
Finally, imagine that we're not talking about KIPP or a charter school at all, but a run-of-the-mill public school, one which is serving its disadvantaged, minority students so well that middle-class and affluent non-minority families start trying to send their kids there. Would we see this as a problem? I think not. Instead, we'd see it as good evidence the school is delivering a high-quality education. We'd also probably be pleased to see greater economic and racial integration that many folks believe can contribute to improved outcomes for disadvantaged kids. So why would it be a problem if the same thing were occurring in a charter school?
Friday, December 08, 2006
Starlets: The Real Achievement Gap
Slate recently published "a rambling, semi-literate" (in the words of the NY Post's Page 6, which broke the story) e-mail sent by starlet Lindsay Lohan to 18 of her closest friends and lawyers. A sample:
While I'm psyched to learn about Ms. Lohan's interest in improving the education of our society, I can't help but wonder if there might be some serious gaps in her own. It appears there's some doubt of whether Ms. Lohan, or simply someone claiming to be her, actually wrote this story. Count me skeptical, anyway.
But if Lohan did write it, this is her second rather curious epistolary episode in less than a month, following a similarly confusing, though clearly heartfelt, letter of condolence to the family of the late director Robert Altman, who passed away in late November. Lohan had appeared in his final film, A Prairie Home Companion. Both letters are rife with sentence fragments, weak in organization, and suggest that in addition to misspelling "adequate" Ms. Lohan is also somewhat confused about what the word means.
I don't mean to make fun--heaven knows I've made my share of embarrassing gramatical and spelling errors in the webpages of this blog. But I am deeply concerned about the apparent and troubling "starlet crisis" within our education system. Clearly we need a No Starlet Left Behind Act, stat. In the meantime, I'm suggesting that Ms. Lohan could benefit from some supplemental educational services. Rachel and our sweater model could certainly whip her writing into shape, and I bet I can think of some male writers with mad verbal skillz who might rise to the challenge.
I am willing to release a politically/morally correct, fully adequite letter to the press if any of you are willing to help.
Simply to state my opinions on how our society should be educated on for the better of our country. Our people...
Also because I have such an impact on our younger generations, as well as generations older than me. Which we all know and can obviously see.
While I'm psyched to learn about Ms. Lohan's interest in improving the education of our society, I can't help but wonder if there might be some serious gaps in her own. It appears there's some doubt of whether Ms. Lohan, or simply someone claiming to be her, actually wrote this story. Count me skeptical, anyway.
But if Lohan did write it, this is her second rather curious epistolary episode in less than a month, following a similarly confusing, though clearly heartfelt, letter of condolence to the family of the late director Robert Altman, who passed away in late November. Lohan had appeared in his final film, A Prairie Home Companion. Both letters are rife with sentence fragments, weak in organization, and suggest that in addition to misspelling "adequate" Ms. Lohan is also somewhat confused about what the word means.
I don't mean to make fun--heaven knows I've made my share of embarrassing gramatical and spelling errors in the webpages of this blog. But I am deeply concerned about the apparent and troubling "starlet crisis" within our education system. Clearly we need a No Starlet Left Behind Act, stat. In the meantime, I'm suggesting that Ms. Lohan could benefit from some supplemental educational services. Rachel and our sweater model could certainly whip her writing into shape, and I bet I can think of some male writers with mad verbal skillz who might rise to the challenge.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Schoolhouse Rocks
AFT's launching a new initiative to draw attention to decrept and overcrowded condition of too many of America's public school buildings and urge policymakers to invest in renovating and building new, adequate* public school buildings. Good work, guys and gals! School facilities are an issue near and dear to my heart, and one on which I've written several articles. The Clinton administration put a lot of effort into trying to establish federal help for states and school districts for school construction, but the issue has pretty much disappeared from the public radar since then. So I'm really glad to see the AFT taking up the school construction. I think their recommendation to incorporate a "learning environment index" into NCLB is a little silly, and I think there's more room for innovative thinking about how to help states and school districts pay for buildings than they talk about here, but these are minor quibbles. It's an important issue, so check out what they're doing.
BTW, one of the complaints that seems to come up a lot from the teachers AFT surveyed about problems with their school facilities is the prevalence of rats and mice in many school buildings. Jelly, who's still waiting for her call from NYC, now expands the offer of her services to children and schools throughout our great nation.
*Lindsay: Note spelling.
BTW, one of the complaints that seems to come up a lot from the teachers AFT surveyed about problems with their school facilities is the prevalence of rats and mice in many school buildings. Jelly, who's still waiting for her call from NYC, now expands the offer of her services to children and schools throughout our great nation.
*Lindsay: Note spelling.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Score One For The Aardvark
In researching English-language learners I checked the What Works Clearinghouse- our Dept of Ed's "central and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education". They list ELL as one of the WWC's areas of focus.
Topping the list of the four studies that meet all of the WWC's standards for sound research on ELL students was a single study on Arthur, the 8-year aardvark that appears for 30 minutes each morning on PBS.
The study involved 108 kindergarten students who were randomly assigned to watch 54 episodes of Arthur or its competitor Between the Lions, another PBS show that features a family of lions that reads together.
Finding: Aardvark does a better job of teaching English to English-language learners than the family of lions.
Personally, I like Arthur, even if my 2 1/2 year old prefers the lions and now thinks that "aardvark" is another word for "big mouse with glasses". So i'm happy to know that we have research that proves it's what works, at least for ELL kids. But I wonder just how many teachers are grappling with the difficult choice of which television programs they should show their ELL classes.
At a cost of roughly 25 million dollars (from 2002-2006), the WWC, described on its website as "a decision-making tool" that "helps the education community locate and recognize credible and reliable evidence to make informed decisions", features an aardvark among its most worthwhile national evidence of what works in education.
Score one for the Aardvark.
Boys and Girls: A Blast from the Past
Washington Post Magazine celebrates its 20th birthday this week with an issue of excerpts from noteworthy articles it's published over the past two decades. Interesting stuff, from dispatches from war zones in Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, and Iraq; to the Monica Lewinsky and Jessica Cutler scandals; to the Great Zucchini. But one 1993 article in particular caught my eye with its subtitle: "The trouble with being the smart girl."
The article, a profile of an incredibly smart and academically successful high school senior named Elizabeth Mann, was written at the peak of the early 1990's "girl crisis," following the 1992 publication of the American Association of University Women report How Schools Shortchange Girls, and it has most of the hallmarks of the girl crisis genre. There are the opening paragraphs, in which Elizabeth waits patiently to get a word in during class while her more aggressive male peers interrupt and ignore her efforts to speak (or course, when she's finally able to speak, she offers the right solution to the question they've been hashing out). There's the obligatory reference to research that places Elizabeth's story in national context:
There's the description of how Elizabeth's school, a magnet math and science program at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, is trying to foster girls' interest and achievement in math:
Having spent a lot more time than I ever intended to reading, writing and talking about the "boy crisis" that has recently supplanted the girl crisis in the public and journalistic imagination, I couldn't help but be struck by the both the similarities and contrasts between this "girl crisis" article and many of the "boy crisis" pieces I've been reading lately. The 1993 article told us that: "girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong." Compare that to Newsweek's boy crisis cover story earlier this year:
Would it be too radical if I suggest that everybody, regardless of gender, really dislikes and tries to avoid appearing wrong, foolish or weak? )
The section on how Montgomery Blair tried to make its school more "girl-friendly" in the early 1990s also has eerie similarities with proposals to make schools more "boy-friendly" today. Both suggest that boys are more competitive but girls prefer cooperation and group projects, and that girls like people (or at least living critters) while boys prefer objects and computers. The difference is that while Montgomery Blair added group work and downplayed competition to attract girls, schools are now being urged to do the opposite in order to better serve boys.
Most significantly, both the boy crisis and girl crisis stories seem to rely heavily on rather dubious research and anecdotal reports about individual boys and girls whose experiences, while they make for compelling narrative, are often not representative. Today the girl crisis issues that garnered so much attention in the 1990s are often dismissed as wrongheaded analysis based on bad research that has since been debunked, or folks say that the achievement gains girls have made mean whatever problems there were have been resolved. Reading this 13-year-old article, I couldn't help but wonder if, 13 years from now, we'll see today's boy crisis hype largely the same way.
But there are contrasts between this article and the boy crisis stories that catch my eye, too. Most notably, it's no coincidence that Elizabeth Mann is an extremely high-performing--by all accounts exceptional--young woman. Much of the efforts to address the girl crisis in the 1990s seemed to focus on opening up opportunities for the highest-performing young women. To some extent, this makes sense: There have been real ceilings placed on women's opportunities and achievements (and in some places there still are) that need to be shattered. If you think it's important to build the next generation of women leaders and to make sure women have key leadership roles in politics, business, the sciences, it makes sense to focus on encouraging high-aptitude girls to do into these fields. In this respect, though, the boy crisis and girl crisis conversations are radically different. The boy crisis, to the extent it exists, is about the problems of a subset of low-performing boys--particularly but not exclusively low-income, African American and Hispanic boys--who do seem to be disproportionately concentrated in the lowest portions of the achievement distribution and who as a result of this low-performance aren't obtaining the basic skills and knowledge they need to make a decent life for themselves in the mainstream economy today.
Both the boy crisis and girl crisis narratives have considerable flaws, particularly when they're cast as broad, dramatic social problems that impact virtually every adolescent member of a particular sex. But beneath the hoopla both include significant truths that demand public and policymaker attention. The problem is that these truths are point to very different types of problems, but public conversation about both the boy and girl "crises" have been couched in strikingly similar (and largely useless) terms. There are significant, in some ways different, social, educational, and economic opportunity problems facing both male and female teenagers in the United States today. But I don't think we're doing a very good job of having public conversations about them.
***
Finally, a personal note. I am three years younger than Elizabeth Mann. I would never claim to be anywhere near as accomplished as Mann, but by the standards of my school I was also "the smart girl," which, along with having my dad as principal, carried lots of negative social consequences. But I never felt dominated in class by boys, never felt like my achievements were discounted or in any way treated differently because I was a girl, never was made to feel the kind of intellectual insecurities Mann mentions in this article. I was a freshman in high school when How Schools Shortchange Girls came out. I'm sure I benefitted from some of the things that were done in response to it and other studies suggesting girls were in trouble (but I mostly remember wondering why everyone seemed so dead set on convincing me to become an engineer just because I got good grades in math and science). I didn't know then about How Schools Shortchange Girls, but if I had, I wouldn't have recognized it as matching my teenage reality.
The article, a profile of an incredibly smart and academically successful high school senior named Elizabeth Mann, was written at the peak of the early 1990's "girl crisis," following the 1992 publication of the American Association of University Women report How Schools Shortchange Girls, and it has most of the hallmarks of the girl crisis genre. There are the opening paragraphs, in which Elizabeth waits patiently to get a word in during class while her more aggressive male peers interrupt and ignore her efforts to speak (or course, when she's finally able to speak, she offers the right solution to the question they've been hashing out). There's the obligatory reference to research that places Elizabeth's story in national context:
Every year, every month, every week seems to bring another study detailing how dismal things are for females in math and science and how they need to be encouraged. One study says that the number of women going into either field is "disproportionately low." Another says that "gender differences in science achievement are not decreasing but increasing." Another says that although girls have as much ability as boys, they often start developing sour attitudes toward math and science in middle school and soon lose all interest. Others say that's because in classrooms boys dominate, that girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong, that eventually girls reach the point where they not only don't do well but decide they're incapable.
On and on the studies go, endlessly on, all making the same points about how lousy things are for females. Math, it seems, eventually becomes nothing more than a skill to balance a checkbook, while science, horrible science, becomes a nauseating memory of formaldehyde and some frogs.
There's the description of how Elizabeth's school, a magnet math and science program at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, is trying to foster girls' interest and achievement in math:
[The math and science magnet program] had been structured to mirror a boy's emotional development, he realized, which in many ways was at odds with a girl's. For instance, an early emphasis on physics, rather than life sciences, was something many of the girls said they didn't like. They also didn't like the strong emphasis on using computers. "Why?" Haney remembers asking a girl one day as they looked at some boys in the computer lab who were busy typing away. "They like it," he said. "They'll sit there all day." "Yeah," the girl said, "but look at the social skills of those boys."So the program was recast to seem a little friendlier toward girls -- competition was de-emphasized, group work was stressed -- and by the time Elizabeth arrived four years ago, things were humming nicely along. The number of girls still hadn't come close to 50 percent (and hasn't so far), but at least the migration had stopped.
And then there's the emotional fallout of "being the smart girl" for Elizabeth--her sense of insecurity (in contrast to the apparently confident boys) and nagging questions about her own intelligence and achievements, as well as a fair amount of emotional brutality from male peers who resent her success.
"I feel like 'The Girl' in the class. It's something I'm very conscious of, almost every minute in there." She says, "I have a certain fear that somehow when I'm in that class, I'm this impostor who doesn't really understand."
The only thing that's missing is a dire story about depression, an eating disorder, promiscuity, substance abuse or self-mulitation. In fact, Elizabeth is "obliging" and "obedient," seemingly well-adjusted and "has never smoked a cigarette nor drunk the first drop of alcohol, rarely fights with her parents and doesn't yell at her younger brother."
Having spent a lot more time than I ever intended to reading, writing and talking about the "boy crisis" that has recently supplanted the girl crisis in the public and journalistic imagination, I couldn't help but be struck by the both the similarities and contrasts between this "girl crisis" article and many of the "boy crisis" pieces I've been reading lately. The 1993 article told us that: "girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong." Compare that to Newsweek's boy crisis cover story earlier this year:
Middle-school boys will do almost anything to avoid admitting that they're overwhelmed. "Boys measure everything they do or say by a single yardstick: does this make me look weak?" says Thompson. "And if it does, he isn't going to do it."(
The section on how Montgomery Blair tried to make its school more "girl-friendly" in the early 1990s also has eerie similarities with proposals to make schools more "boy-friendly" today. Both suggest that boys are more competitive but girls prefer cooperation and group projects, and that girls like people (or at least living critters) while boys prefer objects and computers. The difference is that while Montgomery Blair added group work and downplayed competition to attract girls, schools are now being urged to do the opposite in order to better serve boys.
Most significantly, both the boy crisis and girl crisis stories seem to rely heavily on rather dubious research and anecdotal reports about individual boys and girls whose experiences, while they make for compelling narrative, are often not representative. Today the girl crisis issues that garnered so much attention in the 1990s are often dismissed as wrongheaded analysis based on bad research that has since been debunked, or folks say that the achievement gains girls have made mean whatever problems there were have been resolved. Reading this 13-year-old article, I couldn't help but wonder if, 13 years from now, we'll see today's boy crisis hype largely the same way.
But there are contrasts between this article and the boy crisis stories that catch my eye, too. Most notably, it's no coincidence that Elizabeth Mann is an extremely high-performing--by all accounts exceptional--young woman. Much of the efforts to address the girl crisis in the 1990s seemed to focus on opening up opportunities for the highest-performing young women. To some extent, this makes sense: There have been real ceilings placed on women's opportunities and achievements (and in some places there still are) that need to be shattered. If you think it's important to build the next generation of women leaders and to make sure women have key leadership roles in politics, business, the sciences, it makes sense to focus on encouraging high-aptitude girls to do into these fields. In this respect, though, the boy crisis and girl crisis conversations are radically different. The boy crisis, to the extent it exists, is about the problems of a subset of low-performing boys--particularly but not exclusively low-income, African American and Hispanic boys--who do seem to be disproportionately concentrated in the lowest portions of the achievement distribution and who as a result of this low-performance aren't obtaining the basic skills and knowledge they need to make a decent life for themselves in the mainstream economy today.
Both the boy crisis and girl crisis narratives have considerable flaws, particularly when they're cast as broad, dramatic social problems that impact virtually every adolescent member of a particular sex. But beneath the hoopla both include significant truths that demand public and policymaker attention. The problem is that these truths are point to very different types of problems, but public conversation about both the boy and girl "crises" have been couched in strikingly similar (and largely useless) terms. There are significant, in some ways different, social, educational, and economic opportunity problems facing both male and female teenagers in the United States today. But I don't think we're doing a very good job of having public conversations about them.
***
Finally, a personal note. I am three years younger than Elizabeth Mann. I would never claim to be anywhere near as accomplished as Mann, but by the standards of my school I was also "the smart girl," which, along with having my dad as principal, carried lots of negative social consequences. But I never felt dominated in class by boys, never felt like my achievements were discounted or in any way treated differently because I was a girl, never was made to feel the kind of intellectual insecurities Mann mentions in this article. I was a freshman in high school when How Schools Shortchange Girls came out. I'm sure I benefitted from some of the things that were done in response to it and other studies suggesting girls were in trouble (but I mostly remember wondering why everyone seemed so dead set on convincing me to become an engineer just because I got good grades in math and science). I didn't know then about How Schools Shortchange Girls, but if I had, I wouldn't have recognized it as matching my teenage reality.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
The Wire Week Eleven: Everything Goes Wrong
This week on The Wire, poor, anonymous Sherrod dies of accidental cyanide poisoning while trying to get high in the middle of the night in his homeless drug-addict uncle's unheated hovel. Randy's foster mother is burned alive and nearly killed after their house is fire-bombed by neighborhood kids angry that Randy helped the incompetent police with a murder investigation. Namond has nowhere to live because his Mom is angry that he's not enthusiastic enough about following his dad in the family drug-dealing business that will quickly lead to prison or the grave. Dukie is promoted to high school, cutting him off from the only adult in the world who really cares about or pays attention to his welfare. Michael, who started the season as the strongest and most virtuous of the group, goes into training to be a drug gang assassin, beats up a small child, beats up Lamond, and stands by while his well-meaning boxing coach is shot and almost killed by his new drug gang buddies.
Growing up in West Baltimore really sucks.
We shouldn't be surprised, of course, the hallmark of The Wire is unflinching honesty. And lest you non-viewers out there (could there possibly be any left?) worry that the show is so depressing as to be unwatchable, it made for great, compelling television.
I'll save most of my final thoughts for next week after the season finale, but a quick note on the theme of circularity this season. There's a point near the end of the opening credits where there are five or so shots in a row that are about circles or cycles -- the revolving plastic thing in the convenience store where patrons exchange money for cigarettes, a spinning tire rim, drugs being packed in a circle around a spare tire in the trunk of a car, a child spinning an old tire around in an alley. The season has also followed a round object--Marlo's ring--on a circular path, from Marlo to Omar to whathisname the bad cop to Michael, who is now involved with Marlo.
On one level this is all kind of obvious--the pathologies of drugs and violence are visited upon children, who quickly grow up to perpetrate them on the next generation. The cycle of poverty, etc., etc. But in the hands of the The Wire's creators, this kind of symbolism, as well as the constant drawing of parallels between various individuals and institutions, is never trite and often kind of profound. As Saul Austerlitz said recently in Slate, The Wire is "a didactic show in the best possible sense."
Growing up in West Baltimore really sucks.
We shouldn't be surprised, of course, the hallmark of The Wire is unflinching honesty. And lest you non-viewers out there (could there possibly be any left?) worry that the show is so depressing as to be unwatchable, it made for great, compelling television.
I'll save most of my final thoughts for next week after the season finale, but a quick note on the theme of circularity this season. There's a point near the end of the opening credits where there are five or so shots in a row that are about circles or cycles -- the revolving plastic thing in the convenience store where patrons exchange money for cigarettes, a spinning tire rim, drugs being packed in a circle around a spare tire in the trunk of a car, a child spinning an old tire around in an alley. The season has also followed a round object--Marlo's ring--on a circular path, from Marlo to Omar to whathisname the bad cop to Michael, who is now involved with Marlo.
On one level this is all kind of obvious--the pathologies of drugs and violence are visited upon children, who quickly grow up to perpetrate them on the next generation. The cycle of poverty, etc., etc. But in the hands of the The Wire's creators, this kind of symbolism, as well as the constant drawing of parallels between various individuals and institutions, is never trite and often kind of profound. As Saul Austerlitz said recently in Slate, The Wire is "a didactic show in the best possible sense."
Monday, December 04, 2006
Jon Chait, Wrong About Education
The good thing about articles like Paul Tough's much-discussed NYTimes piece about the achievement gap is that they get a lot of people talking about an important educational issue. The bad thing is that many of those people don't really know what they're talking about.
Take, for example, Jonathan Chait's new column in the LA Times. Chait usually writes a great column; he's one of the few New Republic writers that I'll read based on the byline alone. But this column is full of shallow analysis and one major factual error. Chait says:
Schools do not raise most of their funding locally. On average, a litle more than 40 percent of school funding comes from local sources, with about 50 percent coming from state revenues and 10 percent from the feds. This isn't news; as this table shows, the last year schools got most of their revenues from local sources was 1974.
He's right to point to the problem of teacher distribution in Illinois (I worked on the project that produced the report he cites). But Illinois has the worst school funding system in the country. They're the exception, not the rule.
Chait also repeats a point that I've seen a lot in the last week, that schools like KIPP are un-scaleable because the teachers there work "16 hours days." I remember being startled when Tough threw that assertion into his article--for the record, teachers in KIPP schools do not average 15-16 hours days, as at least one KIPP teacher notes in the comments section here. Can Mike Feinberg and David Levin please post something on the KIPP website to clear this up?
Chait also says:
Maybe Chait's wife was a great teacher, maybe not, I don't know. But this kind of deterministic thinking does poor children no favors. Schools are rarely successful when adults look at where children have come from and think they can see for certain where they're going.
Finally, Chait re-commits Tough's error of getting the politics wrong. Chait specializes in exposing the fallacies and illogic of conservative policies, which is, frankly, one of the reasons I normally like reading his stuff. But he's starting to become a hammer who only sees nails. The fact that the Heritage Foundation, which has very little to say about education policy, happened to write a report years ago titled "No Excuses" doesn't make that position conservative orthdoxy.
In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any reputable conservatives in the education policy world who hold the simplistic beliefs Chait criticizes. Like a lot of political commentators, Chait knows less about education policy than he thinks he does, but is perfectly comfortable stepping into the arena only occasionally as a means of fighting larger ideological battles. People like the teachers and students in KIPP schools deserve better.
Take, for example, Jonathan Chait's new column in the LA Times. Chait usually writes a great column; he's one of the few New Republic writers that I'll read based on the byline alone. But this column is full of shallow analysis and one major factual error. Chait says:
There are two main problems with our pool of teaching talent. The first is that it's badly distributed. Schools are mostly funded locally, which means rich districts can easily afford to pay teachers more than poor ones. Tough cites a study of schools in Illinois that found the highest-quality teachers concentrated in the richest schools and the lowest-quality teachers concentrated in the poorest schools.
This is the unavoidable result of making schools raise most of their funding locally. The only way to change this insane system would be to fund schools at the national level
Schools do not raise most of their funding locally. On average, a litle more than 40 percent of school funding comes from local sources, with about 50 percent coming from state revenues and 10 percent from the feds. This isn't news; as this table shows, the last year schools got most of their revenues from local sources was 1974.
He's right to point to the problem of teacher distribution in Illinois (I worked on the project that produced the report he cites). But Illinois has the worst school funding system in the country. They're the exception, not the rule.
Chait also repeats a point that I've seen a lot in the last week, that schools like KIPP are un-scaleable because the teachers there work "16 hours days." I remember being startled when Tough threw that assertion into his article--for the record, teachers in KIPP schools do not average 15-16 hours days, as at least one KIPP teacher notes in the comments section here. Can Mike Feinberg and David Levin please post something on the KIPP website to clear this up?
Chait also says:
My wife spent a few years teaching in a mostly low-income elementary school. The main thing I remember her telling me was that parental involvement was a near-perfect predictor of her students' performance. The kids with active parents did well, and the kids with disengaged parents did poorly.
Maybe Chait's wife was a great teacher, maybe not, I don't know. But this kind of deterministic thinking does poor children no favors. Schools are rarely successful when adults look at where children have come from and think they can see for certain where they're going.
Finally, Chait re-commits Tough's error of getting the politics wrong. Chait specializes in exposing the fallacies and illogic of conservative policies, which is, frankly, one of the reasons I normally like reading his stuff. But he's starting to become a hammer who only sees nails. The fact that the Heritage Foundation, which has very little to say about education policy, happened to write a report years ago titled "No Excuses" doesn't make that position conservative orthdoxy.
In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any reputable conservatives in the education policy world who hold the simplistic beliefs Chait criticizes. Like a lot of political commentators, Chait knows less about education policy than he thinks he does, but is perfectly comfortable stepping into the arena only occasionally as a means of fighting larger ideological battles. People like the teachers and students in KIPP schools deserve better.
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