On Kozol

A few years ago, Jonathan Kozol and I were among a group of people giving presentations at an event in Chicago tied to the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. He spoke first and gave the kind of eloquent, morally severe speech one would expect, asserting that the nation's increasingly segregated schools were an insult to the memory of Brown. He also had unkind words for the contemporary school reform movement, citing in particular those who would point to "miracle schools," as he called schools with high poverty and high achievement, as evidence that education could serve as a counter-weight to larger problems of race and class. "We can't depend on miracles," he concluded. There was much applause.

I was working at the the Education Trust at the time, which specializes in identifying high-poverty, high-performing schools. So at the end of my presentation, which was about school funding disparities between rich and poor (they're particularly large in Illinois), I said, "Like most of the people in the audience, I've read and greatly benefitted from Jonathan Kozol's books. But I think he's wrong about the promise of high-performing schools. They're not miracle workers, they just do their jobs uncommonly well. Saying that their success is somehow supernatural denigrates their real accomplishments."

After the final speaker, an unreconstructed Marxist professor from DePaul who explained (really) that there could be no school reform until the revolution comes, we broke for lunch. I was making small talk with someone from the Chicago school district, when Kozol walked up and asked, without preamble, "Do you really think there all these schools out there that can overcome poverty?" Thus began a fascinating, hour-long conversation that continued as the room emptied out and the waiters cleared the dishes around us, before going outside where he could smoke. He was smart, wry, and more willing than he is in public to concede that some of public education's failures originate from sources other than societal racism, corporate-controlled goverment, and economic inequality. He was particularly interested in the school finance stuff, and we exchanged FAXs (he didn't do email) for a few months thereafter.

Kozol has been in the news a lot lately, first with his much-discussed diet to protest NCLB, and now with the publication of a new book, "Letters to a Young Teacher." The Weekly Standard has a review here, which contains most of the elements of the standard conservative anti-Kozol piece, which has become a genre unto itself: a lengthy section focusing on Kozol's admiration for Castro, standard pro-voucher and anti-school spending arguments, etc. There are also more than a few exaggerations and factual errors, which is problematic given that the author, Jonathan Leaf, accuses Kozol of the same sloppiness, as well as (citing no evidence) outright fabrication. Leaf says:

Kozol's impact has been enormous. The national phenomenon of judges' compelling states to change their tax codes to increase funding for schools in poor districts was driven by the widespread credence given to his 1991 book Savage Inequalities, which sold over 250,000 copies in hardcover alone.

That's nonsense. School funding lawsuits have been going on without interruption since the early 1970s, and the seminal Kentucky case that kicked off the "adequacy" movement in school finance, Rose v. Council for Better Education, was decided in 1989. Leaf also says:

As academics have known for many years, states that spend more on their schools often have the worst educational performance and some of the states that spend the least per pupil--like North Dakota and Utah--have among the best.

While North Dakota does pretty well, Utah ranks in the bottom half of states on the latest NAEP reading test. Hardly "some of the best."

Leaf does, however, hone in on what I think is the essential criticism of Kozol, which is that in his righteous anger and dark pessimism, he's become blind to all evidence of progress and possibility with our public schools. This point is made in Sandra Tsing Loh's much more worthwhile review in latest issue of The Atlantic, which isn't online yet, where she confesses to being:

"a longtime, rabid fan of Jonathan Kozol. Yea, I could show you my tower of dog-eared Kozolalia...I am the sort of impressionable woman whose eyes seep tears while reading his heartrending descriptions of racial inequality in public education...Pfizer should develop a special anti-depressant--"Zokol: for when you've read too much Kozol."

But she's also the mother of a white child who attends the predominantly minority, often low-income Los Angeles Unified Public Schools. She says:

I was pleasantly surprised (steeped in Kozolalia as I was) to discover that it was not a blasted wasteland...While aesthetically uninspiring on the outside, inside it was a plethora of books, computers, LeapFrog pads, and the like...I have yet, for instance, to trip over a crack-addicted parent in the parking lot...

Tsing Loh relates how she had her own Jonathan Kozol moment recently, and tried to talk to him about what these things might mean:

But he wasn't interested. What we need are moral leaders! he roared mightily. This is a civil rights issue! We need a religous leader, a prophet...thundering from the pulpit!

Kozol's critics often complain that he's been writing the same book, over and over, for forty years. I've never understood this--if the book needs to be written, if the message needs to be heard, then what else should he do? People need reminding of what's important--that's why church is every Sunday--and there's no surplus of well-known authors who can focus attention on the deep structural and social inequities that plague the education of the most vulnerable children.

But somewhere along the way, the burden and exhilaration of all those decades of righteousness seem to have narrowed Kozol's vision to point that he can longer see reasons to hope. True prophets provide more than just portents of doom; they stand up and show the faithful a path to a better place.

Don't Be Questioning My Bill James-itude

Calling my Daily News editorial on the NYC value-added controversy "outlandish and mathematically inept," Steve Koss says:

True baseball aficionados -- those familiar with the work of Bill James, for example -- also understand that these now-famous analytical models are almost exclusively multivariate regression models. In other words, baseball general managers like Billy Beane use mathematical models that predict a player’s value or performance from many different variables simultaneously, each variable clearly measurable and each contributing a portion of the total “value added.” These models are mathematically complex, fraught with issues of relevance, cross-interference among variables, and time series interdependencies (respectively called statistical significance, multicollinearity, and autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) that must be carefully considered in their formation and use.

Contrast this approach with the DOE’s under Chancellor Klein, where a teacher’s ostensible “value added” is derived entirely from a single variable, standardized test scores, that is itself an arguably spurious measure. Imagine baseball owners paying their players on the basis of just one variable, such as number of home runs. Within a few years, it would hard to tell the New York Yankees from the New York Giants – every Yankee would be 6’6”, weigh 275 pounds, bench press 500 pounds, and hit 40+ home runs per year. With players judged and rewarded on any single variable, the game of baseball would be rendered unrecognizable, grossly perverted from the multiple-skill game it is today.

Okay, people can say what they like about my credentials, education policy papers, or what have you, but I started buying the Bill James Baseball Abstract in the mid-1980s. These accusations will not stand.

Moreover, Koss doesn't know what he's talking about. The NYC value-added measures are not "derived from a single variable," they're exactly the kind of complicated multi-variate measure he describes. As the NY Times reported.

The city’s pilot program uses a statistical analysis to measure students’ previous-year test scores, their numbers of absences and whether they receive special education services or free lunch, as well as class size, among other factors. Based on all those factors, that analysis then sets a “predicted gain” for a teacher’s class, which is measured against students’ actual gains to determine how much a teacher has contributed to students’ growth.

The NYC model uses something like 12 discrete variables, and the HLM version of value-added pioneered by Bill Sanders is so complicated that you need a PhD in statistics and a special computer at SAS headquarters to run it. It's more complicated that anything Bill James does, as it should be.

As for baseball, yeah, imagine if the Yankees started throwing untold million of dollars at players based primarily on their home run totals, leading to players shooting themselves full of steroids and turning into musclebound, home run producing freaks. It's a good thing that never happened! Instead, the Yankees continue to dominate the American League East and add to their historic World Series victory total by sticking to the tried-and-true Yankee tradition of paying players strictly on the basis of the number of years since they left the minor leagues, regardless of what position they play, how well they hit, or the number of games they win.

Enlightened Leadership

We released a report recently on the troubled state of teacher evaluation in public education, in which we suggested that a few local teacher unions are supporting comprehensive evalution systems with teeth, but that most aren't. So it has been encouraging that a number of union leaders have written to compliment the report. One union-created organization, the new Tom Mooney Institute for Teacher and Union Leadership in Washington, DC, has linked to the report on its website.

But perhaps that's not so surprising, since the institute, named after the former president of the Cincinnate Federation of Teachers and funded by several foundations that also support Education Sector, is working to groom a new generation of progressive, reform-minded teacher unionists. "Our goal," the organization writes, "is to help local union leaders to be bold, collaborative and creative advocates for the improvement of public education."

No one can object to that mission.

education, baseball, tomato, tomahto

Those who couldn't get enough of my extended baseball metaphor vis a vis the recent NYC teacher evaluation contretemps can read a new version in the New York Daily News here.

Hoosier Taxation

Michele McNeil reports in Education Week:

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, who is facing re-election this year along with the entire House and some of the Senate in that state, has made property-tax relief his top priority this legislative year and wants to remove funding for schools’ general operating budgets from the property-tax rolls. That plan, coupled with a legislative proposal to fund the costs of student transportation—except the purchase of school buses—with state dollars and not property taxes, would mean a $1.3 billion annual shift of school costs to the state. The state, in turn, would raise the 6 percent sales tax by a percentage point, and use other money set aside for property-tax relief to make up the lost funding to schools.

This isn't a very good idea. The Indiana general fund property tax functions essentially like a state--not local--property tax, in that the state sets local property tax rates, then determines the total amount of general fund revenue school districts get, and then fills in the difference between that amount and what the local property tax raises with state money, which comes from combination of sales and income taxes. When property values rise, the state benefits in the form of reduced obligations to school general funds; when property values fall the state is on the hook for the lost revenue. School budgets aren't affected either way. That creates a fairly stable three-legged property/sales/income revenue stool for local schools, with the volatility of one source being offset by the others. If the Daniels proposal is enacted, they'll be down to two legs and subject to increased risk of sales tax volatility tied to the business cycle, which is precisely what the Ed Week article describes happening in Florida.

In other words, this isn't really an education issue at all, it's just a question of whether the state of Indiana wants to change its revenue mix in a way that relies more on sales taxes and less on property taxes. Another consequence woudl be redistributing some of the tax burden down the income ladder, since poor people consume their entire income, more or less by definition, and thus pay sales taxes on it, while wealthier people invest part of their income in stuff like property, which would be taxed at a lower rate.

The "Trans-Classroom" Teacher

The new issue of Innovate: The Journal of Online Education features a thoughtful article by Teachers College's Susan Lowes about the possibilities arising from an emerging cohort of "trans-classroom" teachers:

...Although face-to-face and online courses do indeed take place in separate environments, the social field of the teacher who teaches them increasingly includes both. And as a teacher moves, either simultaneously or serially, from one environment to the other, the course being taught will also be transformed as it is shaped and reshaped to fit first one context and then the other....This research, exploratory though it is, suggests that giving more teachers the opportunity to teach online, as well as deliberately encouraging those who do teach online to share what they have learned with their fellow classroom teachers, provides an opportunity to strengthen teaching in both environments.

As I wrote last week, the future for education is neither a fully virtual nor a parallel system, but an integrated one. Dr. Lowes' research focuses us in the right direction: Away from the false online vs. classroom dichotomy and towards an understanding of how to improve teaching practice across a multiplicity of learning environments.

TEACH Grants: A Misnomer

President Bush’s 2009 budget includes $14 million for a new program established by Congress (introduced by Kennedy and Miller) last year—the TEACH Grants program. The program calls for grants of up to $4,000 to be awarded to approximately 41,000 students each year starting in the 2008-09 school year, and is intended to encourage students to pursue teaching in high-need schools and subjects. According to the budget, the TEACH Grant program,

...awards annual grants of up to $4,000 to eligible undergraduate and graduate students who agree to serve as a full-time mathematics, science, foreign language, bilingual education or other English language program, special education, or reading teacher at a high-need school for not less than 4 years within 8 years of graduation.

Sounds good, right? But these ‘grants’ are mislabeled—if you keep reading the budget description, it becomes clear that these aren’t grants at all. And calling them grants could lead some students into much more debt than they expected:

For students who fail to fulfill this service requirement, grants are converted to Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loans, with interest accrued from the date the grants were awarded. (Italics are mine)

This means that students who don’t meet any one of the requirements—teaching within 8 years of graduation, teaching in a high-need school for at least 4 years, or teaching in one of the subjects listed—will suddenly have as much as $16,000 in loans, and that’s not including the accrued interest. That would certainly be a rude awakening to a student who thought they were receiving a grant. In fact, these aren’t even considered grants in the budget; they’re just, for some reason, called grants:

For budget and financial management purposes, this program will be operated as a loan program with 100 percent forgiveness of outstanding principal and interest upon completion of a student’s service requirement. The Administration currently estimates approximately 80 percent of participating students will not complete the required service and thus will have their grants converted to Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loans. (Italics, again, are mine)

According to the government’s own calculations, only 20 percent of students who sign-up for this program will actually receive the promised benefit. The rest will end up with much higher debt loads than originally expected.

If the government is considering this as a loan program for budget purposes, it should label it as a loan program for clarity and for students’ own budgeting purposes. While 'TEACH Loans' might not sound as generous, the proper labeling will save many students a lot of confusion and also save some students from a potentially distressful financial situation when an unexpected bill comes due at graduation.

Note: Thanks to Sara Goldrick-Rab at the University of Wisconsin - Madison for the tip. And as she points out, "It's not a loan forgiveness program though-- it's a loan, not a grant-- and there's no forgiveness if it turns into a loan."

Knightfall

Legendary basketball coach Bob Knight is retiring from Texas Tech. I met him, briefly, years ago when I worked from the state senator from Bloomington, IN. He's an imposing guy, more so than you realize watching him on TV because there he's surrounded by even bigger players. Even beyond that, he has this palpable physcial presence that's unusual and more than a little intimidating. It's easy to see how that, combined with a brilliant basketball mind, molded three national championship teams and the most wins in history, just as it led to his justified dismissal from IU when his temper got the better of him one too many times. Some suggest that Knight will be remembered as much for his failings as his success, but I don't think that's true; he may have embarrassed himself but he never dishonored the game through the kind of cheating that ran rampant in other programs that couldn't match the talent and execution at IU.

Helicopter Parents and Other Exaggerations

In a refreshing anti-bogus trend story, Eric Hoover reports the following($) in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the alleged growth of "helicopter parents" who supposedly can't let go of their darling children and hover over them in college, thus spoiling them into adulthood and beyond. This meme has grown so prevalent that it was the topic of a week-long series of Tank McNamara, and there is of course no more reliable filter and promoter of bland conventional wisdom than the daily comics.

Surveys of Students Challenge 'Helicopter Parent' Stereotypes

Tales of meddlesome moms and dads are irresistible. Take the one about the mother who asked the dean to make sure her son was wearing his sweater. Don't forget the parent who told the professor his tests were too hard.Then there's the one about the administrator who received a telephone call when someone's kid needed a light bulb replaced.

These and many other true stories have shaped the popular image of modern parents as high-strung nuisances who torment college administrators day and night. Only that description doesn't match reality, according to Marjorie Savage, director of the parent-liaison program at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. "Helicopter parents?" Ms. Savage says. "Truly, there aren't that many of them." Several longtime student-affairs officials agree that while helicopter parents are real, their numbers — and behaviors — have been exaggerated.

In admirable anti-bogus trend fashion, Hoover continues by citing actual, solid, verifiable data, namely newly-released results from UCLA's extensive, long-established Survey of the American Freshman, based on responses from over 272,000 students at 356 colleges and universities nationwide. The survey found that a significant number of freshmen--particularly, and not suprisingly, first-generation students, who are disproportionately from low-income and minority backgrounds--complained of not having enough parental involvement, which is consistent with the recent finding from the respected National Survey of Student Engagment that helicopter parenting, to the extent it actually exists at all, is a good thing.

This illustrates two of the more important things to understand about the way higher education is perceived in this country:

1) Everything is filtered through the sensibility of the top 10 percent of college students and institutions, clustered on the coasts and big cities, people who make up a disproporionate share of the consumers of elite media and an overwhelming percentage of the producers of elite media.

2) This filter produces common perceptions of students and colleges that are often 180 degrees from the general truth.

Helicopter parents aren't prevalent and problematic, they're rare and beneficial. The biggest problem facing typical college-bound high school students isn't too much pressure to cram lots of activities and college prep classes into their schedule, it's not enough preparation for the academic rigors higher education. Similarly, college isn't actually a break and a let-down after the hard work of running the admisssions gantlet; for much students it's a lot more work than they experienced in high school, which often leads to academic struggles and dropping out. The biggest problem facing most college bound students isn't getting into college, since anyone can get into college, it's paying for it once they get there. While growth in private school endowments get a lot of attention, many public universities are gearing up for another set of state budget cutbacks. And so on.

This is particularly problematic from a public policy standpoint, because nearly all worthy higher education policy issues concern the bottom 90 percent, particularly the bottom 50 percent. Elite institutions and the people who attend them are fine--more than fine--and don't need any help. It's the students attending community college and relatively open access four-year instiutions--i.e., most students--who deserve resources and attention, but they don't get it because everyone's worried about whether Little Jenny will get into Dartmouth or Smith.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode Five

I which Marlo reminds us that the future ain't promised to no one, as he seizes the crown. When it became clear that Marlo was going to become the new force on the West Side at the end of Season 3, I was relatively non-plussed; I wasn't sure what more could be said after the epic Stringer / Avon story came to conclusion. But I think the steady onset of Marlo's dead-eyed will to power has been one of the strongest elements of Season 5. You can barely understand what he's saying half the time (thank God for Tivo), but it's nearly always meaningful and compelling. Marlo, Chris, and Snoop clearly represent the culmination of the capitalist impulse that David Simon is critiquing, what he chooses to do with Marlo thematically and plot-wise will play a big role in the ultimate success of the final season.

Elsewhere, the Baltimore powers-that-be remind Clay Davis to stop snitching. Come on Clay, didn't you see the Carmelo Anthony video? Train Wreck McNulty and the fabulist meet their destinies in one another--maybe. I'm inclined to give Simon the benefit of the doubt that this plotline may not be as crashingly obvious as it seems. Strangely, nobody in the Sun management says or does anything to invoke the righteous anger of Saint Gus. Managing editor Klabenow in particular seems quite reasonable in his handling of the serial killer case, first in declining to put it on A1 without more reporting and then refusing to let McNulty tap their phones. Maybe not such a one-dimensional bad guy after all? Levy, Lester, Omar, and everyone else continue to underestimate Marlo. Cutty and Dukie have a conversaton that's a bit too didactic for my taste, while Lester and McNulty explain their wire tap plan to the viewer each other. Come on! No exposition allowed. Bubbles wrestles with survivor's guilt. Omar goes in with guns blazing only to be outfought by Chris, Snoop, and Michael. The only thing that saves him is an apparently bullet-proof couch and the fact that he's Superman. But we knew that already.

Based on next week's coming attractions, the yet-to-appear list now looks like this:

Cutty
Prez
Bunny
Namond
Randy
Poot
Royce
Elena
Brother Mouzone

I'm assuming that Prez, Bunny, and Namond will show up eventually, and Brother Mouzone will probably stay in NYC. Therefore, I can only conclude that <The Wire will wrap up with the stunning revelation that it was Poot all along, pulling the strings Keyser Soze style to become the unchallenged king of Baltimore.

Let's also return for a moment to the scene between Carver and Herc in last week's Episode Four. To recap: It's nightime, in the back parking lot of the Western District headquarters, and they're having a beer. The two came up in the ranks together, but while Carver has been promoted, Herc was recently kicked out for general incompetence. Carver has decided to bust Colicchio for beating up an innocent schoolteacher. Herc advises Carver that this is going to cause him a lot of problems, people will say he's a snitch. Carver says he's going to do it anyway, because:

Carver: Remember when I gave you that kid to deliver last year, whats-his-name, you were supposed to get him to Bunk Moreland? You remember that?

Herc: Yeah. I f---ed up. So what?

Carver: So, it mattered.

Herc: So what the f--- does this have to do with Colicchio?

Carver: So it all matters. I know we thought it didn't, but...it does.

Herc: So you gotta do Colicchio, huh? Guess you think they had to do me?

Carver: [silent]

Herc: Yeah, probably. [pause] The guys are going to talk s--- about you for a while. But f--- it, Carver. You do what needs done.

This exchange pretty much sums up everything David Simon has been trying to say on The Wire and how it plays out for the characters and story. When asked by Slate to summarize what the show is about, he said:

Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We're worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of capitalism.

In other words, Simon believes that while the only decent, moral view of the world holds that all people have value--that everything and everyone matters--the systems that govern the world, particularly Baltimore, are disconnected from this idea. Often, they oppose it. Accordingly, pretty much every character on The Wire is defined along three dimensions:

1) Where this state of affairs has left them.

2) How well they understand it.

3) How they've chosen to respond.

Simon's crucial observation--what elevates The Wire above standard drama--is that understanding the nature of things and choosing to fight back--to do what needs done--is by no means a sure path to happiness of any kind. McNulty, for example, is painfully aware of how the system works, but trying to do something about it destroys him. He can't deal with the absurdity and injustice, it drives him to drink and dissolution. Jay Landsman, by contrast, understands the system just as well as McNulty, but he's long since given over to cynicsim and self-interest. Not in a totally evil kind of way--remember his mercy toward Bubbles last season--but he's completely unwilling to sacrifice any of himself to change a system he didn't make. Other characters, like Bunk, try to split the difference, trying to matter and stay sane at the same time.

Many of the most potent dramatic moments on The Wire revolve around the characters coming to understand Simon's view of reality, the way it changes them, and the choices they make. Bunny Colvin, Carver's mentor, chose to push back, kept his dignity, but lost his pension and job. Bodie was hollowed out by the knowledge that "the game is rigged," but still decided to die on his feet rather than live on his knees. I suspect that in their last moments, both Prop Joe and Stringer Bell understood that their hubris in thinking that The Game--and thus, those playing it--could be anything other than a remorseless death machine was what brought them down.

Simon's underlying pessimisim is reflected in the fact that the farther up the food chain we go, the less likely to find anyone pushing back against the system, because, of course, the game is rigged in their favor. At the same time, he allows most of the characters who fight honorably to live with some integrity and peace of mind. Lacking that would be the one tragedy that even David Simon couldn't bear to show.