NYTimes on the Achievement Gap: What To Think

Paul Tough went long--really long--on the achievement gap in yesterday's New York Times Sunday magazine. While I'll quibble with some his conclusions and interpretations, on the whole I think he got the story right.

First, the quibbles. Tough frames the story by discussing the latest NAEP data, which is fine since there's no better source of info about national trends. Reading scores are relatively flat, math scores are up. But in tying NAEP data back to a discussion of the NCLB goal of 100 percent student proficiency by 2014, he says:

The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.

The implication is that while we've made some progress in closing the gap in math, we're still far, far short of 100 percent proficient. But the 100 percent goal isn't based on the stringent NAEP proficiency standard, it's based on individual state standards, a fact that Tough doesn't mention until the very end of the article. The typical state puts 4th grade math proficiency at around 75 to 80 percent, a whole lot closer to 100. One can argue whether they've set the bar high enough (I think many have not), but it's an important distinction to understand in discussing whether NCLB is realistic, or working.

Tough also critiques 2001 research from my former employer, The Education Trust, that pointed out that there are thousands of high-poverty, high-minority schools that have above average test scores in some grades and subjects. As Tough notes, critics responded that many of these schools weren't high performing in all grades and subjects, or were high-performing in some years and not others. But Ed Trust has followed up since then with many reports and searchable databases, unfortunately not mentioned in the article, that addressed these criticisms, showing that there really are schools out there that succeed for many students in many subjects for many years. For a list of schools in New York that outscored most other schools statewide for three years running in math, despite having students who are mostly poor and mostly minority, click here.

Tough also oversimplifies the political dynamics at work, making it sound like belief in the ability of schools to close the achievement gap is primarily a conservative position promoted by the likes of the Heritage Foundation. It's not, and it's an odd mistake to make in an article that references work from obviously non-conservative groups like Ed Trust, as well as self-described "liberal" education reformers running schools for disadvantaged students, as often as it does.

But all in all the article does a pretty thorough job of summarizing the extant research on why low-income and minority students come to school behind academically and what can be done to help them. KIPP schools feature prominently, as is often the case in these debates. Tough's conclusion, which I think is the right one, is that while the achievement gap is caused by a lot of deep-seated inequities that occur outside of schools, really good schools can go a long way to mitigating those problems--but only if they're really good schools.

It's not enough to stop giving disadvantaged students less money, worse teachers, and fewer educational resources, which is what we're doing now. We have to give them more of all of those things than we give other students, which is difficult and expensive--but not nearly as hard as managing the consequences of the inequitable school system we have today.

UPDATE: More from Matt Yglesias here, AFT here.

Real Football For Thanksgiving

Tonight at 7pm (at the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif) the U.S. Women's National Team will play in the semifinals of the Women's Gold Cup against Mexico. If they win, they go to the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup.

North Carolina still wins for sending the most women to play on the national team, with 5 UNC grads on tonight's roster (I expect they'll win the NCAA title too this year). Also notable on tonight's roster is goalkeep Briana Scurry, who hails from my own alma mater UMass-Amherst and took a year off in 2005, but is probably best known for making good on her promise to run naked through the streets of Athens if the U.S. won the 1996 Olympics. They did
so she did, 20 yards on a side street with nothing but her gold medal.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Whac-a-Charter School

Joe Williams’ Ed Next cover article about charter school opposition put me in mind of my late, lamented Whac-a-Mole Game. About four years ago a home version of the Whac-a-Mole carnival game popped up in my Amazon.com recommendations, and I just had to have it. It was by far the best $10 I ever spent. Sadly, after a few years of serious abuse, Whac-a-Mole died this year and now sits forlornly in a corner of my bookshelf. Even worse, it’s apparently been discontinued, probably because it was a very dangerous toy—people got hurt playing Whac-a-Mole, which was part of what made it so darn fun. Milton-Bradley now makes a watered down, much less fun-looking but probably safer (and also more expensive!) version of the game, but it’s a pale imitation. Rather than a board of about 8 moles like my game had, where you have to be alert to all the moles and a true master wins by not only hitting her moles but also blocking the opponent from hitting his moles (that's how one gets hurt), the new Milton Bradley version has only four moles, and each player is assigned exactly one mole. Boring! If anyone reading this happens to know where I can get a version of my beloved and discontinued Whac-a-Mole, or has facility with electronics and might be able to help me fix it, I would be exceedingly thankful. To sort of pretend I'm making this post education-relevant: Read Joe's article!

Is Quality Preschool Good Enough?

Writing in the latest Education Next, UVA's Robert Pianta notes research showing that high-quality preschool classrooms can significantly narrow achievement and behavior gaps for at-risk 4-year-olds. But, he cautions, other research finds that:

Most children in pre-K, kindergarten, and grade 1 classrooms are exposed to quite low levels of instructional support and only moderate levels of social and emotional supports--levels that are not as high as those in the gap-closing, effective classrooms...

What's more, there is great variation in the quality of experiences and supports for children even within programs that meet the standards that are generally recognized as being necessary for preschool quality--small class sizes, credentialed teachers, and the like.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there is huge variation in children's experiences in preschool classes that meet similar quality standards. After all, virtually all K-12 teachers have bachelor's degrees and most are certified, but there's tremendous variation in the educational outcomes they produce for kids. A bachelor's degree might be a reasonable floor, but it's hardly a guarantee of effectiveness. Non-tangible or hard-to-measure teacher characteristics (and other characteristics of preschool programs) also matter a lot. That's why regulating inputs alone is never going to be sufficient to ensure quality, either in K-12 or preschool. We also have to look at outcomes in some fashion. Now, we can argue about different ways of measuring outcomes--although I think most reasonable people will probably agree that the way we measure outcomes for little kids will probably look different than it does for bigger kids--but that doesn't change the basic conclusion here.

Also, on a sort-of-but-not-really related note (Shameless Plug Alert!): While you're checking out the latest Ed Next, have a look at this piece I wrote on NCLB restructuring.

WaPost Goes to School Room, Misses Elephant

There's a kind of unreality running throughout today's front-page article in the Post about students who get good grades in school, and even end up on the honor roll, but fail state standardized tests:

Students and teachers offer an array of explanations for why test scores sometimes fail to match up with grades. Some students don't take the exams seriously. Some freeze up. Still others trip over unfamiliar language. And teachers sometimes are not prepped in what the exams cover, especially when the tests are new. Occasionally, some school officials suspect, classes aren't rigorous enough to prepare students adequately.

Occasionally, some suspect. You know, just maybe, every now and again.

Said one parent of an honors student who failed the state algebra exam:

"It's hard to understand a situation where you can have an Honor Roll student who doesn't pass the test. She's been an Honor Roll student since the sixth grade," she said. "I can't say I really hold her teacher accountable. . . . I just accepted the fact that Brittanie may not be a child that tests well."

The only mystery here is why everyone in the article is being so circumspect about something that should be pretty obvious: states create standardized tests because local schools, when left to their own devices, don't always hold students to high enough academic standards. They put students on honor rolls who don't belong there, pass them along to the next grade even though they haven't learned what they need to know, and ultimately hand them diplomas signifying the attainment of skills and knowledge that students haven't actually attained. Not all schools, certainly, or even most. But way too many.

How do we know this? Because every measure of what students who have graduated from public schools actually know and can do shows deep deficiencies. According to the National Assessment of Education Progress only 59% of seventeen year-olds can perform "moderately complex" procedures in math. 40% of all college students are forced to enroll in at least one remedial--that is, high school-level--course. 43% of all adults score at only the "Basic" level or below on a test of literacy. Etc., etc.

One could argue, I suppose, that the schools have set the standards right and the states have set the bar too high. But you can only make that case if you're willing to forgoe any and all arguments along the lines of "standardized tests are dumbing down the curriculum, hurting gifted students, etc."

You could also chalk it up to measurement error--inevitably, some bright students will score poorly on a given test on a given day. Then again, by the same token you would also expect the opposite to occur--students passing the standardized test who really didn't learn what they needed to know. Somehow, those students never seem to end up in the newspaper. And when you consistently come up with numbers like those cited in the article--between 12 and 25 percent of students who failed the state exam getting passing grades from their school--it's not hard to figure out what's going on. Unless, strangely enough, you're the normally reliable Post.

Update: AFTie Michelle offers a sensible take on the article.

In which Sara pretends to take the Onion seriously as an excuse to praise a favorite professor

So, apparently, the theater department at my alma mater has become more nationally recognized since I graduated. I was never a theater major, but I tended to hang out with a lot of theater people and managed to appear in a couple of shows and take a few classes. My Shakespeare professor, Robert Ball, was very demanding but also one of the best professors I had who had a lasting, positive impact on my life.

The Wire Week Nine: The Beginning of the End

After a couple of very good but not great weeks, The Wire launches into the final third of the season with a vengeance.

First, I hope the foolishness with sticking students in 90-minute test prep classes, but then turning up the heat in order to keep them docile in said classes, apparently without considering that the heat also means they're sure not to learn whatever meager test prep lessons are being presented, can help put to rest this whole argument about accountability and teaching to the test. Craig made this point last week, but it needs repeating: When people do stupid things in response to a sensible policy, that's not evidence that the policy is stupid, nor does it mitigate the responsbility of people who do stupid things.

For example, let's take the obvious parallel of the Baltimore police department. I think most reasonable people would agree that police departments have two mains goals: reducing crime and apprehending criminals. Most people would also agree that crime statistics are a pretty good way to measure success in accomplishing those goals.

Faced with the challenge of being evaluated by crime statistics, there are a number of things a police department can do. It can act strategically, tasking its best people with implementing a long-term plan to take down the high-level criminals. That's what Daniels' Major Crimes unit did, with much success. Or it can innovate, think outside the box, and try to reform the drug trade itself. Thats what Bunny Colvin did last season, also with some success.

Or it can be stupid and make a lot of meaningless low-level arrests, which will just antagonize people and do nothing to solve the problem--and thus, improve the crime statistics--in the long-term. That's what happened this week. I wonder if there's a Fraternal Order of Police blog out there somewhere pointing to this as evidence of how we need to stop holding police departments responsible for crime statistics? Probably not, because while we can criticize ineffective police departments, at least we respect them enough to hold them responsible for their own bad choices. Yet when it comes to teaching to the test--or messing with the thermostat--the refrain is too often, "No Child Left Behind made me do it."

The exchange between Colvin and the administrator about the goals of the special class was also interesting: "You're socializing them, but not educating them." I've been reading Diane Ravitch's history of 20th century school reform recently--back in the '30s and 40s, most leading progressive educators would have said that socializing Namond et. al. is educating them, that if the school can help them with practical lessons like learning to be a waiter or interacting with government, its job is pretty much done. Times certainly change.

But as has been the case all season, the most compelling storylines about the education of urban children on The Wire take place outside the school walls, as the writers constantly draw parallels between the fate of children caught between highly dysfunctional formal institutions and highly functional informal institutions. Take the unfolding tragedy of Michael's corruption by Marlo. Despite his unusual intelligence and integrity, the school system has all but ignored Michael. He turns in perfect homework problems and all Prez can do is look at them quizzically, like he's not quite sure what to do. Meanwhile, Michael and his brother have to live with a drug addict and a child molester.

Marlo, by contrast, sees Michael's potential in an instant (literally, with a shock of recognition in the first episode that I suspect will turn out to be the anchor moment of the entire season. While the writing on the The Wire is often and justly praised, many of the most significant passages this season have been dialogue-free, consisting entirely of silent moments of recognition and wordless shots of character's faces. Rawls' definitive break from Burrell happened in the mayor's office, with three consecutive half-second reaction shots--Rawls, the mayor's aide, the mayor. Or the lingering, Al-Pacino-in-the-Godfather-style shot of Michael's deadened face after he sent Chris and Snoop to do murder. Chilling.)

The lesson seems to be that highly efficient, well-managed organizations like Marlo's drug gang win out in the short-term--at least long enough to consume the likes of Michael, Namond, and possibly more. But in the long-term--and this is one of the meta-themes that runs throughout the entire series--the efficiency of untrestrained capitalism embodied by the Baltimore drug trade consumes everyone. When willingness to kill becomes just another competitive advantage, everyone dies in the end.

And so the The Wire's creators are caught between their frustration with the way politics and human imperfection diminish the value of vital public institutions--schools, police, cities--while at the same time acknowledging that reforming those institutions is the only thing that can save students like Michael. It's that combination of unforgiving realism and sustained hope that makes The Wire so great.

Something tells me...

That Mike Antonucci really wants to win Jay Mathews' "best ed. blog" poll.

Graduation Rates in Context

The new NCES report (“Placing College Graduation Rates in Context”) is worth taking a look at. While, as they note, there are major limitations to the Department of Education’s graduation rate calculations, the range in graduation rates among similar institutions is striking (and sounds vaguely familiar…). And, they found Black and Hispanic students succeeding most at institutions where they were most highly represented.

Some highlights:

- Among very selective institutions classified as low-income serving, graduation rates varied from 25% for institutions at the 10^th percentile to 75% for institutions at the 90^th percentile.

- Graduation rates were actually slightly higher for Black students compared with White students at the 16 very selective bachelor’s degree institutions with large low-income enrollments.

- Similarly, the smallest gap between White and Hispanic students existed among the moderately selective institutions with large low-income enrollments.

Also interesting is that NCES found that the "high performing" institutions were not easy to categorize based on structural differences. This is good news -- there is a lot ALL colleges can learn from institutions that both enroll a high number of low-income students and maintain high graduation rates.

Shameless Plug

Per Craig's post below (see also this and this), part of the problem here is that a lot of the tests themselves suck. Conventional wisdom aside, it's possible to design a standardized test that is a pretty good measure of what we want kids to learn--including higher-order thinking skills. The problem is that doing so is really expensive and time consuming, so a lot of states have decided to use crappy, off-the-shelf exams instead that test mostly lower-level skills and aren't aligned with state standards. These kinds of tests can create incentives for "teaching to the test." One way to address the problem would be by encouraging more states to pool their money and work together to develop higher-quality shared standards and test, like in New England. (Or, if you're Matt or the Fordhamites, National Standards.)

The Wire: Teaching to the Test Revisited

Matt Yglesias makes some thoughtful observations about yesterday's Wire post, generating a bunch of really interesting comments about NCLB and test prep over on his site. It's great to see some actual discourse on this topic—both because claims of "unintended consequences" often are unexamined and because they are sure to loom large when Congress gets around to reauthorizing the law.

I agree with Matt that my evidence doesn't prove drill-and-kill teaching to the test isn't happening in lots of places, but just to be clear I didn't set out to prove that. Instead, I'm arguing that teaching to the test is 1) a choice being made by school systems, 2) a bad choice, and 3) an unnecessary choice. It's a choice because there are other alternatives. It's a bad choice because those alternatives are better for kids and for society. And it's an unnecessary choice because research shows that good teaching—instruction that helps kids master basic skills and encourages deep understanding of math and language—actually produces higher test scores than narrowly teaching to the test.

I also agree with Matt that the solution is not to stop testing. Would anyone argue that Baltimore's elected officials and fourth estate should stop looking at crime statistics and putting pressure on the police system to improve public safety? Of course not. Any politician who argued they should stop doing that because it causes the police department to play tricks with numbers would be voted out of office (or should be). The key is to collect data and hold the system accountable while at the same time expecting the department to engage in good, authentic police work to improve public safety, rather than simply juking the numbers. And we should expect the same of school systems.

Of course, that raises some questions, too. Why are systems choosing to juke the numbers rather than doing their jobs more effectively? I would argue that some schools and districts do it because they believe that poor and minority kids really can't learn the math and language skills in question, so instead they help them game the tests without really mastering the content. Some are probably doing so out of ignorance: They've heard they are "being forced to teach to the test" and similar rhetoric so often that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy; I fear that many educators truly believe they have no other choices. In both cases, we should do more to "educate educators" that there are better alternatives and that those alternatives work just as well for poor and minority kids.

However, as some have argued over on Matt's site, other schools and districts might know there are alternatives, but feel forced to take shortcuts because they believe they lack the capital--human, material, intellectual--to work more effectively. For example, in the world of The Wire, school system leaders might have issued the test prep directive because they believe their teachers really are not capable of teaching math and reading very well. But even if that is the case, we should focus on that question and look to building capacity, rather than getting rid of tests and accountability, as the next frontier of public policy-making.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

AFT: He Who is Not the Enemy of My Enemy is My Enemy, Or Something.

AFTie Ed faults Education Sector's new Connecting the Dots about the Walton Family Foundation's support of the charter school movement for not being what it isn't--a report about Wal-Mart's anti-union activities. Why? Because, says Ed:

Wal-Mart attacks unions and those workers who want to form one. There is no reason to see their support for charter schooling as anything other than part of that attack.

Really? "No reason"? "Anything other"? There's basic aversion to empiricism here that runs throughout a lot of what gets written on the AFT blog. It's the main reason teachers unions are increasingly getting left out of real debates about education policy.

Look, Wal-Mart is, without a doubt, a stridently anti-union corporation. I think this is an inherently immoral position and Wal-Mart deserves pretty much all the blame it gets on this front. People have a right to organize and bargain collectively, whether you like it or not. Taking away that right is wrong, period.

So it's perfectly reasonable to wonder if Walton Family Foundation is pursuing an anti-union agenda through its philanthropic activities. It makes sense to use a gimlet eye in examining their motives and funding choices.

But having asked the question, you still have to answer it. Fairly, using actual facts and data. Particularly when it comes to an issue like charter schools, which are supported by people and organizations of all political stripes, including those who are as pro-union as they come. People should read the report and draw their own conclusions, but personally I find the idea that it's all just a stealth anti-union campaign to be ludricous and unserious. Choice, markets, entrepeneurship, innovation--these are really issues that deserve to be debated on their own terms. There's a certain narcissism to the belief that all your enemies think about is you.

Similary, AFTie Beth recently said of the North Carolina AYP growth model experiment:

What’s the point? Apparently, in NC, no schools made AYP just because of their growth model. It’s a lot of work for states and the feds to submit and analyze plans. If it is not helping, why continue with the process?

The point of growth models is to identify schools that are missing absolute performance standards but are making a lot of growth. What if the North Carolina didn't identify any such schools because there, you know, aren't any?

To say that it's not "helping" is to give the game away -- to AFTie Beth the issue isn't what's true or false. The issue is what helps the cause. If the facts support the cause, great. If they don't, that's their fault. This is why far too many education policy issues are hopelessly politicized, and why students get stuck with irrational systems as a result.

The Wire, Week Nine: Ain't No Jukin' It!

This week the writers ramped up the education subplot in a scene where Tilghman’s principal and vice principal order teachers to spend the next six weeks preparing students to take an upcoming standardized test. The word has come from downtown: Teachers are given test preparation materials and enjoined to drill students in how to answer “clone questions” that closely parallel the questions that will be on the test—and only the reading portion of the test, so Prez’s slowly improving math lessons must be put aside. Prez draws a parallel to his experience in the police department, where top brass, under pressure from politicians to improve public safety stats, periodically sent word to “juke the numbers” to create the impression that crime was going down and/or arrests were going up.

One way to read what’s happening is this: The No Child Left Behind law is putting pressure on educators to improve test scores, so they are “being forced” to substitute dumbed down, drill-and-kill test prep for real teaching and learning. That explanation has pretty much become part of the national discourse over the past five years. “Teach to the test”—It’s such a suggestive, seductive, even alliterative (four t’s!) phrase, one that critics of NCLB use quite effectively to conjure up outrage on demand. Fortunately for them, it’s also one bit of conventional wisdom that is very seldom questioned.

But it should be. Let’s break it down. In The Wire’s scenario, Prez and his colleagues are being told they must teach to the test, but not by No Child Left Behind. The directive is coming from the school’s administrators, who are, in turn, passing on a directive from downtown. Okay, perhaps the district administrators are being forced to force principals to force teachers to teach to the test. But that would be true only if one of the following conditions is true: 1) There are no other strategies Baltimore's schools could use to raise test scores, or, 2) If there are other strategies, teaching to the test is the only strategy that can raise scores sufficiently to meet the demands of NCLB.

But according to the best research available, neither of those conditions holds true. For example, researchers with the Consortium on Chicago School Research conducted a three-year study analyzing classroom assignments and student gains on standardized tests across more than 400 Chicago classrooms in almost 20 elementary schools. They found that students whose teachers assigned them more “authentic intellectual work”—tasks that called on disciplined inquiry, complex thinking, and deep conceptual learning—logged much higher test score gains than students whose teachers relied on “drill and kill” assignments normally associated with teaching to the test.

That means good teaching produces higher test scores than “teaching to the test”! Not coincidentally, it also produces better educated citizens equipped with a more powerful set of intellectual skills increasingly in demand in today’s workplace. Of course, a little test prep, such as helping students become "test literate" so they understand how tricky questions can prevent them from showing what they really do know, can be healthy in small doses. But there is no legitimate reason to spend months on the kind of soul deadening test prep materials Tilghman's teachers were given in this episode. (More on all this here.) Prez is right to question the school system’s choice about how to handle NCLB and standardized testing, even more than he realizes.

The police department has made a similar choice to juke the stats rather than to engage in authentic police work—such as the investigations conducted by the Major Crimes Unit over the first three seasons. (I won’t spoil it, but McNulty gets some screen time next week in small sub-plot that very effectively underlines the choice between juking the stats and doing real police work.) Like authentic instruction, authentic police work is better for better for the professionals as well as the citizens they serve, and better for the city of Baltimore as a whole because it promotes real improvements in the quality of life.

This makes for a much more complex storyline than the “forced to teach to the test” narrative that many viewers are reading into The Wire’s education subplot, and it leads to a much more compelling question: Why do these systems make the choice to game the numbers rather than promoting good teaching or good police work, especially when the latter will produce better results over the long term? To some extent, that is the single biggest overarching question The Wire has been exploring for the past four seasons. Unlike Tilghman’s teachers, the writers are unlikely to spoon feed us the answer.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Disappointment abounds

When I read the headline of this New York Times article (Leaving the City for the Schools, and Regretting It), I was excited – perhaps there was finally an article extolling some of the virtues of urban public schools. Yes, these schools have plenty of troubles and there are schools in NYC that any parent would run from (assuming they could), but there are also schools in NYC that provide a good education, and with a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds that can be an educational asset. Unfortunately, that is not what this article was about.

I won’t go on too long, since the article is clearly intended to fuel the anxieties and “beat the Joneses” impulses of upper-class parents. Suffice it to say that the concerns highlighted do not impact most people. For example, one parent’s pressing problem that “her husband’s Ford Focus had become something of a joke parked alongside his co-workers’ Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs, as the family has forgone fancy cars and vacations to afford the tuition [of an expensive private school].” Or the horror that “public schools, powerless to choose who fills the desks, often had less motivated students.” Which, by the way, is not true – those high property taxes parents in the article complain about work as a pretty effective filter for who gets to fill the seats at suburban high schools.

Is this 'trend' a new problem of failing suburban schools? I doubt it. It is more likely that there is a new echelon of parents looking to give their kids yet another edge over their neighbors, and that means forsaking public schools that would be the envy of most parents in this country. Any parent would do this. It is, in fact, very reasonable for parents to give their children the best education they can afford. The unfortunate thing about this article is that it feeds into the notion that public schools are inherently inferior - only meant for the average kid (and what parent would say that their kid is average?). And it wastes news space - those words could have been better utilized focusing on the similar plight of parents in the boroughs around Manhattan, where the choice can be much more difficult - to risk their child's future at a failing public school, or find financial aid and make sacrifices (beyond giving up their Mercedes) to give their kids a chance at a good education.

Britney Spears and College Rankings

I'm in Miami Beach this weekend, sitting out by the pool while my lovely wife attends a conference on utility regulation. It turns out that Britney Spears is also staying at our hotel (sans Fed-ex, naturally), which I guess makes me either famous or trashy by association, I'm not sure which.

As some of you may know, I've been spending a lot of time recently writing and talking about college rankings. This gist of the report we published on the subject: rankings--specifically the U.S. News & World Report rankings, have a big influence on how colleges and univerisities behave. And because the rankings are primarily based on wealth, fame, and exclusivity, they cause higher education institutions to focus on those things, instead of what's best for students. Rankings can't be eliminated--the public wants them, so someone will always publish them. Thus, we need new rankings based on better information, such as how much college students actually learn while they're in school.

Several critics have responded along the lines of, "The rankings aren't as influential as you think. Sure, universities pay attention, but they're not the be-all and end-all." I thought of this as I read the Miami Herald this morning, out by the pool (it's funny how they build a hotel next to the beach and then everyone sits by the pool, where you can't even see the beach), and came upon an article on the front page of the Metro section, beginning as follows:

University of Florida leaders have been so obsessed with rankings in college guide books that they initiated a national advertising campaign to persuade academics around the country to give the school more respect. But as the ads went out last year, the state's flagship university was racking up a multimillion-dollar debt in its College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, where most students take their core classes.

The fallout -- proposed cuts in math, English and other humanities teaching positions -- has critics arguing that UF is undermining its efforts to bolster its image. Cuts could lead to larger classes and the perception of diminishing quality, prompting the best professors to leave, critics say.''You're not going to become a top 10 school if you start gutting the humanities,'' said Donovan Hulse, a 32-year-old philosophy graduate student whose department is slated to lose a fourth of its grad student slots.

Actually, that's entirely wrong. You could gut the humanities 'til kingdom come and still become a top 10 school, because the rankings have nothing to do with the quality of education in the humanities, or anywhere else. The only real "academic" measure is a reputational survey, which is all about the research reputation of your faculty. As the article goes on to note:

T.K. Wetherell, the president of rival Florida State University, is promoting his own bold plan: to recruit 200 ''superstar'' professors within 10 years in an attempt to put the school in league with UF as a top research university.

How many of the those "superstars" attained that status because they're good at teaching? Without knowing anything about them, I'm confident that the number is, give or take a few, and accounting for the statistical margin of error, none.

I've also noted that the U.S. News rankings contribute to the endless escalation of college costs, because they're substantially based on how much money colleges spend. It doesn't really matter how they spend it, other than lowering class sizes, which is a crude measure with no proven link to learning at the collegiate level. The important thing is just that you get more money, and spend it somewhere.

Last week I made this point on the PBS Nightly Business Report, which also featured Brian Kelly, executive editor of U.S. News. He disagreed, saying, "We're not the problem." But here's what the University of Florida wants to do:

UF has argued that it cannot reach its own aspirations without a lot more money. President Bernie Machen has led the campaign among state university presidents to wrest power from the appointed Board of Governors and the Legislature to set the school's tuition -- and perhaps double it from its current $3,200 a year.

Maybe--just maybe--the rankings actually do have something to do with out-of-control increases in spending and tuition. Just a guess.

But the larger issue is that the U.S. News rankings, divorced as they are from the core educational mission of higher education, create strong incentives for colleges and universities to pursue unworthy goals--wealth, superficial attractiveness, and fame for fame's sake. That's what the rankings are based on, so that's what colleges try to acquire.

In other words, U.S. News makes colleges try to be like Britney Spears. As long as the rankings continue to be so influential, this pervasive and growing Spearsification of higher education is sure to continue.

Some of the Best School Films

Sid Davis died earlier this week. For folks who don't know, he produced some of the most popular "social guidance" films for youth in the 50s and 60s, also called "mental hygiene" films that praised the joys of conformity and domesticity and warned of the perils of drugs and reckless behavior anywhere and everywhere (on the road, on the bus and yes even in the lunchroom).

Davis' were low-budget films- most made for less than a grand- but he made enough money selling them to schools and police departments to keep making more and more of them. Some of the best include
Girls Beware in which a young girl, "Judy Miller", is murdered because she's careless about who she trusts (produced with the help of the Inglewood School District and Inglewood Police Department), only to be topped by Boys Beware, which actually came first, about a boy named Jimmy Barnes who also trusts a stranger who is "sick" ("you see he was a homosexual" and "one never knows when a homosexual is about- he may appear normal"). Davis was also big into the anti-drug message and although his films weren't as terrifically comedic as Reefer Madness, his Seduction of the Innocent (not to be confused with the more recent same-named song by KISS) is a pretty over the top account of a young girl whose experimentation with marijuana leads to addiction, death and destruction. Of course, the decade that followed its 1961 release is most known for drug use among youth, which makes you wonder about its effectiveness. And it describes the effect of pot as "everything speeds up to 100 miles per hour", which also clarifies that Davis was not himself experimenting with the drug. At any rate, Davis' films were seen by millions of public school kids in the 50s, 60s and 70s and were chock-full of societal ne'er-do-wells and blood and guts and violence. Reminding us that the good old days had its troubles too. As well as some great film-making.

The Wire, Week Eight: Does Not Compute!

A Wire-watching buddy tells me, “Man, I’d never teach in a city school. The eighth graders can’t even do fractions!” When I ask him why he thinks that is, he cites the usual litany of family and neighborhood challenges kids face in West Baltimore, the ones portrayed so vividly and heartbreakingly in The Wire itself. But the scene my friend was referring to illustrated what the real culprit is: Our schools often do a terrible job teaching math. When one of Prez’s students says he can’t complete the fractions worksheet because “we never did one-thirds,” Prez responds, “One-fourth, one-fifth, one-third: Follow the same steps.” He’s right in one sense: Certain steps will produce correct answers. But he’s doing nothing to address the much larger problem: Many of his students clearly have no grasp of what fractions are or what “doing arithmetic” with them really means. They've studied a set of steps, but they don't understand how those steps apply to different denominators or problems that don't involve food items.

To illustrate, let’s assume they were dividing fractions, e.g. problems like “10 / ½ =”. Most of the kids might recall from studying division by whole numbers that when you divide, you get a smaller number. Their elementary school teachers might even have encouraged them to check their work by looking to make sure their answer is smaller than the number they started with. But when you divide by a fraction, you get a bigger number, in this case 20. Instead of working with students to help them understand why, many teachers simply drill them in a rote, two-step procedure for dividing by fractions: “invert and multiply.” Students are asked to memorize the word “invert” and told that it means “to flip,” and then asked to memorize and practice those two steps. Sure, that produces the correct answer, but simply memorizing a procedure does little to develop real mathematical understanding. They’ve simply been drilled to follow a seemingly arbitrary set of steps that produces a counterintuitive result. No wonder they’re confused!

Math doesn’t have to be taught that way. In 1999 a young researcher named Liping Ma published a book that caused a huge stir in math education circles (though, sadly, very little buzz in the education policy arena). She found that Chinese teachers help their elementary students develop a much deeper conceptual understanding of math and offer them a broader repertoire of strategies for solving problems than do their American counterparts. That's partly because American teachers themselves tend to have a much shallower grasp of math concepts than Chinese teachers, despite spending more years in formal education to become a teacher. In fact, fewer than half of the American teachers in Ma’s study fully and accurately answered the problem “1¾ / ½ =”. It wasn't simply a matter of forgetting the steps but also a lack of conceptual understanding about what it means to divide by a fraction. Some teachers told her they divided 1¾ by 2 because they understood the problem as asking them to “divide something in half” rather than to figure out, say, how many halves there are in 1¾. One teacher admitted, “I can't really think of what dividing by a half means.” (Ma’s sample included only 21 American teachers, but others who have replicated her research with a larger numbers of teachers have found similar results.)

Ma’s book also sheds light on another perceptive element of that Wire scene. She found that poor conceptual understanding made it difficult for many American teachers to find helpful and accurate ways to represent fractions. U.S. teachers mainly used either food or money to represent fractions, while “those used by the Chinese teachers were much more diverse” and included many examples students would be familiar with from their daily lives, “such as what happens in a farm, in a factory, in a family, etc.” Recall that another of Prez’s students tells him she can’t do the fractions problems on the worksheet because they involve cars: “All that stuff we did in practice was about food!” Again, Prez's response isn't very helpful. He tells her it doesn't matter and to just “pay attention to the number.” Huh?

Such difficulties are not limited merely to teaching fractions in the upper elementary and middle grades; Ma documents how poor conceptual understanding can impede instruction in something as simple as subtracting two-digit whole numbers (e.g., 53 - 26 =). In fact, a hugely important study published last year (also summarized and discussed here) by several University of Michigan researchers found that teachers’ mathematical knowledge has a big impact on how much their students learn over the course of a year—even at the first grade level. They also documented that disadvantaged students—particularly minority youngsters—are more likely to have teachers with lower levels of mathematical knowledge and understanding, a finding they call “shameful.”

Although the full breadth of this problem and its implications have been largely ignored in policy circles, that might change soon. Liping Ma and Deborah Lowenberg Ball, one of the U. Michigan researchers, are both serving on the new, high-profile National Mathematics Advisory Panel. But getting traction won't be easy: This is an uncomfortable topic for many people, including teachers, who sometimes feel it amounts to “teacher bashing.”* Let's be clear: It’s the system that should come under fire. Teachers are themselves the products of the same shallow elementary math instruction they pass on to their students, and deficiencies in their mathematical understanding seldom get addressed later on, either during their time in ed schools or after they start teaching. In contrast, Ma says that Chinese teachers get lots of opportunities to build their math knowledge over the course of their careers. The good news? Another study by Ball demonstrated that “teachers can learn math for elementary school teaching in the context of a single professional development program.”

Of course, that would require a system that works thoughtfully to nurture knowledge and cultivate capacity. Ironically, says The Wire, Marlo and his colleagues are much better at doing those things in the system they run!

* Ball and a colleague discussed some of the negative feedback they’ve received for even conducting such research (e.g., testing teachers for research purposes is inherently wrong because it “de-professionalizes” them, etc.) in a must-read article for American Educator, the excellent magazine published by the American Federation of Teachers, last year.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Virtual Schools=Mainstream Reform?

I just returned from Plano, TX, where I spent the past three days with virtual school teachers, researchers, and program managers at the North American Council for Online Learning Virtual School Symposium. Virtual schools take a variety of forms, from district- or state-led schools that are primarily or entirely supplemental—offering students the option of taking one or more courses to supplement their traditional school experience—to fully online "cyber" schools.

I returned to Washington convinced that the growth in K-12 virtual schooling is even more dramatic than our recent Chart You Can Trust on state virtual schools detailed. And, I learned that growth is not the only reason that we need to pay attention.

Most interesting was the subtext underlying both the formal presentations and my informal conversations. If you think that virtual schooling is just about learning online, you've missed the real potential impact. While not explicit, it is clear that the technology is only a means that offers an opportunity to start from scratch and re-think many traditional assumptions. The end goal is school reform. Two anecdotes:

• In separate conversations with representatives from two different state-based programs, I learned how state-led virtual programs are exposing wide gaps in expectations for learning within a state. These program managers explained how students that were at the top of their class in their local schools were overmatched in courses at the statewide virtual school. It's hard to imagine a more concrete (and sad) example of accountability than when the virtual school teacher has to explain to the student and his/her parents that their ace student is woefully under prepared.


• Former classroom teachers, now managing one state's program, talked about the "culture change" required to teach in that state's virtual school: "In the online world, what they [the teachers] do is more transparent. There is an expectation that you can and will be observed....We will evaluate you....There is a quantitative goal for student achievement." Likewise, in the same presentation, a detailed program for initial online teacher preparation, mentoring, and professional development was also in place.

Many people have compared the virtual school movement to the charter school movement at a similar stage. While I was not involved in the early charter school movement, I can see parallels: The majority of persons I met this week were education entrepreneurs; there are fully-online "cyber" charter schools; and competition for funding is an issue. One lesson that the more experienced virtual school leaders understand is the critical need at this early stage to rigorously protect quality so that the field is not defined by its bad apples. Even the most ardent proponents concede that virtual schooling is still the "wild, wild, West."

But, there are also key differences that could allow the virtual schools to reach a higher level of impact than charters. While reaching scale is still difficult, it is much more possible in the virtual environment—Florida Virtual School may already offer more students classes than any charter management organization. And, choice can consist of a mouse click rather than a new school in a new place (and, as noted above, the comparison is very evident). Finally, the people leading and teaching in many of these programs are public school classroom veterans. And many of the new institutions are actually state- or district-run. These entrepreneurs have found a niche within the system. They are the ones talking about culture change—not union foes or voucher proponents. Very interesting.

Election Miscellany

Yesterday turned out to be an even bigger day than lots of pundits expected, with Democrats picking up 28 seats for a majority in the House of Representatives and a good chance at a majority in the Senate, too, if two races still in the balance come down the way it looks like they're going to. Dems also picked up 6 governorships. (btw, Mike Antonnucci is funny in re: wrong election predictions) DCEdublog has results for the D.C. races I mentioned Monday. Edspresso's got a run-down of races around the country they felt were particularly relevant to education. Ed at NCLBlog proclaims the defeat of all three state TABOR initiatives (but cut it out with the midwest-mocking, already!). CNN's got results for all races here.

Andy and Alexander Russo say the implications for education aren't much to talk about. I agree: a George Miller-led Ed-Workforce committee isn't going to eviscerate NCLB. Apparently Edspresso's Ryan Boots didn't get the message, though.

And, Joe Williams wonders why we close schools on election day. In D.C., at least, we didn't--yesterday was a school day for DCPS students. But most D.C. polling places aren't located in schools. As far as Joe's question is concerned, my guess is that it probably has to do with patronage, but also concerns about student safety with lots of random adults in a school and just general logistical hassels.

UPDATE: Ed had more to say this afternoon about TABOR (Ezra Klein also discusses TABOR over at TAPPED) and other state initiatives, including a failed "65% solution" initiative in Colorado, which reminds me that my former colleague Alexander Wohl has an American Prospect piece on the stupidity of the whole "65 % solution" idea.

Get Out the Vote

Most of the people I know in D.C. are so preoccupied with who'll control the House and Senate following tomorrow's election, you wouldn't even know that we're also voting on several important D.C. government races tomorrow. That's partly an artifact of political class transience, and also of Democratic dominance in D.C. politics that means most of the major D.C. government races are already decided. (Adrian Fenty will be the next mayor.) But tomorrow D.C. voters have a chance to decide on three very important non-partisan offices that are still very much up in the air. Voters city-wide are voting on school board president, and voters in wards 5, 6, 7 & 8 are voting for school board members to represent their school board districts (wards 5 & 6 are on district, and wards 7 & 8 are another). These races are important because the D.C. school board has substantial power to impact education for children in D.C. And this year the race is particularly important because DCPS is at a critical juncture: with more than a quarter of the city's kids in charters, troublingly poor academic performance, an ambitious but slow-moving reform plan from Superintendent Janey, and incoming Mayor Adrian Fenty proclaiming his intention to take over the schools, the new school board is going to face some serious challenges and major decisions. So, if you live in D.C., take a second away from the national races to learn about the school board race and cast an informed vote tomorrow. I can't tell you who to vote for (like you'd listen to me anyway), but I will suggest you heed the advice of the Washington Post on this issue.

Review!

This week's Washington Post Magazine features their semi-annual Education Review. The cover story relates the experience of African American students in Prince Edward County, Virginia, who were denied an education for several years in the 1960s when the county closed all its public schools as an act of massive resistance to Brown vs. Board of Education. Important reminder of how little space and time there really is between today and a shameful history of de jure segregation that denied opportunities to generations of African Americans. On a positive note, Jay Mathews tells how Montgomery County, Maryland, is using all day kindergarten to help close achievement gaps for disadvantaged youngsters early.

William Styron, 1925 - 2006

The main character in Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity is constantly mulling over and revising a series of personal Top Ten lists, most related to music: "Greatest Songs to Appear on Side One, Track One," etc. One of the reasons I enjoyed the book was the discovery that I'm not the only person who has these internal conversations. My personal music lists are pretty basic, of the "Top Ten Desert Island Albums" type. The more involved lists run toward baseball and, especially, writing: Best writers, non-fiction (Michael Lewis), essays and criticism (Adam Gopnik), graphic novels (Alan Moore, obviously), observation of pop culture (Chuck Klosterman), and so on.

But the most extensively considered list has always been in the prime category of Novelist. Different authors have come on and off as I've gotten older and my tastes have changed, but there have always been two constants: all of the writers were alive, and William Styron was always somewhere on the list. I decided that until I read a better book than "Sophie's Choice," he wasn't moving. I haven't, and neither has he.

So the news of his death last week, while not surprising, was still unavoidably sad. Few 20th century writers wrote with his elegance and power, and fewer still--particularly American writers in Styron's mid-century cohort--chose to apply their gifts to the wrenching moral questions that defined the age. Styron didn't produce a lot--for years, articles would suggest that he was working on a final novel based on his experiences as a Marine in World War II, but one always had the sense that it would never come. Now it never will, but what he did give us was more--much more--than enough.

I Couldn't Resist

I just love this, prompted by Erin's last post of course. Almost as much as I love the word "islandize", used most recently by NCAA President Myles Brand in remarks about his presidential task force report on D1 athletics while describing the fiscal "stress" that higher ed is facing. College sports needs to be more aligned with the academic pursuits of higher education, says the report. Even if it seems impossible, Charlie Brown, it's a goal worth all the energy it will take.

Never, ever, ever give up

I love stories like this one in today’s Washington Post about the Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Texas. While the name may conjure images of contraband cigarettes and a behind-bars drug trade, it’s, well, kind of about that. It’s about the fact that skills involved in setting up a complex, underground system for trading contraband items in jail may just be skills that are useful in setting up a successful, independent business.

The organization selects soon to be released inmates for an intensive business course, where they must complete assignments, are mentored by business executives, and eventually propose their own business plans. The program boasts a high success rate, including 93 percent employment, which is critical in preventing recidivism. The most heartening aspect of the program is the fact that it shows that these inmates, generally considered “undesirables” in society, are able to rise to the challenge and do the hard work necessary to succeed.

These programs serve as evidence that people (including students) respond to expectations - if we, as a society, expect former inmates to act like criminals, then that's likely what we'll get, but if we challenge ourselves to expect more, we might just get a group of people with the kinds of entreprenuerial skills our society relies on.

His spirit continues to drool...

Responding to this, Cato's Adam Schaeffer claims that

But the thing is, school choice through tax credits provides an education system more accountable to parents and the public than charters, voucher, or anything else.

Unfortunately, his own arguments undermine his case. In the next paragraph, he says:

Personal-use tax credits allow parents to spend their own money on schools that they choose . . . and school accountability to parents is the most effective kind of accountability. Donation tax credits let people choose the kinds of Scholarship Granting Organizations they think do the best job educating lower-income children. In both cases, the people with the most interest in holding schools accountable for results are the ones with the power to actually hold them accountable – parents and the people funding the schools.

But wouldn't tax credits actually weaken the incentives for donors to be serious about holding accountable the scholarship granting organizations they funded? Right now, people who donate to scholarship funds are doing so as acts of charity--they forfeit some other use of the money. But with a tax credit, they don't have to forfeit anything--if they get a dollar for dollar deduction in tax liability for their donation, the donation suddenly becomes free, thereby reducing its cost to the donor and his or her incentive to hold scholarship foundations accountable.

More significantly, Adam's point here acknowledges that the people who fund schools have a clear interest in holding those schools accountable. Guess what--when we're talking about education that's supported from public coffers, then the people funding the schools are all of us taxpayers, and we all have an interest in holding schools accountable for serving the public good. Adam might counter that we're not talking about education that's funded from the public coffers here, because education tax credits offer a subsidy on the tax side of the budget rather than the spending side--taxpayers get to choose how to use their own money. But it's still a publicly-supported subsidy for a specific behavior, and the difference between tax expenditures like education tax credits and government outlays on the spending side is more an accounting and timing difference than a practical one. In fact, the illusion that taxpayers/the public/the government isn't really paying for these scholarships or private school tuitions is one of the reasons I think that tax credits for private education are less desirable than flat-out vouchers, which make expenditures much more transparent.

Even if you don't buy the public interest in how kids educated on our dime are learning, there's still a case to be made here for a government accountability role in providing information needed to run a well-functioning education market place where parents and donors can make good decisions. Kind of like how you can buy whatever food you want, but the government mandates that all the packaged foods in the grocery store have comparable nutrition labels. As Kevin Kosar wrote recently on Edspresso, it's difficult for even a savvy parent to make sense of the information available on the performance of different schools. Good public accountability systems that provide comparable information for parents across available schools are essential to help parents make good decisions. Should accountability systems be designed to be more responsive to parent demands for information? Probably. But considering the angst with which middle-class suburban parents await test scores for their neighborhoods, I'd argue that there's a significant amount of parent demand even for the suboptimal test-based accountability information we have now.

I'm arguing this as a supporter of increased choice in publicly-supported education. I think families should have more freedom to choose the schools to which they send their kids and that a greater diversity of choices should be available to them. I don't care if you want to send your kid to a Montessori school, a single-sex school, a military school, a religious school, or a billingual Esperanto immersion school. But I do care, as a taxpayer, that schools using my tax money meet basic health and safety standards, don't discriminate, and teach kids sufficient math and verbal/literacy skills to contribute to the economy and have a decent shot in life. That's why we need both parent choice and public accountability. And it's why education tax credits just don't cut it.

Speaking of Mayoral Control

WaPo reports on what D.C. residents think of incoming Mayor Adrian Fenty's ambition to take over DC's troubled school system. The general verdict: people want change, so they're down for pretty much anything, but some are skeptical Mayoral control will fix the problem.

DC PTA president Darlene Allen sure doesn't: "It's not the structure that causes the problem, it's the people who are being elected," she told the Post. But if DC school board politics play out in such a way that either the people voters have to choose from are not very good or voters consistently pick people who don't run the board well, doesn't that at some point suggest a broader structural problem with how we select our school boards and maybe the need for alternatives?

More Spitzer

NYT today looks at education issues in the NY state gubernatorial race between Democrat Eliot Spitzer and Republican John Faso. Both support raising the cap on charter schools in the state and extending Mayor Michael Bloomberg's control over the NYC schools. But they disagree about how much more money the state should give to NYC schools in response to the CFE lawsuit. Spitzer wants to give NYC and other poor districts $8.5 billion more a year. Faso doesn't.

Credit where Credit's Due?

Ryan at Edspresso and Adam Schaeffer at Cato-at-Liberty are both drooling over NY gubernatorial candidate Elliot Spitzer's support for school choice. Joe Williams also notes that Albany, NY, charter founder Thomas Carroll is psyched about Spitzer's school reform cred. I'm quite happy to see a prominent Democrat like Spitzer embracing charter schools, but I can't share Ryan and Adam's enthusiasm about his support for education tax credits.

It particularly troubles me to see these tax credits being hyped by Schaeffer as a "third way" alternative to vouchers. If you're a moderate on these issues, you should actually find tax credits more troubling than straight-out vouchers, mainly because tax credits for private education have even less public accountability for how public funds are used than do vouchers. The second issue is a more wonky one, but in general, doing education spending indirectly through tax credits is less transparent and more complicated than spending funds for vouchers outright would be. There's also distribution: Unless tax credits are refundable and capped, you wind up subsidizing affluent people who are already sending their kids to private schools rather than expanding educational options for disadvantaged families. Basically, the only reason to go this route is to get around Blaine Amendments or because it's somewhat less politically controversial (for all the wrong reasons) than regular vouchers.

There could be a silver lining in all of this, however: The last attempt to create an education tax credit in New York got transformed, for political reasons, into a broad child tax credit. In contrast to education-specific tax credits, generalized child tax credits (particularly if they are refundable for low-income families) are a good idea, because they provide a general supplement to parents' incomes that they can use to help defray the costs of childrearing in whatever way best serves their families' unique needs (including in the early years when children are particularly costly and parents' incomes are often low). In these days of stagnating incomes, parents, particularly lower on the income scale, need all the help they can get.

Tarnishing a Silver Bullet?

It's become sort of a truism in education that parent involvement is critical to student achievement--But what does that mean when a parent works two jobs to make ends meet, doesn't speak English well-enough to communicate with school officials, or has little or no formal education herself? That's the question Joseph Berger asks in an NYT article about the obstacles to parent involvement for Latino immigrant families in Newburgh, N.Y. It's not that these parents don't care about their kids' education. Many of them came here in part to give their children a better life and have high aspirations for them, but lack skills and resources to give them the educational supports schools that serve middle-class students often take for granted.

Cultural perspectives about the roles of educators and parents are also an issue, notes researcher Pedro Noguera. "In many Latin American countries there’s a tendency to defer to authorities in school, an assumption that educators know what they’re doing.” Affluent white parents often monitor children's progress closely and don't hesitate to advocate with school authorities on their children's behalf. But “many immigrants parents don’t understand that this is a role they need to play,” instead defering to educators as experts. This is also true for working-class and poor parents more generally, as sociologist Annette Lareau demonstrates in her book Unequal Childhoods. The conflict between schools' expectation that parents should act like affluent and middle-class parents do, and lower-class parents' own views on what appropriate parental involvement means, can create tension between parents and schools, further pushing parents away and leading students to view school as an alien culture hostile to their own. No one denies that parents are incredibly important, but it's unrealistic to expect low-income parents to start acting like more affluent parents. Parent involvement isn't a silver bullet.

The Wire Week Seven: A Man's Got to Have a Code

The signal moment in this week's episode of The Wire came during the prison exchange between Omar and Bunk. Omar's been framed by Marlo for killing an innocent citizen. Bunk knows that Omar only robs and murders drug dealers, but begins by saying "Hey, even if you didn't kill this woman you've killed lots of other people, so that's justice one way or the other." To which Omar responds, "If Omar didn't kill that woman, then someone else did," and moreover, "A man's got have a code."

Like so much on The Wire, this has meaning on multiple levels, one related directly to the characters at hand, and one resonant with the larger themes that the creators are developing this season.

In the first sense, Omar is talking about the nature of manhood. To Omar, a man can't be a man unless he lives by a code. The nature of the code itself isn't the issue, the important thing is giving the code fidelity, whatever it may be. In other words, nothing is more important than integrity. Omar and Bunk, who came from the same neighborhood and went the same high school, took opposite paths in life, but they share this core belief. Omar knows this about Bunk, and thus it's no surprise later in the episode to see Bunk trying to get Omar transfered to a safer jail and suggesting to the other homicide detectives working the case that Omar might not be guilty. Bunk's code, like Omar's, is rooted in a sense of justice: bad people deserve to be punished. But Bunk also believes that justice demands truth, and that truth can't be suberted to punish the wicked.

That's why the virtuous characters in The Wire like Bunk and McNulty respect Omar while despising many of their colleagues--like Omar, they believe that integrity matters most. Contrast Omar with the corrupt police officer who steals from criminals, children, even poor Bubbles. He's a minor, one-dimensional character; his only purposes is to serve as the anti-Omar, a man defined by his lack of integrity. Rationally speaking, one could argue that he's still doing more to make the world a better place than Omar, a murderer and a thief. But let's be honest--if he and Omar met in a dark alley, which of the two would you, the viewer, really want to walk away? I think you'd pick Omar, and not just because he's more interesting to watch on TV.

Omar's credo can also be interpreted a very different way: codes are unavoidable. A man's got to have a code in the sense that he can't not have one. It's the nature of the human condition to look for rules to live by. The corner boys rushing toward some kind of manhood in The Wire are all struggling to define themselves. The misadventures of rookie teacher Prezbo and the vignettes of poorly managed public schools represent only a small facet of this season's focus on education. The much larger issue is how children growing up on the streets of west Baltimore internalize social codes that have been warped and degraded by the social anarchy caused by the drug trade. That's really what Colvin and the professor are after--understanding the codes that cause students like Namond to be who they are, and changing them before they become written in blood and stone.

Suffer the Children II

This NYT article about child trafficking and forced labor in Africa is incredibly sad. UNESCO reports that youngsters in Sub-Saharan Africa are the least likely of anywhere in the world to attend primary education. The share of Sub-Saharan youngsters attending elementary schooling has increased 27% since 1999, but one third of youngsters still do not attend school, often because they must work or cannot afford school fees.

While this child's story is heartbreaking on a human level, there's a broader problem here than individual suffering. When very young children must work instead of learning basic skills like reading, writing and math; when their health and nutrition are sacrificed because their families lack adequate provisions for them or value them less than adults, you essentially have a society that is cannibalizing its future--physically, cognitively and psychologically. The labor these small children provide is not particularly efficient, and it comes at severe costs in terms of their long-term potential as workers and contributors to their society. These children's parents are in an untenable situation with few choices, but the choices they are making lock generations in a vicious cycle of ignorance and poverty. One of the long-term benefits of agricultural advances and industrialization was that, despite some serious abuses of child labor to begin with, eventually the resulting productivity gains allowed adult family members to support the family without child labor, freeing children to attend school, allowing the development of a more educated population, which increased productivity, raised living standards, and led to a virtuous cycle of more education, productivity and better living standards.* Improving basic health, education and nutrition for children in the developing world is critical.

(*As Jonathan Chait points out in the latest New Republic, this cycle has seemed in some ways to be a bit less virtuous of late in the U.S., since the wages of productivity gains in recent years flow almost entirely to the very richest Americans, while everyone else's living standards stagnate. But that doesn't detract from the broader point that getting the virtuous cycle started by equipping kids with basic skills is an important first step to building decent lives for people.)

Don't Breathe Easy

NYT reports on a new study looking at Bronx schoolchildren's exposure to pollution and its impact on their asthma. The picture is not pretty. In the Bronx, there are 9.3 asthma-related hospital admissions annually per 1,000 children. And in Harlem, which has one of the country's highest asthma rates, a 2003 study found one in four children has asthma. Nationally, asthma is the leading cause of missed days of school, accounting for nearly 15 million missed school days annually. Asthma rates are increasing. And, disadvantaged kids, because of lack of access to health care, poor housing, and living in polluted urban areas, are among those who experience the most severe consequences from asthma, exacerbating achievement gaps.

Negative consequences from asthma are particularly frustrating because a lot of asthma-related problems could be prevented if more children had proper preventative health care to manage their asthma. Teaching kids to manage their asthma is relatively cheap. Uninsured kids winding up in the emergency room when they have an asthma attack is expensive. The costs of missed school days and difficulty learning because you can't breathe are harder to estimate, but kids and society pay for them as well.

Professional College Football

Selena Roberts' column($) about big-time college football in the NYTimes yesterday echoes a piece George Will wrote last week, each relying heavily on a recent letter from Rep. Bill Thomas, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to the president of the NCAA. Thomas wants to know why, exactly, it's okay for tax-exempt colleges and universities to be running massive, for-profit professional sports leagues. It's a good question.

I have nothing against pro sports. Like lots of people, I'm a big fan, particularly of the professional football team owned and operated by my grad school alma mater, Ohio State. The Buckeyes are kicking eleven kinds of butt this year and I'm enjoying every minute of it. When we spank Michigan next month on our way to the national title game, it will be a great day for all right-thinking Americans.

At the same time, in the 11 years since I left Columbus I've been treated to a regular diet of scandals and unsavory reports of how the university has consistently bent and broken its policies and values in support of the franchise. Academic misconduct, grading scandals, riots led by drunken fans, ex-players arrested upon being found driving erratically in a truck loaded with a bullet-proof vest, a loaded AK-47 type assault rifle, three loaded handguns, a hatchet, and an open, half-drunk bottle of vodka--the list goes on.

Every one of these incidents embarrasses the university and stains its good name. And if could trade them in for fewer wins on the field--if a clean program meant more Saturdays on the receiving end of the 44-0 drubbing OSU gave Minnesota last weekend--I'd do it in a minute.
There's a place for pro football teams that put winning above all else: the NFL.

The real question is why universities don't see things the same way, why they routinely sell their higher ideals and institutional values for the fame, money, and thrills that go with big-time sports. In one sense the question answers itself -- fame, money, and thrills have always tempted people, and some people are always too weak to resist. But the answer also lies with the complex, insular nature of the institutions themselves.

Colleges and universities do much more than teach. They provide community and a powerful sense of shared identity in a world where those things can hard to come by. Sports augment and focus that process. There's something undeniably great about sitting in a stadium with a 100,000 other people that all want what you want, that for at least a few hours see the world just like you. The problem is when those shared desires are so in conflict with the basic mission of education that we all end up coming together to support something that shames us in the end. As long as colleges continue own pro sports franchises, the danger of that will be hard to avoid.

Advising Mr. Fenty

Writing in the Washington Post Outlook section, T. Robinson Ahlstrom, headmaster of Washington Latin School, a recently-opened public charter school in the District, asserts that "DCPS is dead. It's time to bury it," by replacing the elected Board of Education with a NYC-style Department of Education Accountable only to Mayor-to-be Fenty.

I don't disagree with Ahlstrom that DCPS' failure to educate many children is a tremendous tragedy for these children individually and the city as a whole. I'm not sure I buy his argument, though, that political will alone is the problem here. Suppose someone, say, a newly elected Mayor, had the political will and political capitol to enact whatever agenda he sought to renew the public schools in DC. (This would be an incredible feat because so many entities--Congress, the city Council, the CFO, Board of Education, etc.--are involved in making decisions about DC's governance, but it might actually be possible given the current dismay with DCPS' performance and the fact that Superintendent Janey seems to be losing some of his luster.) Even then, there's still the issue of what to do.

And, when you're dealing with a system that has DC's problems, that's not an easy question. There's nothing wrong with Ahlstrom's ideas (heck, I proposed moving DC's public school facilities into the control of an independent agency all the way back here), although I do think he overstates the case a bit when it comes to DCPS' financial inefficiency and teachers unions (and I'd love to see Leo Casey take him on about the latter set of arguments). But I doubt they're enough.

There are basically two schools of thought on how to fix DCPS and other troubled urban school systems. One is a sort of radical decentralization approach, which argues that the thing to do is to dramatically cut bureacracy, radically constrain the authority of school boards or central administration, give school site managers control over their budgets and schools, encourage and foster the growth of charter schools and other autonomous options, and push existing schools to become more charter-like. Paul Hill's portfolio model is something along these lines. This is particularly appealing in a place like DC, where 25% of the students are already in charter schools. The other idea is much more centralized. It focuses on centralizing and coordinating curriculum, professional development, and other key activities so that they are aligned across the system.

These two alternatives seem opposite, but they are not entirely at odds. The NYC efforts, for example, with which Mr. Fenty seems quite enamored, contain elements of both. As will, likely, any effective approach for DC. Certainly, expanding the number of high-performing charter schools, creating a more hospitable atmosphere for them, and giving more autonomy and budgetary control to better-performing DCPS schools would be a positive step. But the performance of many DCPS schools (as well as rapid principal turnover in DCPS) doesn't inspire confidence that their leadership should be given more autonomy. At least in the short to medium run, addressing the problems in these schools will require some sort of central bureaucracy that can align standards and curriculum in these schools, diagnose and address problems, and provide high-quality leaders and teachers. At a minimum, some sort of central leadership needs to make sure that the district's most basic systems--things like payroll, procurement, student data collection--function properly for these schools. There's also a critical central role for addressing DC's special ed crisis. Making the trains run on time won't improve student achievement, but if teachers and principals are spending all kinds of time trying to work their way around basic operational issues, that's a huge barrier to improving student learning.

The Williams administration was successful in addressing a lot of these issues elsewhere in the DC government, so capacity on these issues exists in the city, and perhaps moving control of DCPS to the Mayor's office can lead to progress here. But there are two concerns. The first is churn. The District's educational system has suffered from incredible instability in the past decade. It's been governed by an elected school board, the federally-appointed control board, and a hybrid appointed-elected school board. It's had seven superintendents during that time period. With this kind of governance and leadership turmoil, is it any wonder not many improvement efforts gained traction or produced results for DC's kids? One reason that DC's charter schools, on average, are doing better than DCPS schools is that the best charter schools have actually had a lot more stability in DCPS. In his book Spinning Wheels, AEI's Rick Hess writes about the dangers of reform churn, a never-ending cycle of reform efforts in urban school districts that are abandoned before they are even fully implemented, let alone have a chance to succeed. Shifting control of the schools to the Mayor would create tremendous turmoil and churn. That's not to say it may not be a good idea, but the potential benefits need to be weighed against the costs of churn, and the people Fenty selects to manage the process need to strive to reduce the negative impacts of churn.

The second danger is that governance changes can create the appearance of change without really improving anything. Giving the Mayor control of the schools is not in itself a good reform strategy. It's what he does with the control that matters. And there are a lot of good things a Mayor can do, like better connecting education and other social services in the District to address the many health, family, and other problems kids carry with them to school.

A lot of what needs to happen to improve schooling in DC is not flashy, bullet-pointable, initiatives. A lot of it is pretty basic, day-to-day stuff: making the trains run on time, hiring and developing good people, holding people accountable, getting a good curriculum, sticking with it and refining it to make it work.

Look For Those Lights Tonight

A week or so ago InsideHigherEd.com posed the question: Football is everything?

The Nike ad of the same name (sin question mark) doesn't just assure us that yes, football is everything but also reminds us of some of our finest stereotypes about student athletes and high schools. Classrooms filled with young strong men garbed in game-day uniforms (it's not clear that there are students in the class who are not football players) who sit disrespectfully with their feet up in class and who know to expect special treatment since it is, after all, game day. These are mostly young black men who are waltzing down the hall, giving high fives and flirting with a come-hither Hollywood hot blond girl. All distractions cast aside for the big game, of course, before which this team of young men gather to pause for prayer. They are then victorious in a stadium that looks more like FedEx field than a high school field and is packed with cheering fans with signs and face make-up.

All of this under those Friday Night Lights. Yes, NBC has managed to make a longer version of this ad with its "The OC meets Odessa,Texas" teen drama where the coach doesn't teach any classes at the school ("football coaching is more than a full time job" quips the wife)and the girls bake cookies for their assigned star players. The show, by the way, does not air on Friday night (maybe because it would take us away from making the big game?).

Also, read Sara's earlier post on single sex. Because it's important and worth reading, not because it relates to football. Although if we DO go single sex, this may change the cookie-baking rules.

International Perspective

A new UNESCO report looks at educational issues internationally and finds progress but lots of room for growth. About 86 percent of primary-school aged children are enrolled in school, and Sub-saharan Africa, which has the lowest rate of youngsters attending primary school, increased primary school enrollments 27 percent between 1999 and 2004. Progress is also being made in gender equity, with 94 girls now enrolled in school internationally per 100 boys, up from 92 in 1999. But too many children still lack access to school or fail to complete their schooling, and one-in-five adults internationally lacks basic literacy skills--two thirds of those lacking these skills are female. The report also pays particular attention to early childhood care and education, and offers examples from many countries.