Why Is It So Important That American Students Learn a Foreign Language?

I ask this after reading the summary of the new Time magazine cover story, "How to Build a Student for the 21st Century." In quoting the chairman of UPS it says that country needs:

workers who are "global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages" -- not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.

Now, I'm not against global literacy, being sensitive to foreign cultures, etc. I think they're important. But I'm not sure that means it's a problem that only half of high school students are taking a foreign language. I base this on what is admittedly the worst of all sample sizes of one: myself. I took French for six years, starting in the seventh grade and going all the way through high school. In retrospect, it was pretty much a waste of time. I've long since forgotten most of it, and what I remember has been useful only when travelling in French-speaking countries, of which they aren't very many.

Not that I think studying language is a waste of time. I just would have been better off spending that time studying this language, doubling up on English literature, writing, rhetoric, etc. I know that students in other countries around the world are generally much more likely to study multiple languages. But that's partially a function of geography--places like Europe are much more multi-lingual. And it's partially because they're not here. If there was a huge country somewhere else that dominated the world's economy, culture, and commerce, I'd want to learn their language. But I live in that country, so I don't have to. English has become the world's lingua franca. I once stood in line in a Parisian department store behind a German tourist arguing with French saleswoman about the price of a purse. They bickered in English--it was the only language they could both speak. I can see how foreign languages are important if you're running a huge multinational corporation like UPS, but that's not exactly a typical case.

None of this means we should stop teaching foreign languages in public schools. It seems like an important choice to offer, and it wouldn't make sense to shut people off from the opportunity. All else being equal, students are undoubtedly better off knowing multiple languages than just one. But there are lots of things they're better off knowing than not knowing, the question is which of those things are most important. If foreign languages go onto that list, something else has to come off. It's not clear to me what that should be.

The only exception I could see is Spanish, which is spoken by a large and growing number of Americans. If students were required to take a least a few years of Spanish, they'd have a stronger connection to many of their fellow citizens, as well as most of the rest of the Western hemisphere. They'd also have a good jumping off point into other romance languages. That seems like a more logical policy than saying that students should be required to study any foreign language in-depth, but not saying what that language should be.

KIPPing up with the Joneses?

Conor Clarke at TNR considers whether or not selection bias accounts for KIPP's impressive academic results. The allegation that KIPP and other high-performing charter schools "skim" off higher-performing students from the public schools is pretty much as old as the charter movement itself and a lot of evidence suggests it's far from accurate. But lately an interesting spin on this argument--the assertion that the now well-known success of KIPP and other high-flying charter networks has caught the attention of more engaged parents and resulted in more higher-performing kids applying to these schools--has been popping up in lots of places, and deserves some attention.

First, neither the original skimming allegation nor more recent concerns suggests that the "above average" kids these schools might be attracting aren't still disadvantaged, predominantly minority kids who are generally below grade level academically. We're not talking about affluent kids here. We're talking about kids who may be above the average for disadvantaged kids because they have parents who have slightly more cultural capital and are slightly more engaged in or savvy about their kids' education than the average disadvantaged urban parent. Like Ezra, I'm not sure that's something to get too upset about. Sure we might feel that kids with the least-engaged parents need intensive, high-quality KIPP-style schooling more than those with more engaged parents. But engaged low-income parents are making the effort to send their kids into schools like KIPP because they know many of the other educational alternatives available suck and often present real risks to their kids. Considering all the ways our economy and urban organization make to unnecessarily difficult for engaged, low-income urban parents to raise their kids well, shouldn't we be cheering anything that helps them out?

Schools like KIPP are never going to attract substantial numbers of middle-class or affluent applicants. Partly that's because of where KIPP schools choose to locate and the population of students they currently serve. But it's also a matter of what I call (probably somewhat inaccurately) "aesthetics." I know several education types (all middle-class or affluent professionals) who admire what KIPP does but admit that some aspects of KIPP--the level of disciplinary regimentation, the explicit teaching of visual tracking (sp?)--make them uncomfortable, and that they wouldn't choose to send their kids to a KIPP school. They know that KIPP works, but it's not really to their tastes. I think that's probably going to be the case for most middle-class parents. As Paul Tough wrote in the NYT Magazine, kids who attend KIPP need the kind of discipline and explicit teaching of cultural skills it provides because of differences in childrearing practices and attitudes between middle-class and low-income families. But because KIPP is designed specifically to serve the needs of kids whose families don't tend to practice a middle-class approach to childrearing, it's probably not going to appeal to (or necessarily be a good fit to the needs of) families that do practice middle-class childrearing behaviors.

Finally, imagine that we're not talking about KIPP or a charter school at all, but a run-of-the-mill public school, one which is serving its disadvantaged, minority students so well that middle-class and affluent non-minority families start trying to send their kids there. Would we see this as a problem? I think not. Instead, we'd see it as good evidence the school is delivering a high-quality education. We'd also probably be pleased to see greater economic and racial integration that many folks believe can contribute to improved outcomes for disadvantaged kids. So why would it be a problem if the same thing were occurring in a charter school?

Starlets: The Real Achievement Gap

Slate recently published "a rambling, semi-literate" (in the words of the NY Post's Page 6, which broke the story) e-mail sent by starlet Lindsay Lohan to 18 of her closest friends and lawyers. A sample:

I am willing to release a politically/morally correct, fully adequite letter to the press if any of you are willing to help.

Simply to state my opinions on how our society should be educated on for the better of our country. Our people...

Also because I have such an impact on our younger generations, as well as generations older than me. Which we all know and can obviously see.

While I'm psyched to learn about Ms. Lohan's interest in improving the education of our society, I can't help but wonder if there might be some serious gaps in her own. It appears there's some doubt of whether Ms. Lohan, or simply someone claiming to be her, actually wrote this story. Count me skeptical, anyway.

But if Lohan did write it, this is her second rather curious epistolary episode in less than a month, following a similarly confusing, though clearly heartfelt, letter of condolence to the family of the late director Robert Altman, who passed away in late November. Lohan had appeared in his final film, A Prairie Home Companion. Both letters are rife with sentence fragments, weak in organization, and suggest that in addition to misspelling "adequate" Ms. Lohan is also somewhat confused about what the word means.

I don't mean to make fun--heaven knows I've made my share of embarrassing gramatical and spelling errors in the webpages of this blog. But I am deeply concerned about the apparent and troubling "starlet crisis" within our education system. Clearly we need a No Starlet Left Behind Act, stat. In the meantime, I'm suggesting that Ms. Lohan could benefit from some supplemental educational services. Rachel and our sweater model could certainly whip her writing into shape, and I bet I can think of some male writers with mad verbal skillz who might rise to the challenge.

Schoolhouse Rocks

AFT's launching a new initiative to draw attention to decrept and overcrowded condition of too many of America's public school buildings and urge policymakers to invest in renovating and building new, adequate* public school buildings. Good work, guys and gals! School facilities are an issue near and dear to my heart, and one on which I've written several articles. The Clinton administration put a lot of effort into trying to establish federal help for states and school districts for school construction, but the issue has pretty much disappeared from the public radar since then. So I'm really glad to see the AFT taking up the school construction. I think their recommendation to incorporate a "learning environment index" into NCLB is a little silly, and I think there's more room for innovative thinking about how to help states and school districts pay for buildings than they talk about here, but these are minor quibbles. It's an important issue, so check out what they're doing.

BTW, one of the complaints that seems to come up a lot from the teachers AFT surveyed about problems with their school facilities is the prevalence of rats and mice in many school buildings. Jelly, who's still waiting for her call from NYC, now expands the offer of her services to children and schools throughout our great nation.

*Lindsay: Note spelling.

Score One For The Aardvark

In researching English-language learners I checked the What Works Clearinghouse- our Dept of Ed's "central and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education". They list ELL as one of the WWC's areas of focus.

Topping the list of the four studies that meet all of the WWC's standards for sound research on ELL students was a single study on Arthur, the 8-year aardvark that appears for 30 minutes each morning on PBS.

The study involved 108 kindergarten students who were randomly assigned to watch 54 episodes of Arthur or its competitor Between the Lions, another PBS show that features a family of lions that reads together.

Finding: Aardvark does a better job of teaching English to English-language learners than the family of lions.

Personally, I like Arthur, even if my 2 1/2 year old prefers the lions and now thinks that "aardvark" is another word for "big mouse with glasses". So i'm happy to know that we have research that proves it's what works, at least for ELL kids. But I wonder just how many teachers are grappling with the difficult choice of which television programs they should show their ELL classes.

At a cost of roughly 25 million dollars (from 2002-2006), the WWC, described on its website as "a decision-making tool" that "helps the education community locate and recognize credible and reliable evidence to make informed decisions", features an aardvark among its most worthwhile national evidence of what works in education.

Score one for the Aardvark.

Boys and Girls: A Blast from the Past

Washington Post Magazine celebrates its 20th birthday this week with an issue of excerpts from noteworthy articles it's published over the past two decades. Interesting stuff, from dispatches from war zones in Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, and Iraq; to the Monica Lewinsky and Jessica Cutler scandals; to the Great Zucchini. But one 1993 article in particular caught my eye with its subtitle: "The trouble with being the smart girl."

The article, a profile of an incredibly smart and academically successful high school senior named Elizabeth Mann, was written at the peak of the early 1990's "girl crisis," following the 1992 publication of the American Association of University Women report How Schools Shortchange Girls, and it has most of the hallmarks of the girl crisis genre. There are the opening paragraphs, in which Elizabeth waits patiently to get a word in during class while her more aggressive male peers interrupt and ignore her efforts to speak (or course, when she's finally able to speak, she offers the right solution to the question they've been hashing out). There's the obligatory reference to research that places Elizabeth's story in national context:

Every year, every month, every week seems to bring another study detailing how dismal things are for females in math and science and how they need to be encouraged. One study says that the number of women going into either field is "disproportionately low." Another says that "gender differences in science achievement are not decreasing but increasing." Another says that although girls have as much ability as boys, they often start developing sour attitudes toward math and science in middle school and soon lose all interest. Others say that's because in classrooms boys dominate, that girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong, that eventually girls reach the point where they not only don't do well but decide they're incapable.

On and on the studies go, endlessly on, all making the same points about how lousy things are for females. Math, it seems, eventually becomes nothing more than a skill to balance a checkbook, while science, horrible science, becomes a nauseating memory of formaldehyde and some frogs.

There's the description of how Elizabeth's school, a magnet math and science program at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, is trying to foster girls' interest and achievement in math:

[The math and science magnet program] had been structured to mirror a boy's emotional development, he realized, which in many ways was at odds with a girl's. For instance, an early emphasis on physics, rather than life sciences, was something many of the girls said they didn't like. They also didn't like the strong emphasis on using computers. "Why?" Haney remembers asking a girl one day as they looked at some boys in the computer lab who were busy typing away. "They like it," he said. "They'll sit there all day." "Yeah," the girl said, "but look at the social skills of those boys."

So the program was recast to seem a little friendlier toward girls -- competition was de-emphasized, group work was stressed -- and by the time Elizabeth arrived four years ago, things were humming nicely along. The number of girls still hadn't come close to 50 percent (and hasn't so far), but at least the migration had stopped.

And then there's the emotional fallout of "being the smart girl" for Elizabeth--her sense of insecurity (in contrast to the apparently confident boys) and nagging questions about her own intelligence and achievements, as well as a fair amount of emotional brutality from male peers who resent her success.

"I feel like 'The Girl' in the class. It's something I'm very conscious of, almost every minute in there." She says, "I have a certain fear that somehow when I'm in that class, I'm this impostor who doesn't really understand."

The only thing that's missing is a dire story about depression, an eating disorder, promiscuity, substance abuse or self-mulitation. In fact, Elizabeth is "obliging" and "obedient," seemingly well-adjusted and "has never smoked a cigarette nor drunk the first drop of alcohol, rarely fights with her parents and doesn't yell at her younger brother."

***
Having spent a lot more time than I ever intended to reading, writing and talking about the "boy crisis" that has recently supplanted the girl crisis in the public and journalistic imagination, I couldn't help but be struck by the both the similarities and contrasts between this "girl crisis" article and many of the "boy crisis" pieces I've been reading lately. The 1993 article told us that: "girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong." Compare that to Newsweek's boy crisis cover story earlier this year:

Middle-school boys will do almost anything to avoid admitting that they're overwhelmed. "Boys measure everything they do or say by a single yardstick: does this make me look weak?" says Thompson. "And if it does, he isn't going to do it."

(Would it be too radical if I suggest that everybody, regardless of gender, really dislikes and tries to avoid appearing wrong, foolish or weak?)

The section on how Montgomery Blair tried to make its school more "girl-friendly" in the early 1990s also has eerie similarities with proposals to make schools more "boy-friendly" today. Both suggest that boys are more competitive but girls prefer cooperation and group projects, and that girls like people (or at least living critters) while boys prefer objects and computers. The difference is that while Montgomery Blair added group work and downplayed competition to attract girls, schools are now being urged to do the opposite in order to better serve boys.

Most significantly, both the boy crisis and girl crisis stories seem to rely heavily on rather dubious research and anecdotal reports about individual boys and girls whose experiences, while they make for compelling narrative, are often not representative. Today the girl crisis issues that garnered so much attention in the 1990s are often dismissed as wrongheaded analysis based on bad research that has since been debunked, or folks say that the achievement gains girls have made mean whatever problems there were have been resolved. Reading this 13-year-old article, I couldn't help but wonder if, 13 years from now, we'll see today's boy crisis hype largely the same way.

But there are contrasts between this article and the boy crisis stories that catch my eye, too. Most notably, it's no coincidence that Elizabeth Mann is an extremely high-performing--by all accounts exceptional--young woman. Much of the efforts to address the girl crisis in the 1990s seemed to focus on opening up opportunities for the highest-performing young women. To some extent, this makes sense: There have been real ceilings placed on women's opportunities and achievements (and in some places there still are) that need to be shattered. If you think it's important to build the next generation of women leaders and to make sure women have key leadership roles in politics, business, the sciences, it makes sense to focus on encouraging high-aptitude girls to do into these fields. In this respect, though, the boy crisis and girl crisis conversations are radically different. The boy crisis, to the extent it exists, is about the problems of a subset of low-performing boys--particularly but not exclusively low-income, African American and Hispanic boys--who do seem to be disproportionately concentrated in the lowest portions of the achievement distribution and who as a result of this low-performance aren't obtaining the basic skills and knowledge they need to make a decent life for themselves in the mainstream economy today.

Both the boy crisis and girl crisis narratives have considerable flaws, particularly when they're cast as broad, dramatic social problems that impact virtually every adolescent member of a particular sex. But beneath the hoopla both include significant truths that demand public and policymaker attention. The problem is that these truths are point to very different types of problems, but public conversation about both the boy and girl "crises" have been couched in strikingly similar (and largely useless) terms. There are significant, in some ways different, social, educational, and economic opportunity problems facing both male and female teenagers in the United States today. But I don't think we're doing a very good job of having public conversations about them.
***
Finally, a personal note. I am three years younger than Elizabeth Mann. I would never claim to be anywhere near as accomplished as Mann, but by the standards of my school I was also "the smart girl," which, along with having my dad as principal, carried lots of negative social consequences. But I never felt dominated in class by boys, never felt like my achievements were discounted or in any way treated differently because I was a girl, never was made to feel the kind of intellectual insecurities Mann mentions in this article. I was a freshman in high school when How Schools Shortchange Girls came out. I'm sure I benefitted from some of the things that were done in response to it and other studies suggesting girls were in trouble (but I mostly remember wondering why everyone seemed so dead set on convincing me to become an engineer just because I got good grades in math and science). I didn't know then about How Schools Shortchange Girls, but if I had, I wouldn't have recognized it as matching my teenage reality.

Fifth Day of Christmas

See days one and four.

The Wire Week Eleven: Everything Goes Wrong

This week on The Wire, poor, anonymous Sherrod dies of accidental cyanide poisoning while trying to get high in the middle of the night in his homeless drug-addict uncle's unheated hovel. Randy's foster mother is burned alive and nearly killed after their house is fire-bombed by neighborhood kids angry that Randy helped the incompetent police with a murder investigation. Namond has nowhere to live because his Mom is angry that he's not enthusiastic enough about following his dad in the family drug-dealing business that will quickly lead to prison or the grave. Dukie is promoted to high school, cutting him off from the only adult in the world who really cares about or pays attention to his welfare. Michael, who started the season as the strongest and most virtuous of the group, goes into training to be a drug gang assassin, beats up a small child, beats up Lamond, and stands by while his well-meaning boxing coach is shot and almost killed by his new drug gang buddies.

Growing up in West Baltimore really sucks.

We shouldn't be surprised, of course, the hallmark of The Wire is unflinching honesty. And lest you non-viewers out there (could there possibly be any left?) worry that the show is so depressing as to be unwatchable, it made for great, compelling television.

I'll save most of my final thoughts for next week after the season finale, but a quick note on the theme of circularity this season. There's a point near the end of the opening credits where there are five or so shots in a row that are about circles or cycles -- the revolving plastic thing in the convenience store where patrons exchange money for cigarettes, a spinning tire rim, drugs being packed in a circle around a spare tire in the trunk of a car, a child spinning an old tire around in an alley. The season has also followed a round object--Marlo's ring--on a circular path, from Marlo to Omar to whathisname the bad cop to Michael, who is now involved with Marlo.

On one level this is all kind of obvious--the pathologies of drugs and violence are visited upon children, who quickly grow up to perpetrate them on the next generation. The cycle of poverty, etc., etc. But in the hands of the The Wire's creators, this kind of symbolism, as well as the constant drawing of parallels between various individuals and institutions, is never trite and often kind of profound. As Saul Austerlitz said recently in Slate, The Wire is "a didactic show in the best possible sense."

Fourth Day of Christmas

Missed day one?

Jon Chait, Wrong About Education

The good thing about articles like Paul Tough's much-discussed NYTimes piece about the achievement gap is that they get a lot of people talking about an important educational issue. The bad thing is that many of those people don't really know what they're talking about.

Take, for example, Jonathan Chait's new column in the LA Times. Chait usually writes a great column; he's one of the few New Republic writers that I'll read based on the byline alone. But this column is full of shallow analysis and one major factual error. Chait says:

There are two main problems with our pool of teaching talent. The first is that it's badly distributed. Schools are mostly funded locally, which means rich districts can easily afford to pay teachers more than poor ones. Tough cites a study of schools in Illinois that found the highest-quality teachers concentrated in the richest schools and the lowest-quality teachers concentrated in the poorest schools.

This is the unavoidable result of making schools raise most of their funding locally. The only way to change this insane system would be to fund schools at the national level

Schools do not raise most of their funding locally. On average, a litle more than 40 percent of school funding comes from local sources, with about 50 percent coming from state revenues and 10 percent from the feds. This isn't news; as this table shows, the last year schools got most of their revenues from local sources was 1974.

He's right to point to the problem of teacher distribution in Illinois (I worked on the project that produced the report he cites). But Illinois has the worst school funding system in the country. They're the exception, not the rule.

Chait also repeats a point that I've seen a lot in the last week, that schools like KIPP are un-scaleable because the teachers there work "16 hours days." I remember being startled when Tough threw that assertion into his article--for the record, teachers in KIPP schools do not average 15-16 hours days, as at least one KIPP teacher notes in the comments section here. Can Mike Feinberg and David Levin please post something on the KIPP website to clear this up?

Chait also says:

My wife spent a few years teaching in a mostly low-income elementary school. The main thing I remember her telling me was that parental involvement was a near-perfect predictor of her students' performance. The kids with active parents did well, and the kids with disengaged parents did poorly.

Maybe Chait's wife was a great teacher, maybe not, I don't know. But this kind of deterministic thinking does poor children no favors. Schools are rarely successful when adults look at where children have come from and think they can see for certain where they're going.

Finally, Chait re-commits Tough's error of getting the politics wrong. Chait specializes in exposing the fallacies and illogic of conservative policies, which is, frankly, one of the reasons I normally like reading his stuff. But he's starting to become a hammer who only sees nails. The fact that the Heritage Foundation, which has very little to say about education policy, happened to write a report years ago titled "No Excuses" doesn't make that position conservative orthdoxy.

In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find any reputable conservatives in the education policy world who hold the simplistic beliefs Chait criticizes. Like a lot of political commentators, Chait knows less about education policy than he thinks he does, but is perfectly comfortable stepping into the arena only occasionally as a means of fighting larger ideological battles. People like the teachers and students in KIPP schools deserve better.

First Day of Christmas...

Welcome to a special Quick & Ed feature celebrating the spirit of the holiday season weekdays during the month of December. Who is this woman? Stay tuned for more information (and pictures!)...

Dropping Harvard

The Civil Rights Project is dropping Harvard to move across the country to its new home at UCLA, where it will focus its efforts on immigrant and Latino issues.

A win for California and UCLA, who picks up not only CRP co-founder Gary Orfield but also Orfield's new wife, UC-Davis professor and associate director of the UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute Patricia Gandara.

A disappointment for CRP co-founder Chris Edley's hope that the CRP would become bicoastal when he dropped Harvard in 2003 to lead Berkeley's Boalt Hall. Edley said he was leaving the project knowing it would continue to flourish at Harvard and would become "bigger, better, and bicoastal" as he moved to develop a Berkeley-based center. It's clearly getting bigger in California, and better for taking on immigration issues, but sadly no longer a bicoastal endeavor. Not all bad..more reason to travel back to California.

Culture Club

Over at EdWize, Peter Goodman complains that "the pathology of poverty" makes it difficult to motivate and educate kids like those on The Wire: "Poverty, the culture of the streets is not shed at the classroom door!! As teachers we can’t make the streets safer or construct better housing or more stable family life … we can only teach and nurture and care …"

Whenever I hear sentiments like that, I think of what teachers and principals in high-performing and rapidly improving urban schools have to say. For example, Barbara Adderley, the principal of Stanton Hall Elementary in Philadelphia, made some compelling observations when she accepted an award at the Education Trust's national conference a few weeks ago. She talked about driving to work every day through blighted neighborhoods and seeing the drug dealers on the corners, and dealing with a situation in which children walk to school past crack houses and hear gunfire many nights. (As the Philadelphia Weekly describes it, "On her first day in September 2002 Adderley was greeted with madness: children running and screaming, teachers showing up late if at all, parents cussing and students overwhelmingly failing. Surrounded by drugs, neglect, poverty and violence at 16th and Cumberland in North Philadelphia, Stanton was one of the city’s worst-performing schools.")

Her response, Adderley told the conference crowd, was not to adjust academic expectations downward and focus exclusively on caring and nurturing, but instead to re-build her school around the assumption that its students were destined to become the next generation of business and civic leaders---the future Director of the Education Trust, the future U.S. Secretary of Education, etc. (she was citing the “big names” in attendance at the awards ceremony to add rhetorical flourish)---rather than the next generation of neighborhood drug dealers and addicts. Then she and her teachers began to TREAT THEM LIKE THAT by fashioning a new school culture and a new set of educational practices around that assumption. “Drugs are worse, guns are everywhere,” she told the Weekly, but "We can’t worry about any of that. We can only make this a climate where kids wanna be here, and where they’re learning."

Similarly, when Goodman asks "How do we convince 'corner boys' to pass Regents exams?" I think of June Esserly, principal of the University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts. At a session hosted by the Alliance for Excellent Education last year, Esserly talked about a three-week long August Academy she and her teachers provide for entering middle school students. (Contrast that with the chaos attending the first day at The Wire's Tilghman Middle School when the doors opened and kids simply swarmed into the hallways.)

The Academy helps kids bone up on study skills, she said, "But the most important thing is they get to understand the culture of the school. They get to understand that we are serious about education and that we are serious about them going to college. They need to start thinking about it now to get where they need to be." The Academy accomplishes that in ways both overt and subtle. For example, "I wanted the kids to be reading a book they could finish in three weeks, because in my experience a lot of urban kids don't finish what they start, so I want them to learn right from the get go, you start it, you finish it."

Adderley and Esserly recognize that "the culture of the streets" is out there and that their students, for now, must live in it, but also believe they don't have to go to school in it. Excellent schools for poor, urban students (public schools, not just charters like KIPP), purposefully shape the culture inside the school and wield it in very instrumental ways to influence expectations, aspirations, and behavior. In that sense, the culture becomes a tool in the educational toolbox, not something that is accidental or random or---as Goodman seems to imply---something that just inexorably seeps into the hallways and classrooms through the school's doors and windows.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Blogroll Addition

Richard Colvin's got a new blog about early childhood education and media coverage of it. Good stuff, now in our blogroll. (Thx to Andy for pointing this out to me.)

Paradise on the Potomac? Or a State-like Solution?

Commenting on Mike Casserly's Sunday Washington Post op-ed, Andy writes:

...The redundancy in education governance in Washington is almost comical. D.C. could do a lot worse than look to Hawaii for some ideas on having a unified state/school district structure since there is only one school district in Washington in the first place.

I've got to disagree here. If we were having this conversation in, say 1995, the last time Congress considered major legislation aimed at reforming DC schools, I'd probably agree with this analysis. But the problem is that, thanks to the DC School Reform Act of 1995, we don't actually have only one school district in Washington. We've got more than 50, and most of the are public charter schools, which, in DC, are legally their own local education agencies, or LEAs.

Because DCPS has both state and local education agency roles, it actually has to carry out state-level responsibilities--such as distributing some federal grant funds and running the "statewide" accountability and assessment system--that impact charters as well as traditional schools, including charter schools authorized by the Public Charter School Board (PCSB), over which DCPS, as an LEA, ought to have no authority. This can create serious conflicts of interest, because DCPS as an LEA competes with charter schools. The controversy over Supt. Clifford Janey's suggestion, earlier this year, that he wanted to use his authority as State Schools Officer to intervene in low-performing charter schools , including those authorized by the PCSB, is a good recent example of how the combined state/school district role for DCPS is problematic when charters are involved. There are also legitimate concerns that it's a conflict of interest for DCPS to have state responsibilities for holding itself accountable as a local school district.

Making DC a single state/school district like Hawaii would only exacerbate these problems. While Hawaii has charter schools, its charters are substantively different from those in DC: They are authorized by the Hawaii LEA/SEA, not an independent authorizer like the Public Charter School Board, and they do not have the legal and financial autonomy that DC charters do. And because of a relatively low charter cap in Hawaii, that state's charters are not currently the competitive threat to existing public schools that they are in DC.

In 2000, Mayor Williams established the State Education Office under his control to help deal with some of the new complexities that emerged in public education in DC as it moved from a single LEA system to one offering both DCPS and a host of public charter schools. The SEO monitors enrollment for both DCPS and charters, develops the uniform student funding formula used to allocate funds to the schools, oversees school nutrition programs, and also carries out some state-level higher education functions. But the combination of programs it carries out is rather eclectic, and it doesn't have most of the powers of a regular state education agency.

Based on some of the discussions floating around town right now, I wouldn't be surprised if what we saw happen with DC school governance in the next year or so would be creation of a real , separate State Education Agency, under the control of Mayor Fenty, that would have the responsibilities of a typical SEA with regard to both charters and DCPS. (This is pretty similar to what Casserly's op-ed is calling for.) Such an arrangement would have a number of benefits. It could give Mayor Fenty a significant role in holding DC's schools accountable and influencing education in DC without creating the huge operational and political disruption that shifting the day-to-day management of DCPS schools to the mayor would do. A smart plan to create a Mayor-controlled SEA would shift traditionally problematic areas in DCPS, such as out-of-district special education placements for high-needs students, and facilities, to DCPS. Legislation could also be written to give the Mayor, as SEA, power to take over chronically low-performing schools, with or without the Board of Education's consent. And, considering the vacuum created by the Board of Education's recent decision to surrender its role as a charter school authorizer, a Mayor-controlled SEA would be a great potential replacement for the board as a charter school authorizer. Although relatively few Mayors have chartering authority, those who do, like Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, have a promising record. DC could benefit from following this lead.

It's also increasingly looking like this is an idea most of the key parties could get behind politically, possibly avoiding the "donnybrook" Casserly fears a bid for full-out mayoral control would spark. There's already legislation in the U.S. Senate that would require the Board of Education to develop recommendations to shift its state-level functions to another entity, which observers seem to think in practice would most likely be the SEO. The Council's held hearings on the idea. At the same time could also been framed as a token step towards making DC more like a "real state," which might appeal to DC-statehood advocates. It would preserve a role for the elected school board, mitigating home rule concerns, but still give Fenty much greater control. It would give newly-elected reformist school board leaders like Robert Bobb and Lisa Raymond a chance to work for reform, while also building a foundation for a mayoral role that could be more easily expanded to full control if reform efforts on the board fail.

Update: Andy clarifies his comment a bit. I'd just like to add that, despite my skepticism a Hawaii-like model per se makes sense for DC, if anyone would like to fund some research travel for me to go to Hawaii this winter, investigate the state/district model in practice, and bring back recommendations for what DC can learn from it, I'd be all over that.

Unwarranted Pessimism on the Achievement Gap

Matt Yglesias is too pessimistic about the prospect of closing the achievement gap.

Referring to Paul Tough's recent NYTimes article, which concludes that the gap can be closed if we put disadvantaged students in schools that are better-run and have more money, he says:

This seems to me to involve assuming a can opener. Schools full of poor kids could do just as well as schools full of middle-class kids if they had more resources at their disposal than the middle-class schools had. But why would they have more resources? It's hard to imagine suburban homeowners voting for a politician who promises to raise their taxes in order to pay their kids' best teachers to go teach in inner city schools, thereby making it harder for their kids to get into selective colleges and reducing the value of the homes they own.

It's not hard to imagine, because it's happened in a number of places already. High-poverty school in Massachusetts get substantially more money than low-poverty schools, based on funding reforms implemented over a decade ago. The Maryland legislature implemented similar reforms a few years ago, also with broad support.

Suburban voters tolerate and in many cases support these policies, because (A) they're the right thing to do, and (B) wealthy suburban kids are still getting into good colleges, because they come from privileged backgrounds and go to good schools. You can have less money than a high-poverty school and still have enough money to teach your students well. The point of closing the achievement gap is not completely erasing class differences, it's giving disadvantaged students what they need to graduate and succeed in college, the workplace, and life. It's not a zero-sum game; nearly everyone can be well-educated if we give schools enough money--given whom they're educating--and spend it wisely.

Other states, obviously, still have inequitable funding systems. But there's plenty of precedent here, a significant number of states have done the right thing. And when the politicians won't do it voluntarily, disadvantaged districts have been able to go to the courts to forced their hand, as happened in New York just last week, when the state's highest court ordered the legislature to give New York City schools an extra $2 billion per year.

Moreover, there's an awful lot you can do without more money. While some of the reforms mentioned in the article are resource-intensive, many aren't. They have a lot to do with strong leadership, high expectations for all students and staff, and a disciplined focus on increasing learning results.

And these things, in turn, help tremendously with recruiting staff. The best way to induce good teachers to leave the suburbs and come into the cities is to create good schools that they would enjoy working in, schools that respect them as professionals and give them an opportunity to succeed at a job they really believe in. More money obviously helps, but there's a lot more to it than that.

So while poor kids could undoubtedly use an assumed can opener or two, in education and elsewhere, we don't need them to give those students a much better education than we're giving them today.

A Case of Cognitive Dissonance

The op-ed by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post this morning (“A Slide Toward Segregation) would likely stoke serious debate around any water cooler in the country. It talks about the legacy of Brown and the current Supreme Court cases in Seattle and Louisville on school desegregation. She points out the recent trend in the federal government against any policy that explicitly recognizes race as a factor. Race has always been an uncomfortable topic in America – its legacy and current divisions fly in the face of our founding principals, creating a nationwide case of cognitive dissonance.

Prior government policies focused on changing behavior, attempting to create integration through programs like busing, in order to reconcile our belief in equal opportunity with the existence of a segregated school system. According to Marcus’ piece, the current federal government is pushing to eliminate race as a factor in government policy, a strategy which seems to assert that if we don’t include race in any official decisions, then equal opportunity exists. In school reform, it seems that people on the ground have all but given up on the idea of integration as a solution to our separate and starkly unequal school system, and instead have taken on the challenge of building successful and high quality schools in minority neighborhoods – focusing on the unequal, and not separate, side of the equation.

Should we, as a country, simply accept de facto segregation, or should we establish policies to create integration, even if those policies require us to candidly use race as a deciding factor? Cases like Seattle and Louisville will guide how this country resolves the dissonance between our stated commitment to equal opportunity and the reality of our school system.

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.