Stands Scotland where it Did?

WaPo gives more background to the racial tensions that have surfaced at Montgomery County’s Winston Churchill High School following a string of recent fights and letter sent home by the school’s principal describing them as “Black-on-Black violence.” Residents of Scotland, an historically African-American community in the school’s attendance area viewed the comment as a specific attack on them. In the more recent article, the principal says she made the comment to defend the school’s black students, who have recently raised their test scores.

But the school's African-American students are still not doing very well on state achievement tests. In the most recent assessment, in 2006, only 51% of the school’s black students (who make up 6% of its enrollment) tested proficient in reading—worse than the average for black students in Montgomery County or the state of Maryland as a whole, and a sharp contrast with the 95% of the school’s white students—well above state and county averages—who were proficient in reading. Gaps between Winston Churchill’s white and black students were similarly large in math, although the school’s black students performed marginally better than the state average in math. The racial tensions at Churchill accompany large achievement gaps.

These gaps exist in what is generally regarded as a high-performing, elite suburban school—according to Jay Mathews, one of America’s 100 best—underscoring why disaggregated accountability reporting, a la NCLB, is so important to advancing educational equity for poor and minority kids. Some of Winston Churchill’s students are learning much less than others, but you’ve gotta look past the averages to see what’s going on. Further, Winston Churchill's African-American and low-income students are barely matching or doing worse than their peers statewide even though they attend a racially- and economically-integrated (at least at the schoolwide level), high-resource, generally high-performing school. That’s not an indictment of efforts to advance racial and socio-economic integration, but it is a caution against expecting either to be a silver bullet for improving the achievement of disadvantaged and minority students.

Frosty the Anti-Snow Man

Frosty Hardison, a concerned parent of seven, wants Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" banned from school. In an interesting twist, he objects not because he doesn't believe in global warming, but because the movie doesn't present an alternative explanation for global warming: instead of rising carbon emissions, it's a sign that the biblically ordained end times are upon us. Which seems pretty ridiculous, but then again I did just read that shockingly reasonable Bracey report....

For Lenders, the Trouble Begins

Next week, the house will consider a bill to cut interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans in half--to 3.4%--over five years. The cost of these cuts will come close to $6 billion and, under the new ‘PAYGO’ rules, the Democrats are paying for it with cuts in lender subsidies. While some students will benefit from the lower interest rates, this bill is more about freeing-up money from the heavily-subsidized lending industry than it is about making college more affordable.

Making college more affordable will require broader changes in the lending ‘system’ (although our confusing and complicated financial aid system is hardly a system at all), including targeting aid to students who need it most and providing help to students who are struggling to repay their debt. While interest rate subsidies will alleviate debt payments for some, they are poorly targeted, do not encourage colleges to lower costs, and do not take into account students’ post-graduation income levels and ability to repay debt.

This bill does make some important steps forward, however, in how money is allocated in our lending system. Currently, a lot of money is tied up in lender subsidies and payments. This bill starts to chip away at those subsidies and reallocate the money to students. Hopefully, once it's apparent that lenders can survive reduced government subsidies, it will make room for more lender subsidy cuts and more reallocations to financial aid.

A Sign of the Coming Apocalypse

Jerry Bracey has released his annual "Rotten Apples" awards. Roughly speaking, I agree without about half of the awards. I find this to be an inordinately high and deeply disturbing number. It's some kind of leading indicator of deterioration in the education policy sphere--the more often Bracey is right, the worse things have become.

Down to Brass Tacks on Teacher Pay

Leo Casey has weighed in on "Frozen Assets," Education Sector's recent report on the fiscal consequences of teacher contracts. Or as he puts it, "yet another" Education Sector report. Sorry, Leo--plenty more where that came from! No rest for the wicked!

It seems like just a couple of days ago--oh wait, it was just a couple of days ago--that Leo laid out some sensible ground rules for substantive, informed blogging on education policy, such as the fact that union critics are not wrong by definition. So it's a little disappointing to see him dismiss the research cited in the report as "old thin gruel by the anti-union, anti-public education short order cooks." There have been cease-fires in the Middle East that lasted longer than that....

But Leo's post is nonetheless useful, because he quickly gets down to the heart of the matter: merit pay. "Frozen Assets" isn't a merit pay manifesto by any means, but it does put the idea squarely on the table, and it does criticize the seniority-based single salary schedules used by the vast majority of school districts. Even though research clearly shows that teacher effectiveness tends to stop increasing after about five years in the classroom, salary schedules keep bumping up pay for years or even decades beyond that.

To his credit, Leo concedes this point. But he defends perpetual seniority-based raises on the grounds that they're needed to retain teachers, particularly after all that goes into getting them past the five-year threshold. And to do that, we have to "take into account the mid-life financial pressures faced by teachers, as they pay home mortages and send their own children to college."

In this one sentence, once can learn a great deal about why issues of teacher pay are so contentious and hard to resolve.

I suspect that teachers unions often wonder why people keep obsessing over merit pay, particularly when they concede, as Leo does, that it would be okay to have differential pay for other things, like working in hard-to-staff schools or getting National Board certification.

The answer, I think, is that getting paid based on how well you do your job is so ubiquitous and inherently sensible that to deny it on principle is to fundamentally dissociate onself from both logic and the common experience of workers and professionals in this day and age. In that sense, merit pay is about more than the issue at hand. It's a litmus test for reasonableness, an indicator of whether you're serious about schools and educators being driven by performance, about whether you believe that teachers should or should not be compensated in basically the same way as everyone else who has a job requiring similarly high levels of education, professionalism, and dedication.

Leo can object to merit pay "schemes which seek to replace the entire structure of teacher salary schedules with pay differentials decided by subjective supervisory judgments and by poorly crafted standardized tests." But I think we all know that it goes deeper than that, that even if the schemes became plans and the supervisory judgments became objective and the tests became well-crafted, the basic issue would remain.

The vast majority of people who work, particularly in professional jobs, are paid what their labor is worth in the open job market, no more, no less. That amount can often seem arbitrary or divisive or insufficient or unfair. And all those things are frequently true. But in the end, they don't get paid more than their colleagues who do work of the same value, or more, just because they happen to be of a certain age or have kids in college and a mortgage to pay. That's the world we live in.

Perhaps Leo think that's the problem in a nutshell, that teachers unions have achieved a more enlightened way of doing business, one that keep workers together instead of pushing them apart, one that is more stable, fair, and humane. Which makes merit pay a litmus test of a different kind, an indicator of whether people want to preserve the past victories of labor and build on them, or attack those victories and tear them down.

I believe in unions. As I've said before, I think the final reckoning of the last 100 years will show that unions are disproportionately responsible for much of what's decent and honorable in the working lives of Americans. But on this issue, I think teachers unions are trying to do too much, at too great a cost. The best way to help teachers with kids in college isn't to pay them extra, it's to fully fund Pell grants and keep tuition low. Unions can, and should, push for increasing the overall amount of money teachers are paid, which I think is too low. But the dynamics there are not the same as, for example, increasing the minimum wage. And banding together to collectively fight for higher wages doesn't preclude teachers from making distinctions about those wages based on something as elementary as performance. Unity and uniformity are not the same thing.

In the long run, performance has to matter in education. If you tell a group of people that their status and salary will be determined in a manner that is indifferent to how hard they work or what they ultimately accomplish, they will, collectively, accomplish less. In the long run, teachers unions are going to have to concede this principle. That doesn't mean that there are no difficulties in transforming the principle into practice, or that teachers shouldn't play a major role in making those decisions. They absolutely should. But as long as unions stay on the wrong side of this line in the sand, they're going to be fighting a losing and increasingly lonely battle.

Update: Sherman Dorn comments here. Briefly: Sherman gives Leo (or me, not quite sure which) too little credit here--I actually think Leo does a good job of engaging seriously on the ideas, which distinguishes him from some of his colleagues. I just think his ideas are problematic. I'm not sure what "significant logical flaws" Sherman is talking about--does he mean Leo's comments about the NYC class size limitations? Of course eliminating a class size reduction or limitation policy would increase class sizes. That goes without saying, doesn't it? What else could it mean? What the paper says is that there's little in the way of research to suggest that marginal class size reductions, along the lines the 1.5 or 2 per class that Leo describes, have significant benefits. Big reductions below a certain threshold, yes. Small reductions that don't reach that threshold, no. Therefore, that money could potentially be spent for other, more productive purposes--like increased teacher salaries.

When Mom and Dad Don't Show Up

Sophia Pappas has a really terrific post up about parent engagement and teacher responsibilities. After trying--and failing--to engage the mother of one of her lowest-performing students, Pappas writes:

I grow frustrated and decide instead to focus solely on Tyrique and our work inside the classroom. With our efforts to target his needs in one-on-one, small group, and whole group interactions, Tyrique has now started to identify beginning sounds and some letters in words on his own. He can also write his name and read the names of his friends.

Is family support important? Of course. But what happens when difficulties with parental investment arise, even as early as pre-k? Does the child become a lost cause? Of course not. Should teachers relinquish their own responsibility? Just the opposite.

This strikes me as just about right. Communicating with parents and trying to engage them in their children's learning when appropriate is part of teachers' jobs. But teachers have relatively little leverage to change parent behavior, so focusing on what teachers can do to address children's needs directly often has better returns to effort than trying to engage unresponsive parents.

In an ideal world, we'd want all kids to have engaged, supportive parents who were eager to get information from teachers about how to support their children's learning and to put that information in practice. In reality, that's not always the case, even when parents love their children very much, for a host of reasons. And the kids who are getting the least support at home are also those who can least afford to have their teachers give up on them as a result of their parents' shortcomings.

Anyway, I've really been enjoying Ms. Pappas' blog since it launched in early December, so if you haven't checked it out yet, you should.

Merit Pay is Murder

Per the post below, to get a sense of just how much some local teachers union officials hate the idea of merit pay, here's a quote from local president in Nashville (Hat tip-Joanne Jacobs):

Last fall, the association passed on a $400,000 donation that would have put up to $6,000 extra in the pockets of Inglewood and Alex Green elementary schoolteachers. Any changes to Metro teacher salary or compensation need approval by a majority of the union’s members. Association President Jamye Merritt said the money was rejected because the terms of the gift were unclear, and teachers didn’t know what expectations they would need to meet. “People take money every day for things I would not do ... there are people that are paid to be assassins,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just not worth the sacrifice you would have to make for the money.”

Teachers, Unions, Money

Educaton Sector has released a new report authored by Marguerite Roza of the University of Washington and the Center on Reinventing Public Education, analyzing the fiscal impact of teacher contracts. Titled "Frozen Assets," the paper finds that roughly $77 billion nationwide is tied up in supporting contracts provisions that have a weak relationship with student learning, and could thus potentially be put to better use.

The Washington Post has a good story on the report here. NEA president Reg Weaver offers the standard "object first, figure out what the heck I'm talking about later, or more probably never" non-sequiter response, by saying: "Research has shown us time and time again that low salaries drive committed people from the teaching profession." Had he read the report, he would know that it has nothing to do with cutting salaries for teachers overall. If anything, it would increase teacher salaries by redirecting money that is currently being used for purposes that, according to research, don't contribute to student learning, such as teacher's aides, marginal class size reductions, ineffective professional development, and overly generous non-salary benefits. As the paper notes, that money could be used for proposals that the NEA itself supports, like increasing the average starting salary for teachers.

AFTie Michele posits that one of the provisions analyzed--excessive sick days--may be a function of the fact that teachers, more than most workers, tend to (A) be women, who take time off to go the doctor when pregnant, and (B) spend a lot of time with children, who spread a lot of germs. Seems like a fair point, whether it accounts for all the differences the report notes, I don't know.

Beyond that, her objections mostly boil down to "This is all about not liking seniority and the single salary schedule." Well, sure, it is mostly about those things. The report explains these positions and cites research to back them up (hopefully this will address the concerns of Sherman Dorn). If you disagree, you have to say why you disagree. Noting that private schools have similar policies isn't enough, they may just be making the same bad decisions.

By contrast, I recommend this post from Leo Casey at EdWize, who, unlike his colleagues at AFTBlog, actually offers detailed arguments and evidence to back up his disagreements. In doing so he inadvertently exposes some of the internal contradictions in the way unions talk about teacher salaries, which are apparently vitally important unless we're talking about differential salaries, in which case teachers are suddenly much more motivated by "an altruistic sense of public service and nurturance, to make a positive difference in the lives of children." But it's still a thoughtful post on the topic of wage compression and the history of teacher salaries and collective bargaining, and well worth reading.

Too Many Asians at Berkeley?

In today’s NYTimes Education Life supplement, Timothy Egan writes an unsatisfying story about an interesting issue: the growing number of Asian students at elite universities.

Egan pegs his story to UC-Berkeley, where the percentage of Asian students has grown to 41% in the wake of a statewide ballot initiative prohibiting the consideration of race in public college admissions. But while he gives a sense of the changing atmosphere on the Berkeley campus, Egan doesn’t really dig into the heart of the matter—affirmative action.

Affirmative action comes with serious costs. But on the whole I think it’s a good idea, for three reasons.

First, not all students get the same opportunities in K-12 schools. Black and Latino students, on average, are forced to attend schools that receive less funding, are taught by worse teachers, have less access to advanced curricula like Advanced Placement tests, and generally suffer from the hard bigotry of low expectations. Affirmative action helps students who would have come to the admissions process with better credentials if they’d been given a fair shot to begin with.

Second, affirmative action works, in the words of Yale law school professor Stephen Carter, whose Reflections of An Affirmative Action Baby is required reading on this topic, as a tax. Taxes are necessary for a functioning society, and there’s plenty of precedent for tax policies that treat different people differently. For example, the federal income tax system taxes rich people at a higher rate than poor people. This is a good, workable policy because (A) rich people can afford it, and (B) other people need that money more.

Affirmative action is basically an educational opportunity tax on white people. Like progressive income taxes, it redistributes resources from people who have a disproportionate share to people who need them more. This seems unfair to white people who themselves come from less advantaged backgrounds, and it probably is. But it’s no more unfair than applying the same tax rate to the rich person who earned every dollar from the sweat of his brow as to the person who inherited his money and got a cushy job in the family business. Policies are by nature imperfect, and in the end it’s still better to be rich than poor in America, and white people still enjoy huge advantages that others don’t. Having to settle for a slot in a slightly less competitive college moves the traditional losers in the zero-sum affirmative action game—unusually smart, well-qualified white people—from being in the 99.999th percentile of luckiest people on the face of the Earth to about the 99.998th. They’ll be fine.

The third justification for affirmative action is diversity, which is certainly important—it makes sense for colleges to create an academic environment with broad, differing perspectives, backgrounds, and beliefs. But I tend to value diversity less than the first two justifications for affirmative action, mostly because of how the idea gets used and applied in practical terms. Proponents don’t do a good job of explaining the theoretical limits of diversity as a value, the degree of its benefits or cases when it should be subordinate to other things. Nor do they seem eager to discuss the fact that some perspectives, backgrounds, and beliefs are more worthwhile than others. As a result, diversity as an idea is routinely diluted and abused by people like the college coach in Dan Golden’s excellent book on the corruption of the college admissions process, The Price of Admission, who justified giving preferences to academically suspect athletes on the grounds that the university would benefit from “academic diversity” in that students who aren’t as smart ask more questions in class.

Moreover, for reasons of constitutional law and, I think, a fair amount of intellectual dishonesty, the diversity benefits of affirmative action are increasingly framed in terms of what’s good for white people, as if the whole point is to give the sons and daughters of privilege a chance to spend a few years in a controlled environment hearing about how what it’s like to be a minority in America, before going back to the economically and racially segregated world from which they came. As Dahlia Lithwick said in a discussion of the Michigan affirmative action case, “Schools are not petting zoos.” Or do we honestly think that the main benefit of affirmative action is to give minority students a once-in-a-lifetime exposure to the white perspective? Don’t they get more than enough of that already?

Asian students make all of this more complicated. Many are striving first-generation immigrants from modest economic backgrounds, the embodiment of the American dream. They belong to ethnic groups that have suffered significant past legal and cultural discrimination. Given the added benefits of diversity, the more in college the better—right?

As it turns out, not so much. As Golden made clear in his book and subsequent articles in the WSJ, a number of elite colleges now have what amount to reverse quotas for Asian students, admitting a smaller percentage of Asian applicants than other groups even though those students have stronger qualifications by basically reviving the racist policies the same colleges first developed in the 1920s to keep out Jewish students. Apparently, a college can become too diverse, or it least it can when diversity is defined as “degree of difference from the white people who run things.” What institutions like Princeton (which is being sued by an Asian student with perfect SATs it rejected) seem to want is enough diversity to keep things interesting, but not so much that it threatens their overwhelmingly white base of wealthy alumni, particularly those who have children up for admission.

This collision of race, class, privilege, and history has led to a lot of confused thinking. Both Egan and one of the students he interviews refer to UC-Berkeley as “overwhelmingly Asian,” a strange thing to say about a university where Asian students are still less than half the population. This is neatly reflected in the cover of the Education Life supplement, which is comprised of 100 identical squares, 41 of which feature a picture of an Asian student, exactly the same as the percent of Asians among Berkeley undergrads. But the other 59 squares don’t feature the white, black, Hispanic, and other non-Asian students that make up the majority of the Berkeley campus. They’re blank, so all you see are Asians. The cover reflects the same skewed perspective as Egan and his interviewee.

Egan also quotes a professor getting several things wrong all at once:

“I’ve heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all,” says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. “What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster — for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it’s been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian.”

Most of the Asians interviewed in the article seemed pretty psyched to be enrolled at the top-ranked public university in the nation with lots of other Asian students. To say that getting rid of race-conscious admissions has been a “disaster” for them is bizarre, and represents a common failure among affirmative action advocates--an unwillingness to acknowledge that admissions policies are zero-sum. You can't say there are no winners and losers in affirmative action. You can only say who should win, who should lose, and why.

Moreover, the last thing Latinos and black should want from a purely selfish standpoint is for Asians to not be considered a minority, unless they mean a minority that’s actively discriminated against. Berkeley in 2007 is what happens when race isn’t considered in admissions, not when it is.

It will be a long time before society can consider racial issues or embody them in public policy without considerable pain and controversy. But it strikes me that the difficulties of considering race in higher education admissions could at least be lessened if universities would be more nuanced about their criteria and more disciplined in their decision-making. Treating students from Japan, China, and Korea (much less India, Pakistan, etc. etc. etc.) similarly just because their countries of origin are sort of near one another and they kind of look the same to Western eyes is absurd. It would be better if colleges developed some rational criteria (diversity value, historical discrimination, etc.) for deciding exactly which racial/ethnic groups deserve various degrees of admissions preference and which don’t, using as many categories as it takes—10, 50, 100, whatever makes sense. Then they should be a lot more transparent about how that plays out in the admission process, instead of hiding behind the “we consider the whole student” generalities that act as smokescreen for whatever vague or sinister policies they actually have in place. The Michigan decision is driving things in the opposite direction, of course, but that’s what happens when the Supreme Court resorts to using sketchy constitutional law to try to do the right thing.

The great dilemma of racial and ethnic differences lies with reconciling the need to recognize their value and meaning with the need to heal the wounds that have been and continue to be inflicted in their name. As a result, affirmative action will always be hard to sort out. But as the case of Asian student admissions shows, we can’t stop thinking about it, even if we want to.

Fenty's School Plan

Newly-inaugurated DC Mayor Adrian Fenty unveiled his plan to take over the D.C. Public Schools this morning. Key provisions include:

• Placing day-to-day operation of schools in the control of a NYC-style schools chancellor, who would report to Fenty and be a cabinet-level officer in his administration.
• Appointing a schools ombudsman.
• Creating a facilities management and construction authority to manage the district's school facilities and implement the School Modernization Financing Act of 2006.
• Stripping the elected school board of its day-to-day school oversight role and budgetary authority, but maintaining its responsibility for state level functions such as academic standards and teacher certification.
• Placing all charter schools under the oversight of the Public Charter School Board and requiring school charters to be reviewed every three years (instead of the current five year reviews).

FWIW, this plan--Fenty taking over day-to-day operations and the Board of Ed maintaining control over state-level roles--is the exact opposite of what I predicted will eventually happen and what several folks smarter than me have recommended.

Some of these steps could potentially be good ideas, but it's hard for me to say for sure until I see the text of the legislation. More importantly, no one should be tricked into thinking that just giving Fenty control of the schools, in and of itself, will translate into better learning for DC kids. After all, the District has had at least three different governance structures answering to both the electorate and various appointing entities over the past 10 years, but no one believes a lot of progress has been made as a result of these changes. Good governance is a prerequisite to reform, and putting the schools in the hands of someone who has the authority to act decisively to improve student achievement can produce good results, but it's what people do with their authority that really matters.

So far, Fenty's picked good people for his education team, and this makes me hopeful. (I recently learned that the excellent Abby Smith, who's been serving in Teach for America's DC office as their VP for Research and Public Policy, is joining Fenty's education team--this is good news.) But he said little about what he'll do in practice to improve the schools once he gets control. No one should be under the illusion that Mayoral control alone is a silver bullet.

The legislation needs to be approved by the DC Council. Fenty has a good moment of political support right now because of the desperation and urgency to improve DC schools, and a majority of the council members appeared with him today announcing the plan (although not all of those who appeared agreed to endorse it). But there is strong opposition from local activists on home rule grounds, as well as the DC education establishment. Newly elected school board president Robert Bobb has strongly criticized Fenty's plan. A lot of reform-minded people in DC who support Fenty's takeover idea also campaigned for Bobb as an education reformer, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out in practice. Finally, there's the wild card of Congress here. It appears that Fenty could technically do many of the things he wants to do without Congressional approval, but Congress still holds the purse strings and they could also bigfoot Fenty's plan if they wanted to or enact it themselves if it can't get local support to pass (as happened with the School Reform Act of 1996 and charter schools). This could produce all kinds of insanity. Stay tuned for more.

Is School the Fountain of Youth?

An interesting article in the New York Times today about the life-extending benefits of school. Apparently, spending time in the classroom may actually add years to your life. I’m not sure if I’m sold on it yet, but it’s worth checking out the article. If nothing else, it points out the difficulties and uncertainties of this kind of research.

Now it's time to get back to those graduate school applications...

Left-Right Fringe Convergence Rears its Ugly Head Again

So, I was feeling cranky with Joanne Jacobs and Ken DeRosa for giving any attention at all the this utterly crackpot John Derbyshire rant on education, when I got to his fourth bullet point and nearly choked to death on my Diet Coke:

There is the homework racket, exposed in Alfie Kohn's book The Homework Myth--basically, a device for getting parents to do teachers' work for them.

That John Derbyshire is endorsing that Alfie Kohn? Do we need any more evidence of a frightening convergence of the crazy right and crazy left fringes on education?

Boundaries

You can learn a lot from the things that people say go without saying.

For example, AFTie Michelle recently came across a teacher policy paper that my Quick+ED colleague Sara Mead wrote with Andrew Leigh a couple of years ago. Citing research from Caroline Hoxby, the paper posited that:

"collective bargaining agreements that compressed teacher pay scales and eliminated the possibility of performance-based pay for highly effective teachers might have reduced the returns to aptitude in teaching."

This apparently struck Michelle as so on-its-face ridiculous that she wrote a December 26th post with the very not-in-the-holiday-spirit title of "Dumb and Dumber," complaining that this is obviously absurd because...well, just because.

In refutation, she notes that unions helped to improve teacher salaries and working conditions, which is perfectly true, but doesn't address the actual issue at hand: wage compression. She also asserts that the Hoxby article Sara cites wasn't peer reviewed. The comments section suggests that this is wrong, but in any case it's a strange standard for the AFT to start throwing around, given that less than two weeks earlier Michelle was perfectly willing to cite AFT research director Howard Nelson's not-peer-reviewed research on teacher transfer provisions.

Finally, Michelle dismisses the research as "in keeping with Hoxby's dim view of unions," for which she provides a link to another Hoxby paper finding that teachers union policies have had a negative impact on student achievement. In other words, Hoxby's criticisms of union policy cannot be trusted, because she has a documented track record of criticizing union policy.

My point is not to hack on Michelle's sour post as yet another example of the frustrating tendency of teachers unions to characterize all criticisms of union policies as thinly veiled attempts to attack or otherwise undermine the very existence of unions themselves, to see all critiques through the lens of teachers unions' existential struggle...well, okay, that may be partially my point.

But the larger issue here is the way underlying shared assumptions have a huge impact on the way people talk to one another, take in information, and generally see the world. I'm routinely fascinated by the way two reasonable, well-meaning people can look at the same information in a policy debate and reaching diametrically opposite conclusions. The difference (usually) isn't that one person is just stupid or acting in bad faith. It's that they simply have a whole different way of seeing things, different baseline facts and modes of thinking that are very hard to shake.

Different boundaries, in other words. For people who live and breath unionism, the idea that the rise of unions could have been in any way a bad thing is literally beyond the pale. They resent even having to address the issue. The idea--which I personally believe-- that unionism was on balance a big improvement, but came with both pluses and minuses, is outside the confines of polite conversation.

The lesson for advocates and policy entrepreneurs is that if you want to make a real difference in the world, try to figure out where the boundaries are, and move them. It's hard, because people don't like to have their baseline assumptions shaken. It's nice to walk out the door in the morning knowing that some things are true and some things are not, and it feels rude when someone tells you otherwise. But that's where the real potential for change lies--not just telling people what to think but how to think, not just giving them new information but new ways to interprate all kinds of information. Doing so makes people unfcomfortable, and is bound to produce an intemperate blog post or two. But in the long run, it's the policy work most worth doing.

Update: AFTie Michele notes that I've spelled her name wrong throughout the post above. My bad! Clearly, I need to be reading Eduwonk more closely. It's One-L, not two.....

Teaching Kids ≠ Catching Rats

At the holidays, teachers don’t expect lavish gifts but it is always nice to receive thanks for your hard work with students. When I was teaching, the best gift I ever received was a Christmas card from a parent thanking me for teaching her son how to read. Doesn’t get much better than that, though who can say no to a festive holiday sweater?

Don’t get me wrong—teaching is often challenging, frustrating, and really really hard. As a new teacher I spent my share of evenings crying while writing lesson plans. That said, I don’t think teaching is nearly as unpleasant as being a rat-catcher or proctologist for example, as a British journalist suggests. It’s disconcerting that some people think that teaching urban minority students is such a terrible disgusting task.

I do think however, that people often underestimate the challenge that teaching presents and it would be useful for federal, state, and local policymakers to spend more time in public schools than a photo-op walkthrough where the dog and pony show is in full swing. The emphasis today (rightly) is on data-driven decision making, but I think the value of first hand experience can’t be overestimated. Watch or lead a classroom for even an hour and I suspect you’ll learn more about the joys and challenges of teaching than countless hours of research can ever convey.

Intra-Q&E Foreign Language Smackdown Continues

Alright, back to the foreign language intra-Q&E debate, sparked by Kevin's commentary on the questionable utility of studying a foreign language in high school and then another to highlight a reader's view, and then Sara's bust up of Kevin's so-called consensus of two, followed by Margie's idea to start with Chinese.

So I have to weigh in...

Kevin's lament about his own French-taking experience aside, he and Sara and the-one-who-wrote-in are all right that we need to teach foreign language earlier, but it's not so simple.

First of all, a few hours a week at any grade will offer, at best, mere exposure to language. This isn't a bad thing if exposure is the goal, but it will not ensure proficiency. In the early grades, we need full immersion where kids are taught the language not as a separate "language class" but as part of content learning throughout the day. Critics say that this approach delays achievement in English and research backs this but also shows that this lag only happens in the very short term and, in the long run, these kids score as well or better than their peers in all subjects and test higher on cognitive tests.

Secondly, our public schools are woefully under-prepared to teach foreign language well- not to mention bilingualism and biliteracy, which is really what we should pay attention to as our population changes and our approach to language (hopefully) evolves. So we have a big job ahead of us in developing a teaching force- elementary and secondary. I think it’s a task worth taking on but have to point out that we are behind the curve.

Finally, I think Margie and Sara are right that Arabic and Chinese and other languages would be good to teach and learn, but wrong to suggest that the demographic changes in this country shouldn't be the driver for its foreign language curriculum. In some places, this will mean Chinese. But in most, it means Spanish. This is most practical, not only for the nation but also for me. Consider a place like Oakland, CA- with a large Chinese population. It has several English-Chinese dual immersion programs that teach both English and Chinese. This makes perfect sense. Native English-speakers learn Mandarin or Cantonese, while Mandarin or Cantonese-speakers learn English. Both emerge able to communicate and participate more fully in the community. And in the Fruitvale area of Oakland, where the population is largely Vietnamese and Spanish, the elementary school rightly offers bilingual classes in these two languages. There are kids in this area that speak at least 20 other languages but these are the dominant ones, the ones that drive the community, and the ones that schools should teach.

The Bay Area, being the Bay Area, has immersion programs in French, German, Swedish, Armenian, Farsi and many other languages. And I agree it's good for any child to learn other world languages (by the way, the $114 million next year for critical language learning in Farsi and Hindi and others should help). But the fact remains that the practical second language in this country is Spanish (Chinese is a very distant third, albeit growing along with Vietnamese and Russian) and most populations and school programs should and will reflect this. If a choice is to be made for public school curriculum, Spanish is the right one. The fact that Spanish is not a language of power outside of this nation does not change the reality that it is a language that has a strong history and an inevitable future in this country.

Higher Ed Revolution From the Lower Ranks?

A NYTimes front-page story earlier this week focused on the strenuous efforts of the University of Florida's flagship Gainesville campus to ascend in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. A few days earlier, the Charleston Daily Mail reported on how a growing number of West Virginia colleges and universities are trying to figure out how well they're teaching students and how much those students actually learn. Of the two, I'm guessing the Times article attracted a lot more attention. But West Virginia is where the really interesting and important story lies.

For an institution like the University of Florida, climbing the U.S. News rankings creates all kinds of conflicts and contradictions with their obligation as a public university to provide an accessible, affordable education to a broad array of students. That said, it's a fundamentally rational thing for them to do. They're 13th in the rankings now, so getting to the Top 10 isn't out of the question. In the elitist, status-driven context that governs the way people think about higher education quality, it would undoubtedly help them.

Public universities in West Virginia, by contrast, are never going to be in the upper echelons of the U.S. News hierarchy. Unlike the University of Florida, it wouldn't make sense for Glenville State College, where 59% of students receive Pell grants and the median incoming SAT score is 905, to launch a huge effort to become wealthy, famous, and exclusive, which is what it takes to look better according to U.S. News.

For an institution like Glenville, and the hundreds of other public and private universities like them, the only way to truly distinguish yourself is to add value, to show that you do a really good job teaching the students you enroll, and that they learn a lot between the time they arrive and the time they leave (hopefully with a degree). That's exactly the kind of information that National Survey of Student Engagement and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which are referenced in the article, provide.

At the moment, most of the NSSE and CLA results are kept close to the vest. Universities use them for internal evaluative purposes, but don't release them the general public. Insitutions are nervous about how they data might be interpreted, particularly if it indicates that they need to improve in some areas.

But in the long, I think the Glenvilles of the world are going to figure out that it's in their best interests to release this information, to create new terms of competition and status in higher education. If you can't beat the likes of the University of Florida at the current game, then change the game. Tell people that you're good at doing the job you're meant to do. Challenge the institutions that have a monopoly on all the money, status, and acclaim in higher education to prove that their reputations hold up when it comes to educating students.

There are a lot more Glenvilles than Gainesvilles in higher education. Eventually, they're going to figure out what's good for them. Then the institutions that have worked so hard to get to the top of the U.S. News rankings may find that they picked the wrong mountain to climb.

The Last Day of Christmas

Here's your final picture of Mary Brown in her festive Christmas garb, accompanied once again by her AP Senior English class--and Santa! As you can see, everyone is very excited by the prospect of the coming week of winter break.*

Vote for your favorite festive holiday photo here.

Thank you, Mary, for sharing your holiday spirit with us this month and, more importantly, for the great work you do all year long teaching Honors French, AP English, and SAT Prep to students at Clear Spring High School in Washington County, Maryland. On top of all her other work, Mary is working towards her National Board Ceritfication.

Special thanks, also, to Mary's Clear Spring colleague Nadine Fox for her excellent photography and for uploading and sending me these pictures every evening. In addition to working with Clear Spring's students with special needs, Nadine and her husband run Buck Valley Ranch, a bed and breakfast in Warfordsburg, Pennsylvania.

Thanks also to Mary's AP students for joining in the festivities the past few days.

Finally, thanks to my sister, Rachel Kurtz, who teaches English along with Mary at Clear Spring and who helped set this whole thing up. I'm looking forward to seeing Rachel this afternoon as we head home to celebrate Christmas with family in Michigan and Indiana!

Merry Christmas, y'all!

*The Quick and Ed team is also looking forward to a winter break next week, so expect light posting until January 2, when we'll return rested and feisty for the new year.

Alternative Lifestyles

In an attempt to create more opportunities for charter schools and/or improve the quality of charter school authorizing, some states are allowing "alternative" authorizers--such as state level charter boards, institutions of higher education, mayors and other municipal officials, and nonprofit or philanthropic organizations--to approve charter schools in addition to or instead of the local and state boards of ed that approve and oversee charters in most states. A new Progressive Policy Institute report by Louann Berlein Palmer looks at how these alternate authorizers are performing.

Holiday Sweater Bonanza!

I couldn't resist adding to the Q&E holiday festivities (thanks, mom!). I narrowed it down from about 20 pictures (just a normal day of holiday wear at a Virginia elementary school) to three runner-ups (see below) and this one - my top choice. As my mom says, "The kids love them" and so do we!

Some Top Contenders

Holiday Cheer - Coming and Going

The Rich Get Richer

The Education Trust released its annual Funding Gap report yesterday, just in time for New Year's. (Disclosure: I used to work at Ed Trust and wrote the 2003 and 2004 editions of the report.) As always, the report exposes the basic resource inequities that hamstring many educators and disadvantaged children. Despite the fact that low-income children need more resources, many states are giving them less.

As the Post wrote this morning, this year's report features an expanded analysis of an issue that previous reports have touched on: flaws in the Federal Title I formula. The essential problem is that while Title I provides more money to poor school districts than wealthy school districts within each state, it actually provides more money to poor districts in wealthy states than it does to poor districts in poor states. That's because it adjusts per-student funding to states based on how much money the states themselves spend on education. States that spend more, get more.

This seems to reward states that make the effort to support their schools. But as the analysis shows, state funding levels are less a function of effort than they are of wealth. States that have more tend to spend more. So we end up with a situtation where Massachusetts gets more than twice as much Title I money per poor child than Arkansas, even though education funding effort in Arkansas, measured as education spending divided by taxable resources, is greater.

This issue hasn't received a lot of attention, but hopefully that will change as discussions heat up around the reauthorization of NCLB. The federal government should ameliorate inter-state differences in resources, not make them worse.

Twenty-first Day of Christmas

Only one more day left until our teachers get a well-deserved winter break!

Here's our special holiday guest teacher, Mary Brown, with her senior AP English class helping share the holiday cheer. Check in tomorrow for our final festive Christmas photo, more information about Mary and her school, and a chance to vote on your favorite festive Christmas outfit!

In the meantime, catch up on previous days of Christmas here.

College Rankings Return

The NYTimes goes to Florida to explore the problems and contradictions of public universities trying to climb the greased pole that is the U.S. News & World Report rankings system. Leaders from the University of Florida explain why it's important to jack up tuition by $1,000 in order to move from being the 13th-ranked public university in the country to the Top 10:

“Florida wants a top-10 university because it’s clear that our economic development is increasingly tied to research,” said Dr. Machen, the president.

Manny A. Fernandez, chairman of the board at the University of Florida, talks as frankly as Dr. Machen about rankings.

“I want to be on the cocktail-party list of schools that people talk about, because that influences the decisions of great students and great faculty,” Mr. Fernandez said. “I don’t apologize for trying to get the rankings up, because rankings are a catalyst for changes that improve the school.”

As is always the case when higher education leaders try to explain why the want to move up in the rankings, these comments say a lot about where their priorities truly lie. What you won't find in this article, and this is very typical, is anyone saying something along the lines of, "We're doing this because it will result in a higher quality education for our students." It's always, "the state will benefit from the research" or "we'll get 'better' students to enroll" or "the alumni will donate more."

The unquestioned assumption is that if faculty with great research reputations work there, and students with high SAT scores enroll there, it's a good school. The problem is that this assumption is plainly illogical--faculty often build up their scholarly credentials at the expense of teaching, and colleges should be judged based on how much their student learn while they attend college, not how much the learned before they got there. Institutional selectivity as a mark of quality is completely self-reinforcing--students will go to whichever institution is hardest to get into, because that's what selective universities are selling: a diploma that tells the world, "I got in."

For an explanation of why the U.S. News rat race is bad for higher education and how we could create a new rankings system to channel the ambitions of institutions like the University of Florida to more productive purposes, click here.

Twentieth Day of Christmas

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Nineteenth Day of Christmas...and the Fourth Day of Hanukkah!

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Caption provided by our photographer: "We are looking tired....the break can't come soon enough..."

I bet a lot of teachers agree with the second half of that statement right about now!

A Teachable Moment in Fiji?

There's been a lot of discussion on this blog and elsewhere recently about the value of teaching foreign languages and otherwise exposing students to cultures other than their own. On the latter point especially I'm inclined to agree that we must do more. For example, did you know that the government of Fiji has been overthrown via military coup four times since 1987? The latest coup happened just a few weeks ago, led by someone named--seriously--"Commodore Bananarama Bainimarama." I totally missed that. This could be used as the launching point for a lot of important school discussions, such as:

• What does it say about human nature that people living in an island paradise can have such problems that their government gets overthrown by coup more often than some governments turn over via actual election?
• Given that the head of a military dictatorship can call himelf pretty much anything he wants, has any anti-democratic strongman ever adopted a less imposing title than "Commodore"?
• Can you imagine the restraint exercised by the reporters and headline writers who didn't work the phrase "Cruel, Cruel Summer in Fiji" into their coverage?

Don't Ban "Blankets"

The AP published a variant on the tried-and-true "libraries ban books" story today, focusing on parental objections to children having access to certain graphic novels. Among them: Craig Thompson's "Blankets."

Most of the graphic novels you'll find in the book store are compendiums of multiple, previously-published comics books. "Blankets" is a single, book-length (582 pages) volume based on the author's experiences growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household in Minnesota. The story revolves around his adolescent struggles with faith, family, and the intense feelings of his first romantic relationship. A few pages contain exceptionally tasteful portrayals of semi-nudity, causing one concerned Missouri parent to ask, "Does this community want our public library to continue to use tax dollars to purchase pornography?"

I have a lot of sympathy for parents who are concerned about their children being exposed to a popular culture that seems to grow more vulgar, exploitative, and unavoidable by the year. This is true of some mainstream comic books, which tend to feature a lot of consequence-free violence and anatomically improbable women runing around in skin-tight spandex.

But here's the thing: "Blankets" is exactly the opposite of that. It's as honest, touching, and humane as one could imagine. Here are some reviews:

"...a first-love story so well remembered and honest that it reminds you what falling in love feels like...achingly beautiful." -Time

"In telling his story, which includes beautifully rendered memories of the small brutalities that parents inflict on their children and siblings upon each other, Thompson describes the ecstasy and ache of obsession (with a lover, with God) and is unafraid to suggest the ways that obsession can consume itself and evaporate." -The New York Times Book Review

"...recreates the confusion, emotional pain and isolation of the author's rigidly fundamentalist Christian upbringing, along with the trepidation of growing into maturity, with a rare combination of sincerity, pictorial lyricism and taste." -Publisher's Weekly

"...an impressively concrete portrait of emotional emphemera, captured with talent, disarming humor, and a gentle sincerity that glows through on every remarkable page." -The Onion

Children absolutely need to be protected from pornography, but doing so means applying a reasonable definition of what that word means. At its worse, pornography stimulates the basest human impulses with graphic, dehumanizing depictions of violence and sex. It's ironic that the word itself has become debased in a way that seems allow the worst imaginable kinds of violence while drawing a bright line at the portrayal of specific, fairly innocuous elements of female anatomy, regardless of context.

Libraries shouldn't be banning "Blankets," they should be handing out free copies at the door.

The Eighteenth Day of Christmas

Only a week left in our series! Catch up on previous festive holiday outfits:
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English-Only Island, (Korea)

In a fairly strong approach to second language acquisition, the government of Korea is planning to create an entire English-only town on the island of Cheju, complete with elementary and secondary schools and colleges. It’s a way to boost students’ language skills, while also saving a chunk of the $3.3 billion that Korean students spend to study abroad each year. It could be related to the ever increasing numbers of Korean students coming to study in the U.S., which jumped 10% just in the past year.

I see at least two main ways to think about this—one that Kevin is right and current U.S. dominance allows us to assume most people speak English and focus on other areas, or two, that if people from other countries can speak English and increasingly do our jobs for less, maybe we should start developing new skills and flexibilities to compete. My vote is to start with Chinese. There’s no reason that academic content can’t be taught in dual language academies so that we aren’t removing anything to teach language skills.

On a broader level, I think we overestimate the number of people who speak English, and fail to recognize the importance of being able to communicate with the 4 billion people who don’t speak English (including over 20 million in the U.S.) both in terms of being able to compete economically and valuing global citizenship. Obviously, we can’t all learn one language that will open global communication, but I don’t think learning Chinese (1 billion speakers) or Spanish (330 million speakers) is a bad place to start. First up? Rosie O'Donnell.

Fifteenth Day of Christmas!

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The Clip that Caused All the Trouble

By now you've probably heard about the Virginia teacher who's been placed on administrative leave for his apparently lucrative side business painting with his posterior. But have you seen the YoutTube clip that landed him in trouble with his school board? If you've got the stomach for it, you now can, here.

Meet Ms. Pappas

Pre-K Now recently launched a new teacher blog by New Jersey pre-k teacher Sophia Pappas. It's well worth your time to check out. I find a lot of people are confused about what we mean when we talk about high-quality preschool and, in particular, early literacy and school readiness teaching for young children. If you're one of those folks, a glimpse in Ms. Pappas' classroom can help you get a better sense of that.

With this new blog and Richard Colvin's Early Stories, I'm pleased to see early childhood gaining ground in the edu-blogosphere, which has generally seemed dominated by K-12 and higher ed bloggers. If readers know of any other good early childhood or preschool blogs I'm missing, I'd appreciate if you'd send them my way.

Intra-Q&E Debate!

Not to bust up Kevin's emerging consensus, but if we're going to start making foreign language a mandatory part of the elementary school curriculum (which I think IS a good idea), I don't think we should make it mandatory that the language taught be Spanish. I don't disagree with Kevin that Spanish is useful to know (it comes in very handy for me all the time), but as a Romance language it's much easier to learn as an adult or teen than lots of other languages. So why not teach elementary school students Mandarin Chinese, which I keep hearing is going to be increasingly useful in the business world as China's economy grows, or one of the Dravidian languages, in light of the growth of India's economy, or Arabic, which, given the many problems in the Middle East right now, I can't imagine our national security aparatus isn't going to have growing demand for for some time to come. These languages are all extremely difficult to learn well as an adult, and there's a real shortage of speakers of them for both business and government. Obviously, you'd run into major teacher supply issues trying to make any of these languages mandatory, but that's not a reason not to encourage schools to include them in the mix of languages being taught to young children, or to experiment with innovative ways to draw on the many native speakers of these languages already in the U.S. to help children learn them.

The Fourteenth Day of Christmas

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The Thirteenth Day of Christmas

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The Rapidly Growing National Consensus on Reforming the Teaching of Foreign Language

A Quick+ED reader writes in about my post on teaching foreign languages:

I agree completely about language education in the early grades. I wasted a great deal of time in high school Spanish classes and had to learn it years later in Mexico. My daughter, on the other hand, has been in a dual language program since first grade (she's in fifth now) and is fully bilingual.

It's idiotic to wait till kids are teenagers, which is precisely when their aptitude for language acquisition begins to deteriorate. Studying a foreign language has the added benefit of making you think about and analyze your own, if you're fortunate enough to have a good teacher.

Consensus!

Tough on the 16 Hour KIPP workday

Alexander Russo has posted an interesting interview with Paul Tough, author of the much-discussed recent NYTimes article on the achievement gap. A sample:

AR: One of the things that folks have glommed onto is the idea that KIPP teachers work 16 hours a day. Where’d you get that from, and does it really matter?

PT: Dave Levin, one of the co-founders of KIPP, said that to me. I wish in retrospect that I’d made it a bit more conditional, and Dave might wish that, as well. (I don’t know that he does, I should say; I’m just guessing.) I think KIPP teachers work really hard and work long hours, and I think that was the point Dave was making. But I don’t think they all work 16 hours a day every day. I think both points are important to understand – and it’s obviously a critical question because of the debate over the replicability of the KIPP model. I do think there are a lot of really good and really committed teachers and potential teachers out there who would be (and are) eager to teach in a school that is well-run and is achieving great results, even if it means a lot of hard work and long hours.

AR: Sixteen hours a day or no, not everyone’s willing to go what I’m going to call the “KIPP route.” Where did you come out from your reporting on the topic of broader, non-instructional approaches- health insurance, living wages, affordable housing, financial incentives to attend and complete school, and – most timely – integration efforts?

PT: When you say “not everyone,” do you mean not every parent, not every child, not every teacher or not every administrator? I think the one thing we know is that there are many more parents and children willing to go the KIPP route than are now going the KIPP route. So I think that’s the first problem to solve. That seems like a good first principle, in fact: if there are poor children and poor parents willing to put in the kind of effort and hard work that KIPP students exert, we shouldn’t be denying them that opportunity.

Buy Now! College On Sale!

I couldn’t resist noting the synchronicity of today’s front-page New York Times article, “In Tuition Game, Popularity Rises with Price” and the Chart You Can Trust we released today. The New York Times piece did a good job of getting at the red flags of tuition discounting—merit aid going to well-off students, the increasing uniformity of pricing in higher education, and high sticker prices that are used as a marker of quality and at the same time dissuade qualified, low-income students from applying. But, the BIG reason tuition discounting is disturbing was summarized in the last line of the article, “We don’t know.”

Students and their parents don’t know the true price of a college when they apply, or how much of a discount to expect in their financial aid letters. In our Chart You Can Trust, we focus on a subset of colleges—small, lower tuition private colleges—which, on average, offer a discount to 92% of their freshmen. When 92% of students receive a discount, what is the real price of the college? And who receives those discounts? While some colleges limit aid to students with financial need, others use discounts to boost the SAT scores and average GPA’s of their incoming class. One thing is certain: with the growing use of tuition discounts by both public and private colleges, tuition discounting needs to become part of the conversation on tuition pricing and affordability.

Tuition discounting also ties in with the conversation on transparency and accountability in higher education. As is apparent in the New York Times article, price is currently used as a proxy for quality when students and parents evaluate colleges and universities. An increase in price, however, does not necessarily mean an increase in quality. Often, the revenue generated from price increases simply goes to providing discounts to more students and is not invested in educational resources. Judgments on higher education quality need to be more sophisticated. They need to be about teaching and learning and not simply how much you paid.

Foreign Language Redux

Sherman Dorn takes me to task for generalizing from personal experience in questioning about the value of learning foreign langugages. Totally fair, as I thought I made clear when I said that my question was based "on what is admittedly the worst of all sample sizes of one: myself." He also makes a point that was raised by my colleagues here on the Education Sector policy team, who are generally a lot smarter about these issues than I am: it's dumb to wait until late middle school or high school, as I did, to start learning a foreign language.

So how about this: make foreign language a mandatory part of the curriculum for students in elementary school, since that's when children are in the language acquisition and development stage. Moreover, don't make it any old language. Make it Spanish, for everyone, since that's far and away the most commonly-spoken foreign language in this country, by at least a factor of ten. Then when students get to secondary school, include a mandatory curricular element focused on learning about diverse cultures, global geography, etc., which might or might not include additional instruction in a variety of foreign languages, depending on student interest.

In other words, concentrate foreign language instruction during the stages of development when students are most likely to benefit, in the language that they're most likely to use. Then give them the chance to continue that course of study later on, but only if they want to. This seems better than the way things worked when I was in school (and I'm pretty sure my experience was, and is, fairly typical), which often involved spending a lot of time studying French, German, and/or other languages that relatively few people in this country or the world at large actually speak.

The forseeable objections of Lou Dobbsian nativist crazy people aside, would this be a good idea?

The Twelfth Day of Christmas

Catch up on days one, four, and five.

(For more fun photo viewing not in any way related to this series, check out this one from D-ED Reckoning and this one and this one from NYC Educator, who always has lots of fun and interesting photos and pictures accompanying posts.)

The Wire Season Finale

Season Four of The Wire comes to a close. I think Craig's take on the strengths and weaknesses of the show's examination of the Baltimore school system and contemporary education policy is exactly right and better than I could have written. Many thanks to Craig for his insightful analysis and commentary.

As to the finale and season as a whole, it's worth stepping back for a moment to consider what David Simon, the show's creator, has called the overriding theme of The Wire's entire multi-season run:

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

Most of the drama and character development in The Wire ultimately comes down to the many characters confronting this reality. It's a narrative of individuals struggling against irrational, destructive larger forces, of trying to retain their humanity in an indifferent, dehumanizing world. Some succumb to it completely, while others save enough of themselves to keep living.

Growing into adulthood is partly a matter of understanding life's most difficult realities— obligation, limitation, unfairness, tragedy. Using the maturation of children to demonstrate the overriding theme made Season Four compelling in ways that exceeded even the tremendously high standards of seasons 1-3. Adults at least have the benefit of some kind of self-determination. Watching children fall into the maw of the West Baltimore drug culture was very hard to take.

But Simon's commitment to his viewers has always been one of truth above all else, so it wasn't surprising that Season Four ended largely in tragedy, disillusionment, failure, and loss:

Bubbles, hanging from the police room ceiling, later collapsing in Steve Earle's arms, shattered by the realization that despite his good heart and best intentions, drug addiction had consumed his life and led him to accidentally kill the boy he was trying to protect.

Carver, unable to save Randy from the group home, his guilt made all the worse by Randy's forgiveness.

Norman, seeing that Carcetti is no better than all the rest of the politicians when it comes to putting his interests above those of children who can't vote.

Colvin, realizing that his attempt to reform education was destined for the same fate as his attempt to reform policing, understanding that sometimes speaking truth to power makes things worse, not better.

Bodie, acknowledging that the game is rigged, but holding onto his identity as a soldier and choosing to die on his feet rather than live on his knees. Bodies's death was harder to take than I thought it would be. I kept saying to myself, "He killed Wallace…" but somehow that didn't make it any better.

Dukie, approaching the new high school and then, in a moment, walking away, back to the corner, closed off from whatever small chance he might have had.

Prez, watching Dukie slinging, all his attention and care and teaching undone.

And Michael, now a murderer, waking from a vision of better days with his brother. "Now you can look anyone in the eye," said Chris, but of course Michael was always able to stand up and look people in the eye. That was his strength; that's what doomed him. This is the essential lie of the game, the one that Bodie realized too late: it promises you respect, family, wealth, but all it ever does in the end is take those things, everything, away.

Still, it wasn't all loss and tragedy. The Wire always gives viewers enough hope to get through. I suspect Randy will survive the group home and start that small business yet, and Namond—least deserving by far—has a fighting chance to make something of himself. Given the odds facing students in West Baltimore, one out four was probably generous in the end.

And some of the other characters seemed more hopeful still, with McNulty returning from a better place to the major crimes unit, Cutty together with the nurse who misjudged him, the police who matter more supported and valued than at any time before. And there's always Omar, the one man who lives outside the system on his own terms.

The Wire lets its characters have victories—they just have to earn them. And as pessimistic as David Simon's worldview may be, it's less hopeless than I suspect even he realizes. He lets his characters find decent lives and a measure of happiness because in the long run all is not lost and reform is not impossible. People can be worth more, not less, as long shows like The Wire continue to tell the truth.

The Wire: Craig's Final Grades

At the beginning of the season, I wondered if The Wire would break the entertainment industry’s record of getting urban education wrong by reducing it to a string of hackneyed set pieces about cardboard kids (either saints or hard-cases-with-hearts-of-gold) and heroic teachers (usually white) who swoop in to save them. I expected it to accomplish that by “spending a full year taking a close look at urban education.”

Were my hopes realized? The answer is both “yes” and “no.” The Wire gets a “B-” as an educational documentary, but an “A+” as television drama.

First the bad: It turns out that the writers never intended to give viewers the kind of complex, comprehensive picture of the education system they’ve presented of the criminal justice system. Yes, we did get a more realistic peek into a corner of the education world few ever see. And the writers nailed some things with enough realism that even briefly-glimpsed props could enrich the narrative. But by spending too little time on how adults interact with adults in that system, and doing that mostly through the eyes of a novice teacher and some outsiders running an alternative “pull out program,” we got a black and white snapshot rather than a rich tapestry.

Unfortunately, that limitation reduced other aspects of the education subplot to black and white, too. My inner ed wonk was disappointed that The Wire too often presented uncommonly simplistic takes on complex topics like the impact of No Child Left Behind and the phenomenon of “teaching to the test.” And my inner Wire fan was disappointed that it sometimes resorted to dramatic shortcuts and lazy writing for that purpose. How many times did Cutty’s ex-wife show up in the teachers’ lounge only to tell us, yet again, what Ed Burns thinks of NCLB?

Now the good: While my inner ed wonk will have to keep waiting for a TV show or film to tackle urban education systems in the nuanced way The Wire has tackled police work, my inner Wire fan is more than satisfied with the season we got. In fact, considered as a whole, this might be my second-favorite season of the four. (Time, and another full viewing, will tell.) Yes, some adult characters never transcended expositional cardboard, but the new kid characters shattered the mold. Brilliantly written and acted, those characters were literally “transcendent”—re-writing the rules for adolescents on television.

And their stories were devastating in the best tradition of The Wire—both dramatically and thematically. I’ll be haunted by Randy’s question to Carver in the hospital: “You gonna help, huh? You gonna look out for me?” I’ll be haunted by Prez watching Dukie selling drugs on the corner after bowing to his boss’s advice not to get too involved. I’ll be haunted by the look Michael gives his mother to let her know he’s had Bug’s father killed, the moment he loses not just his future but his soul.

I’ll even be haunted by the final shot that lingers on Namond’s new “corner,” symbolic of all the opportunities open to him now that Bunny and his wife have adopted him. In a show as carefully plotted as The Wire, it’s no accident that the least sympathetic kid character of the four is the one who’s saved. That’s the point: We can talk about America being a meritocracy all we want, but for kids in West Baltimore that word is mostly meaningless.

If America were a true meritocracy, one that rewarded talent—and developed talent for the common good—Duquan would attend an excellent school with a great math teacher, not a rookie who has no idea how to help him, let alone teach him. If it were a true meritocracy, budding and innovative capitalist Randy would be treated like the next Michael Dell, or at least someone who might actually own a store of his own someday. And in a true meritocracy (heck, even just in a halfway rational society) a kid with Michael’s practical smarts and immense leadership skills would be treated as a future business or civic leader—even a future mayor of Baltimore—and educated accordingly.

But for children in West Baltimore, making it has far more to do with luck than with merit. If The Wire is right, it has nothing to do with merit at all. How can we live with that?

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

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.