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.

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.