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.)