AFTie Confusion

In critiquing my post on Richard Rothstein, AFTie John can't figure out the difference between the title of a law and what the law actually says.

Or he thinks Rothstein can't tell the difference, or Congress can't. I'm not exactly sure.

The larger point being, the phrase "close the achievement gap" can mean equally legitimate but very different things. It can mean "erase all academic performance differences between poor and non-poor students," or it can mean "make sure that both poor and non-poor students reach a defined (and in most states, not particularly high) level of achievement."

Since Congress chose the latter definition when the wrote the actual provisions of NCLB, it seems safe to assume that they also had that definition in mind when they referred to closing the achievement gap in the title.

It's also safe to assume that Rothstein, who is obviously a pretty smart guy, understands the distinction. That's why his tendency to switch back and forth between the two in rhetorically slippery ways is so maddening.

20 More Days (of the same?)

D.C. Superintendent Clifford Janey is proposing to extend the school year for a group of low-performing schools, as reported by the Post. This would mean a 200-day school year, reducing summer break by nearly 20 days and giving these students more time to learn. This isn't a bad idea, given research that shows low-income kids fall behind their more affluent peers during the long summer break. "Summer learning loss", as it's called, and the achievement gaps it helps to create, are worth tackling with more time. But I'm not convinced that more time in D.C.'s lowest performing schools is going to do the trick. I worry that this is a policy of last resort, a concern that is only heightened by the Post's reporting that Janey is adding the time because he says he's "running out of options to help students in low-performing schools."

I also wonder how D.C. plans to assess this program, and to sustain it if it proves effective. It is possible, I guess, that Janey has been contemplating and studying this idea for some time, and that D.C. has a strong plan to implement and evaluate the effects of a longer DCPS school year. But in case not, he might want to check out Massachusetts, where ten public schools in five districts were competitively chosen to try out longer days and longer years beginning this school year. Massachusetts 2020, which has been leading this charge, knows how difficult this can be- financially, politically and logistically- and will gladly share lessons learned. Good reading before we finalize plans for what board of education VP Carolyn Graham calls "a radical" and "aggressive" approach to boosting student achievement in D.C.

By the way, Education Sector will be talking about extending school time on October 11th. Join us if you can.

School Reform by Referendum?

An interesting court case is happening in New York City - a coalition of parents and teachers, including representatives from Class Size Matters and the American Federation of Teachers, filed a lawsuit in order to place a class size referendum on the November ballot. The city blocked the referendum, which would set aside 25 percent of the money received through the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case in order to lower class sizes. Legalities aside, the essential question is whether a referendum is the best way to determine how this money should be spent.

In the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, the state's highest court ordered the state to pay city schools $4.7 billion to $5.63 billion in additional operating funds over four years. That is a lot of money and (assuming this money comes through) it is an incredible, and rare, opportunity for New York City.

Is class size reduction a good use of these funds? Maybe, but it is an expensive reform and can result in unintended consequences if enacted poorly. It does, though, have a nice ring to it and is easy to understand, making it popular among parents and voters. Voters, though, don'’t typically have all of the information needed to make an informed decision -– take California, for example.

California'’s class size reduction effort was implemented quickly and across all schools, resulting in greater inequalities in teacher quality distribution - schools suddenly had to find credentialed teachers to fill the open positions, resulting in an increase in the number of un-credentialed teachers, especially among schools serving the most disadvantaged students.

Research has shown that class size reduction can be effective in raising student achievement, especially among minority students, if it is done well. Given that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity money is a once in a lifetime opportunity for New York City, how it is spent needs to be a carefully considered process involving multiple options. I doubt that referendums are the best way to achieve this.

Rothstein, Concluded

Richard Rothstein recently posted a lengthy essay at the Economic Policy Institute Web site responding to various critics--most prominantly Checker Finn--who've been writing in recent weeks about his views on race, class, and educational achievement. I've blogged overmuch on this topic, but I'm going to go back to the well one more time, because the first page of the essay actually tells you everything you need to know about the basic fault line in this ongoing debate. Rothstein says:

Mr. Finn asserts that good schools are "powerful enough instruments to boost poor kids' achievement to an appreciably higher academic plane." Nobody - not I, nor anyone with whom I am familiar - disagrees with this assertion. But what is commonly argued (and the notion that I dispute) is not that good schools can boost the achievement of disadvantaged children to "an appreciably higher plane" but rather that such schools can "close the achievement gap;" i.e., produce achievement from lower class children that is approximately equal to the achievement of middle class children.

Or, to rephrase:

Checker Finn believes that good schools can appreciably increase poor student learning. I, along with all reasonable people, believe that too. Therefore, for the remainder of this essay, I'm going to argue against a different assertion--one that Checker Finn did not make, and which most reasonable people do not believe--which is that good schools can completely erase the achievement gap.

This is classic, straw-man-driven rhetorical misdirection. Moreover, it's a hugely important distinction from a policy perspective, because--Rothstein's frequent assertions to the contrary--NCLB is not based on the premise that good schools can erase the achievement gap. It's based on the premise that good schools can raise disadvantaged student performance to a defined level, proficiency. A school can make AYP under NCLB and still have huge achievement gaps, as long it gets all students over that minimum standard.

On a number of levels, the entire ongoing public debate about the NCLB and the achievement gap is driven and sustained by an inability--or unwillingness--to recognize this distinction.

High School Students Not Stressed Out Enough -- Seriously

Diana Jean Schemo's great article about high remediation rates in community colleges was, unfortunately, kind of buried in the Labor Day weekend slot a few days ago. If you missed it while barbecuing and closing up your pool, take a look. In a nutshell:

As the new school year begins, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work.

and:

The unyielding statistics showcase a deep disconnection between what high school teachers think that their students need to know and what professors, even at two-year colleges, expect them to know.

This quote in particular stands out:

As the debate rages, nearly half of all students seeking degrees begin their journeys at community colleges much like the Dundalk campus of the Community College of Baltimore County, two-story no-frills buildings named by letters, not benefactors or grateful alumni. The college’s interim vice chancellor for learning and developmental education, Alvin Starr, said he saw students who passed through high school never having read a book cover to cover.

“They’ve listened in class, taken notes and taken the test off of that,’’ Dr. Starr said.

People living and working in the upper-middle professional classes are deluged with anecdotes, books, and news stories bemoaning the ever-more-crushing workload being imposed on high schoolers. Along with Jay Mathews' excellent Washington Post Op-ed from a few weeks ago, this article is another reminder that most American high school students simply do not live their lives that way. Their biggest problem isn't schools that ask too much, it's schools that ask too little.

Unfortunately, the consequences of too-low expectations don't come back to the high schools that create them. They fall upon the students themselves, often just a few months after graduation, when they enroll in college and suddenly find out how little their diploma is actually worth.

Next Week on "The Wire"

Next Monday, the Quick and Ed will be launching a new feature, a weekly analysis and discussion of the HBO television show "The Wire." For those of you have never watched it, it's time to start. "The Wire" is, by a wide margin, the best show currently on television and part of any serious discussion of the greatest television shows ever made.

Created by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon and former Baltimore homicide detective Ed Burns, "The Wire" follows the lives of a group of police and drug dealers on the West side of present-day Baltimore. That makes it sound like a typical cop-and-robbers show. It isn't. In fact, "The Wire" is unlike anything else on television. Using dozens of characters and multiple, interlocking storylines, "The Wire" is nothing less than the story of the life of an entire city, in all its messy, fascinating complexity.

More than any show now running, "The Wire" treats its viewers like adults. The characters don't stop for unnatural conversations designed to tell you what you just saw or what happened last week. The vernacular of criminals and police isn't watered down. Each episode isn't shoehorned into a neat three-act structure with a tidy emotional and dramatic conclusion, because life doesn't work that way.

Each character in the sprawling cast is complex and multidimensional–"The Wire" doesn’t' glorify its heroes or demonize its villains, although it has plenty of both. In addition to a top-notch cast of actors, "The Wire" also benefits from a writing staff that includes experienced Baltimore journalists, as well as novelists like George Pellecanos and Dennis Lehane.

Every season, "The Wire" uses its huge canvass to explore a specific theme related to life in urban America. The first season looked at the struggle of individuals in modern organizations, the second season examined labor and the deindustrialization of cities, and the third season focused on the challenges of political and social reform.

Season Four will focus on education. In addition to ongoing storylines involving police, criminals, and politicians, the show will follow four middle-school boys and a frequently dysfunctional school system struggling to deal with the consequences of drugs, poverty, and our society's crushingly ineffective efforts to fix those social ills.

This all might sound horribly, take-your-medicine-bleak and boring. Trust me, it's not. "The Wire" is also tremendously entertaining. The only danger is that once you rent the DVDs you won't get any work done that week because you'll be up all night until you've seen every episode, possibly more than once.

Joining me each week will be Craig Jerald, a D.C.-based education analyst and writer who wrote a great paper on high school reform earlier this year. A former Teacher For America corps member, much of Craig's work has focused on closing the achievement gap for low-income and minority students. Like me, he'll be breaking down each episode and what it means for contemporary education policy, asking whether policymakers at all levels are working hard enough and smart enough on behalf of students like those in Baltimore.

Stay tuned.