Peter Meyer

The Best Education for the Best Is the Best Education for All

2012-09-08T16:35:31-04:00

“We Don’t Need No Education,” an essay by Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, in a recent New York Times, is a succinct and compelling argument for giving all our children a solid liberal arts education, through and beyond high school -- and a cautionary tale about trying to create utilitarian schooling tracks that avoid the humanities.

Though I’m not sure that taking out after the “instrumentalist rhetoric” of recent reports like that of the Council on Foreign Relations (U.S. Education Reform and National Security) is appropriate, Roth is right to question those who wonder “why people destined for low-paying jobs should bother to pursue their education beyond high school, much less study philosophy, literature and history.” I have written about the subject before (here, here, and here) because, as Roth argues, it’s important. It’s an education policy issue that, played out in the trenches, is very much a social justice issue, if not a moral one—and, I would argue, very much a national security issue. This was the point of my post on Earl Shorris’s Roberto Clemente program for the poor; that the poor deserve a good education too. As Shorris wrote:

If the multigenerational poor are to make the leap out of poverty, it will require a new kind of thinking—reflection…. And that is a beginning. [The study of the humanities is] in itself a redistribution of wealth.

Shorris quotes the great University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins: “The best education for the best is the best education for us all.”

Of course, there are arguments about what a “best” education is, but for too many of our urban kids who can barely read and write those are arguments at the fringe. The thin ice here, and this is what Roth is getting at, is that by determining that some kids are only cut out for the manual trades, we are denying them access to that “best” education and—this is the national security problem—thus denying the nation a wealth of potential rocket scientists and CEOs.

Some of this is a variation on the voc-ed debate—see Checker and my dueling essays last winter, “Liberal Arts vs. Technical Training”—and Roth offers decent reasons for rejecting the “dual-track” system that sends some kids toward plumbing (or computer programming?) and others toward Hegel and Dickens. It is not a new debate: John Dewey argued, as Roth points out, that a dual-track system would, in Roth’s words, “reinforce the inequalities of his time.” (These are the same “structured inequities” that Tony Bryck said were part of what made public schools inferior to Catholic schools.)

Roth says that our current “instrumentalist perspective” is a bad thing for many of the same reasons:

Who wants to attend school to be “human capital?” Who aspires for their children to become economic or military resources?

In my “College for All! Please!” post last year I cited a piece by David Leonhardt, also in the Times, which I called a “masterful KO of the silly notion that we shouldn't encourage kids to go to college.” Leonhardt’s Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off “should take your breath away:"

A dishwasher with a college degree earns 83 percent more than a dishwasher with no college;

A cashier with a college degree, 56 percent more;

A plumber, 39 percent.

Leonhardt quotes David Autor, an M.I.T. economist, saying rather bluntly, “Sending more young Americans to college is not a panacea. Not sending them to college would be a disaster.” There are, of course, many hidden assumptions in this “college for all” debate, the first of which is whether you mean that all kids should go to college or all kids should be able to go to college. I personally would be pleased if all kids were capable of going to college, where college is defined as something more than remedial education.

But at a minimum we have to broaden the standards movement to include colleges (this is the K-20 approach to education). There are many community college horror stories, but I do think we could, if we tried, agree on some basic standards for college readiness. (Kindergarten “readiness” is another question, one that should send our elementary school policymakers back to the drawing board; a topic for another day.)

I personally don’t care if a kid decides not to go to college. I would, however, demand that every high school graduate at least be capable of reading (and understanding) David Leonhardt’s story—i.e., your options are probably pretty constrained if you don’t go to college—and that every district superintendent be judged by the number of his or her truly college-ready graduates. If a student decides not to go to college, fine. But at least he or she would have, I would hope, the option of going if he or she wanted to—which is better, I would assume, than not having that option after twelve years of schooling.

The question here is the Hutchins question: Shouldn’t every American citizen have a right to the best education we can deliver? And this is what Michael Roth is getting at; that the liberal arts are, in fact, part of that best education -- and that that best education should be available to all students, even those destined for the trades. He quotes Dewey:

The world in which most of us live is a world in which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do…. Some are managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human significance.

Every student deserves that education.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute's Board's Eye View blog.

Knowledge Wins

2012-09-05T09:00:00-04:00

When we think of poverty, what do we think of? Food stamps? Emaciated children? Tin shacks? Empty refrigerators?

I have seen poverty all over the globe in my lifetime and know that it is all of that -- and much more. Some 20 years ago Life magazine asked me to find an American family that could be the face of poverty. How was poverty lived in the United States?

We had correspondents in all parts of the country send in candidates, with pictures, for consideration. In the end, I chose a family in Portsmouth, Ohio, a once flourishing industrial town (birthplace of Roy Rogers), down on its luck. I spread the snapshots of the family out on the table for the editors to see. I expected the look of shock on their faces.

"But they're white!" said one.

"Yes," I replied. "Most poor people in the United States are white." That was a revelation. White people could be poor.

Flashing forward for a second, according to the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, things haven't changed much. In 2010, over 5 million white children lived in poverty and 4.8 million black children did. Whites still prevail.

Of course, I am fudging now as I did then, since the rates of poverty by demographic category give a very different picture; 35 percent of Hispanic children under 18 live in poverty and 38 percent of black children are poor. For whites, it's just 12.4 percent. Just! It's no fun to be poor, defined, crudely, as not having enough money to pay for food and shelter. But what about the TV? And the cell phone? The drugs? The teenage pregnancies? Is that poverty? Do we subsidize it?

Is there a racial component to poverty in the United States? Of course. Are there cultural differences in the way poverty is "lived"? Yes. Are there correlations in marital status and poverty? Indeed.

One of the reasons we titled the 1989 Life story "Children of Poverty" was to convey the multi-dimensional, multi-generational nature of the beast. You were born into poverty as you were born into America or France or Nigeria. Indeed, "poverty" had a lack of money dimension to it; but it was just one of the characteristics of the syndrome. After all, plenty of people have their "going broke" periods; this family had been, it seemed, perennially "broke," always "down on their luck." And in the post-Great Society era, their "work" had become "working the system." It was a co-dependence that was quite obvious and quite frightful.

So, can we "cure" poverty?

Years after the Life piece appeared, I met a low-income housing developer who talked frankly about the money he had made building housing for the poor, to help cure poverty. "It didn't work," he said. "We were supposed to provide decent housing," he continued, "and the rest would follow."

I asked about schools. "Yes," he said, "Getting kids a good place to live was supposed to improve their educational prospects. It didn't."

After decades of helping give poor people what we thought they needed in order to succeed in school -- food and shelter -- this man had concluded that what they needed were better schools. "You don't improve the schools by improving living conditions," he said. "You improve living conditions by improving the schools."

Education, education, education. That's how you solve poverty. It's a solution the country hit up on the mid-1800s, when states began to impose compulsory school attendance laws; and it worked. Several generations of immigrants and natives alike contributed to the building of school houses, most of them the best buildings in town, on a hill, representing the hope of upwardly mobile change that education offered. They believed that knowledge counted; that it counted enough to lift you from poverty to providence. And it worked. By the mid-1900s America had educated several generations of the poor and they had gone on to recreate America, transforming it into the world's most powerful economic engine.

Somehow we've turned the paradigm of success on its head; we've convinced ourselves that we can't educate children until we solve poverty. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

Knowledge counts. Knowledge wins. And schools remain the only place that rich and poor alike are going to acquire knowledge. The poor do not lack dollars; they lack the knowledge that is the only currency accepted on the toll highway to success.

This post is part of the HuffPost Shadow Conventions 2012, a series spotlighting three issues that are not being discussed at the national GOP and Democratic conventions: The Drug War, Poverty in America, and Money in Politics.

HuffPost Live will be taking a comprehensive look at the persistence of poverty in America August 29th and September 5th from 12-4 pm ET and 6-10 pm ET. Click here to check it out -- and join the conversation.

Poverty and Schools: Finally, Some Lights Go On

2012-08-06T11:24:08-04:00

When Jesus said (according to Matthew), "the poor you will always have with you," he might have added, "and so too the debate about whether schools can educate them." Paul Peterson has written one of the better essays on the seemingly interminable battle between those who believe that you have to cure the poor before you can educate them and those who believe that educating the poor will help cure poverty.

But there is some good news to report: the pendulum might be swinging, ever-so-slightly, toward the believers (in school).

First, Del Stover reports that a summer session of the Council on Urban Boards of Education (CUBE), according to the post, concluded that "[t]ending to children's social, emotional needs [is an] important part of delivering education." It's the "part of" part that is encouraging; the source of the problem of educating the poor may be outside the schools, but the solution is inside the schools. The CUBE seminar, according to Stover, included a presentation by Barbara Cavallo, head of Partnership with Children, a New York City social services agency, describing the many challenges (to learning, to life, to everything) faced by poor children -- and what schools could do to overcome them. Cavallo's counselors, according to Stover, "work with teachers and principals to develop a school-wide plan to create a safe and supportive school climate."

And, according to Stover, the training is paying the kind of dividends that school reformers have long argued are quite possible:

A survey of the Partnership's program found that school administrators reported a 25-percent decrease in students being referred to their office, and they said they spent about one-third less time on disciplinary matters.

What's more, another study of similar programs nationwide found that schools that focused on social and emotional learning reported a noticeable bump in standardized test scores.

Next, Joe Nocera in the New York Times, profiled Pamela Cantor's Turnaround for Children program, also in New York City (and Washington, DC). Like Cavallo's Partnership, Cantor's Turnaround has been around for a while (there's a nice endorsement from Joel Klein on the organization's home page) and has taken up the reformers' belief that schools can educate poor children if they understand how poor children learn. According to Nocera, Turnaround embeds a team of three professionals in a school for three to five years and focuses on three key players in the school:

Principals "[c]reate a positive, disciplined culture, where students come to believe they can succeed."

Teachers give them "tools ... that will allow them to handle disruptions while keeping the other students on track."

Social workers "[t]rain the school social workers to help with the psychological and emotional needs of children in poverty, while identifying the most troubled students, the ones who can drive the entire school."

There appears to be no research yet about the impact of the program, though Nocera cites an independent evaluation by the American Institutes for Research, which showed that its schools had "far fewer disruptions and were generally calmer, safer, indeed, happier places." Nocera also notes that the AIR report "suggested that Turnaround needed to put more emphasis on improving the academic environment in the classroom."

But at least, as Nocera writes, Cantor is showing "the importance of facing poverty squarely in schools."

And this leads, finally, to a recent Huffington Post blog by Richard Whitmore, education journalist and author of the Michelle Rhee biography The Bee Eater, who used an ACLU suit in Michigan to review the question of whether schools can educate the poor. (See the Wall Street Journal's excellent report about the district's decision to "outsource" its schools to a charter management organization -- a sign, at least, that the district believes that someone might be able to educate poor kids.) Whitmore notes that his research on high-poverty schools has found "many schools, and a few entire districts, that are head and shoulders above their counterparts." Though he says that "[e]ven the best of these schools can't replicate wealthy suburban schools ... [w]hat matters in places such as Washington and San Jose is that hundreds more students will arrive in their senior year of high school prepared to take on some kind of post-high school education." Isn't some progress better than none?

Let's hope that these efforts -- and their successes -- will motivate more school leaders to believe that they can and must face poverty squarely, in the classroom. As Nocera concludes, "Creating schools that are designed from the start to deal with the predicable challenges of poverty -- it is the most important thing we can do next." Yes.

The End of Geography (and School Boards?) in Education Governance

2012-07-17T11:30:18-04:00

Of the thirteen papers presented at Fordham's Rethinking Education Governance for the 21st Century symposium last December, one that had particular resonance for me was Rick Hess and Olivia Meeks' analysis of the school district dilemma.

We have nearly 14,000 of them in this country and they control billions of dollars worth of taxpayer money. Lots of people hate them; many believe that they are a large part our education system's deterioration. But as Gene Maeroff writes, in his brilliant new book, School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy, "of all the institutions in the country with jurisdiction over large chunks of money and the ability to influence the nation's future, boards of education are surely the most obscure and least understood." (I am trying to make them less obscure by soliciting essays from reform-minded school board members about their experiences in the trenches. See here.)

Hess and Meeks do a brilliant job of taking us by the hand and leading us gently through the weeds of school board governance -- it's a fascinating history -- and the foothills of the popular alternative of mayoral control, leading us to a mountain top, from where we can see, in the distance, a cloud of sorts, an education system where we "organize schooling around function rather than geography." It's an amazing view -- and it doesn't have to include school boards, not because they are bad, but because they will be mostly irrelevant.

Our current problem, Hess and Meeks argue, is that "every school district is asked to devise ways to meet every need of every single child in a given area," and it doesn't work. Districts are simply not capable of "build[ing] expertise in a vast number of specialties and services" or "juggl[ing] a vast array of demands [that] require them to become the employers of nearly all educators in a given community."

The two education researchers are too practical to suggest the end of geography (i.e. all virtual all the time), but they understand that current school district impotence is a symptom of a problem, not its cause. Importantly, their analysis of the causes also makes them doubtful that suggested alternatives to school boards, like mayoral control, move us in the right direction. They write:

[T]he critiques voiced by those ready to abolish or overhaul boards seemingly imply tacit approval of the antiquated, geographically configured school district itself. Instead of addressing the fact that the ship itself is taking on water, those pursuing governance reforms have focused on who should be at the helm. While a good captain is undoubtedly preferred to a bad captain, reformers serious about righting the ship must be ready to address the bigger challenges.

The chances that current suggestions for fixes -- such as making board elections more relevant and reducing the influence of unions in them, or mayoral control -- "will be the bearers of revolutionary change in governance are," say the authors, "slim, at best." The only reasonable way of governing 21st century schools is by freeing them of place-based constraints.

Thus, you would have education providers -- each offering their own set of specialties and services -- roaming the country (virtually or otherwise), providing their services directly to schools or sets of schools. We're stuck with a department store model of education when Amazon may be showing us the future:

A glance at catalogues from the early 1900s shows the one-stop-shop business mentality of the era. The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue, for instance, features firearms, baby carriages, jewelry, saddles, and even eyeglasses with a self-test for ― old sight, near sight, and astigmatism. That's no longer the way providers in most sectors are organized....

Today we push thousands of districts to embrace and implement unwanted programs. If the private sector operated in this fashion, Amazon.com would have restricted its clientele to residents of Washington state, while would-be imitators from across the country flocked in to learn its secrets and then return home to emulate them....

Instead of encouraging school districts to emulate successful charter management organizations, for instance, policymakers might focus on enabling and encouraging CMOs like KIPP to open schools more readily in order to satisfy local demand.

Hess and Meeks even foresee the possibility of "competing boards" in a given locale; or "empower[ing] non-profit or for-profit networks that might contract directly with a state" to provide educational services. Or, a third approach "is to do away with districts altogether. One could imagine states turning every school into a charter school."

I emailed Rick over the recent holiday and he was gracious enough to elaborate on his ideas in a couple of emails. "The disease is really twofold," he explained. "Progressive bureaucracy and the perils of place-based governance." The latter, he says, "prohibits specialization, makes it enormously tough to recruit like-minded professional staff or to cater to families who have shared concerns and needs."

A "portfolio management" governance system that could be part of the future, writes Rick, would, for instance, "allow districts to work with focused organizations to each recruit the professional who can serve the families for whom its approach makes sense." (Lest one think this is just another cockamamie idea of the radical right, see the work that Paul Hill and his Center on Reinventing Public Education are doing.)

The digital revolution, which is just now beginning, is clearly part of the new education world that Hess and Meeks see on the near horizon. Certainly, the World Wide Web opens amazing opportunities of organizing education around function not geography.

"The giant challenge" here, as Rick explained in his email, is that we have "no assurance that these providers will cover everywhere, and, as with utilities, we have a desire to see schooling available everywhere. One solution is the gradual expansion of virtual options. But the other is having localities play a role in attracting providers, coordinating them, or providing schools if no one else wants to."

He thinks the portfolio approach is "the BIG STRETCH in today's thinking about governance," but it's also the one he believes is "the minimum" that needs to be done to accomplish the shift to an education governance system that is truly in line with the necessities of the 21st century.

In Search of the Elusive Reform-Minded School Board Member

2012-07-12T14:01:59-04:00

I have just finished a five-year school board term, which I have written about on my Board's Eye View blog for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (here, here, here, here). It has been a wild ride.

Are there others like me out there?

Much current thinking among school reformers is that school boards should go the way of the Edsel. Our own Checker Finn, head of TBFI, has not liked school boards for some time and as recently as 2010 wrote, in National Affairs, that "it seems increasingly clear that our revered system of 'local control' by elected municipal school boards cannot cope with today's realities of metropolitanization, mobility, and interest-group politics."

True or false?

If you are -- or were -- a school board member who believes in school reform, I would like to hear from you. What is it like trying to turn around a tanker with a paddle? Are you a flamethrower or consensus builder? Did you win any fights? Were you able to improve your district? Have you come away from your experience as believer in boards of education or a determined skeptic?

I have been trying to "fix" my little district (2,300 students 15 years ago, less than 1,900 today) ever since my son entered first grade (he is now finishing his third year in college). A third of its students can't pass basic proficiency tests and 40 percent don't graduate in four years. I ran for the board in the late '90s, won, quit, helped start a charter school (which crashed on the shoals of racial politics), started an email listserve dedicated to watching the district, and ran again for the board in 2007, winning another five-year stint -- and a warning from my wife: don't quit again. I didn't.

On June 25 I attended my final meeting as a member of the board, after five years and some several thousand meetings. I had outlasted two superintendents and a good half-dozen board members. But despite being the senior person on the board, I leave sitting in the same seat, literally, as when I began -- the very last place in the always awkward line-up of tables and chairs stretching across whatever room we were in; seven board members, the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, the business manager, the student representative. In a line-up where power radiated from the center -- the board president and superintendent sat in the middle -- I remained an outcast.

And the district remained in the same place, based on student academic achievement, as it was when I joined the fight, more than a dozen years ago. Though I can't prove a causal relation, I do think that the system discourages reform-minded people from running for board and, should they win a seat, defeats their best efforts to improve things.

I still have a printout of Jay Greene's early email counsel about my school board enthusiasms (expressed in this Education Week essay in 2009) taped to a long-dead computer screen:

Even if, by some miracle, a dissenter can slip onto the board, there are tricks that the status quo uses to neutralize that person. And eventually they'll organize a challenger who will unseat you.

I unseated myself, choosing not to run again. It had nothing to do with weighing my chances of winning; it was simply time to move on. I was satisfied that I at least helped establish a new dynamic and, most importantly, helped bring a new superintendent to the table. Leadership change always brings hope. Will it bring improvement? The challenges, especially in districts that have been failing for some time, are daunting.

During my first (brief) stint on the board (recounted in Education Next), I recall one elderly member of the community, mother of a board member, who would sit in the front row at board meetings and knit. She took to calling me "Mr. No!" and so addressed me, with a scowl, whenever she saw me, in the supermarket, the newsstand, church. I laughed, but what was interesting was that she had dubbed me "Mr. No!" not because I was saying "no" to everything, but because I kept making proposals to change the district, to improve it. She was one of the nicer ones. As I became more militant in my reform efforts, the local paper once editorialized so brutally that a friend remarked, "I've seen them say nicer things about murderers."

What most people don't understand is that managing failure is just as hard as managing success. And this is, I believe, part of the reason school boards don't improve schools. Stability and coherence are watchwords in both the high-achieving and low-achieving systems. Administrators want to keep their staff happy and their board at arm's length. In both successful and failing districts, "micromanaging" by the school board is considered a no-no. I recall a woman addressing our board not along ago. "We're not supposed to rock the boat," she said. "But the trouble is that the boat has tipped over and we're lashed to our seats." Rocking the boat is exactly what must be done to effect change -- change, one hopes, that leads to better student outcomes.

I spent most of the last 10 years, on and off the board, pushing for a rigorous curriculum, stopping the disproportionate disciplining of African-American students, and complaining about the over-identification of special ed students (almost a quarter of our student body). But, for the most part, no matter what I proposed -- a new bus route, a paint job for the flag pole, or a curriculum -- I was mostly ignored. In order to get a pile of old lumber and rusty nails removed from the edge of a playground I had to threaten to dump it in the superintendent's driveway! For me it was one pile of rusty nails after another and life on the board seemed part barroom brawl and part waterboarding torture -- to most of my colleagues, I was a nut.

So, the existential question of school board membership is this: can you suggest improvement without appearing to criticize the current administration, the current system? The answer is no. The truism is true: everyone thinks the education system is broken -- except in their school. My district is rated 83rd out of 86 in the region, a position it has pretty consistently held since such lists have been kept, and yet one of the most common comments I hear when the subject of school failure comes up is, "We have good schools here; you just have to take advantage of them." Then, of course, the conversation turns to the "lousy parents" and the "kids who don't care."

For better or worse -- mostly, if you are a reform board member, it's worse -- change comes hard. My experience is that school board members trying to improve their schools face a harsh reality about change agents. They are it. Le change, c'est moi. And it's lonely when you step out of the foxhole.

I would love to hear from fellow reform board members. Are you out there? I'd like to hear about successes as well as failures. Post your comments here or email me at pmeyer@edexcellence.net.

Spread the word.

The Secret to Good Parenting? Good Schools.

2011-11-15T08:43:10-05:00

I'm not so sure my colleague Mike Petrilli is right that "we have a parenting problem, not a poverty problem," and I'm even less sure that he is right that educators should "start talking about the problem."

I know this may sound heretical, since anyone who has spent more than a minute in an inner city school or neighborhood (see my Ed Next story on two Chicago charters) knows the intensity of the social dysfunction -- and no school is immune to its effects. But parenting is not a problem that educators are equipped to handle -- they have a hard enough time agreeing on curriculum. I think of a sixth-grade teacher in our small district who, on meet-the teacher-night, passed out no "parent contracts" and no "student contracts" -- both were then the rage -- and gave no lectures about student behavior and the role of the parent. He described what he was going to teach that year, what books the kids would be reading and then said to the assembled parents, "You don't have to worry about a thing; I'll take care of your kids." And he did. He had the same kids from the same bad families that every other teacher had, but he didn't complain about them -- and his classroom was quiet and orderly. And because of that, his students will be better parents.

None of this is to say that parents don't make a difference in a student's life. Or that schools should pretend that it doesn't make a difference. It is to say that schools and parents have different responsibilities -- and we need to appreciate the differences.

My own rule of thumb, as a member of a school board, is a variation on the Kati Haycock "no excuses" motto: "We can talk about parents after we get the buses to run on time." We can tell parents what to do after the school's drinking fountains are fixed and the potholes in the school driveway are plugged. We can teach parenting classes after we get our teachers to show up on time and our aides to stop yelling at children. We should instruct parents about being better parents after we start returning their phone calls -- and after school board members stop bullying one another. We can tell parents what to read to their kids after we get a written, taught, and tested curriculum.

In other words, once schools are doing what they should be doing, then they can start telling parents what they should do. This sounds harsh and it doesn't mean that schools shouldn't encourage parent participation, but when you've seen school dysfunction up close and personal, you know you can't afford to allow the "bad parent" problem into your school! It will be used as a crutch or an excuse -- or worse.

Sure, parents have problems; one of them is bad schools.

The irony here, with all due respect to the fine work of our sociologists who tell us how doomed kids from bad backgrounds and uneducated parents are, is that we have somehow turned public schools inside out. What used to be considered "the engine of social mobility" (see Fareed Zakaria in the new Time magazine), the incubator of productive and successful citizens (and parents), the school is now treated as some kind of barometer of caste and class. Instead of a place to liberate one from ones background, to become better (at parenting and citizenship), school has become a mirror for reflecting that background back on students. We slice and dice kids to know their every "learning style" proclivity, dooming them to a suffocating stasis. As Joseph Campbell has said, "the first purpose of mythology is to pitch you outside of yourself." The history is obviously more nuanced than this, but as I read it, we created public schools in large part to get kids away from bad homes and bad parents and onerous social and economic circumstance and stigma. It seemed to work pretty well until about 50 years ago. Now, we seem unable to teach kids unless their parents are educated saints and poverty is solved.

Mike isn't arguing for any particular approach to the parent problem, but it is a slippery slope, especially for school reformers, to turn the discussion to one of parenting (or poverty) precisely because, as Kati Haycock would suggest, it lets schools off the hook. In fact, the focus on parents and parenting lets entire communities off the hook. In a district like mine, with high poverty and minority representation in the schools and terrible academic outcomes, it is an unfortunate given among those middle class people who have succeeded in school (or think they have) that the only reason that the district has such lousy test scores and graduation rates is "the parents." Part of the point I was trying to make the other day, with my "More money to the parents" post, was that plenty of these parents, including poor parents, are a lot smarter than we - the system - gives them credit for and that if they had more choice (or the money to exercise those preferences) and fewer structural and institutional impediments to overcome, you'd see big changes in some of our slackard schools. Even bad parents are not so dumb. (See Parent Revolution and Bruno Manno's new Ed Next story, Not Your Mother's PTA)

At another level, my worry is that the parent improvement movement is destined to become another responsibility for a system already freighted with the weight of the world - and the World Wide Web! If you add up the time already spent on behavioral modification curricula and their spin-offs -- anti-bullying, anti-drugs, anti-gangs, anti-teen-pregnancy, character, self-esteem, individualized education plans -- is it any wonder that our kids are getting the socks beat off them in international academic competitions? Academics? What's that? Who's got time for the parts of speech or the periodic table when you're busy writing or reading poetry about your terrible life in the projects?

The good news is that part of the answer to the parenting problem is in Mike's essay, when he suggests that much of what "healthy parenting" is about is "commitment, discipline, and practice." These are fairly fundamental character traits - and they can be taught. It is the "grit" factor about which Paul Tough wrote a couple of months ago in the New York Times Magazine, "What if the Secret to Success is Failure?" You need not go as far as a formal curriculum on character (in fact, I'm not a big fan), but there are plenty of ways of teaching grit in regular classes. In other words, character traits like commitment, discipline, and practice can be taught (and practiced) while teaching history, math, geography, art, acting, science, and, yes, "reading" (in quotes because the subject has been so devalued in the last couple of decades).

Thus, the solution to bad parenting is fairly straightforward: teach kids to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent while they are learning the times tables, memorizing the Declaration of Independence, handing in homework, and paying attention in science class. Oh, yes, and reading about the great philosophers, soldiers, writers, stoics, saints, despots, monks and martyrs who knew something of these traits -- more, perhaps than your local mayor or teacher or even your inner self. And, also, by sitting up straight when reading these folks, one might learn something of the discipline necessary to be a good parent.

This post originally appeared on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.

The Times Has It Right on ESEA Renewal: Just Say No!

2011-10-28T10:58:33-04:00

The New York Times editorial page has been a remarkably consistent and clear voice on behalf of smart education reform -- and today it stays the course with a sensible critique of the Tom Harkin (Democrat of Ohio) and Mike Enzi (Republican of Wyoming) proposal to update the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (lately known as No Child Left Behind). The Harkin-Enzi bill is a compromise that Thomas Fordham VP Mike Petrilli says is "a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that should alarm folks on the right and the left" (See here. Also, don't miss the all-day event on 21st century governance on December 1, sponsored by Fordham and the Center for American Progress.)

Advises the Times: "go back to the drawing board."

The editorial does the requisite bowing and scraping before the flaws in No Child Left Behind, but it does not forget the law's remarkably radical attempt to fix a broken American education system: forcing schools to be accountable for educating all children. Yes, folks, teeth can be discomfiting.

The Times supports the Obama Administration waiver plan because it "would allow states to be rated on student growth" and rightly also requires that waiver applicants "set goals for all schools and plan for closing achievement gaps."

The Harkin-Enzi bill "lowers the bar," says the Times, and "backs away from requiring states to have clear student achievement targets for all schools."

It is past time to fix NCLB -- but it is not the time for retreat on the need to raise standards and hold educators accountable for student performance.

This post originally appeared on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.

New Study on Student Discipline: Black Kids Take It on the Chin

2011-10-10T17:09:58-04:00

The wonderful hubris of the new National Education Policy Center study on Discipline Policies, Successful Schools, and Racial Justice, is not the assertion that discipline data should be an essential metric in gauging a school's success--which it should--but that current disciplinary policies and practices are racist.

The author of the report, Daniel Losen of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, is more diplomatic than that, but he does suggest that many current discipline policies may be "unlawful" because of their "disparate impact" on African Americans and the disabled. And I would have to agree.

In our post-Columbine, zero-tolerance, character-first education world, Losen proposes a radical thesis (that the race of the student counts more than his or her behavior) and mounts a remarkably persuasive argument for doubting that current mainstream beliefs--and the policy and practices that they have spawned--about disciplining our students have done anything for academic excellence, much less for equity. In fact, Losen bluntly states, student suspensions "are significantly influenced by factors other than student misbehavior."

If that sounds radical, even counterintuitive, read the study. Among the findings reported here are these:

"School suspensions nationwide have risen steadily since the early 1970s, and racial disparities have grown considerably as well."

"In 2006, at least one district in each of 46 states imposed long-term suspensions or expulsions on students with disabilities significantly more often than on nondisabled students."

Racial and physical biases aside, the suspension crackdown (my word), according to Losen, doesn't seem to have improved our educational outcomes:

"[I]f suspending large numbers of disruptive students helped improve instruction and the learning environment, better academic results should be expected. But this does not seem to happen."

"There is little reason to believe that removing a child from a school to spend more time in...a dysfunctional [home] setting will improve behavior."

Quoting from a study by the Academy of American Pediatrics' Committee on School Health, "Children who are suspended are often from a population that is the least likely to have supervision at home.... Children with single parents are between 2 and 4 times as likely to be suspended or expelled from school...."

Quoting from one of his earlier reports, for the Poverty Law Center (see my report last September), "Longitudinal studies have shown that students suspended in sixth grade are more likely to receive office referrals or suspensions by eighth grade, prompting some researchers to conclude that suspension may act more as a reinforcer than a punisher for inappropriate behavior...."

[R]esearch on the frequent use of school suspension has indicated that, after race and poverty are controlled for, higher rates of out-of-school suspension correlate with lower achievement scores.

While many of these findings may seem obvious, the key insight here is this:

"Often, student misbehavior is attributed exclusively to students themselves, but researchers know the same student can behave very differently in different classrooms. Disruptions tend to increase or decrease with the skill of the teacher in providing engaging instruction and in managing the classroom--areas many teachers say they would like help improving."

I have seen the terrible consequences of overt, covert, and implicit racism in my small district over many years. It is not simply the numbers, though they certainly represent something of a signal of trouble: 30% of the kids are African American and 99% of the teachers and administrators are white. And it has never seemed coincidental--as Losen's report points out--that the academic performance numbers correspond so well with the suspension numbers: blacks were about twice as likely as whites to fail as they were to get kicked out of school. As the American Pediatrics' report quoted by Losen said,

[C]hildren most likely to be suspended or expelled are those most in need of adult supervision and professional help.

If I hadn't seen such racist behavior on the part of adults--and there is no other explanation for it--I would not have believed it. And I would not have believed that the disproportionate number of disciplinary actions--from "referrals" to suspensions--against blacks was caused by the kids' color. But it was. Of course, it is more complicated than that, but that is what makes the problem so insidious and why the "disparate impact" standard explained by Losen is appropriate in weighing a school's culpability for inequitable enforcement of discipline standards. Writes Losen, quoting from a 2010 book he co-authored,

Under the `disparate impact' theory, a method of discipline that is racially neutral on its face but has a discriminatory effect may be found unlawful absent sufficient justification such as educational necessity. Even if a school's action is found to be justified, it still may be unlawful if equally effective, less discriminatory alternatives are available.

There may be some justifiable controversy here about the significance of "uneven educational outcomes" as a perfect measure of unfair disciplinary practices, but there should be no doubt that adults have to take charge of their schools--which means taking responsibility for the behavioral atmosphere within them. The best evidence here, supporting Losen and his findings, comes from Martin Luther King himself, who was asked in 1959 what he thought of the historic 1954 Brown versus Board of Education ruling that integrated schools:

I favor integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel. I am for equality. However, I think integration in our public schools is different. In that setting, you are dealing with one of the most important assets of an individual--the mind. White people view black people as inferior. A large percentage of them have a very low opinion of our race. People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.

As long as white people are writing the rules, interpreting them, and enforcing them, African Americans have something to worry about--and it's not segregation.

This post originally appeared on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.

More Evidence: The "Poor" Can Be Educated

2011-10-04T16:26:41-04:00

Part of the answer to my colleague Mike Petrilli's "Single-minded Focus" question the other day about the depressing college completion data is in Sam Dillon's recent front page New York Times story on the success of incentives (i.e. $$$) programs in getting poor kids into -- and passing -- Advanced Placement courses. (Another part of the answer to Mike's question was in Paul Tough's story for the Times magazine a couple weeks ago, "What if the Secret to Success is Failure?" Tough argues, pretty persuasively, that character helps a lot.)

Mike wonders whether we're doing the wrong thing expecting that kids should go to college. I would suggest that it depends on what you mean by college.

I would further suggest that these days we seem to be awash in existential educational questions like those, brought on by such new controversies (at least, newly packaged) as whether it's good to try to close the achievement gap, whether it's counterproductive to demand "proficiency" as opposed to "improvement," whether "differentiated instruction" is another form of tracking, whether common standards are anti-American, etc. All these tough issues seem to point, roughly, to the Big One: What's the point of an education? What exactly does "college ready" mean? What's the difference between that and being "career ready"?

Mike asks these questions:

...with so many kids dropping out of college -- and especially so many poor kids -- should we reconsider our assumption that higher education is the ticket to the middle class? Isn't it possible that lots of these kids would be better off pursuing the trades or (dare I say) the military?

In a sense, Dillon's Times story helps answer those questions by subverting the premise: that we can or should decipher a difference between higher education preparation and a pursuit of "the trades" or "the military" before before we decide what a K-12 education should -- or can -- do. Yes, Dillon's report is superficially about paying kids and teachers to succeed -- and I'm sure it will invite another round of debate about the merits of merit pay -- but it is really about shattering the myth (again) that poor kids can't learn -- or can't be taught -- the stuff of higher education. (Here, I recommend the new book by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.) The amazing turnaround in the lives of the children participating in the National Math and Science Initiative, as described by Dillon, stands as yet more evidence that schools and teachers can indeed make a difference in poor kids' educational lives.

I would like at least to think we are finally approaching a tipping point in terms of educating "the poor" -- rather, a tipping point in educating our educators: the success stories are now more than exceptions that prove the rule. In fact, at least in my view of things, we are simply reclaiming the optimistic belief that schools are a ticket out of poverty. Now, all we have to do is convince our educators that whether a kid wants to be a plumber or a lawyer, a soldier or a physicist, he or she should finish high school armed with enough knowledge to pursue any of those careers.

Pipe dream? Only if you've given up on the American dream.

This post originally appeared on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.

New York Leaps Into the Middle School Trap

2011-09-26T13:20:19-04:00

What was so odd about Dennis Walcott's announcement that New York City was opening 50 new middle schools is that the most recent research suggesting that a middle school grade configuration (generally, 6-8) is probably not the way to go was done in his city. In last year's fall issue of Education Next, Columbia Business School researchers Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood reported their findings from a review of almost ten years of data for Gotham school children who were in grades 3 though 8, in all different school grade configurations, and concluded rather ominously:

In the specific year when students move to a middle school (or to a junior high), their academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, falls substantially in both math and English relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K-8 elementary school. What's more, their achievement continues to decline throughout middle school. This negative effect persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.

I found other research that supports the Rockoff and Lockwood findings -- that grade configuration matters -- in my report for Education Next earlier this year. I traced the history of the modern middle school movement, known as "middle schoolism," which was born with a Cornell University speech by educator William Alexander in 1963. It is a movement that came of age in an era in which the psychological society teamed up with the sociological one and together marched into into our schools, making a beeline for what was considered the most troublesome though forgotten age group, 11 to 14. The best way of treating those children (instead of teaching them?), many educators of the time believed, was separating them into emotional and behavioral holding pens while their horomones adjusted to maturity. (It didn't help that academics were taking a nose-dive in all our schools.)

"I don't know if it was deliberate or not," Trish Williams, executive director of EdSource, a California nonprofit, told me last winter, "but I know that when my kids were in middle school, one of the best in California, one of the teachers told me that her job was to just hold them and keep them safe until they get through puberty. So there has been a philosophy in middle school which deemphasized academic outcomes..."

As Cheri Pearson Yecke documented with her 2005 study for the Thomas Fordham Institute, Mayhem in the Middle, middle school was "where academic achievement goes to die."

While there is more emphasis on academics at all grade levels today and evidence that the middle school burden can be overcome (Williams and colleagues showed in a major 2010 study, called "Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better," that an intense focus on academics can work), it is odd that Walcott would favor reforming middle schools instead of doing what the research suggests is better and easier -- creating smaller, "elemiddle" (K-8) schools -- and what the trends are showing is happening all over the country -- as David Hough, managing editor of the Middle Grades Research Journal, told me, "The trend is definitely away from stand-alone middle schools."

Walcott promised to borrow instructional methods from successful middle school charters with this initiative, but even charter organizations like KIPP, which began by serving middle school kids, are having second thoughts about the challenges such isolation from other children create, and has been building "clusters" of schools that include early grades and high schoolers. Indeed, it is one thing for the new chancellor of the nation's largest school system to dial back the heated rhetoric that marked much of the Joel Klein reform era, but let's hope Walcott doesn't set the pedagogical time machine arrow to the 60s and 70s.

This post originally appeared on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.

Teachers Breaking Out of the Box

2011-09-20T15:34:42-04:00

I gave up bashing teachers years ago, when I realized that, as with soldiers in the trenches, they had their hands full just staying alive. What I never understood, however, since this wasn't really a war, was why teachers seemed to hide behind their unions on so many school management questions, seemed to be as meek as mice on policy and pedagogy and curriculum issues, and were downright defensive about any criticism of them or their profession. And this was going to be my post, a few weeks ago, responding to Walt Gardner's letter to the editor in the New York Times, in which he opined that teachers "deserve more than the unrelenting criticism they've endured since the accountability movement began."

It's a worthy subject, but I was turned from the "unrelenting criticism" hokum by an email from New York City teacher Mark Anderson, with his announcement that "A new school year begins! Here is the third post in my series on curriculum, in which I advocate for a unified core curriculum." His post is here and I read it with great joy, but I will get to that in a moment.

First, I must make mention of another welcome event; a trend, really, one reported on by Stephen Sawchuk in the current Education Week: "New Groups Giving Teachers Alternative Voice." Sawchuk leads with the obvious question, "In times of great uncertainty for U.S. teachers, who speaks for them?" (The uncertainty is taking its toll: according to a blog post by Sawchuck, as many as 10 percent of teachers are now quitting after just one year.)

The answer to the question of who's speaking for teachers is: they are. At least, they are starting to speak. Sawchuk describes a number of new teacher groups that are stepping outside the unions' tight circle of money-and-work-rules agendas and working for better outcomes for students. He names four such groups: NewTLA (in Los Angeles), Teach Plus Policy Fellows (in Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, LA, and Memphis), Center for Teaching Quality (Denver, Hillsborough County, FL, Illinois, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle), and Educators 4 Excellence (New York City). The head of the Center for Teaching Quality, Barnett Berry, tells Sawchuk:

There are so many teachers out there who want change and have great ideas, but they've had so few venues and vehicles to be heard, understood, and embraced.... They're itching for the research knowledge to help them articulate the connections between policy and practice.

Mark Anderson is one of those teachers. And curriculum is one of his subjects. (Though a commenter pointed out, "it's a lonely world.") I met Mark, a second-year Teaching Fellow working in a fifth-grade self-contained special education classroom in the Bronx, last winter at a conference on teacher quality sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Education Writers Association (see my The "Great Teacher" Trap). He was one of the few teachers or journalists there who seemed interested in curriculum as something more than a teacher autonomy or political ideology (a la Pedagogy of the Oppressed) issue. And I was pleased to see him tackle the subject in a post on Gotham Schools the following June. What arrived in my mailbox a couple weeks ago was his third post on curriculum and he needs to be applauded for attempting to understand the question from outside the box of labor union politics -- and poverty. While everyone is "busy focusing on external factors such as poverty, human capital mechanisms (hiring & firing), and accountability," writes Mark, "we have been largely ignoring one of the most easily and cheaply modifiable components of education: the curriculum. And this is the component that has arguably the most immediate and direct impact on a student."

While still struggling with some grad school language -- "academic knowledge," "core foundations," "impelled the process" -- Mark at least seems to have read E.D. Hirsch*:

When I introduced the Core Knowledge Sequence [first developed by Hirsch's foundation more than a decade ago] this year to the teachers at my school at a faculty staff meeting as a potential reference to guide their curriculum mapping, I expected either a lukewarm or even resistant reception. On the contrary, however, teachers were overwhelmingly excited by the sequence and gratified to have a copy of it to refer to. Aides and preparatory teachers were snapping the copies up like candy, such that we ran out of copies for core content area teachers! I feel like teachers -- just like students -- are desperate for guidance, given the superhuman demands made upon their time and energy. Why would we deny such explicit and systematic guidance to them?

Anderson gets it. As do the teachers in the trenches. The common core doubters need to dispense with the ideology and focus on what teachers -- and students -- need: a rigorous, comprehensive, and aligned (vertically and horizontally) curriculum. And, as a plus, the New York Times this morning reinforces Anderson's colleagues' instincts: with an op-ed essay by Hirsch himself. There is a longer version of the essay here, but it is another persuasive argument for teaching kids (rich and poor) content, early and often. Paraphrasing the famous New Testament chronicler, St. Matthew ("For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath."), Hirsch writes,

The Matthew Effect in language can be restated this way: "To those who understand the gist shall be given new word meanings, but to those who do not there shall ensue boredom and frustration."

Amen, Amen, I say to you: Content counts.

-----------------
*I once asked six different school superintendent candidates what they thought of Cultural Literacy and each launched into a high-minded speech about racial and ethnic diversity. It was clear that none knew anything about Hirsch, much less had read the book.

This post originally appeared on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.

Michael Winerip's Wrong-Headedness About Race to the Top

2011-06-08T17:33:27-04:00

The New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip spoils another good story in his recent piece about Jerry Weast's Peer Assessment Review program in Montgomery County, Maryland. Instead of hailing a successful teacher evaluation program, Winerup turns his story into another excuse to throw punches at the school reform movement. Can't we at least applaud what Weast is doing in his 145,000-student district without having to follow Winerip down a somewhat slippery trail to conclude that Weast's success is Race to the Top's failure?

As Winerip rightly points out, the PAR program is a wide-ranging professional development system (invented, says Harvard Ed, in the early 1980s by teacher union leader Dal Lawrence in Toledo) that includes lots of mentoring by senior teachers and a "panel" of teachers and administrators that actually votes to fire teachers. According to Weast, who has run the Maryland district since 1999, it took several years "to build the trust" in teachers that "we weren't playing gotcha." But in the 11 years since Montgomery County introduced PAR, reports Winerip, its panels have fired 200 teachers and persuaded another 300 to leave voluntarily -- this compared to just five teachers fired the previous ten years.

Sounds promising. And Weast has been justly praised by many people for his successes -- which he is rightly proud of. And when he said thanks but no thanks to the RTTT funds dangled by the feds, it was because he had the proof that he had a better program. The lost money, $12 million, as he wrote in the Baltimore Sun last year represents just 0.5 percent of the district's budget and is "hardly worth unraveling years of successful reforms" for. That nuance, however, was lost on Winerip, who doesn't mention the five-tenths business or Weast's shrug, but who does spend the last half of his story trying to make Weast into the newest poster child for the campaign against RTTT's incentives to tie teacher evaluations to student performance. Once again (see here) Winerip is making a mountain out of the wrong molehill -- using a premier school district, that does many good things well, to make a case against modest reform efforts to fix bad school districts.

Just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating about Winerip's story, I checked in with my friend Harold Kwalwasser, chief counsel to the Los Angeles Unified School District under Roy Romer. Hal has just finished a terrific book about successful school improvement programs all over the United States (full disclosure: I helped edit it), including Mr. Weast's Montgomery County. In an early morning email from California Hal writes,

Winerip has overreached.... Montgomery County is in fact a high functioning district. It has in place a system that evaluates teachers effectively. Although it does not necessarily use "student achievement data," its method of following kids' mastery of subjects gives them a good idea of how well a teacher is doing - and to that is added the observations and collaborations that are fully built into its system.

Most districts do not come close to that system. They don't have data, they don't have PAR, they don't have close collaboration of teachers in planning interventions or professional development. They don't have all the things that allow Montgomery County to make careful evaluations of teachers. For these other districts, student achievement data is one of the few points of information they might have around which to base an evaluation. Over time, it might turn out that other districts can evolve into Montgomery County-like operations. If they do, and if they don't want to use data in the way prescribed by Race to the Top, one would hope that the SEA would have the sense to let them do what works for them, too.

Hal's book should be out early next year -- and I hope Winerip reads it. In the meantime, I urge him to check in with Fordham's Reform Realism archive. We need to get our kids educated -- any way we can.

The New Achievement Standard: Divine Intervention!

2011-06-06T14:58:21-04:00

There has been the "silver bullet" debate, the "secret sauce" battle, the "demonize teacher" tirades, and the "cracking the code" kerfuffle over Waiting for Superman. Now, according to Diane Ravitch, it's the miracle workers perfidy. Sinners, get ye to your rosary beads -- and fast!

According to Ravitch, writing in a recent New York Times op-ed essay, titled, of course, "Waiting for a School Miracle", all these high-powered education reformers, from President Obama to Arne Duncan to Jeb Bush to Michael Bloomberg, are claiming "miracles" for their reform efforts; and Ravitch is there, a one-woman Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a Devil's Advocate, to throw some almighty holy water on the hype fires.

Unfortunately, while accusing these folks of "statistical legerdemain," Ravitch commits the sin of rhetorical tromperie: none of her targets allege anything miraculous. I will leave to others the task of sorting out Ravitch's claims about the accuracy of the reformers' claims, but from the research I've seen so far, nobody's cooking books -- the dispute seems to be one of whether the glass is half full or half empty. And Ravitch proves herself as good at cherry- and nit-picking as the next guy or gal. (See this Jonathan Alter column; it's rather devastating.)

The problem is that slippery rhetoric is as unhelpful as saucy statistics. In her Times essay Ravitch very clearly cites four speeches (including a press conference) and four schools, to illustrate her point that "the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny": Obama in his 2011 State of the Union praises the Bruce Randolph School in Denver; then, it's Duncan addressing the 20th Anniversary Teach for America celebration last February commending Urban Prep Academy in Chicago; then Bush (and Obama and Duncan) at a Miami High School event in March, before a crowd of adoring high schoolers being extolled for their progress; finally, Bloomberg gushing over PS-33 in New York at a 2005 news conference. (Sorry, I don't have a cite to the press conference; I will assume, perhaps too boldly, that Bloomberg praised the school's improvement and that it's probably true, as Ravitch says, the school fell back to earth.)

"[T]he only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations," says Ravitch. But the problem is that the only person calling these improvements miraculous is Diane Ravitch. None of the reformers use the word; I suspect because they know what it means. I suspect that Ravitch also knows what it means, which is why she employs it -- in order to continue her seemingly relentless attack on the reform movement. But these kinds of rhetorical gimmicks are unfortunate, especially if the intent is to improve education opportunities for America's children. (I had a similar bone to pick recently with the Cato folks over their insistence on calling a "common" curriculum a "nationalized" curriculum. See my War of Words ) Indeed, we always need scrutiny of claims. But if we are accusing folks of claiming miracles, then the standards of scrutiny demand that those folks should at least have used the word. You've either been to Medjugorje or you haven't.

Ravitch has the same problem with poverty. "To prove that poverty doesn't matter," she writes in the Times essay, "political leaders point to schools that have achieved stunning results in only a few years despite the poverty around them." And which political leaders are claiming that "poverty doesn't matter?" Again, there is not a single quote from any of the high-powered people Ravitch attempts to skewer in her Times essay that claims "poverty doesn't matter." Why? Because those are Ravitch's words, not theirs.

Skepticism about claims of success is always a good thing, as my colleague at Thomas Fordham Liam Julian suggested earlier, but Ravitch undermines her credibility by inventing these weak-kneed and flammable straw men to set fire to. And her cherry-picking of schools that don't match the hype is not helpful or productive to school improvement efforts either. Facts still matter -- but so do words. And if no one is claiming a miracle cure for bad schools or saying that poverty doesn't count, then let's not put those words in their mouths.

Praise the Lord!

Deep Questions About 'Deeper Thought'

2011-05-14T13:20:29-04:00

Here we go again. The new buzz phrase in education: deeper thought. Or deep thinking. Or deep learning. Deep is suddenly everywhere. The biggest question for schools experimenting with the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) was discussed in a recent New York Times story by Fernanda Santos, A Trial Run for School Standards That Encourage Deeper Thought. There is an upcoming Alliance for Excellent Education briefing called, A Time for Deeper Learning: Preparing Students for a Changing World. Similarly, a reader comment on Michael Petrilli's Flypaper essay about Alfie Kohn went like this:

...the purpose is the same across race and class -- to engage students in deep thinking and the construction of meaning...

What happened to 21st century skills? Remember critical thinking? I often tell the story of showing the Core Knowledge Foundation's K-8 Sequence (upgraded and available here) to our school district's Curriculum Director, who dismissed it with a huff, "We're interested in teaching critical thinking."

"But what," I asked, "will they think critically about?"

As my rhetorical question suggests, it's not so much that these deep concepts are faulty -- who would oppose critical thinking, after all? It's what's behind them that educators need concern themselves. (See my Flypaper Habits of Mindlessness.) Based on Santos' report on the 100 NYC schools testing out the new Common Core standards, there are kinks to be worked out. For one thing, as Joanne Jacobs points out, "It's one of those stories in which the new, improved ideas seem very familiar."

This suggests problems ahead for the CCSSI. As Santos notes:

There are guidelines for what students are expected to do in each grade, but it is still up to districts, schools and teachers to fill in the finer points of the curriculum, like what books to read... There is no national body responsible for seeing that the standards are carried out, because of fears of giving too much control of education to the federal government. So far, only a few other large cities, including Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, have begun to apply the standards in the classroom. And depending on how No Child Left Behind is refashioned, it may still be left to each state to measure its own success.

Chester E. Finn Jr., of the Thomas Fordham Institute, points out in the Times story that "the standards create a historic opportunity in that we now have a destination worth aiming for." And he is right. But there are detours along the way. Here are four of them:

1. Standards are distracting. Yes, the United States is notoriously -- proudly? -- lococentric. Autonomy (see #3 below) is built into our national DNA. But stupidity isn't. And to continuously study, and discuss, and write standards without writing a curriculum is simply not smart. As I wrote in my March Madness post, "we keep talking about playing the game, how to score it, what size the ball should be, the dimensions of the court, the height of the basket, the uniform colors of the referees -- but we don't play the game."

Teachers don't teach standards; they teach "the stuff of knowledge," in Ted Sizer's words. Standards come from that stuff, not the other way around. We get our history standards from -- where else -- history; more specifically, from the events and facts of history. Our students need to learn it. We get ELA standards from great literature -- our children need to read it.

This point was made recently by Caleb Crain in his New York Times review of the new book by Professor X, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, which was written by a college English teacher. As Crain notes, "Competent writing, X insists, requires a solid grounding in grammar and a long history of reading." Unfortunately, though the Common Core has a wonderful reading list in an Appendix (they are only "illustrative texts...meant only to show individual titles that are representative of a wide range of topics and genres," but I'll take it, as a huge step forward), try to find "parts of speech" in the dense 66-page ELA Standards document (officially known as "Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects"). The math standards have their critics as well. The moral here: the sooner we can get beyond standards, to good curriculum (or curricula), the better (see #4 below).

2. Content is misunderstood. In his latest book, The Making of Americans, E.D. Hirsch notes early on that "the widespread notion that the early grades are places where students should learn merely basic skill of reading, writing, and arithmetic rather than specific content is, we now know, a scientifically misguided concept that contradicts reality." Unfortunately, based on dozens of conversations with teachers and other educators -- and reading many blogs by others -- I would say that many educators aren't paying attention. Part of the reason that the standards movement is gaining momentum but remains a weak coalition is the failure to understand, much less appreciate, how fundamental "specific content" is to the education enterprise. As Hirsch writes, "We have paid a high price for a persistent adherence to this fallacious, how-to conception of early schooling in which 'critical thinking' is supposed to transcend 'mere facts.'" Until educators grasp the importance of "the stuff of knowledge," we won't get to our destination.

3. Autonomy is overrated. With all due respect for conservatives like Senator Jim DeMint (from South Carolina), Neal McCluskey (Cato Institute), and our 100 reform colleagues who just issued their anti-curricular manifesto (Rick Hess calls them the anti-Common Core-ites), local autonomy is just one strand of the American DNA; the other essential strand is union. After all, this isn't France -- or Spain or Indonesia. What is America? Do we not want to school our children to be American? Or know what America is?

The anti-Common Core-ites forget the meaning of the melting pot, that the word which comes after e pluribus is unum, and that we fought a bloody civil war to keep it so. Our founders were not only highly educated themselves, but knew that an "informed" public was necessary to sustain the American experiment. Jefferson, often cited for his apt comment that, "I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves," also said, "and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." The agreement to create a national government was an agreement to create a nation -- not sign on to a suicide pact. David Brooks addressed this problem nicely in his Politics of Solipsism column a few days ago. As Brooks says, "America's founders were republicans," meaning that they had "large but limited faith in the character and judgment of the people" and believed in the need to "erect institutions and barriers to improve that character and guide that judgment."

4. The fear of a curriculum. One of my favorite education book titles (and there are many good ones) is Cheri Pierson Yecke's 2005 volume, The War Against Excellence. Part of what Yecke argued was that schools had given up on their academic duties. And in many ways the reform movement of the last 30 years -- since Nation at Risk -- has been a battle to regain the high ground of academic excellence. The push for higher standards and for choice, the effort by our NCLB authors to shine a light on the horrors of the miseducation of so many "subgroups," and the incentives to excellence of Race to the Top are all part of the effort to right the ship. And it should have come as good news, as Sam Dillon reported in the New York Times a couple weeks ago, that the common core standards movement had prompted some foundations, including Gates and Pearson, to start writing curricula -- to do, finally, the real thing. Though we don't necessarily want these folks to write our curricula, their efforts were surely not "The Outrage of the Week," as Diane Ravitch called them. In fact, what Ravitch -- and her new anti-Common Core-ites on the right -- misses is that the country has no curriculum. The only outrage here is that we haven't done this earlier.

In fact, as mentioned, the Core Knowledge Foundation, on whose board I believe Ravitch still sits, produced one of the best full-bodied curricula for K-8 education over ten years ago. As CK's Robert Pondiscio says, in an email,

"It was our hope that textbook companies and others -- Gates and Pearson, I'm looking at you -- would avail themselves of the Sequence, and use it as the "source code" to produce instructional materials that are coherent and sequential. If they merely (and dumbly) throw in an arbitrary amount of nonfiction in their existing basals and skills programs and slap a "CCSS Ready!" sticker on them the entire common standards effort will die in its crib." (See #2 above.)

It's unfortunate we're still in the curriculum crib. But if we're serious about winning the future or teaching children critical thinking skills or how to think deeply, we better get them a comprehensive, rigorous, and content specific curriculum as fast as we can, even if we have to skip the training wheel stage.

Squaring the Teacher Salary Circle: It Can Be Done

2011-05-03T15:38:22-04:00

A few days ago Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari, founders, according to their official ID, of the 826 National tutoring centers and producers of the documentary "American Teacher," wrote an essay for the New York Times titled "The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries." (We know that Eggers also happens to be author of the bestseller A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.)

Unfortunately, the headline doesn't do justice to their argument, which is that we have to "make the teaching profession more attractive to college graduates" by, among other things, better training and recruiting -- but the headline also highlights the problem with their analysis: they can't leave the "low pay" shibboleth alone.

What is refreshing about Eggers and Calegari's approach is that it picks up on some of the more important findings of the recent McKinsey report (released last fall), which was also devoted to the question of attracting and retaining more -- and more better! -- teachers. Their summary of McKinsey's findings comparing the treatment of teachers in three high-performing countries -- Finland, Singapore, and South Korea -- is, more or less, apt:

First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don't.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don't.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do. And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it's 1 percent per year. In Finland, it's 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.

All fine and good. But the elephants in the room are many, and Eggers and Calegari get into trouble when they say that accountability, tenure, and test scores are "worthy of debate" but "secondary to recruiting and training teachers and treating them fairly." They omit "pay" in that sentence, but leave no doubt that it is of primary concern by devoting two paragraphs to it:

At the moment, the average teacher's pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers' salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary -- after 25 years in the profession -- is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

So how do teachers cope? 62 percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet. For Erik Benner, an award-winning history teacher in Keller, Tex., money has been a constant struggle. He has two children, and for 15 years has been unable to support them on his salary....

Booh-Hooh. As I used to say to a local radio personality who would harp ceaselessly about the poor pay that teachers get, "Alan, I'll agree to pay good teachers what they are worth if you agree to pay bad teachers what they are worth." No reply. (I should also note that Bill Tucker of Education Sector points out that "a more apt comparison would be the teacher salaries in those 32 metro areas, almost certainly higher than the national averages. For example, under the recently agreed-to contract, salaries for District of Columbia Public School teachers start around $51,000 and go to $100,000 in 2011-12, not including benefits, bonuses, etc." And a former high level administrator in New York City has emailed me to say that Gotham's average teacher salary is $71,000, not including $23,000 a year in pension benefits and $16,000 for health and disability payments. And that's just for 185 days a year, about 3/4 of the 240-day year that most people, including toll takers and bartenders, work (5 days x 48 weeks) for their salaries.)

I have written on this topic before because it is an important one -- and because many of the same errors of analysis get repeated. (See my Flypaper "Pay Teachers More!" post from March 13, which devoted attention to a wonderful column by Nicholas Kristoff on the subject, and my "The `Great Teacher' Trap" post, also in Flypaper, which highlights an Education Writers Association meeting hosted by the Carnegie Corporation, which has its own The Elusive Talent Strategy initiative. And those of you in Washington on May 9 may want to attend the Center for American Progress's panel on Growing Great Teachers.)

I wish Eggers and Galegari well on their tutoring initiative, but I urge them to avoid the briar patch of "low pay" unless they understand the enormous costs already absorbed by such system inefficiencies as single salary pay schedules, last-in-first-out (LIFO) hiring rigidities, and, of course, tenure. As a nation which already spends more per pupil on education than any industrialized country, we simply can't continue to throw good money after bad. No, we should not hold the good reform initiatives like those proposed by Eggers and Calegari hostage to these issues, but we can no longer afford to treat accountability, LIFO, tenure, and pay for performance issues as secondary.