What Works?

With the semester ending in two weeks, reflections on the value of our academic experience we paid $30,000 for are inevitable. Unfortunately, looking back, I can't help but be filled with a sense of disillusionment – I came to one of the best education schools in the world hoping for answers, and I'm leaving with the sick realization that perhaps, there aren't any answers to be had.

As we studied the history of educational reform, I realized that there are no truly original solutions, merely reiterations and evolutions of basic theories of change. And even if there were an original solution, the realities of educational politics means that it has to adapt and lose some of its boldness to gain the currency it needs to be implemented. And so standards for excellence become standards for minimum competency, bold pure choice systems become a tiny add-on to the existing system. While the names and taglines change, the substance within remain practically the same, and it all seems to be old wine in new bottles.

Ultimately, what happens within the classroom has changed little in comparison to the swirling changes at the policy level. And until what happens within the classroom changes, there will be true education reform. But how can we change instructional practice, when most policymakers and even some education researchers treat the classroom as a black box? How can we design effective reforms, when the people in charge of designing our policies barely know what goes on in the heart of education? How can we successfully implement change, without the buy-in of the people who are most crucial to the education of our children – our teachers?

Until we can trust our teachers – and until we manage to recruit teachers we can trust – any education reform that relies on teachers for implementation will have limited success.

Accountability in Higher Education

Accountability has truly moved into the world of higher education. Not only are advocates pushing for more accountability of what students are actually learning in colleges, many are looking at Harvard as the example of what to do and waiting for their move (Wertheimer, 2007). Two recent articles show how Harvard is in the spotlight of accountability and standards: “Testing Harvard” in the Boston Globe (at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/04/22/testing_harvard/) and “Harvard Task Force Calls for New Focus on Teaching and Not Just Research” in the New York times (at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?ex=1336449600&en=b78842d9d28a84c8&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss). While a move to know where students’ money is going when investing tens of thousands of dollars in higher education, the worries for what this type of focus on test results could do to higher education. Many worry that this would be the end of liberal education in that professors would be forced to ‘teach to the test’, much in the same way that is necessary in many of our K-12 schools at this time. Current and relevant issues are pushed aside in order to prep students for standardized tests. In addition, due to the huge diversity of studies going on, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, at a institution like Harvard it may be hard to find a test that gives reliable and valid results on student progress and achievement (Rimer, 2007).

Tests that test problem solving and critical thinking are being suggested, and used in some parts of Harvard, in order to assess students. While many professors and educators feel that assessing students is a good move in order to see the value added of their teaching, the potential of making the results is troublesome(Wertheimer, 2007). Advocates for public results argue that the consumer would have more information while some educators argue that tests may be misleading as progress could not be measured for all students. Instead students would just be compared to other students at their level.

The federal government has done a poor job in instituting a standards and accountability movement in the area of K-12, so I think they should concentrate on improving this before tackling higher education, if at all. Also, in agreement with interim president of Harvard Bok, the potential for pressure to be put on the University may push the administration and education to preemptively start assessing and improving their teaching. This would be a happy result as many know that Harvard is not known for their undergraduate teaching satisfaction. While consumers may need may information about what goes on inside the black box of prestigious universities, I doubt government control over a such a system will lead to great changes. Similar to what happened in many schools with NCLB, institutions will most likely fulfill the requirements in a way that fits their needs and not really change anything about the way students are educated.

Politics: The Problem (Not the Solution)

The Gates/Broad campaign program, Ed in ’08 is a double-edged sword. It will no doubt encourage candidates to make education a major campaign platform. If successful, the voters will clamor for stronger curriculums, better teachers, and longer school days beyond the 2008 elections, and the issues of education will be as important as healthcare costs and national security.

As an educator, this scares me to death. Don’t get me wrong. I am all for a political push for education. I think that education should be a central part of every campaign. That being said, those elected officials aren’t being held accountable for what actually happens. Voters aren’t being told about the enormous money the test-makers give legislators, to encourage more testing. Voters aren’t being told about the enormous amount of work that goes into a “good” teacher's day. Voters aren’t being told about the difficulties of being a teacher in a highly politicized system. Voters aren’t being told about the turnover of leadership related to school board elections. My guess is that this campaign will probably increase the number of fired urban superintendents over the next few years. The "ED in ’08" campaign will lead to candidate spin that holds teachers, not the politicians, at fault.

Let’s look at the platform for longer school days. Will they increase test scores? There is some research supporting that assertion. Will they increase learning? That point is in contention. If the school day is extended, there is even more time to prepare students for the mindless basic knowledge tests used in most states. Teachers will give students more practice test exercises, more rubrics, more practice writing prompts. The test-makers will get to fill this time with more preparation materials and new diagnostic tests. Teachers (via their new stronger curriculums) will become more discouraged, exhausted, and bitter.

Let’s face it. We have two systems of education in this country and the urban teachers are going to be the hardest hit by the "ED in ’08" campaign. The voters don’t just need to hear about teachers can work harder and do a better job. They need to hear about how political interest supersedes educational outcomes. They need to hear about the high-paying patronage jobs that suck at school budgets. They need to hear about athletic coaches being paid two or three times as much as academic teachers. They need to hear about janitors that don’t show up. They need to hear about union rules that preclude a classroom from being painted. Instead of asking why Japanese students do better, maybe they could be shown a video of Japanese students working out math problems in a gymnasium, climbing ropes, and running around in managed chaos. They need to hear that that Japanese teachers aren’t afraid of being sued if an accident happens.

I wish that I could be overjoyed at the news of Bill Gates and Eli Broad’s efforts. But in all truth, I don’t think adding politicians to the mess of education is going to make it any better. $60 million could help a lot of teachers. There are a ton of teachers that wish they could take a year off and study at Harvard. A bunch of them would like to just have the money to think about continuing their education. Some of them would like to quit their second job, so they could spend more time lesson planning. Everyone would like someone else to pay for the markers, pencils, erasers, books, paper, copies, and curriculum materials they are forced to buy to help out their students. At my school, they really need paper for the copier (the mandatory test prep materials have left a paper shortage).

I agree that the American education is in a terrible spot right now. But making the school day longer, adding professional development, and stronger curriculums aren’t going to do the trick. The public needs to know who is really at fault in their education system. If we want to be honest about education, is a political campaign the place to start?

Gordian Knots and Hidden Themes

Every week I find that the stories which motivate my blogs, however specific or unusual the particulars, end up having threads of several heavy themes running through them. This week is no different.

A story in the New York Times caught my eye recently (read it here) and when I followed it back I found a tale of incompetent school boards, uninvolved parents, heavy-handed government, and questionable professionals. The surface story details a lack of involvement in the parent councils of NYC schools where in many districts as few as four or five parents are on the ballot for a board with nine elected positions. But the real story is about the ongoing struggle over schools that is occurring in many of the country's major cities. According to the article the number of parents running has gone from about 1,200 in the first parent council election in 2004 to 744 candidates this year. What has caused such a drastic decline in parental involvement? Some cite a feeling of uselessness and lack of power stating that the councils are ineffective and often ignored. Others claim there's not enough information, that many parents who are approached about running are unaware of what the council does, how long the terms last, and what, ultimately, they as council members would be expected to do. Curious to learn more about the situation in NYC and mayor Michael Bloomberg's 2002 takeover of the city's school system I found this article from the Washington Post: NYC School Takeover Inspires Fenty, but Critics Abound. There are three particular points of interest from the article that I would like to highlight although time and space keep me from fully examining these themes as they relate to the situation in NYC. In any case the "hidden themes" are accountability, professionalism, and urban contexts.

Between the two articles I found the question of who's accountable to whom answered in very different ways. The parents were concerned that Bloomberg and his appointed Chancellor of Education, Klein, were not accountable to anyone, didn't listen to the parent councils, and were exercising "complete dictatorial powers" in the words of one parent. Later in the article Bloomberg speaks to the "culture of patronage" and making educators accountable for results basically through hiring and firing mechanisms. In essence it appears that Bloomberg's position is that only by making the management unaccountable can the professionals be held truly accountable. It seems that accountability for all is not a feasible position; an interesting question but one which I happen to disagree with. On a related note Bloomberg also had several members of the city's Panel on Education Policy (the committee that replaced the school board) whom he himself had appointed, dismissed when they disagreed with him over the issue of social promotion. And these members aren't your average community member either, but are all leaders in their respective fields; professionals if you will. This leads into professionalism; the second hidden thread. Bloomberg makes a rather provocative statement regarding professionalism which reads as follows: "Parents know about their kids, but they're not professional educators. There is no reason to think they should be designing a school system or running a school system. Do you want parents to make medical decisions? I don't think so." There are two issues here the first being a distrust of parents and the second being a distrust of professionals. While Bloomberg bases his distrust of parents on their lack of professional knowledge he seems to also mistrust professionals as evidenced by his replacement of the board members.

Although Bloomberg's tactics have raised the hackles of many, this sort of mayoral takeover is catching on in many large cities which face dire educational situations. I believe that there are two main contributors to this trend. The first is that larger cities have larger bureaucracies and therefore the easiest solution may be to cut through the red tape with one fell swoop. The second and related feature is that the scope of the problem seems so much bigger in urban areas that it appears unmanageable by ordinary means and the city may on the whole beg for heroic intervention even while those on the ground complain.

While cutting the Gordian Knot proves a quick, and perhaps easy solution, it remains less clear whether or not it is a good one. Like other emergency powers perhaps such takeovers should only be temporary. In fact Bloomberg's management will be reevaluated in 2009. But on the other hand will the ultimate costs of a temporary fix be worth any benefits gained?

Brand Identity.......Is it Market Failure?

While brand identity is an essential element of many industries, there is a question as to whether this helps or hurts the consumer in the market of education. In many industries, brand identity is used to establish a niche in the market and to differentiate that company from others that are providing similar services (or the exact same service). Interestingly, in the market of education it is not always apparent that the brand identity matches the quality assumption that comes with the name.

Information is an essential component for a market to function well. In situations such as the stock market, companies that are publicly traded are required make a large amount of information public, regarding profits and corporate compensation and such, in order for participants in the market to make well-founded decisions. In the current market for education, which is severely regulated in some ways but still has aspects of free market (such as charter schools), there is not enough information for parents to make reasonable decisions regarding their parents education. Many parents and students rely on such ranking as US News and World Report to pick their colleges, when in fact these surveys may not measure the elements that are important to the particular student or are potentially inaccurate. Rankings and test scores for k-12 are provided by many states, but there are also states who refuse to make this information public despite the public tax dollars going to finance their education system.

In this information-starved environment, there is the opportunity for schools to develop brands based a few elements of their school that do not truly encapsulate the experience and quality at said school. Without the proper information regarding schools across the grades and information letting parents know the markers of quality and the results of surveys based on sound indicators, the current market for education is flawed. Even though the education system in our country is not fully market-based, information is imperative for proper functioning and outcomes.

In the current education system, from Kindergarten to college there is a market failure as far as brand identity is concerned because there are not reliable and accurate sources of information for parents to make decisions. Without this, parents are at the mercy of the brand name which does not necessarily guarantee the level of quality expected. Where there is better information, it is not freely distributed to parents in a way that makes sense to them or that is available to all socioeconomic groups, regardless of whether they can afford a computer or whether the parents only speak Spanish.

Replicating Good Practice: Schools and Starbucks

One of the most troubling aspects of school reform over the past 30 years has been the inability to replicate good schools at scale. Since the mid 1970s, researchers have been able to identify the characteristics of effective schools—high expectations, clear standards, strong leadership—but no one has been able to identify a similar strategy for replicating such schools. The systemic standards movement has been the primary response to this problem within the public system, while entrepreneurs seeking to spread charter schools or model curricula face similar challenges from a different angle.

Why is this so difficult? After all, I'd bet the Starbucks on my block looks pretty similar to the Starbucks on yours. Over the past week, I've had the chance to hear two presentation on the challenges of creating effective schools at scale: one from within the system and one from without. Despite their differences as insiders and outsiders, the two had startlingly similar stories to tell about the challenges of creating good practice at scale.

Former Boston superintendent Tom Payzant talked about the challenges of bringing high quality new practice to scale in a recent HUGSE accountability workshop. Speaking from the perspective of the superintendent he used to be, he emphasized the role of trained intermediaries--coaches, district superintendents, and, of course, principals--as the key components to creating the capacity for system-wide improvement. In one sense, the vision here is unavoidably top-down, as the direction comes from the center and moves outward into the districts and schools. But at the same time, Payzant stressed creating opportunities, within this larger vision, for schools to shape the programs to their needs, to choose curricula that fit their missions, and to avoid overly prescriptive programs that denied talented teachers the room to work. If the flaw of “tight on ends/loose on means” was that schools, given the freedom to innovate, didn’t know how to improve the quality of their instruction, the coaching-heavy strategy seeks to remedy the problem by providing external support and expertise for how to improve their practice.

At the same time, Payzant acknowledged that there were some significant challenges to this model. Finding knowledgeable and skilled coaches can be just as difficult as finding high quality principals and teachers. Some schools are much quicker than others to take advantage of new opportunities (such as new curricula for reading), and the lowest performing schools are, not surprisingly, the least likely to do so (more on this in the next post). And a fair number of teachers, particularly those in middle schools and high schools (not to mention universities) are highly resistant to the idea that an external coach should work with them on their teaching, which they see as a core part of their professional expertise.

Approaching similar questions from a different angle, Eastern Michigan researcher Donald Peurach gave an AERA presentation on the efforts of Success for All (SFA), a Baltimore-based reading model, to replicate their efforts at scale. Drawing on his 10 year study of SFA and a literature on organizational replication, he challenged the idea that replication was achieved through developing “best practices” in a hub and then transferring this knowledge to field sites. Rather, he argued, field sites needed to find ways to take what was offered from the hub and make it their own, and the hub needed to learn how to revise its core set of knowledge on the basis of feedback from the field. In this notion of interactive learning, as opposed to transferring knowledge, Peurach’s findings mirror earlier research on the limitations of top-down implementation, and are consistent with a broader constructivist approach to organizational learning and change.

Peurach argues that the challenges to replication are found in four central places: the model, the outlets, the environment, and the hub. Among the barriers he cites: the difficulty of knowing exactly what it is about a successful model that makes it work (the model); field sites that lacked the leadership or previous knowledge needed to make sense of the reform (the outlet); cultural resistance among teachers to the introduction of external routines into their work (also the outlet); a policy and funding environment that was too uncertain to ensure long-term continuity (the environment); and the many managerial challenges facing the hub as it seeks to address the problems in the model, in the outlets, and with the broader environment (the hub). While this analysis is of a program sponsored by an external academic entrepreneur, he argues that similar problems would face state or district efforts to boost capacity. Judging by Payzant’s analysis, he is not wrong.

So where does this leave us? Peurach places his faith in “routines,” which he sees as the key building blocks of organizational replication, tools that encompass both knowledge and tacit skill and can be standardized for widespread usage. The analogy here is a familiar medical one: that doctors are not mavericks who risk patients’ lives in the name of professional discretion, but rather a profession governed by standards of care that serve to ensure a certain consistency in the quality of practice. There is something appealing here, in that it points to the longstanding weakness of teachers’ individualistic notion of professionalism, a vision that is more about being free from oversight and less about working together to achieve quality practice. At the same time, there is something unappealing about applying “routines” to teaching, because teaching, as a form of collective thinking, is most alive when it is open to new or unforeseen possibilities. A middle ground (often proposed but infrequently implemented) might combine the best elements of both: teachers would be given pedagogical strategies but not routines, and other teachers, coaches and principals would consistently observe classroom practice and offer ongoing feedback about how to improve practice. Such a strategy would not solve all the problems of hub, model, outlets or environment, but it would be a start towards spreading quality practice in professional work. Starbucks might learn a thing or two.

Crossed posted at Usable Knowledge.

What should education do for building a world full of love and peace?

416 in Virginia Tech shocked the whole world. Our society needs love and peace, but what should education do for it?

I think first we should educate our children to love the current society they live. That is, to educate the children to take responsibility for development of the world, or at least his/her own family. In order to achieve that, children would be taught how to use and create kinds of necessary tools for subsistence in this world. Consequently academic skills become the first thing for children to learn, which give children basic tools, such as calculation and communication, to live in this society.

However, paying attention to academic skills doesn’t mean we should ask our children achieve exactly equally and similarly. Just as what Charles W. Eliot said, “promote pupils not by battalions, but in the most irregular and individual way possible.” The highest level of civilization is to respect. As for education, to respect our children is to admit they are gifted differently. That is the first reason for concentrating basic academic skills. A child will not know what interested him, mathematics or history, until he learned basic subjects to some basic extent. So learning broad academic skills will be helpful for children’s choice and for realizing society’s diversity. And the second reason can be expounded borrowing a metaphor. The area of triangular base of a pyramid determines the height the pyramid reach. In this way, a person’s knowledge seems like the area of the triangular base, and his contribution seems like the height of the pyramid: the broader his knowledge is, the more he might contribute to the society. Consequently, it is essential to let children learn broad academic skills.

Secondly, children should be educated to love themselves. To wit, children should know what their rights are and how to enjoy their rights, which was also illustrated in “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Fix the Site of the University of Virginia” .

Thirdly and finally, children should learn to love and educate their offspring. Nowadays we are arguing about education and schooling, and in the argument almost everyone knows education should not only include school education, but also include factors from family, community and society. For example, if a child grew up in a society full of discrimination towards minorities, the possibility for him to treat others equally after he grew up would be almost zero. So in this way, environment affects children’s growth greatly. As illustrated in the former example, the child’s consciousness of discrimination probably came from public opinions, even though his school is integrated. Consequently, if we want to get a society without discrimination, it is essential to educate our children to respect and love others; and the starting point to achieve that is that adults should respect and love every other members in the society especially when they are together with their children. That is, any adults should “realize” their responsibility for educating children. Adults in current society cannot achieve that, but we should do our best to let our children achieve that “realization” when they became adults.

It Takes A Campus

In the wake of the massacre that killed 27 students and 5 professors at Virginia Tech, I remain haunted by the anguished appeal of a mother to the students her now-dead son once called classmates. “If they see a friend who’s going through turmoil, if they see a friend who is in some pain, and they don’t want to talk about it – make them talk about it,” Susan Kayton told the Boston Globe. “If they don’t want counseling, drag them to counseling.”

Kayton’s son, Daniel Barclay, was not killed at Virginia Tech. He was a student at MIT whose dead body floated to a Cape Cod beach this week, the victim of an apparent suicide by drowning. The news of his death is not mentioned on MIT’s homepage. That same website, though, features a prominent link to a story entitled, “MIT community shares sorrow, support for Virginia Tech.”

The week before Seung-Hui Cho’s mental illness unleashed the most horrific bloodbath in US history, a sophomore at Stanford University committed suicide by hanging himself. To this day, no announcement of Mo Morsette’s death has been sent to other students on campus. Yet news of a memorial service held at Stanford in memory of those slain at Virginia Tech was also featured centrally on Stanford's website.

In no way do I mean to minimize the terror at Virginia Tech. The memories of those fallen students, the mysteries of their final moments, and the murderous evil with which Cho slaughtered them deserve all the attention they have received. But across the country this week, too many college campuses unified in sorrow over the deaths at Virginia Tech while ignoring the depression that threatens to destroy their own communities. If anything positive emerges from this horrible incident, let us at least commit to combating the tragic ignorance of the hopelessness of so many other college students before they kill others or themselves.

This won’t happen overnight. For one thing, colleges don’t even seem to want to face the issue. They hide behind claims of privacy and hopeful theories of student development to keep the depression of individual students from sending ripples through the apparent stability of the campus. To admit imperfection might make the university itself look bad, might decrease enrollment, might fracture the impression of unity that emerges at football games and commencements.

Details of treatment should not be released publicly. But the fact that depression exists in dorms can no longer be a private concern shared only between troubled students and counselors. By choosing silence, the colleges themselves suffer from the same avoidance of reality that cripples the victims – yes, the victims – of mental illness.

These are not issues that have only impacted one isolated student at Virginia Tech. All that was unique to that campus last Monday was the extent of the effect. What is universal at far too many – if not all – college campuses is the breadth of the cause and the unwillingness to intervene.

Imagine what would have happened at Virginia Tech this week if the rampage occurred at a different campus -- if, say, it tore apart the University of Virginia rather than its in-state rival. I have no doubt that administrators and students at Tech would have reacted in outward displays of sadness while avoiding inward analyses of their own community’s fragility. Perhaps there would have been a memorial vigil held on the now-infamous Drill Field. Seung-Hui Cho probably would not have attended. There would be pictures in the school newspaper of the students who did attend. There should be. But there would be no mention of the student who sat quietly, eerily, helplessly – and alone – in his dark room during the candlelight tribute across campus.

There must be.

To continue to ignore that troubled boy would be to ignore all we have learned this week. A truly collegial environment would make his plight a source of communal concern before his illness destroyed that community.

In such a place, the campus would hope together if he were to disappear into the ocean. And if he were to hang himself, the campus would know.

As we have seen across the country during the past few days, it takes communities united in grief and humbled by death to mourn. What we must also realize is that it will take unified and strong communities to prevent such an event from taking place again.

Let us never forget the 32 innocent people who needlessly died at Virginia Tech this week. Let us also never forget the mental anguish of the hopeless killer who savagely murdered them.

And let us never forget Daniel Barclay or Mo Morsette.

The Case for Radical Change

Most people agree that the American education system needs reforming, but the reforms that are usually recommended are either water-downed plans that don't address the core problems or so outrageous that the educational establishment would never accept it. So, we keep going in the same direction with few changes. Schools today, in many ways, look very similar to those of 50 years ago.

On Wednesday, Tom Payzant, Former Boston Superintendent and part of the commision that produced the Tough Choices or Tough Times report, came to speak to a class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This commission included many establishment educators and policymakers including Superintendents, Secretaries of Education, Senators, Union Leaders, and Business Executives. Given the fact that many of these commissioners had decades as members of the educational establishment, it is shocking that their report represents the most radical education reform suggestions that I have ever read. If these people are recommending the dismantling of the school district as we know it, the concept of social promotion, and the standardized pay scale, then we may finally be moving in the right direction.

While Payzant cited a lot of statistics to set the mood for the commission's recommendations, there is one that stuck with me. Of all 9th graders nation-wide, only 18% graduate with an Associates degree within 3 years of high school or a Bachelors degree within 6 years of high school. Assuming that one needs a college degree to achieve some measure of educational success, then we are failing 82% of our students. I knew it was bad, but that is ridiculous. How can we compete in business, international relations, science and technology with the rest of the world when only a small minority of our populace is reaching even low levels of academic success? It is a threat to our economy, our democracy, and our standing as the sole superpower.

With that in mind, the commission looked at what was being done successfully in other countries. Taking suggestions from our neighbors, the commission developed 10 steps to improve our standing. Some are relatively uncontroversial such as free and universal preschool for all 4 years olds and all low income 3 year olds. They also recommended a tax-protected account given to each newborn with some money for their education (to which they and their families could add even more). These are exactly the kinds of recommendations that I have come to expect from such commissions. They are nice, but really aren't going to get to the heart of the problem.

This commission was different. They suggested doing away with our social promotion procedures where students move from one grade to the next just because they happen to get a year older. Instead they recommend moving students through the system based on their progress with no set timetable. They also recommend raising teacher pay significantly in order to attract candidates from the top 1/3 of their college classes (with a new average salary hovering around $100,000). That's my favorite provision, by the way! Districts would basically be stripped of all their power since schools would be run independently by 3rd parties and get their funding directly from the state. And the federal government would get a lot more power to set national standards and assessments.

Regardless of whether you agree with these specific recommendations, we all have to agree that this is the kind of radical change that our system needs. However, before I get too excited I have to keep reminding myself that it is unlikely that these reforms will ever be instituted. Teachers unions will never let them get rid of the salary schedule. Local officials will never allow the federal government to take any power away from them. Conservatives will scream about tax increases and so called liberals would rather see minorities in failing schools than institute anything that resembles school choice. The members of this commission, who represented every constituency group and every political stripe, put aside their partisan differences and looked abroad to find the solutions that worked best. I hope that in the future we can do the same.

America and the Big Questions

I have any number of comments to make about education in America. But in my mind, most of the questions I find truly interesting and important about education are questions that could be asked of most American institutions. In fact, many of the education debates swirling about today about standards and accountability and vouchers strike me as not being big enough. No doubt these topics seem huge to those who are wresting with them, but at the level of impact I ask again, are they big enough? So often it seems we in America accept the educational enterprise as natural and therefore never question our basic assumptions underlying the system. I’m not necessarily ready to heed Illich’s call to “deschool society” but I do want to challenge Americans to ask bigger questions. Maybe the system we have is the best possible, but how will we ever know if we don’t have the guts to ask?

Most of my own concerns regarding American institutions can be boiled down to the one-size-fits-all mentality. This is a critique which a number of writers and thinkers have made of our approach to international development (Thomas Friedman), to healthcare services (see “eclectic therapy”), and even to data processing models (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~ugur/fits_all.pdf). Naturally there are those who argue back that too much individualization is what created the “me generation” and that not only is it impractical or unrealistic (are these words really synonyms?) to expect institutions to be able to give individualized attention but that it most cases it is unnecessary. A one-size-fits-all system is certainly the most efficient in getting the most bang for the buck. But should education, of all public services, settle for an average education for the average kid? Even the questions we are asking about education follow this one-size-fits-all model. If vouchers are good, they are good for everyone, if standards and accountability are good, they're good for everyone.

Unfortunately, it seems that lately every news story I read about American education makes me question the very idea of a public education system. A piece in Education Week by Robert Epstein (www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/04/04/31epstein.h26.html) about compulsory attendance in high school made me wonder how something intended as a public good could be required and how much of our resources go into making sure that people who do not want to be educated are “educated” anyway (I think a number of questions could be asked about how beneficial such practices are to those individuals and to society at large). This is a question I dealt with in detail in my previous post, but is one that continues to bother me. Likewise a story about the recently proposed use of plastic hand-cuffs to restrain out of control students in Milwaukee (www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=591105) makes me ask again how this system is good for anyone involved. Why do we keep students in a school that is obviously not meeting their needs and simultaneously allowing such students to detract from the learning experience of others? A new curriculum, better teachers, and standards just can’t solve what I perceive to be deep structural problems.

Some readers may be wondering how I can on the one hand call for a more individualized education for each child and on the other hand question the existence of the public education system. But this is exactly the point I’m trying to make. If we are unwilling to ask those big questions, even when they challenge our own values, we are doing a disservice to our community and our children. Certainly the idea of public education is something that Americans hold very dear, but sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to question our most closely held ideals and offer them up for critical examination. While I like many Americans am dedicated to the ideals behind the public education system, I am also afraid that we have come to associate an attack on the public school system as an attack on those ideals and therefore refuse to ask those potentially dangerous but also potentially rewarding questions. America why are we so scared of the big questions?

What should we do on educational inequality?

What should we do on educational inequality? To answer this question, let us make an analysis on factors of educational inequality. School appears to be the first factors of educational inequality, --we always discuss segregation and desegregation of our colorful children. However, it is not the main factors. We cannot ignore affects of family and community on a child’s development. To some extent, these factors are even more important than school. Just as professor Gary Orfield, who recently does researches on the integration of children from working-class families with those of middle-class and higher incomes in a public elementary school in Florida, says, "The middle-class family is basically the strongest educational institution in this country by far. Their destiny is less determined by their school than their family and their network...The kinds are getting a log of education at home".

Therefore, even some day we arrive on finally desegregation, we realize "multiple intelligences"(Howard Gardner), it is still important for us to treat our children individually. To treat our children individually means, we teach them in school, according to their different background, which may related to their home and living community. We must treat them individually, because the highest level of civilization is respect, and the greatest respect to our children is to admit that they are unequal. Educational equality does not mean our children reach the same achievement, that is what NCLB want and is also why it fails, but mean our children can realize their colorful achievement. We want to build a garden with all kinds of plants, rather than only roses. Take the case of "Pre-K Education", there are many rich children with an extra 3 or 4 preparation for schools that poor children do not have, giving some former children an advantage on the very first day of school. In that case, it is actually unfair to desegregate and to set the same assessment for those poor children.

So what should we do on educational inequality? My answer is, to know what our children actually need in their individual development and then to satisfy them.

Koreans Gone Wild: Spring Break In Seoul

It’s Easter weekend, a perfect time for a confession: I spent half of last week traveling through Korea as a private college admission consultant. (I spent the other half flying to and from Korea, but I’ll save the story of that disaster for a different time.)

Having spent several years as a college admission officer at Stanford, I’m well aware of the stigma folks in our profession attach to such for-profit consulting enterprises. It was not uncommon at conferences or meetings to hear virulent condemnations against those charged with “selling our knowledge” or “prostituting your experience” or, my favorite, “crossing to the dark side.”

Bless me, father, for I have sinned.

But I’m happy I went. Not because I particularly liked being whisked around the country the way celebrities usually are – and the way educators usually are not. And not because I successfully convinced the hundreds of people who came to my presentations that the very generic pieces of information I shared were the “inside secrets from a former Stanford admission officer” that the PR department had promised.

I’m happy I went because I learned more in 2 ½ days than I ever could have elsewhere about the threats to schooling when markets trump morals, when entrepreneurs invade education, and when competition outpaces counseling.

It was clear early in my trip that I was expected to tell parents every possible advantage, every trick, and every loophole that would give their students a better chance. It was a brilliant ploy by the consulting company using my presence to recruit customers: prey on the fears of parents, convince them that access and influence matter, show them that strategy is key to success, and then offer the “Deluxe Ivy Guarantee Package.” Education, they suggested, was purely a marketplace maneuver.

The nervous parents and shell-shocked students ate it up. During my trip, I never once had a conversation with a parent or student who asked about a college’s commitment to educational excellence or how to find the campus that would be the best social or academic fit. To the future college applicants and their families, concerns about educational success, intellectual growth, and personal development paled in comparison to concerns about the business of just getting in.

While that disturbed me, I still left Asia with a great respect for the exceptional business savvy of my Korean colleagues. They have found a niche field and have turned the fears and frenzy so many have about the college admission process into a thriving scene for capitalist forces. They’ve performed their jobs and maximized their market influence perfectly. And that’s the problem.

On the long flight home, I crossed the International Date Line again and watched Sunday become Saturday. Literally and symbolically, in that moment I wondered if I had seen the future in Korea: is the obscenely chaotic pre-college landscape a warning of the perfect storm that will occur when education and the marketplace intersect?

To a certain extent, I understand the appeal of the market-based strategies for school reform that we often discuss in class. But I’m now even more skeptical about where they might lead.

I still agree that maybe we should offer more choice to students and parents and promote more competition among schools if doing so will spark necessary changes. That’s the bright promise of capitalism. But are we ready, to quote my old colleagues, to "cross over to the dark side?” Can we find a way to have market-inspired educational practices without also having the dog-eat-dog corporate mentality of Wall Street raiders? How can we encourage the most entrepreneurial and innovative reformers to focus less on business models and more on inspiring the intellectual imaginations and creative freedoms of students? And, perhaps most importantly, will competition among schools have to breed competition among students?

I’m not ready for board rooms to overtake school houses. If that happens, we’ll all need more than one weekend for confession. Bless us, father.

The Impossibility of Getting Into An Ivy League College and School Choice

In some ways, last week's excitement about the increasing difficulty of getting into Ivy Leagues reflects a popular criticism of school choice. (Harvard's admit rate has plummeted to 9.0%! From 9.3%!) The admit rates of Ivy League colleges (and other colleges of similar quality) captured the headlines because candidates of (seemingly) high caliber were being rejected. The NYTimes article linked begins with:

Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages.

This is the result of the demand for these ‘best’ universities far surpassing the supply of places at these institutions.

In a similar vein, some critics argue that school choice doesn't get to the crux of the key education problem dominating the current US education landscape: the insufficient number of good schools. Giving students (and their parents) the option to choose their schools, regardless of race, class, or income, merely tinkers with the distribution of students across the small subset of existing good schools in the entire population of schools, rather than actually improving schools. To use the metaphor of college admissions: instead of splitting hairs trying to differentiate between excellent and outstanding candidates, shouldn’t we be working toward increasing the number of places in the ‘best’ colleges by increasing the number of good universities?

This line of criticism essentially stems from a failure to understand school choice's theory of change: by tying educational funding to students and allowing students (or their parents) to pick their own schools, school choice would result in the survival of a school being dependent on how well it caters to the people who matter most: its students. Schools that do well will be ‘rewarded’ with a long waiting list of students and can then consider scaling up. Schools that chronically under-perform will eventually be ‘punished’ with an exodus of students and hence be forced to buck up or close. Through this mechanism of incentives that encourages the proliferation of good schools and hastens the demises of bad schools, school choice will increase the quality of schools across the board.

It’s precisely because school choice is dependent on students (or their parents) being able to exercise their option to exit that judging the efficacy of school choice based on the success of charter schools in raising the achievement levels of other public schools in their district is disingenuous (Hess & McGuinn, 2002, makes a similar argument about the efficacy of Cleveland's voucher experiment). Firstly, charter schools do not really provide (serious) competition since their numbers are arbitrarily restricted to a tiny fraction of public schools in a district. Thus, despite long waiting lists for most charter schools indicating high demand for them, most existing systems do not allow enough new charter schools to spring up and meet this demand. Consequently, students cannot exercise their option to exit since they have no alternative to exit to (unless their parents are Catholic or are willing to cough out a ridiculous amount of money for private schools, or take a huge pay cut and home-school their children). In this way, 'school choice' via charter schools is robbed of its key mechanism through which to drive improvement in currently under-performing schools. Most public schools know that their students don't have many other tenable options and, like all monopolists, tend to become fat cats without the pressure of competition to keep them lean.

Furthermore, critics of charter schools who claim they do not work because on average, their students' grades on standardized tests aren't much higher than public school students in the same district, are falling prey to a weakness that allegedly market-based reformers are especially prone to: the tendency to judge schools according to their student's test scores. Research has indicated that parents often prefer charter schools because of a host of other issues, like school safety. Not focusing solely on test scores is congruent with the philosophy underlying school choice. When proponents of school choice claim it gives parents the chance to choose the best school for their students, they aren’t necessarily referring only to 'the best school for raising their students' test scores' (one can be test scores-satisficing without being test scores-maximizing). Parents could prefer a school that focuses more on a student's holistic development or a student's particular passion (e.g. music, arts, theater, technology) instead of merely emphasizing how their students perform on multiple-choice questions. Thus, school choice doesn't force an ideal of 'student achievement' on the entire population of students. A voucher system would allow students to choose schools that best fit their diverse and unique individual talents, interests, and learning needs. Such a diversity of schools will better cater to the development of students than an arbitrary one-size-fits-all model that attempts to fit the 'average' student but ends up chafing most students.


School choice has lots of problems (what happens if parents' don't exercise their right to choose? how can we get past the seemingly insurmountable problems of getting rich parents to subsidize poorer students in order to implement the progressive voucher system necessary for achieving true equality of opportunity?), but putting up straw man arguments does nothing to help the case of anti-school choice opponents.

What We Don't Know

Since first joining a Ph.D. program in Sociology and Social Policy 7 years ago, I have been consistently surprised by what even the foremost experts in their fields don't know about solving major social problems. Don't get me wrong, they know more than most, but on the really difficult questions (such as how to improve the quality of instruction at scale) there are lots of conflicting perspectives, each with some support from data, but no clear cut answers.

With this in mind, a group of us here at the GSE have come together to create a seminar explicitly centered on what we don't know, a place to explore hypotheses and think about directions for the future. We had our first full meeting three weeks ago, and have a second one today, featuring former Boston superintendent Tom Payzant. I'm blogging about what we're learning here -- check it out.

Teachers or Politicians?

Just now, when I reviewed our reading of Tyack &Lawrence, I found I added a comment besides the sentence “teachers have their own ‘wisdom’ of practice”, which is “I am wondering whether you rely too much on teachers”.

Suddenly did I remember that after reading Karlo’s short paper draft, I noticed one of his opinion, which is “Our society is leaving important decisions about education to politicians and businesspeople who have not spent one day as a teacher”. Then I added a comment beside that: “I want to mention that Louis Gerstner, an absolute outlier of the field of computer science, helped IBM out of being death as IBM’s CEO. It might not matter whether education administrators are or were teacher, but it does matter whether the administrators know education, know social development, know how to change the educational system according to the social development.”

Karlo, Tyack and Lawrence all believe that it is teachers, rather than politicians, who should determine what to teach, how to teach them and how to shape educational reform. While I thought politicians who stand outside the field of education and can get acquaintance of social development should make decision on education.

At this point, now I think we should combine thoughts from both teachers and politicians together. Teachers are closer to children and to schools than politicians, which indicates they know what schools or kids really need and whether the proposed plan could be accomplished better than politicians. Consequently when politicians make policy decisions, it is necessary to cooperate with teachers. That is also one reason why NCLB is failed, Bush must have no idea how kids grow up, what they need to grow up and in what speed kids study new things, so he issued NCLB only by some suggestion, international comparison and what is most important, by imagination. Imagination can never produce practical policies, that is why politicians should cooperate with practitioners.

Additionally, we can not rely too much on teachers to make policy decisions either. After all, most teachers are working only inside schools, and it might be too difficult to ask them to realize “American is tend to fall behind with other countries technically” which is realized by National Center of Education and the Economy ( Tough Choices, Tough Times. The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. 2006.) Consequently we still need politicians to direct the main development of education and society.

Karlo, I am sorry, my comment is too absolute. We need both teachers and politicians.

Can Schools Exist Without Students?

Bad schools exist in every large school system. Throughout the past decades, educators and policy-makers have spent countless hours and millions (billions?) of dollars trying to make those schools better. They have tried new curriculums, mentoring programs, technological advances, and much more. However, the Green Dot charter school system in Los Angeles is trying a new approach. Their plan is to pick a low performing school each year and open enough high performing charter schools in the area that the entire incomming class chooses not to attend the failing school. What a brilliant idea. After all, schools can't fail students if there are no students there to fail.

Green Dot is unlike most other charter management organizations in LA or elsewhere. Instead of creating schools with some unique characteristics (like arts, math/science, foreign language) in order to attract a niche constituency, Green Dot tries very hard to emulate the LA public school system. Their moto is to take the same money, same resources, and same students, but produce better results. They hope to show the entire city that good schooling is within reach for every student. No private funding is spent within their schools. All teachers are unionized and paid through a salary schedule similar to that used in the public schools system. Teachers are required to be certified, just like all other public school teachers. Most importantly, Green Dot's student body is made up of more special ed students and those from families with less money and education. And it is working as students starting in Green Dot's schools are almost double as likely as those in district schools to graduate from high school.

So given the choice between sending their children to the failing LA public school system or Green Dot's remarkably successful set of schools, most parents would choose the latter. If Green Dot were successful in this new plan, LA would have to shut down many of those low performing schools and lose all of the revenue that goes with them. It should be noted that Green Dot is a good partner with LA Unified, not an opponent like many charter schools seem to be. Some Green Dot schools have opened on LA Unified's campuses so that they could pay rent and put money into much needed district schools. Green Dot schools often partner with local elementary schools to offer tutoring services. And LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently hired Green Dot's Chief Academic Officer to work as his Education Reform advisor.

Given Green Dot's model of team work, not to mention the superior education that they give to thousands of LA students, why are they getting confrontational treatment by the LA School Board? Last Thursday the School Board had to vote on approving 8 new Green Dot charter schools (most of them near the failing Locke High School in Watts). By a vote of 3-3, the School Board rejected these petitions, most likely breaking state law since there are very specific criteria on which school boards can reject an application. School board members cited Green Dot's academic record (which in nearly every measurement is far better than LA Unified) and the money that the district would lose if these schools were opened. However, some believe that this vote has more to do with the millions of dollars that the Teachers' Unions have poured into school board campaigns.

Green Dot will appeal this decision and even the school board's own legal counsel agree that they will likely win. School districts must begin to realize that charter schools are not going away and are likely to just keep gaining momentum in the years to come. What's more, if Green Dot's plan to put failing schools out of business works, watch for this same phenomenon to be attempted throughout the country. School districts can choose to either fight the inevitable or they can partner with successful charters in hope that they can work together to improve the education of those students who are currently being failed by the schooling system.

Teachable Moments

Last week, Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy invited the press and other interested community members to watch the emotional circus of a charter school admission lottery. This prompted a mini-debate on Whitney Tilson’s blog about how much media attention charter school lotteries should receive, and whether such attention is really beneficial to the parents involved.

I understand that it might be better for Moskowitz to publicize sad parents leading children away crying; surely that means that they will be granted some of Spitzer’s new golden charter school tickets. However, my point is not that it shouldn’t happen (although I agree with some of the critics), but that when it does, the charter leaders identify it as a teachable moment. They (Harlem Success Academy) have great resources (including political influence) and the lottery stage provides a unique opportunity to educate the parents about how to take real ownership of their child's education. I will go so far as to suggest that they might have more parents present in that one evening then most of the local schools see at all of their PTA meetings combined. If parents made it to the lottery, then surely they could make it over to their child’s classroom every now and then.

Many charter proponents argue that charter schools provide a means to giving parents the “choices” that are necessary in a democratic system (see Xue's post below). In this case, I would like to suggest that charter schools could actually encourage citizens to become more democratically participative. I wonder what would happen if instead of just turning away parents whose children did not win a spot in the lottery, they turned it into a way to educate concerned parents to have a voice in their current public schools. This would give charters like Harlem Success a unique opportunity to broaden their sphere of influence in a positive way.

Many of the parents attending the lottery may not return next year, maybe they have been lotteried out of the running one too many times, maybe they feel powerless. So in addition to sending that spectacular “we need more Charter schools” message, Harlem Success could send out the even more important “we need more parents” message. Just a thought.

How can school choice deal with socio-economic inequalities amongst parents?

As an economist by training and a liberal inspired by Mill, I’m a staunch advocate for school choice – parents should be allowed to design their children’s education in a marketplace of schools.

But posts like these worry me. Ostensibly, it’s a tragic-funny blog post about the kind of stupid complaints from parents teachers have to deal with – it makes you laugh, but it’s nothing unusual. Yet how commonplace such ridiculous parent complaints are – across countries and cultures – has worrying implications for proponents of school choice. It deals with two issues: a) parents’ lack of information, such that most of what they know about their children’s education is filtered through the unreliable lens of their children; and b) parents’ capacity to make good choices.

The first is easier to tackle – we just need to increase information flows. Websites like SchoolMatters and StandUp go a long way towards helping parents find out more about the educational landscape, from the level of the school to the level of the state. However, the concern is that the parents who need it most – i.e. the parents with children trapped in low-achieving schools – may be least likely to access this information.

And this brings us to the bigger problem of school choice: allowing parents more freedom to choose may result in the exacerbation of existing socio-economic inequalities, as differences in the socio-economic status of parents are reflected and magnified in the differences in educational opportunity and hence achievement of children. Parents of higher-SES will have more economic and social capital, allowing them to expend more time and resources to making educational decisions for their children, which presumably will result in better educational decisions for their children. In contrast, parents of lower-SES may not be able to spare the same amount of time and resources, resulting in poorer choices or them not choosing at all. This fear was realized during New Zealand’s national experiment with pure school vouchers, which resulted in greater socio-economic segregation within schools as better schools with more applicants than places were allowed to select their students (if you're interested, refer to Helen Ladd’s work on school choice). If the problem is parents being ill-equipped to exercising their right to choice, or simply not choosing at all, even progressive vouchers that give less privileged students more money - already a politically difficult policy - will not help.

I still firmly believe that individual choice is better than paternalism, that a diversity of choices will lead to better outcomes for all than a centrally-impsed one-size-fits-all model, but proponents of school choice have to take seriously the argument that sometimes, parents may not be the best people to decide a child’s education. More critically, other than progressive vouchers, how can school choice proponents design a school choice system that does not exacerbate existing socio-economic inequalities amongst parents? To borrow Nancy Birdsall's definitions, how do we maximise constructive inequality that creates positive incentives at the micro level, while minimizing destructive inequality that 'reflects privileges for the already rich and blocks potential for productive contributions of the less rich'?


(NOTE: The Quick and the Ed has quite a few relevant recent blog posts on this topic, especially this one.)

The State Board of Education in St. Louis recently voted to “unaccredit” the St. Louis School District. This was done due to the fact that the district was “underachieving.” The statistics on the districts are not encouraging, with 6 superintendents since 2003 and a high poverty district of 33,000 students. This is further compounded by the 5,800 special education students and 2,600 English language learners.

The transitional board will be led by an entrepreneur from the suburbs of St. Louis, Richard Sullivan. There is much debate over whether he will take too much of a ‘business’ approach to reform. In addition, I wonder how much of a following this leader will and does have from within the ranks of the poverty-stricken minorities of St. Louis, which is vastly different than the predominately white, middle class and wealthy suburbs.

While the State Board of Education thought that due to the low test scores and college placement it was time to take over the district, it is unclear what the new board will do differently in light of the many reforms that have already been tried. Has the issue been that the correct reforms have not been tried or that there were implementation problems? In addition, there is a lack of successful districts in the US in poverty-concentrated areas, so what will they do different to succeed when the odds are against them?

It is the time to stop expecting the State Board of Education, by itself, to turn around struggling districts. Potential answers can be the state encouraging charter school development or instituting a district-wide voucher policy. While some would argue that a voucher system would only give the poor children access to different poorly run schools, I would argue that the effect would be that while some schools would close for a short period, they would then have the impetus to start asking what the parents and students in the district want and reopen a better school. In addition, if vouchers could also be used for charter school, religious schools and other private schools this would expand the options for these children. The State Board of Education, as well as charter school organizations and entrepreneurs, would then be able to serve the demand of this most underprivileged population who the Board of Education has continually failed. It is best to open up the education market of urban St. Louis to some competition so that not only the children who can afford St. Louis Country Day School and Boroughs can get an education.

To see articles:
http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/news/state/16962714.html
http://www.missourinet.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=7C24E862-0EA4-A3E6-07A8BA195AA4B69F

The First "Bunkum Award" for Logic-Train Derailment in Education Blogging

Given that we just started this blog, now might not be the best time to rag on blogs as a type of media. But a recent post on Edwize - NY's United Federation of Teachers blog – reminded me that sometimes the “everyone gets a voice” aspect of blogging creates legitimate venues for illegitimate ideas and analysis.

In this instance, Edwize’s Jackie Bennett takes on William Ouchi, UCLA prof and Grand Poobah of the Weighted Student Funding approach to education, and his description of the instances in which WSF has helped improve educational equity and performance.

Here’s Bennett writing about Ouchi’s use of Boston as WSF success story:

Ouchi points to Boston schools as an example of WSF success. Ouchi says, “The results have been good. In Boston…scores on state tests…are 30 to 50 percent higher than they are at the regular public schools with similar student bodies.”

But here’s what the most recent on-line data I could find says about Boston’s WSF schools:
1. They serve substantially fewer poverty (free lunch) students (61% K-12, as opposed to 78% in the overall school population).
2. They serve substantially fewer ELL kids (3.8% as opposed to 15.8)
3. They serve substantially fewer regular special education kids (1.7% as opposed to 9.8%)…So much for Boston.

Actually, so much for basic reasoning.

Bennett compares WSF schools to rough district-wide averages and says that Ouchi’s analysis is flawed because he is comparing fundamentally different students. But Bennett misses the point because Ouchi actually says in the passage she quotes that he controls for “schools with similar student bodies.”

This basic logic-misstep discredits the entire post. And not to be too much of an elitist but isn’t it silly to think that a fully tenured research professor with Ouchi’s credentials would make as significant a mistake as to make claims about comparative student performance without controlling for essential student characteristics? Maybe we need some “Bunkum Awards” for education blogging.

Suburban Republicans Against NCLB: Proficient But Still Wrong

Congressional Republicans are close to meeting their Adequate Yearly Progress targets for Bush-bashing. The impetus for their latest mutiny? Objecting to reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act on the grounds that it endangers suburban students’ successes.

While more opposition to NCLB is always welcome, the “don’t tread on me” red staters’ reasoning is misguided. Worse, it underscores how NCLB obscures some major educational issues in our nation’s suburbs.

Weisman and Paley write in today’s Washington Post that conservative critics fear NCLB’s mandated high-stakes tests are “jettisoning education programs not covered by those tests, siphoning programs from programs for the talented and gifted, and discouraging creativity.”

Responding at the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal, Kevin Drum cringes at the thought of “pissed-off suburban voters” representing the “80% of our school systems [that] are basically okay” having the ability to sabotage NCLB’s reforms in low-achieving schools.

But Drum, the Republican critics, and the suburbanites they are trying to woo are all ignoring the real problems. The most serious danger with NCLB is that it’s already left too many suburban kids behind. And we don’t even know it.

Let’s be clear about one thing: the challenge for NCLB in the suburbs is not that it punishes successful white students. The problem is that it has artificially inflated suburban notions of success. The vast majority of students in the 80% of schools that Drum mentions are not achieving excellence, even if they are meeting proficiency on some state exam. Yet NCLB has made it easier to ignore the real deficiencies of suburban education by whitewashing the unique and significant problems in suburban schools and by rewarding the most mediocre of them for limping to the finish line.

By continuing to send the message to the majority of suburban students and parents that they are succeeding, NCLB fails to push them to greater heights and cheapens the meaning of educational excellence.

As a result, the Republicans think they can get suburban parents to worry that their kids’ successes are threatened when low-income students are expected to achieve at higher levels. That might win votes, but it misses the mark. What this country needs, what suburban parents deserve, and what will actually help all students is a more imaginative anti-NCLB groundswell reverberating throughout the suburbs.

We need soccer moms to say proficiency ain’t good enough. We need them to demand a new measurement of what excellence really should look like in their “successful” schools. We need to finally recognize that the forgotten middle in this country – measured economically, socially, politically, geographically, and educationally – is trapped behind the falsely comfortable smokescreen of NCLB accountability. And we need to add a footnote to the “success story” of suburban schools: getting by isn’t the same as getting ahead.

In short, we need a louder chorus expressing in a refined and powerful way the “self-absorbed suburban kvetching” that drives Kevin Drum crazy.

And when that happens, none of us can afford to just watch from the sidelines. When this new suburban voice for reform starts speaking, let’s listen when they say that they there’s not enough creativity in their “proficient” classrooms. Let’s applaud when they say high-stakes testing has taken innovation out of learning. Let’s cheer when they say that teachers are spending too much time preparing their students for tests and not enough time preparing them for life.

Agreeing with those statements doesn’t imply elitism or privilege. Nor does it require ignoring the serious problems facing low-achieving urban schools. But it will allow us all to finally recognize that proficiency doesn’t automatically mean excellence, and that suburban education doesn’t automatically mean success.

Teacher Pay

Teachers are not paid enough. There isn't much about education reform that all people can agree on, but underpaid teachers seems to be as close to a unanimous position as possible, right? Teachers in Massachusetts are required to graduate from an accredited college, take 2 expensive tests in literacy and their subject-matter, complete a professional practicum, apply for accreditation to the state Department of Education, continually take professional development courses, and attain a Master's degree within 5 years. For all this work towards professional status, beginning teachers in this state usually start at about $35,000 per year (with many states paying even less).

However, a new report by the Manhattan Institute that was reported in the February 28, 2007 edition of Education Week says that teachers on average get paid "36% more than the average nonsales white collar worker." This puts teachers salaries higher than economists, registered nurses, and architects. While this may seem shocking at first glance, it actually makes a lot of sense. Whenever I go away on vacation, my landlord tells me that he wants to be a teacher in his next life since we have it so easy. We get 3 months off during the summer, another month during vacations throughout the year, we get to leave school at 2:40, and we get tenure giving us unprecedented job security. What a deal!

Many people have begun criticizing this report saying that it misses many of the special characteristics of the teaching profession. While it is true that teachers are usually only requred to work about 7 hours each day, many come early, stay late, and bring work home with them. Most teachers are only paid for 1 hour each day when they are not instructing students, time that they can grade, plan lessons, call parents, or talk to administrators. They argue that these types of reports should compare yearly, rather than hourly, salary. With that changed, teachers will again be at the bottom of the pay scale for their categorization.

However, this may actually be the wrong debate. It is not how much they are paid, but how the pay scale is determined. Currently, teacher pay is differentiated by degrees and years of service. The teachers that are paid the most are those who have gotten their doctorate and worked in the public school system for decades, regardless of the quality of their teaching. There is, in fact, no incentive to work hard. If at the end of the year my students have learned every one of the state frameworks in my subject and I have put in an excessive amount of hours grading papers and meeting with students individually, I will get paid the same amount as someone who uses the book activities and runs out of school before the kids do at the end of the day. A more fair system might be a pay scale based on additional factors (such as supervisor observations and student achievement) with some leeway for principals to encourage exceptional teaching. Either way, the pay system currently used in most public schools is not attracting the caliber of teacher that our schools need and we should continue to look for potential fixes.

Does More Math and Science Really Add Up?

Last Thursday’s New York Times reported that Bill Gates thinks our economy will capsize without additional math and science teachers and resources. The actual testimony recognized the needs throughout our education system, but the NYT Business section published the AP wire about math and science. According to the article, Mr. Gates’ testimony before Congress included the savory fact that Microsoft has about 3,000 jobs that cannot be filled because of the lack of skilled workers in the United States. In response, I thought I would propose a few questions for Mr. Gates (and his foundation).

First, I argue that to be really good at math and science, our students need to be good readers and problem solvers. They need to learn how to think at the “meta” levels of the cognition taxonomy, not just have more classes in math and science. As the fear of globalization grows, I am afraid that someone as powerful as Mr. Gates might be sending the wrong message. I don’t think one subject is anymore important than the other, but we are surely not helping the matter by getting on a soapbox to proclaim that better math and science curriculums will be the economic silver bullet. The Association for Computing Machinery released a study finding the United States really needs advanced researchers, innovators, and inventors for the future of the technology industry. If our high school students can’t read, what good will millions of dollars in curriculum reforms really do?

Second, I propose that we need to be a little more specific (and realistic) about what skills are really needed. Do we need people who need to know a computer language in order to do the same rote task everyday, or do we need innovators? Business Week had an interesting article a few years ago about the kinds of technology jobs that are being sent overseas. Are routine procedural jobs the jobs we are worried about? If we need scientists, engineers, and computer programmers, what is holding back our technically savvy high school students from moving into that industry? Is it years of expensive schooling (and classes that they might not need)? Is it additional years of expensive graduate school? If all they need to be skilled is more math and science classes, are traditional college diplomas a waste? What would happen if in the next four years, Mr. Gates found 3,000 high school students that wanted to work in this industry and trained them? How much would that cost? Would he hire them?

I am not trying, with all of my graduate-student wisdom, to discount Mr. Gates’ concerns. I just want for the preachers of the “mathematics and science as salvation” doctrine to slow down, take a breath, and remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

***As an English teacher on leave, I couldn’t resist using a few idiomatic expressions, rhetorical devices, and one (somewhat) extended metaphor. I’ve even inserted a few grammatical no-no’s. If you can’t spot them- go back to English class!

Right to not be Educated?

In the current issue of Ed Week there was a front-page article entitled "Concerned About Juvenile Sex Offenders, States Move to Tighten Their Regulations" that initially failed to catch my eye. What finally made me consider the article was the end of the first sentence which reads as follows:

“several states this year are grappling with the issue of how to balance a student’s right to an education with the threat that such a student may pose.”

I have pondered on several related questions before, namely how much is it the school's (i.e. government's) responsibility to educate someone who doesn't wish to be educated; to keep someone in school who obviously doesn't want to be there; or most generally to attempt to educate all at the expense of some?

My Libertarian instincts tell me it’s not the school’s place to force an education on those who don’t want it (either explicitly or implicitly as judged by their behavior), although my Democratic sensibilities wonder how hard of a line this should be.

I think the main struggle most educators face with this line of reasoning is the fear that the school system has given up on the student; that we just didn't try hard enough. And while I appreciate this drive in teachers, I also think it is sometimes unjustified. Not because the practical concerns are too daunting, but because perhaps what this kid really needs is an education in rights.

In addition to the common problem of myopia when it comes to the relationship between my rights and yours, the right to an education seems to have had an unfortunate side-effect of making our students take school for granted. A view from the outside might be exactly what's needed while reinforcing the limits of personal rights.

Some might ask where these kids will go. Well I would argue not to in school suspension. If a student already lacks an appreciation for school it seems to do little good to not only keep him or her in school but to then take away all the things about school that might be enjoyable or engaging. I have other issues with ISS as well (such as being motivated by $$ tied to attendance), but especially for these situations it seems an inappropriate response.

In sum while public education is a powerful tool, it is also a blunt one. Occasionally our best option to help a student is to let go and allow other social forces to have a try. And just maybe if the education system stepped back more often other social institutions would step up to fill the gap. Our students' rights regarding education simply need a little clarification.

Bunkum Awards

Two university-based education policy centers have launched the "Think Tank Review Project" which takes key education think tank findings and subjects them to academic review. In a recent commentary in Education Week, the co-directors of the project argue that such a project is necessitated by the influence that think tank studies have, despite their lack of scientific rigor.

To publicize their efforts, they have created the 2006 "Bunkum Awards" for the most egregious examples of faulty or ideologically motivated research, choosing prominent target such as the Fordham Foundation and Harvard's own Paul Peterson. For each of the six "winners," they present both the piece itself, and a point by point academic critique of its accuracy.

Without a careful point-by-point comparison, I can't vouch for the accuracy of the critiques themselves. And it seems a little worrying that all of the research they chose to puncture are conservative in their conclusions, suggesting that the project may not be quite as non-partisan as it claims. But the general idea is promising. As Richard Posner argued several years ago, debate in the public sphere is entirely unaccountable, and is conducted at a level that wouldn't pass muster in a good undergraduate seminar, not to mention in a peer reviewed journal.

At the same time, academics have to take some responsibility for creating a void that the think tanks rush to fill. Not only the pace of academic production, but the choice of questions that are more motivated by disciplinary concerns than by public ones, has opened up a large niche for think tanks (of varying quality). What we need is a network of academics committed to working on public questions and getting their work to policymakers -- perhaps the good folks at the Think Tank Review would like to publish policy briefs through New Vision?

Virtual Schools - Major Reform and Major Confusion

One of this week’s Education Week front page stories ($)reports on growing support among district leaders for online learning, especially courses which blend online activities with traditional classroom instruction. Research by the Sloan Consortium finds that 63 percent of districts make use of some form of online learning, with an additional 20 percent planning to do so within the next three years.

Online learning is a heavily coded term; for some it evokes scary images of kids plugged into computers, downloading information without engaging in the human process of learning. For others it represents a new tool for preparing students for an increasingly technology driven future, while simultaneously improving efficiency by freeing up classroom teachers and effectively lowering class-sizes. These debates end up largely polarized in part due to the simple fact that most people don’t really know what online learning is or how it works.

For example, the Ed Week article states:

“Online K-12 education nationwide has grown steadily in recent years. At least 24 states have established their own online education programs, and several have created “virtual schools,” offering classes in both required subjects and electives.”

This shows how easy it is to get confused about the distinctions between various online options and their relative market shares. As a recent Education Sector report demonstrates (full disc: I’m one of the co-authors) 28 – not several – states have full fledged virtual schools, though the vast majority of them only offer courses that supplement students traditional brick and mortar experiences. In other words, students in those states enroll in the state virtual school in order to take a particular class that will then count for credit at their local school. The polarized debate between online learning advocates and critics thus becomes largely moot due to the fact that these programs work in concert with local schools and districts and don’t end up delivering the majority of any students’ educations.

But this Ed Week article is important because it points out the degree to which district leaders are becoming advocates of the benefits that online learning has to offer. Rather than being seen as a potential threat, online learning is now becoming seen as a means for increasing flexibility, programmatic individualization, and student readiness for the new economy.

State virtual school programs are serving over 140,000 public school students across the country: more than those served by better known programs such as Teach for America, KIPP, and Aspire Public Schools put together.

But more importantly, virtual schools have the capacity to really shake up the status quo of a variety of traditionally intractable issues. What do teacher transfer provisions mean when teachers can teach across district lines via the internet? Why should Carnegie Units matter when students can work at their own pace? Why should students be stuck with limited curricular offerings when they can have access to a wider variety through their state’s virtual school?

As more and more states build and expand their virtual school programs, and increasing numbers of district leaders embrace online learning, virtual schools will come to be seen as the catalyst for conversations about significant reforms to our industrial model education system.

Welcome...

..to the future of education.

On this blog you will hear our thoughts on everything schooling. Although our takeoff point is the present, our interest is the future: How can we take what we have today and create a better future for our schools and our students?

Much more to come.

-- Sarah Davis, Rachel Goldberg, Ethan Gray, Matthew Lawrence, Xueling Lee, Weilin Li, Jal Mehta, Kristin Vindler Michaelson, and Karlo Silbiger.