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.