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Education reform is at a crossroads in this country. And it seems the issue of parent choice — who should have it, how much of it there should be, and for what schools — will determine the direction many reformers will take.
While some may have difficulty defining where they stand on “choice,” others of us — who have spent years, decades, and lifetimes advocating for the liberation of Black children from schools that have not worked for them — do not suffer this crisis of clarity. Our belief is that low-income and working-class families need, as one of the few levers of power at their disposal, the power to choose the right school for their children — and that those choices should include traditional public, public charter, and private schools. Our belief is grounded not just in our understanding that no one type of school is the right fit for every type of child, but in the frank, stark, brutal reality and history that colors the pursuit of education by Black people in this country.
Black history teaches us liberation and education go hand in hand, which is why the struggle by Black people in America to be free has also always included the struggle to be educated. Black people are the only Americans for whom laws were passed prohibiting their education. Despite this, from the moment Black folks became “free” we worked to build our own schools and educate our own children. Yet, still today, Black parents must fight to access schools of their own choosing.
There is one reason that someone chooses to dedicate his or her life to education as a teacher, administrator or community advocate: a sincere, deeply held belief that making a difference in the lives of children is the best way to build equity and move our society forward. Every educator and advocate shares that goal.
Why, then, do we so often fall into the trap of treating education as just another partisan fight?
On both sides of the charter vs. traditional public school debate, heated political rhetoric has infiltrated the speech of people who should be united by a desire to help kids. On behalf of four public Charter School Networks – Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, Green Dot Public Schools and KIPP LA – representing over 35,000 students in some of our most economically distressed neighborhoods, we are calling for a ceasefire.
Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email:
The great social psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan wrote that the principal problem with communication is that we think we express meaning to others, when in fact we evoke it.That is, what we say brings a response in the listener which involves their current thoughts at the time, their feelings, wishes, goals and other preoccupations, all of which affect and alter the meanings of our expression as they hear it.
Psychiatrists are carefully trained to be useful in that situation. They learn to listen. When they do listen, they can derive an understanding of at least some of the ways in which the thoughts of their patients have responded to what was said. They can find out how the patient’s own experiences, thoughts and concerns have interacted with what the psychiatrist said, and this can help the doctor shape what they say next in perhaps more pertinent and more useful ways.
When I was a high school History teacher I was not a bad person, but I almost never shut up in class. If the teacher talks, that can make life easier for students, because they can continue giving their attention to whatever they were thinking about at the time, and if the teacher pauses, most students can easily ask a question to get the teacher talking again if they seem to be slowing down.
Most high school History teachers are not bad people, but they usually feel they have an obligation to talk, present, excite, inspire, demonstrate material and in other ways fill up the time of students in their classes. Some of the best teachers do ask questions, but even they believe they can’t spend too much time on student answers, not to mention on what students are actually thinking about what the teacher has said, or, if other students talk, about what they have said.
This is much less the case in some special secondary schools, like Phillips Exeter, which have small classes meeting around a table as a seminar, specifically designed to gather the comments and thoughts of students about academic subjects. But for public school teachers with five classes of 30 students each, that kind of dialogue is not an option.
Unless they fall silent, high school History teachers almost never have any idea what their students are thinking, and students come to understand that, at least in most classrooms, what is on their minds is of little importance to the process. This doesn’t mean that they don’t learn anything in their History classes. Some teachers really are well-educated, full of good stories, fascinating speakers, and fun to be with. That does not change the fact that even those best teachers have very little idea of what students are actually thinking about the History which is offered to them.
Some teachers do assign short papers, and if the students can choose the topics themselves, and if teachers have the time to read those papers, they can learn more about what some part of History means to their students. Sad to say, the assignment of serious History research papers is declining in this country, with some students working on slide presentations or videos, but many fewer students writing Extended Essays in History.
Education reform pundits all agree that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality, because what teachers do is the lowest level of educational activity of which they are able to take notice. In fact, the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work. Students learn the most from the academic work that they do, but this factor escapes the notice of the majority of education professors, theorists, reporters and other thought leaders.
Since 1987, The Concord Review has published 1,241 exemplary History research papers [average 7,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography] by secondary students from 44 states and 40 other countries [tcr.org]. These papers are on a vary large variety of historical topics, ancient and modern, domestic and foreign, but all of them show what students are actually thinking as they take History seriously. If more teachers of History would read a few of these strong research papers, they would become more aware, first, that some high school History students actually can think about History, and second, that such student writing, based on extensive reading of History, demonstrates a level of sophistication in their understanding of History that can never be discovered in classes where teachers do all the talking.
Great teachers of History should continue to talk the way they do in classes, and their students will learn a lot. But the actual thoughts of students of History should have a place for their expression as well. Students whose work is published in The Concord Review not only benefit from the hard work they have done, they also come to have greater respect for their own achievement and potential as scholars of History.
“Teach with Examples”
Will Fitzhugh [Founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
National Writing Board [1998]
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730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
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www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
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Gabbert, 32, lives in this town in one of the poorest counties in Indiana, where she works the night shift—10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.—for an automotive parts manufacturer. Her life now is a step up from the decade she spent working in fast food, which wasn’t “much of a career,” she told me at the local Walmart, where she was shopping for groceries. Working in fast food, she’d frequently encounter drug users as they pulled up to the drive-in window, needles alongside babies in the backseat of their cars. Like 80 percent of people in rural America, Gabbert doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
Dark, 33, lives in the increasingly metropolitan city of Indianapolis, where he runs a creative consultancy doing videos and marketing work for a variety of clients. Dark, who is a college graduate, works when he chooses, often from his downtown home or from the coffee shops and bars springing up around downtown Indianapolis. He loves to travel—he recently returned from Iceland—and goes out to meet friends almost every night of the week. The same night Ashley Gabbert was prepping for her night shift by dropping her 11-year-old daughter off with her mother, Dark was cooking a venison stew for a meat-and-bourbon potluck dinner thrown by a friend. “I’ve built my life around flexibility,” he told me.
Together, Travis Academy and Holy Redeemer have received close to $100 million in taxpayer funding over the years. The sum is less than what taxpayers would have paid for those pupils in public schools, because each tuition voucher costs less than the total expense per pupil in Milwaukee Public Schools. But vouchers weren’t supposed to provide just a cheaper education. They were supposed to provide a better one.
CREATED IN 1990 BY A COALITION of black parents and school-reform advocates with the blessing of a Republican governor, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program aimed to allow poor parents to withdraw their children from public schools and send them to higher-performing private schools they probably couldn’t otherwise afford.
Today, a little under a third of Milwaukee’s school-age population attends voucher schools. Overall, test-score outcomes for the Milwaukee Public Schools and the private voucher schools are remarkably low, and remarkably similar: On the latest state tests, about 80 percent of children in both sectors were not proficient in English and about 85 percent were not proficient in math. The voucher high schools, however, posted slightly higher 11th-grade ACT scores this year than Milwaukee Public Schools: a 17.5 composite, compared with the district’s 16.5.
The voucher program is not to blame for all of that, of course, but some wonder why the major reform hasn’t made more of a difference. The program has bolstered some decent religious schools—mostly Catholic and Lutheran—which would have never maintained a presence in the inner city serving poor children without taxpayer assistance. It’s helped to incubate a couple of private schools that eventually became high-performing charter schools. But it’s extended the same life raft to some abysmally performing schools that parents continue to choose for a variety of reasons besides academic performance. And it’s kept afloat a great number of mediocre programs.
Research shows Milwaukee parents have listed small class sizes and school safety among their top reasons for choosing a voucher school. Safety per se doesn’t equal educational excellence, but parents’ perceptions of safety can drive their decision-making. But are those perceptions accurate? Advocacy group School Choice Wisconsin examined police-call data for Milwaukee’s public and voucher schools in recent years and determined voucher schools to have proportionally fewer requests for assistance, but voucher schools also serve a disproportionately small number of students in high school, where many of the most serious school incidents warranting police attention occur. Objective data on school safety are hard to come by without records of incident reports, suspensions, and expulsions.
Henry Tyson, the superintendent of St. Marcus Lutheran School, a popular and high-performing voucher school that now serves children in Milwaukee’s central city, has long been frustrated at the lack of state and local political attention given to policies that would help expand high-performing programs and eliminate low-performing ones.
“I am intensely frustrated by the voucher schools that are chronically underperforming over a long period of time,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, any school that has been open three years or more that is under 5 percent proficiency should close, whether that’s a public school, charter school, or voucher school.”
Milwaukee has failed to develop such a mechanism in part because many choice advocates don’t want to give more power to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which they do not believe is an objective overseer. Other advocates refuse to acknowledge that parent choice alone will not always raise the quality of the market.
“What we need to do is to toil every day and keep pushing for that Berlin Wall moment,” says Kevin Chavous, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer and education-reform advocate who supported the launch of the federally funded D.C. voucher program. Chavous is a founding board member of the AFC, and a tall African American with piercing blue-gray eyes and an industrious nature—he’s written entire books on education reform during long-distance flights. He believes that school choice can and will become the dominant method of delivering educational opportunity in America.
“We’re close to that tipping point,” he said in May 2016 during AFC’s annual conference at National Harbor, a resort hugging the Potomac River just south of D.C.
It’s important to remember that private-school choice is still just a tiny sliver of the pie when it comes to publicly funded education in America. Approximately 50 million children attend public schools run by school districts. About 2.5 million attend public charter schools. And only around 400,000 attend private schools with the help of voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or education-savings account, according to EdChoice. But substantial jumps could be around the corner, especially as the programs continue to expand from targeting solely low-income children to being open to all.
A useful article. Links and detailed spending comparisons would be useful. Madison currently spends around $18k per student, far ahove the antional average. Similar achievement at less than half the cost of traditional K-12 organs is worth exploration, perhaps offering opportunities to help students in the greatest need, such as many in Madison.
My students can’t write a clear sentence to save their lives, and I’ve had it.
In 10 years of teaching writing, I have experimented with different assignments, activities, readings, approaches to commenting on student work — you name it — all to help students write coherent prose that someone would actually want to read. And as anyone who keeps up with trends in higher education knows, such efforts largely fail.
For a while now, compositionists have been enamored of a pedagogical orthodoxy that assumes the following:
Composition courses must focus on process, not just product.
Students should compose essays that tackle complex issues rather than imitate rhetorical modes (as in the much-maligned “current-traditional” pedagogy of years past).
Writing and reading instruction should be combined in the same course.After years of experimenting with those three principles, here’s what I’ve learned: They rarely work.
First, a simple truth: Students do not revise. This cuts to the very heart of how most of us teach composition. It is an a priori assumption that a composition course must emphasize revision: Writers learn to make rhetorical decisions based on their audience, and that means the arduous process of “substantial revision.”
But substantial revision doesn’t happen in our courses. I have tried requiring students to write only three essays developed over several drafts, each of which I comment on without a grade. I have used peer workshops to help students respond to each other’s writing. I have used portfolio systems and deferred-grading schemes. I have cajoled; I have encouraged; I have experimented with more rubrics than I can count.
The invariable result? Weak drafts remain weak; stronger drafts get slightly stronger, but not by much.
In peer workshops, while students get more confident in sharing feedback on each other’s work, they generally ignore their classmates’ suggestions. And more often than not, when they do revise based on peer feedback, it’s often unhelpful and inexperienced advice — for example, telling a student that the paper has a clear thesis when it has no coherent argument at all.
How can students make effective rhetorical choices if they do not know what choices exist?
Yes, some professors assert that workshops allow students to find blind spots in each other’s essays. But, as their teacher, I can do that more succinctly and quickly, and it wouldn’t require the loss of another hour of class time.
A second observation: Even when students engage complex issues from readings in their papers, they do not use the basic argumentative structures they need in order to give their ideas voice, cohesion, and support.
In a recent course, I gave students a set of readings on liberal education and its role in a democratic society. Now, class discussion had been interesting, and students had struggled productively to understand Seneca, John Henry Newman, Mike Rose, and Rabindranath Tagore; they had even produced essays with some refreshing insights. But few of their essays contained a clear and unifying argument, and many students seemed unable to focus on one point for more than a paragraph.
Let me put it another way: How can students make effective rhetorical choices if they do not know what choices exist?
If a student’s essay on mass shootings could benefit from a broader discussion of the causes of violence, but the student does not know what it means to argue by causation, then in what sense is an effective rhetorical choice available to her? Writing well involves making rhetorical decisions, but it’s clear that you can’t choose from what you don’t know.
Finally, it’s a mistake to insist that “critical reading” should be as integral to a writing course as the teaching of argumentation, structure, paragraphs, and sentences.
First, study after study shows that reading comprehension is tied to background knowledge and context. So while we can teach general strategies for “reading actively” in our composition courses, there is no such thing as a universal approach to reading aside from a few basic principles: Read slowly and deliberately, annotate as you read, make summary notes, connect to the knowledge you already have. That’s why most composition instructors thematize their courses. We realize that we cannot talk about “reading” very long before we have to talk about reading about something.
Second, because “reading strategies” are context-bound, many composition instructors make their courses about their themes, which leads to two problems: (1) The course becomes more about the content than about writing at the nuts-and-bolts level, and (2) a number of composition instructors, for reasons stemming from the structures of higher education, are not academically qualified to be teaching disciplinary content (e.g., sociology, cultural history, gender criticism) with any semblance of expertise.
That is why students in a composition course can talk about, say, the role of sexism in children’s toys, but can’t write a clear sentence about it. In short, the more time a course focuses on “critical reading” and content, the less time it spends on structure, argument, evidence, logical reasoning, and concise, clear prose — the tools a composition class should give undergraduates.
So how can I help my students write better?
Some of the following injunctions might reek of the “current-traditional.” But they have been my interior manifesto as I move forward with this fall’s set of 100 students:
Students need to write an actual essay and receive feedback on it from me very early in the course. Whether I use neo-Aristotelian rhetoric or process pedagogy, by Week 2 of the semester, students need to have written a short argumentative essay and received feedback on their thesis, use of evidence, and integration of sources. There is no excuse for students to be halfway through the semester without having received this kind of clear response.
Students need to spend less time on difficult texts and more time writing arguments. The more time one spends on content, the less time one has for structure and form. Even if I require only three major essays developed through several drafts, more homework assignments should be short essays that receive clear feedback.
Alternatively, I might structure a course around many short argumentative essays that emphasize rhetorical structure, building up to larger essays. Either way, the point is frequent essays, frequent feedback.
Not every essay requires multiple drafts or peer response. I have foolishly assumed that students cannot submit an essay before having spent at least one class period hashing over a draft with their peers. That should change. Yes, students should be encouraged to read each other’s writing and learn to respond to it. But let’s face it: Unless one believes a writing teacher’s feedback carries no more weight than anyone else’s, this is unnecessary for every essay. (Some academics do claim that a writing teacher’s comments are no more authoritative than any other reader’s, but I doubt such instructors tell their own editors anything like that.)The writing process is a means to an end. Of course the writing process is important: It can be therapeutic, formative, an aid to figuring out what we believe, the record of a mental life, an endless imaginative resource. But in a freshman composition course, process serves product. Let me put it this way: If a bright student sits down the night before a paper is due and hammers out an excellent essay in one draft, do I fail that paper? If I do, then I am not ultimately interested in helping students write effective essays, but in something else.
Sometimes it’s better to ditch an essay and move forward. Even professional writers admit that, at some point, you throw out a project and start over, or you put a project away to work on later (or never). Substantial revision is part of writing, but not for every project. After all, a number of writing contexts do not require, and might even be hampered by, overwrought attempts at revision. Sometimes writing has to come out adequate the first time. And “process” does not have to be restricted to a single piece. Being a writer is a process, too, a process of moving from one project to another, of learning from what worked the last time and what didn’t, of knowing when to revise and when to hit the delete key.
My job is not to save my students from cultural impoverishment. It is to teach them how to express themselves effectively in writing. The development of cogent, clear prose is at the heart of freshman composition. For too long, I have deluded myself into thinking that my job in a composition course was to introduce students to a rich academic topic, make them read difficult texts, make up for years of barely-more-than-functional literacy and book aversion, teach them to be critical thinkers, and help them understand the oppressive structures of late capitalism — all while helping them write focused arguments, revise, polish paragraphs, and edit sentences. Should college students be expected to read difficult texts? Sure. Should students develop a love of reading? Absolutely. Should students learn to express their views and persuade others in cogent, clear prose? Without question. But that last one is the only unique provenance of a composition course.]
So as much as I want to teach my students to love justice, be passionate about politics, and to think deeply about the future of humanity, they are not legitimate outcomes of a writing course. Neither are fostering a fetishistic love of the writing process or trying to teach “critical reading of difficult texts.”
My guess is that by the end of the semester, my students will hate my course because it is “boring,” “hard,” and “a lot of work.” They probably won’t have life-changing epiphanies about oppressive political structures. And I won’t swear to make them read esoteric academic articles. But if they show up, do the work, and turn off their phones, they just might leave my class able to write a sentence.
Joseph R. Teller is a professor of English at College of the Sequoias.
– Via Will Fitzhugh
“Enough to give them opportunity, but not to induce a sense of complacency,” is how Gavin Oldham, philanthropist and founder of The Share Centre summed it up. Gerald Ratner confessed that it did his children “quite a bit of a good when I was in my wilderness years” following the infamous speech that cost him his job, as their inheritance was no longer assured.
The property tycoon Sir Jack Petchey said his children and grandchildren knew he was a “50:50 man”, explaining: “If they really believe in something and are prepared to raise 50 per cent themselves, then I would consider backing them too.” But the author Lesley Pearse said that beyond help with property and education, she intended to “spend as much as possible”, adding: “If I have to stay in a nursing home, it will be a posh one.”
As you wrangle with this question for yourself, you must determine when and how you intend to pass on wealth to your children. Will you leave a certain sum in trust for your heirs when they turn 18 or will they inherit the bulk of your estate when you die?
Will you choose to invest in the best education money can buy — and perhaps their first home — but then leave them to plough their own financial furrow?
Warren Buffett has it nailed. “A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing,” he once said. How much this will be is almost impossible to answer: somebody whose parents are worth £1bn will be used to a different lifestyle from those with £10m to leave to their children.
Sometimes, the answer can be as simple as understanding your children’s character, says Alexandra Ruffel, a private wealth partner at law firm Irwin Mitchell. “You may have a child who’s lovely, but not the sharpest tool in the box when it comes to finances,” she says. “You have to recognise that.”
And at what age are they ready to inherit? Many trust structures will mature on a child’s 18th birthday, but parents should ask themselves if their teenage children will possess sufficient financial maturity at this age.
“It is a concern of a number of our clients,” says Chris Shepard, a partner in the private client tax department at Smith & Williamson, the accountancy and investment management group.
Almost every man at the prison, which is located about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, has been sentenced to a minimum of 20 years; some have been sentenced to life without parole. And because of Illinois truth-in-sentencing laws, many of those serving time for murder expect to remain behind bars for their entire sentence, with no time off for good behavior. It is a place that is ripe for desperation and despair. Yet, in a battered classroom on prison grounds, a serious college-level discussion is taking place. Under exposed fluorescent lights, behind a barred door, fighting to be heard over a noisy fan, liberal arts professor Christina Gómez, of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, calls on Ruben Hernandez, who is serving a 60-year sentence. He is eager to read his homework essay: “How does language influence my identity? When I speak, people find out that I’m not that uneducated Mexican. Yes, I’m from Durango and also from Chicago. Mi gente … we are all one people, Homo sapiens, and we all bleed the same.”
Gómez mildly criticizes him for “code-switching” in the Spanish phrase mi gente (my people), and thus using an idiom only some of his audience would fully comprehend. Mi gente is well understood here, he argues. “People know what it means in here and you should make word choices to grab your audience,” he says, arching his eyebrows at his fellow students, emphasizing a concept Gómez has taught. There are 15 other men in the class, most with black or brown faces, and many of them smile knowingly. They are halfway through their 14-week class in Latino history and culture and they know audience-grabbing when they hear it.After Ruben speaks, Gómez moves into a discussion of a reading from a book she co-edited, Mi Voz, Mi Vida (My Voice, My Life): Latino College Students Tell Their Life Stories, which is a collection of essays written by Dartmouth College students. Many in the class identify with the student narrator Eric, who struggles with his beliefs after his mother dies while he is attending college. “How do we decide what we value in life?” Gómez asks the class. It’s a classic humanities question, incredibly broad, hard to answer, and yet very, very important.
Unlike many college students, who are sometimes unwilling to risk embarrassing themselves in front of their peers, the men in the class at Stateville are eager to share their views and what they have learned from the readings. Ruben and the other students discuss whether they are free to live as they choose or if their lives are determined by their place in “the system.” Ruben is convinced that his current troubles stem entirely from wanting more than he really needs. “My needs are simple now, but there is no doubt in my mind that if I wasn’t arrested for murder, I would have been murdered myself.” Carlos Priester, who has been in prison for 17 years and has 23 more to serve, has a more hopeful attitude: “You want to be able to supply your family’s needs, and I won’t let being a convicted felon stand in my way. I know people who are convicted felons and they own property.”
Social scientists have been trying to identify the conditions most likely to promote satisfying human lives. Their findings give some important clues about choosing a career: Money matters, but as the economist Richard Easterlin and others have demonstrated, not always in the ways you may think.
Consider this thought experiment. Suppose you had to choose between two parallel worlds that were alike except that people in one had significantly higher incomes. If you occupied the same position in the income distribution in both — say, as a median earner — there would be compelling reasons for choosing the richer world. After all, societies with higher incomes tend also to enjoy cleaner air and water, better schools, less noisy environments, safer working conditions, longer life expectancy and many other obvious benefits.
“Why isn’t ‘government must always have the ability to access plaintext’ the more ‘absolutist’ view?” asked Julian Sanchez, privacy and technology senior fellow at the Cato Institute, in a tweet. “‘Swallow arsenic.’ No. ‘Ok, a little hemlock then.’ No. ‘Well, c’mon, you can’t be an ABSOLUTIST about this,’” he joked.
Kevin Bankston, the director of the Open Technology Institute, tweeted that he was “disappointed” Obama resorted to fearmongering. “Opens w/child kidnapping & terror, closes w/child porn & terror, vague talk of balance,” he wrote.
Jonathan Zdziarski:
We, as everyday Americans, should also encourage the idea of warrant proof places. The DOJ believes, quite erroneously, that the Fourth Amendment gives them the right to any evidence or information they desire with a warrant. The Bill of Rights did not grant rights to the government; it protected the rights of Americans from the overreach that was expected to come from government. Our most intimate thoughts, our private conversations, our ideas, our -intent- are all things our phone tracks. These are concepts that must remain private (if we choose to protect them) for any functioning free society. In today’s technological landscape, we are no longer giving up just our current or future activity under warrant, but for the first time in history, making potentially years of our life retroactively searchable by law enforcement. Things are recorded in ways today that no one would have imagined, even when CALEA was passed. The capability that DOJ is asserting is that our very lives and identities – going back across years – are subject to search. The Constitution never permitted this.
The bottom line is this: Our country actually recognizes warrant proof data, and Apple has every right and ethical obligation to recognize it in the design of their products. As Americans, we should be demanding our thoughts, conversations, and identities be protected with the highest level of security. This isn’t just about credit cards.
David Gelernter, via Will Fitzhugh:
Donald Trump is succeeding, we’re told, because he appeals to angry voters—but that’s obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America’s fate under Obama, naturally you are angry; voters should distrust a candidate who is not angry.
But there’s more to it than mere anger. Chris Christie was angry, and he’s gone. Trump has hit on important issues—immigration, the economy, appeasement unlimited—in ways that appeal to voters emotionally. There’s nothing wrong with that; I trust someone who feels what I feel more than a person who merely thinks what I think. But though Rubio and Cruz are plainly capable of connecting with voters emotionally, Trump is way ahead—for many reasons, but the most important is obvious and virtually ignored.
Political correctness. Trump hasn’t made it a campaign theme exactly, but he mentions it often with angry disgust. Reporters, pundits, and the other candidates treat it as a sideshow, a handy way for Trump (King Kong, Jr.) to smack down the pitiful airplanes that attack him as he bestrides his mighty tower, roaring. But the analysts have it exactly backward. Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today. Even Trump has just barely faced up to it. The ironic name disguises the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism. The old-time American mainstream, working- and middle-class white males and their families, is mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years—havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it. Republicans rarely even acknowledge its existence as the open wound it really is; a wound that will fester forever until someone has the nerve to heal it—or the patient succumbs. To watch young minorities protest their maltreatment on fancy campuses when your own working life has seen, from the very start, relentless discrimination in favor of minorities—such events can make people a little testy.
We are fighting Islamic terrorism, but the president won’t even say “Islamic terrorism.” It sounds like a joke—but it isn’t funny. It connects straight to other problems that terrify America’s nonelites, people who do not belong (or whose spouses or children don’t belong) to the races or groups that are revered and protected under p.c. law and theology.
Political correctness means that when the Marines discover that combat units are less effective if they include women, a hack overrules them. What’s more important, guys, combat effectiveness or leftist dogma? No contest! Nor is it hard to notice that putting women in combat is not exactly the kind of issue that most American women are losing sleep over. It matters only to a small, powerful clique of delusional ideologues. (The insinuation that our p.c. military is upholding the rights of women everywhere, that your average American woman values feminist dogma over the strongest-possible fighting force—as if women were just too ditzy to care about boring things like winning battles—is rage-making.)
The mainstream press largely ignored the Marines story. Mainstream reporters can’t see the crucial importance of political correctness because they are wholly immersed in it, can’t conceive of questioning it; it is the very stuff of their thinking, their heart’s blood. Most have been raised in this faith and have no other. Can you blame them if they take it for granted?
Why did the EPA try to issue a diktat designed to destroy the American coal industry in exchange for decreases in carbon emissions that were purely symbolic? Political correctness required this decree. It is not just a matter of infantile posing, like pretending to be offended by the name Washington Redskins. Bureaucrats have been ordered by those on high to put their p.c. principles into practice, and the character of American government is changing.
The IRS attacks conservative groups—and not one IRS worker has the integrity or guts to resign on principle, not one. Political correctness is a creed, and the creed holds that American conservatives are ignorant, stupid, and evil. This has been the creed for a generation, but people are angry now because we see, for the first time, political correctness powering an administration and a federal bureaucracy the way a big V-8 powers a sports car. The Department of Justice contributes its opinion that the IRS was guilty of no crime—and has made other politically slanted decisions too; and those decisions all express the credo of thought-police liberalism, as captured by the motto soon to be mounted (we hear) above the main door at the White House, the IRS, and the DOJ: We know what’s best; you shut up.
It’s a gigantic, terrifying problem—and no other candidate even mentions it! If Cruz and Rubio and Bush choose to be taken seriously by voters (versus analysts), they will follow Trump in attacking this deadly corrosion that weakens democracy from the inside, leaving a fragile shell that crumbles to powder in the first stiff breeze.
The State Department, naturally, is installing the same motto above its door—together with a flag emblazoned with a presidential phone and a presidential pen, the sacred instruments of invasive leftism. Christians are persecuted, enslaved, murdered in the Middle East, but the Obama regime is not interested. In a distant but related twist, Obama orders Christian organizations to dispense contraceptives whether they want to or not. This is political correctness in action—invasive leftism. Political correctness holds that Christians are a bygone force, reactionary, naïve, and irrelevant. If you don’t believe it, go to the universities that trained Obama, Columbia and Harvard, and listen. We live in the Biblical Republic, founded by devout Christians with a Creed (liberty, equality, democracy) supported directly—each separate principle—by ancient Hebrew verses. Christianity created this nation. But p.c. people don’t know history. Don’t even know that there is any. Stalin forced the old Bolsheviks to confess to crimes they never committed, then had them shot. Today, boring-vanilla Americans are forced to atone for crimes committed before they were born. Radically different levels of violence; same underlying class-warfare principle.
And we still haven’t come to the main point. Many white male job-seekers have faced aggressive state-enforced bigotry their whole lives. It doesn’t matter much to a Washington wiseguy, left or right, if firemen in New Haven (whites and Hispanics) pass a test for promotion that is peremptorily thrown in the trash after the fact because no blacks scored high enough. Who cares? It hardly matters if a white child and a black child of equal intelligence study equally hard, get equally good grades and recommendations—and the black kid gets into college X but the white kid doesn’t. Who would vote for a president based on that kind of trivia? This sort of corruption never bothers rich or well-educated families. There’s always room at the top. But such things do matter to many citizens of this country, who are in the bad habit of expecting honesty and fairness from the institutions that define our society, and who don’t have quite as many fancy, exciting opportunities as the elect families of the p.c. true believers. In analyzing Trump, Washington misses the point, is staggeringly wide of the point. Only Trump has the common sense to mention the elephant in the room. Naturally he is winning.
Why, by the way, was Trump alone honored by a proposal in the British Parliament that he be banned from the country? Something about Trump drives Europeans crazy. Not the things that drive me crazy: his slandering John McCain, mocking a disabled reporter, revealing no concept of American foreign policy, repeating that ugly lie about George W. Bush supposedly tricking us into war with Iraq. The British don’t care about such things one way or the other—they are used to American vulgarians. But a man who attacks political correctness is attacking the holy of holies, the whole basis of governance in Europe, where galloping p.c. is the established religion—and has been effective for half a century at keeping the masses quiet so their rulers can arrange everybody’s life properly. Europe never has been comfortable with democracy.
The day Obama was inaugurated, he might have done a noble thing. He might have delivered an inaugural address in which he said: This nation used to be guilty of race prejudice, but today I can tell you that there is no speck of race prejudice in any corner of the government or the laws of this country, and that is an amazing achievement of which every American ought to be deeply proud. An individual American here or there is racist; but that’s his right in a free country; if he commits no crime, let him think and say what he likes. But I know and you know, and the whole world knows, that the overwhelming majority of Americans has thoroughly, from the heart, renounced race prejudice forever. So let’s have three cheers for our uniquely noble nation—and let’s move on tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.
But he didn’t.
Worst of all its crimes is what invasive leftism has done to our schools. Trump’s un-privileged, un-classy supporters understand that their children are filled full of leftist bile every day at school and college. These parents don’t always have the time or energy to set their children straight. But they are not stupid. They know what is going on.
Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and Carson—even Kasich—could slam thought-police liberalism in every speech. They’d concede that Trump was right to bring the issue forward. Their own records are perfectly consistent with despising political correctness. It’s just that they lacked the wisdom or maybe the courage to acknowledge how deep this corruption reaches into America’s soul. It’s not too late for them to join him in exposing this cancer afflicting America’s spirit, the malign and ferocious arrogance of p.c.
David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
The state budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker last month gave Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele broad authority to oversee a special district in Milwaukee for the city’s most troubled public schools.
So, what happens now?
Abele must soon appoint a commissioner to oversee the Milwaukee schools selected for new management. But there’s no money to pay the commissioner, no engagement yet of the philanthropic community — or parents — in the project, and little talk of who will staff the schools selected for treatment, if not the employees in them already.
Abele, a lifelong Democrat, said he’s committed to giving the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program developed by Republican lawmakers and passed as part of the state budget a good-faith effort.
“What got passed is nowhere near the optimum, but it’s not the finish line, it’s the starting line,” Abele said in his first interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about his new role in the city’s education scene.
The program is designed to take some of the district’s lowest-performing schools from the control of the Milwaukee School Board and put them under the control of Abele and the commissioner he selects, or directly under MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver, if she chooses to use that authority.
It is a sad fact of life today that while women make up around 46% of the UK workforce, they are extremely poorly represented in the STEM professions – in other words science, technology, engineering and mathematics. According to recent Government figures, if you exclude medical professions just 15.5% of UK STEM jobs are filled by women, and that figure drops to 8% when you look at engineering jobs.
Despite the gender imbalance being a mainstream topic of debate the situation doesn’t seem to be improving. According to 2014 e-skills, the number of women working in the tech sector has fallen from 17% to 16% again this year – and that is a figure that’s been falling year on year for over a decade now. When you consider that UK businesses face an ever growing skills gap when it comes to recruiting digitally skilled workers, it seems a no brainer that we should try to boost the number of girls enterting the field.
Dear Evan, Lauren, and Zachary,
Many (many) years ago, there was this little girl who spent her summer afternoons creating neighborhood schools for all of the children on her block. She mimicked what school looked like to her: rows of desks, questions and answers, praise and encouragement from the teacher, stickers and stars on the top of “assignments.” She imagined what it would be like to free an idea in someone else’s mind. She was crestfallen when the game of tag pulled her “students” away all too soon in the afternoon. She would wake up early and try to think about how to make learning fun.
What I want you to know is that there are things in this world that you will choose, and there are things in this world that will choose you. That little girl was meant to be a teacher. Although it would take her years to recognize it, that meant you would, by default, know the life of a teacher.
Sometimes I wonder how you feel about this. Sure, there are parts of it you love: hanging out in mom’s classroom, feeling like little celebrities when my students see you at the grocery store. But there’s also the Saturday afternoons I’ve spent grading papers when you’re outside playing, or the dry cereal in to-go bags some mornings when I’ve already been up for hours trying to finish responding to that stack of papers.
Of course there are other fields for which a formal education and certification is still important (medicine is the most obvious one). Also, there are other reasons to go to college besides increasing your value as a worker: it’s a life experience, a good way to meet like-minded people, and it provides a good place to learn from others (of course not the only place or even the best, as was the case before the internet). Unfortunately I do not believe those reasons justify the cost of college in the US for someone who’s not quite wealthy. I’m sure the deans of Ivy League universities would entertain a different opinion, given that the future of their industry depends on the perceived value of their services. What they won’t say is that the commoditization of degrees caused by the expansion of their business means that having one is no longer the differentiator it was one or two generations ago.
In conclusion, I don’t think it will be indispensable for my son to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a successful professional. He may choose to do so if he wants to enter a field requiring access to expensive laboratory equipment, or one requiring legal certification monopolized by universities. However, there’s a growing list of professions that will employ smart and resourceful people regardless of where or how they acquired their skills.
Diane Ravitch writing in Educational Excellence Network, 1989:
Futuristic novels with a bleak vision of the prospects for the free individual characteristically portray a society in which the dictatorship has eliminated or strictly controls knowledge of the past. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the regime successfully wages a “campaign against the Past” by banning the teaching of history, closing museums, and destroying historical monuments. In George Orwell’s 1984, the regime routinely alters records of the past; it rewrites newspapers and books to conform to political exigencies, and offending versions are destroyed, dropped “into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.”
If knowledge of the past does in fact allow us to understand the present and to exercise freedom of mind—as totalitarian societies, both real and fictional, acknowledge by dictating what may be studied or published—then we have cause for concern. The threat to our knowledge of the past arises, however, not from government censorship but from our own indifference and neglect. The erosion of historical understanding among Americans seems especially pronounced in the generation under thirty-five, those schooled during a period in which sharp declines were registered in test scores in virtually every subject of the school curriculum.
Based on the anecdotal complaints of college professors and high school teachers about their students’ lack of preparation, there was reason to suspect that the study of history had suffered as much erosion and dilution as other fields. To test whether students had a secure command of the “foundations of literacy,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered the first national assessment of history and literature in the spring of 1986.
One object of the test was to ascertain whether students had ready command of essential background knowledge about American history.
The results were not reassuring. Presumably there is certain background information about American history so fundamental that everyone who goes to school should have learned it by age seventeen (and nearly 80 percent of those who took the assessment were enrolled in the second semester of their high school American history course). In What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, Chester Finn, Jr., and I pointed out that there had never been a test of this kind on a national basis and that there was no way to know whether students were learning more or less about history than in the past.
Nonetheless, we found it disturbing that two-thirds of the sample did not know that the Civil War occurred between 1850 and 1900; that nearly 40 percent did not know that the Brown decision held school segregation unconstitutional; that 40 percent did not know that the East Coast of the United States was explored and settled mainly by England and that the Southwest was explored and settled mainly by Spain, that 70 percent did not know that the purpose of Jim Crow laws was to enforce racial segregation, and that 30 percent could not find Great Britain on a map of Europe.
Since the test had never been given before, critics were quick to quarrel with our judgment that student performance was disappointing. Perhaps, they suggested, students thirty or fifty years ago might have done worse on a comparable test. Others complained that the test should also have been given to a representative sample of the adult population, because if adults don’t know such things, then high school students should not be expected to know them either.
Still others complained that we should not expect students to know or care about history because our society does not reward people who value learning, whether teachers or professors. And there were critics who insisted that the test relied too much on factual knowledge, which is insignificant compared to learning how to think. The most repeated criticism was that the results were of no importance because the study of history itself was of no importance, of no utility whatever in the world today. Again and again, the questions were posed, “What can you do with history? What kind of job will it get you?”
Polemics can be both endless and frustrating because there is almost always some truth in every assertion and counter-assertion. Everything the critics said was true to some extent. But it was also true that the assessment revealed that students were not learning some important things they should know about American history. Whether their counterparts in the past knew less, and whether adults today know less, is beside the point. Three wrongs don’t make a right.
Plainly, a significant number of students are not remembering the history that they have studied; they are not integrating it into their repertoire of background knowledge, either as fact or as concept. In reality, as every student of history ought to recognize, facts and concepts are inseparable. Some information is so basic, so essential that all students must know it in order to make sense of new learning. Nor can students be expected to think critically about issues unless they have the background knowledge to support their reasoning. Insisting that facts have a rightful place in the study of history does not mean that history must be learned by rote.
However one learns about the Civil War, however innovative or unorthodox the teacher’s methodology, the student should know that it took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century, not because of the singular importance of that isolated fact, but because that fact connects the events to a particular place in time, to a larger context, and to a chronological setting in which it is possible to make judgments about causes and consequences and relationships among events in the same era.
Was there once a golden age in the study of history? There may have been, but I know of no evidence for it. In 1943, The New York Times reported the results of a test given to seven thousand college freshmen in thirty-six institutions. It was an open-ended test, not a multiple-choice test. Only 45 percent could name four of the specific freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights; fewer than 25 percent could name two achievements of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, or Theodore Roosevelt; less than 15 percent could identify Samuel Gompers as a leader of organized labor or Susan B. Anthony as an advocate of women’s rights; and only 6 percent could name the thirteen original colonies.
Compared to the college freshmen of 1943, today’s high school juniors do well; after all, 50 percent of today’s sample identified Gompers and 69 percent identified Susan B. Anthony. But our test takers had some critical advantages: first, they took a multiple-choice test, which limits their options and jogs their memory with the right answer; second, Gompers and Anthony are included in their high school textbooks, but were not always included in the textbooks of forty years ago; third, the multiple-choice format virtually guarantees that a minimum of 25 percent will guess the right answer.
The search for comparability may be a blind alley. After all, the historical knowledge that seems most important will differ with each generation, because the salient issues are different for each generation. Today, we expect youngsters to learn about the history of civil rights and minorities, and we stress social history as well as political history. On the NAEP test, there were a number of questions about recent history, like Watergate and Sputnik. Such questions obviously could not have been asked forty years ago, and some of them may seem unimportant forty years from now.
The questions we may reasonably ask about history instruction in the schools are whether students are learning what schools are trying to teach them; whether the history that schools are teaching is significant, current, and presented in ways that encourage student engagement; whether enough time is provided to study issues and events in depth and in context; whether students learn to see today’s issues and events in relationship to the past; whether events are studied from a variety of perspectives; whether students understand that the history they study is not “the truth,” but a version of the past written by historians on the basis of analysis and evidence; and whether students realize that historians disagree about how to define the past.
I first became concerned about the condition of history in the schools while visiting about three dozen campuses across the country in 1984-1985, ranging from large public universities to small private liberal arts colleges. Repeatedly, I was astonished by questions from able students about the most elementary facts of American history. At one urban Minnesota campus, none of the thirty students in a course on ethnic relations had ever heard of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.
How were they learning about ethnic relations? Their professor described the previous week’s role-playing lesson. The class had been visited by a swarthy man who described himself as an Iranian, made some provocative statements, and then launched into a tirade, chastising them for being prejudiced against him (in reality, he was an Italo-American from Long Island, and not an Iranian at all). This “lesson” hardly compensated for their ignorance about the history of immigration, of racial minorities, of slavery and segregation, or of legislative and judicial efforts to establish equality in American life.
As a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, I lectured at various campuses on the virtues of a liberal education and its importance to society today. After one such speech at a university in the Pacific Northwest, a professor of education insisted that high-school students should concentrate on vocational preparation and athletics, since they had the rest of their lives to learn subjects like history “on their own time.” Time and again, I heard people wonder why even prospective teachers should have a liberal education, particularly if they planned to teach below the high school level. The younger the children, according to the skeptics, the less their teacher needs to know; they seemed to think that knowing and nurturing were incompatible.
In my meetings and talks with students, who were usually the best in the education or the history program, I was surprised to find that most did not recognize allusions to eminent historical figures such as Jane Addams or W.E.B. DuBois. As I traveled, I questioned history professors about whether their students seemed as well prepared today as in the past. None thought they were. Even at such elite institutions as Columbia and Harvard, professors expressed concern about the absence of a common body of reference and allusion to the past; most said their students lacked a sense of historical context and a knowledge of the major issues that had influenced American history. As a professor at Berkeley put it to me, “They have no furniture in their minds. You can assume nothing in the way of prior knowledge. Skills, yes; but not knowledge.”
Those who teach at non-elite institutions perceived an even deeper level of historical illiteracy. Typical were comments by Thomas Kessner, a professor of history at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York: “My students are not stupid, but they have an abysmal background in American or any other kind of history.” This gloomy assessment was echoed by Naomi Miller, chair of the history department at Hunter College in New York. “My students have no historical knowledge on which to draw when they enter college,” she told me.
“They have no point of reference for understanding World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, or the Holocaust.” She expressed dismay at her students’ indifference to dates and chronology or causation. “They think that everything is subjective. They have plenty of attitudes and opinions, but they lack the knowledge to analyze a problem.” Professor Miller believes that “we are in danger of bringing up a generation without historical memory. This is a dangerous situation.”
In search of some explanation for these complaints, I visited social studies classes in New York City. In one high school, where most of the three thousand students are black, Hispanic, and/or recent immigrants, a teacher said to me, “Our students don’t see the relevance to their own lives of what a lot of dead people did a long time ago. American studies means more to them than American history.”
I observed a class in American studies, where the lesson for the day was state government, its leaders and their functions. When the teacher asked whether anyone knew what the state attorney general does, a girl answered tentatively, “Isn’t he the one that says on the cigarette box that you shouldn’t smoke because it gives you cancer?” The teacher responded, incorrectly, “Yes, but what else does he do?” The teacher went on, earnestly trying to explain what New York’s secretary of state does (“he keeps the state’s papers”) and to find some way to connect the work of these officials to the students’ daily lives. The youngsters were bored and apathetic. Watching their impassive faces, I thought that a discussion of the Crusades or the Salem witchcraft trials or Nat Turner’s rebellion would be infinitely more interesting, and relevant, to their adolescent minds.
In another American studies class the topic for the day was the Dred Scott decision. Ah, I thought, I will now see how historical issues are dealt with. The class began with ten minutes of confusing discussion about how students would feel if they were drafted and told they had to serve in Vietnam. The teacher seemed to think this was relevant to the students (since it was relevant to her own generation), although it was not clear that the students had any idea what the war in Vietnam was about. What she was trying to do, I finally realized, was to get the students to wonder who is a citizen and how citizenship is defined. It was a worthy aim, but the rest of the lesson shed little light on the meaning of the Dred Scott decision. The students were told he was a slave who had been brought into a free territory and then sued for his freedom; they were also given a brief definition of the Missouri Compromise. With this as background, the teacher divided them into groups, each of which was a miniature Supreme Court, where they would decide whether Dred Scott should be a slave or go free. Ten minutes later, no surprise, each little Supreme Court recommended that Dred Scott should be a free man, and the class ended. They did not learn why Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decided otherwise, nor did they learn the significance of the Dred Scott decision in the antislavery agitation, nor its importance as a precursor to the Civil War. Since the course was law studies, not American history, the students had no background knowledge about sectional antagonisms, about slavery, or about anything else that preceded or followed the Civil War.
When I expressed surprise about the complete absence of traditional, chronological history in the social studies curriculum, the chair of the social studies department said, “What we teach is determined by guidelines from the State Education Department. In the late 1960s the state decided to deemphasize chronological history and to focus instead on topical issues and social science concepts. We followed suit.” A teacher chimed in to explain, “We don’t teach history, because it doesn’t help our students pass the New York State Regents examination in social studies.” This teacher claimed to have compiled a list of concepts that regularly appear on the Regents examinations; his students prepare for the Regents by memorizing the definitions of such terms as “cultural diffusion” and “social mobility.”
What happened to the study of history? Many factors contributed to its dethroning; some relate to the overall American cultural situation, others to specific institutional forces within the schools and changes in the social studies field. Those who claim that American culture devalues history make a strong case. Despite the fervor of history buffs and historical societies, Americans have long been present- and future-oriented. I suspect that it has never been easy to persuade Americans of the importance of understanding the past. Trends in recent years have probably strengthened popular resistance to historical study. Even in the academy, rampant specialization among college faculties has made professors less willing to teach broad survey courses, less concerned about capturing the attention of non-majors or the general public by tackling large questions.
Within the schools, the study of history has encountered other kinds of problems. During the past generation, history was dislodged from its lofty perch as “queen” of the social studies by the proliferation of social sciences, electives, and other courses. Many in the social studies field say that history still dominates the social studies, since almost all students take the traditional one-year high school course in American history, and about half the students take a one-year course in world history. However, even though the high school American history course may be secure, researchers have found “a gradual and persistent decline in requirements, courses and enrollments” in history at the junior high school level, as well as a reduction of requirements and course offerings in world history in high schools. Indeed, the only history course that is well entrenched in the curriculum is the high school survey of American history.
To some teachers, social studies means the study of the social sciences, and many schools offer electives in sociology, political science, economics, psychology, and anthropology. Some see the field as primarily responsible for the study of current social problems. Others see it as a field whose overriding objective is to teach students the essentials of good behavior and good citizenship. Still others declare that the goal of the social studies is to teach critical thinking, or values, or respect for cultural diversity.
Because of the ill-defined nature of the social studies field, it is easily (and regularly) invaded by curricular fads, and it all too often serves as a dumping ground for special-interest programs. Whenever state legislatures or interest groups discover an unmet need, a new program is pushed into the social studies curriculum. Each state has its own pet programs, but under the copious umbrella of social studies can be found courses in such subjects as energy education, environmental education, gun-control education, water education, sex education, human rights education, future studies, consumer education, free-enterprise education and a host of other courses prompted by contemporary issues.
This indiscriminate confusion of short-term social goals would have dismayed those historians who first took an active interest in history in the schools. In 1893 a distinguished panel of historians, including the future President Woodrow Wilson, recommended an eight-year course of study in history, beginning in the fifth grade with biography and mythology and continuing in the following years with American history and government, Greek and Roman history, French history, and English history. Criticizing the traditional emphasis on rote learning, the Committee of Ten argued that history should teach judgment and thinking, and should be conjoined with such studies as literature, geography, art, and languages. The historians’ recommendations were aimed at all children, not just the college-bound: “We believe that the colleges can take care of themselves; our interest is in the schoolchildren who have no expectation of going to college, the larger number of whom will not enter even a high school.”
In 1899 the Committee of Seven, a group of historians created by the American Historical Association (AHA), recommended a four-year model high school curriculum: first year, ancient history; second year, medieval and modern European history; third year, English history; and fourth year, American history and government. It was expected that students would read biographies, mythology, legends, and hero tales in the elementary years, and that this reading would provide a foundation for their subsequent study of history. The Committee of Seven’s proposal set a national pattern for American high schools for years to come. Like the Committee of Ten, the Seven believed that history should be the core of general education for all students in a democracy.
This four-year model history curriculum came under increasing attack, however, from the newly emerging field of social studies, whose major purpose (according to a 1918 report known as The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education) was “social efficiency.” Characteristic of the progressive effort to make education socially useful, the new report, which for decades has been considered the most influential document in American education, rejected those studies that seemed not to contribute directly to the goal of training students to take their place in society.
Moreover, The Cardinal Principles broke sharply with the findings and recommendations of earlier committees. It endorsed differentiated curricula, based on students’ future vocational goals, such as agriculture, business, clerical, industrial, and household arts programs. Much of the history that had been taught had no immediate social utility and thus its advocates had difficulty claiming a place in the curriculum. In the decades that followed, as the curriculum incorporated more courses that seemed socially useful or were intended to teach social skills, the time available for history shrank. Many schools collapsed their courses in ancient history, European history, and English history into a single, and optional, one-year course called “world history” or “Western civilization.”
The new emphasis on short-term social utility also affected the curriculum in the early grades. The various reform reports of the early twentieth century had recommended that young children read exciting stories about remarkable people and events that changed the course of history. In most city and state curricula, children in the early grades studied distant civilizations and read their myths and legends in addition to learning the stories about heroes and the folktales of their own country. They also celebrated holidays and learned about their local community through field trips, an emphasis called “home geography.” But by the 1930s this curriculum began to be replaced by studies of family roles and community helpers. Instead of thrilling biographies and mythology, children read stories about children just like themselves.
The new curriculum for the early grades, called “expanding environments” or “expanding horizons,” was factual and immediate, ousting imaginative historical literature and play from the early grades. Increasingly, time in the early grades was devoted to this fixed pattern: kindergarten, myself; first grade, my family; second grade, my neighborhood; third grade, my city. There was no evidence that children preferred to read about postal workers over tall tales, stories of heroes, or ancient Egyptians. Nonetheless, the new curriculum gradually swept the country, pushing historical content out of the early grades.
Not until the late 1980s did the social studies curriculum in the primary grades attract sustained criticism. According to leading cognitive psychologists, the “expanding environments” approach has no grounding in developmental research. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that it dwells unnecessarily on what the child already knows or does not need to go to school to learn. In 1987, a content analysis of social studies textbooks for the early grades was conducted at the University of Georgia. One of the investigators, Professor A. Guy Larkins, concluded, “If asked to choose between teaching primary-grades social studies with available texts or eliminating social studies from the K-3 curriculum, I would choose the latter. Much of the content in current texts is redundant, superfluous, vacuous, and needlessly superficial.” Larkins also complained that children were reading about taking field trips instead of actually taking field trips, seeing pictures of a generic community rather than investigating their own.
Learning again and again about the roles of family members and community helpers in the primary years may well be extremely boring for children who are used to watching action-packed stories on television and seeing dramatic events on the evening news. The me-centered curriculum fails to give children a sense of other times and places, and fails to appeal to their lively imaginations. Children might enjoy the study of history if they began in the early grades to listen to and read lively historical literature, such as myths, legends, hero stories, and true stories about great men and women in their community, state, nation, and world. Not only in the early grades but throughout the kindergarten to twelfth grade sequence, students should read lively narrative accounts of extraordinary events and remarkable people. Present practice seems calculated to persuade young people that social studies is a train of self-evident, unrelated facts, told in a dull manner.
By mid-century most American public schools had adopted a nearly standardized social studies curriculum: Children in kindergarten and the first three grades studied self, home, family, neighborhood, and community; children in fourth grade studied state history; in fifth grade, American history; in sixth grade, world cultures; seventh grade, world geography; eighth grade, American history; ninth grade, civics or world cultures; tenth grade, world history; eleventh grade, American history; twelfth grade, American government. While there have been many variations from district to district, this has been the dominant social studies curriculum for the last fifty years. Most cities and states follow the model for the early grades, teach one year of American history in elementary school and again in junior high school, and require a single year of American history for high school graduation. Most, however, do not require the study of world history in the high school years.
Despite this format’s persistent emphasis on social relevance and student interest, surveys have repeatedly shown that students find social studies to be less interesting and less important than their other school subjects. Why is this field, whose intrinsic human interest is so compelling, so often perceived as boring? There are many possible answers, including the compendious, superficial, and dull textbooks students are assigned to read. But the curricular pattern itself must be in some measure at fault, as it forces repetition of courses on the one hand and too little time for study in depth on the other. Both problems are surefire formulas for dullness, and curriculum planners have been thus far unable to resolve either of them.
When the usual curricular model is followed, American history is taught three times: in the fifth grade, the eighth grade, and the eleventh grade. The question is whether to teach a complete survey course (from pre-Columbian times to the present) at each of the three grade settings. If the survey is taught three times, there is no time to go beyond the textbook, to explore significant questions, to examine original sources or to conduct mock trials or debates. Some districts have broken away from the “coverage” survey by instead teaching major topics and themes in American history, but this approach is clearly insufficient when youngsters fail to understand chronology, the sequence of events, or the causal connections among events.
Another alternative to the survey is to devote each of the three years of American history to a different time period. The usual pattern is that the elementary school course concentrates on exploration and settlement and daily life in the colonies; the junior high course emphasizes the nineteenth century; and the high school year carries the student from the Civil War to the present. The advantage of the latter program is that it allows for time to treat issues in depth, without neglecting chronology. The disadvantage is that it allows no time for mature students to examine the Revolutionary era, when the principles of American government were shaped, or to consider the constitutional conflicts that led to the Civil War. It is also problematic in light of population mobility from state to state, as well as the immigrant influx from other countries, which means that newcomers in the middle or later grades will miss out on important events in the life of the early Republic.
While there is no easy answer to this problem, the history curriculum adopted in California in 1987 attempts to meld the two approaches; each year concentrates on a different time period, but each course begins and ends with an intensive review of critical issues and events. In the world history program, the most pressing problem is time. In most districts where world history is taught, it is studied for only one year, not nearly enough time to encompass the history of the world. New York State adopted a two-year global studies sequence in 1987 (though not strong on history), and California adopted a mandatory three-year world history sequence in the same year. Most other states, however, do not require even one year of world history.
Furthermore, the social studies field is divided about whether world history should emphasize Western Europe or global studies. When the course focuses on Western Europe, it is unified by attention to the evolution of democratic political institutions and ideas, as well as to their betrayal by genocide, war, and racism. When the course is global studies (as, for example, in New York State), equal attention is given to Western Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and other regions. The “Western civilization” course has been criticized by some as “ethnocentric,” while the “global studies” approach has been criticized by others for superficiality, for incoherence, and for minimizing the importance of the West in world history. No matter which approach is taken, a single year is insufficient to study world history.
The difficulty of trying to compress the history of the world into an introductory course is exemplified by one widely-adopted text, in which World War II is reduced to a brief summary and the Holocaust to two sentences: “Many millions of civilians also lost their lives. Six million Jews alone were murdered at Hitler’s orders.”
Does it matter if Americans are ignorant of their past and of the world’s? Does it matter if they know little of the individuals, the events, the ideas, the forces, and the movements that shaped their nation and others? If the study of history is to gain public support and attention,
historians must directly answer the utilitarian challenge. They must be prepared to argue that the study of history is useful in its own terms. Those who study history learn how and why the world came to be what it is, why things change and why they stay the same.Knowledge of history is both useful and necessary for our society because everyone has the right to choose our leaders and to participate in our civic and social life. All citizens, not just the few, are expected to understand major domestic and international issues. Without historical perspective, voters are more likely to be swayed by emotional appeals, by stirring commercials, or by little more than a candidate’s photogenic charisma.
Even between elections, a knowledge of history is vital today for the average citizen and vital for the health of our political system. Politicians and news organizations regularly poll the public to assess their view of domestic and international issues. When public sentiment is clear, the government and the media take heed. When the public is ill-informed or uninterested, policymakers are free to act without the consent of the governed. Americans today require historical background in order to understand complex social and political questions in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere.
Writers and editors in national newspapers and magazines assume the presence of a historically literate public by alluding without further explanation to historic events and individuals. Without a historically literate public, readily able to understand such references,
newspapers and television journalism will have no choice but to simplify their vocabulary, to reduce their coverage of serious topics, and serve as little more than headline and amusement services, devoid of significant context.Those who have a professional commitment to the study of history have a particular responsibility to improve the way it is taught and learned in the schools. Organizations such as the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) have a direct responsibility for the quality of history instruction. The teacher-scholar collaboratives sponsored by these organizations are one valuable means to assist professionals in the schools. There are others. For example, professional associations should lobby to ensure that teachers of history have actually studied history in college; in several states, including New York and California, social studies teachers may be certified without ever having studied any history. Professional associations could assist curriculum planners in enriching the study of history at every grade level. The AHA and OAH could provide invaluable support to state curriculum offices that are pressured by powerful interest groups to rewrite or water down the history curriculum; some kind of review mechanism could fend off unreasonable demands.
In 1932, Henry Johnson of Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a delightful review of the teaching of history throughout the ages, somewhat misleadingly entitled An Introduction to the History of the Social Sciences. Johnson quoted a sixteenth-century Spanish scholar, Juan Vives, to explain why it is valuable to study history: “Where there is history,” wrote Vives, “children have transferred to them the advantages of old men; where history is absent, old men are as children.” Without history, according to Vives, “no one would know anything about his father or ancestors; no one could know his own rights or those of another or how to maintain them; no one would know how his ancestors came to the country he inhabits.” Johnson cited the view of the seventeenth-century French oratorians that “history is a grand mirror in which we see ourselves…The secret of knowing and judging ourselves rightly is to see ourselves in others, and history can make us the contemporaries of all centuries in all countries.”
History will never be restored as a subject of value unless it is detached from vulgar utilitarianism; it should not be expected to infuse morals or patriotism. Properly taught, history teaches the pursuit of truth and understanding; it establishes a context of human life in a particular time and place, relating art, literature, philosophy, law, architecture, language, government, economics, and social life; it portrays the great achievements and terrible disasters of the human race; it awakens youngsters to the universality of the human experience as well as to the particularities that distinguish cultures and societies from one another; it encourages the development of intelligence, civility, and a sense of perspective. It endows its students with a broad knowledge of other times, other cultures, other places. It leaves its students with cultural resources on which they may draw for the rest of their lives. These are values and virtues that are gained through the study of history, values and virtues essential to the free individual exercising freedom of mind. Beyond these, history needs no further justification.
via Will Fitzhugh.
For the past four months, a group of Kentucky teenagers has been working to make a one-sentence change to a state law. In the history of student activism, this is not a big ask. They want local school boards to have the option—just the option—of including a student on the committees that screen candidates for superintendent jobs.
That’s it. They aren’t asking to choose the superintendent; the elected school board does that. They just want to have one student sit among the half-dozen adults (including two teachers, a parent, and a principal) who help vet candidates and make recommendations to the board.
“I thought everyone would view it as a no-brainer,” said Nicole Fielder, 18. She said this on Tuesday from Frankfort, the state’s capital, where she was missing classes in order to advocate—for the sixth time—for this bill.
Policymakers should be begging students to serve on committees and school boards, not the other way around. That’s because students are their secret weapons: Kids can translate abstract policy into real life with a speed and fluency that no adult can match.
Related: an emphasis on adult employment.
Richard V. Reeves and Joanna Venator:
Income is the currency of most mobility research – but money is not all that matters in life. There is a long list of other goods in life, including education, wellbeing, trust, agency, interesting work, and so on. Like most mobility researchers, we focus on income because it does matter in itself; because it can be converted to many of the other goods; and because it provides a robust basis for measurement and comparison.
Schooling and Social Mobility
But the transmission of education advantage is also of great interest. Even if someone does not convert a higher level of education into higher income, they are still better off. They can choose more interesting jobs, even if they are not highly-paid. They have more knowledge of the world and possibly of themselves. Education is a good in its own right, not just as a ticket to a fatter paycheck.
On the days that I drive the middle school carpool, I purposely choose a route that takes us past a huge river. Some mornings, the water looks like glass; others, it reflects the moody clouds above with choppy waves – either way, it’s gorgeous. Every time we drive past it, I point it out to my car full of 12-year-olds: “Look at the water today. Isn’t it beautiful?” No one in the car looks up. They are all looking down at their phones, playing games with each other, texting a friend or watching a YouTube video. Sometimes, if I am lucky, I will get a mercy grunt out of one or two of them in reply.
It struck me recently, after one of my quiet carpool rides, that my generation of parents – we of the soon-to-be or recently 40 year old Gen X variety, the former latchkey children of the Cold War and an MTV that actually played videos, former Atari-owners who were raised by the the Cosby Show and John Hughes, graduated high school with the kids from 90210, then lumbered through our 20s with Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey and flip phones – is perhaps the last to straddle a life experience both with and without the Internet and all its social media marvels. After all, I didn’t even learn to use e-mail until I was 19 and a sophomore in college in 1993, and only for a slightly cringe-worthy reason: a cute boy at another college asked me to e-mail him.
[I asked her about some of her experiences with math and history. Will Fitzhugh]
Jessica Li (Class of 2015)
High School Junior, Summit, New Jersey
24 May 2014
[6,592-word Sophomore paper on Kang Youwei…
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize 2014]My interest and involvement in mathematics was inspired by my family and my own exploration. My family instilled in me a strong love of learning in general but especially of mathematics. In elementary and early middle school, I mostly participated in various smaller math contests, practiced contest and advanced math on my own, and took higher-level math classes in school. In late middle school and high school, I first began to see the true beauty of mathematics when I began reading pure and applied math research papers written by graduate students and professors. At first, these papers were, of course, very difficult to understand. But gradually, through persistence and great effort, I began to understand them more and enjoy reading them more.
Before high school, especially in early middle school, my parents had provided more assistance in extracurricular academic pursuits, specifically giving me suggestions about what programs I should look into, what books I might want to read based on my interests, helping me through some challenging problems, etc. Around the beginning of high school, my involvement in mathematics became more independent of my family. They certainly supported me in everything I did, but I began to find my own route and chart my own path. Through participating in summer programs, contests, and online courses I found, I built a network of like-minded peers who shared more information with me about other math-related opportunities. Specifically, in summer 2012, I attended AwesomeMath Summer Program where I met International Math Olympiad participants, medalists, and coaches as well as many other talented young mathematicians.
In summer 2013, I attended the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathemats, a six-week math research program with interesting seminars and courses on a variety of different topics including 4D geometry, theoretical computer science, complex analysis, algebraic topology, set theory, graph theory, group theory, and more. For several years, I have participated in the American Mathematics Competition, American Invitational Mathematics Exam, the United States Mathematical Talent Search (where I received a Gold medal), and Math Madness (where I was in the top four in the country). I have written for Girls’ Angle Bulletin, the journal of Girls’ Angle. I recently conducted my own research and placed in the top three of my category and won a special computing award at the North Jersey Regional Science Fair and was published in the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Physics. Earlier this year, I was accepted to the MIT PRIMES-USA program, a year-round research program with MIT. Only thirteen students in the nation were accepted this year. Last week, I presented my research at the MIT PRIMES Conference.
I try my best not to take all of these wonderful mathematical opportunities for granted. I realize that many other students of all ages do not have the same opportunities as I do to explore mathematics. I have created programs for underprivileged students to learn contest mathematics and showcase their abilities.
In my school, I have worked to involve more girls in mathematics and get more girls interested in the subject through making presentations, suggesting programs, organizing contests and research courses, leading the Mu Alpha Theta research team, giving project ideas and research guidance, sharing posters and math games, etc. This summer, I will be traveling to different states to present at local schools about snowflake and virus symmetries, a main focus of my MIT PRIMES-USA project. The puzzles I designed and 3D-printed to share information about snowflake and virus symmetries will be featured in the Museum of Mathematics in New York City and hopefully other museums as well. My MIT PRIMES-USA project was featured at the Undergraduate Research Symposium at the Illini Union and in a presentation to the head of the Illinois Geometry Lab. My school, specifically the entire mathematics and science departments, honored me with the Rensselaer Medal for Mathematics and Science for my mathematics and science accomplishments in contests, research success, and for involving other students in math.
I have also used my mathematical knowledge and abilities in my other STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) activities. I have used statistical analysis in my environmental engineering projects on microbial fuel cells, cellulosic ethanol, and invasive species control. I also used the leadership skills I gained from getting more people, especially underprivileged students and girls, interested in mathematics to involve students worldwide in environmental engineering and research through a nonprofit organization I founded.
Though I have not used much math in computer science, my interest in math led me to study Java, Matlab, and C/C++ on my own. I have created a number of apps to help clean-water charities and the blind.
My typical family vacation has always been centered around museums. For as long as I can remember, I have loved visiting museums, reading the books about the museum exhibits and artifacts before and after the visit, listening to the tour guides, doing my own research on related topics, etc. I did not, however, conduct my own historical research and write a paper on my research until tenth grade. In my history 10 course, each student was required to write a research paper on a topic of their choice based on a relevant book. I had always been interested in Chinese history, because of its close connection to my family history and my roots. So, I read The Chinese in America by Iris Chang, an author who I was already familiar with after reading The Rape of Nanking. My paper focused on a comparison of the challenges faced by Chinese immigrants in mainland China and in America during the mid 20th century. I loved completing the project. Even though I was only required to write a four-page paper, I wrote twenty pages including a poem from the point of a view of a Chinese immigrant. I also used my computer science skills to create a game that teaches others about the information I learned from my research.
In the middle of tenth grade, I heard about The Concord Review through a friend who knew about my interests and abilities in history and suggested that I may be interested in submitting a research paper to the journal. I was very interested in taking on the challenge to improve my reading, writing, and research skills and to share my work with high school history students, teachers, and other historians. I had some difficulty deciding upon a topic to research.
Around this time in my history 10 class we were learning about the Opium War. After some thought, I decided to complete my research paper on Chinese modernization. I was fascinated by the progress China had made in terms of modernization in the last century and was interested in investigating further. I wanted to shed light on this topic that is not so well known to high school students and others. Before beginning my research paper when I asked teachers, other adults, and friends for advice, they all emphasized the importance of reading other history research papers on similar topics.
Not only would I learn more information relevant to my topic of choice but I would also be more familiar with the style of academic writing featured in high-level, very well-respected journals such as The Concord Review, which is unique at the secondary level. I spent the winter and spring of tenth grade in the library, reading dozens of books and papers on Chinese modernization. In the early spring, I finalized my topic—the rise and fall of Kang Youwei, a prominent reformer in the late Qing Dynasty who is little known, yet had a tremendous influence on Chinese modernization. For the rest of the spring, I focused on reading literature specifically about Kang and those movements and figures related to him and his effects.
I began writing my paper in the beginning of the summer and focused on editing and rewriting for the remainder of the summer. My history 10 teacher found time in her summer to help edit my paper and provide helpful suggestions for improving it. Finally, in August, I was ready to submit my (6,592-word) final paper to The Concord Review. My paper was accepted for publication later in the Winter 2013 issue. I was so excited and honored to be able to share my work with The Concord Review subscribers and others worldwide.
Even though I am not working on a new history project right now, I have continued pursuing my interest in history through reading papers and books and completed a shorter project this year on mental hospitals. I look forward to continuing my history studies and research in college and beyond. Before conducting my own history research, and writing history research papers, I never thought I would continue to study history after high school because I had always thought my main interest would be in math and engineering. But now, I realize the value of history research and academic writing in any career and life path I choose, and also simply to satisfy my curiosity about the past, the present, and the future.
The Rise & Fall of Kang Youwei (PDF).
“I am simply one who loves the past and is diligent in investigating it.”
K’ung-fu-tzu (551-479 BC) The Analects
If college isn’t in a high school student’s plan for any reason, the sense of pressure and judgment that some families feel at this time of year can be overwhelming. Many seniors are deciding where they want to begin college in the fall, decisions that will be final on May 1. “I feel judgment like I haven’t felt since my kids were babies,” Adrienne Jones posted on Facebook (where many parents are proudly posting acceptances and decisions). Her son does not plan to enter college.
When a Motherlode reader asked for stories from other parents who have a child who is not interested in going to college, we asked her to tell us a little more. She described a child whose primary interests were in creative pursuits, and who is, at best, “ambivalent” about college. “He loves to learn but heavy-duty academics are not something he relishes, so on that front, I don’t want to push him into a four-year college where he would be miserable and we would spend what amounts to a fortune from our meager budget.” College of some kind may or may not lie in his future, and she is trying, amid some support from friends and some judgment, to feel sanguine. “It would really help to hear stories from other parents whose kids found a meaningful life with decent work, without college,” she wrote, as well as stories of what children who don’t choose college do after senior year.
So we asked, on Facebook, on the blog, and on Twitter, for parents to share their stories of “noncollege-bound kids” or of their noncollege-bound selves. We read about triumphs, we read about alternatives, and we read about regret. As promised, here are some of the stories.
“My partner and I are both college-educated and assumed that that was the route our intelligent child would take,” Weary1 of Seattle wrote. “But as middle and high school progressed it became clear that being intelligent is not the same thing as being scholastically inclined, and when you combine that with adolescent-onset anxiety disorder/clinical depression, well, college becomes less of an instant option. For this child, a gap year, the prospect of a two-year college in a nonliberal-arts field, working in the outdoors job that suits this child to a T … I am glad all these options exist and that we have come to accept that the four-year-college goal is not for everybody.”
In 1978 Willis J. Stetson, known as Lee, became the dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania. The new job was quite a challenge. Penn at the time was in a weak position. In an era when big-city crime rates were still rising, its location in West Philadelphia was a handicap. Its promotional efforts took pains to point out that despite its name, the University of Pennsylvania was a private university and a member of the Ivy League, like Yale and Harvard, not of a state system, like the University of Texas. But within the Ivy League, Penn had acquired the role of backup or safety school for many applicants. “I would estimate that in the 1970s maybe forty percent of the students considered Penn their first choice,” Stetson told me recently. For the rest, Penn was the place that had said yes when their first choice had said no.
Stetson’s job, and that of the Penn administration in general, was to make the school so much more attractive that students with a range of options would happily choose to enroll. Through the next decade the campaign to make Penn more desirable was a success. As urban life became safer and more alluring, Penn’s location, like Columbia’s, became an asset rather than a problem. Stetson and his staff traveled widely to introduce the school to potential applicants. When Stetson first visited the Harvard School, a private school for boys in California’s San Fernando Valley, he found that few students had even heard of Penn. The school is now coed and known as Harvard-Westlake, and of the 261 seniors who graduated last June, more than a quarter applied to Penn. The Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey, and Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, have in recent years sent more students to Penn than to any other college. Colleges may complain bitterly about rankings of their relative quality, especially the “America’s Best Colleges” list that U.S. News & World Report publishes every fall, but a college is quick to cite its ranking as a sign of improvement when its position rises. When U.S. News published its first list of best colleges, in 1983, Penn was not even ranked among national universities. Last year it was tied with Stanford for No. 6–ahead of Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, and Brown in the Ivy League, and of Duke and the University of Chicago.
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity eNewsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email:
MTI represents nearly 3,000 teachers in the Madison Metropolitan School District. Of that number, over 96% are members of their Union. That number has been rising since Governor Walker, as he described it, “dropped the bomb” on public employees and collective bargaining almost three years ago.
However, there are currently several hundred MMSD employees in the teacher bargaining unit who are not members of MTI. They choose to be “fair share” contributors – that is, they pay a maintenance fee to the Union for all of the rights and benefits MTI has negotiated for them and provides to them, even though they are not members of their Union. These individuals have no voice in what issues MTI pursues; how MTI is governed; and can’t vote on MTI contracts, or in the election of MTI officers.
Faculty Representatives in each school and work location receive, on a monthly basis, updated lists of members and fair share contributors. What can you do? Share this article with fair share teachers at your work location, and have a discussion about the many rights and benefits MTI has negotiated on their behalf over the last 45 years, e.g., a never-ending salary schedule, health, dental and life insurance, due process, retirement, TERP, leaves of absence, paid sick leave, paid holidays and FMLA integration, to name a few.
The term “autodidact” is usually reserved for those who, like Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, and so on, did not have the advantages of spending much time in school or the help of schoolteachers with their education.
I would like to suggest that every student is an autodidact, because only the student can decide what information to accept and retain. Re-education camps in the Communist world, from Korea to Vietnam to China, no doubt made claims that they could “teach” people things whether they want to learn them or not, but I would argue that the threat of force and social isolation used in such camps are not the teaching methods we are searching for in our schools.
And further, I would claim that even in re-education camps, students often indeed reserve private places in their minds about which their instructors know very little.
My main point is that the individual is the sovereign ruler of their own attention and the sole arbiter of what information they choose to admit and retain. Our system of instruction and examination has no doubt persuaded many sovereign learners over the years to accept enough of the knowledge we offer to let most of them pass whatever exams we have presented, but the cliché is that after the test, nearly all of that information is gone.
Teachers have known all this from the beginning, and so have developed and employed all their arts to first attract, and then retain, the attention of their students, and they have labored tirelessly to persuade their students that they should decide to attend to and make use of the knowledge they are offering.
One of the best arguments for having teachers be very well-grounded in the subjects they are teaching is that the likelihood increases that they will really love their subject, and it is easier for teachers to convince students of the value of what they are teaching if they clearly believe in its value themselves.
It should not be forgotten, however, that the mind is a mercurial and fickle instrument, and the attention of students is vulnerable to all the distractions of life, in the classroom and out of it. I am distressed that so many who write about education seem to overlook the role of students almost entirely, concentrating on the public policy issues of the Education Enterprise and forgetting that without the attention and interest of students, all of their efforts are futile.
It seems strange to me that so little research is ever done into the actual academic work of students, for instance whether they ever read a complete nonfiction book, and whether they every write a serious academic paper on a subject other than themselves.
For many reformers, it seems the only student work they are interested in is student scores on objective tests. Sadly, objective tests discover almost nothing about the students’ interest in their experiences of the complexity of the chemistry, history, literature, Chinese, and other subjects they have been offered.
There was a time when college entrance decisions were based on essays students would write on academic subjects, and those could reveal not only student fluency and knowledge, but something of their attachment to and appreciation for academic matter.
But now, we seem to have decided that neither we nor they have time for extended essays on history and the like (except for the International Baccalaureate, and The Concord Review), and the attractions of technology have led examiners to prefer tests that can be graded very quickly, by computer wherever possible. So, when the examiners show no interest in serious academic work, it should not surprise us that students may see less value in it as well.
The Lower Education teachers are still out there, loving their subjects, and offering them up for students to judge, and to decide how much of them they will accept into their memories and their thoughts, but meanwhile the EduPundits and the leaders of the Education Enterprise [Global Education Reform Movement = GERM, as Pasi Sahlberg calls it], with lots of funding to encourage them, sail on, ignoring the control students have, and always have had, over their own attention and their own learning.
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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
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KellyNoel Waldorf
The Chronicle
In my four years at Duke, I have tried to write this article many times. But I was afraid. I was afraid to reveal an integral part of myself. I’m poor.
Why is it not OK for me to talk about such an important part of my identity on Duke’s campus? Why is the word “poor” associated with words like lazy, unmotivated and uneducated? I am none of those things.
When was the first time I felt uncomfortable at Duke because of money? My second day of o-week. My FAC group wanted to meet at Mad Hatter’s Bakery; I went with them and said that I had already eaten on campus because I didn’t have cash to spend. Since then, I have continued to notice the presence of overt and subtle class issues and classism on campus. I couldn’t find a place for my “poor identity.” While writing my resume, I put McDonald’s under work experience. A friend leaned over and said, “Do you think it’s a good idea to put that on your resume?” In their eyes, it was better to list no work experience than to list this “lowly” position. I did not understand these mentalities and perceptions of my peers. Yet no one was talking about this discrepancy, this apparent class stratification that I was seeing all around me.
People associate many things with their identity: I’m a woman, I’m queer, I’m a poet. One of the most defining aspects of my identity is being poor. The amount of money (or lack thereof) in my bank account defines almost every decision I make, in a way that being a woman or being queer never has and never will. Not that these are not important as well, just that in my personal experience, they have been less defining. Money influenced the way I grew up and my family dynamics. It continues to influence the schools I choose to go to, the food I eat, the items I buy and the things I say and do.
I live in a reality where:
Sometimes I lie that I am busy when actually I just don’t have the money to eat out.
I don’t get to see my dad anymore because he moved several states away to try and find a better job to make ends meet.
I avoid going to Student Health because Duke insurance won’t do much if there is actually anything wrong with me.
Coming out as queer took a weekend and a few phone calls, but coming out as poor is still a daily challenge.
Getting my wisdom teeth removed at $400 per tooth is more of a funny joke than a possible reality.
I have been nearly 100 percent economically independent from my family since I left for college.
Textbook costs are impossible. Praise Perkins Library where all the books are free.
My mother has called me crying, telling me she doesn’t have the gas money to pick me up for Thanksgiving.
My humorously cynical, self-deprecating jokes about being homeless after graduation are mostly funny but also kind of a little bit true.
I am scared that the more I increase my “social mobility,” the further I will separate myself from my family.
Finances are always in the back (if not the forefront) of my mind, and I am always counting and re-counting to determine how I can manage my budget to pay for bills and living expenses.
This article is not meant to be a complaint about my life. This is not a sob story. There are good and bad things in my life, and we all face challenges. But it should be OK for me to talk about this aspect of my identity. Why has our culture made me so afraid or ashamed or embarrassed that I felt like I couldn’t tell my best friends “Hey, I just can’t afford to go out tonight”? I have always been afraid to discuss this with people, because they always seem to react with judgment or pity, and I want absolutely nothing to do with either of those. Sharing these realities could open a door to support, encouragement or simply openness.
Because I also live in a reality where:
I am proud of a job well done.
I feel a great sense of accomplishment when I get each paycheck.
I feel a bond of solidarity with those who are well acquainted with the food group “ramen.”
I would never trade my happy family memories for a stable bank account.
I would never trade my perspective or work ethic or appreciation of life for money.
Most times it certainly would be nice to have more financial stability, but I love the person I have become for the background I have had.
It is time to start acknowledging class at Duke. Duke is great because of its amazing financial aid packages. My ability to go here is truly incredible. Duke is not great because so many of the students fundamentally do not understand the necessity for a discussion of class identity and classism. Duke needs to look past its blind spot and start discussing class stratification on campus to create a more welcoming environment for poor students.
If you have ever felt like this important piece of your identity was not welcome at Duke, know that you are not the only one. I want you to know that “poor” is not a dirty word. It is OK to talk about your experiences and your identity in relation to socioeconomic status. It is OK to tell the truth and be yourself. Stop worrying whether it will make other people feel uncomfortable. People can learn a lot about themselves from the things that make them uncomfortable. I want to say to you that no matter what socioeconomic status you come from, your experiences are worthy.
And because no one in four years has said it yet to me: It’s okay to be poor and go to Duke.
In “The New Abolitionism: Why Education Emancipation is the Moral Imperative of Our Time” (TOS, Winter 2012-13), I argued that America’s government school system is immoral and antithetical to a free society, and that it must be abolished–not reformed. The present essay calls for the complete separation of school and state, indicates what a fully free market in education would look like, and explains why such a market would provide high-quality education for all children.
The Need for Separation of School and State
What is the proper relationship of school and state? In a free society, who is responsible for educating children? Toward answering these questions, consider James Madison’s reasoning regarding the proper relationship of government and religion–reasoning that readily applies to the issue of education. In 1784, in response to Patrick Henry’s call for a compulsory tax to support Christian (particularly Episcopalian) ministers, Madison penned his famous “Memorial and Remonstrance,” a stirring defense of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. The heart of his argument can be reduced to three principles: first, individuals have an inalienable right to practice their religion as they see fit; second, religion must not be directed by the state; and third, religion is corrupted by government interference or control. Few Americans today would disagree with Madison’s reasoning.
One virtue of Madison’s response to Henry’s bill is that its principles and logic extend beyond church-and-state relations. In fact, the principles and logic of his argument apply seamlessly to the relationship of education and state. If we substitute the word “education” for “religion” throughout Madison’s text, we find a perfect parallel: first, parents have an inalienable right to educate their children according to their values; second, education must not be directed by the state; and third, education is corrupted by government interference or control. The parallel is stark, and the logic applies equally in both cases.
Just as Americans have a right to engage in whatever non-rights-violating religious practices they choose, so Americans have a right to engage in whatever educational practices they choose. And just as Americans would not grant government the authority to run their Sunday schools, so they should not grant government the authority to run their schools Monday through Friday.
Parents (and guardians) have a right to direct the education of their children.1 Parents’ children are their children–not their neighbors’ children or the community’s children or the state’s children. Consequently, parents have a right to educate their children in accordance with the parents’ judgment and values. (Of course, if parents neglect or abuse their children, they can and should be prosecuted, and legitimate laws are on the books to this effect.) Further, parents, guardians, and citizens in general have a moral right to use their wealth as they judge best. Accordingly, they have a moral right and should have a legal right to patronize or not patronize a given school, to fund or not fund a given educational institution–and no one has a moral right or properly a legal right to force them to patronize or fund one of which they disapprove. These are relatively straightforward applications of the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness–the rights on which America was founded.
We like to think of human rights in affirmative terms, so we speak most often of our rights to move toward what we want: our rights to vote, assemble freely, speak freely, and choose our own paths to happiness. My contention here, however, is that the most basic right–the right that makes all other rights possible–is the right to quit.
Quitting often has negative connotations in our minds. We grow up hearing things like, “Quitters never win, winners never quit.” We’re supposed to stick things out, no matter how tough the going. I rather like this variation, which I heard somewhere: “Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.”
If we move our minds out of the quagmire of competition (indeed, we can’t win tennis matches by quitting) and think of life’s broader goals–the goals of surviving, avoiding injury, finding happiness, and living in accordance with our personal values among people whom we respect and who respect us–then we see that freedom to quit is essential to all of these goals. I am talking here about the freedom to walk away from people and situations that are harmful to our wellbeing.
Alison Gopnik
Changes in our environment can actually transform the relation between our traits and the outside world.
We all notice that some people are smarter than others. You might naturally wonder how much these differences in intelligence depend on genes or upbringing. But that question, it turns out, is impossible to answer. That’s because changes in our environment can actually transform the relationship among our traits, our upbringing and our genes.
The textbook illustration of this is a dreadful disease called PKU. Some babies have a genetic mutation that makes them unable to process an amino acid in their food, and it leads to severe mental retardation. For centuries, PKU was incurable. Genetics determined whether someone suffered from the syndrome, which gave them a low IQ. Then scientists discovered how PKU works. Now, we can immediately put babies with the mutation on a special diet. Whether a baby with PKU has a low IQ is now determined by the food they eat–by their environment.
We humans can figure out how our environment works and act to change it, as we did with PKU. So if you’re trying to measure the relative influence of human nature and nurture, you have to consider not just the current environment but also all the possible environments that we can create. This doesn’t just apply to obscure diseases. In the latest issue of Psychological Science, Timothy C. Bates of the University of Edinburgh and colleagues report a study of the relationship among genes, SES (socio-economic status, or how rich and educated you are) and IQ. They used statistics to analyze the differences between identical twins, who share all DNA, and fraternal twins, who share only some.
When psychologists first started studying twins, they found identical twins much more likely to have similar IQs than fraternal ones. They concluded that IQ was highly “heritable”–that is, due to genetic differences. But those were all high SES twins. Erik Turkheimer of the University of Virginia and his colleagues discovered that the picture was very different for poor, low-SES twins. For these children, there was very little difference between identical and fraternal twins: IQ was hardly heritable at all. Differences in the environment, like whether you lucked out with a good teacher, seemed to be much more important.
In the new study, the Bates team found this was even true when those children grew up. IQ was much less heritable for people who had grown up poor. This might seem paradoxical: After all, your DNA stays the same no matter how you are raised. The explanation is that IQ is influenced by education. Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we’ve changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.
Richer children have similarly good educational opportunities, so genetic differences among them become more apparent. And since richer children have more educational choice, they (or their parents) can choose environments that accentuate and amplify their particular skills. A child who has genetic abilities that make her just slightly better at math may be more likely to take a math class, so she becomes even better at math.
But for poor children, haphazard differences in educational opportunity swamp genetic differences. Ending up in a terrible school or one a bit better can make a big difference. And poor children have fewer opportunities to tailor their education to their particular strengths. How your genes shape your intelligence depends on whether you live in a world with no schooling at all, a world where you need good luck to get a good education or a world with rich educational possibilities. If we could change the world for the PKU babies, we can change it for the next generation of poor children, too.
The Vice Chancellor of Calicut University promptly ordered a probe by a senior dean who, after visiting the internet ( as is the academic practice these days) discovered to his horror that al-Rubaish did have terrorist affiliations. He recommended its removal saying that ‘students would not lose much if they do not read this poem’. One of textbook’s editors explained that, at the time of selection of the poem, there was not much material available online about the poet. He said that they would not have selected this poem if the poet’s background was known to them.
It is an irony of our times that the editors are being shamed for an intellectual act, which was in fact , a creative way to expose the young undergraduates to the emotional impact of the international ‘war on terror’ across continents . Who would dispute that war on terror is a contemporary issue? How does literature react to it? Why and how do the detainees of Guantanamo Bay, the international jail set up by the USA to isolate its prey from life itself, choose poetry as a site to convey their pain and trauma? Most of them were non-poets. Can something they inscribed on the coffee cups or floors of the prison cell, in their desperation to speak, be accorded the exalted status of poetry?
Matt Schifrin, via a kind reader email
In late June, nearly two months after most incoming freshmen had sent in their deposit checks securing places at hundreds of colleges across America, Long Island University’s Post campus, nestled in the wealthy New York City suburb of Brookville, N.Y., was testing a new approach in its efforts to fill up the 250 or so empty seats it had in its class of 2017.
The week of June 24 was “Express Decision Week” at LIU. High school seniors were invited to walk into Post’s Mullarkey Hall any time from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., transcript, SAT scores and personal statement in hand, and LIU’s admissions officers promised to make an acceptance decision on the spot. All application fees would be waived, and registration for fall classes would be immediate. An identical event was being held simultaneously at LIU’s Brooklyn campus.
Post’s aggressive marketing ploy is eerily reminiscent of the on-the-spot low-docmortgage approvals that occurred during the heady days leading up to the housing crisis. But the product here is bit less tangible than a loan that secures a house. These admissions officers are selling the promise of a better life through post-secondary-school learning.
LIU isn’t alone. Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, N.Y. and Centenary College in Hackettstown, N.J. offer similar same-day, on-the-spot admissions events. According to Jackie Nealon, Long Island University’s vice president of enrollment, LIU takes it a step further in the spring and sends admissions officers into Long Island high schools to admit students on location-the academic version of a house call.
If LIU sounds a bit desperate, it is. From a financial standpoint LIU is suffering from a host of ills common to hundreds of colleges today. According to the most recent financial data LIU has supplied to the Department of Education, its Post campus has been running at an operating deficit for three years. Its core expenses, or those essential for education activities, have been greater than its core revenues. Like many other schools, Post is a tuition junkie, with nearly 90% of its core annual revenues derived from tuition and fees.
This year Post raised its tuition and fees by 3.5% to $34,005, yet it offers steep tuition discounts to nearly every incoming freshman. In fact, a quick click over to its website shows the deals available. If your kid is an A student with an SAT score of about 1300 out of 1600, expect at least a $20,000 rebate per year.
This seeming paradox of raising prices while simultaneously offering deep discounts is a way of life among middling and lower-quality colleges in the market for higher education. It’s a symptom of a deeply troubled system where the cachet of elite institutions like Harvard and Yale has led thousands of nonelite schools to employ a strategy where higher prices and deeper discounts are more effective than cutting prices and tightening discounts. According to the National Association of College & University Business Officers, the so-called tuition discount rate has risen for the sixth straight year and is now averaging 45%. In some ways colleges operate like prestige-seeking liquor brands. In other ways they are more like Macy’s offering regular sales days, only quietly.
Behind Forbes College Financial Grades
To do that we created the FORBES College Financial Grades, which measure the fiscal soundness of more than 900 four-year, private, not-for-profit schools with more than 500 students (public schools are excluded). For the purposes of our analysis we used the two most recent fiscal years available from the Department of Education-2011 and 2010. The grades measure financial fitness as determined by nine components broken into three categories.
-Balance Sheet Health (40%): As determined by looking at endowment assets per full-time equivalent (15%), expendable assets (assets that can be sold in a pinch) to debt, otherwise known as a college’s viability ratio (10%) and a similar measure known as the primary reserve ratio (15%). Primary reserve measures how long a college could survive if it had to sell assets to cover its expenses. Schools like Pomona and Swarthmore are so asset-rich, for example, that they could cover expenses for ten years without collecting a penny in tuition. Other well-known schools like Carnegie Mellon and Syracuse have primary ratios of about 1.0, meaning they could last about a year.
-Operational Soundness (35%): A blend of return on assets (10%), core operating margins (10%) and perhaps most important, tuition and fees as a percentage of core revenues (15%). Tuition dependency is the most serious risk facing middling colleges today.
-Admissions Yield (10%): The percentage of accepted students who choose to enroll tells not only how much demand there is from a specific school’s target customers but also gives an indication of the effectiveness of its admissions staff.
-Freshmen Receiving Institutional Grants (7.5%): The most desperate schools use “merit aid” as a tool to lure more than 90% of incoming freshmen.
-Instructional Expenses per Full-Time ?Student (7.5%): Struggling schools tend to skimp in this area.
If Americans are judging the colleges they choose a, they may be better off not choosing a college at all. It turns out that college graduates are significantly less engaged in their jobs than everyone else. And this finding is true across all professions, age ranges, and income levels. College graduates are less engaged than technical/vocational school grads, high school grads, and even high school dropouts. This finding alone is about as devastating as it gets for higher education, but it’s actually worse than you think.
The key driver of college graduates being less engaged is that they are much less likely than everyone else to say they have an opportunity to “do what they do best every day.” In other words, something about college isn’t working — it appears it doesn’t do a good enough job of bringing students closer to figuring out what they are best at. The implications of this are so profound that it will literally change everything in higher education. From rethinking what its ultimate purpose should be, to the very basics of how we teach, coach, mentor, and develop learners.
College — based on recent economic analyses — does produce higher earnings over a lifetime. But it does not always lead to a “good job” – one in which people are engaged in their work and doing what they do best. At least, not compared to everyone else who doesn’t go to college. The magnitude of this failure can’t be over-exaggerated, especially considering what Gallup knows about human development and wellbeing — where nothing is more fundamental than doing what you’re best at every day.
Retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman:
The first speech was at a family dinner following that graduation ceremony 44 years ago. My father told me the most important thing to remember was to choose my career carefully. He said that I should do something I loved because 40 years is a long time doing something you don’t like or you don’t care about.
That’s Lesson #2: “Work is a 4-letter word,” my father said, “but so is the word play. Find a job that brings playful joy every day and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Not that it hasn’t had its ups and downs, but being an educator has been a labor of love for me, and I’m thankful that I followed my father’s advice. Now it’s your turn to find your own labor of love.
My mother then said, “Not so fast, young man,” as she leaned over, elbowing my father lovingly in the process. “It’s not all about enjoying yourself,” she said. “It’s not all about you–that’s selfish and useless.” She insisted, “Find something that will make the world a better place than you found it.” Although my mother was not a camper, and never saw an insect that she didn’t run from, she believed in the good camper rule. “Always leave your campsite better than you found it,” and she preached it constantly.
That’s Lesson #3: Make a positive difference for others. When you look back at your life, you won’t be proud of the money you made or the stuff you’ve accumulated or even the fun times you had for yourself. No, you’ll look back and be most proud of what you did for others. You will feel your life was worth living because you made the world a better place for others. Then, my mother told me to stop chewing with my mouth open and to save room for dessert, and the speeches were over.
I hope that Zimman stats active on education issues.
What Alice in Wonderland has to do with electromagnetic theory, relativity, and Pluto.
“You are a mashup of what you let into your life,” it’s been said. Since creativity is combinatorial, the architecture of mind and character is deeply influenced by the intellectual stimulation we choose to engage with — including the books we read. There is hardly anything more fascinating than the private intellectual diet of genius — like this recently uncovered list of books computing pioneer and early codehacker Alan Turing borrowed from his school library. Though heavy on the sciences, the selection features some wonderful wildcards that bespeak the cross-disciplinary curiosity fundamental to true innovation. A few personal favorites follow.
Laurie Rogers, via a kind email:
Dear Colleagues and Friends:
The citizens of Washington State need your help in defending the principle of open government.
Last week, I wrote an article for my blog “Betrayed” about how the board of Spokane Public Schools is again attempting to modify the Public Records Act in ways that would undermine the Act for citizens across the entire State of Washington. That article is found here: http://betrayed-whyeducationisfailing.blogspot.com/p/by-laurie-h.html
One of the bills introduced this year regarding the Public Records Act is HB 1128, a bill that would essentially gut the Public Records Act for citizens and whistleblowers. HB 1128 would make it nearly impossible to obtain records that agencies do not want to release. It was theoretically written to protect and defend public agencies against abusive records requesters; it was not written to protect or defend citizens against abusive agencies.
On Jan. 25, HB 1128 was discussed in a legislative hearing. All of the pro-HB 1128 arguments were made by public officials, including Spokane County Commissioner Todd Mielke. Nearly all complained about vindictive behavior by former public employees. Meanwhile, all arguments made in opposition to HB 1128 were made by non-government people who spoke up for the principle of open government and the right of citizens to hold their government agencies accountable.
Legislators wisely elected to revisit the language of HB 1128, so we have a brief opportunity to influence this process. I’ve written an analysis of HB 1128, which I’ve pasted below and attached in a PDF file. You will see that the impact of HB 1128 would be devastating for open-government in Washington State and for all citizens. I also have serious worries about future bills regarding the Public Records Act.
All comments and suggestions are welcome. You also are welcome to quote or forward this email and the analysis as you wish.
If the language in any new legislation regarding the Public Records Act and other open-government laws doesn’t protect the rights of citizens and whistleblowers, I guarantee that language will be used against us. Please help us to maintain open government in Washington State. Please ask your legislators, your friends and your colleagues to stand up against HB 1128, against the language in HB 1128, and against any other bills that would negatively affect the principle of open government in this state.
There are other ways to accomplish what the authors of HB 1128 intended. Tim Ford, the open-government ombudsman in the Attorney General’s Office, would be a great point of contact on how to do it.
Thank you for your help. Please see the analysis below or attached.
Laurie Rogers
Spokane, WA
wlroge@comcast.net
It was a privilege to talk with author and adventurer Hugh Pope [website, International Crisis Group, Twitter] recently regarding education. Pope has lived and worked in the “Middle East” for three decades. His books (all highly recommended) include: Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East, Sons of the Conquerors: the Rise of the Turkic World and Turkey Unveiled: a History of Modern Turkey.
Here’s an excerpt:
In your education as you think about growing up, when did your light go off about critical thinking and observation as opposed to just accepting? Was it your education, was it your experience? Was it your parents? What was decisive?
Hugh: Well, I think that I never felt that I had a particular base group to relate and I was born South Africa and lived the first nine years of my life there and saw things from a, I suppose, a English speaking South African perspective. Then I, because of political reasons we had to move out of South Africa…and the apartheid regime had made things difficult for my father, so we moved to England and I was put in a completely different area and they took, it was very puzzling because I spoke English, I thought it was English but it turned out that actually there’s more to English that’s being English than just language. I don’t think that I ever completely fit in, and so I always saw things as a bit of an outsider there. I think that when you are an outside you take a much more careful view of everything that’s going on. You see things rather more distinctly than someone who’s always been inside it, so perhaps that was the critical thing for me, moving at the age of nine. Not that I would particularly recommend it as a course of action, I don’t think it’s a very…It’s quite traumatic. I think that’s where it comes from if anything.
Jim: If we could turn on the time machine and take you back to 18 or 16, would you study the same thing? Would you pursue the same career? What would you do, Hugh?
Hugh: Well, I always remember at the Oriental institute, in my University, that we used to really pity the people that were studying Chinese and Turkish, because when we were 18 those two countries really seemed to be completely pointless. What were they ever going to contribute? Everyone clamored to learn Arabic and Persian because those were oil-rich countries that were clearly going to be much better for peoples’ careers, and of course it turned out to be exactly the other way around. [laughs] I suppose it’s a bit like those advertisements about investments, don’t judge past performance as an indication of future profits. It’s very difficult to choose what to do. I think I was very lucky in that I was one of the last generation of people educated for free in Britain.
It actually didn’t matter what one chose, because there was no debt associated with it. Nowadays if you go into University I think you’ve got to be much more aware of, “Whether this is going to be a possible investment of time and money?” because that debt is going to hang over people, isn’t it? If I was going today I think I would be a bit more commercially minded, in a sense that I would choose something that was not just of intellectual interest.
Still, I did love learning Persian, and I think that was a benefit in itself, I still think that the Persian poetry we were taught about made a deep impact on me. I wouldn’t change that. There are many things about the Middle East that make one really frustrated but at the same time there is a liveliness and an instantaneous about the Middle East which you don’t find in Europe.
The way that countries like Turkey and elsewhere change rapidly is much more exciting than a country in Europe where everything is planned many, many years ahead. People start thinking about their pensions in their 20’s.
I found Pope’s comments on languages interesting as well. I hope you enjoy the conversation and appreciate Hugh’s time.
Read the transcript or listen to the mp3 audio file.
The 22nd annual Maclean’s University Rankings issue–the holy book for anyone planning their education in Canada–is now available on newsstands and tablets.
The 2013 issue, our biggest-ever, features 132 pages of charts, stories and advice designed to help future students choose the right school, while sparking conversations on the quality of the post-secondary experience from the size of classes to the cost of textbooks.
The issue also offers a peek inside campus life from coast to coast, including an examination of the viral videos phenomenon, a deeper look at the scourge of drinking, Emma Teitel on fraternities, the college advantage and pages more. There are online extras, too, like photo tours of life at 24 campuses.
And, of course, the issue features the 22nd annual rankings.
Newark and its teachers union on Thursday are expected to sign a tentative contract deal blessed by Gov. Chris Christie that would overhaul teacher pay, introducing lucrative merit bonuses and giving teachers a role in grading each other.
The contract, fueled by about $50 million from the foundation started by Facebook Inc. FB -4.55% founder Mark Zuckerberg, covers the next three years and would offer a compensation system that removes lifetime pay increases for those who earn advanced degrees and blocks poorly rated teachers from receiving automatic pay raises for years of experience, officials said.
Teachers could, however, choose to stick with the current pay scheme, which offers small, annual pay bumps for years served and for advanced degrees earned, officials said. They wouldn’t be eligible for some bonuses.
New technology can be inspiring, exciting or sometimes infuriating – but I can’t ever remember it being really moving. Until, that is, I met Ruby Dunn, whose life is being changed by a piece of software.
Ruby, who was born 14 weeks premature in 2006, has autism and has never spoken. She does, however, attend her local school – Sandford Primary in Somerset – and is well integrated into every aspect of school life. But it is an app which she uses on an iPod and an iPad which is making a big difference.
Ruby uses the app, Proloquo2Go, to communicate with her teachers, her family and other children. She taps on symbols, constructs a sentence and out it comes, spoken in a child’s voice. So in the playground, she taps “head, shoulders” to choose a game. At lunchtime she chooses “lasagne” and “carrots” adds “please” and “Tina” and hands it to the dinner lady. And in the classroom she reads a story and then taps out answers to questions about it via the iPad version of the app.
With the long summer holidays upon us, many parents will be hoping to keep themselves sane and their children entertained by signing them up for summer classes. But with a plethora of programmes to choose from, selecting one that will entertain and educate your child can be a daunting task.
“One of the most important considerations when selecting a summer programme for your child is their interest,” advises Dr Caleb Knight, an educational and child psychologist at the Child and Family Centre in Central. “It is not productive to push a child into a programme of activity in which they show little motivation.”
Robert L. Nasson, via a kind email:
The National History Club (NHC) was formed in March 2002 to promote the reading, writing, discussion, and enjoyment of history among secondary students and their teachers by giving after school history clubs around the country a clearinghouse to share history-related activities and information with each other. We now have 445 chapters in 43 states and there are over 13,000 students involved. Each chapter sets its own course, and this has led to a wide array of activities that include: Veterans Day ceremonies involving local veterans, participation in National History Day, historic preservation outreach in their communities, and trips to such historic sites as the 16th Street Baptist Church, Valley Forge, and the Lewis and Clark State Historic Site.
This makes the organization unique. By encouraging students to take charge of the direction of their clubs, the NHC uses a bottom-up approach, where students passionate about history are doing the history activities they choose. Rather than a traditional top-down method, which often leads to apathetic students, the NHC has given an ownership stake to every chapter that has joined the organization.
History is the only topic taught in every secondary school that can engage students in learning from past to achieve understanding of, and tackling human problems in, the world today. In history there is truly something for everyone. History is political, artistic, social, economic, military, athletic, scientific, cultural, religious, technological, literary, philosophical, geographic, ethnic, and mathematical. History can be as contemporary as yesterday and as ancient as Mesopotamia, as near as the city one lives in and as far away as Andromeda. History can be seen and touched, read and written, made and remembered. Everyone is a part of history.
More importantly, the study of history builds the critical skills students need to become responsible citizens and effective leaders. Researching and discovering new information, as well as reading, synthesizing, and communicating that information effectively: these are the skills that help make someone successful in business, in civic life, and even in science.
We produce a tri-annual Newsletter that features chapter accounts from throughout the country, and run a number of award programs with various history organizations such as George Washington’s Mount Vernon and The History Channel. Chapters are frequently sharing ideas and activities with each other, and this leads to an active and involved membership. Through this interaction, students and Advisors see that they are not alone in their passion for the study of history, and this encourages more schools to join.
The work of the NHC is as important as ever considering the deteriorating history standards in our schools. A 2010 Civics Assessment administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress displayed the lack of understanding of civics among students in our secondary schools. Among some of the key findings:
Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights.
Only one in 10 eighth graders demonstrated acceptable knowledge of the checks and balances among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
Three-quarters of high school seniors were unable to name a power granted to Congress by the Constitution.
While there are many people and organizations now complaining about the historical illiteracy of the younger generation, we are one of the few actually doing something about it. The NHC has a sustainable model in place, and we are constantly adding chapters in schools from big cities and rural towns to our community. We want students, teachers, and schools that have a passion for history to join our movement. To view our latest Newsletter or to find out how to create a chapter and join the NHC please visit www.nationalhistoryclub.org
Robert L. Nasson
Executive Director,
National History Club
P.O. Box 441812
Somerville, MA 02144
www.nationalhistoryclub.org
rnasson@nationalhistoryclub.org
Historian David McCullough was asked by a reporter recently if he started writing any of his books with a theme. He said that when he became interested in a subject he started reading to see what he could find out about it, but he had no advance idea of what would result.
Even those of our teachers who do work with students on research papers too frequently indulge in the science envy of requiring them to have a thesis. Students are asked to have some prior notion of the history they will read which they will test to see whether it is falsifiable or not.
Science is rich, famous and powerful, so it is not surprising that it is envied in our culture, but it should be remembered that its practice is to reduce, as much as possible, reality to numbers.
History does not lend itself well to a reduction to numbers, as it is about human beings, who also cannot very well be competently encompassed by numerical descriptions.
Words are the numbers of history, and words connote as much as they denote, they contain and evoke possibility and ambiguity in ways that the number users of science sometimes find annoyingly imprecise and quite uncomfortable.
The study of history should begin with curiosity about people and events: What was that person really like? How did that event come to happen and what resulted from it? These are the sort of non-thesis questions that our students of history should be asking, instead of fitting themselves out for their journey of learning about the past hampered with the straitjacket of a thesis.
Serious history students are often curious over something they have read about. They want to know more, and, when they have learned quite a bit, they frequently want to tell others what they have discovered. Like scientists, they are curious, but unlike them, they are willing to live with the uncertainties that are the essential ingredients of human experience.
Science has earned our admiration, but its methods are not suitable to all inquiries and we should not let envy of the success of science mislead us into trying to shrink-wrap history to fit some thesis with which students would have to begin their study of history.
David McCullough has reported that when he speaks to groups very often he is asked how much time he spends doing research and how much time he spends writing. He said he is never asked how much time he spends thinking.
The secondary students of history published in The Concord Review do not generally begin their work with a thesis to prove or disprove, but rather with wonder about something in history. The quality of their papers reveals that not only have they done a good deal of reading and research–if there is any difference there–but that they also have spent some serious time thinking about what they have learned, as well as how to tell someone else about it.
They have inevitably encountered the complex causes of historical events (no control groups there) and the variety of forces and inclinations both within and without the historical figures they have studied.
Some of these students are very good in calculus, science, and so forth, but they realize that history is a different form of inquiry and provides a non-reductionist view of the truth of human life, but one that may be instructive or inspiring in several ways.
So I urge teachers of students of history, who are asking them to write serious research papers, to let them choose their own topics, based on their own wonder and curiosity about the past, and to relieve them of the science envy of a thesis requirement. Let them embark on their own study of some part of the immense and mysterious ocean of history, and help them return with a story and an understanding they can call their own and can share, through serious research papers, with other students of history.
————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
There is little love for the SAT. How little, you ask? When a massive cheating scandal erupted this fall, fewer people rushed to defend the test than rose to defend Penn State officials for allegedly covering up the sexual abuse of children. But as unpopular as the iconic SAT may be – among students and many educational activists alike – it’s actually pretty good at what it’s designed to do, which is to serve as a common measure across the hodgepodge of academic standards, grading systems and norms being used by America’s sprawling 25,000 high schools.
Unlike many of the tests that the education world loves to argue about, the SAT is an optional test; students choose to take it if they want to attend schools that require it for admission. So SAT angst is limited to the college-bound. (The test is administered by the New York-based nonprofit College Board, which is also in charge of high school Advanced Placement tests.) And although its only true fans are the intellectually insecure, the SAT, which used to be an acronym for Scholastic Aptitude Test, doesn’t show how smart or savvy students are or how successful, happy, or impactful they’re likely to be in life. But on average, it does fairly accurate gauge on how well students will do in their first year of college. That’s something admissions officials want to know. And that’s why good scores can boost an applicant’s chances of getting in and low scores can torpedo them.
HELEN F. LADD and EDWARD B. FISKE
NO one seriously disputes the fact that students from disadvantaged households perform less well in school, on average, than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds. But rather than confront this fact of life head-on, our policy makers mistakenly continue to reason that, since they cannot change the backgrounds of students, they should focus on things they can control.
No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s signature education law, did this by setting unrealistically high — and ultimately self-defeating — expectations for all schools. President Obama’s policies have concentrated on trying to make schools more “efficient” through means like judging teachers by their students’ test scores or encouraging competition by promoting the creation of charter schools. The proverbial story of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost comes to mind.
The Occupy movement has catalyzed rising anxiety over income inequality; we desperately need a similar reminder of the relationship between economic advantage and student performance.
The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.
International research tells the same story. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?
Yet federal education policy seems blind to all this. No Child Left Behind required all schools to bring all students to high levels of achievement but took no note of the challenges that disadvantaged students face. The legislation did, to be sure, specify that subgroups — defined by income, minority status and proficiency in English — must meet the same achievement standard. But it did so only to make sure that schools did not ignore their disadvantaged students — not to help them address the challenges they carry with them into the classroom.
So why do presumably well-intentioned policy makers ignore, or deny, the correlations of family background and student achievement?
Some honestly believe that schools are capable of offsetting the effects of poverty. Others want to avoid the impression that they set lower expectations for some groups of students for fear that those expectations will be self-fulfilling. In both cases, simply wanting something to be true does not make it so.
Another rationale for denial is to note that some schools, like the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools, have managed to “beat the odds.” If some schools can succeed, the argument goes, then it is reasonable to expect all schools to. But close scrutiny of charter school performance has shown that many of the success stories have been limited to particular grades or subjects and may be attributable to substantial outside financing or extraordinarily long working hours on the part of teachers. The evidence does not support the view that the few success stories can be scaled up to address the needs of large populations of disadvantaged students.
A final rationale for denying the correlation is more nefarious. As we are now seeing, requiring all schools to meet the same high standards for all students, regardless of family background, will inevitably lead either to large numbers of failing schools or to a dramatic lowering of state standards. Both serve to discredit the public education system and lend support to arguments that the system is failing and needs fundamental change, like privatization.
Given the budget crises at the national and state levels, and the strong political power of conservative groups, a significant effort to reduce poverty or deal with the closely related issue of racial segregation is not in the political cards, at least for now.
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis has had some ugly squabbles with Rahm Emanuel–the longer school day battles, for starters, including his recent charge that the union is “cheating children out of an education”–and, in my opinion, she has often emerged the loser.
Last week, she filed the CTU’s latest lawsuit against the city, charging that the school board is using its “TeacherFit” questionnaire to hire teachers who are willing to buck the union.
The camera doesn’t favor her, and in her battle to stop the new mayor from pushing through a longer school day, she seems on the side of outmoded, lumbering labor. Who, after all, wants to deny Chicago public school kids more time for math, reading, lunch, and recess?
But in person, Lewis, 58–South Sider (grew up in Hyde Park, now lives in the Oakland neighborhood), CPS lifer (Kenwood, ’71), daughter of two teachers, former high-school chemistry teacher (Sullivan, Lane Tech, King College Prep), wife of a now-retired CPS P.E. teacher–has a sharp sense of humor, and intelligence and articulateness to spare. After an hour spent with her at a conference table at the CTU’s headquarters in the Merchandise Mart, if someone asked me to choose a few words to describe her, I’d say “substantial, self-confident, direct.”
Dr. Armand A. Fusco, via a kind email:
“No one has been able to stop the steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss.” Bob Herbert / Syndicated columnist
Everything you wanted to know about urban education and its solutions!
For over 50 years this shame of the nation and education has remained as a plague upon its most vulnerable children. All reform efforts involving billions of dollars have not alleviated this scourge in our public schools. The rhetoric has been profound, but it has been immune to any antidote or action and it is getting worse; but it doesn’t have to be!
The following quotes summarize the 285 pages and over 400 references from my book.
Edited Insightful Quotes
The explanations and references are found in the contents of the book.
- School pushouts is a time bomb exploding economically and socially every twenty-six seconds
- Remember what the basic problem is–they are in all respects illiterate and that is why they are failing.
- Every three years the number of dropouts and pushouts adds up to a city bigger than Chicago.
- Politics trump the needs of all children to achieve their potential.
- One reason that the high school dropout crisis is known as the “silent epidemic” is that the problem is frequently minimized.
- Simply stated black male students can achieve high outcomes; the tragedy is most states and districts choose not to do so.
- In the majority of schools, the conditions necessary for Black males to systematically succeed in education do not exist.
- While one in four American children is Latino–the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States–they are chronically underserved by the nation’s public schools and have the lowest education attainment levels in the country.
- Miseducation is the most powerful example of cruel and unusual punishment; it’s exacted on children innocent of any crime.
- Traditional proposals for improving education–more money, smaller classes, etc.–aren’t getting the job done.
- The public school system is designed for Black and other minority children to fail.
- The U.S. Department of Education has never even acknowledged that the problem exists.
- Though extensive records are kept…unions and school boards do not want productivity analysis done.
- Educational bureaucracies like the NEA are at the center of America’s dysfunctional minority public schools.
- Does bonus pay alone improve student outcomes? We found that it does not.
- Performance pay is equivalent to “thirty pieces of silver.”
- Data necessary to distinguish cost-effective schools are all available, but our system has been built to make their use difficult.
- Districts give credit for students who fail standardized tests on the expectation that students someday will pass.
- We saw some schools that were low performing and had a very high parent satisfaction rate.
- We’re spending ever-greater sums of money, yet our high school graduates’ test results have been absolutely flat.
- America’s primary and secondary schools have many problems, but an excess of excellence is not one of them.
- Not only is our use of incarceration highly concentrated among men with little schooling, but corrections systems are doing less to correct the problem by reducing educational opportunities for the growing number of prisoners.
- Although states will require school districts to implement the common core state standards, the majority of these states are not requiring districts to make complementary changes in curriculum and teacher programs.
- We can show that merit pay is counterproductive, that closing down struggling schools (or firing principals) makes no sense.
- The gap between our articulated ideals and our practice is an international embarrassment.
- It’s interesting to note that despite the growing support by minority parents for charters, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and other civil rights groups collectively condemn charter schools.
- Public schools do respond constructively to competition by raising their achievement and productivity.
- Gates Foundation has also stopped funding the small school concept because no results could be shown.
- The policies we are following today are unlikely to improve our schools.
- Our country still does a better job of tracking a package than it does a student.
- Indeed, we give these children less of all the things that both research and experience tell us make a difference.
- Reformers have little knowledge of what is working and how to scale what works.
- The fact is that illiteracy has persisted in all states for generations, particularly among the most vulnerable children, and getting worse is a testament that national policy and creative leadership rings hollow.
- We can’t change a child’s home life, but what we can do is affect what they do here at school.
- Only a third of young Americans will leave high school with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.
- Black churches can no longer play gospel in the sanctuaries while kids drop out into poverty and prison. They must embrace school reform and take the role that Catholic churches have done for so long and for so many.
- There is only one way to equalize education for all–technology.
- Whatever made you successful in the past won’t in the future.
- The real potential of technology for improving learning remains largely untapped in schools today.
- Can’t read, can’t learn, can’t get a job, can’t survive, so can’t stay within the law.
- Of the 19.4 million government workers, half work in education, which rivals health care for the most wasteful sector in America.
- The only people not being betrayed are those who feed off our failing education system…that group gets larger every year.
- Mediocrity, not excellence, is the national norm as demonstrated by the deplorable evidence.
- Parents are left to face the bleak reality that their child will be forever stuck in a failing school and a failing system.
- The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system.
- The very public institutions intended for student learning have become focused instead on adult employment.
- We conclude that the strategies driving the best performing systems are rarely found in the United States.
- No reform has yet lived up to its definition!
- Minority males don’t get the beef, they get the leftovers.
- The cotton plantations have become the school plantations (children held in bondage of failing schools) and the dropouts move on to the prison plantations.
AMONG the episodes in his life that didn’t last, that were over almost before they began, including a spell in the army and a try at marriage, Michael Hart was a street musician in San Francisco. He made no money at it, but then he never bought into the money system much–garage-sale T-shirts, canned beans for supper, were his sort of thing. He gave the music away for nothing because he believed it should be as freely available as the air you breathed, or as the wild blackberries and raspberries he used to gorge on, growing up, in the woods near Tacoma in Washington state. All good things should be abundant, and they should be free.
He came to apply that principle to books, too. Everyone should have access to the great works of the world, whether heavy (Shakespeare, “Moby-Dick”, pi to 1m places), or light (Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, the “Kama Sutra”). Everyone should have a free library of their own, the whole Library of Congress if they wanted, or some esoteric little subset; he liked Romanian poetry himself, and Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha”. The joy of e-books, which he invented, was that anyone could read those books anywhere, free, on any device, and every text could be replicated millions of times over. He dreamed that by 2021 he would have provided a million e-books each, a petabyte of information that could probably be held in one hand, to a billion people all over the globe–a quadrillion books, just given away. As powerful as the Bomb, but beneficial.
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Why this area teacher chose the non-union option
Elijah Grajkowski:
If the teachers union is as wonderful as it claims, then it should have no problem attracting members, without the need to force teachers to join. How is this any different from any other professional organization that teachers, as professionals, may choose to join? It’s a question I have been pondering since I became a public school teacher in Wisconsin.
For years, I have chosen not to be a member of the union. However, this is a choice I didn’t exactly have before Gov. Scott Walker’s collective-bargaining bill became law. As a compulsory union state, where teachers are required to pay union dues as a condition of employment, the most I could hope for was a “fair share” membership, where the union refunded me a small portion of the money that was taken from my paycheck that lawyers have deemed “un-chargeable.”
Every September, after lengthy, bureaucratic and unadvertised hurdles, I would file my certified letter to try to withdraw my union membership. Then, the union would proceed to drag its feet in issuing my small refund. I often wondered why this kind of burden would be put on an individual teacher like me. Shouldn’t it be up to the organization to convince people and to sell its benefits to potential members afresh each year?
Why should I have to move mountains each fall to break ties with this group that I don’t want to be a part of in the first place? Something seemed dreadfully wrong with that picture.
Union’s efforts help all students, educators and schools
WEAC President Mary Bell:
I became a Wisconsin teacher more than 30 years ago. I entered my classroom on the first day of school with my eyes and heart wide open, dedicated to the education of children and to the promise public schools offer. I was part of our state’s longstanding education tradition.
Like many beginning teachers, I soon encountered the many challenges and opportunities educators face every day in schools. About 50% of new educators leave the profession within their first five years of teaching. New teachers need mentors, suggestions, support and encouragement to help them meet the individual needs of students (all learning at different speeds and in different ways) and teach life lessons that can’t be learned from textbooks.
That’s where the union comes in. In many ways, much of the work the Wisconsin Education Association Council does is behind the scenes: supporting new teachers through union-led mentoring programs and offering training and skill development to help teachers with their licenses and certification. Our union helps teachers achieve National Board Certification – the highest accomplishment in the profession – and provides hands-on training for support professionals to become certified in their fields. These are efforts that benefit all Wisconsin educators, not just a few, and no single educator could accomplish them all alone.
These are difficult times for public education. As school districts struggle to choose where to whittle and whack next, it’s easy to suggest that there are simple ways to achieve savings and reduce costs.
What’s troubling, however, is the misleading and sometimes inaccurate information that some folks are using to disparage our schools and educators.
Public schools’ mission is teaching and learning. Our success is measured by the opportunities that we create for our students, both in our classrooms today and later in life.
Throughout these lean economic times brought on by the Great Recession, the Eugene School District has worked steadily to keep cuts away from the classroom as much as possible. Now, facing a $21.7 million budget shortfall, we can no longer avoid further reductions to our teaching staff and the resulting increase in class sizes.
We continue to put the needs of students first and to maintain high academic expectations. We are focused and clear about our priorities. We have made hard decisions to let go of valued programs so that all students have the educational opportunities that they need to be successful. This is not, and will not be, easy for students, parents, staff or our community.
The following questions and concerns are submitted to you for your consideration regarding the “findings and recommendations” of the MMSD K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation report:
1. What findings and recommendations are there for ‘year-around’ literacy experiences to help mitigate ‘losses’ over the summer months in achievement gains during the traditional academic year?
Although “summer loss” was not a particular focus of discussion during the evaluation process, there are several ways in which the recommendations address reducing the impact of summer reading loss. These include:
Recommendation I – curricular consistency will provide for a more seamless connection with content and instruction in summer school, Saturday school (pending funding) and after school supports.
Recommendation II – more explicit instruction focused in early grades will allow students to read for enjoyment at earlier ages.
Recommendation III – a well-developed intervention plan will follow a student through summer school and into the following academic year
2. What are the findings and recommendations regarding parental (significant adults in student’s life) participation, training, evaluation and accountability in the literacy learning process?
Parental participation opportunities to support their children’s enjoyment and achievement in literacy include:
Family Literacy Nights at various elementary schools and in collaboration with Madison School and Community Recreation. Town Hall Meetings that provide opportunities for families to share pros and cons of literacy practices at school and home.
Literacy 24-7: Parent training for Spanish speaking families on how to promote literacy learning. Read Your Heart Out Day: This event builds positive family, community and school relationships with a literacy focus and supports both the family involvement and cultural relevance components of the Madison Metropolitan School District Strategic Plan.
Tera Fortune: Professional development for parents about the Dual Language Immersion Program with a focus on bi-literacy throughout the content areas. MALDEF Curriculum Training: Nine-week training covering a variety of topics to assist parents in sharing the responsibility of student success and how to communicate effectively in schools.
Regular column in Umoja Magazine: Forum to inform families and community members about educational issues through African American educators’ expertise. Several columns have focused on literacy learning at home.
Training is provided for parents on how to choose literature that:
Has positive images that leave lasting impressions
Has accurate, factual information that is enjoyable to read
Contains meaningful stories that reflect a range of cultural values and lifestyles
Has clear and positive perspective for people of color in the 21st century
Contains material that is self affirming Promotes positive literacy learning at home
Evaluations of the Read Your Heart Out and Family Literacy Night were conducted by requesting that participating parents, staff, students and community members complete a survey about the success of the event and the effects on student achievement.
3. What are the consequential and remediation strategies for non-performance in meeting established achievement/teaching/support standards for students, staff and parents? What are the accompanying evaluation/assessment criteria?
A District Framework is nearing completion. This Framework will provide clear and consistent expectations and rubrics for all instructional staff and administrators. Improvement will be addressed through processes that include the School Improvement Plans and staff and administrator evaluations processes.
4. Please clarify the future of the Reading Recovery program.
MMSD proposes to maintain Reading Recovery teachers and teacher leaders as an intervention at grade 1. There are currently two Reading Recovery teacher leaders participating in a two-year professional development required to become Reading Recovery teacher leaders. One of these positions will be certified to support English Language Learners. The modifications proposed include: 1) targeting these highly skilled Reading Recovery teachers to specific students across schools based on district-wide data for 2011-12 and 2) integrating the skills of Reading Recovery staff into a comprehensive intervention plan along with skilled interventionists resulting in all elementary schools benefiting from grade 1 reading intervention.
5. How will the literacy learning process be integrated with the identification and development of Talented and Gifted (TAG) students?
The development of a balanced, comprehensive assessment system will result in teachers having more frequent and accurate student data available to tailor instruction. K-12 alignment uses tools such as Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) and Educational Planning and Assessment System (EPAS) are being implemented in Spring, 2011.
The Response to Intervention model is based on evidence-based instruction and responds to students who need additional challenge and/or support.
6. What will be the 2010-2011 budgetary priorities and strategies for undertaking the literacy program and resources recommendations outlined in the report?
PreK-12 literacy will be a priority for the 2011-12 budget process. In addition to the prioritization of funding within our budget parameters, MMSD is in the process of writing a major grant (Investing in Innovation – i3) to support the recommendations of the literacy evaluation as a key strategy to close achievement gaps and improve literacy for all students to be ready for college and/or careers.
Caire believes the Madison community must first address its at-risk population in a radically different way to level the playing field before fundamental change can come.
“Madison schools don’t know how to educate African Americans,” says Caire. “It’s not that they can’t. Most of the teachers could, and some do, valiantly. But the system is not designed for that to happen.”
The system is also not designed for the 215 annual school days and 5 p.m. end times that Madison Prep proposes. That, and the fact that he wants the school to choose teachers based on their specific skill sets and cultural backgrounds, is why Caire is seeking to proceed without teachers union involvement.
“Ultimately,” he says, “the collective bargaining agreement dictates the operations of schools and teaching and learning in [the Madison school district]. Madison Prep will require much more autonomy.”
Many aspects of Caire’s proposed school seem rooted in his own life experience. Small class sizes, just like at St. James. Uniforms, just like the Navy. Majority African American and Latino kids, eliminating the isolation he grew up with. Meals at school and co-curricular activities rather than extracurricular, so that poor students are not singled out or left out.
Teachers the students can identify with. Boys only, in the hopes of fostering the sensitive, supportive male peer groups so critical to Caire’s evolving sense of self over the years.
Much more on Kaleem, here.
Canada’s point is that the only way to fix our schools is not with a Superman or a super-theory. No, it’s with supermen and superwomen pushing super-hard to assemble what we know works: better-trained teachers working with the best methods under the best principals supported by more involved parents.
“One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist,” Canada says in the film. “I read comic books and I just loved ’em …’cause even in the depths of the ghetto you just thought, ‘He’s coming, I just don’t know when, because he always shows up and he saves all the good people.’ ”
Then when he was in fourth or fifth grade, he asked, “Ma, do you think Superman is actually [real]?” She told him the truth: ” ‘Superman is not real.’ I was like: ‘He’s not? What do you mean he’s not?’ ‘No, he’s not real.’ And she thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real. And I was crying because there was no one … coming with enough power to save us.”
“Waiting for Superman” follows five kids and their parents who aspire to obtain a decent public education but have to enter a bingo-like lottery to get into a good charter school, because their home schools are miserable failures.
Guggenheim kicks off the film explaining that he was all for sending kids to their local public schools until “it was time to choose a school for my own children, and then reality set in. My feelings about public education didn’t matter as much as my fear of sending them to a failing school. And so every morning, betraying the ideals I thought I lived by, I drive past three public schools as I take my kids to a private school. But I’m lucky. I have a choice. Other families pin their hopes to a bouncing ball, a hand pulling a card from a box or a computer that generates numbers in random sequence. Because when there’s a great public school there aren’t enough spaces, and so we do what’s fair. We place our children and their future in the hands of luck.”
It is intolerable that in America today a bouncing bingo ball should determine a kid’s educational future, especially when there are plenty of schools that work and even more that are getting better. This movie is about the people trying to change that. The film’s core thesis is that for too long our public school system was built to serve adults, not kids. For too long we underpaid and undervalued our teachers and compensated them instead by giving them union perks. Over decades, though, those perks accumulated to prevent reform in too many districts. The best ones are now reforming, and the worst are facing challenges from charters.
Every parent and taxpayer should see this film.
Life expectancy at birth ranges from 80 years in Hawaii to 72 in Washington, DC; and from 83 in Japan to 40 in Swaziland. In vitro fertilisation is available in some regions of the UK within months; in others it takes years. Fill in your own example here, because it is now a commonplace that the price, availability and quality of anything from a nursing home to a good education will vary depending on where you live.
I am not sure whether the British complain more about this than anyone else, but we have developed our own term to describe it: the “postcode lottery”. For community-minded gamblers there is actually a real postcode lottery, in which prizes are shared between winning ticket-holders and those fortunate enough to have homes on the same street. But for most Britons, the term is a lazy shorthand for the fact that where you live affects what you get.
There is a glaring problem with this phrase: while the ticket that gets pulled out of the tombola is chosen at random, the postcodes where you and I live are not. We aren’t serfs. If we want to move and we can afford to move, we can move.
I live in Hackney, a London borough where crime is high and the schools are poor. If I had a few spare million, perhaps I would move to Hampstead or Chelsea. I do not. People who shop at Harrods expect better food than those who shop at Tesco. Ferraris are faster and sexier than Fords. There are many words to describe this state of affairs, but “lottery” is not the one I would choose.
Harford makes an excellent point. It is clearly futile to impose one size fits all approaches, particularly in education. We, as a society are far better off with a diverse governance (many smaller schools/districts/charters/vouchers) and curricular environment.
Over the years, I feel like I’ve come to know you — your political leanings and life experiences, your writing style, sense of humor and average snark level. But what about your math skills?
For example: Can you (or any high school student you know) do this?
Show that there are only finitely many triples (x, y, z) of positive integers satisfying the equation abc = 2009(a + b + c).
Or this?
Let n be an integer greater than 3. Points V1, V2, …, Vn, with no three collinear, lie on a plane. Some of the segments ViVj , with 1 *< i < j < n, are constructed. Points Vi and Vj are neighbors if ViVj is constructed. Initially, chess pieces C1,C2, ...,Cn are placed at points V1, V2, ..., Vn (not necessarily in that order) with exactly one piece at each point. In a move, one can choose some of the n chess pieces, and simultaneously relocate each of the chosen piece from its current position to one of its neighboring positions such that after the move, exactly one chess piece is at each point and no two chess pieces have exchanged their positions. A set of constructed segments is called harmonic if for any initial positions of the chess pieces, each chess piece Ci(1< i < n) is at the point Vi after a finite number of moves. Determine the minimum number of segments in a harmonic set. (*Note: This sign (<) should read "less than or equal to," but I have some keyboard limitations.)
There was a day a few weeks ago when I found my 2½-year-old son sitting on our building doorstep, waiting for me to come home. He spotted me as I was rounding the corner, and the scene that followed was one of inexpressible loveliness, right out of the movie I’d played to myself before actually having a child, with him popping out of his babysitter’s arms and barreling down the street to greet me. This happy moment, though, was about to be cut short, and in retrospect felt more like a tranquil lull in a slasher film. When I opened our apartment door, I discovered that my son had broken part of the wooden parking garage I’d spent about an hour assembling that morning. This wouldn’t have been a problem per se, except that as I attempted to fix it, he grew impatient and began throwing its various parts at the walls, with one plank very narrowly missing my eye. I recited the rules of the house (no throwing, no hitting). He picked up another large wooden plank. I ducked. He reached for the screwdriver. The scene ended with a time-out in his crib.
As I shuffled back to the living room, I thought of something a friend once said about the Children’s Museum of Manhattan–“a nice place, but what it really needs is a bar”–and rued how, at that moment, the same thing could be said of my apartment. Two hundred and 40 seconds earlier, I’d been in a state of pair-bonded bliss; now I was guided by nerves, trawling the cabinets for alcohol. My emotional life looks a lot like this these days. I suspect it does for many parents–a high-amplitude, high-frequency sine curve along which we get the privilege of doing hourly surfs. Yet it’s something most of us choose. Indeed, it’s something most of us would say we’d be miserable without.
Trying to put the finishing touches on a series of education policy victories in the recently concluded legislative session, Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed into law a hotly debated plan to let local schools seek waivers from a range of state rules and regulations.
But as soon as the ink was dry on House Bill 1368, one of the state’s major teachers unions delivered on its promise to challenge the act as unconstitutional.
The teachers group wants a Baton Rouge district court to rule that the Legislature cannot abdicate its law-making authority by effectively allowing the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to pick and choose which laws local schools have to follow.
The new program topped Jindal’s K-12 education agenda for the session that ended June 21. The governor pitched waivers as a way to give schools more flexibility, much like public charter schools that have proliferated in New Orleans and elsewhere since Hurricane Katrina.
In the past few days, we have heard much sound sense from the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, about schools reform. But here is what the Prime Minister had to say, and it is worth quoting at length: “No one will be able to veto parents starting new schools or new providers coming in, simply on the basis that there are local surplus places. The role of the LEA [local education authority] will change fundamentally. There will be relentless focus on failing schools to turn them round. Ofsted will continue to measure performance, albeit with a lighter touch. But otherwise the schools will be accountable not to government at the centre or locally, but to parents, with the creativity and enterprise of the teachers and school leaders set free.”
The PM continued: “Where parents are dissatisfied, they need a range of good schools to choose from; or where there is no such choice, [to be] able to take the remedy into their own hands. Where business, the voluntary sector, philanthropy, which in every other field is an increasing part of our national life, want to play a key role in education, and schools want them to, they can. Where local employers feel local schools aren’t meeting local skill needs, they can get involved. The system is being empowered to make change. The centre will provide the resources and enable local change-makers to work the change. We will set the framework and make the rules necessary for fairness. Where there is chronic failure, we will intervene. But the state’s role will be strategic; as the system evolves, its hand will be lifted, except to help where help is needed.”
It began for Alyssa Pometta, as these habits so often do, with the soft stuff. We are talking, of course, about lip gloss. She began wearing it in fourth grade – Bonne Bell’s Lip Smackers, a girl’s rite of passage – after yearsof wearing ChapStick and pretending it was Revlon. But the thrill of flavoured lip gloss was fleeting, and in January, 11-year-old Alyssa asked her mother, Phyllis Pometta, if she could graduate to the hard stuff: lipstick, eyeliner and mascara.
Pometta’s first instinct was to send her daughter to her room, but she reconsidered. Instead, she took her for a makeover.
“I’m using the choose-your-battles kind of parenting,” Pometta, an independent publicist, reasons. “I figured, better that she’s informed and has the right tools than she goes into it blindly with her friends in the bathroom and comes out looking like a clown.”
from The Burden of Bad Ideas Heather Mac Donald, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America’s nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores–things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. “Let’s be honest,” darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. “What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?” It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)–self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity–but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to “professionalize” teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats’ pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in “Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education” that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson’s course doesn’t give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn’t either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by “building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing.” On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be “getting the students to develop the subtext of what they’re doing.” I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
“Developing the subtext” turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and–most admirably–quickly checking the students’ weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light “texts,” both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; “What excites me about teaching?” “What concerns me about teaching?” and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: “What was it like to do this writing?”
Deep down, we know the rules of writing. Or the rule, rather, which is that there are no rules. That’s it. That’s the takeaway point from any collection of advice, any Paris Review interview and any book on writing, whether it be Stephen King’s “On Writing” or Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Faith of a Writer” (both excellent, by the way, but only as useful as a reader chooses to make them).
Despite this fact, writers continue to write about writing and readers continue to read them. In honour of Elmore Leonard’s contribution to the genre, “Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing”, the Guardian recently compiled a massive list of writing rules from Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Annie Proulx, Jeanette Winterson, Colm Tóibín and many other authors generous enough to add their voices to the chorus.
Among the most common bits of advice: write every day, rewrite often, read your work out loud, read a lot of books and don’t write for posterity. Standards aside, the advice generally breaks down into three categories: the practical, the idiosyncratic and the contradictory. From Margaret Atwood we learn to use pencils on airplanes because pens leak. From Elmore Leonard we learn that adverbs stink, prologues are annoying and the weather is boring. Jonathan Franzen advises us to write in the third person, usually.
In some quarters I’m viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I’ve spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I’ve spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal justice system.
These two seemingly disparate halves of my professional life are, in fact, quite closely related: The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one’s true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand.
In his 1946 linguistic critique, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that one must “let meaning choose the word, not the other way around.” By largely ignoring this truism, administrators and legislators who craft imprecise regulations have given their particular enforcement arms—campus disciplinary staff and federal government prosecutors—enormous and grotesquely unfair power.
A new report on the rapid proliferation of small schools in New York City finds that while the schools have expanded students’ options, most students choose to attend larger schools.
Commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the report is one of four that will eventually be released in order to study how the schools have multiplied, who is attending them, who is teaching in them, and whether they’re succeeding. The Gates Foundation popularized and funded the small schools movement in New York, fueling the growth of nearly 200 small schools with a $150 million investment.
A New-York based research group, MDRC, conducted the report, which does not look at the schools’ academic record — that analysis will come out in spring — but focuses on the schools’ enrollment and demographics.
One of the report’s key findings is that the small schools are seeing modest demand from students.
Complete report: 3.4MB PDF.
Opponents of a controversial sex ed bill passed by Wisconsin legislators last week warn that if Gov. Jim Doyle signs the bill into law as he has promised, some local school districts will stage a revolt against the measure by ignoring it or dropping their human growth and development curriculum entirely.
“Did the state in its zeal to impose its own way even think about the consequences? Because a lot of districts are just going to just walk,” predicts Matt Sande, director of legislation at Pro-Life Wisconsin.
The proposed new law would require any Wisconsin public school district that offers a course in human growth and development — or sexual education — to teach students about sexually transmitted diseases and methods of safe sex, including contraception. Under current law districts can choose to provide only instruction focusing on abstinence or chastity.
The proposed new law doesn’t require school districts to offer such courses at all, however. School districts can drop their sex ed classes completely rather than comply, which is what Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action, says her organization will encourage them to do in upcoming mailings. “This is a Planned Parenthood dream come true,” Appling says about the bill. “They have taken options away from local school districts. Now the choice is something Madison says is best or to have no human growth and development classes at all, which, quite honestly, is the better choice.”
Three years after calling for a reordering of elementary and middle school math curricula, the nation’s largest group of math teachers is urging a new approach to high school instruction, one that aims to build students’ ability to choose and apply the most effective problem-solving techniques, in the classroom and in life.
Cultivating those skills will make math more useful, and more meaningful, to students, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics argues in a document scheduled for release this week.
“Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making” is a follow-up to the NCTM’s 2006 document, “Curriculum Focal Points,” which offered grade-by-grade content standards in math for prekindergarten through 8th grade. “Focal Points” won general praise in math circles, even from some of the NCTM’s strongest critics.
The high school document has both a different purpose and a different structure. It is not a suggested set of content standards, but rather a framework that attempts to show how skills that the NCTM considers essential–reasoning and sense-making–can be promoted across high school math.
By ADAEZE OKOLI and DEIDRE GREEN
Okoli, 15, and Green, 18, write for The Simpson Street Free Press, a local newspaper for Dane County teenagers.
Who first decided that being intelligent had a direct relation to being white?
That may seem like a harsh question. But it’s one many high-achieving minority students face every day. When a young minority student chooses to study after school, rather than play basketball, he or she is often ridiculed for “acting white.” This is just plain wrong. And it is an idea born of low expectations.
It’s time we admit the truth. Low expectations damage the chances for success for many kids — especially minority kids. And it’s something we need to guard against here in Dane County.
Many government-funded after-school programs lack substance. They focus on recreation rather than academic achievement. At their core, these programs try to keep students busy and off the streets. That’s OK. But it’s not helping them build a promising future.
Academic success, on the other hand, does. Academic support should be the top priority for after-school programs and in local neighborhood centers.
The same principle should apply in our schools. We don’t have the dollars anymore to spend on fluff. Schools should focus as much time as possible on core subjects. Those who are behind should spend the bulk of their time studying math, science, history, books, music and arts.
To proceed otherwise is to reinforce low expectations, which are a cancer. The achievement gap is just a symptom.
By the time many minority students reach high school, they are behind and unlikely to catch up. Students sense the low expectations. Some teachers stop talking to the kids they believe don’t have potential. The whole nasty reality just keeps repeating itself and discourages these students.
Not all will go to college. But all will benefit from regular exposure to books, science and writing. This means continued high expectations for all students in the critical high school years. It’s never, ever too late to benefit from education.
Brigadier General Marcia Anderson recently told The Simpson Street Press about a trip she took to Ethiopia. She and her colleagues handed out candy to school children until it was gone. Then Anderson gave them pens.
She said the kids were extremely grateful for their pens — much more so than they had been for the candy.
There’s an important and obvious message in this story. Anderson noticed quickly how important school was to these kids. They carried their textbooks so preciously.
These Ethiopian kids share the same dreams as our forefathers. It’s a dream shared by millions of immigrants from all over the world who came to the United States to find a better life.
This dream they believed so fiercely is often called the American dream. It’s a dream that promised equal opportunity and a chance to succeed.
Many kids today have lost sight of that dream. And that’s a shame, given how much our ancestors sacrificed so that we could have a shot at that dream.
Being a hard worker and attaining high goals is in the fabric of our American heritage. All the people who came to America came here with a dream of success. Those who were brought here in chains worked even harder to pursue the American dream.
Success does not come without hard work. And no one should ever be ridiculed for trying to attain an education.
Related posts:
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/07/acting_white_1.php
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2006/01/theyre_all_rich.php
And of course, the new MMSD TAG Plan has — as one of its highest priorities — the early identification and ongoing support of high potential/high ability students of color and poverty —
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2009/08/madison_school_136.php
Abigail Call corrects her mother’s grammar when they speak Italian and has started to teach her father the language, sometimes making up nonexistent words just to toy with him a bit. She is not quite 4 years old.
“When she’s by herself with her dolls, she sings all these songs in Italian,” said Abigail’s mother, Jessica Hall. “I’m a parent, so of course it makes me want to cry – to think that her little brain, in those unprompted moments of alone time, chooses to do that.”
Abigail doesn’t know it yet, but she is part of a trend.
Italian playgroups, preschools and language centers for children are proliferating in the Bay Area these days in a manner unequaled anywhere in the country, according to Marco Salardi of the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.
“It’s just exploding,” said Salardi, director of the consulate’s office of education. “It’s very new. And it’s becoming bigger and bigger. It’s a very nice surprise.”
La Piccola Scuola Italiana on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Spazio Italiano Language Center in North Beach. The tiny Vittoria Italian Preschool in the Mission District. Girotondo Italian School and Parliamo Italiano, both in Marin County. Mondo Bambini in Berkeley, purchased a few months ago by Girotondo so it can expand to meet a swelling demand in the East Bay.
There are dorms that are popular on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus: Elizabeth Waters, the scenic hall in the center of campus, or the new Ogg, which has air conditioning and walk-in closets.
And then, for whatever reason, there are the ones that aren’t. Whether it be Witte, Cole, Kronshage, or another, officials say they’re never sure which dorms will drop to the bottom of the list on any given year, falling victim to the whims of 17- and 18-year-olds.
In particular, the university has had some trouble enticing students to live in dorms they label as learning communities, or those that bring faculty, staff, and unique seminars into dorm life.
There are two full dorms on campus with this mission — Chadbourne and Bradley — plus floors with special interest themes like women in science and engineering, entrepreneurship, international interests and more.
Last year, UW-Madison started a program that rewards students for picking these halls by allowing them to choose their room online, a la seat selection with the airlines. The fate of other students are left to a computer program’s random picks.
Long division or long stock position? Both are part of the curriculum at Chicago’s Ariel Community Academy, a public school sponsored by Ariel Investments, where the kids are managing real-life portfolios.
Each first-grade class is given $20,000 to seed a portfolio. At first, the money is invested on their behalf as they study the savings-and-investment curriculum, a joint project of Ariel Investments and Nuveen Investments.
Finance classes start with counting coins. By sixth grade, students take more control of their portfolio.
Teacher Connie Moran says students usually choose to invest in names they recognize — Nike, Target, McDonald’s. And yes, their investments are down just like yours. Between March 31, 2008, and March 31, 2009, class portfolios fell an average of about 40 percent.
If there was any doubt that education analyst Gerald W. Bracey doesn’t play favorites, that’s gone now. After excoriating the Bush administration and its education officials for eight years, after canvassing his neighborhood, donating his own money and voting for Barack Obama for president, Bracey is giving the new president just what he gave the old one — unrelenting grief.
In a speech to the American Educational Research Association in San Diego last month on “countering the fearmongers about American public schools,” Bracey added to his list of non-truthtellers President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “Obama and Duncan seem to be following the long-established line that you can get away with saying just about anything you choose about public schools and no one will call you on it,” Bracey said. “People will believe anything you say about public education as long as it’s bad.”
Bracey and I disagree on many issues, but I have long been one of his most appreciative readers, dating back to the days when I knew him only as a sharp-witted writer whose pieces occasionally appeared in The Washington Post’s Outlook section. When I came back to Washington to cover local schools, I introduced myself to Bracey, who was then living in Northern Virginia, and wrote a piece about him and his long battle to persuade policymakers, political candidates and journalists to stop exaggerating our educational problems to win themselves appropriations, votes and attention. He lost at least one job because of his writing. Instead of using his doctorate in educational psychology to get a cushy university or think tank job, he has devoted his life to setting us straight, in his less financially secure role as freelance writer, author and speaker.
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan tells us that “School Reform Means Doing What’s Best for Kids” (op-ed, April 22). His cry for “doing what’s best for kids” rings a bit hollow when he failed to do what is best for the 1,700 low-income kids in Washington, D.C. who were counting on him. Those kids were given a lifeline — a voucher to escape schools that continually failed them, schools in a district to which neither Mr. Duncan nor his boss would send their own children. When crunch time arrived, politics trumped educational freedom, at least when it came to poor, inner-city kids in the District of Columbia.
Mr. Duncan speaks eloquently about how the public education establishment must change. He correctly says “we need a culture of accountability in America’s education system if we want to be the best in the world.” But what greater accountability can there be than that which comes from customers exercising free choices? True accountability in education will only come about when all parents are empowered to choose what they deem is best for their own children, not just those, like President Obama, Mr. Duncan, and most readers of the Wall Street Journal, who have financial means. So my question is, “When will the Obamas, Duncans, et. al. stand up for low-income parents so that they, too, can make choices that are best for their kids?”
Who would you choose to sail your boat? Who would you vote for? Who do you want for your boss?
The little test above is from a study summarized in the always wonderful BPS Digest, my vote for the best place in the world to find translations of academic research. It is from a forthcoming study in Science. As BPS reports:
“John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas presented photos of pairs of competing candidates in the 2002 French parliamentary elections to hundreds of Swiss undergrads, who had no idea who the politicians were. The students were asked to indicate which candidate in each pair was the most competent, and for about 70 per cent of the pairs, the candidate rated as looking most competent was the candidate who had actually won the election. The startling implication is that the real-life voters must also have based their choice of candidate on looks, at least in part.”
Then, the researchers asked kids and adults the “who would you choose as the captain” question and “For the pair of candidates shown above, 77 per cent children who rated this pair, and 67 per cent of adults, chose Laurent Henart, on the right (the real-life winning candidate), rather than Jean-Jacques Denis on the left.”
Charles J. Sykes:
“Dumbing Down Our Kids–What’s Really Wrong With Outcome Based Education”
Charles J. Sykes, Wisconsin Interest, reprinted in Network News & Views 2/94, pp. 9-18
Joan Wittig is not an expert, nor is she an activist. She just didn’t understand why her children weren’t learning to write, spell, or read very well. She didn’t understand why they kept coming home with sloppy papers filled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar and why teachers never corrected them or demanded better work. Nor could she fathom why her child’s fourth-grade teacher would write, “I love your story, especially the spelling,” on a story jammed with misspelled words. (It began: “Once a pona time I visited a tropical rian forist.”)
While Wittig did not have a degree in education, she did have some college-level credits in education and a “background of training others to perform accurately and competently in my numerous job positions, beginning in my high school years.” That experience was enough for her to sense something was wrong. She was not easily brushed off by assurances that her children were being taught “whole language skills.” For two years, she agonized before transferring her children from New Berlin’s public schools to private schools.
After only a semester at the private schools, her children were writing and reading at a markedly higher level. Their papers were neatly written, grammatical, and their spelling was systematically corrected.
Earlier this year, she decided to take her story to her local school board.
Pupils in every secondary school should be taught the statistical skills they need to make sensible life decisions, one of Britain’s leading mathematicians says.
A basic grasp of statistics and probability — “risk literacy” – is critical to making choices about health, money and even education, yet it is largely ignored by the national curriculum, according to the UK’s only Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk.
David Spiegelhalter, of the University of Cambridge, told The Times that as the internet transformed access to information, it was becoming more important than ever to teach people how best to interpret data.
Familiarity with statistical thinking and the principles of risk could help people to make sense of claims about health hazards and the merits of new drugs, to invest money more wisely, and to choose their children’s schools.
Political indoctrination in the guise of “Residence Life” programs took a pounding during a National Association of Scholars debate.
In last week’s Clarion Call, I wrote about the debate over academic freedom at the recent National Association of Scholars conference in Washington, D.C. But equally important was the contentious final session, devoted to the agenda of the “Residence Life” movement.
That movement is a nationwide initiative that has managers of student dorms teaching a leftist political catechism to students under their control in an effort to radicalize them.
The discussion focused on the infamous ResLife program at the University of Delaware. It took some interesting turns, including opposition to the programs from AAUP president Cary Nelson. He is a man of the left, but nevertheless doesn’t want to see curriculum and instruction handed over to people who aren’t even remotely scholars.
First to speak was Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He explained the objectives of the Residence Life movement generally and concentrated on the University of Delaware, where the program was first seen in all its authoritarian splendor: prying questions, indoctrination sessions, and special “treatment” for students who were either uncooperative or, worse, had the temerity to disagree. Kissel made it clear that the ResLife agenda consists of clumsy, authoritarian indoctrination of students meant to color their thinking toward leftist bromides about the environment, capitalism, institutional racism and so forth.
“Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach” (1998)
from The Burden of Bad Ideas
Heather Mac Donald
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America’s nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores–things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. “Let’s be honest,” darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. “What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?” It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)–self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity–but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to “professionalize” teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats’ pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in “Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education” that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
The Capital Times — 10/27/2008 4:31 am
Dear Editor:
As elected officials, we work hard to make Madison and Fitchburg the best places in the country.
The foundation of our vibrant community is our public schools. Our kids and schools need our support this fall. We urge you to vote for the Madison schools referendum on Nov 4.
Talented professionals, the people who start and build new businesses, don’t do it in a vacuum. They choose communities with the resources for a good life, as well as a good business. First among those resources is quality schools.
Schools in Madison and across Wisconsin are suffering from state-imposed cuts in funding. Some public schools are literally on the verge of bankruptcy. Madison schools have cut programs and services by over $60 million since 1993, when the restrictions began. Every year it’s harder and harder to provide our children the education they need and deserve.
The long-term solution lies with the Wisconsin Legislature. But until there’s a majority working toward a solution, we have to protect our kids.
The Nov. 4 proposal will increase taxes by about $28 on a $250,000 home in 2009, $43 in 2010, and $21 in 2011. The school district’s Web site has details: www.madison.k12.wi.us.
For that investment, we’ll maintain smaller class sizes, keep first rate teachers, help our special needs kids, keep up with basic maintenance — and much more. This referendum is very reasonable. The increase in taxes is modest. The commitment to our kids is enormous.
In America, every child deserves a chance to succeed — not just the rich. Public schools make the American dream a reality.
Join us by voting YES on the Madison schools referendum on Nov 4!
Madison School Board: Arlene Silveira, Ed Hughes, Lucy Mathiak, Beth Moss, Marjorie Passman, Johnny Winston Jr.
Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz
Madison Alders: Brenda Konkel, Mike Verveer, Robbie Webber, Marsha Rummel, Eli Judge, Brian Solomon, Tim Gruber, Satya Rhodes-Conway, Julia Kerr, Tim Bruer, Larry Palm, Judy Compton, Joe Clausius, Mark Clear
Fitchburg Alders: Roger Tesch, Bill Horns, Steve Arnold
Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk
Dane County Supervisors: Scott McDonell, Barbara Vedder, Brett Hulsey, Wyndham Manning, John Hendrick, Matt Veldran, Carousel Andrea Bayrd, Dianne Hesselbein, Paul Rusk, Chuck Erickson, Melanie Hampton, Dave de Felice, Tom Stoebig, Dorothy Wheeler, Sheila Stubbs, Kyle Richmond
State Senators: Mark Miller, Fred Risser, Jon Erpenbach
Assembly Representatives: Sondy Pope-Roberts, Joe Parisi, Mark Pocan, Spencer Black, Terese Berceau
Everyone seems to have an opinion about education and they seem more than happy to share it. Nelson Mandela called education the most powerful tool you can use to change the world, while Mark Twain joked that he never let his schooling interfere with his education.
One thing we can agree on: We all want our children to have the best education possible — one that will help them to achieve their potential in life, no matter which path they choose.
Our kids in Hawaii deserve our best efforts to give them a good start on life, and we have a unique opportunity to do just that. With a culturally rich and ethnically diverse student population, Hawaii represents a microcosm of the world’s future. We have teachers, principals and administrators deeply committed to equipping our children with the knowledge and skills they’ll need, and parents ready to support them in their efforts. We have a Board of Education responsible for setting policies and standards to ensure all children a quality education, regardless of their economic background or ZIP code. By working together and coordinating our efforts, we have the potential to transform our island state into an educational model for others to emulate.
MORMONS, military and McKinsey are the three Ms said to characterise the student body at Harvard Business School (HBS). Philip Delves Broughton, a British journalist, was none of the above, yet he was prepared to spend $175,000 for a chance to attend this “factory for unhappy people”. He never completely fitted in, perhaps because he largely shunned the prodigious alcohol-driven networking for which MBAs are famous, or perhaps because he did not really want to devote his life to getting rich. Yet his engaging memoir suggests he found it a positive experience.
Mr Delves Broughton did not set out to write a book about the course. Nor is this probably the book that HBS would choose to mark its 100th birthday, which it is celebrating extensively this year. Yet anyone considering enrolling will find this an insightful portrait of HBS life, with detailed accounts of case studies and slightly forced classroom fun, such as the students on the back row–the “skydecks”–who rate the performance of their peers. (“HBS had two modes, deadly serious and frat boy.”)
What They Teach You At Harvard Business School
I’ve been convinced that a comment I made on another thread about Ted Widerski deserves to be shared as a post. –LAF
“I’ll miss him” only begins to capture it for me. Ted was HUGELY important to the student advocacy work I do in the District. I think I/we won’t know — fully — what we’ve lost until the school year begins to unfold.
People have said that Ted was a tireless and “courageous” advocate for TAG students, and that he was. I couldn’t agree more. At the same time, I can’t help but think “why should it require boundless courage and limitless persistence simply to get smart kids’ educational needs met?” Sigh.
On a more positive note, it has occurred to me that there are two things each of us could do to honor Ted’s memory. The first is to donate to the “Ted Widerski Mathfest Fund.” There is no better way to honor Ted than to insure that the mathfests he worked so hard to create, implement and protect KEEP HAPPENING. Send your check — appropriately marked “Ted Widerski Mathfests” — to the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools, 455 Science Drive, Madison, WI, 53711.
The second thing each of us could do to honor Ted’s memory is to approach the coming school year with the happy intention of becoming more like him. So much of what we are up against in our advocacy work is a matter of misunderstanding, misinformation and misguided attitude. With a change in all of that – and few, if any, more dollars – the situation for our students could be profoundly different.
Practically speaking, what might it mean to “become more like Ted?” Well, here are a few beginning thoughts about that. I’m sure some of you will have many more.
SEED Maryland was admitting boys and girls beginning in sixth grade. They will live in a dormitory — insulated from the turmoil of their neighborhoods. In Washington, nearly all SEED graduates have gone on to four-year colleges, including Princeton and Georgetown.
Because its schools are financed by both private and public funds, SEED can offer this once-in-a-lifetime, small-class-size, prep-school education for free, but it can’t cherry-pick its students. It has to be open to anyone who applies. The problem is that too many people apply, so it has to choose them by public lottery. SEED Maryland got more than 300 applications for 80 places.
The families all crowded into the Notre Dame auditorium, clutching their lottery numbers like rosaries. On stage, there were two of those cages they use in church-sponsored bingo games. Each ping-pong ball bore the lottery number of a student applicant. One by one, a lottery volunteer would crank the bingo cage, a ping-pong ball would roll out, the number would be read and someone in the audience would shriek with joy, while everyone else slumped just a little bit lower. One fewer place left …
Carlos Sadovi and Stephanie Banchero, via a kind reader’s email:
Public boarding schools where homeless children and those from troubled homes could find the safety and stability to learn are being pursued by Chicago Public Schools officials.
Under the plan, still in the nascent stages, the first pilot residential program could open as soon as fall 2009. District officials hope to launch as many as six such schools in the following years, including at least one that would operate as a year-round school.
The proposal puts Chicago at the forefront of urban school reform, as cities struggle to raise the academic achievement of students hampered by dysfunctional homes and other obstacles outside school.
Some districts, including Chicago, have looked for solutions from small schools to single-sex campuses. But residential schools are a bolder — and far more expensive — proposition. Long an option for the affluent, boarding schools are virtually unheard of for the disadvantaged.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan said he does not want to be in the “parenting” business, but he worries that some homes and some neighborhoods are unsafe, making education an afterthought.
“Some children should not go home at night; some of them we need 24-7,” he told the Tribune. “We want to serve children who are really not getting enough structure at home. There’s a certain point where dad is in jail or has disappeared and mom is on crack … where there isn’t a stable grandmother, that child is being raised by the streets.”
Chicago school officials are still working through details of the plan, and it’s not clear whether the schools would be run by the district, outside agencies or some combination of the two.
It’s also not certain how the schools would be funded, who would shoulder the liability of keeping students overnight or how students would be selected.
In April, as part of its Renaissance 2010 new schools program, the district will put out a formal request for boarding school proposals. Officials have already met with interested groups in Chicago.
Officials have also visited several public and private boarding schools across the country and asked some to submit proposals.
Duncan said he has dreamed for years about opening boarding schools, but only last year, when he hired Josh Edelman, son of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, did the idea take off.
The nagging question since Republicans took full control under the Gold Dome is this: What difference does it make?
In many areas, the difference is hard to see. Not so with education. Bit by bit, Georgia is catching up with other states in giving parents control over the education our children receive.
That is one of the major differences that surfaces repeatedly in legislative debate about education, about health care and, in general, about the role of government in our lives. It’s become especially noticeable in the past year. Democrats and Republicans are beginning to divide philosophically here, as they do nationally.
The debate generally breaks down as to whether we as citizens are responsible enough to choose what’s best for us — or whether wiser, better-informed and more compassionate bureaucrats should exercise that authority.
It’s the transcendent conflict of our time, made all the more urgent by the fact that the national tax base is shrinking while lifestyle choices grow dependence. In 2004, according to the Washington-based Tax Foundation, 42.5 million Americans filed returns and had zero tax liability, up from 32 million four years earlier. Non-payers have increased 160 percent since 1985, the foundation reports. Meanwhile, out-of-wedlock births make government a second parent.
She basically just writes about her feelings on anything of her choice and often is encouraged to just make things up as long as it is flowery and emotional. This is apparently what they look for on TAKS.”
—
“It is no wonder that college professors think our Texas high-school graduates are not ready for college. The brutal fact is that they are not ready.”
“An Expose of the TAKS Tests” (excerpts)
[TAKS: Texas Assessment of Knowledge/Skills
ELA: English/Language Arts]
by Donna Garner
Education Policy Commentator EducationNews.org
10 April 2008
….Please note that each scorer spends approximately three minutes to read, decipher, and score each student’s handwritten essay. (Having been an English teacher for over 33 years, I have often spent over three minutes just trying to decipher a student’s poor handwriting.) Imagine spending three minutes to score an entire two-page essay that counts for 22 % of the total score and determines whether a student is allowed to take dual-credit courses. A student cannot take dual-credit classes unless he/she makes a “3” or a “4” on the ELA TAKS essay…
…The scorers spend only about three minutes scanning the essays and do not grade students down for incorrect grammar, punctuation, spelling, and capitalization unless the errors interfere significantly with the communication of ideas. Students are allowed to use an English language dictionary and a thesaurus throughout the composition portion of the test, and they can spend as much time on the essay as they so choose…
The schools are virtual, but the children learning from them are very real.
And, sometimes, real kids have real problems.
Brennan Fredericks, 16, had big problems in middle school. His parents, Dan and Donna of Black Earth, said his former school did little to protect him from bullies. He has life-threatening food allergies and, his mother said, other kids would throw peanut butter sandwiches at him and taunt him.
“He ‘d sit all alone at a table labeled peanut ‘ and get picked on, ” Donna Fredericks said.
It got so bad that the thought of going to school made him ill.
After home schooling their son through much of eighth grade, the family was delighted to find the Monroe Virtual High School, a charter school run out of the Monroe School District.
To fulfill high school requirements, Brennan can choose between high school and college courses, which arrive with books and online homework. When it ‘s time to take exams, a teacher from the Monroe school drives to Black Earth and administers the test at the local library.
It has worked well for a kid who struggled in regular school.
Madison School Board: Monday evening, November 12, 2007: 40MB mp3 audio file. Participants include: Superintendent Art Rainwater, East High Principal Al Harris, Cherokee Middle School Principal Karen Seno, Sennett Middle School Principal Colleen Lodholz and Pam Nash, assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools.
A few notes:
I’m glad the Board and Administration had this discussion.
Related:
Martha Naomi Alt, Robin Henke and Kristin Perry [1MB PDF]:
Nearly all graduates (93 percent) who were teaching in 2003 expressed overall satisfaction with that job (figure C). Teachers were more likely to be satisfied with the learning environment at their 2003 school (77 percent) than with such aspects as pay, parent support, and students’ motivation to learn (48 percent of
teachers were satisfied with each of these aspects).
On other measures reflecting job satisfaction, 90 percent of 2003 teachers reported that they would choose teaching again, and 2 in 3 (67 percent) said they would remain a teacher for the rest of their working life (text table 4). Male and female teachers did not differ measurably in how long they planned to remain in the profession. However, more male than female teachers (94 vs. 88 percent) said they would choose teaching if they had a chance to make the decision again (figure 9). White teachers were more likely than Black teachers to plan to teach until retirement (70 vs. 37 percent; figure D).
About 11 percent of the 1992−93 cohort were teaching in 2003, and 9 percent had taught but were not currently teaching (text table 2). Roughly as many graduates had thus left teaching as had stayed in the field by 2003, whether leaving was on a temporary or permanent basis.
via Mike Antonucci.
Maureen Rickman raised some pertinent points in her recent post regarding MMSD budgeting. Observing some of the discussions over the past few months, I found it interesting that when a school board member asked about business services items, teaching and learning (should we really be spending money developing curriculum and “frameworks” in this day and age, never mind the fact that we live in the internet era, the UW and MATC are next door, and that many teachers choose the best tools for their students, regardless of local dogma?) or other items not on the proposed reduction in increased spending list, they never got very far. In one case, the response was (paraphrasing) “if you do that, it will come out of salary savings” which translates to a reduction in the district’s equity.
If that is the answer, what can a board member do, in the absence of 3 more votes? Or, if the votes are there, and the Administration does not execute, what happens? What is the recourse? Navigating these challenges is not a simple task.
We’ll soon have new leadership in some MMSD departments along with an eventual new Superintendent (props to the board member(s) who recognize this reality and route around the outages). The department changes may be the biggest news of all, particularly, given the timing – before a new super is hired – which is very important, in my view. Laurie Frost looks beyond the “fog”. It’s interesting that in so many facets of life, one has to step back and try to look beyond the immediate rhetoric.
There are no shortage of challenging K-12 issues at hand. Many on this site have argued (for years) that all budget items should be on the table. I think we’re getting closer to that day. I also hope that we’ll soon see the last of the “same service” or “cost to continue” or “cost plus” budget approach. After all, spending goes up every year ($333M in 2006 / 2007 to $339.6M+ in 2007 / 2008 – maybe more, we’ll see this fall when the “final” budget is adopted).
Related:
In the context of the Madison School District’s financial challenges, it’s easy to understand why creating a new program may seem unthinkable. Yet creativity can prove a strong ally in times of adversity. Take the prospect of the latest charter school idea to come before the Madison School Board, and consider these points:
As a charter school, the Studio School can bring in $550,000 in federal grants over its first four years. These grants, earmarked for charter schools, are designed to help districts cover start-up costs. The Studio School can be implemented in a way that keeps operating costs in line with other elementary schools district-wide; yet as a charter with an arts and technology emphasis, it would have the ability to seek additional grants and sources of financial support.
The Studio School would be in an existing public school, just as the district’s bilingual charter school operates. This school-within-a- school model is a cost- efficient way to foster innovation. As a taxpayer and a parent, I see the Studio School as an excellent use of underused space. While its location has yet to be determined by the district and School Board, the idea poses interesting possibilities. Could a charter school draw some students from a nearby overcrowded school? Over the long term, might an innovative option help attract new families to a neighborhood where parents had once worried about the future of an under-enrolled school? And how might such an effort dovetail with our city’s development plans?
Since 1992, Pam Cross-Leone has quietly, effectively and tirelessly worked as a parent volunteer in the Madison schools. Pam welcomed the homeless children at Emerson Elementary, working to make them part of the school in every way. When Sherman Middle School and East High School experienced the problems that come with rapid changes in students and too frequent changes in principals, Pam did her part to help steady the schools and keep expectations high for all children. She should have a life-time service award from East High for unending service to its Booster Club for athletics.
Problem-solving and concern for workable, inclusive decisions are the hallmarks of Pam’s years of service to her union at MGE. The same is true of her work with United Way of Dane County as a “loaned executive.” Always on task, always open to better ideas, always focused on ways to increase support for the group’s decision.
The representatives elected to the Madison School Board in 2007 will make decisions that will affect the future of our schools in critical ways. The next board will choose a new superintendent. It will determine whether parents and public should have a greater role in evaluating the curriculum for our children. It must develop new financial partnerships between the schools and local businesses. It must address the legitimate desire of employees for high quality health insurance by making competition among insurance providers work to reduce future costs.
I support Pam Cross-Leone because I know that I can trust her judgment. I can expect openness to all ideas. I can expect concern for every child. I can expect her to work toward solutions that merit wide community support. Pam has done the work that makes her the best choice in her race since 1992.
School spending has always been a puzzle, both from a state and federal government perspective as well as local property taxpayers. In an effort to shed some light on the vagaries of K-12 finance, I’ve summarized below a number of local, state and federal articles and links.
The 2007 Statistical Abstract offers a great deal of information about education and many other topics. A few tidbits:
1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | |
US K-12 Enrollment [.xls file] | 40,878,000 | 41,216,000 | 47,203,000 | 47,671,000 | 48,183,000 | 48,540,000 | NA |
US K-12 Deflated Public K-12 Spending – Billions [.xls file] | $230B | 311.8B | $419.7B | $436.6B | $454.6B | $464.8B | $475.5B |
Avg. Per Student Spending | $5,627 | $7,565 | $8,892 | $9,159 | $9,436 | $9,576 | NA |
US Defense Spending (constant yr2000 billion dollars) [.xls file] | $267.1B | $382.7B | $294.5B | $297.2B | $329.4B | $365.3B | $397.3B |
US Health Care Spending (Billions of non-adjusted dollars) [.xls file] | $255B | $717B | $1,359B | $1,474B | $1,608B | $1,741B | $1,878B |
US Gross Domestic Product – Billions [.xls file] | 5,161 | 7,112 | 9,817 | 9,890 | 10,048 | 10,320 | 10,755 |
What is 256 times 98? Can you do the multiplication without using a calculator? Two thirds of Massachusetts fourth-graders could not when they were asked this question on the statewide MCAS assessment test last year.
Math education reformers have a prescription for raising the mathematical knowledge of schoolchildren. Do not teach the standard algorithms of arithmetic, such as long addition and multiplication, they say. Let the children find their own methods for adding and multiplying two-digit numbers! For larger numbers, let them use calculators! One determined reformer puts it decisively: “It’s time to acknowledge that continuing to teach these skills (i.e., pencil-and-paper computational algorithms) to our students is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive and downright dangerous.”
Mathematicians are perplexed, and the proverbial man on the street, when hearing the argument, appears to be perplexed as well: improve mathematical literacy by downgrading computational skills?
Yes, precisely, say the reformers. The old ways of teaching mathematics have failed. Too many children are scared of mathematics for life. Let’s teach them mathematical thinking, not routine skills. Understanding is the key, not computations.
Mathematicians are not convinced. By all means liven up the textbooks, make the subject engaging, include interesting problems, but don’t give up on basic skills! Conceptual understanding can and must coexist with computational facility – we do not need to choose between them!
Much more, here.
Ted Kolderie and Joe Graba, charter school leaders at Education/Evolving urge legislators to expand Wisconsin’s charter school law:
“The Importance of Innovation in Chartering”
Remarks to the Legislative Study Committee on Charter Schools
By Ted Kolderie and Joe Graba, Education/Evolving
October 17, 2006
TED KOLDERIE
Let me try to set the context for the Legislature’s use of the chartering strategy. The ‘Why?’ of anything is important to legislators. It is fair to ask: “If ‘chartering’ is the answer, what was the question?”
The question is: How do we make schooling different enough to motivate the kids who have never learned well in conventional school?
Paul Houston, the head of AASA, has been pointing out how dramatically the signals have been switched for public education. Forever, their charge was access and equity: take everybody; give everybody the opportunity to participate and to learn. Now suddenly the charge is proficiency: The districts are required to see that all children learn.
This is a huge change. The current model of schooling was not built for this. The districts were not built for this. Success with this very different assignment requires major readjustment in the institution.
Look around the business world and two things stand out: the modern economy places an enormous premium on brainpower; and there is not enough to go round.
But education inevitably matters most. How can India talk about its IT economy lifting the country out of poverty when 40% of its population cannot read? [MMSD’s 10th Grade Reading Data] As for the richer world, it is hard to say which throw more talent away—America’s dire public schools or Europe’s dire universities. Both suffer from too little competition and what George Bush has called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.
Thursday’s meeting between Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater, the MMSD’s Brian Sniff and the UW Math department included two interesting guests: UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley [useful math links via the Chancellor’s website] and the Dean of the UW-Madison Education School. Wiley and the Ed School Dean’s attendance reflects the political nature of K-12 curriculum, particularly math. I’m glad Chancellor Wiley took time from his busy schedule to attend and look forward to his support for substantial improvements in our local math program.
Despite those limitations, school officials came up with a new tool this year to entice more teachers to Loudoun.
With help from the county’s chamber of commerce, a school employee approached dozens of area businesses, banks and apartment complexes about offering discounts of some kind for county educators.
The result is the Loudoun Incentives for New Employees program. Think of it as a coupon book for teachers.
School officials say they hope that with the extra financial assistance — a break on closing costs for a new home, for example, or a $100 deposit in a new checking account — more teachers will choose to live in Loudoun, closer to the football games and after-school activities that are part of school life. Loudoun is now the home address of 63 percent of the county’s teachers.
Running some searches recently, I came across this April, 2004 article by Lee Sensenbrenner on Connected Math. The words remain timely more than two years later:
A seventh-grader at a Madison middle school is posed with the following situation: A gas station sells soda in three sizes. A 20-ounce cup costs 80 cents, a 32-ounce cup is 90 cents and a 64-ouncer goes for $1.25.
The first question, which appeared in similar form on a recent exam, is as traditional as any mathematical story problem: What size offers the most soda for the money?
But the second question carries the spirit of the Connected Math Program, which has developed strong undercurrents of controversy – both here and nationally – and plays prominently in one of the Madison School Board races Tuesday.
This question asks: If the gas station were to offer an 84-ounce Mega Swig, what would you expect to pay for it?
There’s really no concrete answer. A student, for instance, could argue that the 84-ouncer would cost what the 20-ounce and 64-ounce cups cost together. Another student could say that soda gets cheaper with volume, and then choose an answer based on some per-ounce price slightly less than what was given for the 64-ounce drink.
For the people fighting an impassioned battle over Connected Math, the differences between question number one and question number two are not subtle or inconsequential.
On one side, those who support Connected Math say that engaging students by presenting problems as real-life scenarios – often with no absolute solution or single path to arrive at an answer – fosters innovation and forces students to explain and defend their reasoning as they discover mathematical concepts.
The other side says the approach trades the clear, fundamental concepts of math, distilled through thousands of years of logical reasoning, for verbiage and vagary that may help students learn to debate but will not give them the foundation they need for more advanced mathematical study.
Many links and articles on math can be found here. The recent Math Forum is also worth checking out, along with a discussion of the District’s math performance.
I’m told that the MMSD’s math curriculum will be getting some attention this fall. We’ll see (35 of 37 UW Math Faculty Open Letter on Math).
My largest concern with Connected Math – having read some of the books is that we’re training the students to be consumers, not creative types (figure out the phone bill, count the cheerios, buy a soda, etc.). TeacherL made a great point recently: We can choose to be consumers or we can choose to be citizens. I know which one I think will provide the stronger future for our country.”
DUMB liberal ideas in education are a dime a dozen, and during my time as superintendent of Houston’s schools and as the United States secretary of education I battled against all sorts of progressivist lunacy, from whole-language reading to fuzzy math to lifetime teacher tenure. Today, however, one of the worst ideas in education is coming from conservatives: the so-called 65 percent solution.
This movement, bankrolled largely by Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com, wants states to mandate that 65 percent of school dollars be spent “in the classroom.” Budget items like teacher salaries would count; librarians, transportation costs and upkeep of buildings would not.
Proponents argue that this will counter wasteful spending and runaway school “overhead,” and they have convinced many voters — a Harris poll last fall put national support at more than 70 percent. Four states — Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana and Texas — have adopted 65 percent mandates and at least six more are seriously considering them.
The only drawback is that such laws won’t actually make schools any better, and could make them worse. Yes, it’s true that education financing is a mess and that billions are wasted every year. But the 65 percent solution won’t help. The most likely outcome is that school officials will learn the art of creative accounting in order to increase the percentage of money that can be deemed “classroom” expenses.
An op-ed by Rod Paige in today’s NYT kicks off a new round of debate about student finance. Paige makes some good points, criticizes the 65 percent solution, and touts a new ecumenical manifesto about school finance organized by the Fordham Foundation and signed by a wide range of people including former Clinton WH Chief of Staff John Podesta and former NC Governor Jim Hunt. But, because the manifesto is bipartisan, or really non-partisan, it’s a shame Paige’s op-ed doesn’t have a dual byline to better frame the issue. Incidentally, hard to miss that while a few years ago few on the left wanted much to do with Fordham, that’s really changed. Sign of the changing edupolitics. (Disc. I signed.) It’s also hard to miss the enormous impact Commodore Marguerite Roza is having on this debate.
The Economist covers a fascinating subject:
For its exponents, this is a paternalism for the times. People are jealous of their freedoms; yet they squander them. They resent outside authorities telling them how to live their lives, but they lack self-command. They have legions of entrepreneurs dedicated to serving them better, but often they fail even to understand the embarrassment of offerings that is spread before them. Some gentle guidance would not go amiss.
But if such manipulation is sometimes a necessity, should it be made a virtue? (John Stuart) Mill, for one, would have disapproved.He who lets the world choose…his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself must…use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.
Reasoning, judgment, discrimination and self-control—all of these the soft paternalists see as burdens the state can and should lighten. Mill, by contrast, saw them as opportunities for citizens to exercise their humanity. Soft paternalism may improve people’s choices, rescuing them from their own worst tendencies, but it does nothing to improve those tendencies. The nephews of the avuncular state have no reason to grow up.
This is very long, and the link may require a password so I’ve posted the entire article on the continued page.
TJM
http://www.tcrecord.org/PrintContent.asp?ContentID=11566
Standards, Accountability, and School Reform
by Linda Darling-Hammond — 2004
The standards-based reform movement has led to increased emphasis on tests, coupled with rewards and sanctions, as the basis for “accountability” systems. These strategies have often had unintended consequences that undermine access to education for low-achieving students rather than enhancing it. This article argues that testing is information for an accountability system; it is not the system itself. More successful outcomes have been secured in states and districts, described here, that have focused on broader notions of accountability, including investments in teacher knowledge and skill, organization of schools to support teacher and student learning, and systems of assessment that drive curriculum reform and teaching improvements.
3/1/2006
CONTACT:
Sen. Breske
608-266-2509
Rep. Pope- Roberts
608-266-3520
Rep. Toles
608-266-5580
Rep. Lehman
608-266-0634
Rep. Sherman
608-266-7690
Assembly and Senate Democrats Want New Funding Formula by June of 2007
MADISON – A group of Democratic lawmakers unveiled a timeline for reworking the Wisconsin school funding formula at a Capitol news conference today. The school financing system has long been criticized for inequities that treat rural school districts unfairly. In addition a state Supreme Court ruling, Vincent v. Voight, has also directed the legislature to equalize the funding formula.
On Wednesday, January 11, representatives of Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) and the Madison school district met at the union’s headquarters for three hours. MTI Executive Director John Matthews chaired the meeting. It was the first of two meetings at which MTI and MMSD will supposedly explore the potential for savings on health insurance costs for the teachers. Those expecting a serious effort by union and district representatives to compare costs and services from a range of health insurance providers and press the companies for savings will be seriously disappointed.
There were two presentations at the meeting: one from representatives of Wisconsin Physicians Services (WPS) and one from Group Health Cooperative (GHC). Despite a promise from the board president and superintendent that the meeting would be videotaped, the district did not tape the meeting. So far only the text for the WPS presentation (with accompanying PowerPoint) is available for public review.
At the meeting on January 25, 2006—also at MTI’s headquarters at 821 Williamson Street beginning at 1 p.m.—the task force will hear presentations from representatives of Dean Care and Unity. There has been no explanation of why there will not be presentations from Physicians Plus or the State Group Health Plan. Both offer services comparable to those that teachers currently receive under the collective bargaining agreement between the parties at competitive rates.
schoolinfosystem.org