Archive for December, 2008

Ed Person of the Year #2: Who’s Afraid of Linda Darling-Hammond?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 31, 2008 in No category. 4 Comments

During the 2008 election, some Americans were encouraged to worry about a candidate who pals around with terrorists.  Others, education reformers of a certain stripe, seemed more concerned about a candidate who palled around with Linda Darling-Hammond. 

“Whether one wants to believe it or not, she spent 2008 shaping the President-elect’s thinking on education and the policies that made up his education platform,” notes Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards.  That earned the Stanford professor, tapped as Barack Obama’s education transition chief, the #2 slot on our list of the most influential people in education in 2008 as judged by our panel of edupundits. 

The end of the campaign only intensified the angst felt in some reform circles as the fight over the Democratic Party’s educational soul grew hotter.  “The reform community is scared to death,” Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, told The New Republic.  In the weeks before Chicago’s Arne Duncan was tapped to be Education Secretary, Darling-Hammond became a lightning rod, the poster girl for what David Brooks of the New York Times described as “the establishment view” of education policy.  The Wall Street Journal described Darling-Hammond as “a union favorite, a vocal supporter of traditional certification [and] a fierce critic of Teach for America and other successful alternative certification programs.”  

However, veteran teacher Nancy Flanagan, author of the Teacher in a Strange Land blog, observes that “in the world of academe, Darling-Hammond is high-profile, but fairly middle of the road.” She became a familiar name to millions in 2008, Flanagan notes, ”unfortunately, some of what they “know” about Linda Darling-Hammond is third-hand and at best partially correct. She represents the battle over two enormous issues in the field–What is effective teaching? How do we make more good teachers?”  Darling-Hammond addressed both issues in a recent Newsweek interview:

“Other countries put a lot of energy into recruiting the best and the brightest into teaching, training them very intensely, making sure they have professional training. They undoubtedly have ways to get rid of incompetent teachers, but they put a lot of effort on how to be sure that the teachers are competent in the first place.  In this country, I’ve been advocating for a long time, how do we get teachers that are highly competent in the first place. If we’re thinking about what we need to do to be competitive with other nations, we need to be thinking about building a supply of great teachers and continually improving their skills, rather than only focusing on the bad teachers when we haven’t helped them learn how to be good.” 

That sounds not unlike Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, who put Darling-Hammond close to the top of his 2008 ballot.  Educators concerned about curriculum narrowing in the NCLB -era will also surely be cheered to hear Darling-Hammond’s comment in the same Newsweek interview about America’s poor showing in the recent TIMSS study.  “We’re not even teaching science in a lot of elementary schools, much less the kind of science that other countries are teaching,” she said.   ”When I went to Singapore, at every grade level in every classroom in every school I visited, kids were coming up to show the experiments they’d designed and conducted. High-achieving countries are making sure their kids can be the inventors and engineers of the future. We have to really redouble our efforts.”

Pre-Obama, if Darling-Hammond was well-known for anything outside of narrow corridors of the academy, it was for her criticism of Teach for America.  That alone was sufficient to temper enthusiasm for Barack Obama among many in education reform, including Washington, DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who admitted she voted for Obama only reluctantly. “What’s disappointing is the fact that Darling-Hammond is a staunch opponent of TFA and other alternative programs,” Rhee told The New Republic. “We get many of our best teachers through those routes. Somebody who’s coming into this with thoughts about shutting those down is extremely problematic.”

Accountability hawks seem to be making their peace with her.  “Darling-Hammond has spent a lot of time studying the teaching and testing systems of high achieving industrialized countries and likes them better than ours,” Education Sector’s Thomas Toch wrote recently at The Quick and The Ed. 

Among other things, she says, they teach fewer topics in greater depth; focus more on reasoning skills and applications of knowledge rather than on coverage of content; and rely heavily on open-ended questions “that require students to analyze, apply knowledge, and write extensively,” in contrast to US tests that “rely primarily on multiple-choice items that evaluate recall and recognition of discreet facts.” She’s right about that.

Darling-Hammond has also spoken and written extensively in favor of performance assessments over simple multiple-choice tests, another potential flashpoint.  “So, if Barack Obama gives Linda Darling Hammond a major role in his administration,” Toch concluded, “we’re going to have a big policy debate over testing in American education and whether we should move beyond NCLB accountability to something potentially very different. Such a debate wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

Darling-Hammond seems to be viewed as not a bad thing among teachers, either.  “She has a great deal to offer as a reformer, not a smasher, of the American school system,” wrote teacher-blogger Dan Brown.   Adds Corey Bunje Bower, who blogs at Thoughts on Education Policy, “I’ve never seen anybody hated so much for so little.”  Diane Ravitch, another whose reformist credentials are in good order, sounded a similar tone on her Bridging Differences blog. 

“Many years ago, Linda Darling-Hammond and I were colleagues at Teachers College. We sometimes crossed swords over issues, but I always found her to be smart, thoughtful, and deeply devoted to the well-being of teachers and children. I don’t think that makes her a leader of the “status quo” crowd. I have always thought that she is above all interested in improving schools, helping teachers, and doing right by kids. What’s wrong with that?

What indeed?

Ed Person of the Year #3: Joel Klein is Still Here

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 30, 2008 in Education News. 3 Comments

You will not like this post about Joel Klein. 

It is impossible to write a sentence that includes the words “Joel” and “Klein” in succession without upsetting people.  Lots of people, in fact.  More than six years into his run as New York City Schools Chancellor, minds are largely made up.  Ask someone in New York City for their opinion about the Chancellor and you will hear “no one cares more and is willing to fight harder for always doing what is best for kids.”  (Whitney Tilson)  Or else you will hear about a “ruthless dictatorship” and “a disaster for our schools.” (Leonie Haimson).  Klein has passionate supporters and detractors, and they are not shy about expressing their opinions. 

Hey, it’s New York.  You got a problem with that?

Like so many controversial contemporary figures in education, your opinion about Joel Klein says a lot about how you feel about a specific set of education reform ideas.  You like merit pay? Charter schools? Alternative certification?  You’re probably a Klein fan.  Not so big on incentives and test-driven accountability?  The Chancellor is not your cup of tea.  But our panel of education observers recognize that Klein’s impact has been deep and broad, earning him the #3 slot on our list of the most influential people in education in 2008.

“Klein continues to do his thing, and he is a love/hate schools chancellor,” notes Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards. “He probably deserves more credit for the data than he receives, since moving an organization like NYCDOE is so difficult.  And he is never one to back down from a fight.”  Sol Stern, often at the vanguard of Klein critics, listed the Chancellor as his top pick for the most influential person in education this year ”for the most radical changes, though not necessarily change we can believe in.”

 At one level, it’s hard to understand why Klein evokes such strong negative response in some people.  Unlike Michelle Rhee, who seems to delight in rhetorical excess and leading with her chin, Klein makes a habit of sounding reasonable, even candid, as he did in a recent interview with U.S. News:

The most important thing that we can do to change high school outcomes is improve the education of kids before they get to high school. People who have a high school-only strategy are going to fail. And the second most important thing is, we have got to finally crack open the nut and say, these are the standards and these are the assessments of what it means to have successfully completed high school. Anybody can get you a high school degree; all they need to do is keep lowering the standards, and more and more kids will graduate. We’re fooling ourselves, and it’s time to get serious about national standards and national assessments.

But where supporters see a hard-nosed reformer, willing to “break some china,” others see a Bush-like refusal to admit error and a nuance-averse brand of ed reform.  ”Bloomberg and Klein placed all their bets for school improvement on market-style accountability reforms,” Sol Stern wrote last summer in City Journal, “such as granting principals greater autonomy over budgets, making schools compete against one another for letter grades, and offering bonus pay to administrators and teachers who boosted student scores.”  In the view of New York Times columnist David Brooks, Klein is “the highly successful New York chancellor who has, nonetheless, been blackballed by the unions.”  Deborah Meier on Bridging Differences  says “NYC’s ‘reform’ has been at best a waste of precious years, and at worst a disaster.” 

These are not subtle differences of opinions.  And so it goes.  And will continue to go.  

A multiple choice question:  Where previous NYC Chancellors would have been well-advised not to purchase green bananas, Joel Klein has held the job over six years. With Mayor Bloomberg having made his path straight for a third term, it’s possible Klein will be with us for years to come. This will make people in education:

a) Giddy with excitement

b) Rend their garments and gnash their teeth

c) All of the above

 The correct answer is c.

Ed Person of The Year #4: Eduwonkette–An Inconvenient Truth Teller

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 29, 2008 in Education Leadership, Education News and Research and Reports. 17 Comments

Once upon a time there was an unassuming guy from Kansas named Bill James. Big baseball fan. Great with statistics. Uncanny knack for seeing things in the stats others didn’t. Scary smart. Through pure statistical analysis, James was able to show what factors led to teams scoring runs and winning games, and how the efforts of individual players contributed to wins. He was often able to show with hard, empirical data, why many time-honored “truths” about the game were simply not borne out by statistics—why RBIs matter less than on-base percentage, for example. Or why stolen base attempts tend to hurt a team’s offense. He didn’t have a lot of luck getting his observations about baseball published, so he ended up self-publishing an annual book called The Bill James Baseball Abstract. It started out as a cult item with a certain kind of geeky, fanboy appeal. But 25 years later, what James discovered about baseball ended up transforming the way we look at the game and even how some major league clubs put their teams together. It’s probably no coincidence that two years after hiring Bill James in 2002, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since the end of the war.  World War, that is.  The first one. 

Before Bill James, baseball was all batting averages, bromides and intangibles-more than a century of baseball men who knew what they knew based on experience and instinct. They didn’t need numbers. They knew the game. Then teams like the Oakland A’s, as chronicled in Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, started putting Bill James-style statistical analysis to work and found they were frequently able to compete effectively with large-market, big-budget teams like the Yankees. In effect, they used data to close the baseball equivalent of the achievement gap.

Education may have found its Bill James. Her name is Jennifer Jennings, but she’s better known as Eduwonkette. She made a name for herself in 2008 by demystifying the process of using statistical evidence to make rational decisions in education. More to the point, she used her extraordinary, Jamesian grasp of data to call out those who claimed they were using statistical evidence to make rational decisions. Sol Stern puts it bluntly, calling Jennings “the best bullshit detector on the web.” Diane Ravitch, another fan, put Eduwonkette at the top of her ballot naming this year’s most influential people in education. At her best, Jennings implicitly challenges education policymakers to be objective, to pay attention to what the data is telling us about education rather than what they want to believe-or want us to believe. And much like James, she makes the potentially dry world of statistical analysis not merely digestible, but fun. She wields a livelier pen than most professional education journalists, and on data she’s simply without peer.

“The amazing thing about Eduwonkette is the fact that pretty much everyone in the EdBlog world either loves her or deeply respects her work, or both,” says teacher-blogger Nancy Flanagan. “Her commenters are free to argue with her-and she will acknowledge her arguments’ shortcomings with grace and smarts. She makes statistics sing. Her occasional snarkiness is buttressed by scholarship and a finely-tuned sense of humor.”

Launched in late 2007 as an anonymous blog featuring a masked superheroine icon, Eduwonkette quickly won plenty of attention in the edusphere for what seemed like a nonstop stream of posts questioning the gains claimed by New York City’s Department of Education. The blog was accurately described by the New York Sun as “a stubborn thorn in the Bloomberg administration’s side.” But Jennings is no one-trick pony, having spilled varnish remover on Teach for America, Washington think-tanks, proponents of pay-for-grades schemes and dozens of others who seek to use data to promote their programs or points of view. Recently she offered one of the first analyses of incoming Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s record running the Chicago school system. “Have gaps separating white/black and white/Hispanic students in Chicago shrunk in the last 5-6 years?” she asked rhetorically. “Nah.” Note to Mr. Duncan’s future press secretary: You’ve been warned.

“Rather than merely toiling away in the vineyards of the American Educational Research Association, writing papers for fellow academics, [Eduwonkette] recently overtook Eduwonk as the top education policy blogger,” Mike Petrilli wrote in the most recent issue of Education Next, “even though her competitor is a former Clinton White House aide and cofounder of a major Washington education think tank. It’s clichéd to say that the Internet evens the playing field and makes the traditional trappings of power and influence obsolete, but so it is.”

What makes Eduwonkette particularly effective is Jennings’ relative lack of ego or apparent agenda. Guessing Eduwonkette’s identity became a favorite parlor game and gave early buzz to the blog. Her voluntary unmasking (done out of concern that incorrect suspects were being fingered with consequences for their academic work) was even covered by New York Magazine. But coming out has arguably given Jennings even more clout. Where critics were once able to speculate that she had “skin in the game” those whose ox she gores now have to grapple with what she writes, rather than attempt to discredit her with speculations about her affiliations and motivation.

Describing his role with the Red Sox, Bill James told the Wall Street Journal, “I see it as being my job to ensure as much as I can that we act on the basis of actual evidence.” That’s also a pretty fair description of Jennifer Jennings’ job in education. Indeed, if I were a savvy charter school operator, or even an urban schools chancellor, I might be tempted to ring up the talented Ms. Jennings and offer her a job. If Bill James could help the Red Sox break the Curse of the Bambino, who knows what Jennings might accomplish as an insider.   It took over 20 years for Bill James to leave his mark on the game of baseball. It wasn’t until Michael Lewis’ book came out that “Moneyball” became a household word. Today, some education wonks are fond of invoking Moneyball as a paradigm for public education. “Bill was an outsider, self-publishing invisible truths about baseball while the Establishment ignored him,” Red Sox owner John Henry said in a piece about Bill James in Time Magazine. “Now 25 years later, his ideas have become part of the foundation of baseball strategy.”

A prediction:  In the above quote, change ”baseball” to “education,” and “Bill” to “Jennifer.” Fast forward 25 years.

You heard it here first.

Ed Person of the Year #5: Gates Reboots

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 27, 2008 in Education News. 1 Comment

Until very recently, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s brand of school reform was largely associated with the small schools movement. They spent $2 billion turning big, “obsolete” high schools into smaller “learning communities.”  In November, faced with evidence of diminishing returns on the strategy, Gates hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and rebooted their efforts, shifting the focus to higher standards for college readiness and improving teacher quality.

“We must give the Gates Foundation and its founders credit for their honest self-scrutiny,” wrote Diane Ravitch on Forbes.com.  ”Most proponents of education reform defend their ideas against all critics, regardless of what evaluations show.”  In Fortune last month, Claudia Wallis summarized the Gates Foundation’s new direction, the goal of which is to double the number of low-income students earning a college degree by 2025.

The upshot is that Education 2.0 is bolder and more aggressive in its goals, and it involves even more intensive investment – $3 billion over the next five years. This time the focus isn’t on the structure of public high schools but on what’s inside the classrooms: the quality of the teaching and the relevance of the curriculum. It steers smack into some of the biggest controversies in American education – tying teacher tenure and salaries to performance, and setting national standards for what is taught and tested.

“One of the reasons to think that the Gates 2.0 plan will be more successful than version 1.0 is that the plan involves a commitment to measure results and follow the evidence rather than plow forward with a preconceived notion like ’small schools are better,” wrote Wallis. 

Lessons Learned

“We saw that there is a big difference between graduating from high school and being ready for college,” said Gates in a speech at the Foundation’s November announcement.  “In general, the places that demonstrated the strongest results tended to do many proven reforms well, all at once: they would create smaller schools, a longer day, better relationships—but they would also establish college-ready standards aligned with a rigorous curriculum, with the instructional tools to support it, effective teachers to teach it, and data systems to track the progress.”  The defining feature of a great education, said Gates, is what happens in the classroom. 

We’ve known about these huge differences in student achievement in different classrooms for at least 30 years. Unfortunately, it seems that the field doesn’t have a clear view on the characteristics of great teaching. Is it using one curriculum over another? Is it extra time after school? We don’t really know. But that’s what we have to find out if we’re going to not only recognize great teachers, but also take average teachers and help them become great teachers. I’m personally very intrigued by this question, and over the next few years I want to get deeply engaged in understanding this better. 

Curriculum advocates, who often feel marginalized in ed reform debates about purely structural issues, were also cheered to hear Gates say “I believe strongly in national standards. Countries that excel in math, for example, have a far more focused, common curriculum than the United States does.”  He also called for better use of data to drive instruction — and as the basis for merit pay.  Gates, however, took pains to display a nuanced take on the potentially divisive issue.

There are two extreme sides in this debate. According to the caricature, one side just wants to turn teachers into commissioned salesmen, so their whole salary is based on how much the scores improve. The other caricature says that teachers don’t want to be held accountable, so they will reject any system that ties pay to performance. In truth, designing an appropriate incentive system is difficult, but possible.  We believe in incentive systems, but we understand the concern that without the right design, they could seem arbitrary or incent the wrong things. They need to be transparent, they need to make sense, and teachers themselves need to see the benefits of the system and embrace them.

“The good news is that the Gates Foundation, with its vast resources, has pledged to devote its attention to what happens in the classroom,” concluded Diane Ravitch in her essay for Forbes.com.  “The first thing it will learn is that there are no quick fixes. If it targets its dollars wisely, exercises a measure of humility, and continues to evaluate its efforts rigorously, it can make a positive difference.”

2008 Education Person of the Year

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 26, 2008 in Education News and No category. 7 Comments

Who were the most influential people in education in 2008?  To determine an answer to that question, the Core Knowledge Blog this month polled a number of close observers of education—high profile bloggers and pundits whose thoughts and writings go a long way toward shaping our perceptions of education and ed policy. 

Our panel of education observers are Sol Stern, contributing editor to City Journal and a Manhattan Institute senior fellow; veteran Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews; Bill Jackson, founder and president of GreatSchools; Andy Rotherham, founder and co-director of Education Sector; Diane Ravitch, Professor of Education at New York University and a Core Knowledge board member, whose frequent writings about education include the Bridging Differences blog with Deborah Meier; Mike Petrilli, Vice President for National Programs and Policy at the Fordham Foundation; Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas and author of Jay P. Greene’s Blog; Michael Shaughnessy, senior columnist for Education News.org; Nancy Flanagan, an award-winning veteran teacher who blogs at Teacher In A Strange Land; Patrick Riccards, CEO of Exemplar Strategic Communications and author of the blog Eduflack; Corey Bunje Bower who blogs at Thoughts on Education Policy; and Dan Brown, a teacher and author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, who writes about education for The Huffington Post.

Each of our edupundits was asked to name five movers and shakers who they felt had the greatest impact on education — for better or for worse — in the past year.  First place on each ballot was worth five points; second place, four points, etc.   Starting tomorrow, we’ll count down the top five top cumulative vote-getters.  But today, we’ll look at several significant runners-up–those who received significant support from our panel of experts, but didn’t quite crack the top five.

Outgoing Education Secretary Margaret Spellings appeared on the most ballots of anyone who didn’t make the final list of the top five most influential people in education for the year.  Jay Mathews credits Spellings for “staying tough with a cogent argument for NCLB despite lots of criticisms.”  Patrick Riccards also included Spellings, but feels she squandered her opportunities in 2008.  “She should have been out there saving Reading First, fighting for DC vouchers, and getting NCLB reauthorized (or at least have key provisions agreed to) before the elections arrived,” says Riccards. ”Instead, she kept a low profile, ceding the education improvement field to anyone who wanted to talk about it.” 

In 2008, Randi Weingarten was elected president of American Federation of Teachers and its one and a half million member teachers, while maintaining her position atop the UFT.  Sol Stern cited Weingarten on his ballot for “the best political balancing act in education.”  Could 2009 bring an even bigger political future for her?  A dark horse candidate, Weingarten has officially downplayed speculation that she’d be interested in Hillary Clinton’s soon-to-be-vacant U.S. Senate seat.  On the other hand, the New York Daily News quoted governor David Paterson on the record saying he and Randi discussed it.

Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation and I agreed that Roland Fryer belonged on our ballots.  That we were alone in that view is surprising given that the pay-for-performance idea championed by the Harvard professor was one of the biggest hot-button issues of 2008.  But even a much-discussed appearance on the Colbert Report wasn’t enough to push Fryer into the Top Five. 

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post put Wendy Kopp of Teach for America well up on his top five list.  “The big jump in TFA apps,” he notes, ”means she is going be producing even more people like Michelle Rhee and the next two guys” KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and David Levin, who also made Mathews 2008 list.  Jay himself was cited among the top movers and shakers by teacher-blogger Nancy Flanagan, a former Michigan Teacher of the Year.  “For traditional educational journalism, nobody wields a bigger syndicated pen than Mathews,” she wrote.  Mathews “straddles the line between what the general public thinks about educational issues and what ‘professional’ educators think. Willing to dialogue with people who think he’s wrong, and explore new trends, but confident in his opinions.”

Does the name Dane Linn ring a bell?  “Dane is the workhorse in education, and few outside of the pure ed wonks would know the name of the National Governors Association’s Education Division director,” says Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards.  In 2008, Riccards points out, Linn wrapped up a major high school improvement effort in 10 states, continued a major STEM initiative in six states, and is implementing a common graduation rate across the nation, with Florida, North Carolina, and Michigan among those who came aboard in 2008.  ”He’s kept the governors focused on education issues, even during tough budget times, and is the great connector and collborator in town,” Riccards notes.  “Few realize how many fingers he has in how many pies, but everyone wants NGA involved.  And when it comes to education, Dane is the NGA. He just never claims the credit.”

Other boldface names cited by multiple members of our panel of ed bloggers and journalists:  Diane Ravitch, Green Dot founder Steve Barr, and Geoffrey Canada, President and Chief Executive Officer for Harlem Children’s Zone.  Professor Michael F. Shaughnessy of Eastern New Mexico University, a senior columnist for EducationNews.org, put Reid Lyon at the top of his list for “his ongoing, almost never ending work on behalf of Reading First.” Surprisingly, only Dan Brown, the teacher, author and Huffington Post blogger named Barack Obama.  Arne Duncan’s name also failed to come up, although in fairness, nearly all of the ballots were submitted before he was tapped to be the next Education Secretary.  Lastly, Election 2008 is apparently already a distant memory.  So much so that the name Bill Ayers appeared on not one ballot.

Tomorrow: #5 Education’s Power Couple

Ignorance and Want

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 24, 2008 in No category. 0 Comments

‘Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,’ said
Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe,’ but I see
something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding
from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?’
 
‘It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,’ was
the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. ‘Look here.’

 
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;
wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt
down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
 
‘Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.’ exclaimed the Ghost.
 
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,
wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where
graceful youth should have filled their features out, and
touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled
hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and
pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat
enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No
change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any
grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has
monsters half so horrible and dread.
 
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him
in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but
the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie
of such enormous magnitude.
 
‘Spirit, are they yours?’ Scrooge could say no more.
 
‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon
them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.
This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,
and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy,
for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the
writing be erased. Deny it.’ cried the Spirit, stretching out
its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye.
Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.
And abide the end.’
 
‘Have they no refuge or resource?’ cried Scrooge.
 
‘Are there no prisons?’ said the Spirit, turning on him
for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no workhouses?’”

   - A Christmas Carol, Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits

 

The Most Literate Cities in America

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 24, 2008 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Minneapolis and Seattle are the most literate big cities in America, followed by Washington, D.C., St. Paul and San Francisco.  Atlanta, Denver, Boston, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Portland, Oregon round out the top ten.  There’s no testing involved in the designation.  The study by Central Connecticut State University ranks cities based on six factors: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.  Dr. Jack Miller, the President of Central Connecticut State, examined — and dismisses — criticism that the list is skewered by a decline in newspaper circulation caused by a rise in reading papers online. 

The conventional wisdom here is similar to the claims about the decline in bookstores: it’s caused by the rise in online book buying. And that is the same conventional wisdom that, pre-internet, claimed that library use and support of bookstores were mutually incompatible.  More free book sources would be associated with fewer bookstores. And in all cases, the conventional wisdom is wrong. As the data for this and previous surveys indicates, cities ranked highly for having better-used libraries also have more booksellers; cities with more booksellers also have a higher proportion of people buying books online; and cities with newspapers with high per capita circulation rates also have a high proportion of people reading newspapers online. Cities that rank highly in one form of literate behavior are likely to rank highly in the other forms and practices of literacy. A literate society tends to practice many forms of literacy not just one or another.

USA Today notes America is far behind other countries in a related study examining international literacy.  In preliminary data of per-capita paid newspaper circulation, the U.S. ranks only 31st in the world, “far behind other countries, including Aruba, Liechtenstein and Japan.”

Facebook and Your Students: To Friend or Not To Friend?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 24, 2008 in Education News and Education Practice. 6 Comments

Should teachers allow their students to “friend” them on Facebook?  The Houston Chronicle, following up on a local story of an ex-school aide accused of having sexual exchanges with a 16-year-old former student he contacted online, asks where teachers should draw the line.

Opinions are mixed. Opponents fear innocent educators will be branded sexual predators for chatting with students online, while proponents caution against overreacting to a powerful communication tool. 

Most school districts, says the Chronicle, have yet to “define the rules of virtual engagement.  In the Houston area, many districts block access to social-networking sites on campus computers, but they don’t have policies addressing after-hours use between educators and students.”

Having current and former students as Facebook friends could be a particularly sensitive issue for KIPP charter schools and others where teachers are encouraged to give students their cell phone numbers.  KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg tells the Chronicle he limits his Facebook contacts to alumni. “My personal threshold,” he says, “is not to accept friends on Facebook from KIPP-sters until they are in college.”  But Joseph Miller who runs the KIPP to College program tells the paper Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with current and former students.

Comments from teachers following the story show strongly divided opinions.  Says one, “Here’s the thing; a teacher is NOT a student’s “friend.” It’s called professionalism.”  Echoes another, “As a teacher of 8 years, I have never had the desire or the need to communicate with my students directly outside of the classroom. If I have an issue concerning absenteeism, behavior, or academics with my students that can not be handled in class, then I go directly to the parents and make them at least aware of the issue and leave it to them to accept their responsibility as a parent to raise their own child.”  However another teacher who uses Facebook points out,

“I teach at a school, however, where most students don’t have this kind of [parental] support at home, either because the parents are working multiple jobs or there’s something negative going on. I don’t seek my students out, but do let them “friend” me if they like. This does not mean that we are FRIENDS. It does let me keep an extra eye on them and make sure they are not doing/saying things they’re not supposed to. They find ways to slyly let me know that they appreciate that there’s someone who admonishes them with they curse, etc.”

Ultimately the question of to friend or not to friend becomes a proxy for the nature of the teacher/student relationship.  As another teacher on the Chronicle site puts it:

I am a teacher and it’s a long time coming that people wake up and realize that professionalism doesn’t mean de-humanizing yourself. A lot of times kids need to know that a teacher is human. Too many times teachers come into the classroom thinking that all the are going to do is teach. That’s the wrong assumption. Teachers are counselors, motivators, nurses aides, even temporary banks when kids forget their lunch money. Wouldn’t a parent want to know that their kids had a teacher like that?…We have to realize that this is the way the kids communicate. Most of my students are far more techno savvy than I am and have mobile applications for facebook on their iphones and smartphones. They are always on the go and this is the mode of communication. It’s a major communication shift that not just teachers, but more people need to learn how to integrate into our lives. The days of waiting for the land line phone to ring to get info are no more.

In the alternative certification program I went through, the New York City Teaching Fellows, one of the oft-repeated homilies was “students have to know that you care before they care what you know.”  While we were never explicity told to engage with our students after hours, playing basketball with kids after school, or taking them to a museum on the weekend was taken as proof of our commitment and praised.  On the other hand, the message was decidedly mixed: we were also warned explicitly never to allow ourselves to be in a classroom alone with a student with the door closed for any reason.

A Bleak Christmas in Brooklyn

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 23, 2008 in No category. 1 Comment

Letters to Santa from elementary school students in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn open a heartbreaking window on urban poverty.  The letters in the New York Daily News ask for food, clothes, a better place to live and money for college as their gifts this year.

“I need food,” wrote one P.S. 241 student. “I need . . . not to starve every morning, noon and evening. I just can’t take it anymore. Me and my family are hungry.”

The 571 prekindergarten through fifth-grade students at the school were assigned to write letters laying out their needs this holiday season so teachers and others could help, the Daily News reports.  “These are issues on a grand scale and issues that highlight the disparity that continues to exist in Brooklyn,” says City Councilwoman Letitia James, who according to the Daily News, thought the kids would request dolls, bikes and other toys. “I cried when I read these letters,” said James, who is collecting donations. “These children are carrying a heavy weight on their shoulders.”  The letters also include pleas for a new stove, money to pay the bills and new homes because of mice, crime and overcrowding.

“My mom and dad had money but it’s for food and clothes and bills,” wrote one child. “I don’t want me going to college to take from food and clothes and bills. I know college is far away from [now] but, can you help me with my college fund,” wrote a fifth-grader.

PS 241 Principal Philip Dominique says the letters reflect the most extreme cases at the school, where 81% of students are considered poor.

Study Cites Impact of “Low Quality Parenting” on Achievement

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 23, 2008 in Research and Reports. 2 Comments

“Low-quality parenting” can determine the ‘school readiness’ of children from low-income backgrounds,” according to a new report from Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel. 

Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook of the University of Bristol in the U.K. analyzed data on 19,000 children born in the UK in 2000 and 10,000 children born in the United States in 2001.  The children in both studies were followed from the age of nine months onwards, and completed tests in language, literacy and mathematics skills at ages three, four or five.   The authors write:

During the crucial first few years of life, low-income children experience poorer environments in terms of factors that would promote their cognitive, social and health development.They are more likely to begin school with deficits in their learning ability and social behaviour – and, as a result, they progress more slowly than their more affluent peers and achieve fewer educational qualifications, even in circumstances in which schools serve all pupils equally.

The research also shows that “higher-income mothers interact more positively with their children” when they are as young as nine months old, show greater sensitivity to their needs, are less intrusive and provide more cognitive stimulation. These types of behaviors are then strongly related to children’s performance at the time of entry to school, and in particular to language development.

Our research identifies lower quality parenting behaviours as a key factor behind the deficits in school readiness of low-income children in the US.  If that is indeed the case, the question naturally arises of what can be done to improve parenting skills in the poorest families.

A BBC report on the study carries the subhed, “Poor parenting is the key factor behind the significant gaps in readiness for school between children from low and middle income families.”  It’s a testament to how deeply ingrained the idea that teachers and schools should be able to overcome all deficits that such a headline seems mildly shocking to American eyes. 

The study appears inthe University of Bristol’s Research in Public Policy; a podcast with Elizabeth Washbrook on the report is available here.