Halfway through an otherwise strong article about Bill Gates’ renewed focus on education reform in Newsweek, Jonathan Alter writes with sublime confidence that ”the challenge is not to find what works for at-risk kids—we know that by now—but how to replicate it.”
In the time it took me to gather up my teeth, several of which were jarred loose when my jaw hit the floor, Mike Petrilli had already set Alter straight over at Flypaper.
Sure, this is true in the simplest sense. KIPP works. Achievement First works. Cristo Rey works. (Read all about it in David Whitman’s recent Fordham book on “paternalistic” schools.) But replicating these schools 1,000 or 10,000-fold is more than just a challenge. It might be impossible. Writing in the Gadfly a few weeks ago, Steven Wilson made the very good point that these “no excuses” schools tend to hire graduates from America’s top universities and work them to death. Neither part of that equation is “scalable.” What we need is a school model that gets great results with mere mortals. No one has cracked that nut yet.
True that.
Teach for America got Page One treatment from the Washington Post on Saturday. Competition for slots in the program is way up, in part because of the economy. Nearly 40,000 applications are expected for about 5,000 teaching slots.
In part because of the dearth of other job prospects in the sagging economy but mostly because the program has captured the imagination of a generation of student leaders bent on doing good, some graduates of the nation’s elite universities are fighting for low-paying teaching positions the way they once sought jobs on Wall Street.
The bad economy angle notwithstanding, the Post story mostly covers familiar territory and reports “research into Teach for America’s effectiveness has been inconclusive, but at least three major studies in the past several years indicate that students taught by its teachers score significantly lower on standardized tests than do their peers.” That’s enough to set Eduwonk’s teeth on edge.
In fact, while there has been a lot of “research” into TFA the methodologically most solid studies have shown that TFA teachers are as good or better than other teachers, including veteran and traditionally trained teachers. Mathematica (pdf) and Urban Institute/CALDER are the two best examples — and those are independent analyses not TFA studies.
One angle not discussed in the Post piece, or anywhere else that I’ve noticed. If the recession is driving more recruits into TFA, might it also mean that a lot of teachers who might have left for greener pastures in flush times are staying put?
It is a generational right, and probably a compulsion, to look at the generation in the rear view mirror and pronounce them unfit to lead. Hence books like Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. But look at the data, and you’ll see something surprising. The short of the stick in the brains department is being held, not by today’s 20-somethings and teens, but by those born from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. “Compared with every other birth cohort,” writes author Neil Howe in the Washington Post, “they have performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the fewest educational degrees and been the least attracted to professional careers. In a word, they’re the dumbest.”
Want proof? Let’s start with the long-term results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is housed within the U.S. Department of Education. Considered the gold standard in assessing K-12 students, the NAEP has been in continuous operation for decades. Here’s the bottom line: On both the reading and the math tests, and at all three tested ages (9, 13 and 17), the lowest-ever scores in the history of the NAEP were recorded by children born between 1961 and 1965.
Same story, different test: “The SAT reached its all-time high in 1963, when it tested the 1946 birth cohort,” says Howe. “Then it fell steeply for 17 straight years, hitting its all-time low in 1980, when it tested the 1963 cohort. Ever since, the SAT has been gradually if haltingly on the rise, paralleling improvements in the NAEP.”
“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well, it were done quickly.”
If I were Obama, I’d take Macbeth’s advice and hurry up and pick my education secretary already, if only to put an end to the nonstop “reformers vs. traditionalists” drumbeats that are growing by intensity day by day. The will he or won’t he (pick a “reformer” or go old school) has now been the subject of this David Brooks column, this piece in The New Republic, and this story in the Associated Press in the last three days alone. Perhaps the pick is someone both sides will be equally pleased with – or upset by. But if you’re planning on alienating a segment of your amen corner, why prolong the agony? Let the healing begin.
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