The Core Knowledge Blog

“I am trying NOT to write off the 21st century skills movement as a sham, but its leaders don’t make it easy,” writes the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews this morning on his Class Struggle blog. 

Mathew raises a skeptical eyebrow at a new book by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times.  The pair are Silicon Valley corporate honchos and members of the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  He was hoping the book would “prove wrong those of us who could see nothing in this movement but a lot of buzz words and jargon describing principles of teaching and learning that have been with us for many decades.”   Keep hope alive, Uncle Jay.

I sense Trilling and Fadel are smart tech guys who just don’t know much about real schools with real kids who have difficulty learning how to read, write and do math. The perspective of much of the book is from thousands of feet up, as if the authors were on a jetliner flying into San Francisco’s airport. They can’t see the scuffed floors and trash-strewn playground of a public middle school in Oakland, but can use their laptops to write nice sentences about how the six emerging principles of the movement are “vision, coordination, official policy, leadership, learning technology and teacher learning.”

Meanwhile Common Core continues to treat P21 like its personal chew toy.  In his book review, Mathews sees “no sign that the Partnership, based in Tucson and Washington, D.C., is using its revenue to buy beach mansions in Bali.  However, Lynne Munson and James Elias parse a list of 230 organizations that signed on to P21’s National Action Agenda on 21st Century Skills and conclude it’s “a laundry list of vendors who undoubtedly either profit from or would like to profit from P21’s work.”  The list is also significant, they say, for who is not on it.

Just 11 of P21’s 13 member states signed.  The holdouts were New Jersey and Massachusetts, where P21 has encountered very strong resistance.  A number of the mostly for-profit heavyweights that sit on P21’s Strategic Council also were absent, including Ford Motor Company, Lenovo, Nellie Mae, Verizon, Walt Disney, and CPB.

“The closer we look,” Munson and Elias conclude, “the more P21’s unproven educational program appears to be just another mechanism for selling more stuff to schools.”

Linda Perstein, former Washington Post writer and author of the standout ed book, Tested, has launched an ed blog.  The Educated Reporter launched Monday, a year and a half after Perlstein was named public editor for the Education Writers Association.  What to expect?

My job is to help improve coverage of education, through direct coaching of journalists and broader commentary.  So a blog makes all kinds of sense. I find myself taking up issues on EWA’s internal listserve and in our newsletter that I realize people outside the organization might like to hear about. When I have a story idea to suggest, or when an oft-repeated myth needs debunking—no, states do NOT build prisons based on third-grade reading levels—or when a report comes out I know reporters will be calling about, I’ll have a place to share.

Welcome to a real pro.

Faced with student attrition and a financial crisis, Catholic schools have to reinvent themselves.   “The biggest threat that urban Catholic schools face is nostalgia,” John Eriksen, a Catholic schools superintendent from Paterson, New Jersey tells Time Magazine. ”We’ve been running these schools in a way that might have worked 30 or 40 years ago but doesn’t work now,” he says.  Catholic schools have been reinventing themselves by converting to charters, and forging partnerships with philanthropists and foundations in an effort to stem their decline, the magazine notes.

Nearly 1 in 5 Catholic schools in the U.S. has closed its doors this decade. To non-Catholics, this may not appear to be something worth worrying about. But parochial schools are one of the largest (if not the largest) alternatives to the American public-education system, and their steady decline inordinately affects urban low-income minorities who would otherwise be left at the mercy of public schools that have proven incapable of educating them.

At National Review Online, Sol Stern says the Time piece is “a welcome look at the plight of urban Catholic schools.” But Stern argues their decline has been “exacerbated by public-school reform schemes that have been oversold to the public and, ironically, cheered by many conservatives and businesspeople.”

In New York City, for example, the Catholic schools are competing for teachers with a public school system that now has unheard-of sums of money to spend. In just the past seven years, the city’s education budget has increased from $12.7 billion to $22 billion. Teacher salaries have risen 43 percent across the board in six years, passing the $100,000 top-salary threshold for the first time. Ten years ago, the gap between the city’s top salaries for Catholic-school teachers and public-school teachers was around $28,000. It’s now $50,000. Catholic schools find themselves stuck on a treadmill in which they either have to raise salaries even higher — and pass the costs on to students’ families — or lose more teachers to the public schools.

The Time piece notwithstanding, it’s mystifing at how little attention Catholic schools get given their long history of effectively educating poor urban children.  According to the National Catholic Education Association, 99% of Catholic secondary school students graduate, with 97% going on to college. And scale?  Reform darling KIPP runs 66 public schools serving just over 16,000 students.   Catholic schools serving 25 times more children have closed down this decade.   Over a thousand schools, serving nearly half a million students, nearly all of whom, one assumes, went back into public schools, which have failed to produce anything like the results posted by Catholic schools.