Hobson’s Choice

by Robert Pondiscio
August 28th, 2012

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Posted in Educational Policy, Opinion | 14 Comments »

“Hobson’s choice” is one of those wonderful phrases you don’t hear much anymore.  The story is told about one Thomas Hobson, who ran a rental stable in England in the 17th century.  If you wanted to hire one of his horses, Mr. Hobson, who didn’t want his best mounts overused, offered you a choice: you could take the horse he offered or no horse at all.  “Hobson’s choice,” often mistakenly rendered as a “Hobbesian choice,” entered the language as a phrase meaning “no choice at all.”  Take it or leave it.

I thought of Hobson’s choice today when reading Nancy Flanagan’s Teacher in a Strange Land blog over at EdWeek.  “Choice isn’t the answer to building a vision of a high-quality, personally tailored, democratic education for every child in America,” she writes.  “Nor is it evil incarnate. It’s a distraction from the conversation we should be having about improving public education in America.”  The early aspirations of the charter movement notwithstanding, choice has failed to live up to its promise, Flanagan notes.

“While charter promoters talk a great game about families flocking to the innovative, high-quality programming at public school academies, what’s more likely is that the charter represents a more palatable option than the public school–perhaps over something as simple as a grumpy teacher, an inconvenient bus schedule, lack of opportunity for parental control.”

I’m not as troubled as Nancy by parental caprice in exercising choice.  It would be ironic to be in the business of education and have little faith in parents’ ability to make an informed choice—or to correct course if that choice proved untenable.  My personal bottom line, speaking only for myself, is that choice is an intrinsic good.  I like exercising school choice for my child and I want you to have the same options.  And let’s face it, education is fundamentally coercive: you have to educate your child.  Some latitude in how you go about it is to be encouraged.

Flanagan is on stronger ground when she observes that school choice has “not provided a range of options for children in poverty.”

“…and predictable aspects of entrepreneurial school start-ups have intensified: Cutting corners on staff. Relying on private schmoozing and charitable funding rather than community/tax-based support. Focusing on surface features–like uniforms and hall behavior–rather than strong academics. Using public monies for advertising rather than educational quality. Booting kids who don’t burnish the school’s reputation or scores. Inventing bogus politicized agendas like the parent “trigger” for personal and commercial gain.

The points Flanagan raises are debatable but here’s the problem with choice I think she overlooks:  Too often, the “choice” is either false or irrelevant.   To give the most obvious example, if a nearby charter school is wedded to the same content-poor curriculum as a neighborhood school, if writing is taught as pure process, and reading as a set of strategies to be learned and practiced, if test-prep dominates the school day and the curriculum narrowed for that purpose, then issues of staffing, management structures, union contracts and funding mechanisms don’t matter at all.

I’ve argued this before: education doesn’t have a process problem.  It has a product problem.  Having to choose between the same thin gruel, lowest common denominator education in Public School A or Charter School B is a choice.  Hobson’s choice.

Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor. And Free Beer!!

by Robert Pondiscio
August 21st, 2012

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Posted in Curriculum, Opinion, Teaching | 8 Comments »

“It strikes me as funny that we call our political organizations ‘parties,” writes Ann Beeson. “Elections and political parties are the antithesis of fun. It’s no wonder that many young people avoid them.”

A lecturer at the University of Texas and former national associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Beeson observes in a New York Times op-ed that young people “are some of the most active and committed people I know” yet stay away from the polls in droves.  “Three causes are worth exploring,” she writes.

“First of all, many young people just don’t see the connection between voting and their commitment to improve their communities, advocate for a cause, or change the world. Secondly, there are very real grounds for political cynicism. And finally, let’s face it, civic engagement can be a snore.”

Civic engagement, Beeson writes, lacks “the fun factor.”  It conjures up “images of neighborhood meetings that plod along in rooms with stained carpets, cheap paneling and fluorescent lighting.”

Bummer, dude.

Sure, Beeson want young people “scared straight into voting” by emphasizing the price of their inaction.  But most of all, she says, “it should be terrific fun to vote and to stay involved after election day.”

“What if the average civic gathering – whether it’s a political rally, grassroots group, school task force, or city council – involved cook-offs, improv or gaming? What if we devised clever ways to scale up what’s working, instead of whining for a living? What if we banned Robert’s Rules of Order and actually got to know one another?”

We’ve heard this before in education.  If we want kids to care, we have to make it fun and engaging.  And while I agree with the impulse, there’s something to be said—both in education and in civic engagement—for also acknowledging the idea that we owe a debt to ourselves and history to stir ourselves from the couch and embrace mature responsibility.

“Has the nation become so self-indulgent that we are no longer motivated to act for the greater good or are the issues just less significant and less motivating than in the past?” a friend asked me this morning after reading Beeson’s piece.  It’s a good question.   I don’t have the answer, but I’m reasonably sure that a better grasp of our nation’s history wouldn’t hurt.  If we don’t understand and value the price that has been paid over generations to found, protect, and ensure the viability of our democracy, we can hardly be surprised if our children take its continuance as a given.

Cook-offs, improv and gaming?   The Freedom Riders were not lured onto luxury coaches with DVD players and giddy shouts of “road trip!”  The Greatest Generation won WWII and faced down communism.  D-Day was not, I suspect, positioned as a great way to meet French girls. Unless I’m very much mistaken, the Declaration of Independence did not include the Founders’ pledge to each other of “our Lives, our Fortunes, our sacred Honor…and free beer!”

I’m being churlish, I know.  Forgive me.  But if making voting and civic engagement “fun” is what it takes to stir young people to take act in their own self-interest, perhaps we will be no poorer if we let grownups decide things.

A Place in the World

by Guest Blogger
March 2nd, 2012

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy, Opinion, Teaching | 19 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

In the wake of last week’s release of New York City Teacher Data Reports, educators and administrators are debating what exactly the value in a high value-added teacher looks like. Even teachers who scored high marks on the Teacher Data Reports question the value of tests that cannot possibly evaluate every aspect of what it means to be a great teacher, and the value that teacher imparts to his or her students.

The new feature-length documentary A Place in the World, directed by Adam Maurer and William Reddington, addresses the question of teacher value and the role of a school in building community. The documentary chronicles two years at The International Community School (ICS), a K-6 charter school in DeKalb County, Georgia. DeKalb County is the largest refugee resettlement area in the country and the most diverse county in the state of Georgia. Half the students at ICS are recent immigrants and refugees from war zones, and half are local children from DeKalb County.

The film focuses on two educators: Drew Whitelegg (Mr. Drew to his students), a first-year teacher, and Dr. Laurent Ditman, Principal of ICS. Mr. Drew, formerly a post-doctoral Fellow at Emory University, speaks honestly about how tiring his job as a fourth-grade teacher is, how difficult it is to avoid being consumed by the challenges inherent in teaching a population of barely English-literate, emotionally and physically terrorized children how to function as educated members of American society. “Teaching at a university was a dawdle compared to teaching here. I mean it really was. And there’s a sense that you are in this for the long haul. But the rewards – the rewards here are absolutely endless. And they don’t come from all the great moments, they come from the small moments.”

According to Mr. Drew, the education gap that divides the American and refugee students in his fourth grade classroom at ICS is created by language deficits. Mr. Drew is not talking about language deficits in terms of the ability to hold a basic conversation, he’s talking about cultural vocabulary, the connotation words carry in American culture that help proficient readers understand context and relevance. Mr. Drew gives an example in the film: The math problem 1/2 + 1/4 written numerically, as a math problem, is something his students can do. But ask this same problem as a word problem, with one kid baking cakes and giving half away to friends and then deciding to give another quarter away to another friend, “then it’s not a test of math, it’s a test of language ability.” Many of Mr. Drew’s students come to his classroom with no knowledge of English, and some students, such as Bashir, who was born in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, have no understanding of the concept of school. Bashir spent his first days at ICS wandering the halls, walking in and out of classrooms, calling out for his father. Principal Laurent Dittman recounts the story of a girl from the refugee camps in the Sudan who spent her first weeks at ICS huddled under a table, hiding from whatever dangers she had survived in the Sudanese refugee camp.

Dr. Dittman, himself an immigrant and the child of Holocaust survivors, believes in school as a refuge from his students’ unsettled home lives. He understands his students’ impulse to hide under tables in order to escape. “The first thing I learned from my parents was how to hide. When something bad happens, or is about to happen, you hide. I see that in many of the kids at the school.” Dr. Dittman views his school as a refuge for his students, a place to come out of hiding and learn. Dr. Dittman says of his own upbringing in an immigrant family in France, “I really liked school. It was a safe place. My parents were refugees and things at home were not always a lot of fun, and I saw school clearly as a refuge.”

When asked about the standards his students are expected to meet under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), his outlook is not quite as hopeful. “According to NCLB 2014, all students – 100% – will be proficient in all subject matters. What’s the old Garrison Keillor, everybody is above average? That doesn’t make any sense. My guess is that in a few years, all those standards, all those compulsory standardized tests will be a bad memory. I think that the pendulum is going to swing back the other way and return to a more rational, less ideological approach to education.”

ICS did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in 2011 under NCLB. Dr. Dittman and Mr. Drew, who educate malnourished, traumatized, impoverished and previously uneducated children, must cover core subjects such as math, science, and history while helping their students find a place in American society. They are not simply teaching American history, they are teaching their students how to be Americans. The making of Americans is currently not a category in the Teacher Data Reports’ calculation of a teacher’s value-added assessments.

For validation on that front, Dr. Dittman and Mr. Drew do not look to test scores and value-added assessments; they look to their students. Dr. Dittman thinks back to that that one Sudanese girl, hiding under the classroom table. His voice breaks as he recounts the ending to her story. The girl refused to come out until one day her teacher crawled under the table and joined her there. Once her teacher had gained the girls’ trust, she felt safe enough to crawl out from under the table and join the class. According to Mr. Drew, “I don’t think teachers should blow their own trumpets or credit themselves overtly, but I think that you can go home at the end of the day and say, you know what, I’ve made a difference, you know, and the world is actually a better place from what I did today.”

As teachers and administrators move forward and continue to do the job of teaching this country’s students, it is important to remember that not all value is quantifiable. The Teacher Data Reports, in all their margins of error and fuzzy logic, can never get at the real value of this country’s teachers.

Jessica Potts Lahey is a teacher of English, Latin, and composition at Crossroads Academy, an independent Core Knowledge K-8 school in Lyme, New Hampshire. Jessica’s blog on middle school education, Coming of Age in the Middle, where this piece also appears, can be found at http://jessicalahey.com.

Legislating to the Test

by Guest Blogger
January 26th, 2012

Posted in Education News, Opinion | 4 Comments »

By Rachel Levy

It’s legislating season here in Virginia. One bill by state Senator John Miller (D-Newport News) would remove the Science and Social Studies SOL (Standards of Learning) tests from third grade, not because there are too many tests and not because Senator Miller thinks science and social studies shouldn’t be taught, but so that teachers can spend even more time preparing students for the Reading and Math SOL tests, the Reading Test in particular. Here’s the rationale:

“Miller told the subcommittee that the JLARC study showed that 95 percent of third graders who pass the reading proficiency test will pass the reading SOL in fifth grade, while those who fail have a “50 – 50 chance” of failing the fifth grade test, and ultimately failing in school.”

I read this right after writing a post for the Virginia Education Report explaining how we might advance literacy in Virginia, as our Governor says he wants to do. My second suggestion was:

We need to spend much less time teaching reading as a subject and teaching reading strategies beyond their utility and much more time teaching content or subject matters, such as literature, science, social studies, p.e., art music, foreign languages, technical education, etc. Yes, most kids need to be explicitly taught to decode and yes, to a point reading strategies are useful. Of course, content should be taught as reading and writing intensive. However, literacy is largely representative of someone’s background and content knowledge, and knowledge of vocabulary and does not develop or improve without it. As the University of Virginia’s own Dan Willingham says, teaching content is teaching reading. (It’s also much, much more meaningful and interesting for kids.) My regular readers know that I talk about this ad nauseum. In case you’re new to my writing on education, here are some posts that elaborate further: here, here, and here.

So, first of all, yes, we’ve all made that point on this blog a thousand times.

I can tell you as the parent of two public school third graders that plenty of time is already spent preparing for the Reading SOL. I can tell you as a former Virginia public school social studies teacher that the History SOLs seem to be relatively heavy on minutiae and relatively light on essential knowledge and broader concepts. I’ve always been reassured, though, that unlike many other states, at least Virginia has SOLs for numerous subjects and not just for math and reading. Now, whether any of those tests (all multiple choice except for the writing test) are of good quality is another question. Whether the SOL curriculum is of good quality is yet another one. Neither seems necessarily so given what Chris Dovi reports here about what happens to many Virginia public high school graduates who are successful at mastering the Standards of Learning but not very successful once they get to college.

To be clear, while I am pro-assessment and all for data-informed instruction, I am not currently in favor of many aspects of NCLB or high-stakes standardized testing. Even so, I am somewhat sympathetic to the stance taken, by Andrew Rotherham here in this column about cheating scandals:

“We know from research — as well as experience and common sense — that the best way to help students perform well on standardized tests is not to drill them (and certainly not to cheat) but rather to actually teach them. . . . Real teaching is like a well-rounded breakfast: it sustains you. Drilling for a test is like eating a doughnut: it works for a bit, but you’re hungry again before long. After all, what most assessments are testing is the ability of students to encounter and master material that is unfamiliar in its specifics but similar to what they’ve been taught. So the takeaway for parents is straightforward: with good teaching, the tests take care of themselves. When teachers or schools obsess over tests, parents should be concerned — not about the test, but about the school.”

I say “somewhat” because when Rotherham says that, “with good teaching, tests take care of themselves,” he leaves out (or blithely assumes) good curriculum. This comes across as, it doesn’t matter what’s being taught as long as the teaching is good. In that case, it doesn’t matter if you serve doughnuts every day for breakfast so long as the cooking is good; with good cooking, a good report from the doctor’s office takes care of itself. Otherwise, yes, with good teaching and solid curriculum (and an environment where teachers are free to engage in good practice and to teach knowledge-based curriculum), the tests should theoretically take care of themselves.

The idea that testing isn’t the problem, though, lets policy makers off the hook. Educational malpractice cannot solely be laid at the feet of bad teachers or bad teaching. Senator Miller’s bill is case in point that practice and curriculum are influenced by policy. This bill essentially dictates bad practice. This well-meaning legislator in Virginia said expressly that he was legislating to the “test,” passing a bill that is meant to mandate that teachers spend more time preparing for a reading test, the stated goal being to get those reading scores up. The stated rationale is not: it’s better educational practice (it’s not); it will make for better education (it won’t); or, explicit preparation for standardized reading tests make students better readers (it doesn’t); rather, it’s getting pass rates up.

If we want teachers to stop teaching to ill-conceived tests then lawmakers are going to have to stop legislating to those tests, lobbyists are going to have to stop lobbying to the tests, and reporters are going to have to stop reporting to the tests. While I think good policy can create the conditions to spur meaningful education reforms, I have serious doubts that we can directly legislate better teaching and more meaningful, knowledge-based learning. If the powers that be are going to try anyway, may they at least legislate sound practice and a broad and rich curriculum, and not more vapid reading test prep.

UPDATE: The bill has been passed 33-7 in the Senate (and, by the way, was supported widely by groups representing Virginia educators). Senator Miller said,“I believe it makes common sense to concentrate on reading and math, and give a good basic foundation in those two core subjects for our students.”

Unfortunately, this is what is accepted as common sense in education today, but it’s far from common sense. People learn to read and there are some reading strategies that can be of great use, but people do not learn reading; it’s not a subject. By assuming and then legislating as if it is, we undermine our students’ acquisition of knowledge and their literacy development. I understand that many Virginians want fewer SOL tests and I don’t blame them, but all this bill will likely do is replace subject matter instruction with more reading instruction, and make it so that Virginia’s kids struggle with literacy more. Without background knowledge, exposure to vocabulary, and instruction in content, literacy does not develop.

Rachel Levy is a writer and a former (and likely future) ESOL and Social Studies teacher who lives in Ashland, Virginia, with her husband and three children. She blogs about education at All Things Education.

Meet Students Where They Are…And When They’re Ready

by Robert Pondiscio
January 25th, 2012

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Posted in Education News, Education Theory, Opinion, Research and Reports, Students | 11 Comments »

President Obama used his State of the Union address last night to propose requiring students to stay in high school until they either graduate or turn 18.  “We know that when students aren’t allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma,” he said.

Perhaps so, but let’s be honest:  what’s the value of a diploma that is conferred by coercion?  And where’s the win in forcing kids to stay in “dropout factory” schools against their will and where they get seat time and nothing of use or relevance?

Listening to the President, I was reminded of an idea floated by Michael Goldstein, founder of Boston’s MATCH Charter school a few years back.  In an email to the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, Goldstein suggested that if kids are bound and determined to drop out, we should let them leave—and set aside the money saved as a kind of education IRA.  The funds would be waiting for the dropouts if or when they woke up to the benefit of further education or training.  In Goldstein’s view, a little taste of the dead-end life of a dropout would be a more powerful inducement to get an education than the exhortations of any teacher.

Here’s what Mike wrote in 2008:

“At first, for a Jonathan Lewis, nobody bugs you to get up in the morning. . . . You like it, freedom. After a few months, you realize you’re a loser, other people are going places but not you. You maybe get a job and it’s a boring security job at $8/hour. And, maybe by age 20, or 26, or whatever, some maturity. THEN a Jonathan Lewis can start over. He can use the set-aside money from the years of high school he missed for GED tutoring or perhaps special charter high schools set up for older students, then college or other higher ed. But he controls the money; he’s essentially buying the service. Other options could spring up. Maybe even [in] the junior/senior year, $30,000 could be given to the military, which could set up programs where a high school dropout could attend a military-run boot camp, get a degree, then enlist”

Goldstein correctly observed at the time that at present lots of kids merely go through the motions “but resist every effort to learn.”  Even if “Jonathan” manages to graduate, “he’s still a kid with very low academic skills. The win is not much of a win,” he wrote. “The option should be ‘Graduate from a high school which features only rigorous classes’ or ‘Bank the money we want to invest in your education and do your own thing for a while,’” Goldstein concluded.

I emailed Mike this morning to ask if hindsight and the President’s desire to raise the bar on compulsory education has altered his thinking at all. Nope. “I still like my idea more than President Obama’s,” he replied.  “I think it’s win-win-win for kids, teachers, and society.”  Finland only requires kids to stick around until 16 (“I thought everyone wants to copy Finland!” he writes).  More to the point, Goldstein cites a Rennie Center study that uncovered “little research to support the effectiveness of compulsory attendance laws” in decreasing the number of dropouts or increasing the graduation rate.

Most critically, Goldstein’s idea does not write off dropouts. Rather it “holds constant the amount of education that someone receives.”  Is it sometimes appropriate to delay spending on a resistant student at age 17 or 18, and instead spend on that same person a few years down the road?  Goldstein believes it is.

“Interesting that President Obama also called for government supported job training.  My proposal essentially self-funds a certain amount of job training for the least employable people.  It simply shifts a 17 year old from sitting in a required 11th grade history class in Raleigh where he is totally ignoring the teacher and possibly distracting other kids, to that same human being as a 22-year-old who might be sitting in a chosen community college class getting training on a technical job with Siemens with the same public dollars.”

Veteran teachers know that there is a subset of teenagers who simply do not want to be there, regardless of how hard their teachers work or how engaging their lessons might be.  Raising the compulsory age, like so many ideas in education, effectively translates to “work harder” and “engage more kids.”  By contrast, Goldstein’s idea makes good, intuitive sense.

A standard classroom homily is “Meet the students where they are.” To that we might add: “And when they are ready.”

Says Who? Lots of Folks, Actually…

by Robert Pondiscio
May 9th, 2011

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Posted in Education News, Educational Policy, Opinion, Teaching | 29 Comments »

Whitney Tilson, ed reform’s most aggressively outspoken acolyte, is cranky with those who think reformers “don’t acknowledge the importance of factors outside of a school’s control like poverty.”  And he’s none too happy with the idea that reformers “demonize teachers.”  In his latest ed reform email blast, he throws down the gauntlet:

“I challenge anyone to show me even one quote from one leading reformer who says that reforming the schools is all that is needed or who believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that’s required to improve student performance.”

Excuse, me Mr. Tilson, I think you dropped your glove.  Let me get that for you.  It took me all of 30 minutes of Googling to come up with these memorable bon mots:

1.  “By our estimates from Texas schools, having an above average teacher for five years running can completely close the average gap between low-income students and others.” Steve Rivkin, Rick Hanushek, and John Kain.

2.  “Having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.” Robert Gordon, Tom Kane, and Doug Staiger.

3.  “We know for poor minority children, if they have three highly effective teachers in a row, versus three ineffective teachers in a row, it can literally change their life trajectory.”  Michelle Rhee.

Reading these quotes in rapid succession feels like watching the old game show Name That Tune.  Isn’t anyone going to say “I can close that gap in TWO years”?  OK, reformers….Close that gap!  But, in fairness to Tilson, at least no one is saying poverty and outside factors aren’t a factor and teachers can overcome every obstacle. 

Er….um….well….

4.  “Florida is debunking the myth that some kids can’t learn because of life’s circumstances. The state has proven that a quality education and great teachers can overcome the obstacles of poverty, language barriers and broken homes. Florida is now forging a seismic path for modernizing the teaching profession nationwide.”  Jeb Bush.

5.  “What I know for sure is whether your family is well-off or not, functional or dysfunctional — no matter what your familial circumstances are — a great teacher can overcome the challenges that a child is facing so that they have a good chance of a productive life. I’m not discounting the effects of poverty or kids coming to school hungry, but we can’t use that as an excuse for not reaching our kids. At the end of the day, you know and I know, great teachers who took kids from improbable circumstances and catapulted them to great lives and we have to ensure that this is the norm and not the exception.”  Kaya Henderson, DC Schools Chancellor.

OK, well at least no one within the ed reform movement is making the mistake of saying things are simple and easy.  No, that’s the Amen corner’s job.

6. “Repeat after me: We can’t have great schools without great teachers.  And when you start with that simple truth, the solutions become pretty clear. Let’s recruit our best and brightest. Develop the ones we have to become better teachers. Reward the ones who are doing a great job. Recruit and train talented principals. And after trying everything, help find another job for those teachers who aren’t cutting it.” Waiting for Superman director Davis Guggenheim.

7. “We know what works now and should just go ahead and fund it.” Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter.

Right.  Well at least we have a Secretary of Education who sees the big picture in all its nuance and complexity.

8.  “I think you need a number of things. I think that’s part of the difficulty here  is people look for one simple answer. So, do great teachers matter tremendously? Absolutely. And give an average child three great teachers in a row, and they’re going to be a year-and-a-half to two grade levels ahead. Give the average child three bad teachers in a row, they’ll be so far behind they’ll never catch up.”  Arne Duncan.

The Duncan quote is particularly interesting because he starts out by saying a number of things need to be done, but then states just one thing—teachers, naturally—is enough to get kids not just where they need to be, but ahead.

OK, so if teachers have come to suspect that the world looks at them and thinks the only thing standing between every child and upward mobility is them, it’s not something they just made up.

We are deep into a not terribly productive cycle of rhetorical excess, oversimplification and magical thinking from all sides.  I have often commended the work of Nancy Flanagan, veteran teacher and frequent commenter on this blog, whose Teacher In a Strange Land blog runs at Education Week.  Over the weekend she launched a cri de coeur, calling Duncan out for preaching education as social justice and a ticket out of poverty, while pursuing an agenda of market-based reform.  “I am heartily sick of politicians and educational entrepreneurs using ‘civil rights’ and ‘social justice’ as a rhetorical shield for advancing their own interests and commercial goals,” Flanagan thundered. 

“It’s time to remember the Freedom Riders, who risked their very lives fifty years ago this week, to achieve democratic equality. Not segregated charter schools which a handful of lottery-winners get to attend. Not classrooms staffed by two-year adventure teachers . Not watered-down, low-level curriculum and test items.”

I’m deeply sympathetic to many of the items on Flanagan’s bill of particulars.  She loses me, however, when she presumes to judge who is or is not entitled to wrap their reforms in the language, history and terms associated with the civil rights movement.  Frankly, I find myself increasingly likely to stop listening to anyone these days, regardless of their cause or concern, the moment they start nattering on about the new front in the civil rights movement, who favors the status quo, who puts the interests of adults ahead of children, or whose reform is more disruptive. 

News flash:  This #$%@! is really, really hard and bewildering in its complexity.  But you knew that.

When Bad Ideas Happen to Good Columnists

by Robert Pondiscio
April 18th, 2011

Tags: , ,
Posted in Education News, Opinion | 8 Comments »

The prolific Larry Ferlazzo, arguably the most thoughtful and consistently fair-minded teacher-blogger currently drawing breath, makes an interesting observation about education journalism.  “I really am surprised to see so many ordinarily thoughtful national columnists, show such poor judgment when they write about schools, Larry writes.”  He points to recent entries by David Brooks, Ruben Navarrete and Matthew Yglesias.

“What is it that blinds these columnists? In fact, what is it that does the same to so many school reformers and legislators? Do they think that since they went to school when they were children, that makes them experts in figuring out how they should be run? They all have gone to see a doctor at some point, too, but they don’t seem to be as critical or prescriptive about how they think a medical professionals should treat their patients.

I’ve observed this phenomenon quite a bit, having spent far more time in my career working in the national media than in education, but my response is exactly the opposite of Larry’s.  When I see poor judgment writing about schools, I don’t think “how can someone so smart be so ill-informed?” Rather, I wonder, “if you’re this ill-informed on a subject I know a lot about, how ill-informed are you on subjects I don’t know about?”  When a columnist writes about a subject about which you have a lot of background knowledge, they’re opening a window on their work at large. 

Keep in mind that very, very few columnists are engaged in actual reporting.   And what reporting they do tends to be talking to sources and experts with a point of view; they rarely if ever do the shoe-leather work of sitting in classrooms before writing a column on ed reform.  That’s not their job and it’s one of the reasons beat reporters tend not to like “bigfoot” columnists who parachute into “their” stories.  Next, there is the phenomenon that John Taylor described memorably nearly 20 years ago as Take Journalism.  “Once upon a time, journalists like to brag about their ‘sources,’ he wrote. ”Now they are more inclined to brag about their ‘take.’”  Columnists, more than anyone else in print journalism, measure their value and influence on the impact of their “take.”  Then too, there’s the issue of access.  A curious courtship exists between columnists and the powerful people they write about.  Agree too much with the President, for example, and you’re “in the tank.”  Disagree too much and your access dries up.  Take the President to task on foreign policy but write favorably on education issues and you’re “tough but fair-minded” — the sweet spot that wins you respect and readers among all but the most doctrinaire.  Thus the dirty little secret about pundits: They generally traffic in borrowed and repackaged expertise.  Their judgement is often driven not by what they know, but by who has their ear. 

None of this is a criticism; it’s the job description.  It’s also, one reason why there is extraordinary value in the democratizing influence of the web, where there is no shortage of deeply informed opinion available to those who are diligent enough to seek it out and synthesize it. 

The bottom line:  There are lots of good reasons to read big-name columnists.  Getting an authoritative analysis on complex education issues is not one of them.

Education Needs An X Prize

by Robert Pondiscio
September 28th, 2010

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Posted in Education Leadership, Education News, Opinion | 11 Comments »

When Charles Lindbergh flew to Paris in 1927, he was aiming for more than glory.  His flight netted him the $25,000 Orteig Prize, a reward offered a decade earlier by a wealthy New Yorker to the first aviator to to fly from New York to Paris.  Such prizes were a common means of spurring achievement in the early days of aviation.  More recently, the $10 million Ansari X Prize was offered for the first non-government group to launch a reusable manned spacecraft twice in two weeks.  Big prizes get attention, capture the imagination, and create a multiplier effect as competitors battle it out for the money.  The team that won the Ansari X prize spent $25 million of Paul Allen’s money in pursuit of their $10 million payday.  Prizes are small beer compared to the potential to spur an entire industry, like aviation or space exploration, which is precisely what the underwriters have in mind. 

This brings us to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his decision to give $100 million to Newark, New Jersey’s school system.  Zuckerberg has no obvious reason for friending Newark.  After meeting mayor Cory Booker, he merely decided, ”This is the guy I want to invest in. This is a real person who can create this change.”  One gift, one district, one time, so they can “try out new things.” 

Zuckerberg is to be commended for his generosity.  But if he wanted to give $100 million to an urban school district to drive change, why not follow the lead of the X Prize or its many predecessors?  Offer it up in the form of a $100 million windfall to the first inner city school district that closes its 8th grade reading achievement gap on NAEP and keeps it closed for three years running.  Or the first district to graduate 80% of its 9th graders from high school four years later.   Create a rigorous, independent reading test and give the prize to the first district that gets 95% of its third-graders to pass it.   Since charter schools are supposed to be our engines of innovation, invite them to the party.   Even the sharpest critics of KIPP will stand up and applaud if (to pick another potential prize goal) they manage to send 90% of their graduates to college without the need for remediation.

At Forbes.com, Neil Weinberg cautions that the names Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates swirling around Zuckerberg’s largesse are “enough to blind an observer with its starlight.”  So much so, he warns, as to obscure the question of whether the Facebook founder’s money is “headed down a rat hole.” Newark already spends roughly $23,000 per pupil.  “Even the L.A. Unified School District, whose students are just as poor as Newark’s, gets by with half as much,” Weinberg notes.

“Given that Zuckerberg’s $100 million will be spread over five years and 40,000 students, it will add all of $500 per pupil, or 2% to the annual budget. Add in matching funds promised and hoped for and you get double that. Sound revolutionary? Not if it ends up in the same places as the rest of the money.  What would really be revolutionary would be to use funds from Booker’s celebrity backers to conduct a forensic audit of the waste, fraud and abuse that’s swallowed Newark’s education budget. Giving money to accountants, of course, doesn’t create the same warm-and-fuzzy PR as giving it to kids.

Weinberg has a point.  From a social entrepreneurship persepective, simply writing a big check may not be the best strategy to spur innovation.  I didn’t agree with several of the reform inititiatives enshrined in Race to the Top, but it clearly demonstrated how the promise of a big payday can drive change, especially when budgets are tight. 

So my advice for the next billionaire who decides to give away an eye-popping sum of money is not to force others to adopt your pet strategy.  Avoid the temptation to back high-profile, charismatic reformers, no matter how smart they are or how dazzling their vision.   Pick a clear, simple goal for education.  Make it big.  Make it audacious.  And then put the money aside in an interest bearing account and wait for a knock on the door when some enterprising group of educators steps forward to claim it.

If history’s any guide — and it usually is — someone will come along sooner or later.  And you’ll be buying more than hope and promises.  You’ll be funding results.

Five Blogs You Need To Have In Your Feed Right Now

by Robert Pondiscio
August 24th, 2010

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Posted in Education News, Opinion | 7 Comments »

NYC teacher/blogger Jose Vilson offers Five Blogs You Need To Have In Your Feed Right Now.  Good idea, so I’m stealing it.

I treat my Google Reader like the starting lineup for the Indianapolis 500, with feeds running three across.  Joanne Jacobs, for example, has been at the upper left, or pole position, for a very long time.   The closer to the top, the more often I read it.   Once a blog slips toward the bottom, I read it only sporadically.   

Picking up on Jose’s meme, here are five blogs I now read avidly that are either recent additions to my feed reader–or that have elbowed their way toward the top: 

1. The Answer Sheet is the only “new blog” (it’s almost exactly a year old) to have cracked the top row of my feed reader.   I started reading it when it became the online home for Dan Willingham’s peerless writing about education.  Valerie Straus has become the sharpest, most opinionated voice on education in the mainstream media.  Honestly, I’m not sure how she gets away with it. 

2. Rick Hess Straight Up.    Hess has forgotten more about education than most of us will ever know.  The man ignores every blogging convention there is, cranking out long thoughtful, provocative posts day after day.  The most appealing thing about Hess as a writer and thinker is that he’s aggressively independent.  You think he’s on your side?  Here’s a thumb in your eye.

3. I’m a sucker for great writing and sound opinions grounded in actual classroom experience.  Jose Vilson included Nancy Flanagan’s Teacher in a Strange Land, which occupies a choice position in my feed reader.  But since this is about new blogs, I’ll recommend Walt Gardner’s Reality Check.  Gardner’s perspective is informed by nearly 30 years of teaching in Los Angeles, longer than most edubloggers have been alive. That’s hard-won authority.

4. In the process of writing this post, I realized that Get Schooled by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Maureen Downey needs to be much higher on my must-read list.  Downey is another smart, independent blogger who’s not shy about expressing her opinions and backs it up with good reporting.   Bonus: she’s attracted a large cadre of thoughtful, engaged commenters.

5. In fairness, Better Living Through Beowulf is not an edublog, per se.  By my own criteria, I should round out my list of five from among Education Next, Shanker Blog, RiShawn’s Biddle’s Dropout Nation, Linda Perlstein’s The Educated Reporter or Larry Ferlazzo’s blog, which have all found their way into my reader in the past year.  But BLTB features  thoughtful, personal and beautifully written ruminations of the human condition filtered through the lens of literature.  A brilliant defense of the liberal arts without even trying.

Two broad trends I notice in my blog reading via this exercise:  compared to a year ago, I’m paying more attention to teacher blogs and major news outlets; less to think tanks and ed tech blogs. 

And what are you reading?

College Ready Should Mean Accepted to College

by Robert Pondiscio
August 3rd, 2010

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Education News, Opinion | 10 Comments »

Valerie Strauss is on vacation over at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  I pinch-hit with a piece suggesting that if New York wants to be the truth-in-education state, they should consider setting a high, meaningful bar for “proficiency” — and guarantee a seat in the state’s university system to all students who clear it.

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