Only 3.5% of Arizona public school students got six or more questions correct on a version of the United States Citizenship Test. Matthew Ladner of Jay Greene’s blog thought that was pretty pathetic–new immigrants to the U.S. have to answer six or more correct–until they gave the same test to kids in Oklahoma. The results were not OK.
Perhaps I ought not to have been so hard on Arizona students. After all, they passed at a rate that was 25% higher than their peers in Oklahoma! That’s right: the passing rate for Oklahoma high school students was 2.8%. They somehow underperformed Arizona’s already abysmally pathetic performance.
“These kids wouldn’t do much worse if the pollster asked them questions in Sanskrit instead of English,” Ladner concludes. Over at Joanne Jacobs, guest blogger Diana Senechal says Ladner’s right. ”According to a binomial distribution calculator, the chances of getting at least 6 out of 10 questions correct (where each question has 4 options) is about 2 percent. So, no, they wouldn’t do much worse in Sanskrit,” she writes.
“I have an empty metal coffee pot in my office marked “Sweden Civics Survey Fund,” Ladner writes. “Please drop by a give what you can afford. Once it gets to a couple of thousand bucks, I’ll retain the pollster to give this exact same survey on AMERICAN civics to high school students in Sweden.”
Great idea. I’ve got a ten-spot in my hand, Matthew. What’s the address?
Jay Greene invokes Neville Chamberlain in a WSJ op-ed this morning, calling out school choice proponents who in his view, have tried to appease teachers unions by supporting charter schools but not vouchers. “On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs,” Jay writes. “They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.”
But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. With voucher programs facing termination in Washington, D.C., and heavy regulation in Milwaukee, the teachers unions have now set their sights on charter schools. Despite their proclamations about supporting charters, the actions of unions and their allies in state and national politics belie their rhetoric.
“Vouchers made the world safe for charters by drawing union fire,” Greene concludes. “But now that the unions have the voucher threat under control, charters are in trouble.”
Yesterday, Alfie Kohn; today Tony Wagner.
Jay Greene goes after the education guru on his blog and in an op-ed in the Northwest Arkansas Morning News. The Fayetteville Public School system has purchased 2,000 copies of Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap and is holding a series of public meetings, according to Greene, on how Wagner’s vision for 21st century skills ”might guide our schools.” Be afraid, says Jay. Be very afraid.
It’s hard to get people to think critically about people who push a focus on critical thinking. To be for critical thinking is like being for goodness and light. The tricky part is in how you get there. To the extent that Wagner has any concrete suggestions, he seems to be taking folks down the wrong path. He wants less emphasis on content and less testing. But he shows no evidence that higher levels of critical thinking can be found in places or at times when there was less content and less testing. In fact, the little evidence he does provide would suggest the opposite.
Joanne Jacobs weighs in as well, pointing to a Sandra Stotsky op-ed on Tony Wagner, and noting succinctly: “I don’t see excess knowledge as a big problem for today’s students.”
Cultural Literacy Bonus: Check out the illustration atop Jay’s blog post. It’s Bugs Bunny dressed as a Wagnerian Valkyrie from the cartoon, What’s Opera, Doc? Can you imagine a kid’s cartoon using Wagner’s Ring Cycle as the basis of a parody today? It’s a bromide to suggest that entertainment has been dumbed-down over time, but it’s hard not to notice the difference in the vocabulary of Mary Poppins, for example, or the Rex Harrison version of Doctor Doolittle compared to contemporary kids’ fare. Quantifying the change in cultural references and vocabulary level in children’s entertainment over the last 50 years or so would make for an interesting study, if it hasn’t already been done.
The school board in Jacksonville, Florida will decide next week whether to change the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School to Firestone High, stripping the name of the Confederate general off the majority African-American school.
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes, there’s been a backlash in the South against taking the name of Confederate leaders off of schools. However, Forrest made his fortune as a plantation owner and slave trader; his resume includes a role as an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1867, the newly formed Klan elected Forrest its honorary Grand Wizard or national leader, but publicly denied being involved. In 1869, he ordered the Klan to disband because of the members’ increasing violence. Two years later, a congressional investigation concluded his involvement had been limited to his attempt to disband it.
One wonders what Jay Greene would make of this. Jay famously made a study of school names that showed just how controversy-averse school naming has become. He discovered that more schools in Florida were named for manatees than George Washington.
Jay Greene wonders if school should be more like camp. At camp, Jay’s kids learn an enormous amount, including a large amount of traditional academic content. “But unlike school, the kids love it,” he notes. “Don’t get me wrong, they like school quite a bit — but they love camp. They love it even though they are made to do all sorts of challenging or sometimes unpleasant things that they rarely do at home. They have to do all of the cleaning, they serve and clear all of the meals, and they fold their own clothes. It can be broiling during the day and freezing at night. They help tend farm animals. They climb to the top of a high tower. They go for long hikes.”
How are these camps able to teach kids a lot, get them to work hard, and get the kids to love it, while schools struggle to do any of these things, Greene wonders, at a lower cost than the average public school? For starters, it’s all those young energetic counselors.
They don’t get paid very much but tend to be enthusiastic, bright, and energetic. Some will later be doctors or lawyers, but they are happy to be counselors for a few summers in the meantime. It’s easier to get talented people for low pay for a short time than for an entire career.
Hmmmm..
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