April 2008 Archives

April 30, 2008

Guest Blogger Sol Stern Weighs In on Social Justice Teaching

Sol Stern, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, responds both to my post and Bill Ayers's post on social justice teaching.

Thanks for posting my articles on social justice teaching and for being willing to open up this space for more discussion of what I regard as a retrograde education movement.

Unfortunately you [eduwonkette] avoid dealing with the harm done by this movement when you suggest that there’s really no “coherent and distinctive pedagogy that’s taught at schools of education across the country.” If you believe that, you’re somewhat out of touch with some of the biggest stars of the Ed schools. If you can stomach it, I suggest reading the works of Maxine Greene, Michael Apple, William Ayers, Peter McClaren, Carole Edelsky, Henry Giroux, Eric Guttstein, and their many epigones. Several years ago, David Steiner, presently the Dean of the education school at Hunter College, published a study of the syllabi of the basic “foundations of education” and “methods” courses in 16 of the nation’s most prestigious Ed schools. The mainstays of the foundations courses were works by Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux and Jonathan Kozol (who wrote one of the earliest manuals on how American teachers can sneak left wing social justice lessons into the classroom.) For the methods courses, Bill Ayers’s To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher tops the bestseller list. Among those education writers who are almost never included on course lists are advocates of a knowledge-based and politically neutral curriculum, such as E. D. Hirsch Jr. or Diane Ravitch.

You also minimize the problem by suggesting that even if it could be shown that social justice teaching was a significant part of the Ed schools’ agenda, “they largely have been unsuccessful.” I don’t know how we might measure success or failure in this regard. I do note that just two months ago, The Nation, always on the alert for signs of resurgent leftism in our civic institutions, celebrated the growth of the social justice education movement. In my City Journal articles I have cited numerous examples of New York City schools devoting their curriculums to social justice themes and have described specific units taught to children (including in elementary schools) that clearly fall under the rubric of political indoctrination. For example, the radical education group NYCoRE created a “Katrina curriculum” that has been piloted by one of the group’s leaders in the fourth grade of a Manhattan elementary school. The curriculum leaves nothing to chance, providing teachers with classroom prompts designed to illustrate the evils of American capitalism and imperialism. One section, called “Two Gulf Wars,” suggests posing such questions to the kids as: “Was the government unable to respond quickly to the crisis on the Gulf Coast because the money and personnel were all being used in Iraq?”

So it seems to me that the question isn’t precisely how widespread social justice teaching is right now (although more studies would be welcome) but rather what public school leaders – state education commissioners, teachers union leaders and district superintendents – might do to make sure that intrusion of left wing or right wing political ideology into the classroom doesn’t spread any further. We need a professional code of ethics for teachers, a Hippocratic Oath if you will, that makes clear that our public school classrooms are not laboratories for social and political change, with the kids serving as guinea pigs. Perhaps Stanley Fish put it best: “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or obedience or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or antinationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk show host.”

Unfortunately, in his recent New York Times column, Professor Fish somewhat hypocritically ignored his friend Bill Ayers’ blatant violations of this injunction. So it’s useful that Ayers surfaces here and proudly affirms that he is “in favor of teaching for social justice.” Still, he’s unusually reticent in this post and comes close to defining the social justice teaching he advocates as nothing more than mom and apple pie. He denies that he is out to indoctrinate students in left wing ideology. This is understandable, considering the current news cycle and the public tribulations of Ayers’ Hyde Park neighbor Barack Obama. I admire Ayers’s loyalty to Obama and his sense of political discipline (unlike Reverend Wright.) I assume that after November 8th we will be getting the full, unexpurgated Bill Ayers again. In the meantime I offer a few more snippets from Ayers academic corpus:

For a course called “Social Conflicts of the 1960’s” Ayers posted his introduction to his collection of Weather Underground agitprop —called, with no intended parody, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974. “Once things were connected,” Ayers’s introduction recollects, “we saw a system at work, we were radicalized, we named that system—imperialism—and forged an idea of how to overthrow it.” If this isn’t an attempt at indoctrinating students, I don’t know what would qualify for that characterization. Similarly, Ayers offers these comments about the role of K-12 teachers for his course on Urban Education: “Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression—we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things. We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.” So, not only should public school teachers be working to overcome racism and oppression in Chicago but they should be advocating for the “children of Palestine.” Considering that Ayers’ website includes rants against Israel and Zionism, we can just imagine what he means by that exhortation. And here is the entire required reading list for that same Urban Education course:

- Freedom School Curriculum (Distributed in class).
- Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000.
- bell hooks. Teaching to Transgress, Routledge, 1994.
- William Ayers. Teaching Toward Freedom, Beacon Press, 2004.
- William Ayers, Pat Ford. City Kids, City Teachers, New Press, 1996.

Now that’s real intellectual diversity. No left wing ideology, no indoctrination here. Perhaps Professor Ayers’ Urban Education course answers Eduwonkette’s question about whether “teaching for social justice involves a particular pedagogical approach?"

Posted by at 5:42 PM | Permalink | 49 Comments | Recommend

April 30, 2008

Guest Blogger Bill Ayers on Social Justice Teaching

I asked Bill Ayers, Professor of Education at the University of Illinois - Chicago, to weigh in on teaching for social justice. You can read his blog here.

It’s hard to know what Sol Stern is worked up about. He quotes me exactly once, urging new teachers to work to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and…be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”

In spite of the ellipses, and in spite of the fact that this is a tiny excerpt from a syllabus for a class I taught to masters level students, it makes sense—all great teaching, after all, comes back to the twin goals of human enlightenment and human freedom. Whether “teaching underprivileged children to read” or teaching history or physics to graduate students, education involves a search for truth through evidence and argument, and teaching at its best allows students to become more powerful and more purposeful, more informed and intelligent, more aware and more ecstatically free in their projects and their pursuits. That’s teaching.

Stern repeats several times that I want to “indoctrinate students” and turn classrooms into “laboratories of revolutionary change.” Not true, not even close. He claims that I want to “promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms,” and that my work is based on the idea that “the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony.” Not true, not true. He offers no accompanying quote or citation, which is a little odd since he states that it’s a “major theme.”

The one true assertion he makes about my actual work—and he repeats it several times—is that I am in favor of teaching for social justice. He never explains why that’s a bad thing—Stern favors teaching for social injustice?—but simply calls it the “social-justice teaching agenda.”

So a brief word on schools and social justice: all schools serve the societies in which they’re embedded—authoritarian schools serve authoritarian systems, apartheid schools serve an apartheid society, and so on. Practically all schools want their students to study hard, stay away from drugs, do their homework, and so on. In fact none of these features distinguishes schools in the old Soviet Union or fascist Germany from schools in a democracy. But in a democracy one would expect something more—a commitment to free inquiry, questioning, and participation; a push for access and equity; a curriculum that encouraged free thought and independent judgment; a standard of full recognition of the humanity of each individual. In other words, social justice.

Posted by at 12:06 AM | Permalink | 15 Comments | Recommend

April 29, 2008

What is Social Justice Teaching, Anyway?

The blogosphere never passes up an opportunity to swing at an education professor (see Still a Public Menace and Bill Ayers is Worse Than a Terrorist. He’s an Ed School Professor for representative headlines.) After reading Sol Stern’s article about Bill Ayers, I was still unclear about what “social justice teaching” actually means, and he kindly pointed me to his previous work that provides concrete examples (see here, here, and here).

As I understand it, Stern’s argument about “social justice teaching” has four parts:

1) Education school professors have indoctrinated their students to “teach for social justice.” As a result, social justice teaching is widespread in our schools.

2) Social justice teaching involves feeding “left-wing, anti-American ideology” to students across the curriculum.

3) Social justice teaching reflects a pedagogical approach grounded in the work of Paolo Freire, which rejects the “banking” approach to education and is radically student-centered.

4) Social justice teaching does not impart usable skills or knowledge and thus deprives poor and minority children of the opportunity to succeed.

Regarding Stern’s first point, I question whether “teaching for social justice” has one meaning. Like the terms social capital, globalization, and neoliberalism, social justice teaching means many things to many people. Many Teach for America corps members have social justice motivations for teaching; the leaders of Democracy Prep Charter School in Harlem, which turned its kids loose to remind adults to vote on primary day, may also see their approach as “teaching for social justice.” In short, it’s not clear that “social justice teaching” is a coherent and distinctive pedagogy that’s taught at schools of education across the country . It’s also worth noting that teachers are relatively conservative. If education schools have been engaged in an active project to disseminate social justice teaching, they largely have been unsuccessful.

Second, I agree with Stern that some projects flying under the flag of social justice cross the line of political neutrality in the classroom. In my view, social and political issues have a rightful place in the classroom; Stern and I likely disagree on this point. However, lessons that lead students to the “right” answer on politically contested issues cross the line. For example, this abstract from the Radical Math conference does not imply that there is one right answer to these economic questions:

This session will focus on how financial literacy and justice topics can be incorporated into the math classroom. These topics include calculating the true cost of rent-to-own stores, comparing check cashers versus banks or credit unions, understanding credit card offers, and assessing the benefits and dangers of tax refund loans. Using these day-to-day examples not only prepares students for real-life math but also enables discussion around broader economic justice issues that particularly affect low-income communities and neighborhoods of color, including redlining, community reinvestment, and income inequality.

On the other hand, projects with titles like, “Using Mathematics as a Weapon in the Struggle for Social Justice: Free the Jena Six!” (also from the Radical Math conference) do suggest one right answer. But framed differently, this project is a benign mainstay of statistics problem sets: if chosen at random, what is the probability that x jurors would be white?

Third, it is not clear to me that teaching for social justice involves a particular pedagogical approach. Wouldn’t KIPP teachers claim to be teaching for social justice?

Finally, to Stern’s claim that social justice teaching robs poor kids of a good education: it is impossible to know whether this is the case. To the extent that these projects engage disengaged kids and prepare them to participate in our democracy, they don’t. To the extent that they supplant the teaching of skills that kids need to be successful, they do.

Rather than focusing on whether education schools eat children and kill puppies, I would like to hear more from opponents and proponents of social justice teaching about 1) whether controversial social issues have a rightful place in K-12 classrooms, and 2) what general guidelines we might endorse for these projects.

Posted by at 1:26 PM | Permalink | 15 Comments | Recommend

April 28, 2008

skoolboy says: Some of My Best Friends are Psychometricians, But...

Deborah Meier added a comment to the end of the value-added thread from last week. (Thanks for stopping by eduwonkette's blog, Deb!) Her point is too important to overlook. She writes that standardized tests of reading proficiency are only loosely correlated with good reading habits—i.e., that a student can score well on a test of reading proficiency without demonstrating the habits of mind that could enable him or her to engage in a critical discussion of a text. Meier also writes that we do not have tests that measure "the more significant intellectually sound habits of heart and mind fundamental to being a well-educated member of society. The capacity to confront a phenomenon of interest in ways that help one best understand it, and then to make use of the knowledge acquired, is surely more important than being able to guess the one out of four 'best answer.'"

She's absolutely right, in my view. Preparing children and youth to be citizens in a democracy is a critical purpose of schooling. eduwonkette has written that there's a lot to schooling that can't possibly be measured by standardized tests – I think my favorite line is from the title of a post in January riffing on New York City's "Thank a Teacher" nomination process, "They Never Say, 'Thanks for Improving My Test Scores!'" – but it's easy to fall into the trap of treating the current testing regime as the natural order of things.

We need to be mindful that public schooling is now what institutional analysts such as Pat Burch call an organizational field, with lots of actors influencing our definitions of schooling and its outcomes, including textbook publishers, testing firms, test-prep firms, and a variety of other commercial entities. Lots of commercial enterprises and non-profits owe their livelihood to public education, and are engaged in an ongoing project to shape our definitions of "real school."

Testing is big business in the U.S. Non-profits such as the Educational Testing Service and ACT have annual gross revenues approaching $900 million and $400 million, respectively. ETS's K-12 testing operation had gross revenues of $172 million in their 2006 IRS filings. On the for-profit side, Pearson Education had gross revenues worldwide of $4.6 billion in 2006, with $600 million in adjusted operating profit. Their annual report crowed of a "healthy outlook in school testing underpinned by 2005 contract wins with a lifetime value of $700m (including Texas, Virginia, Michigan and Minnesota)." McGraw-Hill Education had revenues of $2.7 billion in 2007, with operating profit of $400 million.

With this much money, and more, at stake, you can bet that there are ongoing projects to define tests and testing as the appropriate way of defining what counts as good education. They tap into a logic that defines the modern world as increasingly rational, and society as a collection of individuals with increasingly differentiated roles, identities and personal preferences.

I'm not sure what the right approach is to counter all of this. At one point, I thought that giving politicians, educators and parents vivid representations of good teaching and good learning –e.g., videos, or portfolios--would be sufficient to persuade them that test scores don't come close to capturing what we aspire to in public education. But I haven't seen that strategy be successful. Preaching to the choir isn't going to do it – we need to find a way to put people in the pews. Readers, do you have ideas?

Posted by at 8:42 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend

April 25, 2008

Name Fordham's Boy Band!

Watch these videos, and tell me these guys won't give Justin Timberlake a run for his money. But they need a catchy moniker. My picks: Checker and the Finns, The Alarmists, or Milli Petrilli.

Update: The name to beat is "Rage Against the Rothstein."

(From left to right, Liam Julian, Mike Petrilli, and Checker Finn. No pics available for Coby Loup.)

Posted by at 12:03 AM | Permalink | 13 Comments | Recommend

April 24, 2008

New Facebook Friends Waiting for the Madame

Rumor has it that Madame Secretary is cooking up a Facebook page. Facebook addict skoolboy tipped me off to the "Get Rid of Margaret Spellings" Facebook group. Their mission:

They're 10 members strong - 6 hail from a high school in Durango, Colorado.

Posted by at 11:16 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

April 24, 2008

A Closer Look at Violence in Chicago

Last weekend, 36 people were shot in Chicago, and 13 of the victims were Chicago Public Schools students. This school year alone, more than 20 CPS students have been fatally shot. Looking towards the future, Mayor Daley dispensed this soothing advice to parents: "What we're asking parents to do is know where your children are. It's going to be a long summer, and parents better capture this responsibility."

What do trends in weapon-carrying and fighting among teenagers in Chicago look like? I pulled data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which surveys American high school students every 2 years and includes a representative sample of Chicago students. What emerges is a mixture of good and bad news - the long-term trends are generally positive, but the overall levels of violence are astoundingly high.

The first graph below shows the percentage of students carrying a weapon to school in the last thirty days, as well as the percentage of students carrying a weapon overall, from 1991-2005 (the in-school numbers aren't available until 1993). The percentage of students who carried a weapon in the last 30 days declined substantially from 1991-2005: 44% of boys and 23% of girls had done so in 1991, but these numbers fell to 22% for boys and 16% for girls by 2005. Despite this decline, that's a lot of kids carrying weapons. Perhaps more positively, in 2005, only 5% of students had carried a weapon to school in the past 30 days. (It feels so wrong to say only when 1 in 20 students is carrying a weapon.)

Though most weapon carrying is happening outside of school, tightening up school security by adding security cameras and more officers appears to be a key response to recent shootings in Chicago. Anti-violence groups contend that violence in schools remains a major problem, even though none of the recent shootings have occurred in schools. Gary Slutkin, the executive director of a group called Cease Fire, said in the Post article linked above, "Violence in the schools is ongoing," Slutkin said. "It's not just the deaths. It's the kids beaten until they have seizures. It's the fights on buses with bats and knives.

The next graph, which displays the percentage of students in physical fights in school and overall in the past 12 months, suggests that Slutkin has a good point. The percentage of students who fought in school has remained stable for boys and inched up slightly for girls; in 2005, 18% of girls and 22% of boys fought in school in the last year. But if we consider fights outside of school as well, more than 1 in 3 Chicago girls (39%) and almost 1 in 2 Chicago boys (47%) fought in the last year.

So do Chicago students feel safe? Fewer students report that they stayed home from school because they felt unsafe in school or on their way to or from school in 2005 - but 1 in 10 students still reported staying home for safety reasons.

What long-term effects can we expect from this wave of violence in Chicago? This Science paper, "Firearm Violence Exposure and Serious Violent Behavior," provides some insight. The authors analyzed data from Chicago, and argued that there is a causal relationship between exposure to firearm violence and subsequent perpetration of serious violence. The effects were quite large - "exposure to firearm violence approximately doubles the probability that an adolescent will perpetrate serious violence over the subsequent 2 years."

Education bloggers (present company included) spill a lot of ink over the smallest details of accountability plans, but it's important to remember that this is the context in which our schools are working. Community problems inevitably seep into schools, and the interventions that we spend the most time talking about do little to help kids manage the emotional toll of these events.

Posted by at 12:41 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

April 23, 2008

On Graduate Student Unions

I broke a few hearts with my take on graduate student unions. Mike Antonucci, who desperately wanted to out me as Randi Weingarten or Reg Weaver, probably won't be able to crawl out of bed tomorrow. (But Leo, this is what the Walmart-sponsored anti-union flag really looks like.) So let me say a few words on this issue, and since my heels aren't deeply dug in about it, invite you to convince me that I'm wrong.

I don't have new angles to offer on the worker versus student question. Nonetheless, it strikes me that just as aspiring teachers must student teach to complete their degree requirements (performing the same job as other employees), graduate students are also students, not workers. (There are arguably many differences between student teachers and grad students as well, as I'm sure someone will point out.) The central purpose of graduate school is to train students to become professors, and part of that training involves learning to teach. Here's the other side of the coin from FACE talk, a new AFT higher ed blog:

Beyond the legal and institutional definitions, the argument that graduate teaching and research assistants are students, not employees, and that their work is training as part of their student experience is problematic on at least two levels. First, graduate employees are responsible for a critical university function: undergraduate education. To suggest that they are not qualified to teach courses, run discussion groups, lead labs, etc.--that is, that they are untrained apprentices who should not be considered employees--is both demeaning and contradictory....Second, the notion that employees learn on the job should not affect their employee status....they are still considered employees from the moment they begin providing a service to an employer in exchange for wages.

Unrelated to the student vs. worker issue - the claim that graduate student unions will address the problem of contingent labor in higher ed hasn't borne much fruit in public universities with unions, has it?

That's all I've got for tonight. Readers, take it from here.

Posted by at 12:47 AM | Permalink | 26 Comments | Recommend

April 22, 2008

Yin and Yang! A New Blog to Cheer About

There is balance and order in the world. Following Fordham and Jay Greene, Sara Goldrick-Rab (University of Wisconsin - Madison higher ed extraordinaire) and Liam Goldrick-Rab (New Teacher Center) have started a new blog.

Update: Wow! See Sara's terrific post on the problems with the policy recs in Ed Sector's college graduation rate report.

Posted by at 9:54 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

April 21, 2008

Matrix Algebra Miscellany

1) Really Good Discussion About Policymaking & Value-Added: Down there in the comments. Come and put in your two cents, and also check out the AFT's take and Nancy Flanagan's post on assessing teachers. If you're tired of this thread, head over to one commenter's unrelated op-ed in USA Today about A Nation At Risk.

2) Matrix Algebra: After the keg runs dry, they play all kinds of party games at the Education Next editorial board meetings. Apparently, the boys lacking the vim and vigor to win a round of duck-duck-goose get pinched into starting blogs. Between Flypaper and Jay Greene, I can't respond to every post that makes my face twitch (see allegorical clip below) - though Mike Petrilli and I are on the same page about graduate student unions. Welcome to the block, guys.

Posted by at 9:55 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

April 20, 2008

skoolboy on: The Status of the Status Quo in Education Policy

Over at The Quick and the Ed, one of the many house organs of Education Sector, Kevin Carey is conducting a serial monologue belittling eduwonkette as an “alleged social scientist.” “Alleged”? Yeah, I’ll allege it – eduwonkette is a social scientist. It’s not an epithet, as much as Carey might believe; to some of us, it’s a way of life.

What’s the latest bee in Carey’s bonnet? It’s eduwonkette’s contention that particular value-added assessment systems for evaluating teacher performance are not ready for prime time. Carey views the claim that a particular policy alternative has identifiable flaws as tantamount to embracing a status quo that is demonstrably flawed. Public education clearly isn’t working, he argues. Therefore, any policy alternative to the status quo is to be preferred. Anyone who raises caveats about any kind of change is just an apologist for the status quo, a weasel, and probably a bed-wetter too.

The problem, Carey opines, is that social scientists such as eduwonkette – wait a minute, is she a social scientist or not? – have unrealistic standards for evaluating policy alternatives. “The standard in public policy isn't 95%,” he writes, “ it's whatever is most likely to be best: 51%. “ I’m not sure what the 95% refers to here, but most policy analysts I know are in the business of trying to recommend a policy alternative based on multiple criteria: the likely consequences of the alternative for various desirable outcomes; its cost; its feasibility and sustainability; its consistency with public values; and the likelihood of successful implementation. The hard reality is that there often isn’t a very strong evidence base for making these judgments, and policy analysts have to consider a range of possible outcomes along these criteria (a confidence interval that expresses the uncertainty about what might happen), and confront the tradeoffs, because invariably no single policy alternative looks best across all of these criteria. Simply having a good big idea—choice, accountability, charters, vouchers, whatever—isn’t enough to carry the day, because the devil of public policy is in the details. The world of policy analysis is littered with examples of good ideas that were implemented poorly, and thus did not have the desired effects—even though they were very costly initiatives.

For this reason, scholars of policy analysis (e.g., Eugene Bardach of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley) almost always recommend considering allowing present trends to continue undisturbed as one of a set of policy alternatives intended to address a problem condition. Enacting an alternative that costs more than the current approach and doesn’t work is arguably worse than the status quo.

As for value-added assessment systems for evaluating teacher performance, we need to consider particular policy alternatives to the status quo in particular settings, not the big idea of value-added assessment for evaluating teacher performance (which both eduwonkette and I agree is promising.) If I can return to the New York City case which eduwonkette has discussed at length, the one new issue with regard to policy analysis that I’d like to introduce is feasibility and sustainability. It’s my opinion—and I’m not a lawyer, just an alleged social scientist—that the New York City approach, which defines 50% of a particular teacher’s effectiveness on the basis of how that teacher’s students do in other teachers’ classes over which the teacher has no control, would not survive a legal challenge. Other policy analysts might disagree, and might therefore be more favorably disposed towards this particular alternative. Either way, though, good policy analysis considers feasibility and sustainability as important criteria in evaluating policy alternatives.

Posted by at 10:20 PM | Permalink | 32 Comments | Recommend

April 17, 2008

The Upper West Side Relief Act of 2008 (Or: More on Gifted Admissions in NYC)

Upper West Side kids face obstacles, folks - sometimes there are two Bugaboo strollers blocking their path to the Elephant Playground at 76rd and Riverside. Joel Klein recognized their struggle against adversity, and gently tweaked the gifted and talented admissions rules to open the door of opportunity for all (Manhattan) kids.

Make no mistake - NYC's poorer community school districts lost out under the new gifted and talented admissions process. On Monday, I discussed the change in gifted seats by district, but some readers asked for the overall percentage of kids in each district that are classified as gifted.

Let's look at the numbers for this school year first. We see that some districts, like Brooklyn's District 22 or the Upper West Side's District 3, have very high proportions of students in the entry grade classified as gifted (23.8% and 13.8%, respectively). On the other end, East Harlem's District 4 and the South Bronx's District 7 have no students in the entry grade classified as gifted.

Percentage of Students Classified as Gifted and Talented in Entry Grade, 2007

I then estimated the percentage of students that will be classified as gifted in the entry grade if all students matriculated in gifted programs. These estimates are necessarily imprecise in two ways - first, because all students will not enroll in NYC gifted programs and thus we will overestimate gifted populations in districts with high private school sending rates, and second, because the true cohort size is not available, so the best we can do is use this year's cohort size as the denominator. Caveats aside, these estimates do offer insight into the effects of the new gifted policy.

What we see in the map below is that Districts 2 and 3 in Manhattan have especially large increases in the proportion of students classified as gifted - from 13.8 to 22.3% in District 3 and from 7.1 to 15.2% in District 2. Hence, the Upper West Side/Manhattan Relief Act of 2008. And as expected, the districts with higher proportions of free lunch kids have fewer kids classified as gifted in both 2007 and 2008, but many of these districts fall further back because of the GT policy change. (See Robert Pondiscio's post for implications.)

Percentage of Students Classified as Gifted and Talented in Entry Grade, 2008

You can find the full figures for 2007 and 2008 below. Overall, the big winner in entry grade seats is Manhattan, and Brooklyn and the Bronx lost the most.

On behalf of all Manhattan residents, I'd like to thank the Department of Education for helping us pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. It's rough out here!

Percentage of Students Classified as Gifted and Talented, 2007 and 2008

Posted by at 11:22 AM | Permalink | 9 Comments | Recommend

April 17, 2008

Did School Integration Really Do Much Good?

Alexander Russo asks the title question (which makes PREA Prez mad), and here's one answer:

There have always been multiple justifications for desegregation - among the most cited are 1) separate schools will always have resource inequalities, and 2) social interaction in the early years can spur social integration later on.

What were the effects of desegregation on its intended beneficiaries - black students - and if these effects were positive, what mechanisms explain these effects? Sarah Reber, a UCLA economist, wanted to know, too. In this important paper, she found the following:

In Louisiana, substantial reductions in segregation between 1965 and 1970 were accompanied by large increases in per-pupil funding. This additional funding was used to "level up" school spending in integrated schools to the level previously experienced only in the white schools...the increase in funding associated with desegregation was more important than the increased exposure to whites. A simple cost-benefit calculation suggests that the additional school spending was more than offset by higher earnings due to increased educational attainment...the results of this paper are consistent with earlier work suggesting that desegregation improved educational attainment for blacks and sheds new light on the potential mechanism behind this improvement in Louisiana: increased funding for blacks' schools.

Funding is one mechanism, but teachers are another. At AEFA last weekend, Sunny Ladd presented a new paper on teacher working conditions, in which the outcome of interest was teachers' intent to leave the school. She found that net of working conditions in the building, teachers were more likely to express intent to leave in schools with higher proportions of African-American students. This finding is also buttressed by a huge literature on how teachers' decisions about where to work are shaped by the racial composition of the school. It is simply more difficult to attract teachers to schools with high proportions of African-American students.

If you're interested in the non-cognitive side of this issue, check out this study by Amy Stuart Wells. (See her report "How Desegregation Changed Us.")

Posted by at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 16, 2008

Guest Blogger Mike Klonsky Part II: Deb Meier’s Innovation Became Bloomberg’s Bulldozer

Mike Klonsky is back with the second half of his guest post. His first post can be found here.

Public school reform could not help but be affected by power and influence of the Ownership Society Anschluss that went full-tilt at all public space, including public schooling, eight years ago.

Deb Meier, reflecting on her early notions of small schools, posted this on her blog:

I thought small schools was one reform no one could do harm with… I saw them as representing new ideas and new relationships between the constituents to schooling. I thought of Ted Sizer's little Parker School in Fort Devons, Mass, and a half dozen other little schools I immediately loved. I forgot about the little independent bookstores in my neighborhood that have been replaced by the Barnes and Nobles of the world.

But when the small-schools movement that she helped launch in the ‘70s met up with the Ownership Society and its top-down strategy for urban school reform, it became clear to many of us that we had to take a fresh look our own change strategies. As Jessica Siegel wrote in the Village Voice: “…what for Meier was an innovation has become, for Klein and Bloomberg, a bulldozer.”

In the last chapter, we offer some strategic and tactical ideas about public school reform and how we can work to both save and transform public education. They include an analysis of the role of teacher unions, and building opposition to NCLB’s testing mania and privatized school management. A key piece in all of this is community organization and fighting to keep public schools public.

And a new study funded by the Annenberg Institute seems to back us up on that. It finds:

-Organizing is helping to expand the capacity of urban public schools to provide a successful earning environment.

-Organizing is contributing to higher student educational outcomes.

-Organizing is helping to expand equity and school capacity in historically underserved communities through targeted district- and state-level policy and resource interventions.

So, in the words of the old labor agitator, Mother Jones: “Don’t mourn. Organize.”

Thanks again to Eduwonkette for letting me guest blog and I hope you will read our book.

Posted by at 9:28 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 16, 2008

What Can Other Professions Teach Us about Evaluation and Accountability in Education?

In a very productive exchange, Dean Millot and Corey Bower have been contemplating the professional status of education. Dean's most recent post, "Why Legally Recognized Professionalism is Necessary to Reasonable Teacher Accountability," is one of the best think pieces I've read in some time. Read the whole thing, but here's the central theme of the post:

Lawyers and doctors are not punished for undesired outcomes; they are accountable for doing what professionals should do given their client’s circumstances....As a legally recognized profession, teacher conduct would be judged by teachers, according to standards of educational care devised by teachers, applied to the client circumstances in question.

Dean's post links well with AEFA conference talks by Randi Weingarten and Richard Rothstein last weekend. Weingarten also drew on the medical metaphor to argue that "teachers are physicians of the mind." In her view, there is a difference between the most skilled physician and a miracle worker. Just as the best hospitals can't solve public health crises on their own, Weingarten argued that, "schools cannot beat back all personal, social, and economic challenges that kids have." In an op-ed last week, she also endorsed a professional standard similar to that proposed by Dean:

[Teachers] should be assessed on how they use test scores and other data to adjust their teaching to help students improve....The approach is akin to judging doctors on how they use the results of blood tests, X-rays, and the like to prescribe a course of treatment.

In his talk, Rothstein drew on the experience of more fields than I can name (business, medicine, public works, etc). Despite many leaders' calls for education to mimic the private sector, Rothstein's review concluded that "private sector performance incentives rely primarily on subjective evaluations, not easily corrupted quantitative measurements." The central theme of the talk was that systems of measurement distort the processes they are intended to measure. The paper on which the talk is based - "Holding Accountability to Account: How Scholarship and Experience in Other Fields Inform Exploration of Performance Incentives in Education" - is a comparative/historical tour de force, and a must read if you're interested in the evaluation question.

Blog posts without positions generally fall on their face, but I still have more questions than answers about Dean's proposal. Here are the two questions I'm pondering:

* How do the processes of diagnosis, inference, and treatment in education differ from those in medicine and law, and what are the implications of these differences for "professional accountability?"

* How does the state of our knowledge about educational diagnosis and treatment differ from that in other professions?

Posted by at 12:39 AM | Permalink | 5 Comments | Recommend

April 15, 2008

Guest Blogger Mike Klonsky: The Small Schools Movement Meets the Ownership Society

We're well into Small Schools 2.0, which makes it an opportune time to reflect on the similarities and differences between the two small school reform waves. Joining us to discuss this issue is Mike Klonsky, author of a new book on small school reform and the blog Small Talk.

Thanks to Eduwonkette for inviting me in as a guest blogger to talk about our new book, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society. She hasn’t told me yet how much $$$ I have to kick back her way. Just put it on my tab, 'Kette.

Susan Klonsky and I write from the perspective of long-time educators and school activists who were heavily influenced by democratic schooling (and de-schooling) movements in the ‘60s, including the Freedom Schools and Citizenship Schools that were central to the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the ‘60s.

The early small schools efforts in New York, Philly, and Chicago were filled with much of the same transformational spirit and sense of purpose. Mainly created by rebel teachers and supported by community-based organizations, the early small schools, beginning with Deb Meier’s Central Park East in 1974, had the potential to be much more than replicable models of corporate-type restructuring (in the Starbucks sense). For us, they were primarily ways to engage whole school communities in the education of children.

Many of the new small schools were democratically run and focused on making kids more visible and on building a professional community of teachers. Even the early charter schools that followed, pioneered by progressive thinkers like Ted Kolderie, Ted Sizer, Joe Nathan, Albert Shanker and Ray Budde, looked nothing like today’s chains of Edison and KIPP schools. Words like autonomy and choice didn’t mean what they mean now under the Bloomberg/Klein reforms in N.Y. or Daley/Duncan Renaissance 2010 in Chicago. Autonomy meant teachers would have more power over their teaching/learning environments and be freed up from stupid rules, while choice meant expanding choices and options within local schools for students with diverse interests and ways of learning.

Our book tells the story about what happened when that movement ran head-long into the "Ownership Society" (to use George Bush’s own campaign slogan) with its penchant for eroding public space in favor on shock-and-awe privatization, standardization, and school closings. The early small schools visionaries couldn’t have imagined their efforts to create a critical and innovative force within public education being taken over by corporate-type school operators and program vendors. They wouldn’t have dreamed of chains of small schools, bankrolled by the world’s richest men—schools actively excluding ELL kids or students with disabilities for the first two to three years.

How could this have happened? Is there a way out of the quagmire? More on this to follow.

Posted by at 2:26 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

April 14, 2008

More Signs of the Apocalypse!

Here's my take on the New York tenure law discussion going on around the blogs:

1) The backdoor process was unsavory, and now threatens to displace an important discussion about the limits of value-added measures in New York. Sherman Dorn offers some fertile thoughts on the process issue. Also worth noting that last week's outragists were hardly outraged about the secrecy surrounding NYC's teacher experiment.

2) Critics would do well to separate the likely effects of this law from their unhappiness with the process. Consider Robert Gordon's post, which interprets the law's effects as follows:

This means that in deciding whether to give a teacher a presumptive right to teach for 30+ years, a principal may not consider evidence of whether the teacher is helping students learn. The principal can consider whether the teacher maintains neat bulletin boards, whether the teacher attends meetings on how to pay for pencils, and whether the teacher is sufficiently deferential in the hallway. But the principal may not consider, based on achievement data, whether children are learning.

Do classroom observations provide no "evidence of whether the teacher is helping students learn?" Value-added measures, after all, are simply a proxy for student learning, and observations also provide proxy data on student learning. Gordon assumes that principals cannot identify teachers with especially low value-added in the absence of test score data. But if value-added measures mean anything, very low performers should be getting poor subjective evaluations too. It turns out that principals are actually pretty good at identifying teachers with low value-added based on subjective evaluations (see this post). If a teacher is a consistent low performer, the three admissable forms of evidence in tenure decisions - 1) observations, 2) peer review, and 3) an evaluation of how teachers use data to inform instruction - already provide lots of information about how teachers affect student learning.

3) To my knowledge, no one has provided a viable technical solution to the middle of the year testing issue. Given existing problems with value-added and the added complication of midyear testing dates, it would be wildly irresponsible to put these measures into place in NY without further study.

If you want new reasons (not related to testing dates) to sweat about the fallibility of value-added, check out this paper, which was presented last weekend at AEFA by Tim Sass (in collaboration with RAND's J.R. Lockwood and Dan McCaffrey). They looked at the year-to-year stability of value-added estimates in Florida, and found that it's often the case that teachers who are in the bottom 20% of value-added estimates in one year are not in the bottom 20% the next year. In Broward County, only 41.4% of teachers who were in the bottom 20% in one year were in the bottom 20% the next year, too. In Orange County, only 31.7% of the teachers who were in the bottom 20% in one year were also there the next year!

Update: Robert Gordon cherrypicks a finding from the Jacob and Lefgren paper to make his point. Perhaps if he'd read beyond the abstract and looked at the magnitude of the value-added advantage over principal ratings in predicting future student achievement (a whopping .036 SD in reading and .074 SD in math), he would realize that all is not lost. And again, this minuscule value-added advantage is coming from the middle of the distribution, not the top and bottom - and the bottom is the relevant issue in tenure decisions. From the same paper:

While value-added measures of teacher effectiveness generally do a better job at predicting future student achievement than principal ratings, the two measures do about equally well in identifying the best and worst teachers. With regard to parent satisfaction, we find that a principal’s overall rating of a teacher is a substantially better predictor of future parent requests for that teacher than either the teacher’s experience, education and current compensation or the teacher’s value-added achievement measure.

Moreover, what kind of predictive advantage can we expect inaccurate/noisy value-added estimates to have over principals' evaluations?

Posted by at 10:52 PM | Permalink | 10 Comments | Recommend

April 14, 2008

With New Gifted and Talented Rules, Who Wins and Loses?

"Today, there’s limited access to gifted and talented education in some districts. The opposite is true in other districts. We want to create universal opportunity—and dramatically increase the numbers of students testing for, and hopefully entering, gifted and talented programs."

-Joel Klein, October 29, 2007 Press Release

This fall, New York City adopted a uniform system for gifted and talented admissions. Educational equity, we were told, was the reason for this reform; New York City has long operated a decentralized network of gifted programs, and the conventional wisdom is that more affluent community districts had more than their fair share of these programs. Tapping into this debate, Joel Klein framed his reform as a mechanism to increase access to poor and minority kids.

Last week, the Department of Education released the number of kids qualifying for gifted and talented programs by community school district (those scoring at or above the 90th percentile on the OLSAT and Bracken School Readiness Assesment qualified). The DOE did not release socioeconomic or demographic breakdowns, but one way to get at the equity question is to look at which districts won and lost under the new system.

Did poor kids gain ground? The graph below, which plots the percent change in the number of students offered gifted seats in the entry grades against the percentage of students qualifying for free lunch in the district suggests that the answer is no. On average, districts with higher proportions of poor kids saw declines in gifted admissions. Districts above the red line gained seats, while those below the red line lost seats.

Percent%20change%20GT%20Seats%20vs.%20Free%20Lunch.png

Here's a closer look: in Washington Heights' District 6, 80 students are currently enrolled in kindergarten G&T classes, but only 50 have been offered seats next year. In Manhattan's more advantaged District 2, 174 students are enrolled in G&T kindergarten this year, but 371 have been offered seats for next year. District 3, which includes the Upper West Side, saw increases from 192 to 310 students. In District 9 in the South Bronx, the number of seats declined from 37 to 11. (Footnote: It's possible that admitted students in more advantaged districts will enroll in private school at higher rates, so the gains may not be as pronounced as they appear here. With available data, we can only compare the number of students admitted for fall 2008 with those enrolled this year. Also, my free lunch numbers are from the 2005 School Report Cards; please point me to more recent data if you know where to find it!)

If we cut the data by the percentage of African-American students in the district, we also see that many districts with high proportions of black students lost ground.

Percent%20change%20GT%20Seats%20vs.%20Black.png

Yet the Department of Education continues to swagger about how many more students were tested. Yes, the number of students tested in all districts increased, and we see larger increases in high poverty districts.

But parents in disadvantaged districts have not been complaining about their kids' lack of opportunity to take an admissions test, but their lack of access to programs for more advanced students. Families in New York City's poorest districts face disadvantages that make them less likely to reach the 90th percentile on a national assessment, but the highest achieving students in these districts could still benefit from enriched instruction.

If we want to increase access to advanced instruction for disadvantaged kids who are more advanced than their peers, we might consider offering gifted slots to the top 5% of students in each community school district, while also guaranteeing a seat for any student who scores in the 90th percentile or above of the national distribution. This is analagous to states' top 4% (California) or top 10% (Texas) plans for college admissions, which guarantee college admission to students who have excelled in their own high schools. What do you think, readers?

Preview: I've also put together tables on the proportion of students applying to and qualifying for gifted and talented programs in each district, and will post these tables later this week.

Posted by at 12:11 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend

April 11, 2008

Finally, Credit Recovery Uncovered by NY Times

To close observers of the NYC system, the "credit recovery" story is old news. But this burgeoning phenomenon had received scant media attention until Elissa Gootman turned in this important NYT article linking credit recovery to the mounting pressure to increase graduation rates by any means necessary.

For the uninitiated, credit recovery involves "letting those who lack credits make them up by means other than retaking a class or attending traditional summer school." This often involves completing a project which demonstrates "mastery" of the course. I've seen projects ranging from a packet of math problems to a 5-page "term paper," and Gootman also identified similar patterns in NYC high schools:

In interviews, teachers or principals at more than a dozen schools said the programs ranged from five-day crunch sessions over school breaks, to interactive computer programs culminating in an online test, to independent study packets — and varied in quality.

Klein argues there's no evidence that credit recovery has become more prevalent in recent years. But the incentives for schools to push students through (or to transfer them out before they count against the school) have grown with the adoption of NYC's report cards and funder-driven graduation targets for the small schools.

When a simple system tries to regulate an issue as complex as graduation rates, you end up with unintended consequences. Hopefully Madame Secretary will consider NYC's experience with credit recovery as she contemplates graduation rate measures and targets.

Posted by at 1:42 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

April 10, 2008

Quotes of the Day

This afternoon, Randi Weingarten was the keynote speaker at the opening session of the annual meetings of the American Education Finance Association. More detail on the talk later, but here are three quotable quotes in the meantime:

"What drives me crazy is that there is so much disinformation and downright hostility towards teachers these days. The fact that they get scapegoated so much is a huge disservice to society."

"The vast accounting trick [of current educational accountability systems] sooner or later will implode and leave the shareholders - the public - holding an empty bag."

"Education used to have the fad of the month - now we have the fad of the Chancellor."

Posted by at 8:31 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

April 09, 2008

After NY's Teacher Tenure Law, Blogosphere Plays Union Pinata

That's what I get for predicting that the big ed news of the week would be Mario Chalmers' shot. The NY legislature has put a two year hold on the use of test scores for teacher tenure decisions, and will convene a commission to study the issue in the meantime. First, check out these links to Joel Klein's op-ed, Randi Weingarten's op-ed, the NY Times article, and the NY Post article.

Neither policymakers nor the public understands the complexity of estimating value-added models, so I preferred educating lawmakers and the public about what conditions would have to be in place to validly use these measures to nixing the use of test scores formally. Perhaps that was naive on my part, as Joel Klein wanted to ignore these limitations and move ahead with value-added (see his op-ed above).

But I worried that formally barring test scores from consideration would give union bashers another opportunity to distract attention from the larger problems faced by public education. And now the union pinata match is on. Joe Williams' post stands out for its histrionics. Featuring a mushroom cloud, Williams prognosticates, "When we are all standing at public education's funeral someday in the near future, remember to do a cough-chant of "murderer" when Dick Ianuzzi or anyone else from NYSUT tries eulogize." Kevin Carey digs deep and pulls out Paris Hilton-worthy dramatics: "It's hard to imagine a more unambiguous declaration of the union's total disregard for student learning when its members' jobs are at stake." Socrates calls the legislators "union-mouthpieces." Joel Klein, in his op-ed, even blames unions for the existence of achievement gaps:

Protecting grownups rather than making sure students can read and do math is how our country has gotten into the educational mess it's in today. It's the reason we have shameful racial achievement gaps separating our white and Asian students from our African-American and Latino students.

That's why there are no achievement gaps in North Carolina and Texas!

Yet none of these guys acknowledges the elephant in the room in New York: tests are given in January. That means that a value-added measure would estimate the effects of teacher pairs, not individual teachers: one teacher teaches students from January to June, and another from September to January. Even if two teachers are equally effective, a novice 4th grade teacher who receives students from a 10 year superstar 3rd grade teacher is going to look better than a novice 4th grade teacher who receives students from another novice teacher.

If NYC wants to get serious about value-added, tests need to be given in September and June, and these tests need to be designed to measure growth, which NY state's tests are not.

The good news is that principals are actually pretty good at identifying which teachers have high or low value-added, even in the absence of these data, and they can use this insight to inform their tenure decisions. Take a look at this paper by Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren, based on a study in which the authors estimated value-added models, but also had principals conduct subjective performance evaluations. They found that principals can identify teachers with high and low value-added; for tenure, the goal is to deny tenure to teachers with especially low-value added. Moreover, Jacob and Lefgren found that, "a principal’s overall rating of a teacher is a substantially better predictor of future parent requests for that teacher than either the teacher’s experience, education and current compensation or the teacher’s value-added achievement measure." They concluded:

To the extent that the most important staffing decisions involve sanctioning incompetent teachers and/or rewarding the best teachers, a principal-based system may also produce achievement outcomes roughly comparable to a test-based accountability system. In addition, increasing a principal’s ability to sanction and reward teachers would likely improve educational outcomes valued by parents but not readily captured by standardized tests.

See below the fold for more wonky stuff on the testing calendar.

Posted by at 12:52 PM | Permalink | 14 Comments | Recommend

April 08, 2008

Why Do Journalists Love Shaky Science on Race?

Let me preface this post by saying that I am predisposed to believe that peer effects influence students' success. But I am consistently frustrated that journalists pick up, run with, and extrapolate from poorly executed studies on the topic of "acting white" or "acting Black." Let's walk through two examples from the last month:

1) I've now seen two articles on this mess of a study published in Professional School Counseling. The articles feature headlines like, "Having a best friend of a different race can make a big difference in the academic achievement of black and Hispanic high school students, according to a University of Arkansas study." The study compared the achievement of students with same-race and different race best friends, and found that kids with different race best friends do better in school.

Never mind the well-known finding in the friendship selection literature that birds of a feather flock together - that is, kids self-select into friendships. Is it any wonder that kids choose friends of similar achievement levels, and that given current distributions of achievement and patterns of tracking and school segregation, higher achieving African-American and Hispanic kids are probabilisitcally more likely to choose a different race best friend if they are selecting friends with similar achievement levels?

Yet the authors appear totally oblivious to the causal inference problems raised by their study, and are ready to design interventions around these findings: "The researchers suggested that school counselors 'could create opportunities for students to interact with other students from different racial backgrounds in the hopes that they might develop friendships over time.' Peer mentoring programs could be one way to introduce struggling students from various racial groups to academically successful students of other racial groups." I'm all for creating spaces to nurture interracial friendships (though this is hard to do when kids attend racially isolated schools?!), but I wouldn't hold my breath on their achievement effects.

2) Consider the Ed Week article, Gifted Black Pupils Found Pressured to Underperform, which leads with, "Gifted black students who underperform in school may do so because of peer pressure to 'act black,' according to new research published this month in the journal Urban Education." (HT: Robert Pondiscio) The study, based on surveys of 166 gifted black students, asked students whether "they have ever heard the phrases 'acting white' or 'acting Black,'" among other questions.

Given how widespread pop conversations about these terms have been for the last 25 years, the authors unsurprisingly found that students associate the phrase "acting White" with school achievement, intelligence, and positive school behaviors and attitudes; most attribute acting Black to negative school achievement, low intelligence, and poor behaviors and attitudes. Furthermore, based on questions about being teased, the authors contend that gifted black students face peer pressure to perform poorly. The study did not link students' attitudes to student achievement, and did not compare these gifted students' experiences with high-achieving white students' experiences (who also report high rates of teasing - see here and here). Furthermore, the authors did not ask these students about their own racial identities, which are more likely to be associated with their own achievement. Yet the authors conclude with confidence, "this can and does contribute to the achievement gap." But the authors conducted no analyses linking achievment to students' attitudes about acting white or black!

We could invoke the standard explanation that journalists don't understand research, but there is plenty of research (bad and good) on structural causes of achievement gaps (i.e. boring stuff like prenatal care) that receives much less coverage. Journalists need a story that gels with the commonly accepted narrative about inequality, which focuses on individual responsibility for success and failure (see Americans' Attitudes on Inequality). Culture is much easier to write about than structure - the reasons why black kids show up to kindergarten .4-.6 standard deviations behind white kids don't translate into a chatty crowd-pleasing story about why school isn't cool (HT: Joanne Jacobs).

What do you think? Are "acting white/acting black" stories over-reported?

Posted by at 11:35 AM | Permalink | 14 Comments | Recommend

April 07, 2008

Nothing This Exciting Will Happen In Ed Policy This Week

Rock Chalk Jayhawk!!!

Posted by at 11:55 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

April 07, 2008

Has "A Nation at Risk" Done More Harm Than Good?

Richard Rothstein bats first in a lineup of essays at Cato Unbound commemorating the 25th anniversary of "A Nation At Risk," and asserts that the report has done more harm than good.

Why? First, Rothstein argues, the report wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. The report mistook the changing composition of SAT test takers for a half a standard deviation decline in SAT scores since the 1960s. Second, Risk placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. While education surely plays a part in economic growth, he shows that our economic vicissitudes are driven by factors much larger and more complex. Third, he writes, Risk ignored the responsibility of the nation’s other social and economic institutions for learning. Rothstein concludes:

A Nation at Risk was well-intentioned, but based on flawed analyses, at least some of which should have been known to the Commission that authored it. The report burned into Americans’ consciousness a conviction that, evidence notwithstanding, our schools are failures, and a warped view of the relationship between schools and economic well-being. It distracted education policymakers from insisting that our political, economic, and social institutions also have a responsibility to prepare children to be ready to learn when they attend school.

I'm looking forward to this exchange, as I've never squared away in my mind whether A Nation At Risk was a report that spurred a movement, or a movement that engineered a legitimizing report. Michael Strong, Sol Stern, and Rick Hess will also weigh in this week.

Posted by at 11:29 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

April 04, 2008

Is Teaching an Overrated Career?

Over at the Faculty Room, they're discussing the US News and World Report claim that teaching is an overrated career. Devin Ozdogu shares an old excerpt from Whitney Tilson's guru, Linda Darling-Hammond:

HELP WANTED. College graduate with academic major (master’s preferred). Challenging opportunity to serve 150 clients daily on tight schedule, developing up to five different products each day to meet individual needs. Adaptability helpful since suppliers cannot always deliver goods and support services on time. Diversified position allows employee to exercise typing, clerical, law enforcement, and social work skills between assignments and after hours. Ideal candidate will enjoy working in isolation from colleagues. Typical work week 50 hours. Nature of work precludes use of telephones or computers, but work has many intrinsic rewards. Starting salary $24,661 with chance to earn $36,495 after 15 years.

eduwonkette guest blogger alumnus Sean Corcoran responds, too, and suggests that being a US News "best of" listwriter may the most overrated career of all.

Posted by at 2:39 PM | Permalink | 12 Comments | Recommend

April 04, 2008

TGI - NCLB

1) Grad Rate Questions: Sherman Dorn frames 12 questions about the forthcoming grad rate measure. If the 2014 proficiency target provides any indication, the answer to this question, "If there are such required benchmarks, is there any supporting research to suggest that the status or improvement benchmarks are realistic?" will be a resounding no.

2) Swifty Statistics: I'm a sucker for a good Harper's Index, so head over to Charlie Barone's brief on the new school choice and tutoring report. His take: "The take-home message is that more and more students are exercising their options to transfer to another school or to enroll in after-school tutoring. The number who chose to transfer more than doubled. The number enrolled in after-school programs increased over 500%."

Charlie's index gives us raw numbers, but the percentages of eligible students participating in choice and SES are 1% and 17%, respectively. On the choice tip, everyone likes to blame districts for not notifying parents (70% of districts required to offer choice to elementary students notified parents; 20% did at the middle school level, and 17% did at the high school level). However, the report notes that:

Most districts that did not offer the school choice option said it was because all schools at that grade level were identified for improvement. Districts typically have fewer total schools available at the middle and high school levels: 77 percent of districts with high schools have only one high school and 67 percent of districts with middle schools have only one middle school, while 53 percent of districts with elementary schools have only one elementary school.

Even if we consider the group of parents who were notified and had options in their districts, very few chose to leave their schools. The literature I've seen on choice suggests at least four reasons for low choice participation: 1) revealed preferences (parents are actually pretty happy with their schools, and have better information than NCLB does about these schools), 2) preferences for closeness to home and other non-academic features of schooling, 3) a lack of information about school options, and 4) structural barriers to choice (attending a non-neighborhood school imposes costs on the choosers). Whatever the reasons, we need to ask whether school choice is a better NCLB policy option than more targeted interventions that could be delivered to struggling students in the schools they currently attend.

Posted by at 10:51 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend

April 04, 2008

Obam-Arts

Via Mike Klonsky, looks like Obama has been reading the ed blogs on curriculum narrowing. He said:

Part of the reason you’re seeing schools eliminate art and music – or at least diminish them – is because of No Child Left Behind, a law that was intended to raise standards in local schools but what happened was because it relied just on a single standardized test, school districts felt pressured to just teach to the test….in a lot of school districts, they just had to make choices, and they decided, you know what, if we’re going to bring our kids up to test level, all they can do is just study math and reading every day all day long. They’ve eliminated recess. They’ve eliminated art and music. So part of the solution then is changing NCLB so that the assessment is one that takes into account all of the factors that go into a good education, and is developed with educators, not to punish schools, but to improve schools.

Surely some blogger will hit Obama back with the "only 16% of districts reduced art and music" finding from the CEP report. It's worth noting that many schools that will struggle with NCLB's targets already eliminated or scaled back art and music pre-NCLB because of budget cuts. What we need to know is what proportion of schools reduced art and music of schools that had art and music programming before NCLB.

Image Credit: TARARTRAT

Posted by at 10:19 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

April 03, 2008

Do High School Exit Exams Pay Off in the Labor Market?

High school exit exams have become a common fixture in American high school life. By 2006, 22 states had exit exams - and because larger states are more likely to have exams, approximately two-thirds of all high school students face exit exam requirements.

Proponents of exit exams often assert that these tests make the high school diploma more meaningful to employers. If this is the case, these policies should widen the gap in earnings and labor market outcomes between those who earn high school diplomas and those that don't. Despite the popularity of these policies, few papers have examined this claim empirically.

In "State High School Exit Examinations and Postsecondary Labor Market Outcomes," published in the most recent edition of Sociology of Education, Rob Warren, Eric Grodsky, and Jennifer Lee take up this question. Analyzing data from both the Census and the Current Population Survey, they found no evidence that state exit exams positively affect labor force status or earnings. Furthermore, they found no evidence that the effects of these policies vary by race or ethnicity, or by the level of difficulty of the exit exam.

In short, exit exams do nothing to increase the labor market value of the high school diploma. At the same time, other evidence suggests that exit exams (especially more difficult ones) are associated with lower public high school completion rates and higher rates of General Educational Development test taking (see Warren et al., High School Exit Examinations and State Level Completion and GED Rates, 1975-2002). Others find that exit exams increase inequality in rates of high school completion, and especially influence African-American students' odds of completing high school. (See Dee and Jacob, Do High School Exit Exams Influence Educational Attainment or Labor Market Performance?)

Of course, it is possible that exit exams help improve the quality of education in lower grades, though I've seen little evidence on this point. Readers, what do you think? Do exit exams hurt more than they help?

Posted by at 5:00 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

April 03, 2008

Value-Added Preview

Wisconsin's Center for Educational Research has posted abstracts for the National Conference on Value-Added Modeling. Take a look here.

Posted by at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 02, 2008

Quotes of the Day

Call me old fashioned and curmudgeonly, but I can't stand it when the wonks break out in a "research shows" chorus with no references. If research so valiantly and definitively shows it, you should be able to tell us whose research shows it.

The quote of the day is a tie; both quotes hail from the Teachers College forum on class size this afternoon.

1) In introducing NYC Department of Education's Garth Harries, who is the "Chief Portfolio Officer" and the former "engagement manager" at McKinsey, TC prof Carolyn Riehl said, "These titles - we usually don't think about them in education - so I'm sure it makes for some great cocktail party conversation."

2) After Harries spoke at length about how the effect of teacher quality is much larger than the effect of reduced class size, an audience member asked him to cite some studies supporting this claim. Harries replied, "Uh, I can't quote to you on what the research is, but I can (pause) get it to you." Research shows!

For a paper on teacher effects using the STAR data, see "How Large are Teacher Effects?"

Posted by at 8:14 PM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend

April 02, 2008

AERA continued: The Teachings of Russ Whitehurst

In a talk last Thursday entitled, “Seven Things I've Learned About Education Research and Policy, Plus or Minus Two,” Russ Whitehurst, the Director of the Institute of Educational Sciences, summarized what he’s learned about education policymaking during his seven years at IES.

1) The research community is oriented towards understanding, while the policy community is oriented towards action.

Researchers are often upset that their work is not defined as “policy relevant” (and thus not included in IES’s funding priorities). But they usually haven’t thought about what’s actionable in their own research. Whitehurst gave the example of a study in which the researcher coded classroom interactions between teachers and children of different ability levels, and found meaningful differences. When asked what the policy implications were, the researcher looked at him like a deer in headlights.

Said Whitehurst, “I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with that kind of scholarship,” but this quest for understanding rather than prescription is perplexing to policymakers. Researchers often defend research oriented towards understanding by appealing to the long arc of science. In response, Whitehurst argued that education is not a discipline in the sense that neuroscience is a discipline. Rather, education is more like transportation, in that it presents a series of problems that need to be solved.

2) Researchers operate under the logic of disconfirmation, while policymakers operate under the logic of confirmation, especially once they’ve committed to a course of action.

Once policymakers have signed on to an initiative, they are not looking for evidence that they’ve committed to the wrong program. Using NCLB as an example, Whitehurst explained that once NCLB was passed, the Department of Education necessarily had to shift from being a buyer to a seller of education policy. A series of complex policy decisions had to be made – i.e. establishing subgroup size and the percentage of students who could sit for alternate assessments. Whitehurst’s point was that the sweet spot of policymaking is where people are uncertain and uncommitted. Policymakers like to have the weight of research behind them, and it’s most effective to offer advice before they’ve publicly commented about the issue.

3) Much research that’s relevant to policymakers shouldn’t be because it’s too methodologically weak to be taken seriously.

Whitehurst lamented that he’s had to provide assessments of research to major newspapers, though the research “was so weakly done that it’s a shame that anyone had to spend time thinking about it.” Unfortunately, Whitehurst said, a report put out by a thinktank is given the same weight as an article published in Science. Whitehurst argued that until policymakers don’t have to worry that what they’re reading is a political document, rather than a research document, the relationship between educational research and educational policymaking will be troubled.

4) Demonstrating that popular programs don’t work is risky business.

No good evaluation goes unpunished, Whitehurst quipped. He provided the example of the Upward Bound evaluation, which found no effects of Upward Bound on college going, and discussed the subsequent shutdown of a randomized trial to further evaluate Upward Bound.

5) The combination of high-stakes for policymakers and high uncertainty about what they can do generates unreasonable expectations for educational research.

While medical research has invested millions of dollars in the search for an AIDS vaccine, it has been unsuccessful. The medical community is willing to accept that research and progress takes time, while there’s no understanding that identifying solutions takes time in educational research, too.

This was probably the best session I attended at AERA. His points weren’t particularly novel, but Whitehurst pulled them together coherently, if sometimes naively. For example, he worried that policymakers see research articles as political documents rather than research documents – but isn’t the choice of research questions and outcome variables political to begin with? I also expected more fireworks from the audience about funding priorities – only a few years ago, many researchers were stomping mad that their research was ineligible for funding.

Posted by at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 01, 2008

April Fool in Love Links

1) We Can Fix AERA!: Sherman Dorn has thought a lot about how the AERA rating system stacks the deck against presenters lacking tacit knowledge.

2) Marry Me, Eduwonk!: Boys, watch and learn from a Clinton-certified Don Juan - the passive aggressive flirting, truculent pet names, salacious locker room gossip, and wonky bickering all make me hot. Sure, you're already married - but after #9, polygamy is the new prostitution in New York.

3) E.D. in '08: This is What 60 Million Gets You: Fordham goes funny.

Posted by at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 01, 2008

AERA Continued: Dropout Factories

In the fall, the AP reported that 1 in 10 US high schools are “dropout factories.” At AERA, Robert Balfanz provided an overview of Hopkins Center for the Social Organization of Schools' research that led to the AP article.

Central to the “dropout factory” is the idea of promoting power. “Promoting power” compares the number of 12th-graders in a high school to the number of 9th-graders three years earlier. While this is not a direct measure of the graduation rate, it is a decent indicator, and can be calculated for every school in America from the NCES Common Core of Data. Balfanz and colleagues labeled schools with promoting power of less than 60% - i.e. of 100 freshman enrolled in the fall of 2004, fewer than 60 are still enrolled in the fall of 2007 – as dropout factories. These schools are located primarily in urban centers and in the South and Southwest, and 25% of them are the only high school in their town. Schools with high concentrations of minority students are overrepresented: 56% of schools that enroll more than 90% African-American or Hispanic students are classified as dropout factories.

What I didn’t hear in the fall news coverage on dropout factories was a consideration of how out-of-school factors drive the dropout rate. Balfanz did a nice job of not only blaming schools, but the broader social policy context in which schools and students are located. As Balfanz wrote in an article available at the gradgap.org website:

The teachers, administrators, and students in these schools are often going to heroic lengths to succeed despite long odds. The fault lies not with the schools or their teachers or students but with the intended and unintended consequences of decisions made at the city, state, and federal levels to create a subset of under-resourced, over-challenged, and non-supported schools that primarily educate low-income and minority students.

Balfanz reviewed, and then generally dismissed, three popular approaches to reforming these struggling schools. Closing schools may be necessary in some cases, Balfanz said. However, many school closings replace one under-resourced, struggling school with another. And for schools that are the only high school in town, it’s a difficult sell. A second popular remedy is reconstitution, which Balfanz argued has no track record of success.

A third solution is the creation of small schools, which Balfanz was optimistic about in cities with high concentrations of human capital (New York and Boston). But he warned that these schools have the potential to displace the students who would have attended the old “dropout factory” otherwise (see here, here, and here on displacement in New York). Instead of these three silver bullet solutions, Balfanz argued that we need a “wholesale transformation” of these schools, which includes a mix of schoolwide, targeted, and intensive interventions. He didn’t go into great depth about what this transformation would look like, though he did mention an “early warning system” – one that closely monitors grades, attendance, and behavior for students who are at-risk of dropping out – as an important component of high school reform.

Of particular interest was Balfanz’s discussion of how our “counterproductive accountability system” creates pressure to hold students back so they don’t affect the schools’ scores, or to transfer students so they don’t count against the school’s graduation rate. Balfanz mentioned that an "on-track to graduate indicator" might be a better accountability metric, but didn’t go into detail about how this indicator could be used for accountability purposes.

Interesting session overall, but I was left wondering whether the dropout factory press splash actually moved this debate forward, or was just another “our schools are failing” report that paved the way for more school closings that often leave nothing better in the dropout factory’s place. I also wanted more detail about what a "wholesale transformation" looks like on the ground.

Image credit: inmagine.com

Posted by at 9:25 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend

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