On the New York Times’s “Room for Debate” blog, a daily topic is offered up to a panel of experts for commentary, and yesterday they were talking about the “Advanced Placement Juggernaut.” A.P. classes have been offered to high school students for fifty years now, but in the past five their enrollment has increased by 50 percent. The program is nearly universally accepted as a good thing, and it’s particularly well-liked by college admissions officers. But some researchers and educators call its value into question.
Trevor Packer, who represents the College Board in the Times’s discussion, argues that the only problem with Advanced Placement is how few minority and underserved students have access to AP classes. He says:
…studies have indicated that teachers’ preconceived notions of student potential are often at odds with student capability. We should applaud teachers willing to take on students whom others had pre-judged as lacking in potential, not just those interested in teaching students who are likely to earn a 5 on an A.P. test.
Of course, as teacher Patrick Welsh notes, the College Board has a vested interest–in the way of $86 per A.P. exam administered–in the steady increase of A.P.’s popularity across all demographics. And researcher Kristin Klopfenstein points out that many students hoping to get into selective colleges enroll in A.P. classes without taking the final exam. Because many high schools weight the grades of students enrolled in A.P. classes, students know that A.P.s will not only look good on their transcripts, they’ll also boost their class ranks.
Yesterday, Scholastic published a list of the “10 Biggest Education Ideas of the Decade.” The list covers charter schools, technology and the stimulus, among other topics. For the past decade–and since long before that–the producers at Learning Matters have done in-depth reporting on big ideas in education; at the same time, they’ve told the intimate stories of the people behind those ideas. To mark the end of the aughts, I asked our producers which stories, series and documentaries they feel most proud of, or found most interesting to work on. Watch, read and listen to the results below.
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1. Paul Vallas in New Orleans: Episode 6 - Mixed Results for School Reform Efforts
I first met Vallas in Episode 1, at a rally where he pumped up his teachers for the start of his first school year as Superintendent. I was taken aback by his enthusiasm to take over one of the worst school districts in the country. Vallas was a whirlwind: eager, ready, armed with high expectations, and no one was going to stand in his way. His gusto surely rubbed off on his teachers, as they danced in the aisles to classic New Orleans trumpets and cheered at every catchphrase Vallas rattled off, in the incessant way he has of speaking. There was an excitement in that convention center room that was unmistakable; you had to be there to believe it.
Three years in, one thing is clear: Vallas has not lost one bit of zeal for his mission. His hyperactive nature has led him to roll out an abundance of new initiatives, many of which got off to a shaky start. A teacher once told me, ‘Vallas has about 500 ideas…but if we are lucky we can get maybe 5 of them to work.’
One of my favorite episodes is Part 6, which aired at the end of his first year. This segment highlights Vallas’ greatest challenge: overage students struggling to move on. In the episode we follow two students: one drops out of an alternative school and the other finally graduates from a traditional high school after an astounding number of attempts to pass her graduation exam. The segment made the reality of New Orleans schools all too real to me; half of these students will never make it across the stage. However, seeing a student who makes it against all odds exemplifies the very thing Vallas is trying to prove: it is possible. **
2. Turnaround Specialist: The Program
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David Wald, Managing Producer: One of my favorite projects is “The Turnaround Specialist,” which was a series we shot over the course of a year and aired in installments on the NewsHour. We did not know how Principal Parker Land, with years of experience in suburban schools, would perform at his first inner city school in Richmond, VA. So as we filmed him over the course of a year, everything was unexpected.
It was also kind of a confusing story because in the end scores went down at his troubled middle school and yet his superintendent “promoted” him to principal of a much bigger high school, requiring him to leave the middle school at least a year earlier than he’d planned.
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3. Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC: Episode 6 - Tough Changes and Controversy
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Cat McGrath, Producer: “What do you think of Michelle Rhee?”
Since joining Learning Matters in 2007 my focus has been on reform efforts in Washington D.C. under the leadership of Michelle Rhee. My first day on the job was the first day of school under Rhee’s watch and now, two years and eleven reports later, people continue to ask me what I think of her. Well, if you drop me an email me I might share some of my personal observations, but the reports pretty much say it all.
If you haven’t watched any of the episodes yet, I would start with Episode 6, which is a round-up of her first year in office. You’ll see a meeting Jane and I filmed in which the Chancellor fires a principal, and an end-of-the-year afternoon cruise I took down the Potomac with the staff of a school Rhee had decided to close. It has been quite a journey, and though it’s not over yet, I feel very fortunate to have met so many people in D.C. who are so passionate about education.
One of my favorite moments was when we ran in to a man who told us he had moved to D.C and taken a job as a Vice Principal after listening to one of our podcasts! He was also offered a job in Boston, but said the podcast inspired him to work in D.C. If you have a story about how our work has changed your mind about anything, one way or the other, I’d love to hear it! **
4. Pay for Grades: The Program
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John Tulenko, Senior Producer and Correspondent: “Pay for Grades” is one of my favorites. At the time we produced it, the idea of paying students was considered avant-garde in New York City and elsewhere, but we found a tiny steel town in Ohio that had been doing it for years.
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Jane Renaud, Producer: A favorite piece I worked on is the podcast “After He’s Gone,” which accompanied the NewsHour piece “Lessons of War.”
The podcast is a favorite of mine for two reasons. One, the listener really gets to take the time to get to know Scarlette Keeling, a 27-year-old mother of three whose husband, Corey, just deployed for Afghanistan. Scarlette and Corey were featured in our NewsHour segment, but as is often the case, we’re forced leave much of our interviews on the cutting room floor. Here, Scarlette and John Merrow’s conversation can unfold naturally, getting to that big question: “What do you say when they ask the big question: ‘Will Daddy die?’” Secondly, we interspersed sound recorded in the Keeling home and in their public school with the interview, giving an intimate, portrait feeling. This is one of the first podcasts I worked on, and it’s still my favorite.
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6. School Sleuth: The Documentary
John Merrow, Executive Producer and Host: My favorite of the decade has to be School Sleuth, primarily because of all the elaborate production and storytelling that went into it. I choose it because it was (and is) so different from everything else we’ve done. John Tulenko, Tania Brief, Alexis Kessler, our professional actress, Eliza Foss, and I had a blast. We shot the set pieces during the wee hours of the morning at an abandoned spice factory in Brooklyn and then wove serious elements into the story of “The Case of an Excellent School.” I had just completed Choosing Excellence, my book on the same subject, and we did our best to have the two appear at the same time. Winning a George Foster Peabody Award, our first, was just icing on the cake.
By the way, the great recession has prevented us from bringing back the Sleuth in a second case, “Who’s Killing School Reform?”
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made two significant appearances this week: one on PBS NewsHour -which has recently updated its format to include more internet-based features, like this conversation between Duncan and correspondent Hari Sreenivasan about the Department’s financial literacy initiative and, of course, Race to the Top- the other a town hall meeting on “elevating the teaching profession” Duncan held with teachers from the D.C. area. The webcast is long, but full of honest and thoughtful comments from teachers on the need for better certification programs, the need for scholarships and grants related to ESL students, and more.
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed today that marries two of education’s hottest topics: D.C. superintendent Michelle Rhee and the Department of Education’s Race to the Top fund. The Journal claims that Secretary Duncan should more actively and publicly put himself in Rhee’s corner, since her reform efforts in D.C. parallel many of the Department’s alleged reform goals. Race to the Top funding will be given to states that prioritize pay for performance, charter schools, and tying teacher evaluation to student performance–all of which figure prominently in Rhee’s plan for D.C.
As you know if you’ve been following our coverage of Rhee, it’s the D.C. teachers’ union who most vehemently oppose her approach to school reform; it’s been more than two years since we started following Rhee, and her prolonged contract negotiations with the union are still unresolved. In many states, especially those with strong unions, it may prove difficult to get teachers on board with proposals for reform. The Journal writes:
The problem with this passivity is that union-negotiated collective-bargaining agreements are often the biggest barrier to enacting these education reforms. By not using their bully pulpit to back state and local reformers like Michelle Rhee, Mr. Duncan and President Obama are sending mixed messages, emboldening the opposition and jeopardizing their own education objectives.
The Journal’s unilaterally positive read on Rhee, whose reign in D.C. has been controversial, seems full of jumped-to conclusions. But it will be interesting to see whether the Race to the Top will produce replicates of the situation in D.C., as states and districts come up against union resistance, and whether Duncan’s position–”We generally don’t weigh in on local labor disputes”–will change.
To catch up on the ongoing negotiations between Rhee and the D.C. teachers’ union, watch our most recent coverage for the NewsHour, below, and listen to our interviews with Rhee and union president George Parker, collected here.
Our interest was especially piqued this week by a story on the hedge fund managers and other wealthy businessmen and women who invest in charter schools, in Sunday’s New York Times. According to Joe Williams, director of an organization that lobbies for charter schools, “These are the kind of guys who a decade ago would have been spending their time angling to get on the junior board of the Met, the ballet.” What does it mean that charter schools are the new face of stylish philanthropy?
In June, we wrote about Shakira’s increasing focus on education in her philanthropic work. The Economist recently published a piece she wrote about the importance of creating a Global Fund for Education. The fund, she writes, already has President Obama’s support, and would work toward the United Nation’s stated goal that every child in the world complete primary school, starting in 2015.
One of Shakira’s foundations, Pies Descalzos–The Barefoot Foundation–builds and maintains schools in three regions of Colombia, and focuses its work on children whose families are part of Colombia’s large displaced population. The Barefoot Foundation’s approach to education seems to be holistic, in the vein of Harlem Children’s Zone:
We also support the broader community. On any given day our school buildings are hubs of activity—providing a range of services, including adult-literacy classes, youth-leadership development, access to libraries and computer training. Perhaps most importantly, we have also begun to form parent co-operatives focused on teaching parents and on income-generating activities aimed at ensuring that families are financially secure.
Learning Matters’ John Tulenko explores another side of global education in a recent interview with the Ford Foundation’s Joan Dassin. Dassin’s primary concern is the phenomenon of “Brain Drain” in the developing world: young people, once educated, often leave their countries of birth. The Ford Foundation’s college scholarship program tries to ensure that the talented and educated citizens of the developing world stay there.
Though they’re working from different ends of the education lifespan, both Shakira’s and Dassin’s thoughts are worth some attention this holiday season.
If you hear someone worrying about a “federal takeover,” it’s likely they’re talking about the health care debate and the public option — but Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott is pointing in a different direction.
The US Department of Education is “placing its desire for a federal takeover of public education above the interests of the 4.7 million schoolchildren in the state of Texas,” Scott said last week. He was discussing the USDOE’s “Race to the Top” (RTTP), a federal education grant program, the first of its kind, with $4.35 billion in cash for winning states.
To be competitive, states must agree to enact USDOE sanctioned reforms, including participation in the creation of common standards. Only two states have elected not to participate, Texas and Alaska. According to Scott, who says Texas’ standards are already high, the RTTP amounts to coercion.
The “Race to the Top” is the federal government’s latest, and arguably most ambitious, foray into education reform. In a recent piece for the NewsHour, we asked where RTTP fits into the history of federal involvement in public education. Watch it below.
Though Rosie the Riveter is an important feminist emblem, and represents a turning point in the history of women in the workforce, we don’t necessarily see so many Rosies around us in 2009.
Women dominate any number of fields, but the kind of work that they were recruited to do during World War II, and for which Rosie is a symbol, has remained the province of men. Female construction workers, for instance, are a rare sight in American cities.
For me, it was all about the money. Women in nontraditional jobs earn 20% to 40% more than women in what are considered ‘traditional’ women’s jobs. That’s $1 million over a lifetime.
If Rosie the Riveter High produces a generation of female millionaires with biceps like Rosie’s, we’ll have no reason to complain.
James Lipton, the decidedly odd host of the now defunct Bravo series “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” hardly seems like an ideal spokesman for teen culture. And yet, LG, a large electronics company that produces mobile phones, has developed a series of PSAs targeted at teens centered around Lipton. In each of the flippant, quirky videos, Lipton delivers a short monologue on the dangers of sending belligerent text messages or sexually explicit photos to one’s peers. “Before you text…give it a ponder,” he says, after transferring his signature beard from his own face to the face of the teen in question. The campaign seems potentially effective: Lipton may be just offbeat enough to appeal to teens.
“Sexting,” as it’s somewhat obnoxiously referred to by many, has become a real threat to the health and happiness of adolescents, as have other forms of online harassment. Check out our coverage of this issue from earlier this year to find out how some other non-profits are addressing it, and watch our favorite Lipton bit below.
Though charter schools have been a buzzword in education reform for years now, the past months have seen them gain even more traction and hype. Thanks to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s vocal support for charters, and the regulation that denies Race to the Top funds to states that block their creation, it looks as if the future of public education will have to accommodate them.
And so, it seems, will New York City. According to the New York Times, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made it a priority to encourage the growth of New York’s charter schools in his third term. Not only has he committed to opening twenty-four charter schools next fall and one hundred over the next four years, he has offered many of the city’s charters space to operate within existing public school buildings. In most other cities, charter schools are required to buy or rent their own spaces–this is in part what distinguishes them from traditional public schools and makes it more difficult for them to exist in the first place.
In the case of the 100 Academy of Excellence, the principal told a state official that money was saved by letting go veteran (read expensive) teachers and increasing class size (read cost saving).
By Wolff’s reasoning, Bloomberg’s decision to house more charter schools in public school buildings may improve the quality of the education they provide. But, as Jennifer Medina notes in her piece for the New York Times, students in traditional public schools will still have to walk past their charter neighbors and wonder why their facilities are newer and better. Joel Klein, New York City’s schools chancellor, has said about charters:
“There are so many talented people out there, and I want them to come to New York…[w]hy would we want to put up barriers to that?”
His emphasis on importing talent begs the question: when charter schools move in, what will happen to what’s already here?
We make programs for television, which can take some time. This blog allows us to share education news, events and resources quickly. Think we missed something? Send us tips and ideas here: news@learningmatters.tv.
On the New York Times’s “Room for Debate” blog, a daily topic is offered up to a panel of experts for commentary, and yesterday they were talking about the “Advanced Placement Juggernaut.” A.P. classes have been offered to high school students for fifty years now, but in the past five their enrollment has increased by 50 percent. The program is nearly universally accepted as a good thing, and it’s particularly well-liked by college admissions officers. But some researchers and educators call its value into question.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made two significant appearances this week: one on PBS NewsHour -which has recently updated its format to include more internet-based features, like 
Our interest was especially piqued this week by 
Though Rosie the Riveter is an important feminist emblem, and represents a turning point in the history of women in the workforce, we don’t necessarily see so many Rosies around us in 2009.
And so, it seems, will New York City. According to the New York Times, 
