Reliability and Validity are the Alpha and Omega of testing.  A test that is reliable can be counted on each time it’s given, while a valid test measures what it is supposed to. Tests that meet these two criteria are the gold standard of assessment..

For example, making someone swim 100 yards to test whether or not he can swim would be a valid and reliable test.  If you sink, you flunk, and that’s true each time the test is given and is independent of who is doing the testing.

However, when teachers are trying to assess ‘soft’ skills, the waters get murky.  How can we measure the ability to work with others, process information from disparate sources, communicate persuasively, or work reliably?

Consider the concept of reliability. Is an employee who is late to work one day most weeks reliable?  What grade would you assign her, on a scale of 1-5?  Suppose you found her explanations plausible (child care problems, for example) and you cut her slack—and gave her a 5– because you’ve been there yourself? However, another employer might give that same employee a grade of 2 or 3, because, after all, late is late.

There’s no set scale for measuring ‘working with others,’ meaning that the rating may vary depending upon who’s doing the rating.  And what to one teacher is ‘persuasive communication’ may fall flat with another. There’s just no easy way to measure those all-important ‘soft’ skills.

And they are important. Put yourself in the position of Human Resource officer, trying both to be fair and to have some confidence in an applicant’s likelihood of success on the job.  You want to know as much as you can about a potential hire, but now all you have to go on are a resume, impressions from an interview, and maybe some recommendations.

Or consider higher education. College admission officers don’t want a freshman class made up entirely of students with perfect GPA’s.  They know that students with ‘soft skills’ and academic proficiency contribute greatly to campus life.
And so they consult SAT (and maybe AP) scores, scores on high school exit exams, references, and high school GPAs, but how reliable and valid are these?  High school grades and GPAs are clearly unreliable–as every student who has chosen courses and teachers to enhance their record knows.  References are even less reliable, and the lack of predictive validity of SAT scores has led many selective colleges to abandon them.

Clearly, both employers and admissions officers could use more information—if only that information were reliable and valid.

While we recognize the complexity of measuring soft skills, we believe we are close to meeting this challenge. This summer, with help from a Kellogg Foundation grant, we are asking mentors at 28 community-based organizations to assess teenagers’ performance and provide them with a Verified Resume.  We ask the mentors to assess high and middle school students on such traits as responsibility, work ethic, collaboration, communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity.

We ask the mentors to write a two -sentence description of the context in which each of the traits was demonstrated.  Was the teenager responsible about picking up trash in the park or helping out on the surgical ward?  Communicating to a friend about the homework assignment requires a different skill level than communicating about obesity to a large community audience.  There is no reasonable rubric that will cover this amount of variation.

Finally, mentors also grade the students’ performance on a scale of one (“cannot do it”) to five (“does it well enough teach others”).

Having a Verified Resume of performance will potentially improve the package of information available to college admissions and HR staff, if those busy folks take the time to look at the VR in the few minutes that they devote to considering each applicant.  The challenge is to convince them that the VR will improve their decisions.

Five communities are involved in the current Kellogg-financed project: Baltimore, Boston, Grand Rapids, Montana and Salt Lake.  Baltimore provides a good illustration of the process.  All of the eight participating not-for-profit organizations  there are involved in youth development.  Two have students creating videos; another sends students to City Hall; students in a third organization engage in debates; those in a fourth help younger students with algebra.

Here are two grades and comments pertaining to a student in a media project.

Skill    Rating    Observations
Responsibility    4.50    G. created and took on personal projects above and beyond the requirements of the programs in which he participated. He often came in early to ensure that these tasks were completed professionally and on time.
Team Player    3.50    G. has consistently led his team members to complete projects on time. In the Festival Committee, he helped to organize his peers to accomplish the production of promotional videos and prepare for public speaking events.

But the process doesn’t stop when the mentors give their grades.  Instead, we will survey employers to see if they agree with, for example, that ‘5’ the mentor gave their new employee.  If not, revisions are in order, and perhaps some retraining of the mentor. That is, we envision the VR as a living document, one that is always subject to on line revision.

We got into this because we believe performance traits like responsibility, tolerance for diversity, ability to communicate and work ethic matter.. Because they matter, we must also figure out how to measure them reliably.

It’s not going to be easy, but nothing of importance ever is.

Can the VR come close to the assessment community’s gold standard?   The quest for the perfect is frequently the enemy of the good.  John Maynard Keynes is credited with saying, “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” Teaching, measuring, and certifying soft performance skills are important, according to both employers and colleges.  We cannot afford slavish adherence to shibboleths regarding statistical purity without asking if new measures can provide more real reliability and better predictive validity.

The state hired Paul Vallas, veteran superintendent of Philadelphia and Chicago, to turn around the city’s troubled schools.  Three years later, Vallas is ready to move on, proudly proclaiming he’s created “a model district.”

The school system is unquestionably transformed.  By next year 2/3 of New Orleans public schools will be chartered, the highest percentage in the country.  Paid for with public money but permitted to operate with limited government oversight, charters are considered by some to be the best possible solution, and by others an unproven experiment that could leave needy kids behind.

This final report in our 3-year series, turns a critical eye on Paul Vallas’ legacy in New Orleans.  What has he done, how is it working, and will his changes last after he’s gone?

At first I thought that was a legalistic, hair-splitting response—until I read about a principal who did get involved, was subsequently sued by the angry parent of the offending child, and lost. That’s horrifying, but it’s the reality.

My takeaway, however, is not that schools are right to split hairs and decline to get involved. Instead, I think we need some redefinition, some fresh thinking.

Consider for a moment how non-public schools function. Most have a code of conduct, one that students who have chosen to attend must accept. So if a student from Andover or Pencey Prep does something on a weekend that is an egregious violation of the behavior code and is caught, that student would suffer the consequences. No way the school head could drop that “not my responsibility” line and get away with it.

The key point here is that these schools embrace values. And having values is generally a 24/7 proposition. As the old chestnut goes, you cannot work in a whorehouse on weekends without consequences for M-F.

Parents-and perhaps the kid—chose their non public school with their eyes open. Often they are choosing a school because of its values. And, of course, some public schools—think KIPP and other charter schools—have a code of conduct that all are expected to adhere to.

Because values matter, why not build schools around the concept of choice and variety? That would mean embracing the true mission of education, going beyond 8AM-3PM, test scores, athletics and college admissions.

What if a district embraced differences and variety and choice, but at the same time insisted that each school develop its own code of conduct, of acceptable behaviors?

Publish the choices and the code of ethics/behavior, and let families make informed choices.

Me, I would put ‘safety,’ particularly emotional and intellectual safety, at the top of the list of priorities.

I devote a long chapter of Below C Level, my new book, to the issue of school safety. The horror stories are there, of course, because it’s important that readers understand just how pervasive bullying and cyberbullying are. We don’t have the luxury of standing on the sidelines on this one, not parents and not school people either.

In one of the most closely watched teacher contract negotiations in the country, Washington, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and union leader George Parker finally agree on deal breaking issues such as tenure, performance pay, and hiring and firing policies. In June, district teachers voted overwhelmingly in favor of the new contract, which offers them a 21.6% salary increase as well as performance pay incentives of up to $30,000 a year.

Over the course of the two and a half year-long negotiations, Parker and Rhee spoke candidly with John Merrow about the role of unions, the national implications of the contract, and why it took so long to come to an agreement.

Oct. 9, 2007

“I am a change agent. And change doesn’t come without significant pushback and opposition.” - Michelle Rhee

Download audio file (83.mp3)

In this interview, Michelle Rhee talks about why Mayor Fenty chose her and why D.C. schools have failed for so long. (15: 26 min / Download Transcript)

Nov. 26, 2007

“The union has never been the problem.” - George Parker

Download audio file (89.mp3)

In this interview, Washington Teachers’ Union President George Parker suggests that Rhee’s reform efforts could threaten union rights. (12:14 min / Download Transcript)

July 22, 2008

“Am I a benevolent dictator? Maybe.” - Michelle Rhee

Download audio file (113.mp3)

In this interview, Rhee reflects on her controversial first year, including her relationships with the community, the City Council, and Mayor Fenty. (16:29 min / Download Transcript)

July 22, 2008

“We are now a competitive school district, where student achievement may well determine our existence.” – George Parker

Download audio file (112.mp3)

In this interview, George Parker discusses a lack of accountability in unions, and updates us on contract negotiations and teacher morale. (13:07 min / Download Transcript)

Sept. 30, 2008

“We are not afraid of accountability” George Parker

Download audio file (123.mp3)

Pressure is mounting on George Parker to reach a contract agreement. In this interview, he shares his views on performance pay and tenure, and suggests that an impasse may be close at hand. (6:45 min / Download Transcript)

Oct. 7, 2008

“If we have ineffective teachers in the classroom, the goal is to not have them in the classroom any longer.” – Michelle Rhee

Download audio file (124.mp3)

In this interview, Michelle Rhee argues that, without significant changes in the way principals and teachers are held accountable, the “dance of the lemons” will only continue. (9:28 min / Download Transcript)

Jan. 27, 2009

“Tenure is the holy grail of teacher unionism” - Michelle Rhee

“I think the challenge in this contract is that there is opportunity versus sacrifice” – George Parker

Download audio file (210.mp3)

With the national teachers’ union now at the table, contract negotiations take on even greater national significance. In this interview, Michelle Rhee and George Parker discuss the major sticking points which include teacher compensation and tenure. (9:53 min / Download Transcript)

May 3, 2009

“I can’t control what the media says or does.” – Michelle Rhee

Download audio file (244.mp3)

In this interview, Michelle Rhee discusses the impact of national media coverage on her relationship with D.C.’s teaching force. (10:36 min / Download Transcript)

May 3, 2009

“It created a culture of low morale…lowest that I’ve seen since I’ve been in DC Public Schools and I’ve been here for 25 years.” – George Parker

Download audio file (243.mp3)

In this interview, George Parker reflects on the last 17 months of negotiating with Rhee and talks about a “culture of fear” in D.C. schools, as well as his views on pay-for-performance and special education. (10:29 min / Download Transcript)

Aug. 17, 2009

“As long as the Mayor wants me here, I will be here.” – Michelle Rhee

Download audio file (257.mp3)

In this interview, Rhee looks back on her time in office, and considers her mistakes along the way. She hopes to reach a contract agreement when teachers return for the next school year. (12:04 min / Download Transcript)

Aug. 17, 2009

“There is the pressure of knowing what we do will affect more than just what happens in DC.” – George Parker

Download audio file (256.mp3)

In this interview, George Parker and John Merrow discuss pay-for-performance, one of the most controversial issues in the contract. (13:59 min / Download Transcript)

Nov. 17, 2009

“I think the Chancellor has lost a lot of respect of some very, very highly qualified and committed teachers.” – George Parker

Download audio file (260.mp3)

In this interview, George Parker questions Rhee’s decision to hire 934 new teachers in the spring, then lay off 266 teachers just six weeks into the school year.(7:11 min / Download Transcript)

There’s a long way to go before we have genuine national standards in core subjects, and there’s no guarantee that they will be challenging enough, given the inevitable pressures to water them down.

And if we do develop worthwhile standards, some form of national testing is likely to follow.

The President of the United States is already on board for that. He said, “I believe we need some national standard education achievement tests—to be used only optionally when states and/or local school systems want them.”

Whoops, that wasn’t Obama; that was Jimmy Carter in 1977.

By the way, the public is on board. 77% of the public favors using national testing programs to measure the academic achievement of students.

Whoops, that was the Gallup Poll back in 1989.

And even teacher unions are supportive, judging from this quote from a powerful union president:  “American public schools need a national curriculum to become competitive with school systems in other countries and to reverse plummeting public confidence in education.”

Pretty strong stuff, no?  By now you are on to me and have guessed that Albert Shanker said that back in April1990.

I wonder how many of you know just how long the struggle for higher, more comprehensive standards has been going on? I recently read a paper from 1990 by Marshall Smith, Jennifer O’Day and David K. Cohen, published in American Educator, the AFT magazine, back in 1990.  In that article, the authors make the case for standards, lay out the obstacles, and defuse some of the objections.

I write about the current movement in my new book, Below C Level, but if you want a serious examination, download the  Smith-O’Day-Cohen piece here.  It’s called “National Curriculum, American Style.”

(Full disclosure, Mike Smith and David Cohen were my thesis advisors back when they were professors at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and we remain friends.)

The long history, which includes strong support from arch conservatives like William Bennett, suggests that the current drive can be stopped, just as it has been thwarted before.

Personally, I think the time has come, as long as the standards are challenging, interesting and not too finely detailed. What do you think?

New York, NY, July 7, 2010 – Learning Matters is proud to announce that the CINE organization has awarded Learning Matters and its producers John Merrow, David Wald, Jane Renaud, Cat McGrath, Valerie Visconti and Tania McKeown a CINE Golden Eagle Award for “Leadership: A Challenging Course.” The title took the prestigious award in the Professional News Division - Informational category, in the 2010 Spring CINE Golden Eagle Film and Video Competition.

“Leadership: A Challenging Course” is an ongoing report, airing on “PBS NewsHour”, where education correspondent John Merrow follows both novice superintendent Michelle Rhee in her first two years leading Washington, DC’s troubled public schools, and veteran superintendent Paul Vallas’ efforts to create a new school system in a city struggling to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina.

The series has also been the recipient of two EWA awards.

WATCH THE SERIES ONLINE

Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC /    Paul Vallas in New Orleans

To the first question my answer is always the same. ‘I hope not.” Of course I never answer the second question when I am asked, because it’s our job to report what we see happening, not express opinions or pass judgment.  I do, however, have some thoughts on the subject, which you will find in Chapter 9 of Below C Level, pages 81-105.  Yes, it takes 24 pages.

I spent five and one-half years writing Below C Level. The first drafts of many of the chapters were written on an airplane—I haven’t watched an in-flight movie for years—because my work takes me to distant places, and I have been living on the West Coast for the past eight years.

But, looking back with the first copy of Below C Level on the desk next to me now, I realize that the first five years were a walk in the park, relatively speaking. The last six months were without question the hardest part of the journey.  During that time I rewrote every one of the 37 chapters. Once rewritten, it then had to find a place in the structure of the book, or go into the circular file.

Working closely with a brilliant young editorial assistant, Kristen Garabedian, we pretty much scrutinized every sentence.  She religiously checked every fact and assertion. More than once she caught me repeating as fact some oft-repeated observation.  That only 20% of households have school-age children is a shibboleth I have stated with confidence many times—but that turns out to be difficult to nail down—and therefore suspect.

I wrote Below C Level because I am genuinely worried about our country’s future. We are not producing enough skilled adults capable of changing gears to work in a changing society.  Recent reports about the difficulty that moderately high-tech fields are having finding workers confirms my fears.  But our schools are also not supporting our democracy; they are passive to a fault, and one consequence is an increasingly fragmented society in which adults, faced with complexity, retreat to a comfort zone (such as Fox News or MSNBC).

I suppose I am trying to have it both ways: do the work for PBS NewsHour, think about what I’ve seen, and then write about it.

As I sit here, I am aware of my good fortune—to work as a reporter for perhaps the most respected news organization in the world and then to have the opportunity to reflect on what I have seen and experienced over the past 35 years.

Many years ago in a conversation with Howard Gardner, the brilliant scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I gave voice to my admiration and envy for the success of his books, which sell thousands of copies.  He looked at me incredulously. “Are you kidding?” he asked. “Every piece you do for PBS NewsHour reaches more than 2 million people. I envy you.”  On one level, he’s right, because what we do is seen by millions of educated and involved citizens.  But those pieces also disappear into the ether, whereas a book has substance. You can hold it in your hand (and maybe even read it). You can refer to it again and again. It’s there!

Below C Level has substance (or so I’ve been told).  I’ve included lots of stories from my time reporting in the field, but the book also covers what I believe are serious issues in education–issues that demand attention. I offer suggestions of my own, of course.  Feel free to reject them, but I hope you will weigh in with your own solutions.  We’ve had too many years of predicting rain. It’s time to build arks!

Get more info about the book at www.belowclevel.org.

And if you want to be the first in your neighborhood to have a copy, please visit the Below C Level website or purchase it online directly at www.createspace.com/3422460.

When you do that, you will be getting a pretty good read and also helping Learning Matters–because I am donating most of the royalties to the company.

What’s in the book, you ask? Well, It’s 432 pages before you even get to the index, 37 chapters covering everything from pre-school through higher education.

A wry friend suggested that, if I wanted to sell a lot of books, I should just write about all the people I’ve interviewed over the past 34 years. An option, he said, was to tell the truth about them. I’ve actually followed his advice (including the option); the index is 11 pages of mostly names.

A few of the 37 chapters in Below C Level are personal favorites:“Convenient Lies”, the first chapter, is pretty strong stuff. “Safety First” tackles bullying and cyberbullying with powerful stories of what’s gone wrong and suggestions for immediate change. “Following Leaders” is my personal take on Michelle Rhee in Washington and Paul Vallas in New Orleans. Not sure how they’ll feel about the chapter, but I daresay you will enjoy it.

Many of you helped select the cover of Below C Level. When you have the book in your hands you will be able to read the faux ‘theme’ that the designer, HS sophomore Caitlin Colvin, wrote. It’s a clever pastiche of teenspeak that would make any English teacher write, “See me.”

I’ve dedicated Below C Level to two dear friends, Ted Sizer and Bill McAnulty. Most of you know Ted, the author of Horace’s Compromise and the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools. Bill McAnulty was a courageous family court judge in Kentucky when I met him in the early 80’s. He became the founding Board Chair of Learning Matters; more importantly, he was the first African American on the Kentucky Supreme Court. The contributions that both have made to a better society, and to my life, live on.

Visit the book website at:  http://www.belowclevel.org or purchase the book directly at http://www.createspace.com/3422460.

That’s 15 segments, each 8-10 minutes in length, a total of 2 hours of television, roughly.

Our monumental task–15 times over–was to then take that raw material and edit and shape it into a short segment that would tell some part of the story of the effort to transform what was easily one of the worst school districts in the nation.

We produced more than our reports for PBS NewsHour:  Each piece was accompanied by as many as four podcasts, usually longer interviews with Vallas, State Superintendent Paul Pastorek, various Teach for America teachers, parents, and so on.  (Listen to the podcasts here.)

We’ve been doing the same job in Washington, DC, chronicling the efforts of Michelle Rhee to reform the schools there.  We’ve made as many trips, shot as many hours of video, and spent as many weeks editing.  We’ll present our final chapter from that city later this summer.

Did we get it right?  Journalism is merely the first draft of history, and I hope I am around long enough to see what parts of the story we got right, and what we missed.

Meantime, I am considering what to do with the hours and hours of unedited video, because at Learning Matters we don’t throw anything away.  I believe our archive, which now includes about 80,000 hours of unedited video and about 400 of my NPR documentaries, is a historical treasure for anyone interested in American public education from 1974 to the present.   Among the tapes are unedited interviews with the guiding lights of education, including most U.S. Secretaries of Education, Albert Shanker, Debbie Meier, Ted Sizer, Frank Newman, James Comer, Linda Darling-Hammond, Checker Finn and on and on.

What do you think we should do with our archive? Please share your ideas in the comments below…I’m interested in your thoughts.

(I want to give a quick shout out to the foundations that believed in the importance of this work: the Wallace Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Annenberg Foundation.  They made it happen, and we appreciate their support.)

Innovation is education’s only hope. Even if more stimulus dollars become available, that will only put off the day of reckoning, unless educators wake up and act.

Happily, some are. Here are three examples.

I wrote recently about a charter school in Redwood City, California, that uses the last month of school (after the state tests) as a mini-semester in which kids take one elective class and, at month’s end, present their results to the entire school.

I just came from a Gates Foundation meeting in Seattle, where grantees shared ideas for shaking up and changing post secondary education, particularly the community colleges and their embarrassingly high failure rate. A community college in El Paso, Texas, goes into all the local high schools and gives juniors its placement exam. When the kids see the results, they’re likely to see the light—and work harder so they won’t have to spend their first year of ‘college’ taking remedial (high school) classes. The school districts are so keen on this that they are paying the costs of testing, the community college president told me. And they’re also developing curriculum that addresses the deficiencies revealed by the placement tests. In the end, this ‘experiment’ will reduce both failure and costs.

Out here in California, a state whose education system is as hard hit as anywhere in the US, some enterprising folks have figured out a way to reduce the costs of technology by embracing free, open-source software, specifically Linux. I’m indebted to Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury News for pointing this out to me and the other readers of his column on June 11th. Cassidy points out that schools have thousands of computers that have reached the point of obsolescence—they could not support an upgrade of their Windows operating system even if their school system could afford it (which they cannot).

Unplugging them reduces the electricity bill but turns them into paperweights, Cassidy notes. But rather than throw those machines out and deprive students of access to the Internet and the world outside the school’s wall, why not install Linux? It’s free, easy to use and growing in popularity?

There are reasons not to act, of course, including inertia, fear, the costs of retraining people, and perhaps some existing contracts with providers.

Let’s deal with each of these: Contracts should not be a barrier for long, because no company doing business with the public would want to be seen as standing in the way of children’s education. Retraining also should not be a major issue as long as the adults are willing to swallow their pride and enlist teams of students (who are generally ahead of us in technology). Just create teams of kids and adults working together, because that way you’ll end up with checks and balances and safeguards. Installing the software and creating management systems, et cetera, would be real work, which is what most HS students I know would much prefer to the Mickey Mouse routine that is today’s HS experience.

Inertia can’t resist strong, effective leadership. Fear is part of the human condition, which means it has to be faced head on. Address it, harness it, and move beyond it.

So there are three interesting and potentially game-changing innovations: mini-semesters with electives; community colleges reaching down into high school for a reality check for students, and installing free, open-source operating systems in otherwise useless computers.

None of these innovations is motivated chiefly by a desire to save money, but all three end up producing savings.

We should be sharing this sort of news, early and often. If you know of more stories like these, please weigh in. I won’t be the only person thanking you.

The Foundation was kind enough to suggest some opening questions, such as “How can we serve more low-income students better, faster and cheaper?” and “What do each of your institutions have to offer?” and “What will higher education look like 5-10 years from now?”

Maybe it’s because I am still medicated after my recent knee replacement surgery, but I find my mind wandering to other, perhaps more provocative questions. Such as:

Everyone is talking about ramping up ‘success’ and doubling the percentage of low-income students completing their degrees from the current 26% to 52%. Admirable as that is, how is that possible when these institutions operate in a world in which institutional success is not rewarded and institutional failure is not punished?

Does it make sense to have state money flow to these institutions based on enrollment on a certain day in October? Shouldn’t at least some of the money be dependent on the number of students who make it through to the end, successfully?

Picture in your mind a restaurant at the Grand Canyon, the only place around where you can get a meal. There’s always a line out front. Very few repeat customers because everyone’s a tourist. What interest does the restaurant have in serving better meals? Likewise, these institutions operate on what economists call a ‘churn model.’ As long as the number of incoming students equals those leaving, it doesn’t’ matter economically whether the students graduate or flunk out or drop out. How can that model be changed?

Given that more than half of incoming community college students are required to take at least one and often three or more semesters of remedial education, shouldn’t community colleges be working at the high school level? Shouldn’t they give their placement exam to all HS juniors, just to let them know where they stand? That seems like a no-brainer, but in fact only a few community colleges bother.

Why are remedial courses organized by semester? If the institution can tell students what their deficits are, shouldn’t they be able to study up and then try to test out? Why not make it like the test for a driver’s license? Who benefits when the time is inflexible? Certainly not students, who after all want to get beyond remedial and into real college courses?

About one-third of community colleges now have either divisions or departments of developmental education, separate organizations that need failing students in order to justify their existence. What interest do they have in eliminating the need for remedial education? Don’t they, by definition, have a vested interest in seeing that the flow of failing students continues?

Educators talk about the student’s “Right to Fail,” which means operationally that they don’t limit the number of times a student can take and fail remedial math, for example. I’ve met students who tried four, five and six times without success. Is this responsible behavior for an educational institution, or are they just cashing the checks?

Community college students are often heroic in their determination. Last night we heard one person talk about her 9-year plan for earning an Associates degree, while another, a policeman, joked about his “30-year plan” for earning his Associates degree. But why should the burden fall on them?

Why are these stories told from only that vantage point, the struggling, heroic, determined student?  Why don’t we dig deeper? If we did, we’d learn that the classes were oversubscribed by a factor of ten, or that the classes needed were offered only during working hours, or that courses taken at one institution were not accepted at another.  That is, why don’t we look at institutional behavior more carefully?

Walmart just announced a partnership with a for-profit education institution, American Public University. Employees will receive a 15% discount on tuition, and the company is setting aside $50 million over three years to help with costs. Is this a new player in the game? Is this a threat to the status quo? Is this a good thing?

California community college students are leaving in droves, according to so recent research. And they are going to the for profit institutions, despite those places having exceptionally high failure rates. What does this mean? Have students simply gotten fed up with not being able to get the classes they need, when they need them? Is this the canary in the mine, an alarm bell for public institutions? Now California has a partnership with Kaplan, a for-profit institution, in which students get a small discount (15%, I believe). That in fact raises their credit-hour cost by a factor of ten. Who benefits here?

So many questions, so little time. And such an important issue.  If you have some answers, please share them in the comments.

Michigan’s governor actually brought in an Emergency Financial Manager to deal with the situation. His name is Robert Bobb, and he’s got a lot of critics – especially DPS employees who fear that Bobb has an agenda to turn all of Detroit Public Schools into charters. Why might they think this? Well, foundations that support charter schools are paying almost one third of Bobb’s salary. Just what is Bobb’s agenda for the Detroit Public Schools?

Full disclosure: this podcast mentions the Broad and Kellogg foundations. Learning Matters has had support from the Broad Foundation for our coverage of New Orleans and Washington, DC. That grant has not been renewed. Our ListenUp! Youth Media Project has a current grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Think about that for a moment, maybe put yourself in the shoes of a teacher or a student. If you’re a kid, the message is clear: the year is over! Time to kick back and relax. However, if you happen to be a conscientious teacher, you have to climb a big hill every morning and afternoon for the next five or six weeks, because you have to try to interest your students in what they know doesn’t matter.

Left unexplored is what’s being tested. Do these tests cover everything that the students are supposed to have learned, or merely 5/6ths of the material? If they cover everything, isn’t that unfair to those who are being judged by the results (students and, increasingly, their teachers)? If they cover just 5/6th of the course content, will that mean that many students will never get past, say, World War II in history?

Why this happens is no mystery: it’s done for administrative convenience, to give the test companies time to run the test papers through their machines, process the scores, and get them back to the school districts as early as possible in the summer. With so many tests and so few companies, the bottleneck is frightening, worse than the lines at the toll booths on a summer evening when everyone is driving back from the beach.

What makes this bottleneck worse are the mistakes that occur. Imagine if the toll collectors randomly collected different amounts from some drivers! That’s what happens when the machines begin their mass processing: they make mistakes!

(It’s bad in another way: Districts used to be able to get a cheaper rate if they agreed to give the tests early, a ‘bargain’ that poorer districts took advantage of to save money. This harmed their students, who ended up taking the tests before they had actually covered the material they were being tested on. I recall being in a school in a poor district in Michigan during ‘end of year’ testing—in late February! That may well contribute to education’s infamous ‘achievement gap.’)

This mess is education’s equivalent of an iatrogenic (essentially ‘doctor-caused’) condition in medicine, meaning that we do it to ourselves. Since we created it, we ought to be able to prevent it in the first place.

I see three solutions, two of which are more hypothetical than real. The first would require getting rid of high-stakes machine-scored tests or at least minimizing their importance, and that’s just not in the cards. Is there a technological solution? Could the bottleneck be eliminated, with faster machines? The IRS once faced a similar bottleneck, long lines at the post office as the April 15th deadline approached, and if the IRS can solve a problem, then perhaps anyone can. But the momentum is on the side of more machine-scored tests in more subjects, not fewer in fewer, and so any improvement in the machines themselves will neither save the day nor solve the problem.

No, we are stuck with ‘end of the year’ tests being given only 5/6ths of the way through the year. But there is a solution, one I became aware of last week when I visited Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City, California, just up the road from where I live. On the day I visited, the students were about to take the STAR tests, California’s state exams. Founder Diane Tavenner told me that the faculty had adapted the curriculum to the reality of the 5/6th-1/6th absurdity. “We teach everything that’s going to be on the test before the test,” she said. “We’ve changed the schedule so that kids have the same amount of class time going in.” (In other words, they learn about World War II, Korea and Vietnam!)

“But what happens next, once the state tests are over”” I asked. “That’s the best part of the year,” she said with a smile. “All our students take an elective class, one subject from May 17th through June 11th,” she said with pride, showing me the list of 18 choices.

The elective called Musical Theatre, for example, is described thusly: “Join in an exciting and challenging class of musical theater. Learn to sing and dance and develop your public speaking skills while expressing yourself. You will move to the music, create with your classmates and have a chance to perform well-known musicals. This is a great opportunity to discover your shining star and develop new skills. Come join the fun!!

But it’s also work with consequences, because students are expected to demonstrate what they’ve accomplished in end-of-the-year performances for the entire school.

Tavenner knows that students enjoy digging deeply into something they’ve chosen. “Kids aren’t afraid of work,” she said, “but they don’t like busy work, and that’s what school can be once the state tests are over.”

Tavenner isn’t the only member of her family who’s aware of the weird scheduling in regular schools. “My second grade son asked me last week why he was taking the ‘end of the year’ tests when it wasn’t the end of the year,” she wrote in an email. “People wonder why our students are trailing the world in academic achievement. The truth is as a nation we have come to accept an entire array of school rules that make absolutely no sense.”

Students at Tavenner’s school are presented with the menu of electives much earlier in the year and make their choices during first semester. They’re expected to find their adult mentors, decide if they are going to work alone or on a team, and develop a work plan, all before the start of second semester.

And while students are deep in their projects in the next few weeks, Summit’s faculty will be engaged in serious professional development, Tavenner said. “We spend this time trying to improve our own practice, figuring out ways to become better at our craft.”

Because Summit is a charter school, it has the flexibility to adapt to situations, including this stupid and educationally counterproductive one imposed on schools by adults behaving stupidly. Just being a charter school isn’t the solution per se, because not all of them put real learning first. Unfortunately, in my experience, most charter schools do not ‘think outside the box’ they way the folks at Summit do.

In a perfect world, the school district that Summit is part of would be watching and trying to learn from this ‘experiment.’ That hasn’t happened yet, Tavenner said, but it may.

That’s just one example of flexibility and imagination in the face of bureaucratic idiocy. I’d love to hear more examples.

I believe we need FairTest more than ever. No Child Left Behind is still the law of the land and is likely to remain so for many months. As we move toward common standards, we need voices calling for multiple ways of evaluating schools, teachers and students. Those who believe that one score tells it all are sadly wrong, but they are also very powerful.

Sophie Sa, a friend of many years who is now FairTest’s Board Chair, reminded me that FairTest was created in 1985 “to fight against the misuses and abuses of high-stakes standardized norm-referenced tests … while promoting the use of multiple forms of authentic alternate assessments.”

I agree with Sophie that FairTest has been “the leader, the organizational glue, and the legs for individuals and groups concerned with the deleterious effects of standardized testing on students, particularly students in need; on schools and their curriculum; and on the kind of learning that emphasizes critical thinking and deep knowledge.”

Sophie and I go way back, to my own professional crisis back in 1994. I had been affiliated with a non-profit based in South Carolina. It did the books for us and managed the grants I found—for a price. That price seemed steep to us, and so I attempted to negotiate. No deal, I was told. So for our next grants I negotiated with the foundations and saw to it that the payroll-processing fee could not exceed 10%. The man in South Carolina was furious and, when one grant was delayed and our funds were short, he pulled the plug. ‘I’m closing you down,’ he announced, ‘because you don’t have enough grant funds.” ‘We have a big grant on the way, maybe two months.’ “Too bad,” he said.

I began a desperate search for the $150,000 we needed to finish two documentaries, calling anyone and everyone. Out of the blue I got a call from someone from the Panasonic Foundation named Sophie Sa. She told me that her foundation did not make grants but that she had heard about our situation. “Did I know,” she asked, “about the secret foundation?”

‘No,’ I said, ‘please tell me.’

“I can’t,” she answered, “it’s a secret.”

Long story short, a few days later I got a call from someone at the secret foundation, was invited over and walked out with a check for $150,000. I used some of that money to hire a lawyer to incorporate our own company, which we called Learning Matters.

Over the years FairTest has helped me—and others–bring balance to coverage of testing.

Now Sophie Sa has reached out to me to say that FairTest needs help. Truth is, I would help FairTest even if Sophie weren’t involved.

Last week Learning Matters began its own campaign, and we haven’t finished with that. But I am urging you to consider making a tax-deductible gift to FairTest, an organization that plays a vital role in our understanding of the business of learning.

In keeping with the spirit of the moment, here’s a multiple-choice test for you:

THE BEST WAY HELP TO FAIRTEST IS:
A) Contribute on line at http://bit.ly/bd5yP4
B) Send a check 15 Court Square, #820, Boston, MA 02108
C) Encourage your friends and colleagues to help
D) All of the above.

Thanks.

Just 3% of Detroit’s fourth graders scored proficient in math on a national test last year, and Bobb says he intends to do something about it. He hired a curriculum expert, and planned for school mergers and redesigns, even a school that would house pre-kindergarten through community college students. But he has a problem - Detroit still has an elected school board, and they say they control academics, not Bobb.

Download transcript (pdf)

Brian jumped in with both feet. He eagerly turned the page on the past and created a new identity for the school. With extra money from Rhee, he hired coaches for his teachers, coaches who taught the teachers to start their planning by writing the final exam and then working backward from there.  With carte blanche on hiring, he brought in virtually an entirely new staff, and he made it clear to them that he expected results–or they would not be around long.

Kids loved him.  That was apparent to anyone who spent time in the building or outside it before the first bell. He would greet children by name and with a hug, dozens and dozens of them.  For someone like me–I sometimes struggle to remember my own name–this was an awesome display.

I can’t say that I liked all his innovations, such as getting rid of recess, but it was impossible to avoid being swept along by his enthusiasm and his commitment.  He was a risk-taker–even promising in public that he would get another tattoo if his students did well on the city test.

And he easily passed my own personal test of leadership: he was never in his office.  I remember joking with him that, if I were a misbehaving kid in his school and had to hide out somewhere where no one would find me, I would just hide in his office.  He laughingly agreed.

Back in November 2008 we decided to focus one of our NewsHour reports on one DC school.  To get the best story, we filmed extensively in two schools, Brian’s and Ronald Brown Middle School.  In the end, we focused on Ron Brown, and the video from Brian’s school went on the shelf.

Until now.

Today we are posting a wonderful interview with Brian that captures the essence of the man.  I think other educators can learn a lot about leadership from this interview, while parents and others will get a pretty good idea of what to look for in an instructional leader.

On one level, it may be difficult to watch, knowing that Brian is gone. On another deeper level, however, this interview keeps his spirit alive.

EDIT (05/03/10):  Three 18-year-old men and the mother of one of them have been arrested in the case. For full details, go to www.washingtonpost.com and search under “Brian Betts.”

This 2008 interview with Brian Betts captures his essence.  Other educators can learn a lot about leadership from this interview, while parents and others will get a pretty good idea of what to look for in an instructional leader.

On one level, it may be difficult to watch, knowing that Brian is gone. On another deeper level, however, this interview keeps his spirit alive.

Osiris’ “Circle of Courage” is one strategy the school is using to try and help students stay out of trouble and pass their classes. But how much can sitting in a circle and talking really help?

Now, I don’t know how many of you out there looked at any of the original proposals. I read into four of them and can tell you that the writers (using that term loosely) have invented a wonderful substitute for Ambien, a perfect cure for insomnia. I think the average proposal came in at somewhere between 800-900 pages—of turgid prose. Had I been sentenced to read all of that stuff, I think I would have thrown up my hands, torn out my hair, screamed, and then given the money to the states with the shortest proposals.

I hope this time the Duncan team will tell the competitors in the second round: “30 pages max! If you can’t say it in 30 pages or less, don’t bother. Put all the rest in appendices, thank you.” (I recall the wisdom of “If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter,” attributed to Mark Twain and others.)

A second remarkable event is the new contract between the Washington Teachers Union and Michelle Rhee. It took 2+ years, but it may have been worth the wait. Assuming it’s ratified by the City Council and the members of the union, this contract essentially ends the tyranny of seniority and introduces a strong dose of pay-for-performance. Does the contract have implications beyond Washington? I think it does, and I base that on Randi Weingarten’s remarks at the press conference. She went out of her way to brand this as ‘unique,’ using that adjective four times in the space of a couple of sentences to try to convince listeners that it applied only to DC and no other cities, states, towns or unions. As Hamlet noted in watching the overheated acting in the famous ‘play within the play’, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

Change is here, and it’s no longer possible to talk about paying teachers simply based on years in the classroom and number of college credits. Those days are over, I think thanks largely to Rhee. What the new systems will look like, I don’t know, but I am willing to bet that anyone arguing for ‘seat time and credits’ will be laughed out of town.

And finally, Detroit, where I am now preparing a report for PBS NewsHour. This city’s schools are a mess. How bad? On the most recent NAEP results for cities, only three percent of 4th graders scored at a proficient level in math. That’s not a misprint: 3%!

Most people I’ve talked to blame the State for what it did when it took over and ran the schools from 1999-2005, but that’s about all Detroiters agree on. Detroit has an Emergency Financial Manager, Robert Bobb, who has extraordinary authority, thanks to the Governor and the Legislature.

Since arriving just over a year ago, Bobb has closed schools and turned over a lot of rocks—and found corruption under quite a few of them. The Detroit School Board is suing, saying that Bobb has no authority over academics, only finances. Bobb responds that anything that money touches—and it touches curriculum, of course—is under his authority.

Members of the Board are also upset that unnamed private foundations are paying $145,000 of Bobb’s annual salary of $425,000, and that’s in court as well.

Lost in the shuffle, I fear, are children and young people, even though everyone claims to be putting the kids first.

What’s going to happen? I have no idea. If this were a baseball game, you have to say that it’s only the second or third inning. But, unfortunately, it’s not a game.

(Photo credits: Top - David Clow - Maryland; Bottom -  Stephen Voss.)

Download “Life at Schwarz” to take a look inside the school paper. (pdf)

When Paul Vallas took over the New Orleans Recovery School District in 2007, he inherited hundreds of these cases. His solution was a network of alternative schools run by a private contractor, but that did not go as planned. This year Vallas is trying something radically different, hoping to address the deep roots of students’ academic and behavioral problems. Find out what he’s trying…and whether it’s working.

Download transcript (pdf)

On our last trip to New Orleans, we spent time in two ‘alternative’ schools — schools designed to serve students who have failed in, or been failed by, ‘traditional’ schools.  Students in these alternative schools are sometimes there for behavioral reasons (they’ve been expelled or spent time in the juvenile justice system).  Sometimes the problem is academic.  In every case, the situation is complex.

We wondered how alternative schools can make a difference in the lives these students, so we asked national experts to weigh in.

We hope that you’ll continue the discussion in the comment section, below.

DENNIS WHITE

Director Emeritus, National Alternative Education Association

Traditional or regular education and schools are designed to teach mainstream students in a “manufacturing” or “production” manner. This approach has not changed much since the middle of the 20th Century. Even school reform efforts have focused on the “supply side” of education, not the “demand side.” In other words, regular education (and reform efforts) presume that most if not all students are “typical,” that the needs of these “typical” students are more similar than they are different in the student population, and so on.

In alternative education, a student is not considered typical; very often, each student has unique needs that might be rooted outside the school, in the home, in the neighborhood, and so on. These unique needs – these demands – might also be rooted in learning styles – and testing skills – that regular schools have not accommodated, or cannot or will not accommodate. These students and school-age youth might be under-performing academically, may have learning disabilities, emotional or behavioral problems, or may be direct or indirect objects of the behavioral problems of others. These students can be considered “at risk,” through no fault of their own. Alternative education offers additional opportunities to achieve academically and develop socially and emotionally in a different setting. Alternative education is “student-centered” rather than “system-centered.” Alternative education is the ultimate education reform.

The NAEA provides staff development and support to professionals who work on behalf of disenfranchised and at-risk youth. The NAEA supports professionals who work on behalf of youth who can benefit from alternative curriculum, instruction, and customized educational programming by (1) maintaining effective guidelines for best practice and (2) providing on-going professional development for those individuals who work on behalf of these youth.

SAMUEL ROSALDO

Director of Retention Initiatives, District 79:  Alternative Schools and Programs, New York City

I have a colleague, Stacey, who earned her GED fifteen years ago. On the day she enrolled, the assistant principal said to her, “You’re 16?! You need to go back to high school.” When Stacey explained that neither of her two previous high schools wanted her back, the AP told her to check in every evening before class with an update on her progress. Most of the time she did, and when she didn’t, more often than not the AP would track her down. Within a year she earned her GED. (We’re fortunate that Stacey Oliger is our Deputy Director of Student Support Services, and her AP, Gloria Ortiz, is now the principal of a District 79 high school on Rikers Island.)

In New York City, nearly 200,000 16-24 year-olds are neither enrolled in school nor engaged in work. Every one of our students should have an adult who cares and pushes him/her to succeed at a high level, just as Stacey did. Too often we lower expectations and lack urgency in serving students who decide to reconnect to school, when they would most benefit from higher expectations and an increased sense of urgency. We don’t want our programs to be the last stop for our students. In order to be the stepping stone our students need, we must take advantage of the opportunity to propel them towards success.

LORI LAMB

President, The National Alternative Education Association

Director of Alternative Education, Arkansas Dept. of Education

Alternative schools and programs provide positive interventions while also helping students graduate and set post secondary career goals.  Students often cite individual relationships and smaller class sizes as being instrumental to their success in this placement.  In the alternative setting, innovative approaches are used such as including students in the decision making process. Students begin to take ownership in discussing what wasn’t working and what supports are necessary for them to succeed in the future.  Often, technology advancements are also applied to support the delivery of rigorous curriculum.

Alternative education provides thorough wrap-around support services for students.  Credit recovery, self pacing, remediation of skills, encouragement in art, music, self expression, social skills, physical activity, and individualized counseling are all unique assets to alternative education.  The hands-on, project based learning approach includes the student in a way that creates a connection and purpose for learning.  The Exemplary Practices published by the NAEA (National Alternative Education Association) demonstrates necessary components to provide a positive culture for these intervention programs.  Some students that feel disconnected from peers in a traditional setting flourish in the alternative setting due to the “family atmosphere” and acceptance for all students.

MICHAEL HAGGEN

Deputy Superintendent, Recovery School District, New Orleans, LA

If an alternative school does not take students who were failed at a traditional school, the student does not have another option to go to public school.  Those students who drop out of school after being failed in regular schools have less of a chance of getting employment.  The students often end up in the criminal justice system.

Often times [at a traditional school], students who make many poor choices continue to do so because of the lack of intervention services, which are services for students who have been identified having a special need.  Some special needs include emotional disturbance, learning disabilities in reading or math, attention deficit disorders, and attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

The difference an alternative school (Multiple Pathway Network School) in the Recovery School District New Orleans could make is more individualized attention.  The student teacher ratio is much smaller, and each school is required to have at least 1 full time social worker, special education specialist and  counselor, two student interventionists, part time nurse, life skills course and a mandatory once a week meeting for the students and social worker or counselor.  In the Recovery School District, we recognized that the students need to be reengaged in the learning process and must have the proper parameters and tools to do so.    Alternate placement gives students another chance and accepts them when no one else will, but it is important to have clear expectations, consequences and rewards.

Students in the alternative setting learn to come to the staff when they have conflict at home or school.  They share what is going on so they will not make a poor choice and come to value the new opportunity they are given.  Some of our students that have met all of the criteria to transition back to a traditional school by passing all classes, being present in school at least 85% of the time and not having any major incident, request to stay at the alternative school or come back after they have reentered a traditional school.  The students say, “The teachers and counselor never meet with me”, or “They don’t care.”  The alternative setting exposes the students to all the possibilities that are available for them when they complete high school.  The students learn and respect that failure is not an option.

The second event is a figurative cancer, the inexplicable and disgraceful inaction of an unknown number of teachers and administrators at a public high school in South Hadley, Massachusetts, who were—according to the district attorney–aware of the harsh bullying of a 15-year-old girl by a handful of students and yet did nothing. Multiple felony indictments of nine teenagers were announced last week, all classmates of Phoebe Prince, who hung herself in January. No adults were charged.

Jaime Escalante gained national prominence in the aftermath of a 1982 scandal surrounding 14 of his Garfield High School students who, after they passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam, were accused of cheating. As Elaine Woo wrote in the LA Times, “The story of their eventual triumph — and of Escalante’s battle to raise standards at a struggling campus of working-class, largely Mexican American students — became the subject of the movie, which turned the balding, middle-aged Bolivian immigrant into the most famous teacher in America.” Mr. Olmos, who helped raise money to defray the teacher’s medical costs, said, “Jaime didn’t just teach math. Like all great teachers, he changed lives’.

The teachers and administrators in South Hadley also changed lives, one permanently. The prosecutor said the teenagers’ taunting and physical threats were beyond the pale. Two boys and four girls, ages 16 to 18, face felony charges that include statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury, harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly. Three younger girls have been charged in juvenile court. The taunting and physical threats went on for three months, the District Attorney said.

As the New York Times reported “It was particularly alarming, the district attorney said, that some teachers, administrators and other staff members at the school were aware of the harassment but did not stop it. “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome,” Ms. (Elizabeth) Scheibel said, but did not violate any laws.”

No laws were broken? What about fundamental ethical principles? Moral laws? Common decency? Where was South Hadley’s Jaime Escalante? What sort of moral vacuum exists at South Hadley high school? Does this happen at many other schools?

The answer to my last question is, unfortunately, YES. Every day about 160,000 children miss school because they’re afraid of being bullied, according to the National Association of School Psychologists.

Schools are supposed to be safe havens, physically, intellectually and emotionally. We shouldn’t need anti-bullying laws, although at least 40 other states have or are contemplating legislation, and Massachusetts is putting the finishing touches on its own law—after a year of debate and discussion. No doubt we will have federal action as well. One such bill is the Safe Schools Improvement Act, H.R. 2262, which would require schools that receive federal education funding to implement a comprehensive, enumerated anti-bullying policy that also requires schools to report bullying incidents.

These laws are largely aimed at youthful offenders. It seems to me that what’s needed is adult training in how to intervene, as well as sanctions for failure to intervene. Just as adults are required by law to report suspected sexual abuse, so to should they be required to act in clear cases of bullying.

I have some experience with cowardly or indifferent educators on this, unfortunately. As a reporter, I meet students all the time who talk openly about being teased:

“I’m just sick of some people making fun of me because of the color of my skin, or because of what I wear,” said Jessica, a young white girl in a nearly all-black middle school in New York City.

“Kids would make fun of my ears, because they’re big, and I just hated it,” said Charles, 17 years old and about six feet two inches, recalling painful years of merciless teasing by classmates.

“They call me stupid, stuff like that, because I get nervous and start stuttering,” said Carlos, a Maryland high school student, describing how other students react when he tried to read aloud.

“They’d go ‘Hahaha, A.D.D. boy, you can’t do anything right. You’re so stupid,’” said John, who’d been diagnosed with A.D.D. and was on Ritalin.

When students tell their stories to me, a reporter from outside, I often ask, “What happens if you complain to teachers or to your parents?” Usually, the kids tell me, the adults say, ‘Get tough. That’s just normal, so get used to it.’

I’ve heard that before. I remember one of my daughters coming home after being cruelly teased at school. I was concerned enough to visit the head of the school. When I related my daughter’s experience, he nodded. “We’re aware of it,” he said, “and we’re watching to see how it turns out.”

His detached attitude and his unwillingness to stop the bullying infuriated me. “Why isn’t it your job to intervene?” I demanded.

“This is a natural part of growing up,” he said, unfazed, “and kids have to get tough.” We took our child out of that school, because we could. Why keep a child in an institution whose leader believes in going with the flow, instead of taking responsibility? But most parents might not be as fortunate, and besides, they shouldn’t have to move their children. Schools and the adults in them have moral and ethical responsibilities to protect children, whatever the laws may say. Responsible school leaders work overtime to create an environment in which student leaders discourage bullying, an environment which all but shouts out “We don’t do that here.”

Where are the men and women of courage, the Jaime Escalantes? I know they are there. What keeps them from speaking up, shouting if need be? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Chapter 22 Excerpt

Where seniority rules, new teachers are likely to suffer. They are often assigned to the least desirable schools, given the “worst” classes, the most preparations and the additional assignments nobody else wants. But here’s a radical thought: Seniority, at least in its most rigid forms, hurts veteran teachers, too.

It’s not difficult to find administrators who dislike the rigidities of seniority. When I asked an assistant principal how his elementary school went about hiring teachers, he answered wryly: “You want to know how we fill vacancies? We don’t. A day or two before school opens, someone shows up with some paperwork and says, ‘I’m your new fourth-grade teacher. Where’s my classroom?’ And we take the paperwork and point to the empty room.”

His distaste was palpable. “What other profession doesn’t allow the professionals to select their colleagues?” he wanted to know. “How can we create a genuine learning environment when we can’t control who teaches here?”

When teachers have seniority, “Who benefits?”  That’s a question I’ve been pondering ever since I happened to meet Marlene, a middle-aged veteran of more than 20 years in the classroom.

“This is the worst school I’ve ever taught in,” the teacher muttered to herself, just loud enough for me to hear. We were watching several hundred high school students streaming into school on a fall morning a few years ago. I asked how long she’d been teaching there. “It’s my first year,” she said bitterly.

Because her union was fiercely protective of teachers’ seniority rights, I assumed she’d made the decision to teach there, and I asked her why. Her answer stunned me: “It’s the closest school to my home, and I wanted a short commute.”

We introduced ourselves and talked for a while. I don’t know what sort of teacher Marlene is, but it’s easy to hypothesize that she’s a burned-out, bored worker counting the hours until she can go home for the day. I can imagine her contempt for the school playing itself out with her students.

Is Marlene Exhibit A, proving the evils of the seniority system, or could there be more to the story? I’m assuming that 20 or 25 years ago she was a typical new teacher: idealistic, energetic and determined to contribute to the growth and learning of her students. What happened to make her view her profession through such a narrow prism? Have the rewards of teaching been so slight that commuting time, not her colleagues, the curriculum or the work environment, has become her highest priority?

Unions fought for seniority to protect their members from what they perceived as arbitrary decisions of administrators, and any veteran teacher can tell horror stories of being treated contemptuously or indifferently. Does that still happen? Do administrators still treat trained teachers as if they were “interchangeable parts?” Sadly, in many places they do.

A few years ago I watched a first-year teacher showing high school sophomores how to determine the area of a rectangle. She gave her students the formula and did three sample problems on the board. Each time she gave the answer in meters. No one in the class, including the teacher, knew that the answers had to be in square meters.

What she was experiencing in her first year on the job helps explain why unions fight so hard for rights for teachers. As a new teacher, she had no rights at all, and she was treated disrespectfully. The school district had hired her to teach physical education, the subject she’d trained to teach, but on the first day of school her principal assigned her to teach two sections of algebra, a subject she herself had not studied since high school. Could she have refused? “Yes,” she said, smiling ruefully, “but I wouldn’t have had a job.”

“Teachers as Interchangeable Parts” seemed to be the operating principle of that school principal. Elsewhere in the school, an art teacher was teaching basic math and a middle school basketball coach was teaching high school English.

That fundamental attitude of anti-professionalism goes beyond individual administrators. It’s built into laws and regulations. For example, Georgia (where that young woman was teaching) said at the time that it was fine for teachers to spend 40 percent of their time teaching subjects out of their field without being categorized as “out-of-field.”

A persuasive analogy, perhaps, has to do with automobiles. Consider this: A BMW mechanic could not spend 40 percent of his time repairing Volvos or Fords, but a phys ed teacher can be told to teach two physics classes! So cars are more important than children (or other people’s children, anyway).

The world of teachers is one of small victories, and dozens of routine indignities: constant interruptions from the main office (“Please send Joey Brown to the office”), hall patrol, lunch room duty and the impossibility of taking a bathroom break when nature calls.

Over the years this treatment takes its toll. Many teachers simply leave. In fact, the data show that over 40 percent of new teachers quit the profession in the first five years, according to Richard Ingersoll, professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. It may be as high as 46 percent within five years, according to the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future in 2007; that’s an exit rate far higher than in law, medicine, nursing or the ministry – professions that teaching is often compared to. In many districts, the numbers are even worse. The University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute reported in June 2009 that in Chicago, “Teacher mobility rates at schools with low teacher commitment are abysmal – 67 percent in elementary schools leave within five years, and 76 percent turn over in the high schools. These are schools where teachers do not feel loyal to their schools, would not recommend their school to, and do not look forward to teaching every day.”

What happens to those who stay? While thousands continue to do wonderful work despite it all, many become, in the current lingo, “burned out.”  That is, they’re on the job, but they’ve lost sight of why they became teachers in the first place. Perhaps that’s what happened to Marlene.

Seniority gives veterans – finally – the opportunity to thumb their noses at these indignities, and that’s how I explain Marlene’s way of choosing her school.

There are much better alternatives of course, ways to allow teachers to be professionals. In Seattle, for instance, progressive union leadership and a visionary superintendent, the late John Stanford, pushed through an agreement allowing teachers to be part of the hiring process at individual schools while, at the same time, allowing schools to hire without regard to seniority. That meant teachers were able, for the first time in their professional lives, to participate in choosing their colleagues, in building a professional team at their workplace.

Improving the system, however, cannot start with doing away with seniority. Most teachers I’ve known want to be good at their job, but they’re working in systems that don’t let that happen. Seniority is a desperate protection, but if I were a teacher I’d fight to hold onto it, unless and until management demonstrated its commitment to teaching as a profession.

How will union support, or opposition, affect Race to the Top?

With almost 5 million members nationwide, teacher unions are one of the most powerful labor organizations in the country. For years they’ve been accused of calling the shots in our nation’s classrooms. But Race to the Top, with its emphasis on tying teacher evaluations to student performance, is challenging the unions. Some of the 16 state finalists in the competition for $4.35 billion entered with almost no backing from their local unions. When winners are announced and plans enacted, it’s anybody’s guess what role unions will play.

Are union objections to Race to the Top legitimate, or are they simply protecting their members? We take you to one small city in Pennsylvania where, despite its one high school failing for the past six years and despite only 50% of kids being at grade level, the local union refused to be part of Pennsylvania’s application. They are wary, to say the least. Are their suspicions justified?

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At least three forces washed away the hard-won gains that “A Nation at Risk” produced, and they have created the perilous situation we now find ourselves in:

• An ambitious but misguided federal law.
• An MBA-like “bottom-line” mentality.
• Parsimonious behavior.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 began with bipartisan optimism. In language that resonates today, the new president from Texas decried “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and declared that unless all groups of students at a school made progress, the entire school would be found deficient.

Unfortunately, for the most part NCLB has not worked. I have spent hundreds of days in schools since the law’s passage and have witnessed principals and teachers focusing on getting as many students as possible over the NCLB “basic” bar: a laughably low standard in most states. The kids “on the bubble” get the attention, while brighter ones must fend for themselves.

Did NCLB produce genuinely high standards? From what I’ve seen and reported, NCLB has driven down standards, dumbed down the curriculum, suffocated programs for talented students, and driven away many of our best teachers. Moreover, it has actually led to an increase in school dropouts, as some educators “encourage” low-performing students to try their luck elsewhere.

The MBA mentality is also at fault here. Schools seem to have abandoned their mission of preparing skilled and competent individuals to face a complex world with confidence. Instead, many schools focus on bubble test scores. “Drill often” replaces teaching and learning. As the “challenge-based learning” project notes, “Students today have instant access to information through technology and the web, manage their own acquisition of knowledge through informal learning, and have progressed beyond consumers of content to become producers and publishers. As a result, traditional teaching and learning methods are becoming less effective at engaging students and motivating them to achieve.” That’s a polite way of saying that many of our brightest kids are bored to tears.

Money is the third cause of failure. The conventional wisdom, that education spending has been going up for years, is wrong. While the dollar amount increased from $100 billion in 1985 to about $500 billion in 2001, and is continuing to rise with President Obama’s latest additions to the education budget, our effort – as a portion of our Gross Domestic Product and overall government spending – has declined significantly. According to the Office of Management and Budget, in 1980 we devoted 9 percent of GDP to education; in 2001, it was less than 5 percent. And according to the OECD, after five years it was just 5.5 percent in 2006.

We are not trying harder!

I am not arguing that education dollars are well spent, because often they are not. And we clearly have to do more with what we have now, in these difficult times.

In case you are interested, teachers are actually worse off today.

In 1991, the average teacher made slightly more than the average college graduate; in 2008, the median annual wage for K-12 teachers was between $47,100 and $51,180, with the lowest 10 percent earning between $30,970 and $34,280, and the top 10 percent earning $75,190 to $80,970, according to The Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average starting salary for a 2010 graduate with a bachelor’s degree, estimated to be down this year due to the economy, is $48,351, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Compared with their international counterparts, U.S. teachers fare worse. A 2007 OECD study found that a primary school teacher in America with 15 years of experience earned a ratio of about 96 percent of the country’s GDP per capita; primary teachers with similar experience in other OECD countries typically earned 117 percent of their country’s GDP per capita, with teachers in Korea earning the highest (221 percent).

But nothing illustrates our parsimony as powerfully as our spending on testing. According to policy analysts at Education Sector, in 2006 we spent just 15 cents of every $100 on NCLB tests. Cheap tests, the tail wagging the dog, are the principal cause of education’s decline into rote tedium.

Those cheap tests actually mask the severity of the problem, because young children can be drilled to pass them. They are drilled, and they do pass. That is, fourth-grade scores generally seem to suggest improvements in competency in reading and, up through 2007, math, but those gains are illusory; they begin to disappear as early as fifth and sixth grades and are often gone by eighth grade. By their sophomore and junior years in high school, many of our students have actually regressed.

It’s my considered opinion that most of the early gains are not real but are actually a mirage, created by teaching a narrow curriculum and by teaching students how to pass the tests. In the name of getting enough passing test scores to meet NCLB’s requirements, many schools are stifling student creativity and curiosity and drowning children’s desire to learn.

The implications for our economy are frightening. “Over the past thirty years, the modern workplace has radically changed, and the demands on those making the transition from the classroom to the workforce continue to rise,” notes the Alliance for Excellent Education. “Students from Birmingham and Boston no longer compete against each other for jobs; instead, their rivals are well-educated students from Sydney and Singapore. But as globalization has progressed, American educational progress has stagnated. Today, the United States’ high school graduation rate ranks near the bottom among developed nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And on virtually every international assessment of academic proficiency, American secondary school students’ performance varies from mediocre to poor. Given that human capital is a prerequisite for success in the global economy, U.S. economic competitiveness is unsustainable with poorly prepared students feeding into the workforce.”

And we are failing those most in need. The gaps in opportunity, expectations and outcomes between rich and poor, and white and non-white, are increasing.

Strong measures are needed to save public education. NCLB (under a new name) will eventually be reauthorized by Congress, which, unfortunately, shows few signs of having learned that Washington cannot run public education.

The Congress and President Obama are attempting to enable excellence by providing money to allow consortia of states to develop common standards and tests. (And yes, I do agree that we need accountability and good tests.)

But I believe that Congress must also provide more funds and tax breaks to encourage our best and brightest to become teachers. It could provide additional tax breaks for those willing to teach math and science or in economically impacted areas. Economists suggest that, while these changes would not have strong effects, the symbolic significance – showing that the United States values teaching – would be powerful.

America needs a wake-up call – because right now, in terms of convenient lies, we’re telling ourselves some real whoppers.

The first truth we must face is that we are a ticking time bomb. Nearly one in four American high school students will leave school without a diploma. About 1.2 million students drop out each year (that’s between 6,000 and 7,000 American children every school day or one every 26 seconds), and close to 50 percent of Hispanic and African- American students do not finish high school on time.

These dropout rates significantly impact the health of our economy. Observing that our country’s “achievement gap” is similar to sustaining “a permanent national recession,” McKinsey & Company estimated that if academic performance by minorities had equaled that of white students in 1998, America’s 2009 GDP would have been between 2 to 4 percent higher (a difference of $310 billion to $525 billion, according to their calculations).

“In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity — it is a prerequisite,” said President Obama in February 2009, addressing the House and Senate. Citing the high dropout rate in our country and adding that only about half of American students have a college diploma, the president called this a “prescription for economic decline because we know the countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow.” He added: “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself; it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American.”

Just 20 years ago, the United States was home to the most college graduates on the planet; today we rank 15th out of 29 countries compared in “Measuring Up 2008,” which notes that “the U.S. adult population ages 35 and older still ranks among the world leaders in the percentage who have college degrees – reflecting the educational progress of earlier times. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, however, the U.S. population has slipped to 10th in the percentage who have an associate degree or higher.”

Compared with other countries, our students’ performance in math and science is falling behind; one study even showed American eighth-graders tied with students in third-world Zimbabwe in mathematics.

Our economy will lose billions over the life of our “dropout nation,” and as America moves from a manufacturing-based economy to a globalized service- and technology-based economy, our schools are not producing a well-enough educated work force to handle jobs that will keep the country clicking.

Educationally, we are the equivalent of a vinyl LP in an iPod world.

America has a history of surviving crises, of course. Think of the Morrill Act after the Civil War; the GI Bill after World War II; the National Defense Education Act after Sputnik; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency; and the waves of education reform that followed “A Nation at Risk” in 1983.

Today the stakes are higher, and our response has to be faster and stronger. If the $100-plus billion stimulus package (and any subsequent bailout packages that Congress might provide) turn out to have allowed schools to just keep on doing what they’ve been doing, then we will have merely postponed the day of reckoning.

The tone of the rest of the book is not like this, of course, because part of my goal is to identify solutions, which I endeavor to do, but it is important to face up to the fact that our system is prone to accept mediocrity—and that’s what must change!

The design is by Caitlin Colvin, a sophomore at Castilleja, the girls school in Palo Alto, California. Caitlin modified the design, per suggestions from me and many of you. Notice the subtle handwriting on the slightly crumpled essay as well as the warmer font.

I am still wrestling with the subtitle and invite you to weigh in if you have an opinion. My own three finalists are:
1, the current one: “Why it pays to be average in public education–and what we can do about it.”

2:  “How public education encourages mediocrity–and what we can do about it”
3: “How public education rewards mediocrity–and what we can do about it”

The last phrase is essential, because the book includes solutions, suggestions and portraits of success.

I would have been more than happy to have either of the other two cover designs on Below C Level. #1 is the work of Lillian Xie, who is a junior at Palo Alto High School. She’s an accomplished pianist, a reporter for the high school newspaper (one of the best in the nation), and a superb artist. #2, the clever play on ’sea’ and ‘C’, was created by a design team of two Castilleja students, Emily Hayflick, ‘11 and Camille Stroe, ‘12.

I am making a few final edits on the book itself, all 38 chapters, and expect to send it off to Amazon’s publishing division later this week. It should be available for pre-ordering in just a couple of weeks and in your hands not long after that.

Again, thanks for your participation and guidance in helping me choose a cover. It was interesting and fun to read all of your comments and suggestions!

New York, NY, March 11, 2010 – Learning Matters is proud to announce that The Education Writers Association (EWA), the national professional association of education reporters and writers, has awarded Learning Matters and its producers John Merrow, David Wald, Jane Renaud, Cat McGrath, Valerie Visconti and Tania McKeown First Prize for Best Television Documentary/ Feature for “Leadership: A Challenging Course” in the 2009 National Awards for Education Reporting, the prestigious national competition for education journalism.

“Leadership: A Challenging Course” is an ongoing report, airing on “PBS NewsHour”, where education correspondent John Merrow follows both novice superintendent Michelle Rhee in her first two years leading Washington, DC’s troubled public schools, and veteran superintendent Paul Vallas’ efforts to create a new school system in a city struggling to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina.

This is the 16th EWA award for Learning Matters. John Merrow will accept the First Place Award at the awards luncheon Saturday, May 15 during the Education Writers Association’s 63rd National Seminar being held in San Francisco, California at the Hotel Kabuki.

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Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC /    Paul Vallas in New Orleans

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]]> “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” it’s often said, but can you and will you be the judge for the cover for my new book? A short time ago I asked students at two California schools, Palo Alto High School and Castilleja, to help create the cover for my new book, Below C Level: Why It Pays to be Average in Public Education (and what WE can do about it).

The students submitted dozens of possibilities, and I have selected three finalists—for your consideration. Understand that these are drafts and can be changed, so I am NOT asking for an up-or-down vote but for your preference AND your suggestions as to how to improve the eventual winner.

Here they are. Please submit your vote and suggestions to the blog itself, so we can post your views. I ask you to remember that the designers are high school students who have put a lot of time and energy into this. They’re in the game, and they know they might not be chosen, but they deserve credit for their efforts, not snarky comments.

I am publishing the book on Amazon, meaning that there’s only one way to buy it—and it should be available for purchase in less than a month.

I’m donating a sizable portion of the royalties to Learning Matters, so, when you buy it, you will be supporting our in-depth coverage of education.

As for the book itself, here’s a snippet from the preface:

Schools are at the proverbial crossroads. Think of it this way: Just a few years ago, children went to schools (and libraries) to have access to knowledge, but today knowledge is everywhere, thanks to technology and the Internet. So why should kids go to school?

Just a few years ago, children went to school to socialize and be socialized, but today there’s an app for that! Kids have Facebook, Farmville, Myspace, Twitter and other powerful social media, so why should kids go to school?

I am asking the question, “Is School Obsolete?” And my answer is, essentially, “No, but…..”
As I will argue, many adults want schools to keep an eye on their kids and keep them safe. Those are not good enough reasons from a youth’s perspective, and so effective schools will teach young people how to evaluate knowledge, how to separate the wheat from the chaff—and how to choose the wheat. Yes, schools must teach values!

Good teachers will be like musical conductors, but the music won’t be classical. It will be jazz, full of riffs and tangents, and changing from performance to performance. Teaching will be tougher but infinitely more rewarding in these schools–if we are smart enough to build them.

Thanks for participating in this competition. I look forward to reading your ideas.

Cast your vote in the comments! We’ll be tallying the scores and sharing the results next week.

In the world of film documentary, the word ‘see’ means ‘video tape,’ and Washington DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee was actually inviting us to run our cameras as she fired one of her employees.

My colleagues Jane Renaud and Cat McGrath accepted the invitation on the spot. As Jane recalls, “She told us to come back at a specific time, and so we got a sandwich, returned to her office, set up the equipment, and shot the meeting.”

Jane and Cat had spent the morning with Chancellor Rhee, filming her meetings with parents, and with community groups and principals. Rhee was a dynamo, moving easily from meeting to meeting, and from scene to scene, and always seemingly unaware of the presence of our cameras, including the scene where she fires a school principal.

Our film of that event was broadcast nationally on PBS NewsHour and helped to illuminate the persona of Michelle Rhee as a fearless and determined reformer who puts the interests of children first.

Now an Academy Award-winning filmmaker has inserted the footage into his new feature film, without our permission.
For me it is more than just another spat between filmmakers. It is a matter of principle and respect.

Here’s some background: Early in 2009 Davis Guggenheim reached out to us in an e-mail. He praised our work, and he asked me to call him. I had admired his earlier film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and I told him so on the phone. We had a pleasant conversation, and he told me he wished to use some of our Rhee footage. He identified the clips he wanted, including the scene where Superintendent Rhee fires the employee. When he asked to buy it, I told him that we had never sold footage before, but at that time we were actually having bit of a financial struggle, so I told Mr. Guggenheim that I might be interested, for the right price.

Rather than discuss terms, we agreed to get back to one another to work out the actual deal. I believed that the footage was worth at least $25,000, which would have been a great help to us at the time. I waited for an offer. Not long afterward his producer called. She offered $5,000.

My immediate reaction was that I was being low-balled, that because his people knew our situation, they expected us to take whatever they offered.

So I said no. Of course, this was a negotiation, and I expected a decent counter-offer, but I also thought that if none came that would also be okay. The truth is, we had long planned to put this footage into a documentary of our own. For me, for us, this was a win-win game.

But then came a bit of stunning news. In mid-January Mr. Guggenheim’s producer called. We are using the footage anyway, she announced, and we want to give you one last chance to take the $5,000. When we did not accept, she then cited the ‘fair use’ doctrine and noted that their film would give Learning Matters credit on screen.

Now, the doctrine of ’fair use’ is ambiguous at best and is very limited for creative works, where qualitatively important work is taken and the use undermines the market or replaces the market for the original–all which are the case in this situation. I believe that Mr. Guggenheim’s attempted purchase of our footage is nothing more than firm confirmation that they knew the ground rules before they went about making their film.

And it is, by all reports, a very powerful film. It was very well received at Sundance, and we understand that Paramount’s Vantage Pictures bought the rights for worldwide distribution. A fall opening is planned.

Well, our lawyer has informed Mr. Guggenheim that we intend to take whatever steps are necessary to protect our property. In turn, Mr. Guggenheim’s attorney has said that ‘fair use’ applies and has warned me not to criticize his client.

But our attorney has been down this road before; in fact, he even argued and won a landmark copyright case before the Supreme Court. Film at eleven!

Henry was for all intents and purposes a slave, but with a huge difference: he knew that he would become a free man on a specific contractual date. He might even gain his freedom before that date if he saved enough. But in either case, each day he worked brought him closer to his freedom.

Is it too over-the-top to propose that this is akin to America’s high schools today? Students are certainly not slaves, but at times they are a bit like indentured servants, who, if they put in their seat-time for a set number of days and years, will receive diplomas and be done with schooling. They will be free.

Back to Henry Merrow; he served out his  term and became a free man. He eventually married and moved to Reading, Massachusetts,  where he raised an impressively large family and prospered. His is a success story, but I find myself wondering if some indentured servants simply became fed up with the system and ran away before their terms were up.

It sure happens a lot today in our schools. Over the course of an average school year close to 6,000 high school students simply drop out every day. They decide not to stick around for the full term of their indenture.  We might ask whether the high school experience so stultifying and so frustrating that we should call their behavior rational, but that’s the wrong question. Rather ask, what is the cost of such ‘voting with your feet’? Well, it’s costly all around. We know that dropouts are more likely to be incarcerated, underemployed or saddled with children while still in their teens. We can calculate the cost to our economy, and it’s in the billions of dollars.

What brought my family history to my mind was the announcement a few weeks ago that dozens of high schools are going to give 10th graders the opportunity to test out of high school early.  Other countries, including Finland, France, England and Singapore have been doing this for a while, so it’s not an untested idea.

This effort is being organized by Marc Tucker’s organization, the National Center for Education and the Economy, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

According to reports, the eight participating states (Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont) agree that the academic requirements for leaving must be high.  That is, the current high school exit exams, where the bar is set at about a 10th grade level, are not acceptable.  The new ‘Board exams’ will cover English, math, science and history  and will, presumably, not be exclusively multiple-choice.

What a concept: make it clear to students exactly what they need to master, set the bar high, and provide multiple opportunities for students to gain their freedom. Even those who fail to pass the tests the first time around will gain valuable knowledge.  Those who do  pass can move on to community college, four-year colleges, or the vocation of their choice.

Each of the eight states has pledged to recruit between 10 and 20 high schools to participate in the program beginning next school year. According to a report in the New York Times, the project’s supporters include the National Education Association and the National Association of Manufacturers, unlikely bedfellows on most occasions.

What’s not to like about this?  What could go wrong? Could this be the jump-start that we need in the direction of more challenging and relevant curriculum?  Or is this a stalking horse for a two-track curriculum, one for the Ivy Leaguers and one for workers?

Ever the optimist, I say, “Here’s to ending the indentured servitude that we know as high school.” I imagine Henry Merrow would approve!

——

Further Reading

High Schools to Offer Plan to Graduate 2 Years Early [New York Times, 02/17/10]

The big picture isn’t much brighter, what with some school districts embracing “creation science” as deserving of equal billing with evolution.

All of this is obscuring what may be a greater challenge – unlearning bad science.

A few years ago I watched a teacher at Cary Academy in North Carolina ask his science students which organism had the most chromosomes per cell: mosquitoes, corn, broad beans, cats or humans? The kids picked humans, which is correct, because we have 46 chromosomes, while cats have 38 and mosquitoes only 6. Then the teacher expanded the list to include horses, chickens, goldfish and potatoes. Once again, his students confidently chose their own species. At that point he told them that even potatoes, with 48 chromosomes, beat us humans, and goldfish had 104 chromosomes, more than twice as many as humans.

The students were stunned (as they are every year). How could they be less evolved than a potato? Or a horse? What this teacher wanted them to do was confront their assumptions, because he knew that, in order for students to learn science, they first had to unlearn what they have assumed to be true (in this case, the more chromosomes the better).

As kids, we make all sorts of “common sense” assumptions about the ways the world works, which is a loose definition of science. “We have more brains than horses or potatoes do, so we must have more chromosomes,” or “The sun makes us warm, it’s warm in summer, and so the sun must be closer.” All too often we never unlearn them; instead, “book learning” gets layered on top long enough for us to pass exams. Then we revert.

Filmmakers at Harvard’s graduation provided powerful evidence of this when they asked new graduates why it’s colder in New England in the winter and warmer in the summer. In the 1988 video “A Private Universe,” each young man and woman explains with perfect confidence that the sun is closer to the earth in the summer and farther away in winter.

Of course, the opposite is true; the earth’s orbit is elliptical, and New Englanders are actually closer to the sun in winter. The earth is tilted away, though, and it’s the tilt of the earth’s axis that determines climate.

We can assume that nobody actually taught those Harvard seniors bad science. Instead, they probably intuited that “fact” when they were young and never unlearned it. Since they were admitted to Harvard, they must have learned enough classroom science to get high grades on tests, but without dislodging or unlearning what they thought they knew from observation. As Lee S. Shulman, former president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has noted, “The first influence on learning is not what teachers do pedagogically, but the learning that’s already inside the learner.”

A ray of hope is the Obama administration’s emphasis on STEM–science, technology, engineering and mathematics–with dollars backing up the focus. But most of this energy is directed at the upper grades in schools and teacher preparation in college. We need excellent science teaching in elementary schools, instead of raising a hamster or a rabbit and putting an artichoke avocado pit in water to watch it develop.

Top photo credit: “Junk Science” by Bill Keaggy.

Connor graduated from Princeton College with a PhD in Classics in 1961, and went on to be a professor there for over twenty years. He then worked as the president of the Teagle Foundation, which advocates for liberal arts in higher education. Currently, he serves as the senior advisor to the president. Producer John Tulenko interviewed Connor about why he thinks liberal arts education remains as a valuable path for American students.

For more information on The Teagle Foundation, visit www.teaglefoundation.org.

The Asia Society is trying to change the reputation of America’s education system. Its created a network of 20 schools that try to answer the question, what should today’s students learn about the world? This network of schools, called the International Studies Schools Network, teaches foreign languages, connects students from across the globe to work on projects together, and seeks to embed global history in all facets of education. So, how are they doing? Producer John Tulenko speaks with Tony Jackson, Vice President for Education, Asia Society.

For more information visit www.asiasociety.org.

Photo credit: Jami Saunders.

How does that happen?  How does a kid who hasn’t learned enough to be promoted get moved up anyway?

Here’s what I have been able to figure out. Louisiana administers a state test called LEAP in the fourth and eighth grades, which students must pass to move into fifth grade and ninth grade, respectively.  The teenagers at Booker T. Washington Alternative School passed the fourth-grade LEAP — that much we know.

But what happened next?  Somehow they were promoted THREE times by their teachers and their schools. It might have happened a FOURTH time if the state hadn’t checked up again in eighth grade. Only then was someone held accountable.

And guess who was held accountable?  The students, not the adults who had let the kids fall through the cracks.  The students were told that they were deficient and could not move on to high school.  Are some of these young people angry?  Wouldn’t you be?

To her credit, principal Rosemary Martin — in her first year there — is candid. “We understand that somewhere along the road someone dropped the ball,” she told me.

She said that she tells students it’s not their fault and urges them to focus on the future. “I tell them,” she said, “’’We know that some things happen.  But we want to take you to where you need to be.  Allow us an opportunity to take you where you should be at, at this point.’  And most of them will say, ‘Okay.’”

I pushed her. “Are you willing to acknowledge that these kids got screwed?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes, we have to acknowledge that.  That’s the first step, acknowledgment.”

I am not a fan of cheap bubble tests, but, when you hear stories like this one, how could anyone argue against LEAP or tests like it?  If some adults in our schools are going to find excuses for promoting students whose skill levels are inadequate, then we need more LEAP-like tests, not fewer.

I am familiar with the arguments in favor of social promotion, that kids need to be with their age group, that their self esteem suffers when they are with kids who are four, five and six years younger, and that the younger kids can be victimized by the older youth.  Some teachers are under so much pressure with overcrowded classes and such that they end up having to triage.  Or perhaps they decide to promote a kid when they realize the alternative is to have him in their class again next year. Whatever the reasons, I think that “retention versus social promotion” is a false dilemma. Neither option is a good one.

The only viable option is to track progress carefully and intervene right away when kids start falling behind.  We need regular testing, we need to trust teachers and their evaluations, and we need to provide the resources those teachers need. It shouldn’t take a state-mandated test to “prove” that some kids need help.

And finally, the adults who let this happen must be accountable for their failure. They should not be allowed to collect a paycheck for their mediocre work. (That, by the way, is the argument of my new book.)

When you see the NewsHour piece, I think you will be inclined to approve of what Vallas and his team are trying to do for these “overage” youth.  Booker T. Washington middle school seems to have become de facto “ungraded” in that no one reminds the students that they are still in, say, sixth grade rather than eighth.  Rather, the kids know that they must pass the LEAP test and, when they do, they move on to high school.

The school has what amounts to an anger management class, which it needs.  In the piece you will meet one terrific young teacher who uses a so-called “smart board” to make basic grammar, spelling and punctuation a fun game.

But I walked away wondering why school systems create alternatives only after years of failing at the same old stuff.  Talk about being ‘overage’ learners!

This video is part of our series following the day in the life of a Teach for America recruit. Watch the entire series here and weigh in with your comments.

Some school districts and private and parochial schools around New Orleans have canceled school for the Monday after the game, reasoning that most students would be partying hard all weekend and wouldn’t show up anyway.

Call me an old fogey, but I find closing schools to be irresponsible behavior on the part of the adults. Are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders going to be worn out from partying? What are working parents supposed to do, or are they also exempt from going to work?

Worse, however, the educators are bypassing a remarkable teachable moment, a chance to connect learning with the city’s obsession with the Saints. Why not encourage kids to wear their Saints clothing to school that day, schedule a celebration (or a wake), and—this is the key—build some interesting lesson plans in various courses?  Math is a no-brainer because of all the statistics, but students could also write about the game and their experience watching it.  They could write letters to favorite players, congratulating or commiserating.  I’d assign students who don’t care much about sports to track commercials; then I’d show some in class and help the kids analyze the rhetorical and persuasive techniques being used.

By canceling school the adults are inadvertently revealing who’s really in charge: the kids. The unspoken message is clear: what we offer in schools isn’t enough to hold students’ attention.

Which brings me to the subject of classroom control: A careful viewer of The Real World of Teach for America, our series of portraits of TFA teachers, detected a thread running through many of the profiles.  “Most of these teachers seem to be overly concerned about control,” he told me.  “I get the feeling that they’ve been taught some simple rule like ‘Control first, teaching next.’”  What about Lindsay or Colleston, I asked him?  “They’re the exception,” he said.  “They seem to understand that control is a byproduct of stimulating education.”

I told the man about a Teach for America rookie whose class we filmed in last week.  Matt Taylor teaches English at an alternative school, a middle school for kids who are four, five or six years below grade level.  Just imagine trying to teach 16-year-olds whose literacy level is not much above “See Spot Run” but who are acutely sensitive to their age/skill level discrepancy!  In the 90-minute class I observed, Matt engaged his students in 8 or 9 different activities, using a Promethean Board to make everything interactive.  He peppered students with questions, rewarding correct answers without calling attention to incorrect ones.  At one point he displayed a long paragraph on the Board, a passage that contained at least a dozen errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation. What ensued was a game in which all but one student engaged (one slept most of the class).  If I remember correctly, Matt had told the students that he had found only 12 errors.  They found two or three more and enjoyed the triumph of outdoing their teacher, a darn good strategy on the teacher’s part.

Control was not an issue, ever.  It never is if kids are engaged.

But so much of school is about control, which brings me to technology and media, an opportunity that I think most schools are missing. Adults and kids encounter about 3000 media messages every day, from ads on TV to logos discreetly placed on a shirt breast pocket to loud New Orleans Saints jerseys.  It’s time for schools to acknowledge this, embrace this, and teach to it, but first they have to give up some control.

It’s often said that children today “swim in the digital sea,” but I’m a skeptic. We’re immersed, to be sure, but I think everyone needs swimming lessons, adults and children alike.  Kids may be digital natives, but that doesn’t mean they know it all. Adults—not natives but visitors–often try to harness technology in order to control the environment.

I’m in a plane on my way to the Ohio 2010 Educational Technology Conference in Columbus as I write this, and I’ve been learning from the writing and thinking of some of the participants, including Dennis Harper, the founder and CEO of Generation Yes and an internationally recognized expert on technology and education.

Harper is angry that students are, for the most part, excluded from meaningful participation in technology in schools—it’s done to them.  He likens this to civil rights struggles of blacks, women and gays.

“For decades, the U.S. missed out on a lot of talent that could have been provided by women and minorities if they had been engaged and empowered. Hardly anyone is considering how much talent is being wasted by not allowing students, who represent 93% of a school’s population, to be engaged and empowered.”

I gather that Harper wants another ‘civil rights movement,’ one that will turn over control of technology in school to the students.  He seems to think that high schools can and will adapt, that adults can let go of the reins.

I’m not so optimistic.  Today well over 1 million students drop out of school each year. That’s about 6,000 students every day over a 180-day school year.  Awful as that is, I’m almost as worried about those who do not drop out, who instead put in the seat time and endure a narrow curriculum.

So if high school doesn’t work for the million+ who drop out or for many more who endure, what’s the alternative?

We’re working on it. For the past four years we have been trying to develop an alternative to the traditional high school diploma and the GED.  Our goal is a valid and reliable instrument that measures the skills that young people are going to need to have as adults: persistence, the ability to work with others (including those who may not look like them); the ability to communicate, use technology, gather and assimilate data, and make public presentations.

We call it the Verified Résumé. It’s a work in progress, involving adult trainers at our Listen Up projects and those who eventually employ the young people.  Our trainers grade youth on the skills listed above, and then so do their employers.  Is there a match?  If not, what’s gone wrong?  This résumé is a living document, validated with each new job or learning opportunity.  It’s not about control but about shared learning—and learning of real skills that matter, not just stuff that can be tested on a multiple choice exam.

Will this work?  We are optimistic, and we are grateful to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which just last week renewed our grant to allow the work to continue for at least one more year.  I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Geaux, Saints!

University of Tennessee graduate Kady Amundson’s days rarely end when school is over. At the start of her Teach for America assignment, her school faced administrative and scheduling difficulties.  But that didn’t stop Kady:  she became a tutor and cheerleader to a 19 year old struggling to graduate senior year for the third time, and Kady is now in her third year of teaching.  How’d she overcome the early hurdles that so many TFA teachers face?

This video is part of our series following the day in the life of a Teach for America recruit. Watch the entire series here and weigh in with your comments.

Today, Teach for America (TFA) is the country’s largest provider of teachers for America’s low-income communities. Wendy Kopp sat down with us in Spring 2008 to talk about TFA’s core values, some bright alums (including Michelle Rhee) and how TFA is influencing DC and New Orleans school districts.

This video is part of our series following the day in the life of a Teach for America recruit. Watch the entire series here and weigh in with your comments.

#1.  Last week the PBS NewsHour aired our piece about what the federal government is calling the Race to the Top, the $4.35 billion competition for education dollars.  It aired the night 40 states and the District of Columbia filed their applications.

#2.  We’re rolling out a bonus web video and two podcasts that feature a lot more information about the Race. This bonus video with Race director Joanne Weiss (below) will give you a better sense of the woman Arne Duncan hired to run the huge grant program.  In one podcast, you hear Colorado’s Lieutenant Governor Barbara O’Brien try to persuade teachers and other locals that more state and federal involvement is a good thing.  Finally, representatives from Maryland and Delaware and Weiss herself talk about one of the elephants in the room, the Gates Foundation and its $250K grants to some—but not all—states competing for Race to the Top dollars.

#3.  And we are also releasing parts five and six of our 7-part series about Teach for America. These are short video profiles of rookie teachers in New Orleans, vivid pictures of the highs and lows of what it’s like to be on the front lines in urban education—with barely two months of preparation.  (There’s also an 8th part, an interview with TFA founder Wendy Kopp.)

That’s 12 (TWELVE) separate productions in the space of a few weeks.  Sounds like the work of a small army, doesn’t it? But there are only nine of us at Learning Matters

Watch the credit roll for a news program or a documentary sometime.  If you can, count the names as they scroll by.  Quite a few, aren’t there?

Our work continues.  We’re planning another segment about the Race to the Top, looking at the judging process and digging into the skepticism coming from right and left.  I’m in New Orleans now with two colleagues, working on the next installment of our series about this city’s attempt to rebuild its schools, under the leadership of Paul Vallas.

These are remarkable times in American public education. The federal government’s role grows ever larger, economic pressures on schools seem to increase weekly, and foreign competition is a growing threat.  In these circumstances, schools can be forgiven for battening down the hatches in hopes of surviving the storm.  It’s perfectly understandable—but it’s probably bad strategy.

Holding onto the old ways almost never works. It hasn’t worked for newspapers, it isn’t working in journalism, and it probably won’t in public education either.

But what will emerge?  Is Race to the Top just the breath of new energy that’s required in public education, or is it a last gasp, akin to breeding better, faster horses for the Pony Express?

We’ll do our best to report these stories for you.

This video is part of our series following the day in the life of a Teach for America recruit. Watch the entire series here and weigh in with your comments.

This video is part of our series following the day in the life of a Teach for America recruit. Watch the entire series here and weigh in with your comments.

Whether the additional funding will produce a better application remains to be seen. When winners are announced in April, many will be curious to learn who got help and who did not.

This video is part of our series covering the Race to the Top. Watch all related videos and listen to more podcasts here.

We joined her in Pueblo Colorado where she confronted a room full of skeptical teachers and parents.

This video is part of our series covering the Race to the Top. Watch all related videos and listen to more podcasts here.

On January 19th, 40 states and D.C. submitted their applications to the Department of Education. In the applications states outline their plan to improve schools and present strategies on how they intend to enact Secretary Arne Duncan’s four core areas of reform; including more charter schools and tying student achievement data to teacher performance. Weiss gives us an inside look at what it takes to win this race.

Make no mistake about the educational shape our schools are in—it’s bad!  More than one million students drop out of school every year, costing the economy billions of dollars. International comparisons are downright embarrassing.  Only 1.3 percent of our 15-year-olds scored at the highest level of mathematical proficiency, putting us 24th out of 30 nations participating in PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment.  By contrast, 9.1 percent of Korean and 6 percent of Czech 15-year-olds scored at the highest level.

Duncan believes he knows how states can shape up.  For openers, they have to step on a reliable scale.  In education, that means a transparent data system that tracks students’ progress throughout their school years, and it means common standards, so that everyone is using the same weight measures.  (Today each state chooses its tests and decides what constitutes passing.)

His plan for better nutrition, educationally speaking, includes a diet of charter schools, publicly funded but independently run institutions.

Losing weight requires more than better food.  Serious dieters also work out sensibly, focusing on the parts of the body that need attention.  In the gym, one might use the Stairmaster to tone up the legs and thighs and free weights to develop upper body strength; in education, that means putting the best teachers in the lowest performing schools.  It means paying the best teachers more money.

Another key to getting in shape is getting rid of bad habits, whether it’s smoking, snacking or eating a big dessert just before bedtime.  The bad habit that education’s diet doctor wants eliminated is the failing school.  Duncan wants states to close down their persistently bad schools, perhaps as many as 5,000 of them across the country, and reopen them only when there’s a serious plan for improvement.

Most states have just submitted their ‘diets’ to Washington, which will review them and decide which deserve a big reward. This spring some states could receive as much as $700 million.

But winners won’t get the money all at once.  Duncan plans to monitor their ‘diets’ over the next several years and will dole out the money only to states that stick to their promised education reforms.

Will Arne Duncan’s nutrition plan, his ‘Race to the Top,’ be successful?  Will school systems across the country lose weight and get in better (educational) shape?  If it does, it will be the exception to the rule, because, as nearly all of us know from personal experience, most diets fail.

It’s a massive gamble on Washington’s part, an effort to change state and local education policies by dangling the carrot of big dollars in front of states and school districts that are desperately trying to make ends meet. Washington wants more charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and plans for putting the best teachers in the worst schools.

In the weeks before the applications were due, we watched legislators and educators in Colorado, Maryland and other states planning their strategies. Some states changed laws just to qualify to compete, while others rewrote policies in hopes of increasing their chances of winning.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, some states will walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars, while others will be left without a cent.

Who will get some of the money? We look into the race preparations.

Download transcript (pdf)

This video is part of our series covering the Race to the Top. Watch all related videos and listen to more podcasts here.

This video is part of our series following the day in the life of a Teach for America recruit. Watch the entire series here and weigh in with your comments.

This video is part of our series following the day in the life of a Teach for America recruit. Watch the entire series here and weigh in with your comments.

This series explores those questions.

Over the course of two years, Learning Matters producers followed 7 Teach for America recruits as they fulfilled their assignments in New Orleans.
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These are their stories.

Watch all 7 profiles and weigh in with your ideas and thoughts. Join the discussion happening here, on Facebook and Twitter.

Want to own the series? Great for classroom use or to watch for group discussion. Buy online now!

These are important questions at any time, but I submit they are of particular importance today, with Teach for America (and other alternative routes into the classroom) growing in popularity.

No doubt about Teach for America’s ascendancy.  During the presidential campaign both candidates spoke favorably about the program, and President Obama often speaks highly of it.  Here’s one example: when he signed the Serve America Act last April he went out of his way to cite the growing popularity of TFA as evidence of young America’s commitment to public service, saying in part, “I’ve seen a rising generation of young people work and volunteer and turn out in record numbers…they have become a generation of activists possessed with that most American of ideas – that people who love their country can change it…they are why 35,000 young people applied for only 4,000 slots in Teach For America.”  (That’s a 42 percent increase over the previous year.)

Many of those young people come straight out of our finest colleges and universities.  Thirteen percent of Harvard’s class of 2009 applied, and TFA is more popular than top Ivies.   ‘Only’ 69 percent of those accepted into Princeton choose to attend, but 77 percent of those selected for TFA choose to join.

And when I linked President Obama and TFA in a Google search, it produced nearly 9 million citations.

At his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2009, Obama’s choice for Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, had high praise for Teach for America and Kopp herself.

Teach for America has become a household word in its short history.  I suspect everyone knows that Wendy Kopp developed the idea as her senior thesis at Princeton in 1989 and then founded the program in 1990.  As it prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary, TFA has put more than 14,000 teachers into hard-to-staff classrooms, usually for two-year stints.  Less than a quarter remain in the classroom beyond two years, but over 60 percent of TFA ‘graduates’ stay connected to public education.  Prominent alumni include KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin and Washington, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

In a funny way, I was ‘in’ Teach for America long before Wendy Kopp came up with the idea.  I had been accepted into the Peace Corps and was scheduled to teach English in East Africa, but then I failed the physical just a few months before my Dartmouth graduation in 1964.  Even though I had taken only one education course at Dartmouth, I was determined to teach.  And so, two months after my spinal fusion and still in a brace, I began teaching at a high school just outside New York City.

I worked long hours, spent most weekends grading papers, made a lot of mistakes, tried to bring imagination and creativity into my lessons.  There were four other rookies on the staff that year.  We supported each other, and, to be truthful, we shared a certain smug attitude toward many of the veteran teachers, who, we felt, were just putting in the hours and didn’t care as much about the kids as we did.

By the end of my second year, I hit my stride and was doing a pretty good job.  That’s when I left to go to graduate school.

As a reporter I have been in a fair number of classrooms with TFA corps members.  They are almost always fun to be around, because they are bright, energetic and outgoing.  Their idealism and goodness virtually ooze out of every pore.  What’s not to like?

Well, to be honest, sometimes their teaching is not to like.  After all, they are first-year teachers who have had just five weeks of summer training and a 1-week orientation in their assigned city.  They make all sorts of rookie mistakes.  Occasionally I recognized in them that smug attitude I once exhibited toward veterans.

This week we are releasing the first two of a series of video profiles of Teach for America teachers at work, scenes from their classrooms in high schools in New Orleans.

I think you will end up liking all of these young men and women.  We certainly did.  And you would be thrilled to have some of them teaching your children.  But probably not all of them.

Meet Yale graduate Daniel Hoffman. He entered Teach for America with high hopes, but one year later, Daniel was out of the classroom. Sometimes even the best of intentions aren’t enough.

This video is part of our series following the day in the life of a Teach for America recruit. Watch the entire series here and weigh in with your comments.

Meet Lindsay Ordower from Mount Holyoke College. She came to Teach for America determined to succeed. But on any given school day, Lindsay’s classroom was only half full. How do you teach students that aren’t there?

This video is part of our series following the day in the life of a Teach for America recruit. Watch the entire series here and weigh in with your comments.

Listen Up! has received a grant of $400,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, MI to continue its Verified Resume project. The funds will be used to assist community-based and other organizations certify the career skills of young adults. The purpose is to help young adults, especially those who are disadvantaged, obtain and succeed at jobs. The mechanism is a Verified Resume. The ultimate goal of the project is to create a valid and reliable alternative to the traditional high school diploma that young adults can use when looking for jobs.

The Verified Resume process:

• Imparts skills and behaviors youngsters need for success in college and work such as responsibility, working in teams, listening and communicating.
• Provides a document for young people to use. Like a letter of recommendation, the VR is a valuable asset for those who don’t have someone to vouch for them.
• Establishes feedback from work to youth development organizations by connecting youth programs to immediate work supervisors who directly observe the youngsters on the job. Unlike a traditional diploma, a Verified Resume is a living document that changes to reflect a youth’s work experience.

The project’s goal is to engage up to eight organizations in each of five communities in the process and ultimately issue Verified Resumes to nearly 900 young adults over the course of 12 months. Dr. Arnold Packer, the distinguished economist, is directing the field work for Listen Up!
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About Listen Up!
Listen Up! is a youth media network that connects young video producers and their allies to resources, support, and projects in order to develop the field and achieve an authentic youth voice in the mass media. Listen Up! is a project of Learning Matters, Inc., a Peabody Award-winning production company. For over 15 years Learning Matters has been producing outstanding reporting about American education.

About W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Established in 1930, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation supports children, families and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society. Grants are concentrated in the United States , Latin America and the Caribbean, and southern Africa. For further information, visit the Foundation’s website at www.wkkf.org.

In mid-December the New York Times reported that poor children are four times more likely to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs than their middle-income counterparts. One study cited in the reporting indicates that poorer children also receive these strong drugs for less serious conditions. Why? Several explanations are offered: Medicaid pays less for psychotherapy and counseling than does private insurance; fewer counselors are available for the poor; and drugs are easier. As one co-author noted, “A lot of these kids are not getting other mental health services.”

That’s today’s news, but for me it literally is déjà vu all over again, because I have reported on this same issue twice, first in the 70’s and again in the mid-90’s.

Back in the late 1970’s when I was with NPR, I spent a couple of months in mental hospitals for poor and middle class children in Maryland and Texas. It was truly horrifying to see how young children whose major problem seemed to be poverty were being drugged. As I recall, their Medicaid coverage was limited to a small number of weeks, after which they were simply released to the streets. By contrast, the children of the well-to-do were less likely to be medicated, more likely to have one-on-one counseling with a psychiatrist, and so forth.

One teenage girl told her story of being walked to the highway and told to hitchhike home. She said a group of young men picked her up, took her to an apartment for sex, and then let her go. Her language was far more graphic, but we ran the story as she told it, with an advance warning to stations. Despite the warning, “Children in Mental Institutions” got me kicked off the air in parts of Texas. (It also led to a lifelong friendship with Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, who happened to hear the program and wrote me a lovely letter about it.)

Fast forward to 1995, when my colleague John Tulenko and I reported on Attention Deficit Disorder.  A.D.D.: A Dubious Diagnosis? followed the money trail and showed that, while the disorder was genuine, the A.D.D. epidemic was man-made. We learned that the maker of Ritalin, the popular A.D.D. drug, was quietly funneling money to a supposedly neutral parents’ group called CHADD. CHADD had managed to infiltrate the U.S. Department of Education, which had underwritten a series of so-called ‘public service announcements’ in which CHADD leaders passed themselves off as ordinary parents and praised Ritalin. Simultaneously CHADD was lobbying Congress to change the drug regulations to make methylphenidate—generic Ritalin—easier to come by. At the time the U.S. was consuming about 85 percent of the world’s supply of the drug. When we made the film, several million kids were being medicated, the large majority of them white teenage boys.

We found one heartening piece of good news in that story: African American parents were not inclined to accept a diagnosis that required medicating their children, whether the diagnosis came from a teacher or a counselor, because, as one parent told us, “We have enough drugs in our community. I don’t believe that more drugs are a solution.”

A.D.D. is a peculiar disease. It says, ‘You are deficient because you aren’t paying enough attention to what we (your teachers or your parents) think is important. And so we will medicate you!”

Gene Haislip of the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration Office was responsible for determining annual production quotas for methylphenidate and Ritalin. Haislip told us that, while there was a window of legitimate use for the drug, the data suggested, “this has become a popular fad…especially when you realize that the United States is using five times as much as the entire rest of the planet.”

As journalists are trained to do, we asked, “Who benefits?” We were shocked to discover when we followed the money trail, that Ciba-Geigy, then the primary producer of Ritalin, was covertly funding a parents’ group known as CHADD, Children with Attention Deficit Disorder . While not illegal for a pharmaceutical company to fund non-profit organizations, the transactions (more than $800,000 over three years) were made public, if at all, in very small print. CHADD maintained that there was no quid pro quo, but its widely distributed materials recommended Ritalin by name to parents concerned about their children’s behavior.

Although the American Psychiatric Association recognizes ADD as a mental disorder, the exact cause is unknown, there are no medical tests for it, no clear medical or physical evidence exists of its condition, and the identifying characteristics are blatantly subjective. They include fidgeting with hands and feet, squirming in your seat, getting out of your chair when you’re supposed to sit still, and running about and climbing excessively. That’s a perfect description of millions of impatient children in crowded classrooms.

Clinching the case for us, however, was the first-hand testimony of many boys and their parents, all of whom noted that the condition seemed to disappear during summers, and even on weekends. Whenever school was not a part of their lives!

CHADD, however, was telling concerned parents that ADD was a neurobiological disorder that stemmed from a chemical imbalance in the brain. Ritalin, a psycho-stimulant, presumably corrects that imbalance by activating neurotransmitters– the chemicals that carry messages in the brain.

We learned that teachers often recommended Ritalin for certain children. One parent whose son had been recommended for the drug implicated school districts in the growth of ADD. “They’re trying to cut their budgets and trying to keep big populations in the classes, and they can’t have kids who are not under control. Teachers are more than happy to have kids on Ritalin, if it in fact will control their activities in the classrooms.”

Some parents accepted a diagnosis of ADD because it offered a more palatable explanation for their child’s behavior. Helen Blackburn, an educational psychologist for the Greenwich, Connecticut, public schools, put it this way. “Parents want a school-based reason why a child isn’t doing well. And to say that a child is not bright, that he may be a ’slow learner,’ or that family issues are causing the problems in school, parents don’t want to accept that. They want a diagnosis and a label that then makes the school responsible for solving the problem.”

There are always doctors who will prescribe Ritalin for a child. Simon Epstein, a child psychiatrist in Connecticut, said he prescribed Ritalin for about 150 children a year. He explained his dilemma. “If I tell them that I don’t think it’s clinically indicated, the parents will just go elsewhere. If that’s what they want, they will go on until they find somebody who will prescribe it. ”

We discovered that some CHADD leaders had engaged in dubious behavior of their own, even going so far as to infiltrate parental information videos distributed by the U.S. Department of Education. On these videos, several ranking officials of state ChADD chapters present themselves as ‘typical parents’ agonizing over their children’s condition and then extolling the virtues of Ritalin. An embarrassed Department of Education hastily withdrew the videos after we reported the clear conflict of interest.

At one point, I asked Dr. Parker if he felt compromised by accepting money from Ritalin’s manufacturer and then recommending the drug? Did he feel ‘bought’ by Ciba-Geigy? “I don’t feel bought,” he said. “I feel they owe us that as a matter of fact. I feel they owe it to the parents who are spending their money on medication. They owe it to these families to give them something back.”

Dr. Gene Haislip of the DEA was incredulous. “You mean he really thinks there’s nothing wrong in taking this money and keeping it a secret like they have? Well, I think it’s an outlandish statement to make really, and I must say it surprises me.”

A Ciba-Geigy spokesman expressed satisfaction with the arrangement. “We’re getting big information out there and I think that’s the bottom line here…CHADD is essentially a conduit, providing this information directly to the patient population, and they do a pretty good job of it.”

Subsequently CHADD actively lobbied Congress, something non-profit organizations are not allowed to do, to make it easier to get methylphenidate, the generic form of Ritalin! This despite the gruesome fact that, at the time, the United States was consuming 85 percent of the world’s supply of the drug. ChADD’s lobbying effort was defeated, and for a time the consumption of methylphenidate actually fell. Since then, however, more studies have ‘proven’ that methylphenidate works, and today at least five per cent of our children, most of them young middle class boys, take Ritalin or a similar drug.

Of course it works. It dulls the senses and makes it easier to control a class. For the small number of children who actually are hyperactive and whose condition does not seem to respond to improved diet or more personal attention, the drug may be necessary. For most children, the behaviors that often lead to a diagnosis of ADD are situational and can be changed: smaller classes, more personal attention, less sugar and caffeine, and maybe more hugs at home.

But instead we medicate and, in so doing, deliver a pernicious message: “You have something wrong with your brain, but this little pill will make everything better.”

And apparently we are still sending that pernicious message today. But why not drug kids? It’s cheaper, faster and easier than individual counseling (or attending to underlying problems). And what the heck, they’re other people’s children, not ours, right?

Anyone out there have a New Year’s Resolution to suggest about medicating our children?

We’ve been following the efforts of this dynamic young leader since she took office in June 2007.  When I read about her appointment that spring, I called her up, introduced myself, and invited her out to dinner. Our senior producer, Murrey Jacobson, joined us, and I made a pitch: “We’d like to chronicle your efforts on the NewsHour. What do you say?”

Her immediate reaction was notable for its candor: “I have to figure out whether it will help me do what I have to do, which is make things better for kids,” is what she said in roughly those words.  If it would help, she’d be on board. If not, forget it.

I don’t know if our coverage–11 segments and counting–has helped her, but I do know that the NewsHour audience has benefited from a rare inside look at how a big urban school district works–and how it resists change.  We’ve watched Michelle Rhee change as well.

Producers Cat McGrath and Jane Renaud and I will continue our reporting into the coming year.  Watch the full series online and I hope you’ll stay tuned for more in 2010.

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.

We recently covered the success of BASIS charter schools in Arizona, where they credit much of their success to a heavy focus on A.P. coursework. Are college-level classes the key to successful learning in high school? Let us know what you think.

The Advanced Placement Juggernaut [NYT, 12/20/09]

Recently, while filming our PBS NewsHour story “Schools and the Recession” in Arizona, we discovered a school that surprised us.  Sopori Elementary is in a small, poor, rural town called Amado.  But Sopori is anything but poor.  Among other things, the school boasts a new gym, modern computer lab and a swimming pool.  Even more impressive is the way it serves its community.

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1. Paul Vallas in New Orleans: Episode 6 - Mixed Results for School Reform Efforts

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Valerie Visconti, Associate Producer: My favorite series is the one I have been producing for over two years on the New Orleans school system under the leadership of Paul Vallas.

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.
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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!
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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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5. Podcast: After He’s Gone

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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?”

7.  When School is Home: The Program

Tania McKeown, Producer:  One report we produced last year that really left its mark on me was the story of homeless families and how schools were responding to this growing problem. We visited Green Bay, Wisconsin where dedicated teachers and social workers were identifying and assisting struggling families. Their work was inspiring and vital to the kids’ ability to succeed in the classroom. For me, the story highlighted that schools are (and should be) much more than a place of education…

Download transcript (pdf)

Arizona is ranked 50th in the nation in per-pupil funding.  On top of that the Tucson school district had to cut 10% of their budget last year.  Nonetheless Fagan is optimistic that innovative thinking will improve Tucson schools and reverse a steady decline in attendance.  For her sake it better work — only three of the five members of the Tucson School Board voted to hire her.

John Merrow spoke with Dr. Fagen to find out how Tucson schools are weathering the “great recession.”

The L.A. Times published an op-ed piece this week by Ben Miller, director of a Los Angeles non-profit that works to empower parents in the reform of public schools. Without participation from parents, Miller argues, how does California expect to attract Race to the Top dollars–which the financially unstable state desperately needs? In an even more incensed op-ed, Diane Ravitch, writes in her blog on the Ed Week website that New York’s efforts to prepare for Race to the Top–which she calls “the express train to privatization”–have come at public school students’ expense.

Finally, in higher education news, the Washington Post has a good piece on the civil rights investigation around gender distribution in American colleges. Women apply to and attend colleges and universities in greater numbers than do men; do admissions offices have the right to discriminate based on sex, if they want to keep things 50-50?

Secretary Duncan: Finish Line Nears for ‘Race to the Top’ [PBS NewsHour, The Rundown News Blog, 12/15/09]

Elevating the Teaching Profession: A National Town Hall Meeting with Arne Duncan [Ed.gov, Education News Parents Can Use, 12/15/09]

Put power over California’s schools in hands of parents [LA Times, 12/16/09]

The Race to Nowhere [Bridging Differences, Ed Week, 12/15/09]

Sex bias probe in colleges’ selections [Washington Post, 12/14/09]

This post came from my interest in one reader’s comments to my recent post on innovation in schools.  His name is Philip Kovacs, and he’s a former high school English teacher who now teaches would-be teachers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I also know that he has a PhD in Educational Policy Studies, a 6 month-old son, and some strong convictions about public education. (The latter is the focus of the interview, although the proud new Dad manages to work his son into the conversation a couple of times).

The Interview

So tell me what you believe, and why.

In my dissertation I argue for keeping public schools public, but after four years working with local public schools, I’m open to alternatives. I am now working on starting a project-based lab school.

How did you find Learning Matters?

It was research into the Gates Foundation that brought me to your website in the first place. The Foundation funds an unbelievable number of projects, some of which argue against one another, though the larger of the funded organizations agree on key points, none of which, in my humble opinion, are very innovative. I do not, for the record, think Bill Gates is controlling your content!

I am now editing a book about the Gates Foundation’s involvement in educational reform. I am 100% sure that the edited volume is going to anger the educational “right” and “left.”

You sound as if you want to anger both ends of the spectrum.

I guess I do, now that you mention it. Three years ago I helped about 30 scholars, teachers, and other concerned individuals create and post a petition calling for an end to No Child Left Behind. While I am listed as the author, it was a collaborative effort with me acting as editor. That document has 16 points, all of which remain irrefutably true, though I’ve changed my position on at least two points, and in retrospect I regret some of the wording.

When I posted the petition, I was attacked from the left and right. NEA leadership sent out a memo telling its 3 million members not to sign, and from the other side I was called misguided at best and an anarchist at worst. I can’t tell you how many people called me naive.

I just thought, and in fact continue to think, that NCLB is bad policy. I think I’ll get the last laugh on this one. At the very least the name will be changed, though I am not sure how much of a victory that is.

You can see the petition and read the signatures and comments here: http://www.petitiononline.com/1teacher/petition.html.

The comments from teachers and principals are quite powerful. There are also comments that are misguided and flat out strange. I think NCLB is an easy target for all sorts of educational ills. Deservedly so in many cases, but not so much in others.

My blog post about innovation in education touched a nerve, mostly because you feel that I missed an obvious contradiction, the notion of ‘top down innovation.’ So tell me more about that.

I’m not upset about your blog post, but I am stunned when the President and his Secretary of Education discuss ‘innovation’ and ‘national standards’ in the same breath. I’m equally shocked when business leaders such as Bill Gates engage in the same behavior. Does anyone believe that Gates would where he is today if he had been forced to do the same thing as his competitors every step of the way?

Those pursuing innovation in education through top-down mandates (success will be judged by scores on standardized tests alone regardless of whether or not you are a public or charter school) should look to history to see how top-down micromanagement has worked elsewhere.

They might begin by looking at the number of Russian automobiles on the market, the amount of Nobel Prize winners from North Korea, or more generally at the amount of innovation that has come from any centralized government over the past 200 years.

Go on…

With respect to the current administration and the most influential philanthropist on the planet, I have faith that both are acting in what they believe to be the best interests of the country and its children. That doesn’t, however, make their calls for innovation and standardization any less wrong-headed. And let me be clear, asking states to create more charter schools and then forcing all of those “laboratories of innovation” to use the same limited metric for judging success is wrong-headed, plain and simple.

So let’s pretend (or hope) that the political and corporate leaders interested in reforming our public schools are reading this right now. What would you tell them?

Of course I would commend them for wanting innovation, and then I’d suggest five ways to truly change status-quo schooling.

#1. Replace the word “rigor” with “vigor.” Seriously. I have a 6-month-old son, and the last thing I want more of in his education is rigor. I mean, look at the definition:

• strictness, severity, or harshness, as in dealing with people.
• the full or extreme severity of laws, rules, etc.
• severity of living conditions; hardship; austerity: the rigor of wartime existence.
• a severe or harsh act, circumstance, etc.
• scrupulous or inflexible accuracy or adherence: the logical rigor of mathematics.
• severity of weather or climate or an instance of this: the rigors of winter.
• Pathology. a sudden coldness, as that preceding certain fevers; chill.
• Physiology. a state of rigidity in muscle tissues during which they are unable to respond to stimuli due to the coagulation of muscle protein.
• Obsolete. stiffness or rigidity.

Contrast that with the meaning of vigor:

• active strength or force.
• healthy physical or mental energy or power; vitality.
• energetic activity; energy; intensity: The economic recovery has given the country a new vigor.
• force of healthy growth in any living matter or organism, as a plant.
• active or effective force, esp. legal validity.

Language matters, and the words we use to describe education speak volumes about the type of education we’re giving children. I want my son, and all children, to have educational experiences that require active strength, healthy power, and energetic activity, not an education that is harsh, severe, inflexible, or obsolete. Asking states to create more charter schools and then requiring those charter schools to adhere to standardized educative models guarantees rigor at the expense of vigor and that’s nothing parents or business leaders want.

No argument from me on that. My friend Debbie Meier often derides ‘rigorous’ by bringing up rigor mortis, not what we want in schools! So what is suggestion #2?

Make sure the “ends” of education are in line with the means. As we replace obsolete schooling with schooling that is active and flexible, we should remember that we educate children for more than jobs. We live in a democratic republic, and our country will neither be democratic nor a republic without citizens who have the skills and capacities necessary to maintain both. There is no reason to expect that, after years of “memorize and regurgitate” schooling, children will become the critical and engaged adults necessary to keep this country a beacon of hope beyond the realm of economics.

History shows that great countries fall more often from internal collapse than from external threat, and reducing education to job training is a recipe for internal collapse. Towards a more robust democratic social order, schools must encourage responsibility more than accountability and reward individuality more than standardization, as democracy thrives on individuals acting as responsible members of diverse communities. Standardizing educational experiences for all students and expecting them to become innovators is an invitation for student and social failure.

And number 3?

We must teach and encourage responsibility from students. To do this, we need to respect, listen to, and honor the student to the greatest extent possible. Every child brings something unique into the classroom. We need an educational policy that supports and recognizes the individual. That does not mean letting Sally do whatever she wants every day she comes to school. But if she is going to spend six hours a day working on what adults ask her to work on, then she should have at least one hour a day to work on something she loves. At the end of the year, she should be responsible for presenting her work to her peers, teachers, and members of the community. The next year, she should be asked to inquire further, ask more difficult questions, or learn more intricate skills, as required by the topic of her choice.

The results should be placed on a website maintained by the student as soon as she/he is able to do so. A web-based portfolio can and should replace the report card, which, in its current form, dates back to at least the 1830s. If doctors still relied on tools from that point in time, they’d be applying leeches. A website would allow any interested or invested individual to see exactly how a child is developing and growing without the use of any standardized test. A district moving from standardized assessment to individualized measurement of a child’s development and growth will save money and have a far more robust system for tracking teaching and learning…I’d ask teachers to keep similar online portfolios (see below).

I’m beginning to feel like Ed McMahon, but what’s next?

Use tests less frequently and make them more meaningful. The tests we use now—end of year exams, the SAT, the NAEP—are instruments for measuring recall and not higher order thinking. They are even less useful for determining whether or not children are acting intelligently.

We should teach towards and assess the degree to which our children are resilient, prescient, persevere when tasks get difficult, control impulses, are flexible thinkers, strive for accuracy, pose problems and find answers, apply past knowledge to new situations, take risks based on calculations, and are willing to offer controversial alternatives to difficult situations based on personal and group research.

These are the skills and capacities necessary to maintain a healthy democratic republic as well as an edge in an increasingly competitive global market place. There is not a single standardized test now in use capable of measuring any of the above. This means we need highly qualified, highly effective teachers to develop and employ a range of assessment tools in order to track the development of such skills.

And what’s last? Number 5?

We need to reform tenure. I suggest using a 5-point system to determine teacher promotion. There is no reason that a person who performs well on a job for three years should be guaranteed the job for 30, but at the same time, we should find a way to protect and reward great teachers. Rather than relying solely on standardized test scores, we should use data from five sources. These include 1) the teacher himself, via a webpage similar to the ones created by and for students; 2) the teacher’s peers, as most teachers know who is doing what and how well; 3) the teacher’s administrators; 4) student reviews, because if we don’t trust students to vote on good teachers there’s no sense in giving them the right to vote at 18; and 5) a robust sampling of student work.

The unions are right to oppose to merit pay based solely on test scores, which we know correlate directly with socioeconomic status. Basing pay on test scores alone will result in the best teachers going to the wealthiest school districts, something that is arguably already occurring. A 5-point data collection system would allow teachers in any district to show clearly how well they are (or are not) doing. The teachers doing the best work should receive more money. Those doing enough to get by should receive invitations to leave.

No offense, but these are fairly simple innovations, and not particularly new either.

Maybe so, but they are light years beyond the standardized educational experiences being pushed by the administration and most business leaders. Innovation will not thrive in our schools until we give those schools the freedom and support to innovate. Keeping in mind the five suggestions above, I believe that public and chartered schools can help produce children who become adults that maintain our country in a state of integrity and usefulness, socially, economically and politically.

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.

Who’s Got Michelle Rhee’s Back? [The Wall Street Journal, 12/14/09]

Two Years of Talks with Michelle Rhee & George Parker [LMtv, 9/21/09]

This week at Learning Matters, correspondent John Tulenko brings us two new interviews: one, with Dr. Kay McClenney, focuses on a new report about American community colleges; the other, with the Ford Foundation’s Joan Dassin, deals with higher education on a global scale. John Merrow fleshed out the domestic side of the issue: his interview with Pat Callan of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education appears on his weekly blog, Taking Note.

And, if you live in New York, tonight’s event celebrating Gotham Schools (one of our favorite education blogs) will feature words from Diane Ravitch and Joel Klein.

Scholarly Investments [New York Times, 12/4/09]

Podcast - Brain Drain [LMtv, 12/7/09]

Podcast - The State of Community Colleges [LMtv, 12/7/09]

The Future of Higher Ed: An Interview with Pat Callan [Taking Note, LMtv, 12/8/09]

The GothamSchools party is tomorrow and you’re invited [Gotham Schools, 12/8/09]

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.

Shakira: The Voice of Early Childhood Education [Ed Beat, LMtv, 6/10/09]

Si, Se Puede [The Economist, 11/13/09]

Podcast: Brain Drain [LMtv, 12/7/09]

The Barefoot Foundation

It’s part of their series of profiles of presenters for the March 2010 conference, “Critical Transformations”.

Learn more about the conference here.

If you watched our documentary, Declining by Degrees, you know what Pat looks like. And you may have heard him on a couple of our podcasts. Now you can read him, in this interview.

Yes, Pat has been around for a while and has served with distinction on the California Higher Education Policy Center, the California Postsecondary Education Commission, the Washington State Council for Postsecondary Education, the Montana Commission on Postsecondary Education and the Education Commission of the States.

He’s a force to be reckoned with and shows little sign of slowing down.

The Interview

Let’s begin with higher education and the recession. I know that your organization has tightened its belt, and we certainly have done that at Learning Matters.  What about higher education generally?

There has been belt tightening and much of it has been difficult and painful.  But remember, John–colleges and states can pass significant portions of their financial problems along to their consumers—students and families.

That’s certainly happening in California now. A 32% increase has sparked angry protests on many UC and Cal State campuses. Did you see this coming, and does this spell the end of California’s Master Plan for higher education, its promise of a low cost education for all able citizens?

The current round of cuts, tuition increases, and enrollment reductions are shaping up to be the most severe, particularly with the severity of economic hardship Californians are experiencing, but it’s very consistent with the way California handles budgetary problems—the default position is pass as much of the pain as possible along to students and families.

Remember the history, John. In 1960 California became the first state—in fact, the first government anywhere in the world—to commit itself to provide higher education access to every adult who was motivated and could benefit from it.  But that commitment, in what was called the Master Plan, has eroded substantially over the last three decades.  In each recession since the early 1980s, California has raised tuition substantially and turned thousands of students away from college.  For example, in the recession of the early 1990s, California reduced public higher education enrollments by 230,000 students.  In the dot-com recession early in this decade, enrollment was cut by 150,000 students.  Each time this has happened, some higher education and political leaders and many in the media have proclaimed that an unprecedented breach of the Master Plan has occurred.

I look around my office and see everyone working much harder, but I haven’t heard of college faculty teaching an extra course per semester, or anything like that.  Am I missing something?

There have been increases in faculty teaching, due primarily to larger classes.  But there’s been little in the way of systematic efforts to improve productivity in ways that don’t undermine educational quality and are on a scale large enough to have an impact on access and affordability.  Many institutions could increase undergraduate teaching for full-time faculty, either as an emergency measure to protect student access to programs and courses or, in some cases, or to rebalance the faculty priorities and time devoted to undergraduate teaching, research, and graduate programs.

So why don’t they?  What’s in the way?  Faculty power?

It’s not a case of proponents of change losing great debates about the issue..  The problem is that these debates aren’t taking place at all in most of the country.  This is a leadership failure, beginning with governors and legislatures, college boards of trustees and presidents.  Tuition increases may produce just enough revenue for institutions to mitigate pressures for innovation.  And college and university leaders do not generally seek conflict with faculty, even in better times, much less when the faculty is already beleaguered by larger classes, hiring freezes, and salary cuts and furloughs.

Consider California again. One might expect the state that prides itself on innovation and is the home of the Silicon Valley and so much of the cutting edge media would have systematically explored, developed, and implemented innovative and cost effective approaches.  But this has not happened, at least not on a scale that has had impact on college opportunity.  Like much of American higher education—and the governors and legislatures are also part of the problem—California apparently prefers to expand and contract the existing ways of doing business, even when that leads to a pattern of diminished college access and affordability.

Even Harvard has cuts–it isn’t serving cookies in the afternoon—but elsewhere tuition and fees continue to go up in this recession.  Can you make sense of that?

It’s still a “sellers market” for higher education, and the high unemployment has increased the numbers who seek to enroll.  In a severe recession, college, which is already a necessary condition for most jobs that support a middle class standard of living, becomes the only option for many young people; and older and working (or formerly working) adults turn to colleges for new knowledge and skills.  So most colleges can continue to raise tuition despite the economic distress and still maintain enrollments.  This has been called “pricing with impunity.”

For years and years the conventional wisdom has been that private colleges were an endangered species because of the competition from subsidized state colleges and universities, but now it looks as if something very different is happening.  What once were ‘state-supported’ institutions are now, as one wag put it, ‘state-situated.’  And at least some private colleges, such as those that are character-driven, seem to be doing well. What’s going on here? Is there a real shift going on?  Are public colleges in danger?

I don’t think so. The rumors of state retreat from support of public higher education have been greatly exaggerated, often by public college and university leaders seeking to justify tuition increases.  State support for higher education, in the aggregate, has actually increased substantially in the recent past, in the 1980s, the 1990s, and in this decade prior to the current recession.

The problem is the volatility of state support, which is difficult to manage.  States have generally funded higher education well—better than many other state services in good budget years—cut colleges deeply in recessions, and then allowed colleges to make up substantial portions of the cuts with tuition.

Private higher education has demonstrated that it can compete in this environment, but lacks the capacity to compensate for a large-scale rollback in the capacity of the publics.

Let’s talk about the increasing debt burden carried by graduates.

That’s a darkening shadow hanging over private colleges and the more expensive public, their heavy reliance on the willingness of students, and in many cases parents, to borrow for college.  If, as some economists have predicted, the country emerges from this recession more debt-averse, that is, less willing or able to take on consumer debt and home mortgage debt, it is likely that this will extend to borrowing for college.  Student and parental debt is the principal way the middle-class has financed the run-up of tuition for the last two decades.  If reluctance to borrow becomes pervasive, higher education’s current economic model may be in serious trouble.

Both the percentage of students who borrow and the amounts borrowed has increased for each graduating class.  Student borrowing had doubled in this decade in the years prior to the recession.  Polling data shows growing public concern over the amount of debt students now incur to pay for college.  And, as the study just released by the Institute for College Access & Success suggested, students who graduated with debt last year entered an economy in which the employment prospects were problematic, even for college graduates.

Is the stimulus money getting through to post-secondary institutions?  How’s it being used?

We don’t yet have a full national picture yet.  However, the higher education dollars that flowed directly to states seem to have been used only sporadically to protect students and families from large tuition increases.  While it can be argued that things would have been much worse without the stimulus, this may be scant consolation to students whose tuition and fees are rising at a time of high unemployment and negligible inflation.

On a related subject, the administration’s initiatives to increase funding and streamline student financial aid make sense and deserve support.  However, it appears that, at least in the short term, increased federal investments in financial aid will not produce improved college access and affordability because most, if not all, of the new federal dollars will be absorbed by tuition increases imposed by colleges and states.  This is an example of the way that even the most enlightened federal initiatives and reforms in higher education can be effectively nullified by states and colleges.

And, in contrast to the stimulus money for public schools, none of the money provided to the states for higher education was directed toward innovation.  The only requirement is that it be spent.  So an opportunity to stimulate reform and improve productivity may have been lost.

President Obama and his Education Secretary have talked a lot about the value of community colleges, and Arne Duncan has chosen a community college president, Martha Kanter, to be his number two person.  What might this mean for higher education in Washington?  Does this tip the scale in favor of community colleges?

I think the scale had already tipped toward the community colleges.  After all, they are the largest sector of American higher education.  The Obama administration appropriately recognizes that these colleges must be one of the cornerstones if the nation is to achieve the President’s goals of significantly increased access and global leadership in higher education attainment by 2020. Martha Kanter is a key leader as well as the symbol for much of this.

There’s some talk about creating incentives for students to complete college in three years.  Does this have legs, or is it just more talk?  If it’s going to happen, where will we see it first?

The 3-year degree idea has been around for a long time and has yet to be widely institutionalized.  It should certainly be available to more students, but I doubt that it will (or should) be the model for all students. When it happens, it usually comes from the students’ own initiative, not the institutions’. These students take college courses or earn college credits by examination in high school, enroll in summer sessions while attending college, or take extra courses each quarter or semester. For the 3-year degree to become more common would require institutions and faculties to rethink and redesign curricula and courses so that learning that is determined to be requisite for the degree is achieved in a more compressed way.  For that to happen there would have to be greater clarity about the learning and skills that the baccalaureate degree certifies.

What do you mean by ‘greater clarity’?  I don’t think many colleges have shown much interest in measuring outcomes.

The reluctance of much of American higher education to define and assess learning outcomes is well documented.  It impedes innovations that might lead to enhanced learning and bring costs down, and the 3-year degree is only one example.

Colleges have barely tapped the potential of interactive electronic technology to individualize learning and improve productivity of on-campus courses and distance learning.

What we have is a system in which time (measured in seat time and credit hours) is the constant and learning is variable; it should be the opposite.  Without the capacity to compare and measure educational outcomes, systematic experimentation is difficult, and all too often an unreasonable burden of proof is placed on those who propose innovations.

After years of reform efforts to level the economic playing field that go back as far as Lyndon Johnson, today the best predictor of where someone goes to college is their parents’ economic status.  Do you have some radical suggestions as to how that might be changed?

Income is not only the best predictor of whether a student will enroll in college but also where—in a private, public, two-year or four-year college—and of the likelihood of completing a degree once enrolled.  In the fifty years after World War II, higher education was one of the major forces for the expansion of the middle class and for intergenerational social mobility—kids doing better than their parents.  Today, it is an impediment to mobility, with both access to college and the distribution of students within higher education highly stratified by income.

Any good news?

The Obama administration seems focused and determined, so stay tuned.

____________________________________________________

Want to know more?

Listen to Pat Callan talk about what’s wrong with American education.

Watch a recent program featuring Pat Callan and others discuss the rising cost of higher education.

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.

A Race to the Top: The History [LM.tv, 12/03/09]

Texas Education head warns of federal takeover [Austin American-Statesmen, 12/03/09]

Can it be stopped?  The Ford Foundation is trying. 10 years ago it launched the International Fellowships Program, a 350 million dollar effort to nurture talent in developing countries and keep it there.  In this
podcast, we hear from the program’s director, Joan Dassin.

Dassin runs one of the largest international scholarship programs in the world and after hearing her you’ll want to tell your friends all about it.

Learn more about the International Fellowships Program: http://www.fordifp.net.

1. What percentage of college students attend community college?
A) 12%    B)  25%    C) 35%    D) 50%

2. To reform community colleges, President Obama proposes to spend?
A) 12 billion   B) 3 billion    C) 500 million    D) 100 million

3.  What’s the graduation rate at community colleges?
A) 35%    B)  22%     C) 55%     D) 65%

If you missed any of these questions, then you should learn more about community colleges.   They are overflowing with students seeking to save on college tuition and laid off workers seeking to train for new careers.  The President considers community colleges crucial to the economic recovery and wants them to get far bigger and better in the years to come.

In this podcast, Dr. Kay McClenney, discusses her just released report on the state of community colleges. “The Community College Survey of Student Engagement” polled thousands of students at some 300 campuses to find out what works in this fast growing section of higher education.

Read the report online: http://www.ccsse.org.

[Answers: 1) D; 2) A; 3) B.]

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.

In Long Beach, California, a charter school using Rosie as its namesake–Rosie the Riveter High School–aims to close the gender gap in technical fields like construction, auto mechanics and electrical engineering. Students (both boys and girls) take a full range of academic courses, but they also take vocational classes at a local community college.

The non-profit that sponsors the school, Women in NonTraditional Employment Roles, was started by Lynn Shaw, a former miner and steelworker who says that prejudice is often what keeps women closed out of these specialized fields. She emphasizes the financial benefits of this kind of work:

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.

Nailing a trade at Rosie the Riveter High [The LA Times, 12/3/09]

Women in NonTraditional Employment Roles (WINTER)

“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.

Give it a Ponder [Official Site]

How “Give it a Ponder” Could Help Teens Think Twice [YPulse, 12/02/2009]

Relationship Abuse: That’s Not Cool [Ed Beat, LMtv, 6/30/09]

The competition is called the “Race to the Top,” and it is unlike any education reform efforts of the past. This program starts at the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and traces the growing involvement of the federal government in public education.

Download transcript (pdf)

In a conversation with John Merrow, Ravitch, a former Assistant Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, questions the federal government’s new role in public education.

But there’s a catch: in order to compete states must promise to raise standards, track student performance and tie it to teacher pay, turn around the lowest performing schools, mainly by opening charters and more. The requirements are already causing a stir in the education community.

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 an article for Counterpunch, David Wolff does a thorough job of explaining how the business behind charter schools–the investments that support them, and why it’s lucrative for companies to invest in them at all. According to Wolff, when charter schools use portions of their (public) funding to buy real estate, it often means that cutbacks are made in other areas:

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?

City’s Schools Share Their Space, and Bitterness [The New York Times, 11/29/09]
Speculating on Education [Counterpunch, 9/29/09]
Tracking the Charter Movement [Taking Note, 12/01/09]

I’d like to raise two issues: 1) quality control and 2) persistent opposition.

For one thing, the Obama Administration is embracing charter schools (or ‘chartered schools’) with great enthusiasm. Now, it’s true that Education Secretary Arne Duncan adds a qualification, saying that they support ‘good charter schools,’ but that strikes me as, for the moment anyway, an empty distinction, largely because of an absence of ways of measuring quality.

It’s true that egregiously bad charters get shut down, but mediocre ones keep plugging along, doing just as much damage to kids as mediocre public schools. But what the charter school proponents don’t seem to realize is that these mediocre institutions are also damaging ‘the movement.’ I’ve heard them (and you know who you are!) say that mediocre public schools aren’t punished, as if that justifies not closing mediocre charter schools! It doesn’t, precisely because the charter school advocates are claiming to be different.

I think that charter schools risk becoming like schools of education if they aren’t careful. How many of the 1400 or so schools and colleges of education are excellent? I’d say 50 but, if you want to argue for 100, I’ll go along with that. But are the 100 excellent ones doing anything to get rid of the 500-700 that are dreadful? If they are, it hasn’t made my radar screen.

I think that, for the charter movement to succeed, it must take the lead on setting high standards and then enforcing them.

Is that realistic? Is it happening somewhere?

A second issue I didn’t cover thoroughly in my Ed Week piece is the issue of opposition to charter schools. Everyone knows that unions have fought against charter schools because they’ve seen it in their self-interest (teachers in charter schools don’t have to belong to unions). But, guess what, local school boards have been as great a roadblock, and in some cases, even fiercer opponents. They go to court to keep charter schools from opening or expanding. Why? It’s about money and control, as far as I can tell. But if the demand exists for charter schools, why wouldn’t elected officials whose mandate is education be supportive?

Just yesterday in the neighboring town of Los Altos, California a county judge ruled against a charter school and in favor of the local school board. The charter school had sued because it wanted to expand to include 7th grade and needed space. Forget for a minute the particulars of that case and ask yourselves why it wanted a 7th grade? Could it be that parents of 6th graders wanted to keep their children in the charter school? And why is it that school boards are so hostile to success? Shouldn’t they be trying to figure out what that successful school was doing, so they could copy it? That was the hope of charter schools, that they’d be incubators.

If you and I both operate restaurants, and my restaurant is drawing a crowd and yours isn’t, wouldn’t you want to know why? Wouldn’t you think seriously about changing some aspect of what you are doing? Or would you sue me?

What can be done to change school board behavior? Is it all about money and power? What am I missing?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

When Roads Diverge: Tracking the Charter Movement [Education Week, 12/2009]

How New York City’s Charter Schools Affect Achievement [The NYC Charter Schools Evaluation Project, 09/2009]

When two roads diverge in a yellow wood, in poetry and in life, one must choose. After picking a path to follow, inevitably you ask the unanswerable question: What would have happened if you had chosen the other path?

Now we know what happens, at least in education, thanks to a remarkable study of charter schools in New York City. And that study, released in September, suggests that it’s time to widen one of the roads.

Because New York City doesn’t have enough room in its charter schools, admission is by lottery. Over the past seven years, only about half the 80,000 students who have applied have been accepted. Most of the others ended up going to traditional public schools in their neighborhoods.

Not only were the applicants similar in observable characteristics of race, gender, poverty, disability, and English proficiency, but, because all had made the effort to enroll in a charter school, researchers could infer similarity in motivation and family interest in education. Such an opportunity is what the study’s lead author, Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford University, calls ‘‘the gold standard’’ in research, the opportunity to compare apples to apples.

The announced results are dramatic. The lottery winners went to 48 public charter schools, and those who finished 8th grade performed nearly as well as students in affluent suburban districts, closing what the researchers call the “Harlem-Scarsdale achievement gap” by 86 percent in math and about two-thirds in English.

By the 3rd grade, each year in a charter added about 5 points to math and English language arts scores on state exams, compared with those who lost the lottery. Every year in a charter increased a high school student’s likelihood of earning a state Regents diploma by 7 percent.

The study’s results can be generalized, Hoxby maintains, because most charters are in cities, most urban districts use a lottery system, and New York’s students resemble urban students everywhere.
But, as with all education research, caveat emptor is a good rule to adhere to. For one thing, nowhere in the published study does Hoxby reveal how many children actually went through eight years in charter schools. She does acknowledge that she did a fair amount of extrapolating.
Just what does that mean? Think of an eight-mile road race in which only some runners ran the entire distance. Most, however, ran some portion of the distance—miles one through three, say, or miles five through seven. And then the race officials compiled the final standings by assuming that those partial race times would have been replicated over the full distance. If someone who ran only three or four miles of the course got a trophy, there’d be an uproar, of course, but statisticians like Hoxby are comfortable with drawing inferences about academic performance.

But did she extrapolate beyond what the data support? Some in the field are skeptical of the study’s conclusions. They note that the research hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, and that the study’s scope, confined to New York City charters, limits its usefulness on a national scale. A few also point out that Hoxby’s studies of charters tend to be consistently positive.

But Hoxby stands behind her results and their meaning. She told me recently that the peer-review process is under way and should be finished soon. But what’s more relevant to her, she said, is whether someone can articulate an actual problem with the methodology.

Meanwhile, her research shows clear performance differences among charter schools in New York City. While Hoxby will not name the best and worst, she is willing to identify the characteristics of the best. The high-performing charters have a longer school day and year; more time devoted to studying English; pay for performance, and not simply based on seniority and credentials; a clear academic mission; and a moderate disciplinary policy of both small rewards and small punishments (meaning that behavior issues—good and bad—are attended to on the spot).

Not all the charters were successful, though. It’s important to note that 14 percent of students in the study attended charter schools that had an overall negative effect on math performance, compared with students who did not win the lottery.

So what does all this mean for choosing education’s road to the future? What will happen now? Hoxby sees these results as a clear call to create more charter opportunities, something President Barack Obama, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and many others have been urging. The federal government, in fact, is doing more than talking. It has made it clear that states with limits on charters may be less likely to do well in competition for the $4 billion in Race to the Top stimulus funds it’s preparing to distribute. Some states already have removed their charter caps in response.
The general public clearly wants more charter schools—64 percent in the 2009 Gallup poll on education. And a 2009 survey conducted by Education Next reports that more than a third of public school teachers support charters, a number that jumps to nearly half when respondents are told of President Obama’s support.
Yet, that support notwithstanding, charter schools are not home free. To understand why requires some history.
Although the notion of chartering schools had been around for a few years by 1988, it was in October of that year that the charter movement was born, at a small meeting by the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Itasca County, Minn. Among those in attendance were two New York educators, Albert Shanker and Seymour Fliegel; Ember Reichgott, a visionary Minnesota state senator; and the Minnesota educators Joe Nathan and Ted Kolderie. The concept of a charter—a renewable license to innovate, free of most school district rules—was built on a simple idea: Educators would be free to carry out their dream, but would be held responsible for results.

I ran that meeting, and remember well the overriding spirit of optimism: Chartering would be embraced by school districts, which would use them to “incubate” best practices.

That has rarely happened, unfortunately. Most districts have resisted the idea of weakening their central control. And because charter teachers would no longer have an obligation to belong to a union, Shanker came to see them as a threat to union power.

Still, the idea had legs, in part because people could read into the term “charter” what they wished. Some on the political right supported charter schools as a wedge to break up the public school monopoly, while others on the left thought charters would be the equivalent of their own private schools. Allowing profit-making firms to create charter schools, encouraged by state laws, produced more support.
The first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992, with fewer than 100 students; today, 4,000 charter schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia enroll over 1.3 million students—and counting. Many of the charters have been granted by entities other than the local school district (the State University of New York grants charters in New York state, for example), effectively ending district monopolies.

Leading the way have been nontraditional educators like New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, Superintendent Paul Vallas of the Recovery School District in New Orleans, and Chancellor Michelle Rhee in Washington. In the latter city, over 35 percent of students are in charters, and well over half of Vallas’ schools are charters. These three leaders encourage charters not as “incubators,” but as challenges to the rest of their schools.

Still, as Joe Nathan, a founder of the movement, says, “Some terrific charters are doing great things for kids, but charlatans have entered the field and have ripped off kids and taxpayers.” He says charter school organizations must develop better ways of screening out crooks and incompetents before they get to start schools.

Ted Kolderie, another founder, believes unions are coming to terms with the idea. He cites a United Federation of Teachers initiative in New York City, teacher cooperative schools in Milwaukee, and the charter organization Green Dot in Los Angeles as evidence that “when teachers play significant professional roles, the massive contracts generated by a boss-worker model are no longer required.”

Just as the waters of Lake Itasca flow into the Mississippi and down to the Gulf of Mexico, expect the movement that began there to continue to grow. However, just as the Mississippi is a dangerous and at times unpredictable river, the charter movement should not expect smooth sailing.

Because the recent New York City study will—quite properly—produce more enthusiasm for charters, it’s important to remember that 14 percent negative effect on math cited above. A buyer-beware attitude is more important than ever. Never forget that the name “charter” on a schoolhouse door reveals no more about a school’s quality than the word “restaurant” tells you about the food. There’s no substitute for transparency, high standards, and direct observation of the sort reported in this remarkable study.

John Merrow is the education correspondent for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS, and the president of Learning Matters Inc., in New York City.

Soling’s documentary, now playing at the Quad Cinema in New York, argues that public schools are instruments of fear and oppression in the lives of children. Reviews in both the New York Times and Variety are quick to note that the film’s reporting could be more balanced, but neither dismisses its claims as outlandish, either. The film uses shocking images–of which you’ll get a taste in the trailer–of armed guards, police dogs and handcuffs to emphasize its points. It drifts, too, into analysis of other ways in which children are oppressed by adult institutions–namely, the over-prescription of drugs like Ritalin. Clearly, efforts to keep children–or adults, for that matter–healthy and safe can all too often lead to passivity and fear.

Watch the trailer below and, if you’re a fan of the Colbert Report, watch Soling’s appearance on the show tonight at 11:30 on Comedy Central.

The War on Kids [Official Website]
The War on Kids Review [Variety, 11/17/09]
The War on Kids: What Ails Public Schools? Better Ask, What Doesn’t? [The New York Times, 11/18/09]

Good news for Michelle Rhee this Thanksgiving: the DC Superior Court ruled yesterday that layoffs she made in October were legal. “This has been a difficult time for the entire school system,” Rhee stated through a press release Tuesday evening. “We all look forward to maintaining our focus on serving students and renewing a collective effort to improve the quality of education we offer every child across the District.”

The decision is a blow to the Washington Teachers’ Union, which had argued that Rhee had manufactured a budget shortfall in order to target teachers she wanted out of the system.

George Parker explains his version of events at 3:20, below.

Judge Judith Bartnoff acknowledged that some teachers may have been improperly removed but soundly rejected Parker’s larger claim, writing:

The Court recognizes that questions could be raised about particular RIF decisions, in terms of the position that was eliminated, the individual whose employment was terminated, or both… Nevertheless, some questionable RIF decisions do not establish that the RIF was a pretext for a mass discharge, given the undisputed evidence that the DCPS budget was sufficient to support the existing staff and the new teachers being hired for the current school year, until the Council reduced the budget by $21 million only two weeks before the new teachers were scheduled to report.

Parker and the teachers’ union may appeal Bartnoff’s decision. But for now, it seems that the dispute will return to its original venue, out of the courtroom, and back to the bargaining table.

Also important to note - at a city council hearing in October, council members questioned whether Rhee’s decision to lay off teachers was legal, but for a different reason. When the council cut Rhee’s budget over the summer, it ordered her to slash funds for summer school. Instead, Rhee made layoffs without seeking the council’s approval. That charge continues to be investigated by the council.

Full coverage of Michelle Rhee and DC Schools:
Michelle Rhee in Washington DC: The Series
Two years of talks with Michelle Rhee and George Parker

You’re not a teacher, you say? OK, neither am I by profession, but sometimes we are put in that role. Imagine you’re walking in your neighborhood when a stranger stops her car, rolls down the window, and asks for directions to a local restaurant. You know the place she’s asking about, so you immediately begin figuring out how to explain it to her.

You are, for the moment, her teacher, she your pupil. You’ll explain it as clearly as you can (“Continue for three blocks, turn right on Maple Street, and go for two more blocks. The restaurant is on your right.”). As her teacher, you’ll be watching to see if she understands your directions.

Innovations occurs when you realize that you are not getting through. At that point, like a good teacher, you will scrap that ‘lesson plan’ and devise a new one. That is, you will find another way to teach her how to get where she needs to be. (“See that church steeple. Go one block past that and turn right. Then when you see the two gas stations…”)

Suppose she still doesn’t get it? At that point, more creativity: you might draw a map. Anything at all, just to get her to her destination.

Why is that innovation, you might be wondering? Maps aren’t new, and neither is rephrasing. But being innovative doesn’t require complete invention, only finding different approaches to a problem. Putting new wine into old bottles qualifies as an innovation because solves the problem of what to do with the wine.

What conditions are necessary for innovation in education? I find several, and all exist in my example of the lost driver: a relevant task; a measurable outcome; a willing student; and instructional flexibility.

You (the teacher) and the driver (your student) have a clear goal, getting her to understand how to get to her destination. Because the challenge is relevant—she wants to get to her destination–she is a willing student. You, the teacher, have instructional flexibility, the room to be innovative, precisely because the goal is clear. And because the goal is clear (and you are not sadistic or antisocial), you want to be successful. It’s odd, because you have never seen the lost driver before and most likely will never see her again, but at that moment you are measuring your own worth according to how well she learns. In effect, you believe that you haven’t taught effectively if she doesn’t learn it.

The parallel works in another way in that most of the work—ultimate success—is up to the student, not the teacher. The driver still has to follow those directions in order to get to her destination, and that’s as it should be. Teachers should not be expected to do it all.

But don’t you wish all teachers worked that way? Many, perhaps most, would like to but cannot because schooling’s goals and outcomes are murky or trivial. Without clear and relevant goals, process inevitably becomes the focus. Because process rules, many teachers today are given detailed lessons plans describing what they should be doing in class, every day. Innovation is neither expected nor encouraged. That in turn leads to a ‘cover the material’ philosophy, as in “I taught it, but they didn’t learn it.” What they really are doing is covering a certain part of their anatomy.

Transfer that situation—unclear goals and outcomes and a consequent focus on process—to my analogy of the lost driver. What might happen if you asked a stranger for directions and then didn’t grasp what he told you? Rather than find an innovative way to communicate, he’d just say the same thing again, but louder, or maybe slower. And if you still didn’t get it, he would raise his voice again. Before long, he’d be SHOUTING slowly.

It wouldn’t take you long to realize that, with that guy as your teacher, you’ll never get where you need to go, and so you would step on the gas and seek help elsewhere.

And he would write you off as a dense student who failed to grasp the material.

Some teachers, schools and systems take that approach to learning. Just as that guy would blame you for not grasping his shouted directions, schools and teachers often blame students for not understanding. When students don’t get it, they fail and have to repeat the grade, which is the equivalent of shouting the same words.

Many of those failing students—well over one million a year–do the equivalent of ‘driving away.’ They drop out of school.

My question is, who is failing? If school systems consistently fail at teaching and then at remediation–and that’s what often happens–can we just blame it on students? In fact, most remediation programs are echoes of what’s already failed.

The recipe for good schools has three steps, which must be taken in order: 1) figure out where we want to go and how we will measure our achievement; 2) hire capable, trained people and let them figure out how to get there; 3) and hold them accountable for results. Innovation per se isn’t a goal and shouldn’t be, but we can encourage it by replicating the conditions described above: clear and measurable goals, relevant tasks, and instructional flexibility, the freedom to innovate.

Here in Doha at WISE, the World Innovation Summit for Education, six groups were recognized for innovation, sustainability or pluralism. I managed to snag interviews with five winners.  Martin Burt’s project in Paraguay, ‘the Self Sufficient School,’ seeks to enable the poor to make a living while living on the land. As he told me, “Experts talk about ‘eliminating poverty,’ but that’s too abstract. I’m talking about putting money in the hands of the poor, money they have earned.”

I had a lively conversation with Joyce Dongotey-Padi of Ghana, whose project, known as WANE (Widows Alliance Network), aims to emancipate Ghanaian widows from the social, cultural and economic deprivation brought about by the prejudices they face because of their status. Ms. Dongotey-Padi is not a widow herself but was moved to act when a neighbor and friend became widowed and found herself virtually helpless and penniless.

I also talked with the Executive Director of Curriki, Dr. Barbara (Bobbi) Kurshan, and soon will put up an interview with her colleague Peter Levy.  Curriki’s name comes from ‘Curriculum’ and Wikipedia’ and is meant to suggest free, user generated curriculum for teachers.  Pretty neat stuff that is deservedly catching on and now has about 100,000 participants, almost all of them teachers.

The project to educate girls and women in India, Nanhi Kali, caught my attention.  It began in 1996 but didn’t really take off until recently.  It now reaches 52,000 girls across 8 states in India, up from just 1700 girls in 2002.  Its stated goal is to reach 100,000 girls by the end of this year, but its real goal is to change the social attitudes that devalue girls and women.  Ms. Sheetal Mehta was at WISE representing the project, and her energy and optimism jump off the screen.

Unfortunately I did not get to talk with representatives of the two other projects but both are worth your attention.  Escuela Nueva in rural Colombia uses collaborative learning to transform the traditional classroom and promote entrepreneurial skills. It was initiated in 1975 in rural Colombia in response to endemic educational problems like high dropout rates, weak school-community relationships, ineffective teacher training and the lack of children’s learning materials.

The second one I missed is a successful distance learning project in the Amazon forest, where many small towns and villages are accessible only by boat.  It was launched in 2007 by the Secretariat of Education and Learning Quality of Amazonas State and today transmits live classes via a two-way videoconference link to 25,000 students in 300 secondary schools and 700 classrooms, throughout the 62 county districts. A teacher is also located in each classroom to support local activities.

The awards were formally presented at the gala Tuesday night by Her Royal Highness Sheika Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned.  Each project received $20,000.   The first WISE Awards attracted 500 entries, and I was told that the judges could have honored many more projects than they did, so expect an even bigger splash next year.

Dr. Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani is the Chairman of WISE and Vice President for Education of the Qatar Foundation.  Dr. Abdulla knows the United States well, having gone to graduate school at Colorado State University. I spent a few minutes with this soft-spoken, focused and optimistic leader on the first day of WISE.  He was very clear about his high hopes for the event.

Not on the tape but revealing: When Dr. Abdulla learned that I live in California, his face lit up.  He told me with great excitement about the time he and a cousin rented motorcycles, took a 1-hour driving lesson, and then drove down our Route One from Big Sur down to Santa Barbara.  He told his parents, he confessed, only after the trip had concluded successfully.

About 1000 delegates from more than 120 countries are represented here in Doha, Qatar, at WISE, the World Innovation Summit for Education. Plans are to make this an annual event, and it’s backed by the Qatar Foundation and the prestige of Her Royal Highness, Sheika Mozah, the wife of the Emir. She opened the 3-day meeting with a rousing call for innovation in education.

She reminded us that more than 75 million school-age children are not in school and that nearly 800 million adults cannot read or write. And she sounded a theme that is of profound importance: the education gender gap is wide and growing, because discrimination against women and girls is deeply entrenched.

The need for innovation is clear, because business as usual means accepting severe teacher shortages, funding deficits and low completion rates. Can this conference energize at least some of the participants to work for significant change?

For this stranger,a lesson on arrival had to do with pronunciation of Qatar. I’ve always said ‘ka-TAR’ but they say ‘cotter’, as in cotter pin. The second lesson: This is a new country intent on leaping into the 21st century: Construction cranes everywhere, and what they have already put up is impressive. Google ‘Education City, Qatar’ and see for yourself.

About 50 journalists are here, and the organizers have ‘quarantined’ us at a hotel miles and miles from the meeting hotel, the Ritz. We are downtown, where life happens, and we have a 30-40 minute bus ride morning and night that gives us a chance to see some of Doha. Those ensconced at the Ritz are out on a peninsula, miles from anything else. They do get the famous Ritz chocolate chip cookies, however.

After Sheika Mozah’s speech, we were talked at, about the importance of innovation in education. Why is it that the pedagogy never changes? Does someone believe that’s the best way to communicate?

When I’m president, we’ll fight to make sure we’re once again first in the world when it comes to high school graduation rates.

-Barack Obama (Dayton, Ohio, September 9, 2008)

I admit I do things that get me in trouble at school. I like to talk in class, argue with the teacher and make people laugh. But I feel like the teachers and principals are always waiting for me to do something stupid so they can jump on my case. It’s like we’re in a war. The only question is who’s going to strike first.

- Desmin, New York, New York, April 2009

Many Americans hear from or about President Barack Obama near daily.  But voices like Desmin’s - an 8th grader struggling to finish middle school in New York City - are less heard, though education reform remains a high priority of this president (and the last).

A recent report commissioned by the America’s Promise Alliance (PDF) puts the national high school graduation rate at 71%.  That number drops sharply in large urban districts like New York, where in 2008 just 60% of students earned a diploma within four years — a new high for the city.  

Youth Communication attacks the problem from an unusual angle.  Founded almost 30 years ago in New York, YC is dedicated to helping teenagers develop reading and writing skills by publishing magazines written by and for teens.  A recent issue titled “Getting to Graduation” included Desmin’s story.  An excerpt:

Now I am on the brink of being kicked out of school because of my behavior. I think my teachers feel like the school would have no problems if they just got rid of me, and that upsets me. I feel disgusted because they label me the bad seed. I don’t see myself as that.

I just want to pass 8th grade and move on to high school. I don’t really want to draw negative attention to myself for acting up. I’d rather draw positive attention to myself for being on the honor roll.

I want to go to college and get my master’s degree. I want to become an architect or maybe an entrepreneur so I can be my own boss. With this brain, I feel that I have the skills to start my own business—like a champagne label or maybe a record label. But first I have to graduate from high school.

This weekend, take the time to read Desmin’s story and others on the Youth Communication website.  Often our discussions of education pivot around adult stories, neglecting the voices of those sitting in the classroom - or leaving it too early.

Learn more: Youth Communication
Related content: Listen Up! Youth media network

Free For All, Poppendieck’s exposé of the American school lunch, claims that public schools need to prioritize providing nutritional, free breakfasts and lunches to all its students. The issue of school lunch is wedded, she argues, to issues of race and class: after all, the accepted measure of poverty at a given American school is the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. In many schools, the free lunch fed to poor kids is not only unhealthy, it’s also ridden with social stigma. From Christensen’s review:

The three-tiered system of free, reduced-price, and full-price lunches ostensibly provides for needy kids but in fact intimidates and confuses parents with endless forms to fill out and fosters a sense of shame in eligible kids, who opt to go hungry rather than expose their poverty to their peers. The program therefore often fails to reach the very kids it was designed for.

Christensen compares Poppendieck’s book to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and one hopes that the popularity of Pollan’s ideas will carry over into the realm of education. We all deserve to eat well, but with the considerable challenges they face, schoolchildren may deserve the finest dining.

Midday Malaise [bookforum.com, Dec/Jan 2010]
A Reading List [Taking Note, LMtv, 9/22/09]

Obama and Duncan Are Wrong About Charters ["Bridging Differences," EdWeek, 11/17/09]
Ford Gives Money to Teachers Unions [WSJ.com, 11/17/09]
Concern at a School in a Building Tied to Iran [NY Times, 11/13/09]
Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C.: Tensions Rising [LMTV and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 11/17/09]

At the center of the storm: over 200 teachers who lost jobs in October. That may not sound like much — but the layoffs follow a national campaign to recruit teachers to DC. Why did Rhee hire 934 new teachers between spring and fall only to make layoffs six weeks into the school year?

One thing is for certain — the temperature is rising in Washington, DC. Contract negotiations with the teachers’ union have ground to a halt. And in the words of one DC councilmember, “We are sitting in a chamber where tensions couldn’t be higher.”

Download transcript (pdf)

In this interview, John Merrow interviews Jodie Gittleson, Eve McCarey, Crystal Proctor and Tina Bradshaw-Smith, four DC teachers who were laid off during the Reduction in Force (RIF).

Podcast producer Selly Thiam interviewed Jason Kamras, one of the architects of IMPACT and the Director of Human Capital Management for Washington, DC’s teachers about the evaluation system and how he thinks it is going to change teaching in Washington, DC.

Though he was perhaps the most clearly partisan in his opinions, Gingrich stood out for the clarity and specificity of his thoughts during this interview. Whereas Duncan said a lot of things we’ve heard him say before, all along the lines of “We all have to take responsibility…we all have to step up,” and whereas Sharpton made some basic, declarative statements about de facto racism in education and the achievement gap, Gingrich pushed his own education agenda. He said twice that he’d “like to have a Pell Grant for K through 12,” and he claimed that charter schools are a solution to the discipline problems in inner-city schools:

We have a friend whose daughter is now teaching in a school [in D.C.] where there have been 23 lawsuits this year over discipline in a school that’s fundamentally undisciplined.  And so teachers are told basically, “You can’t get enough control to teach.” And this is why, when you go out to the KIPP school and to other systems like that–and there are 82 KIPP schools in the country–they’re very structured.  The Mastery schools, very structured. These kids, for the first time in their lives, are being given discipline; and therefore, they can attract great teachers because they can actually focus on the kids.

Despite the vagueness of some of their answers, it’s impressive to see such seemingly mismatched political partners united in their concern for American schools. Watch the full episode below.

Media Monday: BASIS Charter Schools [Ed Beat, 11/9/09]

I’m headed to the first World Innovation Summit on Education in Doha, Qatar. Hundreds of education innovators, policy makers and experts will be gathering there and I plan on recording video, audio interviews and filling you in on what’s happening there as it unfolds. This week, expect a post a day from me until Thursday, when I return.

To learn more about the WISE conference, visit their website: http://www.wise-qatar.org.

“Changing the Odds: Learning from the Harlem Children’s Zone Model,” a three-day conference attended by upwards of 1,000 educators, municipal leaders, and non-profit workers, was held earlier this week in New York. Secretary Duncan gave a keynote address, explaining that grants would be competitive, and that communities must base their proposals on already existing systems of schools–money won’t be spent on good ideas alone.

The Harlem Children’s Zone has received extraordinary praise for the very real gains it has produced in reading and math achievement among students who attend Promise Academy schools. As the New York Times‘ David Brooks points out, “In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.”

But Harlem Children’s Zone has some advantages over its proteges, among them a politically savvy, high-profile leader and a $65 million yearly budget furnished by big sponsors (including the chairman of American Express). Without that kind of influence or cash, it’s unclear that other programs will be able to match HCZ’s explosive success.

Non-Profits Look at Harlem Children’s Zone and Ask: Only in New York? [WNYC, 11/11/09]
The Harlem Miracle [David Brooks, NY Times, 5/7/09]
In The Zone [Ed Beat, LMtv, 8/28/09]

The study, an “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning”, includes research from 1996 to 2008, and focuses mostly on online courses for adults in continuing education programs. For years, continuing education has been where the bulk of online learning has happened. According to the New York Times:

Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.

In other words, online learning has been and will continue to be transformed by its ability to bring people together. The Times quotes Philip Regier, the dean of Arizona State’s Online and Extended Campus program:

“People are correct when they say online education will take things out of the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”

Last week, John Merrow wrote about the potential uses of technology in the classroom, and the resistance to innovation that exists in some public school communities. If online learning can truly “take things out of the classroom,” though, one wonders whether it will be possible to integrate an online classroom with its real-life counterpart. And how will these new learning communities affect the kind of “hands-on” (for lack of a better term) learning that traditional school fosters? Play, classroom discussion, and verbal communication all seem to be at stake.

Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom [NY Times, 8/19/09]

Technology in Schools: Problems & Possibilities [Taking Note, 11/3/09]

In 2006, Jenkins and his team at the time published a white paper called Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.  This paper was the reason why I decided to apply to the CMS program at MIT because it so fundamentally changed my view of the relationship between technology and education. I had been teaching video for a couple years in day and after school programs in NYC public schools, and I was finding myself frustrated by my students’ obsession with social networks and video games.  I came across the whitepaper and realized that they were “obsessed” because these new media both engaged them and allowed them to be a part of a community inside and outside of the school walls that was relevant to their lives.

What are the New Media Literacies?  What are a few of your favorites, and why?

The New Media Literacies are a set of social skills and cultural competencies that we believe are necessary for students to participate fully in society - this includes being a good student, a successful worker, and an engaged citizen.  The whitepaper, which you can access here, explains the conditions that are necessary for a participatory culture to exist.  It also outlines three major challenges we must deal with moving forward.  First, while we are making strides in the digital divide by putting computers and broadband in most schools, we are now facing a participation gap, which is “the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.”  Second, there is a transparency problem, which means that young people are unable to see the ways that media is shaping their perceptions of the world.  And third, there is an ethics challenge, stemming from “the breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.”

With these three challenges in mind, Jenkins and NML created a list of 11 (now 12) social skills and cultural competencies that broaden the idea of what it means to be literate today.  (Read the full list here.)

We all go back and forth about which skill we think is most important because they so often overlap and interconnect, it’s hard to just choose one.  That being said since I’m currently doing research around using digital games in education, I am a little partial to the benefits of play.

Tell me a little about what the project “does” and why you think it is important.

I’ll answer the second part of your question first.  Academics get some flack for never leaving the university and thinking up new ideas, but NML makes sure it grounds its research in practice.  We learn a lot developing our resources, but we probably learn even more when we take them into educational settings and see how teachers and students use them.

Over my past year at NML we’ve been very busy.  Since the publication of the whitepaper, NML has created several resources that are putting the new media literacies into action.  NML developed a web-based activity center called the Learning Library, that introduces users to skills through what we call challenges.  These challenges are interactive multimedia lessons that pull in elements from the web, such as videos, images, or audio.  The Learning Library is a tool that encourages educators and students to participate in learning, allowing both to create, remix, or share a challenge.  You can check it out here, and see some of the challenges the NML team created or even make your own challenge, if you like.

NML, working under the idea that media literacy should be incorporated across the curriculum, has also been working on Teacher Strategy Guides for use in formal education.  The first one, Reading in a Participatory Culture, was piloted in several schools last year.  It is a modular curriculum that  consists of four units, each of which focuses on a handful of skills.  While the idea was that the guide could be used with many different texts, our example uses as source texts, Moby-Dick and a contemporary theater adaptation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley called Moby-Dick: Then and Now.  As Jenkins often says, we wanted to “be conservative in content, and transformative in method.”

Our website has more information about these resources, and others like our Digital Ethics Casebook collaboration with Howard Gardner’s GoodPlay project.  We also presented much of our research in Threshold magazine’s spring ‘09 issue which you can find here.

I’m interested in the fact that appropriation is one of the literacies–this one seems particularly specific to internet culture and is something that all internet journalists grapple with all the time.  How do we learn to successfully “sample and remix” content generated by others?

We’ve found that appropriation is a particularly complex skill when it comes to schools.  Teachers are concerned with the apparent ease of plagiarism and confusions around copyright and fair use.   We tend to talk about appropriation in terms of remix culture because most young people are more familiar with it.  In the Teachers’ Strategy Guide, we even talk about Herman Melville as a remixer because of the way he incorporated elements from many sources, including the Bible and scientific texts, with a classic story of revenge in his novel Moby-Dick.  With remixes we don’t just mean a creative work that borrows pieces from others, but a creative work that builds on and transforms the meaning of the original source or sources.  We see in the process of making remixes a way for students to think about media critically, become an author, and understand their audience.

That being said we understand educators and students want to know more about their rights around copyright and fair use.  NML made several required challenges in the Learning Library that explore real-world situations and provoke discussion around the state of copyright and how our use of new media is challenging it.

On John Merrow’s blog and in general at Learning Matters, we’ve been thinking a lot about access to technology in schools and whether traditional public schools, especially, will be resistant to the flow of technology into the classroom.  What do you think?  What–if anything–has your work with NML shown you about the disparities in access across lines of race, class, etc?

As I mentioned above, NML is very concerned with the participation gap.  Many schools today have computers and broadband internet access, but these are not useful to teachers or students if they don’t know how to use them as full participants. A growing trend seems to be that schools ban access to YouTube and social networks because they are distractions or liabilities, but these are also resources that students will need to learn how to navigate and use once they are out of school.  Students with access to these resources at home usually have ample time to become proficient in using them.  Students who are not able to engage with new media resources at school or only for a limited amount of time could be less likely to develop the skills, knowledge, opportunities and experiences that are required for students to fully participate in our increasingly digital society.

Do you think you are new media literate?

I am lucky that I was able to learn video production in high school, go to film school, work in documentaries at LMI, and now study media at MIT.   After all that, though, with the pace of technology innovation increasing, I still find it hard to keep up with the latest gadget, app, or social network.  Above any technical skills I’ve acquired though, I think I most value the skills I’ve learned that help me navigate across a range of media, evaluate and synthesize the information I find, and express my point of view in a variety of ways.

Indeed, according to the Economist, school founders Michael Block and his wife, Olga, started the school because Olga, who is Czech, was “horrified by the mediocrity and low expectations at American public schools.” One of the school’s teachers, interviewed in the clip below, says that the Blocks “took a blend of the Asian and European style, and it has an American flair.”

Reverend Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich have both publicly supported the school, and in 2008, Newsweek ranked it the #1 public high school in America (this year they are #5). Michael Block accounts for the schools’ success by citing its rigorous academic demands–the BASIS high schools use only Advanced Placement curricula–and the hard work of its students. Are high academic standards and “four hours of homework a night” the keys to education reform? Watch Block’s interview with Tucson local news, below, and tell us what you think.

“The Future of Learning” [Ed Beat, 10/26/09]
“Desert Excellence” [Economist.com, 10/29/09]

That all changed when Andrew joined Rochester’s Work Experience Program (WEP), which combines small academic classes with vocational education. Carleen Meers, Assistant Director of the program, told us that close to 80% of WEP graduates obtain competitive employment or enroll in college after high school.  

That’s an impressive figure — but it’s also important to note that the fact the figure exists at all is impressive!  When Meers joined WEP, there wasn’t any data to track student outcomes after graduation.  That’s not unusual. 

In many states, school systems simply do not know how well they have prepared special education students for life after high school.

Oregon, where 1 out of 8 students is in special ed, is trying to learn. An article from The Oregonian details a recent survey conducted by the Oregon Dept. of Education, the first of its kind in the state:

 Telephone surveys of former students in every school district found that about 1,150 of the 4,200 special education students who finished their high school education in 2006-07 spent the next year without getting a job that paid minimum wage or any post-secondary education.

That’s a quarter of Oregon special ed students.  But officials are optimistic:

State and national officials called the results a big success, simply because schools are finally tracking what happens to students with disabilities once they leave school, information that will help them better prepare future students.

I’m reminded of a conversation John Merrow had with then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings about No Child Left Behind in 2007.  In the video below, at about 8:30, John asks a question about states using loopholes.  Spellings’ response — a “Hooray” that the question can be asked at all because of the new availability of data — underscores the tension, playing out in school districts across the country, between the act of measuring success and acting meaningfully on the information learned.

In Rochester, where schools received $30 Million from the federal government, the money helped to save three innovative programs and many educators’ jobs. According to President Obama and his education staff, this kind of change has been and will continue to be fostered by stimulus dollars. In a speech yesterday in Madison, Wisconsin, the President laid out the tenets of his Race to the Top program, in which states are eligible to win stimulus grants if they “develop a strong plan to improve the quality of education”in their states. He described what states need to do to qualify and how applications will be evaluated. Meanwhile, the Department of Education has released a report detailing the effects of stimulus money in the education sector, which states that 325,000 jobs have been saved since the money went out.

Pieces in both the New York Times and EdWeek say that the report’s data is somewhat suspect, however, and “only as good as the recipients that have reported it.” In many cases, it remains unclear what kinds of jobs were created and whether “saved” jobs were ever really in danger–for example, many Head Start programs seem to have given raises to employees whose jobs were reported as saved. The Obama administration has prioritized transparency by making these numbers public so quickly, but the report itself sheds only a hazy light on the stimulus and its usefulness.

Stay tuned for continuing coverage from us on both the stimulus and, more narrowly, the Race to the Top.

“Holding the Line” [LMtv & The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 10/3/09]

Watch Obama’s Speech in Madison

Reports Show Conflicting Number of Jobs Attributed to Stimulus Money [NY Times, 11/4/09]
Transparency Watch: Evaluating Stimulus Reporting [Education Week, 11/2/09]
ED Recovery Act Report: Summary of Programs and State-by-State Data
[ED.gov, 11/2/09]

We hope that in light of this unprecedented refund offer, parents will be reassured that their babies do not need videos in order to learn and grow optimally.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children under two shouldn’t be exposed television or “screen media.” I’ve known many children under two to watch an episode of “Sesame Street,” though, and in the age of New Media Literacies, one wonders how useful–or possible–it is to keep an infant in a screen-less bubble. Baby Einstein’s programming–for example, this short clip below that pairs an image of a cow and the letters ‘c-o-w’–seems potentially ineffectual, but relatively harmless.

Early-childhood education programs–not to mention music and dance “classes” for infants–are all the rage, but it seems like educators and parents still have a lot to learn about early development.

Disney Expands Refunds on ‘Baby Einstein’ DVDs [New York Times, 10/23/09]

But I think there are three reasons to worry.  Reason one, the technology will be unevenly distributed, meaning that the gap between rich and poor will actually widen.  Two, schools won’t respond to the creative potential of technology in positive ways.  And, three, they will respond uncritically.

First, the technology gap (which I wrote about on this blog a few weeks back). This issue is major, because in most of history the rich have gotten richer, and there’s no reason to expect things to be different this time around.  Creating special programs to put technology into schools with poor children won’t work unless those programs are accompanied by serious professional development, because most teachers I know are uncomfortable with computers and even more uncomfortable with the notion that kids know more than they do.

What do poor kids get when schools are their main source of advance technology?  Not much!  As teacher Esther Wojcicki of Palo Alto notes, kids in school are forced into what she calls ‘the airplane mode.’ “They’re told to sit down, strap in and face straight ahead for the duration of the flight.”

Right now, well off children have access to technology at home, meaning that they will find it easier to cope with the ‘powering down’ that happens when they walk into their schools.  Not so for poor kids, who end up suffering through a lot of drill.

My second fear is that schools will resist innovation and become irrelevant. A tsunami, a huge wave of technology in the hands of young people, is approaching, but many educators seem unaware that their students swim in a sea of technology outside the school. They want to continue to use computers and other tools to control students and to manage information, and that’s about it.

Because they fear technology in the hands of kids, they look for ways to keep it out of schools. When a couple of students were found looking at ‘inappropriate’ videos on YouTube in one school recently, the administration decided on the spot that no students would have access to the site.  That’s overreaction based on ignorance, and a valuable teachable moment thrown away.  Of course kids are going to go to places we don’t want them to, but what that requires is vigilance on the part of adults as well as scads of interesting and challenging work.  Even in a high tech world, idle hands (and minds) do the devil’s work.

Imagine the response of the rest of the kids when they learned that YouTube couldn’t be accessed at school.  Guess what site they were sure to visit at home?

My third fear has to do with what happens when schools do embrace technology. That is, I worry about the enthusiasm of technology’s supporters. Last week I participated in a 2-day event held at Google headquarters in Mountain View and organized by Sesame Workshop, Common Sense Media and the MacArthur Foundation. At one point we watched a short homemade video of a young man purporting to teach how to solve a quadratic equation.  With great energy, the boy lunged at the camera lens and enthused about how easy it is. He wrote on a white board, enthused more about changing the minus signs to plus signs, and concluded by nearly shouting again that it was easy.  The audience applauded, but for what? He hadn’t explained why he was changing signs, or anything else for that matter. It was terrible teaching, pure and simple, but technology was being used, and most of the adults loved it!

But ignoring technology is the greater danger. We saw another video in which a high school student told us that he never read books, hadn’t read one in years.  Why bother, he asked rhetorically, when you can read plot summaries on line in 30 seconds.  He confessed (rather he boasted) that he’d aced a test on Romeo & Juliet without reading a word of Shakespeare’s play.

I think technology is a huge threat to a decent education precisely because it allows shortcuts like that.  We know that students everywhere are downloading term papers written by others and submitting them as their own, and now they don’t even have to read the material.  We’re producing students with no deep understanding of our culture and a fundamental contempt for education.

There is a solution, of course. It’s not anti-technology, but it does require slowing things down. Take Romeo & Juliet.  I’ll wager that it was one of three or four plays the students were assigned to read and the teacher required to ‘cover’ in a few weeks.  Under those circumstances, SparkNotes may be appropriate.

But suppose three or four weeks could be devoted to one play?  Then the odds would be that no student could get by without reading.  And if students don’t give a rip about Shakespeare, change the assignment: put Macbeth and Lady Macbeth on trial for first-degree murder, with kids playing the roles of Macbeth, his wife, Duncan, Banquo, et cetera.  Now they’ll have to prepare to give testimony, while the students who are the defense and prosecutors will have to prep for cross-examination. That is, they’ll have to read what Shakespeare wrote, think about the meaning, perhaps watch Olivier or Orson Welles in film versions, and more.

There’s a marvelous role for technology in this.  Assign students to videotape the proceedings and prepare nightly news reports ‘from the courtroom,’ to be posted on the web and aired on the school’s broadcast or narrowcast system.  To be able to interview intelligently, these students also would have to dig deep into the play itself.  So long, SparkNotes!

In a perfect world, this kind of curriculum would be found in our poorest schools, giving those kids the opportunity for deep learning and powerful intellectual challenges, not the ‘drill and kill’ routine they are more likely to encounter.

Today’s path–a breakneck pace through a required curriculum aimed at enabling students to pass cheap bubble tests—is antithetical to the effective use of technology. Instead, students in East Palo Alto, Greenwich, Mumbai, Shanghai and London should be connected, working together on projects to, for example, analyze acidity in rainfall or traffic patterns or election results. (Often they are already connected–outside of school–through Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.)

The choice is ours:  We can use technology in schools to support students who dig deep and create knowledge, or we can continue with business as usual, an environment that invites kids to use technology’s power in ways that ultimately hurt us all.

The goal of the Teacher Salary Project is to generate energy and excitement around the idea that public school teachers should be paid much, much more. As one teacher convincingly puts it in the trailer:

I mean, if you were to say to me, if I were to make a lot more money, would I stay in teaching—if that’s all that would happen, I would probably say no. But I know that if the salary went up…things would follow in terms of the level of prestige and I bet the level of effectiveness and I bet the retention.

The project has amassed a good deal of video footage of teachers–some in a kind of video diary format, some of it simply observing their work in the classroom. The more personal clips tend to focus on long, exhausting days through which teachers cheerfully struggle; the classroom clips are there to celebrate the innovative work of good teachers (below, a Spanish teacher uses music and rhythm to teach vocabulary).

When we covered Teach for America teachers working in New Orleans during the 2008-2009 school year, we found that many of them were struggling, and that only a few of them planned on staying in the teaching force long-term. It’s refreshing to watch the teachers featured by the Teacher Salary Project, whose hard work is ongoing. Now it’s time to properly reward them.

The First Ever GOOD 100 [GOOD.is, 10/7/09]

The Teacher Salary Project

Paul Vallas in New Orleans, Episode 10: The TFA Effect [LMtv, 7/7/09]