Yesterday, we noted that Kevin Donnelly, authority on all things related to Aussie-ed, was displeased that Victoria was offering its teachers a massive, across-the-board pay raise decoupled from accountability. With principals, though, it's another story.
No, I'm not referring to this survey from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, though there are some promising tidbits. (Six in ten parents express interest in enrolling their children in charter schools once they are described as "independent public schools that are free to be more innovative and are held accountable for improved student achievement.")
I am referring to the fantastic news (hat tip to Alexander Russo ) that reporter Diana Jean Schemo is leaving the New York Times . Schemo wrote the infamous 2004 front-page story, "Nation's Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal ," which was an AFT-aided hit job on the charter movement. (Read all about it in Jeff Henig's newish book on the topic .) She also completely politicized the paper's coverage of the Reading First program (see here and pages 28 to 31 here ) and, in a 2006 column , finally admitted her own skepticism that schools can do much good for kids in poverty:
A growing body of research suggests that while schools can make a difference for individual students, the fabric of children's lives outside of school can either nurture, or choke, what progress poor children do make academically.
Russo reports that Schemo is now working on a book about the Naval Academy. That's too bad for the Academy--but good for K-12 schools.
Mike has been all over the connection between Obama and Bill Ayers. Today, Bob Novak is on it, too; he thinks that Obama, who called the terrorist-sympathizing, America-hating Ayers just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," will have to offer voters a more thorough explication than that.
Obama supporters should hope any such explication is better than the one??put forth??by Stanley Fish, law professor and New York Times blogger, who justified his own association with Ayers by noting that people should not be held accountable for the actions of their acquaintances. That's baloney. It's also shockingly relativistic. It also won't convince voters in Ohio. It also violates what everyone's mother told him in first grade.
And while the sins of Ayers's past are disturbing, so are his present sins--i.e., the drivel that he continues to publish and proffer. In one of his latest blog posts, for example, Ayers suggests that teachers structure their lesson plans to??encourage the ideas in Whitman's Leaves of Grass, such as "love the sun and the earth and the animals, despise riches, give alms to anyone who asks... dismiss whatever insults your soul," etc. Ugh.
Tom Stanley-Becker is an AP dropout. The young man writes today in the Los Angeles Times:
The problem with the AP program is that we don't have time to really learn U.S. history because we're preparing for the exam. We race through the textbook, cramming in the facts, a day on the Great Awakening, a week on the Civil War and Reconstruction, a week on World War II, a week on the era from FDR to JFK, a day on the civil rights movement--with nothing on transcendentalism, or the Harlem Renaissance, or Albert Einstein. There is no time to write a paper. Bound by the exam, my history teacher wistfully says we have to be ready in early May.
AP and IB are rigorous programs (as we've noted), and when compared to the usual public-school classroom experience, they dazzle. But for students who want to learn more than surface facts, who desire a deep and engaging dialogue with the material they're covering, AP and IB can be profoundly unsatisfying. Educators have every incentive to "teach to the test," and no incentive to encourage their classes to think critically or to spend time penning essays that do more that recite facts. AP and IB programs can suffer from the same problems that hurt NCLB.
Some say: "But AP and IB students must learn the basic facts first; they can react to them later."??But "later," which presumably means "in college," often never??comes because??university freshmen??are no longer required to take real subjects but may, instead, opt for semesters of feminist literary theory. Furthermore, why can't??advanced high-school kids learn facts and react/relate to them simultaneously?
The Gadfly is up. Checker wrote a nice essay this week rebutting Charles Murray's claim, in The New Criterion, that??to believe "that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better" is merely romantic.
Also in The Gadfly, Checker reviews Mark Bauerlein's new book, The Dumbest Generation, the title of which refers to my generation. Checker notes a misspelling of Bauerlein's last name on the publisher's website, and fingers the perp:
One pictures the culprit as a 23-year-old staffer with iPod and ear-buds who illustrates the point of this Emory University English professor's terrific new book: today's young people don't know squat in large part because the trappings of the "digital age" have addled their brains, distorted their priorities, and occupied all their time.
Well.??Earlier this week, I also??learned from a very respected journalist at a very respected publication, that "nobody cares if a 25-year-old reads something, thinks really hard, and then writes his opinion about it."
Perhaps that attitude is one reason why lots of journalists are these days taking jobs as bartenders; history shows that 25-year-olds who think really hard should not be ignored. Just last night I read in Malcolm Gladwell's article in the newest New Yorker ("The Innovators Issue") that Alexander Graham Bell "knew the answer to the puzzle of the harmonic telegraph" after taking a walk in the woods and sitting by a swiftly flowing river. He invented the telegraph at 27-years-old--he was a 20-something guy who took a walk and thought really hard and voila.
In fact, lightning is far more likely to strike in the 20s than in later decades. A bevy of scientific and technological breakthroughs (not to mention artistic revolutions) were started by young people. The chef/owner of New York's hottest new restaurants, one of which just garnered 3 stars from the Times, started his empire when he was 27. Modern conservatism was ignited by a 25-year-old. And three major companies in the news a lot these days--Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo--were all founded by 20-somethings....
Another interesting bit in The Gadfly is this piece, which describes how thousands of Massachusetts students who pass the MCAS and graduate high school nonetheless have to take remedial courses at 2- and 4-year colleges--i.e., they're not ready to do college-level work. Many drop out.
The MCAS is supposed to be one of the nation's toughest exit exams. So if thousands of students who pass it can't get along at university, this should alert policymakers to a piece of common sense that has, in the age of No Child Left Behind, become taboo: Not every student can or should attend college.
The "all kids to college" push is something of an unquestioned mantra in ed-reform circles, which has always puzzled me. Of course the only way all students, or even most students, will get to college is if college admission (and by extension, college degrees) means nothing. We already see this happening in states that have attempted to tie high school graduation to high school exit exams; they can either make receipt of high school diplomas an easier task or export more dropouts to the streets.
A??university diploma has no intrinsic value. So when we hear that all kids must go to college because??the good jobs employ only those who possess??at least a Bachelor's degree, we can be confident that (suspending disbelief) when everyone in America finally does attend college, the good jobs will demand applicants with Master's degrees. And so it goes.
A better idea: High schools (and ed reformers) should lose their "college or nothing" mindset. Lots of kids won't, can't, don't want to attend a university, and they deserve high school pathways, such as career and technical education, that do not leave them as 18-year-olds??with zero prospects.
While childlike Liam takes Checker to task for questioning the incalculable contributions of twenty-somethings, in Boston they're rehiring retirees in the wake of laying-off young teachers. And in this case, the local teachers union head gets it right:
Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, said that by relying heavily upon retirees to return to their old jobs, the school system risks never training a new generation of workers.... "Institutionally, it's a weak way to replace your skilled employees," Stutman said.
Hmm, teachers unions standing up for younger teachers over older ones? This is new.
Over at Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey turns in a lengthy post, replete with percentages and bullet points, that draws lessons from Ed Sector's newest report, Waiting to Be Won Over. His second sentence shocks, then awes, then shocks again:
In recent decades, America has experienced a steady de-unionization of the private sector workforce. This is a real problem, particularly in an era of declining economic security and increasing inequality (problems that partially stem from de-unionization itself).
To??assert that??the loss of jobs in, say,??Michigan and Ohio stems from de-unionization??certainly has originality going for it, if not much veracity. To??maintain that the??steady decline of Ford and General Motors--neither of which can compete with Japanese car makers in large part because they pay something like $2200 more in labor costs per car than does Toyota--is??the??product??of de-unionization is... well, it's definitely new.??
Further down the post, Carey writes about public sector unions??and notes "the??fact that most teacher are quite open to reforms of traditional labor arrangements that many teachers unions fail to actively support at best, and oppose at worst."
His first example is that "55% [of teachers] agreed that the process for removing teachers who are ???clearly ineffective and shouldn't be in the classroom' is ???very difficult and time-consuming.'" Somehow, this statistic??doesn't??transport me to joyfulness. That just over half of k-12 educators find "very difficult and time-consuming"??the Byzantine process of attempting to fire a??public-school teacher is, instead, a tad??depressing.??It doesn't say much for the teachers themselves, 45 percent of whom are either dishonest, asleep much??of the day, or subscribe to wholly different codes of fairness than??your average American.??
Carey concludes thusly:
The message seems to be that teachers are open to a number of good ideas that could improve the way they're paid and evaluated, but those reforms can't and shouldn't be implemented in a way that's fundamentally antagonistic their labor rights or idenity in terms their union. That doesn't immunize teachers unions from criticism when they oppose commonsensical reforms that most of their members support. But it does point to a collaborative reform strategy--which is as it should be.
Alas, this paragraph says nothing--and one wonders if the author is perhaps deluding himself??by thinking??that the "collaborative reform strategy" he advocates is anything other than the shuffling of??deck chairs on the Titanic. That teachers are receptive only to educational reforms that fit the agendas of their unions--agendas that??are inarguably??designed to increase union membership, solidify union political power, and ensure that teachers don't work too hard--is not progress of any sort. It is the ingredient list for a stalemate that prolongs the current coma??of public schools.
Update: Kevin Carey calls??the above??a "bizarre reading" of his words. Dismissive adjectives are fun??but sometimes struggle to achieve specificity or real meaning, much like Carey's original post in question, which claws at logic but can't quite grasp it.
Carey is ostensibly perplexed about why I??write about Michigan and Ohio. He never mentioned Michigan or Ohio; why, then, would I mention them? What I've done, you see, is supply real-world examples to counter Carey's vague assertion that "declining economic security and increasing inequality" are the results of private sector de-unionization--a claim that would seem to go against basic economic theory. I merely put forth two states where job growth has in fact been strangled by private sector unions, and in the case of Michigan, the United Auto Workers is to blame (which is why I refer to General Motors and Ford, two companies that typically produce automobiles). Just recently, Toyota surpassed General Motors for the first time ever in the number of cars sold. Toyota's plants in union-free Alabama are booming, and workers there make more per hour than do UAW unionized workers in Michigan. Those who find this paragraph bizarre are encouraged to consult a ninth-grade English teacher, who, one suspects, will explain that providing actual examples rather than off-the-cuff lines about economic inequality, mean and monicled capitalists, etc. is a fine strategy for building a convincing argument to support one's point.????
Carey perhaps consulted this teacher, because he puts forth an example of his own:
Meanwhile, a growing percentage of the labor force is employed by corporations like Wal-Mart that actively employ blatant and often illegal union-busting tactics--when they're not busy giving money to organizations like the Fordham Institute.
Most people like Wal-Mart, especially poor people, who can actually??afford to buy stuff there. I'm unsure whether??Fordham receives money from Wal-Mart or its ilk, but if we do, I'm miffed because our office could sorely use a better coffee maker, and Wal-Mart probably stocks many fine models that??it could donate.????
Carey writes on. He's baffled (Baffled! Befuddled! Utterly bewildered!) by my post's conclusion. He writes:
To repeat: teachers unions are often against tougher evaluation systems, against making it easier to fire ineffective teachers, against moving away from the single salary schedule to differentiated pay plans. Our survey indicates that most teachers are, by contrast, in favor of those reforms.
But Carey himself wrote earlier that teachers are in favor of those reforms only when the??reforms do not antagonize educators' "identity in terms of their union," whatever that means. That teachers are concerned about their union identities (again, I'm not sure what is a teacher's union identity; is it an alter-ego, like Mr. Hyde?) is not real progress. That teachers are willing to support education reforms only when their unions find such reforms agreeable is not real progress. These situations are, instead, signs of an anachronistic professional structure, and it's not a structure that deserves defending.
To receive a high-school diploma in Massachusetts, one must at least pass the MCAS (or make one's way through a reasonably challenging alternative path.) Nonetheless, according to the Boston Globe, "thousands of Massachusetts public high school graduates arrive at college unprepared for even the most basic math and English classes." Such students must therefore take remedial courses and many drop out, all of which, the Globe notes, will "cast doubt on the MCAS exams as a predictor of college readiness." But that's a misleading statement, because the MCAS is actually a fine predictor of college readiness: those who barely pass it are more likely to take remedial courses in college than those who ace it. Some would argue then that the test's passing score should be raised to indicate true readiness for college. Says Paul Schichtman, who coordinates testing for the Lowell schools, "Your high school diploma needs to be a credential for a two- and four-year school, and it's something that we take very seriously." We agree--and that's the spirit behind the American Diploma Project, with which we've been proud to be associated. Yet the Massachusetts board of education, not so long ago, declined to raise the MCAS passing score, and they did so for a reason. How large a fraction of its youthful population can America stand to have walking the streets having been denied their high school diplomas, even after they've attended dutifully, passed their courses, and attained what was previously the "cut score" on the statewide graduation test? Could Charles Murray be a little bit right? Is it naïve to suppose that everybody passing through our k-12 system should emerge ready for college-level work? Isn't this the same line of thinking that led to NCLB's "100 percent proficient" folly?
"Many Mass. graduates unprepared in college," by Peter Schworm, Boston Globe, April 16, 2008