The pontiff is still in the middle of his speech to Catholic educators (which, as predicted, is mostly a soft-spoken smack down of Catholic colleges and universities gone astray). But we're pretty sure he said a few helpful things about the tragedy of inner-city schools closing at an alarming rate. (We say pretty sure because we find his accent difficult to parse.) More later when a transcript is available.
Last week we asked, ???Who Will Save America's Urban Catholic Schools???? Pope Benedict XVI offered his thoughts in today's address to Catholic educators:
The Catholic community here has in fact made education one of its highest priorities. This undertaking has not come without great sacrifice. Towering figures, like Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton and other founders and foundresses, with great tenacity and foresight, laid the foundations of what is today a remarkable network of parochial schools contributing to the spiritual well-being of the Church and the nation. Some, like Saint Katharine Drexel, devoted their lives to educating those whom others had neglected--in her case, African Americans and Native Americans. Countless dedicated Religious Sisters, Brothers, and Priests together with selfless parents have, through Catholic schools, helped generations of immigrants to rise from poverty and take their place in mainstream society.
This sacrifice continues today. It is an outstanding apostolate of hope, seeking to address the material, intellectual and spiritual needs of over three million children and students. It also provides a highly commendable opportunity for the entire Catholic community to contribute generously to the financial needs of our institutions. Their long-term sustainability must be assured. Indeed, everything possible must be done, in cooperation with the wider community, to ensure that they are accessible to people of all social and economic strata. No child should be denied his or her right to an education in faith, which in turn nurtures the soul of a nation.
And:
Here I wish to make a special appeal to Religious Brothers, Sisters and Priests: do not abandon the school apostolate; indeed, renew your commitment to schools especially those in poorer areas. In places where there are many hollow promises which lure young people away from the path of truth and genuine freedom, the consecrated person's witness to the evangelical counsels is an irreplaceable gift. I encourage the Religious present to bring renewed enthusiasm to the promotion of vocations. Know that your witness to the ideal of consecration and mission among the young is a source of great inspiration in faith for them and their families.
What to make of Pope Benedict XVI's comments about Catholic schools? Here are a few thoughts.
First, note that he described ???contribut[ing] generously to the financial needs of our institutions??? as ???a highly commendable opportunity for the entire Catholic community.??? Translation: Bishops should ask their parishioners to open their wallets and help support Catholic schools (as has happened in Wichita, where widespread tithing has allowed the diocese to make all Catholic schools free for Catholic families).
Second, he said that ???everything possible must be done, in cooperation with the wider community, to ensure that [Catholic schools] are accessible to people of all social and economic strata.??? Translation: it's not just the Church's responsibility to support Catholic education for poor children; the larger public should help, too--perhaps through school vouchers and the like.
Bottom line: if these words reach the ears of Catholics, and other Americans, too, they could do a world of good.
UPDATE: Education Week's take here.
Clayton Wilcox, superintendent of Pinellas County Schools (Florida), the 22nd largest district in the country,?? today??announced his resignation. After years of controversy, the district just released??zoning maps for its??new student assignment plan, which doesn't take race into account when apportioning pupils to schools. The maps are bound to stir things up, and perhaps Wilcox wants to avoid the??forthcoming??scuffles.
(For fourteen months, Wilcox actually operated a blog, which he briefly shut down, ostensibly because too many comments on his posts were insulting.??Flypaper scoffs at such blogging weakness.)
Pop quiz. Which level of public school governance is most responsible for funding, standards, student assessment, teacher and principal quality, and data management systems?
If you guessed "states," you win. But why, then, does the spotlight so neglect states, which are these days the wallflower at the school-reform dance?
America is losing ground internationally and our two primary approaches for reversing this trend--one federal, the other urban--are essential yet insufficient as a national strategy. It's time to look to states for answers.
Despite the indispensable role that No Child Left Behind has played in bringing the performance of all children out from the shadows, widespread opposition to the law's reauthorization--from both conservatives and progressives--has demonstrated the limitations of this federal approach.
At the other end of the spectrum, cities have deservedly drawn increased attention from funders and media as focal points of school improvement. Districts in Chicago, Houston, New York City, and the District of Columbia, for example, have taken bold and creative approaches to some of education's toughest issues, and these are the proving grounds for our nation's best public policy work.
While this urban focus is a powerful social justice strategy, it is simply insufficient to prepare more American pupils to compete against their international peers. A big-city strategy leaves too many youngsters out. Our top 20 cities educate just 11 percent of American students. To make the painful educational changes necessary to reach world-class status will require a broader base, and suburban and rural voters need not only to understand the benefit of those changes but also to feel them in their schools. Their support is crucial.
Take teacher quality, for example. Federally, the U.S. Department of Education has made grants to encourage districts to experiment with teacher performance pay. Some cities have been building new teacher pipelines and refashioning union contracts. But the real policy action needs to occur at the state level: opening up licensing practices; strengthening prep programs; creating career paths and compensation systems that have a chance of attracting our best and brightest into the profession and keeping them there; and developing a performance management system that ties funding to student needs and, working with accomplished teachers, finds a politically feasible way to take student achievement into account when making staffing and compensation decisions. (See here.)
Of course, not all states make equal sense as laboratories of reform. But let's have an open competition for federal and philanthropic funding among those that are ready, willing, and able to go the next step in their reform efforts.
Our experience in Delaware suggests what's possible. This state's Vision 2015 plan for world-class schools, developed by a coalition of public and private leaders with citizen input, has received national attention, and our governor and legislature are taking steps to incorporate its recommendations into their agendas. Vision 2015 calls for sweeping changes in how we attract and pay educators and fund students, and advocates extended time for learning and building incentives for continued innovation at the school level in return for real accountability. We are far from our goal, but we are moving. More importantly, similar efforts are springing up in Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, California, and Illinois.
An important missing piece, however, is a multi-state mechanism to share lessons learned, build a research base, and develop creative advocacy strategies that will overcome the inevitable resistance from preservers of the status quo. We envision a small cadre (three to five) of entrepreneurial states, working together as incubators and exemplars of innovation. Akin to what Achieve has done with its American Diploma Project, this new coalition would go beyond ADP's single-issue focus (standards and assessments) and collaborate on the wide range of interlocking issues necessary for sustainable reform: effective ways to recruit, develop, and retain great teachers and administrators; stronger data infrastructures; and fair and flexible funding systems that support excellence.
As in ADP, a state's team should be broad-based: the governor; state superintendent; the head of the state college system; K-12 educators; and business, civic, and legislative leaders. To avoid the potential mush that might come from such varied input, each state would need to commit to clear fiscal and legislative changes, and any external funding should be contingent upon the team's ability to deliver. Businesses and foundations would provide seed investments and thought leadership. The feds would offer incentive dollars along with exemptions from regulations that discourage innovation. Cities would continue to incubate solutions at the local level. And a group of research organizations could provide much-needed evaluation and feedback.
Such a coordinated multi-state strategy would be the fastest and most coherent way to redesign how America delivers public education. Building on the pioneering work of our cities, it's the natural next step.
Let the competition begin. With states vying to be champions of policy leadership and innovation, our kids have a better chance of competing against the best in the world.
To find out more about Vision 2015, click here.
Ally, a middle-school drama queen, starts tormenting her friend Selena after catty Holly and Chrissy (teeny-bopper Iagos, both) conspire to charge Selena with a crime against Ally that Selena did not commit. Disorder descends: (Holly: "She [Selena] said that on Saturday she thought your outfit was really ugly." Ally: "That's really weird...she just told me that she thought my outfit was really cute.") In real life, Ally is 13-year-old McKenzie Bonnett of Champaign, Illinois. She and her classmates acted in The Stories of Us, a 25-minute film that depicts the horrors of bullying and is being marketed to American schools. McKenzie found, a tad disconcertingly, that she stepped into her Ally role with relative ease. "I realized that I had done half of these things before," she said, referring to the bullying tactics that her character employs against Selena. Unfortunately, that familiarity is not apparent in McKenzie's performance, which is largely uninspired. Indeed, at times her stunted delivery indicates that she has most likely forgotten her lines and is attempting bully-improv to the best of her ability, which is notably poor. The Stories of Us does tell sad stories, ones of muddled plots, confused themes, and underdeveloped characters badly portrayed. Gadfly says skip it. The Sarah Jessica Parker flick looks more promising.
"Film helps bullies learn their lesson," by Mary Ann Fergus, Chicago Tribune, April 15, 2008
Those who divvy up by race strain to justify it. The newest wrinkle comes from Fairfax County, Virginia, where the school board is struggling to rationalize a report that it commissioned to evaluate the "Essential Life Skills" of its students. (That the school board is evaluating such skills is itself goofy.) The results were categorized by race and elicited predictable protest.
Fairfax County reported that the "moral character and ethical judgment" of its white and Asian pupils are more developed than those of its black and Hispanic pupils. These conclusions, drawn from disparate data about attendance, disciplinary infractions, and teacher observations, manage to be both offensive and useless. Fairfax finds that its black students have more character flaws than its white students--now what?
The No Child Left Behind Act is pilloried from various quarters: teachers' unions that cringe at the suggestion that their members might be held accountable for anything, conservatives who dislike the federal government's increased role in local schools, and parents who fear their children will be subjected to nonstop rote instruction in the math and reading skills that NCLB tests.
Yet maybe NCLB's most worrisome feature is the part that usually elicits hosannas: its emphasis on "disaggregating" exam data by reporting separately on black kids, white kids, Asian kids, etc. Consensus holds that this approach has usefully illumined noisome achievement gaps in supposedly sterling public schools and has turned the nation's attention toward the plight of poor and minority students.
Perhaps so. Unremarked, though, is whether the authority that NCLB has given to racial culling will yield more positive or negative consequences over time. The Fairfax project suggests the latter. School board member Tina Hone told the Washington Post's Marc Fisher that "The superintendent told me that the reason they broke it down by race was that two years ago, the board decided to report all data by race."
Is that really a good thing to do in 21st Century America? Whereas reporting exam scores by race has an ostensible function (to combat the "soft bigotry of low expectations" by forcing teachers to focus on struggling minority students), the willy-nilly classification of all school-related data by race has none. What emerges from this purposeless strategy is a purposeless result, such as Fairfax County's report on moral character, which neatly sorts numbers into racial categories and then gropes blindly to justify and interpret them. NCLB seems to have lent legitimacy, even encouragement, to such neo-segregationist practices.
So the country's racial conversation grows ever more polarized and contradictory. On one hand, commentators tell us that race doesn't matter, that an increasingly diverse America should move past anachronistic notions of black, white, Hispanic, whatever. Heads nod. The same commentators then say our schools are still too segregated by race and steps should be taken to ameliorate that. More head-nodding. Unity does not arise from such inscrutable conversations.
What arises, generally, is more segregation. In Fairfax County, some have concluded from the report on "life-skills" that different races require different types of education, although they've couched the connection in euphemism. School board member Ilryong Moon said teachers should "have a full understanding of whom they teach, and their different learning styles and family backgrounds."
NCLB's well-intended focus on disaggregating education outcomes data encourages these statements, which are not important but are, in fact, profoundly distracting and ineffective--especially so when, as in Fairfax, "different learning styles" becomes another way of saying that different races should be taught differently. Such concerns evolve into making race-based assumptions about students' abilities--i.e., doing exactly that which NCLB's disaggregated-data system is meant to prevent.
A better approach for schools is to concentrate on the academic performance of individual students of all races, to monitor their achievement from one year to the next, and to intervene energetically when problems begin. That of course means leaving the race-based data behind.
This article originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on April 15th on National Review Online.
According to the Las Vegas Sun, principals in the Clark County schools have in recent weeks "been recommending up to 100 students for expulsion each day." Some of these pupils end up in special "behavior" schools, where they do nine-week stints before returning to their home campus. But others, who are formally expelled, are sent to "continuation" schools; these students cannot return to their original schools, but they may apply for readmission to another district facility (troublemakers are therefore passed around the entire district). Recidivism is high, too. Twenty-two percent of students who were referred for expulsion this year have already been referred again. All of which significantly disrupts the educational process and leaves Clark County in a bind: what does it do with its hardened discipline problems? (Surely other districts face the same conundrum.) We think that if reasonable interventions aren't working, if a student has clearly decided that he doesn't want to learn and, moreover, is bent on discouraging his peers from learning, then he should exit the system for good. That means spending the remainder of his days in academic boot-camp--no privileges, no fun, no free time, just hard learning and hard discipline. Attending the school one wishes should not become a "right" divorced from all responsibilities. It is a privilege and should be treated as such.
"Expelled, but not out," by Emily Richmond, Las Vegas Sun, April 14, 2008
Food, gas, overnights at the Mayflower hotel--all grow steadily pricier. Meanwhile, the New York City high school diploma is cheapened, and that city's oft-challenged reputation as a dogged pursuer of higher educational standards is again called into question. A recent New York Times article highlights abuses of a little-known practice called "credit recovery," through which students who lack the credits necessary to graduate may earn them via alternate routes. At one Bronx school, for instance, a program "lets students earn a year's worth of science credits by responding to 19 questions on 5 topics." One question asked, "What are some ways that you, as an individual, can help [the environment]?" A Manhattan principal called the practice "the dirty little secret of high schools," and a Harlem teacher boycotted his school's graduation ceremony to protest the fact that, as he put it, many students are "being pushed through the system regardless of whether they have done the work to earn their diploma." Maintaining a high standard for graduation has proved difficult for many states and districts, especially in an era when school leaders are pressured simultaneously to boost student achievement and cut the drop out rate. Big Apple Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has it right: "We do students no favors by giving them credit they haven't earned." Let's see if he acts on those unimpeachable words.
"Lacking Credits, Some Students Learn a Shortcut," by Elissa Gootman, New York Times, April 11, 2008
Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews has performed a useful service for folks dissatisfied with NCLB's accountability system, which often penalizes schools that enroll significant numbers of disadvantaged students even if those students are making academic progress. He has located and highlighted Barcroft Elementary in Northern Virginia. The school and its educators are straight from central casting--Barcroft serves lots of poor immigrants, the principal is a dynamo, and the teachers are terrific--but the school nonetheless failed to make "Adequate Yearly Progress." Measuring individual student gains (what NCLB doesn't do) would probably show that Barcroft's kids are in fact making tons of progress. It's a great story, but unfortunately it's not representative. In North Carolina, for example, when the state moved to a "growth model" (allowed by a federal pilot program) that measures individual achievement gains over time, only a handful of schools in the state improved their status. Most schools in the country that are considered "in need of improvement" by the first permutation of NCLB would remain so under an improved, growth-model version. The Barcrofts of the world are simply few and far between.
"The Wrong Yardstick," by Jay Mathews, Washington Post Magazine, April 13, 2008