The Education Gadfly Weekly

Marilyn Thomas and Crystal Collins
Southern Regional Education Board
2009

Drawing upon many recent studies that highlight the positive correlation between middle and high school achievement, this report from SREB stresses the importance of aggressively raising standards and improving curricula across the middle grades. Looking at state and NAEP test scores of its 12 member states, SREB concludes that modest gains over the past five years do not diminish the need to do more to ensure that middle schools are adequately preparing students to succeed in high school. Studies have shown that declining individual achievement in the middle years is a serious problem--high school dropout indicators can be traced as far back as sixth grade--but schools have too often focused in this critical early-adolescent period not on academics but on concerns with identity, self-respect and such. (See Fordham's report on this topic by Cheri Yecke.) To curb these troubling trends, SREB has five recommendations for states: rework reading curricula to implement effective instructional strategies; restructure math curricula so that eighth graders can reach Algebra prepared (as opposed to simply having all eighth graders take Algebra, ready or not); provide an accelerated catch-up curriculum for students who enter middle school not on grade level; improve certification and professional development for middle school teachers; and engage students in educational and career planning. None of these moves is exactly revolutionary--or applicable only to middle school--but it never hurts to reemphasize them again during the years that could make or break a student's future. Read it here.

Dr. Ben Chavis with Carey Blakely
New American Library
September 2009

Part biography, part case study, and part pep talk, this book tells the story of the wildly successful American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS) and its charismatic, take-no-prisoners, leader, Ben Chavis. As readers of Fordham’s Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner City Schools and the New Paternalism already know, Chavis took over AIPCS in 2000, at which point the school was failing in many ways. He faced rampant drug usage, 65 percent attendance, the lowest test scores in Oakland, CA, and the imminent threat of closure. He promptly fired the entire faculty and staff and instituted a new educational model--now called AIM-Ed--focused on “high expectations,” “free market capitalism,” “family culture,” and “accountability and structure.” In his first year, he raised attendance to 95 percent and by 2003-04, AIPSC had the best scores of any public middle school in Oakland, never mind its heavily minority and impoverished student body. But if this turnaround can be called a miracle, so too can the length of Chavis’ tenure. He is, to say the least, unorthodox, provocative, and politically incorrect. Throughout the book, as at the school, he seems to intentionally provoke those who might disagree with him, claiming that Democrats “pimp” poor people and calling one school board member “part of those far-to-the-left liberals who in my opinion are worse than the Ku Klux Klan.” His disciplinary methods have been extravagant, not to say extreme. He motivates students by calling them (among other things) “darkies” and “half-breeds.” He fought low attendance by hiring drug dealers to watch for truants and threatening to withhold parents’ welfare checks. The book proudly recounts all this as evidence of Chavis’s rest-of-the-world-be-damned commitment to academic achievement, but it also poses an important question: Just how far are we willing to go to raise children’s test scores? The book can be purchased here.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
2009

This annual publication from the OECD always carries a wealth of information, mostly more of the same depressing news about lagging American achievement. But this edition, which focuses on four areas (education levels and student numbers; economic benefits of education; paying for education; and school environment), has a nifty new section: TALIS, OECD’s new Teaching and Learning International Survey. It surveyed some 73,000 lower secondary teachers in 23 countries (16 OECD members and 7 partner countries) during the 2007-2008 school year, asking them about four main topics: professional development, pedagogical beliefs and practices, teacher evaluation and feedback, and school leadership. Unfortunately, the U.S. did not take part in the survey, but from some similar American data sources, such as the NCES Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the New Teacher Project’s recent report The Widget Effect, we can see that many lands are tackling the same issues we find within U.S. schools. For example, only 9 percent of teachers reported that evaluations had a moderate or large impact on their salary (read: merit pay). Almost three-quarters of them reported that fellow teachers would not be dismissed for ongoing poor performance. And a third or more of teachers in Austria, Ireland, and Portugal reported that no evaluations, internal or external, had occurred in their schools in the last five years. The survey also found that teachers, who reported their own pedagogical beliefs in two categories--direct transmission (i.e., teacher-centric) and constructivist (i.e., child-centric)--strongly preferred the latter in every country save Italy. It would, of course, have been helpful for the report to tie these findings to student achievement. But it’s still useful in picturing the rather similar condition of teachers in other nations. Read all 472 pages (for free online or for a fee in hardcopy) here or a shorter “highlights” version here.

A current proposal from the Philadelphia School Reform Commission (SRC) would force charter schools that want to increase their enrollments or reconfigure their grade levels to do so as part of the contract renewal process (which occurs every five years), instead of through a separate, less-regulated process of amendment. Under the new rules, charters seeking to expand would need to submit, along with their regular renewal paperwork, a supplementary form specifying their academic, financial, managerial, and other plans for expansion; they would also need to have made AYP for at least the preceding two years. Charter operators say this process is unduly burdensome, will stunt their growth, and cripple their nimbleness. "If the same criteria were applied to neighborhood district schools that this charter-school policy sets, none of [them] would meet the mark," said David Rossi, chief executive of Esperanza Academy Charter School. It’s certainly reasonable to expect charters (and other schools) that want to grow or change in material ways to be able to justify the alteration. But couldn’t the SRC come up with a speedy method for vetting those justifications? 

"Plan would limit charter schools' independence," by Dafney Tales, The Philadelphia Daily News, September 11, 2009

What kind of education would one need to make sense of the current health-care debate? As America rethinks its academic standards and international competitiveness, this is not a bad time to ask what U.S. citizens and voters (and taxpayers) need by way of knowledge and skills to follow the hottest domestic policy issue of the day and to form reasonable conclusions about what they do and don’t like about the various options, packages and arguments on the table.

Today’s elites seem certain that John Q. Public is irremediably ignorant about, and perhaps oblivious to, this debate, thus susceptible to being persuaded, brainwashed, maybe cowed. Some Democrats are convinced that the insurance industry is creating “movements” bent on misleading and confusing people and planting suspicion in their heart, while at least one GOP Congressman (and more than a few conservative pundits and talk show hosts) says President Obama is lying. All these folks seem to assume that the masses cannot possibly understand the debate. But must we accept that as a given? What would it take?

Basic literacy and math skills obviously come first. Lots of numbers, cost projections and ratios are being tossed around, and so are many sophisticated words, phrases and concepts.

Some “21st Century skills” are called for, too (even if one believes, with me, that these skills were just as important in prior centuries). One must, for example, be able to get behind the words, slogans, claims and counterclaims to discern motives, rhetorical strategies, etc., and must distinguish among fact, conjecture, opinion, propaganda, and so on. One must also muster the cognitive firepower to gauge the impact of a given proposal on one’s own situation or that of one’s parents, children, etc.

What I’m most struck by, however, is the enormous amount of background knowledge that one must possess--across multiple disciplines--to understand this debate. It’s almost a litmus test of cultural literacy. Consider, for starters, just three short paragraphs from President Obama’s address to Congress last week:

I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health care reform. And ever since, nearly every President and Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, has attempted to meet this challenge in some way. A bill for comprehensive health reform was first introduced by John Dingell Sr. in 1943. Sixty-five years later, his son continues to introduce that same bill at the beginning of each session.

Our collective failure to meet this challenge--year after year, decade after decade--has led us to a breaking point. Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans. Some can't get insurance on the job. Others are self-employed, and can't afford it, since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer. Many other Americans who are willing and able to pay are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or expensive to cover.

We are the only advanced democracy on Earth--the only wealthy nation--that allows such hardships for millions of its people. There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone.

I’ve marked (in italics) a few of the many terms, concepts, people and formulations in those paragraphs that demand background knowledge.

What is “health care reform” and what’s the significance of adding the word “comprehensive” to that phrase?

Who were Theodore Roosevelt and John Dingell Sr. (and Jr.) and what’s the relevance of their past experience to our present debate? How does the past shape the present?

What are key differences between Democrats and Republicans? Why did Obama invoke both? Is it coincidental that he also named Roosevelt and Dingell?

How does “insurance” work? What do insurance companies do? What do employers do in this realm? What does it mean to be “self-insured”? What is “coverage”? “Bankruptcy”?

What’s an “advanced democracy”? How many are there? What are some others? What’s the point of Obama’s comparison of the U.S. with other countries?

Now let’s note some other essentials:

What are Medicare and Medicaid? Where did they come from? How do they work? Who is covered by them?

What’s the federal deficit and why are some people concerned about its size?

What is the Congressional legislative process and why is it unusually complex in this instance?

As is obvious, history, civics and economics converge here. If you don’t possess a goodly amount of background knowledge in these fields, how could you expect to be even a knowledgeable observer of the health-care debate, much less an active participant? And if you are not knowledgeable yourself, what are the consequences? In the end, you could wind up with some unpleasant (or possibly pleasant) surprises. More immediately, you are--just as the elites say--vulnerable to rhetorical tricks, scare tactics and propaganda, and you are apt to abdicate your civic role to others, like it or not. Those others may be elected officials or may be interest groups and lobbyists. Perhaps they will serve you well. But you’re not likely to be able to determine whether that’s so, because you simply don’t know enough.

Maybe you don’t need to know these sorts of things to succeed in college or the workplace--which seems to be the litmus tests for today’s standards-writers and education reformers. But you really do need to know them to be an effective, constructive participant in modern American life. Who is going to ensure that our schools teach these things, too?

A version of this piece appeared this morning on National Review Online.

Who were Julius Caesar, Leif Ericsson, and Charles Darwin? Know the answer? Well that’s because you, dear reader, are not a recent or current product of British schools—state, independent, or otherwise--where the Romans, Vikings, and Victorians, amongst others, can be skipped in history class so that students have time to learn how to use social networking sites like Twitter. Outrageous? We agree. A recent study (pdf) by the Historical Association, a British research organization that focuses on the study and preservation of history, found that thousands of students drop the subject at age 13. And 48 percent of schools report that 11 and 12 year-olds spend only one hour a week in history class. But it gets worse. Thirty percent of secondary schools don’t even teach history as a stand-alone subject in the upper grades. And only thirty percent of students take the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) history test at age 16. Though these data were collected from just 700 teachers at 644 schools, if representative, they present a troubling trend. How can students be citizens of the 21st century if they know nothing about the preceding ones?

"History in danger as only 30% of pupils take subject at GCSE," by Ian Drury, Daily Mail, September 14, 2009

"History is being forgotten from GCSE curriculum, fear school teachers," by Polly Curtis, The Observer, September 13, 2009

Many years hence, as the students of Cushing Academy hold their faces close to their electronic book readers, they probably won't even know of those distant days of yore when people discovered literature by browsing shelves. That's because the prep school west of Boston donated most of its 20,000 book collection this year to local schools and libraries to make room for a new technology-riddled learning center. "When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books," said James Tracy, Cushing's headmaster. A $500,000 renovation will fill the former athenaeum with laptop-friendly study areas, three large flat-screen TVs, a coffee shop (with a $10,000 cappuccino machine), and 18 electronic book readers from Amazon and Sony. School officials argue this is the right move; a review of library records one random day last spring showed only 48 checked-out books, 30 of which were children’s selections, out of their 20,000-book collection. But librarian Liz Vezina, who has overseen Cushing’s bibliotheca for seventeen years, doesn’t think she’ll be getting used to the switch anytime soon. “I’m going to miss them. I love books. I’ve grown up with them, and there’s something lost when they’re virtual. There’s a sensual side to them--the smell, the feel, the physicality of a book is something really special.” We can already hear a scream coming across the sky from librarians around the world.

"Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books," by David Abel, The Boston Globe, September 4, 2009

Dr. Ben Chavis with Carey Blakely
New American Library
September 2009

Part biography, part case study, and part pep talk, this book tells the story of the wildly successful American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS) and its charismatic, take-no-prisoners, leader, Ben Chavis. As readers of Fordham’s Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner City Schools and the New Paternalism already know, Chavis took over AIPCS in 2000, at which point the school was failing in many ways. He faced rampant drug usage, 65 percent attendance, the lowest test scores in Oakland, CA, and the imminent threat of closure. He promptly fired the entire faculty and staff and instituted a new educational model--now called AIM-Ed--focused on “high expectations,” “free market capitalism,” “family culture,” and “accountability and structure.” In his first year, he raised attendance to 95 percent and by 2003-04, AIPSC had the best scores of any public middle school in Oakland, never mind its heavily minority and impoverished student body. But if this turnaround can be called a miracle, so too can the length of Chavis’ tenure. He is, to say the least, unorthodox, provocative, and politically incorrect. Throughout the book, as at the school, he seems to intentionally provoke those who might disagree with him, claiming that Democrats “pimp” poor people and calling one school board member “part of those far-to-the-left liberals who in my opinion are worse than the Ku Klux Klan.” His disciplinary methods have been extravagant, not to say extreme. He motivates students by calling them (among other things) “darkies” and “half-breeds.” He fought low attendance by hiring drug dealers to watch for truants and threatening to withhold parents’ welfare checks. The book proudly recounts all this as evidence of Chavis’s rest-of-the-world-be-damned commitment to academic achievement, but it also poses an important question: Just how far are we willing to go to raise children’s test scores? The book can be purchased here.

Marilyn Thomas and Crystal Collins
Southern Regional Education Board
2009

Drawing upon many recent studies that highlight the positive correlation between middle and high school achievement, this report from SREB stresses the importance of aggressively raising standards and improving curricula across the middle grades. Looking at state and NAEP test scores of its 12 member states, SREB concludes that modest gains over the past five years do not diminish the need to do more to ensure that middle schools are adequately preparing students to succeed in high school. Studies have shown that declining individual achievement in the middle years is a serious problem--high school dropout indicators can be traced as far back as sixth grade--but schools have too often focused in this critical early-adolescent period not on academics but on concerns with identity, self-respect and such. (See Fordham's report on this topic by Cheri Yecke.) To curb these troubling trends, SREB has five recommendations for states: rework reading curricula to implement effective instructional strategies; restructure math curricula so that eighth graders can reach Algebra prepared (as opposed to simply having all eighth graders take Algebra, ready or not); provide an accelerated catch-up curriculum for students who enter middle school not on grade level; improve certification and professional development for middle school teachers; and engage students in educational and career planning. None of these moves is exactly revolutionary--or applicable only to middle school--but it never hurts to reemphasize them again during the years that could make or break a student's future. Read it here.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
2009

This annual publication from the OECD always carries a wealth of information, mostly more of the same depressing news about lagging American achievement. But this edition, which focuses on four areas (education levels and student numbers; economic benefits of education; paying for education; and school environment), has a nifty new section: TALIS, OECD’s new Teaching and Learning International Survey. It surveyed some 73,000 lower secondary teachers in 23 countries (16 OECD members and 7 partner countries) during the 2007-2008 school year, asking them about four main topics: professional development, pedagogical beliefs and practices, teacher evaluation and feedback, and school leadership. Unfortunately, the U.S. did not take part in the survey, but from some similar American data sources, such as the NCES Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the New Teacher Project’s recent report The Widget Effect, we can see that many lands are tackling the same issues we find within U.S. schools. For example, only 9 percent of teachers reported that evaluations had a moderate or large impact on their salary (read: merit pay). Almost three-quarters of them reported that fellow teachers would not be dismissed for ongoing poor performance. And a third or more of teachers in Austria, Ireland, and Portugal reported that no evaluations, internal or external, had occurred in their schools in the last five years. The survey also found that teachers, who reported their own pedagogical beliefs in two categories--direct transmission (i.e., teacher-centric) and constructivist (i.e., child-centric)--strongly preferred the latter in every country save Italy. It would, of course, have been helpful for the report to tie these findings to student achievement. But it’s still useful in picturing the rather similar condition of teachers in other nations. Read all 472 pages (for free online or for a fee in hardcopy) here or a shorter “highlights” version here.