The Education Gadfly Weekly

William Damon
Free Press
2008

The country's foremost authority on character development and moral education, Stanford psychologist Bill Damon, has just published the findings of a path-breaking study of young Americans' faltering quest for purpose in their lives and the concomitant "failure to launch" that finds at least a quarter of them rudderless and "at serious risk of never fulfilling their potential." He and his team surveyed 1,200 young people and interviewed a quarter of them in depth. He notes the paradox that "purpose is both a deeply individual and an unavoidably social phenomenon" because people have to find their own direction and purpose in life yet those discoveries are "guided by other people in their lives." But he offers tantalizing suggestions for forging a "culture of purpose" via community endeavors, careful (but not overprotective) parenting, schools that "address the why question with students about all that they do" while engaging their pupils in community pursuits and civic activity, and--maybe the scarcest of all--"positive role models in the public sphere." This a manageable, thoroughly readable, extraordinarily timely, and very important book that you will surely want to study. Learn more here.

Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant
Jossey-Bass
2008

The authors spent two years studying twelve successful nonprofits, including Teach For America (TFA), to discover "what enabled them to have such high levels of impact." They came away with six lessons, which build off the central tenet that "the secret to success lies in how great organizations mobilize every sector of society--government, business, nonprofits, and the public--to be a force for good." The golden six: Advocate and serve; make markets work; inspire evangelists; nurture nonprofit networks; master the art of adaptation; and share leadership. In the case of TFA, a couple of these are particularly relevant. Many critics have bemoaned the tendency of TFA teachers to quit the classroom after their two-year stints. But in the last several years TFA veterans have popped up in important roles across the education landscape: D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, teacher of the year Jason Kamras, and KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin are alumni. (The spinning-off of KIPP also falls under the "nurture networks" category.) TFA has also "mastered the art of adaptation." They "collect data as if their lives depended on it" and experiment with research techniques. The authors mention one case in which TFA hired a psychologist to identify the key traits that distinguish great teachers. The findings led them to focus more on leadership skills and less on education training when recruiting applicants. There's a lot more here, of course, on TFA and the other eleven organizations. It's a must-read for established nonprofits, and especially so for young social entrepreneurs hoping to make a big difference. Order it here.

Elena Silva
Education Sector
April 2008

Something is causing praiseworthy gains in the performance of students in inner-city Chattanooga schools. But what? Is it the cash incentives and reapplication process? Maybe not, or at least not mostly. Instead, it seems to be that "helping teachers improve the quality of their instruction" was key to the success of Chattanooga's "Benwood Plan," which, beginning in 2001, introduced financial incentives (free master's degrees, mortgage loans, and merit pay bonuses) to attract quality teachers to a set of underperforming schools in that corner of the Chattanooga area. The revamping of the schools was made possible by a $5 million grant from the Chattanooga-based Benwood Foundation. Benwood also forced all teachers to reapply for their jobs and replaced those deemed unworthy of rehiring. After doing some digging, though, Elena Silva has found that "most of the teachers who reapplied for their jobs were hired back, and less than 20 of the 300 teachers in the Benwood schools received bonuses in the first year of the much-touted financial-incentive plan." Silva credits the new climate created by other Benwood reforms for causing, among other accomplishments, third graders in the eight schools to raise their reading scores from 53 percent passing to 80 percent passing in the last five years on the state test. As part of the reform effort, district staff were placed inside schools to give teachers more hands-on support, outside funding created a leadership institute for principals, some schools received reading specialists, and assistant principals were required to spend at least 50 percent of their time monitoring academics. Teachers began receiving additional support from full-time "teaching consultants" who were hired to help develop curricula, align instruction with standards, and examine teacher practices. These factors, along with the financial incentives, deserve praise for catalyzing the gains Benwood students have realized. Hamilton County's then-Superintendent Jesse Register spearheaded the Benwood reforms--he says that mayoral attention was key to the effort, and that it "sent a strong signal to the entire community that these weren't second-class jobs, that we valued these schools and these teachers." Find the report 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

Elena Silva
Education Sector
April 2008

Something is causing praiseworthy gains in the performance of students in inner-city Chattanooga schools. But what? Is it the cash incentives and reapplication process? Maybe not, or at least not mostly. Instead, it seems to be that "helping teachers improve the quality of their instruction" was key to the success of Chattanooga's "Benwood Plan," which, beginning in 2001, introduced financial incentives (free master's degrees, mortgage loans, and merit pay bonuses) to attract quality teachers to a set of underperforming schools in that corner of the Chattanooga area. The revamping of the schools was made possible by a $5 million grant from the Chattanooga-based Benwood Foundation. Benwood also forced all teachers to reapply for their jobs and replaced those deemed unworthy of rehiring. After doing some digging, though, Elena Silva has found that "most of the teachers who reapplied for their jobs were hired back, and less than 20 of the 300 teachers in the Benwood schools received bonuses in the first year of the much-touted financial-incentive plan." Silva credits the new climate created by other Benwood reforms for causing, among other accomplishments, third graders in the eight schools to raise their reading scores from 53 percent passing to 80 percent passing in the last five years on the state test. As part of the reform effort, district staff were placed inside schools to give teachers more hands-on support, outside funding created a leadership institute for principals, some schools received reading specialists, and assistant principals were required to spend at least 50 percent of their time monitoring academics. Teachers began receiving additional support from full-time "teaching consultants" who were hired to help develop curricula, align instruction with standards, and examine teacher practices. These factors, along with the financial incentives, deserve praise for catalyzing the gains Benwood students have realized. Hamilton County's then-Superintendent Jesse Register spearheaded the Benwood reforms--he says that mayoral attention was key to the effort, and that it "sent a strong signal to the entire community that these weren't second-class jobs, that we valued these schools and these teachers." Find the report here.

Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant
Jossey-Bass
2008

The authors spent two years studying twelve successful nonprofits, including Teach For America (TFA), to discover "what enabled them to have such high levels of impact." They came away with six lessons, which build off the central tenet that "the secret to success lies in how great organizations mobilize every sector of society--government, business, nonprofits, and the public--to be a force for good." The golden six: Advocate and serve; make markets work; inspire evangelists; nurture nonprofit networks; master the art of adaptation; and share leadership. In the case of TFA, a couple of these are particularly relevant. Many critics have bemoaned the tendency of TFA teachers to quit the classroom after their two-year stints. But in the last several years TFA veterans have popped up in important roles across the education landscape: D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, teacher of the year Jason Kamras, and KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin are alumni. (The spinning-off of KIPP also falls under the "nurture networks" category.) TFA has also "mastered the art of adaptation." They "collect data as if their lives depended on it" and experiment with research techniques. The authors mention one case in which TFA hired a psychologist to identify the key traits that distinguish great teachers. The findings led them to focus more on leadership skills and less on education training when recruiting applicants. There's a lot more here, of course, on TFA and the other eleven organizations. It's a must-read for established nonprofits, and especially so for young social entrepreneurs hoping to make a big difference. Order it here.

William Damon
Free Press
2008

The country's foremost authority on character development and moral education, Stanford psychologist Bill Damon, has just published the findings of a path-breaking study of young Americans' faltering quest for purpose in their lives and the concomitant "failure to launch" that finds at least a quarter of them rudderless and "at serious risk of never fulfilling their potential." He and his team surveyed 1,200 young people and interviewed a quarter of them in depth. He notes the paradox that "purpose is both a deeply individual and an unavoidably social phenomenon" because people have to find their own direction and purpose in life yet those discoveries are "guided by other people in their lives." But he offers tantalizing suggestions for forging a "culture of purpose" via community endeavors, careful (but not overprotective) parenting, schools that "address the why question with students about all that they do" while engaging their pupils in community pursuits and civic activity, and--maybe the scarcest of all--"positive role models in the public sphere." This a manageable, thoroughly readable, extraordinarily timely, and very important book that you will surely want to study. Learn more here.