Get our most popular stories once a week!
Boarding schools are schools where the..."
Posted by bevanstraut in Where is Dr. King's Dream Today?
blessy posted in Tools for Activists: Turning Privilege Disparities into Just and Sustainable Action
Gayathri posted in Tools for Activists: Turning Privilege Disparities into Just and Sustainable Action
morganwardztas posted in Tools for Activists: Turning Privilege Disparities into Just and Sustainable Action
|
China, the Olympics, and the Competition that Matters Most
I write this entry from Beijing, China just one day before the start of perhaps the most highly anticipated and controversial Olympics in recent history.
At different times and by different observers, these Beijing Olympics have been referred to as both visionary and subversive. Depending on who you listen to, China's hosting of the epic contest is either a proud moment for a rapidly developing nation seeking to join the global community, or a perversion of major values that civilized nations should seek to affirm.
The feeling on the ground here in Beijing, at least among ordinary Chinese citizens, leans heavily toward the former view. Taxi cab drivers, construction workers, and middle-class office workers alike have expressed a great deal of excitement about the upcoming games, proud that their country is serving host to over five million international guests. Even as heavy smog and pollution sweep the skies, the energy is palpable across the country.
But as viewers in the United States tune in to observe the games, it is the un-televised competition happening betweeen students in American public schools and Chinese schools that matters most for the 21st century. By one count, China produces more than nine times more engineers than does America--a gap of 650,000 to 70,000. A Canadian global think tank estimates that within two years, 90% of all engineers holding doctorate degrees will live in Asia.
Some of this owes to the fact that China has 1.4 billion people to America's 300 million. But only some. The reality is, China has yet to tap into a huge reserve of potential that resides in its rural areas where many children do not yet have access to public education. Once that takes place, and by some estimates it is already starting, America will fall even further behind.
So as US fans cheer a likely victory of our basketball team led by Lebron James and Kobe Bryant over the Chinese National Team on August 10th, what remains to be seen is whether the same fans will realize soon enough that the competition that matters most is not on the court, but rather in the classroom.
McCain Addresses NAACP
Lots of happenings in the past few weeks to catch up on, perhaps none more interesting than a speech given by Senator McCain to the NAACP two weeks ago where he officially unveiled his education platform for the presidential campaign.
While the edu-world consensus seems to be that there wasn't too much in the way of earth-shattering policy suggested in the speech, there were at least a couple items that caught my attention.
The first observation has to do with the over-arching positioning behind Senator McCain's proposals. It's pretty clear that he has no intent of making education anything close to a center-piece of his campaign, instead choosing to allow education to serve as an echo and reinforcement of themes upon which he and his advisors have already bet their campaign livelihoods. For instance, the second and third sentences of his education platform declare:
"Now is the time to demand real, new reform earned through discipline, grinding work, tough choices and leadership. John McCain has dedicated his career in public service to the hard and sometimes unpopular work of achieving meaningful reform."
Sure, sounds great, but I couldn't help but notice that the same two lines could have been used in a campaign statement on health care, energy policy, campaign finance, the housing crisis--heck the two lines could be an intro to Senator McCain's position on Major League Baseball and steroids. My point here is not to criticize the Senator, especially since he has some thoughtful viewpoints on teacher pay, teacher recruitment, and school choice later on in his plan. But I do mean to point out that the first question his campaign asked when weaving an education platform was not, "what is best for children?" but rather, "what makes the most sense for this campaign?" To be fair, Senator Obama has arguably done the same on the issue.
Second observation has to do with Senator McCain's opponent and the issue of race. He spent a good minute in the opening of his speech praising Mr. Obama in front of a predominately African-American audience, both graciously and eloquently. But I wonder how much of Senator McCain's remarks and choice of venues--in front of the very same NAACP that he refused to speak at in 2007--have to do with this recent poll from the Public Education Network that shows that African American and Latinos actually support the No Child Left Behind Act more than do white voters, by a pretty significant 3-to-2 margin.
Bold Education Ideas for Senators McCain and Obama
News yesterday from the presidential campaign trail was that Senator McCain was preparing to give an address before the NAACP next week discussing his plans for how the federal government can help improve public education outcomes in America. While his talk, even by his own campaign's admission, is unlikely to be as deep and detailed as Senator Obama's parallel speech on education more than a month ago, word is that he will discuss No Child Left Behind and a handful of more intricate issues such as teacher pay-for-performance.
The fact that none of the presidential candidates have been so measured in their approaches on education -- even Senator Obama's 19-minute address six weeks ago did not contain any headliners -- indicates that they have both bought into the current orthodoxy of education reform in Washington, DC: the standards-based accountability movement. This is the movement that has resulted in states setting standards for what students should know in each subject area by each grade level, and implementing testing systems to measure whether those standards are being met.
In principle, the standards based accountability movement is a sound strategy that owes much of its genesis to successful business practices designed to monitor and enhance productivity. But unlike the business world, where workers rarely object to the idea that they will be held to a set of performance indicators to determine their efficacy, we have seen a fair deal of back-lash from educators and other stakeholder groups against the standards based model in education, particularly on the testing front.
I have often been quick to play devil's advocate against this brand of backlash, asserting the general logic that anytime an institution is suddenly and openly confronted with its own failures (and in the institution of public education, the magnitude of those failures is immense indeed), that the institutional stakeholders will reject and rail against the accountability system that reveals its weaknesses. But it must also be admitted that there is some degree of resonance to what those who object to NCLB and standards-based school reform are saying. The appeal of their arguments can be described this way: is the end goal and sum-total of what we are trying to achieve in public education reform really just an increase in the number of students who correctly fill-in some arbitrary percentage of bubbles on an annual test?
To be sure, those bubbles, the arbitrary percentage, and the tests themselves represent real skills that are indicators of what our children need to know to compete in the world economy. But that's also the problem: they are only indicators. If Susie Q. passes her state-written 4th grade reading proficiency test she still has a ways to go before she has earned her way into a prosperous participation in the global economy.
None of this would be a problem if we didn't have better indicators. That is to say, most people agree that institutions, whether public or private, ought to be held accountable to meeting their stated purposes, and we should use the bets-tailored indicators possible to decide if they are in fact succeeding. But in the case of public education, I believe we do have better indicators to determine whether our schools are meeting the goal of preparing all youth for productive future lives as democratic citizens and members of an ever-changing global work force: college completion rates and, by extension, high school drop-out rates!
Read the rest of the post »
A Lot of Carnage
As the school year winded down for the 240 middle school students and 20+ staff at my school, there was a lot of carnage.
In the last week, two of the students who I had thought made a great deal of progress were expelled because of a fight involving a thrown garbage can and a brandished fire extinguisher. This would have been the most notable occurence of the day, except that earlier in the day the 8th grade math teacher finally called it quits. He had shown remarkable resolve by staying in the classroom despite not getting along with the students or much of the administration for most of the year. But twenty minutes before the fire extinguisher fight, the math teacher stormed out of the building and quit after he was pelted in the face by a group of several students who used fruit cup, oranges, and other foods as ammunition.
But the end of the school year was actually less bloody for the students and teachers than it was for the administration. My principal had been fired a month before the end of the year and replaced with a new principal who had a stronger background in urban education. The last month of the school year was thus filled with a great deal of stress for the other two administrators (a dean of students and a director of curriculum and instruction), along with the few teachers who were hoping to return. In theory at least, the new principal would be evaluating those who hoped to return to decide who would make the cut and return next year.
Well on the day after school let out, we found out that both the dean of students and the director of curriculum & instruction were fired. Which means that not a single administrator will be carried over from the school's first year into year two.
What are the implications of this? For the students, I have to say that it is a good thing. Sometimes when an organization fails at its mission, there is something to be said about sticking with the people who made up the organization so that they can improve based on lessons learned. Other times, institutional memory can be a bad thing if unsuccessful practices become ingrained. In the case of our school, we needed a brand new fresh start.
But there are broader implications as well. Our school is far from the only one in the nation where administrators and teachers are being fired (or deciding not to return) left and right. In a profession where half of the employees quit their jobs within five years there are a whole host of problems that arise. Indeed, any serious policy response to teacher quality problems has to address problems with retention as urgently as it addresses recruitment.
A Roomful of Lawyers and the Right to Education
I’ve spent the past two days at a conference hosted by the National Access Network, an alliance of organizations that works to support state-level legal efforts to increase educational opportunity.
The fact that such an organization exists, servicing a growing body of lawyers who have tried state-level education lawsuits in nearly all of the 50 states, may seem something of an anomaly to casual observers of civil rights in America. After all, we are barely more than a half-century removed from one of the most well-known lawsuits in American history, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which established as a matter of national jurisprudence that schools could no longer discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. So the concept of equal educational opportunity has long been at the very heart of the battle for civil rights.
The anomaly is that even as civil rights have become increasingly a matter of federal court action—from Miranda rights to free speech rights to other matters of equal protection—the progress of lawsuits on the federal level to further education as a civil right has long since ground to a halt. Whether it was the 1973 Rodriguez US Supreme Court decision which ruled that children do not have any kind of a right to education in the federal government, or the 2007 Seattle / Louisville decisions which effectively ended the legacy of Brown-initiated desegregation efforts, the federal courts have been a place where education advocates have gone only to get bad news over the past three decades.
In the wake of these negative rulings at the federal court level, a quietly impressive—and at times, heroic—group of lawyers have risen up to fight on behalf of children in the states instead. The basic nature of the challenges that these lawyers have brought is to question whether states, all of which have some limited clause requiring the provision of public education, have met a certain standard to provide educational opportunity to their children. Some of the lawsuits have fought for more equitable distribution of resources between wealthy and poor districts; others have argued instead for an adequate level of resources in every school district within a state, equity notwithstanding. The trial record is a mixed one, but the adequacy lawsuits have been particularly successful, winning 20 out of 28 state cases at the state Supreme Court level.
The recognition among lawyers that these state lawsuits are the “only game in town” has grown into a truism, with any discussion of raising a new federal level claim scorned upon as unrealistic. The problem with foregoing action at the federal level, be it legal or political action, is that it impels an end game where we have 50 different sets of standards, resources, and ultimately educational opportunities—and children will win or lose depending on what state they are born in. That might have been okay two hundred years ago or even a half century ago when youth in different states faced unique economic challenges, but that is no longer the case today.
All of this made my participation at the conference, representing Our Education’s 20,000+ students who believe that quality education ought to be a federal right guaranteed to all American children no matter what state they live in, something of an oddity. In a roomful of brilliant lawyers who have spent thousands upon thousands of hours fighting to force statehouses to do better by children but who have generally looked at the federal government without much hope, the idea of a constitutional amendment is at best naïvely optimistic, and at worst, a detraction of resources and energy away from more winnable strategies.
Read the rest of the post »
Light on Opportunity or Light on Interest?
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/campaign-2008/2008/05/08/presidential-candidates-have-little-opportunity-to-talk-about-education.html?PageNr=1A US News & World Report article published earlier this month provides an accurate overview of how education has been treated on the presidential campaign trail so far this election cycle.
In short, education has played an insignificant role in both of the primaries, and appears to be headed in the same direction in the general election. None of the three remaining candidates have staked out bold positions on the most important K-12 and higher education issues, and none of them have made much in the way of headlines in terms of promises or policy proposals.
Both Senators Obama and Clinton appear to be content with criticizing funding levels for NCLB, clamoring for increased loans to help with college affordability, and drawing moderate lines on teacher pay and quality initiatives. One disjunction between the two is that Senator Clinton has toed the teachers union supported line of rewarding teachers based on how well whole schools are doing whereas Senator Obama has taken the more controversial stance of rewarding only those individual teachers who are dramatically improving student achievement.
For his part, Senator McCain has had even less to say about education. He doesn't even yet have a full education platform published on his campaign website, and has really only issued standard GOP responses on education, trumpeting such ideas as school choice, merit pay for teachers, charter schools, and sometimes even vouchers. To the degree that education remains a low-priority issue, it will benefit Senator McCain since he has little expertise on the matter, especially given a traditional Democratic advantage among voters who consider education to be a key election day issue.
My only challenge to the article regarding low attention paid to education on the campaign trail is to the title. US News has the piece printed under the headline, "Presidential Candidates Have Little Opportunity to Talk About Education." I question whether this gets to the heart of the matter, or if it actually gives the candidates a bit more credit than they deserve regarding this issue which, after all, may be one of the most pressing policy matters facing our nation's future.
To me, the presidential candidates have plenty of opportunity to address whatever issues they deem to be important. After all, we're talking about candidates who give multiple speeches each day talking about all of the changes they'd like to make to the country. Senator McCain, for instance, has had no trouble making headlines with his unique views on global warming and climate change--issues which he has raised on his own, without having to wait for the right "opportunity". In other words, I'm afraid the candidates have not lacked in opportunity to address education, but have instead lacked sufficient interest to make it a crucial topic. And if you're wondering why none of the candidates (not just this year, but really for the past half-century since K-12 education has become a federal issue) have made K-12 school reform a priority, allow me to ask you a question to offer a hint why education will take a backseat for the foreseeable future: how many elementary, middle, and high school students are allowed to vote?
Are Unhappy Students the Exception or the Rule?
If you want to know how good a school is, here's a novel idea: ask the students.
At a bad school, you'll hear complaints that are well-founded, such as a number of the quotes from a powerful report published earlier this week in Washington, DC .
One elementary school student complained, "Give us harder work, not the busywork that we already know."
A middle school student, when asked about her teachers, said that "they let you know you are failing but then let you go on struggling and then send you to summer school."
A student at the same school reflected, "Teachers don't teach us a thing throughout the entire period. When visitors come, they start working."
And at one of the city's high schools, one history class had an almost unbelievable lesson plan, where students were asked, "Where is your favorite place to shop?"
The concept of students complaining about school is not a novel concept, of course, especially at this time of the year when summer is just around the corner and patience grows thin on the part of adults and students both. But there is something telling in these comments from DC's students--and its telling more because of who says them, than what they are saying.
After all, were you really all that surprised to hear that it was students from an inner-city with high levels of poverty complaining about bad teachers, low expectations, and overall low quality of education? I hear similar statements from students all the time in my school, and I have to confess that they are often on point. In short, reports of student discontent are numerous in DC, St Louis City, and other areas with high concentrations of low-income and minority children, and they often hit on important themes, such as those having to do with low quality teachers or run-down school buildings.
Meanwhile, if a school is actually pretty good, you'll likely hear a combination of compliments and complaints. The difference about the complaints, however, will be marked. Instead of focusing on obvious problems such as inept teachers, broken facilities, lack of safety, and inadequate student support and discipline, in the nicer suburbian schools, complaints will sound a lot more like the student in the video below, which is to say high on passion and energy, but low on common sense. (Message to student: you are right that some teachers focus too much on rote memorization, but trust me when I say that learning vocabulary words does serve a purpose in the end!)
New GI Bill Not Enough
Legislation passed by Congress this week will finally help US Armed Forces members cope with rising college tuition rates. Along with mental health care and homelessness, education is a key issue for returning vets.
But as the report above details, a skeptical President Bush may veto the bi-partisan bill. Understand, of course, that this is a declaration to support the troops when they come back home from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a email, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said:
"House Democrats also voted to create a GI Bill for the 21st Century that ensures our veterans have the right to an education when they return home. This part of the bill restores the promise of a full, four-year college education, and makes the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan part of the American economic recovery, just like the veterans of World War II were. "
In an emotional floor speech Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin) spoke in strong support of the bill:
But, of course, we all know that this is not enough. This past week we learned that Army Physicians in the VA have been falsifying diagnoses for soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (see email document below).
As Mike Connery accurately states, this is a disgrace.
According to Mike's report,
"A study by the RAND corporation, [approximates] 300,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan display symptoms of PTSD, or nearly 20% of veterans. . .only half of those 300,000 veterans have ever sought treatment.
A 2004 story in the LA Times reports no conclusive evidence to pin-point the causes of homelessness among veterans, but along with high housing costs, unemployment, and little education, past injuries and PTSD were also listed as root causes.
That same piece quotes Department of Veterans Affairs 2004 estimations that say homeless Vietnam veterans account for more than twice the number of soldiers, 58,000, who died in battle during that war.
According to an piece by MSNBC from November of last year,
"The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans from the current wars and says 400 of them have participated in its programs specifically targeting homelessness."
A similar New York Times piece says that the VA and aid groups are bracing for those number to increase. Those interviewed for both stories that served in Iraq and Afghanistan who were homeless were all under 30.
As I said before, the New GI Bill is hopefully just the beginning in a series of legislation that will continue to help keep our promises to our soldiers.
54 Years Later, Problems Remain
Saturday marked the 54th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. The decision, reached by a unanimous Supreme Court, struck down laws that segregated schools on the basis of race. No longer would children of color be forced, by virtue of the circumstances of their birth, to attend schools separate from those attended by whites.
What has been the impact of the court's ruling, now that we have the benefit of 54 years of wisdom in hindsight? There are three frameworks through which politicians, educators, and casual onlookers typically refer to the decision, and depending on which one you chose to adopt, the decision has been either completely successful, partially successful, or completely unsuccessful.
The simplest way to look at the impact of Brown v. Board is to make a purely legalistic analysis. In this lens, the Supreme Court set out to do one very simple thing: get rid of the pernicious practice--as ordained by local and state laws--of forcibly sending one group of children to school A and another group to school B based solely on skin color. Never mind whether school A is nicer, has better teachers, spends more money per child, increase student achievement more than school B; in the legalistic sense, the only goal to be sought was the realization by law of the court's finding that "separate but equal [schools] are inherently inequal".
In the legalistic sense, the Supreme Court succeeded completely. Fifty-four years after the ruling, there is not a single school district or state that affirms a policy of race-based segregation. There may be other reasons why a child cannot attend a particular K-12 school, but to public knowledge, race alone is not one of them.
Some, however, would argue that the legalistic analysis is too simple, and that the proper way to analyze Brown's impact is to measure whether black children are actually being enrolled in white schools at appropriate rates. Call this the intermediate frame of analysis; the idea that the actual goal of the Supreme Court in Brown was not just to outlaw school segregation as a policy, but rather to go one step further and actually integrate schools to some appropriate degree. In other words, in this analysis, getting rid of school segregation laws is only step one of a two-step process envisioned by the court. To determine whether the decision has been successful requires us to measure how far we have come in the second step (are our schools actually integrated), and not the first.
In this second way of looking at the decision, it's probably the case that we have experienced only mild success in the wake of Brown. Although for a while the pace of integration was fast post 1954, it has slowed and even reversed in recent years--segregation has actually been on the rise for blacks since the late 1980s. Of course, the difference is that today's segregation is not shoved upon blacks by Jim Crow laws, but rather subtly arrived upon as the complex result of demographic forces, housing markets, and school districting lines. In any case, a person adopting this framework likely looks at the past 54 years with mixed feelings: thrilled with the complete reversal of school segregation laws (which was hardly a given even in the 1960s), but concerned with rising de facto segregation in our schools.
Read the rest of the post »
Anti-NCLB Lawsuit Fizzles Out
Despite a regular stream of criticism from politicians and educators about the law--some for its complete abolition, others for severe revision to the point of rendering it unrecognizable from the law's original goals--the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 remains, for the most part, safe and unchanged.
That's not to say that it hasn't been challenged and at times, threatened. But one of the more serious threats was unmistakably denied last week, when a federal judge ruled against Connecticut's lawsuit challenging NCLB as an unfunded mandate.
The root of Connecticut's lawsuit was a claim that the cost of fulfilling the annual 3rd through 8th grade testing requirements of NCLB was greater than the amount of money the federal government was providing the state in Title I funding. Connecticut sought an exemption from the US Department of Education to continue testing only in 4th, 6th, and 8th grades as it was doing prior to the law's passage. But the federal circuit court judge ruled that Connecticut had failed to provide any evidence that the federal government was not providing enough money to pay for the testing. NCLB's mandate to test every year between 3rd and 8th grade and once in high school, in other words, was sufficiently funded.
The case itself was simple in its holding, and relatively uncontroversial. The more interesting question for those of us concerned with the implications for chilrden is, where is all of the anti-NCLB sentiment coming from? The law has pretty universal goals, after all: to reduce the achievement gap and ensure school accountability.
My observations about the origins of anti-NCLB sentiment among educators is that it is partly due to top-down teacher union influence, and partly due to a bogey-man type mentality. In the former regard, national level officials in the NEA and AFT have long regarded NCLB as a problematic path for reform, since its chief proposal (school level accountability for student achievement) diverts attention from policies that would enhance teacher union membership or teacher benefits (such as class-size reduction or across-the-board teacher pay raises).
In the latter regard, my experience is that a significant number of teachers are upset about NCLB because of a post hoc ergo proper hoc* logical fallacy. Essentially, teachers get frustrated about their jobs for a multitude of reasons (low administrative support, lack of staff-wide teacher quality, poor student behavior, pay that they believe to be too low, to name a few). Many of these reasons may just have to do with the fact that teaching is, of itself, a challenging job. But since the passage of NCLB, teachers have attributed their angers and frustrations to the laws, rather than to more subtle demands that have long existed on the profession.
In short, teachers are blaming the NCLB-bogey man for non-NCLB-related problems. A great example of this is when teachers blame NCLB for high-stakes testing policies that school districts and states decide to implement. NCLB itself says nothing about making a certain grade level test a requirement for grade promotion; the states are to blame for it!
Sadly, this kind of attribution problem is probably par for the course any time a significant policy change is made without immediate results. But what we must make sure to avoid is giving up on a potentially positive policy because of wrong-headed backlash.
Read the rest of the post »
NCLB in the Classroom: Observations from the Front
Debates about No Child Left Behind (NCLB) often come down to fractures based on perspective. Many of the educators I've met ground their opinions on the law in their experiences in the classroom. To these educators, NCLB's annual testing requirements have turned schools into factories where innovative lessons have been replaced by rote test preparation. Moreover, the annual tests have placed onerous expectations on students, filling some youth with such anxiety that they shut down or disengage from school entirely.
On the other hand, policy makers analyze the law from a perspective that can be characterized generously as a birds-eye view, or cynically, as an ivory-tower view. From their vantage point, requiring regular standardized tests in schools is crucial to ensure that schools are successful in their core purpose of advancing student achievement. Moreover, detailed, thoroughly examined data on how our students are doing within each racial and socioeconomic grouping is absolutely necessary if we want to close down the pernicious achievement gap affecting low-income and students of color.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that for most of my time in the education policy arena, I've fallen squarely in the latter camp. But now that I've taught and gone through a year where standardized testing has been a serious challenge, I am better able to understand the nuances of the debate.
The basic problem boils down to a simple fact: students of all ages and all backgrounds are already not inclined to test-taking. Now, some tests are easier to stomache than others. Tests that are relevant and reasonable are always better than tests that seem arbitrary and unnecessary. Tests that students feel well-prepared for are also more likely to be taken seriously than tests that seem overly difficult.
On both of these fronts in my school this year, however, NCLB-required standardized testing did not fare well with my students. Since passing the tests is not required for grade promotion (which, contrary to popular belief, is usually the case with most of these tests), the students did not see any direct reason to try hard on the tests. Moreover, the tests asked many questions that were inaccessible to the students, particularly on the math and science sections. So students who were already uninspired to try hard on the tests found themselves frustrated with confusing questions.
When that happens, the natural inclination for almost all of my students was to quit trying. There was a lot of random bubble-filling going around my room, and test sections that should have taken an hour only took 15 minutes. And there were a lot of angry students lashing out at teachers and other staff members who they perceived to be the reason why they had to take the seemingly unreasonable tests.
But here's where the rub is. Because the students did not try hard on the test, the data from the tests will not actually be a reliable way to measure our school's success! So the education policy maker's original goal of getting data to evaluate schools will not be met, and the process will only anger children and their teachers in the process. No wonder why there are so many educators who are upset!
Yet to demand that NCLB's testing requirements be shelved also misses the point. Because the real root cause of the controversy over the tests is that many of the students, in my school at least, find them so difficult that they refuse to try. Addressing this root cause problem by demanding an end to standardized tests makes as much sense as a shopping mall getting rid of its security cameras when it finds out that there has been an outbreak of theft.
The solution?
Read the rest of the post »
Tough Education Choice for Sen. McCain
A great blog called "Education Election" has been running courtesy of the National Education Writers Association at Edelection. It covers news stories in which presidential candidates have discussed education, and adds a good bit of analysis as well.
One intriguing note is that Barack Obama has made news with his positions and proposals for education a total of 37 times since the start of the campaign season, Hillary has been covered 34 times, and John McCain has been covered only 10 times. Though it doesn't mean anything about the content or quality of their views on education, there may be some conclusion that is reachable regarding the priority with which each campaign views education as an election issue.
You don't need to take it from me or the education writers association, however. You can take it from the McCain campaign itself, which has all but admitted that education will not play a major role in his campaign. Indeed, "education" only appeared on the issues section of his website very recently, and he has refrained from virtually any substantive discussion thus far.
Why has the Arizona Senator said so little about schools and school reform? This terrific article by Richard Whitmire on Politico.com explains it well. Basically, McCain has a choice to make. On the one hand, he can do what most GOP nominees have done for the past quarter-century and minimize education as a federal election issue by mostly talking up school choice, empowering parents, and avoiding tougher issues around NCLB and accountability. This is what worked for Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.
On the other hand, Senator McCain can do what the current President Bush did back in 2000 and 2004, which was to encroach upon traditionally democratic territory by pushing more centrist and aggressive reforms such as charter schools, teacher quality reform, and other ideas that are less appealing to the Republican base but more promising from a student achievement perspective.
Which one will he choose? It looks like the former right now, except for the fact that his chief education advisor is a woman named Lisa Graham Keegan -- a real firecracker who has made major waves as chief of schools in Arizona and as the head of a DC based group called the Education Leaders Council (*full disclosure -- I worked for Ms. Keegan as an intern back in 2001 and was quite impressed with her passion for finding solutions to help children learn*). Arizona is perhaps the premier state in the country when it comes to putting conservative talking points on school reform into action, as it has widely available charter schools, vouchers, and other parent choice mechanisms in play. The results haven't been conclusive however -- one study, at least, has gone so far as to rank Arizona last in K-12 education outcomes.
It will bear watching in the coming months, while the Dems continue to slug it out, whether Sen. McCain sets up an aggressive reform agenda on education, or whether he lets it serve as a back-burner issue to Iraq and national security.
Also, I wanted to leave you with this humorous video from Comedy Central's the Colbert Report that is education-related:
Teachers Union in PA Goes Heavy on Endorsement Ads, Light on "Ed"
As millions of eyes have been trained on Pennsylvania for the past six weeks, incredible numbers of ads, speeches, and other forms of political messaging have hit the airwaves. Some of these ads have been though provoking, many have been negative, and all of them have been expensive. But one ad caught the attention of some education advocates last week.
The ad was a radio spot purchased by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Pennsylvania, for the cost of $329,425. The ad supports Hillary Clinton for president, although previous AFT ads in New Hampshire and Iowa also supported Senators Obama and Edwards.
You can listen to the ad and read the script here. As you listen or read, pay attention to what is NOT said, bearing in mind that the ad was bought by the nation's largest urban teachers union, which has nearly one and a half million members.
If you don't have time to check out the ad, I'll cut to the chase for you. In 57 seconds of talking, the American Federation of Teachers advertisement mentions the word "education" a grand total of zero times. It mentions the word "school" just once -- when a woman named Margo announces that she is a public school teacher. Margo's next line should be about Hillary's plan to improve schools, help students learn, refocus our national energies on our children, right? Instead, Margo says that she supports Hillary Clinton because "She's capable, she's experienced, and she's a fighter."
In other words, the major education lobbyist group at play in the Democratic primary is buying ads that are education free. What hope do our children have if even the teachers don't think education is an issue that merits our attention this election cycle?
Rethinking Drivers' Ed
In the United States, getting your drivers' license a rite of passage for many teens, marking your first taste of independence. We're a car-obsessed culture, and the fact that many teens spend hours and hours in drivers' education courses preparing to get behind the wheel reflects that. But what if instead of learning to drive a car, American students learned how to use the full-scope of transportation options? If mobility education advocate David Levinger has his way, that's exactly what teens would be learning rather than placing all the emphasis on automobiles.
"The drivers license has become the American coming of age ritual," says Levinger, a Seattle native and the director of the Mobility Education Foundation. "This is very important transition point. You're increasing the demand for and reliance upon driving at the same time you're teaching kids to drive."
Levinger founded the Mobility Education Foundation in May 2007 to promote the idea that high school students should be taught how to get around safely and efficiently using a variety of transportation options. Under the model he has proposed, students would learn about walking, biking, and using public transportation in these courses as well, and the financial and health benefits of alternative modes of transport.
"By being able to use the full transportation system, you can save a lot of money, and also extend your ability to travel and really increase your mobility," says Levinger.
Americans spend an average $8,000 a year to own and operate a car, a huge financial burden that many young people aren't prepared to take on. Reliance upon the automobile also sets young people up for a lifetime behind the wheel, an unhealthy habit. The average adult spends an hour and a half in the car each day , and according a study conducted by the University of British Columbia, every 30 minutes spent in a car per day is linked with a 3 percent increase in the risk of obesity. Biking or walking also makes you healthier, which means you'll spend less money on medical costs.
Read the rest of the post »
Pomp, Circumstance, and Fudging Numbers
Try and make sense of these two sets of facts:
Fact set 1: The state of Missouri reported an 85.8 percent high school graduation rate for the 2006-2007 school year. In the same year, New Mexico reported a high school graduation rate of almost 90 percent to the US Department of Education. Multiple states provide similarly high rates in their official reports to the federal government.
Fact set 2: At the middle school where I teach in St. Louis city, no fewer than ten eighth graders have dropped out of school or have been expelled without any intention or re-enrolling elsewhere. This means that our junior high school graduation rate is just over 90 percent.
How can these two sets of facts co-exist? To be sure, part of it owes to the nature of the St. Louis City school district, which has lower school completion rates than Missouri as a whole. But the main source of the dissonance is something altogether different, and worse: most states are simply lying when they disclose their high school graduation rates.
There is little surprise as to why the states are so willing to lie about their graduation rates -- it's just good public relations. Admitting that thousands upon thousands of students are quitting school early does not win points with current residents, potential residents, and certainly not voters. The more perplexing issue is why we (the public, the federal government, America as a whole) have not made a fuss about it.
Read the rest of the post »