Dana Goldstein

Thoughts On History, Ideology, and Kevin Carey's Profile of Diane Ravitch

The New Republic has published a provocative profile of Diane Ravitch by my friend Kevin Carey, and it serves as a useful companion to the profile of Ravitch I wrote in June. Kevin, who works for the standards and accountability think tank Education Sector, is unsurprisingly more harshly critical of Ravitch than I was. He focuses a great deal of attention on her shortcomings as a historian, and while I think it's fair to point out that an ideological, polemical writing style has colored all of Ravitch's work, it's also the case that many celebrated, serious historians have held ideological worldviews, from Charles Beard to David Hofstadter to the Schlesingers. Gordon Wood's The Idea of America contains a lot of interesting thinking on the contributions and limitations of history colored by contemporary political concerns, and I think Ravitch's style follows the politically-engaged example set by the progressive historians in particular.

But unlike some her male role models, as a young woman, wife, and mother while she was working on her first major work, The Great School Wars, Ravitch faced what I have every reason to believe was a real and significant amount of sexism from the historical establishment, which took neither women nor public schools (as a subject matter) particularly seriously. Ravitch also experienced discrimination in the journalism world, when she interned at the Washington Post as a college student. There, it was made clear to her that women should not aspire to be reporters. So one reason Ravitch is argumentative and tough is because she's had to be that way in order to be taken seriously in a series of male-dominated professional and intellectual circles. Undoubtedly, her personality is also inherently confrontational and competitive, from her years as a teen drag racer to her recent delight in sparring with Joel Klein via email and with her many critics on Twitter.

Kevin allows that although Ravitch's positions on testing and school choice have flip-flopped, she has been constant on the need for a core curriculum. He is less sympathetic to Ravitch's defense of classroom teachers and their unions, but here, too, she has been fairly consistent. It's strange that The New Republic doesn't mention that some of Ravitch's most influential journalism was published in that magazine's pages. Her 1987 collection The Schools We Deserve reprints some of that work, including a 1983 essay, "Scapegoating the Teachers," which declares:

It is comforting to blame teachers for the low state of education, because it relieves so many others of their own responsibility for years of educational neglect.

This is very much a position Ravitch would take today. It's also worth noting that her affiliation with the anti-Communist left, dating back to her time at the small opinion magazine The New Leader, made her close friends with Al Shanker and some other labor folks who developed, as Ravitch did, neoconservative tics. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Shanker sent Ravitch on a speaking tour to newly-organized Eastern European teachers' unions, so she has always been comfortable as an ally of organized labor. 

In short, I believe that to understand Ravitch, you must understand her as a certain sort of lifelong counterintutive liberal, not all that constitutionally different, come to think of it, from the editors who established the tone of Slate and The New Republic in the 1980s and 1990s. Those magazines moved left when confronted with the the know-nothing conservatism of the post 9/11 era, and Ravitch has moved left, too, though she has applied her new beliefs to a subject -- school reform -- that many liberals continue to see through the lens of the bipartisan consensus that developed around "A Nation at Risk." Whether that center will hold over the coming years depends, I think, on how history evaluates the education reform records of Bloomberg, Klein, Rhee and their allies. Right now, I think we're lacking the perspective and longterm data we need to truly make that assessment, but as Kevin points out, Ravitch has put herself out in front of the debate by essentially predicting, before all the evidence is in, that this movement has failed.

Better Parents?

On my various nerdy listservs, I saw a lot of snickering over the weekend about Tom Friedman's "Better Parents" column, which explained international research findings linking higher student achievement to parenting practices like reading aloud, checking homework, and asking kids about their school day. 

The reaction was a collective "duh," followed by "so what?" After all, schools and governments can't possibly do anything about bad parents, right? Over at Flypaper, Peter Meyer has a much more thoughtful version of the critique: 

What does a teacher – or a school – do in the face of the reality that parents make a difference?  The answer: teach the kids.  Schools can’t fix parents. They can — and should — educate (fix) kids.

I agree with Meyer that all too often, schools are expected to "fix" problems that aren't their fault and that they aren't well enough resourced or equipped to solve. This is a big problem with the entire poverty conversation in America. That said, some of the most dedicated school reformers have concluded that if they want to reach kids, they ought to do what they can to influence parents, too. 

In Jay Matthews' book Work Hard, Be Nice you can read about KIPP charter school founder Mike Feinberg visiting the home of Abby, a student who never does her homework. Feinberg chats with Abby's mom, who explains that she can't pry her daughter away from the television. Here's what Feinberg does next:

Feinberg decided to go for broke, play his last available card. "I don't want to do this, but you give me the TV, or your daughter is not in KIPP anymore."... The woman did not react at first. She was quiet for a few seconds. She did not seem upset, just thoughtful. Then she said, "Take the TV."

Abby, who had been listening intently, began to cry. Feinberg unplugged the set and reached down to pick it up. He stopped for a moment to talk to his student. "Abby, you can earn this back. You do your homework great for three weeks straight, and I will bring the TV back."

Abby does indeed get her TV back.

Once before when I wrote about this episode, a number of commenters called Feinberg's approach parochial and said it epitomized one problem with charter schools: that they can use strongarm tactics to pressure students and families, because they have the power to revoke admission. But regardless what you think of this particular anecdote, all kinds of schools have decided over the last decade to amp up their outreach to parents. In 2007 I reported on the suburban town of Ossining, New York, which is dealing with a huge influx of immigrants from rural Ecuador. The school district was hosting literacy classes for young parents, in the hope that it would increase the odds that immigrant children entered school with some reading experience, in either Spanish or English. 

In 2009 I wrote about Mayor Bloomberg's experimental Opportunity NYC program, which actually paid poor single moms for getting their kids to school on time, signing them up for library cards, and other "good" educational behaviors. 

In Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough describes the Harlem Children Zone's myriad efforts to educate poor parents about the kinds of parenting practices college-educated parents already know about, from reading daily to their kids to constantly asking them questions about their feelings and observations.

And this fall some New York City neighborhood public schools borrowed a page from the charter school movement and required teachers to make home visits, asking students and parents to sign a "contract" on behavior and academic commitment. 

This kind of work is time-consuming and sometimes expensive, but it isn't at all self-evident that schools are helpless in the face of "bad" parenting practices. (And by the way, middle-class and rich parents mess up, too, as any teacher or principal can tell you--whether by coddling, spoiling, emphasizing sports over academics, or a million other things that make schools' jobs harder.) 

Read more: The "Parenting Problem" is a "Poverty Problem"

The International Perspective on Teen Pregnancy

Each year when the national teen birth rate statistics are released by the CDC, the media get very excited. This year the birth rate is down to about thirty-four births per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19, which Reutersattributes to the bad economy, better sex education and even cautionary TV shows like MTV’s Teen Mom.But just two years ago, when the teen birth rate rose slightly in twenty-six states, the media cited many of the very same factors: USA Today attributed that change to worse sex-education; pop-culture depictions of pregnant teens, such as the movi Juno; and celebrity teen moms, such as Bristol Palin and Jamie Lynn Spears.

I’d argue for spending less time peering at the year-to-year fluctuations in the teen birth rate and instead look at the big picture, which shows the United States has exponentially more teen moms than any other developed world nation.

*chart via the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy

We can only gesture toward the myriad factors causing this problem, but here are some likely ones: lack of knowledge about and access to affordable contraception (one in five sexually active teenage girls do not use any kind of birth control); lack of access to abortion-providers in 87 percent of American counties; increased immigration from nations where teen pregnancy is more the norm; and even high poverty rates that cause some girls to see motherhood as the only viable path to adulthood, since a college education and decent job are unavailable to them.

The good news is that the American teen birth rate has steadily decreased over the past seventy years, despite year-to-year ups and downs. The bottom line, though, is that the United States remains an outlier not only on the teen birth rate but on teen pregnancy and abortion, too, which occur far more often here than in European nations. Clearly, our hot-potato reproductive rights debate isn’t solving these problems, which is just one of many good reasons why we should ratchet down the politicization of this public health issue and take a common sense prevention approach, one that accepts that over 95 percent of Americans have premarital sex.

cross-posted at The Nation

 

Brain Crush

With all the reading I'm doing for my book proposal, there is one person who I think deeply got the various dysfunctions of the American school system and, more importantly, the American cultural conception of education itself: Richard Hofstader. If you haven't already, you should really read Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It is one of those eerie experiences where you feel the work could have been written today--Penn State scandal!--but it dates to 1963:

A host of educational problems have arisen from indifference—underpaid teachers, overcrowded classrooms, double-schedule schools, broken-down school buildings, inadequate facilities and a number of other failings that come from something else—the cult of athleticism, marching bands, high-school drum majorettes, ethnic ghetto schools, de-intellectualized curricula, the failure to educate in serious subjects, the neglect of academically gifted children. At times the schools of the country seem to be dominated by athletics, commercialism, and the standards of the mass media, and these extend upwards to a system of higher education whose worst failings were underlined by the bold president of the University of Oklahoma, who hoped to develop a university of which the football team could be proud. Certainly some ultimate educational values seem forever to be eluding the Americans. At great effort and expense they send an extraordinary proportion of their young to colleges and universities, but their young, when they get there, do not seem to care even to read. 

On a side note, Hofstadter was one of many New Deal-generation liberal thinkers put-off by the theatrics of the 1960s student protest movements and by hippyism more generally. I must have some kind of subconscious attraction toward these types, because when I was profiling Diane Ravtich, a similar period of her life fascinated me, though she is much younger. A lot of these folks moved right for a period of time, and it's interesting to wonder how Hofstadter's thinking might have evolved had he lived to complete the three-part, comprehensive American social history he planned to write.

I just ordered this biography on Kindle, so perhaps I will have more to say about Hofstadter soon. In the meantime, happy weekend. 

An Explosion in Lobbying around For-Profit K-12 Programs

My friends at The Nation have published a really fascinating investigative piece by Lee Fang about the explosion in lobbying around K-12 for-profit, virtual education, particularly targeting charter schools. This is a sector of the education world that's very difficult to track, because every state has different, often vague laws about how for-profit companies can be involved in public education.

As of 2008, 13 states allowed charter schools to partner with for-profit companies for facilities, 17 states allowed partnerships for services, and three states actually allowed for-profit companies to directly open a charter school. But even in states where for-profits are not allowed to hold a charter themselves, they are sometimes allowed to spin-off an affiliated non-profit to hold the charter, which will then contract with the for-profit for services. (This is prevalent in Ohio). Here in New York, no charter opened after 2010 can be managed by a for-profit, but in Michigan, 80 percent of charters are for-profit.

What do for-profit education services for public K-12 schools look like? Sometimes they are online-learning classes or tutoring services offered to students enrolled in brick-and-mortar schools. Sometimes they are completely virtual schools, like the one described by Katherine Boo in her 2007 New Yorker piece about the collapse of Manual High School in Denver:

Ashley, who had been accepted into a small, competitive program at another public high school, was uneasy, too, and, anyway, there were flyers at Wal-Mart about a publicly funded online charter school a few blocks from home. One of the people involved with the program had been a Denver Nugget, and his daughter was the R. & B. singer India.Arie. Students did their work on the Internet, and it was graded by teachers in an office somewhere else. Plus, they could train to be nurses or doctors, or something; the details weren’t clear. Still, after a stressful year, the chance to stay near home, with Internet access and relational proximity to India.Arie, seemed soothing, so two of Manual’s star students changed their plans.

As Fang notes, online learning can be an important supplement to real-world classrooms; I think this is especially true for advanced high school students, who should be given the chance to jump ahead in the curriculum, perhaps through video lectures from college professors. The problem is that the studies we have of typical online learning outcomes haven't shown very impressive results. Fang writes:

A recent study of virtual schools in Pennsylvania conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University revealed that students in online schools performed significantly worse than their traditional counterparts. Another study, from the University of Colorado in December 2010, found that only 30 percent of virtual schools run by for-profit organizations met the minimum progress standards outlined by No Child Left Behind, compared with 54.9 percent of brick-and-mortar schools. For White Hat Management, the politically connected Ohio for-profit operating both traditional and virtual charter schools, the success rate under NCLB was a mere 2 percent, while for schools run by K12 Inc., it was 25 percent. A major review by the Education Department found that policy reforms embracing online courses “lack scientific evidence” of their effectiveness.

So there's good reason to proceed with caution, which is difficult to do when folks like Jeb Bush are traveling the nation advocating for absurd laws like one recently passed in Florida, which requires every single public high school student to enroll in at least one online course before graduation. This is certainly putting the cart--technological "innovation"--before the horse, which should be a quality education provided by effective teachers.

Some Books I have Loved and Lost

War, love, the theater, the aristocracy: All equally absurd. 

Politics corrupt.

The Culture of Power is reproduced in the classroom. Instead, it should be decoded.

Writer types: Don't sell out.

"You fit into me/like a hook into an eye/a fish hook/an open eye"

Marriage: Really hard.

The 99 Percent, the 1 Percent, and the Bloomberg Education Agenda

 

The folks at The Awl have published my longish essay on the Occupy movement, Mayor Bloomberg, and the public schools. Since I attended the education reform "teach-in" at Zuccotti Park last Friday, I've been thinking through whether the 99 percent/1 percent critique applies to school reform, as Bloomberg critics argue. Here's part of what I concluded:

The trouble with this narrative comes in comparing education reformers with greedy bankers. The dominant ethos of the school choice/Bloomberg/Obama reform movement is one borrowed not from Wall Street, with its desperate lust for profit, but from Silicon Valley, with its commitment to meritocratic innovation that—yes, of course—earns money, but also serves the public.

There's a lot more in the piece, so please check it out. 

The Mexican Education War

The average Mexican attends school for only eight and a half years. That's the equivalent of dropping out in middle school—before reading Shakespeare (or Cervantes), learning trigonometry or writing a sophisticated research paper.

Mexico, the next-door neighbor of the richest society in the world, ranks dead last among the forty-one countries that participate in the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment. About 40 percent of Mexican 15- to 19-year-olds are completely disconnected from civil society and the legitimate economy; they have dropped out of school and are unemployed.

I spent several days this week in Mexico City, on a trip for American journalists and policy professionals hosted by Grupo Salinas, the media, retail and banking conglomerate owned by Ricardo Salinas Pliego, one of Mexico's powerful oligarchs. Like the United States, Mexico is preparing for a contentious presidential election next year, and our group had the opportunity to meet with and interview several of the leading candidates.

The mayor of Mexico City, Manuel Ebrard Casaubon, a presidential candidate for the PRD

Shockingly, only one—Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, the pragmatic, progressive mayor of Mexico City—identified the scant schooling of the typical Mexican citizen as one of the nation's foremost economic, social and cultural problems. The others, Josefina Vázquez Mota of the ruling center-right National Action Party, and Manlio Fabio Beltrones of the formerly authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), instead voiced an education reform agenda that seemed ripped from the pages of an American newspaper: Blame the teachers union.

Congresswoman, former education minister and PAN presidential candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota

Vázquez Mota, a former education minister, claimed that when it comes to education, "the major challenge has to do with the union doing their job." Beltrones, the Senate leader and a second-tier PRI candidate, complained that the union "has its own agenda" when the agenda should be "a quality elementary education for everybody." (We did not meet the current presidential front-runner, Enrique Peña Nieto of PRI, nor the candidate of the traditional left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.)

I believe this type of thinking—lobbing rhetorical bombs at teachers unions while focusing solely on primary school education—is too modest for a nation as vibrant as Mexico, which enjoys tremendous geographic and cultural strengths, yet which faces stiff labor market competition from Asia, where countries like China and South Korea have prioritized educating their workforce.

To be sure, elements within the 1.5-million member Mexican teachers union have defended some horrifying practices, including the family inheritance and buying and selling of teaching jobs. But thanks to reformsinstituted by President Felipe Calderón’s administration, those days are over. Vázquez Mota led the 2008 negotiations with teachers union leader Elba Esther Gordillo, who—like Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers—has embraced teacher quality reforms over the protests of some her own members. “For the first time in the history of education in Mexico, teaching positions are now assigned due to merit, and not for political reasons," Vázquez Mota told us. Mexican educators must now pass an exam before they preside over a public school classroom.

Like Beltrones, Vázquez Mota bragged that almost all Mexicans are now attending primary school, in part because of her party's Opportunidades anti-poverty program, which provides cash payments to low-income mothers who keep their children enrolled in school. This is certainly an accomplishment in a nation where half the population of more than 50 million people live in poverty. Thirteen million of these Mexicans are the destitute poor, residing in rural communities disconnected from modern technology and functional social services. To put food on the table, parents pull their kids out of school and put them to work, sometimes in the violent, underground drug economy.

But to truly fight this vicious cycle, small cash payments won't be enough. The priority ought to be connecting all poor children to a full twelve years of quality formal schooling, so they can strive for a middle-class lifestyle in our increasingly globalized knowledge economy. In order to do this, Mexico must continue to grow its economy and must fight poverty just as doggedly as it has fought the drug war—and hopefully more successfully.

An added challenge is creating curricula that are relevant, respectful and engaging for Mexico’s 10 million indigenous citizens, who are especially at risk for dropping out of school. Traditional, Catholic Mexico must also expand access to contraception and legal abortion, so that women can plan their family size and offer more opportunity to the children they have.

Teachers unions should modernize their practices, and in both Mexico and the United States, they are well on their way to meaningful reform. But the truth is, weakening labor protections for teachers will not, on its own, solve the international problem of educational inequality. Here in the United States, state budget crises are forcing schools to cut crucial programs and staff. In Mexico, many millions of children see their basic educations cut short well before they gain the skills necessary to live an economically stable life. Teachers unions have little control over these poor educational and macroeconomic conditions, and are not responsible for them.

Of the politicians I met in Mexico, only Mayor Ebrard Casaubón seemed to grasp that successfully reforming education would mean radically increasing access to many, many more years of formal schooling. In Mexico City, the high school graduation rate increased by 120,000 students over the past five years, and “now we want to reach twelve years of education” all across the country,” Ebrard Casaubón said.

This is ambitious thinking, but big ambitions are exactly what we need, worldwide, if we are to use education as a lever to move people out of poverty. Teachers union—bashing will never be enough. 

cross-posted at The Nation

Thoughts on My Trip to Mexico City and the Drug War

 

View of Mexico City from the home office of Ricardo Salinas, the retail/media/banking tycoon.

I spent the first half of this week in Mexico City, on a junket sponsored by Grupo Salinas. There's a lot of worry about Mexico's violence--and I have some of my own thoughts on the topic, below--but I didn't feel at all unsafe. Mexico City is an architecturally beautiful town with a lovely culture of late-night, outdoor dining and delicious street food. Swaths of the city reminded me of the immigrant neighborhoods of south Los Angeles, cut by smog and gridlock, but home to vibrant local business strips and cohesive communities. Indeed, Mexico's economy has been less hard-hit by the financial crisis than ours has.

Our group of writers and policy wonks met with a really interesting list of journalists and politicians, including three presidential candidates. My take on Mexico's upcoming election and the country's education challenges are over at The Nation in a new column; in short, I was surprised by just how similar the rhetoric on Mexican school reform sounds--there's a big focus on the excesses of the teachers' union, for example--even though Mexico is confronting an educational inequality crisis far more serious than our own, with the average Mexican dropping out after just eight years of formal schooling. 

So if you want to learn more about education in Mexico, click here.

More broadly, the trip left me all fired up to legalize drugs. About 45,000 Mexicans have been murdered since President Felipe Calderon escalated and militarized the drug war in 2006, with political, financial, and tactical support from the United States. The drug cartels are conducting terrible massacres, and intimidating and sometimes killing both professional and citizen journalists. 

All of this is happening despite the fact that "the war" has successfully led to the deaths and arrests of dozens of top drug lords. In their absence, some of the major trafficking cartels split into smaller, more agile organizations that can better resist detection. These small groups are now fighting among themselves, which has (of course) contributed to the increase in violence.

Why isn't the drug war working? Because it isn't addressing the demand side of the equation: Americans' unquenchable appetite for illegal cocaine and marijuana. The only way to decrease demand is to begin treating addiction primarily as a public health problem, not a criminal one--as Portugal has done--and to legalize the production and sale of less dangerous drugs, like pot, to tamp down on the violent narcotics black market.

Ending the drug war would also revitalize American inner city neighborhoods, where the existence of this underground economy disincentivizes education and work, and sends 17 percent of black men to prison. 

In July the Los Angeles Times' published a riveting four-part series about the regular Americans and Mexicans caught up in the massive Sinaloan drug cartel. I highly recommend it, and think it could win a Pulitzer: Read parts one, two, three, and four.

"Tests" for Kindergarteners?

I'll be in Mexico from Sunday through Wednesday, so this will be my last post until late next week. In the meantime, check out my new piece at Slate, which examines the best and not-so-great practices in "kindergarten readiness assessment"--yes, the so-called kindergarten "tests" the Obama administration is asking states to develop, and which have dusted up some controversy. 

Read it!