Dana Goldstein

On the Purposes of Schooling

Horace Mann: "Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is that one is carried by blood and the other by water." 

The New York Times' Stephanie Saul has a blockbuster investigative feature out on K12, the for-profit manager of virtual public charter schools. Saul finds that enrolling a child in a virtual school is, in fact, cheaper for the state than enrolling him in a brick-and-mortar school. But in the case of Pennsylvania's Agora Cyber Charter School, the modest cost savings are more than offset by a loss of quality: a learning "environment" of low standards (the lowest grade is not 0, but 50, and it is almost impossible to enforce attendance) and little or no real-time interaction with peers and teachers.

Many educators believe there is a place for full-time virtual learning for children whose pace is extremely accelerated or those with behavioral or other issues, like teenage mothers who need to stay home with their babies. But for most children, particularly in the elementary grades, the school experience should not be replaced with online learning, they say.

“The early development of children requires lots of interaction with other children for purposes of socialization, developing collaboration and teamwork, and self-definition,” said Irving Hamer Jr., deputy superintendent of Memphis city schools.

The entire piece raises the following question: What is school for? There is a disturbing tendency in the education reform debate to narrowly define "student achievement" as the goal of schooling. If our measures of success are merely graduation rates and test scores, then why not save $1500 per student and allow a bunch of disadvantaged kids to veg out in front of their laptops, indoors all day? Sure, over half of K12's 200,000 "cyberpupils" are behind grade level, but most of them are poor anyhow, and their neighborhood schools are probably failing, too. And maybe we can improve virtual schools over time--there's no reason to be a technophobe! Right?

In researching the history of American education for my book project, I've been struck again and again by the newness of the idea that schooling is primarily a matter of academic achievement. The mid-nineteenth century reformers who founded the Common Schools Movement, the precursor to our modern system of universal public education, believed that Protestant morality was the first goal of education. "Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine," Horace Mann declared. His friend Catharine Beecher, an advocate for girls' education and women teachers, believed that the role of the teacher was "to instruct in morals and piety."

As the student population diversified at the turn-of-the-twentieth century, "Americanization" became the major goal of public education. In later years, reformers focused on vocationalism and then on racial healing. It is only really since "A Nation at Risk" that we've had a national dialogue about academic excellence for every child. This is a much-needed development in American culture, but its discontents are numerous: A lack of attention paid to the civic, social, and artistic benefits of schooling, and the ways in which children are (ideally) shaped as moral, cultured, socially-responsible people by their teachers and school communities. 

It will be a real political and moral failure if we continue to focus the expansion of the for-profit virtual learning sector not on advanced students, but on children who are already falling behind. These are the kids who most need and deserve the support of traditional learning communities, and who are least likely to have parents who can devote the many hours per day needed to act as a "learning coach" for a child enrolled in a school like Agora. 

That said, privileged kids, too, are dealing with the outcomes of over-rationalized educational thinking. In New York Robert Kolker reports on Valerie Reidy, the controversial principal of the Bronx High School of Science, one of New York City's premier public "test" schools for high-performers. Both my mom and stepdad graduated from Bronx Science; it has a reputation for excellence and creativity not only in the sciences and math, but in literature and history, too. Reidy, however, pushed by the Bloomberg Department of Education, was unhappy with the fact that Bronx Science students scored lower on Regents and AP exams than their peers at Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant. Over time, she required teachers to put more emphasis on preparing students for end-of-year tests, many of which are pitched at a lower level than Bronx Science students are capable of. This sparked a wave of student protests and teacher turnover.

One can debate Reidy's pedagogical approach, which focused on the inquiry method. My question is more about the ends to which she was applying this approach. Were average Regents scores of 85 instead of 95 at Bronx Science evidence of an underperformcing school, as Reidy and the DOE claim--or just evidence of a school that, as a community of educators, parents, and students, had decided to focus on values other than test scores? What's wrong with that?

More on the D.C. Achievement Gap and Michelle Rhee's Legacy

In response to my Nation piece on achievement gaps in Washington, D.C. district public schools, commenter E.B. wondered how things would look different if we measured student proficiency instead of raw NAEP scores. This is a great question, since proficiency--defined as "solid academic performance"--is the standard to which we should hold most children.

As you can see from the chart I've whipped up below, things still look pretty abysmal when we measure proficiency instead of raw achievement. While D.C. public school students from every demographic group made modest gains over the past four years, just a small minority of black (12 percent), Hispanic (22 percent), and poor children (11 percent) in Washington perform at grade level in math. I've included scores from Charlotte, North Carolina as a comparison, since Charlotte typically outperforms other urban districts.

When we compare Charlotte to D.C., we see that demographics play an important, but ultimately limited, role in a child's academic performance. Poor, black, and Hispanic students do better in Charlotte than they do in D.C. There are many reasons why this is so, starting with "peer effects:" The Charlotte district is more diverse than DCPS, with a greater percentage of white, Asian, and middle-class students, as well as individual schools and classrooms that are more socioeconomically-integrated. (To review why integrated schools are often better schools, click here and here.) There are also an almost-unlimited number of curricular, pedagogical, and human resources practices that could be responsible for one district, like Charlotte, outperforming another, like Washington, D.C.

I want to be clear--especially in response to Alexander Russo--that I'm not attempting to hold Michelle Rhee responsible for the existence of these achievement gaps, which far predate her term and are partly attributable to demographic realities out of her control. What I do want to do is call attention to the continued underperformance of disadvantaged D.C. kids compared to their peers in other cities. The Rhee agenda was multi-faceted. It included elements I support, such as bureaucratic streamlining and the recruitment of more college-educated families into the public school system, and elements about which I am skeptical, such as the tying of teacher evaluation and pay to student standardized test scores. The Rhee years also conincided, as Alexander notes, with an increase in charter school enrollment, and there is some limited evidence that D.C. charters may be outperforming the city's traditional schools.

The takeaway, I think, is that Rhee pursued a number of reforms, but there is no evidence that her most controversial, anti-union moves are responsible for the limited growth we've seen--or that teacher-evaluation reforms alone can, over time, move many more poor, black, and Hispanic D.C. chidren to academic proficiency. Indeed, the D.C. public schools are still highly segregated by race and class, with quality teachers more clustered than ever in whiter, wealthier schools. These trends are negatively correlated with high academic achievement for disadvantaged kids.

In Post-Rhee D.C., Achievement Gaps Remain Staggeringly Wide

On Sunday, the New York Times published an op-ed critical of school choice policies in Washington, DC. As Matt Yglesias very fairly pointed out, the author, Natalie Hopkinson, failed to cite student achievement data to back her claim that residential segregation and the expansion of the charter school sector have left many DC families with only “mediocre” public school options. Thankfully, on Wednesday the federal government dumped a mass of new NAEP test score data from the nation’s largest cities, including DC. NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is the gold standard in education research: the only exam overseen by the federal government and adminstered to a random selection of schoolchildren annually, with no rewards or punishments attached to corrupt the scores.

I spent this morning diving into the new NAEP numbers in an effort to paint a more complete picture of student achievement in DC over the past decade, which included the three tumultous years of Michelle Rhee’s chancellorship. While white, black and Hispanic children all made modest test score gains in DC since 2003, the Rhee agenda has not significantly narrowed achievement gaps between the various demographic groups, nor has it brought disadvantaged DC youth up to the national average scores for peers of their same race and class in other cities.

I’m going to focus this post on fourth grade math, since it seems to be the subject and grade level most suspectible to reform efforts. In DC since 2003, the black/white score gap remained constant, the poor/non-poor gap grew, and the Hispanic/white gap closed slightly.

Achievement gaps would be less disturbing in and of themselves if overall achievement levels were moderate or high. But what we continue to see in DC is that white students score well above both national and urban district averages for their race; black, Hispanic and poor children score well below national averages for their races and classes. This makes DC the city in the nation with the largest black-white student achievement gap.

If you are a white or middle-class family living in Washington, your child will likely attend a socioeconomically segregated neighborhood school or a higher-quality magnet, and will outperform her peers in suburban public schools. If you are a poor parent of color, on the other hand, your child will do worse in the DC public schools than he likely would have done in other urban or suburban districts. The NAEP data does not include charter school students, but the Washington Postreports that black and Hispanic children in DC charters score better on standardized tests than their traditional-school peers. The bottom line, however, is that there are far too few seats in high-quality charter schools to serve every disadvantaged child in Washington, and those left behind at neighborhood public schools continue to be shortchanged. Indeed, the district’s own data show experienced and highly-rated teachers more clustered than ever in affluent neighborhoods and schools.

In short, Michelle Rhee and her successor, Kaya Henderson, have presided over a landscape of modest raw test score gains. Meanwhile, the expansion of school choice in DC encouraged more white and middle-class families to send their children to public schools, and provided an escape route to some poor children who would otherwise have attended failing neighborhood schools. What Rhee and Henderson have not done is shrink ahievement gaps or guarantee to DC low-income parents that their children will receive at least an adequate, “average” education, no matter what school they attend.

cross-posted at The Nation

Follow-Ups and Reading Lists and a Poem

I'm caught up in long-form writing projects this week, but here are some quick thoughts and reading recommendations until I can return to the blog in full force:

• I got a lot of interesting responses to my post on Siri and abortion access. A common critique was that it's crucial to catch problems like this early in a new technology's life cycle, before it reaches mass market penetration. I totally agree, but maintain that greater progress would be made for more women right now if half the attention paid to the Siri contretemps was funneled into building basic web sites for locating reproductive health services. For example, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy has created Bedsider, which allows you to enter your zipcode and get a list of nearby clinics that provide affordable contraception. We need something similar for abortion.

• Linda Darling-Hammond (on the left) and Rick Hess (on the right) are two of the smartest people in education policy. Here is their joint prescription for fixing No Child Left Behind, and for the federal government embracing a more "humble" role in school reform.

• On the occasion of the Utne Reader downsizing, my friend Reihan Salam has a very thoughtful post on how small-ciruclation print magazines created "virtual communities" before the Internet. As Reihan notes, this was a big part of being a nerdy kid in the 1990s. And yes. I basically owe my life to small-circulation print magazines!

• Speaking of which, the new issue of N + 1 contains delightful histories of Pitchfork and Gchat. Pick up a copy.

Lastly: My New Year's resolution for 2011 was to read a poem each night before bed. I failed miserably (of course), but in the spirit of the year ending, I've attempted to actually do this occasionally for the past month. Here is an old favorite, which I still find almost shockingly irreverent. But it's true, I think, nonetheless.

A Brief for the Defense, by Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Who Would Actually Use Siri to Find an Abortion Provider?

Amanda Marcotte, Jill Filipovic, and lots of other folks are calling attention to the fact that Siri, the new iPhone voice-recognition software, can find Viagra, prostitutes, breast implants, and anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers, but not abortion providers or contraception. For example:

Jill: I want a blowjob.
Siri: I found twelve escort services fairly close to you.

Jill: I want cunnilingus.
Siri: Is that so?

Jill: I’m pregnant, should I have an abortion?
Siri: I didn’t find any abortion clinics.

Jill: I’m pregnant. What do I do?
Siri: Are you?

Jill: My girlfriend is pregnant. What do I do?
Siri: Consider your alternatives.

Jill: My girlfriend is pregnant. What do I do?
Siri: First, do no harm.

Jill: My girlfriend is pregnant. What do I do?
Siri: Always do the right thing.

This is pretty hilarious for what it tells us about the puerile, male-dominated culture of the engineers at Apple and the third-party developers whose data and software run Siri. What this isn't is a crisis for women who own iPhones and are facing reproductive health challenges.

The average household income of an iPhone owner is $100,000 annually, compared to $85,000 for other smartphone users and about $50,000 for the typical American. Do we really believe that women who own iPhones--a generally privileged, educated, savvy group of people--will turn first to Siri when they are in need of a birth control prescription or information about where to obtain an abortion?

What women really need on these occasions are websites that plainly and clearly list where one can access various affordable reproductive health-care services. Here's a great page provided by the New York City Department of Health, explaining where to pick up emergency contraception. It would be wonderful if there were a similar page for abortion providers in the city, but I can't find one. Instead, when you click on "abortion" on the city's "Health Topics A-Z" site, you are told to call 311, an extra step that could dissuade many people, especially young girls hesitant to talk about their pregnancies. 

If you have money or tech expertise to donate to local women's clinics, it would be a great idea to help those organizations improve their SEO, so that when women Google for information on reproductive health services, they are directed to helpful sources, instead of to the CPC crap that so often rises to the top of searches. It would also be great if there were more local websites geared specifically toward teenagers, providing easy-to-read information on where to access birth control and abortion. 

In any case. Apple is embarrassed. It's sad and funny. But it's way more important to focus on basic web searches for this kind of information than it is to worry about Siri, a tool used by a very privileged and educated slice of the population.

The Trouble with National Social Studies Standards, and how the Common Core Might Help

Education Week reports on social scientists who complain that the new Common Core curriculum standards replicate the problems of No Child Left Behind, by shunting civics and history in favor of English and math. 

I share the concern about the sorry state of civics and history education in American schools, but this is actually one reason why I'm cautiously optimistic about the Common Core. The Common Core English standards call for 50 percent of all reading assignments to be non-fiction and "informational;" currently, according to David Coleman, the lead architect of the new standards, about 80 percent of all reading assignments are fiction or memoir. So if schools and teachers take the Common Core suggested reading lists seriously, students will gain  a lot more exposure to great thinkers and ideas in civics, history, and the social sciences. Here's a sampling of what the Core suggests they read:

K-1: How People Learned to Fly

2-3: Martin Luther King and the March on Washington; A Medieval Feast

4-5:  We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball; Let’s Investigate Marvelously Meaningful Maps;  The Kid’s Guide to Money

6-8:  Preamble and First Amendment to the United States Constitution; Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott; A Short Walk through the Pyramids and through the World of Art

9-10: "Gettysburg Address;" "Letter from Birmingham Jail;" Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West;  Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491

11-12:  Common Sense; "Politics and the English Language;" Democracy in America; "Delcaration of Sentiments" by the Seneca Falls Conference

English class reading lists aren't a substitute for high-quality history and civics courses, but they do foster seriousness toward these subjects across the curriculm. And remember: There are pragmatic political reasons why the Common Core isn't explicitly crafting history standards. Every time the country or even an individual state tries to come to any sort of agreement about how to teach history, we become embroiled in culture war nonsense. It happened in the 1990s with the National History Standards, which were written by a staggeringly broad array of scholars and teachers, yet attacked by Lynne Cheney et al as a font of identity politics liberlism. In Texas last year, the state Board of Education approved what can only be called a jingoistic, Christian conservative history and economics curriculum.

The United States remains an outlier among developed world nations in not articulating national standards for history. But with our politics as polarized as they are, and with the Republican Party particularly skeptical right now toward any federal attempt to regulate or even influence local schools, I just don't see the next few years as the time when we'll break through this barrier.

drawing depicts Elizabeth Cady Stanton speaking at the Seneca Falls Conference for women's rights, July 19, 1848