Dana Goldstein

More Thoughts on Teacher Polls, Tenure, and School Funding

Over at The Nation I have a new piece looking at surveys of public school teachers, one of which found job satisfaction at its lowest point since 1989. The most important thing to note is that polling shows teachers are not unhappy because they resent new accountability policies like the more stringent teacher evaluations instituted in response to President Obama's Race to the Top program. In fact, most teachers support using multiple measures of student learning to assess educators, and most believe it should take longer to earn tenure (an average of 5.4 years according to the Gates/Scholastic poll) than it currently does (an average of 3.1 years across all states). 

Critics of tenure will say the system shouldn't exist at all. But it takes a long time to shift opinion within a profession, and the polls show teachers have already evolved significantly. What's more, huge policy changes on tenure are already underway. Since 2009, the majority of states passed legislation significantly weakening teachers' job security. In Colorado, for example, teachers will lose their seniority protections if they receive a bad performance evaluation two years in a row.

The big remaining question is how these new evaluations will work, and teachers are worried student standardized test scores will be weighed too heavily. School budget cuts are the other major reason teachers are unhappy, and that's where I focus the new column. I dive into the latest research on school finance and teacher turnover to show that--contrary to popular belief--money very much does matter in school reform. 

The piece appeared in print so there are unfortunately no hyperlinks embedded, but here are some sources I mention:

• Bruce Baker's report "Does Money Matter in Education?"
• Information on Lobato v. Colorado, the case in which Judge Sheila Rappaport ruled her state's school funding scheme discriminates against poor children and low-income school districts
• New paper on "How teacher turnover harms student achievement" 

Read the Nation piece here. 

The European High School Apprenticeship Model and American "CTE"

I've written about some innovative New York high schools that combine traditional academic learning with workplace internships and apprenticeships. But most American teenagers have little access to experiences like these, and the Obama administration's new blueprint for career and technical education, released today, would do little to change that.

The additional $1 billion in proposed CTE funding would be directed mostly toward improving existing programs and making them more relevant to the economy's needs; many of these programs provide very little or no actual workplace learning outside the classroom, and instead present a fairly traditional curriculum through the thematic "lens" of a particular field, such as healthcare or engineering. 

To vastly expand high school kids' access to high-quality workplace learning experiences, we would need to build up a robust infrastructure linking businesses and schools, in order to help workplaces become sites for education--and we would have to incent employers to hire students who successfully complete CTE training. (Yes, this is a public-private partnership, but it would also be quite expensive.)

In Switzerland, Finland, and Germany, these types of systems are already in place, and youth unemployment is much lower than it is in the United States. That said, there are real costs to consider in terms of the social ramifications of tracking. Over at The Nation, I discuss the European high school apprenticeship model with Nancy Hoffman of Jobs for the Future, and while this is a pretty wonky interview, I think it's filled with interesting thoughts:

I was fascinated by your idea of providing older teens—especially “the forgotten half” that will not attend a four-year college—with an easier “transition to adulthood.” You describe upper secondary school students in Switzerland working behind the counter in a cell phone shop for school credit, which will certainly horrify a lot of advocates of a college-prep curriculum. Can you talk about why you think this type of “transitional” work is so important?

In Switzerland there are whole stores run by kids, so there are multiple jobs including management, repair, all the technical jobs, plus customer service. If we have a situation in the United States where only about 20 percent of 26-year-olds have any credential, we need something for people to do to get them from 16 to 20 without landing in jail, on welfare or on the street; something that gives them a structure and lets them figure out their potential and interests.

This guy working in customer service at the cell phone shop was going to get a retail certificate in meeting the national standard. And whether he is going to make the leap forward to become a cell phone designer, who knows? But being in a setting where adults have goals, having a structure from age 16 to 19, seems like a much more positive option than what many young adults experience in our country. This Swiss person has an income. He gets paid anywhere from 800 to 1,000 euros per month. He has to demonstrate his competencies in sales. He will have the equivalent of really a year or two of community college, because he was also going to school two days per week.

Read the whole thing.

The Kids These Days, Pornography, and Pleasure

Sasha Grey, via her Twitter feed

A Cuddle Party would exist in my personal ninth circle of hell. Nevertheless, the sex/relationships guru who came up with the concept, Reid Mihalko, made some interesting comments in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday that back up the ideas I was getting at in my critique of Katie Roiphe's Newsweek article on women, work, and S&M. 

In short: Greater interest in sadomasochism has less to do with economic trends and more to do with increased access to porn and erotica online. Mihalko spends a lot of time conducting workshops for college students, and he has found that many of them are exposed to really kinky stuff via the Internet, yet lack basic information on sexual health and pleasure, in part because they are graduates of abstinence-only sex-ed programs or received no sex education at all. He explains:

About 30 to 40 percent of what I do is lecturing at colleges. I do a lecture called "Sex Geek Chic," which is about using peer pressure in a positive way to encourage young adults to get their shit handled. If you don't know your STD status, if you don't know how to use a condom, if you're not savvy with consent and how to navigate your emotions in intimate relationships, you're uncool. ...

There's an interesting dynamic going on among college students. A lot of them grew up with federally funded, abstinence-only education. But they also grew up with the Internet. So for visual learners, especially, they're getting their love-making cues from watching porn.

 Trying to learn how to be a better lover from porn is like trying to learn how to drive from watching "The Fast and the Furious."

Yes. I began high school in 1998, before pornography could be easily streamed online. It could be downloaded, but this took some real time and effort; guys I knew figured out how to do it, but if any of my female friends were experimenting with this in the late nineties and early aughts, we weren't talking about it openly with one another. (We were reading Anais Nin, though, don't get me wrong!) And way back when we were first hitting puberty in the mid-nineties, it was still scandalous and fascinating to get one's hands on an issue of Playboy.

Obviously, everything changed during my first few years of college--not just because my friends and I were getting older, but also because of technology. I don't want to be all old-ladyish at 27, but the last decade has seen a sort of epochal shift in how teenagers and young adults explore their sexuality. It used to be you had to go to an adult movie theater or the adult section of a video rental store or a sex club to watch other people getting it on; you had to actually interact with other human beings in those places and you risked getting "caught" by someone you knew. (A somewhat separate category of consumption would be the semi-ironic screening of retro porn movies on college campuses. Been there! And how prevalent was buying video pornography via the mail back in the day? I don't really know. Commenters?)

Now you can watch other people have sex anytime you want, for free, and in total privacy. This is a really significant development in the history of human sexuality, and I think its effects are both positive (less shyness about sex) and negative (more exposure to unrealistic, staged sex; more sexual outlets other than one's partner; and possibly more body anxiety as a result of comparing oneself to hundreds and thousands of other naked people).

Today it seems like we're having a constant, national conversation about porn and how it is changing our culture. Pornstars like Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey have achieved some modicum of mainstream respectability, and pornography is regularly opined upon in the kinds of publications nobody would be embarassed to read on the subway. Porn has gone mainstream before, as it did in the "Deep Throat" era. But the shock and moral panic is, for the most part, missing these days (pace Rick Santorum); the general assumption is that almost everyone over the age of 12 has seen video porn at least a few times.

In any case, Reid Mihalko is on to something about young people and kink, even though he also seems a bit kooky. I really love the site MakeLoveNotPorn, and would like to especially refer my younger friends and readers to it (make sure to click on the arrows to see all the tips!). A more comprehensive resource on these matters is ScarletTeen.

This is a Real Press Release I Actually Received

Dear flacks,
Please don't ever send me press releases like this. 
xo
Dana

Hi Dana,

It’s been said that women are a mystery. Why do women pee more than men? Why do women’s relationships with men can appear to be driven by “that time of the month”? For as long as women and men have roamed the earth, no one has unraveled the enigma of the female species—until now.

Scientist Patricia Barnes-Svarney offers a fascinating head-to-toe female look at bodies, brains, love, sex and shiny objects in WHY DO WOMEN CRAVE MORE SEX IN THE SUMMER: 112 Questions That Women Keep Asking—and That Keep Everyone Else Guessing (June 5, 2012).

Patricia is available to answer questions (and, of course, the book is available for excerpt and review) such as:

· How can marriage or living together keep the brain young?

· Why do women and men have different senses of humor?

· Why can’t men have PMS just once?

 Patricia Barnes-Svarney was once a geologist and is currently a science writer who has published more than two dozen books, and hundreds of articles in such publications as Popular Science, Air & Space, Astronomy, Discover.com and more. I hope you will give WHY DO WOMEN CRAVE MORE SEX IN THE SUMMER feature consideration. To schedule an interview with Patricia, please be in touch.

Oh…and women crave more sex in the summer because of our heightened sense of smell.

Best,
Melissa

When it Comes to Online Education, Consider the Yoga Analogy

One reads a lot of hype about online education, and one ought to be skeptical.

In this blog post, Matt Yglesias perfectly explains why.

My Thoughts on Katie Roiphe, Sadomasochism, and Feminism

are over at The Nation:

Katie Roiphe has written a link bait-y Newsweek cover story making an interesting claim: that the pop culture appearance of submissive female sexual fantasies, in shows like Lena Dunham's "Girls" and pulp fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey, is somehow a backlash against women's increasing economic power.

I think this is generally wrong. ...

Taboo-breaking sex is culturally prevalent right now not because of macroeconomic trends like the decimation of the male manufacturing sector, but because we live in an age in which all sorts of sexual practices are incredibly visible and talked about. In particular, easy access to online pornography allows people, at a younger age than ever before and with more privacy, to explore non-vanilla sex, whether low-key spanking and restraints or much kinkier stuff. Female-authored erotica and sexualized fan-fiction are burgeoning genres online, as well, and e-readers have made it possible for consumers to purchase and read this material with perfect privacy. This is the world from which Fifty Shades of Grey emerged.

But these desires are as old as the human race; in every century and decade, sadomasochistic erotica has broken into the mainstream, from from de Sade to Swinburne to Anais Nin to Anne Desclos to Anne Rice. Why assume, as Roiphe seems to, that some authoritative brand of feminism was ever supposed to lead to human beings losing their curiosity about power-play during sex, which is, after all, a physical act? 

Read the whole post.

Exciting News About My Book

I am absolutely delighted to announce that today I signed a contract with Doubleday, a division of Random House, to publish my book. The working title is The Teaching Wars: A Political History of America's Most Controversial Profession, and it should be on shelves sometime in 2014. (Yes, this is a long process!)

Since the birth of the public school system, there has always been a contention in American politics that something is wrong with the teacher corps, and that it must be reformed and reconstituted. During the 1830s, Common School reformers like Horace Mann believed too many transient, uncommitted young men were teachers; by the turn of the century, urban good government types were alarmed that 80 percent of teachers were women, whom they considered undereducated and unambitious. The Red Scares of the 1930s and 1950s led to nativists pushing thousands of teachers out of the classroom in retaliation for their involvement in left politics; by the late 1960s, Black Power community control activists were critiquing teachers and their unions from the left, arguing that the people who worked inside public schools were disrespectful of disadvantaged students' cultures, neighborhoods, and families.

My book will track the politics of public school teaching all the way up to the present day, and show how teachers have been at the absolute center of every social movement that rocked the United States, from feminism to organized labor to Civil Rights to the Great Society. Teachers' closeness to these controversial movements has made the profession itself controversial, and this controversy means public school teaching is often maligned in the public discourse. When this discouraging conversation about teaching is paired with the sometimes chaotic atmosphere inside under-resourced, badly managed public schools, the result is that many potentially great educators are dissuaded from choosing teaching and sticking with it. And all this noise detracts attention from the real policy challenge, which is recognizing, rewarding, and scaling holistic teaching excellence, which already exists in at least one or two classrooms in almost every public school across the country, no matter how disadvantaged its student body.

There's way more I'm thinking about, drawn from history, social science, and contemporary reporting inside schools. But I'm going to resist the urge to say more right now, because I really need you to buy the book when it comes out -- and I'm sure the ideas are going to evolve a lot as I write.

I'm very lucky that my editor at Doubleday will be Kris Puopolo, who has worked with a long list of writers I admire, including John Farrell, Megan Stack, Joby Warrick, David Hoffman, and Eugene Robinson.

And while I'm expressing thanks, my agent, Howard Yoon, is a ridiculously talented editor, negotiator, and mentor. The book was born in Sam Freedman's deservedly famous non-fiction book writing class. And this project would not exist without the Schwartz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, the Puffin Fellowship at the Nation Institute, and the Spencer Fellowship at Columbia University.

This means I'll be blogging a bit less over the next 18 months, as I spend most of my time working on the book and doing occasional magazine features. But as always, I love hearing ideas and reading recomendations from readers, so please keep in touch via the comments section.

Have a great weekend.

My Al-Jazeera Appearance on American Jews and Israel

Last Wednesday I went to D.C. to appear on The Stream, a smart Al-Jazeera English show that combines traditional, in-studio interviews with feedback from online social networks. The topic was American Jews' changing views on Israel, the subject of Peter Beinart's new book The Crisis of Zionism, which I reviewed favorably for The Nation.  

I was especially interested in the Skype interview with Saar Szekaly, an artist who appeared on the Israeli version of "Big Brother" as a sort of political, performance art project, in order to raise awareness about what he considers an unjust occupation. On The Stream, Szekaly made the point that the average young Israeli, especially outside of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, has almost no contact with Arabs, Palestinians or Muslims, and that this makes it difficult for many Israelis to understand the depth of Palestinian suffering. Because of the continuing conflict, the security wall, and increased racial and religious segregation, a young Israeli is less likely than her parents or grandparents to have befriended non-Jews. 

This is in remarkable contrast with the experience of young American Jews. Many of us attended racially and culturally diverse colleges, where we encountered the Palestinian narrative and grappled with it. In the post-9/11, Arab Spring era, most of us have far more interest in and contact with the Arab world than our parents and grandparents did in their formative years.

I do wish this segment had included a perspective further to the left, from someone who supports the broader BDS movement, for example, like the writers at Mondoweiss.

an earlier version of this post appears at The Nation

On Bullying, Teen Suicide, and the Rush to Ascribe Blame (Often to Schools)

One of my first assignments as a college student journalist for the Brown Daily Herald was covering the suicide of a sophomore, who killed herself while home for October break. I remember feeling sick to my stomach as I walked to the girl's dormitory to interview her shocked, grieving friends. About 10 of us gathered in the dorm's common area, sitting in a circle. I scribbled notes as the dorm mates described an intelligent, curious, and socially conscious young woman. But when I pressed, somewhat uncomfortably, for details on the victim's emotional state and the recent events in her life, the friends were hesitant to speculate as to why, exactly, she had killed herself.

They were correct to be wary of my questions--and of the entire endeavor of "explaining" a suicide in a 600-word news article. Doctors, social workers, and researchers know that every suicide is unique and incredibly complex; there is rarely one simple reason why a person decides they no longer want to live. In a Slate review of the new documentary "Bully," Emily Bazelon does an excellent job complicating the picture of suicide the media so often paint, noting it's all too easy to blame schools after a tragic death, when, in fact, many suicidal teens are suffering not only from peer bullying, but also from mental illness, learning disabilities, and unsupportive home environments.

"Bully" devotes a lot of time to the story of 17-year old Tyler Long, whose parents--among the film's heroes--are suing his school district in the wake of Tyler's suicide. But as Bazelon reveals, the film never mentions that Tyler was on the Autism spectrum and had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD, nor that he sometimes picked fights at school and that his parents strongly suspected he was considering suicide, but didn't tell his therapist about it. What's more, Tyler's suicide note, addressed to his family, didn't mention bullying at all, and instead focused on their lack of support. "I don’t have a supporting family or friends for that matter," Tyler wrote. "You think I am worthless and pathetic. All I wanted was acceptance and kindness, but no I didn’t get love."

Jesse Green's 2010 New York article about Teddy Graubard, a 17-year old private school student who jumped to his death after being caught cheating, does an excellent job of showing just how complicated it can be to suss out why a teenager with Asperger's syndrome and a history of mental health issues kills himself.

The point is not that we shouldn't feel awfully, terribly sympathetic with suicidal teens and their devastated parents. We should. And of course, schools need to do everything in their power to help students feel safe and supported, both by cracking down on bullying and by referring kids (both the bullied and bully-ers) to in and out-of-school mental health services. The problem is the over-simplification of this issue in the public conversation, which actually makes it more difficult for schools and governments to address teen suicide rationally.

We saw this a lot around the story of Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers freshman who killed himself shortly after his roommate, Dharun Ravi, secretly filmed him making out with an older man. My Nation colleague Richard Kim has been eloquent on this point: The prosecution and conviction of Ravi had less to do with evidence that his actions led directly to Clementi's death, and more to do with moral panic over young people, bullying, technology, and sex. Richard writes:

Among the things blotted out by the trial and media circus is the enduring mystery of why Tyler Clementi committed suicide. He had an older, gay brother with whom he had a close and supportive relationship. His parents' reaction to his sexual orientation was mixed; his father was cool, his mother not so much, but they were still in regular and civil communication. He was clearly vexed about what Dharun Ravi had done, but was discussing what to do about it with a friend, the RA and online message boards. There’s nothing in these records that indicated he was suicidal or even beyond appropriately anxious about a situation to which he himself saw a resolution within reach (a new room). He wasn’t the victim of bullying across campus, and although he was socially shy, he was also somewhat sexually daring. He had four years of college, and a life, to look forward to—and indeed, until his Facebook post announcing his suicide, he was doing just that.

There are all too many cases of gay teenagers whose lives have been made intolerably miserable and who are driven to suicide by the harassment and violence of parents, family, fellow students, teachers and other authority figures. This is not transparently one of them.

In the wake of Clementi's suicide, New Jersey passed aggressive legislation requiring schools to document and address all cases of alleged bullying of students, whether they take place in or outside of school, or online (via Facebook, MySpace, email, etc.). As the Newark Star Ledger reports, the law, which did not include much extra funding for mental health services, has led to complaints from parents that it doesn't do enough, and complaints from school officials that it imposes a heavy paperwork burden without providing much explanation of how, exactly, to define bullying, or support to enable schools to monitor and address it effectively:

Guidance counselors and teachers face a steep challenge in trying to draw the line between conflict and bullying.

One suspected bullying incident in Roxbury involved two kindergartners fighting over crayons, and another stemmed from two intermediate school students excluding a third from their lunch table. The crayons case was ruled not to be bullying, but the lunch-table incident was, said Roxbury anti-bullying coordinator Phyllis Prestamo.

I'm not going to propose a solution to bullying or teen suicide, because I obviously don't think there is any kind of silver bullet, beyond supportive, caring families and schools, and expanding access to affordable, high-quality mental health care. It's just important to note that law suits, hate crime legislation, and education policy cannot be the only avenues for addressing these problems. I really do hope the Affordable Care Act, which will help a lot, is not overturned.

How Do New Teacher Evaluation and Pay Models Affect Students?

The Fordham Institute is a Washington education policy think tank that supports market-driven reforms. It has published a paper lauding the teacher pay system in Harrison District 2, which is one of the most unusual in the country: The Colorado Springs district has abolished seniority and education-based raises entirely, and now pays teachers exclusively according to how much they advance student achievement, as measured through state tests, district tests, student performance tasks, and classroom observations.

The problem is that the paper was written by Harrison's superintendent, Mike Miles, the man who crafted this system and has traveled the country promoting it. So although Fordham also published some interesting critiques of the Harrison plan by education professor Allan Odden, the entire endeavor fails to grapple fully with the discontents of the district's reform agenda. 

In November 2010, while reporting a cover story for The American Prospect, I spent four days visiting Harrision schools and interviewing teachers and administrators there. I found a lot to like. Administrators insist that every adult--including guidance counselors, art teachers, and gym teachers--is focused on helping low-income students reach high academic standards. Principals use a fairly sophisticated classroom observation system to help teachers improve their lesson planning and instructional practices. 

But there was one major aspect of Harrison's system that left many teachers anxious and demoralized: the intense pressure to raise scores on both traditional and experimental standardized tests, accompanied by the administration's deep (indeed, almost evangelical) faith in testing as the best measure of student learning.

In order to collect the data used to measure whether a Harrison teacher is advancing student achivement, the typical Harrison child will experience nine to 10 weeks per school year in which she is sitting for state or district-created testing in some or all of her classes. (If individual Harrison teachers are creating their own classroom assessments--a hallmark of effective teaching--this would be in addition to all the state-mandated and district-mandated testing.) When I was working on my article, the Harrison administration and I calculated that the typical student in the district experiences high-stakes testing at least 25 days per year. 

The high stakes, of course, are generally for the teacher, not for the student. This is typical in the contemporary American school system. But it is important to ask the question of how Harrison's greatly increased amount of testing impacts students' experience of school. Here's how one Harrison elementary school teacher put it, in a conversation with Miles: "It seems we don't have time to teach, because every time we turn around, we're testing." And it's worth noting that reforms that emphasize testing are often so unpopular with college-educated parents in places like Scarsdale and Berkeley that they are tried first on low-income kids in places like Harrison, where parents are less likely to protest. 

In the Fordham paper, Miles admits that assessment has been the biggest challenge for the district, noting the cost and intellectual difficulty of creating tests for every subject and every grade level, including in non-traditional subjects such as art, and for the youngest children. As I observed in 2010, Harrison's first attempt to assess "specials" in the early grades led to some strange test questions, such as requiring students, on a physical education test, to draw a picture of what two hands should look like when they are catching a ball. 

Harrison has worked to improve its assessments since then, but we can't ignore or downplay the impact on students of various new teacher evaluation and pay schemes. This is especially important as states move forward with implementing their Race to the Top plans, which in many cases necessitate a bevy of new student assessments.