Dana Goldstein

Cities are Growing Faster than Suburbs for the First Time Since the 1920s

Over at Slate, I discuss why that could be a good thing for public education -- if policy-makers don't miss the opportunity to lessen the racial and socioeconomic isolation of poor, non-white children.

By the way, every time I write about the benefits of integrated schools, someone asks whether going to school with poor children hurts the academic achievement of middle class kids. It does not, as long as the classroom doesn't "tip" to become majority high-poverty. Rick Kahlenberg discusses some of the research here. On the social benefits of integration for all kids, I recommend the work of Amy Stuart Wells.

On Nora

Is it embarassing to admit I always rediscovered Nora Ephron after breakups? She had survived so many while retaining both her sense of humor and the ability to fall in love all over again. 

I hope those days are behind me -- the break-ups, of course, not the reading of Nora. Because all her work -- the cultural essays, the cheesy rom-coms, the memoirs -- is fundamentally decent and hopeful. Feminism is vitally important, she said, and yet, why can't feminists be nicer to one another? There is nothing cute about lady journalists flirting with their sources. Aging and sickness are terrible, but at the end of the day, there is always dessert. And one should not feel any moral compunction about using a garlic press. 

Speaking of women "having it all," here is what Nora had to say about it in her lovely 1996 Wellesley commencement address:

"This is the season when a clutch of successful women—who have it all —give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can't have it all. Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands. And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today, they won't make the list in ten years—not that you still won't be some of those things, but they won't be the five most important things about you. Which is one of the most delicious things available to women, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It's slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he gave. "When you see a fork in the road," he said, "take it." Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a movie I made, don't laugh this is my life, this is the life many women lead: Two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It's another of the nicest things about being women; we can do that. Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the words, nobody said it was so hard. But it's also incredibly interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an option.

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives."

Read the whole thing. Really, really, really.

On That Baby-in-the-Briefcase Story and the 5 Real Policy Fixes Women (and Men) Need for Work-Life Balance

Can women have it all? Probably not. Can anybody who isn't wildly wealthy "have it all?" I don't think so.

I have long admired Anne-Marie Slaughter as both a foreign policy intellectual and as a role-model for women. But I was filled with annoyance and dread as I read her Atlantic cover story, which, as Jessica Valenti notes, was rather problematically packaged. 

I'm annoyed because the problem of not being able to "have it all" is NOT about "the failures of feminism," but, in Slaughter's case--in which she left the State Department to return to her job as a tenured professor at Princeton--about the particularities of the Washington power structure and the intense expectations on high-up political appointees. I personally know both men and women who've struggled with the lifestyle of an appointee; indeed, no one seems to want to stay in these jobs for more than two years or so. I don't see why it's surprising that appointees often lose steam after a short time, since this kind of job isn't personally sustainable for the vast majority of people of either sex. A small number of individuals want to risk their personal relationships and private happiness for the sake of having an internationally important job. As Slaughter notes, more of the people willing to do so are men than women, because of the history of expectations on men to be breadwinners and women to be caregivers. Here I agree with Slaughter that we need to deploy technology in the service of changing workplace cultures to make them more flexible and family-friendly for both sexes. We should also acknowledge that working in the State Department or White House will always be intense and not suited for all people indefinitely. 

But I also felt dread. As a woman in my late twenties who is, in fact, incredibly privileged, I am sick of being told to approach my personal and professional future with anxiety and foreboding instead of optimism and activism. (Men are never expected to wring their hands in this way, though plenty of men I know struggle with the exact same work-life balance challenges.) I am sick of hearing about the failures of feminism when actually what we need to fix these problems for all families, across socioeconomic distinctions, is more feminism, not less. Such as:

1. Universal early childcare and pre-K

2. Extended learning time at school, not just for more test-prep, but for art, music, sports, and other enrichment and supervision affluent kids get as a matter of course. This would help the school day better conform to parents' work day, which helps women (and men) work and parent (Slaughter also points this out)

3. A higher minimum wage and workplace representation in the service sector (especially helpful for single moms)

4. Paid family leave

5. More enlightened men - men who do chores! According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest time-use study, men still do only about 25 percent of housework, 29 percent of food preparation and clean-up, and 33 percent of childcare.*

I'd like to see college-educated women and men who care about work-life balance devote some of their energy to advocating for the above proposals. We need to raise active support for these ideas among folks who are affluent enough to spend their way out of these problems, through nannies, private schools, housekeepers, and the like. 

*To answer commenter John Romano's question, the BLS stats show men still do more lawn-care, for example, than women. If outdoor and indoor chores are combined, men do about 40 percent of all "household activities." I'd only add that there is a minute-to-minute, day-to-day quality to food preparation, indoor clean-up, and childcare that "outdoor" housework lacks. Hat-tip to Doug Henwood for help analyzing the BLS numbers.

In Memphis, Arts Assessment Through Portfolios

A quick follow-up on my Slate piece about testing in the arts and physical education: The Department of Education reminded me that in this Februrary speech, Arne Duncan highlighted Memphis' pilot arts assessment program, which was created by teachers and uses portfolios of students work -- something more like the highly-regarded Advanced Placement program, and less like the multiple-choice exams and timed performance tasks some other states are trying.

Duncan said:

Evaluation should include classroom observation, peer review, parent, and student feedback. We need to figure out how to evaluate and support teachers in subjects like the arts, foreign languages, and physical education. In many places, teachers themselves are already leading and driving this complex, important work.

Just two weeks ago, I met with Dru Davison, a music teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. Arts teachers there were frustrated because they were being evaluated based only on school-wide performance in math and English. They didn't think that was fair. So Dru convened a group of arts educators to come up with a better evaluation system.

After Dru's committee surveyed arts teachers in Memphis, they decided to develop a blind, peer-review evaluation to assess portfolios of student learning. It has proved enormously popular—so much so that Tennessee is now looking at adopting the system statewide for arts instructors.

Read more about Memphis arts assessment in the Commerical Appeal.

How are Schools Testing in Art, Music, and Gym?

Today at Slate I look at models for testing in art, music, theater, and physical education. Though it may seem absurd to administer standardized tests in these subjects, attempts to do so are proliferating in response to President Obama's Race to the Top program, which asked states and districts to collect student achievement data for every teacher, in every grade level and every subject. 

South Carolina has been a trailblazer here. Their fourth-grade music and arts tests do include "performance tasks;" in music, students perform an 8-beat rhythym, and in art they create a drawing that is graded on whether it depicts depth of field, detail, and texture. But there is also a multiple choice component: 

South Carolina’s fourth-grade music exam, administered via computer, asks: “When singing a melody together with a friend, what dynamic level should you sing? A) Louder than your friend B) Not too loud and not too soft C) Softer than your friend or D) the same as your friend.” (The correct answer is D.) Students are then shown a measure of sheet music and asked to identify which of four electronic recordings matches the notation. The multiple choice section of the state’s fourth grade arts exam shows students a picture, such as one of a vase and a bowl of fruit placed on a chair, and asks them to identify the drawing as either a “landscape,” “portrait,” “non-objective,” or “still-life.” The question is: Does a student’s ability to answer such queries correctly actually indicate arts proficiency? Can such a test measure creativity—or is creativity not the point?

I'm not wildly enthusiastic about the multiple-choice sections of these assessments, which I think could shift teachers' attention from creating art with their students to drilling them on vocabularly and concepts, some of which have a tenuous connection to artistic skill and appreciation. But with political and philanthropic forces aligned in demanding more measurement and data, all the time, requiring schools to assess the arts may be one of the most effective ways to make sure they are still offering arts instruction -- and taking it seriously. Ideally, I'd like to see more holistic asssment systems like the one offered in Advanced Placement Studio Art, in which students don't sit down for a single high-stakes test, but instead collect their artwork over the course of an entire year, and then submit it to expert graders. 

Read the whole piece.

There Has Never Been a Female Zuckerberg, Jobs, or Gates

One of my personal educational regrets is that I never took a computer programming course. So I really enjoyed reporting this Slate piece on what schools and parents can do to hook girls early on the kind of "computational thinking" that can help them succeed in high-tech careers. Currently, women hold fewer than one-third of American computer science jobs.

The effects of this gender gap reach far beyond whether women are building video games or coding Web apps alongside men (and making technology female-friendly—remember the Siri/abortion flap? Or the more recent dust-up over Asus’ leering tweet?). Over the past 10 years, three times as many jobs have been created in STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—than in non-STEM fields, and STEM workers have been far less likely to experience unemployment. Women who work in STEM also earn more than other female workers: an average of $31.11 an hour, compared with $19.26 for non-STEM women. The wage gap between the genders is also smaller in STEM fields, just 14 percent, compared with the 21 percent difference between men’s and women’s earning powers in the rest of the workforce.

Economists expect those trends to continue over the coming decade. And if American women can’t step up to meet the growing demand, our foreign competitors will. Brazil, India, and Malaysia are among the rising powers that have much more successfully prepared girls to enter computer science.

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, calls the fight to attract girls and young women to high-tech careers "our generation’s major frontier for equal outcomes for women." And Sandberg has a counterintuitive suggestion for how to close that gap: “Let your daughters play video games. Encourage your daughters to play video games!” she told me in an interview last fall.

Read the whole piece.