Dana Goldstein

An Activist Teacher, a Struggling School, and the School Closure Movement: A Story from L.A.

In the hallway at Crenshaw High, spring 2011.

On Monday, half the teachers at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles found out they had been dismissed from their jobs as part of a "conversion" process. Among them was Alex Caputo-Pearl, who I first met two years ago when I reported on Crenshaw. Caputo-Pearl was a member of the very first class of Teach for America recruits, in 1990. He has spent two decades teaching in high-poverty L.A.-area schools, first in Compton and then at Crenshaw, where he helped craft a reform plan known as the Extended Learning Cultural Model. ELCM won sizable grants from the Obama administration, the Ford Foundation, and other philanthropies to pursue school improvement driven by the higher expectations of the Common Core, yet built around a curriculum tied to addressing the challenges of the low-income South L.A. neighborhood where Crenshaw resides. Here's an example of some of the work expected from 10th graders enrolled in Crenshaw's Social Justice and Law Academy, the themed small school-within-a-school founded by Caputo-Pearl and some of his colleagues, who have also been dismissed:

For their final project, students had to analyze a data set that included test scores at various schools; neighborhood income levels; school truancy rates; and incarceration rates.

In math, students graphed the relationship between income and social opportunity in various south L.A. neighborhoods. In social studies, they read conservative and liberal proposals for school reform and practiced citing data in their own written arguments about how to improve education. In science, students designed experiments that could test policy hypotheses about how to improve education. And in English class, they read Our America, a work of narrative non-fiction about life in the Ida B. Wells housing projects on the South Side of Chicago.

In addition, some Crenshaw students were placed in paid community-service internships. Others worked with local colleges to conduct research on South L.A. Click here to read more about the research that backs this reform vision.

Teachers like Caputo-Pearl led the turnaround work at Crenshaw, in part because the school has seen massive management turnover -- over 30 different administrators in seven years. Test scores remain below district averages, though they have shown some growth, especially for African American and disabled students. I've reported here on some of the unique demographic challenges Crenshaw faces, including higher-than-average numbers of students living in foster care.

Yet despite hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal and philanthropic support for the Extended Learning Cultural Model, L.A. Superintendent John Deasy announced in November that Crenshaw's work would be halted and the school would be reconstituted as a magnet, with a focus on expanding Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate offerings. Teachers were required to reapply to their jobs. The Social Justice and Law Academy will be done away with; three new magnet programs will be organized around the arts, entrepreneurship, and STEM - science, technology, engineering, and math. 

Cresnhaw's union chair, Cathy Garcia, wrote in a letter to supporters that the district seems to have targeted for dismissal Caputo-Pearl and other teachers who led the Social Justice and Law Academy. A district spokesperson responded, "Students, parents, alumni and community members helped to create the criteria used during the selection process for candidates and educational programs. The district, as well as the school’s staff, believe the changes will establish rigorous academics, allowing all Crenshaw students to graduate college- and career-ready.”  

According to Crenshaw sources who have seen a list of dismissed teachers, 21 of the 33 are African American, and 27 have over 10 years of experience. These teachers will be placed into a candidate pool and will be allowed to apply for open positions at other schools. But for educators who have dedicated their careers to improving Crenshaw, and who have deep well-springs of support among parents and students, the dismissals are devastating. 

This isn't the first time the district has attempted to remove Caputo-Pearl, an outspoken activist, from Crenshaw. In 2006, as he was organizing neighborhood parents to fight for better school resources, such as up-to-date computers, he was forcibly transfered to a more affluent school across town. Parents complained and he was eventually reinstated. Caputo-Pearl is part of a dissident, left caucus within the L.A. teachers' union, and he has written in the New York Times about why he has become a critic of Teach for America. He opposes tying teacher evaluation and pay to student test scores, and is critical of the expansion of the charter school sector.

He says his next step is advocating for the Crenshaw students who will be affected by the school's reorganization. Those children will not be automatically re-enrolled in one of the new magnet schools inside the Crenshaw building; instead, they or their parents will need to fill out a "Choices" application, which looks like this. This barrier can be a signfiicant one for children in foster care, or whose parents are not aware of what the process entails. Many students "feel unsure of what school they will be at next year," Caputo-Pearl said. "Our immediate priority has to be ensuring all students have the right to a neighborhood school in the Crenshaw area, and the right to equitable treatment at that school."

What's happening at Crenshaw is representative of the death of the large, urban comprehensive high school all across the country. In New York, research from the New School suggests that Mayor Bloomberg's efforts to break up large, underperforming high schools have, in fact, led to the founding of higher-quality schools. The problem is that students whose schools close may not end up enrolled in those better schools; instead, a significant number of them will be enrolled by default in the nearest large high school that is still open, which itself has extremely low test scores. That school, in turn, will eventually be shut down, creating what the New School researchers call a "domino effect," in which the most disadvantaged teenagers are shuttled from failing school to failing school, while those with more active, involved parents win spots at new schools. 

In Chicago, only 6 percent of students whose schools are shut down end up enrolled in a school within the top achievement quartile, and 40 percent of students from closed schools ended up at schools on academic probation. 

If smaller, themed schools are better for kids -- and there is significant evidence they are -- the question then becomes, how can districts transition to such a system without leaving behind those students who most need help? Crenshaw was already pursuing a themed school-within-a-school reform plan, and it is discouraging, I think, that the Social Justice and Law Academy, whose work was politically and intellectually challenging, will be discontinued, with its leaders dispersed. 

After the jump, I am posting a statement from Alex Caputo-Pearl, as well as the letter from union reps Cathy Garcia and Joseph Zeccola.

Cracks in the Common Core Coalition: On the Right, Left, and Now in the Center, Too

In a speech in Manhattan this morning, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called for a "moratorium" on high stakes attached to Common Core tests. She complained that in New York state, students sat for new tests this spring, before schools received promised new curriculum materials from the city and state, which are expected to come in the fall. A multi-state survey of AFT members found that most believe they have not received adequate professional development or instructional materials aligned to the new standards.

Weingarten said Common Core-driven tests like the ones rolled out this month in New York, created by the Pearson company, should not yet count toward student graduation requirements, and that students' scores on these exams should not yet be weighed as part of their teachers' evaluations. (In New York, students' state test scores are set to count for 20 percent of a teacher's rating.) And she noted that while the federal government has spent $350 million to help fund the development of Common Core tests, it has not devoted any specific funding streams to teacher training on how to use the new standards in the classroom. She said:

I am proposing that states and districts work with educators to develop clear tasks and a clear timeline to put in place the crucial elements of Common Core implementation. And until then, the tests should be decoupled from decisions that could unfairly hurt students, schools and teachers.

When scores drop as sharply as they’re expected to, it will send an inexcusable message to parents: Your child is far from meeting the standards. And she needs to meet the standards to get into college. But we don’t have a plan, and nobody’s accountable for getting her there. Except for the teacher, who hasn’t been trained. And you can just imagine how that teacher feels. ...

Let me be clear about what this moratorium is and isn’t: We aren’t saying students shouldn’t be assessed. We aren’t saying teachers shouldn’t be evaluated. We’re not saying that there shouldn’t be standardized tests. We’re talking about a moratorium on consequences in these transitional years.

We're currently seeing cracks in the incredibly broad coalition -- made up of teachers' unions, test manufacturers, the vast majority of states, and standards and accountability hawks -- that originally came together in 2009 to design the Common Core. The Common Core has always been controversial on the margins. On the left, activist parents charge that standardized testing degrades the curriculum. On the right, opposition from senators like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, as well as from Republican state legislators, has centered around a sort of purposeful misreading of the federal government's involvement in the Core. While it's true the Obama administration, through Race to the Top, provided financial incentives to states that adoped the Core, the Department of Education had nothing to do with writing the standards themselves, a process initiated by the National Governors' Association and a group of state school superintendents. Those folks hired the consulting group Student Achievement Partners to write the standards, and in doing so, SAP consulted with the unions, teachers, academic experts, and testing companies. Much of the funding came from private philanthropy. 

What's more problematic to implementation are the differences emerging between strong supporters of the Core on the center-right and center-left. Since states, districts, and schools have a lot of flexibility in how they implement the standards -- what specific novels to assign, which math textbooks to use -- standardized testing was always meant to be the main way teachers would be pressured to adopt the Core faithfully. Weingarten is urging a slower approach to accountability, asking that teachers and students have time to adjust to the higher expectations over the course of multiple years. But other Common Core fans, like Jeb Bush, gladly accept the very prospect Weingarten resists: that many, many more children will "fail" Core-aligned tests. As I noted last week, both Bush and one of the Core's leading architects, David Coleman, told me last year that until students, parents, and teachers realize where they stand against these higher expectations, as measured by tests, it will be impossible to move the country forward on school improvement more broadly.

This repesents a deep divide. Will disappointing, high-stakes results on Common Core tests scare us into meaningful school reform? Or should the process be slower, more holistic, and less high pressure? 

A third possibility -- and probably the most likely one, judging from the history of American education reform -- is that states will set cut scores for passing these tests lower, in order to insulate more students from accountability. Meanwhile, teachers will continue to implement the Core in an uneven way, adjusting to the materials and professional development they have personally received, which varies greatly from school to school.

Test Resentment and the Politics of the Common Core

There is a growing national movement to opt one's children out of public school standardized tests, and much of its energy is flowing out of New York state, which this week debuted Common Core-aligned exams in English, created by the Pearson corporation. These tests ask much more challenging free response and essay questions than students are accustomed to, and were rolled out before many schools and teachers received all the new curriculum materials and professional development opportunities promised as part of the the Common Core movement toward higher, nationally-shared academic standards. 

New York media is filled with disgruntled parents and teachers complaining that kids simply weren't ready for these changes, and that the tests caused anxiety and fear. But the decision to move quickly was a deliberate one on the part of state policy-makers; since the exams are tied to teacher evaluations and high school graduation requirements, rolling them out sends a strong message that officials expect instruction to improve now. The risk is that the Common Core movement will lose political support as families and schools receive low test scores, and that states like New York will grade the exams on such a steep curve that their purpose--raising expectations--will be watered down. I wrote about these risks last year in my Atlantic profile of David Coleman, one of the Core's architects, and now the president of the College Board:

Perhaps the deepest political obstacle to raising academic standards for all students is that, at least initially, large majorities of those students will likely fail. Most experts believe that faithfully testing the Common Core standards would result in only a small minority of American children being declared “on track” for college or a career. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a critic of teachers unions and supporter of online learning, is a hero in many education-reform circles. He is also one of the Common Core’s most vocal Republican champions. Like the pundits who argue that banks should have been allowed to fail in 2008, as a cautionary tale for world markets, Bush believes that many children, teachers, and schools may have to be declared “failing” before the public understands the urgency of school reform.

“The big fight will be coming in 2014, when we begin to implement and assess these standards,” Bush told me. “If a third are ready, what will the response of states be then? Will they do what they historically have done, which is to pull back and say ‘Oh my God, that’s not fair, excuse, excuse, excuse’? Or will they accept responsibility to say ‘That’s the fact, that’s where we are now. Maybe 40 percent of our kids are ready if we benchmark them against the world’?”

Bush’s tough-love position is easy for a former politician to take, but less so for a current elected official. After all, no governor or legislator wants to preside over plummeting test scores. Pressure to roll back the Common Core or to relax the tests may be intense.

Coleman admits that the Core will probably lead to “a short-term reduction in [test] scores,” but he seems to have made peace with this reality as a necessary hardship on the road to his academic utopia.

States have a history of lowering cut scores or making tests easier when large numbers of students--especially middle-class, suburban students--fail. In fact, it happened just last spring in Jeb Bush's Florida, which had created new, more challenging writing tests. Right now, states like New York and Illinois are in a period of education policy idealism, raising standards and warning that achievement scores might decrease. But we don't yet know how much fortitude politicians associated with education reform, like Gov. Andrew Cuomo, will have when they are confronted with growing parental protest and potentially plummeting scores. 

From Carnegie to Gates

I'm excited about my new piece in Smithsonian, about the history of corporate and philanthropic influence over American public schools. It summarizes some of the research I've done for my upcoming book: 

During the twentieth century, private interests drove a number of cyclical, sometimes conflicting education reform movements. From Chicago, Jane Addams built broad, elite support for an agenda of ending child labor and increasing the years of mandatory schooling. Across the country, politicians and school administrators were inspired by the ideas of the management guru Frederick Winslow Taylor, and implemented complex new evaluation systems to rank and supposedly improve the work of teachers. One of the longest-lasting and historically fraught education reform movements was ability tracking tied to IQ tests, a so-called “social efficiency” agenda that consigned many non-white and working class students, as well as some middle-class girls, to courses in sewing, cooking, personal finance and “current events.” Testing companies marketed “intelligence” assessments later revealed to measure not the innate capacity to learn, but simply the quality of a student’s previous education. A 1932 survey of 150 school districts found three-quarters used IQ exams to assign students to different academic tracks.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights movement recast education in terms of equality: equal access to good schools, effective teachers and a curriculum with the ability to engage all children and hold them to high standards. Yet when the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education proved incredibly divisive, even in the black community, the national school reform agenda fractured.

Read the whole piece.

 

Does It Matter When Education Reformers and Activists Send Their Own Kids to Private School?

The scandal-prone Michelle Rhee does it. So does Leonie Haimson, the combative leader of the advocacy groups Class Size Matters, Parents Across America, and NYC Kids PAC, which oppose almost all the ideas Rhee supports, like increased standardized testing, teacher pay tied to test scores, and larger class sizes for effective teachers.

Many lefty education writers have criticized Rhee for enrolling one of her daughters in the exclusive Harpeth Hall girls' school in Nashville, which boasts of tiny class sizes and a focus on critical thinking and the arts. But Haimson says her own decision to send her youngest child to a private high school is different, because unlike Rhee, she believes all children, especially the poor, should benefit from the small classes and progressive pedagogy many private schools provide. Indeed, Haimson has devoted her life to this cause, and isn't planning on stopping her activism simply because her own child is now enrolled in private schoool.

I am a product of socioeconomically diverse public schools and have written about why opting-out of public schooling -- or any kind of schooling! -- can have negative affects on both individuals and the common good. I've also reported on the choices prominent education personalities make on where to send their own kids to school, and like this media ethicist, I think it's a completely legitmate topic for journalists to cover.

But unlike Haimson, I'm not sure if it's fair to play gotchya! with Rhee, or any other public figure, on this question, as opposed to simply speaking and writing honestly about what personal choices can tell us about the constraints on American public schools. (Geoff Decker's reporting on Haimson at GothamSchools is an absolutely wonderful example.) We don't know anything about Rhee's daughter or Haimson's child; whether they have special academic or behavioral needs, for example. What's more, while I'm on the record as a years-long skeptic of some of Rhee's favored policies, I'm not sure if it is fair to accuse her of hypocrisy. Though it is rarely discussed openly, the contemporary standards-and-accountability school reform movement is based, in part, on the assumption that disadvantaged children need more structure, stricter discipline, and more back-to-basics instruction than many affluent kids do, in order to catch up academically and make up for some of the poverty-related turbulence in some poor children's home lives. If you're interested in reading about this way of thinking, check out Paul Tough's Whatever it Takes, about the Harlem Children's Zone, and Jay Matthews' Work Hard, Be Nice, about the KIPP charter schools. Rhee and her ex-husband, Tennessee Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman, are generally associated with this ideology.

On the other hand, Rhee has admitted that the fastest way to improve a city's public schools would be to require every single child within district limits to enroll in them, which would bring engaged, politically savvy parents into the system. Instead, she and Huffman are choosing to opt out, and it's worth asking them more about it. Do they believe other people's children will benefit from a different type of education than their daughter needs? Why? Or are they simply unwilling to enroll their child in a school system that they do not -- at least not yet -- consider up to par for any child? Do they believe their own privileged daughter's educational and life outcomes would be hindered by attending school alongside less privileged peers? If so, why? These types of frank conversations happen far too rarely.  

Feminism, Child Development, and the Legacy of Shulamith Firestone

Like a lot of other people, I was riveted by Susan Faludi's New Yorker report on the work, life, and death of Shulamith Firestone, a Second Wave feminist theoretician and organizer whose name I knew, but whose legacy I was barely cognisant of. Faludi deals beautifully with Firestone's repressive Orthodox Jewish upbringing, her struggle with schizophrenia and social isolation, and the unfinished business of her particular brand of radical feminism, which declared that "pregnancy is barbaric" and childbirth is like "shitting a pumpkin." Those notions are shocking and perhaps ridiculous, but I nevertheless found insight in Firestone's observation -- decades before Judith Warner's Perfect Madness and Elisabeth Badinter's The Conflict -- that the increasing fetishization of childhood in the developed world has brought with it an unrealistic set of burdens on mothers, just as women finally earned the right to full lives beyond the domestic sphere. Describing Firestone's classic, The Dialectic of Sex, Faludi writes:

The book’s longest chapter, “Down with Childhood,” chronicled the ways that children’s lives had become constrained and regulated in modern society. “With the increase and exaggeration of children’s dependence, woman’s bondage to motherhood was also extended to its limits,” Firestone wrote. “Women and children were now in the same lousy boat.” The argument drew the appreciation of one notable feminist, which must have pleased Firestone. Simone de Beauvoir told Ms. that only Firestone “has suggested something new,” noting how the book “associates Women’s Liberation with children’s liberation.”

In an unforgiving economy with increasing social stratification, affluent Americans, unlike many European parents, obsess about providing their kids with the sorts of intellectually stimulating, resume-building experiences that supposedly prepare one for the rigors of meritocracy. The hours spent signing children up for activities, taking them there, and providing them with educational play and conversation at home are borne disproportionately by women, since mothers still do over twice as much childcare as fathers. And the burden of mothering expectations has gotten heavier since Firestone was writing: While both men and women now work more hours outside the home and do more childcare than they did at mid-century, mothers still spend far more time on domestic responsibilities than fathers do.

Yet today, one ought to balance this critique with evidence from contemporary child development research, which suggests that some of the practices of preening parents, such as constant "conversation" with even the smallest babies, really do yield cognitive and academic gains that last a lifetime. At the Times, Tina Rosenberg has a fascinating report on Talk Providence, a new program that aims to teach low-income mothers about the benefits of early vocabulary building through regular parental speaking to babies, and conversing back and forth with toddlers and older kids. It's important, however, to balance these expectations for mothers with continued support for childcare and school programs that serve the neediest kids -- hence, President Obama's new pre-K proposal. I'm skeptical of the claim, made by some vocabulary researchers, that changing parental conversational practices can alone erase socioeconomic achievement gaps. Vocabularly can't make up for the lack of social capital that prevents many poor children from enrolling in the most effective schools and extracurricular activities, or from eating a nutritional diet or living in adequate housing. 

On the Atlanta Cheating Scandal

I've written a new explainer for Slate on the indictments of 35 Atlanta educators for inflating students' test scores: What does it tell us about national education reform? For previous coverage of my thoughts on Atlanta and standardized test-based accountability, see this 2011 piece.

And here is my Martin Bashir segment on the same topic, from yesterday:

 

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Realistic Expectations for New Teacher Evaluation Systems

I'm seeing some off-the-mark responses to the news--first reported by Education Week's Stephen Sawchuck, and then picked up by the New York Times--that many of the new, high-stakes teacher evaluation systems are rating only 2-6 percent of teachers ineffective. This is being greeted by some supporters of numbers-driven teacher reform as a disappointment, while skeptics, like American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, are suggesting this proves the vast majority of teachers are great performers, after all. 

I don't think we can jump to either conclusion. First of all, the goal of these systems is not necessarily to fire large numbers of teachers, it is to help them improve their practice, since previously, most American educators received little constructive feedback on their work. Most new evaluation plans include more classroom observations, which means teachers are not just receiving number ratings, but actual notes and suggestions on their instruction. Of course, whether that feedback is helpful or useless depends entirely on the quality of the administrator.

Contra Nicholas Beaudrot, it's not true that education reformers have a "hazy" idea of how many bad teachers they'd like to see lose their jobs after this overhaul. I've asked a number of prominent accountability hawks that question over the past six years and the answer I've heard most frequently is "5 to 10 percent." As Matthew DiCarlo explains, that estimate is culled from the research of the ubiquitous Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, and by that standard, these evaluation systems are already half way to where they are intended to be, a reasonable outcome for something so new.

That said, I'm still quite skeptical that the new evaluation plans will transfrom the teaching profession, in part because of the lessons from history I'm learning as I research my book. For over a century, school reformers have been dissatisfied with how teachers are evaluated, yet overhauling rating systems has not, historically, been an effective way to improve educational outcomes for kids. This is like hoping to lose weight by buying a new, high-tech scale, without changing your diet or exercise routines.

During the late nineteenth century, the New York City schools used an "excellent-good-fair-bad" rating system for teachers. When reformer William Maxwell became superintendent in 1898, he complained that 99.5 percent of teachers were rated "good" and instituted a plan to grade teachers on an A-D scale instead. The city distributed intricate tables for judging teachers’ output. First, teachers would be measured by evidence of their students’ learning, which could be demonstrated through test scores or examples of children’s essays, penmanship, and drawings. Teachers would also be judged on their personal characteristics and given numeric ratings in largely subjective categories, such as “obedience,” “honesty of work,” “dress,” “voice,” and “force of character.” A teacher’s command of classroom discipline could be assessed by counting the number of students who were late or unruly, and even by timing the number of seconds and minutes it took for a teacher to distribute or collect worksheets. 

By the late teens, the vast majorty of teachers were earning perennial ratings of B+, the exact sort of slightly-better-than-average rating that had predominated under the previous plan. In prominent education journals, dissident principals like Alexander Fichlander, a Brooklyn leftist, explained that the paperwork involved with implementing the system was so burdensome that administrators rushed through it; what's more, there was little incentive to spend a lot of time rating teachers if the district provided no extra funding or training to those who needed to improve. Additionally, when managers find it is difficult to replace low-performing teachers with workers who are more effective--another likely outcome--they may decide evaluation systems are not worth their time.

Because of these problems, by mid-century, detailed evaluation systems were being replaced by simpler "satisfactory-unsatisfactory" plans, which today are being replaced by value-added measurement and frequent observation notes. But if the new evaluation systems end up being more about paperwork than about improving practice, then they, too, will fail to improve instruction and will lose their political palatibility.

On "Innovation" in Social Policy, and "Solutionism" in Education

The following was written by the Princeton sociologist Melvin Tumin, in 1973. Tumin was thinking about the Teacher Corps, a Great Society program that was a sort of lefty precursor to Teach for America, in which intern teachers arrived in disadvantaged schools eager to close achievement gaps and -- because it was the sixties -- also build racial pride, improve student self-esteem, and overhaul the curriculum to better reflect African American history and culture. Most Teacher Corps interns grew frustrated by the slow pace of change within schools; most veteran educators were suspcious of the interns' intentions and ideology. As Tumin points out, this inevitable culture clash is a key finding of research in organizational theory, and helps explain why it is so difficult for small social programs to impact bureaucracies:

...one of the most important factors that made the Program difficult to implement was that it could not promise the members of agencies and institutions whose cooperation was needed that it would be worth their while. Innovation is a charming word, beguiling and rousing. But it is like other terms such as relevance, concern, sensitivity. One cannot be against these on principle. But they are almost always privately read as warning signs that there is trouble ahead for those who are fulfilling their accustomed routines. Moreover, since most innovation efforts fail sooner or later, wise masters of ongoing enterprises have learned to live and wait until such innovations speed themselves to their ultimate demise. While not many other earthly travails can be safely waited out, with any hope of relief, innovative programs do have that special quality of a high probability of failure, so that “this too shall pass” is a reasonably sound prediction about most of them. 

I read this just after I returned from SXSWedu, and it seemed particularly relevant to the (almost total lack of) dialogue between social entrepreneurs who want to use software to disrupt traditional classroom practices in ways that are supposed to benefit poor children, and the majority of teachers and administrators who might be enthusiastic about specific technologies, but who simply do not see the lack of technology as the key barrier preventing schools from better serving all students. Educators are more likely to point to teacher quality, or to the content of the curriculum, or to factors stemming from the home and family. And sure, technology may be able to address many of these challenges. Yet tech-hypers lose credibility when they ignore the fact that inequalities outside the realm of access to technology remain the primary drivers of disparate educational outcomes.

Evgeny Morozov's recent essay on technological "solutionism" is certainly applicable to the tendency to mistake the technocratic measurement of educational problems, using software, as the very same thing as coming up with solutions to those problems. It should be obvious--yet at SWSWedu, it rarely was--that the quantification of inequality, whether in student achievement scores or ratings of teacher effectiveness, is only a jumping off point for complex political, policy, and social debates over how to use such data, and whether and how to close achievement gaps. The collection of "Big Data" does not, in and of itself, guarantee the formulation of effective solutions to problems.

Is Working From Home a Feminist Issue?

I've worked in offices for small magazines, large media companies, and think tanks. So I know there's a lot about office culture that sucks: useless meetings, crackberries that ruin your precious out-of-the-office hours, and sometimes an assumption that whoever stays latest or arrives earliest is working hardest. In New York, there's competitive dressing. In DC, there are old-school dress codes, as if everyone were about to meet with a senator, any minute now! A lot of this is absurd. I'm a huge believer in flex time for office workers. There's nothing about the hours 9-7 that make them especially productive; a lot of us get more done in the evenings, or while fighting insomnia, or at sunrise. And the occasional guilt-free day of working from home is priceless: the quiet, the pajamas, the home-cooked lunch. For new parents, people with chronic health conditions, or people who serve as caretakers for sick or elderly relatives, having the ability to work from home at least some of the time can mean the difference between being able to hold down a job and being forced to quit. 

So I sympathize with those who are outraged over Marissa Mayer's decision to put the kibosh on work-from-home arrangements at Yahoo. It's insulting to employees to suggest that the only legitimate reason to stay home is "for the cable guy," and Mayer does sound like kind of a nightmare boss, counting the cars in the corporate parking lot at 5 pm. Because women tend to disproportionately handle child care and other domestic responsibilities, it is very likely that female employees will be especially affected by Yahoo's policy change. 

All that said, I'm not sure working from home is feminist nirvana.

I'm a freelance writer -- a really lucky one, with a book project, an interesting editorial consulting gig, and frequent magazine assignments. I love what I do. But working from home is by far the hardest and least enjoyable part of my professional life. For one thing, it's lonely, isolating, and, at least in my case, challenging for my physical and emotional health. I often get so caught up in my indoor responsibilities that I forget to get fresh air, put on real clothing, take a walk, or talk to other human beings. At The Awl, Ken Layne pretty much nails what this can feel like. 

And here's the thing. For a woman, being stuck inside "the home" all day--a space traditionally coded as female, one that many women hold themselves to high standards to care for--can be especially stultifying. Here are some of the things I can do, in my home, when I'm supposed to be writing my book: Laundry. Emptying the dishwasher. Booking a hotel reservation for a friend's wedding. Cleaning the toilet. Shopping for and preparing a healthy, low-carb, high-protein dinner for my boyfriend and me. (This morning, I've already done several of these chores, and it's only 11 am.)

No one is forcing me to take sole responsibility for these tasks. If I don't do them when I'm "working from home," they will still get done. My boyfriend and I will split them up, or do them together. But here's the thing: It's really hard for me to be at home and ignore my domestic to-do list. I have a voice in my head telling me that until my apartment is neat, clean, and stocked with fresh food, it's perfectly okay to procrastinate on my real jobs, the ones for which I get paid: reporting, writing, and editing. After nearly three years of freelancing, I've learned that I shouldn't work from home more than one or two days per week. I now commute from Brooklyn into "the city" almost every morning, to work at the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. Yes: I voluntarily spend my days in midtown Manhattan, eat lunch at the ubiquitous Hale & Hearty Soups, and dodge tourists in the subway.

Granted, I don't have children yet. And if I'm still freelancing when I do, I know my flexible schedule will make parenthood much easier. Yet I have many freelancer female colleagues, a few years older than me, who admit that a big professional challenge is learning to turn off their mom selves and simply get to work (luckily, work they love). They are some of the people who helped me realize that even if you "work from home," you have to work outside your home often, and if that means scrimping for a babysitter, a coworking space, or a $104 monthy Metrocard, it's totally worth it, if you're privileged enough to be able to afford it. 

So here's my tentative conclusion. Flex-time is a feminist issue. Working from home full time? Maybe not so much. And here are some very definite feminist issues: Access to high-quality, affordable childcare. Paid sick leave, maternity leave, and paternity leave. Male partners who pull their weight at home.