Dana Goldstein

In Defense of Daisy

Ah, Daisy -- the glamorous, self-absorbed cipher at the center of The Great Gatsby. She has come in for a lot of hate from critics of the book and film. Richard Brody judges actress Carey Mulligan "overmatched by the part." Ester Bloom says Daisy is "a drip." Critisizing Fitzgerald's novel, Kathryn Schulz argues the Daisy/Gatsby/Tom love triangle is "psychologically vacant." She accuses the author of making a "travesty of his female characters--single parenthesis every one, thoughtless and thin," thus ignoring the vibrant women's movement of the 1920s. 

I don't think so. Daisy isn't awful, she is trapped and scared -- and that is how Mulligan plays her, timidly. Raised a debutante in Louisville, she is expected to marry as a teenager, and she does, to the alcoholic, racist, chronically unfaithful Tom Buchanan. Daisy hasn't had the chance to go to college, or travel the world in the army, as the male characters have. She has a baby before she becomes an adult, and thus is hardly prepared to be an attentive mother. If there are opportunities out there for Daisy to live a more exciting, fulfilling life, she is only dimly aware of them. Is it any wonder she idealizes her first, adolescent romance, with a sweet young officer? Her brief affair with Gatsy is probably one of the only things Daisy has ever done fully by choice. Look at her wrists, bound by diamond cuffs. She is shackled by her own privilege. When she finds out her newborn is a girl, she can only hope the child will turn out to be "a beautiful little fool." Why? Because Daisy is smart enough to know how awful her predicament is, as an old money daughter and wife with few culturally acceptable options for independence. It would be easier, she thinks, if her own daughter could be simple-mided; if she could accept the role she was born into without coming to understand its severe unfairness. There's a reason why, in the film, director Baz Luhrman keeps drawing our attention to Daisy's massive diamond engagement ring. She has been acquired by Tom and is weighed down by men's expectations for her. Even Gatsby is in love with a chimera Daisy more than the real woman; as he tells Nick toward the end of the book/film, he wants her because she has always been "a nice girl;" the kind of girl who could help him his advance his climb from poverty into the upper class. 

Some of the most powerful feminist depictions in art are the ones that show us how bleak life was for women before feminism, or for women who couldn't or didn't embrace feminist ideas. (Think: Anna from Anna Karenina or Lily Bart from House of Mirth. Even Betty from "Mad Men.") By design, all the characters in The Great Gatsby, male or female, are sketches; archetypes of the most cynical, materialistic slice of a cynical, materialistic, lost generation. Nick Carraway could be any Ivy Leaguer with writerly pretentions who gets a job on Wall Street. But I've always found Jordan, Nick's unrealized love interest and Daisy's best friend, one of the more intriguing people in Gatsby. She is a golf star -- a famous female athlete! Jordan, with her boyish name, is optimistic and fun-loving; unlike that pitiable, delicate flower, Daisy, Jordan has a life.

In the end, when Daisy runs away with her brutish husband, there is little question that she has made the "right" choice. Marrying a gangster who loves her for her respectability wouldn't have solved her problems. Poor Daisy. She might be a bit of "a drip," but it's not because she's bad at heart. She is the representation of every woman entrapped by beauty, wealth, and femininity. She is a tragic, utterly conventional, child bride. 

Joseph Massad's Stunningly Ignorant Al-Jazeera Essay on Zionism and Anti-Semitism

I've been excited about Al Jazeera's expansion in the U.S. market, but this poorly-written, rambling essay by Columbia professor Joseph Massad, calling Zionists anti-Semitic, is as bad as its critics allege. Yes: The Israeli government's repeated claim to speak on behalf of all Jews, worldwide, is deeply problematic, especially given Israel's deplorable ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands. But Massad takes this observation and pads it with ignorant misreadings of history and religious belief, as well as a breezy, ahistoric, and anti-Semitic conflation of Zionism with Nazism. I have neither the time nor the inclination to rebut the piece point by point, but here are a few obvious flaws:

1. Massad claims the Jewish longing for Israel dates back only to the 18th century rise of Protestant nationalism in Europe. Hogwash. Much of the Jewish liturgy, dating back two milennia, is built around mourning for the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and the hope that we will congregate in the Holy Land in a figurative "next year," returning there permanently after the coming of the Messiah.

2. Massad points out that both Zionists and Christian anti-Semites believed Jews did not belong in Europe. Does it follow that Zionists are as anti-Semitic as Nazis were, as Massad shockingly claims? Of course not. Many disempowered people have created separatist movements. In the American context, think of black nationalism and separatism. Were Marus Garvey or Amiri Baraka adherents of the same ideology as 19th century "Back to Africa" whites, like Lyman Beecher? No. Zora Neale Hurston opposed Brown v. Board of Education, not because she felt blacks were inferior to whites and thus should attend separate schools, but because she believed integration would damage "the self-respect of my people" by forcing them to closely associate with racists. 

3. Massad writes that almost all those Jews who opposed or were skeptical of Zionism were killed during the Holocaust, leaving a monolithic group of rabidly Zionist (and also anti-Semitic?) Jews. In fact, a number of prominent Jews and Jewish organizations remained critical of Zionism after the war; Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt obviously come to mind. In his book The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart discusses how organized American Jewry was actually rather slow to embrace Zionism as a central cause. Massad also asserts that "Orthodox and Reform Jews, Socialist and Communist Jews, cosmopolitan and Yiddishkeit cultural Jews" were opponents of Zionism. In fact, members of all the aforementioned groups were sometimes strongly Zionist, whether they lived in Europe, Palestine, or the United States. For example, many of the earliest Zionist Jewish settlers in Palestine came from European cities and were socialists. They created kibbutzim to reconnect Jews to the land in a communiatarian way. 

Al-Jazeera can do better.

Att. Jason Richwine: You're Not the First Guy to (Wrongly) Believe Immigrants are Dumb

It turns out that the deliciously-named Jason Richwine, author of an anti-immigration reform paper from the Heritage Foundation, is also the author of a 2009 Harvard public policy dissertation called "IQ and Immigration Policy," which claims that because Latinos are genetically intellectually inferior to whites and Asians, their immigration to the U.S. should be tightly restricted. Richwine has also contributed to a white nationalist website called AlternativeRight.com. 

The human brain remains, in many crucial aspects, a mystery to science. So what is IQ? It is a measure of the capacity to learn in the linear fashion prized by Western culture, and we know that it is partially determined by genetics. Yet in the life of the average, individual human, those "innate" genes are vastly, vastly overpowered by the effects of environment: decent nutrition; an emotionally stable, vocabulary-rich home life; physically and emotionally attentive parents; good schools and teachers. Those factors tend to be in shorter supply among high-poverty populations. Claiming that such populations are genetically inferior ignores about a century of research and writing on the malleability of IQ and the proper uses of intelligence assessments.

Alfred Binet, the French psychologist who invented IQ testing, made quite clear that his exams could not draw conclusions about the difference in innate ability between two individuals from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Little has changed. In 1995, after the tempest around Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman summarized what is known about intelligence, race, class, and heritability. The consensus is that IQ can help distinguish between the capacities of "within-group" individuals--for example, two upper-middle class American Jewish girls who attended good public schools and then Brown University. However:

1. IQ supremacists claim IQ is a measure of innate ability. Yet IQ tests are actually achievement exams, which, in Heckman's words, can be "manipulated by educational interventions." If a child is asked during an IQ assessment to memorize and repeat a long string of numbers, she will do a better job if she has an excellent math teacher or if her dad helps her with her math homework at night -- if, in other words, she has had the opportunity to gain confidence around numbers.

2. If two race-similar individuals are compared, the person with the higher IQ will often have superior social outcomes. He is more likely to graduate high school or get a high-paying job. Yet the evidence suggests that IQ itself--as opposed to all the other social factors correlated with IQ, like parental income--is responsible for only a small fraction of this difference in achievement. Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but correlation does not imply causation. 

3. IQ is one predictor of success on the labor market, but it is not the only or even the most important factor. Social skills and work ethic are not measured by IQ, yet can be substantially improved through education and training, especially if that training is received in childhood. 

4. We know socioeconomic factors influence intelligence, but our measures of those factors are crude. For example, a nutritious diet increases cognitive function, but we don't know by exactly how much. If we get better at isolating and measuring such effects, it might turn out that genetic intelligence is even less important than we assume. 

One of the books I recommend most often is The Big Test by Nick Lemann. He shows how wave after wave of new immigrants, including white immigrants, were assumed to be innately stupid, in part because of their initial bad scores on IQ exams. This is true even of those groups, like Jews, whom we think of as "smart" today. Here Lemann writes about IQ tests given to World War I recruits, and the way the scores were intepreted by Carl Campbell Brigham, a Princeton psychologist who became an author of the SAT:

On the Army IQ tests, Nordics scored higher than Alpines, who scored higher than Mediterraneans. The test results as a whole were like a photograph of American culture, so faithfully did they reproduce the social order. Officers scored higher than enlisted men, the native-born scored higher than the foreign-born, less recent immigrants scored higher than more recent immigrants, and whites scored higher than Negroes. There were ironclad natural laws at work here, Brigham felt, and he warned that wishful thinkers who pretended otherwise were deluding themselves--writing, for example, "Our figures, then, would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent." Brigham's stern conclusion was this: "American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive...These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows." 

The social and cognitive science has improved since then. But somehow, Richwine didn't get the memo, so we keep rehashing these noxious old arguments.

Update: Via Twitter, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross points out that in his dissertation, Richwine does discuss the Brigham research. He concludes that Brigham unfairly discriminated against certain white immigrant groups, since those groups, like Italians, now perform equally to Northern European Americans on today's more sophisticated IQ tests. This is from page 20:

Richwine recognizes Brigham's bias toward certain white people. Yet he assumes that innate genetic traits are responsible for Latino's lower IQ scores over the past several decades, as opposed to the many socioeconomic realities described above and acknowledged as far-greater predictors of IQ. Richwine writes that since Asians are both poor and do well on IQ tests, this destroys the argument that poverty accounts for Latino's lower scores. Yet poverty is not a monolithic phenomenon. It differs culturally, across the globe, in terms of how much emphasis is put on academic learning. Ex; Until Reconstruction, it was illegal in the American south to teach black people to read. Chinese culture has emphasized success on written civil service examinations for over a millenium. Some Latino teenagers arrive in American public schools nearly illiterate in Spanish; they come from agricultural communities in countries where anything beyond an elementary education is off-limits to the very poor. Comparing Asians to Latinos is thus exactly the sort of "out-group" analysis that Heckman and Binet warned about.

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. 

Why Helen Gurley Brown Was A Lot Like Hugh Hefner

To commemorate the death of the iconic and controversial Cosmo editor, I thought I'd pull this article from my archives, which is a joint review of Jennifer Scanlon's biography of Gurley Brown and Masters of Sex by Thomas Maier, about the sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson. 

In an adoring new biography, Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon reopens the old debate about whether Gurley Brown can really be considered a feminist. That, of course, depends on one's definition of feminism. Undoubtedly, through her books and in the pages of Cosmopolitan, Gurley Brown encouraged young women to enjoy sex and to embrace, at least during their twenties, the single life. Her frank discussion of sexually active dating was offensive to many early-1960s readers and certainly pushed the culture toward accepting that even "good girls" engage in premarital sex. Considering Gurley Brown's influence, Scanlon, who previously wrote a cultural history of Ladies Home Journal, the staid magazine for housewives, goes to great lengths to portray Gurley Brown as a proto-second-wave feminist -- a sort of libertarian Betty Friedan, more concerned with fun than with whining about women's "victimization."

But it is only after immersing oneself in the back catalog of Ladies Home Journal that one could really mistake Cosmopolitan as radically feminist. Like Hugh Hefner, Gurley Brown was not just a magazine editor but the purveyor of a fantasy-lifestyle brand. The product Gurley Brown sold didn't purport to fix, or even address, the real economic and career anxieties facing midcentury American women. Rather, Cosmo proffered an escapist alternate reality in which every woman could distract herself with a work-related dating life as glamorous as the one Gurley Brown experienced in the Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s. For Gurley Brown, Scanlon writes, the office was "a decidedly sexy environment," not the site of daily humiliations for women relegated to serving as "office wives," making coffee and picking up laundry for frequently lewd, condescending male bosses. Knowing that Gurley Brown experienced these privations in her own career only makes her wildly optimistic view of the intersection of sex and work seem more peculiar.

Read the whole piece.

The Death of the Urban Comprehensive High School?

Head to The Daily Beast to read my review of Michael Brook's new book, Saving the School, which does important work capturing this particular moment in national education reform, when so many urban neighborhood high schools are at risk of closure:

Brick, who worked for The New York Times, spent a year embedded at John H. Reagan High School in “the Two-Three,” a poor neighborhood on the eastside of Austin, Texas, known for tensions between black and Hispanic residents. Of the school’s approximately 700 students, 110 are teen parents, and only 22 are white. Over a third of Reagan students are classified as still learning the English language, and over 80 percent are so poor that the government pays for their school lunch. When a girl refuses to remove her hat during a school assembly, she is handcuffed and dragged out by the police. Military recruiters roam Reagan’s halls.     

Brick has done his homework on the history of American education, and he accurately assesses why schools like Reagan often appear to be such blighted places: less because their teachers are uniformly uncaring or their students unmotivated than because so many impoverished schools have become, over the past 30 years, increasingly cut off from the mainstream of American society, situated in neighborhoods victimized by white and middle-class flight; asked to compete with charter schools; and then left to educate a greater proportion of poor, special education, and non-English speaking students than the public school system at large. Reagan High is a good stand-in for the approximately 1,700 high schools across the country that are classified by the Obama administration as “persistently failing.” They are also sometimes known as “drop-out factories:” schools where more than half of the freshman class never graduates.

Read the whole piece.

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 David Coleman, "Life Writing," and the Future of the American Reading List

Mary Cassatt's "Young Woman Reading." David Coleman believes American kids should read more non-fiction and fewer "stories."

Yesterday the College Board, the organization that administers the Advanced Placement program and the SAT, announced David Coleman will become its new president in October, and will focus on deepening the curricula on which College Board exams are based.

Coleman is controversial, especially among English teachers.

A classicist cum McKinsey consultant cum education reformer, he is (in)famous in education circles as the frantically energetic, hyper-intellectual architect of the new Common Core curriculum standards in language arts, which 45 states have agreed—at least theoretically—to adopt in 2014. Currently, about 80 percent of the reading American students are assigned in school is fiction or memoir, and 20 percent is non-fiction. If Coleman gets his way, that balance will soon tilt closer to 60-40. American children will spend a lot less time reading and writing what Coleman calls, somewhat derisively, “stories,” and much more time reading and writing about the ideas in “informational” texts by the likes of Richard Hofstadter, Atul Gawande, and H.L. Mencken in high school; John Adams, Frederick Douglas, and Winston Churchill in middle school.

Why? “As you grow up in this world," Coleman said at a conference last year, "you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

Argument-driven writing about non-fiction sources, Coleman says, is a much better approximation of what students will be asked to do in college courses and at work than are typical public school writing prompts, like this one, for Tennessee 8^th graders:

Most students have a person they want to be like someday.  Who is your role model?

Or this one, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress 12^th grade exam:

Write an essay in which you define heroism and argue who you think our heroes really are--mass media stars, ordinary people, or maybe both. Be sure to use examples of specific celebrities, other people you have heard or read about, or people from your own community to support your position.

These prompts require students to “life-write:” to reflect on their personal experiences, feelings, and opinions. The problem, Coleman explained in a June 2011 talk to the New York State Department of Education, is that “it is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that, I need a compelling account of your childhood.” (Coleman now tells the Times “he should have chosen his language more carefully.”)

Coleman’s message—hey kid, your little life is less important than the big ideas of history, science, and politics—is blunt, funny, and refreshingly free of self-esteem psychobabble. But it also makes many English teachers deeply uncomfortable, because it overturns decades of educational orthodoxy. The identity politics pedagogical theories of the 1970s and 1980s, as articulated in works like Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, emphasized the ability of “personal narrative” to empower students, particularly the economically and racially disadvantaged. This thinking led to classroom reading lists filled with inspirational stories about foster children, abuse victims, drug addicts, and the severely disabled, all overcoming various challenges. Among the most commonly assigned books in American English classes are A Child Called “It,” a memoir about a boy who is horrifically abused by his alcoholic mother, and The Rule of the Bone, a novel narrated by a 14-year old drug dealer whose stepfather is a sexual predator. Writing assignments often encourage children to reflect on their own personal growth.

In 2008 the National Council of Teachers of English released a position paper on “Supporting Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Learners.” The document declared teaching “a political act” and stated, “As public intellectuals and agents of change, we recognize that English teachers…are complicit in the reproduction of racial and socioeconomic inequality in schools and society.” To counteract those inequalities, teachers were directed to “research and share the personal histories of all in the classroom.”

As David Coleman traveled the country teaching educators how to implement the Common Core standards, his attack on this sort of “personal history” writing engendered a backlash. Writing in opposition to Coleman and “in defense of stories,” Steve Zemelman, director of the Illinois Writing Project, argued, “stories are a vehicle by which cultures pass on their history, beliefs, and values.”

As individuals, we tell stories all the time…In telling these stories later, we gain distance and perspective on the events. Sometimes the worse the difficulty, the more captivating the story, and the more satisfaction we get from relating it. This happens because telling stories involves thinking, integrating, and evaluating – i.e., gaining deeper comprehension of a set of events. Thus, stories are about deepening comprehension and dealing with complexity– exactly what the [Common Core] reading standards are about. And this happens not just by reading stories, but also by writing them.

Alice Mercer, a California elementary school teacher with experience in high-poverty schools, noted on her blog that the current California standards for second grade writing focus on narrative and producing “friendly letters,” while the new Common Core asks second graders to write opinion pieces and research papers using documentary evidence from books.

“From friendly letters to writing opinion pieces… that’s a mighty big leap,” Mercer wrote, predicting that in five years, the public will decry that “kids can’t write a decent friendly email.”

Alan Lawrence, an education blogger and former English teacher who was California’s 2007 “teacher of the year,” complained that Coleman “has zero K-12 teaching experience. Should we really be learning how to cook from a person who’s never been in the kitchen?”

Indeed, Coleman has never been a public school teacher. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Cambridge, and his mother is the president of tony Bennington College. So perhaps, critics say, Coleman doesn’t fully understand the power of “stories” to reach children—especially poor children—who would otherwise find reading and writing a chore.

As an education reporter, I’ve seen evidence of the power of personal narrative in the classroom. One of the most effective programs in the troubled Newark, New Jersey public schools is the Children’s Literacy Initiative, which teaches basic writing skills by asking kindergarten through third grade students, every day, to draft a short “story” about a life event. Teachers then use these pieces to go over grammar, spelling, and syntax with each student.

The idea is that children are most invested in improving a piece of writing that amplifies their own experiences and feelings. And the Children’s Literacy Initiative works: The Newark schools using its strategies are among the highest-performing schools in the city, and their students—almost all of them living in poverty—routinely exceed state test score averages not only in reading and writing, but also in math and science.

So I’m sympathetic to teachers who are turned off by Coleman’s rhetoric. There’s something discomfiting about Coleman—a white guy with advanced degrees, who earns a living spreading his opinions—sending the message that children’s personal stories and feelings don’t matter, so they shouldn’t write them down.

Yet Coleman is responding to a deeply troubling landscape in American reading and writing instruction. Only one-third of fourth-graders read at grade level. According to a report from Renaissance Learning, the top 40 books read by American high school students have an average reading level of just 5.3—meaning they are more appropriate for fifth graders than for teenagers on their way to college or the workforce. Educators (and journalists) know good writing is informed by high-level reading, which exposes us not only to vocabulary, but also to background knowledge rich with facts and ideas.

If you scratch the surface of Coleman’s incendiary proclamations and dive into the Common Core standards documents, you see he’s making a more complex argument than his critics give him credit for: that when schools don’t require students to interact with difficult, non-fiction texts, they deny them the opportunity to build the skills they need to amplify their thoughts and opinions, by writing them clearly and backing them up with evidence. Coleman is correct that ultimately, most college-student and adult writers are judged less on their ability to reflect on their own lives, and more on their ability to reflect on the world of ideas and events around them—whether they are drafting a final paper about a classic novel, a letter-to-the-editor about a local political race, or a memo outlining their company’s web strategy.

There is something valuable in Coleman’s promotion of non-narrative reading and evidence-based writing, especially in a culture of reality television and Facebook “timelines,” in which the prosaic events of individual lives are opened up to public consumption and critique. Memoir will always be a rich and legitimate literary genre, and teachers shouldn’t stop empowering children to write personal histories. But life-writing, alone, cannot teach students the critical thinking skills they need to develop; it cannot teach them how to add strength to their opinions by backing them with the force of research evidence.

Coleman states it best in a recent essay—free of his usual snark—on “What Kids Should Be Reading.”

Students will not likely choose sufficiently challenging text on their own; they need to be challenged and supported to build their strength as readers by stretching to the next level. ... The books students read should be worthy of close attention and careful re-reading for understanding. To become career and college ready, students must grapple with a range of works that span many genres, cultures, and eras and model the kinds of thinking and writing students should aspire to in their own work.

I expect Coleman will bring these ideas with him to the College Board—as well as his other controversial opinions, such as his interest in developing computer programs that can grade the more sophisticated student essays he would like to assign. I've been fascinated by Coleman for a long time and will be watching with great interest.

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.