Dana Goldstein

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do New Teacher Evaluation and Pay Models Affect Students?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Rent is Too Damn High" and Education

We know school desegregation is important because of a growing body of research showing that "peer effects" are correlated with better teacher quality and higher test scores for low-income children. So I've done a lot of reporting and writing about how public schools can racially and socioeconomically integrate classrooms, both through instructional reforms and by forging partnerships with other schools across the boundaries of neighborhoods and even muncipalities.

That said, school desegregation efforts are, at their core, a work-around for the problem of residential segregation by race and class. That's why I found my friend Matt Yglesias' new e-book, The Rent is Too Damn High, so fascinating. Matt argues for increasing the supply of affordable housing in central urban neighborhoods--the kinds of places with good or rapidly-improving public schools--by allowing real estate developers to build tall apartment towers, regardless of NIMBY concerns about historic preservation, aesthetics, or preserving sight lines. He also argues that inner-ring suburbs should reduce zoning barriers that make it impossible for developers to construct high-density, affordable housing near good schools.

Here's the crux of Matt's argument as it relates to education:

The United States is racked by a multisided and vicious series of controversies about improving learning outcomes in our public schools. One thing everyone can agree on is that it's neither logistically nor politically easy to achieve large improvements. But given that some schools are already performing better than others, this raises the question of why parents don't simply relocate to places with better schools. Many parents, of course, do relocate. It's common for afluent young couples to move out to the suburbs when their children reach the appropriate age. "Everyone knows" that poor families can't afford to do this. But we only rarely ask why poor families can't afford to move to nice suburbs. It's not because construction costs are higher in the suburbs. It's because it's frequently illegal to build the kind of dense apartment buildings that could accommodate lower-income families. Indeed, in higher-income suburbs, American regulatory policy often goes further and bans "accessory dwellings"--the practice of renting out a room a basement, garage, or attic to someone who's not a member of the family. 

Towns' reasons for wanting to zone out potentially "undesirable" low-income families are understandable, if not particularly admirable, but when exclusion occurs all across the country it becomes a major barrier to the delivery of high-quality public services.

Although I believe there is real cultural value in some historic preservation efforts, I generally agree with Matt that American urban liberals should worry less about preserving buildings and property values, and more about expanding access to quality education, transportation, and other services. 

I'd only add that politically, achieving greater residential integration may not totally solve the problem of school segregation. Some privileged parents feel so strongly about sending their children to schools dominated by racially and socioeconically similar children that they will do almost anything to preserve school segregation, including gerrymandering school zones; opening new schools for the "gifted;" suing to prevent school district consolidation; and so on and so forth. 

But Matt's thinking on the issue is creative and an important challenge to established policy assumptions. Check out the e-book here.

Randi Weingarten on Teachers, Tests, and What Obama and Duncan Can Learn from Other Nations

When I talk about education with folks who aren't experts, but who are politically engaged, the person they ask me about most often is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. They usually want to know if Weingarten is a "real" reformer who actually cares about the quality of schools, or if she is more of a traditional labor unionist; a political operator who has cagily moved to to the center--accepting new limitations on tenure protections, for example, and embracing more stringent teacher-evaluation protocols--only because the national education debate has shifted to become more critical of career teachers and their unions. 

I think the "real" Randi Weingarten is both of those things: a proud unionist who will fight to the death for her members' pocketbook benefits (including the old-fashioned benefits, like pensions, that are politically unpopular) and someone who thinks seriously about how to improve schools. I've interviewed her many times and written about her at length, and while I don't agree with all her issue positions, I always learn a lot when I speak with her. 

This week Weingarten was in New York for the second annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession, hosted by the OECD. Over at The Nation, I interviewed her about what the United States can learn about teaching from other nations--from Japanese "lesson study" to Singapore math--and why she believes the Obama administration needs to pay closer attention to international best practices in education reform. Here's a sample:

What do you hope Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his staff will take away from the summit, having heard that very few other nations are pursuing teacher reform strategies that are as test-driven as the kinds of reforms the Obama administration incentivized through Race to the Top?

I just hope they listen. I never doubt—and I know this will be controversial—but I never doubt their wish and hope and aspiration for transforming America’s educational system to ensure that there is both excellence and equity for all children. I don’t doubt them for a second. But it’s about the hows. The president is a very smart guy and he focuses on evidence. Here you have a lot of evidence about what works in other places.

America always pivots between collective responsibility and the idea that the individual can pull himself up by his bootstraps. What you see is that in education, you have to understand this notion of systems rather than individuals. Creating teacher capacity, teacher efficacy, and climates of trust are what enable all kids, rather than just some kids, to learn. If you want equity, you have to have a system that focuses on it. 

There was a real consensus at the summit. When nations were reporting their plans, you heard the buzzwords of collaboration and trust, of retain, recruit, support. You didn’t hear market solutions, competition, things like that.

Read the whole interview.

On Democrats and the Liberal Arts

My friend and colleague Rick Perlstein interviewed me for his latest Rolling Stone column, in which he argues Rick Santorum got one thing right in his otherwise counterfactual anti-college rant last month: Democratic presidents have a history of putting too much faith in the power of the liberal arts to lift people out of poverty:

Stick to your guns, Rick [Santorum]! The thing is, you exposed a poetic truth: While Obama might not push college education exclusively, like most Democrats he does oversell it, and does shortchange the alternatives. And millions of young Americans pay the price.

Here’s how. One of Lyndon Johnson's aides once joked that his boss so worshipped the power of education that "he seemed to think it would cure everything from chilblains to ingrown toenails." Barack Obama errs on the side of the chilblains theory of education, too. Most of us do, especially educated Democrats. Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality. (That's me, by the way: Hell, I think we should be spending $50 billion a year to make college education free.) Few of us take seriously enough the moral wisdom  of the great populist leader William Jennings Bryan, who said in the early twentieth century, a time when only six percent of Americans graduated high school, "I fear the plutocracy of wealth, I respect the aristocracy of learning, but I thank God for the democracy of the heart that makes it possible for every human being to do something to make life worth living while he lives and the world better for his existence in it."

Do you? Does Barack Obama? Not exactly. "The administration has done a good job of talking about, and even funding, career training for high-school graduates," says education expert Dana Goldstein of the New America Foundation. "What they will not do very much is talk about or fund career training for teens, even though there is good evidence that if you don't offer career and technical training via the public schools, you may lose people forever." A democracy of the heart that acknowledges there are simply some people who will never step into an academic classroom post-high school, and that this is alright, seems a bridge-to-the-twentieth-century too far for our schooling-mad politicians these days.

I agree with Perlstein, but I'd add that after the 1983 publication of "A Nation at Risk," many prominent Republicans embraced the notion that test-driven education reform can substitute for a broader anti-poverty agenda, and have thus adopted a similar faith in the miraculous power of education. This is the thinking behind No Child Left Behind. The entire Bush family, John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Boehner and many other  Republicans have subscribed to this ideology over the years, which I trace with greater precision in my recent Nation essay.

Read the rest of Rick's column here.

On the Radio

Continuing our conversation in Slate and n+1, here are Astra Taylor and I debating homeschooling, unschooling, and public schools on the radio show "To the Best of Our Knowledge."

Listen here.

Republicans and the Education Culture Wars

In a new essay at The Nation, I trace the recent history of the Republican Party's school reform agenda, looking at how Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney started on the same side--pro-federal intervention--but ended up in drastically different places:

Judging by the applause lines at GOP campaign stops and debates this winter, a significant segment of the Republican electorate understands public education not as a crucial civic institution, nor as a potential path from poverty to the middle class, nor even as a means of individual betterment. Instead, this coalition of religious conservatives and extreme tax-cutters prefers to vilify public schools—and actually, pretty much any traditional educational institution, including liberal arts colleges—as potential corruptors of the nation’s youth; as unwanted interlocutors in that most sacred relationship: the one between a child and her parent.

It is a curious thing, because with some 90 percent of American children enrolled in public schools, there must be significant overlap between the consumers of public education and the approximately one-third of Americans who describe themselves as Tea Party–type conservatives. Never mind: It is clear that in the American political economy, there is nothing unusual about a voter hating and resenting a government program even while relying heavily upon it.

Rick Santorum’s presidential bid looks increasingly quixotic as we head toward Super Tuesday. He clearly represents only a minority of the Republican base. But what his surge made clear is that there was appeal in appointing a sort of national standard-bearer for the culture war against mainstream education, perhaps because anti-government voters could look up to Santorum, a homeschooling father of seven, as a man who actually lives their values. Disdain for schools has been everywhere in Santorum’s rhetoric, from his ad nauseam boasting about his own family’s homeschooling; to his assertion that government-run public schools are "anachronistic;" to his complaints about comprehensive sex education; to his counterfactual claim that President Obama is “a snob” who opposes vocational training and wants all Americans to be “indoctrinated” by liberal college professors.

Read the whole thing.

The Narrative of Poverty

When I was reading Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about day-to-day life in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi, I couldn't stop thinking about how much the book had in common with one of my all-time favorites: Random Family, Adrian Nicole Leblanc's masterpiece about love and the drug trade in the South Bronx of the 1980s and 90s. So I wrote an essay for The Daily Beast about the two works--and about what Indian poverty and American poverty have in common. 

...the affinities between the two books—set 7,800 miles and two decades apart—are astonishing. The way Annawadi’s savvier operators make a business out of government corruption, skimming off the top of generously funded anti-poverty efforts, is not dissimilar from the way the drug economy operates in American inner cities. “Corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained” for personal advancement in a Mumbai slum, Boo observes; several of the garbage-pickers she profiles accept their dirty lot in life only after giving up on dreams of a good education and clean, service-sector work in nearby luxury hotels.

In LeBlanc’s account of the South Bronx, smart young men like Cesar turn to drug dealing as a rational response to a neighborhood devoid of opportunity as most of us know it, one that lacks quality schools and decent jobs. In both books, individuals who idealistically resist the financial pull of illegal commerce eventually learn that, as Boo puts it, “there were millions of other bright, likable, unskilled young men in this city”—and not nearly enough jobs in the legitimate economy to go around. (Only about half of Mumbai residents hold formal jobs, while in New York, a third of all low-income households have experienced unwanted job loss, wage reductions, or hour reductions over the past year.)

Read the whole piece.

Rick Santorum and Barack Obama Actually Agree on Vocational Education

It's too bad that Rick Santorum is sullying what might otherwise be a fairly sophisticated take on the benefits of vocational education with a ridiculous smearing of President Obama and misrepresentation of the White House's higher-ed agenda.

Santorum on Friday:

Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands. Some people have incredible gifts...and want to work out there making things. President Obama once said he wants everyone in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.

Yes, a Republican presidential candidate is calling Obama a DFH -- big surprise! What's worse is that Santorum is totally misrepresenting the president's higher-ed priorities. Here is what Obama actually said in his February 2009 address to Congress, the speech to which Santorum is referring:

So tonight I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be a community college or a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.

It would be more than fair to complain--as I have--that the administration hasn't done enough to direct funding to successful career and technical education programs. But it's completly untrue that Obama expects all Americans "to go to college." Indeed, the president doubled down on his pro-vocational education messaging last June, when he visited a community college auto repair program in Virigina and said "the goal" of his higher-ed agenda "isn’t just making sure that somebody has got a certificate or a diploma. The goal is to make sure your degree helps you to get a promotion or a raise or a job. And that’s especially important right now.”

Obama is well aware that between now and 2018, over 14 million new American jobs will be created in "mid-skill" occupations, like dental hygiene, that require an associate's degree or an occupational certificate, but not a four-year college degree. That's why Secretary of Education Arne Duncan helped promote the Harvard report "Pathways to Prosperity," about the continued importance of vocational and technical education as routes from poverty to the secure middle class.