Dana Goldstein

The European High School Apprenticeship Model and American "CTE"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

My Al-Jazeera Appearance on American Jews and Israel

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

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

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

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

an earlier version of this post appears at The Nation

In Defense of Peter Beinart

Please head over to The Nation to read my essay on Beinart's important new book, The Crisis of Zionism:

Beinart accurately diagnoses the central challenge for the 21^st century international Jewish community: how to come to terms with “the shift from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power.” In other words, if Jews do not learn to wield our newfound military, political, and economic strength ethically—showing the same concern for Palestinian and Arab-Israeli minority rights that we hope gentiles will show for Jews—then we, as a people, have failed to learn the painful lessons of Jewish history.

What I found most revelatory about The Crisis of Zionism was the way in which Beinart appeals not just to Jewish political liberalism, but also to our faith. The holy books of Judaism are filled with portents about what happens when Jews abuse power, Beinart notes. After Persia’s Jews toppled Haman, the anti-Semitic royal advisor, they slaughtered 75,000 people in retribution; our texts recount that both the Babylonian and Roman destructions of Jewish empires came in the wake of Jewish moral decadence. “Our tradition insists that physical collapse was preceded by ethical collapse,” Beinart writes.

Read the whole thing.

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.

The International Perspective on Teen Pregnancy

Each year when the national teen birth rate statistics are released by the CDC, the media get very excited. This year the birth rate is down to about thirty-four births per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19, which Reutersattributes to the bad economy, better sex education and even cautionary TV shows like MTV’s Teen Mom.But just two years ago, when the teen birth rate rose slightly in twenty-six states, the media cited many of the very same factors: USA Today attributed that change to worse sex-education; pop-culture depictions of pregnant teens, such as the movi Juno; and celebrity teen moms, such as Bristol Palin and Jamie Lynn Spears.

I’d argue for spending less time peering at the year-to-year fluctuations in the teen birth rate and instead look at the big picture, which shows the United States has exponentially more teen moms than any other developed world nation.

*chart via the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy

We can only gesture toward the myriad factors causing this problem, but here are some likely ones: lack of knowledge about and access to affordable contraception (one in five sexually active teenage girls do not use any kind of birth control); lack of access to abortion-providers in 87 percent of American counties; increased immigration from nations where teen pregnancy is more the norm; and even high poverty rates that cause some girls to see motherhood as the only viable path to adulthood, since a college education and decent job are unavailable to them.

The good news is that the American teen birth rate has steadily decreased over the past seventy years, despite year-to-year ups and downs. The bottom line, though, is that the United States remains an outlier not only on the teen birth rate but on teen pregnancy and abortion, too, which occur far more often here than in European nations. Clearly, our hot-potato reproductive rights debate isn’t solving these problems, which is just one of many good reasons why we should ratchet down the politicization of this public health issue and take a common sense prevention approach, one that accepts that over 95 percent of Americans have premarital sex.

cross-posted at The Nation

 

Thoughts on My Trip to Mexico City and the Drug War

 

View of Mexico City from the home office of Ricardo Salinas, the retail/media/banking tycoon.

I spent the first half of this week in Mexico City, on a junket sponsored by Grupo Salinas. There's a lot of worry about Mexico's violence--and I have some of my own thoughts on the topic, below--but I didn't feel at all unsafe. Mexico City is an architecturally beautiful town with a lovely culture of late-night, outdoor dining and delicious street food. Swaths of the city reminded me of the immigrant neighborhoods of south Los Angeles, cut by smog and gridlock, but home to vibrant local business strips and cohesive communities. Indeed, Mexico's economy has been less hard-hit by the financial crisis than ours has.

Our group of writers and policy wonks met with a really interesting list of journalists and politicians, including three presidential candidates. My take on Mexico's upcoming election and the country's education challenges are over at The Nation in a new column; in short, I was surprised by just how similar the rhetoric on Mexican school reform sounds--there's a big focus on the excesses of the teachers' union, for example--even though Mexico is confronting an educational inequality crisis far more serious than our own, with the average Mexican dropping out after just eight years of formal schooling. 

So if you want to learn more about education in Mexico, click here.

More broadly, the trip left me all fired up to legalize drugs. About 45,000 Mexicans have been murdered since President Felipe Calderon escalated and militarized the drug war in 2006, with political, financial, and tactical support from the United States. The drug cartels are conducting terrible massacres, and intimidating and sometimes killing both professional and citizen journalists. 

All of this is happening despite the fact that "the war" has successfully led to the deaths and arrests of dozens of top drug lords. In their absence, some of the major trafficking cartels split into smaller, more agile organizations that can better resist detection. These small groups are now fighting among themselves, which has (of course) contributed to the increase in violence.

Why isn't the drug war working? Because it isn't addressing the demand side of the equation: Americans' unquenchable appetite for illegal cocaine and marijuana. The only way to decrease demand is to begin treating addiction primarily as a public health problem, not a criminal one--as Portugal has done--and to legalize the production and sale of less dangerous drugs, like pot, to tamp down on the violent narcotics black market.

Ending the drug war would also revitalize American inner city neighborhoods, where the existence of this underground economy disincentivizes education and work, and sends 17 percent of black men to prison. 

In July the Los Angeles Times' published a riveting four-part series about the regular Americans and Mexicans caught up in the massive Sinaloan drug cartel. I highly recommend it, and think it could win a Pulitzer: Read parts one, two, three, and four.

Thoughts on my TIME Piece About Young American Jews and Israel

Me in the Golan Heights, 2005.

It's been awhile since I wrote about Israel-Palestine issues, so I'm glad TIME asked me to do a piece on how younger American Jews are thinking and talking about the conflict as the United Nations considers Palestine's statehood bid. 

This is a personal and difficult topic for me, as I explain in the article. The thrust is that American Jews in their teens, 20s, and 30s are far likelier than their parents to have met Palestinians, been exposed to the Palestinian narrative of the conflict, and even to have visited the Palestinian territories or Arab nations. 

One UC Berkeley student I interviewed, Eliana Lauter, grew up in an actively Zionist family and attended Jewish day schools. She has lived in Israel on several occasions, and told me, "I love Israel so much. I miss Israel when I’m not there and I get really upset about it. I can cry myself to sleep at night knowing I’m not there."

But Lauter, who is president of Berkeley's Jewish Student Union, has a nuanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a high school student, she was assigned a "dual narrative" history, in which the Israeli and Palestinian narratives were presented on the same page, side by side. (Ex; Many Arabs refer to the founding of Israel and the resulting Palestinian refugee crisis as the "Nakba," or "catastrophe.")

Last summer, Lauter worked in Israel as the assistant to a Jewish professor researching Arab Israeli civil rights issues. "That sparked my interest," she said. "I didn’t necessarily agree with everything I read, but it was a start of envisioning an Israel that also fits non-Jews and non-Israelis."

What I didn't have space to explain in the piece is that even organizations that have traditionally promoted an uncritical view of Israel are now accepting that the terms of the debate have changed. Hillel, for example, the most prominent Jewish organization on college campuses, last week launched "Talk Israel Tents" on 21 campuses, in which students were encouraged to openly debate Palestinian statehood and other issues.

Tor Tsuk, Israel fellow at the Columbia Barnard Hillel, wrote to me that the tent was "a tremendous program that gathered for the first time students from Hillel and the Students for Justice in Palestine group in a discussion."

It's also important to note that among the more progressive Israel advocacy groups, there is significant divergence on tactics. Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, which last year organized a protest in which young people heckled Benjamin Netanyahu, supports divestment campaigns targeted at corporations that profit from the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. J Street and its campus organization, J Street U, on the other hand, oppose divestment, which they say deligitimizes Israel's existence. Instead, J Street U has promoted a campaign called "Invest, Don't Divest," which supports microfinance efforts in the Palestinian terroritories and Arab-Israeli economic cooperation. 

On the statehood resolution, J Street, after internal debate, decided to support President Obama's decision to veto. Jewish Voice for Peace opposes the veto. Yet everyone I interviewed said the resolution is an incredibly complex topic; no one was willing to say a "yes" vote for statehood was the absolute right thing at this point in time, given the delicacy of potential negotiations and the opposition of even some Palestinian activists to pursuing statehood in this manner. 

I hope you'll go over to TIME and read the piece.

"Kings of Pastry," France, America, and the Vocational Education Debate

 

MOF finalist Jacquy Pfeiffer, cofounder of Chicago's French Pastry School, with sugar sculpture. Photo via "Kings of Pastry"

It's been awhile since I've had the chance to indulge my Francophilism on the blog, but last night I watched a fantastic documentary, "Kings of Pastry," that left me reflecting on the cultural differences between how Americans and the French think about intelligence, knowledge, and education. 

The film, which you can stream on Netflix, tells the story of the MOF--Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, or "best French craftsmen"--competition in pastry. Every four years, chefs, bakers, cheesemongers, florists, jewelers, weavers, woodworkers, and dozens of other French artisans compete to win this designation. It is considered one of France's highest civilian honors. 

The 16 pastry chef finalists--all of them male, a fact the film ignores--bring an absolute, overwhelming intensity to the MOF competition. Their wives and girlfriends speak of normal family life being on hold for years while their partners pursue the MOF doggedly, testing elaborate recipes and decoration techniques, usually at night after working a full day in a restaurant or shop. Some competitors devote decades to the process, competing every four years until they finally acquire a coveted MOF medal. 

The film shows President Nicolas Sarkozy speaking at a MOF award ceremony for chefs. I was really struck by how coherent his support is for what might be termed "vocationalism," and how out of step this would sound in an American context. Sarkozy said:

"Worker, artisan, apprentice. I affirm: There are not two forms of intelligence, two kinds of knowledge. Manual skill doesn't fall from the sky any more than intellectual skills. I don't want any more of that concept in our country. Because this idea is morally scandalous, and is insufficient economically."

The French education system is structured around such ideas. In the last three years of high school, or lycee, French teenagers choose to focus on the hard sciences, social sciences, or literature, or from among eight career-oriented "technical" courses of study, including the food sciences, health sciences, and hospitality. 

Americans are--and probably should be--skeptical of efforts to "track" 15-year olds into specific careers, especially given the vast inequities in children's educational and social opportunities before they ever enter high school. But some of the most thoughtful education reformers I've talked to in my reporting are Americans who are trying to seed workforce-relevancy into our own school system, by introducing young adults to possible professions in an intellectually rigorous way. This is important work, because we know one of the primary causes of dropping-out is that low-income students don't see how their education will help them land a job or build a satisfying, remunerative career in the future. 

I profiled two high schools that embody workforce-relevancy and academic rigor in my July Nation feature, but I'd say this remains a real minority movement in American education circles. So many of us--and I'd include myself--feel a real attachment to a romantic idea of the liberal arts, and of "college" in general.

"Kings of Pastry," however, romanticizes vocationalism in a way that is both enchanting and very foreign seeming. It's a delightful film -- but also also very relevant to the education debate.

Joyeux Jour de la Bastille

Despite DSK, I remain a comitted Francophile.

 

 

Madonna, Judaism, and Philanthropy

illustration via New York

Vanessa Grigoriadis' New York exposé of Madonna's ill-fated intervention in Malawi is well worth a read, first for its discussion of the vapidity of celebrity philanthropy, and second for its revelations about the fraudulent and cultish Kabbalah Centre, which seems more interested in bilking rich people and flipping real estate than in teaching the tenets of mystical Judaism.

The whole nasty business reminded me of one of the enduring lessons I learned in Hebrew School: that not all tzedakah, or charity, is created equal. Indeed, the Talmud outlines eight ascending levels of tzedakah, which also means "fairness" and "justice:"

1. Giving begrudgingly
2. Giving less that you should, but giving it cheerfully
3. Giving after being asked
4. Giving before being asked
5. Giving when you do not know the recipient's identity, but the recipient knows your identity
6. Giving when you know the recipient's identity, but the recipient doesn't know your identity
7. Giving when neither party knows the other's identity
8. Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant

Worth thinking about--especially number 7, I think.