Dana Goldstein

From Carnegie to Gates

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

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

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

Read the whole piece.

 

On the Atlanta Cheating Scandal

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

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

 

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Is Working From Home a Feminist Issue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radio Days

In a Nation podcast, Bryce Covert interviewed me about Obama's new early childhood proposals. Listen here.

And on Jane Williams' BloombergEDU show, I participated in a panel discussion of education writers. We each got to discuss two education issues to watch in 2013. I named preK (before Obama's annoucement!) and school diversity/integration. Listen here.

On Mike Elk, and Thinking About Writing Careers in 2013

Two years ago, a young writer named Mike Elk lent his Huffington Post press pass to a union organizer, who used it to help 200 protestors crash a meeting of the Mortgage Brokers' Association. Elk was subsequently "fired" from his unpaid position as a HuffPost blogger. He then landed a paid gig covering labor at the Chicago-based lefty magazine In These Times, where he broke some news, but also demonstrated a sometimes self-defeating tendency to pick public fights with other journalists, frequently through confrontational tweeting. Now the foundation funding for his In These Times position has dried up, and Elk has again taken to the pages of the Huffington Post, this time to apologize for the 2011 press pass debacle, to proclaim himself a born-again "straight" reporter, and to complain that he has not yet been hired for a Big Reporting Job at a Big Mainstream Publication. 

Elk's essay is, of course, self-serving, since he hopes prospective employers will discover it when they Google him, in addition to critical coverage of his past misdeeds. Though I've corresponded with Elk via Twitter, I've never met him personally nor worked with him, so I can't speak as to what kind of colleague he is or whether his raw reporting and writing are ready for a much bigger platform. What I do know is that his essay brings up a number of important issues within journalism. Since I've been getting tons of emails lately from young writers looking for advice, I thought I'd use his piece as a jumping off point to ponder the following:

There's still no substitute for a traditional, newsroom reporting internship. Whether on your college newspaper or at a small local daily or alt-weekly, this is some of the best entry-level experience a journalist can accrue. (I did my time at The Journal News, The Brown Daily Herald, and the North County News.) Because small papers tend to embrace a fairly traditional way of practicing journalism -- quaint notions of "objectivity" in tact -- you will learn the rationale behind the profession's basic mores, which is kind of a crucial first step if, like Elk, you end up subverting or tweaking them later on. In the early and mid-oughts, young writers like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein skyrockteted into the media world by being really great, independent opinion bloggers. Publications wanted to hire them to introduce readers to what was then a new format. But that path has dried up as the blogosphere has become institutionalized. You should blog and tweet and Facebook, but all that probably won't be enough to land your first job. 

 As Elk writes, foundation funding for journalism can be problematic. I've been lucky to receive funding from four foundations (New America, the Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation) that have never sought to influence my writing or reporting in inappropriate ways. Yet this isn't always the case, especially when foundations are going directly to publications to fund specific beats or even articles. (This happens shockingly often, and is becoming more common.) Another problem is that foundation-funding is usually short-term, doled out in year-long or project-specific grants. This means writers and publications are constantly anxious about whether their grant will get renewed, which increases the pressure to hew to a donor's point-of-view. When you consider all this, the old advertiser-driven model doesn't look too awful. Personally, I welcome Buzzfeed and other eyeball-hungry outlets onto the media scene. They will fund serious work by successfully getting readers to their site with lists, GIFs, and lifestyle and entertainment coverage.

The liberal magazine space can be an unstable place to build a writing career. Most professional writers don't want to earn $200 per article, or $40,000 per year, forever. What's more, journalists like to reach a broad audience, including those who disagree with us. So as we gain experience, we gladly embrace a more explanatory and less polemical tone, we try to be more narrative in our writing, and we begin to pitch mainsteam publications, in addition to those on the left. As Elk learned, this isn't something to be cynical about, but rather the natural evolution of many journalistic careers. This is not to imply that opinion magazines don't publish excellent work -- THEY DO! --but in the opinion writing space, young journalists are competing with professors and think tank staffers who can afford to write for free or next-to-nothing. So to compete in the markets of both liberal and non-ideological media, we really do need to build explicitly journalistic skills such as breaking news, obtaining and analyzing data, filing FOIA requests, and uncovering under-examined sources from the past and present. Elk has done his best work interviewing on-the-ground sources, and it's an important lesson for any young writer.

(Editing is probably the safest journalistic skill set to develop, as it tends to be relatively well-remunerated, even at low-budget publications. But this post is mostly about reporting and writing.)

Be easy to work with. This is a crucial piece of career advice I always offer, and that I've come to through hard-lived personal experience. For a journalist, this means that in addition to being polite, positive, and punctual, you are easy to edit: clean prose, humble attitude. It means you demonstrate the kind of journalism you think is important mostly by doing it, instead of by complaning that other people aren't doing it. Of course, press criticism is important stuff, but probably not the safest route to long-term employment in the first few years of a career, since you don't want to alienate potential bosses or mentors.

I'd be happy to address feedback and questions in the comments section.

Old posts on journalism careers

• Should Progressives Boycott the Huffington Post?
• Blogging Isn't Dead
• Journalism's Elitism Problem
• So, You Want to Be a Magazine Journalist

Update:

Mike Elk asked me to post the following response from him, which I am quoting directly:

 

"I really enjoyed your article and a lot of valuable insight. I must say though that my primary motivation behind writing this article was not as you state in "hopes prospective employers will discover it when they Google him, in addition to critical coverage of his past misdeeds." I wrote mainly because I wanted to be free of not being right about something. I grew up in a household where my Uncle Herb was a hero because he refused to the take the easy way out by naming names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He stood on principle and while I stood on principle by admitting what I did when it happened, I didn't stand on principle by defending myself. It bugged me, it made me feel dishonest, which I couldn't take. Finally, after being denied a job, I was forced to confront the full force of my dishonesty and I felt I had to say something. It feels good getting rid of all that ego and pride that led me to not admit the full cost of my mistakes. I feel like a free man."

 

 

Michelle Rhee, Back in the News in a Big Way

I'm looking forward to this evening's episode of FRONTLINE, which will explore evidence of adult tampering with children's tests in certain Washington, DC public schools during the chancellorship of Michelle Rhee, who is perhaps the nation's most controversial school reformer. The allegations are not new. They were first revealed nearly two years ago by my colleague Greg Toppo and his crack reporting team at USA Today, which used a computer algorithim to comb through reams of data, and found a national pattern of manipulated standardized test scores in the wake of No Child Left Behind, which greatly increased test-score pressure on schools and districts. Tonight's documentary, however, reported by John Merrow, will delve more deeply into Rhee's efforts to evade a thorough investigation of statistically implausible test score gains. In a preview interview with the Education Writers' Association, Merrow judges Rhee harshly. "The record is pretty clear that D.C. schools are not better because she was there," he says. "They’re still at the bottom, with the lowest graduation rate in the country."

The FRONTLINE report is especially timely as it comes just a day after Rhee's national advocacy organization, Students First, released a "report card" grading states on how closely they align with Rhee's agenda of tying teacher evaluation and pay to student test scores; weakening teacher tenure; transitioning teachers from traditional pension to 401(k) plans; funding charter schools and private school vouchers; instituting mayoral and state control of schools; and expanding the charter school sector and holding it accountable for results. Doug Henwood notes that states with high grades on the report card, including Louisiana and Florida, have woefully poor student academic achievement, while Massachusetts, with the highest math and reading scores in the nation, earned a D+ from Students First. This is true, but as Matt Yglesias writes, most of Rhee's favored policies are too new to be conclusively judged; the proof will be in the pudding a decade from now, when we can track what effect, if any, school choice and test-score based accountability policies have had on gold-standard NAEP test scores over time. 

That said, Rhee's most influential effort, her push to tie teacher pay and job security to individual students' standardized test scores, is the one element of this agenda for which we already have some powerful, and disturbing evidence, thanks to the investigations of USA Today and FRONTLINE. As I've reported, psychometricians, the scientists who study testing, have been warning for decades that when policy-makers attach ever-higher stakes to tests--first accountability measures targeting schools and districts, and now job security threats for individual principals and teachers--the reliability of test scores is compromised, sometimes due to teaching-to-the-test, and sometimes due to outright cheating. This consistent finding has crucial implications for "value-added measurement," the method, promoted by economists, of using standaridzed test scores as the major proxy for teacher quality and student learning. If we are concerned, as Matt is, about so much economic modeling being backed by poor data, we must deal with the implications this has for education policy. In my 2012 year-in-review, I talk a bit more about what all this means for education research; I want to emphasize that raising concerns about value-added measurement does not mean one is reflexively "anti-testing," it simply means that one is questioning the wisdom of tying high stakes to tests.

Before I leave the subject of Michelle Rhee, it's worth noting that Students First has had a very difficult time coming up with a consistent position on the rights of teachers to collectively bargain, even just for pay.  (Most recently, it seems that they are against collective bargaining -- for everyone.) Now, as Joy Resmovits reports at the Huffington Post, many of the well-connected Democrats who worked for Rhee have left her team, and are being replaced by former staffers from Americans Elect, a hedge fund-backed effort to elect third-party independents. 

I'm not questioning Rhee's personal commitment to certain progressive aims. I was impressed, for example, with her genuine efforts to better integrate public schools in rapidly-gentrifying DC neighborhoods, by working hard to convince college-educated parents to enroll their kids in local schools. But as her career advances nationally, she is more and more allying with Republican, even Tea Party-type conservative governors and state legislators. I'm midway through writing a book on the history of American education, and from this vantage point, I'm very skeptical about relying upon an anti-government political movement--one almost totally indifferent to social and economic inequality--to invest in and improve the schools poor children attend.

2012: The Year in Review, Education and Beyond

Education story of the year: The Chicago teachers' strike. American teacher unionism was founded in Chicago in the late 1890s, as female, largely Catholic elementary school teachers resisted centralization policies--standardized testing, a uniform curriculum, numeric teacher evaluations--pursued by a male, Protestant bureaucracy. So it was fitting that the loudest cry of protest against contemporary standards-and-accountability school reform emerged in the Windy City this September, as teachers resisted professional evaluation tied to student test scores, closures of neighborhood schools, and the expansion of the charter school sector. You can read my history of Chicago teacher unionism here.

The strike has had a few interesting results. First, it raised the profile of Chicago Teachers' Union leader Karen Lewis, who is a less compromising and more leftist figure than Randi Weingarten, president of the national American Federation of Teachers. Second, it brought to the public's attention the tension bewteen increasing test-score pressure on teachers and schools while cutting budgetary support for art, music, counseling, school psychologists, and the many other crucial, yet more holistic services schools provide. Third, it resulted in a compromise contract with both progressive and regressive features. More funding for social support services, especially in high-poverty schools, is a good thing. Continuing to backload teacher salaries and bonsues, though, will not make the profession more appealing to ambitious young people or career-changers. Yet it is encouraging that CTU agreed, at least in theory, to professional evaluations that include evidence of student learning. Now the devil will be in working out the details, particularly on what role standardized test scores will play, and how to evaluate teachers of currently non-tested subjects and grades, like art, music, PE, and kindergarten.

 

Magazines of the Year: Tomorrow and Jacobin.
 

Education research-finding of the year: Teachers matter, and not just for academics. A study by economists Raj Chetty, Jonah Rockoff, and John Friedman found that teachers who consistently improve their students' standardized test scores also help children avoid teenage pregnancy, get to college, and earn higher incomes. But there is a crucial caveat to this finding: The study was conducted in a low-stakes setting, in other words, among teachers whose pay and evaluation were not tied to test scores. The researchers admitted in their paper that when tests do become high-stakes, there is an increased risk of score manipulation, which can occur either through teaching-to-the-test or outright cheating. In high-stakes settings, test scores become less reliable and, therefore, their link to better life outcomes for kids could be compromised.

 

Under-reported education trend of the year (and decade): Sociology used to be the academic discipline with the most influence over public education policy. Today that discipline is economics. On the upside, we now have more data about children's academic and life outcomes. On the downside, education policy-makers are paying less attention to aspects of children's lives that are more difficult or impossible to quantify, such as parental involvement and comfort with diversity.

 

New York restaurant of the year: Pok Pok. We only had the patience to wait in line for this place once, but it was so, so, so worth it. A close runner-up is Battersby, where I had two wonderful meals. Another year, another few reasons never to leave Brooklyn. 

 

Book of the year on How We Live Now. Twilight of the Elites, by Chris Hayes. This bracing book about "America after meritocracy" has implications for every area of policy-making, but is especially sharp at deconstructing myths we tell ourselves about education: that test scores measure aptitude and that elite schools serve the common good.

 

Education story to watch in 2013: The roll-out of the Common Core. Will the movement to implement shared national academic standards remain bipartisan, or will conservatives and Republicans increasingly turn against it? Will schools implement the Core faithfully, or will myths about the standards--like the false idea that they cut out fiction reading--persist?  

 

Albums of the year: "Break it Yourself," by Andrew Bird. "Sun," by Cat Power. "Channel Orange," by Frank Ocean. "The Idler Wheel..." by Fiona Apple. "Shields," by Grizzly Bear.

 

Education book of the year: My favorite was Saving the School, by Michael Brick.

 

A book to pounce on in 2013: The absolutely masterful Hope Against Hope, by Sarah Carr, the definitive account of education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, told through the eyes of a student, a teacher, and a principal. A gripping narrative with deep historical and political ramifications. 

 

Cultural controversy of the year: The battle over the future of the New York Public Library's main branch, at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. Should this world-class research institution ship several million books to New Jersey, and open space for a lending library? Should architect Norman Foster, known for his glass additions to historic buildings, be let loose on this Beaux Arts masterpiece? I work there almost every day, and I still can't decide how I feel about it. 

 

TV Show of the Year: "Girls." Feminists are funny. 

 

#longreads of the year: This past spring, the magazine that launched my career, The American Prospect, experienced a terrifying brush with death. I'm so glad donors and subscribers have helped The Prospect continue its work, because under editor Kit Rachlis, it has published some amazing writing. Monica Potts' "Pressing on the Upward Way" is a compassionate, beautifully-constructed portrait of rural poverty in Eastern Kentucky. Equally stirring was Gabriel Arana's "My So-Called Ex-Gay Life," which not only told Gabe's personal story of surviving "ex-gay therapy," but also broke news by revealing how the psychiatrist who pushed to define homosexuality as a mental illness, Robert Spitzer, has come to regret and retract his previous work.

Documentary of the Year: "Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry," by Alison Klayman.

Personal Highlight of the Year: Pacific Street. With this guy.

Happy New Year, folks. 

The Real Boston Busing Story

Mayor Thomas Menino says school busing is unpopular and outdated. So why are 10,000 Boston children on a waiting list to be bused to higher-quality schools? 

Check out my report at Atlantic Cities on Boston's contentious school zone reorganization process.

Thoughts on the Education Section of the Debate

Are over at Slate.

Hollywood and the Politics of School Reform

Over at The Nation I've written an essay about "Won't Back Down," the latest feel-good school reform movie financed by conservative entrepreneur and Weekly Standard publisher Phil Anschutz. The film, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis, has been a centerpiece of NBC's "Education Nation" conference this week, in which both presidential candidates participated. Michelle Rhee also hosted a screening of "Won't Back Down" at the Democratic National Convention, and folks like Bill Gates, Cory Booker, and Antonio Villaraigosa are promoting the movie.

In short, there is a lot of money, political influence, and star power behind this vehicle, just as there was behind "Waiting for Superman" two years ago. I didn't like the oversimplified politics of "Waiting for Superman," but that documentary was at least well-directed and featured some charming real-life families and schools.  "Won't Back Down," on the other hand, is a bad, hackneyed film that is difficult to sit through. I didn't have space to fully explain this in my Nation piece, which appears in the Oct. 11 print issue, but while there is plenty of room for reform in teacher evaluation, pay, and tenure policies, this film's anti-union talking points veer toward parody. The most misleading suggestion is that teachers' union contracts prevent educators from staying after school to give students extra help, even if individual teachers would like to do so! It really made me wonder if anyone involved with writing this film has had any contact at all with public schools or public school teachers.

But actually, as I watched "Won't Back Down," I had the sense it had been written by some sort of committee, so painstakingly does the screenplay repeat the overused talking points we hear again and again in debates over school accountability and choice. ("We're here for the children, not the teachers!" "A good school can cure neighborhood poverty!") One of the main characters, the Teach for America alum Michael, experiences a conversion over the course of the film from pro-union to anti-union politics. The explicit message is that effective teachers don't actively choose to be unionized -- which is pretty disturbing, considering the amazing, union activist educators I've met around the country over the past six years -- folks whom any parent would want teaching his or her child. I'm thinking of Alex Caputo-Pearl in Los Angeles; Mark Anderson in the Bronx; and the entire team at the Math and Sciences Leadership Academy in Denver, just to name a few. 

Teachers are a diverse group of millions of people with a broad range of views on organized labor. But if you hear the suggestion that good teachers don't want to be in a union, you should raise your eyebrows. This simply does not correspond to real life in the real world. Poll after poll of teachers' attitudes show the majority appreciate their union representation. That's why these sorts of gross caraciatures of teachers' unions will not  move the education reform debate forward; they will calcify people into self-protective camps, feeling attacked, misunderstood, and blamed. What we need instead are productive, cooperative partnerships to improve schools and elevate the teaching profession.

Read more at The Nation.