Dana Goldstein

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. 

Diverse Neighborhoods and the Charter School Movement

My colleague Sarah Garland has written a wonderful piece for The Atlantic about a local/federal/charter school partnership to racially and socioeconomically integrate the East Lake neighborhood of Atlanta. Across the country, more and more charter school movement leaders are realizing that if charters serve only poor, black, and Latino families, they will limit their potential educational reach, and will leave themselves open to criticism that they are reifying the segregated nature of American public education. Here in New York, for example, Eva Moskowitz's controversial Success Academy charter network will soon open two new schools in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Cobble Hill, where many white and college-educated families live. An explicit goal of the schools is to attact a student body far more diverse than that of the typical "no excuses" charter school. In the process, charter advocates hope to increase the base of political support for charter school expansion.

But as Sarah writes, the successful Atlanta charter she reported on, Charles Drew, is not a "no excuses" or "strict discipline" type school. Unlike the Success Academies, Drew embraces progressive pedagogy and does not overtly obsess about discipline or testing:

Drew is not one of the "no-excuses" charter schools where young children march in formation through the hallways and teachers give out demerits when students don't maintain eye contact. At Drew, children wiggle and dance through the halls, hugging teachers as they pass and laughing with their friends. Standardized testing is a focus, but not the only focus. It's the sort of school that might attract suburban middle-class parents.

"We're trying to instill a sense that you're taking responsibility for your educational experience," says Don Doran, the principal at Drew. "It's hard to do that if you come out with a whole lot of rigidity."

I've visited a number of "no excuses" charter schools, and some of them do seem like very happy places, despite the emphasis on rules. That said, as I reported from Rhode Island last year, the "no excuses" model does present significant challenges for middle-class families, who tend to prefer less drilling and test-prep; more art, music, and extracurricular activities; and more opportunities for parents to get involved in shaping school policy. As the charter school movement looks to expand beyond the poorest zip codes, it will be interesting to see whether more charters end up looking like the progressive Community Roots in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and fewer like KIPP, a national network of "no excuses" schools.

That said, using progressive pedagogy and enrolling white-collar families does not guarantee that a charter school will attract broad-based political support. Community Roots, for example, experienced strong opposition to its proposal to open a new middle school, which the city eventually approved. The teachers' union and some neighborhood parents objected to the charter taking over space currently alotted to a traditional public school that serves a high proportion of special-needs students. These arguments over real estate and whether charter schools "cream" easier students to teach aren't going away, especially in the nation's most diverse and expensive cities. 

Cities are Growing Faster than Suburbs for the First Time Since the 1920s

Over at Slate, I discuss why that could be a good thing for public education -- if policy-makers don't miss the opportunity to lessen the racial and socioeconomic isolation of poor, non-white children.

By the way, every time I write about the benefits of integrated schools, someone asks whether going to school with poor children hurts the academic achievement of middle class kids. It does not, as long as the classroom doesn't "tip" to become majority high-poverty. Rick Kahlenberg discusses some of the research here. On the social benefits of integration for all kids, I recommend the work of Amy Stuart Wells.

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.

Video and Event: I Talk About Testing and School Reform

This Thursday, May 17 at 5 pm, I'll be hosting an online live-chat at The Nation to discuss the role of testing in Obama-era education reform. I'll be joined by two New York City public school teachers: Mark Anderson, who also writes at Schools as Ecosystems, and a member of the Educators for Excellence network. You can participate on Thursday by clicking here. If you have questions about testing you'd like us to address, please leave them in the comments section.

In preparation for the event, The Nation's Frank Reynolds created this nifty video of me talking about testing. 

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.

Remembering Adrienne Rich

Here are my two favorite verses from 1976's "Twenty-One Love Poems:"

I

Where in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk...if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseparable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing 
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior highschool playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.

III

Since we're not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we're not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we'd live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

"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.

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.