Dana Goldstein

Discussing Educational Inequality With Chris Hayes

Chris Hayes is getting a lot of flack for his Memorial Day episode, in which he grappled seriously with war, peace, death, and memory. I'm going to outsource commentary on that to Conor Friedersdorf, but really, Chris should be lauded for hosting a show that deals with issues like education policy with more nuance than any other show on television. I was lucky enough to be part of Chris' panel on Saturday, where we discussed racial and socioeconomic segregation of schools, teachers' unions, and other crucial topics. Here are some clips.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

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.

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.

"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.

The Neighborhood as Curriculum

Crenshaw section of South Los Angeles, near Crenshaw High School. May 2011.

The role of curriculum in school "turnaround" efforts is not often acknowledged, which is why I wanted to write this piece, about Crenshaw High School in South L.A. The school has struggled with difficult demographics, constant administrative turnover, and persistently low test scores. But the district has now empowered a group of activist teachers at Crenshaw to enact an unusual reform agenda, in which an interdisciplinary, problem-solving curriculum built around social challenges in South L.A. is married to more traditional goals, such as raising standards through the national Common Core:

Last semester, the 10th-grade Social Justice Academy focused on school improvement across L.A. For their final project, students had to analyze a data set that included test scores at various schools; neighborhood income levels; school truancy rates; and incarceration rates.

In math, students graphed the relationship between income and social opportunity in various south L.A. neighborhoods. In social studies, they read conservative and liberal proposals for school reform and practiced citing data in their own written arguments about how to improve education. In science, students designed experiments that could test policy hypotheses about how to improve education. And in English class, they readOur America, a work of narrative non-fiction about life in the Ida B. Wells housing projects on the South Side of Chicago. ...

What’s controversial about the Crenshaw reform agenda is that it is explicitly political. It asks students to think critically about the social forces shaping their lives and to work actively to improve their low-income neighborhood. Poor children often hear that they need to do well in school in order to escape their communities. What if, instead, kids understood that doing well in school could help them become more effective advocates for their families and neighbors?

I first learned about Crenshaw through Alex Caputo-Pearl, a 19-year veteran social studies teacher and faculty leader at the school. Alex was actually part of Teach for America's very first class of recruits, in 1990, the year he graduated from Brown University. Since then, he has demonstrated an extraordinary level of commitment to social justice-oriented school reform in L.A., agitating for change within the teachers' union as a member of the Progressive Educators for Change caucus, helping to organize parents to demand better services in low-income neighborhoods, and now working with a group of colleagues to overhaul Crenshaw's curriculum.

(And here's why union representation can be so crucial for teachers: As a reward for his efforts, Alex was branded a troublemaker by the district in 2006, and transferred against his will to an affluent elementary school across town. Students, parents, and the teachers’ union protested. He was reinstated.)

After making contact with Alex about a year ago, I was able to visit Crenshaw last May and sit in on a day of teacher professional development training for the new curriculum I discuss in the article. I hope to visit L.A. again this spring and next fall to track Crenshaw's progress over time. In the meantime, check out the whole piece, at Zocalo Public Square.

Remnants of the Twentieth Century City, Newark

Here are some images of downtown Newark, NJ on the day I reported this story, about Cory Booker and Chris Christie's efforts to convince teachers and other white-collar professionals to move to the neighborhood. 

This is the retail corridor along Market Street, walking from Penn Station to the area of the proposed SOMA development.

 

 

The art deco Paramount Theater, opened in 1886 and shuttered in 1986. It was sold in 2007 for $2 million, but has yet to be developed. You can check out the gorgeous interior, which is set to be demolished, here. 

 

Turning south onto Halsey Street, approaching the site of the proposed SOMA and Teachers' Village developments. The building below will be demolished to make way for new construction by Richard Meier. (See renderings of the project here and here.)

 

The future of these handsome buildings, some of them abandoned, remains in question. A lot depends on whether the SOMA developers can attract enough financing to the project.

 

This is 17 Williams Street, a historic building next to the Teachers' Village site that is set to be rehabilatated. Here in 1939, the book Alcoholics Anonymous was written by Dr. Bob Smith, in an office donated by his friend Bill Wilson, a publisher.

 

A wall.

Further Thoughts on Homeschooling, Liberalism, and Special-Needs Kids

I’ve been overwhelmed and gratified by the huge response to my Slate essay on secular, liberal homeschooling—especially Astra Taylor’s deeply thought rebuttal at N+1, which I highly recommend. Taylor maintains that her original piece was not prescriptive: that she does not believe progressive homeschooling is practical or right for all children, simply that considering its benefits—its child-centered ideology and disdain for testing—is a useful thought experiment when contemplating how to improve education broadly. 

To me, the salient question is how we get from point A) a public school system that isn’t doing a good enough job educating many kids, especially the neediest, to point B) a public school system that is more equitable and higher quality. Does the increasing prominence of homeschooling—both in terms of raw numbers of families joining the movement and homeschooling’s growing role in the political debate over education—serve this purpose? I continue to believe it does not, because it is difficult to improve an institution without broad buy-in into it.

Furthermore, I’m concerned that the deep cynicism about public education reflected in Taylor’s original N+1 essay and other statements from progressive homeschoolers and unschoolers--in which schools are compared to prisons and public school educators are depicted as vicious enforcers of class and race hierarchies--only serves to lessen support for this crucial social institution. 

I received dozens of emails since Slate published my piece, most from politically liberal parents eager to share stories of how homeschooling allows their own children to flourish through field trips, hands-on projects, and curricula molded to their quirky interests. Others told me they believe their child’s special physical, emotional, or intellectual needs can not be adequately served by schools; this is a wrenching challenge for millions of families with special-needs children, and one I should have acknowledged in my piece. (Later in this essay, I’ll address special education at greater length.)

But my Slate piece was not about the benefits or drawbacks of homeschooling for particular families or children. Rather, my piece was about the educational needs of society at-large. To clarify my own position, I do not think homeschooling should be illegal, and I acknowledge it may be the best option for a relatively small population of disabled and special-needs kids. My own belief is that when it comes to the typical child, however, homeschooling does not comport with crucial social justice values related to investing in the common good, and so I’d urge parents concerned with social justice—both broadly and in terms of their own children’s development—to think twice about making this choice.

The debate the article sparked, especially on the left, illuminates a deeper divide: What kind of liberalism does one subscribe to—one primarily concerned with the common good, or one primarily concerned with individual rights? Obviously a good society is made up of a careful, Rawlsian balancing of both these interests. But I believe American liberalism weighs private interests and “choice” too heavily, and that our society would be strengthened by more shared institutions and experiences, including in education.

Though just about 2 million children are homeschooled—compared to 55 million children in the public school system—homeschoolers are amazingly well organized, and have successfully lobbied many in the Republican Party to abandon their previous support for education spending and for federal and even state school improvement efforts. As secular progressives join the homeschooling movement in greater numbers, perhaps they will disassociate it somewhat from its outright hostility toward public education and efforts to improve it; one need not participate in a public institution to support it politically.

Yet as the political theorist Corey Robin deftly noted in our Twitter exchange about homeschooling, the social programs with the deepest support in the United States are those, like Medicare and Social Security, into which we all invest. In other Western democracies that have a history of greater public investment in education—and histories of greater respect for schooling and intellectual activity more generally—homeschooling and even private schooling is practically unheard of. Those cultural differences are why, as the New York Times reported last week, affluent, foreign-born parents in New York City enroll their children in public schools at nearly double the rate of native-born Americans in the same income bracket.

To respond directly to Taylor’s critique of my piece, I will admit to a romantic strain of thinking in some of my writing on public education. Looking back on the public schools I’ve chosen to report on over the past few years, from Newark to Queens to Denver, it’s true that I consistently visit excellent ones. In part, this is because I am eager to share best practices in the hope they can be replicated; in part, on an ideological level, I want to push back against “Waiting for Superman”-like thinking, in which charter schools are misrepresented as the only public schools helping low-income children transcend the economic conditions into which they were born. 

That said, I try to stay vigilant about policing Pollyannaish tendencies in my work, knowing I come from a family of public school educators and that I had a generally positive public school experience in a district that was (and remains) in many ways unusual. To this end, my first long-form magazine feature about education entailed revisiting my hometown to confront an issue Taylor brings up in her rebuttal to my piece: the problematic history of de facto tracking by race and class in integrated public schools.

But the fact of the matter is, if there’s one reason to feel romantic about American public education, it’s that the public school system is required to educate all children, regardless of disability-status, behavioral problems, or whether or not they have parents actively engaged in their child’s education. Here is Section One of Title XI of the New York State Constitution:

The legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated.

The history of American public education is a history of efforts to make good on the Common School movement’s promise of universal, quality education. The Education and Secondary Education Act, signed into law by President Johnson in 1965, gave the federal government a new, aggressive role in supplementary funding for the education of disadvantaged children. When Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975, it prevented states and districts from excluding special-needs children from public education.

It would be a farce to claim all public schools are doing a good-enough job at serving special-needs kids. But at least within the public system, parents have legal recourse when they believe their children are not being adequately served. In New York City, for example, there’s a fantastic organization called Advocates for Children that provides disabled kids, low-income kids, foster kids, and other disadvantaged populations with attorneys to represent their interests in confrontations with the public schools.

This is in marked contrast to the homeschooling cooperatives and radical “free schools” I discuss in my Slate piece, in which “problem” children may be completely excluded. In the Brooklyn preschool cooperative Sonia Songha joined, “things got ugly” after the teacher suggested one child needed an individual aide, a common service public schools provide to kids on the autism spectrum, for example, or who are hearing-impaired. As parents in the co-op fought over whether to hire and how to fund an aide, two families pulled out.

And while the private Albany Free School Taylor visits in her N+1 essay is a fascinating (though, as Taylor admits, un-scalable) experiment in social-justice oriented education, it is not required to educate all children. Taylor writes:

At the time of my visit the staff had just dismissed a student for the first time in the school’s history. The boy, 10 years old and extremely large for his age, was angry and aggressive, intimidating and hitting his classmates without provocation. His peers knew his home life was tough, but their empathy didn’t deter him from terrorizing them. The whole community—teachers and students—held a meeting and, after discussing the issue at length, voted to have him leave.

Public school teachers and students are not allowed to vote any child out of a school.

Last spring I reported from Providence, Rhode Island and met Betsy Blanchette, a public school psychologist who specializes in working with children on the autism spectrum. Because the state of Rhode Island is required to provide free services to all disabled kids, Blanchette spends her day shuttling between up to six schools, some of them private schools, where she meets with students for counseling and with parents and teachers to design plans to educate special-needs children.

In 2010, Blanchette won an award as educator of the year from the Asperger’s Association of New England. She was nominated by the parents of a high-functioning autistic first-grader whose small private school had become overwhelmed by his needs. Reluctantly, the parents approached the Providence public schools for help; Blanchette was assigned to the case. She began meeting with the boy once a week to work on basic social skills, like how to interpret physical mannerisms or stay calm if a teacher “redirects”—changes directions for an activity mid-stream, a very confusing thing for a child on the autism-spectrum to understand, since they tend to be highly-literal and rules-oriented. Blanchette encouraged the family to enroll their son in public school, and then convinced the district to hire a full-time aide to attend class alongside the boy. Today he is in a fifth-grade inclusion classroom and doing well.

In this case, only the public school system had the expertise, resources, and legal responsibility to serve this particular child. And at the end of the day, that’s why homeschooling is severely limited as an education reform thought-experiment. Because the vast majority of two-income and single-parent families will never be able to homeschool or afford private school, we need to pursue educational equality within the confines of the public school system we have—a system that is constantly struggling, in a legally-accountable way, to balance the needs of individual children with the needs of the community at-large. The more of us engage in this struggle, by enrolling our kids in public schools and supporting public schools politically, the better these institutions will be.

Update: I forgot to mention that a few homeschoolers wrote to me saying they also believe investing in the common good is very important, so despite pulling their kids out of public schools, they have them volunteer, visit cultural institutions, and do other activities related to giving back. This is great, but again, this is the private liberalism of piecemeal philanthropy, not the sort of public liberalism I support, in which we build strong, shared social institutions capable of systemically addressing poverty.

Update 2: Yes, of course the choice of where to live, in terms of moving to a "better" school district, severely impacts educational equality and buy-in to the common good, as well--and is far more common than homeschooling. Click here and here to learn about ways to lessen the negative impact of residential segregation on schooling.

Update 3: A really smart response to the debate, from my friend Sara Mead.

On the Purposes of Schooling

Horace Mann: "Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is that one is carried by blood and the other by water." 

The New York Times' Stephanie Saul has a blockbuster investigative feature out on K12, the for-profit manager of virtual public charter schools. Saul finds that enrolling a child in a virtual school is, in fact, cheaper for the state than enrolling him in a brick-and-mortar school. But in the case of Pennsylvania's Agora Cyber Charter School, the modest cost savings are more than offset by a loss of quality: a learning "environment" of low standards (the lowest grade is not 0, but 50, and it is almost impossible to enforce attendance) and little or no real-time interaction with peers and teachers.

Many educators believe there is a place for full-time virtual learning for children whose pace is extremely accelerated or those with behavioral or other issues, like teenage mothers who need to stay home with their babies. But for most children, particularly in the elementary grades, the school experience should not be replaced with online learning, they say.

“The early development of children requires lots of interaction with other children for purposes of socialization, developing collaboration and teamwork, and self-definition,” said Irving Hamer Jr., deputy superintendent of Memphis city schools.

The entire piece raises the following question: What is school for? There is a disturbing tendency in the education reform debate to narrowly define "student achievement" as the goal of schooling. If our measures of success are merely graduation rates and test scores, then why not save $1500 per student and allow a bunch of disadvantaged kids to veg out in front of their laptops, indoors all day? Sure, over half of K12's 200,000 "cyberpupils" are behind grade level, but most of them are poor anyhow, and their neighborhood schools are probably failing, too. And maybe we can improve virtual schools over time--there's no reason to be a technophobe! Right?

In researching the history of American education for my book project, I've been struck again and again by the newness of the idea that schooling is primarily a matter of academic achievement. The mid-nineteenth century reformers who founded the Common Schools Movement, the precursor to our modern system of universal public education, believed that Protestant morality was the first goal of education. "Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine," Horace Mann declared. His friend Catharine Beecher, an advocate for girls' education and women teachers, believed that the role of the teacher was "to instruct in morals and piety."

As the student population diversified at the turn-of-the-twentieth century, "Americanization" became the major goal of public education. In later years, reformers focused on vocationalism and then on racial healing. It is only really since "A Nation at Risk" that we've had a national dialogue about academic excellence for every child. This is a much-needed development in American culture, but its discontents are numerous: A lack of attention paid to the civic, social, and artistic benefits of schooling, and the ways in which children are (ideally) shaped as moral, cultured, socially-responsible people by their teachers and school communities. 

It will be a real political and moral failure if we continue to focus the expansion of the for-profit virtual learning sector not on advanced students, but on children who are already falling behind. These are the kids who most need and deserve the support of traditional learning communities, and who are least likely to have parents who can devote the many hours per day needed to act as a "learning coach" for a child enrolled in a school like Agora. 

That said, privileged kids, too, are dealing with the outcomes of over-rationalized educational thinking. In New York Robert Kolker reports on Valerie Reidy, the controversial principal of the Bronx High School of Science, one of New York City's premier public "test" schools for high-performers. Both my mom and stepdad graduated from Bronx Science; it has a reputation for excellence and creativity not only in the sciences and math, but in literature and history, too. Reidy, however, pushed by the Bloomberg Department of Education, was unhappy with the fact that Bronx Science students scored lower on Regents and AP exams than their peers at Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant. Over time, she required teachers to put more emphasis on preparing students for end-of-year tests, many of which are pitched at a lower level than Bronx Science students are capable of. This sparked a wave of student protests and teacher turnover.

One can debate Reidy's pedagogical approach, which focused on the inquiry method. My question is more about the ends to which she was applying this approach. Were average Regents scores of 85 instead of 95 at Bronx Science evidence of an underperformcing school, as Reidy and the DOE claim--or just evidence of a school that, as a community of educators, parents, and students, had decided to focus on values other than test scores? What's wrong with that?

More on the D.C. Achievement Gap and Michelle Rhee's Legacy

In response to my Nation piece on achievement gaps in Washington, D.C. district public schools, commenter E.B. wondered how things would look different if we measured student proficiency instead of raw NAEP scores. This is a great question, since proficiency--defined as "solid academic performance"--is the standard to which we should hold most children.

As you can see from the chart I've whipped up below, things still look pretty abysmal when we measure proficiency instead of raw achievement. While D.C. public school students from every demographic group made modest gains over the past four years, just a small minority of black (12 percent), Hispanic (22 percent), and poor children (11 percent) in Washington perform at grade level in math. I've included scores from Charlotte, North Carolina as a comparison, since Charlotte typically outperforms other urban districts.

When we compare Charlotte to D.C., we see that demographics play an important, but ultimately limited, role in a child's academic performance. Poor, black, and Hispanic students do better in Charlotte than they do in D.C. There are many reasons why this is so, starting with "peer effects:" The Charlotte district is more diverse than DCPS, with a greater percentage of white, Asian, and middle-class students, as well as individual schools and classrooms that are more socioeconomically-integrated. (To review why integrated schools are often better schools, click here and here.) There are also an almost-unlimited number of curricular, pedagogical, and human resources practices that could be responsible for one district, like Charlotte, outperforming another, like Washington, D.C.

I want to be clear--especially in response to Alexander Russo--that I'm not attempting to hold Michelle Rhee responsible for the existence of these achievement gaps, which far predate her term and are partly attributable to demographic realities out of her control. What I do want to do is call attention to the continued underperformance of disadvantaged D.C. kids compared to their peers in other cities. The Rhee agenda was multi-faceted. It included elements I support, such as bureaucratic streamlining and the recruitment of more college-educated families into the public school system, and elements about which I am skeptical, such as the tying of teacher evaluation and pay to student standardized test scores. The Rhee years also conincided, as Alexander notes, with an increase in charter school enrollment, and there is some limited evidence that D.C. charters may be outperforming the city's traditional schools.

The takeaway, I think, is that Rhee pursued a number of reforms, but there is no evidence that her most controversial, anti-union moves are responsible for the limited growth we've seen--or that teacher-evaluation reforms alone can, over time, move many more poor, black, and Hispanic D.C. chidren to academic proficiency. Indeed, the D.C. public schools are still highly segregated by race and class, with quality teachers more clustered than ever in whiter, wealthier schools. These trends are negatively correlated with high academic achievement for disadvantaged kids.

The 99 Percent, the 1 Percent, and the Bloomberg Education Agenda

 

The folks at The Awl have published my longish essay on the Occupy movement, Mayor Bloomberg, and the public schools. Since I attended the education reform "teach-in" at Zuccotti Park last Friday, I've been thinking through whether the 99 percent/1 percent critique applies to school reform, as Bloomberg critics argue. Here's part of what I concluded:

The trouble with this narrative comes in comparing education reformers with greedy bankers. The dominant ethos of the school choice/Bloomberg/Obama reform movement is one borrowed not from Wall Street, with its desperate lust for profit, but from Silicon Valley, with its commitment to meritocratic innovation that—yes, of course—earns money, but also serves the public.

There's a lot more in the piece, so please check it out.