Dana Goldstein

My Al-Jazeera Appearance on American Jews and Israel

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

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

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

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

an earlier version of this post appears at The Nation

"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.

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.

Bon Weekend

Let me set the scene: It was summer 2006. I had just moved to Washington, D.C., where the Republican Party controlled all three branches of the federal government. I was working at the Center for American Progress and hanging with all the other smart-ass young liberals...and a few seemingly random Reason writers.

We frequented a dank basement bar called the Childe Harold (RIP), but every time someone suggested going there, we would all moan, "Oh nooo, not again!" 

It was hotter and humider than I thought possible. Cockroaches were hanging out on the sidewalks, along with other disgusting bugs I had never seen in the Northeast.

I had simultaneous crushes on several handsome young political journalists. One of them had just given me a pretty fucking fantastic mix CD. This song was on it, and I played it over and over again on my old school iPod with the click wheel. It has something to do with crossed wires--you know, not getting what someone is trying to tell you.

 

A couple years later I finally saw Jens live at the Black Cat with Ann and Brad.

Sigh. Just a long way of saying--DC friends, I miss you tonight. And a good weekend to all.

 

How Politically Astute is Michelle Rhee?

Ben Smith and Byron Tau have written the definitive piece on this new phase of Michelle Rhee's career. She is attempting to build a national advocacy organization to directly confront the teachers' unions, and--though she continues to identify as a Democrat--she is now working most closely with GOP governors whose foremost priority is to drastically roll back public spending.

Smith and Tau very fairly present the evidence of Rhee's history of political tone-deafness and, to be frank, I don't think she has become all that much more sophisticated over the last three months since Adrian Fenty's defeat. There's only so much common ground a Democratic education reformer can find with politicians who resent the very existence of a social safety net. This hard reality calls into question Rhee's entire strategy of what Smith and Tau call "apocalyptic" confrontation with unions, as opposed to reasoned negotiation that recognizes the unions' expertise on matters ranging from school funding to curriculum and instruction. (And, by the way, I agree with Rhee that the seniority-based teacher layoff system needs to be reformed.)

The often wise Rick Hess explains clearly why Rhee is on such unstable ground: "One of the things that’s going to come down the pike — maybe in 2012, maybe in 2016 — there’s going to likely be a parting of the ways between these progressive education reformers and the folks who have deeper and more profound concerns about public section unions. ... It’s a temporary alliance.”

Why Did the Teachers' Union Spend $1 Million to Defeat Fenty?

Should Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee have done less--not more, as I argued earlier this week--to build cooperation and compromise with the Washington Teachers' Union and other community groups skeptical of the Rhee school reform agenda?

That's the contention of Reihan Salam. Adam Serwer does a good job of explaining why, in the context of D.C. politics, union busting is just a really stupid idea. Indeed, as Adam points out, Rhee sometimes went out of her way to burnish her Democratic credentials by defending the Washington Teachers union when it was being attacked by conservatives like the Center for Union Facts, whose raison d'etre is not school improvement, but to dismantle organized labor and weaken worker rights.

So, you might be asking--if Rhee said nice thing about unions and the union eventually agreed to her bold teachers' contract, why did the American Federation of Teachers spend $1 million trying to defeat Fenty and Rhee? Why aren't they out there selling their role in a contract widely believed to be revolutionary and a step forward?

The answer, I believe, is that the bad blood between Rhee and the union goes back to Rhee's first months on the job, when she announced her goal of firing teachers and instituting merit pay well before she had developed IMPACT, her new teacher evaluation system linked to the district's curriculum. From a teacher's perspective it's pretty clear why a decent evaluation system would need to precede merit pay and firings: How can you decide who is failing if you haven't first defined success? 

Other cities with strong teachers' unions, most recently Pittsburgh, have embraced Rhee-like reforms without the drama that went down in D.C., in part because when the discussion starts off on terminations, instead of with a debate about what makes an excellent teacher (a complex question), a lot of people are going to get very pissed off.

On Fenty's Defeat and Schools as Community

My take on Mayor Adrian Fenty's defeat in Washington, D.C. last night is up at The Daily Beast. In the piece, I write about how middle class black communities became skeptical of Fenty's aggressive school reform agenda, which he pursued through his lightning-rod chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who often voiced contempt for the idea of community buy-in. (Even, ironically, as she worked hard behind the scenes to encourage more families to enroll children in the public schools.)

Via Twitter, Matt Yglesias points me toward the City Paper's pre-election poll, which found that 62 percent of parents with children currently in the D.C. public schools did support Fenty. But the reality is that many other community members feel invested in their local school: those who work in the schools, graduated from them or saw their children graduate from them, or simply feel protective of them as a local institution. (I learned all this the hard way when I campaigned, in high school, for my school district to retire its outdated and caricatured "Indian" mascot. BOY, was I unpopular with the old folks!)

This doesn't mean the schools shouldn't be overhauled. They should be! They need to be! And it is children's and parents' needs that should matter most in education! It does mean that the Fenty/Rhee PR strategy--freewheeling with the besotted national media, close-to-the-chest with the more critical local press, and derisive of local institutions--likely contributed to the allegations of arrogance that (along with economic malaise) cost Fenty the race.

This definitely has ramifications for the national movement of eduction reform entrepreneurs who are favored by the Obama administration. It's a reminder that systemic overhaul, in which the achievement-first, tough accountability values of high-performing charters are grafted onto traditional neighborhood schools, won't be just about winning mayoral control or negotiating with teachers' unions. It's also about accepting that schools and neighborhoods are one and the same, and meeting people where they are to learn what they value about their schools, what they'd like to improve, and hopefully, to convince many of them to get on board with reform.

Update: Commenter "Guy," below, alerts me to the fact that the City Paper poll's demographics are hugely out of whack. I've checked it out, and it appears to be true. While over 80 percent of D.C. public school students are black, just 42 percent of the poll's DCPS parent respondents are black. Meanwhile, white children make up about 10 percent of the schools, but 43 percent of the parent poll-takers are white. 

Unless I'm missing something (and please tell me if I am), that means the point I made in my Daily Beast column is likely true: that plenty of public school parents in D.C., especially black parents, were skeptical of the Fenty/Rhee edu reform agenda.

Imagining the Kinsley/Scarborough Conversation at Politico

John Harris: Jim, I want to make a big splash with our new opinion section.

Jim VandeHei: Totally. It should be something really cool.

Harris: You know who I've been reading since the 70s? Mike Kinsley. I love that guy.

VandeHei: Yes. That guy is a real talent and it's by time someone gave him the leg-up he deserves. Also, Kinsley is not a doctrinaire liberal. That's important because liberals are so boring.

Harris: Totally.

VandeHei: One fresh face on the right is Joe Scarborough. I think the American political elite would benefit from learning his daily opinions.

Harris: Absolutely. I'm so pleased we've figured this out.

VandeHei: Me too. Our 100 percent white male opinion section roll-out is sure to bust open the boundaries of American journalism.

Read more at Mediabistro. The above post is offered in the spirit of friendly collegiality and genuine concern about the continued lack of diversity on opinion pages.

Should White Families be Recruited Into Urban Public Schools?

That's the question posed by this week's Washington City Paper cover story, about D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee's efforts to encourage middle class, college-educated parents to enroll their spawn in the city's public schools. According to reporter Jonetta Rose Barras, Rhee will personally contact parents who've visited or even just called a public school to inquire about enrollment, and even allow interested parents a voice in the hiring process for new teachers. In one especially controversial case, Rhee removed a middle school principal who some white elementary school parents complained was encouraging lax academic standards, even though the parents of actual middle schoolers liked and respected the guy.

What Rhee is trying to do could be called "reverse integration," and it's an outgrowth of reverse white-flight--the trend of white-collar (and often white) professionals choosing to live in urban neighborhoods in their twenties and then stay there for their child-rearing years, reversing the decisions, often made by these same people's parents and grandparents, to abandon diverse city neighborhoods in favor of mid-century suburbs. 

On the whole, I think Rhee's efforts here are a good thing, because of the many benefits of integrated neighborhoods and schools for all kids, whether they come from affluent, middle class, or poor families. For one thing, when educated parents send their child to a school, they lobby for that school to have better staff members, art and music lessons, and richer curricula. That influence has the potential to give a boost to all the kids at the school, not just the privileged ones. 

Furthermore, research by Amy Stuart Wells and Jomills Braddock (among others) shows that students who attend racially-integrated schools are more tolerant adults, even decades later, and that for poor, minority students, attending an integrated school can lead to concrete gains in the job market, as students become more familiar and comfortable with "mainstream" institutions.

Research also shows that middle class white kids do no worse academically when they attend school with poor students of color. But what's important to note is that integration alone is unlikely to raise the test scores or college attendance rate of poor kids. The principal with the highest academic standards for college-bound students may not be the same principal who will devote a ton of time to raising achievement for the kids at the bottom of the ladder. (Ideally, of course, teachers and principals would have both goals in mind. It's a balance.)

As I learned when I reported on the high school I attended, sometimes the most integrated schools and districts are the ones struggling most to raise achievement among needy students, in part because the diversity of these schools puts race and class gaps in stark and disturbing relief. Schools that serve low-income kids need to be laser-focused on providing those kids with extra academic and social enrichment and opportunity. Integration is a crucial education reform tool, and the right thing to do to increase civic investment in the public school system. But it's not a fix-all.

The Spectacles and Pageantry, the Thousand Things You've Got to See

Election night on U Street in D.C., 2008

My heart is based in New York, so I'm very excited that soon my professional life will be based there as well. Tomorrow is my last day at The American Prospect. I'm moving on Saturday, and on Monday, I start an exciting new job at The Daily Beast, as an associate editor focusing on women's issues, international coverage, and politics.  I'm so psyched to join such an innovative, growing publication.  And I've already been doing some interesting writing for The Beast -- check it out.

That said, this is a bittersweet transition. I've been in D.C. for a whirlwind three-and-a-half years. I moved here two weeks after college graduation and didn't know a single person. But I was lucky: I started out in an awesome job and quickly met some incredible people, who were not only professional mentors, but great friends. In 2007, something fortuitous happened -- I won the writing fellowship at TAP. It really changed my life. I had to get serious about politics and policy, and fast. Working at TAP has been like grad school, with incredibly smart colleagues. I'll be eternally grateful for the opportunity.

Through it all, I lived in Mt. Pleasant, a neighborhood that's one in a million. This is the view walking down my street, of the National Cathedral.

I complained a lot about the food scene in D.C., and I maintain that most of the whining was justified. But before I go, a few places I can wholeheartedly recommend: Vace in Cleveland Park for fresh pasta and Italian goods; Red Rocks in Columbia Heights for brick oven pizza; Cork, the wine bar on 14th Street that lives up to the hype; Indique, also in Cleveland Park, for Indian; and the new Pho 14 on Park Road. One good thing about the less than tantalizing restaurant options was that I became a better cook, with much assistance from my roommate and close friend of 16 years, the lovely Eva Seidelman. I'll miss her terribly.

It's been a thrilling, stressful, passionate, and at times sad three years, but my time in D.C. is something I'll always value and never regret. I hope to see everyone regularly in New York. As Gossip Girl would say, "XOXO."