Thomas B Fordham Institute - Advancing Educational Excellence

What would George, TJ, Abe, Teddy, Ike, and the gang say?

yes Peter Meyer / February 20, 2012

Past presidents might not be too happy with the current state of education.  Photo by William Andrus.

This is not the time for federal intervention is what they would say. But I would imagine most of our great presidents would be somewhat appalled by the barnacled bureaucracy that now counts as our public education system. I would love to hear what they had to say about these four recent stories: 

• Not to be missed. Scot Simon’s report for National Public Radio on Kansas City’s failed school system is a needed reminder about the delusional thinking of those who defend the current American public education system. K.C. is part of a long-line—think Detroit, Newark, Chicago, New Orleans—of failed city school systems.  One simply cannot take the attacks on school reformers seriously when seen through the prism of reports like Simons’.


• Embracing Common Core.  This is a wonderful symposium by Fordham's Ohio team about the meaning of the Common Core and how to implement it.  See also Education Next’s debate on the math part of the CCCS.  And, of course, always interesting, if somewhat predictable, is Jay Greene’s take: here come the commies. 


• You want to know where we

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  Category: Governance

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  What would George, TJ, Abe, Teddy, Ike, and the gang say?

The poverty myth persists

yes Peter Meyer / February 15, 2012

Every time I see a “poverty and education” story I think of the famous line from the New Testament in which Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want.” 

So, with education. Want a convenient scapegoat for our problems? Poverty. It’s there, it’s handy. 

Want a convenient scapegoat for our problems? Poverty. It’s there, it’s handy.

I sat through an hour meeting of our small school district’s budget committee last week, most of it devoted to bemoaning our fate as a “poor district” (over 60 percent of our kids qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, the standard definition of “poor” for schools) in these recessionary times. State aid has been nearly flat and the Governor punched through a two percent local property tax cap. Woe is us. There goes sports. Not mentioned was the fact that we spend over $22,000 per student! 

Diane Ravitch has been hitting the poverty gong for some time, most recently in Cleveland, where, she says, “the level of urban decay is alarming.” I was just in Cleveland and, while I can appreciate the sentiment, I fail to understand how she gets to the next sentence: “Yet its municipal leaders have decided that their chief problem is bad teachers.” 

Huh?

I visited a couple of successful Cleveland public schools during my visit—successful in educating poor children—and while principals in each of those schools said they could use more money, neither said that money—or their students’ lack of it—was their major challenge. Getting good

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The poverty myth persists

States’ rights: a slippery slope back to mediocrity?

yes Peter Meyer / February 13, 2012

In the midst of the waiver news last week—which set many a reformer’s teeth on edge—came a few events and reports that provide some interesting ringtones for the current debate over the federal role in education.

Let the dollars follow the child was the proposal from the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force, which also makes a compelling case for the federal government’s “central role” in our nation’s education future. Let the feds butt out was the message delivered by Rep. John Kline, Republican chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, as he explained two ESEA rewrite bills at an American Enterprise event. And Unconstitional! was the Pioneer Institute’s conclusion about the federal government’s support of the Common Core:

Actions taken by the Obama Administration signal an important policy shift in the nation’s education policy, with the Department placing the nation on the road to federal direction over elementary and secondary school curriculum and instruction.

One wonders whether “states’ rights” are being invoked to cover up the very inequities that NCLB was determined to remedy.

I hesitate to invoke Civil War analogies here, but there are some troubling signs in the current dust-up that make one wonder whether “states’ rights” are being invoked to cover up the very inequities—the “soft bigotry of low expectations”—that No Child Left Behind was determined to remedy. In a press release from the Education Committee’s Republicans we learn that they “have long recognized the progress state and local officials have had implementing innovative reforms that hold schools accountable for student achievement, support excellent teachers, and

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States’ rights: a slippery slope back to mediocrity?

Education malfeasance: the “reading to learn” myth

yes Peter Meyer / February 11, 2012

I came to the world of public education late in my career, but through a golden portal, E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, a book of such broad intellectual depth and revolutionary import that it was a national bestseller in 1987.  Amazingly, more than twenty years later, very few educators have read it (see here).  That’s too bad.  If they had, they would not make statements like the one Josh Thomases, deputy chief academic officer for New York City’s Education Department, gave to the New York Times just the other day:

The core problem of literacy in middle school is you’re transitioning from learning to read, to reading to learn.

Wrong. The problem of literacy is that the transition from decoding skills to comprehension should happen long before middle school.

The problem of literacy is that the transition from decoding skills to comprehension should happen long before middle school.

Thomases means well. And he’s trying to clean up the anti-academic middle school mess that has persisted for far too long (see my Ed Next story).  But like far too many educators (including the authors of No Child Left Behind, who wrongly set reading up as a skill divorced from content), he misunderstands the nature of reading.  As Hirsch writes in his second, and arguably more important, book about education, The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them,

While the process of decoding from letters to language is the foundation of reading, it isn’t the essence of reading, which

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Education malfeasance: the “reading to learn” myth