Liberal arts vs. technical training

Chester E. Finn, Jr. , Peter Meyer / February 23, 2012

Ed. Note: The email version of this edition of the Gadfly Weekly failed to identify sections of this week's editorials by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Peter Meyer as quotations from other authors. We have great respect for the work of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Mark Bauerlein, and would never want to imply that it was our own. We apologize for the mistake.

Pundits and politicians have cited the loss of manufacturing jobs as a sign of American economic decline for decades now, but a recent Washington Post article suggests that the problem is an under-skilled workforce, not a lack of opportunity. With that in mind, Checker and Peter square off this week to debate whether a renewed and revised focus on vocational education is the key to the U.S.'s economic future.

21st-century VocEd  could be key to future economic prosperity

By Chester E. Finn, Jr.

I’m a huge fan of high-quality liberal-arts education for everybody and really do think it would go far to prepare better citizens, neighbors, and consumer/transmitters of America’s cultural heritage and democratic underpinnings. I’m also an acolyte of E.D. Hirsch and his core point that everyone—especially poor kids—needs to be culturally literate as well as equipped with the 3 R’s (though he emphasizes that his focus is K-8, not high school).

That said, I’m also becoming convinced that the future of our economy and the acquisition of good jobs will hinge as much on well-developed technical prowess as on Aristotle, Shakespeare, Darwin, Rembrandt, and Mozart.

Recent weeks have brought multiple reports of U.S. jobs going unfilled,

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Liberal arts vs. technical training

Memo to the world: America’s secret sauce isn’t made in our classrooms

Michael J. Petrilli / February 23, 2012

American innovation doesn't start in the classroom.  Photo by Dave Parker.

A few weeks ago, a couple of Japanese scholars dropped by the Fordham Institute offices for a visit. This happens every so often—delegations of foreigners make the Washington ed-policy circuit, seeking a better understanding of America’s schools. As with most Asian visitors I meet, these gentlemen were curious about how we manage to produce so many innovative leaders. They want a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs, or a Mark Zuckerberg of their own.

To which I replied: “You’re looking in the wrong place. It has nothing to do with our schools.”

This isn’t meant as a knock on our school system. But from ages zero to eighteen, our young people spend about 9 percent of their lives in class. Isn’t it likely that the other 91 percent contributes more to such attributes as their creativity or willingness to question authority?

I asked my visitors what Japanese adolescents do when they aren’t in school.

“They attend cram school,” was the answer. Uh huh.

American kids, on the other hand, are engaged in all manner of extra-curricular activities: sports, music, theater, student council, cheerleading, volunteering, church activities, and on and on. If you are looking for sources of innovative thinking, leadership and teamwork skills, competitiveness, and creativity, aren’t these better candidates

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Memo to the world: America’s secret sauce isn’t made in our classrooms

It SHOULD be hard to pull the parent trigger

Adam Emerson / February 23, 2012

Supporters of converting an Adelanto, California district school into a charter had boasted that 70 percent of parents backed the change, but the Los Angeles Times reported that nearly 100 later backed out of the petition, which the school board threw out on Tuesday. The failure to enact a ‘parent trigger’ and make Desert Trails Elementary a charter shows how difficult it is to campaign for the sweeping reform the law allows—just as it should be. As states like Florida and Michigan consider their own trigger laws, they should set the bar high to make sure that transformational change is possible only with a supermajority of parents, not the simple majority necessary in California. A parent trigger is good policy. It brings families to a bargaining table that has been the exclusive province of teacher unions and school boards, and it begins to rethink the way we govern public education—and does so in ways that meet the unique needs of low-performing and low-income students. The trigger also helps to counteract monopolies, whether those include strong-arming school boards or obstructionist unions. But a parent-directed reform with a tenuous hold on support and authority can lead to its own imbalance of power, a problem that can be checked if two-thirds of the families agree to sign up. That’s a threshold required to pass constitutional referenda in many states, and it’s one that can give parent unions an invaluable tool to turn around a struggling school.

Teresa Watanabe, “Campaign for Adelanto charter school

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It SHOULD be hard to pull the parent trigger

Rating performance is a tricky business

February 23, 2012

» As Bill Gates opined in this morning’s New York Times, education discourse is better off—and comity about needed reforms somewhat more likely—without teachers’ test scores plastered on front-pages, where legitimate caveats about margins of error and sample sizes are likely to get swept aside. As Eduwonk notes, parents still deserve to know whether their children’s teachers (and others in their school) measure up; but they should get that information from the principal, not the morning paper.

» The Chicago Board of Education backed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s latest move to shape up the Windy City’s schools yesterday, approving closures, teacher firings, or management changes at seventeen underachieving public schools. Gladfly is thrilled that, from Chicago to Cleveland to Providence, a growing number of big-city Democratic mayors are realizing that standing up to teacher unions isn’t just sound policy—it can be a politically smart decision.

» Tucked away in President Obama’s budget is a proposal to cut NAEP funding and shift from a "Nation's report card" to a system that benchmarks students against the PISA. While putting the performance of American students in international perspective provides some useful insights, tying our understanding of student achievement to a fatally flawed test like the PISA is a big step backwards. Besides, we already know how to compare NAEP results with those of other countries.

» The New York Times reports that states are tweaking new teacher evaluation systems as they implement them. While some reformers worry about watering down these promising innovations, we say: A dose of pragmatism

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Rating performance is a tricky business

The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / February 23, 2012

Few education analysts are as knowledgeable and provocative as the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless, and many denizens of the policy sphere look forward to his annual Brown Center Report on American Education. This year’s edition is no disappointment. As in earlier years, it tackles three big topics and manages to be provocative—and out of the mainstream—on all three.

But it’s real easy to misinterpret its message and misconstrue its policy implications.

Topic I has been read as saying that “the Common Core standards won’t raise student achievement.” Of course they won’t, not all by themselves. Standards merely describe the desired destination of the education journey; they don’t get us there. As Kathleen Porter-Magee has carefully pointed out on Fordham’s Common Core Watch blog, to achieve their potential, these standards must be well and fully implemented and joined to quality assessments, accountability systems, and much more. It’s possible to have good standards and low achievement (look at California and D.C.) and it’s possible to have weak standards and pretty good achievement (Connecticut and Vermont are good examples on this front). But, other things being equal, it’s far better to set a destination worth reaching than to embark on a random journey, and it’s far more helpful to those who will do the curriculum-building, the assessment-creating, and the classroom-instructing.

Topic II basically explains why achievement, and achievement gaps, are

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The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?

Obama’s Education Takeover

Lisa Gibes / February 23, 2012

A recent Education Next piece (“Obama’s Education Record”) by Fordham’s Mike Petrilli and Tyson Eberhardt presents a hard-hitting case against the President’s prowess as a K-12 reformer (a reputation sullied by overspending, lackluster results, and micromanagement). Still, compared to this mini-book (and attached video) from the Pacific Research Institute’s Lance Izumi, their essay reads like an Obama festschrift. (Nowhere, for example, do Petrilli and Eberhardt liken Obama to Louis XIV, as Izumi does.) While Izumi references the imprudence of ARRA spending (a critique echoed in Petrilli’s and Eberhardt’s piece), the majority of his broadside lambasts the Common Core State Standards—an unprecedented federal overreach in his eyes. For those who have followed the CCSS debate, Izumi’s deftly chosen (and not exactly even-handed) arguments are not new. He contends that these “national standards” are unconstitutional, costly, and none-too-rigorous. Big statements, if just loosely grounded in fact. We’ve previously rebutted the first argument. And the rigor of the CCSS is equivalent to the best of pre-existing state standards (which those states were—and remain—free to retain). We are obliged to note, however, that Izumi spurned our own analysis of their merits in favor of a more problematic one. As for the costs of the Common Core, that’s a trickier issue. Expect more from us next week (and then still more in the upcoming months).

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Obama’s Education Takeover

School Improvement Grants 2010-2011: The School Improvement Grant Roll Out in America’s Great City Schools

Daniela Fairchild / February 23, 2012

We’ve long cast doubt on the efficacy of school-turnaround efforts, notably those championed (and funded) by the federal school-improvement-grants (SIG) program. This new report from the Council of the Great City School offers a welcome primer on SIG—but does little to allay our concerns. The report first details the history, participation, and look of the SIG program: It was written into NCLB but got a makeover (and a boatload more cash) with the passage of ARRA. Now, SIG prioritizes schools (bucketing them into three “tiers”—I, II, or III—with Tier I being the neediest) and doles out dollars to districts accordingly. To be eligible for SIG, districts must choose one of four interventions for each funded school. In general, the “turnaround model” asks that schools replace their principal and half their staffs. The “transformation model” only requires a changing of the principal guard. The “restart model” converts the school to a charter—or hands the management reins off to an outside agency. The “closure model” is self-explanatory. There’s much more background on SIG here, but what’s interesting is the forty-three member-district survey the CGSC conducted as part of this report. From this, we learn that districts seem to be less aggressive with their turnaround efforts post ARRA (though many more are embarking on them). Before ARRA pumped $3.5 billion into SIG, only

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School Improvement Grants 2010-2011: The School Improvement Grant Roll Out in America’s Great City Schools