This article (via Joanne Jacobs) may be heartening to some who believe that if fewer ritzy, private prep-school students are admitted to Harvard and its ilk then perhaps more deserving, low-income students from public high schools will be. That may be true. It would be a shame, though, if America’s best colleges were to accept large numbers of pupils who are less academically able than are many to whom they, the colleges, deny entry. What good comes of enrolling young people who aren’t prepared—or, rather, aren’t the most prepared—for the Ivy League?

I know, I know: Ivy League classes are supposedly easier than classes at many state schools, so students don’t actually need to be more prepared for Harvard than for the University of Virginia or LSU. Maybe not. But as we’ve argued about AP, and as Checker told Jay Mathews in so many words, the quality of a higher-level class is in many ways determined by whether or not that class actually enrolls higher-level students. I tend to think the same holds true, to a large extent, for university classes and campus culture, too. Too much diversity of intellectual ability on campus doesn’t seem to offer any particular benefit. (It is certainly a myth that Ivy League graduates are the only ones who fill competitive jobs, or that a Harvard degree is necessarily the ticket to success.)

And colleges are of course judged largely by their prestige (agree or disagree about whether that’s good, but it’s true), as measured by lots of things, such as quality of faculty and endowment size, all of which are mutually reinforcing. But at base, I think, a school’s prestige is generally built on who matriculates there. It’s complicated stuff, sure. But if Harvard starts shutting out significant numbers of the most qualified applicants and offering spots, instead, to lesser minds, then Harvard’s unique luster will diminish. Some think that’s a good thing, but I don’t find compelling justification for their thoughts.

Photo by Flickr user mjm.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist signed this week a bill that lessens the emphasis of the state’s high-stakes test, the FCAT. The House minority leader, Dan Gelber, a Democrat, and Patricia Levesque, who directs former Governor Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future, both supported the bill—a rather odd pairing, to be sure. Here’s more about the changes.

From the Washington Post:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is proposing a contract that would give mid-level teachers who are paid $62,000 yearly the opportunity to earn more than $100,000—but they would have to give up seniority and tenure rights, two union members familiar with the negotiations said yesterday.

Union members

said teachers are opposed to giving up seniority and tenure, no matter the size of their raise, and probably would reject such a proposal.

“You may be trading off your future, your tenure, your job security,” a union member said. “When you trade that, it seems to me you’re not getting much.”

Rhee, who declined to comment yesterday because of the ongoing negotiations, has said she wants a contract that would “revolutionize education as we know it.” She also has said she wants to improve instruction by ensuring that the District “has the most highly compensated and competent” teachers in the country.

Education experts who follow teacher contract issues said that D.C. teachers would be among the highest-paid educators in the nation under Rhee’s plan and that a proposal eliminating seniority and tenure would be groundbreaking.

Nice, Christina. And then there are these problems. First, none of the arguments he points out is reductio ad absurdum (one must never forget the ad). Second, if one was, what the heck would be so wrong with that?

Third, who’s Leo Casey?

Update: Rethinking this argument, I believe our opponent classified it nearly correctly, actually—it is reductio ad absurdum, and a strong one at that. Now, when I ask, above, “who’s Leo Casey”... well, that’s definitely ad hominem.

I’ll ignore the rest of Leo Casey’s EdWize post this morning in favor of this one comment:

Are Checker and the boys in a competition to publish the ultimate reductio absurdum?

Leo: Meet Amber, Stafford, and Christina. Women. Who write for this blog (and have done so for several weeks now). If you’re going to call out the Fordham team, find a more gender-neutral way to do so. And you call yourself a liberal.

Photo by Flickr user drbrain.

New Philadelphia schools CEO Arlene Ackerman is making an impression right away; the Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

More than 200 Philadelphia School District staffers received layoff notices this week, a move the new schools chief hopes will begin to de-centralize the district and move resources into classrooms.

The employees were all academic coaches, mostly veteran educators who supported teachers in a variety of roles, from technology to mentoring new teachers.

In short, she’s quickly asserting control over a behemoth bureaucracy, much like Michelle Rhee is in D.C.

The Philly union leader suggests it’s for show: “This is the kind of thing that happens each time a superintendent takes over.” I might be so cynical myself, except we know that such central-office “coaches” are often poorly managed and, unbeknownst to them or anyone else, can help cause huge funding inequities between schools. Marguerite Roza has studied this phenomenon; in an anonymous city where four psychologists float among 10 schools, one “says she spends most of her time at a school where the principal ‘values her work,’” and another “spends the largest portion of her days at the school her own child attends.” As a result, some schools are shortchanged—and often those with the neediest students.

Ackerman might have such a problem in Philly: “When I asked what these coaches do, people would sort of shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Well, I don’t know.’”

But what’s most encouraging to me is that it’s “a move the new schools chief hopes will begin to de-centralize the district and move resources into classrooms.” Such decentralization is a crucial element of weighted student funding, an important reform Ackerman helped implement in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. In this interview, she leaves no doubt that Philadelphia will be next, welcome news for those of us disappointed by Rhee’s moves in the opposite direction in D.C.

The baby boomers are on the way out of the nation’s colleges and universities. The New York Times reports that liberal professors birthed into academia in the 1960s and 70s are retiring—and being replaced by younger and more politically moderate academics. This shift has had numerous effects, not the least of which is the exit of ideology in the way academics understand and study public education.

Michael Olneck, a professor from the University of Wisconsin and the article’s token old guard professor, introduced the syllabus in a class last year entitled, “Race, Ethnicity and Inequality in American Education” with the following: “Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.” By contrast, Sara Goldrick-Rab, his new guard replacement, embraces a more empirically based approach. Her class on inequality and opportunity in community colleges will have an “emphasis on the critical evaluation and assessment of current up-to-date research”.

The renaissance of data will undoubtedly have a great impact in the field of education. With colleges full of professors who haven’t lived through the Civil Rights Movement, Brown v. Board, and a host of other educational milestones, we may be able to move into the future rather than stagnating in the past. While these events had incredible political impact and undoubtedly should not be forgotten, the visceral reaction they created in a generation of professors has fundamentally impeded the ways in which we discuss education policy today by substituting emotion for good common sense.

The USDOE announced a couple days ago the six states approved for “differentiated accountability” plans (Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Maryland, and Ohio). The purpose of the program according to the Department is to “assist those states by targeting resources and interventions to those schools most in need of intensive interventions and significant reform.” Targeting resources to the neediest of needy schools clearly makes sense, but I share Mike’s concern relative to how this program might loosen the pressure on suburban schools in particular. One of the key flexibilities under the new program is that “the state clearly defines its process for categorizing  schools” and from the looks of it, each pilot state is absolutely elated to do so.

Recall that under the current NCLB system, if a school fails to meet AYP two years in a row, it is labeled “in need of improvement.” Since all subgroups of students must also meet AYP benchmarks, that’s meant that many “successful” suburban schools—previously judged to be so based on aggregate student performance—now find themselves “in need of improvement” when one or more of their ESL, special education, Latino, etc. populations don’t make adequate gains.

The Differentiated Accountability program essentially gives states permission to develop kinder, gentler labeling systems for these suburban schools and others. In Maryland, Indiana, and Illinois, for example, it’s out with the “in need of improvement” label and in with the “focused needs” and “comprehensive needs” labels. Schools that make AYP in the “all students” subgroup but not in one or more of the other subgroups are “focused needs” schools, while schools that do not meet AYP for their “all student” subgroup are comprehensive needs schools. Many suburban schools, then, rid themselves of that nasty in need of improvement label. The implication is that they just need to “focus” a little more. After all, according to USDOE, they are “just missing the mark.”

Read a couple of the state press releases from the pilot states and it’s easy to see that the states are just as eager to craft new labels for schools as they are to craft new policies for them to help students. In Maryland, for instance, schools in their first three years of improvement are now in the “developing stage.” In Florida, schools in their first four years of not making AYP are in “preventive” improvement.

To be fair, there are other (unsurprising) changes that states have proposed in this new program (like switching the order of when the tutoring and choice provisions are offered to struggling students). But the power in a name ceases to amaze me. The public attention (and yes, bad press) that suburban schools sometimes receive for not meeting the academic needs of their special student populations is a welcome spotlight. The in need of improvement label is the scarlet letter they understandably wish to banish. But there’s a difference between a label that provides a more precise school description intended to better funnel resources and one that attempts to sugarcoat matters when schools fail needy students. I want to give states the benefit of the doubt and say they are simply doing the former. But my cynical side says let’s not forget that “developing,” “focusing,” and “preventive” schools still need improvement too.

David Broder writes today about America’s national identity and whether the nation’s young people are learning enough about it. He sees a lot to like in the Bradley Foundation’s E Pluribus Unum report, which notes that today’s students seem to know much less about history and their country’s government than did their predecessors. But Broder isn’t too concerned. He writes:

Young people may not know the Constitution as well as we would like, but they found their way to polling places in record numbers this year and joined enthusiastically in many campaigns. And they volunteer for all kinds of good works in their communities.

Pointing out that young people went to the polls in record numbers and that they volunteer in their communities is not an effective way to disabuse anyone of the idea that those young people don’t know much. Enthusiasm is not, in itself, a virtue. History is replete with examples of rallied populations whose ignorance imbued their enthusiasm with the potential for unseemly consequences. Too often, those consequences came to pass. In fact, a persuasive argument can be made that young Americans’ relative flock to the polls this year is a direct result of the emotional pulls of a certain politician, one who seems quite at home with the notion of rewriting history. It is certainly not a reaction to that particular candidate’s intellectual appeal.

Photo by Flickr user kjd.

You may remember that both Amber and Liam first alerted us to, and then wrote on, what’s now being called the Gloucester pregnancy pact—that a group of sophomore girls in Gloucester, MA decided to get pregnant and raise their babies en masse. Well, Time’s Editor-at-Large Nancy Gibbs thinks the Gloucester incident should be interpreted differently.

In a July 7 article appropriately titled “Give the Girls a Break,” Gibbs argues that the lesson is not that there are more teen pregnancies or that we should find the “anecdotal evidence” supporting the pact “certainly troubling.” (Wow Nancy, I award you the understatement of the year award.) Instead, she says, maybe this incident is an indication of changing teenage attitudes about abortion. I’m not going to go near the validity of this conclusion; what I’m interested in is the absolute insanity of her argument. Gibbs decides that teenage girls (and boys) have more respect for life because the Gloucester girls kept their babies. Wait a second... wasn’t the whole controversy over this slew of pregnancies about the fact the babies were planned? (And maybe the fact that one of the fathers was a 24-year-old homeless guy—as reported by Gibbs’s own magazine).

The best part is that she starts the article with the following observation: “You know you’ve found a perfect cultural touchstone when everyone brushes past it on the way to opposite conclusions.” Well done, Nancy.

The NEA is gathering in Washington—some “10,000 delegates and a few thousand other union members and guests,” according to the Washington Post. The union is going to decide whether to offer its presidential endorsement to Barack Obama or to John McCain. (I wonder what are the Vegas odds on McCain?) What’s interesting about this, though, is that Obama will address the group on Saturday. I predict that Mr. Postpartisanism (a concept that shares much with postmodernism), will offer up a bland speech about making sure all children have a future and all teachers have support and all American classrooms are splendid. Maybe he throws in a few lines like, “We should reward the best teachers as they deserve to be rewarded,” from which ed-reform tasseographers can divine the candidate’s future support for merit pay. The key, of course, is for Obama to give a talk that a) doesn’t offend the NEA and b) doesn’t make him sound any less postpartisanismishy. We’ll see if he can pull it off.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, we hear from college graduates who recognized a crummy job market and decided to channel their energies into service programs, like Teach for America. Great idea, right? More teachers for TFA in the interim and more opportunities to introduce grads to a career they may not have thought about.

But then we read this:

Teach for America has an agreement with certain companies, such as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., to grant corps members with existing job offers a two-year “deferral” so they can teach for two years and still have a job waiting for them when their commitment is over. It also runs something akin to a career-placement office to connect former teachers with recruiters at major companies, including General Electric Co., McKinsey & Co. and Google Inc.

And this:

That kind of partnership with non-teaching career paths helped Mike Stewart’s father feel better about his son’s joining the organization. “My fear was that he’d go into the teaching world right off the bat,” after his service, says the elder Mike Stewart, executive vice president of a medical-device company. “One thing that gives me some comfort is that he is still planning on going to law school.”

With so many reasons to bail from teaching the second a commitment ends (great job connections! Parent pressure!), how will these grads consider classroom service a career instead of a bullet point on a resume?

Britain’s schools minister is Lord Adonis. Its schools secretary is Mr. Balls.

There’s been a development in New York City’s “rubber room” controversy. According to the Daily News, the Department of Ed has agreed to hire more arbitrators and tighten investigation procedures in an effort to expedite the cases of teachers put on prohibition for misconduct.

That’s what they’re talking about at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Ross Douthat moderates.

We’ve been accused at times of union-bashing (as distinct from the teacher-bashing attributed to Liam, yesterday and today), but perhaps we can cede that mantle to Thomas Sowell. From his column on National Review Online today:

during the Second World War, France collapsed after just six weeks of fighting and surrendered to Nazi Germany. At the bitter moment of defeat the head of the French teachers’ union was told, “You are partially responsible for the defeat.”

His point, though, is that patriotism matters, and that the French union helped water it down in the 1920s and 30s. I’m not enough of a historian to wade into that issue, but as we approach July Fourth, it should be said that teaching students about America’s greatness (and yes, mistakes too) is something we should applaud, not shun. In 2003, Fordham gathered an esteemed group of authors who made that very point, in a volume that still has relevance today.

While my esteemed colleague may not be buying the numbers coming out of the Big Apple, parents and students are. Mayor Bloomberg announced today that a survey of parents and students revealed that a “vast majority” (according to the New York Times) of New Yorkers were “satisfied” with their schools. While we can only hope the results of said survey may prove to be worth their whopping two-million-dollar price tag, the real kicker was the response of Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, to the finding that 94 percent of parents surveyed were happy with their child’s teacher:

“The fact that parents think so highly of their children’s teachers also indicates how selfless our educators are,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They give their all despite feeling that the central administration isn’t listening to their concerns.”

Did I miss something? Here’s a thought. Maybe the reason parents are happy with their teachers is that Bloomberg’s system works and teachers are responding in kind.

At Fordham, we normally avoid the paparazzi and gossip columns by donning dark sunglasses and entering buildings only by tunnel or back alley, but still, Checker couldn’t avoid the New York Sun’s “Out and About” blog, which caught him and others in New York last month celebrating Fordham trustee Diane Ravitch’s 70th birthday.

If it hasn’t been said on Flypaper before, a belated happy birthday to you, Diane!

New York City’s experiences in the last couple weeks reinforce my belief that the notion that we can “hold public schools accountable for results” is questionable.

No one bought the district’s announcement that test scores have dramatically improved. And why should they have? The doubters seem to understand that politicians who pledge to raise student achievement are heavily motivated to make it appear that they’ve raised student achievement—even if they really haven’t.

What puzzles, though, is that this sage observation seems to have died at the doorsteps of Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein. The skeptics blame these particular politicians as if the perverse incentive to varnish test scores afflicted only certain snaky individuals rather than all holders of public office. Why is that? Why when public servants invariably fall prey to the sinister tug of politics do we blame the individuals and never politics?

Julie Greenberg wrote about the “Mantle of Martyrdom” in a past edition of NCTQ’s TQ Bulletin.

Sandwiching thirteen years of teaching between two periods of policy work, I have acquired an unusual perspective on the culture dominating the teaching profession. I learned early on that we teachers are a sensitive bunch. My warning to non-teachers: never question the martyrdom of teachers.

Whoops.

The Gloucester, Massachusetts, principal who told Time that several students made a “pact” to get pregnant stands by his remarks. (Last week, Amber wrote a sharp Gadfly piece related to this subject.)

“3 of 4 City Students Say They Took No Art Class This Year”

Update: NYC Department of Ed press secretary David Cantor writes in the comments section:

This New York Sun headline from today’s edition is inaccurate, and the Sun will be publishing a correction.

The Sun misread our student survey, publishing the percentage of students who said they participated in arts activities before or after school rather than the number who said they took classes.

In reality, 46% of students said they took at least one class in visual arts this year; 37% of students took at least one music class; 15% of students took at least one dance class; and 12% of took at least one theater class.

To supplement these classes, many students said they participated in arts activities before or after school or during free periods, including 27% in visual arts programs-the number from which the Sun’s headline derives. Here’s the link to the survey.

Given that New York City high school students are required to take only one year of arts, these participation rates for last year are good news.

David Cantor
Press Secretary
NYC Department of Education

Even as he announced an initiative yesterday to educate more mathematicians and scientists, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg thought it necessary to point out that anti-immigration policies pose a grave threat to our economy.

Evidently fearless in the face of controversy, Liam writes today on the touchy subject of so-called “Raza Studies” in Arizona on National Review Online.

NPR’s Morning Edition aired today a segment on which presidential candidate, John McCain or Barack Obama, is actually the most bi-partisan or post-partisan or something like that. Frankly, I couldn’t care less, mostly because these glorified labels are hooey. But here’s how Obama, when asked to speak about a time he has broken ranks with his party, explained his bi-/post-partisanshipishness:

Obama also points to his willingness to consider merit pay for teachers. “I’ve gotten in trouble with the teachers union on this—that we should be experimenting with charter schools,” he said. “We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers.”