I started my career teaching British, American, and world literature to high school kids. So I’m not thrilled to see the steady decline in the number of books read by middle and high school students. We’re told that last year, on average, 2nd graders read roughly 46.2 books compared to 4.5 books for 12th graders. That has me depressed. But before I cry in my beer (read: Starbucks Chai Latte Nonfat Extra Hot), I decided to download the study.

Yes, as a former program evaluator (another post-teaching vocation), I actually like to review the methodology of studies as opposed to relying upon the “bottom line” message often reported in the news media. As alluded in the Toledo news report, the study’s data are collected from a database at Renaissance Learning, a company that markets Accelerated Reader (AR)—a popular reading program in schools. Turns out, though, that the number of books students read is calculated by the number of quizzes that any particular student completes (each AR book title has an accompanying quiz). A caveat explaining such is included in the introduction to the report, which reads:

Please note: Renaissance Learning recognizes, of course, that not all book reading that happens in or outside of the classroom is captured through the Accelerated Reader software. However, it is reasonable to assume that for users of Accelerated Reader much book reading is captured in this way. AR quizzes number more than 115,000, which allows students a wide range of book selection; nearly every book found in a school, classroom, or local library has a quiz available.

They go on to explain that the study sample is one of convenience (duh), not a representative one. They say that they have records for more than 3 million students at more than 9,800 schools. That is all well and good. But let’s not make the mistake of concluding that the data in this report speak for school-age children in general. I’m left wondering about the conditions under which students completed these quizzes. Were they graded? Were there incentives tied to completing the quiz—a book-of-the-month gold star perhaps? These are critical data left out that would help us understand how we should interpret the findings.

So, then, what we should keep in mind about the study is this: The dismal number of books students are reported to have read pertain only to a large bunch of kids enrolled in schools that pay to use Accelerated Reading and then are asked (more likely required) by their teachers to complete a quiz on what they read.

Sure, I agree, kids are probably reading fewer hard copy books these days, but we need to know more about how and how much students read online. Emerging technologies are changing how academic reading is handled in schools, and innovative thinkers are reinventing teaching in exciting ways. So for now, I choose to remain optimistic about kids and reading—and especially what we’ll be doing in the future to enhance how they read.

Photo by Flickr user judybaxter.

Rick Hess and Paul Peterson’s annual look at state proficiency standards is out in the latest issue of Education Next, and the news resembles what Fordham’s Proficiency Illusion report found last fall: a “walk to the middle.” Standards are slipping, particularly in eighth grade.

Their analysis considers the percentage of students passing state tests and compares that to the percentage of a state’s students passing the National Assessment of Educational Progress. From the press release:

Only three states—South Carolina, Massachusetts and Missouri—established world-class standards in math and reading for their students, earning each an “A”. Every other state set a lower proficiency standard—some far short of the NAEP standard. Georgia, for instance, declared 88 percent of 8th graders proficient in reading, even though just 26 percent scored at or above the proficiency level on the NAEP. Georgia joined Oklahoma and Tennessee at the bottom of the class, each earning an “F” for their state standards.

You know where this is going... is it so wrong to dream about national standards?

Another interesting bit in The Gadfly is this piece, which describes how thousands of Massachusetts students who pass the MCAS and graduate high school nonetheless have to take remedial courses at 2- and 4-year colleges—i.e., they’re not ready to do college-level work. Many drop out.

The MCAS is supposed to be one of the nation’s toughest exit exams. So if thousands of students who pass it can’t get along at university, this should alert policymakers to a piece of common sense that has, in the age of No Child Left Behind, become taboo: Not every student can or should attend college.

The “all kids to college” push is something of an unquestioned mantra in ed-reform circles, which has always puzzled me. Of course the only way all students, or even most students, will get to college is if college admission (and by extension, college degrees) means nothing. We already see this happening in states that have attempted to tie high school graduation to high school exit exams; they can either make receipt of high school diplomas an easier task or export more dropouts to the streets.

A university diploma has no intrinsic value. So when we hear that all kids must go to college because the good jobs employ only those who possess at least a Bachelor’s degree, we can be confident that (suspending disbelief) when everyone in America finally does attend college, the good jobs will demand applicants with Master’s degrees. And so it goes.

A better idea: High schools (and ed reformers) should lose their “college or nothing” mindset. Lots of kids won’t, can’t, don’t want to attend a university, and they deserve high school pathways, such as career and technical education, that do not leave them as 18-year-olds with zero prospects.

As with any program, implementation in AP really matters, so it’s disappointing that Tom Stanley-Becker doesn’t say more about how history is taught at his school. Was the AP class his only recent exposure to American history? I have fond memories of my own AP history experience, years ago, because it was precisely what he says he’s missing—we read only essays, and the classes featured roundtable discussions of big and interesting issues. But this was possible because we had all taken the basic American history class the year prior, consuming dates, people, and events in order to free us to talk more about ideas in the second year. I could easily see it being impossible to do both well in a single year, and if that’s happening it’s the fault of the school, not the program.

Tom Stanley-Becker is an AP dropout. The young man writes today in the Los Angeles Times:

The problem with the AP program is that we don’t have time to really learn U.S. history because we’re preparing for the exam. We race through the textbook, cramming in the facts, a day on the Great Awakening, a week on the Civil War and Reconstruction, a week on World War II, a week on the era from FDR to JFK, a day on the civil rights movement—with nothing on transcendentalism, or the Harlem Renaissance, or Albert Einstein. There is no time to write a paper. Bound by the exam, my history teacher wistfully says we have to be ready in early May.

AP and IB are rigorous programs (as we’ve noted), and when compared to the usual public-school classroom experience, they dazzle. But for students who want to learn more than surface facts, who desire a deep and engaging dialogue with the material they’re covering, AP and IB can be profoundly unsatisfying. Educators have every incentive to “teach to the test,” and no incentive to encourage their classes to think critically or to spend time penning essays that do more that recite facts. AP and IB programs can suffer from the same problems that hurt NCLB.

Some say: “But AP and IB students must learn the basic facts first; they can react to them later.” But “later,” which presumably means “in college,” often never comes because university freshmen are no longer required to take real subjects but may, instead, opt for semesters of feminist literary theory. Furthermore, why can’t advanced high-school kids learn facts and react/relate to them simultaneously?

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features an article on K-12 arts education. The piece sets out to refute Obama’s evidently misleading claims that teaching the arts leads to improved student performance on standardized tests.

There is indeed a correlation between, for example, how many years students spend in arts classes and their SAT scores; more art, higher scores. But that doesn’t prove that it’s the added exposure to the arts that boosts verbal or math performance. Another study shows that students who take more courses in any subject do better on the SAT. Meanwhile, a British study found the opposite: the more arts classes students took, the worse they did on their national exams. A more plausible explanation, Winner speculates, may be that academically motivated students in the U.S. gravitate to the arts, eager to show supercompetitive colleges they aren’t just grinds who do well on their SATs. In England, it’s weaker students who are steered onto the arts track.

Fair enough, but there are more important reasons to teach kids about art and music. As Checker and (Fordham board member) Diane Ravitch argued in the Wall Street Journal last year, the breadth of our curricular offerings allows us to “acquire qualities and abilities that aren’t easily ‘outsourced’ to Guangzhou or Hyderabad.”

Indeed, the iPod, Google, Hollywood—these world-beating American icons sprouted from fertile minds that, though they certainly benefited from some technical know-how, would never have found proper nourishment in a drill-and-kill, math-and-science-only environment. Are we really so obtuse as to think that it’s not worth teaching the arts unless it boosts our SAT scores?

(Read more on this in the Fordham report Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children. An essay by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is especially stirring.)

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert tells us that American schools aren’t very good: “We’ve got work to do.”

In his piece, he mentions the new Common Core organization and references its recently released report, Still At Risk.

The Discovery Institute’s David Klinghoffer defends the link—made by the new Ben Stein movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed—between Nazis and Darwinism. I wish I could write on this with more authority, but the D.C. advanced screening of Expelled was canceled.

I just don’t get it, though. Klinghoffer’s piece points out how Hitler used evolution and Darwinism in his propaganda and his personal thought. But nowhere does Klinghoffer discuss why inclusion of such historical instances is at all appropriate in a film that purports to investigate how evolution is taught in modern-day American science classes.

I think it’s safe to say that Expelled is inaccurately juxtaposing Nazis with those who defend teaching evolution in public schools. The New York Times reviewer wrote that Expelled is “[o]ne of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time,” and I’m inclined to believe her.

Find more here.

I was just chatting about this after a recent and jolting visit to some of New York’s Chelsea galleries—today’s art is not judged by how it looks or the skill of the artist who produced it. It’s all about ideology, which is a shame.

But to bring it back to k-12, the article’s larger point is that writing about art has become inscrutable. An example from the Whitney Biennial:

Bove’s “settings” draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings.

That’s bad. But this tripe isn’t limited to the art world; lousy writing is prevalent in all subjects because it’s what students are taught (when they’re taught). Just today, one finds yet another article (this one’s from the U.K.) in which corporate bosses complain that their work-forces lack basic skills, including writing. Seventy-two percent are concerned about the quality of written English. A dose of Strunk & White (”Make every word tell,” “Be obscure clearly”) in our schools would do everyone—managers, employees, museum patrons—a lot of good.

Colorado lawmakers voted put forward a plan yesterday to align state academic standards with the ACT exam.

This seems wise. Most states have struggled to implement high-quality academic standards in the major subject areas, and in the few states that have raised the bar across the board—California, Massachusetts, Indiana—an exceptional amount of political cooperation was required. Certainly that’s not something most states can count on.

So why not adopt a set of clear, ready-made standards that have received the seal of approval from top universities across the land?

UPDATE: It should also be noted that the bill “laid out a multi-year collaborative process for state education officials” to develop K-12 grade-level standards based on the ACT content.

Ah, the vaunted “multi-year collaborative process for state education officials.” Just when you think they’ve figured out a way to cut through the red tape they wrap themselves up again.

The Los Angeles Times featured some debate about Ben Stein’s new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which seeks to expose how a cult of Darwinism has overtaken our public-school science classes. I like Ben Stein, but I’m pretty skeptical about this film, and the reputable reviews are generally negative. Moreover, it reportedly draws connections between today’s science classes and Nazi Germany, which is bizarre.

I wish I could write something more authoritative, but the people in charge of screening the film in D.C. had to cancel because of sound problems, which indicates either a) that after scanning the list of potential attendees, the promoters decided showing the film would be a bad idea, or b) incompetence. Neither inspires confidence in Expelled’s worth.

Ben Bernanke and some around our office suggest that teaching more about finance in American public schools may have prevented our current economic crisis. (What crisis?) I’m unconvinced, and Free exchange, the Economist’s blog, points out that others are, too.

Florida has joined Achieve’s American Diploma Project Network. The press release notes that Florida Governor Charlie Crist made the decision after chit-chatting with Minnesota’s governor, Tim Pawlenty.

The logistical problems with the “Academic Freedom Act,” which is traipsing merrily through the Florida legislature, are legion. The pope’s U.S. visit highlights the logical difficulties that accompany the logistical ones, most prominent among them the continued inability of many to distinguish between the realms of science and religion.

The “intelligent design” proponents (who, by the way, love Florida’s Academic Freedom bill) receive the most press coverage for trying to slip religion and philosophy into science’s corridors. But those on the opposite side, people such as Richard Dawkins, have been just as vocal in their promotion of science as dispositive—i.e., the final, universal theory of all reality. Dawkins, an Oxford scientist, has written that, because of Darwin, religion “is now completely superseded by science.” His notion is true if he’s speaking about, for example, k-12 science standards or science curricula. He wasn’t, though.

Benedict XVI could bring some sanity and clarity to the evolution debate that has so roiled school districts across the United States. To do injustice to his thought by paring it down to its barest form, Benedict (like his predecessor) believes that scientific evidence for evolution is convincing, but that it does not contain the answers to life’s deeper questions. He believes that religion and science are different and separate, and that each can best inform the other when their distinctions are respected.

To bring it back to k-12, science teachers should teach the scientific consensus on evolution without worrying about academic freedom acts that encourage them to muddle the minds of their charges by inserting all types of vague “challenges” to evolutionary theory into their lessons. And science should acknowledge that its impressive discoveries are nonetheless limited, that they do not give us an overarching theory of existence or living.

That such a transparently logical approach is always, it seems, under attack leaves one nonplussed. Perhaps a few papal words on the matter this week would help.

Mike has a fair point that schools can’t do everything. He might have added that it’s hard to picture most high school teachers being able to confidently explain variable interest rates or balloon payments, or any students bothering to listen. But Liam reaches from that to imply that Bernanke is suggesting teaching financial literacy to 12 year olds—that wasn’t what he said (he was talking about high school).

But more to the point, it’s just wrong, and contradicts the Gadfly piece Liam refers to, to flatly dismiss the idea that financial literacy wouldn’t have prevented the current financial crisis. It might very well have. If more people had basic financial knowledge, they would be far smarter about buying homes they could actually afford, about taking loans they could pay back, and about accepting terms that were not “predatory” or overly dependent on variable interest rates. How to help people get that education is the key policy problem. Mike is probably right (as is Liam) that it’s not in high schools—so where, and how?

This week’s Economist contains a special report on “digital nomadism,” the ability to work, and to connect to family or friends, from just about anywhere. When Coburn Ventures, a consulting firm, first started up, its to-do list was as follows: 1) get BlackBerries, 2) start contacting clients, and 3) find office space at some point. Eight months later, the seven-employee firm decided that it didn’t actually need office space; everyone enjoyed the freedom and autonomy of nomadic work.

Twenty years ago, few people would have guessed that businesses could be successfully run without offices. Nonetheless, evermore companies, such as Coburn Ventures, are doing just that.

One can assume that education will go this route, especially private providers that are actively competing against one another for students. Who wouldn’t want their kids to attend a virtual school that saved tons of money on facilities and reinvested those dollars into hiring the best teachers and giving students a lot of personal attention?

Education Sector’s Bill Tucker penned for The Gadfly several weeks ago a nice overview of how virtual education is aiding high-school reform. (Bill based his article on a report he wrote last summer.) Virtual education is expanding, and as it does, it’s taking sundry different shapes. Twenty years from today, will we perhaps have entered an age of educational nomadism?

Mike is right: financial literacy is important, but schools can’t teach everything. In fact, we wrote as much several months ago in The Gadfly.

To suppose that America’s possession of more financially literate 12-year-olds would have somehow staved off or lessened the subprime mortgage crisis, as Bernanke seems to, is really a stretch.

No, it’s not good that the “financial know-how” of American high school seniors has “gone from bad to worse.” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is fired up about it:

The financial preparedness of our nation’s youth is essential to their well-being and of vital importance to our economic future. In light of the problems that have arisen in the subprime mortgage market, we are reminded of how critically important it is for individuals to become financially literate at an early age so that they are better prepared to make decisions and navigate an increasingly complex financial marketplace.

Yes, “financial literacy” is something our schools should inculcate. But I’d rank it behind reading, math, history, science, English literature, geography, a foreign language, art, music, and health education, if I had to prioritize. As schools—with a limited amount of time to teach anything—surely must do.

National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog is engaged in discussion of the same topic that we are. See here and here.

I understand where Mike is coming from here. But the version of American Government currently in classrooms states that “science doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all.” It also contains a sentence stating that global warming is “enmeshed in scientific uncertainty.”

Mike notes that because the disputed statements occur in a U.S. government textbook, they “are more forgivable than if they appeared in a geology text... There is a policy debate about global warming.” But the scientific basis of climate change, not the policy, is what is questioned by Dilulio and Wilson. Whether that happens within a science textbook, a math textbook, or a U.S. government textbook is irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant where the scientific basis of evolution is questioned. If, for example, a U.S. government textbook noted that evolution “is controversial, mostly because it is enmeshed in scientific uncertainty,” Fordham would no doubt take exception.

Mike writes that “science class should be for science.” Then shouldn’t U.S. government class be for U.S. government?

Liam asks “how Fordham can defend literature that goes against the scientific consensus on climate change while pillorying literature that goes against the scientific consensus on evolution.” On its face, this is a fair question. But there are some important distinctions. Most importantly, we regularly rail against states or schools that question the science on evolution—in their science standards or science classes. We frequently argue that the right place to debate “Intelligent Design” and the like is in a current affairs or philosophy class. But science class should be for science.

In this case, the target of the Associated Press article was a U.S. government textbook. So the textbook’s statements on global warming—which I think went up to the line but didn’t quite cross it, in terms of the “scientific consensus”—are more forgivable than if they appeared in a geology text. There is a policy debate about global warming—even if we agree that it’s happening, and humans are causing it, it’s not clear what should be done—and that’s a debate reasonably addressed by government and civics classes. “Intelligent design for global warming” this is not.

Mike is probably correct that the Wilson and Dilulio textbook is receiving scrutiny and press attention because its authors are conservatives. And no doubt lots of left-leaning texts escape similar inspection. But one wonders how Fordham can defend literature that goes against the scientific consensus on climate change while pillorying literature that goes against the scientific consensus on evolution.

One would think this topic wouldn’t deserve treatment from the Associated Press’s national desk—or be picked up in 200 media outlets worldwide (so far). We’ve known forever that textbooks tend to be sloppy, riddled with errors, and generally banal. And when textbooks are “found” to have a liberal-leaning bias, the “news” is only reported by outlets like the Washington Times. But alas, the American government textbook in question in today’s articles is written by two well-known conservatives (oh, the horror!), James Wilson and John Dilulio. (The fact that these two even got a contract to write a textbook probably should have been news.)

What were their sins? Among other things, they wrote that “science doesn’t know how bad the greenhouse effect is” and global warming is “enmeshed in scientific uncertainty.” I might quibble with those statements a bit (I am Leafy Mike after all), but they aren’t as out of line as the anti-American screeds that pass for curricular materials in many a U.S. classroom. But alas, conservatism is under fire from all corners right now, so we shouldn’t be surprised when the MSM wants to pile it on.

An argument for teaching the core curriculum.