That’s my take on the new Marcus Winters/Jay Greene/Julie Trivitt study on the impact of high-stakes testing on low-stakes subjects in Florida. According to its executive summary, the study examined whether labeling schools with an “F” motivated them to increase learning in science, even though it didn’t “count” in the Sunshine State’s accountability system:

– The F-grade sanction produced after one year a gain in student science proficiency of about a 0.08 standard deviation. These gains are similar to those in reading and appear smaller than the gains in math that were due to the F sanction.

–There is some evidence to suggest that student science proficiency increased primarily because student learning in math and reading enabled that increase. That is, learning in math and reading appear to contribute to learning in science.

That sounds reasonable enough to me, though Eduwonkette wants to see all the technical details to know whether the methodology stands up. (I’m not smart enough to figure that out; that’s why we have Amber!)

My beef is with the study’s pre-release spin. The Greene Machine directly juxtaposes its paper with statements by our own Checker Finn (who wrote in National Review Online last year that he worried about “a narrowing curriculum that sacrifices history, art, and literature on the altar of reading and math skills”) and trustee Diane Ravitch (who co-chairs Common Core, an organization concerned about subjects “neglected” by NCLB).

Both Checker’s op-ed and Common Core grew out of Fordham’s Beyond the Basics project. Its conference volume include a great paper by Brown University professor Martin West that finds that schools in states that test in science (or history) didn’t narrow science (or history) out of the curriculum, even if those tests didn’t “count” for accountability purposes. Meanwhile, schools in states without such tests did reduce time spent on those subjects-quite dramatically. Just having a test–even a low-stakes one–seems to be enough of an incentive for schools to keep their focus broad.

Greene et al’s findings are consistent with West’s. What would be interesting to know is whether Florida’s “F” schools also raised achievement in a subject NOT tested by the state. (Of course, doing that study would be much more difficult because state test scores aren’t available.)

The new study provides some helpful evidence that improving achievement in reading and math can improve achievement in science. But it certainly doesn’t contradict other evidence that American schools are spending less time teaching non-tested subjects such as history. The last word on the “narrowing of the curriculum” this is not.

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.

“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

The teachers, it seems, are upset with me. I annoyed more than a few of them when I wrote, in my review of HBO’s Hard Times at Douglass High, that the educators at Douglass High School in Baltimore “weren’t cutting it.” The documentary seemed to make that pretty clear; so, too, the school’s culture and test scores. And yet, as so many classroom managers are quick to note, I’ve just missed it all so very badly.

Take this chap, for example, a teacher who in a particularly fired-up blog post tagged me with a rather unflattering sobriquet. He did not like my diagnosis of what ails Douglass High. But as a co-worker pointed out, when one takes to the blogosphere to rain insults upon others, one should, as a matter of course, take pains to do so in a grammatically appropriate manner. Our friend (the, ahem, teacher) has failed in that task through his predilection for inserting apostrophes whenever he deems them necessary, proper grammar be damned–e.g., “According to its author, Liam Julian, it’s incompetent administrators’ and teachers’ who are to blame for the fact that Douglass is failing just like thousands of other urban schools in the United States.” I’m just saying.

Our friend also dislikes my prescription for improving the health of an English class, which, I wrote, eschews “having a valuable conversation about Nick Carraway’s flaws, say, or the mistakes of old men who fish for marlin.” The angry blogger responds: “According to Julian, if we just made these kids read The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick, all would be well. Think about that: if we just make poor black kids read books by white folks about white folks, all will be okay.”

This gentleman is ostensibly a teacher, and probably he considers himself a good one. Leaving aside his odd insinuation that black students should not read anything by white authors and his weird statement that Moby Dick is a book about white people (a white whale, I thought)–what are we to make of his substitution of Melville for Hemingway? Moby Dick was no marlin.

It is safe to assume, I think, that we are dealing here with a well-intentioned person who undoubtedly knows quite a bit about pedagogical, Marxist theory but next to nothing about anything worthwhile, such as grammar and literature. I respectfully venture that such individuals should not be in charge of classrooms of kids. If I must be pilloried for that zany statement, so be it.

Update: One of the nice things (or bad things, depending, really, on one’s post-breakfast mood on any given day) about blogging is the immediacy and interactivity of it. Several commenters, whose gripes are available below, did not appreciate my Marlin/Whale diagram (which Coby helped to design) or the accompanying words. I must note, first, that such diagrams are clearly necessary because certain persons (see above for an example), cannot on their own distinguish between these two highly distinct marine personalities. And now, about those accompanying words.

We learn that I shouldn’t have pointed out the poor grammar and literary ignorance of the blogger in question; such notes are “derogatory” and contribute to a “vicious cycle.” Vicious it really isn’t–I merely offered some advice about not inserting apostrophes willy-nilly, which is a sound suggestion, any way you slice it. But to insinuate, as one commenter does, that my words are irrelevant is quite wrong. First, they’re funny, and humor always has relevance in my book, especially in an education-policy world where stolidly and solemnity rules and if you tell a joke you garner looks as if you’d just broken wind. Second, they make a point: We have someone who claims to be a teacher, who leads a classroom of students, who questions my ability to pass judgment on the performance of other teachers–and he can barely construct a readable sentence. This is a problem worth noting. Third, let it be known: This isn’t some namby-pamby, change we can blog in-type operation. I play by old-school rules, which clearly state, in Section 3-B, that if one is called a derogatory name or has his honor in some other way tarnished he cannot, ought not, will not brush it off. He will skewer his attacker, perhaps with wit, perhaps with a rapier (if circumstances and local laws and customs permit). Those who are offended by such rules may suck their thumbs and clutch their blankies, or they may simply close their eyes when coming upon any blog post bylined “Liam Julian.”

From Sunday’s Washington Post.

In a New Criterion article, Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history, points out the misperceptions that many college faculty members harbor. If only their presumptions were true!

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective–they do believe that–contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

To avoid accusations that I care not about the Joads or Martin Luther King, Jr., I’ll add this bromide: High school students should learn about the Great Depression and segregation, too.

The problem here elicited is a problem–at least because it engenders a lot of boring writing–and I’m convinced that it’s getting worse. (No, I don’t have data to support that.) Today’s k-12 system generally ignores writing and today’s colleges demand lousy writing, so there you go.

Mark Bauerlein, the Emory professor, Phi Beta Cons contributor, and author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, takes aim at Wikipedia in this new Education Next column. He writes:

The site is criticized for its superficiality, erroneousness, and amateurism, but, in fact, Wikipedia provides ready access to a fact, definition, or overview. No, the real problem with Wikipedia is a stylistic one. Read a dozen entries on the similar topics and they all sound the same. The outline is formulaic, the prose numbingly bland. Sentences unfold in tinny sequence. Perspectives arise in overcareful interplay. If a metaphor pops up, it’s a dead one. Consider the entry on Moby-Dick:

Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off Ahab’s leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale.

Compare that to a sentence from Collier’s Encyclopedia, first published in 1950: “As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly…” Or the description of Ahab in the 1953 Encyclopedia Americana: “a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him…” Or even this in CliffsNotes from 1966: “Ahab’s monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe.”

Pretty compelling. I’m sure literati Liam agrees. As for me, I’m just content that Wikipedia gets its facts straight–at least most of the time.

This month’s issue of The New Criterion is all about education. There’s lots on the value of the classics/liberal education/learning for learning’s sake from smart folks like Roger Kimball, Victor Davis Hanson, and James Piereson. There’s also another piece from the always-provocative Charles Murray on the supposed futility of trying to close the achievement gap.

Today in The Gadfly, I write about George Orwell’s claim that bad writing and bad thinking are mutually reinforcing. I focus on the most egregious cases: sentences punctuated by text-message spellings and abbreviations and plagued by rotten grammar and rampant ambiguity.

What I didn’t have space to comment on are the other forms of poor writing that Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” lambastes, many of which appear daily on the op-ed pages of America’s best newspapers. One of the sharpest observations in his essay is that so much writing isn’t actually an assortment of words; rather, it’s an assortment of hackneyed phrases that people have simply been trained to string together when the appropriate circumstances arise. A writer who follows this training doesn’t make his own meaning. He instead allows boring, overused sentences to construct meaning for him.

If you haven’t read “Politics and the English Language,” you should really turn away from your work for 20 minutes and give it a perusal.

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.

A post from guest blogger and Fordham board member Diane Ravitch.

When No Child Left Behind was first passed, I supported it. It seemed to me a good idea to test kids in reading and math from grades 3 through 8; after all, if you don’t have basic skills, you are severely limited in your ability to learn anything else. I could not, at first sight, see why anyone would object to establishing baseline goals for basic skills.

As the full consequences of the law have unfolded, I have begun to have second thoughts. I must say that my views changed very considerably after a daylong session in November 2006 at a conference that Rick Hess and Checker Finn organized at AEI called “Is the NCLB Toolkit Working?” The dozen or so papers presented that day all gave the same answer: No. If I recall correctly, less than 5 percent of eligible children were taking advantage of choice options; less than 20 percent of eligibles were utilizing after-school tutoring. The after-school tutoring seemed to be a swamp of incompetent providers and badly-administered programs, as best I could tell. I must say that the day was mind-changing for me.

I put those findings together with the increasing evidence that states were inflating their test scores to prove that they were well on their way to 100 percent proficiency (a phenomenon a Fordham Institute report called “The Proficiency Illusion”), and I began to recognize that NCLB was having some very ill effects on American education.

Then came the release of 2007 NAEP scores for the states, and I saw that the test score gains in reading and mathematics that predated NCLB (from 2000-2002 or 2000-2003) were larger than the test score gains since the passage of NCLB. Much ado about very little academic progress.

These are the reasons that I have come to believe that NCLB needs radical overhaul, not just tweaking. It is not working, and it has unleashed an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing, has promoted grade inflation by the states, has dumbed down education by its unremitting focus on basic skills and its narrowing of the curriculum. Hey, folks, there are just so many hours in the day and in the week, and if more and more of them are devoted to testing and prepping for tests, then there are fewer available for the study of history, literature, science, the arts, civics, geography, and foreign language.

I don’t want my grandchildren to go to schools whose reputations ride solely on basic skills and not on their capacity to offer a rich and coherent program in the liberal arts and sciences.

If we continue in this mode, we will manage to produce a generation of kids who can pass the tests but are uneducated. We will also destroy American public education at the same time.

Stop defending NCLB. It has proven to be ineffective, harmful for kids, devoid of what matters most in education, hostile to knowledge-acquisition, and downright bad for the future of education.

Well, only if you consider Italian, French lit, Latin lit, and computer science part of the core curriculum. For better or worse, few American students and their teachers treated these as even part of the peripheral curriculum (by last count, only 1,600 students nationwide were taking the AP Italian course, for example). That’s why the College Board is trimming those Advanced Placement courses from its offerings, according to this Washington Post story. A minor retrenchment for the A.P. program? Yes. A major attack on Western civilization? No.

on why we need to rescue the liberal arts in k-12 education.