AssortedStuff

Were you aware that “public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution” in the US?

I wasn’t.  And after reading this morning’s Post, it’s clear the writer’s use of the term “revolution”, quiet or otherwise, is a major overstatement at best.

It seems this particular “revolution” is being funded by the big money foundation headed by Bill Gates and his wife.

However, actually reading past the headline we find that almost all of their cash is going into a variety of experiments focused on relatively minor variations on the status quo: national standards in language arts and math, pay-for-performance systems, and charter schools.

Of course, this is the same Gates Foundation that over the past ten years has already dumped $2 billion into their failed program to develop a small high school concept.

Which in most cases resulted in a shrunken version of the standard educational structure used in most high schools and little improvement student learning.

But that piece of history gets only a brief mention in this glowing assessment of Gates’ education current funding of reform efforts.

The other side of the issue gets only slightly more space.

Skeptics say the Microsoft founder is foisting a business-driven agenda on schools without understanding the challenges of public education. “I suspect that eight years from now, the Gates Foundation will say, ‘Whoops, we made another big boo-boo. What should we do now?’ ” education historian Diane Ravitch said.

And then there’s this little bit of information from the second half of the story, providing one likely reason for this puff piece to be published at all.

(Melinda Gates, wife of the Microsoft chairman, and investor Warren E. Buffett, a major donor to the foundation, are both on The Washington Post Co. board of directors.)

The price of having a major newspaper declare what you’re doing a “revolution”?

bill gates, education, foundation, reform, washington post

Front page of this morning’s Post, above the masthead, in space normally reserved for major, earth shattering events, comes the news…

The 2010 “challenge” index for DC-area schools has been unleashed on the unsuspecting, and largely statistically clueless, public!

The method for computing this highly-publicized ranking of high schools hasn’t changed.

Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2009 by the number of graduating seniors. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted.

Also not changed is the glorification of the taking of tests, while factoring in nothing about how student actually score on them.

As with the 2009 release, the list includes something called the Equity and Excellence rate, defined as “the percentage of all seniors who have had at least one score on an AP, IB or Cambridge test that would qualify them for college credit”.

Which is also not an entirely accurate number since colleges make their own decisions as to what score on an AP test will earn credit. Or whether the student will get a pass on taking a similar level prerequisite course instead of credit.

So, what exactly is the purpose of the assembling the “challenge” index in the first place?

The rating is not a measure of the overall quality of the school but illuminates the one quantifiable factor that seems to reveal best the level of a high school’s commitment to preparing average students for college. [my emphasis]

The ONE quantifiable factor. Love to see the study supporting that contention, much less the concept that college is the best goal for every student.

While the Post seems to be avoid a “best” tag, it remains to be seen if Newsweek (owned by the Post), when they likely publish the the national version of the index in May, will refrain from billing Mathews’ list as the “nation’s best high schools” as they have in the past.

Ok, I know it’s probably a hopeless cause to continue ranting about this incredibly shallow assessment of high school quality year, after year.

Especially since both politicians and the press seem to be obsessed with reducing everything done in school to simple, headline-friendly numbers, something for which the “challenge” index is tailor made.

However, it would be great if more people would take a critical look at this and other hyper-simple schemes for assessing the complex process of teaching and learning.

By the way, I thought you added the possessive to a name ending in ‘s’ by simply adding an apostrophe. Or am I wrong that the proper punctuation is supposed to be Mathews’ list not Mathews’s list? I’m sure I make plenty of grammatical errors around this place, but I have an excuse. There are no highly trained and paid copy editors around here.

ap, challenge index, high school, jay mathews, washington post

In a guest education column from the Post earlier this week, Daniel Willingham, billed as a cognitive scientist at UVa, makes a good, practical case for the arts being an essential part of K12 education.

He makes many excellent points but there are two that resonate the loudest.

Kagan argues that the arts offer a unique means of communication, using representations in the mind other than words, which are at the core of most school subjects.

…participation in the arts allows children to see the importance of creating beauty, of creating an object that others may enjoy. When a child gets an A on a math test, the immediate benefit is to the child alone. But when the child creates a drawing, she makes something for the pleasure of others as well.

Our traditional system of schooling has always been largely closed, with students only taught to communicate with those in the same room, and largely not allowed to express themselves beyond those walls.

And, pushed by the holy grail of our current standardized testing mania, the curriculum they study has been narrowed to the points that anything but reading and math is considered a frill.

Instead we should be expanding our concept of what it means to be an educated person to include the ability to communicate using many different tools through multiple channels.

art education, curriculum, education, standardized testing, washington post

Jay Mathews and a colleague at the Post are soliciting suggestions for their lists of the ten best education blogs of 2009.

I had the honor of being placed on Uncle Jay’s list of favorites last year, primarily due to my

frequent rants about the pseudo mathematics behind his “challenge” index, with side trips into criticism of his regular AP and KIPP fan club postings.

So, what might the two of them be looking for in their list of the “best”?

Well, Mathews notes that he has a “weak spot for blogs that target me as the spawn of the devil and consign me to a different circle of hell every week”.

Plus he admits that “people with egos as inflated as mine love the idea of being heckled. In our twisted view of reality, it proves we exist”.

Basically, I guess you need to mention him frequently and feature lots of links to his work. :-)

For the record, however, I have never compared Mathews to Satan in this space. And, as for residing in hell, working for the Post is probably close enough for anyone these days.

Anyway, it’s time for some other edubloggers to receive Mathews blessing. Use the comment section on his post to offer your recommendations. Or, if you don’t want to register with the Post, email him directly.

blog, education, jay mathews, washington post

In his weekly Post column, I actually agree with Jay Mathews’ assessment of the campaign promises on education issues being tossed around by the two candidates for Virginia governor:  Pleasant sound bites with little substance.

Whichever Virginia candidate wins will do his best for kids, even if much of what is being proposed is standard American campaign pap. Both want to raise teachers salaries, a wonderful idea, but neither presents a realistic plan to pay for that. Both support school-business partnerships to prepare students for the real world but don’t say how they are going to solve the old problem that neither business executives nor educators have the time or energy to make such plans work. Both want to reduce dropout rates but cite no examples of this happening recently in any significant way, given the drag of poverty on many children’s lives.

I have to admit that Mathews is also right when he says that Virginia already does a pretty good job of supporting public schools.

Unfortunately, that support is almost entirely in the context of the traditional educational structure.

Neither of the people running for governor, much less anyone else in the state political or educational administrative structure, is proposing anything that would substantially move teaching and learning beyond the process familiar to anyone attending school in the last half of the 20th century.

Charter schools don’t do it – the vast majority are just private schools being run with public money using the same curriculum and pedagogy.

AP and IB classes don’t do it – they still lock schools into a college-is-the-only-goal mentality using programs written by the even more tradition-bound university system.

Improving teacher quality is certainly a good idea but not if the plans are centered around enhancing teaching methods designed for students from 1965.

More standardized testing?  More crap is not better crap!

Yes, voters should feel good “about the great job Virginia educators have done” in the past.

But that’s no reason to keep doing the same thing, only more of it, and assuming that every other factor outside the school will remain static.

Oh, and paying for it with leftover small change.

election, jay mathews, school reform, virginia, washington post

The regular Five Myths column from the Sunday opinion section of the Post addresses some statements of “truth” on the topic of merit pay popular with politicians and education “experts”.

And the five are:

1. Merit pay has a strong track record. [That one's not even true in business]

2. Teachers unions are the biggest barrier to merit pay. – Yes and no. But the merit pay experiments of the 1980s also failed because they were, at bottom, capricious.

3. Principals are good judges of teacher talent. [In my experience, many principals are more building and business managers than they are educators, especially in high schools.]

4. Student test scores offer a simple solution to the evaluation problem. [Crap!]

5. Teachers are most motivated by money. [More crap!]

This is far from a comprehensive assessment of the misinformation thrown around in the debates over merit pay but it’s worth a few minutes of your time.

Image: number 5 by Leo Reynolds, used under a Creative Commons license.

merit pay, myths, teachers, washington post

In the squabbles over health care reform this summer (you’d be stretching things to call what’s going on a “debate”), many of the talking heads make the claim that the US has “the best health care system in the world”.

Others, mostly the ones who want to kill the current proposals (but have nothing to offer as an alternative), toss around words like “socialism” and make phrases like “Canadian-style” or “European-style” sound like a formula for instant death.

So, what’s the truth about how citizens of other countries receive medical care?  Do we have the best?  Do people in other countries either die standing in line to see a doctor or get substandard service?

I have no idea.  But if even half the information in the 5 Myths column from this morning’s Post is true then a good deal of the blather heard on the talking heads channels and printed in many publications (including parts of the same paper) is pure crap.

Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise — private-sector, for-profit health insurance — is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France’s health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada’s universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.

The writer does not get into the issues surrounding how we would cover the costs for universal health care, other than to note that the US pays a whole lot more for what we have compared to most other countries.

He also doesn’t touch on the high cost of the American habit to file lawsuits at the drop of a hangnail, which is likely part of those high “nonmedical” costs and should also be addressed in any reform plan.

Still this is the kind of information that news organizations should be digging up, having real experts analyze, and presenting to their viewers/readers rather than staging the almost non-stop “my-opinion-is-just-as-valid-as-yours” arguments that fill far too much space in the media.

government, health, media, myths, washington post

In the opinion section of this morning’s Post, a DC charter school teacher finishing her fourth year in the profession explains why she’s leaving.

The simple answer is burnout, a reason often given by the 30 – 50% of teachers (numbers vary based on the study) who exit from the profession within their first five years.

As you might expect, it’s not quite that simple.

But there is more to those numbers than “burnout.” That term is shorthand for a suite of factors that contributed to my choice to leave the classroom. When I talk about the long hours, for example, what I mean is that, over the course of four years, my school’s administration steadily expanded the workload and workday while barely adjusting salaries. More and more major decisions were made behind closed doors, and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported. One afternoon this spring, when my often apathetic 10th-graders were walking eagerly around the room as part of a writing assignment, an administrator came in and ordered me to get the class “seated and silent.” It took everything I had to hold back my tears of frustration.

Almost every education reform program I’ve ever read centers around the concept of recruiting and retaining great teachers.

At the same time all those politicians and educational “experts” are proclaiming as indispensable the “highly qualified teacher” in every classroom, they also want to automate the teaching process with collections of “best practices” with the goal of squeezing out even better standardized test scores from each student.

So, why would smart, creative, highly educated college grads want to become teachers only to be handed a collection of recipes that dictates precisely how to present a narrow, test-driven curriculum?

Many of those same politicians declare that schools ought to be run like a business.

While that’s always been a lousy idea (repeat after me: schools are NOT businesses!), if there’s one element from the corporate world that can and should be adopted for education, it’s that people are your most important asset.

And that a constant and high turnover of talented employees is probably the most detrimental factor for any organization.

Losing half of new teachers every five years is doing nothing good for American education and any meaningful reform needs to start by figuring out how to fix that problem.

Image by mlhradio and used under a Creative Commons License.

business, teachers, turnover, washington post

The Post this morning is asking subscribers to choose whether or not they want to continue receiving the weekly television magazine.

It’s an opt-in deal where, if we don’t call or return a coupon by snail mail, the section disappears from the Sunday ads package at the end of the month.

Since this particular part of the Sunday paper usually winds up in Tuesday’s recycling bin, I won’t be replying.

However, the fact that there’s no online preference option says a great deal about the Post and how little it understands about their disappearing audience.

Because, let’s face it. TV listings, like stock market charts, sport scores, and other commodity information, should have been dropped from analog news delivery systems years ago.

newspapers, television, washington post

In his regular Monday education column, Jay Mathews takes a look at one DC-area high school senior’s experience with the mix of education and social services.

And relates her story to the larger issue of improving the American education system.

We are in the midst of a national debate, its outcome uncertain, over what should be the emphasis of efforts to fix public schools. Some say the focus should be on improving teaching. Only in the classroom, they say, is there a chance to give students — particularly those in poverty — the tools they need to succeed. Others say teachers cannot reach those children until their family lives, shaken by parental joblessness or mental or physical illness, are straightened out by government action.

Why do those two approaches have to be mutually exclusive?

One of the biggest problems in the education reform debate is that way too many politicians and “experts” focus their proposals almost completely on the institution of school.

They want us to believe the classroom can be divorced from the poverty, crime, and illness that too many students face in the outside world.

In a growing number of districts (including some a short distance from here), it is hopeless trying to improve student learning without at the same time seriously addressing the societal problems the kids and their families live with.

education, jay mathews, poverty, school reform, washington post