Can’t Think of A Blog Post

November 18, 2009

I apologize for my lack of a post yesterday and this lame post today.  I just can’t seem to think of a good post.

Yesterday Greg suggested that I blog about this excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal denouncing the Ford Foundation for giving $100 million to the teachers union to spur education reform and claiming that this money would “shake up the conversations surrounding school reform and help spur some truly imaginative thinking and partnerships.”  The Ford Foundation might as well give $100 million to the city of Las Vegas to address gambling addiction. 

But the Wall Street Journal already did a great job, so it didn’t seem worth my blogging about since I really wouldn’t have anything to add.

I also thought about blogging about how the Race to the Top criteria issued this week hardly demand meaningful reform from states.  But I’ve already written several times on how little we should expect from Race to the Top, such as here.  The bigger surprise is that anyone is surprised.  Besides, Jeanne Allen did a fine job critiquing the Race to the Top criteria here.  And on top of all that, I’ve probably been beating up on Obama and Duncan about education reform too much.  The reality is that at least they are saying a lot of the right things, which has had a big effect on education reform battles at the state and local level.  It’s a big deal that a Democratic Administration has (at least rhetorically) thrown its weight fully behind expanding choice and competition (if only via charters), merit pay, weakening teacher tenure, etc…

I also thought about blogging about a bunch of local issues.  A state school board member was featured in an article in the Northwest Arkansas Times explaining why she opposed every newly proposed charter school in Arkansas this year.  She helpfully explained that she had visited a predominantly Hispanic school in Springdale, AR that was making AYP with its ESL students and “that helped convince her Springdale’s services were sufficient for their students.”  There’s no need to let those families decide if the quality of their education is sufficient.

But some of my friends who write the excellent blog, Mid-Riffs, were already working on something to address this.  I saw no need to duplicate.

In short, I’m sorry, folks.  Maybe I’ll think of something fresh soon.  Or maybe I can just keep writing about all the things that I was going to write about but didn’t.  Or did I?

17 Comments | charter schools, teacher union | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Senator Meeks vs. CTU

November 18, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

“Chicago Public Schools have a gang problem. The gang, however, is not the BDs (Black Disciples), the gang is not the GDs (Gangster Disciples), the gang is not the Vice Lords and the gang is not the Four Corner Hustlers. The gang is the Chicago Teachers Union.”

— State Sen. James T. Meeks, D-Chicago, chair of the Illinois Senate’s Education Committee, Oct. 17, 2009.

Wow- Meeks is not only a state Senator and chair of the Illinois Senate Education Committee, an African American minister and long time friend of Obama. Read more about his unfolding war with the Chicago teacher union in the Chicago Tribune.

Leave a Comment » | teacher union | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Stop the National Standards Train

November 16, 2009

As I’ve said before (here, here, and elsewhere), I can’t understand the enthusiasm of education reformers for national standards and testing.  Advocates for the status quo and/or pure nonsense are much better positioned to control the process of national standard-setting and test-writing than are advocates for meaningful reform grounded in evidence-based approaches.

In case you had any doubts, the current round of national standards and testing craze is once again being hijacked by the Dark Side.  My colleague, Sandra Stotsky, has an excellent piece in the current issue of City Journal ringing the alarm bells:

A distinct lack of interest in allowing mathematicians a major voice in determining the content of the high school mathematics curriculum isn’t confined to educational research publications or presentations. A new effort is under way to develop national math standards for K–12. The two organizations running the effort—the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, with support from both the Department of Education and the National Education Association—have not yet invited a single mathematical or science society to ensure that the high school mathematics standards and “college-readiness” standards they propose in fact prepare American high school students for the freshman calculus courses that serve as the basis for undergraduate majors in engineering, science, and mathematics (as well as other mathematics-dependent majors and technical/occupational programs). The effort, which is being pushed very quickly, seems determined to do an end run around the country’s mathematical and scientific organizations and the panel’s recommendations on the major topics for school algebra.

Who controls this process?  Advocates of “constructivism” and  “cultural-historical activity theory” do.  If you don’t know what this gobbledy-gook means, Sandy helpfully explains: 

Two theories lie behind the educators’ new approach to math teaching: “cultural-historical activity theory” and “constructivism.” According to cultural-historical activity theory, schooling as it exists today reinforces an illegitimate social order. Typical of this mindset is Brian Greer, a mathematics educator at Portland State University, who argues “against the goal of ‘algebra for all’ on the grounds that . . . most individuals in our society do not need to have studied algebra.” According to Greer, the proper approach to teaching math “now questions whether mathematics as a school subject should continue to be dominated by mathematics as an academic discipline or should reflect more fully the range of mathematical activities in which humans engage.” The primary role of math teachers, constructivists say in turn, shouldn’t be to explain or otherwise try to “transfer” their mathematical knowledge to students; that would be ineffective. Instead, they must help the students construct their own understanding of mathematics and find their own math solutions.

We need to stop this national standards train before we all go off the rails.

12 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Disruptive Technology in Treating Autism

November 13, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Check it out: cool stuff! Affordable online tools to allow parents to do therapies for autistic children from a company called Rethink Autism on the national ABC News broadcast.

The whole “isn’t this like getting a manual on how to take your appendix out” stuff is just hilarious. If you don’t have access to a hospital or doctor, getting such a manual beats the living daylights out of not getting a manual.

Isn’t that the sort of thing that print journalists used to say about bloggers, back when we still had print journalists?

Leave a Comment » | special ed | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Destruction of a Profession in PJM

November 12, 2009

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

This morning, Pajamas Media carries my column on Public Agenda’s study documenting the destruction of a profession:

As D-Day for health care “reform” approaches, we’re hearing a lot of contradictory claims about how things are going in countries where they have socialized medicine. One side says Canadian, British, German, and even (in the more extreme cases) Cuban health care is wonderful. The other side says it’s a catastrophe. All these directly conflicting claims aren’t very helpful to those who might be in doubt about the truth.

Instead of seeking our evidence in far-flung corners of the world, why don’t we look at what’s happened to the one profession we’ve already socialized right here at home? The government school monopoly gives us a great opportunity to examine what happens to a profession when you dragoon it into government service.

A commenter offers a point that I think is valid – it’s hard to disentangle the effects of “socializing” a profession from the effects of “unionizing” it. But how different are those? The head of the health-care worker union SEIU, under a cloud for apparently having approached Rod Blagojevich about a bribe, is nonetheless the top visitor to the White House.

Leave a Comment » | teacher quality | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Civic Knowledge Polling Controversy

November 12, 2009

 (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Last summer, I wrote a study for the Goldwater Institute reporting the results of a survey in which we gave 10 questions from the United States citizenship exam to Arizona high school students. The results were terrible, with only about 3.5% of the district students scoring 6 or better correct (passing). A few months later, I replicated the study for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) with Oklahoma students, and the results were even worse.

Since then the survey firm I used, Strategic Vision, has come under attack from a group of critics. I believe that it started over a poll from the New Hampshire primary last year. I am in no position to judge the merits of the case involved. Over the past few weeks, the critics have turned their fire on the civics surveys. Strategic Vision’s most aggressive critic claims that someone has replicated the Oklahoma survey and found them far more cognizant of civics than the Strategic Vision reported, concluding that SV simply fabricated the data. Smelling blood, my old friend Leo Casey is waving the bloody shirt. Some are wondering how anyone ever bought into the results in the first place or are feeling buyer’s remorse.

A few comments seem in order.

First, both myself and OCPA are investigating the validity of the survey. We have asked for and received call logs for the surveys, and we are awaiting receipts for the marketing lists employed in the survey. If, it stands to reason, a polling firm were simply fabricating data it seems terribly unlikely that they would pay thousands of dollars for marketing lists. If there has been a fraud, myself, the Goldwater Institute and OCPA were all victims of it.

Regarding the question of “how could anyone have ever believed these results” people should keep an open mind and examine the available evidence.

For the Arizona study, we purchased a poll of both public and private school students. The public results were terrible, but so too were the private school results. If memory serves, 3.5% of the public school students scored six or better and 13.8% of private school students scored six or better. We reported the private results in the study, and essentially characterized them as simultaneously better than the public results and still catastrophic.

If SV were simply manufacturing data, it seems at a minimum odd to make the private school results so terrible.

Second, results from other exams of civic knowledge should be considered. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has run a series of tests on the civic knowledge of university students. You can look the results of the 2006 study here for both Freshmen and Seniors.

The average score for a freshman at Yale: 69.8%.

Harvard: 67.8%

Princeton: 66%

University of Texas at Austin: 53.8%

University of Michigan: 52.1%

These are all highly to uber selective universities, but strangely enough their students are arriving (and leaving btw-check out the Senior results) profoundly ignorant of American civics. In fact, the Ivy League kids, even the Seniors, score significantly worse than the alleged replication scores (no details provided btw)  in Oklahoma, where the kids supposedly got almost 80 percent correct.

Oklahoma high schools > Ivy League. Things that make you go hmmmmmm…

Next, it is worth considering the differences in testing method. The ISI results were given as multiple choice exams. If they ask you to name the first President of the United States, George Washington is jumping up and down right behind the letter “B.” You’ve really had to have been living on another planet not to get that one right.

The Arizona and Oklahoma surveys, however, emulated the methodology of the United States citizenship exams, directly lifting the questions from INS item bank, and employing their open-answer format. When you are asked “who wrote the Declaration of Independence” it is necessary to answer “Jefferson” without the benefit of four names, one of which is “Thomas Jefferson” literally staring you in the face.

In short, we have no reason to believe that the average high school student to be anywhere near as well-informed as the average student at highly selective universities. As it turns out, students at even highly selective universities know embarrassingly little about civics. Moreover the open answer format of the United States Citizenship Exam represents a higher hurdle of knowledge than a multiple choice exam. You are either carrying around the knowledge of how many Supreme Court Justices there are around in your head, or you aren’t. With a multiple choice exam, you’ve got a shot, but with an open answer format…good luck.

So my request to everyone is to stay calm and give us time to run the traps on this. If I got snookered, I’ll own up to it, but the jury is still out.

 

7 Comments | research reports | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

True to Her Traditions

November 11, 2009

Yale WWI

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The monument pictured above is quite large and centrally located on the Yale campus. When you walk into a nearby building, you enter a small atrium of solid marble walls, covered from floor to ceiling with the inscribed names of Yale alumni who have died in military service for their country.

Neither the monument nor the atrium recieve any attention from the people who walk by them every day. Students sometimes take advantage of the monument’s prominent location by taping fliers to it advertising their beer-and-sex parties.

ROTC has been banned from Yale since 1969.

Happy Veterans Day.

6 Comments | civic values, higher education | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Phony Conflict

November 10, 2009

I don’t understand why enthusiasts of curricular or pedagogical reforms feel the need to pick fights with choice supporters.  Are they so starved for attention that they need to create a phony conflict about whether focusing on choice or curriculum is a more effective strategy for school improvement?

I say that this is a phony conflict because there is no necessary tension between expanding choice and competition in education and spreading the adoption of more effective curriculum and pedagogical practices.  In fact, the two strategies should usually complement each other nicely.  Given that the educational establishment is hostile to reforms proposed by backers of Core Knowledge, phonics-based reading instruction, etc…, the best way to expand access of students to these alternative approaches is to allow them to choose charter or voucher schools where they are more likely to find these alternatives.  We can expand access to Core Knowledge by expanding access to choice.

But curriculum reform enthusiasts often seem uncomfortable with choice.  What if people choose the wrong thing?  Wouldn’t it be much better if we just made everyone adopt the right approach?

The problem with this strategy is that it reflects an amazing amount of political naivete.  If someone were in a position to impose a single curriculum and pedagogy, through national testing, standards, and restricted choice, why would they assume that their view of the desirable curriculum would be the one to prevail?   Opponents of Core Knowledge, phonics, etc… are much better positioned politically to control national testing and standards.  Even if the reformers could gain control over those centralized institutions for a period of time, they can’t simply assume that they would remain forever in control.

It’s time for the curriculum people to suppress these periodic inventions of a phony conflict with choice supporters.  The vast majority of choice supporters are sympathetic to the goals of curriculum reformers and we can make much better progress if we work together than if we get drawn into these phony fights.

9 Comments | instructional reform | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Pass the Clicker: The Future Lost?

November 6, 2009

flash_forward-10

ABC headquarters the day after Lost goes off the air

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

With Lost coming up on its last season, ABC has been scrambling for a new cash cow. It bet heavily on Flash Forward, a new drama with acting talent coming out of its ears and a premise with potential: everyone in the world blacks out for two minutes and experiences a “flash forward” – an intense, dreamlike vision that appears to be a glimpse of what each of them is going to be doing exactly six months later. And everybody’s visions match – if I saw myself having a conversation with you, you also saw yourself having the exact same conversation with me.

The ratings have been slipping and it’s not looking like Flash Forward is going to be the big cash cow ABC was hoping for. Which is too bad, since after a slow start the show is really finding its legs. (Disclaimer: I haven’t gotten around to watching last night’s episode yet, so if the show stank last night I’m not responsible.)

flash-forward1

They clearly invested a lot in stacking this show with talent. In addition to securing Joseph Fiennes to anchor, they rounded up Courtney Vance (known to the general public as a prosecuting attorney on one of the Law & Order shows, but the fan base for Flash Forward is more likely to remember him as “Jonesy,” the brilliant communications officer who figures out how to track the silent sub in The Hunt for Red October), John Cho (Sulu in the new Star Trek) Sonya Walger (Lost’s Penny), and cameos – with suggestions that more appearances may be on the way – from Firefly’s Gina Torres and The 4400’s Peter Coyote.

0929flash_article

Another Lost alum makes a shocking surprise appearance a few episodes into the season, and it looks like that character is going to be a recurring presence.

The show resembles Lost in that it revolves around the intersection between human drama (the “soap opera” element)and great cosmic issues. FF’s cosmic issue is similar to Lost’s, but more anthropocentric – it’s less about man confronting the larger forces in the unverse and more directly about the question of free will, which has come up on Lost but only as one of several themes. Having seen a glimpse of the future, everyone wants to know: can that “future” be changed? Or is it inevitable?

The biggest difference between Lost and FF is the latter’s stronger emphasis on plot. The heroes believe the “flash forwards” are not a cosmic fluke but are the result of some kind of human action, and are trying to track down who’s responsible and why. And so every episode of FF has suspense, thriller and/or mystery-solving elements; the show makes regular use of cliffhanger and twist endings.

This does give the show some strengths. There have been no boring episodes. And the unfolding of the “mythology” is much more well constructed and proceeds at a steady, satisfying rate. The hero has become the lead investigator because he had a “flash forward” in which he was the lead investigator, and he was standing in front of his giant bulletein board full of clues in the case. He remembers many of the clues he saw in his “flash forward” and begins to track them down in the present – and, lo and behold, they turn out to be valid. The idea is for the explanations behind all the seemingly unrelated and sometimes nonsensical clues to be slowly revealed over the course of the season. This will presumably require the writers to avoid making things up as they go.

It also provides a lot of opportunities for the writers to do clever things with the story. More plot = more opportunities for great storytelling, and the writers don’t disappoint.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the script can be dumb – but no dumber than Lost occasionally gets.

That said, as I indicated before, the series did take a few episodes to find its legs. The first few episodes telegraphed various underlying conflicts that were obviously going to unfold over the course of the show, but it allowed them all to simmer too long before they started to produce direct conflict among the characters. For a while, all these great actors just weren’t given enough to do.

That’s all over now, but it appears from the ratings that the show may have missed the chance to find its audience. If you like Lost, you should give this a shot.

3 Comments | Pass the Clicker | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Klein vs. Rothstein

November 5, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I was struck by Joel Klein’s statement in introducing the latest McKinsey & Company report on the impact of achievement gaps.

Klein stated:

People have said to me ‘Chancellor, we will never fix education in America until we fix poverty in America.’ Now I care about fixing poverty, but those people have got it exactly backwards folks. We are never going to fix poverty in America until we fix education in America, and this report shows that it is entirely doable.

Klein has both his theory of causality and priorities correct. It is perfectly idiotic to wallow around in helplessness claiming that education cannot radically improve in the absence of the vanguard of the proletariat seizing the commanding heights of the American economy and creating the New Jerusalem.

It should be painfully obvious even to the most ardent collectivist that this is never going to happen even if it were true, which as it happens, it isn’t. Welfare programs won’t change the fact that we recruit too few of the right people, and too many of the wrong people into teaching. It won’t change the fact that we distribute the limited supply of high quality teachers as if we are out to get poor inner city children. For that matter, it won’t change the fact we still don’t measure teacher effectiveness, and that when we do, we don’t do much of anything with the information.

Parental choice can be seen very much through this same lense. If you draw the short stick and grow up in an inner city area with terrible schools, why should anyone stand in your way of accessing a different group of educators for the same or less funding?

It is absurd to sit in the wealthiest major nation on the planet and have to listen to people claim that $10,000 a year is not enough to teach children how to read. Anyone who actually cares about the plight of the poor would do well to listen to Klein, not Rothstein.

1 Comment | teacher quality | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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