Apt. 11D

Education Gap Between Rich and Poor

Fantastic, and horrifying, information from the New York Times about the education achievement gap between the rich and poor. 

Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.

Research point to a variety of factors that have contributed to this widening gap. The rich are super cultivating their kids, with activities and tutoring. Different approaches to parenting of very young children. The shrinking of the middle class. The growing cultural divide between the rich and the poor. 

How Poverty Affects Schools

In yesterday's New York Times, Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske write that NCLB's efforts to improve schools for low income students were noble, but misguided. It is impossible to improve education for those kids without dealing with the larger problems outside the school building. They say those kids need access to good nutrion, summer experiences, mentoring and tutoring. 

Harry B at Crooked Timber has a great graph showing the increasing correlation between education and educational incomes. (I think that there's more than just growing income inequality behind that particular graph, but that's slightly off topic.) 

While I totally support the programs that Ladd and Fiske suggest, I sincerely doubt whether a mentoring program would really put a dent in the depressing school/income correlation.

The people in low income community need jobs. If you have a job, then you're not depressed and can interact with your kids, follow up with teachers, and vote at school board elections. You will vote to approve the school budget, because you can afford to pay the extra $50 in taxes. If you have a job, you can afford to move to the next town where they have better schools. Maybe jobs are the silver bullet. 

Finding Common Grounds on Education Reform

Rick Hess and Linda Darling-Hammond bridge their political differences to write a remarkable opinion piece on education reform in the US. 

Beyond this list, the federal government is simply not well situated to make schools and teachers improve — no matter how much ambitious reformers wish it were otherwise. Under our system, dictates from Congress turn into gobbledygook as they travel from the Education Department to state education agencies and then to local school districts. Educators end up caught in a morass of prescriptions and prohibitions, bled of the initiative and energy that characterize effective schools.

The federal government can make states, localities and schools do things — but not necessarily do them well. Since decades of research make it clear that what matters for evaluating employees or turning around schools is how well you do it — rather than whether you do it a certain way — it’s not surprising that well-intentioned demands for “bold” federal action on school improvement have a history of misfiring. They stifle problem-solving, encourage bureaucratic blame avoidance and often do more harm than good.        

 

Parents or Teachers: Who's The Bad Guy?

Thomas Friedman's op-ed on parental involvement in schools has been on the top of the most e-mailed list at the New York Times for the past couple of days. Let's talk about it. 

Friedman says that instead of blaming teachers for our failing schools, we should blame the parents. He points to a recent study that found that parental involvement in a kid's education is a huge predictor of performance in school. (Is it more important than teacher quality? I don't know; the op-ed didn't say.)

Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.

I'm not sure why this op-ed irritates me so much. I spend an hour or two everyday helping my kids with their homework. We read books together. I take them to museums and watch the history channel. Steve and I do all those things. Why should Friedman's op-ed irritate me? 

I guess that Friedman ticks me off, because in this article, the word "parents" is code for "mothers." In most homes where all this school supplementation happens, it's the moms who do this work. I wish he would just be honest about it. So, any critique of parental involvement is really a critique of women, and that is bound to tick me off. 

The problem is that schools have not yet adjusted to the fact that most women work. Their work days are longer than a school day. They don't get a winter recess or half days before Thanksgiving. They can't come into the school for parent-teacher conferences at 11am. They can't watch the chorus production at 2pm. They have to go to work. They can't spend two hours reviewing homework, because they don't get home until 6 or 7 and then have to make dinner. 

Any critique of parents (mothers) has to take into account these limitations on a parent's (mother's) time. Also, schools need to adjust to the fact that it is impossible for many parents to live up to this perfect parental model. 

College Essays for the 1%

Last night, an old high school buddy called to catch up. She related horror tales from the private school rat race in Washington, DC. All four of her children attend elite, private schools in DC. Think college prices. The oldest is getting ready for college and has been preparing his applications for the Ivies.

Sue said that the admissions standards for Ivy League schools are much higher than when she went to Harvard. Not only do you have to a perfect GPA and be the president of some club, you also need to be a varsity athlete, president of the class, and do some sanitized charity work. She said that her son's classmates hire a $400 per hour college consultant, who had a three year waiting list. Private tutors for academics. 

Behind each applicant to Harvard is a team of stylists, who create an image of effortless perfection. Canned creativity. Canned generosity. Crammed full of key words that are statistically shown to appear on the SATs.

The new essays for college are predictable in their creativity. Here's a sample from the University of Chicago, "Don’t write about reverse psychology." “What does Play-Doh™ have to do with Plato?” You know what would be really creative? If these kids tore up their college essays and learned how to fly a helicopter for a year. 

Sue said that a psychologist found that 30% of kids at Ivy League colleges were depressed. In part their depression came from working for no reason. At some point, every Type A kid has to wonder if itmatters if they get an A on test rather than a B+. Kids are working their asses off without a goal. 

As Sue related the drama of private school, I kept thinking about the families that I know who are struggling to pay their mortgage. It would be nice if the Occupy people got their acts together and started to make a stink. 

Occupy Your School District

Want to really make a dent in economic inequality in this country? Then, target the public school system.

Andrew Rotherham writes, 

In any event, here’s my humble suggestion to all the protesters who are getting kicked out of Zuccotti Park and other places across the country: take your posters and your outrage and go occupy the central office of your local school districts and its teachers’ union headquarters. Then demand the kind of radical change we need to create a school system that lives up to our values rather than mocking them. Our schools are a more sympathetic target than corporate CEOs, but for many Americans they are a larger cause of economic injustice.

Constraints on State Colleges

We've been pickering for six days about college education, which is about three days longer than the rest of the blogosphere. Not that I'm keeping track or anything. 

After all that bickering, no one has convinced me why I would send my kid to a private college for $30-55K, instead of a state college of equal educational quality for $10-15K. Especially when that difference in price means a life time of college debt. 

The trouble is that state colleges may not be able to maintain their quality or their low price tag. 

Peter Orzag writes that under pressure from failing state governments, state colleges are not keeping up private colleges on a number of measures. With the effects of globalization and a poor labor market, we need quality college graduates more than ever.

His suggestions are interesting: 

One place to start would be to focus on raising productivity in public higher education, so that we could do a better job of delivering quality with constrained budgets. Would we be better off if research dollars were even more concentrated in fewer institutions, and a larger share of faculty specialized in teaching (which is often given short shrift at research universities)? Can more businesses partner with public colleges to create curriculums to teach specific job skills? Can remote learning and online coursework, especially for remedial subjects, finally realize their potential?

Why Student Debt Happens

From n+1's April article, "Bad Education":

When you hire corporate managers, you get managed like a corporation, and the race for tuition dollars and grants from government and private partnerships has become the driving objective of the contemporary university administration. The goal for large state universities and elite private colleges alike has ceased to be (if it ever was) building well-educated citizens; now they hardly even bother to prepare students to assume their places among the ruling class. Instead we have, in Bousquet’s words, “the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobbyhorses of administrators: Digitize the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!” These expensive projects are all part of another cycle: corporate universities must be competitive in recruiting students who may become rich alumni, so they have to spend on attractive extras, which means they need more revenue, so they need more students paying higher tuition. For-profits aren’t the only ones consumed with selling product. And if a humanities program can’t demonstrate its economic utility to its institution (which can’t afford to haul “dead weight”) and students (who understand the need for marketable degrees), then it faces cuts, the neoliberal management technique par excellence. Students apparently have received the message loud and clear, as business has quickly become the nation’s most popular major. 

More Tough Love on Academia

Think I'm tough on academia? Read Tony Grafton:

... traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA...

Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into...

But those already born into the wealthy and professional classes benefit disproportionately from the best educations. Acquire any sort of college education, and you’ll make more money than you would have if you didn’t. But don’t expect you’ll make what you would have if you had studied applied math at Stanford...

Americans, as Malcolm Harris recently pointed out, now owe almost a trillion dollars in student loans, more than they owe in credit card debt. Student debt, he explained, “is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits.”...

 Still, the dark hordes of forgotten students who leave the university as Napoleon’s army left Russia, uninspired by their courses, wounded in many cases by what they experience as their own failures, weighed down by their debts, need to be seen and heard. Perhaps some of those who write seriously about universities could stop worrying so much about who gets into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and start worrying about the much larger numbers who don’t make it through Illinois and West Virginia, Vermont and Texas. 

Legislating "Nice"

Back to School Night is a September tradition. We squeeze our adult bodies into little desks, wave awkwardly at neighbors in the hallways, and march around the school to learn about homework rules and cafeteria food. This Back to School Night was different. At Jonah's school, the principal showed up on the classroom TVs to describe the new anti-bullying laws in New Jersey. (Here's an NPR chat about it.) 

The principal was grim. He gave a twenty minute presentation on the new law, which takes an extremely hard-line on bullying. If a student is caught picking on another student, because of some perceived physical, sexual, ethnic, or neurological difference, the bully will have a permanent mark on his record. Schools are legally required to monitor this behavior, which can happen outside of school grounds or even on the Internet. 

Jonah attended school presentations on the topic. His school is particularly sensitive about bullying, because the Rutgers boy who killed himself after being mocked for being gay, had attended Jonah's middle school. 

At Ian's school, the principal of his special needs school was also alarmed. She viewed this law, which was clearly designed to help kids with neurological differences, as a potential landmine for our kids. Kids with neurological differences have no social filter and think nothing of going up to people to inform that they are overweight. Could their innocent social blunders be construed as acts of bullying?

The principals of both schools saw this law as a bureaucratic nightmare. 

Will this law be effective? Could it be challenged by Free Speech advocates? Won't smart, mean kids inflict pain in very subtle ways that wouldn't be picked up by this law? The silent treatment is a very effective method of bullying. 

Can good character be taught in schools without a draconian law? Clearly good character is important, not only for protecting weak kids, but also for the future success of all kids.