Apt. 11D

What to Do With School Lunches?

The House Education and Labor Committee has been holding hearings on school lunch programs and child nutrition. The $8 billion bill, Nutrition for America’s Children Act of 2010, would increase funding for school lunch programs and child nutrition. 

La Vida Locavore has excellent summaries of the hearings here and here. Tom Colicchio, the celebrity chef, provided testimony at one of the hearings. CNN talked with him about his testimony. More background on the hearings can be found at ABC, the Washington Post, and Tapped.

Most members of the committee seem to agree about the facts. Kids are getting substandard food at school. It's too salty and fatty. Children who are in poverty are even more likely to be obese, because they are eating the wrong foods. There is a correlation between school performance and access to quality food.

The debate is about parental responsibility and money.

Providing a healthy lunch is costly. Alice Waters said that schools needed to spend $5 per kid to provide them with a proper meal. The money would have to go retraining staff, getting access to fresh foods, and purchasing new equipment. Schools need new equipment, so they can steam vegetables instead of frying them. Where's that money going to come from in this economy? Will healthy lunches be simply too expensive. and kids who don't qualify for the school lunch program won't be able to afford the meal?

Should the government be telling parents and kids what to eat? Should food stamps be limited to healthy foods? If kids want french fries, why not give it to them? 

I'm pessimistic about this bill going further in this crappy economy. Schools are struggling to maintain other basic services in schools right now. Tater tots and hot dogs are the least of their problems.

There are other low cost solutions. Schools should provide nutritional charts about each meal that is served in the cafeteria. If McDonald's has to tell you how many calories are in a Big Mac, then the school should tell parents how many calories are in a corn dog. (Yes, my kid's school serves the kids corn dogs and mozzarella sticks for lunch.) They should allow parents into the cafeteria to see what their kids are eating. They should teach parents about packing a healthy lunch.

The PTAs really need to step up in this area. They can demand the school provide nutritional information. If the school menu says that there are salads available for kids, they need to make sure that those salads actually appear on the line. They can sponsor "salad days" at school, instead of "pizza days." They need to hold the schools responsible for not fattening up the kids.

• Related:  The Politics of School Lunches
• Food Matters
• The Politics of Public Health

If I Were A Homeschooler

I suppose it's inevitable that a person with a slightly inflated ego and a dissertation on education policy would think that she could educate their children much, much better than a local school system with a defeated school budget.

Yes, I periodically imagine homeschooling my children. But the school bus pulls up and I happily wave good-bye to the children, so I can read and write without interruptions. The boys happily wave good-bye to me for six hours where they can goof around with their friends. It's perhaps not surprising that most of my homeschooling thoughts happen when the boys are away.

So, how would you homeschool?

During the summer, we do some half-assed homeschooling. I've got an atlas on the floor next to the kitchen table. During dinner, we've been learning the names and capitals of countries. We're using Parragon's Atlas of the World. In addition to clear maps, it has pictures and descriptions of each country's culture and history. 

We also have mandatory reading hours, computer-free hours, and as much physical activity as I can pack in. (The boys and I swam for two hours yesterday, and I'm sore, sore, sore.) We take lots of trips to see friends and to museums.

But things are pretty random, because I know that the kids will learn stuff in school. I can be a dilettante homeschooler. Our educational trip today is to IKEA and to the GAP to buy Steve some new T-shirts.

I suppose if I were really going to homeschool the kids, I would have to set up more of a routine and philosophy. I think I would read some utopian thinkers from the early twentieth century who were all about strong minds, strong bodies -- Teddy Roosevelt types. I would make them write essays in the morning and take hikes in the afternoon.

Usually, my homeschooling fantasies come to a screeching halt after a long weekend of bickering children and demands for lunch and wails about being bored. It's tough to get a block of uninterrupted thinking time. So, it's off to the school bus they go. I figure it's easier to plug up the deficiencies in his public school education, than to do everything myself.

For me, homeschooling is much more fun to imagine than to implement.

Related: The Good Classroom

New Research on KIPP Schools

We've talked a lot about charter schools on this blog. Harry at CT had a charter school post last week.

We have hot new findings about the KIPP program from Mathematica. Their findings include:

• Impacts for large majorities of the 22 KIPP middle schools included in the study are positive in both reading and math in all four years after students enter KIPP schools.

• Impacts in many KIPP schools are large. Three years after entering KIPP schools, many students are experiencing achievement effects that are approximately equivalent to an additional year of instruction, enough to substantially reduce race- and income-based achievement gaps.

• Students entering these 22 KIPP schools typically had prior achievement levels lower than average achievement in the schools of their local districts.

• Compared to the public schools from which they draw students, KIPP middle schools have student bodies characterized by higher concentrations of poverty and racial minorities, but lower concentrations of special education and limited English proficiency students.

Preparing Students for a Global Workforce

In the past few weeks, I've read several articles and blog posts about schools training children for the new labor market.

Harry B at Crooked Timber mentioned a book by Tony Wagner, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do About It. Wagner's thesis is that the most innovative schools in the world provide kids with skills that will enable them to compete in a global workplace. American schools are falling behind because they put too much emphasis on testing and don't teach higher-level problem solving. He interviewed business leaders to find out what deficits exist in their workers.

The New York Times reports that schools are introducing engineering into the curriculum in many schools.

Inside Higher Ed reports that "The United States economy is in serious danger from a growing mismatch between the skills that will be needed for jobs being created and the educational backgrounds (or lack thereof) of would-be workers. That is the conclusion of a mammoth analysis of jobs data being released today by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce."

With bleak employment numbers and the transformation of the economy, it's hardly surprising that there is growing pressure to revamp our schools.

The involvement of business leaders in schools is also nothing new. Since the evolution of our public education system, they have played a cyclical role in shaping our school's curriculum.

I have mixed feelings about this trend to prepare kids for the global workforce.

On the positive side, I do believe there are real changes happening in the workforce, and our kids do need to be prepared for new demands. I believe that education policy should be a community endeavor and should not be entirely shaped by administrators and education elite.

On the negative side, I have many concerns about how a "career-focused" curriculum is implemented.

Administrators in our town have been influenced by the Wagner book. As a result, group class projects have replaced individual projects. These class projects emphasize visual presentation over written expression. The children are rewarded for the number of pictures on the bulletin board. They only write four essays for the entire year. They are taught how to use PowerPoint in their English classes, rather than how to write a clear topic sentence. It's not surprising that school test scores plummeted.

My kid turned eleven last week. He'll enter the workforce in ten years, after he finishes college. If anyone claims that they know the workforce will look like in ten years years, he/she is a huckster and should be mocked. No one can predicted what professions will be valued in ten years time. I can predict with utter confidence predict that PowerPoint will not exist in ten years; five or six new generations of software will pop up in that time. I can also say with complete confidence that we'll need workers that can read complicated material and express themselves both verbally and in written form.

At the same time, budget cuts have devastated our foreign language program. Jonah will spend more time in a home economic class next year, then in Spanish class. I would think that knowledge of a foreign language would be a prime need in a global workforce.

I remain suspicious of all curriculum reform. Talented teachers and motivated students with committed parents will succeed, regardless if the emphasis is on engineering or on Shakespeare.

Another Snag

I usually love acquiring new words. However, the words du jour are all horrible -- flotilla, plumes of oil, top kill.

The latest effort to stop BP's oil spill has hit a snag. The saw is stuck. Face plant.

They have brought in James Cameron to advise them. James Cameron. Are they planning on putting a blue screen down on the ocean floor and using a little movie magic to make it all go away? Hold me. 

Maureen Dowd says that Obama isn't handling this disaster well at all. Well, lots of people are saying that.

(more links later.)

UPDATE: The word of the day? Tar patties.

Dental Care for Kids

I've slowly been getting more involved in the local schools. I went to two town council meetings in the past month to make sure that our schools were properly funded, despite the school budget going down. Unlike some other towns in the state, our town council demanded draconian cuts. I attended several school foundation meetings. I even ran the potato sack race at yesterday's Field Day.

At this week's foundation meeting, one the school nurses asked the foundation for help as she applied for grants to help the children receive free dental care. There are many self-employed and under-employed people in town who can't afford to buy private dental insurance. The number of families in town that qualify for the free lunch program is up 26 percent. While they can qualify for state-run health insurance for their children, there isn't a state subsidized dental program.

The nurse is an adorable woman. When Jonah was in Kindergarten, he was in her office every day getting patched up for some playground misstep. She was incredibly kind to him and I'll always be grateful to her.

Unfortunately, this woman has to deal with more than Jonah's skinned knees. She said that a large number of the kids enter school without ever visiting a dentist. She's seen them loose adult teeth and deal with the pain of untreated cavities. While there are free dental clinics in the urban areas, people forget that poverty exists in suburban areas. She was applying for grants to hire buses to take these poor families to the urban dental clinics. 

Despite this era of budgetary stress, we still have to find a way to make good policies.

Spreadin' Love 443

I'll write a proper post later this morning, but first I need to spread some love.

Hacking the Academy takes a novel approach to creating an academic journal. 

My old academic adviser used to say that it sometimes took economic downturns to make state and local government to be make creative public policy. It's clear that the pressure is on and change is coming. The question is whether good changes will happen, such as eliminating redundant administration, or whether good services, such childcare for the needy or buses for the elder, are simply cut. The New York Times looks at state and local reforms. 

According to the Pew Foundation, 99 percent of social media links are to traditional newspapers and journals. In other words, blogs and new media aren't creating new content, but are instead recycling existing information.

A new paper from researchers at NBER finds that the Internet isn't contributing to ideological segregation. This paper spurred a lot of commentary. Ethan Zuckerman does an excellent job summarizing the arguments.  David Brooks responded,

This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered.

Pushing Moms on Welfare

When Bill Clinton vowed to end welfare as we know, child care was always an issue. Does it make sense to force the single mom to work for minimum wage at McDonald's and then pay someone else to watch her child? Many argued yes. The mom would gain skills at her job, which would enable her to find more well paying jobs. The state would subsidize the child care for a short time. This would end the cycle of poverty.

Welfare time limits and subsidized child care did keep people off the welfare rolls. While there was never great data on what happened to people once they were kicked off of welfare, there was evidence that this program did get people working again.

Until the economy sucked. Between huge unemployment numbers and declined state budgets, which have decimated subsidized child care programs, single moms are in trouble. The New York Times reports on how the reduced numbers of subsidized child care programs are pushing women back on welfare.

The cuts to subsidized child care challenge the central tenet of the welfare overhaul adopted in 1996, which imposed a five-year lifetime limit on cash assistance. Under the change, low-income parents were forced to give up welfare checks and instead seek paychecks, while being promised support — not least, subsidized child care — that would enable them to work.

Now, in this moment of painful budget cuts, with Arizona and more than a dozen other states placing children eligible for subsidized child care on waiting lists, only two kinds of families are reliably securing aid: those under the supervision of child protective services — which looks after abuse and neglect cases — and those receiving cash assistance.

Without subsidized child care and without viable job opportunities, we're about to return to welfare as we've always known it.

The Big Freakin' Mess

Let's talk about the mess in the Gulf.

BP's oil spill is getting bigger and messier every day. I've been waiting to post on the topic until I could see a clear political debate forming. "Ick" and "ack" are pretty much universal, bipartisan reactions. The politics are evolving.

The questions are: Is the Obama administration doing enough? Have they wasted too much time by waiting for BP to plug this hole? Does there need to be more oversight over the oil industry? What are the implications for energy politics? Is anybody going to say "Drill, Baby, Drill" ever again? Will this mean more money that goes to green energy? Who is going to pay for this clean up? Does BP have enough money to pay restitution and to collect all the crap from the ocean?

Good Links: New York Times' Interactive Oil Spill Map.

Bankrupting the Old

I spent the morning in Westchester with my mom. Once a week, my mom helps out a woman that she used to know in the Bronx. My mom pays her bills, fills out all her paperwork, drives her to doctors' appointments, and listens to the woman's woes. Since this woman has no family of her own, my mom has been burdened with this job, which is stressful and thankless. Without my mom's help, this woman would have died penniless in an old age home that over medicates its patients.

This isn't the only old woman that my mom helps out. This is a rant for another day. There are lots of people out there, who are ignored by their children and by their neighbors.

This woman is suffering from bone cancer and from Parkinson's disease. She is immobile, unable to walk or even turn her head. She requires 24 hours care. Medicare and her insurance cover nearly all of her medical expenses; she is a retired NYC school teacher with excellent benefits. However, it doesn't paid for her aides, who cost her $3,000 per week. This woman pinched pennies her whole life and now her life's savings is being spent on medical care.

What's the alternative to in-home aides? Medicare covers three months in one of those death trap, old-age homes, and that is what lots of old people do. Their insurance pays for three months, and after that, it's out of their pocket. They have to spend all of their savings, sell their house, and have basically not a cent to their name before Medicaid kicks in and starts paying for the old-age homes.

You know what goes on those places? Let me just say, you should be very, very nice to your kids.