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QuickReads
Friday, August 2
Making MATCH This Boston charter school prepares its students -- almost all poor, black and Hispanic -- to succeed in college. MATCH reminds me of "my" San Jose charter school, Downtown College Prep, in its relentless focus on high standards, honest assessment and hard work. Students start ninth grade with a median fifth grade level; by 10th grade, they're discussing Macbeth. Same at DCP. 8/2/2002
PhDs in high school Math and science PhDs can't find college jobs; high schools can't find math and science teachers. The National Research Council has a brainstorm: Fund two-year fellowships to certify 15 PhDs as teachers. If it works, the council proposes spending $2.5 million to train 30 PhDs a year. That would be $83,000 per new teacher, which seems like a lot, even with a research component thrown in. So does two years of training. 8/2/2002
Thursday, August 1
Number games Accountability dodgers can find many ways to manipulate standards and tests, writes Chester Finn. 8/1/2002
Choose or lose Courtesy of SchoolReformers.com, here's Adam Smith writing on school choice:
Forcing students to attend any school independent of the merit or reputation of the teachers tends to diminish the necessity of that merit or reputation.
If the teacher who is to instruct each student should not be voluntarily chosen by the students but appointed; and if in case of neglect, inability, or bad usage, the student should not be allowed to change him for another without leave first asked and obtained, such a regulation would not only tend very much to extinguish all emulation among the different tutors but to diminish very much in all of them the necessity of diligence and of attention to their respective pupils.
I don't think Smith would have approved of tenure. 8/1/2002
Meaningless or malevolent? Schools should teach "compassion and respect for both humans and animals" and buy compassionate, respectful textbooks, says a bill in the California Legislature. The author, state Sen. Jack O'Connell is the leading Democratic contender for state superintendent. He's introduced animal rights bills in the past.
Was this tame language covering up something untame -- insidious maybe? Or is O'Connell a believer in the sort of vague vanilla language that has plagued California education for decades?
I suspect O'Connell is trying to score points with animal lovers without actually doing anything. But this sort of meaningless legislation, multiplied hundreds of times, is what's causing textbooks to grow thicker and flabbier each year. Every pet cause is worth a paragraph or two and an illustration. 8/1/2002
Home schooling under attack California's Department of Education is now claiming that parents who aren't certified teachers can't teach their children at home, writes Lance Izumi.
. . . the California Department of Education (CDE) has become more aggressive in its long-held opinion that home schooling is illegal unless either of two stringent conditions are met: 1) children are enrolled in a public school independent study program or charter school; or 2) the parent possesses a teaching credential and is tutoring his or her child. Since most home-school parents can’t meet these conditions, the CDE charges they are operating unlawfully.
It's unlikely the state will prevail in court. However, a legal fight could persuade thousands of home-schooling parents to form or join charter schools, costing the state millions of dollars for kids who are now taught entirely at their parents' expense. 8/1/2002
Education's slow learners Writing in Samizdata, Natalie Solent rips into status-quo-loving educators who resist teaching phonics -- despite its success in preventing reading problems.
The libertarian morals to be drawn are (a) it's taken thirty freaking years or more to overthrow the fraudulent orthodoxy that monolithic state education enthroned, and the job ain't done yet; (b) that when you next hear statists moan on about how horrifically complicated, interconnected and hard to solve social problems are, mentally add the words "so long as you refuse to admit that you were wrong"; (c) watch the buggers in the educational establishment. Watch them with the eyes of a hawk. Sure, they are by now in their heart of hearts convinced that phonics is the system that works. But a little matter like the interests of actual children won't override the fact that the last thing the Special Needs "community" want is sudden, clear improvement in children's literacy. It would make them look bad. Worse, it would make them look unecessary. Expect them to obfuscate, distort and delay reform in every way imaginable.
I found this via Homeschooling, but then hit Natalie's own blog and realized I'd inspired her. All very circular and bloggy. 8/1/2002
Big Fat idiots If you gorge on junk food and get fat, it's not your fault, argues this idiotic Newsweek story.
But with the sudden, dramatic up-tick in childhood obesity, its blame-the-fatso argument is beginning to have a hollow ring. Diseases that used to be associated with retirement homes—atherosclerosis and type II diabetes—are now commonly diagnosed by pediatricians. “Fat kids are to the junk-food industry what secondhand smoke was in the war against tobacco,” says Yale University psychology professor Kelly Brownell. “Everyone can agree on personal responsibility until they realize there are passive victims here.” Activist parents say schoolkids aren’t sophisticated enough to understand that a fruit-flavored soft drink doesn’t have the nutritional benefits of, say, real fruit.
These kids have no parents? It's up to Mom and Dad to say no to sugary drinks and snacks and to pack a lunch if the school food is junk. It's up to Mom and Dad to teach their kids that they are not passive victims of their appetites.
Why did it require a medical study to link consumption of sugary breakfast cereal or sodas with obesity? You eat a high-calorie diet, you get fat. Kids should know this. Parents certainly do. Obesity is unhealthy. Is this a news flash?
The story also praises parents who got their kids' schools to adopt an all-vegetarian, all-organic menu, which means wasting money on organic food that's no healthier and driving all the carnivorous kids to the nearest source of junk food.
The nattering nabobs of nannyism start by claiming to protect children. But they think all of us are children. And they want to take our cookies.
Update: Eric Alterman points out the error in logic in Newsweek's companion column. 7/31/2002
Enemies of ignorance As Number Two Pencil reports, an anti-testing mailing list has listed us as enemies of dumbed-down education. OK, they didn't put it that way. Highered Intelligence made the list too.
By the way, Highered's Michael Lopez has a good post taking apart a story quoting teen-agers on violence.
. . . We don't need people to accept differences, we just need people to not be assholes about them. There's no need for all the kids at school to like each other, and even if there was a need, it is NEVER going to happen. All they need to do is be civil. That's it. That is its own goal, its own motivation. It doesn't need to be built on a foundation that you have to like everyone, because you can't like everyone unless you are utterly devoid of preference and judgment.
Worthwhile Canadian vouchers Vouchers are nothing new in Canada, writes Marvin Olasky in TownHall. Most provinces give per-student subsidies to private schools, ranging from 35 percent of public school costs to 100 percent; Ontario is adding a refundable tax credit for parents paying tuition.
School choice raises achievement scores, especially for low-income students, according to a new study by British Columbia's Fraser Institute.
International comparisons show that Canadian provinces that provide public funding to independent schools tend to have both higher average achievement scores and better scores for less advantaged students, suggesting that such funding enhances quality. Test scores are higher in areas where parents enjoy a wide variety of school choices. . .
Publicly subsidized independent schools can be accountable to government and still maintain their independence and distinctiveness.
Welfare families Mickey Kaus critiques the liberal bias in the NY Times story alleging welfare reform is leaving children with no parents. Most of these children are living with grandparents, Kaus notes.
(Nina) Bernstein's evidence that the kids in question are worse off is more or less nonexistent. (She says, "Children who do not live with their parents do significantly worse on average than those in single-parent homes" -- but that's a correlation you'd expect. Do these children do worse in these homes than in the presumably dysfunctional single-parent homes they've left behind?)
Ronald Bailey cites the stats. According to the Heritage Foundation:
Employment of never-married mothers has climbed 50 percent; employment of single mothers who are high-school dropouts has risen by two-thirds and employment for young single mothers (ages 18-24) has nearly doubled. The result is that 2.3 million fewer children live in poverty than did in 1996. Of course, under the old entitlement system, the percentage of Americans living in poverty in good economic times or bad didn’t change for nearly 3 decades.
The Brookings Institution concurs, noting, “A mother with no more than three children can escape poverty if she works steadily and full-time at a $7 an hour job and receives the benefits to which she is entitled.” No one is saying that life after welfare is a piece of cake, but as Brookings also noted, “Still, in the end, work pays better than welfare.”
In addition, teen pregnancies and births are way down; more children are growing up in two-parent families. Child support collection has improved significantly. These trends are very good for children. 7/30/2002
Nice Jewish Thing Read Monday's Corner for a discussion of the religious affiliation of various comic book superheroes. It turns out The Thing is Jewish.
Real name, Kal-el. And his origin...think a moment about his origin, and remember that this was being written by a pair of Jewish teenagers in 1939. Baby Kal-el, refugee from a holocaust that wipes out his entire people! Where else would he end up but...America?
Alas, his name got changed to "Clark Kent" (and isn't that **exactly** the sort of name a poor Jewish immigrant would come up with, if he were trying to fit In?) and his ethnic origins got laundered fairly thoroughly. Not much left except blue-black hair and a difficult girlfriend.
Lawyer to chancellor Why does Mayor Mike Bloomberg think an anti-trust lawyer is qualified to run the New York City school system? I know it's fashionable to name non-educators to head big city school districts. But I thought the idea was to go for someone who's managed a large business enterprise. Not a lawyer, however smart and successful in his field. How will Joel Klein know when the education experts are talking nonsense? Does managing lawyers qualify him to to run a $12 billion enterprise? 7/30/2002
Planned failure If we expect black students to fail, they will, writes William Raspberry.
America's black leaders, back in the day, took it as their key responsibility to get us ready to compete in an unfair world. Today's leadership, or so it seems to me, sees its primary responsibility as protesting the unfairness.
The difference is between remedying underperformance and merely explaining it.
The result is to make blacks feel "more like powerless victims of circumstances we can't control and less like individuals capable of significant achievement," Raspberry writes.
This is very important. People who believe that what they do makes a difference -- "efficacious thinking'' is the awkward term -- do much better in school and in life than people who believe they're powerless. It stands to reason: Why should students work hard if it's not going to get them anywhere? Why should principals and teachers look for better teaching strategies if their students are incapable of high achievement?
No place to meet on Sesame Street The Israeli-Palestinian version of "Sesame Street" -- designed to promote tolerance -- is now "Sesame Stories," reports the New York Times. It's impossible to imagine a place where Israeli and Arab Muppets could meet peacefully.
The original shows were built around the notion that Israeli and Palestinian children (as well as puppets) might become friends. Now, reflecting the somber mood in the Middle East, producers see their best hope as helping children to humanize their historic enemies through separate but parallel stories.
The pre-intifada shows were a hit with children, and seemed to reduce hostility. The writers and producers -- who have to fly to New York to meet face to face -- are still trying.
In one Palestinian story, "The Rose," a girl in a refugee camp finds a discarded can on the street and is inspired to plant something in it. Despite naysayers, who tell her you can't grow something in a refugee camp, she waters and nurtures the plant, inspiring others to gather discarded materials to plant a garden.
At a production meeting, Israelis objected, not to the story's themes of child empowerment and recycling, but to the image of a child picking up a can on the street. "Our children have been taught not to pick up stray objects," one of them explained. "It could be a bomb." After brainstorming with Palestinian and Jordanian partners, the story was changed to make the container a clear water bottle and to show a child taping the rough edges with the help of an adult.
Gay mentors Big Brothers/Sisters chapters must be open to gay mentors, according to a directive from the national organization. That's OK -- if it's OK with the parent of the Little Brother or Little Sister who gets a gay mentor. But parents won't necessarily be told about the sexual orientation of the nice man who wants to spend time alone with a boy and serve as his male role model. That's not OK. 7/29/2002
No-parent families Welfare reform is being blamed for the rise in urban black children living with neither parent. The number living with a grandparent, other relative or in foster care has more than doubled from 7.5 to 16 percent, the New York Times reports.
Researchers say they cannot pinpoint the forces driving parents and children apart. But among them, they said, may be the stresses of the new welfare world — loss of benefits, low-wage jobs at irregular hours and pressure from a new partner needed to pay the rent.
I can think of another factor: Lying. Many single mothers on welfare live with family members. If the mother doesn't want to comply with welfare-to-work rules, she can pass custody to the children's grandmother, aunt or whoever else will qualify as a "kin care" provider. The children will generate benefits with no work requirement. And the mother can continue to live with the kids. Nobody's going to check that she's really gone. If the mother gets a job, her earnings will be added to the household income with no loss in benefits, since ostensibly the mother's not there.
I have no idea how common this is, of course. But if the system can be gamed, some people will figure out how to do it. 7/29/2002
Poor pitiful me University of California's new "comprehensive review" of students' disadvantages has set off a "sob story sweepstakes", this story says. Academics still counts for about 75 percent of admission points but that last quarter can make a big difference. If UC can graduate most of its hardship cases with reasonable grades, well and good. I suspect many won't make it. 7/29/2002
