Entries associated with the tag "Education":

Peter Sacks in Teachers' College Record:

"As is often the case for lower-income families, Ashlea’s parents always wanted the best for her, but they were as information-poor as their daughter, even more so.

"I met Ashlea through my wife, Kathleen, who was her mentor in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. We wanted to set up a modest college scholarship fund for Ashlea and asked her to maintain a certain GPA in school to earn it. When we broached the idea with her dad, Gary, we were shocked to learn that he didn’t know what a GPA was, let alone SATs, AP courses, or any number of details that families must master nowadays in order to prepare their children for higher education.

"Compared to other more educated and affluent parents and students I interviewed for my new book, Tearing Down the Gates (Sacks, 2007), Ashlea’s cultural deficits put her at a huge disadvantage in the education system. Our system relies heavily on the ability of families to provide the cultural capital needed for children to succeed. If parents of poor children aren’t providing them with sufficient information and resources to thrive in the American school system, then we’ve got to turn to schools to do the job."

From where I sit, this is a variation on a theme that E.D. Hirsch has been pounding away at for a few decades. 

Gerald Bracey, a psychologist with a gift for polemic, has made a second career out of (in his words) "debunk[ing] the notion that schools were better in the past than they are today." In Education Week (registration required) he rolls out the guns once more to claim that the Soviets' launch of the first orbiting satellite 50 years ago "wounded" the reputation of US schools. According to him, they didn't deserve the criticism they got then -- and didn't deserve the criticisms they got in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s either.

In keeping with his stance as a defender of the educational status quo, Bracey doesn't even mention the real Sputnik effect: the influx of federal dollars and the collaborations between teachers and practicing scientists that led to new curricula and improved course designs in the sciences all the way down to grade school. In a paper from ten years ago, F. James Rutherford gives a more even-handed view of Sputnik's effects on US education, adding that if anything that reform program stopped too soon.

As for Bracey's hobbyhorse, he's partly right but mainly wrong. From my book Let's Kill Dick and Jane:

"This image of a lost Golden Age in American education helped fuel a movement to make schools more academically demanding. But as a picture of the world it is so incomplete as to be false. At the turn of the century, when American schools focused on traditional academic pursuits, they educated only a minority of American children." Only 20 percent of WWI veterans had finished eighth grade; 70 percent of WWII veterans had. "No wonder American schools and textbooks changed. For the first time they had to teach the children of all socio-economic classes for more than a few months. To do so, they followed the path of least resistance in a nation that had never been friendly to intellectual endeavor -- and made a virtue of this makeshift. American schools have not deteriorated -- they've never been good enough."

If the tiny finger-shaped Heschl's Gyrus on the left side of your brain has more gray matter than average, you may be well equipped to learn Chinese or other tonal languages -- that's what the team led by Patrick C.M.Wong has been working on at Northwestern's Institute for Neuroscience (abstract here, NU press release here).

Seventeen research participants aged 18-26 "were trained to learn six one-syllable sounds (pesh, dree, ner, vece, nuck and fute). ...The participants were repeatedly shown the 18 'pseudo' words and a black-and-white picture representing each word’s meaning. Pesh, for example, at one pitch meant 'glass,' at another pitch meant 'pencil' and at a third meant 'table.' Dree, depending upon pitch, meant 'arm,' 'cow' or 'telephone.'

"As a group -- and sometimes in fewer than two or three sessions -- the nine participants predicted on the basis of left HG size to be 'more successful learners' achieved an average of 97 percent accuracy in identifying the pseudo words. The 'less successful' participants averaged 63 percent accuracy and sometimes required as many as 18 training sessions to correctly identify the words."

That could be a big difference if you're trying to keep up in a fast-paced class. The authors aren't falling into the old biology-is-destiny trap, either. An undersize Heschl's Gyrus may not keep you from being an ace translator. Says Wong, “We are already testing different learning strategies for participants whom we predict will be less successful to see if altering the training paradigm results in more successful learning.”

In the end, it may just mean that your grandchildren will be funneled into different sections of Mandarin according to the results of their pre-enrollment brain scans.

Schools need all the money they can get, says the Chicago-based Heartland Institute in June:

"In New York, charter schools get generally 20 percent less per student than the other public schools. It is hardly fair to deny them funding and then complain about their reliance on private donors." 

Schools can do their job with much less money than they get now, says the Heartland Institute in August:

"An April 2007 report from the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation estimates the 12 voucher and tuition tax credit programs in operation nationwide before the 2006-07 school year will produce a 15-year cost savings of $444 million.... 'Some of the voucher programs for special-needs students show these students can be instructed for much, much less than the public education system does.'" The article claims that Utah children can be educated just as well on $3,000 vouchers as on the state's per-pupil cost of $7,500.

Moral to alleged think tanks: when you tell the truth, you don't have to remember what you said.

Political scientist Jay Greene and colleagues are busy viewing with alarm the fact that few schools these days are named after presidents, or indeed after people at all. (Here's their op-ed; here's their full article, with a hat tip to Utne Web Watch's email "Short Takes"; teacherblogger Ryan's opinion here.)

"Last year, the Fayetteville, Arkansas, public school district closed its aging Jefferson Elementary School, replacing it with a shiny new building on the other side of the highway. The new building needed a name; the school board could have transferred the Jefferson name along with the students but did not do so. Or they could have chosen the name of another president; for example, they could have honored Bill Clinton, who had been a law professor at the university in Fayetteville and later became governor and then president. But if Clinton was thought inappropriate for a school name, the board could have honored the late J. William Fulbright, who hailed from Fayetteville, graduated from its university, and was the university’s president before serving five terms in the U.S. Senate. Indeed, there is no shortage of people the board could have chosen to honor. Instead, they chose to name the school 'Owl Creek,' after a small ditch with a trickle of water that runs by the school."

Greene et al. did a seven-state survey of school names to confirm that this anecdote is representative. Then they stretched to connect this with US schools' dismal performance in civics. Then they stretched again to connect it with the fact that many school boards are elected (rather than appointed by mayors) and that those elections are often on separate special-purpose election days. Perhaps unintentionally adding bad rhetoric to weak argument, they borrowed that old, tired environmentalist metaphor, claiming they've found a dead canary in the coal mine.

If I were a student, I'd rather be able to debate the merits of presidents without being put in the position of seeming to attack my own school. You tell me: is "Ronald Reagan Elementary School" a teachable moment? Or just a sneaky way to enshrine a particular point of view? And before you answer, consider "William Jefferson Clinton High School."

And if naming a school after a natural feature suggests that over the long haul we depend more on nature than on particular big-name leaders...what's the problem with that?

A Southern California assistant principal, who blogs as Q6 at Assistive Principles, proctored an Advanced Placement test last month. In a place where no one has to be unless they want to, he finds ... apathy. (Hat tip to Teacher magazine's Blogboard.)

"During one exam, I toured around the room making sure no one was cheating only to find that very few were taking the test at all. One of the questions provided statistics about an E. Coli outbreak and asked for a statistical analysis. One student wrote the words 'I don't know' and then proceeded to draw the finest pencil sketch of a hamburger I'd ever seen in my life. Another student created a word search puzzle that filled the page...with a list of words to be found."

Every teacher is a fountain of stories, but few tell them as well or as honestly as recently retired Michigan music teacher Nancy Flanagan in her blog "Teacher in a Strange Land." (Hat tip to Blogboard.) She's a real person (so, like Howard Dean, she'll never be president) and not an ideologue. The Blogboard link will get you her hair-raising story about trying to become a substitute in the district where she taught last year.

A few days earlier, she posted about her grad-school office-mate Jeff, "precisely the teacher that the talking ed-heads and columnists say we desperately need: a bright, well-prepared high school science specialist" who used to teach in Cincinnati:

"A few years into his career, the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers proposed a new pay system tied to an innovative evaluation plan, involving classroom observations by principals and peers, plus a professional portfolio, all standards-based. While Jeff had some reservations about the plan—he felt some of the indicators were less demanding than they could be—he thought the system would reward hard workers like himself and weed some of the deadwood. In fact, he was sure he could reach the top of the scale in a couple of years—a five-figure salary boost. For a young husband and father, this was reason to stay in teaching for a good long while.

"The plan was voted down in May of 2002, by 96% of Cincinnati teachers. Jeff believes he was one of only two teachers in his high school who voted for the plan. He says there were issues between union and district leaders and a mistrust of the new evaluation system, not enough time for teachers to absorb the ramifications of change—too much revolution all at once. Lots of reasons, all boiling down to the same thing: fear. Jeff began seriously looking, that spring, at graduate schools and new career paths, plotting an eventual escape from a system that suddenly felt unbending and stuck in the past.

"Jeff will be a world-class teacher educator, but it is a shame that he stopped teaching those kids in Cincinnati so soon. What is absolutely criminal is that he was pushed out by the intransigent fears of his colleagues. We are not a profession of risk-takers or innovators. We sometimes prefer the mediocre known to the potential of the unknown, and we keep settling for a little extra for everyone rather that shuffling the deck and trying to use our resources to reach our goals."

Bloggers who aren't navel gazers are supposed to be up to the millisecond, but it just ain't so. Strange Maps just put up a five-year-old map of how different states do in setting standards for teaching evolution, lifted from a May 2002 antievolution Web site, which lifted it from the March 2002 issue of Scientific American (text available here).

I liked the old map, because it was in color, it had funny comments, and it allowed for piquant observations about Indiana's doing a much better job than Illinois (at least in statewide standards -- what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom). But the author of all this information -- Laurence S. Lerner, a University of Chicago alum and an emeritus prof at California State University, Long Beach -- hasn't stopped tracking the subject. A year ago January he published an update in Freethought Today on state science standards in general (Illinois scored a B, Indiana an A, 15 states got Fs) and evolution standards in particular (Illinois and Indiana both scored well; the worst states include Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Connecticut). The associated map is in shades of gray.

And Lerner's accompany article is fun as well as informative. He writes, "As creationism has evolved under the selective pressure of a series of court decisions ..."

PZ Myers of Pharyngula performs a public service by collecting (in the comments) books for parents looking for "a primer on skeptical thinking, the scientific method, and religious criticism that was appropriate for early readers or junior high school kids."

It turns out there are several. But commenter Tristero didn't need to make another purchase. He just read some of the Bible to his six-year-old, who asked some good questions. He encouraged her to keep asking, adding, "By the way, what goes for the Bible, goes for all books. Always ask, 'why'? And if they can't explain it in a way you can understand, don't feel you have to believe it. You don't. And never accept 'Because the Bible says so' as an explanation. And that goes for other books, and for people, too."

"'Including you and Mom?' my precocious daughter said.

"'Especially Mom and I,' I replied."

Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University pinpoints the Bush administration's failure in No Child Left Behind:

"In theory, at least, the idea of evidence-based reform is a no-brainer. Use what works. Who could disagree with that? Why shouldn’t education finally join medicine, agriculture, and technology in embracing evidence as the basis for practice? At long last, here was the President of the United States and both parties of Congress openly endorsing the idea that evidence should matter in education, and supporting legislation designed to encourage schools and districts receiving federal funds to use programs with strong evidence of effectiveness.

"In practice, however, NCLB has been a major setback for evidence-based reform. In every area of the law in which evidence could have mattered, it did not, and if anything, programs with strong evidence of effectiveness were discouraged rather than encouraged. The winners in NCLB were the old-fashioned large publishers and other large companies, whose products lack evidence from rigorous experiments."

Read the whole thing in Teachers College Record. Slavin is a coauthor of one of the programs largely passed over.

"Mr. AB," a third-generation teacher from California, tells this story at From the T.F.A. Trenches, where you can read the whole thing. (Hat tip to Teacher Magazine's Blogboard.) The main character, one of his fifth graders, probably has fetal alcohol syndrome:

"He cries constantly, he picks his nose, he licks his shoes and, until the recent acquisition of a hearing aid, he talked at the top of his lungs.... He is paranoid, from years of bullying and abuse. He incessantly believes people are stealing his stuff and making fun of him, and he is often right. Yet, he is constantly in search of companionship and tries, each morning anew, to befriend kids who have despised him for years."

Mr. AB had almost despaired until he picked up a tip from the Internet and turned "D---" loose on a computer.

"Wholly engaged by Multiflyer, hands down the best facts-teaching game ever, D--- would happily work at hundreds of multiplication problems. At first I only let him work during the multiplication period, but then, as he never does his homework, I let him stay on the machine during the homework correction too....

"After a few weeks of this intense practice, D--- told me that he was going to pass the [test known as the] Principal’s Challenge. When he only got thirty or forty problems out of the hundred, he tried to fill in the rest as we corrected the test. The other kids caught him, called him out, and D--- sobbed. He cried to me about how he thought he could do it and how desperately he wanted to pass. I told him to keep practicing. A few weeks later, D--- got fifty-two correct. He came rushing up to me as the class counted out our perfects. The class laughed at him but, undeterred, he said that next week, he would pass the test.

"Last week, just as the five minutes finished up, I walked by D---'s desk and saw something I never believed possible. As my eyes quickly scanned the paper, I did not immediately find it awash with ridiculous guesses. In fact I found myself tracking back and forth across the rows of problems as I looked for an error. I picked it up, telling D--- that I would correct it myself. Unable to tell if he had done well or wrong, D--- assumed the worst and put his head down."D--- did not ace the test, but he got over seventy problems right. It was a spectacular improvement, from twelve at the beginning of the year, and I announced it to the class. We were all amazed and the reconsideration of deep-seeded contempt was tangible. Most of the students in the class did not get seventy correct at the start of the year and for D--- to be within a few months progress of them was inconceivable."

President Bush's one big bipartisan legislative accomplishment will be up for reauthorization in 2007.

Alexander Russo at This Week in Education sees an "unholy alliance" between liberal critics of No Child Left Behind such as Gerald Bracey and conservative critics such as Checker Finn.

Andrew Rotherham at Eduwonk.com offers an "NCLB Tip Sheet" giving the odds on possible outcomes of the debate.  Neither Bracey nor Finn will be pleased. The best odds are on "no reauthorization until after the 2008 election." And it's 35-1 against "National Education Association reasserts itself and rewrites the law to its liking."

It should be a boom year for education pundits, dueling researchers, heart-rending stories, and the like. How would you change the law, if at all?

We all know where tech support comes from, but I was surprised to hear this, from architect John Massengale: "The first [overseas customer service rep] I spoke to couldn't say the letter 'v' -- that's not good when you work for a company named Vonage."

Of course, not all outsourcing originates from the suits at the top. We won't discuss sex tourism, but a friend of my sister's recently found it more affordable to travel to India to have her cataracts removed than to have the surgery done here.

Think your job is immune? Maybe not. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "overseas tutors are teaching U.S. students math, science, English and social studies [online]. And parents are paying half as much as they would for face-to-face instruction."

When the computer-challenged ask me what a blog is, I usually just say that it's like an op-ed column with links and conversation. But sometimes it's more like listening in on the old-fashioned party line. Here's one of each type that I would read even if I didn't get to blog about them. 

On the pundit side, Stirling Newberry reflects on Predatorgate and the tension between base and Beltway:

"The reactionary world has a contagion theory of homosexuality -- gayness is something you are 'infected' with, and by moral weakness are seduced into. In the view of the reactionary world -- and we see this in modern day Africa where traditional societies are firm in their belief that there were no homosexuals in Africa until Europeans arrived -- being gay is something that one catches from other people. . . .

"One reason that Republicans are not falling on their swords as they have in so many past scandals . . . is that the fate of those who are cast out is not a cushy K-Street job, but ostracism. Compare this to the quiet resignation of a White House aid over [Jack] Abramoff recently, or the ending of the careers of DeLay, Ney or Cunningham. They literally could not get far away from the ballot box fast enough. Corruption is not a bar to continued employment, but homosexuality makes the bearer of infection radioactive. This is why conservatives such as Howard Kurtz, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Caldwell are trying to put a firebreak between 'gay' and 'pedophile', or downplaying the scandal entire. They know that a purge of gay men from the upper ranks of Republicanism would do to the reactionary apparatus what AIDS did to the theatre world -- erase half a generation of talent, well down into the farm team."

Of the gossipy-type blogs, Rate Your Students varies a good deal because it depends on people writing in, but when it's on, it's on. (Then again, you may not want to read this blog if you're a nice person who believes "children are our future.")  A veteran of a "commuter campus of a Big Ten school," now in charge of entry testing, reports, "This year, one student could not spell her last name correctly, another student didn't know if his first name was spelled with one T or two, and a third one had to call his father for his address because 'We moved two months ago and I haven't learned it yet.'"

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings on All Things Considered (my transcription, starting at 2:00 in the audio segment):

"When you try to make a decision about where your child should attend college, it's very hard to find out, is it a better deal to get out of my state college in six years or to send my child to a far more expensive private school and get out in four? What are her prospects for employment after she graduates? What kind of average starting salary might she expect? You know, you can find lots of information on Greek life and dorm food and climbing walls and that sort of thing, but it's really hard to figure out how well will your child be educated . . ."

Ahem. God help her children if they should happen to learn anything or change in any way during their college years. Why, their predicted starting salary might decline!

(FYI, Spellings's official biography says she graduated from the University of Houston. Caveat emptor.)

• Just be sure to pick up more than you leave behind.  Openlands Project and the Forest Preserve District are sponsoring a cleanup day along the Little Calumet River, which flows through south suburbs including Calumet City, Harvey, and Blue Island.  (Sign up at 312/863-6253.)  According to the email announcement, "This event is sponsored by McDonald's and participants will receive a free McDonald's lunch!"

• How hard is it to say, "Less Sports"?  In Minnesota, the Center for School Change, headed by Joe Nathan, reports that last spring the local Star-Tribune newspaper published about six times as much on high-school athletes as on high-school academic stars.  (Sounds like an undercount to me.)  The center and allied groups want the paper (and the electronic media) to do better.  But, writes Nathan, "We're not urging reduced attention to high school sports, just more coverage of students who excel in academics."  Huh?  If they're not urging that, they're not urging anything.  News coverage, like attention in general, is a zero-sum game.

• Sure, Speaker Hastert will take your call, Mr. Mayor!  Mayor Daley to the Sun-Times:  “If you took the impropriety of every congressman and senator in Washington D.C. [as an excuse to demand resignations], I don’t think anybody would be left.” 

• Once more with feeling.  Downstate Peoria Republican U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood urges that the Congressional page program be abolished, on CNN: "M. O'BRIEN: Well, that's kind of a sorry state of affairs. In essence, what you're saying is that members of Congress can't be trusted to be around young people.  LAHOOD: Well, that's pretty obvious."

• "This is a green home." I don't think so, and neither does Russ Finley of Gristmill. Money quote, which along with the picture says it all, but there's more in the story: "When we decided to build a new house on our property in Woody Creek, a few miles but a world away from Aspen, we knew we were engaging in inherently antienvironmental behavior, so we decided to go as green as we could." Used to be called greenwashing.
  

• "Your Boyfriend Is a Good Kisser." The Washington Post tells all about teens' sleazoid T-shirt sayings, but buries the lead: "The T-shirts highlight a paradox about this generation: Even as more teenagers absorb ubiquitous sexual messages, federal data show that they report having less sex than their predecessors."  Used to be called sublimation.

• "I was there." One of several priceless student excuses from the consistently depressing and compulsively readable Rate Your Students: "Student told me that he missed class because he was sitting in an empty classroom for an entire week (he told me he thought it odd that there were no other students present) and finally went to the department office and found out we had moved across the hall." Used to be called you flunk, moron.

Virginia attorneys with a taste in vintage music can get four credits for a "Live Legal Ethics Program Performed to the Tunes of 60s Rock and Roll" for about $200. No lie--here's the link. Among the songs parodied and the topics covered:

"Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" -- deceptive tactics

"A Day in the Life" -- courtroom

"When I'm 64" -- ethical considerations in changing firms

"The Boxer" -- conflicts and confidentiality

"Fire and Rain" ("Scum and Pain") -- former clients

"American Pie" ("The Day My Ethics Died") -- Sarbanes-Oxley, i.e., accounting and corporate governance

(Hat tip to Sam Smith's Undernews.) 

Did the following proposal come from a male supremacist or a militant feminist--or just a fiscal conservative?

"Men and women should get the same access to law school--same tuition, same scholarships, etc. If, however, ten years after graduation, the law-school graduate is not working full-time at some job for which law school is a reasonable preparation, he, or more likely, she, will have to give the school back the money that it spent educating him or her over and above whatever was paid in tuition. The refunds would be put in a fund for scholarships for law students who could not otherwise afford to go to law school."

No fair clicking on the link until you've decided.

• The So-Called Austin Mayor doesn't talk as much as I do, but when he does he makes it count. Here he impeaches the supposed integrity of retiring suburban rep Henry Hyde, without even getting into that gentleman's walloping double standard on the subject of presidential impeachment.

• Jessa Crispin at Bookslut will never have to read the New Yorker again, thanks to haiku! Who would've thunk it?

• Alexander Russo's District 299 Chicago Public Schools Blog is fast becoming to CPS what Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and Illinoize are to politics--sources of both information and intelligent discussion from many viewpoints. Victor at Chicago Teachers Speak Out rescues the following from a number of insightful comments responding to CPS's Peter Cunningham, who was invited to make a statement on college-graduation data. The anonymous commenter asks, "Why free a group of schools from bureaucratic oversight? If that oversight is harmful, free all schools. If it is supportive, don't 'free' any. If it is harmful, change it. It's like Cunningham is saying, 'we not imposing our stupid rules and regs on everyone, just the bad schools.'"

• Steve Rhodes at Beachwood Reporter explains in painstaking detail why the Sun-Times's coverage of Daley's Olympic brainstorm would get an F in any reputable J-school. 

No deep moral today, except that those of us who pay close attention to "the issues" can forget how vague it all is to those who don't. And, as Dave Barry was wont to say, remember that in our system these people have the right to vote.

Glimpse #1:  Orange, a guest blogger at Bitch Ph.D., tells a story from her first-day-of-school morning, somewhere not far from here: 

"A Polish mom asked if I could recommend a dentist for her son, David. I warned her that Ben's dentists . . .  like to be paid up front, letting the patient's family do the waiting for insurance reimbursement. Not a problem, she said—they probably take Medicaid, and her son is covered through Illinois's universal health insurance for children.

"'David gets $600 a month of medications for his asthma, and Medicaid pays for that. He can see the doctor, he can go to the dentist. I don't know what I would do without that. Thank you, President Bush,' she said.

"'Don't thank Bush—he'd get rid of Medicaid if he could. Thank the Democrats,' I said.

"(The All Kids program was an initiative from Gov. Rod Blagojevich. He may be corrupt in terms of hiring practices, but he's our corrupt politician. He also ordered pharmacists in the state to dispense Plan B, and is working on universal preschool. I expect I'll be voting for him again, because I care more about issues like those than about cleaning up the state's pandemic corruption. Let's get some more progressive legislation and executive orders on the books, and then we can clean house.)"

No wonder Blago repeats his bread-and-butter initiatives every time journalists ask him about corruption, or how he plans to pay for them.

Glimpse #2:  Saul Levmore at the University of Chicago law school's faculty blog:

"I was entertained last night by my 8th grader's homework assignment, to write a letter to Mayor Daley about what he ought to do [regarding the big-box minimum-wage ordinance]. The assignment was preceded by one in which students had calculated the cost of supporting a family of four in 'their community,' so that they were pushed to think that a job 'must' pay a living wage. Still, not unaware of the problem of discouraging stores from coming in to Chicago, a letter was produced in which the Mayor was encouraged to accept the minimum wage but exempt stores from the high minimum wage if they opened in areas that needed jobs or lower prices."

Hopefully the teacher wasn't depending on each kid having an economically literate parent to point out that trying to do good sometimes has bad side effects.

So much of education punditry is hackwork. On the left, the received wisdom is that educators must spend their time agitating for social change because schools can't be expected to do much when students have had such difficult lives. On the right, the received wisdom is that schools can bring about great changes if they were just reformed, usually through privatization in one way or another.

The debate is so sterile I don't usually read it. So I was pleasantly surprised to blunder into the middle of an ongoing controversy sparked by an August 6 New York Times article (PDF). Richard Rothstein (PDF) of the Economic Policy Institute discusses, soberly and without jargon, how these entrenched ideas might fit together into something resembling reality.

"At present . . . the average achievement of black and white children in America differs by about a full standard deviation, or about 30 percentile points in a distribution. . . . Social scientists generally consider an intervention to be extraordinarily successful if it has an effect size of 0.5, or more than 15 percentile points." So even an extraordinarily successful school would leave a significant achievement gap.

There are lots of stories out there about "beat the odds" schools alleged to have done this much or more. But Rothstein notes that "in every case, highly publicized 'beat the odds' schools enroll children who are more likely to have higher achievement" in any case, among them "a school where most children are poor but which is the location of a district-wide 'gifted and talented' program whose test scores are included in the school's averages; and schools where most children are poor but where an unusually high proportion of parents have college degrees."

These may be good schools, or very good, he hastens to add. But no one has done the work of distinguishing "the extent to which the standardized test scores of 'beat the odds' schools are attributable to school practices or to students with greater capacity to benefit from those school practices."

Rothstein advocates "a balanced set of reform policies, covering schools as well as the social and economic conditions that surround them." After all the ink that's been spilled, that's probably about what our moms would've said if we'd asked them across the dinner table.

More here. 

• So many ways to demotivate, so little time. Posters and paraphernalia to culture-jam any imaginable corporate propaganda.

• Brian Dillon at frieze: An established magazine has to "keep reminding your readers of that first flirtatious thrill, even as you settle into something like domestic routine with your faithful subscribers. At which point, in a sense, you’re already sunk: you’ve begun to second-guess your readers’ motives--or worse, to service their whims: their sensible preference for information over style, their taste for gossip, their impatience with illegible typefaces." (Hat tip to kottke.)

• Of 12 things Guy Kawasaki wishes he'd learned in school, one is how to give good voicemail: "First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people play back your message to get your phone number. . . . Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an e-mail that says, 'Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.' Just say, 'Tuesday, 10:00 AM, at your office.'" (Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who also quotes a list of 10 things never to buy new.)

• Forty-six kinds of male privilege, including item number 2: "I can be confident that my coworkers won’t think I got my job because of my sex--even though that might be true." Unlike most employers, symphony orchestras now have blind auditions, in which hiring decisions are made without knowledge of the applicant's sex. In a 1997 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse gathered data from audition records and found that blind auditioning “increases by 50 percent” a woman’s odds of getting past preliminary auditions, and increases by several times the chance that a woman will win the final round of auditions.

• Chartreuse intervenes on behalf of those born after 1982: "The only thing your parents got right was multiculturalism. Everything else is questionable. . . . I know we’re at war but the world is flat. A Jew hating redneck who lives next door is just that, a Jew hating redneck who lives next door. You probably have more in common with a skateboard-riding, hip-hop-listening kid who lives in India. It’s the values that are important, not the land." (Hat tip to Abstract Nonsense.)

• "I feel almost like I'm living in the last movement of Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony," writes the indispensable Lynn Becker on the impending euthanasia of Carson's and the slow death of State Street.  The usual crop of analysts "are little more than a cross between Pangloss and Polonius. No matter what happens, they, of course, saw it coming, it was inevitable, and it will ultimately prove a very positive thing." His blog.

• At Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, Ed Darrell picks up 10 familiar laments from a teacher--but commenter R. Becker steals the show: "About 20 years ago, I was doing a summer teacher institute [American History] in Baton Rouge, Louisiana . . . three-hour sessions twice a week. Had about a dozen techers, mostly high school, all veterans of at least a decade. . . . Chatting one morning, I asked them this: What one change, ONE change, that would not cost your school or district money, would make your jobs easier and more satisfying? . . .  Instantly, and I mean NO time elapsed from the end of my question to the reply, one nearly shouted 'Rip out the God damned PA system.' The rest applauded her."

• At Illinois Review, Fran Eaton writes that Republican Judy Baar Topinka has basically bet her campaign for governor on a land-based Chicago casino (as a substitute for tax hikes to pay for schools). Eaton observes in passing, "Topinka doesn't like conservatives and wants nothing to do with them."  Well, duh. It wasn't moderates who brought wacko blowhard Alan Keyes to Illinois in 2004 for a Senatorial flameout.

• Larry Griffin at Four Red Stars thinks Topinka made the wrong bet anyway:  "With plenty of casinos scattered around the Midwest as is, who, exactly, is going to come here to visit one casino in Chicago? Even if it does draw more tourists to the city, the folks who are losing all their money to the casinos aren’t going to be filling up the coffers on the Magnificent Mile later that day.  . . . I’m with the social conservatives on this one. As a society, we should not allow the exploitation of our citizens to save property owners a couple dollars on taxes."

Contrary to reports in the Tribune and Daily Herald, Republican state treasurer and gubernatorial candidate Judy Baar Topinka was specific about the main issue separating her from incumbent Democrat Rod Blagojevich at yesterday's annual meeting of the Metropolitan Planning Council:

When you're in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Like any well-prepped pol, Topinka knew about arcana dear to her audience, like the CREATE program for rail freight and the still-aborning CMAP (Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning). But she turned each of MPC's three questions back to rather obvious references to the spend-and-don't-tax incumbent.

• Asked about how the state would help local governments plan for growth, she promised a special assistant in her office, but no resources or incentives "until we get the fiscal problems under control."

• Asked about capital investments in transportation, she agreed that without them "Illinois will not be first in anything" and promised a systematic assessment of need. But, once again, "We're not going to hit the credit card again--we are going to pay our way."

• Asked about education funding, she again agreed with her audience that Illinois relies too much on local property taxes. But "changing the system will require new state funds that frankly don't exist today." Her forthcoming education plan "will be detailed, and whatever we put out,  it will be funded."

Of course she needs to be held to these promises, and give more specifics. But in the context of the fiscal train wreck that is today's Illinois state government, could the mainstream media manage to report the unambiguous common thread running through what she did say?

FYI: According to the Trib, Blago was busy meeting with union members in Las Vegas. He'll give his answers to MPC's questions September 7 at a location to be determined. With an extra month to prepare, they should be good.

Anyone who's ever hung out in the halls of academe will want to devour Terry Caesar's clever article on RateMyProfessors.com over at Inside Higher Education:

"One thing you immediately learn when you visit RATE is that students generally seem to care more passionately than you realized, and some are able to write with more wit than you saw in your own course evaluations," he writes. "A Top Twenty from the site circulates online, including 'Three of my friends got A’s in his class and my friends are dumb,' 'If I was tested on her family, I would have gotten an A,' and, my own favorite, 'BORING. But I learned there are 137 tiles on the ceiling.'

"From a reader’s point of view, who cares if these comments are accurate? They’re fun to read. From a colleague’s point of view, who cares if just about any comments are just? They’re irresistible to read, like gossip. RATE opens up the whole evaluative process insofar as teaching is concerned. Suddenly students get to say what they really think, not just to themselves but to a potential audience of thousands. Rather like guests on certain afternoon television talk shows, individuals feel inspired to be more recklessly candid."

In other words, sites like this are doing for educators what blogs are doing for journalists: the pros get to be publicly judged (and often smeared) by unqualified amateurs--who are also their customers.

Caesar doesn't mention the counterpart underground site Rate Your Students, now in estivation for the summer. It may make better reading for rant-lovers over 30, and in any case the slackers and nimrods often vilified there aren't named or shamed in public as the teachers are.

And yes, there is one for high schools nationwide. No doubt there are pearls of wisdom buried here somewhere, but this randomly selected comment will do for most: "she is f-ing awesome she passed me and I never showed up 4 swimming!!"

Boys are not doing worse in school--their performance just isn't improving as fast as girls'. And far larger than any gender gap is the gap between white children and the rest. In high school, where boys are doing worse than before, girls are too.

Sara Mead, a "senior policy analyst" at Education Sector, uses nothing but data to demolish the latest "boy crisis" fad. As a bonus, she also plows salt into the ruins--explaining how a claim with so little basis in reality could be turned into a bevy of books and pop-magazine sociology.

The media, it seems, were just bored with the well-known socio-economic gap. Pundits, she argues, simply used the "boy crisis" to push harder whatever line they were pushing before:

"A number of conservative authors, think tanks, and journals have published articles arguing that progressive educational pedagogy and misguided feminism are hurting boys. . . . Progressive education thinkers, on the other hand, tend to see boys' achievement problems as evidence that schools have not gone far enough in adopting progressive tenets and are still forcing all children into a teacher-led pedagogical box that is particularly ill-suited to boys' interests and learning styles. . . . In other words, few of these commentators have anything new to say--the boy crisis has just given them a new opportunity to promote their old messages."

This heels-dug-in thinking reminds me of 9/11. Supposedly it "changed everything," but in fact those who were warmongers before kept right on, and those who thought everything would be fine if we just quit writing blank checks to Israel kept thinking that way too.

(Hat tip to Crooked Timber.)

Walter Feinberg, who teaches philosophy of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spent three years visiting Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic schools. In April Routledge published his book about what they teach and how, For Goodness Sake: Religious Schools and Education for Democratic Citizenry.

One of his recommendations--this comes from the U. of I. press release, not the book, which I haven't seen--is that religious schools should teach the history of their own religious doctrines, because young students "need to know that it is possible for religious doctrine to change over time."

Is this naive? A review of the book in Teachers College Record (behind a pay wall) makes it clear that some religious schools do a fine job of this while upholding their distinctive traditions. But can they all? Isn't fundamentalism all about denying change? 

A liberal faith can postulate that human knowledge of God is inevitably partly false--hence doctrine has changed and will continue to do so. Fundamentalists don't go that way, even when one of their heroes makes a change himself.

For example: In 1993 Pope John Paul II included slavery in a long list of practices that he called "intrinsically evil" and that are therefore prohibited at all times and places. That statement goes well beyond anything written in the Bible or in later Catholic teaching.

Writing in the far-right journal First Things last fall, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., did his sophisticated best to square that circle. Since neither the pope nor the tradition could be wrong or have changed, Dulles argued that slavery isn't intrinsically evil and that the pope didn't mean what he'd plainly said. The piece is a strange and strained intellectual exercise.

Would it be naive to expect Dulles, let alone less erudite Bible-thumpers, to appreciate Feinberg's recommendation?