As I suggested in my Scaling up, part 1, essay, part of the problem here is in seeing charters as a pedagogy (or, in Meier’s view, ideology) rather than a market mechanism, one that is largely indifferent to pedagogy or ideology, and, for that matter, capacity. Choice has a way of solving those problems all by itself. The market, as Milton Friedman famously said, is not a cow to be milked.  The idea is not to shoe-horn schooling into governance systems but for governments to get out of the way so good schooling can happen…. The success of so many different models of schooling over the last couple of decades—including the ones [New York Times reporter James]  Traub wrote about in 1999—suggest that it is less pedagogy than governance methodology that is the key. And the what may just be government getting out of the way. We need less system, not more.

Fordham Institute’s Peter Meyer on why school choice is a critical part of moving American public education from its Model T Ford design.

As Joseph Viteritti, one of the country’s top experts in the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and school choice, has observed, the Pierce decision helped establish “the constitutionally protected right of parents to have their children educated in schools that reflected their own values, as well as the commensurate right of religious and private schools to coexist as viable alternatives to public schools.”

Unfortunately, all parents do not have an equal opportunity to exercise this constitutional right. Parents with sufficient resources may satisfy their state’s mandatory school attendance law by sending their children to secular or sectarian private schools, but parents with insufficient resources cannot. As Steve Sugarman recently wrote on this blog, just as the choices guaranteed by the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision require public funding to be fully realized, so do the choices guaranteed by the Pierce decision.

Over the last decade, school choice opponents have used state and federal constitutional provisions as the basis of legal attacks on various school choice programs, but these same provisions provide the basis for expanding and strengthening school choice. For example, if the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses require that government remain neutral when parents choose their child’s school, then shouldn’t the government provide equal financial support for the parents’ choice — regardless if the chosen school is secular or sectarian? Isn’t government putting its collective thumb on the scale when it financially supports parents to attend secular schools but not sectarian schools? And shouldn’t the Free Exercise Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee low-income parents the same access to sectarian schools as wealthy parents?

Redefine Ed‘s Doug Tuthill on how a 1924 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (along with the Constitution) can be used to expand school choice — a subject of past Dropout Nationcommentaries.

Most teachers agree that we could deliver dramatically better results were it not for a “lack of student motivation.” Unfortunately, too many of us think about motivation the way we think about sunny weather — it’s nice when it happens, but there’s nothing you can do if it doesn’t… But actually, there’s a lot we can do. We’ve known for years that the manner in which adults interact with students has a tremendous impact on how students behave, how they value education and how committed they are to producing quality work.

Derby, Conn., Superintendent Steven Tracy, in the Hartford Courant, on why the work of adults is school is what fosters students to succeed.

   Send article as PDF   

School reformers and education traditionalists alike were taken aback last week when Pedro Noguera resigned from the board of the State University of New York outfit charged with authorizing charter schools. For traditionalists — who oppose the very existence of charters — Noguera’s departure (along with one of the underlying reasons — his opposition to the opening of one of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter schools) pleases them greatly because the generally thoughtful education professor has been one of the few fellow-travelers willing to break ranks with them on the importance of school choice. They hated the fact that he was even working to support this aspect of school reform.

Yet as Steve Evangelista of the Harlem Link Charter School points out in this Voices of the Dropout Nation, education traditionalists should actually been happy that Noguera was helping to expand educational options for our poorest and minority students — and, in the process, forcing the much-needed rebuilding of American public education from its foundations.

So Dr. Pedro Noguera resigned from the SUNY board last week, apparently responding to negative feedback from anti-education reform forces for his role as head of the board’s Charter Schools Committee.  When an outspoken and respected critic of the system takes a position of authority, the ground tends to shift.

Dr. Noguera’s view of charter schools and education reform has always been nuanced, and the charter community will feel his loss.  It could herald an even more extreme narrowing of goals than the movement already has.  And that’s exactly why these enemies of reform should be careful what they ask for.  Supporting Dr. Noguera’s view of authorizing, even when he made decisions that didn’t sit well with charter school opponents, would keep an ally who knows how to toe the line in the authorizer’s chair.  Now, we can expect the SUNY board to appoint someone less interested in the voices of those who say they are oppressed under the current wave of reform.

I have to admit I’m puzzled by those people.  How could anyone work with at risk children in this system and think it’s just A-OK as it’s been?  How could you not want serious shakeup?

Chancellor Walcott is experiencing the same dip in popularity as Dr. Noguera.  The enemies of reform had a field day with Cathie Black, and loved to hate Joel Klein. But who is their model? Let’s go back a few chancellors and find the ideal chancellor for these critics. Harold Levy? Rudy Crew? They managed to stand by and manage the system, make some incremental changes that just didn’t stick.

Going further back, there were Ramon Cortines and Anthony Alvarado.  These are earnest professional educators with good instructional ideas who found more staying power on the west coast.  But Cortines could not get things done with the Giuliani administration and Alvarado made key mistakes that prevented him from furthering his agenda.

What I most fear is stagnation in the system–because the system is still so unresponsive to students’ real needs.  I was up in the middle of the night reading an article by William J. Stern about Times Square in the 1980s for some reason a couple of weeks ago and I came across a broken-windows quote from Giuliani’s police chief, William Bratton. He said that the New York Police Department “didn’t want high performance; it wanted to stay out of trouble, to avoid corruption scandals and conflicts in the community.” For an officer in the pre-Giuliani era, career success in the NYPD bureaucracy only came by shunning, risk and avoiding failure. And in the process, as Bratton pointed out, no one in city government realized that “tolerating low-level crime created an environment that inevitably led to serious law-breaking.”

Bratton’s statement exactly described the state of the teaching force when I arrived as an educator in the 1990s: A tolerance of a system in which adults are served at the expense of children. What Joel Klein did, and bless her heart, what Cathie Black would have liked to have done; what Chancellor Walcott aims to do, and what Pedro Noguera has spent his professional life saying we all should do, is to break down this idea that the system needs to serve adults.  The system exists for children. And when incentives have adults watching their backs and avoiding trouble instead of doing what’s best for kids, as it has since I started teaching, there’s a need for serious shakeup.

Enemies of reform, complain about people like Dr. Noguera at your own risk, because in urging him to abandon charters you just may get what you ask for.

   Send article as PDF   

I was very disappointed in the logical fallacies, and the boogeymen, that [Diane Ravitch] kept bringing up. “We must improve them (schools), not lose them.” She seems absolutely convinced that there is a movement afoot to destroy public schools and to privatize them. If you believe that’s so, then her statements make sense. If you don’t, and she offered no evidence that it’s so, then she’s insane. She piled on: There are two goals of the “corporate reform movement”, privatization and deprofessionalism…

Her bad statistics and bad logic could have been picked out by my first-year statistics students. At one point, when talking about how charter schools in Milwaukee haven’t improved education, she said that African-American charter students in Milwaukee score no better than African-American students in Mississippi. Uh, to determine if the schools are an improvement over Milwaukee’s public schools, shouldn’t those kids be compared to African-American students in Milwaukee public schools? She makes several of these types of errors. In another attack on Michelle Rhee she mentioned something, I didn’t write down what, that good teachers do, and then said that “Michelle Rhee certainly didn’t do that in DC.” Great applause line, but Michelle Rhee never taught in DC, she was the chancellor (superintendent) of the public schools there…

I didn’t expect a red meat feeding frenzy. From someone of Ravitch’s stature I expected much more intelligence, decency, and evidence. It’s not that I disagreed with her–I knew going in that that was the case–it’s just that I expected better. I was truly disappointed at the intellectual shallowness of her talk. This was the great Diane Ravitch? Really?

California teacher Darren Miller, surmising what Dropout Nation and others have been saying about the once-respectable education historian.

Imagine, for a moment, what could happen if teachers unions came to the negotiating table with an open mind and a realization that parental choice is about educating children, not protecting the few teachers who are failing them. Teachers are committed professionals who did not choose this vocation in order to become rich and famous. They genuinely care about educating our children and we should respect that.

However, we also must hold them accountable for our children’s academic success and failure. Fighting merit pay, which deals with so much more than student test scores and could actually reward the best teachers, is tone-deaf. Restricting teachers willing to put in extra work is counter-intuitive. Telling parents they should have no power in the way their child’s school is run or where their child is educated is simply inhumane and cruel.

MSNBC Commentator Michelle Bernard, commenting on the declining influence of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. One reason for their decline: The No Child Left Behind Act, which, as this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast explains, has changed the conversation on teacher quality.

   Send article as PDF   

First of all, I am extremely proud of the effects of No Child Left Behind. For the first time, the federal government basically demanded results in return for money. It started by saying, We expect you to measure [student performance]. As a result, there has been a noticeable change in achievement, particularly among minority groups. And I’m proud of that accomplishment and proud of the fact we were able to work with people from both parties to get it done.

When I think back about No Child Left Behind, it’s one of the really positive things our Administration accomplished along with Congress. So on the 10th anniversary, it’s time to celebrate success, but it’s also a time to fight off those who would weaken standards or accountability. I don’t think you can solve a problem if you can’t diagnose it, and I don’t think it is fair for parents or students not to be informed of how their schools perform relative to other schools and how their children perform relative to other children.

Former President George W. Bush stating what should be obvious to all about the importance of the No Child Left Behind Act in fostering the first steps towards systemic reform of American public education. What is needed now is to expand accountability, especially in addressing the low quality of teacher training in the nation’s ed schools, not scaling back as being proposed by far too many people who should know better.

[If] a great teacher is leaving, parents should hold bake sales or pass the hat around in hopes of collectively offering the teacher as much as a $100,000 bonus to stay for an extra year… Conversely, a very poor teacher has the same effect as a pupil missing 40 percent of the school year. We don’t allow that kind of truancy, so it’s not clear why we should put up with such poor teaching. In fact, the study shows that parents should pay a bad teacher $100,000 to retire (assuming the replacement is of average quality) because a weak teacher holds children back so much.

New York Times Columnist Nick Kristof, gleaning the lessons from the recent Harvard-Columbia study on value-added analysis of teacher quality. (Dropout Nation offers more thoughts on improving teacher quality in this week’s Podcast and Building a Culture of Genius commentary on teacher evaluations.)

“We know that great teachers have the power to help students catch up when they’re behind. But you can’t catch up when you don’t have access to the best teachers.”

Arun Ramanathan of the Education Trust’s California branch discussing the outfit’s latest study on teacher quality in the Los Angeles Unified School District. This study comes on the heels of an agreement between the district and its American Federation of Teachers affiliate over revamping teacher performance management — and a lawsuit from families of L.A. Unified students suing the district to force it to improve its teacher evaluations and use student test data in teacher performance management.

“People who care about improving early childhood education need to be deeply concerned about taming the growth in college tuitions, for at least two reasons. First, skyrocketing tuition makes it more difficult and costly to raise the higher educational credentials of the early childhood workforce. Second, unless we reign in college costs, there’s a strong risk that public funding to support higher education affordability will wind up cannibalizing or squeezing out early childhood spending. That’s because most policy efforts to date to improve college affordability have focused on providing increasing public funds to help students pay for college. But, with ever-rising college costs that outstrip inflation and government revenues, this strategy can sustain and expand access only if it consumes increasing shares of government revenue”

Sara Mead, pointing to another state budget priority that will play a part in shaping school reform conversations — and not only for early childhood and prekindergarten programs. Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle made the same points in yesterday’s The American Spectator column on growing Medicaid burdens.

   Send article as PDF   

The two decades-long emergence of the school choice movement, along with the data provided thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions, has helped foster a Parent Power movement that is demanding school districts and state government to end Zip Code Education policies that have condemned far too many children — including those from poor and minority backgrounds — to poverty and prison. And this year, with Parents Unions coming to being in states such as Illinois, along with other Parent Power and school reform groups taking more aggressive political action, expect more battles with education traditionalists over the future of American public education.

On this Voices of the Dropout Nation, new Contributing Editor Gwen Samuel issues a call to action to families to take their rightful lead role in education decisionmaking. Read, consider, and take action. 

This is the year of the “Push Back” Parent, the time to push back  against and change the laws that deny our children access to equitable high quality educational opportunities! This includes school residency laws and zip code education education policies.

Horace Mann once wrote that education is the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” and “the balance-wheel of the social machinery”. But today, our kids are educationally in trouble. All across the country, the fact is, too many students are dropping out. Those who do graduate are not leaving high school and college with the skill sets that they need to become productive citizens, engaged community leaders, and participants in a trained and qualified workforce. Needless to say, this has serious impacts on our state’s economy. That means their future is in jeopardy thus continuing to put our state & country’s economy in “crisis” And we, as parents, can no longer stand it.

Our kids don’t vote nor do they make the educational decisions that impact their lives. But we, the parents do. And it is time to push for our kids and against laws and policies that will deny them quality education.

This “push back” starts with parents and community registering to vote, making sure we hold each other accountable to get to the voting polls in November. There are no more excuses for not voting because you cannot claim that you do not care about what happens to you, your children, your family, and the most-vulnerable.

As parents, we are the only blocks of people with no real legal ability to make educational decisions that impact our children’s overall well being in public schools! But collectively, we the parents have the power to change that! We actually have the power to reform or  shut down low performing schools.  We really do! Remember, our children make up the majority population within America’s public schools…

This is not radical talk. It is real talk! Some may not want to hear it. But they must listen. We must protect our children. And who will do that if we do not?

We must vote. We must educate our neighbors. The Connecticut Parents Union is doing this in our state this year, conducting voter education classes, registration drives, and legislative advocacy training. We, and our fellow Parent Power activists are here to help families in other states do the same.

As Malcolm X once said, when people understand the problems that confront them and their causes, they can take action. It is time for all of us as parents to push back for our children.

   Send article as PDF   

Photo courtesy of Newsday

When it comes to math, American public education does an even poorer job on this than it does on reading. Math curricula is often subpar and the instruction is even worse. As Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Steve Peha pointed out last year in his series on overhauling classroom instruction, teachers seem to think that “reading… is an aptitude” while “math is an attitude.” One reason lies with the poor quality of math instruction in our nation’s university schools of education. Two out of 63 ed school elementary math programs surveyed by the National Council of Teacher Quality met or exceeded standards for training math teachers; just 13 percent of 77 education schools surveyed by NCTQ three years ago had high quality math programs. As a result, even efforts to develop rigorous curriculum and underlying standards for math instruction may fail in classrooms because far too many teachers, especially at the elementary level, just don’t know how to do the work. Making elementary school instruction more specialized (and thus allowing students to be taught by specialists in math) will help in the long run. But until then, we must address the math instruction problem in schools today.

This moment is so important for math instruction the more than 40 states that have adopted Common Core standards. We are on the eve of significantly ramping up its implementation. I’m looking forward to the Standards for Mathematical Practice. I have a lot to say about these eight mandates, which are repeated on each page of the Common Core content standards in each grade. They appear as a floating reminder that math instruction is not (only) about memorization and regurgitation, but about deep understanding, proof and argumentation, focused exploration and interpretation.

But I’m convinced that the Standards for Mathematical Practice are doomed to fail in most schools. Why? Because it seems that most teachers and principals don’t understand a simple fact: to teach elementary school math well, you have to know elementary school math really well. And most people simply don’t understand much when it comes to elementary school math.

I don’t know what teacher preparation programs are doing out there when it comes to math instruction. But from my experience in hiring teachers and my stint as an adjunct in one program, my guess is that if there is a math course in most of them it consists of something like, “Here’s the Harcourt Brace textbook. Here’s the Saxon textbook. Here’s the Scott Foresman textbook. Here are some tricks for teaching long division.”

One of the beautiful babies in the bathwater of teacher preparation is the program I went through at Bank Street College. At Bank Street, my math mentor taught me that children need to struggle with mathematical concepts, and teachers need to guide them through that struggle with strategic questioning that builds understanding, always with the next math concept in mind. Children also should know why they are learning math concepts and facts, and have an authentic contextual basis for their study. You can’t simply give the answer or else a child won’t think it through.

But, the easiest thing for a teacher to do is to give the answer, and demand that the kids memorize it. After all, that’s what Scott Foresman tells you to do. Teaching math progressively is far from the fluffy, no-facts, fuzzy math of popular culture. If done correctly, it’s a far more rigorous and intellectually demanding exercise than traditional math instruction on the part of the teacher.

But many math teachers lack math knowledge and competency. It isn’t addressed in common core. And there is no concern for this problem from graduate programs for this problem. What are we to do?

As always, in times of crisis, I turn to books for advice. (Real books, written by authors, not textbooks written by committees, that is.) I’m not talking about how-to books, manuals of how to teach mathematics. I’ll take plenty of time to explore those in a future post, including books by Marilyn Burns and Cathy Fosnot among others. I’m talking about books that inspire or make clear the importance of loving and learning more about math.

Luckily there are a few friendly books out there that do a good job of either laying bare the crisis of math deficits or of explicating just why it’s so beneficial to understand math. Here are some of them. And feel free to recommend more. (And please, don’t say, “The McGraw Hill series has some great looking times tables in it.”):

Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos: Paulos wrote this tract around 25 years ago but its message is still relevant. While there is tremendous shame associated with illiteracy, society still finds it acceptable to be innumerate. And the consequences for that portion of our society that can’t read a stock table or tell an increasing rate of oil production in a foreign power from a drop in GDP from one quarter to the next extend far beyond the realm of whether 2 + 2 is always equal to 4.

How Mathematics Happened: The First 50,000 Years by Peter Rudman: Rudman is not quite a feminist, and you have to avert your eyes at some of the turns of phrase, but he brilliantly catalogs the timeline of the use of mathematical concepts beginning with our hunter gatherer days. Two powerful ideas I took away from this book are that (a) the development of mathematical knowledge in our concept mirrors the development of these concepts in individual children (that’s self-similar like a fractal, although he doesn’t use those words; you will if you love math as much as I do) and (b) there really is a reason why we should explore our base-10 system and other bases with children as we study math. I hadn’t understood it before, but after reading this book every time I look at a clock I think about it.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter: As I’m kind of slogging through it right now (because it’s dense, not because it isn’t interesting), this tome is not nearly as accessible a read as the two books above. It didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize for nothin’—the author calls it a “metaphorical fugue” inspired by Lewis Carroll, and that’s pretty much what it is, tracing the history of mathematical thinking about patterns and puzzles, their relation to paradoxes, music and computers. Imagine Willy Wonka wrote an autobiography but his obsession was puzzles, not chocolate.

   Send article as PDF