Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times

As Dropout Nation’s writers enjoys Spring Fever, listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast from November 2011 in which Editor RiShawn Biddle challenges the view of the Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers’ unions, and school reformers who oppose revealing the names — and performance — of high-quality and laggard teachers. Presenting good-to-great teachers (and poor-performing counterparts) to the public will provide information that helps families, the teaching profession, and, most importantly, all of our children.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your mobile or desktop device. Also, subscribe to the podcast series, and embed this podcast on your site. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Zune Marketplace, Stitcher, and PodBean. A new podcast will be be broadcast on Saturday.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

The Richwine affair once again brings up the misconceptions about (and low expectations for) the potential of our children that are at the heart of the nation’s education crisis.

Jason Richwine’s forced resignation last week from the Heritage Foundation amid controversy over the anti-immigration report he co-wrote with political scientist Robert Rector and revelations of pieces he had written that had racialist and IQ fundamentalist overtones (including his doctoral dissertation on using IQ to determine which immigrants should be allowed into the United States) continues to capture attention this week. The former education policy and immigration policy analyst defended his work in an interview with Byron York of the Washington Examiner, while others such as Robert VerBruggen of National Review (along with the conservative biweekly’s editorial board) defended Richwine’s perspective as well as the report that led to Richwine’s ouster. [Ron Unz of The American Conservative takes plenty of issue with Richwine's views, while Daniel Drezner of Foreign Policy notes that a cursory review of Richwine's dissertation shows that it is riddled with errors.]

Meanwhile Heritage has remained quiet about the whole matter even as it has been criticized by all sides for its handling of the Richwine affair and the politically driven nature of its research as of late. The American Enterprise Institute, which also employed Richwine, has also remained silent. For good reason. After all, Richwine wrote his now-infamous dissertation while working at AEI. More importantly, AEI gave implicit support to Richwine’s efforts to use IQ data in research, including the study on teacher pay Richwine co-wrote with Andrew Biggs, one of AEI’s  scholars, as well as allowing Richwine to recycle aspects of the dissertation (albeit without the more-offensive references to the cognitive ability of Latino émigrés) on its own site (as well as in National Review). Richwine also declared at an AEI forum that blacks, Latinos, and American Indians could not supposedly assimilate into the American mainstream; the fact that blacks and American Indians have been the key players in shaping mainstream American life — including music, food, and art — should have made his peers at AEI jump down Richwine’s throat and call him on the carpet for such bigoted thinking.  The last thing AEI needs is to be placed into the harsh media spotlight.

Certainly Richwine’s role as one of Heritage’s foremost (and most controversial) analysts on education policy makes his resignation a matter of interest for the school reform movement, especially for those in the Beltway who either worked with him or considered his arguments on teacher compensation. [Your editor doesn't wish ill on Richwine at all; I do hope that he learns the right lessons from what has happened, and emerges the better for it.]  But there are three more reasons why the Richwine affair should be of interest to the movement. All of them have to do with the perceptions of the intelligence of our children, especially those from poor and minority backgrounds, which still shapes the failed policies and practices in American public education that reformers are working to put asunder.

For one, the Richwine affair is a reminder that IQ fundamentalist thinking remains in vogue in some intellectual circles, and especially in some of the nation’s leading think tanks. This is especially true at AEI, which has long backed the work of Richwine’s former colleague, Charles Murray, an IQ fundamentalist whose infamous book, The Bell Curve (along with its theories on race and intelligence), essentially endorsing the view among that crowd that that cognitive ability is genetically-driven and doesn’t change based on environment. Decades of research, including the work of James Flynn of New Zealand’s University of Otago, along with data on education and early childhood learning initiatives, have long ago proven that the views espoused by Richwine and Murray don’t stand up. [The fact that so many IQ fundamentalists have also touted racialist thinking, and that their views are often shaped by the times in which they live as well as by the groups that are considered non-white and thus, ethnic minorities, also makes IQ fundamentalist thinking rather suspect.] Yet AEI continues to give legitimacy to this thinking.

This is problematic for the school reform movement because AEI is one of the most-important players in shaping the ideas driving it. It is also troublesome because some of the thinking embraced by a few reformers — especially those who defend gifted-and-talented programs — is based on in part on IQ fundamentalism. It is to say that it is hard to say that you want brighter futures for all children and still embrace a theory that has been used almost exclusively to deny some kids the high-quality education needed to do so. Amid the Richwine controversy, it is hard not to ask tough questions about the positions of some of AEI”s current players on the education policy front on such matters as the importance of focusing on achievement gaps. Whether those questions are legitimate or not, they will be asked. It is time for AEI to fully disavow the IQ fundamentalist views of Murray, Richwine and others. [It will be interesting to see if AEI players such as Rick Hess, who was Richwine's colleague and from whose shop the teacher compensation piece was released, will say anything on his eponymous blog.] And for conservative reformers, it is also time to call out those fellow-travelers, both within the school reform movement and in the conservative movement, who embrace theories on intelligence and race that are empirically false and are damaging to the futures of children.

The Richwine controversy also reminds us once again that IQ tests (and the data gleaned from them) are still used in decisions within American public education (as well as in research). Districts and school operators use IQ tests in deciding which children are worthy of being admitted into gifted and talented programs that are supposed to be cordons solitaire from low quality teaching and curricula endemic within American public education, as well as in deciding whether certain children (particularly young men of all backgrounds as well as those from poor and minority backgrounds) should be condemned to special ed ghettos. In fact, the use of IQ exams and cut scores on other tests (along with the perceptions of teachers and guidance counselors, who serve as gatekeepers of gifted-and-talented programs, of poor and minority kids), explains why 3.4 million children from poor backgrounds who were top performers in school were excluded from gifted and talented programs.

Yet IQ tests are terrible at determining the academic potential of children. As University of Iowa psychologist David Lohman and Katrina Korb (now of the University of Jos in Nigeria) pointed out in a 2006 report, just 45 percent of first-graders who scored higher than 130 points on the Stanford-Binet test used by many to determine cognitive ability would have scored at that level on other IQ exams. Most first-graders considered gifted in first grade don’t keep that label two years later. And, according to Lohman, only 25 percent of four year-olds scoring 130 on the Stanford-Binet will do so as 17-year-olds. This shouldn’t be surprising. Cognitive ability (or academic talent) is dynamic and not a constant. Especially for children in the preschool and early elementary grade levels, cognitive ability is as much influenced by the quality of learning environment (especially in school), along with the amount of  challenge (academically and otherwise) provided in those environments, as it is by any innate ability.

There’s also the reality that IQ tests probably don’t measure cognitive ability. As Flynn noted in his book, What is Intelligence?, IQ tests actually show what children and adults have learned over time, the context in which they are accumulating knowledge, and even the modernity of one society compared to another. Because the questions behind tests such as Stanford-Binet and the Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children (along with variants such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test) are shaped by those contexts, the ability to correctly answer questions on them depend largely on the time and place in which one lives and the amount of exposure they receive to the world around them. A 19th century European émigré to the United States from a rural community, for example, would respond to the question of “in what way are ‘dogs’ and ‘rabbits’ alike” by answering that one uses the former to hunt the latter; this would be a sensible (if incorrect) response given the time in which they live, along with the dearth of elementary and secondary education for that time, and the fact that they didn’t benefit from 20th century advancements in sorting experiences according to new abstract categories. An adult living in the United States today, living in a modern society with a flourishing K-12 system and having benefited from those advancements in cognition, would give the correct answer that both are mammals. These contextual differences, along with the low quality of teaching and curricula within traditional public education, would also explain why a poor white child from a rural community who has never attended classical music concerts would struggle mightily to correctly answer questions about Vivaldi and Rachmaninoff, while a middle-class black child whose has learned to play violin would ace them.

[The fact that IQ tests and exams used as proxies for IQ such as the SAT don't really measure cognitive ability is one reason why the Richwine-Briggs study -- which used SAT scores to conclude that aspiring teachers (and those who worked in the profession) were cognitively inferior compared to their colleagues headed down other career paths -- is so flawed. At best, the results show that teachers are less-knowledgeable than their peers and have likely garnered less in the way of academic curricula. But the reality the fact that performance on the SAT is shaped by how much one has learned means that it is a poor proxy for determining cognitive ability.]

There are far better ways of measuring how much children are learning and what is contributing to their achievement — including standardized tests and the use of Value-Added assessment of student test score growth — than IQ tests. More importantly, if we believe that all children are worthy of high-quality teaching and curricula, then we shouldn’t be using IQ tests to determine which kids should be provided it. Weaning American public education off the use of IQ tests in deciding the futures of children must be as much a goal of the school reform movement as expanding school choice, enacting Parent Trigger laws, and overhauling how we train and compensate teachers.

Finally the Richwine controversy is one more reminder of the wrongheaded thinking about the potential of children that is an underlying culprit of the nation’s education crisis. As Dropout Nation noted last month in its commentary on why school reformers and immigration reform advocates should work together, arguments about the perceived cognitive ability of immigrants of that time (whose descendants are now among the nation’s political and social elite), along with racialist views about the potential of black children, have been an underlying justification for nativists and others to enact the array of immigration quotas that remain in place today, as well as for denying children high-quality education. Ability tracking, the comprehensive high school model, gifted and talented programs, and even special ed ghettos are all derived from early 20th century beliefs of teachers, school leaders, and education theorists that only some kids were capable of mastering what was then considered to be college preparatory curricula. The consequences of such thinking can be seen today in the high levels of black children overlabeled as special ed, as well as the high levels of white middle class peers being put onto the college track; as Vanderbilt University Professor Daniel J. Reschly noted in his 2007 testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, adults in schools end up labeling black and Latino children as learning disabled because they think they are destined to end up that way.

These beliefs still remain prominent among traditionalists today, especially among those who adhere to the Poverty Myth of Education (which proffers that poor kids are incapable of learning), as well as similar views from the likes of Murray and his ilk. Few in education would infer race and ethnicity today. But many still offer the poverty-is-destiny argument in justifying the failures of traditional districts in improving student achievement; because black and Latino children are among the very poor in our schools, the racialist thinking of the past continues to wreak havoc on our children now.

The controversy over Richwine (along with the overall ire over Heritage’s immigration study) will eventually pass. But the issues about race, ethnicity and intelligence raised by the controversy over Richwine will remain. And as reformers, we must tackle the faulty thinking that continues to contribute to far too many children being put on the path to the economic and social abyss.

What does a great teacher have in common with Kobe Bryant? They’re both always doing the work to become even better.

One of biggest problems with the nation’s system for recruiting, training, compensating, and evaluation teachers is that it does little to actually identify who is a high quality teacher and what makes them do so well in helping kids succeed. The current approach to teacher credentialing, in particular, does little to assure districts and other school operators that the teachers coming into classrooms are capable of improving student achievement and is not geared toward identifying or rewarding good and great instruction. And while new teacher evaluation systems using objective student test score growth data will help identify good and great teachers (as well as separate low-quality instructors from the pack), they are only one step in learning more about what makes high-quality teachers what they are. 

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Los Angeles teacher Peter D. Ford III offers a few insights on what makes high-quality teachers what they are. Read, consider, and offer your own perspectives.

As the year draws to a close, and I read articles about teacher quality, I ask myself constantly, “What makes a great teacher?” In California the credentialing process has become a procedural marathon; there either isn’t enough, or the right data gathered to determine if it raises student learning for all children. Yet, there are obviously credentialed teachers in classrooms who are not serving children, so there must be other factors that determine teacher quality that the credential process neither identifies nor requires. When I think of the great teachers with whom I’ve worked, there are three key things I have seen.

Great teachers have unconditional commitment to children. They commit themselves to children as if they were their own. A great parent is not a child’s friend in the peer sense, but indeed is someone who does not lead a child to danger and devotes themselves totally to that child’s welfare. When a child accepts that commitment they will either perform their best or at least appreciate the effort, and in time respect you even more. As long as there are people, young people particularly, you cannot treat teaching as ‘just a job’ or students as ‘data points.’ Often, the best people for judging this commitment are the students themselves.

High quality teachers also have subject matter passion. Knowing your subject is a given; great teachers breath, eat, and sleep their subject in all they do. They can find it in all aspects of life, and infuse that into their curriculum. When you can turn a faux pas into a poem, a social conversation into a math problem, or connect a student’s endeavor to an historical moment or person, students will learn in your classroom, and learn better when they leave your classroom.

Finally, great teachers engage in continuous improvement. W. Edwards Deming  was the father of it, the Japanese have a wonderful word for it: Kaizen. Great teachers are never satisfied, always seeking to improve their pedagogy. Two of the greatest Los Angeles Lakers and NBA basketball players, Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant, as they matured their games evolved to remain competitive; continuously improving is why partly they have 10 rings between them. While teachers may have certain curricular activities they do all the time – the same way a great orchestra will always perform Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – a great teacher will work to make even that repetitive event a better learning experience for students.

I don’t think there’s a teacher evaluation rubric or teacher credentialing process anywhere that can capture the full extent of these qualities. Just like an NFL rookie, you’d need to sign a new teacher to a 3-5 year contract and assess 3-5 years of their work to even get a glimpse of these qualities. Ultimately it’s the ‘customer’ who’s the best judge of a teacher’s effort and performance. Some of them won’t recognize it until they have left their class. Personally the best affirmation of my effort has been former students who come to recognize and thank me for my effort long after leaving my class; it’s not the ‘A’ or ‘B’ students whose words I appreciate most, but that ‘C’ or less student in whom that seed finally blossomed.

Teaching is hard; identifying, developing, and nurturing great ones for the students who need them most is even harder.

Photo courtesy of Politico

As you probably know by now, education and immigration policy think-tanker Jason Richwine resigned this afternoon from the Heritage Foundation amid a firestorm over a report he co-authored with Robert Rector arguing that the immigration reform plan being touted by U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio would cost $6.3 trillion. The personnel move happened after it was revealed that Richwine had written a doctoral dissertation which asserted that the federal government should use IQ (or perceived levels of cognitive ability) in immigration decisions — especially to keep those immigrants who test low on those exams out of the country — and after Chris Moody of Yahoo News reported that Richwine wrote for the race-baiting outlet Alternative Right. This news led some to speculate that the underlying arguments in that dissertation (and Richwine’s general view that intelligence is genetic and thus unchangeable regardless of environment) may have informed Heritage’s study.[Heritage denied the accusation.] The perceptions that Richwine’s and Rector’s study was bigotry-driven, along with the myriad flaws in the piece (especially in light of the foundation’s own past research supporting expansive immigration policies), the criticisms from those inside and outside the conservative movement over its increasingly politicized research and the lingering animosity between Heritage President (and former senator) Jim DeMint and his onetime colleagues in the federal upper house, may have forced the venerable institution into a corner.

As you would expect, Richwine’s resignation of hasn’t gone down well with fellow think tankers such as Charles Murray, the coauthor if the infamous tome on race and intelligence, Bell Curve, who tweeted that Richwine was a victim of “mindless bashing” and was happy that the American Enterprise Institute had the gesticular fortitude to let him write his bigotry three decades ago. Given the flaws of IQ tests in measuring cognitive ability and potential, the weak correlation between IQ and economic outcomes, and all the other issues, political, ethical, historical, and research-wise, that come with using IQ in reaching any conclusions about anything, Murray and others defending the use of IQ in research should be a lot more thoughtful in defending Richwine then they have been. [Richwine himself should distance himself from using IQ in future research.]

Richwine’s resignation is definitely news within education policy circles. After all, he has written plenty about the education issues, especially in the area of teacher compensation and whether there should be a focus on stemming socioeconomic and gender-based achievement gaps. Particularly for Heritage, Richwine was its most formidable thinker in these discussions (which isn’t saying much),  and in many cases, its most-controversial even before the immigration fracas. Not that  One can only imagine the conversations now going down among Beltway reform types.

Certainly it is hard to know how much Richwine’s resignation is driven by this study or by other issues between himself and Heritage; after all, there are always the officially stated reasons for a separation of employment and the real reasons left unsaid by all sides unless brought to the courts. [Heritage merely issued the typically oblique press statement offering nothing. ] But if Richwine is being forced to resign over this issue, then it is a terrible thing. Even if you think Richwine’s views are repugnant (as I do), no one should be served up as a fall guy by their former employer because of its own irresponsibility in publishing faulty research and touting a rather faulty agenda. If anything, the embarrassment over the Rector and Richwine study should force Heritage to do some soul searching over the quality of its research overall, especially its politically-driven pieces arguing against Common Core reading and math standards.

More importantly, Heritage shouldn’t have even tried to express shock about Richwine’s penchant for using IQ in his research. Back in 2011, Heritage released a report by Richwine and Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute that essentially focused on whether teachers were overpaid based on their “cognitive ability”. The report, which used data from the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the Armed Forces Qualification Test to conclude that “teachers exhibit low cognitive ability compared to other college graduates”, was roundly criticized by education policy types for analyzing teacher’s scores on the AFQT without controlling for education and other methodology flaws. The report’s conceit that teacher’s were less intelligent than their peers even led U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan to command his speechwriter to pen a piece taking aim at the report because it “insults teachers.” Your editor, in particular, was critical of Heritage and AEI for indulging in the kind of rhetoric that alludes to eugenicist and racialist thinking (and does the school reform movement no favors). In spite of the criticism, Heritage, along with AEI, touted the Biggs-Richwine report, implicitly backing Richwine’s thinking.

So Heritage can’t think it can just sack Richwine and think it is free and clear of criticism over its efforts. If anything, the think tank may now be subject to even more scrutiny.

Photo courtesy of Colorado State University

The End of Ed Schools — and Teacher Credentialing, Part II: There are numerous reasons why far too many low-quality teachers end up in classrooms perpetuating educational neglect and malpractice on our children. One is because the nation’s university schools of education do such a shoddy job in recruiting and training aspiring teachers. Another and equally important reason is because the battery of exams (including the PRAXIS tests administered by the Educational Testing Service and exams offered by the Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium that includes the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education) used in credentialing teachers (and, in some states, even to decide whether an aspiring teacher can be admitted into an ed school), do little to weed out laggard teachers from high quality counterparts. This is a considerable problem because PRAXIS and other exams are usually the only gates available for determining teacher competence; once teachers pass the exams, they land in the classroom, unlikely to leave the profession unless a district is aggressive in weeding out laggards through the use of evaluations using objective student test score growth data. Just as importantly, the exams end up being a drudgery for teachers, who often have to take more than one exam depending on whether or not they are instructing in more than one subject. An instructor in Indiana, for example, may have to take four or more exams, depending on the subjects they are teaching and the setting in which they work; a teacher will take even more tests just to gain National Board recognition (and additional dollars in salary).

The fact that PRAXIS and other exams merely the whether teachers have the minimum level of knowledge needed to instruct in a particular subject is part of the problem; after all, you want to know that a teacher can help kids improve their achievement and that they care for every child in classrooms regardless of background, along with knowing that they have some level of subject-matter competency. But as the U.S. Department of Education highlighted last week in its report on the quality of teacher training and certification, another culprit lies with the fact that state teacher certification agencies poorly utilize the tests to assess subject-matter competency by setting cut scores lower than necessary. As a result, pass rates for aspiring teachers on the exams are likely higher than they should be.

Alabama, for example, set a cut score of 137 points (or a mere 68.5 percent of the 200 points total) for aspiring teachers to pass the Praxis II exam called Elementary Education Content Knowledge in 2009-2010. This is 21 points lower than the national mean passing score of 166 (or 83 percent of the total points) achieved by those who successfully completed the exam. [The average scaled score for those taking the exam was 163 points, or three points below the national mean.] No wonder 98.5 percent of aspiring teachers passed the exam in 2009-2010. In Tennessee, the cut score for the same exam is even lower, with aspiring teachers needing to score 140 points (or 70 percent of total points) to pass. This is 26 points below the national mean score of successful test takers. [The average aspiring teacher in the Volunteer State scored 164 points on the test or two points below the national mean for those passing the exam.] All but three-tenths of one percent of the 1,785 teachers taking the exam passed it. Meanwhile Rhode Island had set a higher passing score for this Praxis II exam, demanding that aspiring teachers score at least 148 points (or 74 percent of total points) on the test. Even then, it is still 18 points lower than the national mean passing score achieved by those who passed the test; on average, teachers in the state taking the exam scored only 158 points on it. Ninety nine-point-three percent of teachers in Rhode Island taking the test passed it.

Not one state using the Praxis II exam on elementary education content knowledge had set a cut score above 150 points. Only half of the 12 states that used this particular Praxis II exam had average scaled scores that were either at or above the national mean for aspiring teachers who passed the test. Certainly one has to be cautious in reading the results, as Education Week‘s Steve Sawchuk noted yesterday in his report. The fact that aspiring teachers can take the test multiple times raises questions as to whether their scores are weighing down the average scaled scores; federal officials noted in one report that the mean score for those who failed the test was 34 points lower than the mean for those who passed. There’s also the reality that Praxis doesn’t really do the job in assessing whether an aspiring teacher can hack it in a classroom. In any case, the fact that the cut scores for this PRAXIS II test and other exams are so low– especially given that that many teacher licensing tests include relatively easy questions such as figuring out the percentage of ninth-graders on a school bus — should be a concern.

Of course, one can argue that teacher credentialing is a waste anyway. As studies, including one on  Florida teachers released two years ago by the Manhattan Institute, there is no correlation between credentials — including certification and attaining graduate degrees  — and student achievement; in fact, studies have shown that have shown that credentials and experience account for only three-to-five percent of student performance, making the credentialing process all but meaningless. This fact is one reason why American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten’s constant (and disingenuous) call for submitting teachers to exams similar to those given to law school graduates to gain admittance to the bar have fallen flat; almost no one believes that teachers should be subjected to taking yet another test that is unlikely to provide information on their levels of competence. The better approach to selecting aspiring teachers is to take a combination of approaches: This includes selecting from those with the highest scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, using the approach pioneered by legendary teacher training guru Martin Haberman of placing aspiring teachers in rooms with students from backgrounds different from their own, and embracing Teach For America’s emphasis on selecting teaching candidates who have entrepreneurial self-starter and leadership ability. [Efforts on the recruiting and training front, by the way, would also ease the burden on districts and other school operators, who can then focus on weeding out those few laggards who may have slipped in, as well as supporting high-quality teachers on their payrolls.]

This work is what the nation’s ed schools should be doing. But they are not. In fact, ed schools are failing when it comes to training their teachers, especially in reading instruction. Expecting them to do a better job of selecting teacher candidates is akin to wishing upon stars. After all, growing evidence suggests that ed schools aren’t tightening up standards because it would mean sacrificing revenue; after all, based on the fact that grade point averages for ed school students are higher than those for economics and other courses of study, ed schools may be way stations for collegians, who have figured out that getting a teaching degree is such easy work that they just go in, grab the degree, and then head into another field.

That problem could be mitigated if states did a better job of identifying and shutting down the worst of the abysmal lot of ed schools out there. But that’s not happening. Thirty-five states have never identified an ed school either deemed low-performing or at risk of being shut down. Florida, New York, and South Carolina were the most aggressive in identifying failing ed schools; Florida identified at least one low-performing or at risk ed school every year from 2003-2004 to 2010-2011, while New York  and South Carolina each identified at least one laggard ed school for seven years between 2002-2003 and 2010-2011. Of those that have, a mere 38 were identified in 2009-2010, while another 28 were identified a year earlier. This shouldn’t a surprise. Because ed schools in most states are supervised by teacher certification agencies separate from education departments means that ed schools are not well-scrutinized and regulated; the fact that the certification agencies themselves are also stuck in an old-school mindset (and, until recently, have been banned in nearly all states from even allowing for the use of value-added data in certification) is also a problem. The federal government hasn’t done a good job of holding states responsible either. Because  ed schools are governed by federal law under the Higher Education Act — which deals solely with universities — and not under the No Child Left Behind Act (which deals with teacher quality and its impact on American public education), ed schools escape much-needed scrutiny and accountability.

It is really hard for ed schools to continue justifying their existence. Same too for state teacher credentialing agencies. We need to move to a system of teacher recruiting and training that focuses on performance instead of on paper.

When Hess and Merrow Behave Badly: As you know, Dropout Nation celebrates sparring, especially among reformers over solutions for the nation’s education crisis. After all, healthy conflict is good for the movement. Yet this publication is none too thrilled when conflict borders on the juvenile. Such antics do nothing to shed light on the substantial issues at the heart of discussions.

The latest example of this came earlier this week when Rick Hess, the education policy czar for the American Enterprise Institute, proclaimed that Learning Matters’ John Merrow’s latest reporting on allegations of test-cheating in D.C. Public Schools under the watch of Michelle Rhee — along with earlier, more-positive reporting on Rhee’s work — exemplified what Hess thought was a tendency for “wheeling so hormonally from one extreme to another.” >Merrow, in turn, took to Hess’ Education Week column to insinuate that Hess was just snippy because Merrow had mentioned the supposedly “hidden support” Hess and AEI have received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the think tank’s education policy shop. Wrote Merrow: “Neither my company nor I have ever hidden our sources of support, nor do I ever expect to do so.”

Both men should be ashamed of themselves. Certainly one can argue honestly and fairly that Merrow ruined what was an otherwise fine example of investigative reporting (and in the process, became a partisan in the ongoing controversy) with his editorializing against the use of objective student test score data in teacher evaluations and about the success of the reform efforts undertaken under Rhee’s tenure and that of her successor, Kaya Henderson. But in proclaiming that Merrow is merely behaving like a “dumped sophomore”, Hess did little more than engage in the kind of grade school nastiness unfitting of his stature in the education policy arena.

At the same time, Merrow’s declaration that Hess’ criticisms merely stemmed from anger over information on AEI’s funding sources is rather ridiculous. Gates Foundation has long provided a database on all of its funding sources for public perusal. AEI has also fully disclosed Gates Foundation funding in its pieces, including a report released in January 2011 on college completion. As Merrow noted himself, Gates Foundation’s support for AEI’s education policy work has also been reported on by outlets such as the New York Times, a story in which Hess was quoted. Insinuating that Hess and AEI were engaged in unethical behavior, as Merrow (a dean of education reporting) has done, when the evidence doesn’t support it is unacceptable.

Hess and Merrow owe each other an apology. Enough said.

One of the few questions that never get considered in efforts to advance the reform of American public education is the importance of building long-lasting connections between children and schools — especially with teachers and school leaders. Such ties can help our children stay on the track to graduation and to fulfilling their economic and social destinies long after they left individual classrooms in a particular school. At the same time, those children can help their peers by helping teachers and school leaders recognize what they have done well in improving student achievement, as well as what challenges they need to address to help more kids down the road. 

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Steve Evangelista, the cofounder of the Harlem Link Charter School in New York City, explains his own challenges in building those connections, and explains why overcoming them matters for our kids. Read, consider, and take action. 

Since I became an educator about 15 years ago, I have had a sinking feeling every time I have heard the famous West African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.”  I’ve actually felt sick to my stomach hearing it while immersed in the culture of our school system.  I could never pin down exactly why until I had the opposite feeling on October 18—the night of our first alumni reunion.

I’ve had that sinking feeling because I’ve known that the box we put ourselves in when we think about “school” doesn’t create the environment we mean when we talk about a village.  In terms of school life, our reunion was counter-cultural   Three years—middle school, practically a lifetime—had gone by, but there were our babies, all growing up.  Reveling in their individuality, they told us how proud they were of where and who they were, and how prepared they felt after graduating from Harlem Link.

And there we were for the strugglers, playing the role of critical friend now that we don’t have to be the enforcer.  Because we are no longer in a position of authority, we can engage in a safe, different and productive way those few children who reject seemingly all behavioral interventions.

“I don’t have to tell you what to do anymore,” I told one scholar who had been asked to leave two schools since graduating from ours.  “I’m still going to tell you the same things I used to, but now you can be sure it’s because I care about you and not just because I am doing my job and bossing you around.”  She smiled—sheepishly.

Not only do our peer schools not keep up with alumni, but legal interpretations of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act actively discourage us from being involved in the lives of our students once they leave. Under current federal regulations of FERPA, former schools are no longer “interested parties” with a right to access student contact information.  More important, and I think one reason for this regulation, staying in touch and staying involved are not values of the school system.

I’ve never been to a West African village (the proverb is generally attributed to the Igbo people of Nigeria). But because of my own experience living among a swarm of relatives as a child, I’m going to guess that those villages are organized sort of like my own Italian immigrant family.

Let me focus on one aspect of my childhood: inter generational relations.  In my family, old people continue to be part of the fabric.  When their kids have grown up and moved on, when their careers have come to an end, when they don’t need as much living space as they used to, they don’t go off to a nursing home to die.  They move in with their children.

My grandfather lived with my aunt and her husband for the last 15 years of his life.  Discharged from intensive care in a hospital when a medical storm seemed to have passed, he died at home, sleeping on an easy chair, as peaceful as the breeze.  I was 10 years old.

Nonno wasn’t some distant old man whom we made special trips to visit; he was as much a part of the family as the aunt and uncle he lived with, or another aunt and uncle who lived next door to me.

He transmitted faith in a way no religion possibly could.  I knew that Nonno prayed to his wife’s memory and for her peace, while looking up at an old, brown photograph of her hanging in his small room, every night from when she died suddenly in 1956 until his last days more than 30 years later.

He was the genial, appreciative father figure who watched cartoons with me every Saturday morning while my older sister was off doing activities.  He didn’t understand English, but he understood joy and love, and he gave them even more than he received them.

When he died I didn’t understand shock, so I wasn’t sure why I didn’t cry for three days, but then I couldn’t stop.  We were at my aunt and uncle’s house when it hit me that he wasn’t coming back.  My cousin took me to her room and laid me down on the bed.  “I’m not a baby,” I thought, “but, okay, I will lay down and cry.”

My mother had had a zia, an aunt in Astoria who lived with her daughter and son-in-law until she died not long before Nonno did.  So the concept of death wasn’t new to me when Nonno died.  But there we all were, in mourning in our own ways together, unsure how we could deal with life without him.

Nonno was important to each of us in a different way.  Whether he was giving guidance to his children, handing out orange Tic Tacs to his 11 grandchildren, making funny attempts at broken English or showing the example of a life faithfully and earnestly lived to everyone, he gave something to everyone in our family.

I do not see this in our school system.  In fact, I don’t see anything even remotely like it.  The impulse of most adults in the school system seems to be to care, just not too much.  I was told about this boundary over and over again when I started teaching.

This is the advice I heard: Don’t get too involved in the lives of your students, because you are bound to be disappointed.  And anyway, who knows where they are going to end up?  What could you, their third grade teacher, do to keep them out of prison?  Their home life is such a mess.  And don’t go visit to learn about it first-hand; take my word for it. Besides, it’s probably dangerous.

I hope it is self-evident how destructive these words are.

But it isn’t just the attitude that’s the problem.  It’s the structure—or, rather, the lack of structures that encourage longitudinal thinking about children and meaningful, ongoing relationships with them. Thanks to Value-Added analysis of student test score growth, we no longer have to act as if Johnny walked into my classroom as a blank slate. By calculating where Johnny was the prior year and how far his teacher had moved him, Value-Added acknowledges that children have actually had prior experiences with other teachers. This is an important start. But it does nothing to address the future relationship between today’s teacher and tomorrow’s alumnus.

As a school leader, I want us to re-frame our thinking about the outcome of “school.”  It’s not only about this year’s test, or this year’s graduates, or this year’s teaching and learning.  It’s about the impact of our work and our relationships on the lives of the children in our care.  And those lives extend far into the future, rather than coming to a full stop at the end of June.

The older residents of the village, it turns out, aren’t the people you picture when you think about a school community.  I’m not talking about the gray-haired principal, or the wizened special education teacher, or the grandfather who volunteers with the PTA.  I’m talking about the alumni, who are now downright invisible.

In a time when schools and communities are clamoring for more support, alumni are a powerful untapped resource for our school system.  And they are continually ignored, because to many members of our school communities, they seem irrelevant—or, worse, threatening.

I believe alumni are also ignored because it’s so darn hard to pin them down.  How would you evaluate the impact of a teacher and a school on a child 20 or 30 years into the future?  That task is even more confounding when we live in a time when a third or even half of a school’s teachers might have moved on to other schools or careers by next year.

If it truly “takes a village” then why does our definition of village end in June?  How can we preserve the relationships that teachers form with their students longitudinally at a time of so much change and movement?

I don’t care about the difficulty of answering these questions.  Even a cursory examination of them reveals that they raise all sorts of interesting questions about assumptions we are making. The problem is that no one seems to be asking them.