Mess-free art: a non-school trend story.

I introduced Milo to coloring, thinking it would be a great activity for him to do independently while I cooked or cleaned or otherwise paid him no mind. Of course it didn’t work out that way, because while he (literally) loves crayons to bits—and don’t get me started with his unhealthy obsession with BATH CRAYONS—he sees coloring as a team sport. “Draw blue bawoon!” “Draw M!” “Draw green car!” I draw something, he bids bye-bye and scribbles over it, and it all starts over again.

In search of a new trick, I went looking for coloring books. Ha. Three CVS’s, two Targets, two bookstores and three yuppie toy stores—but no plain old coloring books. What’s taken their place is an entire genre of art products whose prime directive is to leave no trace. A Magic Light Brush that only leaves color on special Color Wonder paper. Paper that allows for a glittery result without actual glitter. “No need for messy glue,” the ads trumpet. Is glue so awful? The idea of fingerpaints that are clear until they touch the paper almost makes me cry.

One other genre of art supplies is mucking up the crafts aisle these days: those requiring batteries. The desperate vibe these products give off reminds me of the constant promotions from the big pizza chains: Now we will put cheese in our crust! Now we will segment the cheesy crust into bits you can pull apart, because cheesy crust on its own was not exciting enough!

If you are one of those education reporters who covers families and kids as well, PLEASE OH PLEASE write a trend story about this supposed advance in coloring technology. And not in a way that makes it sound like a good thing.

As for us, at a sad, empty suburban Toys R Us just before the snow fell, my husband eventually spotted the holy grail: a 400-page Mickey Mouse coloring book. No learning activities, no invisible ink. I bought a pack of washable crayons to go with it—I may be a Luddite, but I am not crazy.

Early childhood education: Dumb product division.

Does anybody ever read a press release? Is that even a remotely effective way to get your message out to journalists? Do PR people think about whether the recipients of their releases would really, truly be interested in them? Did the person who sent me a release about this have any idea I would only publicize it in order to mock it? (Oh, any press is good press, I know.)

The one lesson I have learned from new motherhood is that 65 percent of the products you think you need are absolutely dispensable, if not totally worthless. From now on I plan to give my newly expecting friends one of those Must Buy Baby checklists, relentlessly annotated: Borrow, Borrow, Don’t Need, Don’t Need, Borrow, See if You Need it Later and Then Borrow, Don’t Need, and so on. A prenatal iPod waistband would go into the Please Don’t Tell Me You Just Bought That category. When you are eight months pregnant, do you really need your belly to be even wider? Can’t you just turn the stereo on?

Here at Educated Reporter we are big on the misuse of research, so the website’s implication (backed with many quotes from experts that may or may not have anything to do with this product) that not buying the Lullabelly shortchanges your child’s education—which “begins in the womb”!—was disturbing. Yes, the young brain is plastic. Yes, music is great. But that doesn’t mean an MP3 player strapped to your stomach is going to make your kid smarter. Take the fifty bucks you’ll save from not buying a polka-dotted band of fabric with a speaker embedded in it and buy a stack of great books instead.

The powerful unions.

An interesting point made in a letter to Romenesko by writer David Macaray: Why do journalists so often preface “teachers union” with the word “powerful”? Whether or not they are powerful, we don’t use that formulation with other institutions that clearly are.

And you mean what?

There is so much rhetorical sloppiness swirling around NCLB right now, it is impossible to know what anyone is talking about. Duncan complains that the current law is too prescriptive, but comments indicate new approaches that are even moreso. He calls 100 percent proficiency a utopian goal but wants to replace it with what he says is a higher bar: career and college readiness. How to judge that students are college-ready if not by giving them a test and seeing if 100 percent pass it? You’re awarded money if you make progress, and money if you’re failing. Joanne Jacobs sums some of it up.

What I take out of all the pieces written in the last week is that—aside from a growth model, which we all knew was coming—we really have no idea what the administration wants exactly. Not sure if this is the fault of the administration (for not being sure, or clear), other insiders (for not passing on clearly what they have learned), journalists, or all of the above.

Snowed in.

We all have this feeling there are more snow days than there were in the past, and I would love somebody to analyze whether this is true, for their school system at least. And then let’s figure out why. 

Let’s assume snow (and rain and fog and sleet) days have become more frequent over the last couple of decades but bad weather has not. Today a friend and I puzzled over possible reasons: liability concerns, more precise weather forecasting, decreased tolerance for risk? I know this sounds annoyingly a-mile-uphill-both-ways, but when you were a kid, weren’t snow days a rare, precious thing? I grew up in Wisconsin and I’m thinking weather forced closings maybe once every year or two. And it snowed. Man, it snowed. People say that one reason we can’t have school when it snows is because the sidewalks aren’t passable, but we didn’t even have sidewalks. We stuck our feet in plastic baggies, and then our moon boots, and tromped across four-foot snowbanks alongside the road. In large school districts, the microclimate of the worst-weather neighborhood usually forces closings for the whole county, because we can’t expect teachers to drive from one corner to the other, and how could we possibly manage the logistics of a partial closing anyway?

Just so you know where I am coming from: I have an attitude toward risk avoidance that some might call callous and irresponsible (I prefer to think of it as “sensible”). It does not err on the side of caution, though I am hardly reckless, and I don’t believe that, generally speaking, “If it just saves one person” is the right calculation with which to make public policy. I shovel out, then drive, slowly, in the snow. Unless of course I am feeling lazy, in which case I make a cup of cocoa and just pretend I couldn’t get anywhere even if I wanted to.

Which I think might be the rub, at least here in the D.C. area. We don’t want to do what is necessary of a place that has snow. I wrote about this once, calling Buffalo and Milwaukee in addition to local officials. The snow-to-snow-day ratio differs so much in Wisconsin and Washington because Wisconsin school districts behave like places that snow—they spend money on sufficient snow-removal equipment, use it and expect children to get to school—and the ones here don’t. Then, every single year, it snows, we act surprised, and children spend another day not learning. 

How much will NCLB look like RtTT?

My item on Slate’s Double X blog yesterday:

Yesterday’s New York Times piece suggested that the adminstration might revisit the way what’s called Title 1 money is allocated under No Child Left Behind. If you’ve seen how those funds are currently distributed, and sometimes squandered, you know this is a good idea in principle. But I am uneasy about what the Obama administration might substitute for the status quo.

First, the problem. Here is a typical scene in the exhibit hall at a principals’ convention. The vendor, selling some sort of educational (or “educational”) material, asks an approaching administrator, “Are you a Title I school?” If told yes, cartoon dollar signs flash in his eyeballs. As part of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Title I schools—so designated because they have a certain share of students living in poverty—get lots of extra money. I once watched teachers at a Title I school urgently page through catalogs the day of the deadline to spend their money—the mariachi band would count for parent involvement requirements; Dr. Seuss hats were for a reading event. I felt bad for schools nearby with a few too few poor kids to share in these riches—not because of hats and bands, but because the bulk of this money funds teachers, enabling small-group interventions and collaboration time that might help students excel.

In the Times piece, analysts suggest the White House wants to stop allocating Title I money simply based on the number of poor children. OK, that seems sensible. But a quote from a think-tank director caught my eye: “They want to upend that scheme by making states and districts pledge to take actions the administration considers reform, before they get the money.” Now “the administration considers reform” a small set of approaches, which it is pushing via a $4 billion grant program called Race to the Top. Forty-one states and D.C. have applied for the money by vowing to take certain required steps: welcoming charter schools, creating systems to track student data, adopting common standards, and recasting teacher evaluation systems, in part by factoring student test scores into decisions such as tenure or pay.

You may like some of these ideas, you may not like others. The question is whether they will help children, and the answer is that we don’t know. In the State of the Union, President Obama said he would only invest in “reform that raises student achievement.” But while the reforms required for these grants may be promising, they are not proven to raise student achievement. I like the idea of paying good teachers more, for example, but there is no comprehensive research showing that it improves learning, and the charter research is mixed. It’s one thing to encourage pet programs in a grant competition for a one-time pot of money; it’s another to write them into a law that could last a decade.

“We only reward success,” Obama said last week. The problem is, when it comes to our classrooms, we have done a terrible job at identifying the ingredients for success, and we shouldn’t pretend that we have done otherwise.

Laissez les bons temps roulez!

Isn’t that what they say in New Orleans? I wouldn’t know, because I have never been there before. Remedying that tomorrow with my dear friend Laura. I will be visiting the set of a TV show, meeting with top-notch reporters, and eating eating eating. I am also really looking forward to learning more about the massive upheaval of the city’s schools. It was nothing short of idiotic for Arne Duncan to say that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened” to New Orleans schools—myself, I like to take my school reform without 1,800 deaths and $80 billion in damages—but it is true that much of a bad system is being basically rebuilt from scratch. I have said this before, but Sarah Carr at the Times-Picayune has done a great job of documenting the clash between tradition and reform, between democracy and technocracy, that has become the underlying story of just about every education story coming out of the city.