Chestnut-porcini soup, FTW!

I hope that this week you will be exchanging your Blackberries for apples and pumpkins, and enjoying family instead of reading blogs. I sure will be. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, yet I have not had a slam-dunk one for some time. I have a good feeling about this year. We are hosting my family at our cabin in the woods, where with any luck (and a cooperative toddler) there will be much playing of guitars, board games and Wii. 

I am looking forward to cooking a democratically elected dinner. What wins when eight diners vote on each course? Shocker: not brussels sprouts. Chestnut soup, overwhelmingly; mashed potatoes, by a nose; sausage stuffing, natch; four-onion gratin, a surprising upset; and green beans. My sister-in-law-in-law is baking the pies—thank goodness, as I am horrible at crusts—but if I have time, I’d like to make some maple ice cream to go with them. 

No matter how bad the economy, no matter how crappy the state of our industry, no matter how crotchety I find myself getting about politics, bills, self-centered people and incessantly barking dogs, there is still an awful lot to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving.

Making the most of school visits.

Two of the most common frustrations I hear from new education reporters is that they have trouble coming up with story ideas, and they have trouble building up real-people sources. “Do you get into schools?” I ask, and they say they do—for formal events. Which doesn’t get you much. Here’s my tried-and-true strategy for school visits that result in story ideas, goodwill and a big fat Rolodex. (Or Google contact list—you know what I mean.)

Look at the list of schools you cover. Pick one. Maybe you haven’t yet been to a high-poverty school on the west side of the county. Maybe you haven’t been to a middle school in a while. Maybe you have heard the principal is interesting. Call him or her up. Say that you are trying to get to know the schools better and see what they have to offer. Ask to visit for two hours one morning. Say you’d like to chat briefly with him or her, tour the building, sit in a class and meet some students—a meeting with the newspaper staff, free rein in the lunchroom, whatever they will allow. Tell the principal this isn’t for a story.

During the visit, ask the principal what he or she is proud of and what challenges the school faces. (Framing this as “challenges” is the best possible way to get people to open up about things beyond the obviously glowing.) Ask the teachers you meet the same thing. Get the e-mail addresses, screen names and cell numbers of every person you come across.

I always left these visits with the inklings of story ideas. Why are there no Asian teachers in a school that is one-fifth Asian? Why is the math teacher teaching biology? This wasn’t “Dateline NBC”; I was not there to catch anyone out, and I held to my promise that I wasn’t there to write a story. But I came back to the ideas.

The best part was that the first contact I made with these principals was positive. Later on, I could call them for a quote or context or feedback in a way that was never so easy when we were just names to each other. I had lists of students I could IM with regularly; even if I didn’t keep track of them by name, I grouped them by school to get their takes on whatever I was pursuing.

I made visits like these every week or two. It is never easy to carve out time, of course, but schools generally start earlier than newsrooms and I found that I could make a worthwhile school visit and still be at my desk by 11 for a full workday. Once your editors see the dividends these visits yield, I can’t imagine them complaining.

Seen any good coverage of online learning lately?

I’m always trying to get higher ed reporters to write about online classes, given how common they have become and how mysterious they are to us fuddy-duddies. (Can one be a fuddy-duddy before 40? The case against: I have an iPhone, and I’ve watched every minute of “America’s Next Top Model.” The case for: I just suggested having an iPhone and watching “America’s Next Top Model” makes me youthful.)

Problem is, telling people to write about online courses feels a lot like telling people to eat their spinach. Well, spinach is transformative when flash-fried and dressed with tamarind, yogurt and tomatoes, and journalism on distance learning should be unboring too. So at the APLU conference this week, when I had to choose between two simultaneous sessions, one on veterans and one on learning, I picked the latter. After all, ten times as many college students are taking courses online as are expected to take advantage of the GI Bill.

And it was ... too spinachey. The most interesting thing was the bird flying through the conference room. I went next door to the veterans session and immediately was immersed in story ideas. Nancy Marlin, the provost at San Diego State University, warned we will start seeing lots of problems when veterans drop out and the VA comes after them—not the schools—for all the money paid up front for their education and fees. She warned that enlistees might pay the $1,200 GI Bill contribution up front and then be out of luck if they want to pursue vocational education one day, as that is not covered.

By the way, did you know that the GI Bill does not cover students who take all of their classes online? (I knew I could tie these threads together somehow.) Okay, shoot: What are the most interesting stories you have written or read lately on online courses?

Next in the course catalog: Chicks 101?

I’m glad to see more people talking about young men’s troubles getting through college, and I’ve been following with interest stories about the admissions bar being lowered for male students, so that universities can preserve gender balance on campus. I spent this morning at the annual conference of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, where panelists discussing the “American Male Imperative” talked about guys’ disconnect at college. Males are less likely to graduate, we know that, but according to the panelists, they are also less likely to take advantage of advising and counseling services, to participate in study abroad and other enrichment programs and to appreciate the constructivist and group-work approaches to academics that were designed specifically to engage students.

Among other things, the panelists suggested a reconsideration of the value of the lecture, more gender-themed housing and dude-centered majors. Hmmm. Beyond the fact that this is fodder for way too many easy, unfunny jokes, what is missing, for me, is a discussion of how we got here. Certainly the genesis of “the boy problem” is societal as much as educational. Could the rise of a child-centered culture and helicopter parenting have empowered girls to take charge of their lives at the same time it absolved boys of ever having to do so? Just thinking out loud.

Why publish when you can e-mail your "invlauble arguments" directly?

I am often contacted by students completing assignments who ask me to sum up my books because they cannot be bothered to read them. An e-mail today from a foreign PhD student (where? I have no idea—he did not introduce himself) was simply delicious: “I have tried to find your book to qout what you have exactly said , but unfortunately it needs to be purchased??? Could you please send me your invlauble arguments. thank you very much”


Desperate student or bizarrely targeted Nigerian e-mail scam? You be the judge.

Having trouble posting comments?

Several people have told me they haven’t been able to post comments to the blog. It won’t come as a shock to anyone taking a cursory look at this site to learn that while The Educated Reporter is educated in many things (education policy, international political economy, assorted foreign languages, cooking, reality television), blog technology is not one of them. However, someone who knows more than me can diagnose the problem if you can send an e-mail detailing the troubles to my address, at right. What error messages do you receive? Did you select a profile? Etc.

From advanced to remedial.

There’s something that keeps popping into my brain lately. (Besides how many moving boxes I need. Have you ever tried to pack up a house with a job, a toddler and a husband whose commute eats nearly four hours a day? Grrr.) Anyway. I was listening to Emily Hanford’s terrific American Radio Works documentary on Latinos and college, “Rising by Degrees,”and I thought back to the EWA/Pew Latino meeting last month. We heard from a panel of really interesting students, including an utterly composed GED student who had managed two kids and two jobs during her senior year in high school (note to self: enough complaining about packing).

But the girl who really got me thinking was a young woman who was clearly viewed as success story—surely that’s why she was chosen for the panel. She had taken all sorts of Advanced Placement classes at Albert Einstein High School in Montgomery County, Maryland—the 303rd best high school in the country, if you believe Jay Mathews’ Challenge Index. Now she’s at Montgomery College, where she placed into remedial reading and remedial math.

One of Emily’s subjects faced a similar fate. I’d love to see more stories on how students taking the most rigorous courses in our country’s top school systems wind up pretty much starting from scratch—for no credits! which they don’t realize half the time!—at community college.

Is YOUR pay based on measurable outcomes?

While I’m not in the business of advocating policy positions, I’m on record as supporting some form of merit pay for teachers. But I would never, ever promote it using one justification you hear often from proponents of primarily test-score-based performance pay: that in the real world, workers are paid based on measurable outcomes. Really? Sure, salesmen get commissions. But lawyers, doctors, accountants, consultants, journalists, politicians, policy makers? Bosses judge how valuable their skilled employees are using subjective judgments about effectiveness and pay accordingly.

Quantifiable measures rarely form the basis of that calculus, unless you blog at Gawker (and even they seem to have abandoned the model). So can we put a halt to that rhetorical fallacy? And why not revisit the blanket opposition to subjectivity playing a role in rewarding great teachers, the way it does in so many other professions? “My principal might have it out for me” does not convince me.

The foreign teacher trade.

For many years toward the end of their lives, my beloved grandparents were taken care of by a very kind and able Filipino couple. Many things made me uncomfortable about the arrangement—that the couple hadn’t seen their young children in years; that they worked basically all the time; that my grandparents were difficult, to put it mildly. But what appalled me the most were that the workers were basically owned by the agency that brought them to the States.

This is why I have long been cynical about the importation of Filipino teachers, and puzzled why media coverage of the trend has focused more on the culture shock of entering classrooms of unruly teenagers than on the fact that coyotes treat the hires like indentured servants—while school system administrators look the other way. If human resources officials have not known about the abuses, as they claim, I’ll bet they have tried pretty hard not to find out.

I tried to hook up reporters in the most-affected states with an early copy of an AFT report on the subject in the hopes they would pair it with some real-life reporting. At the time, none bit. Now that Greg Toppo and Icess Fernandez’s powerful piece has been published in USA Today, education officials can’t claim ignorance anymore.

Predicting the pain, cont'd.

I want to elaborate on how I think journalists can better cover district reform before it is a messy, teary, semi-done deal. When board members search for a superintendent, they tend toward blind optimism. Fine. But journalists need to be more circumspect. Travel budgets may preclude a trip to the supe’s previous districts. But reporters must at least get on the phone—to busybody parents, to board members, to the teachers union president. Read up on the battles in the clips. Ask board members, administrators, teachers: Why wouldn’t they happen here? Are we ready for that?

Wouldn’t you agree that kind of information is crucial? Too bad—your school board leaders don’t want you to have it. These days they are likely to agree to superintendent searches that are utterly opaque. Are you as a citizen okay with that? Are you okay with the public having only a couple of days to vet a couple of candidates? Or the “lone finalist”—a common term of late—revealed one day or literally one minute before the board’s final vote? Or how about what happened in Hampton, Va., this summer, when ZERO finalists were made public before approval? (Thanks to many EWA members for providing examples.)

The argument is that nobody good will apply if the fact of their application might be made public. Their current employers will know they are looking, and ... spare me. Everybody hunts, and everybody knows everybody hunts. Code names, candidates showing their resumes and then taking them back so as to not leave a paper trail: Is educational leadership public service, or a Robert Ludlum novel?

Not as ouch as I thought.

Turns out they are remaindering just the Tested hardcover; the paperback will contintue in print. (We THINK. You try getting through Macmillan voice jail to a real person.) I can live with that. And when my friend Hank’s publisher finally noticed all the great ink his new book is getting, they reversed their decision.

Ouch.

I got a letter Saturday from Henry Holt, which published my second book, Tested: “Sales of the title shown below are now very modest, and we have therefore decided to remainder our entire remaining inventory.” Which means 411 books will be assaulted with a Sharpie, smacked with a “REDUCED! $3!” sticker and hidden away on that awful shelf with the crockpot guides and off-brand pop-up books that don’t really work. If they’re lucky. Or I can buy them for $1.83 and resell them myself, which feels pathetic.

This happens to nearly all authors, and the timing often sucks. My brother Rick’s publisher let his first book go out of print as his second was coming out, and my friend Hank, whose phenomenal take on Christmas is now hitting the shelves, just got the dreaded letter about his first book.

It actually wasn’t a horrible month for me, bookwise. I heard from the publisher of Not Much Just Chillin’ that it was headed into its eighth paperback printing. Frankly, I think Tested is a better book. But it doesn’t give readers insight into affluent suburban kids the way NMJC does, which is surely why ten companies bid to publish it (and why it would eventually hit the New York Times extended list), while Tested inspired comments like, “We’ll publish anything by you but this.”

One editor offered me more money if I would switch Tested to an affluent school. I have always sneered at the contention that books about poor kids don’t sell, because affluent book-buyers only want to read about people like them. But now I wonder. Are there any books about poor kids, not written by Jonathan Kozol, that have sold really well? Like, New York Times bestseller well? I can think of one or maybe two.