An Introduction Complete With Easter Eggs

The Educated Reporter herself is a bit busy on a time-consuming project this week that will surely make the rest of us all the more educated. In the meantime, I will occupy the TER chair for the week. Who am I? I am an educated (at times, miseducated, perhaps) reporter from the smaller world of Baton Rouge, the state capital of the great independent state of Louisiana. I cover schools in this medium-sized city and have been doing so for the past nine years. I will be gathering into my virtual net various flotsam and jetsam drawn from my own work and from the greater education world at large. Enjoy.

First up, I had the good fortune last week to interview the lively, talkative and entertaining six-year-old Sunna Jones about her upcoming trip to the White House's annual Easter Egg Roll being held April 5, the day after Easter. It was a short feature with a picture. Here it is if you're interested: http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/89313547.html?showAll=y&c=y. Not being a D.C. native, I had never heard of this event until Sunna's mother, Erin, called us about the family's good fortune. Mother and daughter had been banking on going for months. They bought their plane ticket months before they actually learned they were indeed going. Sunna is all about meeting the first family and the first dog, Bo. I met them during a break at Sunna's public elementary school. Sunna was dressed up in a spring dress for her school pictures and was the definition of cute.

I didn't know anything about Easter Egg rolls before this assignment. So like all good reporters I went to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_rolling. It turns out the tradition goes back a long ways. You push an egg across a field with a long wooden spoon. The White House event also feature an Easter Egg hunt, which I'm much more familiar with. I remember narrowly losing an Easter Egg hunt held on my eighth birthday to John Carroll who traveled only via cartwheels, but had a sixth sense for where Easter Eggs were located. Damn him! Later as an adult, right out of college and broke, I dressed up as the Easter bunny for nouveau riche restauranteur Al Copeland (founder of Popeye's chicken) and his bratty kids. I got paid well, so I can't explain, though the suit was very hot. Al and his then third wife had an Easter Egg hunt and instead of candy, each egg had $20 bills inside. I should have ditched the bunny suit and started collecting eggs.

The Easter Egg Roll provides an interesting window into today's culture and education wars. The Obamas have shaken up this old tradition. They have opened up the event to gay-and-lesbian couples with children. The commemorative eggs are eco-friendly. Michelle Obama is pitching it as part of her efforts to combat childhood obesity, consequently lots of sports and running around. Here's the explanatory page, complete with a fun highlight reel of last year's event: http://www.whitehouse.gov/eastereggroll.

And instead of keeping it a D.C.-only event where families wait in line for hours to get tickets in the fashion of concert-goers of yore, the Obamas now have interested families sign up for an online lottery. Consequently, children from all 50 states are expected to attend this year. Absent a lottery, Sunna Jones wouldn't be going. Her mother was laid off last year from her job as a guidance counselor with the Los Angeles Unified school district and is now back living with family in her hometown of Baton Rouge. I can understand that some along the Potomac might miss their more exclusive purchase on this holiday fun-fest, but they should meet Sunna before they wax too nostalgic. This visit will be the highlight of this little girl's life for sometime and I for one am glad the event has been opened up so widely.

The move online, alas, has also, like a rock concert, given rise to scalping. Sunna's mother said she was tickets listed on Craigslist. The White House has tried to get resellers to stop, but this black market is probably here to stay.

In an attempt to assuage locals who felt left out last year, the Obamas have set aside about 3,000 of the almost 30,000 tickets for public schoolchildren in D.C. This has not gone down well with the private and parochial schools up that way. Here's a story from CNS news, a site affiliated with the liberal-bias-seeking Media Research Center: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/63267. Here we have in a nutshell, the voucher debate. Private school advocate note that their patrons pay taxes too and should be accorded the same benefits that accrue to public schools. But they neglect to point out that the public schools are specifically set up to provide for the education of all children, no matter what. Their books are open to the public that funds them. They are what is known as a public good -- an expensive, arguably underfunded one. As such, they have a strong argument to say they should be at the front of the line. Don't expect private school proponents to agree with me. But as someone who lost his own Easter Egg hunt, I got over it and have moved on. And if you ever have the good fortune to meet Sunna, I promise you won't begrudge her good fortune.

Guest blogger: Charles Lussier.

I am busy on an EWA project this week, so in my place you’ll have the immensely capable, witty and intelligent Charles Lussier. Charles is an education reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate. He’s a native of Florida but applying for citizenship to the independent state of Louisiana. I will miss you all but am happy to leave things in good hands.

TER goes to the movies: “The Lottery”

Today I watched a screener of “The Lottery,” the Eva Moskowitz informercial—er, sorry, charter school documentary—that is making the film festival rounds and coming out in May. Sure, I got a little teary-eyed at the end; every detail of this film is set up for the viewer to believe that if these children do not get into one of Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academies, they are doomed for life. The sad thing is, I had the feeling the five-year-olds at the lottery got that dispiriting message as well. Why do they let children go to these, anyway?

My critique has nothing to do with those charters or the traditional public schools they serve as an alternative to, none of which I have visited. Even if the former are superior to the latter, I found the film exceedingly manipulative. There was the predictable myth I will never tire of attempting to debunk yet politicans will never cease repeating, that prisons are built based on elementary school reading scores.  You hear, as you often do, that the average black twelfth grader reads on the same level of the average white eighth grader. When I tried to track that bit down years ago to use in a book, NCES psychometricians told me it is a misuse of NAEP results, the scale scores for different grades not being directly comparable. There are plenty of legitimate data out there people can use to show how bad the achievement gap is; it irks me that public officials go to the same fictoids again and again.

Okay, those are little pet peeves; let me get past them. Now let’s discuss the way the filmmakers play ominous music literally every time the phrase “teachers union” is used. Or the way they rip apart the traditional schools without ever showing them, or their students, or their teachers, to us. Given the promotional materials for “Waiting for Superman,” I have a feeling we are in for the same unsubtle message when that film comes out too, though I think it at least will take us into the schools being trashed, so viewers might understand why.

I have so many thoughts on how disturbingly polarized the education “conversation” has become—reformers vs. unions, Rhee and Klein as saviors or Satans, as if there is no sane middle ground—that I am having trouble figuring out how to even start explaining them. I was waiting for a big, cohesive way to start laying out my take on all this, but instead it looks like it will just start leaking out of me.

San Francisco in May: You know you want it.

Time is running out to apply for scholarships to attend EWA’s annual conference, “Examining the Evidence,” which is taking place May 13-15 in San Francisco. What will you find there? Practical workshops in approaching the beat, new media and finding data. Panels featuring top-level wonks and real-life practitioners. Speeches by an Oscar-winning director (Davis Guggenheim of “An Inconvenient Truth”) and a hot-stuff magazine editor (Joan Walsh of Salon). Conversations with colleagues about how to approach a beat in this polarized climate. Japanese food, I hope. And what journalism conference would be complete these days without a roundtable on the future of our industry? We just happen to have particularly interesting people lined up for ours.

As well, I’ll be available to meet privately, one-on-one. If you want to talk about ideas, a portfolio critique, your approach to the beat or something else, please e-mail me privately so we can set up a time.

A textbook example of an urban legend?

Every article about Texas textbooks contains that sentence about how the state’s decisions dictate what students will read in classrooms around the country, by virtue of its size and pull in the publishing industry. Given the wackadoo revisions the state is making to U.S. history, I was glad to read this piece by Kate Alexander in the Austin American-Statesman and this one by Richard Fausset in the Los Angeles Times, both of which suggest—for different reasons—that that stronghold might not be as firm or lasting as we assume.

(What did not make me so happy is why none of the Big Three publishers would comment for Fausset’s piece. Why not?)

Looking for freelance work? Or for freelancers?

EWA is compiling a database of freelance writers and editors who work on education topics. If you are interested—even if you already have a job but would like to write a piece on the side once in a while—please fill out our form here. If you are looking to hire freelancers, we will have the info ready to distribute in a couple of weeks.

Four-day weeks: the practicalities.

My child is not even 2 and I am already looking forward to his public education starting—not just because he’ll, like, learn stuff, but also because I will save a lot on child care costs. Sorry if that sounds crass, but there you have it.

Were Milo’s school district to go from five days a week to four, though, I could figure out a way to get him cared for on that odd day. Many more people are not that lucky and absolutely depend on public school to keep their children enriched and protected while they work. Technically, I suppose this Illinois House move toward allowing four-day weeks can’t be challenged academically, because the same amount of school hours would be required each year. (Still, it does fly in the face of a continued push for expanded learning time by a former colleague of theirs, last name Obama.)

What mystifies me about this is how these legislators think six-year-olds will spend their, say, Fridays if they are not in school. No matter your politics, you know this is a fact: Most of their parents will be at work. High school kids can fend for themselves (oooh, now THAT should make for good stories), but elementary schoolers? For anyone but the affluent, child care options are generally sorry as it is. The nonprofits I know of who in normal times might be able to fill the void aren’t doing any better than the school districts these days when it comes to funding. Perhaps it is an opportune opening for the companies fearful about losing SES dollars in the reauthorization?

Four-day weeks have been going on in various spots around the country, but the stories I have been able to find address more of the fun side of things—the new allure of $10-a-day skating rinks, arts classes—than what people do who cannot afford, or transport their children to, those kind of activities. Journalists whose districts are considering four-day weeks should ask questions of locales that already have them. Did officials assess day care capacity before they cut the school week, particularly in the rural locales who seem most apt to adopt this approach? What are younger, less affluent children doing on those days off?

The Wire 101

Drake Bennett writes today on Slate about one television show’s unique prominence in academia. I love stories about the actual content of college courses, I love “The Wire,” and I only wish I could have watched TV for homework.

Want to be the Educated Reporter for a week?

I need a guest blogger for next week, as I will be working on a secret, super-awesome project for EWA that you will learn about soon enough. If you are an education journalist of any sort and are interested in being considered, please contact me privately at the e-mail address at right.

College remediation and third-grade testing: yes, it’s related.

I should start by saying I have no problem with the idea of testing students and holding people accountable. Sad that I have to assert this, but when you critique anything about standards and accountability in practice you are presumed by some to prefer the status quo, think all children can’t learn, hate minority children, be a moron or something else. But theory and practice are two different things, so let me start.

When my book Tested came out in 2007, I showed how one high-poverty school—like many others I had visited over the years—had narrowed its teaching to specifically what would be on the state test, and what that meant for children. It was often not pretty, even though this school was held up in the media as a success story as its scores climbed. Many critics came back with some form of “Of course they should teach what’s on the test” or “It must be better than what came before.”

I wish these people had seen what I saw: how poorly that test measured these children’s abilities, whether because of teaching to the test, easy scoring, a bad test or all of the above. In the class I watched most closely, third-graders had memorized rote answers to questions teachers suspected, correctly, would be on the test. Some were able to spit those back out, and those who could not—whose teachers cringed as they peeked over shoulders on test-taking day—passed anyway, astonishingly. Children who were deemed proficient were still, at the end of the year, writing incoherently and adding two plus three on their fingers. I feel horrible saying this, but I would be surprised to see many of them make it to, or through, college.

So when I see stories like this one by Holly Hacker in the Dallas Morning News, about how many students take college-prep curriculum and pass TAKS yet need remedial work in community college, I am not surprised. I am only surprised that people still defend tests that you can pass even though you are far from ready for the next level. THIS IS WHAT I MEANT.

It truly is depressing: Only 8 percent of Texas students who needed remediation when they got to their two-year state colleges managed to graduate. Obama’s promise of money to improve tests? Can’t come soon enough. Until then, we are lying to people, really.

Gist suggests why Central Falls made a splash.

I went to a reporters’ roundtable this morning with Deborah Gist, the schools superintendent for Rhode Island. Someone asked her the question that struck me from the start: Why did this turnaround get so much media attention? As I mentioned before, many schools have gone through reconstitution that involved teachers having to reapply for their jobs.

Gist suggested maybe it was because in a larger district, teachers removed from one high school can go teach at another. In this case, she said, “there isn’t another place for the teachers to go who aren’t asked to come back.” She also suggested it might have to do with the way state law requires notification of teacher terminations by March 1. Otherwise, a school that might rehire half its teachers can figure out which ones before it fires the other half. In this situation, Gist said, district administrators were obliged in March to give all the teachers notice, even if several of them would still be teaching in September.

Still, there have got to be other reasons this story made such a splash, even before Obama weighed in. Can any of you journalists who were early in reporting on it tell me, either privately or in the comments, why you covered it the way you did?

“Low-achieving” label from a teacher’s POV.

Patrick Welsh is one of the best education writers at the Washington Post. Except he is not a Post employee; he is a high school English teacher who contributes often to the paper’s Outlook section. Check out this really interesting piece on what it felt like when his school, T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va., was labeled “persistently low-achieving” a couple weeks ago.

The Incompleters are complete.

Every team in John’s NCAA bracket—the schools with the lower graduation rate in each game—is out. He is in 87th place of 87 in his office pool. (Is there a booby prize?) The Completers are in 66th place as of Sunday night, with Cornell and Duke still alive. There’s no chance for a decent showing, but at least the Completers beat the Incompleters, which should please Arne Duncan.

Unsubscribed.

I called subscriber services at the Washington Post last week and got an automated voice that said, “To cancel your subscription, press 4 or say ‘cancel.’” When said “cancel,” I was told, “That is not a valid entry.” When I pressed 4, I was told, “That is not a valid entry.” Nice attempt at self-preservation!

The next day I got a real person, an English-language learner, shall we say—at least the Post is only outsourcing its customer services and not its journalism—who did not understand my plea to pass on that I would LOVE to give the Post money, plenty of money, to read the paper online. She did understand that I wanted to donate the remainder of my subscription to a school, though who knows whether they follow through on that.

I have never liked the physical feel of a newspaper. (Magazines and books are a different story; books on tape and e-readers leave me cold and I cannot imagine ever crossing over.) From the day I moved back to D.C. and started subscribing, the Post simply was a recycling challenge, a load of paper that contained words I had already read eagerly the night before on my laptop. According to the Onion, the death of print would be quite distressing for hoarders; I can’t say I feel bad about what my unsubscribing means for them, but I still feel bad.

Final Four update: Go Incompleters!

How about that: John’s Incompleters are in fourth place, ahead of Barack Obama (18th) and the Completers (73rd). Not sure how that is possible, given that seven of his Elite Eight are wiped out already, but I guess he gets lots of points for all the upsets. This sort of makes me wish I played a real bracket, because I hate losing.

Upset.

Well, a couple hours later and I am already out of the game, most likely. Notre Dame, 95 percent of your students graduate! However, you lost in the first round and therefore cannot win the tournament, as I had hoped. Old Dominion (49 percent) triumphed.

This whole project is amusing to me mainly because my husband is now randomly proclaiming “Go UTEP!” Yes, he had to look up what that stands for, and no, he has never cheered for a sports team before in his life. He and the Incompleters were tied, last I looked, for first place in the pool.

Grad rates and Final Four: putting my money on it.

Secretary Duncan said yesterday he would like the NCAA to restrict its basketball tournament to schools that can actually graduate their players. How about schools that can graduate all students? In that spirit, my husband and I entered two brackets into his work pool: one in which the school with a higher graduation rate (university-wide, not just for players) wins in each case, and one in which it loses. I wanted to see which setup would fare better.

It’s looking better already for the higher-graduation-rate bracket, which I will call the “Completers.” So I kept that one for myself. I gave my husband the “Incompleters,” which might be mean of me, since he is a computer programmer whose colleagues now must put their faith in the analytical abilities of someone who predicts a Sweet Sixteen matchup between Sam Houston State (14 seed, 44 percent graduation rate) and Robert Morris (15 seed, 51 percent) and gives the whole tournament to UTEP (12 seed and 29 percent: how can that even be true?).

A note on methods: I used IPEDS’ most recent graduation rate, which measures what share of the entering freshmen completed within 150 percent of the normal time. (Thanks to Karen at the IPEDS Data Center for helping me figure out a glitch in my table; you too should call them sometime.) In the several cases where schools were tied, I defaulted to federal loan default rate, and in the single case where they tied on that too, I picked Marquette over Washington for my bracket, because I grew up in Milwaukee.

So what do the Completers look like? It’s odd—Kansas is upset immediately; Cornell makes it to the Final Four; Lehigh makes it to the Elite Eight—but not totally ridiculous. The Final Four also includes Georgetown, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame, and Notre Dame, a six seed, wins, which is the kind of thing that has not happened before but you sort of feel like it should have.

The Incompleters bracket is insane. UTEP wins. The Final Four includes no better than an eight-seed: UNLV, as well as Sam Houston and East Tennessee. Arkansas Pine Bluff beats Duke, naturally, and Vermont beats Syracuse. Sorry, John. I’ll pay you back the ten dollars, and maybe if you show this blog post around your office they won’t think you’re a moron.

I like that the schools that graduate more of their students make for more realistic basketball champions. But sadly I don’t think I am in it to win it; my bracket would probably do just as well if I let Milo pick out of a hat. I’ll keep you posted.

Got preschool?

The big randomized Head Start Impact Study that the federal government released earlier this year may be good news or bad news, depending on your point of view. The one thing it was not, to many: news at all.

In January the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released the study, which found that the previously documented edge Head Start children had in kindergarten readiness largely disappeared by the end of first grade. (Maybe it should have been called a Kindergarten Impact Study?) Head Start supporters may take the results as proof that public kindergarten is so inferior to the quality of Head Start that it dilutes its effects; opponents likely interpret the news as proof that the program wastes money.

Whatever your take, chances are you did not even hear about the study if you don’t pay close attention to preschool issues. Every researcher I asked about it said it seemed a sound piece of work, if not the best-designed Head Start study ever. The report was addressed online, for example by Lisa Guernsey at New America Foundation, and Steve Barnett at NIEER. But the only journalism Nexis turns up is a brief by Mary Ann Zehr in Education Week and an article by Dan Berrett of the Pocono Record.

Surely at the Heritage Foundation event on this topic next week, conspiracy-theory suspicions will be aired about why the study got so little coverage. I do not suspect nefarious motives. Rather, I would say from experience that getting reporters to cover preschool is always a challenge. I wish I knew why. Journalism is already skewed to the older end of the student population, and most reporters see themselves as covering local school systems that, logistically, don’t assume responsibility for most preschool programs. But why did even national reporters not write about the study? Was it simply not well-publicized? Not, in their mind, news?

I would love to hear from journalists, privately or here, explaining why they don’t write much about preschool and why they did not write about this report specifically. Because absent sound explanations, I am sure Heritage will come up with some of their own.

Press release roundup: blueprint reactions.

The press releases flowing into my inbox in the past week are mostly some form of “Association for XX Reacts to Administration’s Blueprint for ESEA Reauthorization,” and they are utterly unsurprising. A sampling (and I am not doing this again, so please do not take this as an invitation for more press releases):

—Education Industry Association: thumbs down (no required supplemental education services—but don’t worry; there will be plenty of other ways to make money off the law)
—U.S. Chamber of Commerce: thumbs up
—Commission on No Child Left Behind: thumbs up
—National PTA: thumbs down (“no comprehensive plan for meaningful family engagement”)
—NEA and AFT: thumbs down

The blueprint: more questions than answers.

When we are talking about, say, buildings, the word “blueprint” means a detailed model of what a structure is going to look like. When we are talking about federal education policy, it turns out “blueprint” means something far vaguer. Though it is 41 pages, the “Blueprint for Reform” that the Obama administration has just released does not give me a great understanding of how a [insert new clever name for ESEA here] world would, in practical terms, look different from an NCLB world, aside from a growth model, a tougher definition of restructuring and an eventual move from a teacher qualifications model to a teacher effectiveness one. Or, what a lot of real people truly want to know: Who will be tested, when and how exactly will the scores be evaluated?

I broke up with “Lost” last year because the questions piled on so much faster than the answers. In this case, however, I am sure time will provide clarity as details are sorted through. In the meantime, my first few admittedly random thoughts:

—Congratulations, Gender, on your apparent ascension to subgroup status! I can hear my colleague Richard Whitmire applauding from here.

—The blueprint emphasizes that effective teachers be more equitably distributed. NCLB had rules about this too, but they went unenforced. How will the feds do better this time around?

—Everyone loves the idea of a “well-rounded education,” but how do the feds plan to encourage this exactly?

Story of the moment: recess coaches.

“Structured recess” sounds like an oxymoron, especially to those people who are, as one girl in Not Much Just Chillin’ put it, “allergic to anything with the word ‘ball.’” For the introverted and athletically uninclined, fresh hell might be a coach forcing you into a game of kickball during a precious half-hour you could be spending slumped along the wall of the school building, undisturbed by the classmates who will never understand you, reading kiddy manga.

But recess often winds up no fun for even those children eager to run around and play games. I spent a year writing about an elementary school whose kids grew up in environments where they did not learn how to manage conflict peacefully or follow the rules of games, where anger escalated with the uplifting of an eyebrow, where fourth-graders could not manage one single round of foursquare or Uno without fighting or quitting. After that, I am intrigued by the idea of “recess coaches,” which have been getting a burst of press lately. (See this and this and this; whoever does Playworks’ PR deserves a raise.)

Teachers sometimes carry into recess duty the exhaustion and built-up antagonisms of the classroom, and regular aides may lack training to properly manage the chaos. Enter the trained coach. Who, by the way, is assisted by a host of junior coaches, the students themselves, which I love. But then again, I always loved day camp, and this feels a lot like that.

College-ready: off the record.

Yesterday’s Education Sector panel on college and career readiness was a success; you can see the video here. Which is funny given that one of the presenters announced that everything she was about to say was on background. I know congressional staffers often aren’t supposed to be quoted instead of their bosses, but this is one Washington habit that will never make sense to me.

A review is not the book.

Yes, I am overdue in saying something about Diane Ravitch's book, and I intend to. But in the meantime I will just say this: The reviews of a book are not the book. Especially when I wrote Tested, I was amazed at how people misinterpreted what I wrote; later I would learn they did not read the book but only reviews of it. So an offhand comment by Sandy Kress in National Journal's conversation about how the feds would hold states accountable on RtTT hit a raw nerve for me.

Kress was disappointed with Ravitch's opposition to RtTT. He wrote, "I searched through all the reviews I could find of her new book. My goal was to climb the mountain of all the ideas and practices she's come out AGAINST since her conversion to find something she's actually FOR."

Nothing against book reviewers, because I am occasionally one. But if you want to understand someone's arguments, you have to read their work and not just what others write about them.

How fat are our kids?

When it comes to food I maintain what I see as a sensible balance but what others might find hypocritical or insane—there may be cookies in my house, but they are made from scratch and washed down with organic milk, and while this afternoon I snapped at my husband for getting me a doughnut filled with “kreme” rather than custard, far more often (and with nearly equal enthusiasm) I snack on cherry tomatoes.

That ambivalence marks my attitudes toward the newly energized campaign for healthy eating among children. On one hand, I find the focus on school gardens and organic cafeterias sort of silly, but at the same time I think it is a no-brainer that schools should be rid of honey buns in the federally subsidized breakfasts, soda in the vending machines and Little Debbies in the cafeteria.

Whatever your take, make sure you get the facts straight. This Slate piece by Daniel Engber suggests—in the handy clickable sentences at the bottom—that advocates are overstating some of the facts. You don’t need to exaggerate the problem when it is clear there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to American children’s diet and exercise.

The NMJC kids and college.

People often ask me for updates about the kids from Not Much Just Chillin’, who were in middle school eight years ago. I’m in touch with all of them to varying degrees, from Facebook friend to practically siblings—way too close to retain any professional distance. So despite Lily’s mother’s pleas to write another book about her daughter so that she might get into her brain again, I never did so.

But now that the national conversation on education is so focused on college preparation and completion, I think about these kids—sorry, “kids” is a hard habit to break when you have spent ages with them at the roller rink—all the time. These six people grew up all but one squarely planted in the middle and upper-middle class, went through an affluent (according to some measures, “best”) school system in an affluent state and got decent grades. Yet only a few are on track to graduate from college on time.

Jimmy attends a big state university, and Elizabeth goes to a small private college with a synchronized swimming program. They are both full-time and I think on a solid track toward graduation. Mia moved from community college to an elite private university, then withdrew for reasons I can’t get into here. (They had nothing to do with academic preparation, money or effort.) Jackie started at community college too and now juggles a job at Wal-Mart, a toddler and the nursing program at a low-tier state college—whether or not she’ll finish is one of those Life Happens scenarios that seem to be the prime factor for college dropouts, but that is one determined girl, so I have hope.

Eric and Lily are both in community college, he while working full-time at Jiffy Lube and she while doing a lot of cheerleading, both performing and coaching. Eric has switched schools and majors more than once. Told he had to take remedial math, he quit his first attempt at an automotive tech program, but he finally got over himself and reenrolled. He is constantly balancing his desire to earn money in the short term, his lack of car, his lack of maturity, unthinkable family trauma and a hard sell from a chummy, Xbox-wielding Army recruiter with a vague sense, pressed upon him by his mother and me, that he should go to college. He is the Boy Problem and could be the main character for any number of important stories, if not an entire book.

Lily, too, epitomizes some big issues in higher ed today. She hopes to transfer to a big state school and join the FBI one day. As a kid she had wanted to go to UCLA, but I knew it was out of reach. She never stretched academically and had to take remedial math and English at community college. If she had had some good guidance in high school—which this Public Agenda survey says is a rarity—she probably would have realized that, and might have taken steps to improve her chances. We think of this just a poor-kid problem, but I know an awful lot of well-off kids with educated parents who don’t know to take private SAT prep, don’t know how to choose the right high school classes, have these vague goals but aren’t in line to meet them.

I worry about these kids all the time. Especially with some, I think about their mental health, their choice of partners, their risky behaviors (sex, pot, Adderall, street racing). Were they college-ready? And even if they were, will that be enough? I am moderating a panel on Thursday about college- and career-readiness, hosted by Education Sector and College Summit. If you are there, know that even if I am not talking about these six people, they will be heavy on my mind.

Everything old is new again: turnaround edition.

Now that turnaround is the concept of the moment, we need to investigate what it yielded in the olden days when it was called “restructuring.” Last week I suggested journalists keep in context that zero-based staffing, as whole-school firings (or reassignments) are called, is not new. Now we should take the analysis much further. What has gone on at the dozens (hundreds?) of schools that have been zero-based in the last five years or more? Telling readers what has happened to test scores and graduation rates is not enough. I want to know how many of the teachers were hired back, and where did the rest go? Where did the new teachers come from? How were the teachers in the reconstituted schools trained to do better? What other changes were made besides staffing? New curriculum, new discipline rules, new interventions, new culture ... what? And how might the new RtTT-sparked turnarounds differ from the ones that came before?

The Center on Education Policy has studied restructuring and offers some perspective on the staffing question, generally concluding that replacing staff has some benefit mitigated in part by issues such as the time it takes to hire and the lack of a good pool to draw from. They point out that staff changes are usually one reform among several. Their analyses are limited to certain states and there is much more to be done, especially by on-the-ground reporters who can show some case studies. It is rare that a huge policy shift is paired with nearly a decade of lessons to draw from. In this case, I am not sure we have much idea what those lessons are.

Living on Doubleshot in New Orleans schools.

Check out this thorough piece by Sarah Carr of the New Orleans Times-Picayune about the toll on teachers at no-excuses charter schools. Let’s say that the time commitment these teachers make must be kept up to be effective at the school, and that within a couple of years they will burn out and leave because of it. Does it matter? Well, that should be broken down into a few questions. Does it matter for student achievement, as long as strong new teachers take their place? Does it matter for school and community culture? And finally, does it matter for the profession?

That last question is the most interesting to me. I think it matters, and not because I think a teaching degree should be a lifelong license to coast. I have several relatives and friends, all mothers, who have been excellent teachers in high-poverty schools for their entire careers. They work at traditional schools on traditional schedules—though, like all good teachers, they give some of their time off as well. Not 60 hours a week, though. Were that the expectation, they would not teach, and students in their schools would be worse off for it.

I don’t think it’s wrong for some schools to expect that kind of commitment. But even setting the workload bar that high just at high-poverty schools is a problem, because you will lose a hell of a lot of great teachers who care about their own kids, too.

Let me be uncharacteristically not-cynical for a moment.

This Inside Higher Ed article about Stuart Rojstaczer’s latest grade inflation project suggests three possible reasons grades have crept higher: professors are sucking up to the students who write their evaluations, trying to help them do well after school or indulging their sense of entitlement. What about the idea that students might be doing better? Just saying!

A word of caution about Central Falls.

I am surprised at how much coverage the teacher firings in Central Falls, R.I., have gotten, given that schools around the country have gone through these kinds of transformations for years. We should not write about this like it’s brand-new; it is not even close to the first time this has happened. It is usually called “making teachers reapply for their jobs.” Provide some context, keeping in mind that frequently when an entire staff is thrown out, many of them reapply and are rehired.

Who will listen to the teachers?

Scholastic and the Gates Foundation just released an opinion survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers, called “Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools.” Some interesting findings:

—Only 38 percent of high school teachers believe that three-quarters of the students in their classes could be successful at even a two-year college.

—Almost half of teachers say they are willing to have parent-teacher conferences in their students’ homes. But how many actually have? I bet that number is closer to 1 percent, if that high.

—Only 27 percent of teachers said that state standardized tests are essential or very important to measuring students’ academic achievement, while 92 percent said so about ongoing assessment during class. They gave more credit even to data from software programs than to state test results.

—As for accurate measures of their own performance, they rate nearly everything higher than the results of standardized tests—though “student growth” ranks highly, and it is not clear how that differs from test results. Maybe that refers to the results of class assessments? No surprise, teachers put more stock in “self-evaluation” (huh?) than principal observations. They aren’t optimistic about pay tied to student achievement, either as a way to retain students or help them do better.

—When it comes to keeping them in their jobs, teachers say higher salaries are not as important as supportive leadership, collaboration time, relevant professional development, high-quality curriculum and even clean and safe buildings.

A survey of this magnitude is a huge effort. I personally love to see what real-life practitioners think about their jobs and the policies that affect them, and it is great to hear from the teachers themselves, because too often union positions are taken as a proxy for the entire profession. But I don’t think the people who have the reins right now in making and setting opinions on education policy pay much mind to teachers’ perspective, and I doubt they will start now.

Read this: NYT magazine on teacher quality.

Don’t miss Elizabeth Green’s forthcoming New York Times Magazine cover story, “Building a Better Teacher.” Infused into the piece is Elizabeth’s great sense for, and specifics about, what the teacher quality research does and does not say. The reason she does a more thorough and critical job of this than most recent magazine pieces on the topic is not just because Elizabeth is talented but because she is an education reporter. She is careful that every example, every word, accurately reflects the depth of knowledge that experience has given her and that she has gained from picking the brains time and again of all the big thinkers on this topic.

I don’t mean to sound dramatic about it, and you could accuse me of sucking up, given that Elizabeth sits on the EWA board. But really: It is terrific to see a piece that is sure to be influential written by someone who has truly done the tough legwork, over years, to make sure she really knows what she is talking about.

Who knows if Doug Lemov and Deborah Ball hold the answers? Regardless, this level of attention to making teachers good should not be the sole purview of charter management organizations and a few dedicated ed schools. I have sat through hours of mind-numbingly boring and useless professional development provided by various public school systems, and I—and the teachers who moan about the waste of time—can see there is plenty of room for improvement.

The family that studies calculus together, stays together.

I kind of love this story by Bonnie Miller Rubin of the Chicago Tribune, about moms and daughters attending community college together. (No accident that it is not about fathers and sons, by the way.) Personally I can’t imagine it, maybe because while my mother did go back to school recently, it was to clown college. Seriously.

My favorite is the kicker quote, in which a 19-year-old marvels that her mother “is doing homework all the time—even when it’s not due the next day.”

Job opening: “High-level, but flexible.”

That descriptor doesn’t come along often. If you are interested in taking your writing skills and diving into a think tank, Education Sector is hiring. If you prefer to stay in education journalism, jobs exist. Really. The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Ed Week and others have posted positions on the EWA jobs page.

Credit where credit is due.

I know reporters who won’t go into middle schools because it hits some sort of raw nerve; in my case, two years in middle school (for a newspaper series and then a book) made me want to stay forever. I don’t have many natural gifts, but connecting with children is one of them, and after my book was published, I wanted to become a middle school counselor.

A school near me offered a masters program in school counseling with a middle school specialty. At the program’s end, I was willing to earn far less than I made as a journalist, but three years of full-time schooling gave me pause. I had spent five years studying and writing about education for my job, and had not just already read most of what was on the program’s syllabi but also had spoken with most of the authors. Oh, and I was one. Not Much Just Chillin’ was required reading in at least one class. So I called up the dean and asked if I could get any credit for my knowledge and experience.

He said no. Worse, he said that I would not even be able to get into the program, because I had not taken behavioral sciences in college 15 years before. By this point I knew far more about psychology and sociology—the subjects I had been studying professionally—than I did about international political economy, the field of my bachelors and masters degrees and something I had not given much thought to in ages.

Had the university welcomed me and attributed some value to my prior learning, I am certain I would have persisted, graduated and made a good counselor. So I am not unbiased in saying I think this study of 48 schools by the Council for Adult & Experiential Learning (also not unbiased), highlighted in Insider Higher Education, is worth noting. Students with prior learning credits had a far higher graduation rate than those who did not. Hey, rigid educational bureaucracies: Flexibility can yield success.