What if you held a turnaround and nobody came?

A followup to Konz’s piece out of Louisville: The district only got 129 applications to fill 120 slots at turnaround schools, and 50 of those were teachers who were booted in the first place.

So much to learn about turnaround.

Now that we are starting to see more staff churn in the name of turnaround—such as was explained by Toni Konz in this Louisville Courier-Journal piece this week—I imagine (I hope) reporters will pursue comprehensive stories about what reforms look like from that point. How are the new teachers selected? How do you go about changing culture? How are all the educators in the building trained for the new challenge? Are there real-life changes in the way business is conducted day to day? Etc.

Yet another piece worth exploring: Those teachers who were removed—where did they land, and is there is any attempt to help them do better at their next schools? Maybe those schools are not in the lowest 5 percent of poor performers, but they still house children that need to learn.

Forgoing teaching?

A new report in California shows a significant drop in the number of people entering teacher preparation programs in that state. You can’t blame someone for bypassing teaching these days, as it is far from a sure bet at employment. I am curious if this trend is reflected elsewhere, and what it means for improving teacher quality at the beginning of the pipeline. Are universities able to be as selective as before, which, some would argue, was not that selective to begin with?

Columbine.

Last night I finished reading Columbine, Dave Cullen’s play-by-play of the 1999 school shooting. It was the most compelling nonfiction book I have read since Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open. (Which was, flat-out, one of my favorite books ever. Props to ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer for near-poetic narrative skills and to Agassi for his introspection, clear memory and willingness to lay it all out there. Also for the storytelling masterstroke of having married Brooke Shields.)

In Columbine, Cullen does a really good job of shifting focus tight and wide and back again, of showing us the crime in progress upfront and then again, from different viewpoints. He is good with character studies, and while I question his frequent use of terms like “brewskis” and “chicks”—I would have to read the killers’ journals; did they really talk like that?—he writes well.

What lingered with me most were the flaws he laid out in two institutions: the press and the police. Law enforcement failed to connect dots before the crime, and covered up their faults afterward. Rules about shielding evidence allowed them to do so, and to what end? As for the press, which printed an awful lot that turned out to have been wrong: Does speed inherently conflict with truth? Is the need for a compelling narrative and a quick “why” so pressing that mistakes large and small are inevitable and tolerable? I hope not, on all counts. Perhaps it is a given that initial accounts of anything are faulty and it is only with time (ten years, in Cullen’s case) that the truth will reveal itself. Through luck and avoidance, I never covered breaking tragedies, so maybe this is just easy for me to say.

One thing is for sure: The shielding of so much evidence for so long allowed mistaken interpretations to endure. Obviously I am always biased in favor of more information instead of less. I do not understand why so much material was allowed to stay under wraps for so long; sensitivity to victims is invoked, but isn’t understanding the truth the most sensitive thing we can do for everyone?

By the way, it may have something to do with my detachment from religion, but I never really got the Cassie Bernall-as-martyr piece. The story—refuted by Cullen—asserted that the killer asked if she believed in God, she said yes, and he fired. That version implies that she was taking a risk by saying yes, courageously not giving the answer that would have spared her. How would she have known there was a “right” answer? How, for that matter, do we?

Backdoor vouchers, and covering privates.

The Supreme Court is going to address whether Arizona tuition tax credits—a more politically palatable alternative to school vouchers—advance religion. I am more interested in whether the program has been a scam that promised to open private school doors to poor children but really just made them cheaper for the middle-class and affluent families already attending (as the East Valley Tribune explored in-depth last year, a project I sadly cannot find on their website at the moment).

Which, by the way, brings me to an overdue public service announcement about how important it is that journalists cover private schools as well as public ones. It is a huge reporting challenge, press releases and 990s being no match for the data available on our public institutions. Private schools tend to be covered when there is an SAT cheating scandal or ... what? We definitely do not help people understand what the teaching and learning in private and parochial schools look like, even though that is something a lot of parents (including three who asked me about it just this weekend) want to know. Private schools are pretty reflexive about denying access when something bad happens—which seems to be the main time journalists are interested in visiting. But what about just to see what happens in classrooms?

Bookworms produce academic butterflies.

Sorry—I had a really hard time coming up with a title.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed writes up a study that found that the strongest correlator to academic attainment is how many books his or her parents own. It’s an even stronger factor than parents’ education level. Yay, Milo will be in school forever! But do library books count? And what about our twelve boxes of books in storage?

I once read that a home should have books in every room. I am not sure if this was for interior decorating or intellectual reasons, but I thought at the time, of course. I have visited a lot of poor families whose dearth of books disappoints but does not surprise me; it is far stranger to me to see, as I sometimes do, no books in middle-class homes. No children’s books, either! (These houses tend to have televisions in the bedrooms; wonder what that correlation is?)

A few years ago Dick Allington told me of a study I think he ran that found that children who got to choose a bunch of books to take home at the end of the school year lost less learning over the summer than those who attended summer school! That says something about the power of reading ... or the lousiness of summer school instruction?

How many PhDs’ children go to your urban public schools?

When finalists were announced for the 2010 Broad Prize for Urban Education, I did not give much thought to the inclusion of Montgomery County, Md. I did not give much thought to any of the finalists, really. But today I saw the video on the Montgomery County Public Schools website—I covered MCPS for the Post years ago and check in there from time to time—that highlighted the Broad visit and couldn’t help but laugh when I saw the officials at Julius West Middle School. Julius West is a couple of miles from one of the most affluent communities on earth. Heard of Potomac? Not what I would call “urban.”

Yes, there are swaths of poverty in the county, and lots of new immigrants. But Montgomery County has the tenth-highest median household income—and by at least one measure the most educated citizens—in the entire country.

Broad is a prize for urban districts, and previous winners have had poverty levels well below MCPS’s (one-third for elementary schoolers). That poor kids in Montgomery County outscore poor kids in districts where nearly all the kids are poor is not surprising. Large districts in affluent counties are able to redistribute wealth from well-off taxpayers into the few schools with high poverty rates, reallocate from an excellent pool of teachers and make use of all of the systemwide resources inherent in being a really rich place. It is admirable that Montgomery County has chosen to do so (not every place does), and that it often does so effectively, but putting them on a Broad pedestal implies that their accomplishment is equivalent to turning around an impoverished urban district.

Not that I care about prizes, as you know.

What do you think? Am I being pedantic?

Ethnics studies explored.

Emily Gersema of the Arizona Republic has given some welcome context to the discussion about ethnic studies classes in Tucson. We learn why the classes were created in the first place, and a history of concerns about them. Emily gives a little sense of what actually is and is not studied, and I hope she or someone else follows up on this, exploring curriculum materials, assignments, class discussion and the makeup of the classes. Do only Latino students take the Latino studies classes? How do (or don’t) they differ from any other history or social studies classes?

Starting early with dropout prevention.

I have always told reporters that if they just look at the dropout problem through the prism of high school, they are missing out. Same goes for educators. Dropouts are made long before teenagers actually stop showing up at school. So I was glad to see Greg Toppo of USA Today write about a Philadelphia middle school that sees dropout prevention as its mission.

The greatest feature story ever.

At the EWA conference last week I told someone I would send them the link to my favorite piece of journalism ever. Of course I have forgotten who. So, whoever you were—and even if you are not them—read this piece, “The Peekaboo Paradox,” by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post. It is about a children’s birthday party entertainer. Here is where one is tempted to say, “Yet it is about so much more.” Except that it’s not. I mean, this particular children’s entertainer has a gambling problem, an organization problem and some lingering ghosts, which unspool over the course of Gene’s reporting. Gene’s particular genius is that he usually makes his reporting transparent, part of the piece and moving.

The Great Zucchini story is not one of the articles that won him the Pulitzer. That’s okay—Martin Scorcese’s Oscar did not come for his best work either. (Though Gene’s two winning pieces were better than “The Departed.”)

Rick Hess is doing my job for me ...

... by shooting education reporters some story ideas and other food for thought. I have been really interested in the degree to which teachers unions are or are not realistic proxies for the actual views of actual teachers,  so #3 and #8 resonate especially. And given that reading yet another story about KIPP or Green Dot might make my eyeballs burst, #2 intrigues me as well.

Please help the job hunters.

Many education reporters who are hunting for jobs come to me for counsel. Would this be a good fit for me? Do you know what kind of person they want to hire? Would you take a look at my resume? Of course, given the numbers, most of them do not get the job they apply for. What they also do not get, from at least six different employers in the last month:

—An e-mail saying their materials were received.
—A phone call (or even a form e-mail!), once they have gone through interviews, telling them they did not get the job.
—Any feedback that might help them as they move on with their search.

I cannot imagine a good excuse for the first two. And it might be unrealistic to hope for that last part. But why not? Are you so busy that you can’t tell the few people you interviewed, “We hired someone with more daily reporting experience.” “We were concerned you did not have any multimedia background.” Whatever. Those of you out there who hire people: Could you explain why you don’t do that, and why sometimes you don’t contact job applicants at all?

This is obviously not specific to the education journalism field. My little brother, who is awesome and whom you should hire if you have any work in music management, deals with the same stuff all the time in Los Angeles. People are hurting! Show job seekers some love!

Look up, pigs flying over Arizona!

Arizonans voted for tax increases that would reverse some education budget cuts. Wow. That is so ... un-Arizonan. Are we seeing this elsewhere too?

Extreme Makeover: School Edition

What would a reality show about school turnaround look like? Teachers would be fired, replacements pounding Doubleshot would be hired, and data would be gathered like mad. The charismatic new principal would turn some tired educational cliche into a national catchphrase. The host? Jeff Probst, meet Justin Cohen.

Nah, sorry, too boring. Here’s an idea instead: A rotting excuse for a school building gets renovated in just ten days by a cheery, predictable reality show team. (Megaphone, check. Designer with hipster glasses, check.) Welcome “School Pride” to your Friday evenings this fall on NBC.

This model has two advantages over “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” First, the only thing more compelling than five needy people crying at their newly revealed glam surroundings is five hundred people doing the same. Second, rather than a kindergartner getting her bedroom decorated to a fare-thee-well based on a casually mentioned interest she will probably ditch next year, the whole kindergarten classroom will get that treatment, benefiting five-year-olds for decades to come. 

And guess what? Nice buildings boost academic achievement! Well, at least according to the show’s promotional material. And according to executive producer Cheryl Hines, who says in the trailer that the show positively impacts people’s lives ... “and the test scores shoot up.”

At Carver Elementary, the Compton, Calif., school featured in the trailer, scores did go up after the renovation. They had gone up the year before too (though less so). Was it because of the new paint, toilets, playing field, gym, flooring tiles and Ikea furniture? Or the enthusiasm built from the community joining in the work? We have no idea. Suggestions of a link between test scores and capital improvements will surely be repeated throughout the series, so it is worthwhile to look at what the research says. Some studies link specific building issues to outcomes that themselves may impact test scores: air quality, for example, affects absenteeism. There are doctoral dissertations and reports by architects that make a broader case for at least correlation, if not causation. But rigorous, peer-reviewed research that shows that capital improvements boost scores? Not so much. 

Frankly, children deserve non-disgusting school buildings no matter what happens to test scores. I will certainly watch the show, lying as it does in the heretofore untouched sweet spot of the Linda Perlstein brain where school reform meets interior design meets reality television. I will certainly cry. But I hope that Cheryl Hines and gang curb their enthusiasm about the test score stuff—and maybe even let us know what it takes beyond renovation to make sure that students learn.

Shoulda known it was Schnur.

Steven Brill, in a piece in the upcoming New York Times Magazine, lays out the political landscape of education reform better than any piece I have seen during this administration. He does not actually get into what these debates mean when it comes to the education of actual children in actual schools, but he doesn’t purport to. And did you know before where “Race to the Top” came from?

Sources at your fingertips!

Sorry (if you cared) that I was silent this last week, but in reality I was not quiet at all; I was taking part in EWA’s annual conference in San Francisco. I have many thoughts from there to share with you, but first let me tell you about a great new EWA resource we announced at the meeting: a searchable database of more than 1,000 sources on children and education, with full contact information, links to their websites and information about their areas of expertise. You can access it by clicking “Source Search” on the EWA homepage, or go straight to (and bookmark!) ewa.org/sources.

You will see two databases, one for early childhood through high school (“P-12”) and one for higher education. To search by keyword, affiliation, location and so on, click “General search.” Or you can click to get lists by topic and last name. I am not in love with the interface—make sure to scroll down fully to see all your results!

This is a work in progress; it is basically a version of the source list I have been building for more than a decade, so it can be a bit idiosyncratic as a result. It will be greatly improved by users submitting new sources (after you see they are not on there already) and suggesting modifications to existing sources.

Let me know if a keyword you type in turns up blanks. It may be for lack of identified experts, or because of the wording. We have identified synonyms for the prevailing terminology we chose—for example, typing “ESOL” will return results for “English language learners”—but may be missing important ones.

I am still always available to help you identify the right sources for your work, but at times this may be the most efficient first step. Enjoy, and spread the word!

Special ed on the decline?

My colleague David Hunn, a terrific data-driven reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I have been putting together some materials for new education reporters for the upcoming EWA conference, and David came upon something interesting in federal numbers he crunched from the Data Accountability Center. After many years of increases, the share of Americans ages 3 through 21 with identified disabilities declined, from 8.5 percent in 2006 to 8.3 percent in 2008. This parallels a small decline in disabled children as a percentage of total enrollment in federal programs, according to this NCES table.

I am not sure what the difference is in the two sets of stats, because I have not seen David’s original data set. But in both cases there has been this slight dip. Has anyone written about this? If not, why? A leveling off or even decline in disability identification is a big national story, given how much special education has increased over the years. Schools might be responding to pressure not to disproportionately identify minority students as disabled, or they may be having success, through strategies such as Response to Intervention, heading off academic problems that once might have landed children in special ed as a first/last resort. Or [insert findings of your great reporting here]?

“Zero” opposition to Duncan’s agenda?

A commenter on this blog pointed me to Secretary Duncan telling the New York Times that he “encounters no public opposition” to his education agenda. SO WEIRD. Whatever you think of his priorities, you have to acknowledge that there has been plenty of opposition to them, some of it written about by the very reporter who was interviewing him. Either Duncan was lying (and if so, why? what is so bad about saying “Some people don’t agree with us, but we think we are doing the right thing”?) or he is as insulated from the world around him as this guy.

FERPA = Find Evidence Redacted, Please Acquiesce.

Frank LoMonte at the Student Press Law Center is basically a hero to journalists. Lawyers in the D.C. area could really rake it in, but instead Frank spends his time making sure students are allowed to hold institutions accountable. And not as a fancy lawyer in a big firm who does First Amendment pro bono on the side—he works full-time at an underfunded nonprofit where student journalists can get all sorts of help for free.

Frank has an important piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed this week about the joke the federal government has turned FERPA into. Not a ha-ha joke—a scary one, if you care about truth and justice and all that. He is writing about universities, but the problems run through K-12 too.

What are internships worth?

My internships during college and graduate school were a diverse lot. I was paid generous market wages for some (Newsday, Washington Post) and got credit as part of my academic program for others (Foreign Affairs, World Policy Journal, Wall Street Journal Europe). Still others—a theater company, an anatomy lab, a small-town newspaper—were simply ways to explore random interests or keep busy or make a tiny bit of money or none at all. Those in the last category would not have qualified under the Department of Education’s new rules about paying interns, nor would Wesleyan have wanted to give me credit for them. They weren’t worth credit and, frankly, my contributions did not merit much pay. But they were worth it for me.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed had a nice piece yesterday on credit and internships. Yet I would like to read more about casual internships that don’t fall neatly into the credit-or-wage classification. Paying people competitive wages under labor law probably presumes they are contributing to the value of the company. I am sure my fumbling attempts at performing surgery on newborn mice in the mid-1980s did nobody any favors—I probably cost my colleagues more time than I saved them—but the experience sure did teach me what I didn’t want to do for a living.

Hooray for the Hechinger Report.

I am so swamped getting materials together for EWA’s annual meeting, where I will be running a seminar for new beat reporters, leading a roundtable on the polarization of the education debate, meeting one-on-one with journalists and launching a top-secret, totally awesome resource for education writers. So I have not had the time to read the Hechinger Report, which launched today. But I would be remiss if I didn’t call your attention to this new venture in education reporting. It certainly looks smart, and all the people involved are too. More to come...

“I am going to college. Can you pay?”

My favorite charity in the last few years has been Donors Choose. It has the shopping-mall allure of those microcredit charities where you get to choose whom you fund—the Congolese tilapia seller? the Ecuadorian photographer?—plus how can you not love the idea of sending money directly to cool classroom projects? I will say that students waste too much time writing thank-you notes to each donor even though I try to say “Don’t bother,” and you should look at each teacher’s request PDF, where you might see that “Fun math manipulatives!” are just materials for the overhead projector. 

Now there is a similar resource for funding students’ college education, called CO-Fund, out of Brown University. (The CO stands for “college opportunity.”) The project is new—there are only a few students up on the site—and intriguing. High school students who need money for college post personal pleas and tell about themselves, with video. It feels a little eerie, as if orphans made a website advertising individually and directly to prospective adoptive parents, and I am not sure why people this talented, engaging and broke can’t get enough financial aid through the regular channels. But moderated person-to-person giving seems to be the trend, and for good reason—it probably feels more satisfying to know exactly whom you are helping than to send off a check to United Negro College Fund. (Not that you shouldn’t do that too.)

Mrs. Hendrix, Mme. Ver and value-added.

Read this story. You just have to. Tissues, maybe, at the ready.

I believe there is a place for standardized testing, and I believe there is a need to reform the way teachers are evaluated and compensated. But I couldn’t read this story without puzzling over how a teacher like Mrs. Hendrix might have fared in an environment where states are racing to make sure that student test scores count for at least half of a teacher’s measured worth.

I say this as a person who is not sappy, but practical. (Okay, that article couldn’t help but make me a little sappy, and this comes from someone who groaned, “OH, PLEASE,” at the end of “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”) Forget the inspiration part—which we all know is uncountable—and just consider the logistics. Were Mrs. Hendrix’s class to exist today, a fourth grader in it would be reading at an eighth-grade level yet in many states his or her progress would be measured using a fourth-grade test. Even a value-added system would just compare that to how that student had done on the third-grade test while in third grade. And if Mrs. Hendrix was not those students’ homeroom teacher, no matter how much she influenced and taught them, her effect would not be officially measured.

I had several great teachers in my childhood, from Mrs. Goral in kindergarten to Mr. Johnson in freshman algebra to Mrs. Schwartz in ninth and tenth grade French. The most memorable of all was French teacher Judy Worm, or Mme. Ver, as we called her junior and senior year. As long as we only spoke in French in that classroom—when we were in the classroom; there were loads of field trips—anything went: We gave cooking demonstrations; we read Marcel Pagnol novels, four pages at a time; we learned tidbits about every great impressionist and expressionist painter, which remain with me today. (Did you know that Auguste Renoir worked in a porcelain factory, which may help explain why his subjects have such delicate, doll-like features? Or that Max Ernst believed he was born from an egg?) I have no doubt my life took many of the turns it did—studying abroad, masters degree in international affairs, proficiency in several foreign languages—because of her.

In my case, were the system designed properly, you could have assessed the value Mme. Ver added to my French profiency. It would have been sizeable, even though her true effect was far greater. The teaching of foreign languages in school is notoriously weak, yet my friends and I were fluent at 17.

But there’s the rub: were it designed properly. I feel like policy is outracing journalism on this issue, and we are not getting a good understanding of how value-added measures are and will be designed. I am not reading about where we do and don’t have adaptive tests, how the effect of all those other adults besides the main teacher who pedagogically touch a student each day will be considered, the design and validity of assessments for, say, art or kindergarten.

We won’t capture even part of the true worth of a Mrs. Hendrix—or a bad teacher, either—without attending to the details.

Colleges and the profit motive.

I met a woman recently who might occasionally babysit for my son when we are visiting rural Virginia. She seemed unflappable in her oversight of several little kids. We were talking about this and that, and as she reached out to right her daughter on the swing, she said, “I am taking classes online at night.” She is studying for a nursing degree from Kaplan University with the hopes of becoming an ER nurse; forgive me for saying that all I could think about at that moment was the huge debt load of for-profit graduates, Kaplan’s high default rate and stories I have heard about employers rejecting job candidates out-of-hand because their degrees come from for-profits.

Yesterday, “Frontline” aired “College Inc.,” an hour-long piece by correspondent Martin Smith about for-profit universities, which you can watch here. You only had to hear a couple of bars of the background music—is there some sort of musical Getty Images where documentary makers type in “shady character” to yield ominous melodies?—to know that the PBS gang didn’t just share my (and Arne Duncan’s) worries, they were full-throttle harsh on the entire industry. Among the highlights were a former cokehead-turned-for-profit-financier who made telephone deals from an Adirondack chair on the expansive lawn of his coastal estate, and recruitment and lending practices that resemble the worst of the mortgage lenders of the last decade. Former employees explained how they were commanded to exploit whatever soft spot a potential student might have in order to get them in the door.

The most powerful part of the piece was when a group of nursing students talked about how their degree was marked more by false promises and worthless fieldwork than by anything you’d call “education,” and how they emerged from the program ill-credentialed to do the kind of jobs for the kind of salaries that recruiters had promised. I would have liked to learn even more about what the courses and teaching looked like—and surely there were some happy customers who had something worthwhile to say?

Expressing wariness about the industry makes one feel a little classist, as for-profit administrators say that they take the students nobody wants. Okay. But they take them for a hell of a lot of money, resulting in a disproportionate share of financial aid. Why so expensive, beyond the massive marketing budget that “College Inc.” featured?

I cannot say whether the piece was balanced or not, because I have never heard support for the quality of for-profits that did not come from the institutions themselves. If you know of any, please point me there. Is profit-seeking or mass production necessarily incompatible with a decent education? Would it be impossible for for-profits to grow at a rate that pleases investors in a way that still puts a premium on the quality of learning?

Whatever the answers to those questions, the for-profit entrepreneurs did themselves no favor during their “Frontline” interviews. Do you want your education designed by somebody who chuckles at how damn much money he’s made?

School district consolidation explored.

Reporters come to me from time to time looking for resources on school district mergers. School Administrator magazine has come out with an issue devoted to consolidation, which you can read here. It is not a clear-cut cost-saver.

What about other unions?

In all the coverage about teacher quality and tenure, and lengthy due process for teachers who read porn in the classroom while they are not assaulting or underserving children, I never read anything about how teachers’ union protections compare to those in other unions (especially in the public sector). Are there lessons to be learned from other unions? Reforms that have or have not made a difference?

Congratulations Kalamazoo.

I really like student-made videos, especially the whole Shorewood/Shorecrest lip sync smackdown out of Seattle back in December. Those videos were awesome, but neither of them made a gal get kinda teary-eyed the way Kalamazoo Central’s entry into the high school Race to the Top contest did. The school won a commencement speech by President Obama. You can see the video here; start at 1:34 if you don’t want to listen to Arne.

David who?

I spent the last few days at the AERA conference in Denver, meeting with researchers to talk over a project we are thinking of doing at EWA. I had never met most of these people before, so I spent a lot of time walking from lobby to lobby for prearranged meetings, saying “Are you Dick?” or “Are you Bob?”

For my final meeting, with David Plank of PACE, I went to the lobby of the Marriott.

“Are you David?” I said to the only guy there.

“Yes.”

“Hi, I’m Linda.”

We had a good talk, with David giving very helpful input on how EWA might implement this idea, on the nature of educational researchers, and so on. As I stood up to go, he gave me his card.

David Foulk.

Not David Plank.

Awkward! Yet he had acted like he totally expected our conversation. Who did he think I was? I said nothing. I walked over to another man working the New York Times crossword puzzle, looking like he was waiting for someone.

“Are you David Plank?”

“Yes.”

“I just had a half-hour conversation with someone thinking he was you.”

Mistaken David stories run in my family. One year my husband, John, called our neighbor Dave to pick up the cupcakes for my birthday party. Except our Dave had changed his number a year back, and a different Dave had answered the call and gotten the cupcakes. Mystery, and hilarity, ensued.

So, David Plank, sorry to keep you waiting. David Foulk, dean of Hofstra’s education school, thanks for the input—and I hope I didn’t keep you from another meeting with another Linda.