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One man’s job: keeping students in college.
This is a really good piece by Jennifer Epstein in Inside Higher Education about how putting one man in charge of retention—doing whatever it takes to keep students at college—has dramatically improved the graduation rate at Xavier University in Cincinnati. What have the colleges you cover done, or not done, to make sure students graduate?
Salary databases: Lots of data, lots of interest ... except from me.
Several times a year, a reporter contacts me and asks what to do with the database of teacher salaries they just acquired. When a journalist asks me whether or not to write about a piece of research that just arrived on his desk, if I don’t think there is a story there, I feel comfortable saying no. When the reporter has FOIA’d his tail off and massaged the ensuing data to the nth degree and then some, “I don’t think there is a story there” is not a very useful response.
Yet. I look at these Excel spreadsheets and too often say to myself, “So what?” Don’t get me wrong: I think there is plenty to say about teacher salaries—how they are determined, the direction they are headed in, how they compare to neighboring districts, whether back-loading salary scales provides perverse incentives, whether the salary scales make sense at all. There are interesting policy questions to ask, like whether a high school physics teacher should be paid the same as a high school dance teacher or a kindergarten P.E. teacher. But teacher-by-teacher salary data in a district—that is just not all that interesting. “But readers love to find out how much their kid’s teacher makes!” is not a hugely compelling argument for spending resources creating databases where people can do so. Sometimes reporters write about intra-school differences in pay as a proxy for writing about experience. Sometimes, researchers warn me, salary data provided by districts are not reliable.
Surely others out there disagree with me and see lots of value in this sort of work. Have you read or done something good on the topic? If so, please share.
$10 million gets Geoff Canada halfway through February.
I suppose Canada didn’t have a $75 million budget when he started out, either. But it is hard to imagine the Obama administration’s 20 “Promise Neighborhoods” blossoming anywhere nearly as robustly as the Harlem Children’s Zone they are inspired by when they get, on average, $500,000 each. The deadline for the grants is Monday, which Larry Abramson of NPR reports on this week. Still, any money that goes toward tackling the effects of poverty on children is better than nothing.
Radio silence on special ed.
I mentioned last month that special ed identifications seem to be leveling off or even decreasing. Mike Petrilli at Flypaper offers some perspective; he is inclined to think that Reading First and Response to Intervention are behind this shift. Commenters to both our posts ask whether districts are refusing in greater numbers to provide special ed services to students who really need it. That suspicions differ so greatly on the reasons makes it all the more important for some good reporting on the subject. (So far all I have seen lately is coverage of New York City’s special ed population increasing.) I think it would make a good national magazine piece but that entire sector seems solely devoted to teacher quality and charters. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Come work for EWA!
We are looking for a marketing and development coordinator. Job posting is here. You can’t beat the cause ... or the colleagues!
TER goes the the movies: “Waiting for Superman.”
When Davis Guggenheim spoke at the EWA conference in May about his education reform documentary “Waiting for Superman,” he said, “This really is not about ‘charters good, mainstream bad.’” Yet anyone who has seen the film, as I did yesterday, would say it is constructed precisely that way: A set of children waits to find out if they get into the charter schools that we are led to believe are the only hope for them. Unfortunately we don’t get to see for ourselves what is so lousy about these kids’ current schools or even what is great about the ones they aspire to, which is a shame. Guggenheim gives us data on outcomes but really only brings us into bad classrooms via clips from “The Simpsons” and “School of Rock.” Surely Michelle Rhee, who let cameras film her firing a principal, would allow a sympathetic filmmaker into school? And Guggenheim mentions in the film that only one in five charters is producing results. Even if we saw up close that each of these children’s particular schools were awful and the charters they sought were awesome—which may be the case—is that polarity a fair representation of the entire education reform issue?
Guggenheim also said at the EWA conference, “This film is not anti-union.” Um. “Superman” clearly posits that the main barrier to better schools are bad teachers, and the main barriers to that are bureaucracies and teachers unions. There must be a sound file labeled “teachers unions” that filmmakers go to these days, seeking scary background music every time the AFT is discussed.
I worry about such reductive messaging in a film that is generally powerful and well-made and says important things about the inadequate outcomes and occasional inanities of the current system (rubber room, dance of the lemons). The adorable children and dedicated parents Guggenheim features are compelling—though perhaps not fleshed out enough to make this a date-night documentary the way, say, “Spellbound” was. It might be that my perspective on that is skewed, married as I am to someone who wouldn’t go with me to see Guggenheim’s last movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” (“X-Men: The Last Stand” and “Batman Begins” came out that summer. Priorities!)
If you visit here often, you know the Educated Reporter is more than a little obsessed with proper use of statistics. I do think Guggenheim meant that 12 percent of D.C. eighth graders scored below grade level, rather than that they scored “12 percent of grade level,” and I am curious what research shows that students are tracked based on “neatness and politeness.” But as far as I could tell he was admirably accurate, citing sources on the clever, clear graphics he uses and avoiding oft-used fictoids about education. He even edited the film after a colleague and I pointed out an error in a clip we saw in May.
The film ends with the students attending the lotteries of the charters they applied to. Yes, I teared up. I have said it before and will say it again: Why are little kids brought to these lotteries? Guggenheim is not the only one setting up a stark dichotomy; some of these kids clearly have been made to feel in their bones that they are doomed if the bingo balls don’t fall their way. Does telling that to a seven-year-old striver hurt her or help her in the long run? Since watching the film I haven’t stopped wondering.
Where the girls are.
We have been reading that colleges fear going beyond the 60-percent-female tipping point at which presumably a school becomes less desirable to both sexes. So I was surprised to see University of Phoenix advertising its extreme femaleness in the D.C. Metro. Maybe if you go to school on the computer, you don’t much care what gender your classmates are?
Nobody is writing about learning.
I was asked the other day if many reporters come to me about stories on reading. My primary job at EWA is directly working with journalists; the topics they want help on make for a pretty reliable indicator of what’s being written about. Since the beginning of 2010, I have fielded 210 requests for help in coverage from preschool through college—and none of them were about reading. Over the previous two years, four of 450 requests addressed reading.
Are you shocked yet? Let’s broaden the inquiry to all stories about learning and delivery of instruction—curriculum, textbooks, teaching methods, the merit of various interventions, cognition and so on. There have been just 20 of those over two and a half years. If I am generous and include class size, book banning and other topics that might reasonably touch on teaching and learning (but often do not), that comprises 5 percent of requests.
The share of stories about teaching and learning was greater when I started than it is now. Not surprisingly, people are writing about teacher quality a lot this year—but not actual teaching. Reporters want to know about merit pay, about unions, about teaching colleges, about pensions. They’re writing about charters: politics, test scores, facilities, funding, teacher burnout. But they are not writing about how exactly teachers teach and how students learn.
Why not? Is it boring? Irrelevant? Difficult? Elizabeth Green’s notable New York Times Magazine piece shows that you can write about the act of teaching—rather than the politics of it—and get people talking. The problem is even worse in higher ed coverage, almost none of which addresses instruction. I’m not surprised at the trend, but I do find the actual numbers—or dearth of them—startling.
Free screening of “The Lottery.”
As I mentioned months ago, I thought “The Lottery,” a film about families trying to get into Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools, was heartbreaking but manipulative and not very illuminating. If you’re in D.C., you can judge for yourself. The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools is hosting a free screening on Friday evening—popcorn and soda gratis. Register here. If you see it, come back here and share your impressions in the comments.
Elsewhere on the edufilm festival circuit, I am going to see “Waiting for Superman” today. I’ll let you know what I think.
Do you care where your child’s teacher lives?
Can anyone explain to me the point of school system residency requirements? Julie Deardroff of the Chicago Tribune brings us an egregious example—though maybe it is a typical example—of such a policy in action. A school social worker donated a kidney to his supermarket checker, and Chicago Public Schools wants to fire him because he doesn’t live in the city? I would love to read more context about where residency rules still endure and the rationale behind them.
An achievement gap AMONG blacks?
Take a look at this list of black high school students honored in Montgomery County, Md., recently for their “outstanding achievement in academics, community service and leadership.” Notice anything interesting?
Judging from their names and some information I dug up online, about three-fifths of them are African, in a school district where I think immigrants are by far the minority among blacks. This list, you know if you pay attention to this sort of thing, is not unusual.
We are aware of the immigrant paradox, but most people think about it in terms of Latinos. Musing out loud: If the performance of (first- or second-generation) immigrant black students exceeds the performance of the descendants of American slaves, does that distort what we know about the achievement gap? What does it mean about our perceptions of the role of racism in student achievement? How the hell did a kid from Togo who arrived with no English five years ago accomplish so much in so little time? (Could Serge Amouzou be more awesome? I don’t think so.) What can we learn from what the children of Africans have learned?
We often think of racial minorities as monoliths when within them lies a range of experience. Hmongs and Koreans may check off the same ethnicity box on registration forms, but their academic achievement, we know, is not similar in the aggregate. The same goes for all those people checking “African American.” They each are probably better described by one of those two words, and if there is a difference in their academic experiences because of it, we should explore that.
Why almost nobody is writing about the Common Core.
A think tanky pal of mine wrote me today to ask why adoption of the Common Core standards is not getting more press. Fair question; I think when it comes to national ed reform right now, 89 percent of the attention is going to teacher quality, 9 percent to turnarounds and 2 percent to everything else.
I told him that ... standards are boring. I don’t mean to be glib. Among policy people, the question of state standards vs. common standards is and always has been interesting. But for beat reporters, far less so. Perhaps that is because on a day-to-day level, standards are wallpaper. What’s on the benchmark test, what’s in the district curriculum (if there is any), what’s in the Open Court book: This is what determines what happens in classrooms each day. Yes, state standards influence all that, but they are not on educators’ minds as much as policy makers think they are.
Maybe it is just too removed, the question of whether and how much the Common Core standards will change curriculum, teaching and testing. Maybe it’s only interesting in the states that have the toughest, or easiest and vaguest, standards now—which is why we have seen a little coverage out of Massachusetts and Virginia. (Don’t assume, though, that just because a state’s standards don’t explicitly say third-graders should count by 10s, districts don’t make their teachers teach that. Don’t assume they do, either.)
I think where journalists can conclude that the Common Core will really mean a change in the way a state’s schools do business, they should write about it—though that is easier said than done. I don’t, however, sit around wishing we had more coverage of the politics of standards. What do you think? What kind of stories would you like to see, if any? Why haven’t you written about the Common Core?
How important is college acceptance as a metric?
A lot of schools crow that [insert number above 90 here] percent of their students were accepted at a four-year college. Getting accepted to college is definitely one step better than just graduating high school, unless we are talking about open admissions schools, in which case an acceptance letter is no greater signifier than a diploma (unless it is paired with a completed FAFSA and registration for the fall semester).
I assume that some places that use acceptance as a milestone have internal research showing whether their students actually matriculate and succeed in college. I hear the data coming back is not always great. It is good to celebrate levels of accomplishment exceeding what was previously attained, but journalists (and researchers) need to ask what happens next.
Readability!
Oh, my life has changed, for the better. Not because my son, who turned two this weekend, has started using the potty and making me sing “Happy Birthday to Sunscreen” and asking “why” questions, all of which are awesome ... but because I learned about Readability. I hate clicking through endless pages of a long article, and I hate the ugly and awkward single-page “print” option too. Set your preferences on Readability, drag it to your browser toolbar and read that 11-page piece you never felt like clicking through before.
Good work on grad rates.
Linda Shaw has an interesting piece in the Seattle Times, with specifics, on what the Everett School System has done to dramatically increase the graduation rate. I want to know more!
Blame Facebook.
Or blame parents? Or blame The Culture? I think it is interesting and not surprising that a survey would find a decline in empathy among college students, and other generations as well, as reported by Stephanie Steinberg in USA Today. This is depressing, as empathy is the most important thing we can teach our children. This piece just reminds me how much more journalism I would like to see about the inner lives of kids. Of course, that is a small obsession of mine. It’s not really on the radar of media organizations anymore.
12 + 12 = 48 = half-right?
On New York’s state test for fourth-graders, it is. The New York Post writes about scoring guidelines for students, given to them by “an outraged Brooklyn teacher,” that allow partial credit for wrong or no answers. Shocker, right?
Not exactly. Many states have always scored their tests like this. That’s the point of having kids show their work: even if they do the computation incorrectly, they get credit for understanding how to set up the problem. It is worth asking just what level of omission or inaccuracy is deemed acceptable—whether teachers are encouraged to accept even the most fumbling scrawlings—but the general practice of valuing the solution process as much as the final answer has become ingrained into pedagogy. This would be common knowledge if people had a better understanding of what is on standardized tests and how they are graded.
Reducing an emphasis on computation through this sort of scoring is similar to how spelling and sentence structure often don’t count on constructed responses. I sat through an information session years ago where a Maryland official told educators that their students could write bullet lists instead of essays and still get the full score on the written portion of the test, which was, after all, a reading test and not a writing test.
Low-performing school, high-performning accomplishment.
If you are a Chicago reporter and free on Friday, June 11, you should head to Marquette Park to see a group of students from Gage Park High School—a place that is typically in the news either for murdered students or horrid test scores—launch a different kind of memorial, a high-tech kiosk commemorating the housing rights marches of 1966. Civil rights leaders, including Jesse Jackson Sr., will be on hand for the dedication.
Speaking of dedication, this was truly a student-driven project (nothing “low-performing” about what it took for the kids to make it possible and create the content). But above all they benefited from the energy, determination and trust of their civics teacher, Victor Harbison. I’ve kept tabs on the project through my brother, historian Rick Perlstein, and have been impressed with his friend Harbison’s drive.
Rick asked me how such a teacher might fare under the type of merit pay schemes now under consideration. Set aside the fact that Harbison might be one of the 69 percent of American teachers who are not in a tested subject or grade or class. I hope that the mental and communication skills and better attendance that a project like this engenders would influence the results of any test these kids might take. But for one day (or three?) I don’t want to think about merit pay or federal policy. Once in a while it’s just great to see journalism about kids doing something cool.
My favorite education coverage ...
David Brooks is wrong...
... or purposely hyperbolic? He wrote in today’s column on education reform, “In every other job in this country, people are measured by whether they produce results.” Why does he need to say that? Whether or not you think it should be the case, it is just not true. Also, among smart reformers, there is not consensus that once “mediocrity infects a school culture, it’s nearly always best to simply replace the existing school with another,” as he wrote.
Not that Brooks would remember, but I worked for him in my first job in journalism, an internship on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal Europe, in Brussels. I got the job even though my writing sample roundly criticized Reagan. “We like Reagan here,” Brooks said, sitting under a portrait of Margaret Thatcher. (For the record, I criticized Carter too. Also for the record, Brooks and my other colleagues in that brief internship were extremely kind, inclusive and helpful, even if David did insert the term “leftist shibboleths” into an op-ed I wrote. At age 20, I didn’t know what those were, much less what I thought of them.)
Anyway. For a lot of smart people, Brooks’s columns are nearly all they will read about education reform. He often makes good points, always in a powerful way. I guess it is the prerogative of columnists to mold their arguments the way they see fit. But that doesn’t mean I won’t call out exaggerations, misstatements and omissions.
Wal-Mart U.
When I was at Wesleyan, the college did not give me credit for my jobs as a record store clerk, pizza slinger and Friendly’s waitress. So maybe the reason this story, about Wal-Mart employees getting college credit for ringing up customers, rubs me wrong is because I am jealous?
Seriously—I think there is a place for accounting for life experience when it comes to admissions and, in very specific situations, academic credit. And it is great when companies facilitate the educational goals of their employees. But how valuable is a degree in retail management that is built in large part on loading trucks? Would such a degree carry much weight with future employers?
Answering your graduation rate questions—sort of.
I am frequently asked what the U.S. dropout rate is. That’s like asking how you make chocolate ice cream; there are so many possible methods and outcomes. It is easy for me to make recommendations when it comes to ice cream: Alton Brown if you have a lot of time or David Lebovitz if you don’t. Graduation rates, however, are more complicated.
Today NCES released its most recent calculations of graduation and dropout data, taken from the Common Core of Data. The dropout rate—the percentage of students enrolled in 2006-07 who were not enrolled in 2007-08 and had not completed school—was 4 percent. The average freshman on-time graduation rate—the percentage of high school students who entered ninth grade in 2004 and graduated in 2008—was 75 percent, up from 74 percent the previous year. Keep in mind that this doesn’t count the real people who entered school and graduated. It just compares the total number of students at the start to the number at the finish line. If 100,000 students drop out sophomore year and 100,000 exchange students from Belgium arrive junior year and get diplomas, that’s considered a wash. And having 4 percent of students drop out each year leaves more than 75 percent left to graduate, yes?
There are other wishy-washies you can read about in the methodology section. They are sort of inevitable, I guess, until we have data systems that actually track individual students. But the info we do have is still worth paying attention to. Take a look; you might find something intriguing. Like, why is ninth grade such a flashpoint for dropping out in Louisiana, as opposed to the later grades in other states?Or depressing: Why do practically half of your students fail to graduate on time, Nevada? I do wonder if some of the variation between states can be attributed to reporting issues rather than simply who does better or worse by its students.
P.S. to Vermont and South Carolina reporters: Your states were missing from the some of the counts because of missing data. Why don’t you find out what’s up with that?
Last hired, first fired, forever.
I wish someone would write a story about teachers like my sister-in-law. Since getting her master’s about six years ago, she has had to teach a new grade level every year and switched schools nearly as often. No matter that she has ELL certification, no matter that she is great at her job—last hired, first fired, rinse and repeat, every single year. Even before budget cuts spread throughout the country, northeastern Illinois schools, whose taxpayers fought every levy, had pared back, then back some more. These days they do an awful lot of firing.
The districts are so small that getting laid off from one elementary school means finding a job in another district. Which means that you can be a first-year teacher every year, even if you have been teaching for six years. Why would anyone of quality want to jump into that boiling soup?
Sloshed.
If I were to ever write another book, it would be about college. I won’t get any more specific than that—idea poachers and all—except to say it would be a far fuller picture of the entire student experience than a “year in the life of a sorority” book. Teaching and learning and all that important stuff. Which might be my mistake, judging from some accounts revealed recently on the Smoking Gun, which detail the depraved and appalling behavior at sorority formals. Public sex and other activities too vile for the Educated Reporter to mention here: How could that not sell?
But seriously. How could you write about what college means and possibly ignore that sort of stuff? How could you talk about completion and accountability without acknowledging that for some students, access to alcohol is more pressing than access to any sort of meaningful academic experience?
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