I am going to admit something to you, nonexistent readers. I am a conservative. Shocking, I know, since most you have believed me to be a liberal of the bleeding heart variety for quite some time now. But as it turns out, on education, the thing I care most about, I fall very squarely in the conservative camp. Me and Bush, together forever (minus vouchers). On this issue, it's not a bad thing. What was Bush's rhetoric on education? Accountability, standards, and get rid of the "soft bigotry of low expectations." I'm not sure Bush knew what he was saying when he made that remark, but it strikes me as one of the most profound statements made about education since "A Nation at Risk" was published. So the fact that Obama has been voicing and repeating many of the same concerns about education as Bush doesn't disturb me in the least. Go here for an article in EdWeek comparing the two on this point.
The aspect of the tentative Obama education agenda that didn't get any play during the campaign (how could it? education was like 50,000th on the list of issues, even though nothing could possibly be more intimately tied to the economic future of this nation) is the issue of national standards. Check out an NY Times article discussing the "toughening of standards" that makes mention of an Obama admin push for national standards. For non-ed people out there, this won't strike you as particularly strange, but let me tell you : this is about as hot-button an issue as you can get, and political ground on which I thought Obama would not tread. Allow me to back up: what is up with standards?
So No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as many of you know, conditions receipt of federal funds on meeting certain proficiency benchmarks. It also mandates annual testing in grands 3-8. What it does not mandate, however, is how you (state) decide to measure proficiency. What if I told you that in 2005 87 percent of Mississippi's 4th graders were proficient in reading? If you weren't looking too hard at other stats, you might think that there had been some kind of revolution in the deep south and Mississippi had finally lifted itself out of poverty and generally miserable social welfare into some kind of oasis of learning. Alas, as much as I'd love to move to Mississippi, those numbers mean nothing. Mississippi was 50th out of our 50 states on the NAEP, the only national educational assessment of student performance. NCLB, in its current state, is all about gaming the system. Principals, teachers, superintendents, governors...everyone is so scared about losing their jobs and losing funding that they sacrifice the intent of the law for their own self-interest, and the bill simply wasn't written with any mechanism to hold states accountable on this point (ironic for a bill whose entire purpose was increasing accountability in education, no?). I am of the opinion that the only way to ensure that states mandate sufficiently high standards for their students is to set them at the national level. We are a national economy with free flow of human capital. You don't need specific permission to apply to University of Oregon if you went to high school in Louisiana. Presumably, a high school degree in New York is the same as a high school degree in South Dakota. But this is far from true (actually, high school degrees within the same state don't even mean the same thing, but that's another issue altogether). Those who oppose national standards claim it will restrict pedagogy severely, sucking any creativity and in-depth learning out of the classroom and turning the next generation of students into mindless robots (on that last point, I think we can blame myspace and a lot of video games before we start pointing the finger at what is going on inside classrooms, but I digress). I wholeheartedly disagree. I think you can create assessments that measure skills. Teaching skills need not lead to a mandated and uniform national curriculum. If you are trying to teach students about literary structure and theme, you can choose whatever book you think will most interest your students and serve that purpose. If students need to be able to simplify fractions, you can use whatever lesson plan you so desire...give them a worksheet or use manipulatives. Schools where principals force teachers to teach test prep only, thus leading to the rallying cry that national standards and accountability force the inherent evil of "teaching to the test," shouldn't be the rule. That is the easy and stupid way to approach education. That response to standards is not the fault of the standards...it is the fault of the people (principals or superintendents, or maybe some teachers) who are frantically making a foolish choice about how to educate their student population. There is nothing inherent in having learning standards and skill outcomes that necessitates rote memorization and drill and kill all day, all the time (this is a topic for a different time, but a little rote memorization never hurt anybody....how else do you get your times tables down? we need to get over the rhetoric that memorization in education is evil...it's actually essential for the fundamentals).
So in sum: national standards will hold states accountable for graduating students with the skills that are supposedly associated with a high school diploma, increasing national productivity and the overall quality of our workforce. Make if happen, Obama. Add me to your list of "conservative" supporters.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
sometimes we need to reflect on the good...
If you want to smile, go here.
I wish there were more of these stories to tell. Obviously the goal is to make it easier for students to achieve these things, but while barriers remain, it's good to remember that some kids manage to make it. One of them is a future Cornellian....go big red!
I wish there were more of these stories to tell. Obviously the goal is to make it easier for students to achieve these things, but while barriers remain, it's good to remember that some kids manage to make it. One of them is a future Cornellian....go big red!
Sunday, February 8, 2009
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race"- Chief Justice John Roberts
It has taken me about 10 days to become rational and coherent enough to write this post. I realize this makes me a bad blogger, but I'm new at this so bear with me.
After about a grand total of 8 hours of class time in constitutional law, we have just wrapped up the equal protection clause as it relates to racial classification. Done and done....clearly no more to say on the issue. (Sarcasm should be apparent here). Our last class session put me over the edge. We read Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. (Go here for a synopsis of the opinion....sorry I can't find a link to the actual opinion). Basically, parents sued Seattle school district for using a race as a factor in assigning students to schools that were oversubscribed. Seattle had a choice-based system, so students preferenced which school they wanted to attend. A host of other factors were considered before race, and ultimately a very small percentage of students were affected by the racial classification system. The goal, though, was to ensure a level of diversity within these schools that was representative of the school district as a whole. In a 5-4 opinion, the Supreme Court struck down this system of classification, finding that it wasn't a nuanced approach to diversity like that used in Grutter (where the Court upheld Michigan Law School's system of considering race as a "plus" factor in admisssion, recognizing school diversity as a compelling interest and granting a great deal of deference typically absent from the strict scrutiny review (a presumption of unconstitutionality, for you non-law people out there) of government policies that explicitly classify people by race). The opinion concludes with what I can only imagine Chief Justice Roberts thought was a brilliant insight: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
I should say at this point that I am not typically in favor of quota-based affirmative action...not in secondary education, anyway. However, I personally would have upheld the system used in Michigan's undergraduate program that was found unconstitutional by the Court (Gratz v. Bollinger- racial minorities were automatically assigned 20 of the 100 points necessary for admission at U of Michigan; the court found this approach was not narrowly tailored to the interest in student diversity).
Whatever my ever-evolving feelings about "affirmative action" (I use quotes because that term is used to describe a whole range of programs that approach the issue differently), I feel that achieving diversity in public schools is not just a compelling governmental interest- it is an essential governmental interest. The Court makes a series of presumptions in its opinion that betray a debilitating lack of knowledge about the realities of urban education. First, the Court suggests that Seattle schools could engage in the kind of "holistic" review employed by Michigan Law School. I'm sorry, but Seattle public schools have over 45,000 students. Let's just say that there are about the same number of students in each grade. This means that every year they are looking at school preferences for almost 4,000 students (most likely more, because it's probable that similar to most other urban districts, they have far more freshman than sophomores, juniors or seniors). While Michigan Law received a similar number of applications, application review is the sole function of the Michigan Law School admissions department. What makes the Court think that Seattle Public Schools have the time or the money to create a department who specializes in conducting a holistic review of applications completed by 8th graders??? Moreover, having struggled to get my own students to turn in a simple list of 5 places where they would like to intern, I can only imagine what potential difficulties would lie in trying to get 4,000 8th graders to complete an extensive application for the high school of their choice. Beyond that, the Court praises Michigan's process as allowing for diversity in non-racial capacities: life experience, talents, etc etc. What other "diversity" are 8th graders going to be able to demonstrate? The only students with compelling different experiences will be those whose parents had enough time and money to sign them up for advanced oboe classes or send them to France for the summer.
The final statement in the opinion by Roberts could only be written by someone like him: a well-educated white man who has never been aware of his race. His stance reminds me of Steven Colbert's consistent facetious statements of "I'm colorblind. I don't see race, but people tell me that I am white." Colbert's joke, which I'm sure is lost on many, is quite telling. The only people in this country who have the luxury of being "colorblind" are people who are white. We don't feel the need to check a box on applications or talk about what color we are, because society doesn't force us to be aware of it. That is because society affords us opportunities because of what we look like, as opposed to denying us opportunities on this very same basis. I find it incredibly ironic that over time, the Supreme Court has managed to wield the equal protection clause against the very groups of people whom it was meant to protect, and has now re-interpreted it to protect white people against the ills that might befall them if we afford preferences to minorities. I mean, Barack Obama is president. Clearly we have moved way past racism in this country. I recently heard a story about a studio executive nixing a project about a young black man dealing with challenges of racism. After the pitch, the exec said "I mean, with Barack Obama in the white house, is this story even relevant anymore??" Never mind the fact that in several studies about teacher mobility, student race is the largest predictor of whether new teachers will leave their current teaching assignment. One study I reach by Eric Hanushek (if you are interested, contact me and I will get you the article) found that teachers with 3-9 years of experience who moved from urban to suburban schools in Texas were, contrary to the prevailing opinions, taking a pay cut rather than a pay raise. Among those teachers who moved schools within the district, the average teacher moved to a school with substantially higher student achievement and substantially lower percentage of minorities and students qualifying for free lunch. For white teachers, initial placement in a school with a high percentage of minorities resulted in a much higher likelihood of exiting the district or exiting teaching altogether, when compared to white teachers placed in a school with a lower percentage of minorities. To induce teachers to stay in such situations, Hanushek's study estimated that a 10 percent increase in the number of black students would have to be accompanied by a 10 percent increase in pay, which is, as a policy matter, obviously both financially and politically infeasible. To step back, and in order to not misrepresent this study, the authors suggest that they do not know whether these factors (student race and achievement) are functioning as proxies for other factors which cause teacher exit, such as discipline and safety problems. I would argue, though, that we ought to conclude the same thing regardless: that student race is, either implicitly or explicitly, affecting teacher behavior. Even if these measures are "proxies" for discipline and student behavior, that raises other issues: why are these students "allowed" to behave this way? When I was teaching, I frequently felt that some horrendous student behaviors were accepted in my school because of what the students looked like.....that the administration, acting not out of bigotry but white guilt (which can be, at times, equally if not more damaging because it runs under the surface rather than out in the open) allowed students to behave in ways that they never would have tolerated if our students had been white.
So what is the role of the law in all of this? The narrow way in which the Court has permitted race to be used as "remediation" (which only really applied to the mandated post-Brown integration and later court consent decrees dictating targets for those districts who dug in their heels about integrating) and as an interest in "diversity" is so detrimental to the improvement of public education. Race still matters. Period. It is no secret that it is difficult to keep good teachers in schools that have a high percentage of minority students, and that generally, schools with a higher percentage of minorities have less resources and opportunities than schools that are majority white. Whether that is the result of teachers acting on explicit racial biases or the product of societal expectations filtering into the way a school functions is irrelevant. What matters is that school racial composition is highly correlated to student achievement, and for the court to ignore equal educational opportunity as a compelling governmental interest is antithetical both to the purpose of the equal protection clause and the Constitution itself. We can not force people to live near people of another race, but school districts should be allowed to combat residential segregation through school integration.
After about a grand total of 8 hours of class time in constitutional law, we have just wrapped up the equal protection clause as it relates to racial classification. Done and done....clearly no more to say on the issue. (Sarcasm should be apparent here). Our last class session put me over the edge. We read Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. (Go here for a synopsis of the opinion....sorry I can't find a link to the actual opinion). Basically, parents sued Seattle school district for using a race as a factor in assigning students to schools that were oversubscribed. Seattle had a choice-based system, so students preferenced which school they wanted to attend. A host of other factors were considered before race, and ultimately a very small percentage of students were affected by the racial classification system. The goal, though, was to ensure a level of diversity within these schools that was representative of the school district as a whole. In a 5-4 opinion, the Supreme Court struck down this system of classification, finding that it wasn't a nuanced approach to diversity like that used in Grutter (where the Court upheld Michigan Law School's system of considering race as a "plus" factor in admisssion, recognizing school diversity as a compelling interest and granting a great deal of deference typically absent from the strict scrutiny review (a presumption of unconstitutionality, for you non-law people out there) of government policies that explicitly classify people by race). The opinion concludes with what I can only imagine Chief Justice Roberts thought was a brilliant insight: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
I should say at this point that I am not typically in favor of quota-based affirmative action...not in secondary education, anyway. However, I personally would have upheld the system used in Michigan's undergraduate program that was found unconstitutional by the Court (Gratz v. Bollinger- racial minorities were automatically assigned 20 of the 100 points necessary for admission at U of Michigan; the court found this approach was not narrowly tailored to the interest in student diversity).
Whatever my ever-evolving feelings about "affirmative action" (I use quotes because that term is used to describe a whole range of programs that approach the issue differently), I feel that achieving diversity in public schools is not just a compelling governmental interest- it is an essential governmental interest. The Court makes a series of presumptions in its opinion that betray a debilitating lack of knowledge about the realities of urban education. First, the Court suggests that Seattle schools could engage in the kind of "holistic" review employed by Michigan Law School. I'm sorry, but Seattle public schools have over 45,000 students. Let's just say that there are about the same number of students in each grade. This means that every year they are looking at school preferences for almost 4,000 students (most likely more, because it's probable that similar to most other urban districts, they have far more freshman than sophomores, juniors or seniors). While Michigan Law received a similar number of applications, application review is the sole function of the Michigan Law School admissions department. What makes the Court think that Seattle Public Schools have the time or the money to create a department who specializes in conducting a holistic review of applications completed by 8th graders??? Moreover, having struggled to get my own students to turn in a simple list of 5 places where they would like to intern, I can only imagine what potential difficulties would lie in trying to get 4,000 8th graders to complete an extensive application for the high school of their choice. Beyond that, the Court praises Michigan's process as allowing for diversity in non-racial capacities: life experience, talents, etc etc. What other "diversity" are 8th graders going to be able to demonstrate? The only students with compelling different experiences will be those whose parents had enough time and money to sign them up for advanced oboe classes or send them to France for the summer.
The final statement in the opinion by Roberts could only be written by someone like him: a well-educated white man who has never been aware of his race. His stance reminds me of Steven Colbert's consistent facetious statements of "I'm colorblind. I don't see race, but people tell me that I am white." Colbert's joke, which I'm sure is lost on many, is quite telling. The only people in this country who have the luxury of being "colorblind" are people who are white. We don't feel the need to check a box on applications or talk about what color we are, because society doesn't force us to be aware of it. That is because society affords us opportunities because of what we look like, as opposed to denying us opportunities on this very same basis. I find it incredibly ironic that over time, the Supreme Court has managed to wield the equal protection clause against the very groups of people whom it was meant to protect, and has now re-interpreted it to protect white people against the ills that might befall them if we afford preferences to minorities. I mean, Barack Obama is president. Clearly we have moved way past racism in this country. I recently heard a story about a studio executive nixing a project about a young black man dealing with challenges of racism. After the pitch, the exec said "I mean, with Barack Obama in the white house, is this story even relevant anymore??" Never mind the fact that in several studies about teacher mobility, student race is the largest predictor of whether new teachers will leave their current teaching assignment. One study I reach by Eric Hanushek (if you are interested, contact me and I will get you the article) found that teachers with 3-9 years of experience who moved from urban to suburban schools in Texas were, contrary to the prevailing opinions, taking a pay cut rather than a pay raise. Among those teachers who moved schools within the district, the average teacher moved to a school with substantially higher student achievement and substantially lower percentage of minorities and students qualifying for free lunch. For white teachers, initial placement in a school with a high percentage of minorities resulted in a much higher likelihood of exiting the district or exiting teaching altogether, when compared to white teachers placed in a school with a lower percentage of minorities. To induce teachers to stay in such situations, Hanushek's study estimated that a 10 percent increase in the number of black students would have to be accompanied by a 10 percent increase in pay, which is, as a policy matter, obviously both financially and politically infeasible. To step back, and in order to not misrepresent this study, the authors suggest that they do not know whether these factors (student race and achievement) are functioning as proxies for other factors which cause teacher exit, such as discipline and safety problems. I would argue, though, that we ought to conclude the same thing regardless: that student race is, either implicitly or explicitly, affecting teacher behavior. Even if these measures are "proxies" for discipline and student behavior, that raises other issues: why are these students "allowed" to behave this way? When I was teaching, I frequently felt that some horrendous student behaviors were accepted in my school because of what the students looked like.....that the administration, acting not out of bigotry but white guilt (which can be, at times, equally if not more damaging because it runs under the surface rather than out in the open) allowed students to behave in ways that they never would have tolerated if our students had been white.
So what is the role of the law in all of this? The narrow way in which the Court has permitted race to be used as "remediation" (which only really applied to the mandated post-Brown integration and later court consent decrees dictating targets for those districts who dug in their heels about integrating) and as an interest in "diversity" is so detrimental to the improvement of public education. Race still matters. Period. It is no secret that it is difficult to keep good teachers in schools that have a high percentage of minority students, and that generally, schools with a higher percentage of minorities have less resources and opportunities than schools that are majority white. Whether that is the result of teachers acting on explicit racial biases or the product of societal expectations filtering into the way a school functions is irrelevant. What matters is that school racial composition is highly correlated to student achievement, and for the court to ignore equal educational opportunity as a compelling governmental interest is antithetical both to the purpose of the equal protection clause and the Constitution itself. We can not force people to live near people of another race, but school districts should be allowed to combat residential segregation through school integration.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
$57 vs. $24,000
This might be a sprawling post, but it's going to cover a lot of things that I feel like need to be said.
First, I am trying to buy a new car. While this is seemingly wholly unrelated to the achievement gap and education generally, I promise I will get to the connection. I have good credit (probably right around 700), I'm enrolled in law school (there's supposed to be earning potential in this, right?) and have a part-time job where I make somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 gross a month. I have more than adequate student loans to cover my living expenses, and almost the entire purpose of the part-time job is to pay for a car. I'm not being greedy or profligate here...I just want something that works and will last 5-7 years. I've already been ridiculed by quite a few people because I am considering getting a model without a radio and with hand-crank windows and manual locks. (Those "luxuries" run about $1200, in case you were wondering). So at the dealership, I was told that it was probably going to be an issue to get me a loan. I happen to be in the fortunate position that my parents are willing to co-sign for me. But this circumstance has led me again to reflect on the relative positions occupied by people during this "recession"/"credit crunch"/"crecession" (I am not making that last one up....I heard it on NPR). I am not going out on a limb in saying that most low income people don't have the greatest credit in the world. Many are living on high interest credit cards, and fall victim to such "deals" as the pay-day loan or, my new favorite: the H&R Blocks that pop up in Harlem around tax time offering your "tax rebate anticipation loan." You too can have money now and pay twice as much as you should for it later. The institutional economic structures in this country are every bit as responsible for cyclical poverty in this country as the schools, and I think that there is room to address both of these problems simultaneously.
This thought first struck me when I was reading an article in the Economist last year. I like the Economist...it's nice to get a non-American perspective on the world from time to time, and I think they are generally pretty balanced in their coverage. But like almost all other periodicals in this country, they too were briefly obsessed with what Barack Obama's "meteoric rise" meant for "Black America" (as if we can really put such neat and convenient labels on groups of people). The article that struck me most can be viewed here. It talks about how among black teenage males, it is "cool" to be dumb, the role of the family unit in the continued struggle of black americans, and how on average, black males make .70 on the dollar compared to whites. While all of this is depressing and relevant, the fact that struck me the most was this: when comparing the average net assets of white familes in the bottom income quintile to black families in the same income quintile, whites had $24,000 compared to only $57 held by blacks. FIFTY SEVEN DOLLARS. If you were not convinced that there is something racially motivated going on at a systemic level in this country, I hope that figure moves you a bit. With $57, you can not buy a house. You can not buy a car. You are not able to save for your child's education, and you are certainly not going to be able to retire on social security alone. There is a crisis in financial acuity among low-income individuals in this country, particular black americans. Building assets and savings are the foundation of escaping from an impoverished situation...if you can pass something on to your children, or give them some support as they venture out on their own, they are all the more likely to be able to provide more for their own children, and so on and so on. So what is the source of the disconnect? Why are whites in this income quintile able to put some money away or cultivate some assets while blacks are not? In this country, we like to ignore the role of family history in determining your future, and there was this tiny little thing called slavery, and when it ended, the government decided not to provide the newly freed slaves with any assets with which to start their lives. This present day $57 in assets shows that we haven't made very good headway in this country in helping overcome the detriment created by this American atrocity. This also brings me back to my quest for a car loan. Everything I know about finance and money management, I know from my parents. I benefit from the fact that my parents have a mortgage, have owned multiple cars, have Roth IRAs, invested money to help pay for college, etc etc etc. The "secrets" to financial success are held by the haves and never transferred to the "have nots." This stuff isn't taught in school....people learn money management from their families, and their friends and their friend's brokers. The role of schools and education in this process is minimal. At my (public) high school, the only class on personal finance was looked upon in a disparaging way and was seen as reserved for those kids who were going nowhere. They dealt with balancing check books but really went no further. The real deal with money management starts when you meet investment bankers....who wants a one semester class in high school when you can make friends at college who will work for Goldman Sachs? Even as the effects of this financial crisis continue to stifle the economy, and people seem to feel "sorry" for those poor i-bankers who aren't getting that year end bonus they are typically accustomed to, we seem to forget who is really feeling the pain here. I can still get a loan because my parents will help me. People in the lowest income quintile can't. In the process of trying to protect their limited self interests, banks have created a chokehold on the economy that is squeezing those who are worst off (who, by the way, tend to be the main force behind our consumption-driven economy, but let's just put that little piece of the puzzle aside for the moment) while those best off moan and complain about how things will never be the same. So I guess you can't have three BMWs anymore and will only be able to retire with one beach house instead of two. But the worst off among us, who never learned the skills of financial management and had no savings to speak of before this crisis hit are now in the position of having the same nothing they had before and even less ability to get the predatory loans they were counting on to make ends meet before. Wall street and those associated with it have a lot of work to do. But in the mean time, schools (particularly schools in low income areas, but really, schools everywhere) need to institute a comprehensive curriculum that really teaches kids about money and finance in a practical and meaningful way. This shouldn't be seen as remedial curriculum; it's a means of providing access to opportunities....and isn't that what education is supposed to be about?
First, I am trying to buy a new car. While this is seemingly wholly unrelated to the achievement gap and education generally, I promise I will get to the connection. I have good credit (probably right around 700), I'm enrolled in law school (there's supposed to be earning potential in this, right?) and have a part-time job where I make somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 gross a month. I have more than adequate student loans to cover my living expenses, and almost the entire purpose of the part-time job is to pay for a car. I'm not being greedy or profligate here...I just want something that works and will last 5-7 years. I've already been ridiculed by quite a few people because I am considering getting a model without a radio and with hand-crank windows and manual locks. (Those "luxuries" run about $1200, in case you were wondering). So at the dealership, I was told that it was probably going to be an issue to get me a loan. I happen to be in the fortunate position that my parents are willing to co-sign for me. But this circumstance has led me again to reflect on the relative positions occupied by people during this "recession"/"credit crunch"/"crecession" (I am not making that last one up....I heard it on NPR). I am not going out on a limb in saying that most low income people don't have the greatest credit in the world. Many are living on high interest credit cards, and fall victim to such "deals" as the pay-day loan or, my new favorite: the H&R Blocks that pop up in Harlem around tax time offering your "tax rebate anticipation loan." You too can have money now and pay twice as much as you should for it later. The institutional economic structures in this country are every bit as responsible for cyclical poverty in this country as the schools, and I think that there is room to address both of these problems simultaneously.
This thought first struck me when I was reading an article in the Economist last year. I like the Economist...it's nice to get a non-American perspective on the world from time to time, and I think they are generally pretty balanced in their coverage. But like almost all other periodicals in this country, they too were briefly obsessed with what Barack Obama's "meteoric rise" meant for "Black America" (as if we can really put such neat and convenient labels on groups of people). The article that struck me most can be viewed here. It talks about how among black teenage males, it is "cool" to be dumb, the role of the family unit in the continued struggle of black americans, and how on average, black males make .70 on the dollar compared to whites. While all of this is depressing and relevant, the fact that struck me the most was this: when comparing the average net assets of white familes in the bottom income quintile to black families in the same income quintile, whites had $24,000 compared to only $57 held by blacks. FIFTY SEVEN DOLLARS. If you were not convinced that there is something racially motivated going on at a systemic level in this country, I hope that figure moves you a bit. With $57, you can not buy a house. You can not buy a car. You are not able to save for your child's education, and you are certainly not going to be able to retire on social security alone. There is a crisis in financial acuity among low-income individuals in this country, particular black americans. Building assets and savings are the foundation of escaping from an impoverished situation...if you can pass something on to your children, or give them some support as they venture out on their own, they are all the more likely to be able to provide more for their own children, and so on and so on. So what is the source of the disconnect? Why are whites in this income quintile able to put some money away or cultivate some assets while blacks are not? In this country, we like to ignore the role of family history in determining your future, and there was this tiny little thing called slavery, and when it ended, the government decided not to provide the newly freed slaves with any assets with which to start their lives. This present day $57 in assets shows that we haven't made very good headway in this country in helping overcome the detriment created by this American atrocity. This also brings me back to my quest for a car loan. Everything I know about finance and money management, I know from my parents. I benefit from the fact that my parents have a mortgage, have owned multiple cars, have Roth IRAs, invested money to help pay for college, etc etc etc. The "secrets" to financial success are held by the haves and never transferred to the "have nots." This stuff isn't taught in school....people learn money management from their families, and their friends and their friend's brokers. The role of schools and education in this process is minimal. At my (public) high school, the only class on personal finance was looked upon in a disparaging way and was seen as reserved for those kids who were going nowhere. They dealt with balancing check books but really went no further. The real deal with money management starts when you meet investment bankers....who wants a one semester class in high school when you can make friends at college who will work for Goldman Sachs? Even as the effects of this financial crisis continue to stifle the economy, and people seem to feel "sorry" for those poor i-bankers who aren't getting that year end bonus they are typically accustomed to, we seem to forget who is really feeling the pain here. I can still get a loan because my parents will help me. People in the lowest income quintile can't. In the process of trying to protect their limited self interests, banks have created a chokehold on the economy that is squeezing those who are worst off (who, by the way, tend to be the main force behind our consumption-driven economy, but let's just put that little piece of the puzzle aside for the moment) while those best off moan and complain about how things will never be the same. So I guess you can't have three BMWs anymore and will only be able to retire with one beach house instead of two. But the worst off among us, who never learned the skills of financial management and had no savings to speak of before this crisis hit are now in the position of having the same nothing they had before and even less ability to get the predatory loans they were counting on to make ends meet before. Wall street and those associated with it have a lot of work to do. But in the mean time, schools (particularly schools in low income areas, but really, schools everywhere) need to institute a comprehensive curriculum that really teaches kids about money and finance in a practical and meaningful way. This shouldn't be seen as remedial curriculum; it's a means of providing access to opportunities....and isn't that what education is supposed to be about?
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Was it all just a crisis of confidence?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/education/23gap.html
"Provocative" yes. Definitive, no. But it is worth exploring, and if the impact is enduring, it would be wonderful. I am also curious about how the specific performance broke down by level of educational attainment (as in, did the performance of the high school students improve in the same way as the performance of those with a college education? with PhDs?). I need to know more about the design of this study before I can get too excited about it.
"Provocative" yes. Definitive, no. But it is worth exploring, and if the impact is enduring, it would be wonderful. I am also curious about how the specific performance broke down by level of educational attainment (as in, did the performance of the high school students improve in the same way as the performance of those with a college education? with PhDs?). I need to know more about the design of this study before I can get too excited about it.
Friday, January 23, 2009
"Well, 80% of the teachers there have PhDs, and that just won't be true at a public school"
I've been thinking about writing this blog now for a while, and I just overheard a conversation that made the decision for me. So you can expect a lot of ranting and raving from here on out, as well as perhaps a few constructive criticisms and suggestions on what should be done in the massive, ambiguous and now seemingly all-inclusive field of education.
I was sitting in the coffee shop, really trying not to eavesdrop like usual and do my contracts reading. But instead I was distracted by a conversation next to me. A young-ish woman (lets say 30) and a somewhat older man (lets say 50) were having a conversation about the educational opportunities available to her child. She was asking about quality of instruction, types of opportunities, visiting schools, etc....all the things that a parent should probably do when making educational choices for their child. Except that her child was 2, and most of her questions pertained to tracking him into the best high school. She expressed concern about how if he was accepted to so and so competitive elementary school, x school ended at grade 6 and then there would be a 3 year gap before high school, and where would he go. After all, her husband went to Loyola and he really wants their son to go there. To which her companion said that her husband "really needed to do his research," extolling the virtues of private schools, naming some posh schools in LA and saying "Well, 80% of the teachers there have PhDs, and that just won't be true at a public school." I feel the need to remind you, at this juncture, that the child in question is TWO. The woman seemed to be very concerned about this revelation, and worried that somehow she and her husband may be accidentally dooming their child to a life of misery or failure.
Contrast this to last night, when I listened to a podcast of This American Life from September about Geoffrey Canada. For those of you ("you" being perhaps no one at this point, but let me humor myself and pretend I have an audience) who don't know who Mr. Canada is, he is the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone located at 125th and Madison, and his mission is to send all 10,000 Harlem children to college. He has furthered this goal by creating several charter schools, and most recently, a program called "Baby College," which he started when he realized that his middle and upper class neighbors were providing significantly different opportunities and activities for their small children (ages 0-3) than low income families Harlem. See, what these middle-class families knew that seemingly was not know in the inner city was that the development of a small child's mind is critical for their future success. Hence "Baby Einstein" and all other manner of educational toys, games, and yuppie money making ventures. On average, according to a Kansas City study a child growing up in a family on welfare hears only about 13 million words by age 3. His or her peer in an upper income family hears 43 million (see this study). Mr. Canada thought this was a problem, and with the weight of some significant studies that show the lasting impact of early educational interventions (see for example the Perry PreSchool study), he developed Baby College which seeks to educate Harlem parents about the things they can do to give their child the same advantages and interactions that are typically present in middle to upper income households.
I didn't learn anything new from the podcast....I was already familiar with Mr. Canada's work and the vast disparities in language acquisition in children in low vs. high income groups. But hearing this conversation between two white, presumably (since they were talking about 13 years of private schooling, not to mention college) upper class individuals brought the urgency of Mr. Canada's quest back into focus. The conversation that I overheard is not what I think all people should aspire to be. Competitiveness in pre-school placements is, quite frankly, revolting. But it brings to the surface a larger point: upper class people have the luxury (yes, luxury) of spending an afternoon now and many more afternoons over the course of the next few years, planning their child's future and making CHOICES that they think will most guarantee their precious darling's success. This is not a luxury available to most parents in Harlem. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the public, neighborhood schools in Harlem are not as good as the public schools in Westwood...and yet this woman felt that Westwood's elementary schools were not an option. I'm not advocating for vouchers, nor am I promoting unlimited proliferation of charter schools. I'm just saying that something is not right here. There are issues of choices, and there are also issues of getting a dialogue started about how to help lower income parents start to have these conversations, and a dialogue also about how to get options to them, and help them make those choices a reality. When you can make fairly accurate predictions about a child's ultimate educational attainment based solely on where he or she lives, then we need to admit to ourselves that the American dream of equal opportunities and "anyone can make it" is a myth. Just something to think about. Discuss amongst yourselves.
I was sitting in the coffee shop, really trying not to eavesdrop like usual and do my contracts reading. But instead I was distracted by a conversation next to me. A young-ish woman (lets say 30) and a somewhat older man (lets say 50) were having a conversation about the educational opportunities available to her child. She was asking about quality of instruction, types of opportunities, visiting schools, etc....all the things that a parent should probably do when making educational choices for their child. Except that her child was 2, and most of her questions pertained to tracking him into the best high school. She expressed concern about how if he was accepted to so and so competitive elementary school, x school ended at grade 6 and then there would be a 3 year gap before high school, and where would he go. After all, her husband went to Loyola and he really wants their son to go there. To which her companion said that her husband "really needed to do his research," extolling the virtues of private schools, naming some posh schools in LA and saying "Well, 80% of the teachers there have PhDs, and that just won't be true at a public school." I feel the need to remind you, at this juncture, that the child in question is TWO. The woman seemed to be very concerned about this revelation, and worried that somehow she and her husband may be accidentally dooming their child to a life of misery or failure.
Contrast this to last night, when I listened to a podcast of This American Life from September about Geoffrey Canada. For those of you ("you" being perhaps no one at this point, but let me humor myself and pretend I have an audience) who don't know who Mr. Canada is, he is the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone located at 125th and Madison, and his mission is to send all 10,000 Harlem children to college. He has furthered this goal by creating several charter schools, and most recently, a program called "Baby College," which he started when he realized that his middle and upper class neighbors were providing significantly different opportunities and activities for their small children (ages 0-3) than low income families Harlem. See, what these middle-class families knew that seemingly was not know in the inner city was that the development of a small child's mind is critical for their future success. Hence "Baby Einstein" and all other manner of educational toys, games, and yuppie money making ventures. On average, according to a Kansas City study a child growing up in a family on welfare hears only about 13 million words by age 3. His or her peer in an upper income family hears 43 million (see this study). Mr. Canada thought this was a problem, and with the weight of some significant studies that show the lasting impact of early educational interventions (see for example the Perry PreSchool study), he developed Baby College which seeks to educate Harlem parents about the things they can do to give their child the same advantages and interactions that are typically present in middle to upper income households.
I didn't learn anything new from the podcast....I was already familiar with Mr. Canada's work and the vast disparities in language acquisition in children in low vs. high income groups. But hearing this conversation between two white, presumably (since they were talking about 13 years of private schooling, not to mention college) upper class individuals brought the urgency of Mr. Canada's quest back into focus. The conversation that I overheard is not what I think all people should aspire to be. Competitiveness in pre-school placements is, quite frankly, revolting. But it brings to the surface a larger point: upper class people have the luxury (yes, luxury) of spending an afternoon now and many more afternoons over the course of the next few years, planning their child's future and making CHOICES that they think will most guarantee their precious darling's success. This is not a luxury available to most parents in Harlem. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the public, neighborhood schools in Harlem are not as good as the public schools in Westwood...and yet this woman felt that Westwood's elementary schools were not an option. I'm not advocating for vouchers, nor am I promoting unlimited proliferation of charter schools. I'm just saying that something is not right here. There are issues of choices, and there are also issues of getting a dialogue started about how to help lower income parents start to have these conversations, and a dialogue also about how to get options to them, and help them make those choices a reality. When you can make fairly accurate predictions about a child's ultimate educational attainment based solely on where he or she lives, then we need to admit to ourselves that the American dream of equal opportunities and "anyone can make it" is a myth. Just something to think about. Discuss amongst yourselves.
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