Half Changed World

peer effects

It doesn't take an economist to tell you that just one or two really disruptive kids in a class can absorb a disproportionate share of the teacher's time and make things harder for everyone.  But two economists, Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra, have studied the question of just how much effect does a disruptive kid have on the outcomes of the other students in a class.  Here's the paper, here's a less technical version of it, and here's a Freakonomics post about it.  (From last summer, although the paper is dated this month -- I guess there was a pre-publication version circulating.) 

They were able to link school records with court records for domestic violence cases, and looked at both the children of the parents in the DV cases, and their classmates.  And they did find worse school outcomes -- poorer grades and more disciplinary infractions -- among the children who had classmates from these troubled families than among their peers in other classes and even than the same children in other years.

This is elegant research, but the findings shouldn't shock anyone.  Catholic schools pay their teachers worse than public school teachers (even when they're not nuns) and have bigger classes, but their not-so-secret advantage over the public schools is that they can kick the troublemakers out.  The Great Expectations School isn't great literature, but it's a brutally honest report by a rookie teacher of how the classroom management challenge just kicked his ass and made his teaching skills pretty much irrelevant.

This also once again makes me wonder how much of the success of places like KIPP is due to selection.  I don't think they can expel kids any more easily than the regular public schools, but making parents go through even modest hurdles to enroll their kids probably winnows out a lot of the most troubled kids.  And is that ok?  If the lifeboat is sinking and they can rescue some of the kids, but not all, isn't that better than letting them all drown?

But what are you going to do with those kids?  Carrell and Hoekstra's methodology reminds us that these "troublemaker" kids aren't bad seeds -- they're kids with pretty messed up home lives, who are probably used to violence as a way to solve problems, even if they're not being hit themselves.  If anyone deserves help, they do.  But it's probably too much to ask of overwhelmed teachers that they be the ones to provide this help, while also trying to teach 25 other kids to read.

I don't know about the flu, but the hysteria is catching

There are only about 100 cases of swine flu confirmed in the US so far, but nearly 300 schools have shut down to prevent its spread.  Fort Worth, Texas has ONE student with the swine flu, but has shut down the entire system for 10 days.  This, in a country where nearly half of workers don't have any paid sick days, and many of those who do have paid sick time aren't allowed to use it to care for a family member.

But, not to worry, Vice President Biden "said he hoped U.S. employers 'will be generous' in allowing parents to take time off to keep their children home if there has been a confirmed case of flu at their school.”

“Fort Worth officials urged parents not to send their children to day care or 'any venue where groups of children may gather' and pleaded with the employers and the general population to make it possible for parents to accommodate this request.

"This is indeed an example of how the community can rally to support the health and well-being of students, their families and the District," schools superintendent Melody Johnson told reporters.”

I can write a report or take a conference call from home, but you can't cook and serve a restaurant meal, clean a hotel room, or care for a sick patient from home.  So what's going to happen?  Some parents will bring their kids to work.  Older kids may be left at home alone unsupervised.  Some parents will stay home, lose wages, and maybe not be able to afford to get their prescription filled this month, or will fall a little further behind on the electric bill.  But no one will point fingers at Ms. Johnson when a 12 year old left home alone sets a piece of toast on fire.

N has had a nasty cough the last few days, but no fever.  I'm 99.9 percent sure that it's allergies, but we've kept him home anyway, because there's not much downside to him missing a couple of days of preschool.  But there are real costs to closing schools, and I think it's hysterical overreaction to do so without any evidence that this is worse than an ordinary flu.

Summertime and the learning is easy?

I added some clarifications to yesterday's post since I don't think I quite captured Gladwell's point about extreme IQ and achievement.  And I'll take the discussion about why the upper class kids showed more learning gains in the summer over here.

Let's start with the data first.  The data cited is from a study by Karl Alexander, who looked at the reading scores of a cohort of 650 first graders from the Baltimore public school system.  He took advantage of the fact that Baltimore administered the California Achievement Test to the same kids both in June, at the end of the school year, and in September, at the start of the next year.  This let them see what happened over the course of the school year, and what happened in the summer.  Here's a nice summary of the research, from the National Center for Summer Learning.

So, what's going on?  First, as Alexander notes in the summary, we're talking about Baltimore City Public Schools.  So the "upper class" kids are only relatively advantaged -- they tended to have college graduate parents, but to be basically middle class. 

Second, even given that, there's a real difference in what the kids did over the summer.  As Alexander writes:

"I don’t want to break it down into a checklist, but some differences seemed relevant. For example, better-off children were more likely to go to the library over the summertime and take books home. They were more likely to engage in a variety of enrichment experiences such as attending museums, concerts, and field trips. They were more likely to take out-of-town vacations, be involved in organized sports activities, or take lessons, such as swimming or gymnastics lessons. Overall, they had a more expansive realm of experiences."

But there's still the question of why the upper class kids would learn MORE (per month) over the summer than during the school year.  My guess is that they're reading more over the summer when they get to pick what they read than they do during the school year when it's assigned.

Updated:  Sorry, I'm clearly not providing enough detail.  The years when there was the disproportionate amount of learning over the summer were after 3rd and fourth grade:

Learning gains for upper class students in Baltimore

Grade	1	2	3	4	5
Increase during school year	60	39	34	28	23
Increase during summer following	15.4	9.2	14.5	13.4	N/A
Summer/year	4	4	2.3	2

TBR: Outliers

This week's book is Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell.  It's his attempt to look at the environmental and cultural factors that affect why some people succeed and others fail, and to blow apart the idea that individual genius is responsible for success.

It's a quick read (probably took me less than 3 hours front to back) and each section is reasonably entertaining, but it doesn't quite hold together as an overall book or argument.

In particular, the middle section, where he argues that Korean airlines have a terrible safety record because of the cultural pressures for subordinates to defer to their supervisors, seems to have little connection to the rest of the book.  And while it's possible that Gladwell is correct in his claim that the reason that Asian cultures respect hard work is that rice is more work to grow than wheat or corn, he sure doesn't present enough evidence to convince me.

Gladwell is correct that Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun) and Bill Gates were extraordinarily lucky in having the opportunity to program a lot when very few people had access to computers at all.  And there's no doubt that practice is necessary (if not sufficient) for being good at programming.  On the other hand, the reason that Gates is one of the richest men in the world has very little to do with his coding skills. (He didn't write the code for DOS, after all.)

I thought the discussion of the relationship (or lack thereof) between extreme intelligence* and success** was the best part of the book.  In particular, Gladwell tells the story of an early 20th century researcher who identified 1470 highly gifted California elementary school students, and was shocked to learn that only a small fraction of them were particularly successful later in life.  Moreover, there was a huge correlation between economic class and success (not exactly shocking to me, but still sad).  Gladwell cites Lareau and argues that the upper class kids know how to manipulate systems to their advantage, but I'm not convinced --I'm pretty sure that "concerted cultivation" wasn't around in the 1920s.

In the last part of the book, Gladwell returns to the question of education and class, and argues that the intensive school setting of KIPP lets poor kids spend enough time learning to catch up with their middle class peers.   Among other things, he cites the data that shows that much of the growth in the gap between poor and upper class kids during elementary school is not about what happens during the school year, but that the wealthier kids continue to gain over the summer, while the poor kids stagnate, or even slip backwards. I've heard that before, but had never seen the underlying data before -- what struck me the most is that for the upper class kids, they gained about half as much over the 3 month summer vacation as they did over the 9 month school year.  In other words, per month, the upper class kids learned more during vacation than during school. 

*When I initially wrote this post, I omitted the word "extreme" which significantly fails to represent Gladwell's argument.  He cites Arthur Jenson (whom he calls an "IQ fundamentalist") as saying that the four cutoffs that matter for IQ are 50, 75, 105, and 115 -- and that for real world applications, the difference between having an IQ of 115 and 150 or between 150 and 180 is less important.

**Jennifer asked what constituted success.  Here's what Gladwell writes "But few of his [Terman's] geniuses were nationally known figures.  They tended to earn good incomes -- but not that good.  The majority had careers that could only be considered ordinary, and a suprising number ended up with careers that even Terman considered failures.  Nor were there any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses.  His fieldworkers actually tested two elementary school students who went on to be Nobel laureates -- William Shockley and Luis Alvarez -- and rejected them both.  Their IQs weren't high enough... if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same family backgrounds as the Termites -- and dispensed with IQ altogether -- we would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses."

What does the PTA pay for?

I can't find the link now, but last week I heard a story on NPR about a PTA that was buying paper for the teachers to use in the classroom, with money they had been saving for new playground equipment.  The reporter was shocked that this was necessary, but I went to public schools in New York City in the 1970s, and I definitely remember the school running out of paper (for the mimeos!) by late in the term.

Laura at 11d linked to this article about a Long Island school district where parents raised over half a million dollars to preserve school sports and other extracurriculars after the school system's budget was turned down.  Laura wonders if this undermines school equity.  I'm less worried about that situation, where the largess seems to have been spread across the whole district, than the situation you sometimes see where parents raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for specific schools, sometimes hiring extra teachers.  They're willing to do it, because it's still cheaper than private school.

Our school PTA's total annual budget is about $25,000, with the largest fundraisers being sale of Sally Foster giftwrap, a silent auction, and a craft fair.  When the economy gets better, I want to look into putting the big items for the auction online and marketing them outside the school community -- we get some really nice donations, but there's just not enough people in the school who can afford them for them to go for more than the minimum bid.  But we sweat the small stuff too.  We had an election day bakesale, and we collect General Mills box tops.

What do we pay for?  The two biggest expenses are teacher workshops and training, and buses to let each class go on two field trips a year.  We buy some computer equipment for the school (smart boards) and books for the school library.  We bring in visiting authors, and give all the teachers small stipends to cover some of the things they buy for the classroom, which otherwise come out of their pockets.  It's not a ton of money, but it makes life measurably better for the school.

Oh yeah, and we also pay for cheese sandwiches for kids who don't have lunch money.  Unlike in some places, this hasn't been a big deal.  My guess is that it's because slightly more than half of the school qualifies for free or reduced price lunch, so the kids who wind up getting cheese sandwiches aren't particularly poor.  They're either kids whose families are having sudden hard times and haven't gotten the paperwork in, or they're kids who just forgot to bring in lunch money.  We do send a note to the parents, asking them to reimburse the PTA and giving them info on how to apply for school lunches. 

(By contrast, with hindsight, I'm horrified at the memory of the oh-so-progressive elementary school I attended, where only the kids who ate "hot lunch" sat in the cafeteria, and everyone else ate in the auditorium.  The hot lunch was notoriously awful, and I'm sure that everyone who ate it was getting the free lunch.  Sigh.)

What does your PTA pay for?  And do you think it's appropriate?

PTA report

My blogging time tonight got consumed by putting together the PTA newsletter. 

I'm not sure whether anyone reads the newsletter, as most of the content is repeated by single-topic flyers included in the take-home folders.  But it's a chance to provide a bit more advance notice of events and to thank the volunteers who make everything happen.

I picked this job to volunteer for because it's easy to do on my own schedule.  But I don't feel like it's allowed me to get to know as many people as I'd like, since I get all the info for it by email.  Volunteering at the election day bakesale was much better for that.

The hot topic right now is the school schedules.  For years, a group of parents have been campaigning to rejigger the schedule so that the high school students don't have to get up so early.  There's a bunch of research that says that teens really are biologically wired to stay up late.  But, the same buses do multiple routes a day, so if the high schools start later, most of the elementary schools will start earlier.

I don't really personally mind if the school starts at 7.50 (as would happen under the proposed plan).  The school is right on my way to work, so I'd probably drop the boys off in the morning on my way out, rather than having them waiting for the bus at the crack of dawn.  Before we moved, D's school started at 8 am. 

But the principal is really concerned about it.  The worries that she expressed are:

• older kids not being home in the afternoon to watch younger kids
• teachers who live a long way out not being able to make it in on time and so transferring to other schools
• overall, need to provide coverage for a longer day (since it will start earlier but aftercare will have to run just as late).

I don't really know how this will play out.

In somewhat-related political news, Arne Duncan says he's going to send his daughter to public school, but in Arlington, not DC.

TBR: Whatever It Takes

On the plane last week, I finally had the chance to read Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America.  Tough is a reporter for the NY Times Magazine, and this is his expanded coverage of the Harlem Children's Zone, which he's reported on over the years.  Obama has said he wants to create 20 Promise Neighborhoods, modeled after the HCZ, so I thought it was important to read the book.

HCZ is an attempt to change the odds for kids in a poor neighborhood by providing an extensive range of services, everything from parenting classes to preschool to charter schools to summer programs.  What makes it different from most other attempts is:

• it tries to cover kids from birth through college, on the assumption that no program lasting just a few years is going to keep kids on the right track in the face of overwhelming obstacles.  This is in many ways an implicit rebuke to the extravagant claims sometimes made for  Head Start or  home visiting  programs.
• it tries to reach enough kids -- ideally it would be at a scale to reach every kid in the target neighborhood -- to change the culture of the neighborhood for the better.  Canada explicitly argues that the well regarded KIPP charter schools encourage students to separate themselves from the community as a whole

Tough doesn't hide that he's a believer in the HCZ approach.  In general, the book is overwhelmingly positive about Canada and the HCZ, although a long section is devoted to the struggles at the charter middle school they operate, and the choice to give up on the first class of students after two years of disappointing results. 

I think HCZ is a fascinating experiment, but Whatever It Takes isn't quite a fascinating book.  It's a solid book, well-reported, with a decent popular summary of the academic literature behind the theory.  But, fundamentally, the story of HCZ is really only in its first chapter, with no one knowing how it will turn out.  Geoffrey Canada's personal story is quite intriguing, but Canada himself has already written that book.

If you like to listen to the radio, I might suggest the coverage of this book on This American Life or Talk of the Nation instead.

TBR: Mother on Fire

This week's book is Mother on Fire: A True Motherf#%&ing Story about Parenting, by Sandra Tsing Loh.  I had high hopes for this book, as I generally enjoy Loh's essays in The Atlantic, in particular those about how she sent her kids to public school in Los Angeles and the world didn't collapse. 

Unfortunately, Loh's decision to send her kids to public school is the conclusion of this book, not the beginning.  Most of the book is an extended meditation on how terribly unfair it is that two artists don't earn enough to send their kids to fancy private schools.   I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic.

The book is based on her one-woman show, and it does have some funny moments.  My favorite was her discussion of how she suddenly became famous when she was fired from public radio for cursing on the air.  But it's not a good sign when, of the four humorous quotes on the back of the jacket, three of them show up in the first chapter.  And making fun of the pretentiousness of ultra-expensive liberal private schools is shooting fish in a barrel. 

TBR: Three Cups of Tea

This week's book is Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.  It's the story of how Mortenson's failed attempt to climb K2 led to his receiving hospitality from the residents of a small village in Pakistan and to a promise to build them a school.  This promise eventually led him into founding the Central Asia Institute (CAI) and building dozens of schools in the hardest to reach corners of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It's a pretty amazing story, as Mortenson started out as a climber and a night nurse, without any particular expertise about that part of the world, building schools, or raising money.  But he plunged ahead anyway, and learned what he needed to do along the way.  And he did it more or less in obscurity, until 9/11 suddenly made a lot of people start to pay attention to that particular corner of the world.  Mortenson and Relin argue persuasively that the CAI's work does a great deal to create peace, in part by showing people that the US can do things other than drop bombs, but more significantly by providing an alternative to the radical madrassas that have filled the gaps left by the lack of government schools in much of Pakistan.

While it's an amazing story, I can't say it's an amazing book.  It focuses directly on Mortenson, without ever pulling back to provide a greater context about the culture and history of the area.  And while his successes in building the schools are improbable unto the point of miraculous, if you pick up the book, you probably know already that he's going to build the school, he won't get killed driving off a road, neither the Taliban nor the CIA will leave him in a jail cell to rot, etc.  So, while it was clearly very suspenseful to live through all of this, it's not that suspenseful to read.  My sister in law gave it to me last spring, and I read about half of it right away, and then got bogged down in the middle.

But read it anyway.  Because you'll learn a little about that part of the world, and because you'll regain some hope about one person's ability to make a difference.  And you'll be inspired to give what you can to CAI.  And to tell our elected officials to live up to their promises to help rebuild Afghanistan.

First day of school

It was a pretty uneventful first day of school around here.  Both boys are continuing at the same schools (preschool in N's case) that they attended last year, so there was relatively little drama.  And the school bus even showed up on time.

It was an odd feeling for me to be standing around at the "parents' coffee" at N's preschool, looking at the teary-eyed parents of the younger children, and realizing that this is our last year of preschool. 

Some of my previous posts on the topic:

• 2004
• 2005
• 2006 and follow-up
• Much to my surprise, I seem not to have posted on the first day of school last year.  But I did write about the first PTA meeting of the year.

interesting odds and ends

• I thought this article on the growth in Fairfax school enrollment was interesting  It says enrollment is up by 2,500, in part due to a shift of 1,000 students from Prince William county.  Some hypothesize it's due to Prince William's crackdown on undocumented immigrants; others suggest it's due to the high price of gas.  It's likely that both contribute, and may even affect the same families. I wonder what the typical shifts between the two counties are.

• Via Yglesias, I ran into this study arguing that redshirting of kindergarteners leads to reduced high school completion, since it means that kids have completed fewer years of school when they reach the age where they're no longer required to attend school.  This doesn't make sense to me, as it's overwhelmingly upper-middle-class families who hold their kids back a year, but lower-income kids who drop out as soon as they're legally able to.  Anyone want to take a crack at it?

• I love Alan Blinder's idea of stimulating the economy by buying back polluting clunkers for more than book value.  One of my pet bugaboos is that when people talk about "green jobs" they always focus on the sexy futuristic stuff like solar and wind power, when you could get a lot more bang for the buck subsidizing new boilers and more insulation in low-cost rental housing.  (As long as renters pay for the utility bills, it almost never makes economic sense for landlords to make those investments on their own.)

summer time

My current dilemma: if we let the kids stay up late because they don't have to go to school in the morning, the window of time between when they go to bed and when I fall into bed becomes increasingly narrow.  When am I supposed to blog?

Just before bed, D showed us the digital slideshow of the first grade year. Overall, I'd say he had a good year.  I don't think he was challenged, but he didn't seem to be bored either.  He made friends, improved his self-control, decided that he likes science, and improved his writing.

The school said that you can submit letters about your child's "learning style" to help them make class placements for next year.  We're not sufficiently hooked into the parents network to know who the second grade teachers are, and if there are code words that we should be using to try to avoid certain ones.  (And yes, I sometimes think that I'd be more hooked in if I were the at-home parent, but I'm not sure that's really true.)  So, I guess we'll have to actually write about his learning style. The main thing I'd like him to learn is persistence through difficulty, and I sure don't know how one goes about teaching that.  So far, video games seem to be our best bet.

Incentives

Via Kathy G at the G Spot, I found this debate between Gary Becker and Richard Posner on the NYC experiments about providing cash incentives to parents and older teens to reward school attendance, parent-teacher conferences, and good grades.  This is part of Bloomberg's broader anti-poverty strategy, something that I had been meaning to discuss for a while, so I'll jump on in.

Becker has what is probably the classic economist's take:  "boys and girls as well as adults respond to incentives."  While recognizing that there may be challenges with targeting the program correctly, he thinks that it's worth trying the experiment to see if it work.  I basically agree with this -- I think it's funny that people get horrified about "bribing" kids to do well in school, but aren't upset when workers get bonuses for good performance.

Posner comes up with a number of nitpicks of the program, but his fundamental concern is that poor attendance is a symptom, not the disease: "Paying children to attend school will reduce truancy rates some but without improving school quality, and perhaps without improving the education of the children receiving the payments."  (He thinks that school vouchers are the solution, but that's another story.)

Interestingly, this has a lot in common with Margy Waller at Inclusionist's concern that the Bloomberg anti-poverty initiative assigns the blame for poverty to poor people's bad choices.  If the schools are fundamentally falling down at their job of educating kids, giving the kids money for passing tests is like giving me money to make a jump shot.  Similarly, low-wage workers have high job turnover in large part because that's how the jobs are designed.  But, that said, MDRC has been studying programs designed to improve job retention and advancement.  And so far, one of the most effective programs has been one in Texas, which provided financial incentives to former welfare recipients who were employed full-time.

I agree that I worry about the framing of these payments as all about overcoming poor people's bad values.  You can also tell a convincing story about how the financial incentives make it possible for a worker who is paid by the hour to take off from work to go to a parent teacher conference, or wait in a crowded medical clinic to get the kid immunized, or let the parent keep their job by hiring a more reliable babysitter, but that's not how these payments are being covered in the media.

Kathy notes that behavioral economics also raises the issue that there are some times when cash incentives can have perverse effects. In Ariely's language, a financial incentive can shift things from a social setting to a market setting.  So people were less likely to help someone load a car when offered an insultingly low wage than when asked to do it out of altruism, and were more likely to pick up their kids late from child care when the center instituted a late fee.  That's one of the reasons I won't tie my kids' allowances to their picking up their rooms or helping out around the house -- it would implicitly allow them to choose to forgo the allowance and not pitch in.  But I'm not convinced that this analogy applies to the incentives in the experiment.

When I look back on all the crap I learned in HS...

Christine tagged me to come up with a list of five classes that I wish they'd taught (or I'd taken) in high school.  Here's my list, in no particular order:

1. An economic history of the United States.  It wasn't until I got to college and took a class on the American Labor Movement that the Jacksonian era and the bank wars made any sense to me.
2. A class in US history that got past World War II.
3. A class in robotics. 
4. A sex ed class that used Cycle Savvy as the text book.
5. Spanish.  I took 6 years of French, but and then a year of college German, but am not fluent in either.  I'd have far more chances to use Spanish.

The most useful classes I've taken (at various levels of schooling) are:

1. Typing.  (6th grade -- on manual typewriters -- I hated every minute of it, and am so glad that they made me take it.)
2. American Government (high school.  Not because of the content, but because the teacher made us write papers that could not be longer than 3 pages, double spaced.)
3. American Labor History (college)
4. Microeconomics (grad school)
5. Statistics (grad school)
6. Group Dynamics (grad school)

The most useless classes I've taken are:

1. Drafting (mandatory at my high school)
2. "Energy shop" (You had to take a shop, and didn't get to choose which one.  The only part I remember is making a wind powered goose ornament)
3. Yiddish (took a term of it in college, mostly because my favorite teacher was teaching it)

I'm not going to tag anyone, but post a comment if you feel like taking this one up.

My father is right

After reading yesterday's post, my dad emailed me to say that he thought the question of whether young adults are better off than their parents depends mostly on what level of education each generation has attained.  Specifically, he argued that a young adult with a college degree is likely to be better off than her parents if she's a first generation college student, but not if her parents also went to college.

Let's look at the possibilities. 

• If your parents went to college, and you went to college, they are probably earning more than you are.  (Obviously, there are exceptions when the parent suffers from a disability, or chose to be a starving artist, or got laid off, or when the kid joined Google or Microsoft at just the right time, but on average, 55 year old college grads earn a lot more than 25 year old college grads.  To be precise, in 2006, the average 25-34 year old with a bachelor's degree in 2006 earned $40,276 and the average 55-64 year old with bachelor's degree earned $50,397. 
• I wasn't convinced that young college graduates were necessarily earning more than their non-graduate parents but I looked up the numbers, and my father is right.  The average 55-64 year old with a high school degree and no college education earned  $29,283 in 2006.  While there are some plumbers and union mechanics who earn good money with just a high school degree, there's not enough of them to affect the median.
• Young high school graduates are also earning less than their HS-grad parents -- the average 25-35 year old with a high school degree and no college earned just $25,0354.
• And, to fill out the options, the HS grad child of college-graduate parents is clearly downwardly mobile.

[Sources PINC-03-part 37 and PINC-03-part 91.  All figures cited are medians.]

My dad's point was that because the fraction of the population going to college has increased so much, a significant portion of college graduates are from families where their parents didn't go to college. And they're doing better than their parents.  At least in terms of income -- they also have more college debt. And, as lots of people commented yesterday, their parents probably own a home that has appreciated significantly since they bought it, while in a lot of the country, homeownership is still out of reach for most young people, even those with good incomes.

Also, check out Figure 4 in this report.

Fairfax school board

It occurred to me earlier today that tomorrow is election day and I still hadn't figured out who I was voting for in the school board election.  There are 8 people running for the 3 at-large seats, and I didn't have a good sense for the issues or the personalities.  It's a non-partisan election, but the parties do endorse candidates.

So I started looking at the endorsements.

The Post endorsed Moon, Braunlich, and Cooper.
The teacher's union endorsed Hone, Hunt, and Moon.
The Connection newspapers endorsed Cooper, Hone, Moon, Hunt, and Braunlich.
SLEEP (which wants Jr High and High Schools to start later) endorsed Hunt, Hone and Moon.
Fairfax Democrats endorsed Moon, Hone and Raney
Stop Redistricting endorsed Braunlich, Hunt, and Raney.

After reading the endorsements and looking at some of the websites, I think I've made my choices -- Moon, Hone, and Cooper.

I haven't figured out why the Dems endorsed Raney -- his website just sounds like he's drunk the management consulting kool-aid (everything is couched in terms of the "business case).  I seriously considered Hunt, as I do think it's important for the board to be more than an echo chamber for the schools administration, but just couldn't get past his letter to all the principals recommending ex-gay videos.

And I don't really know all the issues around redistricting, but it seems like a mistake to take it off the table as an option.  Yes, redistricting can be traumatic.  But boundary lines weren't handed down to Moses on tablets.  I'm almost certainly biased from our experience at D's old school, but my perception of anti-redistricting advocates is that they're trying to keep what they have, and tough luck to anyone else.

TBR: A Class Apart

This week's book is A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America's Best High Schools, by Alec Klein.  Klein, a Washington Post journalist, spent a year at Stuyvesant High School, one of New York's competitive math and science high schools.  He tells the stories of a handful of students and teachers as the school year progresses, occasionally cutting back for a bigger-picture look at the questions such as the value of gifted and talented education and the huge under-representation of black and Hispanic students.

In topic and approach, A Class Apart bears a striking resemblance to another recent book, The Overachievers, in which Alexandra Robbins reports on three semesters she spent with students at Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County.  (Both authors attended the schools they wrote about.)  But I whipped through A Class Apart in a couple of days, while I gave up on The Overachievers after finishing less than 100 pages in the three weeks the library allowed me.  So what's the difference?

• I also went to Stuy, so I had more of a personal interest in the book.  It was interesting to see what things had changed (more racial divisions in the student body, far more organized prepping for the entrance exams) and what hadn't (Sing!, Ms. Lorenzo, the existence of an assistant principal who would approve schedule changes for the desperate).
• Klein included teachers' experiences which made for a greater variety of stories.
• Klein clearly felt a great deal of affection for the students, the teachers, and for the school as an institution.  I didn't get that from Robbins.
• I think Klein is just a better writer than Robbins.

Klein's book doesn't really have a thesis -- it's just descriptive.  To the extent that it has an argument, it's a plea that there ought to be more schools like Stuyvesant.  By that he means schools that push bright kids to excel, but he also means schools where parents are involved (sometimes to a fault) and schools where students feel a sense of ownership (again, sometimes to a fault) and teachers and administrators are willing to bend the rules in the interest of learning.

PTA

I went to the first PTA meeting of the year this evening.  I'll admit it was nice to attend a PTA meeting where all the participants couldn't fit at a single table.

I did find it a bit ironic that the evening's presentation was on handling stress, with one of the main suggestions being to do less.  Now where would the PTA be if everyone listened to that message?

Teacher autonomy

I'm still on the email list for D's old school, because I still care a lot about the students and the school.  Like many other Northern Virginia schools, it failed to make "adequate yearly progress" (AYP).  But because it's failed in the past, it is now in the fourth year of "Title I Improvement Status."  What does that mean?  Here's the official Alexandria public schools explanation:

"The sanctions dictate that ACPS must take one of six corrective actions.  The Superintendent chose the first option and as a result, has made significant staffing adjustments in several key areas. In addition, this year a school oversight committee will (1) monitor the implementation of JHAA's three-year school improvement plan, and as necessary, modify it to better address the needs of students;  (2) verify weekly that teachers are effectively teaching the division's curriculum and following the pacing guides; (3) analyze a variety of data to inform instructional practices and remedial programs; (4) provide staff development opportunities that focus on bolstering student achievement;  and (5) ensure JHAA staff and parents are aware of the committee's decisions."

I have to say, number 2 on that list made me shudder in horror.  The best teachers I know all modify the curriculum to respond to children's interests, or take advantage of a special event in the community.  This kind of pressure makes it harder for them to do things like this. 

And I just found out from another parent that D's kindergarten teacher from the start of last year (before D was switched into a different classroom), who started every day with children gathered around him listening to a story, was not invited to return this year.  Because he paid more attention to the children than to the curriculum.  Sigh.

I've spent a lot of time over the last 6 months reading about what makes jobs good or bad, for a paper on job quality.*  One of the things that struck me is how much the ability to control how you do your job, what I call "worker voice" in the paper, matters to people's evaluation of whether they're happy at work.  I'm afraid that we're systematically making teaching a worse and worse job in that respect.

*Executive summary here.  If you're curious as to what I sound like, here's a podcast interview with me talking about the report.

School time

School doesn't start here until the day after Labor Day.  Both boys are starting new schools, so we're all a little twitchy waiting to see how everything works out.  D's noticed that he's shorter than kids who are younger than he is, and is a bit worried that kids will tease him about it.  I'm trying to tell him both that it's perfectly normal to be a little nervous about starting a new school, and that it will be fine, and for some reason he seems to think that there's a contradiction inherent in the idea that everyone's scared of it but there's nothing to worry about.

The most emailed article today on the NYTimes website is about teacher turnover, and how school districts are scrambling to fill their slots.  In case you thought this was limited to poor districts, go visit Jody, who's got some stories to tell about teacher and principal turnover.  Having lived through D having 3 teachers (plus literally more short-term subs than I could count) last year, I've got my fingers crossed for some stability this year.

The Washington Post on Sunday had an opinion piece by Patrick Welsh, a local HS English teacher, on the battles over gifted and talented classes in Alexandria.  Apparently they've cut down enormously on the number of kids classified as G&T, especially in the more affluent schools.*  The problem is that there are lots of kids who don't meet the new cutoffs, who are still bored/underchallenged in their regular classes, which (claims Welsh) are mostly focused on making sure that low-income minority kids are passing the SOLs.  He includes a quote from Superintendent Perry that's fairly horrifying if accurate:

"To allay parental anxieties [Welsh has to be tongue in cheek here], Superintendent Rebecca Perry has said that the students at the top of the regular classes -- i.e., the white kids who didn't get into TAG -- will help to 'challenge, mentor and coach' the students struggling with the SOL material."

Interestingly, today's Post has an article on how gifted and talented students are the ones being left behind under NCLB.  It's based on a research paper that actually argues that both the very advanced students and the very behind ones get less attention as a result of the NCLB requirements.  The paper argues, plausibly, that schools have huge incentives to devote their resources to the students who have a shot at passing the standardized exams, but aren't guaranteed to do so, rather than those who definitely are going to pass or those who are definitely going to fail.  It's the same argument for why campaigns focus on swing states, rather than New York or Utah.

Welsh cites the Carol Dweck work on Mindsets that I've written about here before to argue that the gifted and talented label is destructive both to the kids who get put in those classes and the ones who are excluded.   He concludes that the goal should be to challenge "all our kids, all the time."  I agree with him in theory, but think it's easier said than done.  And sometimes easier done with differentiated classrooms, rather than with one teacher trying to cover the full range of skills and learning styles.  Especially with all those novice teachers who are standing in front of classrooms.

*I don't know if it's a real contrast, but the complaints I'm hearing in Fairfax are in the opposite direction, about the "watering down" of gifted and talented classes.  Who knows?

Selection and schools

I wanted to pick up on Dave S' last comment about the role of peer groups and selection in schools. There's no doubt in my mind that KIPP schools and their like have a real advantage over the local public schools in their areas, in that their students have parents who value education enough to send them to KIPP.  That doesn't mean that they're not providing value-added -- in most cases, the local schools were failing with those exact same students.  But it does mean that if you extended the school day at all high-poverty schools and otherwise copied the KIPP model, you probably wouldn't get the same results.

And our old school suffered from negative selection -- it's not just that the parents hadn't made a deliberate effort to send their kids there, but that any parent who didn't want their kid to attend it could opt out.  And this was true long before NCLB, since it was a "focus" school and Alexandria schools allow parents to opt out of any of the focus schools (as well as out of the schools with a year-round calendar). So there was a real shortage of involved parents.  For example, when the school finally acknowledged that D's class was having a new teacher in February, and invited us in to meet her, I was the only parent to come to the event.

Some of this is about class and race -- JHAA's student population is 80 percent low-income and 92 percent non-white, and that alone would scare off some white-middle class parents even if it were the best run school in the city (and it's not).  (See this paper for a discussion of how parents "may prefer poorly run schools with good peer groups over those
that are more effective but enroll worse students" and The Failures of Integration for data on how rare it is for whites to live in majority non-white areas.)

But from listening to people around the neighborhood, I think that highly involved black parents were even less willing to send their kids to the school than highly involved white parents.  With a few exceptions (including the PTA president), they were less confident that their kids would do fine academically regardless of the problems with the school, and so less willing to take chances. 

Alexandria's wealthy enough, and supportive enough of education, that the school had plenty of resources even without the support of an active group of parents -- it's not like DC, where PTA fundraising supports things like music teachers.  But I do think the lack of a core group of involved parents makes a difference, in things from the availability of volunteers to pull events together, to the amount of energy that teachers need to spend on maintaining order in the classroom.

I don't know what can be done to reverse this pattern -- just raising the test scores won't do it.  The district for the school is so spread out -- some say gerrymandered -- that very few people see it as their neighborhood school.

****

On a related note, we just registered D for his new school.  As proof of address, they wouldn't take utility bills -- they want to see the deed to your house, your rental agreement, or a notarized letter from the owner or leaseholder that you live there.  I'd never heard of such a policy.

Best bang for the buck?

Someone posted to some of my local email lists this Forbes article on best and worst school districts for the money.  Our old district, Alexandria, VA, ranked last on their list.  John Porter, who got promoted out of being HS principal into an administrative position (one of my pet peeves about the district) is quoted blaming the poor graduation rates on the large number of foreign-born students.

I'm somewhat skeptical about the methodology of the article (I don't get why they only looked at the districts where most school funding comes from property taxes, and they admit that the graduation rate statistics are inconsistently reported).  It would be interesting to look at the demographics of the top ranked districts, which I suspect are generally quite affluent.  And Forbes almost certainly has an ax to grind.

But as we've discussed here before, I do think that Alexandria is probably not getting performance consistent with the spending levels.  Montgomery County certainly serves plenty of immigrants, and is ranked #5 on the Forbes list.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

At D's end of the kindergarten year ceremony, the kids performed a little song about all the things they had learned during the year, and were each called upon to say what they want to be when they grow up.

D wants to be a scientist who builds rovers.  He explained that a rover is a kind of robot that goes to other planets and if anything bad happens to the rover, it means you can't send people.  (Yes, the Mars imax movie did make an impression on him, why do you ask?)

Of the other kids in the class who didn't totally mumble their answers, the choices were:

• a soldier who drives a truck (said with truck driving action)
• a football player
• air force (said with plane flying action, which looks a lot like truck driving action)
• nurse (said with a simpering "Doctor, here are your instruments")
• ballerina (said with a pirouette)
• a cheerleader (said with a jump)
• a cheerleader (also said with a jump).

I found this intensely depressing.  Yes, I know they're 6 years old, and "when I grow up" is further away than "once upon a time."  But it felt like they're pulling from an awfully limited deck.  I don't know; maybe I wouldn't have felt so strongly about the exact same answers coming from a middle-class group of kids.

I think my dad still has hanging in his office the drawing I did when I was about that age of the different tools that a doctor uses, labeled in an adult hand, but clearly to my dictation (it says things like "this is the pointy part that shoots out.")  And no, I'm not a doctor.  But it was within the realm of what I could imagine.

Laura at Geeky Mom has a series of posts up about why she's not a scientist.  There's a lot of good evidence that girls tend not to take the prerequisite courses math and science in high school, shutting off options before they've really considered them.   That wasn't me. 

In high school, I took calculus, Honors Bio, AP Chemistry (you had to dissect a cat in AP Bio, and that really wasn't something I wanted to do.)  And then I went to college, and took the minimum 3 classes in hard math and science needed to graduate.  I was still interested in the topics, but where in HS I could take math and history and English and French and a science and economics and still have room for pottery, in college, you couldn't take more than 4 or 5 classes a term.  And the introductory level science classes were notorious for being both boring and difficult.  And up a hill a 15 minute walk from the rest of campus.  By then I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a doctor.  So I signed up for the "great books" set of humanities classes and never looked back. 

Kindergarten blues

Jody and Phantom Scribbler and chicago mama all have thoughtful posts up about the NYTimes article about redshirting kindergarteners.

D's birthday is in January, so he's in the middle of his class age-wise, one of the smallest kids, one of the most advanced academically.  One of his good friends, with a July birthday, is doing "junior kindergarten" this year -- but he has some sensory issues, and I know his teacher were worried about his ability to stay on task.  It's not clear how much easier he's going to find it next year, though.  N's birthday is in October, so he'll be nearly 6 before he starts Kindergarten.  If I didn't know that other parents were likely to be holding their summer-birthday kids back a year, I might be in the school office, arguing to let him start a year early.   I was 4 when I started school (November birthday, December cutoff) and didn't suffer.

I think the points the author made about the class issues are real ones -- redshirting kindergarteners is definitely an upper-middle class phenomenon -- but am unconvinced that it matters in the scheme of class inequities in education.  For one thing, I'm doubtful that many poor kids are going to be sitting in the same classrooms as those redshirted kids.  EdWeek has a new tool out that lets you generate reports for any school district in the country on graduation rates and school segregation levels. I took a look at the one for Alexandria and was shocked to see that its school system scores a .78 (on a 0 to 1 scale) for racial segregation and a .52 for socioeconomic segregation.  Those numbers are far higher than average for either Virginia or the country as a whole, but what makes them really shocking is that all the segregation is in the elementary schools -- there's only one high school (TC Williams, of Remember the Titans fame) and two middle schools.

And we're not talking separate but equal either.  My friend who has her kindergartener in one of the predominantly white, middle-class, active PTA schools has been told that her son has been identified as gifted and talented (even though the pull out activities don't start until 3rd grade) and invited to come in for a meeting to discuss the curriculum.  I'm quite confident that if any such process were happening at D's school, we'd have heard about it.  We haven't.

A year ago, in my post about the decision to send D to this school, I wrote " What I worry about is whether they'll learn that school is something to be endured."  I do think this fear has somewhat come true.  D's bored a fair amount of the time at school -- his biggest complaint is that it takes up too much of his day.  And the whole class often loses privileges when some kids misbehave.  D's counting days to the end of school.  And frankly, I am too.

Moving?

As I indicated a couple of weeks ago, we may be moving.  We made an offer this evening.  We gave the seller 48 hours to respond, but I expect that she will accept: it's a fair offer in a buyer's market, and she likes us.  If she accepts, posting may become very erratic for the next month or so while we deal with all the logistics and get this house ready to put on the market.

Everyone we talk to seems to be assuming that we're moving because we're unhappy with the local school.  It's certainly a factor, but not the only one.  Overall, I'd say that D's had a pretty good year at school.  He's learned to read (to the point that I find myself having to explain newspaper headlines), to count up to a thousand or so, to color between the lines.  He considers almost all of his classmates to be his friends, and was heartbroken last week when he was too sick to go to school to perform his role in the Black History Month skit.  (He was supposed to be the manager who hires Jackie Robinson.)

But we do have some frustrations with the school.  D's teacher has been out sick for two extended periods.  That's not something that the school can control, but it would be nice if they had sent a letter home saying something about it, rather than leaving me to interrogate D each day about whether she was back.  When I commented to the principal that it was hard on the kids for her to miss yet another day for training right after she had been out for 3 weeks, the principal got all defensive about it, instead of agreeing that it was unfortunate.  None of the kids in D's class got awards (other than attendance) at the first honors assembly, because the teacher had been out and hadn't submitted them, so the principal said that they'd have a separate assembly just for that class.  It didn't happen.

I'm also frustrated by the lack of community.  Only a very few kids ever play on the playground after school.  The PTA is essentially inactive.  And in spite of D's popularity -- kids rush up to him at school to give him hugs -- he's been invited to exactly one playdate and one birthday party by kids from school.  (My guess is that this is a class thing -- as Lareau discusses, working class and poor kids are far more likely to play with the kids next door than to go to an arranged playdate.)  And this might be ok if there were other neighborhood kids for the boys to play with, but there doesn't seem to be much of that either.  T and I finally figured out that, having chosen a place to live based largely on its convenience and access to the metro, we're surrounded by other people who chose a place to live largely on its convenience and access to the metro.  And our attempts to build community through drop-in-dinners have been a flop.

We're also bursting at the seams a little bit.  I feel more than a bit silly and self-indulgent saying that, given that my parents raised 3 children to adulthood in an apartment smaller than this house, not to mention the vast majority of people in the world who live in smaller spaces.   But the idea of having a place to put the boys' bikes that isn't in the middle of the living room is really appealing.

Wish us luck.

You blog so I don't have to

Here are some links that readers have recently sent me:

• Parenting as a wiki (e.g. everyone's got an opinion and they're all different.)
• Investment banks woo employees with shorter hours
• A new Wharton program for women with MBAs and other graduate degrees returning to the workforce after a 2-7 hiatus.  (And yes, it does say women.  I don't know what they'd say if a SAHD applied.)
• A blog post from Prarie Mary on how educational outcomes on reservations were affected by casino money.
• An article on the growth in SAHDs in Scotland.

And don't forget to send your comments on the FMLA.

What it takes

The NY Times Magazine cover story yesterday was on the disadvantage faced by low-income students and what it would mean to take seriously the idea of "no child left behind."  It's an interesting article, pulling together a lot of different strands of research and thinking.  I want to try to pull the different strands apart, though, because I agree with some of the assumptions behind the article, but not all.

1)  The first claim is that low-income children enter school at a significant disadvantage compared to middle-income children.  I think there's pretty much broad consensus behind this one.  Anyone care to argue it?

2) Next, Tough argues that this disadvantage is primarily due to differences in parenting styles, especially the use of language.  There's not a consensus on this one.  On the one hand, there are those (cf. The Bell Curve) who argue that the differences in performance are larguely genetic.  I think that's wrong -- there's good evidence that genetics is a strong driver of differences in IQ among middle- and upper-class children, but that poor kids often don't get to develop up to their full potential.  On the other hand, there are a lot of liberals who would reject Tough's claim that parenting style matters more than the material deprivation that poor kids experience.

(Tough doesn't entirely dismiss the role of poverty, but concludes that parenting matters more: "True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey.")

As Jal Mehta points out at TMPCafe, this isn't just an academic dispute -- it has real policy consequences.  If you think that material hardship is the main reason poor children are lagging, it points you in the direction of child allowances and other income redistribution schemes.  But if parenting matters more, just giving poor parents more money won't solve the problem.  You either need to somehow change their parenting practices (possibly through some form of home visits), or compensate for them (through programs like Head Start and redesigned schools).

I think the evidence that there are class-based differences in parenting practices is strong (I've written about Lareau's Unequal Childhoods here before), but am not quite willing to write off the role of money. 

3)  The next question is whether poor kids are entering school so far behind that they couldn't succeed if given schools with the resources of the average American public school.  Tough suggests that they can't, because there are so few examples of schools that are succeeding with overwhelmingly poor, minority populations.  I'm not convinced that makes his point -- as Kozol argues in Shame of the Nation, it's essentially an experiment that has never been tried.  The best argument for Tough's position, I think, is that the small number of low-income kids in predominently middle-class schools have generally not done particularly well.  (And I think the strongest part of NCLB is the attention that it has forced school administrators to pay to that achievement gap.)

Tough argues that the kinds of schools that have succeeded -- and are needed for widespread success -- provide three key components: extended school days and years, highly structured lesson plans, with frequent testing to make sure that the desired skills are being aquired, and an explicit focus on affecting the behavior and values of the students by "teaching character."  He writes:

The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.

But is this a better education?  It's certainly a more costly education, once you burn through the supply of true believers who are willing to subsidize such schools by working extra hours for no extra pay.

But I'm reminded of Scrivenings' post about his horror at a New York Times story about a kindergarten class that is operated along such lines.  While some parents would welcome the eased demand for after school care, I think an equal number of middle-class parents would be outraged if their kids' schools added another 3 hours of classes a day, especially if that time were spent on core reading and math rather than "enrichment" activities.  I know that my biggest concern about sending D to a school with lousy test scores was fear that they'd adopt a drill-and-kill approach.

And I know a lot of good teachers resist such a highly structured approach, prefering the flexibility to follow the children's interests and take advantage of teachable moments.  Kozol argues that schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods get caught in vicious cycles, where they get the least experienced teachers, so the administrators rely on scripted lessons, which makes the schools even less attractive for creative teachers.

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Edited to add that none of this says that any individual child can't succeed.  There are certainly kids who overcome mediocre parenting and indifferent schools to achieve great things.  And there are poor parents who devote all their limited resources to making things better for their kids.  All this is about averages.

TBR: Kindergarten Wars/Ivy Chronicles

Today's book review is a special two-for-one deal: two books on the crazy world of private elementary school admissions, one non-fiction, one fiction.

The nonfiction book is The Kindergarten Wars: The Battle to Get Into America’s Best Private Schools, by Alan Eisenstock. (Tip of the hat to Jennifer at MamaNoire who recommended it a while back.) Eisenstock was on the board of directors of his kids’ private school, and after years of watching the admissions process, decided to write a book about it. He interviewed a bunch of families across the country, and writes about the experiences of four composite families as they move through the process, from the first tours of the campuses until they receive the admissions letters and decide which schools to attend.

The main message of the book is that the process is nuts. The schools have far fewer slots than applicants. They can rule out some kids who are emotionally or mentally delayed (private schools are not required to accept children with disabilities or other special needs), but that still leaves them with far too many applicants. So, they wind up deciding based on arbitrary factors such as the gender breakdown of the kids who have sibling preference, and the characteristics of the parents. And because the only way to for the parents to justify the high cost of private school and the pain of the applications process is to fall in love with the schools that they’re applying to, they wind up convinced that their kids’ lives (or their own) will be notably diminished if they don’t get in.

Overall, Eisenstock sends a somewhat mixed message about the private schools. On the one hand, he seems to uncritically accept the parents’ claim that they have given their public school options a fair consideration and found them lacking. He even loads the dice by talking about Pastor Sweetie Williams, whose son, Eliezer, was the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the state of California for inadequate funding of public schools. (Williams appears for a few pages and then disappears from the book – I’d love to have heard more of his perspective on the applications process.) But then, in the end, Eisenstock suggests that the children who go through this process wind up burnt out and exhausted by the time they finish high school.

As it happened, while I was reading The Kindergarten Wars, I happened to notice The Ivy Chronicles, by Karen Quinn on the book swap shelf in my office. I picked it up, and finished it off in a few days worth of commutes. The heroine of the book, Ivy Ames (like Quinn herself) is a downsized corporate executive who reinvents herself as a private school admissions consultant. The back of the book proudly quotes a review from the New York Post that claims that The Ivy Chronicles "picks up where The Nanny Diaries left off." Well, this book makes the Nanny Chronicles look subtle and deeply characterized. Early in the book, Ivy needs to make herself a crib sheet to keep her clients apart with shorthand tags (the mobster, the lesbian couple with the adopted child in a wheelchair, the wall street mogul) and I found myself flipping back to that page with alarming frequency.

As you’d expect, the Ivy Chronicles ends with everyone getting what they deserve, including Ivy herself finding true love, while her most obnoxious client goes to jail for trying to bribe the FDA to approve a drug in order to influence kindergarten admissions. Over the top? Implausible? Yes. Except that we live in a world where Jack Grubman really did get an analyst at Saloman Smith Barney to change his rating of AT&T to get his kids into preschool. (As a writing teacher once told me, "In a world this strange, who needs fiction?")

In her comment, bj suggested that parents who aren’t going through the process are unlikely to read The Kindergarten Wars. I’m not sure that’s true. One audience for the book is certainly parents of pre-school aged children, who want to learn what to expect. But I also think there’s an audience of people who would never apply to private schools, and read the book so they can shake their heads at those goofy rich people. The scary thing is both audiences will find the Ivy Chronicles fills the purpose almost as well.

As for me, what I took away from the books is that no school is so good as to justify the pressure that some of these parents put on their children. No 5 year old should see that their parents’ happiness and self-esteem depends on how well they perform. I may yet someday apply to private school for my kids, but if I do, it will be knowing that the application process is a crapshoot and largely beyond my control. And that they’ll be just fine whether they get in or not.

Failure to launch

Via Shawn Fremsted at Inclusionist, I ran across this article by Theda Skocpol reviewing two books about the GI bill (free but annoying registration required).   Skocpol notes how unusual the GI bill was in providing assistance to young families:

"But unlike most other U.S. social programs, the G.I. Bill focused its largesse on young adults at just the moment when they were building lives for their families. Usually, we spend money on the elderly, who have earned the nation’s support after a lifetime of work."

The article made me think about Strapped, by Tamara Draut, which I reviewed earlier this year.  Draut talks about how the changes in the economy -- the increased cost of education, housing, and child care -- particularly pinch young adults right when they're trying to start families.

The key point, I think, is that it was the 50s and 60s that were the anomaly, not today.  One of the reasons that, in most of history, men have married younger women is that men were strongly discouraged from marrying until they were able to support a family, and there was no expectation that they'd be able to do at a young age.  Older teens and young adults were expected to work, but they typically contributed their labor or earnings to their families of origin.  And when times were bad, as in the Great Depression, people married later.

So we've got this perverse combination of an economy that all but requires higher education for success (even though a college degree doesn't guarantee a good job, as Lauren will attest), an educational system that is dependent on student loans, and an expectation that young adults should be able to make it on their own.  There's no historical precedent.

Opportunity and Education

"At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities."

Anyone who believes that opportunity -- the ability of children to have a future that isn't defined by their parents' socio-economic position -- is an important value should read Isabel Sawhill's issue brief on Opportunity in America: The Role of Education.  The whole volume of The Future of Children on Opportunity is worth reading, but the issue brief is only 5 1/2 pages, so there's no excuse for not reading it.

Sawhill begins by discussing how, contrary to the public image, the US does not have particularly more intergenerational mobility than other industrialized countries, and how such mobility is declining over time.  She notes that Americans are quite resistant to more progressive schemes of taxation and benefits, but -- in theory -- are highly supportive of the role of education in creating equality of opportunity.  And then she makes the statement I quoted above: "At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities." 

First, she argues that the K-12 system is generally weak, and "a society with a weak educational system will, by definition, be one in which the advantages of class or family background loom large."  Then she notes that because of the ways that public schools are funded, poor kids go to worse schools than well-off kids.  And finally, she notes that "access both to a quality preschool experience and to higher education continues to depend quite directly on family resources."

Sawhill goes on to mention some possible ways to address these deficiencies.  This part of the essay is not as convincing.  I'm not sure I think all of the proposals are good ideas, and I'm fairly confident that they don't add up to enough to eliminate the systemic problems that Sawhill has identified.

But go read the brief, because the description of the problem is spot-on.  And then come back and we can discuss whether it's possible to change any of this.

School update

D got his first report card, or "interim progress report" today.  All Ps, for "progressing in understanding" or something like that.  The skills measured are things like letter recognition, being able to hold a book the right way, understanding the difference between capital and lower-case letters.  In math, they're focusing on pattern recognition and counting tangible objects.

The school has decided to hire an additional kindergarten teacher and have 3 classes instead of 2.  The good news is that this means there will be about 14 kids in each classroom, with a teacher and a full-time aide.  The bad news is that D is one of the kids who will be switching classes, and the new teacher is a total unknown.  I'm trying not to twitch too much about it, particularly since D seems quite undisturbed.  (The long NYTimes article about The Blessing of a Skinned Knee cites Mogel's suggestion that parents "spend no more than 20 minutes a day 'thinking about your child’s education or worrying about your child, period.'"  It seems like a reasonable goal.)

Overall, the person having the roughest time right now in the family is N.  He adores preschool, and has pretty much potty trained himself in the 3 weeks since it started.  But it runs until 1 pm, and D's school lets out at 2.35, and that pretty much kills his nap on preschool days.  Yesterday he was so tired by the time I got home that he couldn't stop crying enough to tell me what he wanted.  (D eventually figured out that he wanted to wear shin guards, for no obvious reason.)

How's school going for everyone else?

Geek high

Tonight our local school board is having a hearing regarding whether the city of Alexandria should allow students to attend Fairfax's selective math and science high school, Thomas Jefferson. 

As I understand it, the argument in favor is that it opens up an opportunity for a few very talented high school students to attend a school where they'll be academically challenged and surrounded by their peers.  The arguments against are that it takes away money from the local school system (as Fairfax charges participating districts more per student than Alexandria spends on average), and that it reduces the number of advanced courses that the Alexandria high school (TC Williams -- yes, there's only one high school for the city) is able to offer, by taking away some of the students who would take those classes.

As I've mentioned before, I attended a similar school, and it was an incredibly valuable experience for me.  The fact that it was normal to be smart, normal to read, normal to study, normal to like learning, was wonderful for me.  I truly never had to deal with BS like this.  I had a ninth grade bio teacher who told me that if I became interested in boys and decided to be stupid she'd wring my neck. And it also protected me from the arrogance of some smart people I've known, who are convinced that they're the only ones with any brains.

I mentioned this to Maggie, who often comments on this blog, and she responded:

Isn't it funny how all of our experiences shape our opinions? I'm sure I
would have enjoyed the intellectual companionship of going to
Stuyvesant, if my parents or I had had any idea that it existed - I was
bored a lot in high school. But I also think that a lot of what I like
about who I am today is the direct result of going to a high school
where there were kids across the spectrum, not just high achievers, and
learning to get along with them while still being a high achiever
myself. I learned how to talk to anyone, about anything, instead of just
burying myself in my books. There are lots of people with lots of brains
out there, but there are an awful lot of brainy people who have a dearth
of people skills.

Maggie obviously had better people skills than me to begin with -- I came out of my shell at Stuyvesant, and think I would have disappeared totally into the world of books in many environments.

That said, the stress level at competitive high schools does seem to have ratched up a significant degree since I went to HS.  I started reading The Overachievers, and it's pretty depressing.  (It's also boring, so I'm probably not going to finish it.)   Maggie said that she's "interviewed so many kids from TJ who are just basket cases that I really, really would be uncomfortable sending my kid there."

Early admissions

I was really pleased to pick up the paper yesterday and read that Harvard has decided to stop its early admissions program.  Yes, it's just one school, and yes, as other school admissions directors were quick to point out, it's easy to take the moral high ground when you've got little to lose.  (Harvard could easily select just as qualified a class out of only the people it rejects each year.)  But I do think it changes the terms of the discussion when it's not just people looking in from outside who say "the current system is rotten" but also a major inside player.

James Fallows laid out the basic argument in the Atlantic five years ago, in a story called "The Early Decision Racket."  His major points were echoed by Harvard's president in announcing the decision:

Mr. Bok said students who were more affluent and sophisticated were the ones most likely to apply for early admission. More than a third of Harvard’s students are accepted through early admission. In addition, he said many early admissions programs require students to lock in without being able to compare financial aid offerings from various colleges.

What Fallows also explained -- and neither the NY Times nor Washington Post stories covering Harvard's announcement picked up -- is how the growth of early decision has been driven by the US News and World Report rankings of schools.  The more of your slots that you fill with students who have committed to attending, the fewer total students you need to admit to produce a given size class, and the more "selective" your school appears.  (And Fallows should know where the bodies are buried -- at one point, he was in charge of the rankings.)

Non-binding early action programs -- which is what Harvard used to have, and several of the other very prestigious schools have -- aren't as pernicious as early decision, but I think dropping early admissions entirely sends a much stronger message.  Maybe US News should award bonus points to schools that don't have early admissions.  (I'd love to see the rankings go away entirely, but they're a huge moneymaker for US News, so I'm not holding my breath.)

Update: Princeton joins in.

School roundup

There's been a series of interconnected posts around the blogosphere on how concerned parents should be about less than perfect schools, and I wanted to pull them all together.

I think my post on Debunking the Middle Class Myth started it off, at least in this round.  For anyone who's new here, here's more background on what we're doing, and my worries about our choice.

LizardBreath at Unfogged linked to my post, writing:

"Now, some schools with a poorer student body are objectively worse, but they're worse largely because of the middle-class flight. And the degree to which they're worse seems to me to be wildly exaggerated -- the inner-city immigrant neighborhood school I send my kids to is great."

The discussion there is up to about 300 comments.  Bitch PhD picked up on one of those comments, and recommends to nervous parents:

Try the school you're afraid might be mediocre before you move out to that more expensive suburb, and see if it's really actually better than you think for the particular personality of your particular kid.

This is essentially what we're doing. 

But then Jackie at Esperanza responds:

I want the girls to be in the same school from kindergarten through eighth grade, because switching schools was very hard for me....  I really want my girls to start a school next year and not leave it again until they leave for high school. I want that security and stability for them, because losing it was very difficult for me.

I understand where she's coming from, and agree that I'd rather not keep moving my boys around.  And if D was less socially gifted and adapatable, I might be less willing to take this risk.  But I'm quite confident that he won't be traumatized if we move him in a year or two. 

SuperBabyMama also picked up on Bitch's post, commenting that it's reassuring to know that she's not the only one stressing about school choices.  (And I really hope that her daughter thrives at her new school.)

I think this whole issue ties back to the point that I was trying to make on Monday, about how hard it can be to give up on being a perfect parent.  Knowing that the local school is less than perfect, how can I justify sending my kids to it?  Well, everything comes at a price.

If we opted out of our local elementary school into another one, D would have to ride the bus every day, which would eat into the time he has to play and do other things.  It would be harder for us to be involved with the school.  His friends would be less likely to live nearby, making casual playdates harder.  If all of his friends lived near each other, they might be less likely to make the extra effort to get together with him.

If we moved into a different district, it would almost certainly mean that we'd be further away from public transit.  My commute would be longer, and I'd have less time to spend on everything from being with the kids to reading to volunteering.

There are some really nice private schools in the area, but they're really expensive.  We could maybe afford private school for one kid on my salary, if we gave up on the idea of saving for retirement.  It's pretty hard for me to see how we could afford it for two (although we'd probably qualify for financial aid).  T could go back to work.  I could try to find a higher paying job.  And D would probably feel poor if he went to one of them, because many of his classmates would be better off.

None of these are inconceivable sacrifices, but I'd rather not do them if I don't have to.  But it's almost unheard of for an upper-middle-class American parent to say "Yup, my kid's not going to the best school possible, but I think he'll be ok."   

*******

More for the roundup (I'm going to keep updating this as long as I keep finding relevant posts):

• Jody at Raising WEG has a post on her family's choices and a reaction to an article recommended here.
• Jennifer at Penguin Unearthed reports in on school choice, Australian style.
• Eileen Gale Kugler comments on my post about her book.  Cool.
• Amy at Mamazine is also settling for okay schools.
• Dawn at this woman's work writes about deciding based on your values, rather than your goals.  (Not responding to the other posts in this series, but relevant anyway.)

TBR: Debunking the Middle-Class Myth

Today's book is Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools Are Good for All Kids, by Eileen Gale Kugler.  It was recommended to me by a reader of this blog. Kugler is a parent whose children attended Annandale HS in Fairfax, one of the most diverse schools in the country, and she one by one she knocks down the myths that make parents fearful of sending their kids to such schools (e.g. the best schools are those with the highest test scores, diverse schools aren't safe, etc).

I agree with most of Kugler's overall points, especially her argument that that many of the people who are the quickest to dismiss diverse schools are the ones who haven't set foot in them.  But I can't say that I feel particularly more encouraged about our local elementary school after reading the book.  First, I'm not sure that it counts as diverse by Kulger's standards, as it's about 80 percent one race.  Second, Kugler is careful to say that "well-run" diverse schools can provide an excellent education to all students, and I'm not sure that our school qualifies as well-run.  (This isn't a knock on the new principal, just on the lack of continuity.)

Overall, the major problem with the book is that I'm not sure who the audience for it is.  I have trouble imagining anyone reading it who isn't already convinced of the value of diversity.  And the chapters on what school board members, superintendents, principals, teachers and parents can do are pretty simplistic.

***

Oh, yes, D did start kindergarten today. We did manage to get out the door on time (and I even made pancakes.)  His teacher is an older man with a ponytail who talks to the children in a very soft voice.   D was annoyed that it was pouring this morning when we walked him over, but was happy to sit down in the classroom and say goodbye to us.  In the afternoon, he didn't tell us much about what they did today, but didn't have any complaints.  (When I noticed that he had only eaten one of the two cookies I packed in his lunch box, and asked him why, he explained that by the time he finished his sandwich and the first cookie, it was nap time, but he didn't seem particularly upset about it.)  In his backpack, we found a stack of forms to fill out and return (and yet another version of the supply list).  So far, so good, I guess.

***

I just read Sandra Tsing-Loh's interview on the Atlantic online, which includes this wonderful quote illustrating Kugler's point:

"I found that once we actually got to public school, everything I’d been told about it was wrong. That’s because we’ve gotten to the point now where in my social class—the media class in big cities—not one person I know professionally sends his or her kids to public school. So nobody actually knows what it’s like anymore. So they’re telling each other about a land, like the North Pole, which no one has set foot in."

I'd love to hear anyone in LA's reaction to her "Scandalously Informal Guide to Los Angeles Schools."

k-prep

D is now halfway through his two week "k-prep" session.  He seems to be enjoying it, and has made a couple of friends.  The teachers send little notes home each day saying what he's done that day; their only concern seems to be that he's not eating much of the hot lunch. (what a surprise)  If they're doing any academics, it's with a very light touch, which is fine with me.

The Post had an article on Friday about k-prep.  It was pretty much a fluff piece about how wonderful the program is, touting how it pays for itself by reducing the number of kids who are held back.  I'm a bit dubious about that claim.  The statistic the article cites is that 85.7 percent of participants at the pilot sites were unconditionally promoted to first grade, versus just 80 percent of non-participants.  First, I was sort of startled at how low those numbers are -- how many kids are being retained in general.  Second, I'm pretty sure that this wasn't a random assignment.  While I know they did outreach to try to recruit kids who hadn't had a preschool experience, I'm sure there's a selection bias issue -- parents who send their kids to k-prep are probably more likely to be involved with school, to monitor homework, etc.

School angst

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not entirely sanguine about our choice to send D to the local elementary school.  It didn't help my confidence when I got an email last week telling me that both the principal and vice-principal of the school were leaving.  This means that the school will have its 5th new principal in 6 years.  Not an encouraging sign.

I spent a couple of days freaking out a bit, emailing the local school board members and trying to figure out whether it was too late to get D into a different public school, or even a private school.  I've more or less calmed down now.  The article in the local paper suggests that the principal was reassigned, rather than quit.  Still worrisome, but quite so disturbing.  And I'm hearing generally good things about the new principal. 

Next week is the start of "k-prep", the city's two-week optional kindergarten orientation program.  And just a few weeks later, school starts for real.  Wow.

The Department of Education didn't want you to read this story

As reported in the NYTimes over the weekend, the Department of Education released a report on Friday from a study conducted by the Educational Testing Service, comparing test scores of public and private school students.  While private school students have better scores, on average, the study found that after you control for various school and student characteristics there was no difference between the test scores of public and private school students.

This doesn't really tell a parent trying to pick a school very much.  Among the things controlled for were school size and the composition of the teaching staff, which are precisely the sorts of things that fancy private schools pride themselves on.  And the schools that don't offer these advantages aren't necessarily competing on better educational offerings, but on safety (e.g. that they can kick the troublemakers out) and values.  But it does complicate matters for the privatization advocates who argue that private schools are going to do a much better job with the same population of students and the same resources as public schools.

The most entertaining part of the story is the Education Department's attempt to claim that releasing the report on a summer Friday, without a press conference, wasn't an attempt to bury it.  Yes, this may have been the first day it could have been released.  But if the results had been favorable to private schools, I'm confident that it would have been released in an event at a school where at least some students are attending through vouchers.

School spending

Dave S's comment on my school post -- saying that Arlington county spends $19,000 per student -- sent me googling to look up school spending per pupil in the area.  I think his numbers are a little high -- but only a little.  According to this anti-tax website, the superintendent's budget calls for spending of $17,923 per student in FY 2007.

Another post on the same site sent me to the Washington Area Boards of Education, which puts out this nifty comparison of spending in most of the suburban districts surrounding Washington DC.  According to this site (page 29 of the report), in FY 2006, Arlington topped the local school districts for spending at $16,464 per student, followed closely by Falls Church City at $16,020 and Alexandria $15,871.   Montgomery County and Fairfax County -- the two huge, highly regarded school systems in the area -- come next, at $12,549 and $11,915 respectively.  All of these figures are way above the national average, which is a bit over $8,000

I found this fascinating, because it suggests a) that the high spending levels aren't solely being driven by the overall cost of living in the DC metropolitan area and b) that the systems with the best reputations aren't necessarily those spending the most.  So what's going on? A few things jumped out from the report. Alexandria seems to have particularly low class sizes, especially in the lower grades.  Arlington seems to pay teachers better than average.  Both have lots of small schools, which probably pushes up overhead costs.  Fairfax seems to do a particularly good job of limiting the number of staff who aren't school-based.  (Alexandria seems to have an habit of promoting good principals into system-wide positions, which I think is probably a mistake.) Alexandria and Arlington both have significantly higher proportions of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunches (e.g. low-income families) and higher proportions of English as a second language students than Fairfax does.  It's not in the report, but I know that all Alexandria schools have full-day kindergarten, but only some Fairfax schools do.  I couldn't figure out from the report how they were handling capital costs -- I know that both Alexandria and Arlington have undertaken major renovations/rebuilding of high schools in recent years.

What about DC?  It's not included in this report, but I found a Parents United study that attempted to calculate its spending on the same basis as the surrounding suburbs.  This study suggests that DC spends about as much per student as Montgomery and Fairfax, but serves a much needier student population, and with antiquated facilities that both require much higher utilities and demand more capital investment.

The school post

Last week, in response to my post about the middle class, bj commented "I've been thinking about these issues a lot because we have just made the final step to enrolling our first child in private school" and asked what we were doing about school for our kids.

After an awful lot of agonizing back and forth, what we're doing -- at least for now -- is enrolling D in the public school that we're zoned for.   This is not without some real misgivings.  The test scores are lousy -- it's failing under both "No Child Left Behind" and the Virginia-specific standards.  Something like 70 percent of the students qualify for free lunches.  It's on something like the 5th principal in 7 years. 

But, it's literally three blocks from our front door, so we'll be able to walk D to school and be part of the school community with ease.  The class sizes are very small, especially in the early grades.  The teachers and principal seem enthusiastic and committed.  The city has committed significant resources to the school.  We've talked to some parents we trust who are happy with their kids' experiences.  And we can always try something different down the road if we're not happy with it.

With private school tuitions in the area in the $20,000s and rising, I don't see us trying that route unless we truly find ourselves out of other options.  If we're not happy at this school, we can request a transfer into a different Alexandria school (because ours is a "focus" school, we could request a transfer even if it wasn't failing under NCLB).  Moving is also a possibility, although not one that I'm thrilled at.

Fundamentally, I'm not worried about whether my kids are going to learn to read.  (D is probably going to be reading by the time he starts kindergarten in the fall.)  What I worry about is whether they'll learn that school is something to be endured.

School board election

I spent the evening at a forum for candidates for the local school board.  For some odd reason, Alexandria elects its City Council and School Board on a cycle completely separate from the state and national elections -- every 3 years, in May.  (The official explanation is that the local races would be overshadowed by national ones and wouldn't get as much attention.  The unofficial explanation is that it keeps more control in the hands of the local party committees, by depressing turnout.)

The Alexandria School Board has 9 members, divided into 3 geographic regions.  (This is a compromise between having board members representing specific neighborhoods, and having city-wide elections, which would make it harder for minorities to be represented.)  None of the three current members from my district are running for reelection, so all three seats are open.  There are five candidates running:

• Elliott Branch
• Sheryl Gorsuch
• Sanford Horn
• Scott Newsham
• Eileen Cassidy Rivera

It was interesting to see what everyone had to say.  There wasn't a whole lot of controversy -- everyone supports fiscal responsibility, improved communications, reducing the achievement gap, challenging all students, retaining good teachers, etc.  Everyone agreed that the laptop inititive had been poorly implemented.  No one supported intelligent design.

Overall, I was most impressed by Branch.  I particularly liked what he had to say about individuation in the classroom.  I'm torn between Rivera, Gorsuch and Horn for my other two votes.  Rivera's bio is impressive, but she did such a good job of staying on message with her three priorities that I didn't get as much of a sense of her overall.  Horn's a teachers, which is a plus for me.  His literature talks a lot about improving school lunches, but he didn't mention it at all.  Gorsuch seems like a classic PTA lady, but showed an impressive understanding of details.  Newsham didn't seem to have any specific goals that he wanted to accomplish, but just talked about general management experience.

If there's anyone reading this who wants to sell me on one of the candidates, I'm definitely up for listening.  More generally, what do you look for in a school board candidate in the absense of burning controversies?

Teacher Man

This week's book is Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes.  It's about his 30 years of teaching English in New York City public high schools, first in vocational schools and ultimately at Stuyvesant, one of the highly selective academic schools.  It's a quick read, full of self-depreciating humor and well-told stories. It's not as brilliant or compelling as Angela's Ashes, but that's a heck of a standard to try to live up to.

One of the ongoing themes of the book is how little respect teachers get.  More than once he points out that administrators and college professors get more respect and more money than teachers, and work a lot less hard.  He's also somewhat sardonic about all the attention he got when Angela's Ashes became a hit, after a lifetime of obscurity as a teacher.

The book is also an argument for teaching that doesn't follow the curriculum, that doesn't cover anything that's going to be on a standardized test.  McCourt describes assigning his students to write excuse notes from Adam and Eve, of reading recipes out loud (and having a buffet of the results in the middle of Stuvesant Park).  He glories in the students who challenged him, and the bitterest passages in the book are aimed at the parents of the over-achieving Stuyvesant students, who worry about their grades, and whether his class will help them get into college.

McCourt had retired by the time I attended Stuyvesant, but his classes were still  legendary.  In spite of his complaints about the students' sense of entitlement, a place like Stuyvesant seems ideal for a renegade teacher like McCourt-- it didn't matter that he wasn't interested in teaching grammar, because the kids pretty much got it already.  Because of the self-depreciation, it's hard to tell whether McCourt was a good teacher in his early years, when he started telling stories to his classes as a means of keeping bored and hostile students paying attention. 

Fair, not kind

D's preschool sends home a weekly magazine/worksheet from Scholastic.  Each week, it has a different theme, usually more or less related to the season or an upcoming holiday.  Last week's focus was, as you'd expect, Martin Luther King, Jr.  The magazine had pictures of different ways that you can be kind, and said that Dr. King "taught people to be kind."

That's been bugging me since I saw it.  "Kind" seems like the wrong word.  Even if every white person in the segregated South had been "kind" to black people -- and some certainly prided themselves on their kindness -- there still would have needed to be a civil rights movement.  Kindness is doing something nice when you don't have to -- standing up on the bus because someone else looks more tired than you feel, lending someone a hand when they're struggling with carrying too much. 

I think the right word -- remembering that the audience is 4- and 5-year olds -- is "fair."  Dr. King taught us to be fair.  It wasn't fair that black people had to ride in the back of the bus, and stand if there weren't enough seats to go around.  It wasn't fair that black kids could only go to inferior schools. 

Kind is when you share your cookies with your brother who doesn't have any.  Fair is when you realize that mom gave them to both of you.

TBR: The Shame of the Nation

This week, I'm writing about Jonathan Kozol's latest book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.  I guess I should begin by saying that I agree with probably 90 percent of what Kozol says in this book.  I agree that the inadequate education offered to the vast majority of inner-city students is a national embarassment and should be a source of outrage to all Americans, not just those whose kids are stuck attending those schools.  I think it is absurd to take the kids who come to school with the least family resources, put them in overcrowded underfunded classrooms with the least experienced teachers, and then blame them for their failure to pass standardized tests.   I share Kozol's deep skepticism about the "scripted" teaching programs that are being offered as panaceas to lift up those test scores. 

And yet, I found myself repeatedly arguing with Kozol as I read the book.  He pushes his argument to such extremes that I couldn't follow him all the way.  Yes, it's terrible that kids are attending schools with asbestos coming out of the walls and stopped up toilets.  But Kozol seems to be equally outraged over kids going to classes in trailer classrooms -- which aren't ideal, but aren't terrible, and are common in a good number of solidly middle class school districts too.  He talks about the beautiful and expensive new building provided for Stuyvesant High School in New York, while other schools in the city were falling apart, and points out that only about 3 percent of the students at Stuyvesant are black or Hispanic.  But he doesn't acknowledge, even in passing, that about half of Stuyvesant students are Asian, many from low-income families.

I was also frustrated that Kozol never made a clear case for why he thinks that it's so important for black and Hispanic students to have white classmates.  He devotes a lot of effort to proving how segregated many urban classrooms are -- most notably, observing that if you want to find a segregated school in America, you should look for one named after Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.  But is the problem that the schools are (largely) segregated, or that they're lousy schools?  Is integration worth fighting for in its own right, or only as a means to improving schools for poor minority kids?  Kozol clearly believes the former, but he doesn't provide an argument for it that will convince anyone who doesn't already share his views.

I'm actually scared that Shame of the Nation will set back Kozol's goal of integration.  If you want to convince middle-class parents to send their kids to integrated schools, publicizing the worst case scenarios of dreadful inner-city schools isn't the way to do it.  I'm not saying we should give up on Brown v Board of Education, but if we somehow managed to provide truly excellent public schools to all students, I think a good bit of educational and residential segregation would fade away without a massive government intervention. 

Leaders of the Future

Yale dorm rooms are kind of small.  It's not unusual to have four students sharing a two-bedroom suite that was built in a previous age for two students, or possibly even for a student and his servant.  One of the stories that floated around when I attended is that Yale used to have a goal of admitting "1000 Leaders of the Future" each year.  Then they decided to admit women (in 1969!), but they didn't want to stop admitting "1000 Leaders of the Future," and they didn't think women could be "Leaders of the Future," so the class size was increased by 250.  The story isn't entirely supported by the data, but it's certainly believable.

Yesterday's Times had a story about Yale women who plan on being stay-at-home mothers.  It's been a subject of heated discussion on several of my email lists, as well as of posts at Stone Court, Rebel Dad, And the moon is slowly rising and elsewhere.  My usual litany of complaints applies (unrepresentative sample? check. framing of work-family issues as a purely women's issue?  check.  little discussion of societal factors at play? check.)  And yet, I found myself interested in the article nonetheless.

This blog is named after the subtitle of Peggy Orenstein's book "Flux."  I recognized a lot of myself and my peers in her description of women who in their 20s thought that their possibilities were limitless, but by their 30s had started making accomodations and compromises.  Louise Story describes young women who have already concluded that they can't "have it all," who won't be so unpleasantly surprised down the road.  (Of course, the story doesn't touch at all on the role of the NYTimes in creating that impression.)

So why was I depressed by this article?  Laura at 11d suggests that some of the complaints about the article are signs of prejudice against SAHMs and the work of childrearing.  I don't think that's my case.  My husband is also a Yale grad, and I certainly don't think he's "wasting his education" chasing after the boys. 

If I really believed that these young women were thinking seriously about what they value, and making career and life decisions based on those values, I'd be cheering about this "trend."  But as Ann Bartow points out, law school probably is the last thing you should be signing up for if your goal is to work part-time or to move in and out of the labor force.   Why go tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt if you know that you're only going to work for a short while?   Or are Mom and Dad supposed to foot the bill?  And can't you please figure out how to explain your choice in a way that doesn't involve slamming people who make other choices?

Perhaps the most telling quote in the story is at the end:

"Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

'I accept things how they are,' she said. 'I don't mind the status quo. I don't see why I have to go against it.'

After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.

'It worked so well for me,' she said, 'and I don't see in my life why it wouldn't work.'

The scary thing is that Ms. Ku is right.  Conformity has worked very well for her so far.  Fundamentally, you don't get into Yale by bucking the system.  You get into Yale by sitting in the front row in class, and doing your homework, and doing very well on tests that involve filling in circles with number 2 pencils.  You get into Yale by playing a musical instrument or being on the debate team or organzing a major charitable event, or preferably all of the above. 

If Yale is still interested in developing the "Leaders of the Future," it needs to figure out a way to admit some more kids who do mind the status quo.  And it needs to shake some of the complacency out of the ones who don't.

Three-Toed Sloths

D is on a big three-toed sloth kick lately.  Whenever we go to the playground, he has to hang upside down on one of the curved ladders, just like a three-toed sloth.  For a while he was saying he wanted to be a three-toed sloth for Halloween, but I think we've talked him out of it.  (T is officially in charge of costuming in this household, so it's not my problem in any case.)  And we've consumed the full extent of the library's juvenile sloth section (Carle's Slowly Slowly Slowly Said the Sloth and Robinson's The Upside Down Sloth).

Those of you who don't have preschoolers (or whose preschoolers don't watch TV) are probably scratching your heads wondering where on earth D got a thing for three-toed sloths.   Those of you with munchkins probably know that Dora's cousin Diego is responsible.  D thinks Diego is "awesome."

The ability to pursue enthusiasms like this, rather than staying doggedly on a fixed curriculum, racing against time to cover all the material that will be on a standardized test, is the strongest argument I've heard for homeschooling.  But, for a variety of reasons, we're not really considering going that route any time soon.  I'm hopeful that there will be enough non-school time to provide the boys with the opportunities to follow their interests.

Last month, the Center for American Progress and the Institute for America's Future issued a report on how to improve public schools.  Their first recommendation is to increase the length of both the school day and the school year, as well as to make better use of in-school time.  I have extremely mixed reactions to such a proposal.  I'm afraid my basic response is that it's a good idea -- for other people's kids.  In particular, it's clear that one of the reasons that KIPP and similar schools have had such success with disadvantaged populations is that the students spend so much more time in school than their counterparts.

But for my own kids, I think I'd be reluctant to give over even more of their lives to formal schooling.  I think they need time to run around the playground like lunatics, time to read books with no literary merit, time to bake cookies, and yes, time to learn about three-toed sloths.

Schools and test scores

I had a chance to meet the new principal of our local elementary school this week.  She seemed smart, enthusiastic, interested in engaging parents, committed to the kids.  She gives off less of an "I know exactly what we need to do" air than last year's principal (Dr. B.), but I'm not sure that's entirely a bad thing, particularly since she's been on the job less than a month.

She had just gotten the results from last year's SOLs, and they weren't particularly encouraging.  I'm not quite sure what to make of that.  I don't think that test scores are especially useful as an indicator of school quality, but given the huge focus on them last year, I'd be lying if I said the lack of progress didn't make me nervous.

If nothing else, it undermines my confidence that Dr. B.  really did have everything under control last year.  For example, Dr. B had made a big deal about how much absenteeism and tardiness there had been in the past, and the Urban League even donated alarm clocks for every kid in the school.  But it turns out, there were still over 100 kids -- nearly half the school -- who were absent more than 10 days last year.

I think the overwhelming emphasis on test scores under No Child Left Behind is generally problematic.  But I do think the attention it has focused on schools like this one, low performers in overall decent school districts, has been helpful.  I could easily imagine that without NCLB or Virginia's Standards of Learning requirements, schools like this could quietly have been left to flounder for years, with no one paying much attention. 

We've got another year before D starts kindergarten, so we don't need to make any decisions right away.  I'm still leaning towards sending him to the local school, knowing that we have the option of switching down the road if we're really unhappy.  But we haven't ruled out trying to get him into the dual language (Spanish/English) program at a different public school.

Selective schools

Via Whirled View, I found this post about schooling in England.  The author is moderately snide about the plight of the "London liberal lefty with a kid rising five."  What struck me the most is how much of it could have been written about the US:

"The young and liberal move into funky, down at heel areas, become parents, and then start looking round at the local schools. There’s no way their kids are going to contribute to the local, funky, down at heel ambience..."

Nick Cohen's solution, in the Guardian, is to bring back grammar schools  -- state funded, but selective schools.  (Or rather, he argues that these schools will help bright students whose parents can neither afford fee-based schools (what the English call puiblic, and Americans call private) nor houses in areas with good free schools.  It's Blood and Treasure who says that argument is self-serving.)

The US doesn't have "grammar schools" -- but it does have "gifted and talented" programs in public schools, as well as a handful of selective public high schools, mostly with math and science focuses, such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York, Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, and Montgomery Blair in Maryland.  And I suspect the arguments about them are very similar to the arguments about grammar schools in the UK.

I have very mixed feelings about such programs.  I know that they are often a way for middle-class parents to get more resources -- better teachers, smaller classes, enrichment activities -- for their kids while sending them to public schools.  In Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau writes about the ways that middle-class parents is their skills to get their kids into such programs -- advocating with principals, having children privately re-tested, etc.  At the same time, I attended one of those selective high schools, and after reading A Tribe Apart, I have no doubt that a significant chunk of my classmates would have dropped out and/or wound up institutionalized if they had attended a typical American high school.

The Washington Post magazine had a cover story this weekend about two young women who attended Montgomery Blair who were finalists in the Intel Talent Search.  They say that they didn't care that girls were in the minority in their science classes.  But there's a huge difference between being one of eight girls in a class and being the only one, or one of two.  One of the things that selective schools like that do is make it normal to like math, normal to work really hard, normal to get really good grades,

Conservatives and evolution

Ben Adler at the New Republic interviewed a bunch of conservatives about their opinions of evolution, intelligent design, and what should be taught in public schools. It's quite a fascinating read.

I was particularly struck by James Taranto's casual reference to public schools as "government schools" -- a subtle echo of Grover Norquist's more agressive statement that "The real problem here is that you shouldn't have government-run schools." 

I was also dumbfounded by David Frum's statement -- after saying that he does believe in evolution -- that "I don't believe that anything that offends nine-tenths of the American public should be taught in public schools. ... Christianity is the faith of nine-tenths of the American public. ... I don't believe that public schools should embark on teaching anything that offends Christian principle."

Ok, but does that mean that he thinks teaching evolution offends most Christians?  I think the vast majority of Christians agree with the theory of evolution and have no problems with it being taught in schools.  Interestingly, I argued the same point last week over at Raising WEG, in response to Mia C's question "But will any of the religious parents be discussing evolution and atheism with their children?"

***

Updated: Via Right Magazine (found by following my inbound traffic), I've learned that Frum says he was misquoted.  He writes: "I have no idea what proportion of Americans object to the teaching of evolution, but I very much doubt that it's 90% or even 50%."

That's a relief. 

Boys and girls

Anyone who spends any time at a playground will discover that even at a very young age, gender differences start to show up between boys and girls in how they play. I've written before about how -- in spite of the non-traditional gender roles in my family -- my sons are both into traditional "boy things" like trucks and trains.

I also think that adults often notice behaviors that reinforce their preconceptions more than the ones that challenge them; we've gotten some odd looks from other parents when we point out what a spitfire some of the girls in D's preschool class are.  I've commented before on how different personalities D and N are.  It must be very easy it is for parents of opposite gender kids to assume that the differences between their children are due to gender differences. (And as families get smaller on average, fewer have multiple kids of each gender.)

It's clear that societal and cultural factors contribute a great deal to both gender differences and the perception of them.  Jo(e) wrote recently about the shoes that girls wear, which limit their ability to climb and run.  Mieke picked up on this theme, quoting a friend's description of how other adults interacted with her daughters:

"They would talk about Rachel and Sarah's clothes or their hair or call them "cute" and almost always, ask Rachel and Sarah if they had boyfriends (as I said this started at three). It was kind of a default question that adults had when they didn’t know what else to say to the girls. When the girls said no, the adults seemed stumped by what else to talk about, if they said yes, they would ask all about the boy."

But it also seems that there are some differences that can't be so easily dismissed as cultural.  There seems to be a broad consensus  that boys tend to talk later and to be potty-trained later.  Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with autism and related disorders as well as with ADHD.  (I recognize that there are cultural factors involved in how these disorders are manifested as well as in what behaviors get boys v. girls referred to a psychologist.) 

Dawn and her very thoughtful commenters at This Woman's Work had a wonderful discussion a few weeks ago about children, gender identity, and transgenderism. Like Dawn, my fundamental goal is to allow my children to pursue their interests and enjoy their desires whether or not they conform with traditional gender roles.  That means buying D "lipstick" when he asked for it after seeing one of his classmates with it (although I wimped out and bought chapstick rather than lip gloss -- he was thrilled with it anyway), but it also means letting him play endless games about shooting "bad robots" (robots because we told him he couldn't shoot people).  And yes, I probably struggle more with the latter than with the former.

But I also agree with Dawn that

"I don't have a problem with a boy playing like a girl or even wanting to be a girl. But I start feeling challenged when a boy says that he feels he is a girl because of these girlish interests."

This past year, the principal at the local elementary school split the 4th graders by gender for their reading period.  Her argument was that the boys were more interested in nonfiction (e.g. books about cars, animals and sports) while the girls were more interested in fiction.  Such programs -- which are increasingly common -- make me intensely uncomfortable.  I worry about the boy who wants to read stories, or the girl who loves baseball.  But the truth is, the regular way was clearly failing the boys -- the previous year, something like 30 percent of the boys passed their reading tests, compared to 80 percent of the girls.  That's not acceptable.