teacherken's musings on everything

Perhaps it was science. Maybe history, or foreign languages. Maybe what most interested you was not an “academic” subject. Perhaps it was music, or art, or technical education. Maybe you lived for gym, or in elementary school you couldn’t wait for recess. Perhaps by high school what made a difference was junior ROTC, or a child development course, a cooking class, or even something I have not mentioned.

Imagine school without that favorite subject. It shouldn’t be that hard. If you go visit schools today, increasingly you will find those subjects disappearing. Why? The answer is No Child Left Behind.


Currently NCLB behind requires that every student be tested each year in grades 3-8 in reading and in math. Students must also be tested at least once in high school in the required areas. Beginning next year tests are also supposed to be added in science. But the law has no tests for any of the other subjects. And already this is having a deleterious effect on schools. In elementary schools recess, history, art and music are being eliminated or cut back so that more time can be spent drilling in the math and reading skills that will be tested. In high school, “at risk” students are assigned extra reading and math in lieu of electives. Schools and school systems are worried about the consequences if test scores do not improve. Given the structure of NCLB, most schools will be found in need of improvement (and generally described as failing) because not all subgroups will show Annual Yearly Progress. In the meantime, administrators and teachers struggle to bring scores up to postpone when the ax may fall.

Yesterday’s St. Petersburg Times (one of the nation’s truly great newspapers) had a [story http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/29/Tampabay/To_pump_up_reading__s.shtml] on this.
Entitled “To pump up reading, schools cub back fun” with a subtitle that read

Schools are intent on improving the reading ability of students. But in doing so, they may reduce programs that keep kids in school.

This is the key. As a teacher I know that often what keeps a student from dropping out is that one subject that turns her on. I teach government, which is not tested under NCLB. At least in our state it is a required course for graduation, and there is a state test which this year’s freshman will have to test in order to graduate. Thus my class and my job will not be eliminated. But for some of my students what gives them the reason to remain focused may not be my class, but rather Art or Music, or Consumer Science. Because they have to learn academic discipline in those subjects, their overall work improves. If what turns them on is our AF JROTC program, it may provide them with the overall discipline and structure that would otherwise be missing in their lives, and without which they would not succeed, and might well drop out.

The article examines the effects of a new Florida initiative stressing reading and more reading in the upper grades even through high school.

A statewide effort to improve reading in middle and high schools is whittling away beloved elective courses that many educators think keep struggling students from dropping out. . . .

The result: many high school students will be swapping chorus for 90 minutes of reading, vocational classes for 90 minutes of reading, Junior ROTC for 90 minutes of reading.

The effects on local schools is heavy:

In Pasco County - which is most affected because it has fewer class periods than other local districts - Hudson High's Junior ROTC program could fall short of the numbers needed to keep it funded. A quarter of the students who signed up were identified as needing reading instruction instead.

At Pinellas County's Boca Ciega High School, two foreign language
teachers and one physical education position were eliminated to make room for a new reading program that targets 800 students. That's almost nine times as many students as last year.

Over a quarter of a million of the states high school students could be targeted for the extra reading instruction, which leads people in career-technical education to worry that

removing kids from classes they feel are
relevant could undermine efforts to keep them reading and in school.

"We know some students only stay in school because of those electives," acknowledged Tammy Rabon, the curriculum director in Pasco County. "The electives are a wonderful way for them to explore their passions.

And yet, we need children to be literate, as Rabon acknowledges.

The article gives illustrations of the effects of the initiative on several students. let me offer one example of what might be lost”

Brad Birchfield, 17, a Hudson High junior, said he wonders what would have happened if the requirement had been in place when he started high school. Junior ROTC turned him from a "slacker" with an F-average, he said, to an enthusiastic 4.0 GPA student. "ROTC gave me something to want to be here for," he said.

Because NCLB requires the emphasis on reading and math, the Center on Education policy reports school districts across the nation making massive cutbacks in other subjects

27 percent report cutting back in social studies, 22 percent in science, 20 percent in art and music and 10 percent in physical education.

The Florida legislature doubled the amount of money available to help with reading instruction, but to get any part of that $89 million, school districts had to

submit plans outlining 90 minutes of reading for elementary students and 50 to 90 minutes for middle and high school kids who scored poorly on the FCAT.

The article does not discuss the poor quality of FCAT, the statewide test system. Even were it a superior instrument, this approach would be causing some problems. But given the lack of quality of the testing program, the negative impact on students is so much more tragic. And yet in fairness, students who cannot read are far more likely to drop out even if drawn to stay in school by electives. It is a problem. How can you both keep the electives and still give those students needing extra reading instruction the help they need?

Judy Whitaker, a board member with the Association of Career and Technical Education, said that with No Child Left Behind raising the bar for reading and math instruction, vocational programs are having to fight for a seat at the table. At the high school level, she said, reading must be taught through courses students find relevant, whether it's math, science or auto mechanics.

"If a child is struggling in a course and you give them a double dose of it, sometimes they resent it and they go backward," she said.

A problem in delivering the extra help in reading is that many high school teachers do not have the training to do such courses. In Maryland, where I teach, all newly certified teachers have to have two courses in reading instruction, but as one who was at least briefly enrolled in a masters program in reading instruction, I can tell you that even two courses is insufficient.


If is unfair and immoral that we can allow children to get to high school without being able to read properly. It is absolutely true that even as we address why we have failed to properly teach them in the elementary school, we have an obligation to try to remediate the previous failure among those students who have passed on to secondary schools. I hope and pray that we are determining who those students are by accurate measures. I also hope and pray that we recognize that raising test scores should not be the primary goal of our schools, certainly not at the expense of future health (here I note the dropping of recess and phys ed). Our schools should educate the whole child. We should include the courses in the arts and technical skills that can be so important to keeping children in school and interested in school. We should also recognize that many of these classes enable students to discover career paths they might otherwise not consider.

This is not a problem which can easily be addressed. Issues of reading are critical. What is missing in the approach described in the article is the recognition that school is insufficient if it is the sole means of addressing reading. Somehow we need to reach out to the broader community, so that reading becomes reinforced - students need to be encouraged so that they see reading not as a struggle, but as something enjoyable, and exciting. It is not that students won’t read - the Harry Potter phenomenon clearly demonstrates that given something of interest, students will do a lot of reading. I can see my high school students who really don’t do much of their school work devouring Rap music magazines and sports sections of newspapers.

I do not have easy answers. The purpose of this entry is to provoke a discussion. Education is a crucial public policy issue for the future of our country. If we look at problems solely through a political perspective we may not realize that some who are our political opponents have genuine concerns. We have a moral responsibility to equip our children for the future. Reasonable people can disagree about how this should be approached. My concern is that if we focus too narrowly on one aspect -- say, fixing poor reading -- we may in the process of addressing that problem create one that is just as detrimental, such as dropping the electives that serve as the motivators to encourage our students to come to and remain in school so that we can help them with their reading.

If you would really like to bliss out listening to gorgeous music, I have just told you about one of the most amazing CDs to which I have ever listened. Ennio Morricone has written some of the most amazing and hauntingly beautiful music of the 20th century, largely for film. He has scored many film for Sergio Leone, including the Man with No Name trilogy with Clint Eastwood (with whom he also worked on “In the Line of Fire”) and both movies whose title begins with “Once upon a Time ...” He has worked extensively with both American and Italian directors.

And Yo-Yo Ma is simply a genius of a musician. He has collaborated with country musician Mark O’Connor, he has promoted music from the along the old Silk Road, and he is his generation’s outstanding cellist.

So what makes this album so special?


Morricone has rescored many of his pieces to take advantage of the artistry of Yo-Yo Ma. The cellist not only plays the melody, in other places he adds counterpoint or an obligato. The composer has arranged several mini suites to tie music together.

The first two tracks ties together selections from The Mission.
1. The Mission: Gabriel's Oboe
2. The Mission: The Falls

Next comes some selections from films directed by Giuseppe Tornatore:
3. Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Playing Love from The Legend of 1900
4. Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Nostalgia from Cinema Paradiso
5. Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Looking for You (Love Theme) from Cinema Paradiso
6. Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Malena (Main theme)
7. Giuseppe Tornatore Suite: Remembering (Ricordare)*

We then get a mini-suite with his closest collaborator, Sergio Leone:
8. Sergio Leone Suite: Deborah's Theme from Once Upon A Time In America
9. Sergio Leone Suite: Cockeye's Song from Once Upon a Time in America
10. Sergio Leone Suite: Main Theme from Once Upon a Time in America
11. Sergio Leone Suite: Main Theme from Once Upon a Time in the West
12. Sergio Leone Suite: Ecstasy of Gold from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This is followed by a brief connection of two pieces from Brian DePalma films:
13. Brian DePalma Suite: Main Theme from Casualties of War
14. Brian DePalma Suite: Death Theme from The Untouchables

Morricone also wrote for TV, and he puts together three pieces from two items he scored for miniseries:
15. Moses and Marco Polo Suite: Journey from Moses
16. Moses and Marco Polo Suite: Theme from Moses
17. Moses and Marco Polo Suite: Main Theme from Marco Polo

Finally, there are two pieces from the Lady Caliph, a somewhat forgotten 1970 Italian film, “La Califfa.”
18. The Lady Caliph: Dinner
19. The Lady Caliph: Nocturne


You can listen to selections from all of the tracks [here http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002YCVXI/ref=pd_sxp_elt_l1/103-5666874-4809457#product-details], with either Windows Media Player or Real Player. One listen to Yo-Yo May intoning the theme from Gabriel’s oboe, the beautiful piece from “The Mission” is enough to totally engage me.

And you can read a review of the CD [here http://www.filmmusicsociety.org/news_events/features/2004/110304.html]

Despite the brilliance of his music, Morricone never won an Oscar,although he was nominated 5 times (for another film, the studio neglected to turn in the paperwork in a timely fashion). H has won British Oscars and Golden Globes. And music aficionados everywhere greatly admire his work.



One can read about Morricone’s music [here http://www.stanford.edu/group/resed/row/italiana/culture/music_scores_enniomorricon.htm]
or [here http://demo.classical.com/listen/infopopup3.php?order_view=4&rectrack_id=3221230105]. He has composed music for hundreds of films with most of the world’s great directors, as you can see by this [site http://www.mfiles.co.uk/composers/Ennio-Morricone.htm], which will give you a partial list of some of the films for which he has scored, and will also inform you that his relationship with Leone predates their long association in films because they were classmates.

At this link for [Amazon http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000000WFZ/mfiles09/103-5666874-4809457] you will be able to listen to snippets from a variety of Morricone’s works.

If you love good music, you are likely to fall in love with this CD. Go listen. Were my copy a vinyl record, I would already be wearing out the grooves.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the reauthorization of the the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is wreaking havoc on our nation’s schools. Regardless of the good intentions of some (George Miller and Ted Kennedy come to mind) who supported it in the hope that it would provide more funding for public schools, it is instead serving to delegitimize public schools at the same time that it enriches certain corporate interests.

In today’s diary I will address a number of issues. First I will discuss the problem of high qualified teachers, a requirement under the Law. Next I will refer to a somewhat related column about teacher compensation that appeared on the front page of the metro section of the July 26 Washington Post. Finally I will discuss the issue of supplementary services (tutoring), focusing in particular on an article in the July 25 Baltimore Sun. Throughout I will offer my own analysis and commentary.


NCLB requires that in schools receiving Federal funds (which currently is almost all public schools), all teachers hired after 2005-2006 must be highly qualified. States have some flexibility in setting their own standards, and in general it means that teachers must be fully certified, and not teaching using emergency or provisional certification. For some more explanation, one can go [here http://www.ed.gov/nclb/methods/teachers/hqtflexibility.html] where the US Dept. of Education provides some information.

But it is not clear what will happen next school year, because it will be impossible to meet that criteria. I teach in Maryland. This year Maryland is fortunate, in that we only need about 6,000 new teachers statewide. In recent years that figure has tended to run something over 7,000. But meeting even the lower figure is difficult. State approved teacher certification programs in Maryland produce at best 2,500 new teachers per year, not all of whom opt for Maryland public schools, either going to non-public institutions and/or out of state and/or taking positions outside of the classroom.

Several districts in Maryland are particularly hard-hit by this. While some rural districts have trouble attracting teachers, Baltimore City and Prince George’s County (where I teach) - the two heavily African-American school districts which also have the lowest state test scores, both regularly have trouble filling their open slots. A few years ago the then incoming superintendent in Prince George’s, Iris Metts, announced that no more teachers would be hired with provisional certificates, only candidates fully certified. She had to back down. Had she not done so, she would have been forced to open the school year with several hundred classrooms staffed by substitutes. Just so you can understand the difference -- to have a provisional certificate you must at least have a college degree, and you are supposed to be enrolled in coursework moving you towards full certification within 5 years. You are expected to have majored in the content area. A substitute may have a college degree (not required by state law - a GED is the minimum acceptable educational level), but it does not have to have any relevance to the subject in which you are substituting.

If we are going to move towards the goal of having highly qualified teachers in every classroom, and if we are having difficulty filling the openings we do have, perhaps we need to look at why we have so many openings. One reason is that we have trouble retaining teachers, and one basic cause of that problem is financial. Thus Marc Fisher’s column on the Metro section front page of the July 26 Washington Post may be of some relevance. Entitled [Homeland Security Starts in Our Schools http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/25/AR2005072501648.html], begins with his encountering a clearly overeducated clerk behind the counter at a video rental store.

t turned out that the clerk was really a high school English teacher moonlighting for a few extra bucks.

That teacher, Alex Horwitz, has since left the field to try out the movie business, but all too many other teachers are out there this summer -- and on weekends and evenings during the school year -- working second, third and fourth jobs so they can keep teaching your kids.

Fisher writes about Lorelei Emma, who is 28 and a special-ed teacher in Fairfax County. There is a critical shortage of special ed teaches nationally. Emma

teaches summer school in the mornings, tutors, dog-sits, house-sits and drives out to Lexington each weekend to work at her family's flower shop. Even with all that, and with mom's help on her student loan and car payments, Emma lives in a small bedroom with no closet in a Fairlington house she shares with two roommates.

Last week, Emma applied for work at a Whole Foods store -- she and her teacher buddies call it "Whole Paycheck" -- "because maybe I could get a discount on groceries there."

"I love my kids, and I love teaching, but I can't afford it," Emma says. "I can't be a 30-year-old and expect my mom to keep paying for my car." With a master's degree and four years of experience, Emma makes $49,000 in the Fairfax schools. But housing and other costs in this area make seemingly decent salaries feel like poverty wages.

This area is expensive. I know. I bought my house in 1984 for 129,000 while I worked in data processing. I am doing a refi, and the appraisal will come back tomorrow for between 4 and 5 times what I paid for this house a little more than 20 years ago.

Emma works 12-14 hours day during the year on her school work, tutors, and works in a flower shop. Now she is seriously considering doing something else, because she knows she cannot continue to push herself like that.

Fisher talks with the head of the English Department at T C Williams HS in Alexandria (as in “Remember the Titans”). Mary Beth Kochman is a Penn graduate, who remembers being asked back in school

"Why are you here if you're only going to become a teacher?" Only?

. When she attends reunions her classmates, lawyers, business executives, and the like, really don’t notice pain in paying their student loans. By contrast,

Kochman has to find $300 a month to put toward her loans. She's managed to take on extra jobs related to her career -- teacher training, for example -- but after a decade of teaching, she can't buy a house, travel or live a lifestyle that matches her peers'.

"I am constantly thinking about whether or not I can afford to buy a book from Borders, eat out more than a certain number of times per week, or go away for a weekend," she says.

She is realistic enough to know that many of her students, having lived in cars or through revolutions, have had much harder lives. They may have seen more than one death.

And she's quick to add that she loves her work. Still, she and other teachers I spoke to find it hard to reconcile political slogans about the importance of education with the reality of a society in which teachers cannot afford to live where they teach.

Fisher gets to the heart of the matter with his final two paragraphs:

The nation's schools have never adapted to losing their near-monopoly on working women. That history, in which teaching was usually a family's supplemental income, explains why schools are so far behind in paying for top workers.

How to turn it around? Two ways: Wait for things to get so much worse that the nation must launch a Manhattan Project to revive its schools. Or start now by persuading voters that paying for stronger teachers is a great investment -- it's the real homeland security.

I have shown you some of the issues affecting our schooling. We are supposed to be providing every child with a highly qualified teacher. Yet we are not producing enough teachers to fill all the openings we have. And one reason we have so many openings is the financial difficulties faced by many teachers, so that we are often unable to retain those we would like to keep.

As a result, we have some teachers who should not be in classrooms -- but they are certified and they can occupy a space and they meet the federal requirements. Schools could not get rid of them even if they wanted to. And even the good teachers can be overburdened by the number of students and the requirements of curriculum coverage that often do not allow for individual attention for students who don’t “get it” quite as easily. NCLB does not address these issues. Instead it decides to find a way to authorize payment of funds for remediation, for supplemental educational services, usually in the form of tutoring, which is why I offer the final part of this extended entry today.

The article on tutoring in the Baltimore Sun,
[Tutoring becomes a hot commodity http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-bz.tutoring24jul24,1,5540988.story?coll=bal-business-headlines&ctrack=1&cset=true], provides a very good overview of some of the issues of supplementary services. This is NOT about pocket change. This is a market viewed as being worth up to $2 billion. Here’s a couple of early paragraphs from the article:

No Child Left Behind, the federal law enacted to improve the quality of public schools, has given private tutoring companies a potentially huge new source of income by requiring some troubled schools to contract with tutors for low-income, low-performing students, using money set aside for poor schools.

Industry revenues from NCLB-mandated services more than doubled this past school year from 2003-2004 and are expected to grow by at least 20 percent this year. At Baltimore-based Educate Inc., one of the largest for-profit tutoring companies, revenue from work with troubled schools jumped 402 percent in 2004 - to $27.6 million from $5.5 million.

So far only about 12% of eligible students have enrolled for the services. Still that means that tutoring is being provided, largely by for-profit organizations, to over 100,000 students. The companies think they are doing good deeds.

Tutoring companies see the NCLB market as a way to give low-income students the advantages they've offered for years to middle-class children needing extra help in school or to students from affluent families trying to boost their test scores to get into top colleges or secondary schools.

And one executive of a tutoring company remarks

"It's wonderful that high- quality tutoring companies have their services available to kids who normally could never afford it. It's great."

But the reality may be something else. Note the following:

But some educators are critical of the program because tutoring providers, unlike schools and teachers, are not accountable under the law for the students being able to pass standardized tests. The providers say they ensure that most students will at least make some improvement - which they maintain is better than nothing.

Let’s explain a bit of how this works. Schools are required to measure all students in grades 3-8 in reading and math every year. By 2014 all students are supposed to be proficient (a sheer impossibility, but we will ignore that for now). In the meantime, schools must be making adequate yearly progress (AYP) towards those goals. To put it in simple terms, if in 2004, 40% of students were proficient, the school must gain an additional 60% over 10 years, or add 6% per year. Thus in 2005 the figure would have to be 46%, and in 2006 52%.

But the school can not offer one total number. Scores must be disaggregated, broken out by subgroups. Thus scores must be reported separately by race, and also with categories for Limited English Proficiency and special education, etc. If any one subgroup in the entire school fails to make AYP for the year, the entire school is considered in need of improvement. Two consecutive years of not making AYP trigger a host of measures, including that of offering tutoring.

Before returning to tutoring specifically, let me note one provision. States can set the minimum number of people for a subgroup before it is counted. Thus if I have only 2 Native Americans, I probably won’t have to run separate statistics on them as a subgroup. For any subgroup, at least 95% of the students must be tested or that group is automatically considered not to have made AYP and the entire school is considered in need of improvement (or in colloquial terms, is considered failing). If I have 11 students in a subgroup in ONE of the grades, and two are out sick on the day of the test, the entire school will be considered in need of improvement, even if every other student in the school passed the test. This might help you see how eventually almost all schools across the country will be considered “failing” under NCLB.

Returning to the article:

Schools that do not meet standards for two years in a row are placed in the "school improvement" category, which means parents can transfer their kids to a better-performing school or schools must offer free tutoring for students.

and today we will focus on the tutoring.

Parents can choose a tutor from a list provided by the states. These lists can include non-profits, for profits, face to face, small group, internet, etc. There are no real standards, it is simply up to the state to certify that a provider is acceptable.

Companies don't receive a set price for the tutoring services; the federal government provides $900 to $2,500 a year per student, depending on the state and school district... Providers then determine the length and frequency of tutoring sessions based on students' needs and the money available. Huntington, which normally charges about $40 an hour for retail tutoring, often receives a similar rate for its NCLB services. . .

Read the foregoing carefully. The Federal government will provide between $900 and $2,500 per student per year. If the average teacher load across the country is about 26 students, and the average teacher salary is around 45,000 (that includes al levels of experience and all geographic areas), then the teacher salary per student per year is about 1730. At Huntington’s stated rate of 40/hour, that is only around 43-44 hours of tutoring for the entire year.

I will judiciously not comment about the idea that the length and frequency of the tutoring session is to a large degree set by the money available -- the rates don’t change, just how much tutoring is given!

Not all students eligible for such services are receiving them.

In some parts of the country, parents don't sign up their children for the tutoring programs because tutors are too far away or because kids have other after-school activities.

Maryland has a different problem: The state has funding for only about 12,000 of the 30,500 students who are eligible for tutoring services - and only 6,000 are using it, said Ann Chafin, chief of program improvement for the Maryland State Department of Education. In Baltimore, where a high number of schools fail to meet the No Child Left Behind standards, some children were denied free tutoring because of high demand and not enough supply.

The article goes on to discuss how schools and tutoring companies can do more outreach to get more eligible students into tutoring programs. It also offers examples of how tutoring helps, such as this 8th grader in Baltimore:

"I felt like I was the only one who didn't know math," said Bria, who will be a fourth-grader next fall. "Every time I would try to sit there and work it out, everybody's hands would fly in the air."

Bria's twice-weekly, 1 1/2 -hour sessions gave her a chance to ask questions and work slowly. She said she started to understand math and her grades got better. "The teachers had the time to help me figure out the math problems," she said.

Note the issue of having time for the student, something not always possible in a class with more than 30 students, and where the pressure is on the teacher to keep moving forward to accomplish “curriculum coverage.”

The schools must, under NCLB, monitor the progress of their students.

But there are few, if any, requirements of what the tutoring firms must produce in terms of student achievement. Most tutoring companies tell parents to expect some form of improvement but won't guarantee that a child will achieve a particular score on a standardized test.

The companies may boast,, as do these two:

Educate, for example, says children can jump one grade level in a particular subject after 36 hours of instruction. Huntington boasts of being able to help a child improve by two grades after 12 weeks or 40 hours of instruction.

But there is no guarantee as to improvement by the child, which, as one company acknowledges, depends to a large degree on what the child already knows upon arrival at tutoring.

That troubles Penelope Earley, professor and director of center for education policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

"There's no accountability other than the marketplace," Earley said. "It is quite ironic and quite paradoxical that the accountability standards that are imposed on teachers, on schools and on districts are not imposed on the tutoring firms in the same manner."

There have been some problems, as the next section, with some ellipses, shows:

Many school districts do not have the resources to properly monitor tutoring services, said Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy, a think tank in Washington.

"With companies seeing all the money they can make, there is a possibility of a great deal of abuse," he said. . . .

Some abuses have occurred in places like Las Vegas, where students were registered for services by more than one provider, but only received services from one, according to a report by the policy center. Another example from the report showed that parents who selected online services were forced to pay for hidden costs such as a computer or Internet access.

While acknowledging some abuses, for-profit providers say they have to keep consumers - in this case school districts, parents and students - happy as any other business must.

But many parents lack the skills and knowledge to assess how effective the tutoring is. My concern is that the companies may offer the rhetorical promises about the good they do, but their bottom line is making a profit.

And here’s the kicker -- the states impose no certification tests for those actually doing the tutoring. In most cases, if the tutors have college degrees (and in many cases less than that), they are acceptable to deliver these supplementary educational services. A music major (I was one, which is why I picked this major) is automatically qualified to teach your child reading, for which you may be paying Huntington 40/hour. That person would not meet the standards for being a highly qualified teacher. A beginning fully certified teacher in some states makes as little at 25,000/year. In the districts around Washington and Baltimore, that starting salary can range from 28,000 up. Let’s assume 30,000. Not counting the time out of school correcting papers, planning, continuing one’s own education, most teachers have a 190 day school year, each day officially about 7 hours. That;s 1330 hours/ I am ignoring paid vacations, but presuming that all pay is for those hours. That would be a rate of 22.56/hour, during which time if we presume the average class has 2 students (probably quite low in some places) , we are paying our teachers less than 1.00/hour per student.

Somehow I think the funds being spent on supplementary educational services would have far greater impact were they applied to lessening class sizes, perhaps hiring teacher’s aides to assist with some individual help, and raising the compensation of teachers in order to retain them.

But since I am a teacher, I am sure the arguments I make will be dismissed. I think a quality education should be a right. I do not believe that imposing a profit motive will necessarily improve education. Given the track record of companies like EAI (aka TesseracT) and Edison in fact the profit motive has been shown NOT to improve education and perhaps even to harm it.

NCLB will not change until the next reauthorization. We can only hope and pray that the damage it does in the mean time is not irreversible.

is the title of a Tom Oliphant [op ed http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/07/24/the_great_conservative_hope/] on John Roberts in today’s Boston Globe. Here’s the beginning:

PRESIDENT BUSH'S minions are telling their most conservative supporters that federal appeals court judge John Roberts is a slam-dunk certainty to extend government control of reproductive decisions into two major areas after he is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.

I suspect that in large part they are making it all up.

Oliphant’s cynicism is based in part on the track record of previous Republican presidents dating back at least to Reagan, who have had six nominees to SCOTUS. These presidents may have promised to take on abortion frontally but instead have been to content to nibble at the edges as abortion continues pretty much undiminished [parenthetical note - on this I think Oliphant is wrong, as there have been increasing restrictions and decreasing numbers and availability of abortion].

Oliphant says that since Bush was elected twice while professing his admiration for Scalia and Thomas as role models for the Court, he

was at least on the spot to the extent that his most vocal supporters had to be reassured that Roberts is a worthy partner-to-be of the court's most rabidly antichoice activists.

Advocates for Roberts outside the administration but with connections to it are telling people

his record and their personal knowledge of him provides assurance that he is going to be the fulcrum around which two new, narrow court majorities will be created -- probably in the upcoming term -- with the departure of Sandra Day O'Connor.

The article focuses on these two issues, both of which should appear again before the Court in the near future.

The first issue is if a

government can regulate pregnancy without regard to the broad impact on a woman's health -- most specifically her ability to have children in the future if abortion rights are denied her. This effort has also sought to regulate pregnancy without regard to whether a proscribed method of abortion occurs early or late, thus obliterating another of the central foundations of Roe v Wade.

This is the argument over so-called partial-birth abortion, which Oliphant rightly notes is a term without a medical basis invented for the sole purpose of attempting to roll back Roe. O’Connor was the 5th vote in overturning the Federal law, lower courts have acted similarly with respect to state laws, and now

the Bushies are telling their conservative friends it's a certainty Roberts will uphold the statute.

The second area comes from parental notification (which has already been upheld in part). There is a New Hampshire law that has already been rejected by lower courts that Oliphant describes as adding a twist.

The New Hampshire Legislature has required a 48-hour period after a required written notice has been delivered to at least one parent that cannot be waived in case the young woman is a victim or rape, incest, or child abuse. The woman has a shot at a waiver from a judge and if her life is directly threatened, but that's it. Since intra-family disputes are not exactly a daily occurrence, the larger intent of the law is obvious -- to further undercut the health exemption in Roe to prepare the way for the next set of restrictions on abortion rights.

The idea with the New Hampshire law, as was the case with so-called “partial birth” laws, is to establish a restriction which can then be used as a precedent to further restrict access to abortion., with the hope that eventually the Court will so restrict the Federal guarantee that it ceases to be meaningful.

Oliphant finds a model for Roberts on the current Court, and it is ot Thomas or Scalia, but rather Anthony Kennedy

another impeccably credentialed conservative who is affable, religious, smart as a whip, and unlikely to encounter a government restriction of abortion rights he won't approve.

Oliphant argues that the Senate (Democrats) should argue for the release of all the paperwork Roberts produced during his work for various Republican administrations.

To the general public the White House portrays the judge as a lawyer advocating for his client; to its conservative friends, the White House is saying that he believed in his work. Let's find the truth.

He also says that Roberts should be questioned on his views about the right to privacy,(which predates Roe, being established in Griswold v Connecticut), and if Roberts fails to offer support for the right, to claim that as grounds for a filibuster.

But his final paragraph emphasizes the point others have made since the nomination was announced - the rights under Roe cannot ultimately be guaranteed by SCOTUS:

But the most important obligation is to secure abortion rights through political work. In the end, the courts never provide enough protection for constitutional rights if voters are not asked to support them.

ELections do have consequences. The Democrats lost the last three national elections, having control of the Senate for less than 2 years of Bush’s term. The issue needs to be on the front page of political conflict, not as an issue of abortion, but as an issue of privacy rights, with due notice that should Conservatives succeed in rolling back Roecompletely, Griswold and birth control will also soon be under attack. And if anyone doubts their hostility towards women’s right, look also at their attitude towards Title IX, which is a subject on which the record of Roberts is also not very promising. I would add to the list of things about which he should be questioned to be as specific as possible on this legislation, which has made possible things like the championship U.S. Women’s National Soccer team.

is the title of a piece by James of Ridgeway in this week's Village Voice.  

The opening paragraph reads

From the time he was 10 years old, Karl Rove, Bush's closest and most important political adviser, has made a specialty of dirty tricks. They run all the way from trying to slime a candidate by calling him a peacenik or gay to planting phony campaign literature on an opponent. If the Wilsons turn out to be anything but just another weird turn in Rove's career, that would be real news.

The article provides a chronicle of Rove's life and political career, beginning with his birth on Christmas Day, 1950.

Rove was a Republican from the get go, but in 1960 he was beaten up by a young lady (!!) who supported JFK over his hero Nixon.  For a while, after supporting Goldwater in 19064, Rove was a laissez-faire libertarian and follower of Ayn Rand.

I will mix summaries and quotes from the article

1965: A card-carrying nerd, Rove arrives at Salt Lake City's Olympus High School in a jacket and tie, toting a briefcase. Wins notoriety as high school debater by bringing boxes of blank index cards to tournaments as a means of intimidating opponents.

At various times Rove attend Utah, Texas and George Mason without ever graduating from college.

At his 19th birthday, the man he thought was father walks out on the family, and only then does he learn the man was not his biological father.

FALL 1970: Rove pays visit to Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer. Disguised as a volunteer, Rove steals official campaign letterhead and sends out 1,000 invitations to people in the city's red-light district and soup kitchens, offering "free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing" at Dixon headquarters. When hundreds of homeless and alcoholic Chicagoans show up at a fancy Dixon reception, Rove succeeds in embarrassing the candidate. Dixon still wins the election.

Interesting that Rove his already doing dirty tricks BEFORE he gets involved with Segretti.

IN 1971 Rove drops out of college to focus fulltime on College Republicans.  It is here he becomes a protégé of Lee Atwater.  Ridgeway does not cover how Rove becomes National Chairman --  by challenging every single one of his opponents delegates.  Nor does Ridgeway tell us that the final arbiter of the dispute was the national chair of the parent party, George Herbert Walker Bush, later 41st president.

During the ‘72 campaign, Rove becomes involved with Segretti, where he

paints McGovern as "left-wing peacenik," in spite of McGovern's World War II stint piloting a B-24. Rove also works as staff assistant to George Bush Sr., then chairman of Republican National Committee (RNC).

.  The following year Rove introduces Atwater to Bush, with the consequences we all know.

AUGUST 10, 1973: The Washington Post says it received tape of Rove telling about some of his "dirty tricks." Rove is rumored to have participated in "dumpster-diving" (looking through opponents' trash for information to be used against them), crimes such as identity theft, petty larceny, and campaign fraud, and tours to teach other College Republicans how to perform these tricks.

In November of that year Rove first meets our current president, and is greatly impresses with the young man’s swagger, charisma, etc.

Rove marries for the first time, Valerie Wainwright, in 1976.  This is followed by a period of closer involvement with the Bushes, raising money for the 1980 presidential campaign of the father, advising the son on his ultimately failed Congressional bid, and baby-sitting the son during his drinking.  At the end of this period, in 1979, his wife divorces. him.  IN 1981 his mother commits suicide, and he forms his political direct mail firm, which even though the Republicans get clobbered in Texas in 1982, enables Rove to develop his strategies of targeting the suburbs.

During the period of 1984-1988 Rove helps Phil Gramm win his Senate seat, marries his 2nd wife Darby, helps Bill Clement get elected governor, and - very important:

1988: Rove hits on "tort reform" as winning issue for Republicans. His candidates win five out of six open seats on the Texas Supreme Court.

 (for an interesting analysis of this election and the use of “tort reform”, you can look at a transcript of a program Frontline did on this election).

Let me offer the next item in Ridgeway’s chronology without comment.  

1994: Rove becomes political adviser to George W. Bush in his race against incumbent governor Ann Richards. Bush aided by $1 million pumped into the race. Rove dreams up idea of staging calls to voters from supposed pollsters who ask such things as whether people would be "more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians."

Ridgeway brings us up to the present, including the 2000 smear job on McCain, Rove being forced to sell his Enron stock, the lost PowerPoint presentation which advocated using WOT as a campaign tactic, and all the events from the Plame outing in 2003 on.

Take the time to read it.  When one looks at Rove’s entire career, it tells you all you need to know about Bush and his (absolutely total lack of) ethics when it comes to gaining political advantage.

he two letters from the P-I were printed on Monday. One characteristic of the Washington tests, not unique to that state, is the secrecy which is attached to the test. While it is possible for a parent to see his child’s actual test (not the case in every state), there is a confidentiality agreement that prohibits disclosing what one has seen, even in discussion with the teacher(s) of your child. This provision has criminal penalties. The author of the first letter, David Muga, Ph. D., is a college instructor, and his entire letter can be read [here http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/233075_wasl19a.html ]

The letter is headed “Secrecy of the process helps no one” and begins

I object to the confidentiality form I was asked to sign prior to review of my daughter's fifth-grade Washington Assessment of Student Learning test results. In essence, the form criminalizes any parents who talk about the WASL exam their child took, even if they talk about it to their child's teacher or other parent. As such, I declined to sign the form and was unable to review my daughter's test results.

About 1/3 of the test is recycled each year. However it is not clear whether if those questions were identified the parents could discuss the rest. A more serious problem, as Muga notes, is

According to an Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction representative, Revised Code of Washington 28A.635.040 language quoted in the disclosure form was originally crafted for use in the administration of adult professional certification and advancement testing, for example, teacher certification exams and State Patrol advancement exams. Do WASL questions for my 10-year-old really fall into the realm of tests administered to professional adults? In my assessment, they do not. Adults who apply for a position do so voluntarily; children are subjected to WASL exams under coercive conditions.

WASL exams are allegedly intended to improve student learning. Thus, the reasoning behind enforcement of a level of confidentiality that significantly restricts both access and discussion of the test items is indefensible. Not only do secret tests fail to improve student learning, they, in fact, inhibit it.

Part of the argument given for such confidentiality is that each new test questions costs roughly $20,000

to create, validate, and pilot test

. Muga points out

the insanity of creating an assessment whose very cost precludes its use as a diagnostic tool. If student learning were truly the object of the exercise, hiring new teachers, reducing class size, purchasing new teaching materials or introducing new pedagogical techniques would seem a better use of this $20,000 per-item expense.

Muga also notes that the inability to see and discuss the items seems to work against the idea of having parents of those historically left behind involved in the process of helping their children comply with the expectations the tests impose. He also worries about the amount of testing:

According to my estimates, my fifth-grade daughter was subjected to at least 30 hours of testing, including 18 hours for the WASL, in April and May. Excessive testing; teaching to the test; the use of vague and non-measurable benchmarks and rubrics, portrayed as "best practices," and failure to ensure quality learning opportunities have exacerbated the inequalities of outcome for students.

The second letter, [No Child Left Behind Act and WASL will leave kids behind
URL: http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/233073_teen19a.html], was written by a therapist named Joe Guppy. He begins by talking about his pride at sitting in Seahawks stadium watching his nephew graduate as one of the valedictorians of his class. He then writes

I also felt pride in the diversity among the graduates and the crowd. It was inspiring when society seems to be growing ever more divisive to see a unified celebration of youthful achievement. But as each member of the entire class of 400-plus came forward to accept diplomas, and as the cheering of family and friends rose up from different sections of the stadium, I thought:

How many of these graduates would not be here if the rigid WASL test graduation requirements were in place now, instead of in three years? How many of these whooping and hollering families would instead be struggling with a child who had dropped out of high school, stigmatized as a "failure"? How many younger brothers and sisters will not join their siblings as high school grads?

As a therapist he has worked with many of those who would be affected:

I ran a teen anger management group at a Seattle-area community agency, working with students who struggle with the pressures of a society in which to be average is considered failure, and to be below average is to be considered worthless.

It is not that he is opposed to teaching kids skills in reading, writing and math, but worries that we have devalued an ordinary working class life for those not academically oriented, and the consequences of that devaluation:

Beneath the stories of anger, fights, shoplifting and drug abuse, I always see in these kids a deep shame. We do not give them dignified options, and instead they turn to an identity that offers them respect within an alternative society -- the "gangster" or "outlaw" culture.

He talks about the opportunities that used to exist. How his grandfather, an Australian, jumped ship in Canada and snuck into the U.S., where he joined the Army to earn citizenship, never had more than an 8th grade education, and worked as a house painter. He goes on:

My father earned a Ph.D. and became a top academic officer at Seattle University, but he never gave even a hint that his "career" was of greater value than his father's "job." Perhaps this comes out of the Depression, when any employment was valued and honorable. And he passed this on to his five sons. Some of us hold more working-class jobs and others have advanced degrees, but we know that we all have equal dignity.

I attended high school in a community that was largely upper middle class. Of the four elementary schools, two were that SES or higher, one was a mix of high SES and middle class, and one was lower middle class and working class. That fourth school was largely Italian and Black families. I remember at one reunion seeing a film where they talked about how these were the families who provided the gardeners and servants. I was sitting with a classmate who was Italian, who still burned at the denigrating attitude it reflected. He had developed his own business, after successful military service as an officer. But he was still proud of his father’s gifts as a gardner, and wondered why it had to be viewed in such a demeaning fashion - even 20 years out of high school it still “frosts my cookies” as he put it, trying to abide by his father’s demand that he never curse.

Finally, we have today’s op ed by Bob Herbert, entitled [Education’s Collateral Damage http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/21/opinion/21herbert.html?hp]. Let me offer the beginning:

Stop the presses! Within just a few days we've had a scandal involving a world-class presidential guru bumped off the front pages by a prime-time presidential announcement of a nominee to the Supreme Court.

No one would argue that these aren't big stories. But an issue that is even more important to the long-term future of the U.S. gets very short shrift from the media. In an era when a college education is virtually a prerequisite for maintaining a middle-class lifestyle, an extraordinary number of American teenagers continue to head toward adulthood without even a high school diploma.

Quoting an essay in a new book by Gary Orfield of Harvard, Herbert presents us with this

"Nationally, only about two-thirds of all students - and only half of all blacks, Latinos and Native Americans - who enter ninth grade graduate with regular diplomas four years later."

In much of the nation, especially in urban and rural areas, the picture is even more dismal. In New York City, just 18 percent of all students graduate with a Regents diploma, which is the diploma generally required for admission to a four-year college. Only 9.4 percent of African-American students get a Regents diploma.

In fact, the U.S. has one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world, and realistically, as Tom Vander Ark of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation notes, only one in five of our students is prepared for college. Vander Ark calls it a social justice issue, noting

"In the aggregate, we need more young people educated at higher levels: more finishing high school, more finishing community college, more finishing four-year degrees. And secondly, I think it's very important that we close the racial and socioeconomic gaps in educational attainment.

"We're seeing a scary level of income stratification that is the result of educational stratification. And it's becoming important not just for the economy but for our society that we help low-income [students], and especially kids of color, achieve high levels of education so that they can participate in the economy and in our society."

The Gates Foundation offers the following factoids:

High school dropouts, on average, earn $9,245 less per year than high school graduates.

The poverty rate for families headed by dropouts is more than twice that for families headed by high school graduates.

Dropouts are much more likely to be unemployed, less likely to vote and more likely to be imprisoned than high school graduates.

Let me give some snippets from Herbert’s conclusion, and then offer some remarks of my own:

And whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, if you'd like to see a wiser, more creative and more effective approach to such crucial problems as war and peace, terror, international relations, employment, energy consumption and so on, you'll need to rely on a much better-educated and better-informed population than the United States has now. . . . The public needs to understand the extent of the high school dropout crisis, and its implications for the long-term future of the U.S. It will most likely have more of an impact on the lives of your children and grandchildren than George W. Bush's appointments to the Supreme Court.

On the surface the three pieces I have offered you may seem contradictory, but they are of a piece. First we need to decide what role or function our schools should provide. That we needs to have a meaningful way of evaluating how well we do our job of schooling is not the question. If the way that we do is not supportive of learning, and not structured so that the information obtained can be used to help students, then that means of assessment - such as WASL - is not performing a positive function. Clearly we do not what children dropping out if at all possible. But then we need to recognize that a school environment that devalues much of what students know is counterproductive. We also cannot demean those who opt for future paths that are not the typical aspirations of the upper middle class. It may be more difficult nowadays to make a good living without graduating from college, but I can assure you, having dealt with auto mechanics and tv repairmen in the past few days, certain skills can still lead to a rewarding life even without the BA or higher. And while we should encourage students to strive and to explore, we cannot so structure school that it discourages them and leads to higher dropout rates. Because while one may not need a college degree in order to succeed, it is very difficult without at least a high school diploma. And the disparity of dropout rates always falls more heavily on those form the lower SES, which inevitably correlates all too well with issues of race.

I hope these three items provide some food for thought.

The two letters from the P-I were printed on Monday. One characteristic of the Washington tests, not unique to that state, is the secrecy which is attached to the test. While it is possible for a parent to see his child’s actual test (not the case in every state), there is a confidentiality agreement that prohibits disclosing what one has seen, even in discussion with the teacher(s) of your child. This provision has criminal penalties. The author of the first letter, David Muga, Ph. D., is a college instructor, and his entire letter can be read [here http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/233075_wasl19a.html ]

The letter is headed “Secrecy of the process helps no one” and begins

I object to the confidentiality form I was asked to sign prior to review of my daughter's fifth-grade Washington Assessment of Student Learning test results. In essence, the form criminalizes any parents who talk about the WASL exam their child took, even if they talk about it to their child's teacher or other parent. As such, I declined to sign the form and was unable to review my daughter's test results.

About 1/3 of the test is recycled each year. However it is not clear whether if those questions were identified the parents could discuss the rest. A more serious problem, as Muga notes, is

According to an Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction representative, Revised Code of Washington 28A.635.040 language quoted in the disclosure form was originally crafted for use in the administration of adult professional certification and advancement testing, for example, teacher certification exams and State Patrol advancement exams. Do WASL questions for my 10-year-old really fall into the realm of tests administered to professional adults? In my assessment, they do not. Adults who apply for a position do so voluntarily; children are subjected to WASL exams under coercive conditions.

WASL exams are allegedly intended to improve student learning. Thus, the reasoning behind enforcement of a level of confidentiality that significantly restricts both access and discussion of the test items is indefensible. Not only do secret tests fail to improve student learning, they, in fact, inhibit it.

Part of the argument given for such confidentiality is that each new test questions costs roughly $20,000

to create, validate, and pilot test

. Muga points out

the insanity of creating an assessment whose very cost precludes its use as a diagnostic tool. If student learning were truly the object of the exercise, hiring new teachers, reducing class size, purchasing new teaching materials or introducing new pedagogical techniques would seem a better use of this $20,000 per-item expense.

Muga also notes that the inability to see and discuss the items seems to work against the idea of having parents of those historically left behind involved in the process of helping their children comply with the expectations the tests impose. He also worries about the amount of testing:

According to my estimates, my fifth-grade daughter was subjected to at least 30 hours of testing, including 18 hours for the WASL, in April and May. Excessive testing; teaching to the test; the use of vague and non-measurable benchmarks and rubrics, portrayed as "best practices," and failure to ensure quality learning opportunities have exacerbated the inequalities of outcome for students.

The second letter, [No Child Left Behind Act and WASL will leave kids behind
URL: http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/233073_teen19a.html], was written by a therapist named Joe Guppy. He begins by talking about his pride at sitting in Seahawks stadium watching his nephew graduate as one of the valedictorians of his class. He then writes

I also felt pride in the diversity among the graduates and the crowd. It was inspiring when society seems to be growing ever more divisive to see a unified celebration of youthful achievement. But as each member of the entire class of 400-plus came forward to accept diplomas, and as the cheering of family and friends rose up from different sections of the stadium, I thought:

How many of these graduates would not be here if the rigid WASL test graduation requirements were in place now, instead of in three years? How many of these whooping and hollering families would instead be struggling with a child who had dropped out of high school, stigmatized as a "failure"? How many younger brothers and sisters will not join their siblings as high school grads?

As a therapist he has worked with many of those who would be affected:

I ran a teen anger management group at a Seattle-area community agency, working with students who struggle with the pressures of a society in which to be average is considered failure, and to be below average is to be considered worthless.

It is not that he is opposed to teaching kids skills in reading, writing and math, but worries that we have devalued an ordinary working class life for those not academically oriented, and the consequences of that devaluation:

Beneath the stories of anger, fights, shoplifting and drug abuse, I always see in these kids a deep shame. We do not give them dignified options, and instead they turn to an identity that offers them respect within an alternative society -- the "gangster" or "outlaw" culture.

He talks about the opportunities that used to exist. How his grandfather, an Australian, jumped ship in Canada and snuck into the U.S., where he joined the Army to earn citizenship, never had more than an 8th grade education, and worked as a house painter. He goes on:

My father earned a Ph.D. and became a top academic officer at Seattle University, but he never gave even a hint that his "career" was of greater value than his father's "job." Perhaps this comes out of the Depression, when any employment was valued and honorable. And he passed this on to his five sons. Some of us hold more working-class jobs and others have advanced degrees, but we know that we all have equal dignity.

I attended high school in a community that was largely upper middle class. Of the four elementary schools, two were that SES or higher, one was a mix of high SES and middle class, and one was lower middle class and working class. That fourth school was largely Italian and Black families. I remember at one reunion seeing a film where they talked about how these were the families who provided the gardeners and servants. I was sitting with a classmate who was Italian, who still burned at the denigrating attitude it reflected. He had developed his own business, after successful military service as an officer. But he was still proud of his father’s gifts as a gardner, and wondered why it had to be viewed in such a demeaning fashion - even 20 years out of high school it still “frosts my cookies” as he put it, trying to abide by his father’s demand that he never curse.

Finally, we have today’s op ed by Bob Herbert, entitled [Education’s Collateral Damage http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/21/opinion/21herbert.html?hp]. Let me offer the beginning:

Stop the presses! Within just a few days we've had a scandal involving a world-class presidential guru bumped off the front pages by a prime-time presidential announcement of a nominee to the Supreme Court.

No one would argue that these aren't big stories. But an issue that is even more important to the long-term future of the U.S. gets very short shrift from the media. In an era when a college education is virtually a prerequisite for maintaining a middle-class lifestyle, an extraordinary number of American teenagers continue to head toward adulthood without even a high school diploma.

Quoting an essay in a new book by Gary Orfield of Harvard, Herbert presents us with this

"Nationally, only about two-thirds of all students - and only half of all blacks, Latinos and Native Americans - who enter ninth grade graduate with regular diplomas four years later."

In much of the nation, especially in urban and rural areas, the picture is even more dismal. In New York City, just 18 percent of all students graduate with a Regents diploma, which is the diploma generally required for admission to a four-year college. Only 9.4 percent of African-American students get a Regents diploma.

In fact, the U.S. has one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world, and realistically, as Tom Vander Ark of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation notes, only one in five of our students is prepared for college. Vander Ark calls it a social justice issue, noting

"In the aggregate, we need more young people educated at higher levels: more finishing high school, more finishing community college, more finishing four-year degrees. And secondly, I think it's very important that we close the racial and socioeconomic gaps in educational attainment.

"We're seeing a scary level of income stratification that is the result of educational stratification. And it's becoming important not just for the economy but for our society that we help low-income [students], and especially kids of color, achieve high levels of education so that they can participate in the economy and in our society."

The Gates Foundation offers the following factoids:

High school dropouts, on average, earn $9,245 less per year than high school graduates.

The poverty rate for families headed by dropouts is more than twice that for families headed by high school graduates.

Dropouts are much more likely to be unemployed, less likely to vote and more likely to be imprisoned than high school graduates.

Let me give some snippets from Herbert’s conclusion, and then offer some remarks of my own:

And whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, if you'd like to see a wiser, more creative and more effective approach to such crucial problems as war and peace, terror, international relations, employment, energy consumption and so on, you'll need to rely on a much better-educated and better-informed population than the United States has now. . . . The public needs to understand the extent of the high school dropout crisis, and its implications for the long-term future of the U.S. It will most likely have more of an impact on the lives of your children and grandchildren than George W. Bush's appointments to the Supreme Court.

On the surface the three pieces I have offered you may seem contradictory, but they are of a piece. First we need to decide what role or function our schools should provide. That we needs to have a meaningful way of evaluating how well we do our job of schooling is not the question. If the way that we do is not supportive of learning, and not structured so that the information obtained can be used to help students, then that means of assessment - such as WASL - is not performing a positive function. Clearly we do not what children dropping out if at all possible. But then we need to recognize that a school environment that devalues much of what students know is counterproductive. We also cannot demean those who opt for future paths that are not the typical aspirations of the upper middle class. It may be more difficult nowadays to make a good living without graduating from college, but I can assure you, having dealt with auto mechanics and tv repairmen in the past few days, certain skills can still lead to a rewarding life even without the BA or higher. And while we should encourage students to strive and to explore, we cannot so structure school that it discourages them and leads to higher dropout rates. Because while one may not need a college degree in order to succeed, it is very difficult without at least a high school diploma. And the disparity of dropout rates always falls more heavily on those form the lower SES, which inevitably correlates all too well with issues of race.

I hope these three items provide some food for thought.

(this was originally composed as a comment in response to a diary at mylerftwing entitled [What is the value of a life? http://www.soapblox.net/myleftwing/showDiary.do?diaryId=284] which I highly recommend. Because of its length, I decided to post it as a separate diary, both there, at www.dailykos.com, and here).

What is the value of a particular action, even within that life? This is a relevant question for me right now. You may remember HRH Elizabeth II talking about her "annus horribilis" a few years ago. I have just had a week that falls into that category

- a lightening strike that fried our tv set

- the dishwasher failing

- a physical where blood pressure and cholesterol were way up

- as followup stress test that turned out positive

- today a major auto accident, technically my fault although the other driver was wrong as well -- my car badly damaged, my insurance will skyrocket because I got ticketed, and me feeling like an absolute idiot because I was making a u-turn to save a couple of minutes in doing an errand that was not that time sensitive.

Fortunately no one was injured. Between the accident scene, the body shop, and getting the rental replacement provided by my insurance, I lost about 2.5 hours.

In Brothers Karamozov there is an exchange between Alyosha and someone who has come to him for guidance. In the process he tells a story about a fairly mean woman who had done one good thing in her life -- she had once given an onion to a beggar. So her guardian angel is using the onion to pull her up from hell. As she ascends, others grab on to her legs in the hopes of also being pulled out. She tries to beat them off, complaining that it is her onion, not theirs, the onion breaks, and she falls back.

Yesterday I did my "onion" - there was a frail woman coming out of the supermarket with her cart, well dressed, almost elegant, but really having difficulty. I asked if she needed some help. She just lit up - she said she had been praying that God would send her a man to help her get her things to her car. She asked if I were a godly man. I responded that I really didn't know, but that I'd help her anyway.

Why do I tell this tale? The amount of time I took to help her, including putting all her bags on the back seat of her car where it would be easier for her to get them out as she wouldn't have to bend over, that few minutes was MORE than the time it would have taken me to drive around the several blocks to get to my destination instead of trying to save a few moments by what turns out is an illegal u-turn (in Virginia U-turns are only legal at intersections, and then only if not otherwise posted, as I was informed by the officer who responded to the scene).

I have always been impatient. When, as yesterday, I let go of that and become more open to others, good things happen. That was my onion. When I act from impatience, as I did today, I cannot say the results are particularly positive. Perhaps the onion from yesterday served one purpose - no one was hurt, not the driver or his two passengers (it was a taxi), we all walked away. So maybe that onion got used for a positive purpose.

Life consists of many seemingly small moments. In chaos theory we learn that the flapping of a butterfly's wings ioff S America or in China can lead to the landfall of a major cyclonic storm in the U.S. Each small action has consequences. We could in another context talk about the law of Dharma to help understand this.

I have little control over the meaning of my life in a large scale, even though I feel comfrotable with the decision to dedicate myself to teaching. I do have control over each action I do. And when I act in impatience, with such thoughtlessness for anything except my own needs and desires, I cannot be surprised if the results actually turn out to be quite costly.

I was lucky. Cars can be repaired, and paying several years of extra insurance payments is a far lesser consequence that I could have incurred, or could ahve been suffered by those in the vehicle that hit me. Whether the other driver was fulfilling his responsibility properly does not matter, because I was not fulfilling mine.

We should consider the larger picture of what a life means. But we should also not forget that individual actions within the larger life can have major consequences as well -- for ourselves and for those whom our actions impact. These actions include the words we say, the way we react to the words and actions of others.

I hope that I have learned something from today. I offer in the hope that perhaps it may be of value for others.

What children achieve academically is the product not only of what they learn in school, but of a wide variety of factors, including home and neighborhood influences, and social and economic conditions. My book attempts to help explain the concrete ways in which these influences affect learning.

In yesterday’s posting, The Campaign for Educational Equity, I mentioned that I would be posting this morning about Richard Rothstein. He is based at the Economic Policy Institute, is a visiting lecturer at Teachers College, and spent four years as national education columnist for the New York Times. He now writes for The American Prospect

The quote above is from the current issues The Evaluation Exchange, is a publication of the Harvard Family Research Project, from a piece entitled A conversation with Richard Rothstein.

Rothstein is discussing how closing the achievement gap cannot be addressed only by school reform, an argument which is the subject of his new book, Class and Schools, in response to the basis for his argument.

Here is some more of that first response:

One of the most important ways in which social-class differences affect how children learn, for example, is parenting style. Much research has demonstrated that parents from different social classes have different conversational styles, ways of relating, and intellectual engagement with children. . . . toddlers whose parents had professional occupations heard an average of 2,000 words per hour, while children with working-class parents heard an average of 1,300 words; and children with parents on welfare heard an average of 600 words. These differences are meaningful because the extent to which parents converse with and in the presence of their children impacts children's vocabularies and literacy levels.

When asked what he considered essential for closing the achievement gap, Rothstein’s response began with preschool:

Our priority should be providing high quality early childhood programs for children of all social classes. Preschool for all 4-year-olds is a start, but not sufficient, because gaps show up by age 3. Children's cognitive abilities begin to differentiate early in life, based in part on the amount of intellectual stimulation they receive in the home and in child care.

His second priority is health, responding that even though we know there is a health difference between classes, we often do not fully recognize the impact this has on academic achievement. He first discusses vision:

Low-income children come to school with twice the rate of vision problems as middle-class children—many children can't read simply because they can't see.

He then mentions poor children have three times as many untreated dental cavities as middle class children, noting

children who are in discomfort—whether from a toothache or for some other reason—are going to pay attention less well, on average, than children who are not in discomfort. Children will not learn if they are absent or distracted by health problems.

These are real issues that few schools or school systems have attempted to address. But his next point is one that most people do not realize: that minority children actually learn MORE in school than do middle class children. This section is worth an extensive selection, about which I will then comment:

Our only reliable national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, shows Black students' reading scores rising more from fourth to eighth grade than Whites' scores. The big achievement gap is due partly to disadvantaged children starting out in school already far behind. Also, they get less educational support in summers and after school.

This observation has been confirmed by tests given to children in the spring and again the following autumn. These tests show that during summer, disadvantaged children's scores fall, while middle-class children forget less of what they have learned. This differential “summer setback” occurs partly because middle-class children's learning is reinforced in the summer months—they read more, travel, and learn new social and emotional skills in camp and organized athletics. It is reasonable to think that differences in out-of-school opportunities also exacerbate the achievement gap.

So another effective approach to narrowing the achievement gap would be to offer after school and summer programs that provide academic support as well as cultural, athletic, and organizational experiences for disadvantaged children. Only about one in five low-income children presently participate in after school programs.

The summer problem is symptomatic of the larger problem of educational reinforcement that is not available to children from lower Socio-Economic Status than it is to children who are at least middle class. Rothstein has already discussed the class differences in conversational style and educational engagement. The summer problem is especially acute. ONe problem with our current testing mechanism is that in most states it is a test at the end of the school year. This understates how much minority children (for there is unfortunately still a strong correlation between race and SES in this country) learn during the school year, and gives too much credit to the school for the achievement of the children of families that are middle class and above. Even assuming that our current approach to testing measured the learning of individual students (which by and large it does not, it is comparisons of different cohorts at the same point in their schooling), that would not accurately measure the effect of schooling upon the learning of the children. What we really need is to measure what the students know about a domain at the start of the school year then again at the end of that school year. Please note, I am not arguing for more tests, merely noting that this different approach would give a more accurate measure on which to base educational policy decisions.

The evidence for the summer loss of learning for lower SES / minority is incontrovertible. I read one of the seminal studies when it was in pre-release form, and as much as I thought I knew about the issues that effect the learning of students, I was stunned. This is NOT an issue about which even most policy makers are knowledgeable, which means the decision that are being made are done with incomplete information, and hence DO NOT address some of the most important factors influencing children’s learning. The implications of this are that one of the most cost-effective ways of closing the learning gap would be to increase participation for lower SES students in summer programs that enrich academics. And yet there is in many cases limited availability of such opportunities. The District in which I teach offers an extensive summer school program -- for students who have failed a course and need to retake it in order to move on!! We have one or two enrichment courses for those students who are already doing well that accelerates their learning, thus exacerbating the achievement gap: -- in a district that is of 70% African American and only about 15% White, the repeat classes have very few white students and the accelerated classes have very few minority students

Rothstein is not making an argument that educators should not try harder, but he is pointing out that such effort will be insufficient: school can only be part of the solution. As he notes:

Currently, our national education policy expects something we cannot possibly achieve if schools alone are seen as responsible for student achievement. Our national goal is that all social-class differences in education outcomes will disappear by the year 2014. However, when 2014 arrives and gaps have not disappeared, we will judge that schools have failed. Policies will follow from that judgment. But most of these policies will not work, because we will have made an incorrect diagnosis of the problem and therefore formulated an incorrect or incomplete treatment as a solution.

I want readers to reflect for a moment about the foregoing paragraph. NCLB requires all students to be proficient in reading, math, and science (for which the tests are not yet required) by 2014, in grades 3-8. The current issue is whether they are making enough Annual Yearly Progress. Let my simplify (and slightly distort) how this works: if in 2004 60% of my students were “proficient” I will have ten years to gain an additional 60%, Or I must improve by 6% per year, or the school does not meet AYP goals, Several consecutive years of not meeting such goals and the school will suffer some economic consequences. beside the fact that you are comparing one cohort to another (last year’s kids to this year’s), that is only one issue. Each disaggregated group (by race, special education kids as a group, conceivably English language learners) must be showing AYP or the school as a whole is not: if one group in one grade does not make AYP, the entire school does not. Given the consequences, states are already playing games that hide the failure to meaningfully close the achievement gap, a closure which was one of the principle justifications for Democrats like George Miller and Ted Kennedy to support this atrocity in the first place. The closer we get to 2014 the higher the percentage of schools not meeting AYP - this is NOT Lake Wobegon where all of the children will always be above average.

Rothstein does not directly address this aspect of NCLB. He points out our current national policy, and helps us understand why it is insufficient to address the issue of educational inequity.

I will let you complete the article on your own. Rothstein talks some more about how simple medical problems have a sever impact on the learning of low-income children. He talks about the need of not only providing services to address these, but how it becomes important to coordinate these with the educational system. Let me give an example not directly cited by Rothstein, but about which I know. A city sets up a terrific city-wide magnet program to enrich the schooling of low-income children. But the only way for that child to get to and from school is by school bus. Thus if the child needs to see a dentist to fill a cavity, that child either must miss the entire day of school for what could be a 30-45 minute appointment, or the parent has to miss a day of work to transport the child (that is, if the parent has a car!). I teach at a terrific high school that draws students from about 1/2 of a fairly large county that border’s DC. We see this problem consistently. One solution is to provide health and dental clinics at school based sites. This could address the problem of the commuting student. it could also provide a less expensive place for the rest of the family to receive medical and dental care as well. This would mean rethinking the way we deliver services other than education in order to maximize the effort and resources we do put into education.

Rothstein argues for more research on initiatives that could improve schooling. As he notes

We are so focused on schools being the sole determinants of child outcomes that we spend very little time investigating the ways other institutions and social forces interact

Far too much of our social policy in this country is based on ideology and not on research. Even some of the research is distorted because it is funded by those seeking a particular outcome. We are far to ready to build massive programs of social intervention -- including in education - that have not been thoroughly tested and examined. NCLB is symptomatic of this, but it is far from the only example one could cite within education.

Rothstein is a very perceptive man. While I greatly enjoy the work his successor, Mike Winerip, has done at The New York Times, I do miss reading him on a regular basis. I will read his book, and I would hope those of you interested in truly addressing the educational inequities in this country would as well.

And to put this diary in proper context, if have not already done so, please go back and read my diary from yesterday about the effort at Teachers College to address the issue of educational inequity.

s an effort to address the educational inequities in our society, which cannot be addressed by only looking at the schools, but which does require rethinking how we do schooling.

I first learned about it in an article in Teachers' College Record (disclosure - I have in the past served as a peer reviewer for this publication) written by Arthur Levine, President of Teachers College in New York City. It is entitled [Why Should I Worry About Schools My Children Won't Attend? http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article.htm?id=5150]. The title is from Anna Karenina, and I will offer a few extracts and comments below. You can also use the link above to read the entire article.


In this piece first published back in May, Levine explains how he gets the title:


The article represents not Levine's answer to this question with respect to schools, but the consensus of Teachers College, the entire community. As he notes:


The College has now embarked on a major initiative, the title of which appears in the subject line above, dedicated of closing


If you remember the rhetoric of the Edwards campaign, about Two Americas, this initiative is addressing the reality that

Levine offers a number of statistics to show how broadly based within society the problem is. Let me just list the first three:


He lists ten more and that states



Levine then goes through a number key questions. I will give a sampling of part of the answer to each.

For Why Educational Equity? he addresses the issue of educational inequity, noting that


He also explains why it is also an economic, a social and a civic threat, noting for the last


As to Why Teachers College, Levine notes in part


He reminds us that educational excellence was largely a product of the baby boomers, and as their children leave school, they are no longer as oncerned with education because they (and as I was born in '46 this refers to me as well)


We have had many efforts at school reform over the past 20+ years (A Nation At Risk was released in 1983). The results?


Levine then describes what the campaign will do. This part is exceedingly difficult to extract or summarize in any meaningful way. The key components will be research, dissemination, and demonstration projects. One key player will be research professor Richard Rothstein, who use to write the education column for the NY Times (and about whom I will make a separate posting tomorrow).

Certainly an effort like this must have some goals, some whay of seeing how it is doing. Levine answers the question of How Will Success Be Determined? with the following list of things they hope they have the ability to achieve:


In the rest of the piece Levine talks about historical precedence for Universities taking the lead in addressing social problems, with reference to Abraham Flexner, Thorsten Veblen, and also to the University of Wisconsin under Charles van Hise. Let me offer two paragraphs that give a sense of this section.



Those who have followed my postings know that I am passionate about education as both a social and a political issue. I have described the battle over public schools as ground zero in the war for the political future of this nation. I believe this endeavor by TC is an important step in addressing the inequities in our educational system, and are far more meaningful - and far more likely to make a positive difference - than anything and everyting contained in that abomination known as No Child Left Behind - testing ad nauseum and raising test scores does not address in any meaningful way the underlying inequities that are truly responsible for most of the the difference in performance about which so many claim to be so concerned. My experience and my observation lead me to the firm conclusion that the testing regimen on which we have embarked will actually exacerbate the educational inequities -- in order to close the so-called performance gap those students in schools containing large numbers of disadvantaged students will see their education increasingly limited and reduced to little more than test prepo, whereas those from the mroe comfortable environments will not have to restrict their educational activities as much because their students already perform substantially better.

Teachers' College has a long and distinguished history, although there will be those who will use that history against it and against this effort - after all, a major player in its history was John Dewey. I am sure there will be those who will attack this effort. To no one's surprise, I will not be among them.

If we do not address the INCREASING educational inequity in our nation and society, we will not survive as a democracy. One cn argue that democratic principles are in serious jeopardy as I write this, and I would not disagree. I acknowledge that there are othe battlegrounds that may seem more immediate. But we cannot afford to ignore the schools, because that is the future of us all.