Top of my serious summer reading list is Robert Putnam's new book, about which I expect I'll blog plenty once I've read it. But I assigned myself a pre-reading exercise. I'm going to write out what I think I understand about social capital and where it comes from.
Social capital is a kind of fancy term for a quality that is critical for education, but also for pretty much everything else, and it's another way to understand the differences between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, that goes beyond simply saying, "Some people have money and some people, not so much." And if you like your social studies woolgathering to have some science included, I've written before about this long study in Baltimore by John Hopkins. The marque headline was that family and money "cast a long shadow," but what was really casting the shadow was social capital.
I feel like I know a little something about social capital because I have lived most of my life in the same small town, and when we talk about how the quintessential small town is different, I think one way of understanding what we're talking about is social capital-- though even in small town America, we're losing it, and have been for a century or so (I've read Putnam's previous work, Bowling Alone-- everybody should).
So what do I think are some of the critical elements of social capital, why do they matter, and how have we stopped building them?
Interconnectedness
In a small town, everybody knows everybody. This does not mean that everybody is friends, but there is a level of familiarity that creates a sort of comfort that comes from having known somebody for decades so that every encounter is not charged with the sort of defensive fling-out that marks so many simple encounters in a big city. And it means that after decades, we may not be buddies, but we have an understanding, even to the point that w get along well because I know who you are and how you are and it's like the local climate-- it just is what it is.
Part of that interconnectedness is that we encounter each other in a variety of roles. The guy who checks out my groceries may be my neighbor or sing in church choir with me or lead my kid's scout troop. Members of the community know each other in several different contexts, which means we have access to different dimensions, different angles of view for each other.
This creates some social capital because it forces people to be more thoughtful about interactions. In LA you might be a jerk to your waitress because you'll never see her again. But social capital greases the wheels of karma, and the wrong you do at lunch may be biting you in the ass by supper time. Even if you don't buy altruism and kindness and general human decency, it makes practical sense to avoid peeing in your own weld.
True story. Years ago a new manager of a local hotel decided he would try to become a hub of arts activities as a business plan. His first move was to try to get local choirs to come do a fest at his place for free, so he approached each choir director by saying, "Well, all the other directors have signed on." But some of those directors sang in the same church choir, played in the same town band, were or former students of the same local teacher-- it took about a day for him to be caught in his lie, and he was done. Interconnectedness magnifies positive effects (everyone pitches in for a good cause) and squelches negative ones (it's very hard to be a successful small town con artist).
We lose this when the community is too large (I don't know how large that is, exactly, but I'm curious) or when movement through the community is too much (nobody sticks around long enough to become connected) or when people are dispersed. I cannot recommend strongly enough that teachers live in the communities they serve, but that is challenging in some situations and absolutely impossible if a school is not community based.
When you keep scrambling people around, spreading them out, or isolating them, the opportunity to be interconnected is lost, and so is the magnifying effect of social capital.
Shared experience
A little over a century ago, my county had an amusement park. Located a few miles from both of our larger cities, it could only be reached by streetcar (like most parks of the period, it was owns by the transportation company as a means of creating demand for transportation). On major holidays, the cities were empty-- everyone went to Monarch Park. If you were alive at that time, you knew exactly how everybody sent the Fourth of July and even if you were otherwise strangers, you had that common experience.
Shared experience can even transcend time. In lots of small town areas, grown adults still ask each other, "Where did you go to school?" Because even if you graduated from the same high school fifteen years apart, you share the same school, the same traditions, probably even some of the same teachers.
Shared experiences give us a shared vocabulary, as well as a shared measuring stick (If you hated Mr. McBoogerface as a teacher but I loved him, we now know something about each other). If we belong to the same club (literally or figuratively) we have a bond that connects us.
But if there's anything that has been eroded by the last sixty years of progress, it is shared experience. As a larger culture, we don't watch the same shows, listen to the same music, see the same movies, follow the same websites. Monarch Park was killed by the automobile-- people could go wherever they wanted on their own schedule, so they did. Choices work against shared experiences.
It's true that this was never as great as we like to think. The fifties are often held up as a swell time in which all Americans were pretty much on the same page, but that was only mostly true for white heterosexual males. But today we have sorts ourselves into far more discrete categories because, given the current levels of technology and media, we can. We get what we want, but walled up in our small personal silos, we don't get much shared experience, and we especially don't get shared experience with people unlike ourselves.
Making schools part of this sorting does not help build social capital. More importantly, it keeps it within small groups, and like money, social capital only does any good when it's moving around.
Sharing capital
An individual's social capital accumulates (or diminishes) over time. Do you make connections? Build networks? Share experiences? Do you look out for other members of your community? Favors, assistance, a little slack-- these are all purchased with social capital
Like other currencies, social capital can be shared. You can cash in your social capital to get a favor for yourself or for someone else. You can use your clout for yourself or for the benefit of others. But doing favors for others often garners you more capital in the economy of favors.
Diane Ravitch collected a great deal of social capital by her connections, but she has used that to fourth a cause, and that has included using much blog space to amplify the voices of other writers. Hollywood, heartless as it may seem, is billed with stories of people who become famous and use that fame to lift up other people who are still low in social capital or career success.
Pay it forward is all about social capital-- recognizing that much of what you have was passed to you by folks before you, and so resolving to spend some of your capital on those fourth down the ladder than you. This keeps social capital building and growing. It is very hard to create social capital out of air, but given a little bit of it, you can turn it into a great deal more.
While our culture has a deep love of "I've got mine, Jack," selfishness, a closer look shows the social capita sharing economy in action. The Wizard of Oz is one of many stories in which the hero's main "power" is the power of connecting, building a community, and sharing the capital that is accrued. Even supposedly bootstrappy Horatio Alger stories invariably involve some mentor figure who helps lift up the deserving young scrappy poor kid.
But the sharing economy is a big deal, because the cool thing about social capital is that, as with any god investment, when you share it, you keep all that you had and get more besides.
Where does it come from?
So how do you get social capital. I can think of three ways.
1) You're born with it. You are born into the community your parents live in, and so all their connections are yours at birth. If your are born a rich white guy, you automatically enter the world with more social capital than a non-rich non-white guy.
2) Someone gives it to you. As above-- somebody decides to mentor, boost, share or otherwise help you to some social capital.
3) You earn it. Best way? By being good at something.
Schools and building social capital
So can social capital be created, and if so, what role can schools have in the process? Well, yes, and yes. Schools have a structure that is well-suited for creating social capital.
First, public schools have longevity. When people talk with pride about their children attending the same school they did (and having the same teacher-- I am on children of children of former students at this point), they are talking about social capital. They are talking about interconnectedness and shared experiences, and schools can help with that by being stable and by making sure that many of the shared experiences are positive. Traditions, particularly those that are inclusive and kind of cool, build social capital (love the idea of "clapping out" sixth graders). And traditions in high schools are easy to launch-- it takes just four years to go from "That new thing we're doing" to "That thing we've always done."
The structure of a public school is also like playing at social capital with monopoly money. Seniors have more social capital than freshmen just because. The trick would be to implement programs to teach them how to spend it wisely, to create a culture of sharing. We can also teach our students how to recognize social capital, which I suspect is a lot like learning to recognize privilege without triggering the usual defensiveness.
We can play with that traditional structure to create more interconnectedness; this already happens in things like sports and music programs, where students from all different grades and abilities work together and get to know each other. But we can also extend that interconnectedness out into the community to which the school is attached by bringing family and community leaders into the school.
These connections have to be built over time and with real connections. Drive-by do-Gooding, where some hot-shot breezes into the school and then leaves to never return again does not build connection, community or capital.
What about social capital poverty zones?
The John Hopkins study looked at the problem of communities that are low on social capital, low on connectedness, low on shared experiences that are positive and uplifting.
In communities that are strong in social capital, the big web of connectedness is hung from the topmost peg-- there's somebody connected to that community who has plenty of social capital that is connected thousands of ways to thousands of people and that's what keeps the whole business hanging high.
My own community is largely rural and not very wealthy. You can only rise so high here without simply getting of the community. It was not always that way--we once had a couple of wealthy well-connected families here, but their wealth and social capital did not survive the next few generations. Replacing that would be- I don't even know how you do it. Up the road there is an even smaller community that a wealthy doctor actually bought and refurbished-- built a hotel, a small concert space, some shops, a golf course. It has worked well, but the key was that he moved there and made it his home by carefully connecting to the people who already lived there. He didn't just try to breeze through and he didn't try to brush aside the local connections.
I don't know enough about urban poverty zones to know how to approach this challenge, but I feel certain I know some things that don't work. Taking the connectedness that is there and shattering it to spread the children across an entire city (eg Newark or New Orleans) will destroy more than it builds. Trying to do long-distance fixes without actually entering the community, or ignoring the people who are already connected to each other and the community-- that will destroy more than it helps, too.
Building strong traditions. Finding ways to achieve real self-directed excellence (which is not remotely the same n as scoring well on a test somebody else slapped on you). Building on the economies off sharing that exist.
My homework
This is most of what I think I know now. I will start reading Putnam's book soon; I'm hoping I'll be able to glean some insights from that. I'm sure I'll let you know.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Flying First Class
Traveling always gives me time to think, and I spent yesterday making my way to the West Coast, where my wife and I are spending some time in LA hanging out with my son and daughter, their partners, and my grandson (my in-laws are tending to the house and the dog, who cannot even successfully manage a car trip across town).
On one leg of the journey yesterday, we ended up sitting just behind the bulkhead that separated we Mere Mortals from the folks in First Class.
I've never traveled first class, in fact have never traveled sitting far enough forward to see the wonders that occur there.
I marveled at how those twenty-four travelers, of all of us cattle-jammed into the plane, had essentially their own personal staff of attendants to provide them with a steady stream of amenities, from taking their lunch orders to delivering via tongs some nicely warmed towels. One business traveler's seat would not recline, and after contortions worthy of Godzilla's chiropractor, the flight attendant promised a financial compensation for the travelers emotional pain and suffering from being forced to do without his six degrees of inclination.
I reflected that it made a certain amount of sense-- those folks had likely forked over (sans tongs) a ton of money to sit in airplane nirvana, and so had personally generated a great deal of the plane's profit (I'm pretty sure their extra charges more than covered the expense of the tongs). And to give full disclosure, I was only at the bulkhead where I could watch because I had sprung some extra money to pay for the extra luxury of sitting next to my wife on the trip (she is way better than a warm towelette). So I, too, was a traveler who had the financial means to make my travels a little better.
We all made the exact same trip to the same destination. And we all the opportunity, the access, to the seats in first class. The airline made that section available to everyone, but only some were willing and able to take advantage of it. Could they have provided tongs (and seats with enough space for grown humans) to everybody? Not really, because that wouldn't be economically viable. What works economically, business-model-wise, is to sort passengers out so that folks with more money get more service and folks without money just get where they're going in one (uncomfortable) piece. Occasionally folks are "upgraded" to first class, but that changes nothing about how the system fundamentally works. The airline still retains the ability to sort people based on how much profit those people deliver.
This is what treating education as a business promises us (it is, in fact, exactly what it has delivered to us on the college level) -- sorting out customers with levels of service provided to those customers based on how much revenue they can generate. People who are insisting that a charter-choice system would provide greater educational equality are just plain wrong. A free market charter-choice business-style approach to education gets us more inequality, with some folks up in first class and some folks stuck sitting in the back of thebus plane.
On one leg of the journey yesterday, we ended up sitting just behind the bulkhead that separated we Mere Mortals from the folks in First Class.
I've never traveled first class, in fact have never traveled sitting far enough forward to see the wonders that occur there.
I marveled at how those twenty-four travelers, of all of us cattle-jammed into the plane, had essentially their own personal staff of attendants to provide them with a steady stream of amenities, from taking their lunch orders to delivering via tongs some nicely warmed towels. One business traveler's seat would not recline, and after contortions worthy of Godzilla's chiropractor, the flight attendant promised a financial compensation for the travelers emotional pain and suffering from being forced to do without his six degrees of inclination.
I reflected that it made a certain amount of sense-- those folks had likely forked over (sans tongs) a ton of money to sit in airplane nirvana, and so had personally generated a great deal of the plane's profit (I'm pretty sure their extra charges more than covered the expense of the tongs). And to give full disclosure, I was only at the bulkhead where I could watch because I had sprung some extra money to pay for the extra luxury of sitting next to my wife on the trip (she is way better than a warm towelette). So I, too, was a traveler who had the financial means to make my travels a little better.
We all made the exact same trip to the same destination. And we all the opportunity, the access, to the seats in first class. The airline made that section available to everyone, but only some were willing and able to take advantage of it. Could they have provided tongs (and seats with enough space for grown humans) to everybody? Not really, because that wouldn't be economically viable. What works economically, business-model-wise, is to sort passengers out so that folks with more money get more service and folks without money just get where they're going in one (uncomfortable) piece. Occasionally folks are "upgraded" to first class, but that changes nothing about how the system fundamentally works. The airline still retains the ability to sort people based on how much profit those people deliver.
This is what treating education as a business promises us (it is, in fact, exactly what it has delivered to us on the college level) -- sorting out customers with levels of service provided to those customers based on how much revenue they can generate. People who are insisting that a charter-choice system would provide greater educational equality are just plain wrong. A free market charter-choice business-style approach to education gets us more inequality, with some folks up in first class and some folks stuck sitting in the back of the
I'm Defending Teach for America
I'm about a week behind on this, mostly because I don't usually pay any attention to conservative rantist Michelle Malkin. Yes, she often rants against Common Core and corporate commandeering of public education, but when I first started picking apart the odd alliances, congruence, and alignments of the education debates, one thing became clear to me-- in these debates, as in other aspects of life, the enemy of my enemy might well be my enemy. Or at the very least, a trellis asshat.
Malkin made her recent stink in the New York Post, where she accused Teach for America of harboring dangerous radicals.
But those concerns pale in comparison to the divisive, grievance-mongering activities of the group’s increasingly radicalized officials and alumni.
TFA’s most infamous public faces don’t even pretend to be interested in students’ academic achievement. It’s all about race, tweets and marching on the streets.
She goes on to give accounts of recent civil rights activism by TFA members and alums, including popularizing and promoting the #BlackLivesMatter movement. She links this to TFA's recent initiative to include more men and women of color. She stops just short of saying that TFA has been taken over by a bunch of uppity black folks who don't know how to stay in place-- but only just short of that.
Look-- nobody is ever going to mistake me for a TFA supporter. I've explained numerous times why the organization, which has morphed into one more corporate-stoogery corporation, is bad for education. They started out with one simple foolishly naïve idea (any Better Person from the Right School can become a teacher in five weeks) and built on that foundation a structure of even worse ideas (our Better People can replace the inferior professionals and help charters cut the legs out from under public education). And they have long carried the smell of "white man's burden" colonial-style racism in their operation.
But here's two things about TFA. One is that their initiative to recruit men (and women) of color for the classroom is a response to a real problem. It might be a cynical marketing response, but g's still a response to a real problem. The other is that while I have no love or respect for the organization itself, I have always recognized that many folks join TFA with pure hearts and good intentions (yes, many are just looking at their resume, but not all). That to me one of the great evils of TFA-- they take young people with an interest in teaching, who might have been good teachers, and give them the worst possible introduction to the classroom.
And it's really those TFA recruits that Malkin is going after. She connects the corporate dots, but she's using that to work her way to the big reveal-- our tax dollars are supporting Black People Who Won't Sit Down and Shut Up.
TFA deserves a lot of things, not the least of which is to go away forever, but they don't deserve to be the excuse for a racist rant, and they certainly haven't earned the right to be painted as a training ground for Naughty Black Activists.
I know there are folks whose attitude is that we should attack our enemies whenever the chance presents itself and that we should embrace anybody who wants to attack the people we want to attack. But what Malkin and the people who have followed her lead have constructed is a racist lie, and that's just not okay.
This is just one more reason to define oneself by what you stand for, not what you're against. There are plenty of folks out there who are against Common Core and high stakes testing who are also against public education (particularly when it spends tax dollars on Those People). I am not on the same side as those folks.
TFA deserves to be attacked for many reasons, but it's just wrong to support an attack on them that is based on inflammatory foolishness and which feeds the fires of racism.
Malkin made her recent stink in the New York Post, where she accused Teach for America of harboring dangerous radicals.
But those concerns pale in comparison to the divisive, grievance-mongering activities of the group’s increasingly radicalized officials and alumni.
TFA’s most infamous public faces don’t even pretend to be interested in students’ academic achievement. It’s all about race, tweets and marching on the streets.
She goes on to give accounts of recent civil rights activism by TFA members and alums, including popularizing and promoting the #BlackLivesMatter movement. She links this to TFA's recent initiative to include more men and women of color. She stops just short of saying that TFA has been taken over by a bunch of uppity black folks who don't know how to stay in place-- but only just short of that.
Look-- nobody is ever going to mistake me for a TFA supporter. I've explained numerous times why the organization, which has morphed into one more corporate-stoogery corporation, is bad for education. They started out with one simple foolishly naïve idea (any Better Person from the Right School can become a teacher in five weeks) and built on that foundation a structure of even worse ideas (our Better People can replace the inferior professionals and help charters cut the legs out from under public education). And they have long carried the smell of "white man's burden" colonial-style racism in their operation.
But here's two things about TFA. One is that their initiative to recruit men (and women) of color for the classroom is a response to a real problem. It might be a cynical marketing response, but g's still a response to a real problem. The other is that while I have no love or respect for the organization itself, I have always recognized that many folks join TFA with pure hearts and good intentions (yes, many are just looking at their resume, but not all). That to me one of the great evils of TFA-- they take young people with an interest in teaching, who might have been good teachers, and give them the worst possible introduction to the classroom.
And it's really those TFA recruits that Malkin is going after. She connects the corporate dots, but she's using that to work her way to the big reveal-- our tax dollars are supporting Black People Who Won't Sit Down and Shut Up.
TFA deserves a lot of things, not the least of which is to go away forever, but they don't deserve to be the excuse for a racist rant, and they certainly haven't earned the right to be painted as a training ground for Naughty Black Activists.
I know there are folks whose attitude is that we should attack our enemies whenever the chance presents itself and that we should embrace anybody who wants to attack the people we want to attack. But what Malkin and the people who have followed her lead have constructed is a racist lie, and that's just not okay.
This is just one more reason to define oneself by what you stand for, not what you're against. There are plenty of folks out there who are against Common Core and high stakes testing who are also against public education (particularly when it spends tax dollars on Those People). I am not on the same side as those folks.
TFA deserves to be attacked for many reasons, but it's just wrong to support an attack on them that is based on inflammatory foolishness and which feeds the fires of racism.
Friday, June 12, 2015
Schneider: No NOLA Miracle
I'm not going to add much of anything to Mercedes Schneider's post except to say that, in case you missed it-- you should read it.
The New Orleans story is one of the charter-choice golden narratives. It is the place where the reformsters got everything they wanted, so it has to be a success narrative because if they can't make it there, they can't make it anywhere.
Schneider is one of most invaluable researchers in true world of public school defenders, and she has done yet another piece of invaluable research. One chapter of the NOLA magical success tale is "The Story of How Charter-Choice Raised Graduation Rates." Turns out, not so much.
Reformsters tell that story wit a pre-Recovery School District graduation rate of 54.4% (because made up numbers are more credible when they're very specific). But out turns out that the pre-RSD rate was identical (or perhaps better) than then RSD rate. And looking at her methodology,
So read her post. Bookmark her post. Share her post. And whenever someone tries to tell you how the Recovery School District totally fixed New Orleans education, please acquaint them with some actual facts.
The New Orleans story is one of the charter-choice golden narratives. It is the place where the reformsters got everything they wanted, so it has to be a success narrative because if they can't make it there, they can't make it anywhere.
Schneider is one of most invaluable researchers in true world of public school defenders, and she has done yet another piece of invaluable research. One chapter of the NOLA magical success tale is "The Story of How Charter-Choice Raised Graduation Rates." Turns out, not so much.
Reformsters tell that story wit a pre-Recovery School District graduation rate of 54.4% (because made up numbers are more credible when they're very specific). But out turns out that the pre-RSD rate was identical (or perhaps better) than then RSD rate. And looking at her methodology,
So read her post. Bookmark her post. Share her post. And whenever someone tries to tell you how the Recovery School District totally fixed New Orleans education, please acquaint them with some actual facts.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Can't we do better than access?
Here's a piece of rhetoric that charter-choice advocates love to use:
"...to empower school districts to ensure that all kids have access to high-performing schools."
-- PennCAN
"All options need to be on the table to improve schools so every child has access to the best teachers and every family has access to great school choices."
-- Jenny Sedlis, Executive Director of StudentsFirstNY
"Having access to great school facilities will help these young people reach their full potential."
-- Bobby Turner, CEO, Canyon Capital Realty Advisers (praising Rocketship)
"...low-income urban areas facing myriad challenges and whose families don’t have adequate access to great schools."
-- Andy Smarick
The Challenge of Promoting Equal Access to Quality Teachers
-- Headline of article by Mark Dynarski on Brookings website
"...equal access to great teachers is every child’s constitutional right..."
-- TNTP on Vergara verdict
"His vision... includes expanding access to great schools"
-- DFER, just about every time they go to bat for a candidate
I could do this all day, but you get the idea. A recurring theme among charter promoters and choice advocates is to argue for every child to have access to a great school.
So let me ask you a question. You've worked really hard at your job, and you have bills to pay. Would you rather have access to some money, or would you like to have the money. Would you like to work at a place where everybody has access to a nice paycheck, or would you like to have a nice paycheck? When you are hungry, do you want access to food, or do you want food?
In the charter context, "access" is a great little weasel word-- limiting, but not as obvious as "chance."
After all, if I said everybody at my company would have the chance to earn a good paycheck, would you guess what I was up to pretty quickly?
Maybe some charter-choice boosters just aren't choosing their words carefully enough. They need to step up their game.
Because I don't think giving every child "access" to a great school is much of a goal. I can meet that goal by saying, "Hey, I built a great school that can only hold twelve students, but all 2,000 students in the area had access to it." It smacks of exactly the sort of cherry-picking and sorting that charter fans (except Mike Petrilli) don't have the nerve to fess up to. "Access" says "Yes, we gave every kid the chance to prove they deserved to go to Awesome Charter High, but not all were found worthy." "Access" is a word or built-in excuses-- we gave Chris access to a better school, but Chris didn't have what it takes to make use of it. Left some childs behind? Oh well. At least we gave them access.
"Access" is also a word of transport. It implies that every child, to get to a great school, will have to go somewhere else. It says that we can't do anything about the student's present school except provide the means of escape, an open door to Somewhere Else (that she may or may not have the stuff to pass through).
With that one word, charter-choice boosters write off public schools and most of the students in them.
If you still can't see it, just think about how the picture changes if we change the rhetoric to saying, "Our goal is for every single student in the US to be in a great school."
Well, look at that. Suddenly, the option of trying to fix the schools that children are already in-- that option is back on the table. Nor can we make excuses about how a student had "access" to a great school, but just couldn't walk through that door. Maybe we still want to commit to charters and choice (or not), but we have to make an equal-or-greater commitment to bringing existing public schools up to greatness as well.
We don't need to give children access to great schools. We need to give them-- all of them-- great schools.
"...to empower school districts to ensure that all kids have access to high-performing schools."
-- PennCAN
"All options need to be on the table to improve schools so every child has access to the best teachers and every family has access to great school choices."
-- Jenny Sedlis, Executive Director of StudentsFirstNY
"Having access to great school facilities will help these young people reach their full potential."
-- Bobby Turner, CEO, Canyon Capital Realty Advisers (praising Rocketship)
"...low-income urban areas facing myriad challenges and whose families don’t have adequate access to great schools."
-- Andy Smarick
The Challenge of Promoting Equal Access to Quality Teachers
-- Headline of article by Mark Dynarski on Brookings website
"...equal access to great teachers is every child’s constitutional right..."
-- TNTP on Vergara verdict
"His vision... includes expanding access to great schools"
-- DFER, just about every time they go to bat for a candidate
I could do this all day, but you get the idea. A recurring theme among charter promoters and choice advocates is to argue for every child to have access to a great school.
So let me ask you a question. You've worked really hard at your job, and you have bills to pay. Would you rather have access to some money, or would you like to have the money. Would you like to work at a place where everybody has access to a nice paycheck, or would you like to have a nice paycheck? When you are hungry, do you want access to food, or do you want food?
In the charter context, "access" is a great little weasel word-- limiting, but not as obvious as "chance."
After all, if I said everybody at my company would have the chance to earn a good paycheck, would you guess what I was up to pretty quickly?
Maybe some charter-choice boosters just aren't choosing their words carefully enough. They need to step up their game.
Because I don't think giving every child "access" to a great school is much of a goal. I can meet that goal by saying, "Hey, I built a great school that can only hold twelve students, but all 2,000 students in the area had access to it." It smacks of exactly the sort of cherry-picking and sorting that charter fans (except Mike Petrilli) don't have the nerve to fess up to. "Access" says "Yes, we gave every kid the chance to prove they deserved to go to Awesome Charter High, but not all were found worthy." "Access" is a word or built-in excuses-- we gave Chris access to a better school, but Chris didn't have what it takes to make use of it. Left some childs behind? Oh well. At least we gave them access.
"Access" is also a word of transport. It implies that every child, to get to a great school, will have to go somewhere else. It says that we can't do anything about the student's present school except provide the means of escape, an open door to Somewhere Else (that she may or may not have the stuff to pass through).
With that one word, charter-choice boosters write off public schools and most of the students in them.
If you still can't see it, just think about how the picture changes if we change the rhetoric to saying, "Our goal is for every single student in the US to be in a great school."
Well, look at that. Suddenly, the option of trying to fix the schools that children are already in-- that option is back on the table. Nor can we make excuses about how a student had "access" to a great school, but just couldn't walk through that door. Maybe we still want to commit to charters and choice (or not), but we have to make an equal-or-greater commitment to bringing existing public schools up to greatness as well.
We don't need to give children access to great schools. We need to give them-- all of them-- great schools.
empower
school districts to ensure that all kids have access to a
high-performing school! - See more at:
http://penncan.org/research/real-accountability-real-results#sthash.5cJo5cJU.dpufool! - See more at:
http://penncan.org/research/real-accountability-real-results#sthash.5cJo5cJU.dpuf
empower
school districts to ensure that all kids have access to a
high-performing school! - See more at:
http://penncan.org/research/real-accountability-real-results#sthash.5cJo5cJU.dpuf
Which Choosey Choosers Choose the Choices?
I respect reform advocate Andy Smarick for his willingness to consider some of the problems that come with the reformster movement in education. Yes, he steadfastly advocates for choice and charters, and yes, I think he's wrong about many things. But he wrote a long series of posts about the inherent tension between conservative values and conservative support for reformy stuff (here's my response to one of them), and he was a practitioner of respectful and reasonable dialogue before reformsters decided that it would be a good PR move.
So I was all eyes when Smarick connected with Edushyster for an interview. It's right here, and you should read it.
Democracy vs. School Choice
Smarick and 'Shyster (which sounds like an excellent vaudeville act) get directly to one of the great tensions in the choice movement-- the tension between democracy and choice.
The reformster theory is that school choice ought to be democracy on steroids, a free market where every customer gets a direct vote on What School Looks Like and any entrepreneur can enter that race.
In practice, that seems to be very much what does not happen. Every place that people have been given the chance to "vote with their feet," they have lost all other voice in the process. (Not to mention that when a city moves to a "vote with their feet system," non-parent taxpayers end up with no vote at all-- not feet, not ballots, not anything.) This is not playing well. As Edushyster puts it
In recent elections, voters in both Chicago and Philadelphia basically shouted that they want more say over their schools. Is it just me, or does it seem like if you give voters a vote over whether they want an actual vote vs. the vote with their feet kind of vote, they always seem to vote for the *vote vote*?
Edushyster also throws in Camden and Newark as examples of how choice has led to disempowered and denocracy-free cities. And Smarick... agrees.
I totally agree with you. State takeovers of urban districts are sometimes necessary but they absolutely have to be temporary. It has to be a way to decentralize power to give parents more choices. It can’t be something that exists in perpetuity because then what you get are disempowered communities that are even more disempowered. And that’s no way to have these cities thrive in the way we want them to.
Edushyster bores in (well, not really "bores." Edushyster is the smartest, sharpest Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the edublogger world and I'm pretty sure she could get the toughest interview subject to just give her his car). If choice is so great, why don't citizens get to choose their choices? Why don't the citizens and families get to decide what choices they get to choose from? And again... Smarick agrees.
You’re right. I think this is a failure that I and lots of other people who have done this work are guilty of. We’ve had this urgency about changing things and have done too little to go into these places and have long conversations about, say, what does a new school board look like?
The School Governance Question
In the interview, Smarick raises an issue that I've watched him wrestle with a few times, and his wrestling has led me to do some mulling of my own-- how do you manage governance of a schoo;l system?
The school board model has the virtue of being good old direct democracy. But I suspect that it has upper and lower limits. When we get to the huge urban systems, is a board member who is representing a million voters any more responsive to the customers than a guy who's unelected CEO of a unaccountable charter corporation? On the other end of the scale, we have my small district where, in an not-unusual state of affairs, we have three people running for five empty seats this fall. If you imagine that's not going to end well for us, all I can say is that your imagination is on the mark. And all of that is before we get to the issue of a highly technical and complex operation being run by a bunch of elected amateurs. Sadly, that is still better than having a school system run by unelected amateurs, but it's still not optimal.
We just assumed that democratic control meant that a city had a single school board and that that school board owns all public schools in the district, makes decisions about all of the contracts, makes decisions about all of the principals, makes decisions about where kids go to school based on these residential zones. That is one form of democratic control. What I’m saying is that we could have a different set of rules that govern these boards so that you don’t give one board all of that authority. I don’t think you can have the kind of elected school board we’ve had for 100 years and simultaneously have community and parental empowerment.
It's an interesting idea, but almost impossible to conceive of working combined with a non-geographical school system.
Why the free market is always going to break Andy Smarick's heart
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reading about school reform, it's that free market fans have some romantic and idealistic notions about the free market. In fact, it may be that what defines the different camps of the edu-debates is what part of the picture we are idealistic about (and therefor prone to overlook the problems of).
Smarick doesn't care for the way that Choice Systems seems to descend into Not Much Actual Choice Systems:
...if it’s wrong for the government to tell you where you have to go to school based on where you live, it’s no better if you have a system of choice—and I’m using air quotes here—but there are in fact no choices because all of the schools look the same. Choice is only choice if there are options.
But in a free market, this sort of leveling effect is an absolutely predictable outcome. When your edupreneur and his hedge fund backers set up a charter school, they are not saying, "What quirky specialized school can we create in order to insure a broad range of choices in the total system?" The total system and its range of choices is not their problem. Their problem is drawing in enough customers to make the enterprise worth their wild. And so they, like most of the other edupreneurs in the market, will chase the larger, more financially sustainable, section of the market.
The clearest parallel is the cable tv system. We were going to have thousands of channels, a broad and awesome world of choice. Bravo, Art & Entertainment, Music Television, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, two comedy channels-- we were going to have amazing choices and slowly but surely, as they chased the better parts of the market, they all deserted their original mission and became fun-house mirror versions of each other.
The free market does not love variety. Occasionally an outlier will strike it rich-- and what happens next? Everyone else rushes to imitate.
Smarick is also not a fan of unending government interference with the education market, but this, too, is inevitable. And not (just) because government has trouble keeping its grubby hands off anything.
When you let free market forces loose near society's most vulnerable citizens, bad things inevitably happen. The free market needs the freedom to experiment, but nobody is very enthusiastic about using school children as guinea pigs (and besides, some choice players have not played very nicely) and so there will be calls for government oversight. Plus, because in so many states it was the charter fans who brought the government into the game in order to get political access to the market-- well, you know that once government gets out in the game, it's nearly impossible to get it out. PLUS! When free markets mature, the power players inevitably "team up" with government to make sure the system favors them and not any new interlopers (see examples from Standard Oil to Microsoft).
Short answer-- no free market school system is ever going to be left alone to blossom and bloom on its own.
One last great moment from the interview
Edushyster: This feels to me to be a major contradiction at the heart of the Smarick vision. That on the one hand, parents are going to be empowered to choose their own choices, but on the other hand, all of the choices will be part of an accountability system that rewards a single definition of success. Am I wrong?
Smarick: That’s where you and I will probably agree and I disagree with a lot of reform folks. I think that we have systems that focus on a narrow set of metrics, inevitably we get schools that respond just to those metrics.
So I was all eyes when Smarick connected with Edushyster for an interview. It's right here, and you should read it.
Democracy vs. School Choice
Smarick and 'Shyster (which sounds like an excellent vaudeville act) get directly to one of the great tensions in the choice movement-- the tension between democracy and choice.
The reformster theory is that school choice ought to be democracy on steroids, a free market where every customer gets a direct vote on What School Looks Like and any entrepreneur can enter that race.
In practice, that seems to be very much what does not happen. Every place that people have been given the chance to "vote with their feet," they have lost all other voice in the process. (Not to mention that when a city moves to a "vote with their feet system," non-parent taxpayers end up with no vote at all-- not feet, not ballots, not anything.) This is not playing well. As Edushyster puts it
In recent elections, voters in both Chicago and Philadelphia basically shouted that they want more say over their schools. Is it just me, or does it seem like if you give voters a vote over whether they want an actual vote vs. the vote with their feet kind of vote, they always seem to vote for the *vote vote*?
Edushyster also throws in Camden and Newark as examples of how choice has led to disempowered and denocracy-free cities. And Smarick... agrees.
I totally agree with you. State takeovers of urban districts are sometimes necessary but they absolutely have to be temporary. It has to be a way to decentralize power to give parents more choices. It can’t be something that exists in perpetuity because then what you get are disempowered communities that are even more disempowered. And that’s no way to have these cities thrive in the way we want them to.
Edushyster bores in (well, not really "bores." Edushyster is the smartest, sharpest Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the edublogger world and I'm pretty sure she could get the toughest interview subject to just give her his car). If choice is so great, why don't citizens get to choose their choices? Why don't the citizens and families get to decide what choices they get to choose from? And again... Smarick agrees.
You’re right. I think this is a failure that I and lots of other people who have done this work are guilty of. We’ve had this urgency about changing things and have done too little to go into these places and have long conversations about, say, what does a new school board look like?
The School Governance Question
In the interview, Smarick raises an issue that I've watched him wrestle with a few times, and his wrestling has led me to do some mulling of my own-- how do you manage governance of a schoo;l system?
The school board model has the virtue of being good old direct democracy. But I suspect that it has upper and lower limits. When we get to the huge urban systems, is a board member who is representing a million voters any more responsive to the customers than a guy who's unelected CEO of a unaccountable charter corporation? On the other end of the scale, we have my small district where, in an not-unusual state of affairs, we have three people running for five empty seats this fall. If you imagine that's not going to end well for us, all I can say is that your imagination is on the mark. And all of that is before we get to the issue of a highly technical and complex operation being run by a bunch of elected amateurs. Sadly, that is still better than having a school system run by unelected amateurs, but it's still not optimal.
We just assumed that democratic control meant that a city had a single school board and that that school board owns all public schools in the district, makes decisions about all of the contracts, makes decisions about all of the principals, makes decisions about where kids go to school based on these residential zones. That is one form of democratic control. What I’m saying is that we could have a different set of rules that govern these boards so that you don’t give one board all of that authority. I don’t think you can have the kind of elected school board we’ve had for 100 years and simultaneously have community and parental empowerment.
It's an interesting idea, but almost impossible to conceive of working combined with a non-geographical school system.
Why the free market is always going to break Andy Smarick's heart
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reading about school reform, it's that free market fans have some romantic and idealistic notions about the free market. In fact, it may be that what defines the different camps of the edu-debates is what part of the picture we are idealistic about (and therefor prone to overlook the problems of).
Smarick doesn't care for the way that Choice Systems seems to descend into Not Much Actual Choice Systems:
...if it’s wrong for the government to tell you where you have to go to school based on where you live, it’s no better if you have a system of choice—and I’m using air quotes here—but there are in fact no choices because all of the schools look the same. Choice is only choice if there are options.
But in a free market, this sort of leveling effect is an absolutely predictable outcome. When your edupreneur and his hedge fund backers set up a charter school, they are not saying, "What quirky specialized school can we create in order to insure a broad range of choices in the total system?" The total system and its range of choices is not their problem. Their problem is drawing in enough customers to make the enterprise worth their wild. And so they, like most of the other edupreneurs in the market, will chase the larger, more financially sustainable, section of the market.
The clearest parallel is the cable tv system. We were going to have thousands of channels, a broad and awesome world of choice. Bravo, Art & Entertainment, Music Television, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, two comedy channels-- we were going to have amazing choices and slowly but surely, as they chased the better parts of the market, they all deserted their original mission and became fun-house mirror versions of each other.
The free market does not love variety. Occasionally an outlier will strike it rich-- and what happens next? Everyone else rushes to imitate.
Smarick is also not a fan of unending government interference with the education market, but this, too, is inevitable. And not (just) because government has trouble keeping its grubby hands off anything.
When you let free market forces loose near society's most vulnerable citizens, bad things inevitably happen. The free market needs the freedom to experiment, but nobody is very enthusiastic about using school children as guinea pigs (and besides, some choice players have not played very nicely) and so there will be calls for government oversight. Plus, because in so many states it was the charter fans who brought the government into the game in order to get political access to the market-- well, you know that once government gets out in the game, it's nearly impossible to get it out. PLUS! When free markets mature, the power players inevitably "team up" with government to make sure the system favors them and not any new interlopers (see examples from Standard Oil to Microsoft).
Short answer-- no free market school system is ever going to be left alone to blossom and bloom on its own.
One last great moment from the interview
Edushyster: This feels to me to be a major contradiction at the heart of the Smarick vision. That on the one hand, parents are going to be empowered to choose their own choices, but on the other hand, all of the choices will be part of an accountability system that rewards a single definition of success. Am I wrong?
Smarick: That’s where you and I will probably agree and I disagree with a lot of reform folks. I think that we have systems that focus on a narrow set of metrics, inevitably we get schools that respond just to those metrics.
Reading Is Good For You
Above the door to the chamber in which King Ramses II of Egypt kept his books was written what is, apparently, considered to be the world's oldest library motto:
House of Healing for the Soul
Now here comes the New Yorker this week to remind us that bibliotherapy is a thing.
The article hangs itself on the hook of Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, a pair of bibliotherapists associated with the School of Life, a school headquartered in London that is...well, not traditional in its focus but does not appear to be run by a bunch of wastrelly hippies, either. The article's author, Ceridwen Dovey, describes being given a session with Berthoud as a gift and the ensuing email conversations that led to Berthoud recommending a list that ran from The Guide by R. K. Narayan to Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow.
The notion that reading can be therapeutic is not a new one, and its practice goes back to pretty much as long as we've been able to write down words. The 1800s saw it adopted as a more common treatment approach, and the term "bibliotherapy" was coined in an article for the Atlantic in 1916. Within the next decade, there were training programs for it at Western Reserve University and the University of Minnesota School of Medicine. Reading was a prescribed treatment for veterans of the Great European War.
The fact that reading can make you feel better, can help you sort through issues, can provide a perspective that enlarges and strengthen your mind and spirit-- this is not exactly news to those of us who, as Dovey puts it, self-medicate with reading. Most of us can point to a person in our lives who directed us to the right book at the right time to get us over a particular bump in the road, or who found a work that just opened up our brain in new and exciting ways. I can point to certain corners in my life and identify them by a work that helped me navigate the fork in the road, and I have a shelf of books that I reread as a means of sort or recalibrating myself. It's all very personal and touchy-feely, I suppose, but its real.
But look through the reference section of the Wikipedia entry, and you see entire scholarly books about it (Rubin, R.J. (1978). Using bibliotherapy: A guide to theory and practice. Phoenix, Oryx Press.) along with scholarly articles, including at least one published in the Journal of Poetry Therapy.
Is there science behind any of this? There is some evidence that bibliotherapy helps in treating self-harm, OCD, drug abuse, and (unsurprisingly) insomnia. The article gets very excited about mirror neurons, brain cells that have probably been seriously overhyped, but which suggest a mechanism by which humans can "learn" from experiences they only observe. And we have several recent studies to suggest that show a connection between reading fiction and a strengthened sense of empathy.
It's further proof that we've arrived someplace strange and a little sad that it takes all this noise to argue that reading is good for you, that a good book can broaden the mind, deepen the heart, and lift the spirit. But it's still nice to read something in the popular press that doesn't see reading as an act performed by students in small bites on standardized tests.
House of Healing for the Soul
Now here comes the New Yorker this week to remind us that bibliotherapy is a thing.
The article hangs itself on the hook of Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, a pair of bibliotherapists associated with the School of Life, a school headquartered in London that is...well, not traditional in its focus but does not appear to be run by a bunch of wastrelly hippies, either. The article's author, Ceridwen Dovey, describes being given a session with Berthoud as a gift and the ensuing email conversations that led to Berthoud recommending a list that ran from The Guide by R. K. Narayan to Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow.
The notion that reading can be therapeutic is not a new one, and its practice goes back to pretty much as long as we've been able to write down words. The 1800s saw it adopted as a more common treatment approach, and the term "bibliotherapy" was coined in an article for the Atlantic in 1916. Within the next decade, there were training programs for it at Western Reserve University and the University of Minnesota School of Medicine. Reading was a prescribed treatment for veterans of the Great European War.
The fact that reading can make you feel better, can help you sort through issues, can provide a perspective that enlarges and strengthen your mind and spirit-- this is not exactly news to those of us who, as Dovey puts it, self-medicate with reading. Most of us can point to a person in our lives who directed us to the right book at the right time to get us over a particular bump in the road, or who found a work that just opened up our brain in new and exciting ways. I can point to certain corners in my life and identify them by a work that helped me navigate the fork in the road, and I have a shelf of books that I reread as a means of sort or recalibrating myself. It's all very personal and touchy-feely, I suppose, but its real.
But look through the reference section of the Wikipedia entry, and you see entire scholarly books about it (Rubin, R.J. (1978). Using bibliotherapy: A guide to theory and practice. Phoenix, Oryx Press.) along with scholarly articles, including at least one published in the Journal of Poetry Therapy.
Is there science behind any of this? There is some evidence that bibliotherapy helps in treating self-harm, OCD, drug abuse, and (unsurprisingly) insomnia. The article gets very excited about mirror neurons, brain cells that have probably been seriously overhyped, but which suggest a mechanism by which humans can "learn" from experiences they only observe. And we have several recent studies to suggest that show a connection between reading fiction and a strengthened sense of empathy.
It's further proof that we've arrived someplace strange and a little sad that it takes all this noise to argue that reading is good for you, that a good book can broaden the mind, deepen the heart, and lift the spirit. But it's still nice to read something in the popular press that doesn't see reading as an act performed by students in small bites on standardized tests.
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