Category Archives: Education / Youth

Time for a Charter Reality Check

There are many ways to view America’s contentious education wars. My own interpretation is that–at its most basic–the conflict is between those who want to improve existing public schools and those who want to turn education over to the private sector.

There are lots of nuances to both approaches, of course, and ancillary arguments about high-stakes testing, teacher accountability, etc., tend to obscure the public/private issue. I’m too old and tired to suit up for that battle, but I will share one caution that both camps should be willing to heed.

If we are going to spend public money on Charter Schools–which remain public schools, even when they are managed by private, for-profit companies–let alone vouchers, we have an obligation to both children and taxpayers to monitor what those schools are teaching, and to ensure that their curricula are both academically sound and constitutionally compliant. A recent report from Texas should not only illuminate the problem–it also (as one of my graduate students said after reading the article) should make our flesh crawl.

When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.

 The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”

And that’s just the opening paragraphs from Slate’s devastating investigation of Responsive Education Solutions–a company which proposes to open four charters in Indiana next year. One of those, being conducted through an affiliate, has been authorized by Mayor Ballard’s office and will open in Indianapolis.

You need to click through to read the entire article. It’s appalling.

Here are a couple of questions for critics of our public schools: if you don’t trust “government schools” to educate children, why do you trust government officials with no particular expertise in education to select and monitor the private companies providing those educations? What safeguards against cronyism and ideology do you propose, and how will you ensure that those safeguards are in place?

Accountability isn’t just for teachers and public school administrators, and it isn’t limited to results on standardized tests.

 

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We Can Do Something About This

Sometimes, real life is so ironic.

There is probably no issue more discussed–in Indianapolis and elsewhere–than education. All kinds of grand reforms are being proposed, all manner of expensive “fixes” and pet theories advanced. And meanwhile, we are failing to support proven programs and experiences for the kids who most need those experiences.

Yesterday, our daughter forwarded an email to me from a social studies teacher at Arsenal Technical High School. After 16 years of sponsoring Model UN participation, Tech no longer has the funding to cover transportation and other costs to participate in Chicago in February, and the school board is refusing to authorize the field trip until the teacher can prove he has the cash in hand.

Anyone who has ever taught high school–and that includes me, back in the day–can confirm the importance of programs like Model UN, We the People, Boys and Girls State and the like. Anyone whose children have participated in one of these experiences knows how educationally valuable they are, especially for kids who come from families that don’t have the means to provide travel and similar “extracurricular” enrichment.

Part of the problem facing Tech is evidently that the state has not yet released Title One funds–something that should have happened months ago. These kids will lose a valuable learning opportunity through no fault of their own, because our public “servants” aren’t performing competently.

The teacher, Troy Hammon, feels so strongly about the merits of Model UN that he is offering to use two personal days to pay for his substitute teacher, and covering his own meals and bus ticket. (Shades of those greedy public sector workers people keep complaining about…)

The per student cost of participation is 450. for each of the eight students going. That covers registration, hotel, bus and meals for four days. Extra dollars would pay for a meeting room for research and preparation, and would reimburse the teacher. The kids–honor students with limited time to work– have been asking their parents and grandparents for help. They can get by with 1500 (with the teacher’s contribution), but ideally would have 4,500.

We’re sending $100, and I’m doing something I’ve never done on this blog–I’m asking those of you who can do so to chip in a few bucks so these kids who’ve been working their hearts out to prepare can go to an event with demonstrable educational benefit.

If you are willing to help, contact Troy Hammon. His email is [email protected]. I believe he is setting up a website through which contributions can be made, or you can just send a check to Model UN, 1500 E. Michigan Street, Indianapolis, 46201. [Update: make check payable to Arsenal Technical High School and put Model UN on the memo line]

Grandiose reform efforts are well and good–and needed, obviously–but shame on us if these kids are denied a valuable experience now because we’re all too busy pontificating about policy to do the job that is currently at hand.

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The Devil and the Details

I see where applications for Indiana’s private school vouchers have doubled, in the wake of the legislature’s action last session relaxing the criteria.

School Choice Indiana’s president was quoted as ecstatic, and noted that participation in the program has quadrupled since it was first introduced.

Happy days. Public schools not up to snuff? Don’t bother fixing them–privatize! (We all know that government can’t do anything right, and the private sector can’t do anything wrong.)

I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything that in Madison, Wisconsin, private schools that are currently participating in that state’s voucher program are vigorously resisting proposed new requirements that they make public their students’ achievement data.

Accountability is evidently only for public schools.

The sponsor of the Wisconsin measure, Senator Luther Olsen, is the Republican chair of the state legislature’s Education Committee. He wants the Legislature to be a “careful steward of taxpayer dollars.” As he put it, “No matter if you’re a public school, a charter school or a choice school, if you get a check, you should get a check up.”

That seems eminently reasonable. If tax dollars are going to private schools, the very least we should expect is information about the effectiveness of the programs those dollars are supporting. Furthermore, if parents are going to make informed choices about where to send their children to school, it seems only fair that they should have access to basic information about the performance of the schools they are considering.

According to news reports, however, Wisconsin’s non-public schools are adamantly opposed to making their results public, and the legislature is unlikely to pass the measure.

Interesting, isn’t it? The most vocal critics of public schools–the advocates and beneficiaries of voucher programs that bleed resources from the public system to support their own institutions, the people who insist upon testing and accountability for public schools–aren’t so enthusiastic about performance reviews when they are the ones being evaluated.

I guess sauce for the goose gets kind of bitter when it’s poured on the gander.

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It’s Only a Theory! Or Texas Idiocy Strikes Again….

Well, I see that the crackpot members of the Texas Board of Education are at it again.

Gee, it seems like only yesterday that a previous panel removed Thomas Jefferson from several of the state history standards, and substituted Thomas Aquinas. (Because Aquinas was so integral to development of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution…)

Of course the real target of these doofuses has been and continues to be science, especially evolution. In 2007, Rick Perry appointed a young earth creationist to chair the Texas Board, and in 2009, science standards were considerably weakened. Efforts to substitute fundamentalist biblical beliefs for science have continued, with some setbacks (in 2011, creationists tried to get religious “supplemental materials” offered in Texas science classes, but were unsuccessful.)

But of course, they’re back. This time, the Board has asked “experts” (i.e. creationists) to weigh in on the merits of high school biology textbooks. My favorite response:

“I understand the National Academy of Science’s strong support of the theory of evolution. At the same time, this is just a theory. As an educator, parent and grandparent, I feel very firmly that ‘creation science’ based upon biblical principles should be incorporated into every Biology book that is up for adoption.”

Ignore, for the moment, the fact that every court that has considered the issue has ruled that ‘creation science’ isn’t science; it’s religion, and religion cannot constitutionally be taught in public school science classes.

No, what drives me bonkers is the incredible ignorance shown by the repeated accusation that evolution is “just a theory.”

In normal conversation, we use the term theory to mean “an educated guess.” But in science, the word has a very different meaning; a scientific theory is anything but a guess. The scientific method involves summarizing a group of hypotheses that have been successfully and repeatedly tested. Once enough empirical evidence accumulates to support those hypotheses, a theory is developed that can explain that particular phenomenon. Scientific theories begin with and are based on careful examination of observed–and observable– facts.

Furthermore–unlike religious dogma–scientific theories are always open to revision based upon new observations or newly discovered facts. That process is called falsification.

Falsification is an essential characteristic of a scientific hypothesis or theory. Basically, a falsifiable assertion is one that can be empirically refuted or disproved. Falsifiability means that the hypothesis or theory is testable by empirical experiment. Merely because something is “falsifiable” does not mean it is false; rather it means that if it is false, then observation or experiment will at some point demonstrate its falsity.  Many things may be true, or generally accepted as true, without being falsifiable. Observing that a woman or a sunset is beautiful, asserting that you feel sad, declaring that you are in love and similar statements may be true or not, but they aren’t science, because they can be neither empirically proved nor disproved. Similarly, God may exist, but that existence is not falsifiable—God cannot be dragged into a laboratory and tested. One either believes in His (or Her) existence or not. That’s why religious belief is called faith.

If something isn’t falsifiable, it isn’t science.

Appointing people who don’t even know what science is to review science textbooks is a foolproof way to tell the rest of the world that yours is a state of fools–and a guarantee that your educational system will be hard pressed to maintain its current (abysmal) rank of 45th among the states.

Do you suppose Mexico would take these yahoos back?

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It’s All Connected….

One of the difficulties in crafting reasonable public policies is that the world isn’t nice and neat, so perfectly logical approaches to problem A often fail because the chosen solution doesn’t  take cause B into account.

This is especially true of efforts to improve public education. Those efforts are already fraught, because a substantial number of those arguing over reforms are acting on the basis of analyses based on political ideology rather than on evidence, and because there is no real agreement on either the nature of the education we’re trying to improve or the accuracy of efforts to measure it.

A persistent bone of contention in these debates has been the effect of poverty. Educators have insisted that poor children bring substantial barriers to learning into the classroom with them; their argument has been dismissed by reformers who respond that the “barriers” are just excuses for poor teaching.

If poverty makes it more difficult for children to learn, reform becomes considerably more difficult–so it is understandable that well-meaning people who want to do something now about low performance would be reluctant to consider how it fits into the mix. (One huge social problem at a time, folks!)

As long as this discussion was largely theoretical, reformers could focus on what happened in the classroom to the exclusion of the rest of poor kids’ lives. Aside from occasional acknowledgments of the role played by urban asthma and lead poisoning, there has been little recognition of the effects of poverty on IQ.

That may change.

Last month, the journal Science published a major study by researchers at Princeton, Harvard and the University of Warwick. (Science is a pre-eminent peer-reviewed journal.) The researchers concluded that “the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points.”

It’s important to clarify what that meant. Poor people don’t really “lose” those IQ points–mental capacities return when the stresses and preoccupations attendant to being poor lessen. The research compared human cognition to bandwidth–there’s only a finite amount of it, and poverty imposes a “mental load” that is the equivalent of losing a night’s sleep, or being a chronic alcoholic. As Princeton’s Eldar Shafir explained,

“When your bandwidth is loaded, in the case of the poor, you’re just more likely to not notice things, you’re more likely to not resist things you ought to resist, you’re more likely to forget things, you’re going to have less patience, less attention to devote to your children when they come back from school.”

This researchers studied adults, but obviously, the deficits they identified would affect the children of poor families in a number of ways.

The question is: what do we do to ameliorate the problem? Can we ever hope to “fix” public education without addressing poverty?

And why are our lawmakers so intent on shredding–rather than mending–the social safety net?

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