Education

Issues of governance, funding and curriculum

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What Should We Read?

The Post-Dispatch’s “Battle of the Books,” (October 13, 2023) showed the narrow-mindedness of outraged parents, as well as intolerance of advocates of “controversial reading” .

The behavior of both sides was reprehensible. The”controversial reading” advocates (in the Op-ed “Don’t impose your limit on the rest of the school”) used ill-tempered words like “marginalizing,” “villainizing,” and “stripping resources” to describe the outraged parents. The outraged parents (in “Parents should decide what children read”) pushed the hot buttons: “LGBTQ activists,” “so-called tolerance”, and “mold (and manipulate)” to describe the “controversial book” advocates.

It was hard to choose between these extremes. Both made a good case: the rights of parents and the rights of public schools to choose the books children read. Both parents and schools have rights.  Clearly those rights have been abused in certain cases.

The article made the gap between the two groups unbridgeable.  There was no way these extremes could reach common ground. They portrayed cases that made the other side look bad.  And they were bad.

Often conservative parents have not read the books they want banned, and  liberal parents have not given thought to why the books deserve to be read.  It is as if words like “age-appropriate” and “relevant” have never been discussed with specific books in mind.  Protesters might parrot a canned response that was invented by an interest group. Maybe advocates for all reading fail  to discriminate between relevant books and those dangerous for tender minds.

What if parents, teachers and librarians read a given book together in a well-designed book club? It could be held in schools, libraries, churches or more neutral ground like a YMCA.   It could feature both controversial books and books that parents want in a school curriculum.  They could read some books compiled by the ALA as most often banned:

  • Maus, a  graphic memoir of the Holocaust, a Pulitzer Prize winner
  • The New Kid by  a Newberry Award Winner, recommended for middle school
  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a New York Times bestseller about the psychological struggles of a young adolescent
  • The Hate You Give, a Printz Award Winner – community controversy about shooting of Black teen
  • Caste by Isabel Wilkerson -Pulitzer Prize winner about the claim: American society is based upon a caste system similar to what has been seen in India and Nazi Germany.

The book club would state a purpose, e.g. recommend or reject a book for the library, promote or protest a book in a book review, make a report to a committee that is deciding on the curriculum status of a book.  In any of these cases, someone should take notes on the discussion for the purpose of reporting.

Maybe the club just wants explore a new book together, the traditional purpose of book clubs.

It might be helpful to have a facilitator, who says when the discussion has wandered from the purpose of the book club or when evidence for opinions has not been offered. A few guidelines would be appropriate:

  1. Members should agree to read with an open mind and recognize both good and bad qualities of the book
  2. Members should try to back opinions with passages from the book, i.e. evidence.
  3. Members should be respectful of all other members. Disagree with respect.
  4. Members should not claim that objectionable language was their main objection. That reduces the book to its lowest denominator. There is bad language in many books that are accepted in most curricula: Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird.  So it is not fair to object to a book only for isolated words, unless it is an extreme case.

The book club would have to eventually arrive at some definition of what makes a book great and for what age.  These are hard questions, so it is no wonder advocates on both sides don’t take the trouble to read the books banned and  try to articulate informed conclusions.

A fair and balanced book  club would also choose books that parents advocate. Some would be classics, such as the books recommended by Hillsdale College:

Some might be contemporary books that carry an approved  message:

  • The Hiding Place -Corrie Ten Boom- a holocaust memoir
  • The Light and the Glory – Peter Marshal and David Manuel – Christian influences on the founding of America
  • Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand–dystopian novel about over-regulation of business

Book clubs are for the open-minded and adventuresome. Nothing should be read with prejudice. Readers should be prepared to read like the ideal secondary or college student. The outcome will hopefully be mutual understanding and tolerance, if not consensus. And perhaps another surprise: a book club might read beyond the polarizing books of the school curriculum into the universe of good reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Elitism or Tolerance?

The research of William Marble is a fascinating explanation of why college graduates have migrated to the Democratic Party over the past two decades.  According to Marble’s study of voter opinion polls, the white college-educated class has moved left toward toward progressive economics and cultural diversity. He suggests that the economic, political and cultural institutions have been controlled by the college elites, creating a reaction against these institutions from working class, non-college-educated voters [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/01/understanding-electorate-diploma-divide/]. His analysis would explain why Republicans have begun to campaign against the academic and bureaucratic “elites” in federal elections.

As a professor emeritus of a publicly funded diverse university, I want to suggest a more direct explanation of the “diploma divide” between college graduates and non-college graduates.

  1. the increasing diversity of publicly funded post-secondary schools
  2. the bias toward cultural tolerance in academic communities

Affirmative action has increased the diversity of  publicly and privately funded universities. Increasingly diverse communities have the predictable effect of students understanding diverse racial and gender characteristics that formerly divided them. At my university students confessed to me they had never met a Black or Gay student until they arrived on campus.  In spite of the university being majority white and heterosexual, the presence of students of color and differing sexuality gave students a chance to know students they formerly saw as categories, rather than friends and acquaintances.  My more transparent students admitted as much.

In addition my university supported tolerance in their courses and public discourse to support the diversity of their student bodies. Both natural sciences and social sciences promoted tolerance based on the current research on racial and gender diversity.  As a teacher of “Writing for Teachers” I noticed the development of students’ tolerance of diversity in their essays.  Many of them would refer to changed attitudes based on the research they were exposed to in other classes. As a teacher educator I was pleased that my students were entering the teaching profession with a bias toward tolerance.

The combination of meeting students of differing race and gender identity and the academic confirmation of diversity led white students who came from the suburbs to develop more tolerance than students who remained in their own enclaves at home.  It is not that academically trained students were inherently more sophisticated, but by attending a school with a diverse population and becoming informed about the equality of the races and gender preferences, white students became more tolerant than their peers who lacked these experiences.

It is no wonder the Republican Party campaigns agains the “academic elites” who differ from the non-college population in tolerance of diversity. Yet perhaps there is a “holier than thou” attitude in the college-educated, which further alienates the two classes of voters, and this reinforces the perception that college graduates are “elitists.”

Lately the monetary value of a college education has been questioned. Graduates find they do not have skills that employers are looking for, and therefore wonder if the considerable investment in a college education is worth the price. Perhaps one hidden value of a college education is an appreciation of students that differ in racial identity and gender preference. These lessons are not easily learned in the homogeneous communities student come from.

What can be done about the culture wars that might result from the “diploma divide”? There are other educational environments, such as the military, employment-related programs, and community service. Members of these communities meet diverse recruits and may grow in understanding of differences. The military has grown with the times and advocated the kind of tolerance that universities reinforce.

For the other youth who remain in their familiar communities, the experience of diversity may be missing in their education. The persistence of the racial and culture wars may be reinforced by young people staying at home in their own enclaves. The “diploma wars” will persist until positive experiences of meeting racially and gender diverse contemporaries is part of their culture. The point is not to recruit more voters to the ranks of the Democrats, but to neutralize the culture wars, so that diversity is no longer a significant issue in political campaigns.

 

 

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Persistence on Behalf of Students

President Biden canceled an additional $9 billion in student debt on Wednesday as repayments started up again this month after a three-year pause.

The move affects 125,000 people who qualify under existing programs, including for public-service workers such as teachers and firefighters and for people on permanent disability, according to a White House statement.

Not to be discouraged by the Supreme Court’s overruling his $400 billion student debt relief, President Biden initiated a smaller debt forgiveness program. The concentration on public service workers is both a practical avoidance of the Court’s prohibitions, but also a fitting reward for public service.

Students should sit up and take notice of the Biden administration’s addressing the most pressing problem of college students: paying back their debts.  The measure shows persistence and dedication to students in college.

Will they remember this thirteen months from now when it’s time to vote? Will they register to vote? Will they turn out for a President who has their best interests at heart?

Students have yet to participate in voting as much as seniors, the most dedicated age block among voters. Take the challenge and beat seniors to the polls in 2024. Remember who has your best interests in mind!

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A Proposal for Civic Education

In a guest editorial in the New York Times on September 5 Dean Debra Satz of Stanford and the faculty director of a civics curriculum, Dan Edelstein, deplore the lack of civic virtues, particularly in college undergraduates. They illustrate the effects of intolerance by students and public figures expressed in lack of civic hospitality to guest speakers and the new restrictions on academic freedom by Governor Ron DeSantis, to cite examples of failure to appreciate diverse points of view.

They propose, and have instituted, a new required course at Stanford called Civic, Liberal and Global education as a way to address intolerance and improve listening skills for undergraduates. “All students read the same texts, some canonical and others contemporary. Just as important, all students work on developing the same skills.”

Three issues are not addressed in such a curriculum. First the varied interests in subject matter of first-year students .  Second the development of writing skills, which integrate understanding with effective expression of points of view.  Third, the ability to imagine the diversity of opinion about subjects of civil urgency, although this is implied in the article.

Allegedly Stanford students have superior writing skills and therefore should not be subject to the fundamentals of First-year writing. However writing skills for first-year students do not always include the ability to imagine opposing viewpoints. They are only one year removed from high school where self-centeredness reigns in writing and speaking.

As an English major I once taught an undergraduate mini-course to Advanced Placement students at an exclusive college.  Although they were expert in developing and proving a thesis in the basic expository essay, they were very bad at imagining opposing arguments. Frequently they developed “straw man” arguments, which involved defining an extreme counter-argument and shooting it down with over-simplified arguments of their own.  I reflected that defining legitimate opposition was a primary objective we had not anticipated in our improvised curriculum.

So a required writing course that involved intelligent pro and con arguments would not be beneath the skill and dignity of most first-year writing students. Likewise the interest of first-year students needs some provocation to make them engage seriously with a controversial topic. Finally the skill of locating authoritative source material could be integrated in such a course.

At the risk of sounding like a mouthpiece for conservative complaints, I suggest an argumentative writing class on the Bill of Rights would be an effective method to promote civic responsibility. Conservative think tanks have long argued this should be added to the social studies curriculum in high school without accounting for the superficiality of many secondary school imaginations. However, I would not be opposed to introducing high school juniors and seniors to a basic version of this course.

The important component of all undergraduate writing is modeling the approach you want students to take in subsequent writing. A good introduction would be the ramifications of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people to peacefully assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Although the First Amendment is complex and applied to audiences as elevated as the Supreme Court, there are ways to make it relevant to student audiences. For example the right of extreme speakers to promote their positions on college campuses, the right of student newspapers ( especially high school) to publish without administrative regulation, the right of religious groups to hold meetings in public schools and all the related expressions of religion in a publicly-funded setting. These issues are  confronted in student life and bring the expertise of students to bear on an argument.

Student choice is important in argumentative writing. Subsequent assignments could give students a choice of addressing the Second Amendment (Right to bear arms), the Fourth Amendment  (Rights Against Unreasonable Search and Seizures) the Eighth Amendment (Right to a Speedy Trial and Trial by Jury) the Tenth Amendment ( restrictions against unreasonable Bail and cruel and unusual punishment) and the  Twelfth Amendment (the delegation of rights to the states). These rights have been in the news recently and their complexity would be a way for students to brainstorm the pro and con arguments. In the course of a semester class, students could explore three of these amendments.

What could be more important to civic literacy than the written exploration of four amendments (including the First) to the Constitution? This class would explore the limitations as well as the extent of the rights of an American citizen. It would deconstruct the false claims of attorneys who seek to stretch the interpretation of those rights. But most importantly it would demonstrate the significance of opposing arguments to the opinions expressed by students and stretch their ability to listen.  That is a lesson for adult citizens as much as teenagers.

 

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What School Districts Need from Their Legislators

According to a 2019 study of the Rand Corporation, “Teachers matter more to student achievement than any other aspect of schooling.”  The need for ethnically diverse, highly qualified teachers towers above the problems of culture wars.

The culture wars waged by conservative legislatures have introduced a new age of meddling, but not in the quality of student learning.  Until the last decade, conservatives consistently supported local autonomy in school boards. They believed state and federal government should stay out of local governance, because they assumed local voters knew best what would serve their community.

No more.  Governors and state legislators are concerned with making local curricula align with certain gender and racial ideologies rather than improving teaching and learning and the overall quality of public education. Instead of addressing local learning needs, state legislatures are dictating the content of American history curricula, the selection of books in school and public libraries, and the “transparency” that challenges the professional autonomy of teachers.

Such conditions do not encourage young people to enter the profession.

In a recent study of interest and recruitment of good teachers, Matthew Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon reveal, through surveys and interviews, how students have indicated less interest in teaching in the last decade:

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshman has fallen 50% since the 1990s, and 38% since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years. The number of new entrants into the profession has fallen by roughly one third over the last decade, and the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50- year low. “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession,”

Highly-paid white teachers are easily recruited by prosperous suburban communities.  Recruiting Black male teachers into an urban environment or bilingual teachers into most districts is more problematic. Creating incentives for career teaching is more challenging than recruiting teachers for 2-3 year stints, as Teach for America did. We need young, diverse, committed, and persisting faculty for the next generation.

Federal and state government could provide incentives to attract new teachers in communities by developing an attractive environment for teaching and teacher preparation. School districts can work with local colleges and universities to reduce  tuition and provide loans to engage and retain teachers for up to four years. The longer young teachers are engaged with a school, the more likely they will become career teachers.

  • Schools in Jackson, Miss., have partnered with the Mississippi Department of Education to provide candidates with a no-cost master’s degree and dual certification in elementary and special education. In return, the new teachers promise to stay and teach in Jackson for three years. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1164800932/teacher-shortages-schools-explainer
  • A national movement called Grow Your Own (GYO)  attempts to “draw teacher candidates . . . from the local community. The hope is a community member will be more personally invested in the school system, and more likely to stick around. Drawing teachers from the community also makes it easier for students to see themselves and their life experiences reflected in their teachers.”  Incentives may include college scholarships, mentoring programs for teacher candidates, and job shadowing of good teachers.
  • Most teacher preparation programs discourage working while student teaching. Local universities can underwrite the cost of teacher preparation by providing loans and scholarships for student teachers, who have no income for half a year during student teaching.
  • research-tested mentoring programs for teachers. Without a mentor, nearly one in three new teachers leave by their fifth year, but with a mentor that ratio drops by more than half, to one in seven [edutopia.org/article/case-mentors-grows-stronger-youki-terada/#:~:text=Mentorships%20are%20particularly%20effective%2C%20researchers,of%20growth%20for%20the%20teacher].

Government needs to address the impending shortage now, as young people are deciding whether to become teachers. Increased aid for career development could attract better and more committed students into the profession.

School districts should also find ways to involve parents constructively in schooling. Federal and state governments could fund programs that employ teacher consultants to demonstrate methods such as

  • the Family Writing Project, a program of the National Writing Project. Several National Writing Project sites have experimented with family writing programs as once-a-month gatherings at school. Teacher-leaders at these sites offer practical advice about how to set up such a program, and also suggest writing activities parents and children can do together. The sample activities below are elaborated in “No More Fear and Loathing: The Family Writing Project in Las Vegas.” https://archive.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/resources/write_together.csp
  • Resources are available for parent literacy programs at every level. Check out the National Writing Project’s advocacy for parents at https://lead.nwp.org/kb-tag/parent-involvement/
  • Teachers can create book clubs for parents to become familiar with the curriculum or to model critical reading.  A great example of how schools affect our view of history is Robert E. Lee and Me, by Ty Seidule, a Professor Emeritus from West Point. The author helps us realize how history is absorbed, as well as studied.

The best model for professional development is teachers teaching teachers, but teacher consultants have to be paid, and not for one-shot demonstrations.  The most effective parent literacy programs need at least a year to launch with teacher modeling. Who pays for this professional development? Innovation grants to schools and districts by state and federal funding.

State and federal curriculum tampering will never have a lasting positive impact on local education.  The best function of remote governments is to incentivize local programs with strategic funding: to attract new teachers, to increase parent participation, to create better school-community connections.

If the state and federal government want to improve education, teacher recruitment and parent involvement are good places to start.

 

 

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We Hope for What We Do Not See

“We hope for what we do not see,” said the Apostle Paul, meaning our hope is against all evidence to the contrary.  And as Bill McKibben and Diana Butler Bass say in her meditation today, it amounts to saying. “I told you so,” with a sense of despair. [https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/diana+butler+bass/FMfcgzGtwMWhTCVFXqdglHsWkXgTFRQZ]. The result of all the writing and preaching they did was exactly what they warned against. But there is no satisfaction in saying, “I told you so.”  The climate is hotter. The churches are hemorrhaging membership.  It only means your hope for a change was dashed.

Is this what Jesus was saying in the Garden of Gethsemane when he prayed, “if it is possible, let this cup pass from me”? Was it the suffering or rather the actual despair that all he had gained would be lost. The approving crowds would turn against him, the religious establishment would carry out their betrayal, the disciples would scatter, he would be alone. Weren’t his final words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  It was the loss of all he had achieved that was symbolized in the “cup” that would “pass from me.”

It is much easier to read this story backwards and say,” Jesus, you’re going to triumph in the end,” but Jesus had only the human perspective in that moment. Maybe he had hope, but it was the “hope for what we do not see.” It was hope against all evidence of failure. Jesus faced the specter of failure in his final days, as many of us do. We hope only for what we do not see.

Luke says, “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44). That was true despair. So much like the world, as Paul says, “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains till now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies ( Romans 8: 23).

Jesus knew failure, so do we.

We hope for what we do not see.

I made a career of recruiting and inspiring young people to teach literacy. During my 25-year career as a teacher educator, many of them inspired me with their determination to “make a difference.”   But the beginning of a teaching career is usually fraught with disappointment, because somehow kids are not as taken with Robert Browning or Langston Hughes as you were. And the principal packs your classroom with students, too many to personally attend to them. And kids disappear for a month and return to your classroom saying, “Did I miss anything?”  And the book you thought would make a difference, The Absolutely True Story of a Part-time Indian (Sherman Alexie) was removed from the curriculum, because of the chapter on masturbation. And suddenly Co-vid.

It is all too much for too little. In a recent study of interest and recruitment of good teachers, Matthew Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon revealed, through surveys and interviews, how students have indicated less interest in teaching in the last decade:

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshman has fallen 50% since the 1990s, and 38% since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years. The number of new entrants into the profession has fallen by roughly one third over the last decade, and the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50- year low. “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession,”

All the hallmarks of this failure have followed me into retirement. The cause I believed in has become a lost cause.  It is not even the doom this pronounces on public education that disturbs me, it is the loss of the desire “to make a difference.” So few dream the dream. So few hope.

I am still far from Gethsemane, but there is a feeling of wheels falling off, dreams de-railed.

Jesus knew failure, so do we.

We hope for what we do not see.

 

 

 

 

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Who Wants to Be a Teacher?

The “Blueprint” for the St. Louis Public Schools has the usual institutional worry about logistics of buildings closing and opening. It is not misguided but superficial. The quality of public education has always been about the quality of teachers, and it is a problem St. Louis shares with every urban school system in the United States. We are entering a crisis of lack of new, skilled and committed teachers in the profession.

In a recent study of interest and recruitment of good teachers, Matthew Kraft and Melissa Arnold Lyon reveal, through surveys and interviews, how students have indicated less interest in teaching in the last decade:

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshman has fallen 50% since the 1990s, and 38% since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years. The number of new entrants into the profession has fallen by roughly one third over the last decade, and the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50- year low. “The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession,”

Teaching has recently suffered losses from its ranks during Covid, but the prestige of the profession has been declining for the past decade and longer. Some of the reasons identified by Kraft and Lyon are “education funding, teacher pay, outside opportunities, unionism, barriers to entry, working conditions, accountability, autonomy, and school shootings.”

The problem of loss of prestige most often cited by students is lack of pay. Missouri has addressed its low ranking for teachers’ salaries by minimum pay increases to $38,000 per year, but to no benefit for St.Louis teachers, whose average minimum is $44,000.  Urban schools require higher salaries to attract teachers to schools where conditions may be problematic.  So St. Louis teachers need more competitive minimum salaries.

Lacking that, there are ways to attract teachers to urban schools.

  • A national movement called Grow Your Own (GYO)  attempts to “draw teacher candidates . . . from the local community. The hope is a community member will be more personally invested in the school system, and more likely to stick around. Drawing teachers from the community also makes it easier for students to see themselves and their life experiences reflected in their teachers.”  Incentives may include college scholarships, mentoring programs for teacher candidates, and job shadowing of good teachers.
  • Schools in Jackson, Miss., have partnered with the Mississippi Department of Education to provide candidates with a no-cost master’s degree and dual certification in elementary and special education. In return, the new teachers promise to stay and teach in Jackson for three years. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1164800932/teacher-shortages-schools-explainer
  • Professional Development Schools. This is an institution from the 1990’s that died for lack of funding. Classes in teaching were taught in fully-operating public schools where the gap between theory and practice was constantly challenged. Student teachers could come back to the methods classroom declaring, ” I tried this method and this is what happened.” Clinical professors would engage on the subject of what should happen vs. what works.  It would all occur within the same building, just a few doors away from the actual classroom with real students.  It was clinical education following the model of teaching hospitals. [https://online.suny.edu/epn/developing-a-professional-development-school-pds/].

The Professional Development School worked most effectively in small, under-enrolled schools, which makes St. Louis an ideal candidate.  Universities that prepare teachers must initiate the program by hiring or devoting faculty to clinical teaching in the schools. Teacher education professors would have to commit to a learning-by-doing methodology. In the public schools teachers would have to allow observers and conversations about how to improve teaching.

A significant by-product of Professional Development Schools is kids in schools get to see teachers in the making. They can see a community (university and K-12 teachers) devoted to excellence in teaching and see a bright career path.  The Professional Development School is challenging to set up, but the benefit is a cultural change in teacher preparation.

Improving public schools requires more than keeping the seats filled and the buildings maintained. It takes a village and generous funding to make a teacher, but good teachers are essential to school reform. When young people stop seeing the benefits of a career in teaching, there is serious disruption of the supply chain, to borrow a crude metaphor. It will take a community of teachers, teacher educators and determined public officials to make teaching an attractive career option for the next generation of teachers.

 

 

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The Politics of Regulating Local Schools

The tools of bureaucrats are like the proverbial hammer looking for a nail to pound.
Politicians, like Governor Ron DeSantis, think they can solve local education problems with their executive hammer and tongs, pounding the local curriculum into their ideology. Most recently the revisions concerning the effects of slavery on African Americans have drawn fire.
Local school districts, like the Miami-Dade County Board, pushed back against the Florida’s regulation of curricula, Steve Gallon of Miami-Dade protested,“We’re talking about education.”
There’s no margin of error to plant seeds of disinformation and misinformation. There’s no margin of error to plant seeds of believing that in some shape, form or fashion, that one of the most horrific crimes known to mankind that was levied against people based on the color of their skin, brought some silver lining. [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/college-board-pushes-back-florida-work-group-member-likened-new-black-rcna97525]
School districts within states and across the country are too varied to submit to state and federal regulation of their curricula.

If we were to examine the recent testing report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress by state, we would find astounding variations. The average national proficiency rate of fourth graders in Math is 35%. The highest state proficiency rate belongs to Wyoming at 44% and the lowest state proficiency rate is New Mexico at 19%. Can you imagine applying the same school reforms to Wyoming and New Mexico?  https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&sfj=NP&st=MN&year=2022R3.

If we compared proficiency scores by neighborhoods (which NAEP does not) within New Mexico and Wyoming, we would be astounded at the range of differences within each state. Every school district has unique problems, one of which could be bad testing conditions.

Schools have unique needs for improving student attendance, for recruiting non-white teachers, for attracting bi-lingual teachers, for professional development in teaching math or social studies, for after-school remedial programs, or for expanding home teaching programs and Broadband access. Programs are as varied as the schools they benefit.

The need for ethnically diverse, highly qualified teachers towers over the varied educational landscape. Highly-paid white female teachers can be recruited by the most successful schools. Bringing Black male teachers into the urban environment is more problematic. Creating incentives for career teaching is more challenging than recruiting teachers for 2-3 year stints, as Teach for America did. We need young, diverse, committed, and persistent faculty for the next generation. The state and federal government could create those incentives with aid to recruit targeted teachers and support mentoring programs.

Teachers need long-term incentives to work in the most needy schools, incentives like loan forgiveness, like effective mentoring programs, like pay to underwrite costs of graduate school, pay to address student-based learning obstacles during the summer. Do all schools need these benefits? Of course not. No need to re-invent the wheel at schools in the upper 25% of test performance. Target the aid where and how it is most-needed.

State and federal curriculum tampering will never improve the effectiveness of local education.  The best function of remote governments is to incentivize local programs with strategic funding: to attract new teachers, public relations to highlight local successes in achievement.

Education needs less politics, not more. Conservatives should remain true to their principles and support incentives at the school district level, not meddle with their curricula.  And if they can create incentives for new teachers to work where they are most needed, then they will have made a national contribution to local reform. The answer is to scorn the “one-size-fits-all” mentality and target funding where and how it is needed.

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Middle School Malaise

The recent report of declining test scores among middle school students has alarmed parents and educators about the loss of in-class instructional time during the pandemic years. The details of that NAEP score decline are reported in the June 21 edition of the New York Times, among other media outlets.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/us/naep-test-results-education.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20230621&instance_id=0&nl=breakingnews&ref=cta&regi_id=58015410&segment_id=136280&user_id=c0905f751b354fe438caeb62c91726b3]

More concerning, the overall trend of testing by the National Assessment of Educational Progress over the years prior to the pandemic shows a regular decline, as noted in the Times article:

Performance has fallen significantly since the 2019-2020 school year, when the coronavirus pandemic wrought havoc on the nation’s education system. But the downward trends reported today began years before the health crisis, raising questions about a decade of disappointing results for American students.

The decline of Math and Verbal scores could be influenced by many factors. One cause echoes the seclusion of the corona-virus: chronic absenteeism, which also deprives students of the physical community and the facilities of the school. Chronic absence from the building where crucial learning takes place might be a reason for declining test scores both during the pandemic and before.  Without the peer and teacher reinforcement, the responsive approach to learning, the technology used to reinforce learning– all that is offered by attending school–students who are chronically absent miss the assets of in-person learning.

In the statistics provided below, chronic absence is defined as missing 10% of school days or more in a school year. Here are the most recent data for chronic absence:

Percent of Students Chronically Absent (Chronic Absence Rate)     Number of Chronically Absent Students
2016-17 2017-18 2018-19 2019-20 2020-21    2016-17 2017-18 2018-19 2019-20 2020-21
US TOTALS 12.8% 16.0% 16.2% 11.9% 20.5%   6,479,434 8,095,132 8,171,271 6,043,980 10,100,372

Compiled by “Attendance Works,” an attendance-compiling study that highlights the effects of absenteeism on test results.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OEyUeswKs0lAMrWZaRbTX1rNEvWab-jI/edit#gid=1510369153

These figures indicate that as many as 8 million students (16.2%) have been chronically absent in an ordinary year, with 10 million chronically absent during the throes of the corona-virus. Those numbers of chronically absent students could easily drive down average test scores. The compiler of these statistics, “Attendance Works,” also highlights the public to research showing the academic impact of chronic absenteeism. (see https://awareness.attendanceworks.org/wp-content/uploads/Research2016.pdf).

Poor attendance is sometimes the elephant in the room when teachers and administrators discuss academic performance, because they assume that the responsibility for attendance is outside their control, more a function of family and student attitudes toward education. Sadly, some parents may send their children to school only to qualify for entitlement benefits,  which require a periodic “present” at school during the academic year. Such attendance has no benefit to education.

Schools are not helpless to improve attendance, even though students are motivated by their upbringing and home support to attend schools. “Attendance Works” identifies five strategies to address faltering school attendance, including “Programatic Responses” that the school can implement once the causes have been identified:

Identifying the barriers to attendance can indicate the appropriate solutions, whether that involves, for example, establishing uniform closets, improving access to health care, launching walking school buses, providing tutoring, offering mentoring, developing morning or after school care and other approaches. https://www.attendanceworks.org/chronic-absence/addressing-chronic-absence/strategies-for-school-sites/

Without getting into the weeds of school-specific solutions, the programs recommended by “Attendance Works” are practical to implement, if a school can devote or acquire resources to address the chronic absence problem, but it is a uniquely community-based problem.

Chronic absenteeism can be a consequence of poverty and broken families, along with the individual motivation of children to attend school. It is a community problem, best solved by the collaboration of social agencies within a community. Everything from transportation to public recognition can affect school attendance.

With the ability to offer virtual attendance, schools may have provided students and parents the motivation to miss in-person schooling to accommodate family needs, such as baby-sitting younger siblings, working full time to support family income, or avoiding problematic interactions at school.  Parents might consider virtual schooling a convenience that fits their life-style.

But the evidence of testing at the middle school level over the past decade confirms that learning outside of school is not a good option for adolescent students.  Motivation to learn is seldom enhanced outside of the school building, even if some students have been shown to thrive there. Participation in the school community increases motivation to learn and provides the individual reinforcement most students require in the middle years.

Virtual learning is mostly effective for students already motivated to learn. Consistent in-person attendance is the first step along the learning curve for most middle school students. School leaders and parents should resolve to keep students attending in person to preserve the valuable physical community of schools.

 

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What Did We Get for our $100,000?

George Will continues his crusade against progressivism in academia in The Washington Post by pointing out how the college degree is worth less, because 38% of recent college graduates hold jobs that “do not require a college degree.” That statement does not reflect whether college graduates are preferred by employers or whether there are attributes of college graduates that make them more desirable as employees.

You have to acquire a college degree to teach in a public school, but you may not need one to work as an administrative assistant in a company with gross revenues of $1 million/ year.  However, businesses may prefer college graduates because of their communication skills, including the ability to understand a novel audience. College graduates understand the significance of their audience in ways that those who have only communicated with their family and friends may not.

Another skill that comes from a general college education is the detection and correction of bias or prejudice in written or spoken speech.  This is more than asserting “political correctness,” as right wing commentators call it, but understanding how language reveals an individual’s opinions of other races, religions, genders, or social classes.  Some people rightly take offense to being called “girl” or “boy,” because it shows disrespect. College graduates understand that language matters, and not only for the thin-skinned who take offense at everything.

Mr. Will objects to how history is taught in universities: “a prolonged indictment–ax-grinding about the past’s failure to be as progressive as today’s professors.”   This complaint suggests that our present condition is not influenced, for example, by the original slavery of, and economic prejudice toward, the Negro race.  Past indictments may illuminate present conditions. I’m sure Will would agree with the much quoted warning of Santayana, Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. Otherwise why do we study history at all?

Mr. Will objects to a study of literature “that is mostly about abstruse literary theories–‘deconstruction,’ etc.?”  Actually deconstructing language is a very modern skill necessary for studying social media. Deconstruction is a way of understanding how something was created, usually things like art, books, poems and other writing. Many readers of Facebook and Twitter posts take language at face value, and that is a problem, because they should understand how writers make use of words like “woke” or “globalism” or “diversity” rather than how the dictionary defines them.

Will’s problem is his higher education is private school-centered, where the most expensive, exclusive, politically-correct, and arcane literacy originates. In fact, students attending publicly-funded universities outnumber those attending privately funded universities 3 to 1. [https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment statistics#:~:text=73.0%25%20of%20college%20students%20at, graduate%20students%20attend%20public%20institutions]. Students at publicly-funded universities are more likely to get a workplace-oriented education, because employment is more often the goal rather than graduate school admission.  The academic setting imagined by Will is a private university where the majority of graduates go to graduate school. Yet private school enrollees represent only 25% of the university population.

But whether you go to graduate school or right into the workforce, as a c0llege graduate you have received training in that elusive notion “critical literacy.” College educators characterize it in various ways, but here is one:

When students examine the writer’s message for bias, they are practicing critical literacy.[3] This skill of actively engaging with the text can be used to help students become more perceptive and socially aware people who do not receive the messages around them from media, books, and images without first taking apart the text and relating its messages back to their own personal life experiences.[2][3]

It is not a course in literacy, but an attitude toward literacy that is lacking in many of those who missed college. It is both a skeptical and constructive stance toward reading and viewing that makes college graduates less subject to indoctrination.  Although critical literacy is taught in secondary school, not everyone gets it, because students are often co-dependent on their teachers.  Independent thinking is not always advocated in high school and even when it is, students are too grade-driven to take the risk of disagreeing with the teacher. That sophistication often develops in college, and critical literacy is the best reason for going to college, as a culmination of education.

George Will’s concept of a college education is too much driven by economic goals and political correctness. He needs to get out more and meet some graduates of our public post-secondary institutions, instead of following the headlines.  The reputable state universities (and some private colleges) are focused on the thinking that matters in the workplace, in the community, and on social media. The rest of the academic uproar over political correctness is only a distraction for the 75% who attend public universities.