As the year winds down to a close, I thought that it might be appropriate to close with some stories told by students themselves about the status of our public schools. Now of course these stories are not representative of every school in the country, but the fact that they come from virtually every state and from wealthy and poor school districts alike is telling. It’s not just low-income and minority kids who need better schools; suburban classrooms in the middle of America are languishing too. And it will take all manners of students and concerned citizens, coming together from diverse backgrounds, if we hope to mobilize the political resolve necessary to meet the task at hand.

From Samir, in IL:
Naperville has among one of the highest tax brackets in the nations…I still saw five cockroaches at school on Friday.

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Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The big news in education reform these days is the report released last Thursday by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. It's drawn a lot of praise from different circles of the reform debate, and anyone who sees education as a critical means to ensuring the well-being of the American economy will likely find value in the report's bold recommendations. But some groups have criticized one of the boldest steps that the commission recommends: a complete do-over for the way school boards and local communities function in school-policy decision making to effectively make boards school-authorizers who contract out educational services to contractors who then make educational decisions. Coupled with a recommendation to remove local funding streams for education and replace it with a state-based system with new dollars ($19 billion, to be exact) to ensure that well-off communities do not lose any funding from the switch, the commission is certainly not interested in making any friends with the report.

I've sait it before and I'll say it again - there are many ways to skin the cat, so to speak, if our interests are to dramatically improve the quality of education provided to the 50+ million children in America. A contracted school model, weighted student funding reform, standards reform, teacher quality improvement, and many of the other recommendations made in this report and in other reports could all help students, but to me the biggest question that remains unanswered is this: where will the political demand come from to see these changes implemented properly? Last time I checked there were still more than 11 million kids going to school in buildings with inadequate facilities, and as I've already noted, millions of kids can't see the blackboards. Improving education, whether its for economic, democratic, or principled reasons, is not just a problem of technical know-how that this report attempts to answer, it's a question of public and political resolve. And it'll take ordinary citizens, young and old together, who care deeply and want to see a better day for all our children to bring this resolve about.

One other point on this note: the report, predictably, does not mention the importance of valuing the experiences and viewpoints of students themselves in their schools a single time. Even if the frame of reference for the report is how we can create schools to churn out skilled workers, wouldn't it be nice for the adults who wrote the report to admit that the people they're trying to help have important things to contribute too?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

in the spirit of the holiday season, Our Education is pleased to announce an awesome, inexpensive gift idea if you're looking for a present for a friend or loved one! The gift idea is a new DVD film called The Onyx Project, which reviews in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are calling the "future of film". Unlike traditional movies, which feed you information in a rote fashion, The Onyx Project is the first ever movie to allow the viewer to explore the characters and world on their own terms!

For a limited time only, if you visit http://www.theonyxproject.com/?source=edu and click "purchase", you can buy the DVD for $14.95 (it sells for $29.95 on amazon.com!) and best of all, $4 of your purchase will be given by the film's producers as a donation to your favorite charity, Our Education!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I still remember the sinking feeling I got, deep in my gut, when I held the spatula-shaped utensil over my left eye, back in the fifth grade. Sure, I could read the humungous “H” at the top of the chart, and the “T” and “L” propping up the “H” were pretty clear too. The next level of letters was a little bit fuzzier though, and the fourth row might as well have been barbed wire.

The nurse confirmed it with a note home to my parents: I needed glasses, like every single member of my family before me. And the sinking feeling in my stomach was the fear I had of being ridiculed for wearing them in class.

A familiar story? Approximately one in every four school-aged children has vision problems that can pose a significant threat to learning. Yet where many of these children may face the inevitable teasing associated with eyeglasses, some of the children in greatest need of vision correction face a much crueler fate: they don’t get glasses at all.

What kind of a problem does this pose for the children, their classes, and their ability to learn? Turns out it poses a very serious one. A December 5 Washington Post article tells the story of thousands of Miami Dade County Public School children taking eye tests, learning that they need glasses, and yet not being able to afford them. The trend exists nationally as well: a University of Michigan study found that in 25% of all instances in which children have notices sent home about possible vision problems, no follow-up appointments are scheduled with an eye-care professional. Put bluntly, if there are 50 million school aged children, 12 million of whom need glasses—something on the order of two-three million children are out there trying to learn while barely being able to see the board.

The problem, of course, is exacerbated when one looks at the kind of children who are most likely to make up the subgroup of children who need but do not have corrective lenses. Another U of M study discovered that children living in poor families were far less likely than other children to have glasses, with similar results for the nine million children without health insurance. When race is considered, black and Hispanic children were more than two times less likely to have the glasses they need than white and Asian children.

In Miami, a private philanthropist Leonard Turkel stepped forward to provide a free traveling eye-care center to give thousands of children free eye care appointments and glasses in the 360,000 student school district. But in the vast majority of low-income rural and urban school districts there are no similar programs—and little hope for children who cannot see the blackboard and cannot afford glasses. For them, the sinking feeling they get in their guts when they see the nurse and hold the spatula-device over their eye is much, much more serious than the one I experienced years ago.

It’s helpful to think about factors like these—and similar health issues like asthma, obesity, and malnutrition that affect the ability of millions of youth to learn. At a time when legislators are beginning to squabble over billions of dollars in federal funding for the academic provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, one might wonder if the money will do anything at all so long as such crucial underlying gaps in opportunities remain among children based on wealth and race.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent post by the Eduwonk led me to think: what has been the most influential and important piece written about education this year? When the Eduwonk (an energetic and very smart fellow named Andy Rotherham who runs the Education Sector and is also a member of the Virginia state board of education) calls something the “most important education article written this year,” it means something. And I don’t disagree; I think the piece in question, Paul Tough’s Nov. 26 “What it Takes to Make A Student” is one of the most compelling articles I’ve read all year.

I’m not sure that it stands alone, however, on the top of my rankings. Though I am tempted to include this seemingly unrelated article about a recent Lindsay Lohan gaffe because of its symbolism for how much our schools are in need of improvement, I think the real article that can give Mr. Tough’s story a run for its money is this Nov. 25 item from the Washington Post on student organizing that has taken place over the past twelve months in Chile, which we've been covering for quite some time. In fact, I think the two articles go hand-in-hand in laying out a clear picture for where we are with school reform in America today, where we can be in ten or twenty years if we dedicate ourselves properly, and—this is where the Post article comes in—how we might go about getting there.

To recap the articles for you briefly, I’ll start with the Paul Tough’s piece, which was published in the New York Times Magazine. In it he talks about the confluence of two bodies of research and practice that are coming together, one on the causes of the academic achievement gap and the second on potential cures for it. The causes, he notes, are as disconcerting as they are unsurprising: by and large, low income and minority children are exposed to fewer verbal stimuli and receive less parental attention and positive feedback than middle-class and white children, with the result that the achievement gap starts building almost at birth. However, there is hope: these gaps are not inexorable, as is being shown by a number of high-achieving schools that are educating disadvantaged youth to excel, in many cases scoring higher on standardized tests than their more fortunate peers. The schools that Tough cites—eighty or so that are part of the KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools networks—are raising the achievement levels of children who enter their classrooms well below grade-level with a common recipe: extra time on task (as much as 60% more time each year with six-day weeks, one-month summers, and teachers who work fifteen hour school days); a rigorous pedagogical style that stresses measurable outcomes and frequent testing to show what is being learned and what needs further review; and character education to encourage hard work, teamwork, and positive outlooks among students.

Tough concludes his article by saying that these schools have shown us that the principal goal of the No Child Left Behind Act—the complete elimination of the academic achievement gap by 2013—is indeed possible because some schools are doing it now. But it won’t be easy; it will take an incredible amount of dedication to provide dramatically higher quality education to all low-income and minority children in the same way that the KIPP schools and others are doing with thousands of children today. The other edge of the sword, however, is that if we fail to make progress in eliminating the gap, we will have only ourselves to blame: the successful schools prove to us that should we continue to falter, our failures will be a reflection of a lack of public will, not educational know-how.

Which is where the second article I referenced, the Washington Post piece on Chile’s student movement, becomes important. When government fails to live up to is end of the bargain and provide important services to some portion of its citizens in an adequate fashion, only one strategy has succeeded time and time again in bringing the necessary changes about: social movements. In Chile, it took hundreds of thousands of students—with groups of as many as 800,000 students attending rallies in Santiago and elsewhere—to force the national government to guarantee basic educational resources and services like books and desks. In America, the problems facing children in our schools may be of a different magnitude (although in some cases, it’s not that different at all), but the basic statement is the same: a country that does not place the education of its youth first is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. And it’ll take a social movement of concerned youth, parents, and citizens to ensure that our nation’s leaders learn from what KIPP and other high-achieving schools are showing us: it truly is possible to educate all children, but it’ll take much, much more than we’re giving them now.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm sure it was well intentioned, but this latest gaffe by the star of terrific films such as the Parent Trap and Mean Girls has unintentionally shown us just how much improvement is needed in America's education system... and other countries are taking note.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)