A US News & World Report article published earlier this month provides an accurate overview of how education has been treated on the presidential campaign trail so far this election cycle.

In short, education has played an insignificant role in both of the primaries, and appears to be headed in the same direction in the general election. None of the three remaining candidates have staked out bold positions on the most important K-12 and higher education issues, and none of them have made much in the way of headlines in terms of promises or policy proposals.

Both Senators Obama and Clinton appear to be content with criticizing funding levels for NCLB, clamoring for increased loans to help with college affordability, and drawing moderate lines on teacher pay and quality initiatives. One disjunction between the two is that Senator Clinton has toed the teachers union supported line of rewarding teachers based on how well whole schools are doing whereas Senator Obama has taken the more controversial stance of rewarding only those individual teachers who are dramatically improving student achievement.

For his part, Senator McCain has had even less to say about education. He doesn't even yet have a full education platform published on his campaign website, and has really only issued standard GOP responses on education, trumpeting such ideas as school choice, merit pay for teachers, charter schools, and sometimes even vouchers. To the degree that education remains a low-priority issue, it will benefit Senator McCain since he has little expertise on the matter, especially given a traditional Democratic advantage among voters who consider education to be a key election day issue.

My only challenge to the article regarding low attention paid to education on the campaign trail is to the title. US News has the piece printed under the headline, "Presidential Candidates Have Little Opportunity to Talk About Education." I question whether this gets to the heart of the matter, or if it actually gives the candidates a bit more credit than they deserve regarding this issue which, after all, may be one of the most pressing policy matters facing our nation's future.

To me, the presidential candidates have plenty of opportunity to address whatever issues they deem to be important. After all, we're talking about candidates who give multiple speeches each day talking about all of the changes they'd like to make to the country. Senator McCain, for instance, has had no trouble making headlines with his unique views on global warming and climate change--issues which he has raised on his own, without having to wait for the right "opportunity". In other words, I'm afraid the candidates have not lacked in opportunity to address education, but have instead lacked sufficient interest to make it a crucial topic. And if you're wondering why none of the candidates (not just this year, but really for the past half-century since K-12 education has become a federal issue) have made K-12 school reform a priority, allow me to ask you a question to offer a hint why education will take a backseat for the foreseeable future: how many elementary, middle, and high school students are allowed to vote?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you want to know how good a school is, here's a novel idea: ask the students.

At a bad school, you'll hear complaints that are well-founded, such as a number of the quotes from a powerful report published earlier this week in Washington, DC .

One elementary school student complained, "Give us harder work, not the busywork that we already know."

A middle school student, when asked about her teachers, said that "they let you know you are failing but then let you go on struggling and then send you to summer school."

A student at the same school reflected, "Teachers don't teach us a thing throughout the entire period. When visitors come, they start working."

And at one of the city's high schools, one history class had an almost unbelievable lesson plan, where students were asked, "Where is your favorite place to shop?"

The concept of students complaining about school is not a novel concept, of course, especially at this time of the year when summer is just around the corner and patience grows thin on the part of adults and students both. But there is something telling in these comments from DC's students--and its telling more because of who says them, than what they are saying.

After all, were you really all that surprised to hear that it was students from an inner-city with high levels of poverty complaining about bad teachers, low expectations, and overall low quality of education? I hear similar statements from students all the time in my school, and I have to confess that they are often on point. In short, reports of student discontent are numerous in DC, St Louis City, and other areas with high concentrations of low-income and minority children, and they often hit on important themes, such as those having to do with low quality teachers or run-down school buildings.

Meanwhile, if a school is actually pretty good, you'll likely hear a combination of compliments and complaints. The difference about the complaints, however, will be marked. Instead of focusing on obvious problems such as inept teachers, broken facilities, lack of safety, and inadequate student support and discipline, in the nicer suburbian schools, complaints will sound a lot more like the student in the video below, which is to say high on passion and energy, but low on common sense.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday marked the 54th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. The decision, reached by a unanimous Supreme Court, struck down laws that segregated schools on the basis of race. No longer would children of color be forced, by virtue of the circumstances of their birth, to attend schools separate from those attended by whites.

What has been the impact of the court's ruling, now that we have the benefit of 54 years of wisdom in hindsight? There are three frameworks through which politicians, educators, and casual onlookers typically refer to the decision, and depending on which one you chose to adopt, the decision has been either completely successful, partially successful, or completely unsuccessful.

The simplest way to look at the impact of Brown v. Board is to make a purely legalistic analysis. In this lens, the Supreme Court set out to do one very simple thing: get rid of the pernicious practice--as ordained by local and state laws--of forcibly sending one group of children to school A and another group to school B based solely on skin color. Never mind whether school A is nicer, has better teachers, spends more money per child, increase student achievement more than school B; in the legalistic sense, the only goal to be sought was the realization by law of the court's finding that "separate but equal [schools] are inherently inequal".

In the legalistic sense, the Supreme Court succeeded completely. Fifty-four years after the ruling, there is not a single school district or state that affirms a policy of race-based segregation. There may be other reasons why a child cannot attend a particular K-12 school, but to public knowledge, race alone is not one of them.

Some, however, would argue that the legalistic analysis is too simple, and that the proper way to analyze Brown's impact is to measure whether black children are actually being enrolled in white schools at appropriate rates. Call this the intermediate frame of analysis; the idea that the actual goal of the Supreme Court in Brown was not just to outlaw school segregation as a policy, but rather to go one step further and actually integrate schools to some appropriate degree. In other words, in this analysis, getting rid of school segregation laws is only step one of a two-step process envisioned by the court. To determine whether the decision has been successful requires us to measure how far we have come in the second step (are our schools actually integrated), and not the first.

In this second way of looking at the decision, it's probably the case that we have experienced only mild success in the wake of Brown. Although for a while the pace of integration was fast post 1954, it has slowed and even reversed in recent years--segregation has actually been on the rise for blacks since the late 1980s. Of course, the difference is that today's segregation is not shoved upon blacks by Jim Crow laws, but rather subtly arrived upon as the complex result of demographic forces, housing markets, and school districting lines. In any case, a person adopting this framework likely looks at the past 54 years with mixed feelings: thrilled with the complete reversal of school segregation laws (which was hardly a given even in the 1960s), but concerned with rising de facto segregation in our schools.

The third way of looking at the decision is to take a much more end-oriented view, even more so than the intermediate framework. In this third lens, the purpose of the Supreme Court's ruling went far beyond the direct act of striking down a certain group of local and state school policies, and it even went beyond an end-state where schools were proportionally integrated with perfect blends of white, African-American, Latino, Native American, and other groupings of students. The goal by which to judge the Brown decision--a judgement that we can only conclude to be wholly negative--is whether African American children are receiving equal quality education as white children, as measured by a batch of sensible indicators such as high school completion rates, college going rates, and yes, performance on standardized tests. With gaps persistent along each of these metrics along racial lines, the end-oriented analysis would have to conclude that we still have much work to do in the wake of Brown.

It's interesting to note a fracture between the second and third frames of reference, since it is not necessarily the case that succeeding in one goal merely requires success in prior goals. The end-oriented analysis might suggest that the goal of perfect melting pot public schools is not necessary to reach the more important result of equality of educational opportunity. Indeed, to reformers in this camp, the recent relapse in segregation in particularly urban school settings might be perfectly acceptable if it was accompanied by strong achievement gains in the minority-dominated schools (alas, this has not been the case). Put another way, many educational reformers have admitted that spending political capital and money on integration efforts may run adverse to the more important (in their minds, at least) cause of closing the achievement gap, since simply having a black child sit next to a white child in school is a guarantee of no equality in outcome.

Conversely, proponents of the intermediate analysis reply that equal educational opportunities will never happen until children of color attend the same schools as white children, the schools that receive the most financial and political support. It is a heated discussion that takes place under the surface if at all, but one that will have implications for whether low income and minority children will ever receive the kinds of schools they deserve.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite a regular stream of criticism from politicians and educators about the law--some for its complete abolition, others for severe revision to the point of rendering it unrecognizable from the law's original goals--the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 remains, for the most part, safe and unchanged.

That's not to say that it hasn't been challenged and at times, threatened. But one of the more serious threats was unmistakably denied last week, when a federal judge ruled against Connecticut's lawsuit challenging NCLB as an unfunded mandate.

The root of Connecticut's lawsuit was a claim that the cost of fulfilling the annual 3rd through 8th grade testing requirements of NCLB was greater than the amount of money the federal government was providing the state in Title I funding. Connecticut sought an exemption from the US Department of Education to continue testing only in 4th, 6th, and 8th grades as it was doing prior to the law's passage. But the federal circuit court judge ruled that Connecticut had failed to provide any evidence that the federal government was not providing enough money to pay for the testing. NCLB's mandate to test every year between 3rd and 8th grade and once in high school, in other words, was sufficiently funded.

The case itself was simple in its holding, and relatively uncontroversial. The more interesting question for those of us concerned with the implications for chilrden is, where is all of the anti-NCLB sentiment coming from? The law has pretty universal goals, after all: to reduce the achievement gap and ensure school accountability.

My observations about the origins of anti-NCLB sentiment among educators is that it is partly due to top-down teacher union influence, and partly due to a bogey-man type mentality. In the former regard, national level officials in the NEA and AFT have long regarded NCLB as a problematic path for reform, since its chief proposal (school level accountability for student achievement) diverts attention from policies that would enhance teacher union membership or teacher benefits (such as class-size reduction or across-the-board teacher pay raises).

In the latter regard, my experience is that a significant number of teachers are upset about NCLB because of a post hoc ergo proper hoc* logical fallacy. Essentially, teachers get frustrated about their jobs for a multitude of reasons (low administrative support, lack of staff-wide teacher quality, poor student behavior, pay that they believe to be too low, to name a few). Many of these reasons may just have to do with the fact that teaching is, of itself, a challenging job. But since the passage of NCLB, teachers have attributed their angers and frustrations to the laws, rather than to more subtle demands that have long existed on the profession.

In short, teachers are blaming the NCLB-bogey man for non-NCLB-related problems. A great example of this is when teachers blame NCLB for high-stakes testing policies that school districts and states decide to implement. NCLB itself says nothing about making a certain grade level test a requirement for grade promotion; the states are to blame for it!

Sadly, this kind of attribution problem is probably par for the course any time a significant policy change is made without immediate results. But what we must make sure to avoid is giving up on a potentially positive policy because of wrong-headed backlash.

* Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is latin for "after it, therefore because of it". It is a logical fallacy to blame a problem on another thing just simply because the thing happened before the problem. In this case, teachers are blaming NCLB for some of their problems because NCLB happened first. But there may be (and in many cases, I submit that there are) other sources for the problems that are related to the federal education law.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)