I am sorely missing Eduwonkette. Really, no one combines her wit and irreverence, with statistical analysis. It was a killer combo. I felt reminiscent when I read this killer piece from Tom Hoffman at Tuttle SVC. He takes on a report from McKinsey & Company on The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap on America’s Schools.

This apparently comes out of a larger kerfuffle that had it’s nexus in comments from Thomas Friedman in the NY Times citing the reports findings and a NY Times article on the study. Clay Burrell deals with it in three parts on Education – Change.org Basically, everyone is running around in circles screaming about the achievement gap, and using questionable analysis of achievement data to make their case. They compare the “huge” gaps in achievement in the U.S. to other OECD countries and, surprise, ours is larger. Tom points out succinctly and relentlessly that they also have MUCH smaller income level gaps. Clay takes it a step further, pointing out the gap was smaller in the U.S. when income gaps were smaller. SURPRISE!

This is a classic error in statistical analysis, the apples to oranges comparison, and  has more to do with logic than numbers. There is also the Correlation = Causation error, that Mark Pullen picks up on in this (along with some other recent examples).

My new grand unification theory is this; we have all, in the social sciences, been polluted by Chicago School economics, which is based on elaborate mathematical models that have little basis in reality, and are compromised by some really brain dead assumptions (hey, I don’t just think that, economist do to). Let’s take a look at a short list of fallacies offered up as “givens”:

• People, in aggregate, will generally act to maximize their economic self interest (they’re rational actors).  I’ll just point to this post for a contrary view of how that works in real life, Economist’s View: Is Poverty Caused by Irrational Behavior? and I’ll leave it to you to think about its implications for school reform that has any basis in choice, changing parent behavior based on a putative model, etc.
• Markets will maximize benefits for all. Look at this, for how market choice is working in NYC. You say, well, that’s not like a “real” market which is open and transparent, to which I reply, hedge funds, and derivatives.
• There are some base assumptions in most models. In the recent housing bubble, risk models either assumed an ever expanding market, or did not factor in systemic risk. The big one I see in a lot of the studies like McKenzie is a version of “all things being equal” that underlies basic supply/demand curves. They are assuming all kids are equal and coming to school equal. Economist know all things are never equal, we know all kids are not coming to us with equal assets, so why do we treat them like they are when we look at these studies?

Links

• Tuttle SVC: Shorter Last Night’s Rant

• McKinsey & Company – Social Sector – The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap on America’s Schools

• Education – Change.org: What Thomas Friedman Doesn’t Say, Part Three

• Correlation = Causation! « The Elementary Educator

Some posts that talk more realistically about poverty and it’s not always pretty intersection with education:

• ASCD Summary Part 2: Personal Reflections on Learning

• Why not cure poverty instead? | In Practice

He writes about Education Secretary Duncan’s recent call for students to spend more time in school. He quotes both from a post from David Warlick attacking the idea in a post titled Let’s just put them all in jail 24/7 and one from Nancy Flanagan that is supportive of it.

Bill then asks a question (and answers it):

Does anyone REALLY believe that extra time will lead to anything BUT additional mind-numbing madness for our kids?

I don’t…

I have a different answer.

I think having students in school longer would help many of our students.  For many students,  especially in low-income communities like where our school is located, schools are a hugely stabilizing influence in their lives and, despite their verbal protestations to the contrary, they like it.  That’s one reason why over half of the 2,000 students enrolled stay for an extra one hour class each school day, and why so many of our students want to attend summer school (even though state budget cuts last year and this year have closed that option off for many).

There have also been plenty of studies that have documented the negative impact the “summer slump” has on students — again, particularly on students in low-income communities.

So if Secretary Duncan wants to provide money to schools to be open longer, that’s fine with me.

Listen, I know our schools have a lot of problems, and have a very long way to go. And I think there are a lot of valid constructive criticisms that can, and should, be made. However, in general, I think that many schools, along with a number of labor unions and religious congregations, are some of the few institutions that are doing a pretty decent job at helping people develop skills needed to actively participate effectively in public life.

Maybe I’m living in a bubble, and most schools really are in terrible shape, but it hasn’t been my experience.

Do I think that increasing the time students spend in school is the best thing that government can do to improve the education experience of our students?

Absolutely not.

Here are just three things that I think I think would be better (and I can certainly think of more, too):

Providing more resources to increase affordable housing, health care, and pathways to wealth creation for low-income families would certainly be a better way. Richard Rothstein has clearly identified how these kinds of changes are necessary to bridge the “achievement gap.”

Providing resources for, and pushing schools to,  engage parents more as partners and having, as the Industrial Areas Foundation phrases it, “two-way conversations instead of one-way communication.”  Schools can be important players in working with families on those housing, health care, and wealth creation issues.

Reducing the role of standardized test results as the ultimate evaluation tool for both teachers and students, and increasing the use and value of alternative forms of assessment, like student portfolios, would help focus schools on creating life-long learners instead of going for the short-term gain of test results.  One would hope that government and others have learned from the recent Wall Street debacle that increasing incentives for short-term pay-offs does not benefit our communities.

In organizing (as most readers know, I worked for the Industrial Areas Foundation as a community organizer for many years prior to becoming a teacher), we used to talk a lot about the fact that there’s the world “as it is” and the world “as we’d like it to be.”   It’s important to be pragmatic but, at the same time, recognize the tension between the two worlds — we don’t want to become hopeless sentimentalists, but neither do we want to become narrow-eyed cynics.

I’d like to have my three suggestions implemented right away.  However, that’s the world as I’d like it to be.

For now, though, if Secretary Duncan is going to find extra money somewhere to keep schools open longer, I’ll take it…

During my career as a community organizer, we used to say that successful organizing was just another word for relationship-building.

I believe President Obama, a former community organizer, understands the importance of these kinds of relationships, too.

David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times (who I generally think is pretty thoughtful), appears to agree with this assessment. In a column last week, he wrote:

The Obama approach would make it more likely that young Americans grow up in relationships with teaching adults. It would expand nurse visits to disorganized homes. It would improve early education. It would extend the school year.

So far, so good.

Then he continues:

Most important, it would increase merit pay for good teachers (the ones who develop emotional bonds with students) and dismiss bad teachers (the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed).

Huh?

I’d sure like to know how in the world he expects to be able to fairly measure relationship-building and tie that into merit pay (Mathew Needleman recently wrote about merit pay in this blog).

A little later in the column, Brooks answers my question with what I consider to be faulty logic.  He claims that somehow test scores will be able to determine which teachers are effective at building relationships:

Today, tests can tell you which students are on track and which aren’t. They can tell you which teachers are bringing their students’ achievement up by two grades in a single year and which are bringing their students’ levels up by only half a grade.

I believe I have great relationships with my students.  And I believe that’s true with many other teachers at our inner-city school.  And, overall, I feel okay about the progress our students show on standardized tests (as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our school is one of the few high schools in the nation that has escaped Fourth Year Program Improvement)

If we took the route, though, that the school recently featured by The New York Times did and our classtime was focused on test prep — day in and day out — I wouldn’t be surprised if some student test scores would be higher…in the short term.  I suspect their desire to become life-long learners, their intellectual curiosity,  and their emotional and moral development might very well suffer, however.

“Rigor” does not have to mean “testing,” as Brooks writes in his column.

I’m not afraid of standardized testing — to paraphrase a saying, I believe it has a place, but also has to be kept in its place.    However, I would say — unequivocally — that testing does not help teachers develop relationships with students and nor does it accurately measure the quality of teacher relationships with students (though I do have to say that I suspect some students might try a little harder on a test that they believe is important to a teacher who they like and respect).

It’s unfortunate that Brooks took the idea of building relationships — an important and under-discussed element in teaching and learning — and used it to come up with a non-sequitur related to merit pay and testing (and then even tried to tie it into the voucher debate).

I’m not opposed to the theoretical idea of merit pay. However, I have not read of any fair plan to address who would earn it. I have the following concerns…

Having worked with several principals, I have found that all of them tend to have favorites on staff. I would not want my pay to be determined based on how a principal personally feels about me. I also would not want my pay decided on by a single test or even multiple standardized tests that may not measure what I am teaching in class. Even though I’ve worked at low-income schools throughout my career, I have good friends who work at high performing schools and they don’t have it any easier than I do even though the pressures of working where they teach are of a different kind. I don’t think that time spent working is a fair indicator of how much a teacher should be paid since it seems to me that some teachers spend their whole summer working at school but doing little to do with instruction. Should teachers who are the most organized and spend less time working after school not get bonuses?

It seems to me that even the worst teachers want their students to do well. It’s not as if they’d teach better if only they were paid a bonus. In places where students aren’t learning it seems it’s because teachers don’t know how to do better rather than because they don’t want to do better.

Finally, in a field where we already make less than similarly educated peers in private industry, I wonder if not being able to count on a particular income would be enough to discourage promising people from entering or staying in the profession.

Your thoughts?

The book about his work, Whatever It Takes, by Paul Tough has gotten a lot of press in a range of places. (I’ll link to some at the end of the post.) Tough spent a significant amount of time with Canada and in the various HCZ programs in the process of researching the book. He is an editor for the New York Times Magazine and has written quite a bit on education and on poverty. He knows his stuff.

The book follows the HCZ from fairly early stages through its first couple of years. You can find brief or detailed summaries in many other locations. Amazon’s page has quite a few readers’ reviews as well as brief interviews with Paul Tough and Geoffrey Canada.

NPR’s Fresh Air has an interview with both men from September of last year. It’s about half an hour long and quite powerful because Canada is passionate about his topic. At one point near the end he says, about children living in poverty, “We’re trying to save them in groups of twenty, or forty, or one hundred while we are losing them by the tens of thousands.”

He wants to save them by the tens of thousands and he has created his ‘conveyer belt’ to achieve that end. It begins with Baby College, designed for expectant parents through parents of two-year-olds. At three, there is another program for parents designed around the developmental needs of their children. At four, children will enter the Harlem Gems pre-school program followed by Promise Academy for kindergarten on. Obviously not all children will be able to benefit from all of this. However, Canada’s goal is to get children from the beginning and support them all the way through college.

He is aware that not all children in Harlem will be lucky enough to have their parents attend Baby College or they might not win the lottery to get into Promise Academy, a charter school. Canada’s expectation is that enough children and families will be participating in parts of the HCZ that it will ‘contaminate’ Harlem with its set of values. He expects to see attitudes towards learning and intelligence changing as a result of his work.

One aspect that fascinated me was Canada’s take on KIPP schools.

“If Canada’s model was one of contamination, in which positive ideas and practices spread within a family and throughout a neighborhood, the KIPP model sometimes seemed by contrast to be one of quarantine, walling off the most promising kids from a sick neighborhood’s contagion. As Canada often said, he was tired of programs that helped a few kids ‘beat the odds’ and make it out of the ghetto; his goal was to change the odds, and to do it for all of Harlem’s kids. The idea of success in the middle of Harlem’s ocean of failure – that felt entirely wrong to him.”

I think his work has many implications for schools serving students living in poverty. I have heard criticisms of him and his work in Harlem, but I have to admit, I am quite impressed. He made decisions during those first few years that I did not agree with, but typically they were decisions he did not want to make. Some decisions were made to ensure that the money kept coming in. He also puts significant weight on test scores. His reasoning is that the children in Harlem must be able to compete with middle-class children on standardized tests if they are going to get into colleges. While the focus on testing frustrates me, I am able to see his point.

Geoffrey Canada’s programs cost a lot of money. They require significant time and energy from a lot of people. However, I think that is what is necessary to create real change in the academically neediest areas. Investing in those areas is the only way those children have a fighting chance, on a grand scale. The book is definitely worth reading.

Links:
PRI’s This American Life episode narrated by Paul Tough This half hour segment gives the basics of the book and includes clips of events at the HCZ and interviews of involved individuals. The quote that most hit me referred to a young mom at Baby College, “For most middle class kids, the path that Taisha struggled to find is so straight and well paved that they barely even notice it’s there.”
Geoffrey Canada on The Colbert Report
Paul Tough’s website and blog
Harlem Children’s Zone’s website
Geoffrey Canada’s autobiography, Fist Stick Knife Gun, on Amazon

I find it interesting that it’s being held at a time — all day on a Monday — when it will be difficult, if not impossible, for teachers or school administrators to attend. In fact, it’s even more interesting that the registration form for the event provides a number of different ways to label yourself, but neither “teacher” nor “administrator” is included.

I do believe that we “progressive” (for lack of a better label) educators can indeed learn from the experience and ideas from the people speaking at the summit.  Unfortunately, from what I know of at least some of their work, it doesn’t appear that many share that same openness about learning from others.  And from the way the summit is being organized, it doesn’t look like Kevin Johnson is interested in it, either.

As many readers of this blog and my own know, I was a community organizer for nineteen years before becoming a high school teacher five years ago.  For most of that time, I worked for the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by legendary organizer Saul Alinsky over fifty years ago.  In his book, Rules For Radicals, Alinsky wrote:

“I detest and fear dogma…The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right..”

It’s a quote that all of us, including the people speaking at the Education Summit, might well want to keep in mind.

Okay, this is like folks looking at what the president has done in his first few weeks. The worst critique is from folks on the left belly-aching about how his tactics of trying to get Republican votes was foolish, yhetta, yhetta. We don’t know yet if it that will prove foolish, or wise, you can’t tell stuff like that this soon. Tom acts like some golden moment has passed to promote progressive education. He may be right, I may be crazy, but calling out the edublogosphere for a lack of response on an event just a few days old seems, like he doesn’t realize some of us have lives like teaching where we can’t come up with a policy paper or press release on demand.

My thoughts on the big picture of education policy from Obama? I…don’t…know. I’m seeing signs of hope and change. I’ve blogged before on this in, Reading the tea leaves on whitehouse.gov | Reflections on Teaching. My conclusion is that it is still reading tea leaves. First, he appoints Arne Duncan, which was not Linda Darling-Hammond, but also wasn’t Joel Klein or Michelle Rhee. The only obvious trouble I saw in the appointment was Obama’s use of Palin-esque language,  Education Week: Obama: Duncan ‘Doesn’t Blink’ on Tough Decisions. For the love of all that is good, would someone please put an end to not letting decision makers blink? I still can’t read that appointment, but really, only in rare cases (Rumsfeld, Cheney) does the person being appointed say more about the policy of that department/area, than what the White House itself says. So what have they said?

Education on whitehouse.gov

Reform No Child Left Behind: Obama and Biden will reform NCLB, which starts by funding the law. Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. They will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college and the workplace and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner. Obama and Biden will also improve NCLB’s accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.

Support High-Quality Schools and Close Low-Performing Charter Schools: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will double funding for the Federal Charter School Program to support the creation of more successful charter schools. The Obama-Biden administration will provide this expanded charter school funding only to states that improve accountability for charter schools, allow for interventions in struggling charter schools and have a clear process for closing down chronically underperforming charter schools. Obama and Biden will also prioritize supporting states that help the most successful charter schools to expand to serve more students.

Eduwonkette has touched on this frequently when she discusses differences between charter and non-charter families that can be summarized here:

First, that students selected into a charter lottery makes them different from those who did not. It may be that their parents are more involved in their education, that they are having a particularly bad experience at their neighborhood school, or that their parents can no longer pay for private school. Whatever the reason, families selecting in, even if they are all poor and minority kids, are different by virtue of choosing a non-neighborhood school.

There are folks that don’t always get that difference like this reporter at the Washington Post doing a piece on District charter schools. A whole study was done that is talked about here, eduwonkette: Cool People You Should Know: Stefanie DeLuca, which shows Karelis’ theory in practice. Parents were unable to make the “rational” choice of moving their children out of a neighborhood school because of the complexities of their lives.

The opposite side of the choice coin and a significant issue in low-SES schools is transiency, the frequent movement of students from school to school. My school has a 30% turnover rate. Each year, leaving out kinder, about 30% of our students leave, and are replaced. Some families circle around, and come back after a hiatus. There are many reasons for these moves. They have housing instability, income instability, and any other kind of instability you can name.

This transiency is not good for a child’s education. Part of the argument for scripted programs with pacing guides like the one we use is that it was supposed to make this transiency meaningless for a child’s education. At this point many of you are probably having a ironic chuckle that somehow keeping that one little piece of normalcy, being on the same page in your basel reader, will make up for a 7 year old who has been in 3-6 different schools already. Since I’m on the site student study team, I’ll share another problem that occurs. The district is VERY careful about starting special education testing, they want a minimal number (3) of SST meetings or three 8 week periods of intervention before doing testing. Some sites like mine are on RTI, so kids get services without qualifying, but others do not. We have a fourth grader who is new to our site who cannot decode at a second grade level, or add and subtract with carrying. She has not yet had special education testing, but she has moved around a bit, so that’s not surprising. What can be done? At my present site, the principal is very helpful about giving families permits to stay at our school, and some families travel pretty far to keep coming there, but that doesn’t work for everyone.

But there is another dark side to transiency, which is movement by choice. I’ll share a story from my son’s school which is a Title One school, but not whole school free-lunch (75%+ in poverty), but does have a growing population of poor students as the downturn goes on. The principal was discussing a situation with my my husband about a first grader that had a lot of behavior problems. They had a couple of parent conferences, but the mother and the school were not of the same mind. The parent still had a VERY high affective filter up. The child was missing a lot of school too. They went on a home visit, and the parent had moved. I’ve seen that pattern in various places I’ve worked and it fits with Charles Karelis’ theory that he illustrates with this analogy

A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The … poorer one is … the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

I would add, let’s say a corollary to this. It’s like having multiple medical problems and trying to figure out what to fix. You’re not a doctor, so you pay attention to what is bothering you the most (like taking care of a stubbed toe, but ignoring high blood pressure), and not being a doctor, you may do something that’ll take care of it in the short run (take some pain reliever instead of having the foot x-rayed) but won’t resolve it in the long-term.

To these families, the frequent complaints and requests for intervention with their child from schools is like a stubbed toe, and the best way for them to deal with it is to move. Schools don’t help because they are usually happy to see the backside of those families going out the door. And there is an incentive in California for “driving” a family away (which, btw, I don’t think this principal intended, but I have seen some that do this as an unofficial policy getting into some real snake and mongoose conflicts with parents). You see, to be fair the state only counts test scores for kids you could reasonable have affected, so if kids arrive after what’s called the CBEDs date, they are not computed in your AYP or API (state measure). This was intended to prevent issues with getting a kid right before testing (which happens) that you had NOTHING to do with educating, and having their scores on your test. Since CBEDs is the first Monday in October, this is a little over generous perhaps, but you can see the incentive for schools.

What is the answer to these “choices”? The obvious answer is more housing stability. That would definitely involve moving federal policy in the opposite direction than it’s been going for a long time. Some of what I will talk about in the next and last post will address this issue. In the meantime, we need to do the things to minimize transiency. Work with those parents to lower their affective filters (what I addressed in the last post), let families stay at your school after they move, and give families a stake in your school community (my next post).

What about choices for kids? I remember a point that Mathew Needleman made in a presentation about video in the classroom, that when computers were used by low-SES vs. high-SES children, the low-SES children were largely engaged in being told what to do by the computer (test prep quizzes), while the high-SES children told the computer what to do — e.g. LOGO, ALICE, Scratch (Towards Digital Equity, Neuman). This doesn’t just happen with computers. Based on recommendations from the feds, more time is spent on Direct Instruction in Title One schools. Students are being told what to do, but are not given a lot of choices. Students need to learn how to work and learn independently, otherwise you are just preparing them to be a line worker.

Is this always easy? No, but it is possible. I’ll point to two examples, one with a what, the other with a how. The what is the subject matter you give students. I have students look at rights and especially inalienable rights. This can be a bit difficult for students to grasp, so I have them look at their own rights. Last year I did assignments on the Rights of the Child, and had students come up with some rights of their own. The year before that, I did it to help make the unit on the American Revolution more comprehensible. The how comes from Mathew Needleman who has a series of posts were about independent work time, and how to make it effective, which took on the frequently given excuse for avoiding doing it, with “My Students Just Can’t Work Independently This Year”, and what you’ll need to do when you have kids who don’t know “how to work independently”, (hint–you’re the teacher, so you teach them how).

Further useful reading on parents and school choice:

eduwonkette: Cool People You Should Know: Brian Jacob

eduwonkette: Cool People You Should Know: Cecilia Rouse

Here is an example of that vagueness:

“The best possible thing we can do for low-income students is to fight for their basic human rights, such as equitable access to fully-equipped schools, healthcare, safe and affordable housing, and the sorts of things their wealthier peers take for granted.”– Paul Gorski

I’ve decided to do a series on poverty. The posts will start with theory, look at an anecdote from my or another teachers experience, and last, will finish with approaches that can be used in those situations. While the “solutions” may not always work, but they are more helpful than talking about how lacking poor parents are, or saying the answer is to fight poverty. This first post will be on the overall theories of poverty, next up will be on choice, and the third will be on parents and communities…

“Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money. “– George Carlin in brain droppings

George Carlin has a point, and that’s not just my opinion by the opinion of an interesting economist, Charles Karelis that I ran across here at Economist’s View: Is Poverty Caused by Irrational Behavior?

Karelis’ view is actually the opposite of the title, in that he finds that poverty causes people not be rational actors (and make rational choices), because they have too many problems simultaneously to give attention to any one of those problems (like say, their kid’s education).

If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we’re far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before…

In recent decades, experts and policy makers all along the ideological spectrum have worried that the more aid the government gives the poor, the less likely they are to work to provide for themselves. … It was this concern that drove the Clinton administration’s welfare reform efforts. But, according to Karelis, that argument is exactly backward. Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. …

Those problems become stressors (lack of money, violence, etc.) that lead to brain damage that we see in some of these reports, Study: Poverty dramatically affects children’s brains – USATODAY.com, Poverty may impair growth of brain : News-Record.com : Greensboro, North Carolina I remember seeing a post somewhere after these news reports coming out, saying, yeah we know this is true, now what do we do? Karelis says we need to quit being afraid to fix the problems of the poor directly, but there is something else that Karelis talks about that I think can be extremely helpful and a foot in the door for teachers dealing with this.

Karelis discusses the economic theory of marginal utility with regards to this behavior. It’s similar to an idea in behavior science called the affective filter, and specifically having what’s called a HIGH affective filter.
When families are stressed out, they can’t always hear what you are offering, or accept help. You have to lower that filter to work with them. You all have been very patient while I outlined my theory, so here is where I show how this can work in a school…

My principal is on a mission (he’s that kind of guy). He wants to build relationships with some of our most “difficult” families. He spends a lot of time talking to them, and more importantly listening to them and their concerns. I facilitate our site SST meetings where students having problems are discussed with their parents. He is trying to implement this long term relationship building plan. I was resistant at first because my background working in a behavior school led me to trying to develop discipline and behavior plans that were not parent dependent. The problem with my approach is that kids who are acting out will keep pressing things until you have to involve their parent, so then your alternative becomes suspending them, which doesn’t resolve the long term problem. I think his approach will probably be better for this. In a sense I’ve been doing a lot of this stuff over time as I’ve sat on the student study team.

When parents have a kid with a behavior problem, I share my son’s horrible first grade year. This lets them feel like they are talking to someone who is a mother, and not a teacher who is judging them. With my son having ASD (autism), and the school nurse having two adopted kids on ADD meds, we have a lot of the behavior issues that come up covered. This is not easy. I will share that the hardest thing I have to do is see parents wrestling with a child who may have a language disorder (and the possibility of an autism diagnosis). Those parents always seem to end up in tears, and I feel that because I’ve been there. I never cry with them, but I try to convey to them that I’ve felt that pain. This all helps lower their affective filter. I also try to give them things they can do that are possible, and probable, like behavior plans, etc. I give tips on how to structure those so they are effective, and are not a complete pain in the butt. I tell them it can be hard, but I tell them it’s possible.

Does this work every time? No, but it works better than sitting in a circle around the parent saying, this is what you need to do. Does this address Paul Gorski’s points about addressing the underlying problems of poverty, no, but it is a precondition to doing that which I’ll cover in my last post. So readers, what do you do to lower the affective filter of parents?

When she first proposed an “alternative” non-tenure contract track, Dan Meyer had a post where the comments showed a schism between younger and older teachers on this issue. Chris Lehmann’s comment outlines in a really succinct way why veteran teachers in urban districts may not embrace such a change.

eduwonkette: Washington, DC Archives will include some non-Rhee articles, but most of the recent posts in this category touch on that topic. Of particular interest will be the case of Art Siebens, a tenured teacher who was not rehired at a reconstituted High School.

The Time magazine article about Michelle Rhee that started the recent round of comments.

The Educational Debate — Tone Matters – Practical Theory: Chris Lehmann, once again with the voice of reason on why Michelle Rhee’s leadership isn’t, including quotes from the Time piece.

Happy Reading!