Equitable Citizenship is a Right

Education reform is a topic of much debate.  Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, places emphasis on improving school quality through reforms to unions, performance pay, standards and innovative charters.  What is missing however, is any discussion of parenting.  It is an established fact that failing schools are largely made of of poor students, who come from poor homes with poor parents.  They come in to school from an environment that does not adequately prepare them for success.  The traditional response to this is to simply try and get teachers to do their jobs better.  So far this hasn't worked, and any teacher will tell you that it isn't so simple.  Even the best teachers will struggle when faced with an impossible task.  Poor schools across the country are trying their best and continuing to fail.

But wasn't the real problem the student's home environment?  Maybe that is something we can do more to fix. The first question is, "what kind of home environment"?  What is it about home environment that produces success?  This where differences in socioeconomic status become clear.  School quality does have some effect, but this is largely dependent on the population served to begin with.  (I'll skip further comment here because it's complex and if looking at policy, teacher performance is going to get you minimal results compared with a student-targeted model). 

So the next question is what is it about SES that influences student behavior.  There is a lot of data on this.  It begins in the womb.  Environmental toxins, esp. lead paint, are surprisingly big factors in poor neighborhoods, and they have serious physiological effects.  From there, you go to mother's hormones - stress levels.  Language and emotional development begins very early.  These are enormously dependent on environment.  Basic cognition, vocabulary and social skills can be literally years behind by the time kids enter kindergarten. 

So what can we do about it?  "Money" is a loaded term: spent poorly, it has no effect, obviously; spent wisely it can have very good results.  Again, this is in the data.  What you really want is to target at-risk students, looking at academic deficits, whether behavioral or skill-based.  Models can predict pretty well where these will come from demographically.  Some students will certainly be very difficult to properly provide support for (I'm thinking of those where drug use or criminality is a major factor at home).  But in most cases a comprehensive investment in outreach and daily - if not hourly - support will be plenty.

This won't look like the standard public school model, where a child shows up the first day of kindergarten, sits all day in a class of 30, then goes home with a backpack loaded up with worksheets.  That model simply doesn't work.  Certainly not as a guarantee of the right to an equitable citizenship.  If we are serious about leaving no children behind, we need to take ownership of the idea that every single child, no matter where they come from, will turn 18 having been adequately prepared for life success. 

We have pretended that just by giving children basic access to a teacher in a schoolhouse, we have done our job.  Some stop-gap measures have been cobbled together, such as busing, reduced-price lunches, or special education resources.  But these don't begin to address the many disadvantages many children face.  Some will decide this is too big a task, either because it is impossible or not worth it.  The truth is that it is possible, and a strong case can be made that it will ultimately be worth it not just in a moral sense but because the economic and social gains will end up outweighing the initial investment.

The Harlem Children's Zone in New York claims to have gotten every child into college.  Even if not entirely true, this is a staggering achievement.  They also get 2/3s of their funding from private sources.  That's a budget 2-3 times that of ordinary public schools.  But they are able to use this money to provide services over and above the traditional one child, one teacher model.  They provide parenting workshops, health services, extended hours, and round the clock support.  Their Harlem Gems pre-K program runs 8am-6pm and has a 1:4 child/teacher ratio. 

If we currently spend around $7,000 per child for 12 years, that's roughly $84,000.  California spends more than half that in one year per inmate.  If we took as seriously the problem of giving every citizen an equitable start in life, as we do the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, we could be replicating the success of the HCZ in cities all across the country.  Imagine what this would do for us in terms of productivity?  Real estate values! 

As a matter of civil rights, as arguably enshrined in the constitution, this will likely require federal intervention.   Specific, evidence-based programs can be funded by mandate at the federal level.  But we need the public will to commit the resources in a serious way.  All the talk of teachers and charters and unions is largely irrelevant.  What is needed is a paradigm shift in which a child's development is viewed in a holistic, environmental context.  Most schools will not need very much extra help at all.  Most communities will not need health services or parenting classes or all day kindergarten.  At risk students can be individually targeted and services provided on an as-needed basis.

We can do this.

What "Teacher Bashing" Really Means

 Matt Yglesias, a true believer in the new education reform movement, isn't very interested in looking at much else than bad teaching.   He offered this gem on his blog today:

The idea has gotten out there that efforts to ensure that students from poor families have access to effective teachers is somehow a form of “teacher-bashing.” When you think about it, the reverse is true—the real teacher-bashers out there are the ones insisting, contrary to the evidence, that teaching is irrelevant to the learning process.

One of his commenters takes him to task.

You’ve basically decided that doing the only thing that could actually solve this problem is too politically difficult, so you’re just going to make up a bunch of random shit for political grand standing. Shock of all shocks, you’ve chosen unions as your targets.

I think this is very well said. To be fair, many reformers are being pragmatic, and focusing their efforts on working within the current political realities. But in doing so, they have fooled themselves into believing that the marginal gains you might get on "better teaching" from accountability/standards/charters/etc. are actually substantive.

In reality, I think they are zero-sum at best, as for every gain you get when these policies contribute to more effective education environments, you're also creating room for more impersonal curriculum, punitive and capricious administrative abuses, and a further push towards factory-style learning. These negatives will cause a downward push on talent and more good teachers leave the profession in frustration or simply decide it isn't worth entering to begin with.

Basically, you're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Some schools will find a way to do it by the skin of their noses, but at least as many will contort themselves into grotesque and unhealthy deformities. As soullite and Math Teacher said, the real problem isn't the teachers, but the system, which for too long has been able to hide behind the sacrifices of many of us in the profession who are there to change lives, and have been able to put up with structural inadequacies because we've had to.

Matt Y sets up a series of straw men. Accusations of "teacher bashing" aren't directed at getting effective teachers to poor kids. Who would oppose that? The claim is that the "efforts" see bad teachers as the root problem, and not structural inadequacies. And instead of fixing those (starting by accounting for enormous disparities in social capital between SES groups), the reformers blame teachers when disparities in outcome persist.

He then claims that these accusers also claim that teaching is "irrelevant to the learning process." That's a pretty sickening statement. I challenge him to find a single quote anywhere that argues that. I don't mean to do his thinking for him, but he may have meant to say that these accusers don't place enough emphasis on teacher efficacy in the learning process. Maybe that's a valid critique (I'll thank myself). But what would you expect? When the opponent is doing nothing but attacking you with overemphasized false claims, your defensiveness gives the impression that you under-emphasize them.

God... shades of arguing with batshits! Ask most teachers and they will tell you that they hate bad teachers - not only is it bad for kids, but it literally makes their job harder, and it makes them look bad. And while things like union protection and tenure do make it more difficult to get rid of them, just as often the problem is administrators who simply do not do the heavy lifting in holding them accountable. Over and over you will find that teachers are given little supervision and little support.

So the equation becomes setting them up to fail, and then not holding them accountable when they do. This story in the LA Times gives a great primer on the problem that teachers see over and over. There are ample ways for administrators to hold teachers accountable but the bottom line is that they often choose not to - whether because they are over-worked as it is, or lack the competence.

Flogging Will, P.1: following logics

(from a thread but became so substantial I couldn't bear not to share!)

I'd like to chime in here. I think I mentioned in a prior post that what originally led me to question whether something such as free will existed was my desire to get to the root of a difference between modern liberal and conservatism. Very crudely: liberals feel that society should intervene on behalf of the less fortunate, while conservatives feel that they should be held to greater account.

In following these logics, I realized that the difference lay in how the two philosophies viewed human behavior. When seeking to explain personal circumstance, liberals saw it as greatly dependent upon biology and environment, while conservatives frequently deferred to the concept of individual "free will".

My undergraduate background is in social sciences, so I spent a good deal of time studying social research, which unfortunately, has been essentially the domain of the left since the civil rights era (what was basically being examined was the "history of inequity", not something conservatism is generally concerned with - one could almost say is "defined against".) But that is somewhat beside the point. What I want to emphasize is the degree to which inequality not only exists but is strikingly predictable based on a plethora of very simple factors such as race, income-level, parent education level, etc.

The immediate question is begged: why do these inequalities persist? If it is true, as the conservative argument goes, that everyone is just as capable of success, than why the predictive difference in equality across demographics? If it were merely a matter of individual choice, having nothing to do with biology or environment, than would we not see similar results across the board? There are many other events that occur with relatively similar frequency amongst different races or economic backgrounds. Although in fact, it is difficult to find a human behavior that cannot be correlated in some way with a socio-cultural demographic. I think advertisers have known this for years!

Which finally brings me to your original post:

""If you could take the same child and put him into completely different circumstances he would make completely different choices in life. This is common sense. We may have free will in a limited sense. But the circumstances we are born into and raised in have a huge impact on decisions we make in life."

Is there any way to know that for sure? We have no real way of testing, so would it *Really* be the "same" child?"

While you couldn't possibly give the exact same child different experiences, you can make valid inferences. You can take a group of 10,000 children, say, try and eliminate as many variables as possible, and look for patterns. The results are complex, as the variables are tough to pin down. But some pretty big themes will emerge. Things like family environment, nutrition, peer grouping, violence, education have strong correlations with levels of success.

There was quite a powerful study that came out in the 90's (published in book form as Meaningful Differences, by Hart & Risley), that came out of the 60's war on poverty, itself part of the broader civil rights movement, that examined what role language development played out at various class levels. Three socio-economic groups (high, working & low) were studied, with home observers recording language use amongst family members, coding it, and measuring its correlation with early-childhood language development. The results were striking: the differences between the high, working and low were large. Kids were simply getting very different experiences at home, which were then correlating with different levels of success in school.

Now, this is all actually pretty common sensical. Would you rather your child have a safe, healthy, richly stimulating and positive childhood, or one that was unsafe, unhealthy, etc.? The answer is obvious.

In your following comment, you made a very common argument to support your position - that either you or someone you knew indeed lived a disadvantaged childhood yet managed to find success. In logical terms, this is an appeal to anecdotal evidence. If the question was whether it is possible to succeed at all despite the odds, your example would provide falsification. But the proposition is different in critical way. M. Zehnder wrote:

"....the circumstances we are born into and raised in have a huge impact on decisions we make in life."

Notice that he is only claiming that those circumstances have a "huge impact", not a definitive role. We will never be able to gather data on every single thing that has happened to a person, but we can develop pretty good theories as to what type of environments do what to a person, drawing from sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.

Yet even then we will still be missing the internal, biological nature of the individual. Fortunately, people are pretty similar, again, from psychology, anthropology, neurology, etc. we have pretty good data on baseline human nature. In fact, much of what we know about the human brain has only come about in the past 30 years, coinciding interestingly enough with the civil-rights era push into social studies.

Now, removing all of that, what we are left with is what one might call free will. Somehow all of that data is not enough, and we must still resort to that mysterious, scientifically dubious proposition.