Goldstein: Why Cities Increasing Faster Than Suburbs Is Good For Education

It appears that, for the first time since World War II, major American ubran cities are increasing at a higher rate than those of suburban areas.  There seems to be a number of reasons for this that has taken place.  There are also a number of reasons to be skeptical that this is just a temporary statistical "blip" and not a long-term trend.  Here is an exert from Will Oremus of Slate:

This shift has been in the making for over a decade. As early as 1999, a Brookings report noted that “declining crime statistics, falling unemployment rates, balanced municipal budgets, and a resurgence in downtown living have cities across the country claiming that they are in the midst of a renaissance.” Back then, though, those claims were undermined by Brookings’ finding that suburbs were still outpacing cities in job growth. According to Frey’s new analysis, just five of the largest metropolitan areas saw greater urban than suburban population growth between 2000 and 2010. (One caveat: The U.S. Census itself can't confirm Frey's numbers, since it doesn't break down the data in this way.)

The question now is whether the past year’s reversal is a blip or a leading indicator of America’s urban future. If you think it’s the former, you blame the housing bust and the economy for the suburbs’ short-term slowdown, and predict that they’ll resume their growth when the market clears.

In any case, let's suppose this is a long-term trend.  If that is a case, than this means potential benefits for American education and the cause for integration of public schools, according to Dana Goldstein:

We know school segregation is a major social crisis because—despite the good performance of some high-poverty schools—poor children tend to have better academic outcomes when they attend school alongside middle class students.There is also some evidence that highly effective teachers prefer working in integrated schools.And it is my own strongly held belief that all children benefit from exposure to other children whose backgrounds are different from their own.

With more middle and upper-income young families now showing a predilection for urban living, city school districts have a wonderful opportunity to create more integrated schools. There are several ways they can do this:

1. By purposefully drawing school enrollment boundaries to encompass both high-income and low-income housing stock. My small Brooklyn neighborhood of Cobble Hill/Boerum Hill contains multimillion dollar, single-family brownstones, as well as a large housing project. Yet only one of the local elementary schools is truly diverse while the other two—both in easy walking distance—are segregated.

2. By asking charter schools to embrace diversity as part of their mission statements, and recruit students from across all races and classes, instead of focusing solely on poor children.

3. By creating magnet schools that draw students from across the city, and that do not require high test scores for enrollment. (Chris Hayes’ new book, Twilight of the Elites, is eloquent on the problem of frantic, expensive test-prep contributing to urban school segregation.)

4. And by attacking residential segregation head-on, in part through the sort of housing policies that Slate’s Matt Yglesias proposes in his book, The Rent is Too Damn High.

All of these suggestions have merit to them, and should at least be up on the table for debate in policy and political circles.  I do have one suggestion for the second proposal above regarding charter schools, assuming they are part of this picture to begin with.  Right now, they do more to hurt the cause of integration in public schools than help.  And it is one thing to "ask" charter schools to embrace diversity, but I think they will.  I am uneasy about how selective charters would become if they are given the ability to recruit white, middle-class students.  The one fear I have is that they may overrecruit white, middle-class students who tend to perform better on standardized tests.  School boards and politicians have to make sure that in such a scenario as Goldstein is proposing, that such selectivness doesn't take place.

I would also add that redrawing boundary lines is a good suggestion, but good luck getting the public and local politicans (especially in more, white suburban districts) to agree to it.  Here in the Kansas City metro area on the Kansas side for example, I have a hard time imagining Johnson County schools (Shawnee Mission, De Soto) agreeing to share students with Wyandott County schools (Turner, KCK).  Goldstein expresses similar skepticism at the end of her post:

Sadly, no American governor or big city mayor I know of has committed to school integration as a central, clearly articulated facet of his or her education reform agenda. In part, this is because so many middle and upper class parents still feel skittish about sending their children to school with poor kids, and so “school choice” policies have evolved, in many cities, as a way to de facto segregate the children of the creative class. If we continue down this road, we simply won’t be taking advantage of the social, civic, and academic upsides of our rapidly diversifying cities. That would be a national shame. 

If We Really Want To Close The Achievement Gap . . .

There are other factors that must be taken into account besides test scores and teacher quality.  

Picture from My Favorite Quotes Digitized II

2011 Person of the Year

I know I am a couple of weeks late writing on this story, but I would just like to take a moment to give credit to Time Magazine's choice for the 2011 Person of the Year: The Protestor.

 

Photo from Huffington Post

Clearly the biggest news story of the year were the protests that arose in the Arab World, and that soon spread to other parts of the globe as well (including in the United States with the Occupy Wall Street movement).  Discontent at those in charge is something that so often gets talked about, but very little ever get's done about it.  Sometimes, a person get's kicked out of elected office, and the next person to replace them is either just as ineffective, or worse than the person they replace.  Occasionally, you see a massive uprising against one's government in a foreign country, but that ultimately falter via government crackdown through brutality and fear (e.g. Iran, 2009).

But this year was different.  Why this year, and not any other year?  It is hard to say.  Time Magazine writer Kurt Anderson writes this:

It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats.

For most years, Time would bestow this distinction to one individual, but in more recent years, it seems they have given the "person" of the year (singular) to groups of individuals.  Examples include "The Peacemakers" (1993; represented Yasser Arafat, F.W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, and Yitzhak Rabin), "The American Soldier" (2003), and the lazy and pandering "You" in 2006 (representing people who post things on the internet).  Of course, this year falls under that category of multiple winners as "Person of the Year", and "protesters" they couldn't have picked a more appropriate choice.

But what if you did have to pick just one person to represent the whole protest movement?  Quite a daunting task considering that the number of individuals involved in protest movements around the world this year are (at a minimum) in the hundreds of thousands, if not in the millions.  In addition, there is not one person who is primarily in charge of any of these movements, nor one individual that is the "face" of any of these movements, other than the faces of some of the despots who the protestors are demonstrating against to begin with (e.g. Mubarak, Gaddafi, Putin, etc.).  These were truly democratic movements in every sense of the word.  But there is one person, however, that can earn this distinction, because without him, all of these demonstrations may have never even started (or had the impact that they did).

Many people have suggested (and I happen to agree) that the Person of the Year for 2011 is the man in the picture at the top of this post: Mohamed Bouazizi.  Who is, or rather, who was Mr. Bouazizi?  Here is a description from an article on him from the website African Success, where I also copied the picture from above:

Mohamed Bouazizi  was a Tunisian street vendor born March 29,1984- died January 4,2011, poured petrol over himself on December 17, 2011 and set himself, alight in front of the office of the Governor of his region, life turned upside down in Tunisia and the fires that he lit has burned until it engulfed the entire country from town to town.

 Photo from African Success

He was a student from Sidi Bouzid and upon his father’s death, was obliged to stop his studies and find a job.Faced with the difficulty of finding a job, he ended up becoming a street seller, without official authorisation and desperate he plied his trade as best he could.

His plight echoed the hapless fate of so many thousands and thosuands of young Tunisians, seduced by the promises of western education, yet frustrated and thwarted by a visionless, un-productive, corrupt power structure which dominated the country and suffocated creativity and innovation.


In Tunisia, the President Zine el_Abidine Ben Ali and his family rules his country with an iron bar.

Papers to do this and that, land to build houses on, authorisations of all sorts were obtained by the ‘kind patronage’ of the President and his family.

Mohamed didn’t have the right papers and on the 17th December[2010] the police confiscated his good and threw him out of the market because he wasn’t paying the right dividends to the people the President had put in place. Apparently slapped on the face by Faida Hamdy, it has been upheld that the indignation was the 'spark' that led to him setting fire to himself. Her family have always upheld that she never touched him and a witness who had originally affirmed that she did slap him and has since added that it wasn't true that she didn't slap him.

Mohamed decided to protest by the only means he knew and poured petrol on himself, took out his lighter and burnt himself, becoming the hero and initiator of the ‘Jasmin revolution,’ which brought down the President and his family on 14 January 2011 and made him a martyr and hero of the nation.

The tragic story and suicide of Mr. Bouazizi lead to the ousting of Tunisia's president, and that could have been the end of the story.  A small story of and tragedy and triumph for justice in a small African country took place, but the rest of the world kept going along with business as usual.  But that did not happen.  Here is a piece from an article Reuters on why the The Times of the United Kingdom named Mr. Bouaziz their Person of the Year:

Bouazizi' death from his wounds in January prompted protests across Tunisia, forcing autocratic President Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country. Soon afterwards, millions took to the streets in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere to protest against repression, corruption, poverty and joblessness.

The uprisings unseated despots in Libya, Egypt and Yemen as well as Tunisia, while Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's writ is disintegrating and other authoritarian rulers in the region are eyeing the tide of public anger with nervousness.

Tunisia has since elected new leaders through peaceful democratic elections.

In an October interview with Reuters, Bouazizi's mother Manoubia urged the new leaders to honor her son's sacrifice by helping poor people like him.

"Nothing would have happened if my son had not reacted against voicelessness and a lack of respect," she said.

"But I hope the people who are going to govern will be able to keep this message in mind and give consideration to all Tunisians, including the poor."

 

Photo from Reuters

Without the death of Mr. Bouazizi, not only would there have not been an uprising in Tunisia, there probably would have been no Tahrir Square, no Arab Spring, no Indignant's protest in Spain, no austerity protest in Greece, no protests on the Kremlin and no Occupy Wall Street.  Without Mr. Bouazizi, both Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gaddafi would probably still be in power, and it is possible that no one in America would be talking about the wealth disparity between the 99% and the 1%.

While I sincerely hope that no one ever imitates the drastic actions that Mr. Bouazizi took, we who care about these protest movements need to realize what he did, why he did it, and pay tribute to him and what has happened since then.  May the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi live on.  And may the movements around the globe that he helped create continue to gain momentum in 2012 and beyond!

Parenting, Poverty and Academic Success

Photo from Cool Health Tips  

"How About Better Parents?"  That is what Thomas Friedman suggests in one of his most recent editorials in the New York Times.

In recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

He uses research from the often-cited Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which decided to look at factors from outside of the classroom to see what made successful students.  There were three major findings they found:

• Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.


• The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socio-economic background.


• Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.

Friedman also cites a study by the Center for Public Education, and the Center's Director, Patte Barth, to support this.

“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”

To say that good parenting is important in the academic quality of a young person may seem blatantly obvious to some.  But the reality is that it is probably the most important component in a young person's success.

This simple truth often get's overshadowed in our current national education debate by issues of teacher quality, and how those evil teacher unions want to keep bad teachers in our schools.  That is not to say that good teachers, or good schools for that matter, can't make a difference.  I would even argue that there are probably some things we could do to improve the way teachers are assessed, and there are reforms that can be made to the way schools manage tenure.

But that quote about how "there is no substitute for a good teacher" can be applied tenfold to a good parent.  All teachers know this to be true.  That doesn't mean they give up on student's who struggle or refuse to work.  Often times, they will make extra efforts to reach out to those students.  This isn't to suggest that there aren't good parents who have children that perform poorly in school, or vice versa.  But that general correlation between good parenting and academic quality becomes blatantly obvious whenever a teacher makes a phone call home to a parent, or when parent-teacher conferences come around (if the parent even picks up the phone or shows up to conferences at all). 

Going back to the editorial, something that Friedman barely touches on is the issue of poverty.

Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”

I won't say that Friedman was wrong to gloss over poverty in his editorial, because the point of the piece was about good parenting.  Yes, good parenting is a more important factor in a student's academic success than what type of socioeconomic background that student comes from.  But what type of parent a person can be to their child is highly influences by their socioeconomic status.

 

Image from The Affordable Housing Institute

 
There are numerous factors that play into this: Do the children live in a one-parent or two parent household?  Is one or both of the parents working multiple jobs with late hours?  Do they have time to read to their children (or taken them to a museums or get them involved in other enrichment and supplemental activities)?  Are the parents homeless (thus putting the emphasis of their time on finding food and shelter rather than what book are they going to read)?

None of this is to suggest that an adult living in a lower-socioeconomic background can't be an excellent parent, or a child from a lower-socioeconomic background can't be an excellent student.  But the conditions of poverty make parental and academic success a lot harder to achieve.  This cannot be underestimated.  I would like to close this post by citing a post I wrote back in February on the issue of poverty and academic success of students in American schools:

 The truth of the matter is that, all things considered, American schools are no worse than most countries around the world.  If anything, our schools as they exist in many neighborhoods are just as capable of outperforming schools in Finland, China, or any other industrialized nation.  There certainly are things that our country can do better to improve the quality of schools and education as a whole.  But the main reason that a school district usually struggles to begin with is poverty.  The reason that inner-city school districts struggles with lower test scores, higher drop-out rates, violence, increased teen pregnancy, and so on is because of the poverty that most of the students and their parents live in.  Everyone knows this is the case, and has known it for years.  For all of the well-being and economic success our country has had compared to the rest of the world, poverty (and all of the societal problems that are linked to it) is the great albatross around America's neck.

"Absurd" Education Proposal by Newt

 Picture from Polk County GOP

Newt Gingrich has a history of saying stupid things.  Here is a new one that I found on a NYT blog post generously titled "From Gingrich, and Unconventional View on Education".

In poverty stricken K-12 districts, Mr. Gingrich said that schools should enlist students as young as 9 to14 to mop hallways and bathrooms, and pay them a wage. Currently child-labor laws and unions keep poor students from bootstrapping their way into middle class, Mr. Gingrich said.

“This is something that no liberal wants to deal with,” he told an audience at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on Friday, according to Politico.

“You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine,” Mr. Gingrich said. “You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

 AFT President Randi Weingarten puts it very simply:

“Who in their right mind would lay off janitors and replace them with disadvantaged children — who should be in school, and not cleaning schools,” Ms. Weingarten said. “And who would start backtracking on laws designed to halt the exploitation of children?”

UPDATE:

Newt apparently had some other things to say about children working outside of school as well:

He added, "You go out and talk to people, as I do, you go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between nine and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something, they were washing cars."

"They all learned how to make money at a very early age," he said. "What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don't do it. Remember all that stuff about don't get a hamburger flipping job? The worst possible advice you could give to poor children. Get any job that teaches you to show up on Monday. Get any job that teaches you to stay all day even if you are in a fight with your girlfriend. The whole process of making work worthwhile is central."

The former House Speaker acknowledged that it was an unconventional pitch, saying, "You're going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America and give people a chance to rise very rapidly."

To be fair, there is something to be said about young people getting jobs that helps to instills a sense of hard work, and appreciate what they earn.  Even if that means working for lower-wages, and doing more physically laborious tasks.  That are what jobs for younger people (who are being primary supported by parents and guardians) are supposed to be like. 

I hope that some of the ideas Mr. Gingrich is proposing, however, doesn't mean he wants to alter child-labor laws, as some are suggesting.   I also hope that Mr. Gingrich isn't simply suggesting that working as a child means that one will automatically rise out of poverty.  The primary causes of poverty are numerous and complex, and it is going to take a lot more than kids learning the meaning of hard work to combat it.

Early Childhood Education, Poverty, and Occupy Wall Street

Nicholas Kristoff recently wrote a fascinating piece regarding education and the Occupy Wall Street movement.  He seems generally in favor of what the movement stands for: the desire to change economic inequality in this country.  While Kristoff doesn't belittle ideas such as raising taxes on the rich, or throwing bankers in jail, he says those ideas will not be nearly as effective to fixing the crisis of income inequality as expanding early childhood education:

But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequality is that many young people never get the skills to compete.  They're just left behind.

I agree with the importance of funding early childhood education (and public education in general) as a means of changing society.  After all, one of the biggest reasons why many teachers choose the career they do is to make a greater difference in society (I would include myself in this category).  I don't know if it is more important that other policy measures such as raising taxes, and passing more baking and business regulations.  But nonetheless, education is highly important.  Here is another excerpt from Kristof's column:

“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.

 “The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” she added. “And success breeds success.”

Kristof goes onto quote Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman, who says something I'm not sure I quite agree with.

“Schooling after the second grade plays only a minor role in creating or reducing gaps,” Heckman argues in an important article this year in American Educator. “It is imperative to change the way we look at education. We should invest in the foundation of school readiness from birth to age 5.”

One's early childhood education can determine a lot about how a student will fair in school.  I would even go so far to say that early childhood education does have a bigger impact on a child's education than upper elementary and secondary education does.   But I am skeptical that schooling from grades 3 and up only play a "minor role". 

Admittedly, I have not read Heckman's article, and I am sure he has good data and points to support his assertion.  But how can 10 additional years in school be considered a minor?  How are we defining what important vs less important?  I am not saying Heckman is wrong, I am just skeptical of his assertion.

Kristof also discusses the importance of the Head Start program.  I know multiple educators who like to criticize Head Start (and rightly so to a point) because of the long term ineffectiveness the program seems to have on a child's education.  While Kristoff admits the program has faults, he also shows that it is far better to have Head Start than nothing at all, showing the need for early childhood education:

Take Head Start, which serves more than 900,000 low-income children a year. There are flaws in Head Start, and researchers have found that while it improved test results, those gains were fleeting. As a result, Head Start seemed to confer no lasting benefits, and it has been widely criticized as a failure.

Not so fast.

One of the Harvard scholars I interviewed, David Deming, compared the outcomes of children who were in Head Start with their siblings who did not participate. Professor Deming found that critics were right that the Head Start advantage in test scores faded quickly. But, in other areas, perhaps more important ones, he found that Head Start had a significant long-term impact: the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. Head Start alumni were more likely than their siblings to graduate from high school and attend college.

Finally, Kristoff finished his column by discussing President Obama's need to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise of greater funding for early childhood education. 

President Obama often talked in his campaign about early childhood education, and he probably agrees with everything I’ve said. But the issue has slipped away and off the agenda.

That’s sad because the question isn’t whether we can afford early childhood education, but whether we can afford not to provide it. We can pay for prisons or we can pay, less, for early childhood education to help build a fairer and more equitable nation.

It is surprising that no one other columnists or pundits have brought this up.  Not that the Republicans will let him pass new spending on this, but Obama should at least try.  He also needs to quit supporting asinine measures such as Race To The Top and merit pay which only hurts education.  Like a lot of those on the "education reformer" side of the debate, I believe the President has good intentions when it comes to what education in America should look like.  But the reality of his education policies so far only hurt schools because they do so much to hurt teachers and push standardized testing.  This is not the way to fix American education, and it is damn sure not the way to help combat poverty in the long run.

MLK, Poverty, and Occupy Wall Street

Picture of Martin Luther King at a march for sanitation workers in Memphis.  Photo comes from San Francisco Bay View website.

Today, nearly everyone from every political background admires King.  But if King were alive today, he probably would have been called a "a left-wing nut", a "socialist", and even "anti-American".  And just like the Occupy Wall Street movement today, King was considered both radical and controversial during his time.

Today, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial had it's long-awaited dedication.  It is only by coincidence that the Occupy Wall Street movement is gradually increasing support across the country, and around the world.  There is no doubt that today, MLK would not only support the movement with his words, but would be right there with the protesters risking arrest.

Indeed, right before he was assassinated, King had helped organize the "Poor People's Campaign", which was focused on economic justice in the United States.  43 years later, the Occupy Wall Street movement is protesting economic justice in a similar manner as the protests King was involved in, but under different circumstances.  Just as Americans all love Martin Luther King now, and realize how right he was, will America look back to the supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 40 years, and realize how right they are?  I can only hope so.

Here is a link to a YouTube video from a few months back by the amazing Tavis Smiley. He discusses the vital need for American politicians to tackle the issue of poverty (he quote King at the beginning of the video).  This was made before the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it does allude to the disgusting fact that so much wealth in America (the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world), is occupied by the richest 1%.  This is one of the main things the Occupy Wall Street protesters are standing up against.

Poverty, PISA, and the Myth About Public Schools in America and Around the World

Photo from Space Goddess

Recently in his Class Struggle blog, Jay Matthews has taken on two conventional myths about public education.  The first myth is that at one time, American schools were great and in recent years, they have greatly declined.  The truth is, as Matthews cites Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute, is that we were never that great, nor are we now that bad.  American schools have always been mediocre.  We have based traditionally based the success of American schools on test scores like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).  On such test scores, American students have always scored less than stellar on such comparative tests, even as far back as the 1960s.  While this is not really a good thing, this does not suggest that America, or American schools, are inferior to others around the world.

For the past 50 years, the United States has been one of the world's superpowers.  We have been the world's dominant country in both economics and military power.  While I would argue that there are better ways to measure the success and well-being of a country, it certainly can't be said that because we have never ranked that great on standardized tests, that we are are some how an inferior nation that struggles compared to the rest of the industrialized world. 

Picture from Finland Educational Guide 

The second myth that Matthew's looks at is that other countries around the world have superior schools because they test better.  These countries include schools such as China, India, and the country many consider to have the top education system in the world, Finland.  While there is certainly a lot to laud about Finnish schools, their superiority in test scores is actually something that is of great debate currently in Finland.  

Loveless is less dismissive of Finland, which has been scoring well for several years. But he says Americans who love the Finnish model of paying teachers higher salaries, decentralizing authority over educational decisions and eschewing high-stakes standardized testing should tune into the debate the Finns are having about their schools. 

Finnish children were doing well on international tests before those reforms were adopted. That suggests that cultural and societal factors might be the more likely reason for their success. Many Finnish mathematicians say that the country is catering too much to PISA, which emphasizes word problems and practical applications of math, and neglecting to prepare students for college math. 

Loveless says more than 200 university mathematicians in Finland petitioned the education ministry to complain of students increasingly arriving in their classrooms poorly prepared. "Knowledge of fractions and algebra were singled out as particularly weak areas," Loveless says. 

 So the reason that Finland tests so well on international scores is because there education system is geared towards testing well.  That alone doesn't make their schools more superior than other countries, and in point of fact, is the topic of great debate in Finland.  This same point was made by both Diane Ravitch and the Wall Street Journal a month ago about China's schools.  As Ravitch writes:

In The Wall Street Journal, Jiang Xueqin, the deputy principal of Peking University High School, lamented that those high scores were purchased by sacrificing such qualities as independence, curiosity, and individuality. Even educators in Shanghai, he wrote, recognize that the singular devotion to test scores was "producing competent mediocrity."  

 In the quote from Matthews above on Finnish schools, I highlighted a sentence that he wrote, but really didn't explain.  That being about "cultural and societal factors" as one explanation why Finland does so well in schools.  What are those factors exactly?  Well, I believe Ravitch stumbled upon the problem in her piece:

The other salient factor about U.S. performance on international tests is that we have an exceptional and shameful rate of child poverty. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution says that more than 20 percent of our children live in poverty, and she expects that proportion to increase to nearly 25 percent by 2014. As poverty deepens, Sawhill writes, we should be strengthening the safety net that protects the lives of the poorest. Robert Reich, the former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, says that income inequality is higher now than it has been in many decades. Most of the nations (and cities) that compete on PISA have far lower child-poverty rates. 

In recent years, we have become accustomed to hearing prominent reformers like Secretary Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Klein say that reference to poverty is just making excuses for bad teachers and bad schools. But there is plenty of evidence that poverty affects students' readiness to learn. It affects their health, their nutrition, their attendance, and their motivation. Being hungry and homeless distracts students and injures their health; living in an environment where drugs and violence are commonplace affects children's interest in academics. Living in communities where many stores and homes are boarded up, and where incarceration rates are very high, affects children's sense of possibility and their willingness to plan for the future. 

Researchers for the National Association for Secondary School Principals disaggregated the PISA results by income and made some stunning discoveries. Take a look at this link ("PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid"). It shows that American students in schools with low poverty rates were first in the world when they were compared with students in nations with comparably low poverty levels. Thus, the picture painted by doomsayers about American education is false in this respect. We have many outstanding schools and students, but our overall performance is dragged down by the persistence of poverty. Poverty depresses school achievement because it hurts children, families, and communities.

Picture from China Smack 

 The truth of the matter is that, all things considered, American schools are no worse than most countries around the world.  If anything, our schools as they exist in many neighborhoods are just as capable of outperforming schools in Finland, China, or any other industrialized nation.  There certainly are things that our country can do better to improve the quality of schools and education as a whole.  But the main reason that a school district usually struggles to begin with is poverty.  The reason that inner-city school districts struggles with lower test scores, higher drop-out rates, violence, increased teen pregnancy, and so on is because of the poverty that most of the students and their parents live in.  Everyone knows this is the case, and has known it for years.  For all of the well-being and economic success our country has had compared to the rest of the world, poverty (and all of the societal problems that are linked to it) is the great albatross around America's neck.

I find it interesting that so-called education reformers believe the key to fighting poverty in inner-cities today is battling teacher unions, funding charter schools over public schools, and narrowing the curriculum to focus mainly on reading and math test scores.  While I am sure most of them have good intentions in their actions, their policies will only make things worse for our country.  They are hurting public schools in inner cities, and treating them as if they are the source of so many problems.  True, inner city schools have serious issues, but it is not public schools as a whole that is the source.  Wealthier, suburban districts with low poverty rates don't seem to have the same problems that these school districts have, and those schools have teacher unions, and government regulation.  It seems that so much money and energy that the reformers spend on fighting unions and opening charter schools could go to the root of the problem to begin with.  There are better ways to improve public schools and fight poverty than the current conventional thinking by reformers.

Disintegration

Stephen Colbert takes a look at a part of North Carolina where racial and economic integration has lead to great success and popularity . . . and how the Tea Party is now trying to undo this progress.

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The Word - Disintegration
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Some Articles on American Education on MLK Day.

Dana Goldstein points out that schools are more segregated today than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968.  She also notes the following:

And make no mistake--integration is one of the most powerful school reform tools in the kit. 

Here's how we know that: At the macro level, four decades of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress--the "nation's report card"--show that the achievement gap between white and minority students shrunk fastest during the 1970s and 1980s, the era of Court-mandated school desegregation. Between 2004 and 2009, on the other hand--our NLCB, "standards and accountability" era--the achievement gap between white children and black and Latino children did not shrink at all.

Sarah Mead explains that simply making MLK a day of services, as well intentioned as it is, misses the point in teaching what MLK was really about:

I'm particularly uncomfortable with the decision to make King's holiday a "day of service," on which young people are encouraged to engage in service projects. Not that there's anything wrong with any of these projects. They're nice things to do. But the progress of the civil rights movement didn't come from people working in soup kitchens, cleaning up parks, or doing similarly nice, service-y things. It came from people nonviolently but directly standing up to unjust power structures and engaging in civil disobedience. People actually broke unjust laws--and got arrested for it. Teaching our kids that this is a day about service seems to get the message dead wrong--or at least to suggest that our nation and world are no longer plagued by injustices that require more than volunteer work to right them.

In the South, many school districts do not let there students off school for MLK Day (along with other holidays) in order to make-up for missed snow days.

I have two things to say to these school districts: First, given your less than stellar history on race relations, using MLK Day as a snow day is not the smartest move (at least from a purely PR standpoint).  In fact, it is quite disrespectful and offensive.  Secondly, you should do what other districts in the country do for missed snow days: build in snow days when making your calender, and if you use them up, add on days to the end of the year. 

Finally, there is also this piece from my favorite education writer these days, Diane Ravitch.  She  published this on last year's MLK Day.  She asks if you can imagine Martin Luther King standing along side businessmen and billionaires in favor of more testing and charter schools. I know that what is known as "education reform" gets a lot of positive attention from progressives and leaders in the African-American community these days.  However, MLK was a supporter of public workers and unions, and would just as likely been on the side of supporting public schools, teacher unions, and more money for poor districts (not based on test scores).  He would also have likely pointed out that the real culprit of the achievement gap was poverty.  The NYC Educator blog shares Mrs. Ravitch's views on MLK and union support by quoting him:

"The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome."
-- MLK Jr., Illinois AFL-CIO Convention, 1965.