In 2011, David Brooks heard me speak at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where I talked about a life course approach to improving the lives of children. Days later, he published an article criticizing me for saying that testing and choice were inadequate to overcome the problems of kids who live in poverty.
At the time, he was still enthralled by the idea that charters were a systemic answer to these problems..
But –mirabile dictu!–Brooks has a column today recanting his earlier views. He actually says it takes a generation to raise a child.
He writes:
“….we’ve probably put too much weight on school reform. Again, reforming education is important. But getting the academics right is not going to get you far if millions of students can’t control their impulses, can’t form attachments, don’t possess resilience and lack social and emotional skills.
“So when President Obama talks about expanding opportunity in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, I’m hoping he’ll widen the debate. I’m hoping he’ll sketch out a stage-by-stage developmental agenda to help poor children move from birth to the middle class.”
This is a sign of real progress for those of us who have argued that the “reform movement”–focused on testing, charters, and vouchers– is a distraction at best and a threat to the survival of American public education at worst.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, let us help these poor children . Our leaders need to change their vision ..Authentic learning with effective experienced teachers with resources and support, parent groups and community support. Has to be a buy in by all with great leadership. That is all, Folks…
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“So when President Obama talks about expanding opportunity in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, I’m hoping he’ll widen the debate. I’m hoping he’ll sketch out a stage-by-stage developmental agenda to help poor children move from birth to the middle class.”
Given the economic pressures and trends occurring in the US that are squeezing the middle class, this would indeed require “widening the debate” to address issues that neither the children of the poor nor the poor themselves have any influence or power to affect. Other than voting . . . The wealthy might not be as interested in that agenda.
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When was the last time Obama interacted with middle class and working class people? It seems like he is always dining with wealthy people and having parties and fundraisers with the super wealthy. He wouldn’t know anything about education because he hasn’t taken any time to truly engage teachers, etc. He took a sledgehammer to the profession and ganged-up on teachers with right- wing nuts who want to destroy public ed.
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I totally agree. I read his book when he was running in 2008. His stand on teachers in that book was a big red flag but I voted for him anyway. It turned out worse than I thought.
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That’s just about as good a summary of what’s happened in education under Barry O as I have read.
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I read both his books. They were airy nothings–collections of platitudes.
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Has David Brooks gone Liberal?
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He vacillates. He can be won over by facts.
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David Brooks isn’t there YET! Brooks thought the best way to provide more alternatives for middle level learners was through “small schools of choice” because “…(t)here’s some evidence that New York’s “small schools of choice” yield measurable results.” I’d like to see that “evidence”… He then acknowledges that “… it feels like less money has been raised to help teenagers”. Of course its more than a feeling: it’s a fact that little federal money has been raised AT ALL for ANY public education programs other than Race To The Top. My sense after reading the column and others by David Brooks: I won’t be reading any columns from him in the future that advocate more spending for federal programs to help parents of preschoolers or provide the money needed to allow urban schools to spend the same amount per pupil as public schools. He views any federal programs as an expansion of the “nanny state” and still believes the K-12 education problems can be solved by “the marketplace”.
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It’s good to know a conservative can be intellectually honest enough to let his consciousness evolve.
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David Brooks may indeed be inching his way towards Reign of Error, let’s hope Diane’s advocacy pushes him and his followers in that direction. Seems to me, though, in this column, Brooks still points a long finger at poor kids who need rehab and remediation for their personal failures, only this time for their alleged emotional and social lacks. He hasn’t yet joined the realm of ‘public advocacy’ which takes the bugaboo of conservatives, “personal responsibility,” as a given for civilized society and not as a whip to flay the poor. The eyes of public advocacy as I understand it focus first on the vastly unequal ‘inputs’ bee provide children b/c what we invest in kids powerfully influences what they grow into(‘outputs’). Folks on this list know the rest of that argument; Brooks may learn it yet.
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That is good.
I hope it keeps happening.
This fight is getting tiresome.
And I am flabbergasted that people get mad at those of us who like public school for not celebrating the changes they want to make. What do they expect? They attack an entity that is important to people and, as many see it, vital to a healthy society and expect people to thank them for it or engage about the strong points of their destruction? Those who stand up for it are called names with silly and childish retorts.
I am not losing my steam for standing up for schools, but I am losing my steam for that type of exchange, which it seems more and more people come to this blog looking for. “Discussion,” yes, but a person needs to know that there will be emotion involved when something a person has given time and effort and resources too is suddenly bashed and threatened and rules are circumvented and . . .
I’m just tired of the mean-ness of all of it. Again, thank you Michele Rhee for an entirely wrong approach for helping our country.
Vinegar. Pure vinegar.
How about some honey? How about some positive thinking?
(Thank you to those who show it).
I’m only going to allow myself onto the blog one day a week. I get very upset by trolls.
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Joanna Best: only “one day a week”?
I would miss your comments. If I may be so presumptuous, a little advice: you are under no obligation to respond to, much less read, thoughtless and heartless comments. If someone wants to engage you in dialogue they should be civil, fair and honest if they want responses. If they aren’t, then this bit of wisdom offered up the other day is appropriate: don’t feed the trolls. It only encourages them.
Riffing off what some HS students told me: “fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, haters gotta hate…”
And trolls only exist off the time, energy and efforts given them by others. They’re parasites. When the host refuses to give them sustenance they turn on themselves [as reported on the national news yesterday, the “cannibal rat ship” floating aimlessly in the ocean comes to mind].
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
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KTA—good advice. Baby steps. I will start with a week; then 5 days; then 3; then 2;
I was so stunned by some of what was written to me a few days ago that it really emotionally upsets me. It’s bad enough to deal with what teachers are being dealt in NC, and then, when you are trying to stand up for something obviously (you would think) a better thing for a society, to get hit in the nose like YOU are the selfish one. I hate it. I usually am able to ignore, or tell which ones are harmless (like Harlan). But when the new ones pop up I lately want to hit back. And get angry.
It’s time for this battle to turn a corner. I will be hearing Diane speak next month (so long as the weather is good), and meanwhile I will work on mantras to keep strong when I read trolls quoting me back to me, out of context, mis-characterized, and unfamiliar with the usual beat of discussion on here.
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and by what we are dealt I don’t mean our jobs. I love my teaching job and I feel like I am compensated just fine. I just mean the talk and the energy coming out of Raleigh that teachers are some kind of parasite that must be decimated.
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Joanna Best: with all due respect to you and the owner of this blog—
If you feel aggravated and depressed by the sneers and jeers you have been subjected to here, consider what it must feel like to have people you used to work and have friendly relations with over many years, subject you in public to petty insults and gross distortions unworthy of simple human decency.
Just remember that often those who want to give you a verbal pummeling scream bloody murder when they feel or imagine the slightest pinprick to their tender feelings.
Not an old dead Greek guy, but almost as good, an old dead French guy said it well:
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” [François de La Rouchefoucauld]
It will be difficult at times but honestly and civilly speak your mind and your heart here. I don’t, and won’t, promise to agree with everything you say, but I will read what you write.
And I won’t be only one.
😎
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Joanna,
I would miss you not being here as well. Do not listen to the haters. You have a lot of fans here like me.
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given to, not too
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I agree with what ira shor says and that means that for me, David Brooks still believes it is the fault of the poor for the ways they are so unevolved that they need all this other kind of help. But excuse me for saying this, but the rich kids could definitely use a good deal of learning about social skills, how to form attachments and also would be in rehab a lot more than the poorer population, oh excuse me, they are. The poor kids get to go to jail.
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I see wealthier students who do all of their assignments and, in general, take responsibility for learning. When I worked in a poorer school the children did not turn in and complete assignments. They did not meet deadlines. They did not take full responsibility for their learning. This is a real issue. I would agree that not all wealthier children have cornered the market on manners, etc. but there is a profound difference in academics and it shows in the long run.
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Not sure it will ever equalize. Lazy “rich kids” can buy their way into position. There are parallels in all levels of society as to educational opportunity or success. Underpinning and support are essential to any future.
All this privatization of charter schools causes less equity, not more. Less understanding, not more. Less opportunity, not more. The money needs to flow towards student programs not private wealth.
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How many of your poorer students don’t do their assignments because they’re working because their income is needed to support the family? How many have to take care of younger siblings, or even parents? How many of them live in fear of violence, whether from gangs in their neighborhoods or from an abuser in their home (or both)? How many of them can’t do their assignment because they’re too busy worrying about where their next meal is coming from or where they’re going to sleep?
All kids – rich and poor – learn, it’s unavoidable. It’s just a matter of what they learn. I’m sure a lot of poorer kids would like to be in a position to be able to choose what they learn.
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I’ll believe it when I hear Brooks changing his tune on NPR as well, but it’s hopefully possibly a beginning. And if it is a “change of tune” then next how about taking on Tom Friedman?
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Good luck with that!
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I consider my husband and I to be, not wealthy, but very comfortably well off. We worked and sacrificed to get there. I am also a staunch conservative, with eyes wide open to see real inequity. Not a feather in our caps really, just stating the position we look at the world through. That being said, I have witnessed, firsthand, a child who grew up in the home of a substance abuser. The abuser was sick, even if self inflicted. But most importantly, that child could NOT focus on academics, had no supervision with academics, got to school late, stared out the window during the day (most likely wondering about the parent or what the evening would be like, or what the night before had been like). Sure, child welfare got many a call, but children are fiercely protective of their caretakers, not knowing what the alternative will bring.
You are right, Dienne. It is painful to imagine what squalor some children live in. Mr. Obama has never tried to relate. It’s impossible unless you have been exposed day in and day out. Most people can’t imagine the horrors some children must cope with. It’s easier not to know. The child welfare system doesn’t fix problems like this.
Non-threatening, public education, in a loving, nurturing environment, where a child can get a glimpse of hope, is the only chance some kids (middle class kids too) have for redemption. There is no one size fits all solution but we really must be our brother’s keeper where innocent children are concerned. Aren’t they all innocent? After all, they are children. I wonder sometimes, in this unhealthy school climate, WHO the adults are?
What we do by being outspoken is stressful, but necessary. Keep on being vocal.
Change begins with a single step!
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Brooks actually doesn’t say it takes a village to raise a child. He says, “…human capital development takes a generation.” Big difference here.
Reminiscent of Arne Duncan’s talk to the World Bank (“Improving Human Capital in a Competitive World—Education Reform in the United States”).
Good NYT Op-Ed piece on John Dewey’s vision of learning, “Learning as Freedom” by Michael Roth (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/opinion/john-deweys-vision-of-learning-as-freedom.html?_r=0), who asks,
Who wants to attend school to learn to be “human capital”? Who aspires for their children to become economic or military resources? Dewey had a different vision.
Brooks hasn’t changed his tune. This column is just another of his attacks on the poor. He’s still for corporate reform, privatization, charters. Just doesn’t think it should be wasted on “millions of students can’t control their impulses, can’t form attachments, don’t possess resilience and lack social and emotional skills.”
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This.
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mklonsky: IMHO, although it may seem cynical, I think your last paragraph is an accurate description. I would like to be proved wrong but I ain’t holding my breath…
Krazy props for your blog.
😎
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I take the human capital talk to be indicative of the economy (business people are desperate) and I think it will fade like “the gene pool” did twenty years ago or so.
I hated that. “contribution to the gene pool.” How about. . .human?
How about just “people?”
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By all means, let’s develop policy based on grotesque generalizations like this: “millions of students can’t control their impulses, can’t form attachments, don’t possess resilience and lack social and emotional skills.” How about military boot camp for children 6 months old and up? After all, what else are you going to do with those people? You know how they live.
Mr. Brooks, we are talking about kids here, kids from neighborhoods and communities, kids with extremely varied home environments and influences. Individuals. The wording of Mr. Brooks’s comment speaks volumes about how he views the world. The poor are a degenerate, amorphous they lacking moral compass. Yes, Mr. Brooks, many of the children of the poor face problems, severe problems, that result from their poverty and from the poverty of their communities. Switch those kids, in the maternity ward, with children of the wealthy, and they will grow up to be Senators and pundit columnists. But starting from such a worldview as this will lead only to repressiveness–to more of the school-to-prison pipeline that we’ve so effectively developed in the U.S. in the past few decades.
This stuff from Brooks appears to be not a retreat from education deform but, rather, a harbinger of ed deform, phase 2. Bill Bennet’s old character education notions have recently become coupled, in conservative circles, with a meme about using technology to effect unprecedented command and control of the children of the proles as described in the Orwellian Education Department report on building Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance by hooking children up to monitors of their affective states–retinal scanners, galvanic skin response bracelets, etc.
It would be nice to believe that self-styled “conservatives” in the United States are awakening to the problem of child poverty, to the existence of savage inequalities in our schools, to the need for extensive wrap-around services and for nurturing, locally developed, compensatory, alternative environments for kids growing up in horrific conditions. But that’s just not part of the right-wing narrative in the U.S., and doing anything about the poverty trap–creating those wrap-around services and compensatory, alternative environments, will cost a lot, though it will be cheaper than is sending 1 out of every 100 Americans to prison, which is what we are currently doing.
I listened to a talk, recently, by the brilliant physicist Michio Kaku. He said, “People will always tell you that there is not enough money. But there is plenty of money. It’s just going to the Defense Department.” I agree entirely. We made a decision in this country to be the policeman of the world–to be absolutely dominant militarily over the face of the entire globe. And we pay for that to the exclusion of paying for other things. That decision has had opportunity costs. Dramatic opportunity costs. And it’s the same bad decision that other empires have made, throughout history, just prior to their utter collapse.
I’m glad to see that Mr. Brooks is starting to think about older kids and the problems that they face. Let’s take a good, hard look at the obstacles that keep kids from developing skills for and entering trades in which they can earn a living, for example. What keeps that from happening? How do we fix that?
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The cost of the “wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq has been 4-to-6 TRILLION dollars, to date, in committed expenditures, according to the Brown University Cost of War Project. Yes, all this military expenditure is a federal government jobs program–the defense industry employs a lot of people–but imagine, just imagine, what would happen if resources on such a scale were turned to productive use? There is nothing conservative about the conservatives’ wastefulness, their heedless squandering of our national treasure. 26 percent of our children, in the United States, are living below the poverty line. 43 percent of all African-American children are. We can attend to such problems, or we can play the Empire game. We can’t do both.
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Your remarks regarding the cost of our recent wars are all the more preceptive when one reflects on what is currently happening in the Kurdistan region.
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Does he have a change of heart? I doubt it. Even though he tones down his attack on the system he doesn’t like, that doesn’t mean he would change his elitist instituonalist mindset in general. It would be great if he turned to the other side, but probably that’s not likely the case.
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Any educated person who refers to human beings as “human capital” has a very long way to go.
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Human capital does not refer to people, it is a term of art referring to the part if knowledge that increases a Pearson’s ability to produce goods and services for the community.
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a Pearson’s
now that’s funny!
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The joys of autocorrect.
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been there, done that, TE!
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Brooks, like so many, makes the issues exclusively about children in poverty, we are led to believe everything is just fine with all the other kids.
It’s not. In fact middle class kids and schools are struggling as well, and in large part due to the reforms of testing, accountability, whatever.
Lack of educational, economic, and social mobility is in all but the top strata.
Let’s not take the bait and take the middle class out of the debate. All kids deserve the opportunity to develop to their full potential.
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Absolutely!
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EVen those middle class kids who go to college, these days, find themselves unemployable thereafter–find themselves saying, OMG, what am I going to do now–how do I make a decent living? Many end up going back to some community college or proprietary school, after floundering around for years, to learn a trade. This is a terribly, terribly wasteful approach.
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I wonder, too, about those who leave college unprepared for much.
We know there are a lot of fluff majors. I hink I just heard a story that liberal arts majors are often the more employable.
Maybe it’s about how engaged, or unengaged, kids are in high school and college. And at least in high school, I think we have created cultures where it’s easy to disengage from meaningful learning.
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We’ve long had the bad idea that vocational education and liberal arts education are exclusive categories, but plumbing and graphic design and industrial design and fashion design and ad writing and filming of a commercial spot are arts. So are the customization of cars and computers. We really need to rethink this distinction between the two categories. And those who develop curricula need to attend carefully to both to knowledge of what and to knowledge–to operationalized procedural knowledge. When our educators talk about “skills,” too often it is entirely in the abstract. We formulate “skills” in our standards in these abstract ways. We do not formulate them in an operationalized manner–as a series of steps to be carried out. Here is how to put together a press release or a slideshow, step-by-step.
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The best thing we can do for children is to build an economy that employs their parents and pays living wages. Having a government that supports good wages and protects the rights of working people is the only way we will raise the standard of living for kids. Then the testing results will rise and rise and rise. What will reformers do then?
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“The best thing we can do for children is to build an economy that employs their parents and pays living wages.”
Agreed.
Here’s an inconvenient study:
“The figure below shows that low-wage workers have far more education now than they did back in 1968. In 1968, 48 percent of low-wage workers had a high school degree, compared to 79 percent in 2012. Correspondingly, many more low-wage workers have attended at least some college or have a college degree, which the graph identifies as ‘college experience.’ While only 16.8 percent of low-wage workers in 1968 had gone to some college or had a college degree, that group had grown to nearly half (45.7 percent) by 2012.
The bottom line is that minimum wage in 2013 is far less now than it was in 1968 despite the economy’s productivity more than doubling, and low-wage workers attaining far more education.”
So much for “they’re losing ground because they’re lazy and stupid”
http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-education-1968/
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This is very disheartening, but not surprising. It’s got to stop.
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absolutely. The U.S. has the most productive workers in the world, and productivity has risen dramatically for decades, but workers have not realized those gains themselves. Their overlords have.
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What percentage of students with special needs now graduate from high school that would not have graduated in the 1960s?
I think it is a mistake to assume that being a high school graduate in 1968 means the same thing as being a high school graduate today.
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What Mike Klonsky and Ira Shor said. Beware the false ‘change of heart’ that just opens a new narrative focus for privatization and the reduction of our children to ‘human capital,’
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Go David. He is getting the idea. I love what he says and I beleive in this vision. We need to move forward. Help struggling parents and support young children All the way through high school Isn’t that the promise of Public Education? President Obama, Please read and learn……
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Yes… But did he apologize for his criticisms of you… No he didn’t, and he was a little mean in the “Smells” article.
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The corporate takeover of education is beginning to look a lot like the Iraq invasion. Brooks is a trimmer, preparing the way for himself and others to leave a sinking ship — if it is the case that it does sink.
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Question of the Day
What made America great?
Answer-” Melting Pot”.
The key to the land of opportunity has always been our public school system. I always was taught that segregation, racism, classism, and elitism were the greatest threat to our great culture and society. The fact is the embracing of charter schools across America promote these social ills by institutionalizing these practices. Segregation is segregation no matter how you label it. The Charter School System will take this country back beyond separate and equal; back to separate and unequal. We are quickly headed into a 2 tier educational system. Tier 1 is system that promote higher education with first class facilities. Tier 2 will be for profit educational factories that will marginalize everything for the sake of profit, I challenge anyone to compare urban charter school facilities to the palatial palaces their suburban counter parts have!.
Gregory Allen
Ex Superintendent Designee
Asbury Park Public Schools.
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Well said. Thank you.
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The problem is we’ve already unleashed it.
Now it has to run its course.
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Not unlike the cruise ship, Lyubov Orlova, that is floating in the ocean carrying a cargo of cannibalistic rats. Nothing to do until the darn thing crashes into a land mass.
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Emmy: LOL
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Brooks got his undergrad degree at the University of Chicago. Duncan grew up in the neighborhood and Pres Obama taught there, let’s hope that Duncan and Obama will listen to their felow member of the U of Chicago community.
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I was more concerned that they had been influenced by the economic thinking of Milton Friedman. The University of Chicago, according to Naomi Klein, author of Shock Doctrine, “has produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today”.
I wonder if the most recent theater for application of disaster capitalism has turned inward towards education within the US and what we are observing are the effects of those efforts.
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Good comment. I’m wondering the same thing. Of course, they’re keeping us all on a short leash, so we’re too scared, tired, and worried to question or fight what is going on, but ultimately we’re going to win!
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Putting all our eggs in one basket — testing — will continue to bring us down as a society.
The for profit motive — quarterly bottom line — financial efficiency — sacrificing individuality and common sense — are the business model motivations.
Education needs to have a better delivery system, no doubt. But the needs are not what Rhee, Duncan, Gates, etc want. The needs are for smaller class sizes, more direct instruction, more human interaction, with proven methods for successful learning. Recommendations, not mandates for lockstep delivery systems, are much more useful and beneficial.
To me, the bottom line is helping each student feel glad to be learning and understanding and for them to develop their own interests and confidence and to look forward to being a contributing member of society. These tests add to feelings of futility for some students. Where is the HOPE?
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When I was young and lacking, myself, in a proper moral compass, I moved to Washington, DC, to feed at the government trough, and there I enrolled my daughter, still barely out of her toddler years, in an expensive private day school. It had a lovely campus with a lake and a boathouse. It had stables. It had lawns and tree-lined paths. It had fruit trees. It had a state-of-the-art theater. It had a medical facility. It had field hockey and a state-of-the-art gymnasium. It had a garden. It had enough art supplies to outfit the Rhode Island School of Design. It had very low student-to-teacher ratios.
That’s what a school environment for the children of the wealthy looks like–it’s the Academy, in the ancient sense–the sacred grove.
EVERY CHILD, including and most especially the poorest child of the poorest parent, deserves to go to a school like that. Every child deserves to go to a place, every day, that is breathtakingly beautiful–to a physical environment not characterized by squalor, one staffed by HIGHLY educated, nurturing, autonomous professionals–ones so highly educated and revered that no one would dream of subjecting them to micromanagement by educrats and politicians. Don’t underestimate the importance of the carefully constructed, beautiful environment for developing hearts and minds. It’s important to communicate, via the physical school environment, that LEARNING IS SACRED AND REVERED.
We could have that. We could have school environments like that for every child. For a portion of what we are paying for our insane foreign military adventurism, for prisons, for our perversely counterproductive “war on drugs,” for our opulent megachurches, we could have that. It’s all about the opportunity costs. What do we want to pay for? Do we pay for the development of the next generation of drones, or do we pay people to landscape schools?
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I am in complete agreement with your vision of what education should be for EVERY CHILD and assessment of our collective unwillingness to pay for what we really value (or should!):
“EVERY CHILD, including and most especially the poorest child of the poorest parent, deserves to go to a school like that. Every child deserves to go to a place, every day, that is breathtakingly beautiful–to a physical environment not characterized by squalor, one staffed by HIGHLY educated, nurturing, autonomous professionals–ones so highly educated and revered that no one would dream of subjecting them to micromanagement by educrats and politicians. Don’t underestimate the importance of the carefully constructed, beautiful environment for developing hearts and minds. It’s important to communicate, via the physical school environment, that LEARNING IS SACRED AND REVERED.”
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I was thinking as I wrote this that most people, reading it, would think me completely nuts. What a pipedream! But I do not think that I am being completely nuts here. Far, far from it. It’s all a matter of what we want, what we are willing to commit to creating.
I would love to see people reclaim the word “conservative” from the conservatives. There is nothing conservative about squandering breathtaking amounts of resources on counterproductive ends like the maintenance of empire around the world. Taking care of the next generation of children. That’s what someone who cares about conserving cares about. And he or she shows that care by putting his or her time and money and energy to that end.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we should be very careful what we pretend to be,” said Kurt Vonnegut. Heidegger would have put it this way: “We are the projects that we undertake. These show what we are, what we care about.
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And, let’s take every dime that is being spent on implementing new standards, on tests, on VAM evaluation systems, and return it to local schools to use to meet actual needs.
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I believe, like you, that if our most vulnerable children got what our least vulnerable children often get it would make a HUGE difference. BUT how would we close the gap that is already there for those children? If what we have is a “race” to the “top” the brains of the least vulnerable children are half way to the top when the most vulnerable children begin the “race.”
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Compensatory environments. That’s how we get there. A good start is with lots and lots of oral language in very different environments than those poor kids are used to.
Kids from poor families come into school having been exposed to a small fraction of the vocabulary and grammar that wealthy kids have heard. And then the Matthew Effect sets in: to those who have, much is given; to those who do not have, little. See Matthew Davis’s great book Reading: the Two Keys for a discussion of the research on this.
In his wonderful Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard Nisbett describes breathtaking studies done in Baltimore of kids given early training in fluid intelligence activities. They showed increases of a full standard deviation on IQ tests. But a year after the training stopped, they were back where they started.
Those compensatory environments have to be near total, and they have to last through the early teen years. None of this can be done cheaply.
But the deformers want this stuff cheaply. Flip classes so that we can have 250 students per teacher. Use TFA recruits. Test and punish until you get the results you want.
Silver bullet prescriptions, magic elixirs. Anything, as long as it costs less. But guess what, nothing but near total compensatory environments–for example, schools that provide meals and are open late–will effect the changes that people want to see in the education of children of poverty. And those are expensive.
How I would love to hear someone say, “You can’t solve the defense problem by throwing money at.” You are not going to hear THAT
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Yes, Robert. What message does it send to students, parents, and the general community when kids have to go to school with broken or inadequate chairs and desks, dirty classrooms, bare wires hanging from ceilings, no or inadequate libraries, bad cafeteria food, vermin-infested campuses, broken or no computers, no playground equipment, or lack of art, music, or P.E., etc.? Do we really value our youth, or is that just lip service like when our “leaders” say how much they “admire” and “respect” teachers and all the other professional staff at our schools? And by that I mean all who work in or for our schools, regardless of job title.
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You just described my school. It’s hard to get kids to think that they matter when they see that their school is so neglected.
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Yes, your school and thousands of others across the richest country in the world, Oh, yes, remember…”it’s all about the children”!
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I love David Brooks for his honesty! I watch the News Hour just to hear him and Mark Shields compare notes!!
There are many reformers leading districts that are promoting what I would call publicly funded “charter” or “innovation” schools. How are these being evaluated when they are part of a public school system? Check this out http://co.chalkbeat.org/2014/01/22/boasberg-manuals-shortcomings-are-my-responsibility/
The kids in this high school have had one “innovation” after another starting way before the current superintendent’s term. Remember the Gates small schools idea? That was tried at this high school. Instead of different “innovation” or more coaches for teachers how about small class sizes, RELEVANT curriculum, LOTS of extra help for kids, counselors, time for teachers to THINK about their kids and how to help them. This district now has (a guess) 4-5 “district” people per classroom teacher whose job it is to HELP the teacher (data leader, instructional coach, peer observer, Teacher Effectiveness Coach, ELA coordinator, curriculum content experts, common core expert, etc.). Until the school gets organized around the children that are in it and what they need instead of around increasing test scores this school will continue to “fail.”
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“I love David Brooks for his honesty” — what?????!!!
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I read this with optimism but I must admit I am afraid of what could be done with his change of heart. I have been reading about a new Pearson ADHD assessment and the idea that to prevent atrocities like the Newtown shootings some school districts are discussing the idea of mandating periodic psychological assessments.
I am a huge supporter of having schools work on social and emotional needs and using wrap-around services. But I just got paranoid enough to think about how that assistance could be forever in the data cloud to show a future employer your instability score in third grade and how you required some behavioral intervention. I just had a Clockwork Orange chill. I hope I am wrong.
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I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Brooks and Friedman have suddenly stopped blaming the teachers and started putting the onus on the kids and their families. There is a subtle change going on. Friedman and Brooks (and the media) must have been told to start switching the blame back to the students and families where it belongs, in my opinion. Blaming a teacher for poor students is like blaming a dentist when you get cavities. You can only lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. This is a happy development and signifies a shift in elite thinking.
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You mean “shift in elite” P.R., not thinking.
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In some cultures, for example Latin American and southeast Asian, parents do not want to “interfere” with the school, especially the teacher. We teachers need to spend less time in useless professional development and faculty meetings and more time communicating with parents to show them how to help their children at home with their school work. If parents buy in, we show the students how important school really is to their lives. Just a thought…
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yes yes yes
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For whatever it’s worth, there is more round table discussion to narrow the income gap which some say it matters who your parents are and what schools you attend (esp. at the elementary level). We know the effects, however finding the cause will get us nowhere unless we agree.
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People might want to read both David Brooks columns. In the first he points out among other things that some of the schools that take tests seriously also take art, music and character development seriously.
In the second he calls for an expansion of efforts to work with children and families, not just relying on improving schools.
As to Diane’s comments about “those of us who have argued that the “reform movement”–focused on testing, charters, and vouchers– is a distraction at best and a threat to the survival of American public education at worst”…there are huge differences among many working to improve public schools.
Some who work for public school choice including charters do not support vouchers. Some who work for public school choice are strong advocates of multiple forms of measurement.
Many of us see these as efforts to help more students succeed.
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As long as your efforts don’t undermine public schools and teachers, as long as you don’t pocket public money, as long as your improvements are about contributing to public schools, you might have some relevance. When public schools are replaced by entrepreneurial privately owned business people, the public suffers and the privateers gain. Thus is unacceptable. The means by which some schools are closed and the testing process used to “evaluate” success are nothing less than carnivorous.
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I’m still disturbed by his failure even to mention the role of poverty & unequal treatment in the difficulties experienced by children who are often hungry, homeless, & marginalized. Reading his column, you might get the impression that we should just send out more social workers to help those kids adjust better. But why should they adjust – & how can they be expected to adjust – to intolerable conditions?
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Dr. Ravitch, you would like to think that David Brooks has been influenced by hearing your lecture, and I would like to think he has been influenced by reading my book. Both may be true because Brooks likes to think of himself as a “thinker”, absorbing new information from all sources in the universe, and combining this relational information into new wisdom. He wrote a column about that talent recently, and was criticized for his egotism. But this orientation places him in a different world from Krugman and Reich on the left and Will and Krauthammer on the right. In a column of October 2011 Brooks describes being influenced by the research and writing of Nobel economic science winner Daniel Kahneman that human beings make rational fact-based decisions something less than half of the time. Mostly we are governed by quick, automatic and associative pattern recognition, only mildly connected to documented fact. In that context, he is now able to “see” that most of the currently touted “school reform” measures are not based on fact, but rather on stylistic contrived thrusts and innocent simplistic acceptance. But “seeing” the broader problems does not transfer easily into solutions.
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There used to be a way to instill these virtues in our children. It was called the family. Then came the women’s movement and mothers left home en masse for more satisfying work. That ended the neighborhood where women cared for young children collectively (on occasion they cared for aging parents as well) as the kids spent free time roaming outside and learned social skills around the sandbox.
Then came the “no fault” divorce that resulted in more children living in poverty and often resulted in parents who were too distracted by their own social lives to pay much attention to what was happening in their children’s. Today, many don’t even bother to marry. They have a baby on a whim and then lose interest.
Today children have absolutely no activities that are not adult supervised. Good intentions have left us afraid that sun might cause heat stroke or dehydration, mosquitoes may carry life threatening diseases, climbing trees will lead to traumatic brain injuries, strangers lurk around every corner. In our attempt to protect our child from any possible physical harm we have deprived them of the opportunity to truly live.
Family life in America has fundamentally changed in the past 50-60 years and much of the crisis in education we see today is the direct result of these revolutionary changes. Of course, a crop of new industry was the result of this “progress”. Daycare, preschool, nursing homes, and of course the ever increasing need of schools to do double duty.
I don’t suggest we return to a time when women were second class citizens. I don’t wish to return them to the kitchen where they should remain barefoot and pregnant. I am simply making an observation that we need to take a hard look at the results of the choices we make.
It would appear that all of our children have become wards of the state. I would conclude it does take a village today to raise a child because in many cases we no longer have a family.
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These days in America unless one of the couple has a high paying job, it’s almost impossible to get by on one check. And if that person becomes unemployed, then what? Forty per cent of married women make more than their spouse. More women than men attend and graduate from college. Where would the U.S. economy be without all those women in the workforce? I’m not happy about the pressures economic realty is putting on our families, but what are the solutions? Are the elite decision makers willing to spend the money, i.e. pay the taxes, to improve the situation? I doubt it.
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