More Waiting for Superman?

In The New York Times, Sara Mosle has an interesting review of Steven Brill's just-released book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools. Based on Mosle's read, Brill—perhaps best known for his Court TV and his New Yorker article that called out the Big Apple's "rubber rooms" for rotten, unfireable teachers—places the burden of guilt squarely on America’s teachers’ unions. As the book explains, it’s the heroic story of an "unlikely army—fed-up public school parents, Ivy League idealists, hedge-funders, civil rights activists, conservative Republicans, insurgent Democrats—squaring off against unions that the reformers claim are protecting a system that works for the adults but victimizes the children." But as to be suspected, there's no happy ending in sight and no side is totally innocent—or guilty. In fact, the book seems pretty reminiscent of the divisive film Waiting for Superman.

Mosle, who once riled teachers unions herself, points out that, well, things are complex. She ponts out that while teacher quality may be the most important variable within schools, there's plenty of research showing that that "most of the variation in student performance" is a result of factors outside the school: "not just poverty, but also parental literacy (and whether parents read to their children), student health, frequent relocations, crime-­related stress and the like."

As a teacher herself, Mosle points to one well-known study from 2009, which surveyed approximately half of all charters nationwide and was backed by the pro-­charter Walton Family and Michael and Susan Dell Foundations. The study found that more than 80 percent of students either do no better, or actually perform substantially worse, than traditional public schools—not a great record and perhaps a reminder that charter schools were not started to outperform traditional schools necessarily. The study concluded that “tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception.”

The Economies of Super Parenting (What Matters and What Doesn't)

Freakanomics Radio on NPR has a near hour-long program about the costs of parenting, with a roundtable of humorous, kid-rearing economists. Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and father of four, said he and another economist couldn't find evidence that parental choices based on the premise that quality activities lead to academic and later life success. The other big point: Parents don't matter all that much, nor do all those pricey activities. For the evidence (think nurture vs. nature), listen to An Economist’s Guide to Parenting.

In The New York Times Your Money section, reporter Alina Tugend also contemplates Levitt's work, along with that of other economists. In "Family Happiness and the Overbooked Child," Tugend points to research that suggest the costs -- both financial and otherwise -- simply aren't worth it, if a parent is after lasting impact in their child's life. From the article:

"[w]e have to move away from the idea that if we do not start children early, they will not reach their full potential. After all, we know the human brain doesn’t fully mature until around 25," said William Doherty, a professor of family studies and director of the marriage and family therapy program at the University of Minnesota.

Oh, and culture cramming and obsessive parenting don't work, either. What matters most is "who parents are, not what they do." Determination, apparently, can be inherited.

Sources: An Economist’s Guide to Parenting | Freakonomics Radio, The New York Times

Would You, Could you, If You Could?

TIME reporter Zac Bissonnette asks, If you have the means, should you give your kids a full ride for college? He points to a new study from Bank of America that reports that 47 percent of Americans with more than $250,000 in assets won’t pick up the full cost of their kids’ college degrees. Why? How else will their students learn responsibility?

Read Bissonnette's article at TIME. He also wrote the book on getting getting through college without debt and mooching on parents.

Picturing Where Children Sleep

At an April TEDx education event in San Francisco, Victor Diaz, founder of REALM Charter Schools in Berkeley, put out a question for educators to ask kids: What did it take you to get to school today? For some kids, Victor explained, we could only imagine — and congratulate them on actually making it to class.

James Mollison's large-format photos of kid's bedrooms around the world reminds me of Diaz's questions. Where Children Sleep shows portraits kids from the US, Mexico, Brazil, to England, Italy, Israel and the West Bank, Kenya, Senegal, Lesotho, Nepal, China and India with a photograph of where they sleep, along with an extended caption that tells the story of each child. From simply the cover jacket text, we learn of Kaya in Tokyo, whose proud mother spends $1,000 a month on her dresses; Bilal the Bedouin shepherd boy, who sleeps outdoors with his father's herd of goats; the Nepali girl Indira, who has worked in a granite quarry since she was three; and Ankhohxet, the Kraho boy who sleeps on the floor of a hut deep in the Amazon jungle.

Mollison spent two years, through the support of Save the Children (Italy), photographing Where Children Sleep, and the result creates a mix of emotion and fascination that resonates with both adults and kids. (The book was actually written for children ages 9 to 13.) While genre of photo essays picturing people in personal scenes isn't new — and the approach can sometimes feel manipulative in either emotions or agenda — Mollison's portraits feel far more informative than judgmental.

The Cost of College for All

In The New Yorker this week, Louis Menand ponders why we have college and who learns the most. He explains that "a lot of confusion is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher education has been committed to [two] theories": a meritocracy and a democracy. Not surprisingly, these two theories are at odds. We, Menand writes, "want higher education to be available to all Americans, but we also want people to deserve the grades they receive." In other words, no inflation, no degree farms.

While Menand goes on to write about Professor X, his woes and his new book, he makes a fine argument for a liberal education. As he tells it, a particularly interesting finding is that "students majoring in liberal-arts fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities— [...] show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health." Menand also goes on to highlight the various reasons that liberal-arts students do well: They are "more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve." And the unsurprising kicker, echoed in The New York Times last April? Business majors are the students who score the lowest and improve the least.

Sources: The New Yorker, Professor X's 2008 article in The Atlantic.

Designing Teacups: The Atlantic on Why ‘Average’ Is Underrated

In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Lori Gottlieb writes about the latest in middle-class parent neuroses: designing childhood happiness. She goes on to explain how well-meaning parents may be, increasingly, landing their kids in therapy. As a clinical psychology, writer, and mother, Gottlieb writes that our obsession with children's happiness may be dooming them to unhappy lives as adults.

Wendy Mogel, another clinical psychologist, explains in the article that, “Our children are not our masterpieces.” Today, she says, “every child is either learning-disabled, gifted, or both—there’s no curve left, no average.” When Mogel first started doing psychological testing in the 1980s, according to Gottlieb, she hated telling parents that their child had a learning disability. "But now," according to Mogel, "parents would prefer to believe that their child has a learning disability that explains any less-than-stellar performance, rather than have their child be perceived as simply average. ‘They believe that ‘average’ is bad for self-esteem.’”

The irony, as the article points out, is that measures of self-esteem aren't actually good predictors of how happy a person will be, "especially if the self-esteem comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment." (See Nurture Shock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.) Jean Twenge adds that research suggests that "perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing" are much better predictors of life fulfillment and success.

In the article, Mogel also talks about how college deans are now seeing more and more incoming freshmen called "teacups" — people who are "so fragile that they break down anytime things don’t go their way."

History Shortchanged

Oh, the saga of low test scores in US schools. It's hardly a news story these days. Still, The New York Times, in response to the latest results of a nationwide test, found that most fourth graders are unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War. But, really, is that all too surprising? I am not so sure that most American adults could identify China as a North Korean ally in the 1950s, let alone, a crucial partner in the Korean War.

According to The Times' Sam Dillion, history advocates blame students’ poor showing on the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers and schools no longer have time for history — No Child Left Behind Act, with its requirement that schools raise scores in math and reading but in no other subject, allow time for little else. And if you are not being taught history, it's unlikely that you'll test well.

But as this Reuters story from 1995 shows, student declines in history knowledge is far from new. In fact, the decline even predates 1995. Still, in The Times article, Linda K. Salvucci, a history professor in San Antonio and chairwoman-elect of the National Council for History Education, explains one of the big issues around teaching history.

“History is very much being shortchanged,” Salvucci explains. Many teacher-education programs, she said, also contribute to the problem by encouraging aspiring teachers to seek certification in social studies, rather than in history. “They think they’ll be more versatile, that they can teach civics, government, whatever,” she said in The Times. “But they’re not prepared to teach history.”

Source: The New York Times