Two Countries, Three Kids
I'm in Oklahoma City this week, and what people are talking about here is this article, from last week's Wall Street Journal.
It's about two kids in OKC -- both living in the tough south side -- and the paths they've taken. One got sidetracked by gangs and drugs until he went to a local charter school. The other attended a decent but unchallenging local public high school. The story is surprising: the boy who went to the charter school was transformed into a bright, ambitious powerhouse. The girl who went to the local public school was popular, voted president of her class, but never pushed to think about college, to dream about the future.
And then, a day or so ago, this article in the Los Angeles Times, about the lengths some newly-rich Chinese parents will go to get their child into Hafo. I mean, Harvard.
In a way, this is the same story: parents taking charge of their children's education. Pushing kids to think bigger. Assuming that whatever the state provides is going to be inadequate.
Humiliating, for us, is that China seems able to adapt and innovate. In Los Angeles, where I live, the LA Unified School District is so ossified and sclerotic, so incompetent and entitled, piecemeal reform charter school by charter school will still leave thousands of kids behind, for years to come.
This is one of those rare areas in which President Obama hasn't, actually, been awful. He's even been bold. This could be a Nixon-to-China moment. Or it could be a brief moment of independent thinking from a president and an administration trapped by a party that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers' unions.
In which case, maybe it's time to move to China. For the opportunity.
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May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
Every time I read that President Obama has challenged the teachers' union orthodoxy in some way -- or listen to This American Life on NYC rubber rooms, or hear that the liberal DC schools chief is calling teachers' unions an impediment to reform, or read a Los Angeles Times story about how even the worst LAUSD teachers are all but impossible to fire, and so are paid to do nothing for years on end -- I am optimistic that liberals are finally catching on, yes, but even more than that, I am disgusted by the Democratic establishment's increasingly indefensible behavior on this issue.
There is simply no justification for maintaining the status quo on these issues other than being captive to public employee unions, and valuing the political advantage afforded by being their ally more than the educational outcomes of an entire generation of kids.
Even with these reforms, nothing can replace parental involvement, as you astutely point out, Rob, but the fact that they've yet to be enacted gets me riled up like few other subjects.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
The problem with reforms, necessary as they are, is that if you have a child in school TODAY, you need something TODAY, not 10 or 20 years from now after the reforms, maybe, have time to work into the system.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
Competition for tax dollars can be a nasty undertaking. Teachers' unions enjoy the safety of publically-funded enterprises that can't go broke.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
Great piece in the WSJ Weekend Interview on this topic: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635204575242123324855474.html?KEYWORDS=storming+the+school
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
Cindy: the link you posted cuts off for some reason, but I think you meant to post this link, to the interview last weekend in the WSJ with Madeleine Sackler, the young documentary filmmaker who's just completed a film about low-income parents in New York City demanding charter schools, and the union that fights them. I read that piece too, and it made me really eager to see the movie (though it will clearly make me and Conor blow our respective stacks when we see the union thuggishness she depicts).
What's amazing is that when you read the words, "young documentary filmmaker" you don't expect to read about a film that's critical of the teachers' unions -- or Acorn, for that matter. So maybe the Left is waking up.
Nick, you're right: parents want it fixed now, for their kids who are in school. For a long time, the greatest barrier to the voucher movement was parents who supported vouchers in theory, knew it would work down the line, but didn't want to disrupt the system while their children were in it, which is understandable. Not sure there's a solution to that.
Edited on Jun 7, 2010 at 6:19amMay '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
The President and his party are faced with the same decision they've faced for atleast twenty years. They can either choose real educational reform or the tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and grunt-work the teachers' unions provide for them every election cycle.
I don't hold out any great hope they'll choose reform. They haven't before. There is no compelling reason for them to choose differently now.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
This problem gets worse and worse, because purported solutions, many of which I eagerly embrace, are not necessarily showing the kind of results that we had hoped. Diane Ravitch recently did an "Econ Talk" segment with Russ Roberts that I found to be as disheartening regarding the future of education as anything I have encountered recently: (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/04/ravitch_on_educ.html) - the part there about the crazy curriculum approach adopted by otherwise occasionally sensible Joel Klein in NY was new information to me worth the whole podcast.
I do think that she is excessivly negative on NCLB in that you still cannot tell what is being accomplished without serious testing and measurement- and for any person who throws the "they're teaching to the test!" meme at me, I will repeat: bar exams, medical school licensing exams- go have your prostatectomy done by someone who didn't have to pass a standardized test. Even though I never worked as a nurse, my license at least indicates that I absorbed some basic level of medical information in school.
But nothing at all will ever get better until the public monopoly is shattered, regardless of the marginal record of the alternatives to date.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
Regarding Rob's comment about the Chinese families, that is something that does not compare well with any other ethnicity. Most of Chinese education is private- in fact, the government schools only accept those citizens in perfect standing (one of my daughter's grad school friends, on a student visa from China, had his son born at Georgetown, is thus now a baby without a country because of the US citizenship handicap, and is ineligible for Chinese public schooling when they return to China). Parents sacrifice anything necessary to buy schooling for their kids- which includes learning English (they are a lot stricter about learning English than American schools). It is the societal fetish, trumping almost any other consideration.
Our younger daughter has lived in East Asia for about half of the last decade, mostly on the Chinese mainland (Nanjing, Beijing, Guangzhou). When she was on a Fulbright living in Nanjing, her neighbors had a 14 year old daughter getting ready for her high school entrance English exam, and my bambino did some tutoring for her. The hardest battle our daughter fought in China was not against intrusive commies, it was explaining to that family why she could not accept their money.
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
There's something hilarious -- and tragic -- about learning the value of a little for-profit motivation in education from the (formerly) Red Chinese.
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
Conor Friedersdorf: Every time I read that President Obama has challenged the teachers' union orthodoxy in some way -- or listen to This American Life on NYC rubber rooms, or hear that the liberal DC schools chief is calling teachers' unions an impediment to reform, or read a Los Angeles Times story about how even the worst LAUSD teachers are all but impossible to fire, and so are paid to do nothing for years on end -- I am optimistic that liberals are finally catching on, yes, but even more than that, I am disgusted by the Democratic establishment's increasingly indefensible behavior on this issue.
There is simply no justification for maintaining the status quo on these issues other than being captive to public employee unions, and valuing the political advantage afforded by being their ally more than the educational outcomes of an entire generation of kids.
Another reason for California Dems to Vote Kaus.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
In China there is a frank understanding that the government can pay for so much and no more and so market-funded education is seen as an important ally in achieving growth and higher standards of living. In fact, in the K-12 market, private education is seen as superior and desirable and the government is happy to be relieved of the burden of those additional families. There is a natural assumption that if a school is successful and its owners' rich, it must be doing something right. Parents and grandparents save to send young ones to school. And ALL of this is motivated by enormously high stakes tests that are required first for high school entrance and then college entrance.
Of course there are also cameras everywhere and anyone that dropped out of school to sell drugs would be promptly arrested and hanged...
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
But closer to home, we are in the midst of great debate about the costs and benefits of for-profit education at the post-secondary level. The Obama administration is preparing to impose new rules that would effectively fix prices of for-profit schools and tilt the playing field even more heavily toward state subsidized universities and community colleges. The principal motivation seems to be to remove responsibility from individual students for the cost of their education so that if they fail, drop out or fail to gain employment, they won't owe anyone any money.
Sadly, one of Ricochet's patrons has lent some valuable column inches in the New York Post today to one of the sector's critics, Steve Eisman, who was made famous by Michael Lewis in The Big Short (http://tinyurl.com/2fh29up). Frustrating point here is that Eisman has a direct financial motive in unfairly trashing these companies and the Post is facilitating this transaction. I hope Mr. Murdoch is at least getting a cut of Eisman's profits.
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
So far, me likes.
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
In case you want to read the Op-Ed Trace is referring to, it's here.
Trace, how do you refute Eisman's most devastating paragraph:
That sort of brought me up short. And I'm a fan of the for-profits.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
The Everest course is 10-mos and $14K but I get the point. It leads to a medical assisting job that pays $14/hour and appeals to female students. Everest places these women into externships at clinics and, yes, hospitals and then helps them find employment in their field. Currently employment is running at ~75% (in better times the number is upwards of 80%). They typically graduate ~65% of the students in the 10-mo program which is better than comparable rates at community colleges.
The reasons the students drop out is that their lives are typically chaotic: car breaks down, loss of childcare, etc. On occasion school officials have to disarm visiting boyfriends -- you get the idea. The quality of the education has nothing to do with the trouble. In fact the for-profit schools are motivated to keep the girls in school.
If Everest could determine which girls' lives were going to disintegrate by administering an entrance exam they would. But as a society we have decided to provide these girls with a shot at a better life through education. We could insist they go to state-subsidized schools, but factoring in subsidies, drop-out rates and taxes paid, the cost/graduate is lower at for-profits.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
Open access is inconsistent with high graduation rates and low defaults. The principal objection to for-profits is that students that are unsuccessful are left owing money. Whereas at community colleges they are not. Either way, taxpayers are out. So consumer advocates on the left want the students to be able to go school without bearing any of the cost.
In fairness, there can always be better consumer education and more painfully clear disclosures so that students really understand the consequences of their choices, and I am an advocate of that. But fundamentally, the Stafford and Perkins loan programs are voucher programs and students should be afforded the freedom to spend those vouchers where they choose.
The for-profit schools charge what the programs cost -- and they are better schools. The only similarity with the sub-prime market is the population they serve.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
Isn't it a bit misleading to conflate, as Eisman does, short term vocational programs with actual baccalaureate programs? I don't know of technical schools selling transferability into traditional 4 year programs, though I would bet that most commuter colleges would seriously consider transferring many credits if they could equate the subject matter to a real curriculum requirement. And I've never heard suggestions that Phoenix and Kaplan U's are a bunch of crooks (of course, Kaplan is owned by the Washington Post....)
My sense of Eisman's piece is that it was commissioned by the upper end of traditional colleges, trying deflect attention from themselves and head off the bubble caused by their profligate price increases of the last 20 years.
The way this resembles the subprime situation is simply that bad government policy decisions may have helped marginal applicants indebt themselves too much, as with the Fannie-CRP axis. If changes can put downward pressure on tuition everywhere, great.
May '10
Re: Two Countries, Three Kids
Getting back to the theme "Two Countries, Three Kids", here is an item that can be labeled "Four Families". A new documentary about charter schools starts tomorrow, titled "The Lottery". At least in the trailer, it doesn't look at all friendly to the teachers unions.
Here is a synopsis:
"In a country where 58% of African American 4th graders are functionally illiterate, The Lottery uncovers the failures of the traditional public school system and reveals that hundreds of thousands of parents attempt to flee the system every year. The Lottery follows four of these families from Harlem and the Bronx who have entered their children in a charter school lottery. Out of thousands of hopefuls, only a small minority will win the chance of a better future."