Half Changed World

Dave S’s comment on my school post — saying that Arlington county spends $19,000 per student — sent me googling to look up school spending per pupil in the area.  I think his numbers are a little high — but only a little.  According to this anti-tax website, the superintendent’s budget calls for spending of $17,923 per student in FY 2007.

Another post on the same site sent me to the Washington Area Boards of Education, which puts out this nifty comparison of spending in most of the suburban districts surrounding Washington DC.  According to this site (page 29 of the report), in FY 2006, Arlington topped the local school districts for spending at $16,464 per student, followed closely by Falls Church City at $16,020 and Alexandria $15,871.   Montgomery County and Fairfax County — the two huge, highly regarded school systems in the area — come next, at $12,549 and $11,915 respectively.  All of these figures are way above the national average, which is a bit over $8,000

I found this fascinating, because it suggests a) that the high spending levels aren’t solely being driven by the overall cost of living in the DC metropolitan area and b) that the systems with the best reputations aren’t necessarily those spending the most.  So what’s going on? A few things jumped out from the report. Alexandria seems to have particularly low class sizes, especially in the lower grades.  Arlington seems to pay teachers better than average.  Both have lots of small schools, which probably pushes up overhead costs.  Fairfax seems to do a particularly good job of limiting the number of staff who aren’t school-based.  (Alexandria seems to have an habit of promoting good principals into system-wide positions, which I think is probably a mistake.) Alexandria and Arlington both have significantly higher proportions of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunches (e.g. low-income families) and higher proportions of English as a second language students than Fairfax does.  It’s not in the report, but I know that all Alexandria schools have full-day kindergarten, but only some Fairfax schools do.  I couldn’t figure out from the report how they were handling capital costs — I know that both Alexandria and Arlington have undertaken major renovations/rebuilding of high schools in recent years.

What about DC?  It’s not included in this report, but I found a Parents United study that attempted to calculate its spending on the same basis as the surrounding suburbs.  This study suggests that DC spends about as much per student as Montgomery and Fairfax, but serves a much needier student population, and with antiquated facilities that both require much higher utilities and demand more capital investment.

Last week, in response to my post about the middle class, bj commented "I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot because we have just made the final step to enrolling our first child in private school" and asked what we were doing about school for our kids.

After an awful lot of agonizing back and forth, what we’re doing — at least for now — is enrolling D in the public school that we’re zoned for.   This is not without some real misgivings.  The test scores are lousy — it’s failing under both "No Child Left Behind" and the Virginia-specific standards.  Something like 70 percent of the students qualify for free lunches.  It’s on something like the 5th principal in 7 years. 

But, it’s literally three blocks from our front door, so we’ll be able to walk D to school and be part of the school community with ease.  The class sizes are very small, especially in the early grades.  The teachers and principal seem enthusiastic and committed.  The city has committed significant resources to the school.  We’ve talked to some parents we trust who are happy with their kids’ experiences.  And we can always try something different down the road if we’re not happy with it.

With private school tuitions in the area in the $20,000s and rising, I don’t see us trying that route unless we truly find ourselves out of other options.  If we’re not happy at this school, we can request a transfer into a different Alexandria school (because ours is a "focus" school, we could request a transfer even if it wasn’t failing under NCLB).  Moving is also a possibility, although not one that I’m thrilled at.

Fundamentally, I’m not worried about whether my kids are going to learn to read.  (D is probably going to be reading by the time he starts kindergarten in the fall.)  What I worry about is whether they’ll learn that school is something to be endured.

I spent the evening at a forum for candidates for the local school board.  For some odd reason, Alexandria elects its City Council and School Board on a cycle completely separate from the state and national elections — every 3 years, in May.  (The official explanation is that the local races would be overshadowed by national ones and wouldn’t get as much attention.  The unofficial explanation is that it keeps more control in the hands of the local party committees, by depressing turnout.)

The Alexandria School Board has 9 members, divided into 3 geographic regions.  (This is a compromise between having board members representing specific neighborhoods, and having city-wide elections, which would make it harder for minorities to be represented.)  None of the three current members from my district are running for reelection, so all three seats are open.  There are five candidates running:

• Elliott Branch
• Sheryl Gorsuch
• Sanford Horn
• Scott Newsham
• Eileen Cassidy Rivera

It was interesting to see what everyone had to say.  There wasn’t a whole lot of controversy — everyone supports fiscal responsibility, improved communications, reducing the achievement gap, challenging all students, retaining good teachers, etc.  Everyone agreed that the laptop inititive had been poorly implemented.  No one supported intelligent design.

Overall, I was most impressed by Branch.  I particularly liked what he had to say about individuation in the classroom.  I’m torn between Rivera, Gorsuch and Horn for my other two votes.  Rivera’s bio is impressive, but she did such a good job of staying on message with her three priorities that I didn’t get as much of a sense of her overall.  Horn’s a teachers, which is a plus for me.  His literature talks a lot about improving school lunches, but he didn’t mention it at all.  Gorsuch seems like a classic PTA lady, but showed an impressive understanding of details.  Newsham didn’t seem to have any specific goals that he wanted to accomplish, but just talked about general management experience.

If there’s anyone reading this who wants to sell me on one of the candidates, I’m definitely up for listening.  More generally, what do you look for in a school board candidate in the absense of burning controversies?

This week’s book is Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes.  It’s about his 30 years of teaching English in New York City public high schools, first in vocational schools and ultimately at Stuyvesant, one of the highly selective academic schools.  It’s a quick read, full of self-depreciating humor and well-told stories. It’s not as brilliant or compelling as Angela’s Ashes, but that’s a heck of a standard to try to live up to.

One of the ongoing themes of the book is how little respect teachers get.  More than once he points out that administrators and college professors get more respect and more money than teachers, and work a lot less hard.  He’s also somewhat sardonic about all the attention he got when Angela’s Ashes became a hit, after a lifetime of obscurity as a teacher.

The book is also an argument for teaching that doesn’t follow the curriculum, that doesn’t cover anything that’s going to be on a standardized test.  McCourt describes assigning his students to write excuse notes from Adam and Eve, of reading recipes out loud (and having a buffet of the results in the middle of Stuvesant Park).  He glories in the students who challenged him, and the bitterest passages in the book are aimed at the parents of the over-achieving Stuyvesant students, who worry about their grades, and whether his class will help them get into college.

McCourt had retired by the time I attended Stuyvesant, but his classes were still  legendary.  In spite of his complaints about the students’ sense of entitlement, a place like Stuyvesant seems ideal for a renegade teacher like McCourt– it didn’t matter that he wasn’t interested in teaching grammar, because the kids pretty much got it already.  Because of the self-depreciation, it’s hard to tell whether McCourt was a good teacher in his early years, when he started telling stories to his classes as a means of keeping bored and hostile students paying attention. 

D’s preschool sends home a weekly magazine/worksheet from Scholastic.  Each week, it has a different theme, usually more or less related to the season or an upcoming holiday.  Last week’s focus was, as you’d expect, Martin Luther King, Jr.  The magazine had pictures of different ways that you can be kind, and said that Dr. King "taught people to be kind."

That’s been bugging me since I saw it.  "Kind" seems like the wrong word.  Even if every white person in the segregated South had been "kind" to black people — and some certainly prided themselves on their kindness — there still would have needed to be a civil rights movement.  Kindness is doing something nice when you don’t have to — standing up on the bus because someone else looks more tired than you feel, lending someone a hand when they’re struggling with carrying too much. 

I think the right word — remembering that the audience is 4- and 5-year olds — is "fair."  Dr. King taught us to be fair.  It wasn’t fair that black people had to ride in the back of the bus, and stand if there weren’t enough seats to go around.  It wasn’t fair that black kids could only go to inferior schools. 

Kind is when you share your cookies with your brother who doesn’t have any.  Fair is when you realize that mom gave them to both of you.

This week, I’m writing about Jonathan Kozol’s latest book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.  I guess I should begin by saying that I agree with probably 90 percent of what Kozol says in this book.  I agree that the inadequate education offered to the vast majority of inner-city students is a national embarassment and should be a source of outrage to all Americans, not just those whose kids are stuck attending those schools.  I think it is absurd to take the kids who come to school with the least family resources, put them in overcrowded underfunded classrooms with the least experienced teachers, and then blame them for their failure to pass standardized tests.   I share Kozol’s deep skepticism about the "scripted" teaching programs that are being offered as panaceas to lift up those test scores. 

And yet, I found myself repeatedly arguing with Kozol as I read the book.  He pushes his argument to such extremes that I couldn’t follow him all the way.  Yes, it’s terrible that kids are attending schools with asbestos coming out of the walls and stopped up toilets.  But Kozol seems to be equally outraged over kids going to classes in trailer classrooms — which aren’t ideal, but aren’t terrible, and are common in a good number of solidly middle class school districts too.  He talks about the beautiful and expensive new building provided for Stuyvesant High School in New York, while other schools in the city were falling apart, and points out that only about 3 percent of the students at Stuyvesant are black or Hispanic.  But he doesn’t acknowledge, even in passing, that about half of Stuyvesant students are Asian, many from low-income families.

I was also frustrated that Kozol never made a clear case for why he thinks that it’s so important for black and Hispanic students to have white classmates.  He devotes a lot of effort to proving how segregated many urban classrooms are — most notably, observing that if you want to find a segregated school in America, you should look for one named after Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.  But is the problem that the schools are (largely) segregated, or that they’re lousy schools?  Is integration worth fighting for in its own right, or only as a means to improving schools for poor minority kids?  Kozol clearly believes the former, but he doesn’t provide an argument for it that will convince anyone who doesn’t already share his views.

I’m actually scared that Shame of the Nation will set back Kozol’s goal of integration.  If you want to convince middle-class parents to send their kids to integrated schools, publicizing the worst case scenarios of dreadful inner-city schools isn’t the way to do it.  I’m not saying we should give up on Brown v Board of Education, but if we somehow managed to provide truly excellent public schools to all students, I think a good bit of educational and residential segregation would fade away without a massive government intervention. 

Yale dorm rooms are kind of small.  It’s not unusual to have four students sharing a two-bedroom suite that was built in a previous age for two students, or possibly even for a student and his servant.  One of the stories that floated around when I attended is that Yale used to have a goal of admitting "1000 Leaders of the Future" each year.  Then they decided to admit women (in 1969!), but they didn’t want to stop admitting "1000 Leaders of the Future," and they didn’t think women could be "Leaders of the Future," so the class size was increased by 250.  The story isn’t entirely supported by the data, but it’s certainly believable.

Yesterday’s Times had a story about Yale women who plan on being stay-at-home mothers.  It’s been a subject of heated discussion on several of my email lists, as well as of posts at Stone Court, Rebel Dad, And the moon is slowly rising and elsewhere.  My usual litany of complaints applies (unrepresentative sample? check. framing of work-family issues as a purely women’s issue?  check.  little discussion of societal factors at play? check.)  And yet, I found myself interested in the article nonetheless.

This blog is named after the subtitle of Peggy Orenstein’s book "Flux."  I recognized a lot of myself and my peers in her description of women who in their 20s thought that their possibilities were limitless, but by their 30s had started making accomodations and compromises.  Louise Story describes young women who have already concluded that they can’t "have it all," who won’t be so unpleasantly surprised down the road.  (Of course, the story doesn’t touch at all on the role of the NYTimes in creating that impression.)

So why was I depressed by this article?  Laura at 11d suggests that some of the complaints about the article are signs of prejudice against SAHMs and the work of childrearing.  I don’t think that’s my case.  My husband is also a Yale grad, and I certainly don’t think he’s "wasting his education" chasing after the boys. 

If I really believed that these young women were thinking seriously about what they value, and making career and life decisions based on those values, I’d be cheering about this "trend."  But as Ann Bartow points out, law school probably is the last thing you should be signing up for if your goal is to work part-time or to move in and out of the labor force.   Why go tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt if you know that you’re only going to work for a short while?   Or are Mom and Dad supposed to foot the bill?  And can’t you please figure out how to explain your choice in a way that doesn’t involve slamming people who make other choices?

Perhaps the most telling quote in the story is at the end:

"Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

‘I accept things how they are,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind the status quo. I don’t see why I have to go against it.’

After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.

‘It worked so well for me,’ she said, ‘and I don’t see in my life why it wouldn’t work.’

The scary thing is that Ms. Ku is right.  Conformity has worked very well for her so far.  Fundamentally, you don’t get into Yale by bucking the system.  You get into Yale by sitting in the front row in class, and doing your homework, and doing very well on tests that involve filling in circles with number 2 pencils.  You get into Yale by playing a musical instrument or being on the debate team or organzing a major charitable event, or preferably all of the above. 

If Yale is still interested in developing the "Leaders of the Future," it needs to figure out a way to admit some more kids who do mind the status quo.  And it needs to shake some of the complacency out of the ones who don’t.

D is on a big three-toed sloth kick lately.  Whenever we go to the playground, he has to hang upside down on one of the curved ladders, just like a three-toed sloth.  For a while he was saying he wanted to be a three-toed sloth for Halloween, but I think we’ve talked him out of it.  (T is officially in charge of costuming in this household, so it’s not my problem in any case.)  And we’ve consumed the full extent of the library’s juvenile sloth section (Carle’s Slowly Slowly Slowly Said the Sloth and Robinson’s The Upside Down Sloth).

Those of you who don’t have preschoolers (or whose preschoolers don’t watch TV) are probably scratching your heads wondering where on earth D got a thing for three-toed sloths.   Those of you with munchkins probably know that Dora’s cousin Diego is responsible.  D thinks Diego is "awesome."

The ability to pursue enthusiasms like this, rather than staying doggedly on a fixed curriculum, racing against time to cover all the material that will be on a standardized test, is the strongest argument I’ve heard for homeschooling.  But, for a variety of reasons, we’re not really considering going that route any time soon.  I’m hopeful that there will be enough non-school time to provide the boys with the opportunities to follow their interests.

Last month, the Center for American Progress and the Institute for America’s Future issued a report on how to improve public schools.  Their first recommendation is to increase the length of both the school day and the school year, as well as to make better use of in-school time.  I have extremely mixed reactions to such a proposal.  I’m afraid my basic response is that it’s a good idea — for other people’s kids.  In particular, it’s clear that one of the reasons that KIPP and similar schools have had such success with disadvantaged populations is that the students spend so much more time in school than their counterparts.

But for my own kids, I think I’d be reluctant to give over even more of their lives to formal schooling.  I think they need time to run around the playground like lunatics, time to read books with no literary merit, time to bake cookies, and yes, time to learn about three-toed sloths.

I had a chance to meet the new principal of our local elementary school this week.  She seemed smart, enthusiastic, interested in engaging parents, committed to the kids.  She gives off less of an "I know exactly what we need to do" air than last year’s principal (Dr. B.), but I’m not sure that’s entirely a bad thing, particularly since she’s been on the job less than a month.

She had just gotten the results from last year’s SOLs, and they weren’t particularly encouraging.  I’m not quite sure what to make of that.  I don’t think that test scores are especially useful as an indicator of school quality, but given the huge focus on them last year, I’d be lying if I said the lack of progress didn’t make me nervous.

If nothing else, it undermines my confidence that Dr. B.  really did have everything under control last year.  For example, Dr. B had made a big deal about how much absenteeism and tardiness there had been in the past, and the Urban League even donated alarm clocks for every kid in the school.  But it turns out, there were still over 100 kids — nearly half the school — who were absent more than 10 days last year.

I think the overwhelming emphasis on test scores under No Child Left Behind is generally problematic.  But I do think the attention it has focused on schools like this one, low performers in overall decent school districts, has been helpful.  I could easily imagine that without NCLB or Virginia’s Standards of Learning requirements, schools like this could quietly have been left to flounder for years, with no one paying much attention. 

We’ve got another year before D starts kindergarten, so we don’t need to make any decisions right away.  I’m still leaning towards sending him to the local school, knowing that we have the option of switching down the road if we’re really unhappy.  But we haven’t ruled out trying to get him into the dual language (Spanish/English) program at a different public school.

Via Whirled View, I found this post about schooling in England.  The author is moderately snide about the plight of the "London liberal lefty with a kid rising five."  What struck me the most is how much of it could have been written about the US:

"The young and liberal move into funky, down at heel areas, become parents, and then start looking round at the local schools. There’s no way their kids are going to contribute to the local, funky, down at heel ambience…"

Nick Cohen’s solution, in the Guardian, is to bring back grammar schools  — state funded, but selective schools.  (Or rather, he argues that these schools will help bright students whose parents can neither afford fee-based schools (what the English call puiblic, and Americans call private) nor houses in areas with good free schools.  It’s Blood and Treasure who says that argument is self-serving.)

The US doesn’t have "grammar schools" — but it does have "gifted and talented" programs in public schools, as well as a handful of selective public high schools, mostly with math and science focuses, such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York, Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, and Montgomery Blair in Maryland.  And I suspect the arguments about them are very similar to the arguments about grammar schools in the UK.

I have very mixed feelings about such programs.  I know that they are often a way for middle-class parents to get more resources — better teachers, smaller classes, enrichment activities — for their kids while sending them to public schools.  In Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau writes about the ways that middle-class parents is their skills to get their kids into such programs — advocating with principals, having children privately re-tested, etc.  At the same time, I attended one of those selective high schools, and after reading A Tribe Apart, I have no doubt that a significant chunk of my classmates would have dropped out and/or wound up institutionalized if they had attended a typical American high school.

The Washington Post magazine had a cover story this weekend about two young women who attended Montgomery Blair who were finalists in the Intel Talent Search.  They say that they didn’t care that girls were in the minority in their science classes.  But there’s a huge difference between being one of eight girls in a class and being the only one, or one of two.  One of the things that selective schools like that do is make it normal to like math, normal to work really hard, normal to get really good grades,