The Need for Offense

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai show us that the world is still a very dangerous place with lots of people who want to cause panic in general and kill Americans in particular. That's a fact that we forget at our own peril.

Nearly 50 years ago in his book The Conscience of a Conservative Barry Goldwater explained the rationale for an aggressive approach toward combatting the Soviet Union. He wrote that if one side was playing offense and the other side was only playing defense, the group on the offensive would always win eventually. This makes a pretty good amount of sense if you think about it.

And so here we are in the fight against terrorism. We just received another reminder that we need to be on the offensive to find and kill these terrorists before they do the same to us.

That is not to say that we should immediately embark on a mission of military adventurism in all corners of the globe. We can't go around invading and occupying every country that may now or in the past have had a terrorist. What it does mean is that we need to have a lean, focused military with a lean, focused mission: find the terrorists and eliminate them.

Despite the posturing, this is something that George Bush has not done. Now we're poised to have a new president. Let's see if he understands things any better.

Rights Matter

So the battle over gay rights in this country is heating up again. I'm not even talking about California's Prop 8 right now. I'm talking about e-Harmony, the website matchmaking service. E-Harmony had resisted (a polite way of saying refused) offering services for same sex couples. However, after a lawsuit was filed, the group agreed to settle and provide gay matches for those that want them.

Showing the kind of level-headed open mindedness that has always marked her writing career, Michelle Malkin immediately branded the move the work of "tolerance bullies" for ensuring that "homosexuals will no longer be denied the inalienable 'right' to hook up with same-sex partners on eHarmony." While I find Malkin to be odious, I couldn't help but wonder about the points she raised. After all, e-Harmony is a private company operating within the bounds of the law. Malkin writes that this move is akin to ordering a vegetarian restaurant to serve steaks. It requires them to provide a service that they simply don't provide as a matter of business. This is compelling to an extent.

What tipped the scales for me, though, was to replace the operative word "homosexual" with "black." If e-Harmony refused to offer services for blacks (or whites or any other race) would it still even be debateable?

I don't think it would be. Long ago we, as a society, decided that even private businesses weren't allowed to discriminate based on race. That's why you don't see segregated lunch counters anymore. This isn't just some PC argument either. This is a fundamental issue of fairness and how we treat people in this country. If we wouldn't (and shouldn't) allow it based on race, then we shouldn't do it for sexual orientation either. It's just a question of fairness.

On Screen Doors and Schools

Yesterday was a big day for education in the New York City papers. First, the Daily News discovered the achievement gap. (I told you it was a big day.) They found that schools receiving D's and F's on the DOE-issued report cards tended to have a higher percentage of minority students (particularly black and Latino) than schools receiving better grades. Given that these grades are based largely on achievement on standardized test scores, it's hard to see that this report shocked too many people. Still, the headline ("Bad New York City Schools trap many minorities, study says") provides a nice implicit argument for charter schools and voucher programs. Not that the News would seek to inject their opinion or anything.

The bigger and more interesting news of the day was reported in the New York Times. According to a newly released study, New York City children who live in public housing perform worse in school than their peers who do not live in public housing. On the surface, this is another not terribly surprising statistic given that public housing in the city goes predominantly to low-income minorities. We know from reading the Daily News that this demographic doesn't do as well on standardized tests. What's interesting about the study reported in the Times is that kids in public housing perform worse in school, even compared to students at the same school who share similar demographic factors like race, gender, and poverty. That's a hugely important point. It's not just that the kids in public housing tend to share the traits that we know are indicators of the achievement gap. There is something about living in public housing itself that depresses school achievement even farther.

The authors of the study very professionally refuse to speculate as to what about living in public housing has this negative impact on school achievement. In their words, "We don’t have the data that would enable us to pin it down."

However, the inescapable conclusion is that homelife matters; it has an impact on a child's success at school. To my mind, this has to be a major focus of any real efforts to reform public education. We can't focus just on schools because there are so many factors beyond the schools that impact a child's ability to learn and succeed. As I have been told and say repeatedly, trying to fix education by focusing entirely on schools is like trying to clean the air on only one side of a screen door. Certainly, the schools are important and that's where we can and should focus resources and energy. However, it cannot be our only focus. This study shows us that there's more to schooling than school.

The New Paternalism

There's a new discovery in the field of education. This one comes from John Dewey. One of Dewey's ideas was that public schools would serve a socializing function in a democratic society. That is to say, that after attending school for however many years, children would not only know their reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they would also know how to function within society. They would know how to behave in order to successfully interact with other members of the society. Now we're coming back to this very basic idea.

The latest issue of City Journal has a review of the book Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner City Schools and the New Paternalism. The gist of the book seems to be summed up by saying that schools must teach, "not just how to think but how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional middle-class values.” Somewhere Dewey is smiling.

From looking at six KIPP-like schools around the country that help spur high achievement in their kids, the author, David Whitman, finds that these schools also act as a father figure in the lives of children who too-often don't have a father. The schools provide the tough love approach. In addition, the schools explcitly teach the kids how to shake hands, dress professionally, and speak courteously in proper English.

If we are hoping to really make a difference in education for inner-city youth, then this education is going to be critical. In order to really teach, there must be a receptive audience who are willing to learn. Furthermore, all the knowledge in the world won't do any good if it can't be appropriately packaged and presented. The education battles in our ghetto communities has to be about more than knowledge. It has to be about culture and values. If those are not coming from the families, then it needs to be coming from the schools.

Perils of the Presidency

I guess that one of the perils of the presidency is that everything you do matters. So on that front, Obama is now facing two major decisions that will play out in the realm of educational policy. First, he has to pick a secretary of education. Second, he needs to pick a school for his daughters to attend. Frankly, in comparison, the first choice is looking like the easy one right now.

Who would have thought that the usually private decision of family schooling would take on such monumental consequences? Advocates rallied in Times Square on Wednesday to urge the Obama's to pick a charter school. USA Today published an op-ed piece saying that they should pick home schooling for the girls. Both public and private schools are all but begging to have the chance to educate the president's children.

The kicker of all this is that whichever he chooses is going to be seen as some sort of indication of where his educational priorities lie. If he picks public school it will send one message. If he picks a private or charter school or opts for home schooling it will send a very different message. No matter his pick, it will please some, anger others, and probably draw cries of hypocrisy.

But here's the deal. What the president picks for his children is not necessarily what he thinks is the best policy for the whole of the nation. Being president (or the children of the president) has a set of issues and considerations that no other person in the country has to deal with. So here's my take on it all: back off and let the family decide. It's not your decision and you're not in their shoes.

Everyone's an Expert

I don't know what exactly it is about education that makes everyone an expert about it. Maybe it comes down to the fact that everyone went to school at one time or another and so think they have a pretty good idea about how things should work. After all, what could be hard about creating pedagogically sound, age-appropriate lessons to millions of individual children across the country? Seems like anyone could chime in on how to improve that.

In that vein, Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, has his solution. In short, he wants to run the school system nationally more like a business. Never mind that running businesses like a business hasn't been terribly successful lately. This makes sense to Lou and, because everyone's an expert on schools, he can get attention for saying it.

Now, there are some diamonds in the dunghill of his "solution." He does favor a system of national standards, which as I've written before makes a certain amount of sense. Assuming that we actually are going to focus on accountability (beware the unspeak), then we need goals to hold schools accountable to. Letting states set their own goals is just a race to the bottom. So he may be onto something there.

Where he goes off the rails in my mind is in his plan to consolidate all the districts in the country into 50 to 70 mega-districts. From a business perspective, I can see how centralizing production and all that makes sense. But we aren't mass producing here. We're not trying to sell the same product a bajillion times to make lots of money. In education, we're trying to reach each individual student on an individual level and move them forward as far as we can each year. The school system isn't an assembly line where one teacher dumps a vat of knowledge into a kid's brain before sending them on to the next teacher for another vat to be dumped. That's just not how education works and we forget that at our peril.

The government's last big attempt at centralizing pedagogy has been something less than an overwhelming success. The Reading First program was one of the centerpieces of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now, $6 billion (that's right, 9 zeroes) into the program, we find out that the students in the program made no greater gains in reading comprehension than students not in the program. Once again we see that a one size fits all solution didn't work for every child in America. Do we get it yet?

Hail the Idealocrats

Over at Gotham Schools they've been wrestling with what to call the group of education advocates who follow the Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Jon Schnur model of thought. While those three would probably declare themselves to be reformers, that's kind of a loaded word to use. After all, everyone working on education advocacy would probably describe themselves as reformers so that isn't a particularly useful appelation. Furthermore, it's loaded in the sense that reform automatically implies good. Have you ever heard of negative reform? I'm sure it's happened, but it's just not how the word is used. While what these advocates are doing may or may not be positive, giving them the label of reformer automatically implies that they are doing good, which is a disservice to our discussions on the issue.

So over at Gotham Schools they threw open the question to the readers to hear what other people had to say. The suggestions ranged from the pretty good to the pretty inane. My personal favorite (though it could never be used) is the Axis of Eval. That one's pretty loaded too, but also extremely clever, especially given the focus these people put on accountability and high stakes testing.

The one that I'm actually going to start advocating for, though, is similarly brilliant and sums up so many aspects of this particular "reform" movement. I'm voting for Idealocrats.

The blending together of idealists and bureaucrats is a pretty accurate summation of the idea. On the one hand, you have the naked idealism (perhaps best exemplified in Teach for America corps members) that the system can work, that all children can learn, and that by working to ensure all children are learning we may very well be saving the world. The flip side of that is the bureaucratic focus on data, testing, working within the system, and following a business-like model to achieve quantifiable goals. The melding together of these two seemingly different ideologies is what makes the "reforms" of people like Klein and Rhee different from what has come before.

So all hail the Idealocrats! Now they have a name.