Smooth Pebbles

E.J. Dionne on the Arne Duncan choice

E.J. Dionne makes an interesting observation about Obama's pick of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.

Because Duncan gets along with teachers unions but is also seen as a reformer, his selection was interpreted as a politically shrewd, split-the-difference choice. But that is not the whole story. Lurking behind Obama's talk about getting beyond ideology and stale disputes is an effort to undercut the success that conservatives have enjoyed in framing arguments that leave Democrats and liberals at an automatic disadvantage.

To declare that the only test of a politician's commitment to reform is a willingness to break with unions creates a no-win choice for Democrats. They must either betray long- standing allies or face condemnation as the captives of special interests.

Obama, said Diane Ravitch, an assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush, is trying to "break out" of a definition of reform drawn almost entirely from "the Republican agenda." That agenda focuses on "being tough on the unions, offering more choices, and pushing for more accountability." While reformers of all stripes support accountability, this list actually constrains the options for those who would improve the public schools.

Duncan has already made clear that he refuses to abide by the conventions of the current education debate. When the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal and pro-labor think tank, circulated an education manifesto that focused on expanding the services for poor children available at public schools, Duncan signed on.

This seems to me a sharp-eyed take. Obama's effort to be post-partisan, as it were, is not merely an attempt to split differences or accommodate both sides of an argument. He seeks to change the terms of the argument, just as he did in both the primary and general elections.

Education chief Arne Duncan has his work cut out

The Washington Post, in a story fairly typical of other coverage, says that Obama's pick for Secretary of Education will "reach out to unions, school reform gorups" and "bridge the divides among education advocates, teachers unions and civil rights groups over how to fix America's school." Or as another syndicated WaPo story put it, "Duncan is embraced by the teachers unions, which have been concerned about high-stakes testing and worry about merit pay being tied to test scores, as well as reformers, who favor charter schools and tougher standards."

Apparently at least some from the teachers'-union end of this debate are offering an embrace not exactly friendly:

To portray Arne Duncan as anything other than a privatizer, union buster, and corporate stooge is to simply lie.

That's George Schmidt, editor of Substance News, in an essay posted at Schools Matter.

Catalyst Chicago, which claims it offers "independent reporting on school reformi," offers a rundown of Duncan's track record as CEO of Chicago's schools.

Tierney asks: Science or Garbage

A teacher in West Virginia rallied her students to fight to keep the right to recycle -- presumably for the civic (and eco) learning experience. John Tierney argues she's missing a better teaching opportunity:

If we want our children to be scientifically literate and get good jobs in the future, why are we spending precious hours in school teaching them to be garbage collectors?

That’s the question that occurred to me after reading about the second-graders in West Virginia who fought for the right to keep recycling trash even after it became so uneconomical that public officials tried to stop the program. As my colleague Kate Galbraith reports, their teacher was proud of them for all the time they spent campaigning to keep the recycling program alive.

My colleague Andy Revkin suggests that the West Virginia students might be learning something useful about the interplay of economics and ecology, but I fear they and their teacher have missed the lesson

Technorati Tags:
recycling, education, economics, John Tierney, TierneyLab

The Great Beyond: Far East top in science subjects

From The Great Beyond

Far East top in science subjects

Researchers in the US have released the latest figures comparing the maths and science abilities of 4th- and 8th-grade students in countries across the globe.

Far Eastern countries dominate the top tens, with Singapore top for science in both 4th and 8th grade. In maths, Hong Kong tops the 4th grade scores, with ‘Chinese Taipei’ leading the 8th. (Image right shows the percentage of fourth-grade students who reached the TIMSS advanced international benchmark in science in the top ten countries. See full graph.)

As the New York Times points out, this should worry the US as these subjects “are crucial to economic competitiveness and research”.

“It was good to see that the United States has made some progress in math, but I was surprised by the magnitude of the gap between us and the highest performing Asian countries, and that should cause us some concern,” Ina Mullis, of the International Study Center at Boston College that directs the study, told the paper.

Say that again.

More at the Great Beyond

Gladwell on spotting great teachers

Malcolm Gladwell on how to spot great teachers (and why we should want to):

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year%u2019s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half%u2019s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year%u2019s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a %u201Cbad%u201D school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You%u2019d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you%u2019d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.

A lot of it, he explains, is about feedback -- how and how well the teacher responds to students and engages them in the process of learning.

Old School

At the New Republic, Seward Darby worries that Obama's choice for the head of his transition's education-policy team means he's not serious about shaking up the educational system:

In November, Barack Obama bewildered education reformers by tapping Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor who had advised his campaign, to oversee the transition's education policy team. Their verdict was swift and harsh. "Worst case scenario," wrote Mike Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank, the day after The Wall Street Journal leaked the news. "This is a sign that the president-elect isn't a bona fide reformer," he later told me. Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, confirmed, "The reform community is scared to death."

The "reform community" is an aggressive group of education advocates who argue that the certification programs which produce teachers, and the unions that represent them once they're in the classroom, have had too tight a grip on progressive priorities in the field for too long. Instead, they want to shake up the system through programs that bring in new blood and hold teachers accountable. They place their hopes in nervy, pioneering leaders like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, the chancellors of the D.C. and New York City public schools, respectively. In Darling-Hammond--an academic, union favorite, and vocal critic of Teach for America and No Child Left Behind--they see the opposite: an ideological enemy representative of a sluggish status quo.

Reformers are right to be nervous. During the campaign, Obama deftly appeased all sides of the policy debate. While appealing to the unions, which have long been bastions of Democratic support, he also gave great hope to reformers inside and outside the party by supporting merit pay and pledging to increase funding for charter schools. In asking Darling-Hammond to helm the transition--a precursor, some worry, to her appointment as secretary of education--Obama has suggested that he wasn't entirely serious about change, at least when it comes to education. It's a misstep that threatens to derail his quest for post-partisanship--and ruin a critical opportunity to revolutionize America's lagging schools.

The Lightning Rod Makes Time

Last month I drew notice to an Atlantic story about (and an interview with) Michelle Rhee, the Washington, D.C., school chancellor who is aggressively pressing reforms in that district, most notably an effort to replace tenured teacher tracks with a system emphasizing higher salaries but more accountability and merit pay. She's been controversial, to say the least. She'll get only more so now that she's on the cover of this week's Time.

The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science abilities of its children. Young Americans today are less likely than their parents were to finish high school. This is an issue that is warping the nation's economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research. And Washington, which spends more money per pupil than the vast majority of large districts, is the problem writ extreme, a laboratory that failure made.

Others have pointed to other factors for our lagging performance, noting, for instance, that kids in other countries spend longer and more days in school; that their curricula are often both more diverse (invariably including foreign languages from early on, something that's absent from many U.S. districts); and that most other countries have more consistent national standards that let them more easily evaluate and use what works best. And in "First, Kill All the School Boards," an article in the January/February 2008 Atlantic ,Matt Miller argued that the dominance in U.S. education of "local control" by local school boards effectively leaves education policy in the hands of much more powerful statewide teachers' unions that resist reform and teacher accountability and dominate everything from curricula to school calendars.

The reformers may emphasize different problems, but they generally circle around to a similar stance: The need to shift power from teachers' unions to school leaders and to empower administrators to enact best practices. Michelle Rhee represents, in a personality hard to ignore, exactly that approach, and she does so in a personality and presence that clearly means business:

ONE DAY IN AUGUST, I SPENT THE MORNING with Rhee as she made surprise visits to Washington public schools. She emerged from her chauffeured black SUV with two BlackBerrys and a cell phone and began walking--fast--toward the front door of the first school. She wore a black pencil skirt, a delicate cream blouse and strappy high heels. When we got inside, she walked into the first classroom she could find and stood to the side, frowning like a specter. When a teacher stopped lecturing to greet her, she motioned for the teacher to continue. Rhee smiled only when students smiled at her first. Within two minutes, she had seen enough, and she stalked out to the next classroom.

ONE DAY IN AUGUST, I SPENT THE MORNING with Rhee as she made surprise visits to Washington public schools. She emerged from her chauffeured black SUV with two BlackBerrys and a cell phone and began walking--fast--toward the front door of the first school. She wore a black pencil skirt, a delicate cream blouse and strappy high heels. When we got inside, she walked into the first classroom she could find and stood to the side, frowning like a specter. When a teacher stopped lecturing to greet her, she motioned for the teacher to continue. Rhee smiled only when students smiled at her first. Within two minutes, she had seen enough, and she stalked out to the next classroom.

You can why she badly scares a lot of teachers (and some parents) and inspires many reformers (and some parents). She has become what the reform debate has long lacked: a national focal point.

Rhee has promised to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation, a prospect that, if realized, could transform the way schools across the country are run. She is attempting to do this through a relentless focus on finding--and rewarding--strong teachers, purging incompetent ones and weakening the tenure system that keeps bad teachers in the classroom. This fall, Rhee was asked to meet with both presidential campaigns to discuss school reform. In the last debate, each candidate tried to claim her as his own, with Barack Obama calling her a "wonderful new superintendent."

Her appearance on the cover of Time -- and paragraphs like that one -- will only elevate her profile. She may fade away. Or she may take the debate over school reform -- and the so-far inconsequential 25-year-old debate over how to save America's schools -- into a new, more serious phase.

Michelle Rhee interview

Earlier today I posted about Paul Tough's Clay Risen's* Atlantic profile of Michelle Rhee, the controversial Washington DC school chancellor. I forgot to mention that there is also an interview of Rhee on the Atlantic website.

*correcttion made 11/09/08

The Lightning Rod - The Atlantic (November 2008)

Michelle Rhee

photo by David Deal, from Atlantic Monthly

To my surprise, one of the most-read posts on this mostly-science blog is "Are Teachers Profesionals of Public-Service Workers?", which looked at a NY Times Magazine piece on school reforms by Paul Tough. Tough now has Now there is a piece by Clay Risen* in the current Atlantic Monthly about perhaps the country's most notable school reformer, Washington D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is aggressively pushing reforms -- higher-paid, non-tenured teacher contracts among them -- on the D.C. school district.

The nut graf is below. Catch the whole thing at The Lightning Rod:

Since her arrival, in the summer of 2007, Rhee, just 38 years old, has become the most controversial figure in American public education and the standard-bearer for a new type of schools leader nationwide. She and her cohort often seek to bypass the traditional forces of education schools and unions, instead embracing nontraditional reform mechanisms like charter schools, vouchers, and the No Child Left Behind Act. %u201CThey tend to be younger, and many didn%u2019t come through the traditional route,%u201D says Margaret Sullivan, a former education analyst at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. And that often means going head-to-head with the people who did.

Rhee, responsible not to a school board but only to the mayor, went on a spree almost as soon as she arrived. She gained the right to fire central-office employees and then axed 98 of them. She canned 24 principals, 22 assistant principals, and, at the beginning of this summer, 250 teachers and 500 teaching aides. She announced plans to close 23 underused schools and set about restructuring 26 other schools (together, about a third of the system). And she began negotiating a radical performance-based compensation contract with the teachers union that could revolutionize the way teachers get paid.

.

*attribution corrected 11/09/08, with apologies to Mr. Risen.

Minds of Babes, Agony of Defeat, Ocean Modeling, Oh MY

This week's Science is particularly rich in stories, it seems. These stories require a paid subscription, alas -- but the write-ups here, in Science's weekly mailing, make pretty good reading on their own for those without a subscription. My favorites:

From the Minds of Babes

I became fascinated with baby cognition when I did a story on Liz Spelke's work with infants while also raising a couple. Spelke and others have focused on the wee'ns's innate or very early powers of cognition, including numerosity and early logic and perception. Here, though, is an interesting study that proposes that at least one baby-logic error may occur not because baby's logic is poor but because baby is so intensely focused on being led socially by his or her playmate/mentor/teacher. Given the power and primacy of social connections and trust (a subject I took interest in while writing about Williams syndrome, this seems a viable hypothesis and a wonderful notion: I'd love to see it explored some more.

From Science:

Human babies between 8 months and a year of age cannot perform certain cognitive tasks. In one of these, called the A-not-B error, an object is hidden under a container and the infant repeatedly reaches for it. Then the experimenter hides the object under a different container, in full view of the infant, but the baby still looks under the first container to find it. Topál et al. (p. 1831) propose a new explanation for this error, suggesting that the socially intense "teaching" interaction that usually accompanies the repeated hiding of the object under the first container ensures strong association of the object with that location. When the object is hidden without any communication between the experimenter and the infant, the baby's error rate is reduced. Previous explanations for the phenomenon suggested that it was due to the immaturity of the infant's executive motor control or his or her limited cognitive capacities.

The Agony of Defeat

Maurice Delgado, formerly a post-doc at Liz Phelp's lab at NYU and now with his own at Rutgers, picks up one of the juicier fruits to fall from the neuroecon tree of late: the notion that people in auctions often bid less to experience the pleasure of winning (or owning) that to avoid the regret of losing.

From Science:

Auctioneers take advantage of human nature to increase the sale prices of items. But are they banking on the successful bidder's enjoyment of winning, or are they instead relying on the bidder's aversion to losing? Two sides of the same coin, one might say, but Delgado et al. (p. 1849; see the Perspective by Maskin) argue that it is the latter that drives the phenomenon known as overbidding. When participating in an auction, brain areas sensitive to loss became active. When the authors modified the ground rules of the auction so as to emphasize the potential for loss, without altering the basic possibility of winning, the tendency to overbid was magnified.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol321/issue5897/twis.dtl

Modeling Ocean Circulation

I've loved ocean modeling since I spent way too much time looking at current models while writing The Great Gulf. A major challenge -- and a major need for modeling fish population dynamics, like whether zillions of cod larvae will grow to fish on Georges Bank or be swept into the abyss just to the south -- is modeling the currents in 3-D. Apparently someone has made progress on that front:

From Science:

Hydrothermal systems along ocean ridges help control the chemistry of the oceans and alter and hydrate the upper oceanic crust; this, in turn, returns water to the Earth's mantle at subduction zones. Hydrothermal systems also foster deep ocean ecosystems. Observations seem to indicate that although ocean ridges are broadly linear, outflows are spaced out along them. Comou et al. (p. 1825) have developed a three-dimensional numerical model of this flow to help reveal the dynamics. Their model shows that optimizing heat transfer causes the flows to self-organize into narrow pipe-like upflows, spaced about 500 m apart, fed by zones of warm downflow that recirculate up to a quarter of the heat.

Finally, for the part of you that loves cell phones and pure geekery:

Working Together to Get the Job Done

Bob tries to make a call to Alice but finds that the line is too noisy. Picking up his second phone (he's a very busy builder), he finds that line is also too noisy and so gives up trying to contact her. With two bad lines, Bob wouldn't be able to make that phone call, at least using the classical communication channels of his provider. Had he had access to quantum communication channels, Smith and Yard (p. 1812, published online 21 August; see the Perspective by Oppenheim) show theoretically that the situation is quite different. Two quantum channels, each with zero capacity to transmit information independently, will allow information to be carried across them when used together. Not only of theoretical interest, this counterintuitive result may be of practical use in the design of quantum communication networks.

(Can't be long before Clive Thompson is all over that one.)

Tags: MauriceDelgado, social brain, infant cognition, Liz Spelke, ocean modeling, cell phones, quantum communication channels