Why does Kim Marshall promote the idea that schools can overcome poverty?

My department chair subscribes to the Marshall Memo, and I usually read all of it. I like the way it reminds me of what's important. This week, though, Kim Marshall included a piece called "Pushing Back on Eight Outmoded Beliefs." In the piece, originally published in the official publication of the Michigan Association of School Boards and written by Marshall himself, Marshall declares that it is "outmoded" to believe that "poverty is destiny."

In some sense, okay, poverty isn't destiny and never has been. Ben Franklin, Frederick Douglass and a lot of other heroes of mine have shown that some people can escape the fate that poverty usually points to. But to say that the idea is "outmoded" is pretty galling, not only because it implies that this idea is just a sort of trendy fashion, not only because there is no reason to think that poverty is any less determinative than it has ever been, but also because a more pervasive and pernicious myth is that schools CAN rectify the injustices of an increasingly unequal society.

My first impulse, on reading Kim Marshall's article, was to curse at my computer. But then I thought, well, maybe in fact progress has been made. It's been a few years since I looked into the question of whether schools can overcome poverty. Last I looked into it, I found that, No, in fact, schools cannot overcome poverty. But maybe that conclusion is "outmoded." According to Marshall, "some schools are turning this dynamic around and closing gaps; Education Trust’s website showcases a number of these beat-the-odds schools and what they are doing: https://edtrust.org/dispelling_the_myth/ .

So, okay, I went to the Education Trust's website. I was skeptical, but willing to look at it. If schools were succeeding at overcoming poverty, I wanted to see what they were doing.

Unfortunately, what I found when I looked into it was typical of what I found a few years ago, and typical of education discourse in general. It's the kind of thing that finally got me frustrated enough that I stopped paying much attention to education discourse and research: an absence of evidence that bears even the most cursory examination.

I will try to be brief. The Education Trust is an organization that seems to spend a lot of time and energy showing that schools can overcome poverty. Every year, the Education Trust gives "Dispelling the Myth" awards to schools whose "success dispels the damaging myth that schools can do very little to help students overcome the barriers of poverty and discrimination."

To be clear, this organization looks around the ENTIRE COUNTRY to find schools that overcome poverty.  So you might expect that the award-winning schools would have both high poverty, as measured in the standard way by the percentage of students whose family income qualifies them for Free or Reduced-Price Lunch, and also success, as measured by graduation rates and test scores and so on. I looked to see if this was true. But, mirabile dictu, I didn't actually ever even look to see if the award-winning schools had achieved any academic success, because as I started looking at the high schools that had won this award, I was shocked to find that the first two schools listed (there were only three overall) were serving student populations that actually had significantly LOWER POVERTY than the state or national average.

Let me say that again, because I still can't believe it myself: most of the schools that Kim Marshall and the Education Trust cites as showing that schools can overcome poverty actually have SIGNIFICANTLY LESS poverty than average to overcome.

I don't really know what to say about this, except that I hope Kim Marshall puts out a correction in his memo, and spends some time explicating the more important and very pernicious myth that schools can beat poverty. They can't. Schools can work with and nurture the students we are given, but the only real solutions to poverty lie outside the schoolhouse walls.

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Notes about the particular schools:
The Education Trust lists only three schools. The first, Imperial High School in California, has 40% low-income students. Statewide 58% of students are low-income (meaning they qualify for Free or Reduced-Price Lunch). At the second, Jack Britt High School in North Carolina, 28% of the students are low-income. Statewide, that number is 58%. That's when I threw my hands up and started to write this blog post. But I did go back and look at the third, which though it's called "Pass Christian High School" seems to be a secular public high school in Missouri. Pass Christian actually does have more low-income students than the state average, if not by much (56% as compared to 50%). But still. If Education Trust combs the country looking for schools that beat poverty, and this is what they come up with, I don't think we've proved that poverty can be overcome at the schoolwide level.

ETS calls for Graduate Schools of Educational Public Health and more attention to poverty

ETS (!) has sponsored an excellent report on poverty and education.  Written by Richard Coley of ETS and Bruce Baker of Rutgers (and schoolfinance101), the report says what should be obvious to any observer and what many other excellent reports have said over the past forty years: that poverty is a problem for education, but education alone is not a solution to poverty.  Most of the report does the noble work of making (again) a detailed case that there is way too much poverty in the US, that we don't do enough about it, and that this poverty has serious negative educational consequences. The whole report is worthy, but I noticed a couple of things in particular:

A call for a focus on educational public health
The report's executive summary contains a wonderful sentence expressing a sentiment I wish we saw more often:

Given the strong connection between educational success and economic disadvantage, we might
expect education policy to focus on ways to overcome the effects of poverty on children.

In other words, they want schools of Educational Public Health!

What to do
Despite the report's clear implication that fixing poverty would be a good way to improve educational outcomes, the authors unfortunately choose, apparently from modesty, not to recommend any non-educational measures: "There are other strategies that fall outside of the education arena — tax policy, job creation, minimum wage policy, etc. — that also are outside of the purview of this report." The report does, however, make seven specific suggestions for actions within the "education arena", all of which ought to be common sense:

Increasing awareness of the incidence of poverty and its consequences. Child poverty costs the United States hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Current poverty levels, combined with the growingwealth gap between those at the top and bottom of the distribution, threaten to destabilize our democracy and limit the upward mobility of children of future generations.
Equitably and adequately funding our schools. The economic downturn has taken a toll on state school funding and on targeted programs like preschool that can help disadvantaged children. There is a need for better coordination of federal and state education programs targeted at poverty.
Broadening access to high-quality preschool education. High-quality early childhood education programs improve the educational outcomes of all children, but particularly for low-income children. The administration’s proposed major expansion of preschool programs across the country should be supported.
Reducing segregation and isolation. Many of the nation’s schools are increasingly segregated by race/ethnicity and income. Each student should have the opportunity to attend schools with peers from diverse social and economic backgrounds.
Adopting effective school practices. School policies that have been documented by research and practice to be effective should be broadly adopted. Examples include class size reduction, longer school days and years, and tutoring.
Recognizing the importance of a high-quality teacher workforce. Attracting and keeping high-quality teachers in high-poverty classrooms should be of the utmost priority and may require special incentives. 
Improving the measurement of poverty. The poverty rate is an important social and economic indicator that is used to allocate resources for scores of federal, state, and local programs. Work should continue to expand the official definition of income to include government spending directed at low-income families and to recognize cost-of-living differences across regions.

These aren't new ideas, but as the poet says, it is necessary to write about the same old things
in the same way, repeating the same things over and over. And who knows, maybe this report will get a lot of attention, and we'll stop spending so much time designing ways for schools to compete for the richer students (in Hirschman's terms, we need a system where change is based on voice, not exit).  And, yes, we need a lot less poverty.

Why do we need MOOCs when we have books?

Over the past few years I've gotten interested in economics, and this summer I decided to finally go through an introductory econ textbook.  It's a good way to learn.  I go at my own pace, I can re-read the parts I don't understand, and I can do, or not do, as many of the problems at the end of each chapter as I think I will be helpful. Would taking an actual econ 101 course be better?  Maybe, but maybe not.

Learning economics in this way makes me wonder, of course, about school. I think about the high school courses I teach, and I think, as usual, that we should try to have a lot of our students' learning be done through independent reading. But I also think about online college courses--MOOCs, to use the appropriately silly acronym. And I wonder--what's the point of a MOOC, when we already have books?

Of course, you might ask, what's the point of lectures, when we already have books.  Lectures, as the name implies, started before there were printed books: the lecturer read his book/lecture notes, and the students copied down what he said, so that they could read and re-read it later, at their own pace.  After Gutenberg, lectures weren't as important, but they continued for various reasons (people like watching people, there could be personal contact with the lecturer at other times, etc.). But as many college students have noticed, lectures are not a very good way of teaching.  I skipped at least half of my lectures in college, and I did okay; I had the textbook.

So why MOOCs? And why now? 
If watching someone like Michael Sandel is so great, we could already, before the internet, watch him on videotape or film.  Why didn't community colleges in the seventies and eighties just show films, instead of hiring actual professors? Why are MOOCs happening now?

To answer that question would require going into a whole array of cultural shifts, but it's worth pointing out that places like Harvard and MIT are not, I don't think, going to outsource their teaching to virtual professors anytime soon. MOOCs, like so many other "disruptive" educational innovations, are a matter of providing a cheaper and shoddier product to the middle and lower classes, while providing ever more artisanal craftsmanship to the upper classes.

NOLA schools "improvement": Ed Reform is likely less important than time, funding and demographics

The NYT has a post up about Ed reform in New Orleans that's getting a lot of attention.  The post basically says that ed reform is helping lift student achievement but may be hurting communities in other ways.  The part about hurting communities is interesting, but the part that attributes increasing student achievement to Ed Reform seems dubious to me.

Bruce Baker of Rutgers (and schoolfinance101) has been pointing out for years that all charter successes are completely explicable by looking at two factors: (a) increased spending and in-school time (as at HCZ etc.); (b) different populations.  If you spend more money and time on a school, and if your student population has fewer poor, ELL or special ed students, then your test scores will be higher.  Baker has repeatedly shown that highly touted charters are actually spending more money and/or enrolling more advantaged populations.

The New Orleans schools have both increased spending (as the NYT article mentions but passes over quickly) and a distinctly different population (as the article does not mention at all, as far as I could see.)  This second point is important. The population of New Orleans is distinctly different post-Katrina (as the NYT reported).  It is smaller overall, it is more white and less black, and it is less poor.

My guess is that these factors are easily enough to explain the higher test scores.

NYT sees no evil in ability grouping; but I wonder if it enables boring curriculum

According to a piece in yesterday's New York Times, ability grouping in elementary school is seeing a resurgence.  The article gives very short shrift to the potential problems with tracking, so it might be worth pointing them out. In general, kids in higher groups like tracking; those in lower groups don't, so most of the problems with ability-grouping are obvious Matthew-effect issues: kids in lower-level groups might feel ghettoized; kids in lower-level groups might learn less. But there's one problem that is less obvious, and that affects students at all levels: tracking may allow teachers to get away more easily with less-interesting curriculum that they might otherwise have to rethink.

The Times article describes one teacher's practice:

Ms. Vail teaches the same lesson, whether it is a math concept or a book, to the entire class, but gives each group a different assignment. Working on each week’s set of new vocabulary words, all four groups draw illustrations and write captions using the assigned words, but she encourages team C, her highest-achieving group, to write more complex sentences, perhaps using two new vocabulary words in the same sentence. She also asks children in team C to peer-teach students in the other groups.

“At the end of the day, they’re learning the same words, but just with different levels of complexity and nuance,” she said.

When she moves students to new groups, she tells them it is because she can best help them there, and she believes they see the grouping positively, she said.

“It has to be done properly — you can’t make a kid feel small because they’re in group A,” her lowest-achieving group, she said. “If you don’t have a stigma attached to the group, then I don’t see the problem.

The teacher doesn't see any problems here ; I see three:

1. There is probably, despite the teacher's assurances, still a stigma attached to the lower groups.  How can she really know?  And how can she know what the long-term effect of always being in the lower group might be for some kids? It could be pretty harmful, and she would have no idea.
2. Even if there were really no stigma, there might be harm done to the lower-level kids if they aren't exposed to the more interesting work done by the higher-level kids.
3. Vocabulary study may well be largely pointless, so there is a large potential opportunity cost here: the kids could be reading instead of doing vocab work.  This is especially important for the kids in the lower groups, who are much more likely to essentially never read.

This last point may seem the least germane to the debate, but is actually potentially very important. Ms. Vail's vocabulary lesson strikes me as pretty tedious, but by adapting it to different levels, she makes the boring lesson workable. Tracking, then, may enable boring curriculum, by allowing its weaknesses to be masked by some made-to-measure tailoring. To offer another example: a curriculum that mimics a standardized test won't work with a heterogeneous group, because the test questions will be too hard for the less able students and too easy for the highly skilled.

My theory is that to make heterogeneous classes work well, you need to do more interesting curriculum. The more meaningful the activity, the more it will allow students of different abilities to engage with it in their own ways. An open-ended discussion can be joined in by students of all abilities, and a mini-lesson on Modernist poetry may be appreciated by everyone as well. If you really want to do vocabulary, why not have every kid write something meaningful (a story, a book review, an argument) using the words? That way each kid could write at his or her own level, and stories tend to be less boring than isolated sentences. If you want kids to push themselves, ask all kids to write the piece using and reusing as many words as possible, or offer variations adapted to the meaningful assignment.  In any case, the more the assignment fits into a larger purpose, the better: instead of isolated sentences, have students use the vocab words in the book reviews they are writing of their independent reading books after having read a bunch of book reviews pulled from a variety of publications, with the eventual goal of putting together a class magazine modeled after the London Review of Books--or whatever.  The point is, meaningful tasks can almost always be done at a wide range of levels; meaningless tasks depend on teacher-created difficulty levels, and if you don't have those levels the meaninglessness is perhaps more exposed.

So though I don't actually know if tracking is always a bad idea (though I'm sympathetic to Jennie Oakes's arguments), I think as a general rule we should have whole-class lessons that aren't tracked, have individual work that is appropriate for the individual kid, and have group projects that are mixed-ability.

If disruptive innovation is so great, how come the elite eat artisanal bread and cheese, drink artisanal wine and send their kids to artisanal schools?

Disruptive Innovation has been a big buzzword in business and tech circles for nearly two decades now, but it's only recently that people have started trying to apply it to education.  The basic idea is that in any industry, the established players are focused on incremental improvements, and that big changes only happen when new producers enter the arena, usually with a shoddier but cheaper product that they sell to a new, untapped market.  As I've written, this paradigm doesn't fit K-12 education very well, since there wouldn't seem to be a large untapped market available, and the market is fairly closed to new producers--but one way of seeing the Ed Reform movement is as an effort to open up the market, especially at the low end.

In a previous post, I argued that, seen in the light of disruptive innovation, ed reform was mainly about  serving poor kids with shoddier products that cost less money. In this post, I discuss the flip side of disruptive innovation: the way in which our era, which has been famously amenable to disruptive innovation, is also quite amenable to its opposite: conservative, traditional artisanal products.  These traditional artisanal products are not, however, aimed at the mass market, but at the high end.

The other problem with disruptive innovation: it's often not as good!
"Disruptive innovation" is discussed so much in the media that people tend to forget about the flip side of the shoddier/cheaper dynamic.  In recent decades, a lot of people have also done very well by making things somewhat less cheaply but also of dramatically higher quality. You might call this "artisanal non-innovation."  Especially among the elites in our society, and especially over the past few decades, as the rich have gotten richer and the wages of the bottom half have stagnated or fallen, there has been a movement back toward ultra-high-quality traditional products.  This has been true in education as well, and there is no reason to think this trend won't continue.

Artisanal non-innovation
Artisanal non-innovation means going against the grain of our mass market economy and, inspired by a tradition and learning from its masters, trying to do things the old-fashioned way and do them really, really well.  Artisanal non-innovation has been a fine business model both for those who don't need to grow (often family businesses, like Limmer boots)--and for those who do want to grow (Starbucks, for example).

Artisanal schools
Even as the powers that be promote "disruptive innovation" in education, nattering on about Baumol's disease and productivity, they are, of course, choosing artisanal schools for their own children. In New York City, private schools that used to be considered third-tier, schools that anyone with tuition could get into, are now seen as elite, and some of the elite schools are doing away with testing altogether. If they have to do test prep, they'll do it the old fashioned, artisanal way and get a tutor.

So it seems likely that what is coming in education, as in other areas, is a bifurcated America, in which the masses get sold lots of crappy test-prep products, and the elites, who cheerlead the crappiness of the crappy test-prep regime by calling it "disruptive innovation," will be choosing for their own children education that is ever more artisanal.

Other kinds of disruption
In other words, we public school teachers, parents and children will have this...



...and the elites will have this...

...until, perhaps, we get the more political kind of disruptive innovation that we haven't seen in this country for 80 years or so...

In education, "Disruptive Innovation" means new, worse schools

A couple of years ago Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School and the high priest of "disruptive innovation," was eagerly anticipating the rise of disruption in K-12 education, even suggesting that by 2019 "half of all classes for grades K-12 will be taught online." A more modest new white paper from Christensen's institute scales back these ambitious predictions, suggesting instead that what's coming is "hybrid" or "blended" innovation, in which novel methods will combine with elements of the old regime.  

Perhaps it's a good thing that the Christensen institute is realizing that traditional schools have more staying power than previously suspected. Still, the new paper is an occasion to reconsider the whole idea of "disruptive innovation." After looking into it a bit, I think that if Christensen's first idea was a bit extreme, his basic idea is partly right: we are getting disruption in our schools--but in a bad way, not a good way.

What is "disruptive innovation"?
The basic idea behind "disruptive innovation" is that the status quo is upended by doing something (making cars or steel, providing music or movies, etc.) somewhat more shoddily but also dramatically more cheaply or conveniently.  Clayton Christensen has made a career out of describing and glorifying this process, and it may be a useful way to think about a lot of things: the rise of the Japanese car-makers, for example, or of Netflix's streaming video business.  Christensen, and many others, have predicted that the education status quo will soon be upended by disruptive innovation, usually imagined as some form of online learning.  This may eventually happen, but there are some significant barriers to it, especially at the K-12 level.

Why disruptive innovation won't come naturally to K-12 education
Every year my alma mater's alumni magazine, which fancies itself a major force in journalism, publishes a list of 50 "disruptive companies"; this year, for the first time, an education company made the list.  Predictably, the company was Coursera, which provides free online college courses, and not a company involved in K-12 education, which is particularly resistant to change.

Disruptive innovation typically requires one or both of the following: (1) low-end consumers; (2) new producers who are doing things differently.  First, there has to be a market for the crappier product.  Often the untapped market is in a niche where the crappier product is more convenient, like cell-phone cameras, or where the old product was exclusively expensive, as when personal computers displaced mainframes.  In education, it is very clear that colleges and universities are ripe for disruptive innovation, since colleges are getting so expensive (to be sure, some of this is happening because states are defunding their own public universities).  As for the second requirement, producers who are doing things differently, higher ed. has always had a fair amount of "churn," or Schumpeterian creative destruction, and there are naturally, then, lots of groups working on doing things differently: Coursera, EdX, etc. But K-12 education is fairly different from higher ed, and is less naturally open to disruptive innovation.  K-12 education has not seen the same skyrocketing prices, it has a stable and in some sense captive consumer base, and doesn't have a significant sector of alternative producers to serve the (non-existent) low-end market.

It's interesting that K-12 education costs have been fairly stable. Despite Baumol's cost disease, which is supposed to lead things (like teachers) that are not amenable to technology improvements to become more expensive over time, teacher salaries have been pretty much flat since the early seventies; moreover, the cost of K-12 education has not, unlike that of higher ed or health care, increased as a share of GDP.  So the low-end market that is required for disruptive education is nonexistent; to create it will require political action. Another thing that would be required is a significant sector of producers who are doing things differently.  And in K-12 education, the only producers who are doing things differently are private operations (open schools like Sudbury Valley, homeschool operations like Calvert, etc.). In the traditional system, these private schools do not have access to the low-end market, which has been limited to public schools.

It's possible, then, to see Ed reform as a movement that is attempting to create the conditions for disruptive innovation by (1) creating a low-end market and (2) encouraging a new education sector that is, in Christensen's words, "remote from the mainstream."  Ed Reform is creating a low-end market by starving districts of funding, partly by channeling funds to charters; and this heavy support of charter schools and vouchers, etc., it aims both to increase the number of education providers who are doing things differently and to allow them access to the low-end market.

In other words, in education disruptive innovation may mean a race to the bottom for our poorest kids, even as the rich go to ever-more artisanal schools
The reformers want to open up the education market to low-cost producers.  This is a strategy that has not worked in any other country, and if the history of the free market in other products is any guide, even at its best we will end up with the poorest and most vulnerable children in our society being almost completely cut out.

The rich and powerful, on the other hand, will probably not send their kids to disruptively innovative schools.  Because when it comes to services and human experiences (food, coaching, nature experiences, opera, education, etc.), the rich and powerful very rarely use the products of disruptive innovation.  Rich people don't get take-out via their smartphones; they hire a personal chef.  For rich people, the trend is not toward disruptive innovation, but toward artisanal non-innovation, and the same will probably be continue to be true of schools for the rich.  More on that in another post.

The New York Times Discovers Educational Public Health!

I'm racing to read my huge stack of student papers before Wednesday's grading deadline, but I have to note an excellent post that went up at the NYT this past weekend.  It's from a Stanford professor who's doing good work on income inequality and education--good work that would fit well into my fantasy graduate school of educational public health.  The post is called "No Rich Child Left Behind", and it makes the very important points that:

A) Educational outcomes are and have always been very, very dependent on class.

B) The disparity in achievement between rich and poor has increased over the past fifty years, with the big difference coming because the performance of rich kids has significantly increased since the 1980s, so that whereas in 1980 there wasn't much difference between the rich and the middle class, now there is a significant gap.

C) Test scores of poor kids are not dropping--on the contrary, they are increasing, and the widening gap between rich and poor is because the test scores of the poor and middle class are not improving as quickly as those of the rich.

D) School narrows the gap: over the nine-months of the school year, the gap narrows, but then it increases again (and a bit more) in the summer.

E) According to the author, some of the growing gap comes because of the significant increase in inequality over the last few decades, but some of it also comes because the rich have been devoting ever more resources to the support and have been engaging in, to borrow a phrase from other researchers, "concerted cultivation" of their children's cognitive resources.

In a wonderful section of the post, Reardon writes:

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

[...]

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this.

Yes, we do need to start talking about it, and Reardon starts talking about it in a very important way: rather than talking about how schools can narrow the gap, for instance by using schools to provide social services (something I've argued is silly), he talks about, not only  investing in quality early childhood care for  kids of working parents, but also on providing families with the time and resources to take better care of their own kids.  "Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children," he writes, and goes on to suggest the eminently sensible idea of providing more support for parental leave from work. In this spirit, I have suggested that raising the minimum wage and having a better national health insurance system should also be seen as important educational initiatives.

Reardon also mentions that the American Educational Research Association has decided to make the theme of its annual conference this year be "Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis."  That is of course good news, and although the conference's theme is a bit mealy-mouthed, some of the responses to the theme are interesting--my favorite of the ones I've read so far is the obvious but necessary "The Poverty of Capitalism" by a UCLA prof named Peter McClaren, who says important things even as he conforms touchingly, as I think Noel Coward once wrote, to type (check out his picture in the appendix below), but I also like the idea that we have conversations with our poor students about how "poverty is a prejudiced construct sustained by those who are led to believe that “venerated” institutions are the preferred, superior and normative legislator for values and morals because of their power to grant and reproduce intellectual, academic, able-istic, gendered, classed, religious, environmental, ethnic, linguistic and heternormative capital within dominant culture."

Overall, however, what I'm seeing on the conference website looks a bit more like a backwater of clever theory than anything that will build the institutions we need to combat either capitalism or its constructs.  Again, what we need is a proper, scientific graduate school of educational public health. I think we need to speak the language of the society we live in, not plan for a revolution that may never come, and which, if it did come, would have nothing at all to do with our planning.  That's why I prefer Sean Reardon over Peter McClaren.  But I could be wrong!

In any case, I'm very glad to see the post at the Times, and I'm glad that some people are thinking and talking about the way poverty matters.  I look forward to reading some of McClaren's research.

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Appendix:

For those who like visuals and want to be touched in that Noel Coward way, here's Peter McClaren, the revolutionary critic of Capitalism (or has Tom Petty found a second career?):

Peter McClaren

And, in a picture conforming a bit less touchingly to type, here's Sean Reardon, the Director of Stanford's Interdisicplinary doctoral Training Program in Quantitative Educational Policy Analysis and my hero for this week:

Sean Reardon

We may see improved educational outcomes over the next ten years... no thanks to ed reform

Despite the recession, the long-term unemployment disaster and the ever-higher rates of inequality, there are signs of hope on the educational public health front.  Infant mortality, which may be a leading indicator of other outcomes, has been falling pretty fast over the past several years.  Let's hope that Obamacare helps to continue this positive trend.

Students who need to read in school

It works to make kids do their homework in school

Leafstrewn has just gone through a remarkable episode in which the headmaster's proposal to cut the administrator of an alternative program for kids who are having a lot of trouble in school was met with such opposition from the faculty that she changed her mind.  The episode was remarkable mostly for the teachers' support for a program serving a small fraction of our students, support that will mean losing teacher jobs, but also because the headmaster admitted, quite gracefully, that she had made a mistake.  Everyone came out looking pretty good, and I was proud of our school.

The episode also reminded me of how effective this particular alternative program has been. Five students from my ninth grade classes last year are now in the program, and four of the five have spoken to me positively about it (the fifth I haven't happened to bump into). As the potential cut to the program was in the balance over the past week, I've been thinking a lot about what has made it so successful for my former students.  It certainly helps that the program has very good teachers and a caring and very hands-on administrator, but perhaps the key element of the program is that the students are made to do their homework in school.  As one of them told me recently, after I'd asked if he was doing the assigned reading, they have to get the work done, or they don't get to go home at the end of the day.

This is a simple but extremely important practice.  It seems indisputable that the number one proximate cause (as opposed to indirect factors like poverty) of student failure at Leafstrewn is failure to do homework.  Having an even better teacher might help, being more genetically gifted might help, and coming from a richer and more educated family certainly helps, but the line separating passing from failing is basically whether kids get their homework done. Certainly for my five students from last year who are now in our alternative program, had they all done their homework, they all would easily have passed English for the year.  (Another program here, the "Tutorial" program, essentially gives students time, space and encouragement to do their homework in school.) This makes me wonder, again, about the value of homework, and it makes me think that Bruce Baker is right and the (modest) success of programs like KIPP is mainly due to spending more money on, among other things, a longer schoolday.  It also makes me think, again, about the value of reading in school.

A student who doesn't read

I had a chat today with a former student who isn't in this alternative program.  I'll call him "Billy."  Billy is a bright, polite, very appealing kid whose family has not had it easy, to put it mildly.  When he was in my ninth grade class two years ago, Billy told me regularly that he wanted to drop out of school so that he could get a job and help support his family.  Like everyone else, I told him that he would be able to help his family better if he stayed in school.  Billy passed my class, barely.  He read virtually none of the assigned reading or our whole-class texts.  He did, however, read four or five Alex Rider books (which are at about a fifth grade level).  Those may have been the only books he has completed in high school.

Billy told me he had failed English in 10th grade and he was in danger of failing this year as well. I asked why. He said: "Because I don't do my homework."  I said, "Do you do the reading?"  He said, "No.  Never."  I said, "But you read in my class.  I remember you reading Alex Rider."  He said, "Yeah, because we read in class. I don't read at home.  I never read at home in your class either."  I don't think that's strictly accurate--I remember him reading Alex Rider at home as well--but it gets at an important truth.

Reading is the most important academic skill.  As I wrote last year, "Our school has kids under its control for over six hours a day.  There is no good reason we can't have them sitting and silently reading books for at least an hour each day.  Nothing else we do with them is as important; nothing else would be as efficient, productive, and individualized." Or, as a Mexican novelist recently wrote in the New York Times, "One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”"

If we think reading is valuable, we should be using time in school to have them do it. That a child as bright and wonderful as Billy--a student who devoured Alex Rider books during a six-week independent reading unit--can have read fewer than ten books over his whole high school career is shameful for our school.  We have taken care of Billy in many ways, and we have always treated him with gentleness and respect, but we have mostly not done for him what we would do for our own children--given him books he can read and time to read them.

Homework in School and Social Justice

The proximate cause of these students' failure is that they don't do their homework, but they all share a deeper cause as well: Billy, the students I had last year who ended up in the alternative program, and every student I have this year who is in danger of failing, all come from families that are at the low end of the economic spectrum.  If we really want to "reform" education in a way that will help poorer children succeed, we should start by finding a way to do what our excellent alternative program here at Leafstrewn does, and give kids time to do their homework--especially their reading--in school.

Educational Public Health follow-up: David Berliner's Excellent Work

Just a quick note:

When I wrote about "Educational Public Health," I mentioned David Berliner in the first paragraph, as someone who has studied and written extensively on the impact of out-of-school-factors on educational achievement.  After I posted the essay, I wrote Berliner an email asking him the same question: shouldn't we be studying and working on the educational equivalent of public health?

Berliner wrote a kind note back, saying, "I am with you, 100%."  He also said that in some of his work he has argued the same thing.  In his words, "one of the proper models for educational research is epidemiology," and that the question of the role poverty plays in children's lives is an epidemiological question.

A lot of people have demonstrated the link between poverty and educational achievement, and one of the virtues of Berliner's work (here's a representative paper (pdf)) is the way he continues and extends this important demonstration.  He uses the PISA score data showing that students in low-poverty schools in the US do as well as those in Finland or Korea.  He cites UNICEF data on child poverty, showing that child poverty in the US is among the highest in the OECD.  I have looked at these data many times, and written about them before (http://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2012/07/social-class-and-reading.html).  But Berliner has taught me new things as well.  I particularly appreciated his discussion of very interesting data about how much of IQ can be attributable to one's genes.  According to an extensive study of 50,000 pregnant women and the children they went on to have (including enough sets of twins to be able to study the role of innate genetic differences), variation in IQ among the affluent seems to be largely genetic.  Among the poor, however, IQ has very little to do with genes--probably because the genetic differences are swamped and suppressed by the environmental differences, as few poor kids are able to develop as fully as they would in less constrained circumstances.

Berliner has also, more than most other writers on the subject, tried to begin charting some of the specific causal links between poverty and educational achievement.  He points, in particular, to a number of medical problems that are far more prevalent among the poor than among the middle-class and the affluent; he discusses ear infections, asthma, lead and mercury poisoning, low birthweight.  He also points to the effects of growing up in a poor neighborhood.  Poor kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods do better than poor kids who grow up in poor neighborhoods, and as segregation by class has increased over the past few decades, this factor has become increasingly important.  Berliner also talks about environmental pollution, the way it affects people in poor neighborhoods far more than those in rich ones.

To level this tilted playing field, Berliner suggests a number of interventions, among them universal health care and a greater geographic dispersal of low-income housing. He also suggests universal free preschool, free summer school, and more programs to reduce food insecurity.  These suggestions are reasonable, and I support them.  We should be dealing with poverty directly, rather than thinking we can cure it through the schools. (1)  Perhaps if single-payer health care were seen, as it should be, as an educational program, it might get more support.


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Footnote:
Last year, Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times about the link between social class and educational achievement ("Class Matters. Why Won't We Admit It?" 12/11/11).  Since usually, as the headline implies, the establishment simply ignores this inconvenient truth, it was something of an achievement to get the link between poverty and education mentioned in the Times.  But in order to be "realistic" enough to get published, Ladd and Fiske had to elide the point that we weren't going to solve our educational achievement problems by changing our schools.  Instead, they proposed making our schools responsible for the poverty as well as the education!  This was a bit backwards, and I said as much in a letter to the editor, a letter that I was very proud to have published, since it was the only one that said the obvious, that it was more the poverty that needed to change than the schools.

Literacy by any means necessary: the Malcolm X method of learning vocabulary

As an American literature teacher, I'm used to thinking of classic American literature as a treasure trove of extremely thoughtful meditations about almost everything, so I'm very interested in what the American canon has to say about education in general, and about reading in particular.  I've written about To Kill a Mockingbird's caustic portrayal of school and its loving celebration of a Frank Smith-like culture of reading, and about the great scene in which Huck Finn's father castigates his son for learning to read.  American autobiographies are full of wonderful descriptions of coming into literacy (in Smith's words, of joining the literacy club)--sometimes by reading books on your own (Ben Franklin), by reading aloud as a family (Henry James), by using the library (Richard Wright).

These American autobiographies are especially good on reading as a form of self-definition and self-discovery.  Most of the richest and most poignant examples of this that I can think of happen to be from autobiographies of Black Americans--from Frederick Douglass to Richard Wright to Barack Obama. I love Frederick Douglass's story of deliberately making friends with poor white boys and bribing them with bread so that they would teach him to read--but Malcolm X's story is the one I'm going to focus on today.  I'll talk about Malcolm's efforts in more detail, but I want to note first that for all of these extraordinarily gifted and amazingly determined men, the journey to literacy was, in Douglass's words, "a long, tedious effort for years."  We should not kid ourselves; even as we try to help make the process as easy and painless as possible, we need to remember that learning to read and write well is not always easy, especially for those suffering from their place in an oppressive social system.

The Malcolm X method of vocabulary instruction
If we want our kids to learn vocabulary, maybe we should think about people who have actually done it.  We've probably all read the part of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in which Malcolm describes teaching himself to read, but I hadn't reread it for years, and it's worth looking at again.  In prison, Malcolm (I call him by his first name with all respect) had started corresponding with Elijah Muhammad, and he became frustrated with his inability to express himself clearly.  He also found that when he tried to read, he didn't know many of the words.  He ordered a dictionary from the prison library and looked at it.  Not knowing what to do--since there were so many words he needed to learn, he just started writing, and he copied the down the first page of the dictionary: definitions, punctuation and all.

It took him all day to copy out that first page.  Then he re-read what he had written down.  He was fascinated.  He liked the word "aardvark."  So he copied down the next page.  And he filled tablet after tablet of paper, and in the end he COPIED OUT THE ENTIRE DICTIONARY!

According to Malcolm X, copying out the dictionary was a great way to learn words, and as he learned more words, he was able to understand the books he tried to read, and as he could understand the books better, he came so to love reading that he read non-stop, and you couldn't have gotten him "out of books with a wedge." And the famous clincher: reading was liberating. Although he was in prison, he had "never been so truly free."  For Malcolm, every page of his books was what Richard Wright called it: a "ticket to freedom."

When the work becomes their own
Copying out the entire dictionary worked very well for Malcolm X.  Should we have our students do it?  Maybe. But I think, looking at this story, the main lesson I take away is that of motivation.  Malcolm was obviously gifted--but he had always been gifted.  He had a lot of time--but so did every other prisoner.  The determination to improve his vocabulary came only when he was (a) highly motivated and (b) face to face with his own poor ability (1).  He was very interested in writing to Elijah Muhammad, and he realized that he could not, in his letters, say what he wanted to say.  When motivated to read and write, and aware that he needed to improve, he figured out a method that worked for him.

Is it possible to create, for our students, conditions similar to those that led Malcolm X to copy out the dictionary?  (Our students are certainly not imprisoned, but they are under the supervision of the state for several hours a day, for many years.)  How can we ask them to do writing that they actually care about doing?  The student newspaper is an excellent way--for the kids who work on it. What can we do in our classes? Creative writing?  Sure--for some.  Have them write letters?  Have them write opinion pieces?  We do that stuff...  How can we have them do more writing that they actually really want to do?  The second condition--that they be confronted with their own poor ability--we arguably already try to do, in our grades and comments.

So one thing we could try is giving the students more freedom in what they write and harsher grades on their writing.  Another thing we could try is giving significantly less feedback on their writing and how to improve it.  This would feel extremely unnatural to us, and would probably be really difficult, and our students might hate us for it--but it might work.  (Is that crazy?  Maybe.  It's been a long week...)  I remember my father's telling me he only learned to write when he was a freshman in college and had a choice: learn to write better, or fail out.  My wife, too, only really learned to write when she was a freshman in college and had to work really hard on revising her own papers.  The burden needs to be on the students, not on us.  How do we put it there?

I don't know how to do it, but I have seen the results. Tonight I watched the Shakespeare play at my school. It was wonderful.  The students did amazing work, and they took full responsibility for it.  In fact, they took so much responsibility that in the talk-back after the play, the teacher who directed the play was not even mentioned--not even once.  Now that is a triumph of teaching! The play couldn't have happened without her, but for the students the work became their own.



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Footnote:

(1)
These two factors are exactly parallel with the ones that spurred Ben Franklin to extraordinary efforts at self-improvement.  Franklin was having a debate in letters with a friend of his on various hot topics of the day--like whether it was worth educating women (Ben said yes)--and his father happened to see a few of the letters.  His father told Ben that while Ben often had stronger arguments, the friend was a better writer.  This criticism so wounded Ben's vanity that he went to extraordinary lengths to try to improve his writing: first he took articles from his favorite magazine, the Spectator, made notes on their content, and then tried to reconstruct the article from his outline; second, he took Spectator articles and tried to turn them into rhyming verse; third, he took the rhyming verse versions of the articles and put them back into plain prose.  This is not even to go into the lengths he went to obtain books (after he "borrowed" one in the evening he would stay up all night to read it by candlelight so as to be able to return the book before it would be missed in the morning, and he became a vegetarian and subsisted on a "bisket" or "a handful of raisins" in order to save money to buy books).  Ben Franklin, like Malcolm X, had a powerful practical reason to want to be good at writing (to best his friend Collins) and was confronted with his own poor ability (when his father said Collins wrote better than he did).

Election Special: Presidential Prep Schools (Part II: English Department Goals)

I have suggested that what comes naturally to us as teachers may not always be the best practice, and I often think that teachers can learn a lot from looking beyond our own classrooms: from looking at the way our literature portrays reading; from looking at homeschooling; from looking at good educational research; and from looking at medicine and doctors (and the health care field more generally).

Another place we should look is at schools that might be different from our own.  Leafstrewn High is a public school--a relatively privileged one (our community has, I think, the most graduate degrees per person of any in the United States), but still a public school.  Anybody who can get an apartment in the town, we enroll.  In this we are distinctly different from private schools, which can select, filter, exclude, hand-pick, etc.  So I thought I'd see if private school English departments speak about their practices in the same way we do--or the same way public schools that serve less privileged students do.  Because it's election season, and because our two candidates both went, as do their children and most of the other super-elite in this country, to private school, I looked up the English department web pages for the two presidential prep schools, the Punahou Academy and the Cranbrook School. 

Interestingly, what I found was in many ways similar to what Leafstrewn's English Department says and does.  The mission statements at these elite private schools, however, go far beyond the skills and standards-based philosophy that is in effect at many schools serving less privileged student populations (1). Whereas schools for the less privileged often describe a narrow view of reading, describing skill development and little else, schools to which the elite send their children seem to consider reading quite broadly, mentioning skill development but quickly moving on to morals, imagination, ethics, spirituality and passion.

The mission statement of our English Department
Several years ago, the Leafstrewn English department took a month or so and wrote a mission statement.  Here it is:

We teach all students to think critically and creatively, to read carefully, and to write well.  In our classes we foster relationships, engagement, independence and confidence.

That's a pretty good statement.  I like the attention to things that are not English-specific: thinking, relationships, engagement, independent, confidence.  I could wish that the reading and writing were more clearly tied to these aims, but as a short statement, it's good enough for me.  The Presidential prep school English Departments have websites with much longer statements, statements that draw out the connections more clearly.

Cranbrook: Reading as a "lifelong habit" that "transforms the individual"
The Cranbrook School, Mitt Romney's alma mater, seems to be fairly traditional.  Though it has progressed beyond the days in which gay students were baited and bullied and given impromptu tonsures, it still, even in its English Department, "remains committed to gender segregation."  Like Leafstrewn, it has core texts and doesn't offer elective English courses until Senior year.  It also, however, unlike many public schools, is willing to openly state goals that go beyond mere academic skills.

Cranbrook does talk about explicit instruction in vocabulary, grammar, and reading "rigorous training" in written expression, but it also talks about how its faculty will share their "passion" for literature. Cranbrook's English faculty "believe that the study of literature is a life-long habit"; they also believe that "reading transforms individuals beyond the development of academic competency," helping them "gain the capacity to take reasoned positions on complex questions and develop an appreciation of other cultures" and thus become "better citizens."

Punahou: Reading as a spiritual and ethical pursuit
The Punahou Academy as a whole is interested in more than just academics (and does not see that interest as limiting student freedom); the Punahou English department seems to be at the center of this endeavor.  As the course catalog explains: "In order to educate the heart as well as the mind, Punahou students are asked to explore their spirituality, examine their ethical systems, and develop their roles in communities." To fulfill this requirement students must take a course in which these issues are directly addressed; among the regular offerings with a Spiritual, Ethical and Community Responsibility (SECR) credit are only two Social Studies courses, but nine English courses.

The Punahou English Department's statement of its own goals (1) is also remarkable, saying nothing about reading fluently, or with comprehension, or with proficiency.  No, Punahou has something much more ambitious in mind: "The goal of the Academy English Department is to teach students to read compassionately, think exactingly, write clearly and gracefully, and act with the compassion, exactitude, clarity and grace they derive from their engagement with the English language and with literature."  To read compassionately!  And then to act!  Despite a faint tinge of noblesse oblige (remember "compassionate conservatism"?), these are admirable aims. I am troubled by the fact that both candidates, like so many others in the ruling class, went to fancy private schools that are cut off, even more than places like Leafstrewn, from the masses. Nevertheless, if I had to vote for a candidate based solely on his prep school's English department mission statement, I would have to vote for Obama (despite his continuing war-making, extra-judicial executions and willingness to cut Social Security and Medicare).

What do these goals imply?
I'm interested in these goals in and of themselves--good reading may make us more compassionate, though I wonder if other things are more important!--but I'm also curious about whether having a focus that goes beyond skills (what someone a colleague of mine was reading called "authentic" reading and writing) might actually improve skills more than a set of aims that remained focused primarily on skills.  Some research suggests that this is so, and it would make sense.  That also seems to be our thinking at Leafstrewn; I hope we keep it that way.

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Footnotes:

(1)

I looked at the websites of twenty or so high schools across the country that serve less privileged students.  At most of these high schools the websites were terrible, and even at those that did have a substantial web presence, there was often no information about academics at all.  Some promised information and then didn’t give it; the high school my mom and several of my grandparents attended, in Southern Ohio, had a page on its website entitled “Curriculum”, but this “Curriculum” page showed only the Bell Schedule and the grade scale (A: 93-100; B: 86-92; etc.).  At most of the high schools that did describe their curriculum or mission, the English department statements put a great emphasis on skills, saying nothing about passion, imagination, morality, or spirituality.  Here are two representative statements:

KIPP NYC College Prep

The English Department at KIPP NYC College Prep offers a rigorous four-year course of study that fosters critical thinking, reading and analytical skills, technological proficiency and creativity, and sophistication in writing. With the skills gained through this course of study, Students graduating from KIPP NYC College Prep will be prepared for success in the academic and  professional areas  of  their  choice.

Brighton High:

 The Language Arts Department offers a standards-based curriculum which offers a variety of required courses and electives. These courses not only meet the Massachusetts State Frameworks but also prepare students to be successful in English at the college level. The Boston Public Schools curriculum is taught in all grades (9-12). Students in grades 9-12 have over 7 hours of instruction per week in Language Arts.

Students read literature of various genres and are asked to carefully analyze and respond to literature through key questions, as well as developing their fluency through reading independently selected texts. Writing is taught as a process; students are encouraged to revise and rewrite as frequently as necessary, and representative samples of student writing are published on a regular basis. Vocabulary and language skills are integrated throughout the language arts curriculum. 

(2)

From the Punahou course catalog, available here:

The goal of the Academy English Department is to teach students to read compassionately, think exactingly, write clearly and gracefully, and act with the compassion, exactitude, clarity and grace they derive from their engagement with the English language and with literature. We believe that offering students a wide variety of curricular challenges with language and literature will increase their capacity for perception, feeling, reason, and tolerance; nourish their imaginations; and inspire their actions.

Election special: Presidential Prep Schools (Part I)

Our presidential candidates, like most of the US plutocracy, attended private high school.  I'm interested in the differences between the education and literacy of the elite and the education and literacy of the masses, so I spent an hour or so looking at the Presidential prep schools: the Punahou Academy (Obama) and the Cranbrook school (Romney), and another hour or so trying to think about the differences between these schools and public schools.  I find it troubling that our elites are withdrawing more and more from the spheres that the rest of us inhabit, and the private school/public school divide is just one rift among many.  What does this divide look like, and what does it mean?  I'm not really sure, but I've written two posts trying to explore the matter.  This first post is about Punahou and Cranbrook in general, and I'll post something tomorrow about what the schools' English departments say they're doing.

General differences between private high schools and public high schools
These high schools are different from public high schools mainly in their student populations.  The main reason Obama, Romney, Gates and other elites go to private school is that private schools are allowed to exclude kids who are less docile, less privileged, and less able.  Good public schools are mostly "good" because they enroll more docile, privileged and able students, and low-performing public schools are mostly bad because they enroll less docile, less privileged, and less able students. Elite private schools take this difference between "good" public school and "bad" public school to a whole different level, since even at Leafstrewn we don't actively select our students. Punahou and Cranbrook are able to hand-pick their students, and their enrollments are made up almost entirely of extremely privileged and genetically fortunate children (according to an interesting study differences in academic ability among rich kids are at least 50% genetic, whereas among poor kids environment accounts for 90% of academic ability).  At Punahou or Cranbrook, the few scholarship kids, like the young Barack Obama, are rare birds completely unrepresentative of their poorer peers (and Obama was hardly poor).  This hand-picked student body is by far the most important difference between a private and a public school, since students are the most important factor in student achievement at any school, more important than the curriculum, the teachers, or even the budget. .

Non-academic factors also matter
The student population is also important for non-academic reasons, of course. Just as I myself prefer public schools (as a teacher and a parent) for non-academic reasons, many people prefer private schools for non-academic reasons.  Having different populations means that the friends children make are different; the parent population is different; and the culture is different.  But the differences go beyond population.

For one thing, the physical plant is usually dramatically different.  My son goes to public school in a scary, depressing, prison-like structure:
 

Our President and his opponent, on the other hand, went to lushly landscaped academic chateaux.  (Cranbrook's campus, below left, was called, by the New York Times's architecture critic, "one of the greatest campuses ever created anywhere", and Punahou, at right, reminds me somehow of the Hearst castle at San Simeon):

Academic differences beyond the student population
Aside from the populations, and aside from the culture and the architecture and the groundskeeping, these private schools are also dramatically different from public schools in two ways: (1) they have lower student-teacher ratios; (2) they are not bound by governmental curriculum and testing requirements.

The student-teacher ratios at wealthy private schools are dramatically different from those even at public schools in wealthy towns.  The public schools in leafy Bloomfield Hills, where Cranbrook is located, are relatively well-funded, and have extremely low numbers of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch.  While nationwide about 50% of students are eligible for Free or Reduced Price lunch, the number in our own wealthy Leafstrewn is 13%, and in the Bloomfield Hills public schools it's even lower, somewhere between 2 and 8%.  Nevertheless, whereas the public schools in Leafstrewn and Bloomfield Hills have student-teacher ratios of between 11 and 15, Cranbrook has a student-teacher ratio of 8.

Private schools are also not bound by nearly as many government rules.  Punahou and Cranbrook both require standardized tests to get in, and both brag about their SAT results and their National Merit Semifinalists, but neither school subjects its students to the battery of standardized tests that are a yearly disruption of the routine at Leafstrewn and every other public school in the country.  They are also free to run their schools, including their English departments, however they wish--but I'll wait until tomorrow's post to address that.

What do these differences mean?
One thing they mean is that when politicians or billionaires talk about school reform, it is hard for me to take their words at face value.  If standardized testing is so important for improving schools, why don't elite parents push for their own children's schools to give the same tests?  My son went to a private quaker school for a couple of years in between public schools, and he did not take the MCAS.  Malia and Sasha do not have to take standardized tests every year.  Why not? And if class size doesn't matter much, as Bill Gates is so fond of saying, why is it that Punahou and Cranbrook and Lakeside (Gates's alma mater) have dramatically lower teacher-student ratios than public schools do? (In fact the data is pretty clear: as you would expect, class size does matter, and it matters more for poor kids. The chair of Obama's council of economic advisors, Alan Krueger, has done great work on this--see his 2003 article, available here--but Arne Duncan has said that larger classes in high school might be a good idea.)  So in my eyes, neither Presidential candidate has much credibility on education, and both ignore the most important factors in our country's educational health.

Another thing these differences mean is that we public school teachers might look at the curriculum and teaching at private schools, since they probably do things slightly differently.  I've been thinking a lot about how we English teachers can learn from looking at doctors, at literature, at homeschooling, at international differences, and so on; prep schools are another interesting outside comparison. So tomorrow I'll say something about the way the two Presidential Prep schools say they handle reading, and I'll say which candidate I would vote for if all I knew was their high school's English department mission statement.

Where are our graduate schools of "Educational Public Health"?

"Schooling" and "Education"
Mark Twain famously said that he never let schooling interfere with his education (1).  That's an exaggeration, no doubt, but it gets at an important phenomenon. A lot of one's education--arguably, most of it--happens outside of school.  A researcher I admire, David Berliner, writes that the data show that 60% of educational achievement results from out-of-school factors, while only 20% of achievement, at most, is based on in-school factors. This jibes with what I see every day--but it's a truth that is usually ignored in discussion of educational achievement.  When people talk about "education", they almost always mean "school."  This is unfortunate, not only for children, but for teachers, too.  I wonder if part of the reason that our discussion about education is so limited and inadequate is that we simply don't have good terms with which to talk about it.

If teachers and doctors are somewhat comparable, is there a comparable issue in looking at health?  Is most of a person's health due to factors that have nothing directly to do with doctors or treatment?  Yes, definitely!  So, to understand the schooling/education distinction, it might be helpful to look more closely at the parallel issue in health care.

The study of health, unlike education, has a very clearly defined field, separate from "medicine", that looks at the larger social factors.  That field has its own prestigious schools that parallel medical schools, its own professors, its own vast academic literature.  It also has a handy name: not "medicine" but "public health."  Education has none of these things--no insitutions, no professors, not enough literature, no handy name--and it sorely needs them.  I'd love to see Harvard's GSE renamed the Harvard Graduate School of Schooling, and a new school established--but with what name?  The Harvard Graduate School of Public Education? Probably not.  The Harvard School of Educational Public Health?  Maybe...


How Medicine and Public Health are different
The distinction between medicine and public health is an important one.  To think in terms of medicine is to think about directly "treating" the individual "patient."  To think in terms of public health is to think what factors directly or indirectly affect larger populations.  A public health perspective sees cancer not so much as an illness of the individual patient, to be treated by means of knives and poisons, but rather as a result of large-scale societal factors including various kinds of pollution, diet, or the use of alcohol or tobacco.  Broadly speaking, the public health perspective thinks about preventing problems, while the medical perspective thinks about treating those problems.

Both of these perspectives are useful and necessary, but the public health perspective is arguably far more important.  Just as out-of-school factors contribute far more to educational achievement than in-school factors, public health factors contribute far more to health than medical factors.  The dramatic increase in life expectancy over the past couple of hundred years  is due far more to improvements in public health (clean water, safer foods, vaccination, etc.)  than improvements in medical care.  Citing a CDC report as an authority, my favorite website reports: "During the 20th century, the average lifespan in the United States increased by more than 30 years, of which 25 years can be attributed to advances in public health."

The distinction between medicine and public health is well-defined and well-known, but we don't, unfortunately, make the same distinction in education.  This is regrettable, because just as direct medical care is less important for health than larger social factors, so formal schooling is less important for education than larger social factors, but these larger factors are routinely ignored in the public discourse about "education".  When the Gates foundation attempts to "advance student achievement", or when the Presidential candidates talk about how educational achievement is a key to building the American economy, or when the New York Times makes the same point, the focus is entirely on schools, and there is not even a word, not even a nod, to the "Public Health" side of things.  At best, we get the oft-repeated truism that the teacher is "the most important in-school factor in student achievement"--a sneaky formulation which glosses over the fact that out-of-school factors are far, far more important.

Why Medicine and School get too much attention!
That formal schooling isn't as important as the extracurricular environment is not a new idea.  Americans have always been somewhat suspicious of school.  Our two most famous American autobiographies, by Ben Franklin and Henry Adams, are both explicitly about extracurricular education. Nevertheless, we don't have institutions devoted to studying the out-of-school factors and how to affect them--and we don't have a name for it.

Perhaps a new term wouldn't make a difference.  Even public health, which has a pretty good, pretty well-known name, is consistently--especially in America--underestimated, underfunded, and often ignored.  In both medicine and education, there are structural reasons for ignoring the "public health" side of things and focusing on the medicine side.

First, what would be best for the public as a whole is often in conflict with some individual's local interest, and can often be painted as conflicting with the value of "freedom."  Banning tobacco in bars is one example.  There was resistance to smoking bans from tobacco companies, from smokers themselves, and from the restaurants and bars (which didn't realize that the promise of disgusting air and ashtray hair was keeping more customers away than the freedom to smoke was drawing in). Often, too, the special interests will lose much more, per person than the public interest will gain.  Clean air regulations are an example: adding a year or so to everyone's life is a good thing, but that year is, at the individual level, uncertain and far away, while affected industries may lose millions of dollars in profits right away.  So public health initiatives face an uphill battle.

Attention to and funding for the medical approach, on the other hand, have far fewer structural barriers, especially in American culture.  The most highly energized advocacy groups are those made up of people directly affected by disease, and those groups tend, naturally, to focus on treatment and cure rather than on prevention.  If you or someone you love has breast cancer, you are most concerned with getting rid of it, not with decreasing the chances that others will get it in the future.  Doctors, too, perhaps especially in our system, are far more focused on treatment than on prevention.  There's more glory in it, there's more money in it, and there's probably more immediate human satisfaction in treating a person who's suffering than there is in helping a healthy person stay healthy.

The same structural factors are at work in education.  Even though, as I said, in-school factors generally account for only about 20% of educational achievement (and a key in-school factor, the other students in the building, might be considered an out-of-school factor!) while out-of-school factors account for about 60% of achievement, there is far more focus on schools--what we might call treatment--than on the extracurricular environment.  We are all worried about our own individual schools.  Students, parents, and teachers want to make our schools as good as they can be.  Nearly everyone living in Leafstrewn, even those without kids, wants the schools to be as good as they can be, because then Leafstrewn will be a more attractive place to live, property values will rise, richer people will move in, and so on.

Educational public health, on the other hand, has no particular constituency.  Sure, there are a few scattered folks at Ed. Schools who work on these matters, and a few here and there in psychology, public policy, economics or sociology departments, or at think tanks (2), and there are teachers and parents who are keenly aware that education is about much, much more than just school, but the idea lacks a coherent interest group.

A local habitation and a name
There is all the more reason, then, to come up with a term, to build institutions that will study it and advocate for it, and to make sure never to ignore it when we are discussing schools.

But what to call it?  Anyone have any ideas?


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Footnotes:
(1) Mark Twain was not alone.  Bruce Springsteen learned more from a two-minute record than he ever learned in school. Paul Simon had some choice words about what he learned in high school and how it affected his ability to think.  John Ashbery writes that in school "all the thought got combed out."  For these writers, school was not where education happened.  But even when education does happen in school, its effects are often dwarfed by out-of-school effects.
(2)  I have learned a lot from reading the work of, among many others, Christopher Jencks, Richard Rothstein, David Berliner, B.J. Biddle,  Helen Ladd, Stanley Aronowitz, Stephen Krashen, and Gerald Coles.  Of those, I think only Berliner and Krashen held positions in Ed. Schools, and Krashen started out in a Linguistics department.