The fourth National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, entitled “Creating Cultures of Collaboration,” is scheduled for October 3-5, 2008 in Austin, Texas. These are huge gatherings of mostly practical people who organize public meetings, dialogs, and discussions. They are also opportunities to discuss deliberative democracy and civic engagement. Early registration is available through May 16th. There are openings for new sessions. Details here.
The federally funded program called “Reading First” recently received a poor evaluation. The American Prospect‘s Ezra Klein comments, “This fits into the larger pattern in education reform efforts which is that most ideas fall short of expectations. Vouchers have found themselves in a similar decline, and now they’re losing support even among conservatives.” Kevin Drum from Washington Monthly picks up the theme: “This is one of the reasons I don’t blog much about education policy even though it’s an interesting subject. For all the sturm and drang, in the end nothing really seems to matter. After a hundred years of more-or-less rigorous pedagogical research, we still don’t know how to teach kids any better than we used to.”
There are at least three ironies here:
1. Two major liberal bloggers take the failure of a program that conservatives love as evidence that nothing works in education. (Many comments on their blogs note this irony, as well.)
2. Many progressive educators dislike formal experiments that have control groups and quantitative outcome-measures. They associate those methods with the Bush administration, and they fear that holistic and interactive forms of education will suffer if so evaluated. However, it was because Reading First was subjected to a rigorous quantitative evaluation that we know it doesn’t work.
3. Conservatives seem to love the phonics approach embodied in Reading First and distrust “whole language” methods, which involve teaching reading through literature. I can’t understand why this has become a left/right issue. Evangelical Protestants should be enthusiastic about reading narratives.
Leaving ironies aside, the big issue is: What do we know about what works in education? If you want to see the results of evaluations that use randomized control groups, you can check out the Feds’ What Works Clearinghouse. I think that’s a worthwhile offering, but it’s far from the whole story. It would not be surprising if few curricular packages–off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped programs–made a big difference to kids. After all, education is mostly about relationships: between teachers and their classes, among students, between teachers and parents, and between teachers and administrators. We know that some teachers consistently produce better results than others, holding other factors constant. That’s partly because their relationships are better. (They’re not necessarily nicer or friendlier, but they are more effective at working with children and other adults in their contexts.) We also know that the level of community participation in schools makes a difference. These factors matter, but they are hard to influence through national policy.
Certainly, any parent knows that some schools are better than others, and some teachers are better than others; and it’s not just because of money or demographics. That means that some things work in education. Yet simple mandates and programs are unlikely to make schools better, because they don’t influence relationships. And formal experiments that evaluate programs are most likely to show disappointing results.
The sorting of students into colleges and the marketing of colleges to prospective applicants sometimes seems a corrupt business, a marketplace in which prestige is sold to the highest bidder. It’s a domain of glitzy advertising, coaches and test-prep services, rankings, scouts, and networking. At least none of this is completely new. In 1506, the principal of an Oxford college called Staple Hall allegedly promised six shillings and eight pence (6s 8d) to a man who would introduce him to the Bishop of LLandaff so that he might persuade said Bishop to send a boy of his household to Staple Hall. A ward of a bishop was a good prospect to donate money after graduating. The principal allegedly failed to pay the promised 6s 8d, leading to a suit whose outcome I don’t know, but whose proceedings would probably seem perfectly familiar half a millennium later.
(Perhaps justice caught up with the principal of Staple Hall, for not long afterwards, his institution lay in “ruynes.” Around 1570, William Lambarde wrote about the halls of Oxford: “I have hearde that theare hathe been dyvers others of this kinde, and it seemeth true by the ruynes that yet appear in syghte. I redd in a case that theare was some tyme a house of learninge called Staple Hall; but where it stoade, I have not hytherto learned.”)
Sources: W.A. Pantin, Oxford Life in Oxford Archives, 1972, p. 6; John Alan Giles, History of Witney, 1852, p. 46.
I’ve spent the last two days helping to advise the government on the design of background questions that will accompany the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), a test-like survey of American kids. The background questions are about demographics and students’ experiences in and out of school. They help researchers to interpret and explain trends and gaps in the academic performance of our students.
The process for designing and administering the assessment is complex. It exemplifies the moral and practical complexity of government, and makes me wonder whether governance could be simpler. (I’m not sure that it could be.)
Take the example of how to categorize people by race and ethnicity. In the 1990s, people who considered themselves “multiracial” started lobbying for a separate category on the Census and other official data-collections. There were some objections, for instance, by people who didn’t want to reduce the count of African Americans because that would affect policies regarding legislative districts. Believe it or not, the Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) contracted with my colleagues and friends at the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy to decide what to do. OMB recognized that the problem was basically moral, not empirical. My colleagues recommended that respondents be allowed to check as many categories as they liked. There would be no “multiracial” category, but researchers could construct it by counting all the respondents who checked more than one box.
That became federal policy, which means that NAEP must now use a racial/ethnic identity survey that allows respondents to “check all that apply. But that leaves many questions:
♦ Who should answer the questionnaire: students, parents, or educators?
♦ When should it be answered (e.g., while taking a test, or at some other time)?
♦ Must students who have already been categorized now be recategorized according to the new scheme, or can they be “grandfathered in”?
♦ How many separate racial and ethnic categories should be offered? What should they be called (e.g., Hispanic or Latino)?
♦ How quickly must the new scheme be implemented?
♦ How should trends in educational performance be calculated and reported after any changes in methodology? For instance, it has been proposed to separate Asians from Pacific Islanders. Historically, Asians perform much better on the NAEP (on average). Separating the groups will therefore boost Asians’ scores and create a bigger gap, especially between Asians and African Americans and Latinos. The impact of the change, however, will be small. Should the trends in performance be reported without comment, with a huge caveat to discourage the public from paying attention, or not reported at all?
Here is Allison Fine’s important new paper for the Case Foundation on young citizens and the Internet. It’s an excellent summary. As I read the first 50 pages, which are mostly celebratory, I kept asking questions about the drawbacks or limits of online engagement. But then Allison asks what I consider the three main questions: Who doesn’t use the online media for political/social purposes? Do “bubble” cultures inevitably form online because it’s a medium of choice? Can online activism link effectively to government and policymaking? I might add a fourth question: Are young online citizens right to feel “a higher degree of confidence in corporations than in government institutions”? They “are drawn to brands with strong socially responsible cultures, such as Patagonia, Nau,Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Ben & Jerry’s.” But is that naive?
