Beyond Red & Blue

Apple indoctrinates Maine youth with free Macs

Note: I am now blogging at Robert David Sullivan. You can also follow me on Twitter @RobertDSullivan.

The Boston Globe reports that Apple Computers has worked out a deal to provide every high-schooler in Maine with a MacBook laptop computer. (It will cost the state $240 per year per computer.)

If people form attachments to computer companies the same way they form attachments to political parties, this could mean a whole new generation of Mac loyalists in the Pine Tree State.

I'm not particularly alarmed, but I've been under Apple's spell since the early '90s. Others, however, may be upset that Maine public schools are interfering with parents' rights to guide their children toward one true operating system.

U.S. brings up the rear in Education Olympics

While everyone focuses on the medal count in Beijing, where the Americans are #1, folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based education think tank, have been running a parallel international competition on educational achievement and things aren't going well for Team U.S.A.  Using four main international measures of student achievement, the institute's "Education Olympics" puts countries to the test in 58 categories.  While the U.S. medal count in Beijing currently stands at 101, we have grabbed just one measley medal in the Education Olympics, a gold in the civics category that measures students' ability to distinguish fact from opinion and interpret political cartoons.  Leading the medal count in the Education Olympics are Finland (35), Hong Kong (33), and Singapore (16).

Musical high school part of New York's charter expansion

The New York Times reports that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has approved 18 new charter schools in that city, including an all-girls elementary school where everyone will study Spanish and a school where all students must learn at least two musical instruments. Elissa Gootman writes:

The city’s charter schools generally outperform traditional public schools on standardized reading and math tests, and many charters have been flooded with applications and have had to turn away hundreds of children whose names are not drawn in admissions lotteries. But charters have not been universally embraced. In some places, parents have complained about the mayor’s policy of giving charter schools space in existing public school buildings and about the unfairness of their smaller class size, and have called them a diversion from his responsibility to fix the school system overall.

Lisa Prevost wrote about Bloomberg's educational reforms in this year's special Education issue of CommonWealth.

The end of middle schools?

The Boston Globe's James Vaznis reports that middle schools in Massachusetts -- which cover any combination of grades 5 through 8, depending on the school district -- have become the low part in a hammock of test scores:

Two-thirds of the state's middle schools are not meeting federal standards for raising standardized test scores, about twice the rate of elementary and high schools, according to a Globe analysis of state data.

The findings are raising questions about the best teaching practices for students wading through the turbulent years of puberty, first crushes, and short attention spans.

But concern about the middle school teaching model isn't new. Last year, CommonWealth magazine's Michael Jonas reported on the idea of eliminating the schools altogether:

“Middle schools are the great disaster of the education system,” says Robert Gaudet, senior policy analyst at the University of Massachusetts’s Donahue Institute, who has extensively studied school performance across the state. A 2004 report from the Rand Corp. concluded that there is “weak empirical support” for the idea of separate schools for this three-year span, and it recommended consideration of models that reduce the number of transitions children make between schools.

Is school desegregration still a priority -- or even a possibility?

In yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon looks at a possible shift away from racial integration in public schools and toward attempts at race-neutral, socioeconomic diversity. But there's a problem with either approach:

Simple demographics dictate that [most large cities] hey can’t really integrate their schools at all, by either race or class. Consider the numbers for Detroit (74 percent low-income students; 91 percent black), Los Angeles (77 percent low-income; 85 percent black and Hispanic), New York City (74 percent; 63 percent), Washington (64 percent; 93 percent), Philadelphia (71 percent; 79 percent), Chicago (74 percent; 88 percent) and Boston (71 percent; 76 percent). In theory, big cities can diversify their schools by class and race by persuading many more middle-class and white parents to choose public school over private school or by combining forces with the well-heeled suburbs that surround them. But short of those developments, big cities are stuck. “The options have shrunk,” says Tom Payzant, a former superintendent of schools in Boston.

CommonWealth staff writer Gabrielle Gurley looked at the same issues from a Massachusetts perspective in "A Question of Equity," in our Winter 2008 edition.

You kids get off my lawn and stay out of my wallet!

The Arizona Republic has a column on retirement communities in Arizona and Florida that have adopted an "not my responsibility" attitude toward future generations. Andrew Blechman, author of Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias, writes:

After defeating 17 school-bond measures in 12 years, de-annexing from the local school system, and all the energy spent evicting "contraband children," Sun Citians can likely forget relying on the goodwill of their neighbors who often share a reciprocal bounty of distrust, anger and apathy. Shown in this light, Sun City's claim to fame - community service - rings rather hollow.

Life in the Villages is similarly premised: Seniors have taken control of their county's political machinery and have already begun closing parks for young families who live outside the gated community. As one Villager proudly told me without a trace of irony, "In the Villages we spend our tax dollars on ourselves."

Massachusetts has seen a bunch of age-restricted housing complex come online in recent years, but at least it's not so easy to secede politically from governments that feel obligated to provide parks and education.

Education reform in Mass. and in Florida

The Boston Herald reports on yesterday's Boston College and MassINC event looking at the state of education reform in Massachusetts. A transcript of the event will be available on the MassINC site soon.

Meanwhile, the St. Petersburg Times sums up what's been happening in Florida's public education system:

Florida is No. 1 in the nation in vouchers. It's No. 2 in charter school enrollment. It's No. 4 in the percentage of high school students passing college-level exams.

Numbers like these have made Florida the nation's most-watched laboratory for education policy.

But:

The state's graduation rate remains one of the nation's worst. And critics say [former Gov. Jeb] Bush's agenda is fueled by a right-wing ideology that has produced more spin than miracle.

Patrick ready to confront teachers' unions?

Not necessarily. But today's Boston Globe reports that Gov. Deval Patrick is "set to propose a new form of public school that would assume unprecedented control over matters ranging from curriculum and hiring decisions to policies on school uniforms and the length of the school year." According to the story by Tania deLuzuriaga and Matt Viser, the new "readiness" schools would incorprate characteristics of charter schools and Boston's pilot schools, with an eye toward encouraging innovative teaching methods tailored to each school's student body.

The description sounds similar to that of the high-performing schools analyzed in "Held Back," Michael Jonas's cover story in the current issue of CommonWealth:

These so-called “high-performing, high-poverty” schools almost invariably combine three elements, says the report, no one of which can be left out of the equation. The first is termed “readiness to learn,” which means students are in a safe and inspired environment and have close relationships with teachers and other adult mentors. “Readiness to teach” means there is a “missionary zeal” among staff to boost student achievement and to work on their own professional development. Finally, the report says, these schools have a “readiness to act,” with school leaders having wide latitude to make “mission-driven” decisions on hiring, budget, and curriculum.

Student loan forgiveness for do-gooders

In today's Boston Globe, Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren and student Ganesh Sitaraman have a good summary of the repercussions from soaring student loans:

The high costs of carrying student loans echo through dozens of life-shaping decisions. Big student loans? Don't become a public school teacher, a firefighter, or a police officer - the pay is too low. Better not go into business for yourself - too risky when you have big loan payments every month. Don't apply to graduate school - just more debt. And don't even think of moving back to Iowa or Oklahoma - pay scales aren't high enough to support debt payments. Today's students talk about delaying marriage, not buying a home, and working full-time when babies are born, just so they can keep paying those student loans.

Their solution is to offer graduates full or partial loan forgiveness in exchange for a few years' work in public service. Not a new idea, but one that may get more support as the costs of education continue to rise.

Warren's op-ed fits into her larger thesis that housing and education -- not frivolous spending on TVs and cars -- are pushing the typical American family into debt. Read her interview with former CommonWealth editor Bob Keough from 2003, in which she notes how the desire for a home in the suburbs is about more than social status:

[P]arents are trying to pick among the ruins to find the school districts they believe represent a decent chance for their children to make it safely through school, get a good education, and launch them toward college. But as it becomes harder and harder to find good school districts, the prices in those particular zip codes keep going up.

Warren also participated in the CommonWealth forum titled "Going for Broke: Middle Class Families on the Financial Edge." Read the transcript here.

Remember education reform?

A special issue of CommonWealth, which will be released tomorrow and is now posted in full on our website, looks at the state of public schools 15 years after Massachusetts passed the Education Reform Act. Schools are still failing across the state, reports Michael Jonas, even though we're getting a pretty good idea of how to improve high-poverty districts. (It's not as simple as spending more money on them.) Too many students are getting a high-school diploma without being prepared for college, according to a story by Laura Pappano, which greatly reduces the chances that they'll actually earn degrees. And Charles Euchner reports that the neglect of physical education represents a lost opportunity to "spark" students' brains and put them in a better state of mind for learning.

The special issue also includes a debate on the merits of the MCAS test (the mayor of New Bedford says it shoudn't be a graduation requirement; former state Senate president Tom Birmingham and Nellie Mae Education Foundation president Nick Donohue defend MCAS); an interview with Mark Roosevelt, a co-author of the Education Reform Act and now superindentent of Pittsburgh public schools; and a look at the state's high school dropout crisis, which doesn't seem to have been helped at all by ed reform. 

There are also stories on declining enrollment in Massachusetts public schools (bad news for colleges and employers) and on the rising costs of school construction; plus maps, charts, and statistics on all aspects of public education; and a summing-up essay by incoming secretary of education Paul Reville.