Reverse Robin Hood: Poor Districts Pay More, Get Less

Sometimes there are some really egregious local issues that deserve national attention.  This one comes from Pennsylvania, and I hope some of you will take some action.  There is a convenient narrative that poor districts pay less in taxes, so their schools get less funding.  There is another narrative that per pupil spending on education is too high.  Both can be true, but neither is the whole story.  In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the story is quite different (Montgomery is right outside Philly, where the author of "If I were a poor black kid" that inspired this post was writing).  According to an article in the Pottsdam Mercury, low income districts are absorbing some of the largest budget cuts. 

The Problem

The article discusses a recent report released by the Education Law Center (ELC) that advocates for low-income students in PA.  The report has analyzed funding, which was cut to the tune of $1.5 billion since 2008.  According to their analysis "school districts with a low income population and high property tax rate, like Pottstown, have absorbed up to 10 times more of the $1.5 billion in cuts to state education funding than wealthier districts."  Worse, more cuts are slated and the most recent budget proposal calls for them to hit districts like Pottstown.  

The ELC analyzed Montgomery because the county is home to some of the best and worst in the state. Half of the ten districts with the smallest cuts and "all but one of the districts faring the best under Corbett’s budget are located in southeast Pennsylvania and read like a who’s who of wealthy locales." Not surprisingly, these districts also are among the lowest in student poverty concentrations in PA. 

Why It Matters

What is interesting about this policy is that districts have many low-income students, but some very high property tax rates.  An argument that I hear a lot, "It is not fair for the wealthy to subsidize students in schools their kids can't use," thus doesn't apply here.  Even if you buy into this argument and it applies, these allocations serve to entrench systemic inequalities:

• Low income parents have fewer resources to provide educational opportunities and programing for their kids after school, which leads to decay of previous learning and less overall time spent learning (in and out of school). 
• Low income parents tend to work more hours, be more likely to be single parents, and have less time to allocate to their children's education (as say to putting food on the table or trying to get a table) 
• Low income families tend to have fewer ties to the education system and the benefits of education, thus reducing resources to their schools can send very negative signals.  If you already doubt the value of school and see that your schools are not well funded or effective, then you are more likely to feel like your beliefs have been reaffirmed. 
• Lower budgets cut the amount of time that schools can offer programming and the amount/types of alternative programs they can offer.  That means that poor children are exposed to fewer things, are less likely to find topics that engage them, and are more likely to be routed into an unfilfilling career or track. 

Are these guaranteed outcomes? Absolutely not.  All the same, we should be very concerned as a nation when some of our most disadvantaged students are forced to face even more barriers to success than those that poverty and societal scorn already place upon them.   This is not an argument for higher per pupil expenditures. This is an argument about being fair in how difficult cuts need to be made.  This is an argument for allocating resources and talent in ways that maximize the outcomes at a systemic level.  You can't deny that investing more in students whose parents already provide a lot of support for education and extracurricular programming is somewhat wasteful in a budget-scarce environment.

Act on it!
 

• Write Governor Corbett and ask him to justify and reconsider this regressive policy
• Email: Governor@pa.gov
• Call: 717-787-2500
• Submit an Inquiry Online: http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1072219&parentname=ObjMgr&parentid=11&mode=2.
•  Contact the PA representatives who might change the coming budget:
• Senate Education Committee: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/cteeInfo/cteeInfo.cfm?cde=23&body=S
• Senate Finance Committee: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/cteeInfo/cteeInfo.cfm?cde=25&body=S
• Montgomery County's General Assembly Members: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/county_list.cfm?CNTYLIST=MONTGOMERY 
• Write your local school board or legislator or mayor/governor and inquire about how funding is distributed and how they make cuts when they face budgetary scarcity.  I guarantee this is not isolated to Montgomery County, PA. 

Speak Out!

• Post some ideas for letters you might write to these officials to ensure more equitable funding for schools. 
• Have you seen this in other areas in the US? Call them out!  

Electives aren’t Elective for Artists and Diplomats

As funding gets tighter and tighter, more and more schools are inclined to cut funding for music, the arts, foreign languages and a whole host of other courses that are “nice” but “not necessary.  It makes practical sense, the argument goes.  Kids surely need to measure a triangle or identify adverbs before they learn another language or how to paint, right?  As you may have guessed, I believe that this reflects a value judgment more than a universal truth. 

As standardized testing increases and only makes schools accountable for Reading and Math scores, everything else (including science, history, shop, gym, and other more traditional “staple” courses) goes out the window.   But what about things you can’t test? What about kids with a special aptitude that we are not fostering that are instead written off as failures because they don’t know the Pythagorean theorem?  What about the classes that reinforce or deepen core skills? What about the classes that teach practical skill over theory?  It’s not all fluff, and the treatment of electives as superfluous should be of grave concern.  This post will look at (but not exhaustively) some benefits from these elective courses, look at how they might be incorporated into other courses when budget shortfalls and shortsighted policymakers combine forces to cut these courses, and will hopefully start a conversation about how to rethink how we approach electives for the sake of our kids.

Electives Reap Large Reawards

The most obvious benefits of electives are for people who are not entering a field directly tied to math or reading, and these are not all starving artist careers.  If your child wants to be a diplomat, foreign language should be a centerpiece of their education (sorry Madeline Albright).  If your child wants to be a physicist, well, a good start would probably be a physics class.  If your child wants to be a product designer, architect, medical researcher, lab technician, etc., they’d benefit from science classes in a lab or drafting classes in a studio.  If your child wants to be a chef or baker, perhaps home economics classes would shine at the forefront.  If your child wants to be a carpenter, mechanic, plumber, electrician, furniture maker or construction worker, shop classes would be key (right along side some science and geometry).  If your child wants to be the next Yo Yo Ma, a healthy dose of musical instruction will be key.  

That said, the benefits of elective courses goes above and beyond the obvious exceptions to students that don’t fit the school-college-knowledge worker path.  All students can benefit from elective courses. Here’s how:

Studying a Foreign Language

·      Carolyn Taylor-Ward’s Ph. D. dissertation found that students who had learned a foreign language in the third grade consistently outperformed their peers who had not on standardized tests, including on the English reading/writing portion. 

·      A Stanford University study found that high schools with a higher proportion of students enrolled in foreign language classes tended to have higher levels of annual performance (except in the case of schools with the highest incidence of poverty or English-language learners).

·      A Canadian study noted that students of foreign language tend to acquire and remember all information faster than their peers and tend to perform better in tasks requiring critical thinking. This holds true even for kids with cognitive disabilities.

·      Given the need to reach a global audience (or a more diverse American audience), when competing for a job, a candidate with a foreign language will—all other skills equal—be more likely to get the job and to help a company or agency reach a broader array of stakeholders.

Studying Art and Music

·      The American Youth Policy Forum just completed two studies that found that students, particularly poor students, that study the arts tend to do better on standardized tests.  Further, they found that 80% of students in schools with arts programs get all As and Bs while this is only true of about 65% of students with no arts education. 

·      Students of the arts may be more likely to go to a good college because as the amount of time a child studies art in high school increases so do BOTH their SAT Mat hand Verbal Scores. 

·      A Georgetown University Masters thesis found that children who take arts classes stay in school longer and are less likely to drop out of school.

·      Children in Tucson schools have proven far more engaged and focused when taking music and dance classes, and they also are using their whole bodies, which is of critical importance as diabetes and childhood obesity burgeon across the U.S.

Studying Shop and Home Economics

·      A recent Education.com article highlights several benefits of shop classes, which teach kids to focus, to carry out a project, to develop a concrete skill that can be directly used as a job, and to work in teams.  Additionally, these classes reinforce “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) course content.

·      Retooled shop classes like those mentioned above in Tucson have actually involved 21^st century processes and provide direct training for a high-tech manufacturing sector that is expected to add some 110,000 jobs in the next five years.

This is just a sampling of some of the electives we are watching go out the window, but their potential to improve the critical thinking, career prospects, practical skills, and EVEN standardized test performance, grades, student retention, and college readiness of our children should give you pause before allowing such classes to be cut.  That many are directly tied to greater improvements for the poorest students is of critical importance to closing the so-called “achievement gap” between white and minority students.

Electivizing the Core: Solutions in a Budget-Scarce Scenario (Act on it!)

The benefits above suggest that schools rich in these elective programs create students that master other subjects better, are more job-ready, are better able to think creatively and work in teams, and have a stronger love of learning.  I think the best solution is to do what Tucson did and directly increase the use of such programs from the top down and from the bottom up.  That said, for schools or districts that find increasing funding to such programs politically or economically impossible, there are some possible solutions that increase use of electives without touching the core curriculum:

1.     Use foreign languages to teach all subjects.  Children will learn English at home or around their town, so if they are taught every subject except possibly English or another foreign language in say Spanish or Arabic from a young age, that child will be much more likely to be bilingual and to master their course content at the same time.

2.     Use public-private partnerships to have companies sponsor high-tech shop programs.  These programs could occur afterschool or during holidays and could be tied to internships that more directly bridge the gap between the education system and job market and that need not be “remedial” or “fluff” courses.

3.     Encourage and support teachers in using elective-based lesson plans:

a.     A colleague of mine had her understanding of Africa’s changing map and history awakened when her father made her draw maps of Africa annually and she SAW the geopolitical changes that were occurring and was inspired to understand why what she was drawing had changed.

b.     Use shop, drafting or art lessons to illustrate principles of geometry.

c.      My Sophomore British Literature teacher had us act out scenes from literature or make newspapers or songs to illustrate a particular work or concept.

d.     My 1^st Grade teacher taught geography by asking us to learn key phrases in the languages of different countries, preparing or sampling food from those countries, dancing or celebrating holidays in those countries, etc. through a unit called “Tommy’s Travels.” Our mythical peer Tommy traveled around the world, and we’d reenact what he might have encountered.

4.     Use volunteer organizations like Habitat for Humanity or KaBOOM! to build these kinds of hard skills in students while improving their community and strengthening their ability to carry out a project, 

5.     Invite programs like Junior Achievement or Future Problem Solvers (both of which I did and found incredibly rewarding and helpful for engaging in teamwork and creative thinking) into Social science, science, or English courses.

Speak out!

Can you share a personal experience from a “non-core” or “elective” class that shaped your life?

What kinds of lessons have you used, experienced or heard of that creatively integrate arts, language, shop, problem-solving or other alternative classes into other subjects or parts of the school day in a creative way?

Stop Bothering Society, Poor Kid: Help Yourself!

People who know me, know that I am a firm believer in systemic inequalities. Our country has done a lot to reduce the legal barriers that inhibited certain races from realizing their full potential (though much still remains). That said, in a country that was built on slavery and did not fully protect the rights of Blacks in law until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, you have to imagine that the way the country operates is still favorable to Whites. Even if you full equalized everyone in law and you enforced those laws properly, all American institutions and measures of success are largely based upon White measures of success. Specifically, the White middle and upper class. This article may make you uncomfortable if you are squeamish about talking about race and class (or dislike sarcasm), but my philosophy is that you cannot fix a problem by ignoring it and political correctness is the quickest path to inertia.

An article recently published in Forbes Magazine, entitled “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” recently caught my attention. I responded to the article and then to the author’s response in forceful (and recognizable) terms My intent here is not to rehash my response, but to outline the problem with this author’s overly simplistic assessment and to go one step further by showing the math that debunks his “solution.”

Hey Black Kids, Follow the Binary Road!

Anytime someone who has never been poor or Black and who is not a kid decides to write a treatise on what poor, Black children should do…you should be apprehensive. In the article, a man who is a middle class (and always was middle class) technology expert gives advice to poor black children on how they themselves can and should lift themselves out of poverty. This advice includes:

• Getting good grades
• Using all the free sites on the web like Ted Talks, Cliff’s Notes (a real resource for understanding literature), Google Scholar and Project Gutenberg to do well.
• Finding study partners and using Skype to hone your intellect
• Making sure you get into an elite charter school or get a full ride to a private school
• Sucking up to the guidance counselor so that they help you find jobs, college, and other opportunities
• Learning software programming or computers or another "skill."

All of this advice builds to the conclusion that “Technology can help these kids. But only if the kids want to be helped. Yes, there is much inequality. But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.” (so, you see, poor, Black people are not smart because they aren't trying to not be poor...that is what you are saying, right sir?)

Wait, There Are Holes in This Guy’s Logic!?

Technology was good for this author: rather than giving him a healthy dose of my backhand, he only had to face my comments. As someone who grew up poor in a big city and who ended up going to Stanford, I actually have a lot of relevant experience to comment on this article (which he denied because poor kids, even after going to Stanford, are not smarter than he). A big part of his solution involves poor kids using computers, and he suggests that in the “unlikely event” that they don’t have one, they can just go to one of their wonderful public libraries.

The problem with libraries

As a child, I DID that. I went to the library, and I almost never touched a computer because poor kids (of all races) are competing with retired, unemployed, homeless people and others. Many computers also have a time restriction (in Chicago it was 30 minutes if someone is waiting, which they always were). Further, some of the things he mentions (google scholar, TED) can probably be accessed from a library computer. That said, most do not have the software or hardware for using Skype or for learning how to code. Further, if you don’t live near a library or it is in a sketchy area, the journey there could be dangerous.

Finally, I did a little calculation using Philadelphia to demonstrate the absurdity of his proposal:

According to the most recent census data, approximately 36,000 children in Philadelphia would be considered “poor, Black kids.” (I calculated this by multiplying Philly’s population by the percentage under age 18, multiplied by the percentage of people who are black, multiplied by the percentage of people who are “in poverty,” which probably understates the amount of people who might benefit from his “solutions.”) According to the Philadelphia Public Library Website, there are 68 public libraries. Not all libraries are open right now, no libraries appear to be open on Sundays, so I am again overstating the library’s ability to absorb people. Libraries are open from 9am to 8pm generally 5 days a week and 9 am until 5 pm on Saturdays (not all, but I’ll be generous). That means each library is open 3,285 hours a year. With 68 libraries, the whole system is open 223,380 hours a year. Let’s assume that each has an average of 20 computers (unlikely, but what the heck, we are white and middle class!). Then the system has just under 4.5 million computer hours to offer to poor black kids. That means, each of our 36,000 poor, black kids gets 125 hours with a computer per year if most skipped school for their allotment and if all other library patrons were banned from the computers. This also assumes perfect mobility and that all kids in poor neighborhoods have equal access to equally capacious libraries, which is a stretch.

Now, with about 1,200 of those library hours occurring during school time (40, five-day weeks lasting from 9am until 3pm), each library can realistically only offer 2,085 hours per year, reducing the system’s capacity to 142,000 non-school hours per year, and with 20 computers assumed per library about 2.8 million computer hours. This amounts to 78 hours per “poor, black kid.” How many skills have you mastered by dedicating 78 hours per year? Now if you assume that a kid needs about 30 minutes of homework help for the 200 days that school is in session, that leaves the kid with -22 hours for learning how to code. How many skills have you learned in -22 hours?

As I noted in my article on teachers correcting for systemic inequality, Chicago just moved to close most of its libraries on Mondays. With many cities facing budget shortfalls, the likelihood that public libraries can serve our nation’s poor as much as is needed to escape poverty is decreasing by the day.

Non-logistical problems with the article

Now, aside from the absurd idea that every kid can get the computer access they need to be able to use technology to solve all of their problems, there are many more problems with the author’s arguments:

1. Think back to high school…how was your guidance counselor? I lucked the heck out and I had a great one who helped me apply to colleges, but with a parent that had not gone to college and being in one of the worst public school systems in the nation, the likelihood that this is a sure path is very low.

2. When you are in a single-parent home or have no parents or your parents are working so much that they cannot help you with homework, how do you get good grades? How do you find out about all of these tech resources? How do you know to read interesting middle class guys on Forbes.com to save you from your poverty?

3. The Harvard Business Review recently wrote several articles that note that most people fail to achieve their goals because they are contingent upon things outside of themselves (for example, if I set the goal "get more hits on my blog," that is outside of myself, because you choose to come here, I can't force you...better goals might be: write more posts, leave the link to my blog in other fora, and use social media to attract people to my blog, all of which I can control). Getting good grades depends a lot a teacher’s subjective assessment, having enough food to be able to concentrate on studying/homework, having utilities to be able to see or not shiver to do your homework (or to go online if you are one of the many poor black kids with computers!), or having access to homework help.

4. I noted that the system is probably rigged in subtle ways to favor its creators: higher income whites. Kids are actually quite receptive to this, and kids have to have a lot of willpower to overcome the stigma that being studious often comes with. Many poor black kids get teased or bullied if they try to be studious, often for “acting white.” An educated child also experiences a lot of distance with their less educated family, which can make it tough to keep fighting an uphill battle.

5. The article ignores entirely the severe disadvantages with which most poor kids enter the public school system. The lack of preschool or structured afterschool programming sets them up to be disadvantaged going in. Further, given the amount of tracking (assigning kids to a regular or more accelerated class which usually determines their future trajectory), many kids may already be routed into the “slow lane" of public education.

6. If kids need to fight to get into good schools, then you are admitting that the public school system is failing them in a disproportionate way, which is antithetical to the point of PUBLIC education, as I noted in my article on charters. As the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman” clearly shows, there is not enough supply of charter /private school seats for poor pupils.

7. It is really hard to fight for 78 hours of public library time after school while also getting a job or internship care of your amazing guidance counselor. Further, what if you are an older sibling caring for your younger siblings?

8. Did you skip childhood? Do you know how hard and counterintuitive it is for a child to be that self-disciplined? Part of the advantage that all higher-income kids have is that they are embedded in a web of discipline that is geared toward doing well in school.

9. This article is incredibly paternalistic (I won’t go so far as to say that the author is racist, because I think he believes his ignorant, ill-informed ideas and thinks that they really are a way to help poor kids.). One, it assumes knowledge of something that the author has never experienced. Two, it assumes that poor, black people should work themselves into the ground to be qualified to serve people like him and his business needs.

10. The article completely removes all culpability from the system or from wealthier people. It is rather unfair that his kids, which he notes “have it a lot easier” and not inherently smarter than their lower-income counterparts, do not have to bootstrap their way to the top. I can’t help but wonder if the author were writing in 1840 if the article would blame slaves for not working hard to cozy up to their masters, save up, and buy their freedom. Life is unfair, but let’s not pretend like this is good for our country. We need to attract and keep good teachers. We need for kids to have proper nutrition. We need for kids to have more equal opportunities to succeed or take advantage of an extra-curricular program/job (within the bounds of child labor laws, please!). We need excellent guidance counselors and capacious libraries. We need safe streets. We need to enable working parents to better participate in their kid’s education and put food on the table.

If I Were an Ignorant, Middle-Class Dude

This is my challenge to Gene Marks, the author of this article: put your money where your mouth is. You, as a high-tech employer are probably suffering from a dearth of high-quality talent, so you benefit from having more people to choose from. Further, as a father, it should concern you when kids are unable to escape poverty and realize their full potential. As a taxpayer, you subsidize all the kids’ education that gets wasted when they drop out, their higher incidence of crime (prison is costly!), their higher likelihood to have a teenage pregnancy, and their lower wages that may push them onto the dole. You have a vested interest as a businessman, father, and taxpayer to help poor kids succeed.

I therefore challenge you to go to North and West Philly and take a handful of poor children under your wing. Find them consistent, regular access to a computer and help orient them to all the tools out there. Give them internships. Help them to learn a skill. Give them strategies and structure to help them navigate their school, extracurriculars, and college effectively. Then report back to everyone on all the challenges your article didn’t account for. Report on the amount of resources that it took for you to succeed.

Mr. Marks, my issue with your article was not that the solutions themselves are bad. I used several of them to succeed: I worked my ass off to get good grades and get into magnet schools, I befriended my high school counselor, I went to the library most days of the week, and I taught myself one (and then several) foreign languages. My concern is that it is impractical to expect a kid without any guidance to even think to do all these things, especially when they are logistically improbable. So help some kids to think of these solutions and to carry them out. I want more kids to succeed like me, but I know that my success and theirs is tied to the amount of people who are willing to offer extra guidance and to the ability of the school system and libraries to support and reinforce these kids’ successes.

Act on it!

• Write Mr. Marks or comment on the Forbes article and encourage him to accept my challenge. Write other businessmen and encourage them to offer guidance and cultivate a generation of leaders from the lower-rungs of the socioeconomic ladder of society.
• Take a kid under your wing and offer them access to some of the great tools that Mr. Marks suggests. Consider Big Brothers and Sisters of America or the scores of other organizations working to help kids overcome poverty.
• Fight to keep your local library system open more, give it more resources, and help kids to use them for success.

Speak out!

What other problems do you see with the solutions that Mr. Marks offers? Which of his solutions do you find salient or salvageable?

What do you think it takes for a poor person or someone who suffers from institutional inequality to make it if the system is unable to help them?

-----

For those who are curious, here is what I wrote to the author:

“Sir, as a white kid who grew up on welfare in a single-parent home and went on to graduate from Stanford, you might think that I would support you. Instead, I am so incredibly disappointed in your ignorant “recipe” for success. I got into a magnet school that my mom found out about by sheer accident. I went to the library and read a lot because it was the only place with adequate heat and electricity. The problem? I got evicted more times than I can count. Our utilities got shut off so often. I did not, contrary to your “teacher friends’” assessment, have a computer at home. Had I known about any of these tools (likelihood is that I would not have and that my mother would have been even less likely to as a waitress working 15 hours a day 6 days a week), I still wouldn’t have been able to use them. What library system could accommodate all the poor kids (of any race) to help them to realize this goal? Where would I find the time to use these resources when I started to work at age 15? Where would I get my stamina to study “coding” when we didn’t have enough food to eat dinner that day? It is articles like these that perpetuate the systemic ignorance of the role class and race play on success and prevent us from real solutions. You clearly do not understand what it is like to be poor, and your blindness is a danger because this article will only reach those who are well enough to-do to have an impact on policies that directly affect your mythical “poor black kid.” And those policy makers will make terrible choices that entrench systemic racism and class division even further in our country. Shame on you.”

Here is his response:

“Thanks for your comment. I still stick to what I wrote, and believe that the opportunity is there for everyone if they study hard and get good grades, use technology to help them get good grades, apply to the best schools they can, get help from their guidance counselor, and make sure to learn a good skill.”

You be the judge. Don’t accept inequality of opportunity. Don’t blame the victims. When one person succeeds, we all benefit in concrete ways. Our country’s future depends on everyone being proactive, not washing their hands of blame.

Teaching for or against America?

In a previous post on charters, I noted that aside from their very mixed performance, charters seem wasteful because they suppose that you should scrap the entire old public system for a new, semi-public system. The organization Teach for America (TFA), which essentially takes recent graduates of elite universities and puts them in challenging classrooms across the U.S. for two years, seems problematic in the exact same way. It effectively replaces our old set of teachers (many who happen to be more experienced and unionized...and thus expensive) and replaces them with untrained teachers who may be smart and have unbridled passion, but often have little else that qualifies them for teaching (unless they've taught before, TFA corps members receive a 6-8 week "boot camp" in a summer school program as their only experience). I have met some extraordinarily talented TFA corps members who do an amazing job and do beat the odds (just as I've met amazing teachers that went through normal channels), so my critique is of the organization's purpose and goals, not individuals. (full disclosure: I applied and was admitted to TFA in 2010, though I ultimately rejected the position.)


The Issues with Teach for America

A recent Washington Post blog entry by Andrew Hartman on Teach for America, ties the organization and charters in a different way, asserting that both charters and TFA advance a Conservative agenda to privatize education. The author notes that the organization does so by undermining unions (most TFA recruits are low-paid, non-union recruits that can replace a more expensive unionized teacher), by promoting standardized testing as the means to measure whether kids are learning (TFA is very driven on having teachers be able to bridge an achievement gap between rich and poor, minority and white that is only measurable through such tests), by going outside of the political system to make any reform (which is my big concern, given that education is a universal right and public good), and by pretending that regardless of your origins, an enthusiastic enough 22 year old from Harvard can fix your life and send you to college (which I also question as a goal for all kids).

Hartman also notes that the organization fails to deliver on its four stated goals. It is designed to raise the prestige of teaching, yet the organization's existence is predicated on teachers not needing training, many TFA members do not stay beyond the two year commitment and use their participation as a rung in the ladder to higher education. TFA is also designed to accommodate a short-fall of teachers in more challenging schools, yet there is no shortage in teachers applying via normal channels, especially given mass layoffs since 2008. Third, TFA would craft a corps of ambitious professionals armed with experience in challenging environments to "fix the system." This one has proven most true, with many teachers going into policy work (my public policy program at Georgetown was no exception, many of my colleagues were TFA alums), though they have yet to fix the system and seem to perpetuate (if you look at former DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee) solutions outside of the system. Finally, TFA is supposed to bridge the so-called "achievement gap" between the wealthy and the poor and between whites and minorities in educational success. Julian Heilig and Su Jin Jiz conducted an extensive study on TFA that found that TFA teachers do only comparably well to normal public school teachers based on their level of education and training.

Put simply, TFA is not delivering. This should not be a surprise, as it is a bandaid solution: you cannot permanently attract cheap, quality teachers with experience and keep them there by supressing their wages, showing they are easily replaceable, signaling that a profession requires no training, and assuming that being poor, living in a dangerous area with no extracurricular resources, and having parents with low education levels (or a parent, or no parents at all) has no impact on a child's success. Teach for America is doing as well as, but not better than, the public school system. If it is duplicative and cannot even offer improved outcomes (except in some cases where TFA taught math better), why duplicate our public school teacher corps?


How Does TFA Compare to the World's Best Education System?

An interesting counterpoint, and one I will likely return to in a future post, is Finland, which is consistently the best performing school system in the world (and also quite equitable). This amazing summary of Finland's model and success by the Atlantic highlights some key features of the Finnish system: there are NO private schools (charters!), schools rely on less homework and almost no standardized testing, teachers are all highly-educated and -trained, teachers are given great autonomy and do their own assessments of student progress, and all students are given access to feeding, health care, and psychological programs. You will note that all of these directly contradict the ideas behind privatizing education through charters and TFA. Promoting such policies will entrench stagnation and inequality in the U.S.


Why TFA Is Worth Fixing

Despite failing (on average) on its mission and feeding into a system of inequality, I still think TFA has accomplished a lot:

• It helped raise the profile of education and appreciation of quality teaching enormously.



• It created a network of highly-educated, dedicated people who are working to improve education policy and administration.



• It helped people of higher-income backgrounds to experience the challenges that have-nots face and understand people different from themselves.



• It has made recruitment for teaching into something that is very competitive even at elite universities without improving the pay (though this, I would argue is temporary and needs to be accompanied by increasing pay with experience).

How Can TFA Be Put to Better Use?

Just as I think it is a waste to give up on the public system, I think it would be equally wasteful to give up on TFA as a force for change IN the public education system. I have some alternative ideas for how the program can be put to better use:

1. Maintain TFA as a recruiter of inexperienced, but very educated university students, but put them in the highest performing classrooms. "WHAT?!" you say? Many TFA recruits are not accustomed to low-income areas or their needs and are really overwhelmed (some quitting before their commitment is up, others simply moving on after two years). If we put an inexperienced teacher in classroom with fewer issues, they can develop classroom experience and become qualified to teach in the worst classrooms. If they have more confidence before entering a difficult classroom, they may be more capable and more likely to stay later on. Meanwhile, I would suggest we use TFA allow Master Teachers with a lot of experience who would be much more likely to do better in a challenging classroom to do a one or two year rotation to a low-income classroom.



2. Use the program to recruit teaching assistants or secondary teachers for more challenging environments (low income, special ed, etc.) so that we can tackle the issue of high classroom sizes and allow students with greater needs to have more resources.



3. Use TFA to start up a system of early childhood education so that students are more likely to get the education they need while they are young that our nation is not delivering on.



4. Tie TFA more closely to Schools of Education to increase the likelihood that corps members stay in Education, that the profile of ALL educators is increased thus drawing more talent, and that TFA recruits receive a stronger network of support and training. I could also see TFA coordinating student teaching for Masters students as a service to Schools of Education that would improve the practicum requirement for rising teachers.



5. Use TFA to recruit for public school systems, but expand their recruitment beyond college graduates to professionals or civil society members who are adept at conveying information and connecting with people in challenging circumstances.

Speak out!

Have you applied for TFA or were you a Corps member? I'd love to hear more about your experience and your ideas for improving the organization.

How else could TFA serve the public education system? What other strengths or weaknesses do you see in the model?

Righting Writing with After-School Tutoring in the Private Sector

Anyone who has read the McSweeny's magazine probably knows that Dave Eggers is amazing. He gave a TED talk (which is well worth watching) on this innovative idea to create a forum in his San Francisco publishing space for tutoring kids that needed help with writing called 826 Valencia. Combining amazing urban planning principles with community service, Eggers took street-front retail property and multi-purposed it into a publishing house, a writing tutoring center, and a pirate goods store. The idea has since spread across the nation, combining insane, fun, welcoming (opposed to places that are out of the way or appear remedial and thus embarrassing to kids) spaces with dedicated and talented writers to create a place where kids feel comfortable to learn in the heart of a business community with many professionals well-positioned to offer the exact help those kids need. I just discovered that I used to live above one of the spin-off 826 Centers (Museum of Unnatural History in Columbia Heights in DC).

For those without the time to watch the whole video, here are the key features of this neat model:

• Make volunteering as easy as possible: Writing professionals can offer tutoring right where they work.
• Make tutoring less embarrassing: set up a fun themed store as the streetside venue so that kids are not entering a remedial center, but something like a pirate store.
• Word of Mouth Marketing: By using a teaching professional in schools to encourage kids to go and then creating fun, interactive writing activities during and after school, they were able to capture kids and parents using word of mouth or direct demonstration, as if they were a business.

The model is incredibly intriguing because the use of professionals in space they already were paying for to do their publishing, a creative store that generated interest and eventually profits, and word-of-mouth/school professionals for advertising contributed to a low-overhead cost with a huge pay-off. This creates a community space, reduces likelihood of truancy, adds extra educational programming to a child's day, and bridges gaps between the educational and professional communities. It does so in a fluid environment that serves a variation of pace and skill levels in a way that a single-teacher classroom could not.

Talk about it!

If you were to start an 826 Franchise in your city, how would you set it up?

Do you think the model could be used for other school subjects and/or served by other types of professionals? Are there subjects or fields that might be limited in their ability to carry out this model?

Act on it!

Visit the 826 Group and donate materials or time to a local branch!

Find a way to bring your professional skills closer to a child so that they are better integrated with the labor market and are able to hone their knowledge using your skills!