Beyond Red & Blue

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. 

Fudging high school graduation rates

Fans of The Wire already know how police departments cook crime stats. Today the New York Times reports on how school systems use fuzzy math to come up with graduation rates:

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.

State of the states on charter schools

Massachusetts has the nation's "14th strongest" law on charter schools, according to the pro-charter Center for Education Reform, which likes Minnesota best of all.

Dropping out of high school, dropping into jail

The end of the year brings many gifts to data lovers, and two non-unrelated reports hit computer screens today: the Department of Justice's annual prison population census and the Department of Education's annual report on high school dropout rates. We will be crunching the numbers and mapping the data from these and other surveys in the future, but one thing that jumps out from the Justice report is that New Hampshire had the only double-digit percentage growth in its prison population from 2005 to 2006. The number of prisoners in the Granite State went from 2,530 to 2,805, or up 10.9 percent (versus a national increase of 2.8 percent, and a jump in Massachusetts of 3.1 percent). That's still relatively low for the state's size (Hawaii has more than twice as many prisoners), but the change is startling.

Also surprising is that New Hampshire, which is generally one of the best-educated states, had a high school dropout rate of 3.5 percent in 2004-05, not too far below the 3.9 national rate. In Massachusetts, the rate was 3.8 percent; it was highest in Alaska (8.2 percent) and lowest in North Dakota (1.9 percent).

The geography of job insecurity

The Boston Globe's Adrian Walker writes today on the slow progress in creating pilot schools in Boston. Part of the resisistance comes from teachers' union members:

To their supporters, pilot schools are laboratories for fresh educational ideas that eventually can be applied to traditional schools. The union says it supports pilot schools in theory, but clearly it cannot buy into an educational idea that involves tossing union protections out the window.

"You can be removed from the building you've been teaching in for 15 years, and moved to the other side of the city," said Stephen Crawford, a BTU spokesman. "That's just one of the collective bargaining rights teachers sacrifice."

Crawford's concern is understandable but also a bit disorienting, since we've become accustomed to reading about people afraid that their jobs are going to move to the other side of the country, if not the world. Another example of how everyone has a different perspective in a global economy.

Why Johnny Can't Walk to School

"Less than 15 percent of all schoolchildren walk or ride bicycles to school," notes Charles Euchner (a frequent contributor to CommonWealth) in a fascinating Hartford Courant column. The main reason is the trend toward fewer but larger ("super-sized") schools, many of them sited far from residential areas. (Kids make too much noise, so why not put them in town's warehouse district?) But Euchner points out some of the drawbacks of this phenomenon -- not only the lack of exercise for kids who have to be driven to school, but also the fact that "gigantism requires extra layers of bureaucracy, which puts distance between educators and students."

I can think of another benefit of schools that are within walking distance of most students rather than a long bus ride away: They can start classes later and allow kids some to sleep in a little later, a need that Po Bronson explores in New York magazine.