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Published on Leave a comment on The Knowledge Deficit

I read with some dismay the article, "Failing Schools See a Solution in Longer Day," in today's New York Times. The opening paragraph:

States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year.

It was some consolation that the various states are paying some attention to areas in greatest need and evaluation of the initial efforts. It was also some relief that one of the reasons for lengthening the day was to restore some balance to the curriculum:

Pressed by the demands of the law [No Child Left Behind], school officials who support longer days say that much of the regular day must concentrate on test preparation. With extra hours, they say, they can devote more time to test readiness, if needed, and teach subjects that have increasingly been dropped from the curriculum, like history, art, drama.

I think that dropping subjects like history, art, and drama is the way to worsen, not improve, reading skills. I was very persuaded by the ideas set forth by E.D. Hirsch in The Knowledge Deficit. In the very earliest grades, reading skills consist primarily of decoding words. Our schools do a decent job of that. In later grades, though, reading skills consist primarily of comprehension--understanding the meaning of what is read--on a wide range of topics. Our schools don't do a particularly good job of that. The review of the book in Publishers Weekly summarizes Hirsch's thesis very well:

Education theorist Hirsch decries a dominant "Romantic" pedagogy that disparages factual knowledge and emphasizes reading comprehension "strategies"—summarizing, identifying themes, drawing inferences—that children can deploy on any text. Such formal skills, he argues, are easily acquired; what kids really need is a broad background knowledge of history, science and culture to help them assimilate new vocabulary and understand more advanced readings. "Process-oriented" methods that apply reading comprehension drills to "vapid" texts waste time and slow kids' progress, Hirsch contends, and should be replaced with a more traditional, "knowledge-oriented" academic approach with a rich factual content.

In one part of the book, Hirsch describes the reading comprehension problem as follows. Suppose that you are confronted with a new paragraph in which you know the meaning of 90 percent of the words. You can reasonably be expected to guess the meaning of the other 10 percent from the context, and then it is possible for you to evaluate what's being presented in the whole paragraph. Suppose now that you are confronted with a new paragraph in which you know the meaning of only 70 percent of the words. It is much less likely that you will be able to guess the meaning of a full 30 percent of the words in the paragraph well enough to understand the ideas being presented. So, according to this theory, you make kids better readers if you expand their vocabularies, so that they are more likely to be in the 90/10 position than the 70/30 position (or worse).

Doing process-oriented reading drills on third-rate fiction is a less effective tool for teaching reading than listening to a good piece of non-fiction. Where do kids get that good non-fiction? History class. Art class. Science class. Even music class and drama class. Schools are not lacking for time--they are lacking for content.

Published on Leave a comment on Writing as Communication

Katie at A Constrained Vision is one of the most thoughtful bloggers about education. In this post, she discusses the perception of poor writing skills by college students. One element of the problem is that students aren't widely read, and so they don't become particularly good writers.

There is an element of truth in that, but I think the largest part of the problem is that students in college are writing with the wrong emphasis. There is no denying that many of the college students that I teach are extremely bright. As such, they have been encouraged from a very early age to "express" themselves. Writing for them is a very self-oriented process, as if it is a reply to the admonition, "Show us how smart you are."

This is acceptable for a student in grade school, but as a student matures, writing needs to become more about communication and less about expression per se. (This is true even if the purpose of writing is still for students to show us how smart they are.) Communication is oriented toward the needs of the audience, particularly the audience's need to be persuaded of something in order to change its mind. This is certainly the case every time I read a student's term paper, an article in a professional journal, or an opinion piece.

I think that if this transition were stressed earlier in a student's education, we would see better communicators in college. What to do about the poor communication skills of college students is a bit of a problem. No college administration wants to have to devote large amounts of resources to teaching a skill (as opposed to content) that should have been developed before the student arrived. In our current system, it ought to be taken care of with the 1-3 courses on writing in the first-year curriculum.

Published on Leave a comment on The Right Way to Do Unpaid Internships

I'm going to guess if college students shunned unpaid summer internships, somebody who wrote this book would take them to task for imitating the Baby Boomers' alleged self-centeredness. I cannot but shake my head in disbelief at (and naturally blog about) yesterday's op-ed about unpaid internships by Anya Kamenetz in The New York Times.

Her thesis is to question whether the encouragement of unpaid internships is a good thing for the interns and for society at large. In her own words:

Let's look at the risks to the lowly intern. First there are opportunity costs. Lost wages and living expenses are significant considerations for the two-thirds of students who need loans to get through college. Since many internships are done for credit and some even cost money for the privilege of placement overseas or on Capitol Hill, those students who must borrow to pay tuition are going further into debt for internships.

Second, though their duties range from the menial to quasi-professional, unpaid internships are not jobs, only simulations. And fake jobs are not the best preparation for real jobs.

It is true that there are opportunity costs. (Shall I ask her to identify the activity for which ther are no opportunity costs, or should I just refer her to a discussion of revealed preference?) At Dartmouth, students may apply to the Rockefeller Center for a stipend to cover living expenses when they take an unpaid internship in the public or non-profit sectors. Several of the roughly 40 internships awarded each year are supported financially by alumni or alumni classes who specifically value the opportunities gained through working in an unpaid capacity in the public or non-profit sector.

Just as importantly, when students receiving financial aid apply for a grant, the Center contributes to or covers the financial aid contribution expected from the students' summer work activities, enabling them to focus on their internships without necessarily picking up a part-time job. So Ms. Kamanetz is overstating her case, at least where institutions like Dartmouth are concerned. If her younger sister at Yale, whose internship in New Orleans motivated her op-ed, did not have this opportunity, then her sister (like many others) should have tried to come to Dartmouth rather than Yale.

No one would deny the simple fact that students who come from well off families have more opportunities than those who come from less well off families. That point is irrelevant here, as long as we make sure that the internship is not relatively more expensive for the students from less well off families.

Her second point is sheer lunacy. I supervised a few interns while at CEA. I wouldn't call their experiences "simulations" or "fake." They were assigned projects commensurate with their abilities and academic preparation. Their contributions were generally quite good, and some were downright impressive. One of my regrets after my year at CEA was that I did not go work there as an intern or research assistant 15 years earlier while I was in college. It would have made me a better economist. I think the 10 students being sponsored by the Rockefeller Center this spring (on the page linked above) all have interesting opportunities ahead of them as well. Take a look at the full list from last year, along with a few in-depth profiles, in the Center's annual report.

At the Center, we have taken our support of internships further with the advent of our Civic Skills Training program, in which the Center's staff spends 5 days in Washington with a group of students before their internships to educate them about the public and non-profit sectors and to train them in the skills they will need to succeed in their internships. The Rockefeller Center picks up the entire cost of the training.

I would never presume to disparage a student's choice to work to earn money over the summer rather than work in an unpaid public or non-profit internship. But the suggestion that unpaid internships are not contributing substantially to students' development as young adults is preposterous and flies in the face of what thoughtful colleges are doing to support those internships.

UPDATE: Tony Vallencourt comments below and posts to his blog about the other parts of the Kamenetz op-ed, dealing with societal issues of a perceived lack of access to internships. I actually thought those were the weak points of the op-ed and so left them out of my post. Will Wilkinson takes Kamenetz to task for them on his blog in "The Baffling Mind of Anya Kamenetz."

Published on Leave a comment on That’s a Feature, Not a Bug

Yesterday's New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline, "Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math." Like many discussions of the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act, it seems to miss the central element that this was the inevitable consequence of the legislation. Here's an excerpt of interest:

The historian David McCullough told a Senate Committee last June that because of the law, "history is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove altogether in many or most schools, in favor of math and reading."

Some may disagree with this as an objective, but one should not be surprised at the result. The logic runs as follows:

  • Reading and math are deemed to be more fundamental skills than other subjects to which class time is devoted in public schools; and
  • Some schools can be demonstrated to be inadequate in the outcomes they generate in reading and math; and
  • Schools that are so demonstrated are unlikely to have additional financial capacity to expand their programs; so
  • Those schools should be devoting more time to reading and math, with other subjects crowded out in whole or in part.

I think we should have been surprised if the law were not having the effect of narrowing the curriculum, but I was surprised that the law was having as pronounced an effect as it is. In general, my view is well summarized by this quote:

"When you only have so many hours per day and you're behind in some area that's being hammered on, you have to work on that," said Henry Lind, the schools superintendent. "It's like basketball. If you can't make layups, then you've got to work on layups."

I'd like to be able to say that every school district should offer a broad curriculum of liberal arts courses including history and music and languages and lab sciences, but some school districts aren't able to do all of that successfully. So given that they won't be at the ideal, where should they be? I think of reading and math as foundational. There's very little use in trying to build on a weak foundation. That doesn't mean I support this sort of federal involvement in primary and secondary education, but it does mean that I don't think the consequences of the law, as they are described in this article, are a source of concern.

The article is well written and of interest. I recommend the whole thing.

Published on Leave a comment on A Setback for School Vouchers in Florida

From yesterday's New York Times:

In a ruling expected to reverberate through battles over school choice in many states, the Florida Supreme Court struck down a voucher program yesterday for students attending failing schools, saying the State Constitution bars Florida from using taxpayer money to finance a private alternative to the public system.

The 5-to-2 ruling orders state officials to end, at the close of this school year, a program that Gov. Jeb Bush has considered one of his chief accomplishments.

Known as the Opportunity Scholarship Program, it uses public money to pay tuition for 730 students who have left failing public schools and enrolled in private schools.

Quoting from the opinion, the article continues:

In its ruling, the Florida court cited an article in the State Constitution that says, "Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system of free public schools."

The Opportunity Scholarships Program "violates this language," the court said.

"It diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children," the ruling said. "This diversion not only reduces money available to the free schools, but also funds private schools that are not 'uniform' when compared with each other or the public system."

Hard to argue with the reasoning there. The problem is in the language in the state Constitution. I am a graduate of the public schools in Palm Beach County, Florida. The notion that the system is "uniform," even within the same school district, is preposterous. Schools located in neighborhoods with higher income residents were better schools. And the disparities were not small. I do not see how the Court could uphold a challenge against the current system, even without vouchers.

I do not know the facts of this case, but I suspect that the 730 students in question went from schools where they couldn't get a good education to schools where they could. In the process of getting an education more like the typical student's, they violated this principle of uniformity. Fascinating.

Reform of the public system remains the priority. Over at a Constrained Vision, Katie Newmark lines it up just right: find some philanthropic organization to help get these kids into private schools and work to change the state constitution.