History > 2011 > USA > Education (I)

Nick Iluzada

Shortchanged by the Bell

NYT

22 August 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/opinion/shortchanged-by-the-school-bell.html 

How to Fix Our Math Education

August 24, 2011
The New York Times
By SOL GARFUNKEL and DAVID MUMFORD

THERE is widespread alarm in the United States about the state of our math education. The anxiety can be traced to the poor performance of American students on various international tests, and it is now embodied in George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which requires public school students to pass standardized math tests by the year 2014 and punishes their schools or their teachers if they do not.

All this worry, however, is based on the assumption that there is a single established body of mathematical skills that everyone needs to know to be prepared for 21st-century careers. This assumption is wrong. The truth is that different sets of math skills are useful for different careers, and our math education should be changed to reflect this fact.

Today, American high schools offer a sequence of algebra, geometry, more algebra, pre-calculus and calculus (or a “reform” version in which these topics are interwoven). This has been codified by the Common Core State Standards, recently adopted by more than 40 states. This highly abstract curriculum is simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life.

For instance, how often do most adults encounter a situation in which they need to solve a quadratic equation? Do they need to know what constitutes a “group of transformations” or a “complex number”? Of course professional mathematicians, physicists and engineers need to know all this, but most citizens would be better served by studying how mortgages are priced, how computers are programmed and how the statistical results of a medical trial are to be understood.

A math curriculum that focused on real-life problems would still expose students to the abstract tools of mathematics, especially the manipulation of unknown quantities. But there is a world of difference between teaching “pure” math, with no context, and teaching relevant problems that will lead students to appreciate how a mathematical formula models and clarifies real-world situations. The former is how algebra courses currently proceed — introducing the mysterious variable x, which many students struggle to understand. By contrast, a contextual approach, in the style of all working scientists, would introduce formulas using abbreviations for simple quantities — for instance, Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2, where E stands for energy, m for mass and c for the speed of light.

Imagine replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering. In the finance course, students would learn the exponential function, use formulas in spreadsheets and study the budgets of people, companies and governments. In the data course, students would gather their own data sets and learn how, in fields as diverse as sports and medicine, larger samples give better estimates of averages. In the basic engineering course, students would learn the workings of engines, sound waves, TV signals and computers. Science and math were originally discovered together, and they are best learned together now.

Traditionalists will object that the standard curriculum teaches valuable abstract reasoning, even if the specific skills acquired are not immediately useful in later life. A generation ago, traditionalists were also arguing that studying Latin, though it had no practical application, helped students develop unique linguistic skills. We believe that studying applied math, like learning living languages, provides both useable knowledge and abstract skills.

In math, what we need is “quantitative literacy,” the ability to make quantitative connections whenever life requires (as when we are confronted with conflicting medical test results but need to decide whether to undergo a further procedure) and “mathematical modeling,” the ability to move practically between everyday problems and mathematical formulations (as when we decide whether it is better to buy or lease a new car).

Parents, state education boards and colleges have a real choice. The traditional high school math sequence is not the only road to mathematical competence. It is true that our students’ proficiency, measured by traditional standards, has fallen behind that of other countries’ students, but we believe that the best way for the United States to compete globally is to strive for universal quantitative literacy: teaching topics that make sense to all students and can be used by them throughout their lives.

It is through real-life applications that mathematics emerged in the past, has flourished for centuries and connects to our culture now.

 

Sol Garfunkel is the executive director of the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications. David Mumford is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown.

    How to Fix Our Math Education, NYT, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html

A Pledge to End Fraternity Hazing

August 23, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID J. SKORTON

Ithaca, N.Y.

IN February, a 19-year-old Cornell sophomore died in a fraternity house while participating in a hazing episode that included mock kidnapping, ritualized humiliation and coerced drinking. While the case is still in the courts, the fraternity chapter has been disbanded and those indicted in connection with the death are no longer enrolled here.

This tragedy convinced me that it was time — long past time — to remedy practices of the fraternity system that continue to foster hazing, which has persisted at Cornell, as on college campuses across the country, in violation of state law and university policy.

Yesterday, I directed student leaders of Cornell’s Greek chapters to develop a system of member recruitment and initiation that does not involve “pledging” — the performance of demeaning or dangerous acts as a condition of membership. While fraternity and sorority chapters will be invited to suggest alternatives for inducting new members, I will not approve proposals that directly or indirectly encourage hazing and other risky behavior. National fraternities and sororities should end pledging across all campuses; Cornell students can help lead the way.

Why not ban fraternities and sororities altogether, as some universities have done? Over a quarter of Cornell undergraduates (3,822 of 13,935 students) are involved in fraternities or sororities. The Greek system is part of our university’s history and culture, and we should maintain it because at its best, it can foster friendship, community service and leadership.

Hazing has been formally prohibited at Cornell since 1980 and a crime under New York State law since 1983. But it continues under the guise of pledging, often perpetuated through traditions handed down over generations. Although pledging is explained away as a period of time during which pre-initiates (“pledges”) devote themselves to learning the information necessary to become full members, in reality, it is often the vehicle for demeaning activities that cause psychological harm and physical danger.

About 2,000 alcohol-related deaths occur each year among American college students. Alcohol or drug abuse is a factor in more than a half-million injuries each year — and also in sexual and other assaults, unsafe sex, poor academic performance and many other problems.

At Cornell, high-risk drinking and drug use are two to three times more prevalent among fraternity and sorority members than elsewhere in the student population. During the last 10 years, nearly 60 percent of fraternity and sorority chapters on our campus have been found responsible for activities that are considered hazing under the Cornell code of conduct.

Why would bright young people subject themselves to dangerous humiliation? Multiple factors are at play: the need of emerging adults to separate from family, forge their own identities and be accepted in a group; obedience to authority (in this case, older students); the ineffectiveness of laws and other constraints on group behavior; and organizational traditions that perpetuate hazardous activities.

Alcohol makes it easier for members to subject recruits to physical and mental abuse without feeling remorse and to excuse bad behavior on the grounds of intoxication. It provides a social lubricant, but it impairs the judgment of those being hazed and lowers their ability to resist.

Even more distressing, although 55 percent of college students involved in clubs, teams and organizations experience hazing, the vast majority of them do not identify the events as hazing. Of those who do, 95 percent do not report the events to campus officials.

Doctors, nurses and other student-health professionals have tried to address high-risk drinking and hazing through individual counseling, a medical amnesty process that reduces barriers to calling for help in alcohol emergencies, and educational programs. But the problem has persisted.

There are signs of progress. Jim Yong Kim, president of Dartmouth, has helped organize a multi-campus approach to identifying the most effective strategies against high-risk drinking. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has established a college presidents’ advisory group to develop and share approaches to this problem.

There is a pressing need for better ways to bring students together in socially productive, enjoyable and memorable ways. At Cornell, acceptable alternatives to the pledge process must be completely free of personal degradation, disrespect or harassment in any form. One example is Sigma Phi Epsilon’s “Balanced Man Program,” which replaces the traditional pledging period with a continuing emphasis on community service and personal development.

We need to face the facts about the role of fraternities and sororities in hazing and high-risk drinking. Pledging — and the humiliation and bullying that go with it — can no longer be the price of entry.

David J. Skorton, a cardiologist, is the president of Cornell University.

    A Pledge to End Fraternity Hazing, NYT, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/opinion/a-pledge-to-end-fraternity-hazing.html

Shortchanged by the Bell

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By LUIS A. UBIÑAS and CHRIS GABRIELI

AFTER a summer of budget cuts in Washington and state capitals, we have only to look to our schools, when classes begin in the next few weeks, to see who will pay the price.

The minimum required school day in West Virginia is already about the length of a “Harry Potter” double feature. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, summer school programs are being slashed or eliminated. In Oregon and California this year, students will spend fewer days in the classroom; in rural communities from New Mexico to Idaho, some students will be in school only four days a week.

For all the talk about balancing the budget for the sake of our children, keeping classrooms closed is a perverse way of giving them a brighter future.

What’s needed is more time in classrooms, not less. Our school calendar, with its six-and-a-half-hour day and 180-day year, was designed for yesterday’s farm economy, not today’s high-tech one. While many middle-class families now invest in tutoring and extra learning time, less-privileged children are left on the sidelines, which only widens gaps in achievement and opportunity.

Two years ago President Obama said that the “challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.” Plenty of research suggests that one of the strongest indicators of scholastic achievement is the amount of actual time devoted to learning. Therefore, we need to move schools toward longer days and years. Ideally, increasing learning time by 30 percent would mean more individualized support; a more well-rounded education in a broader array of subjects, from science and foreign languages to arts and robotics; and less unsupervised after-school and summer time. For parents, it would mean a school day better aligned with the typical work day.

The good news is that more than 1,000 schools in the United States are now using expanded schedules. Almost every high-performing charter network in the country, from KIPP to Achievement First, uses significantly more scheduled time to achieve impressive academic gains, and many public schools, spurred by local initiatives, innovative state policies and federal leadership, are also adopting this promising practice.

In Boston, for example, the Edwards Middle School has gone, in five years, from the worst-performing, least-desired middle school to a model of success after it increased scheduled teaching time by 30 percent. Students there now outperform the state average proficiency rate in math and have nearly closed achievement gaps in literacy. This has occurred in a school where over 80 percent of the students come from low-income families.

Perhaps most surprising, some schools have shown that these changes can be made without spending more money. Brooklyn Generation School replaced most administrators with teachers and staggered all employees’ schedules, allowing it to increase learning time by 30 percent without additional cost. Class sizes have been reduced and the burden on teachers lowered. Last spring, 90 percent of seniors graduated on time. Remarkably, when these students entered high school, only about 20 percent were at grade level.

These ad hoc efforts are great for the students involved. But we really need a more comprehensive national effort to make expanded learning time the norm in American education, especially for our neediest students, through smarter use of local, state and federal resources. More hours of learning — not fewer — can make a world of difference.

Luis A. Ubiñas is the president of the Ford Foundation.
Chris Gabrieli is the chairman of the National Center on Time and Learning.

    Shortchanged by the Bell, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/opinion/shortchanged-by-the-school-bell.html

The Hidden Costs of Higher Ed

August 21, 2011
The New York Times
By NOAH S. BERNSTEIN

OVER the next few weeks, millions of Americans will be heading off to college, and despite the promise of need-blind admissions, more of them than ever will be struggling to pay for it. It’s not just the economy’s fault: even as they publicize lavish financial aid packages, colleges and universities are making it harder for average American families to afford higher education, while making it easier for the wealthy.

In the past, families and students covered their tuition with lump payments at the beginning of each semester. To ease the burden of such large bills — recent data shows that tuition and fees have increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 — many colleges have instituted monthly payment plans, while charging zero interest. Even many families that could afford to pay an entire semester upfront find such plans appealing.

Though such plans have undoubtedly allowed a greater number of modest-income students to go to college, they can actually end up unintentionally raising tuition costs. While the plans typically don’t charge a fee for payments made by check or direct deposit, they tack on a hefty charge for credit card payments.

Why? Because most institutions outsource the management of their plans to private companies, which have to make a profit. They charge universities a fee for processing credit card payments, and the schools pass those costs on to students and families, amounting to over a thousand dollars or more per year in some cases.

For example, some of the top liberal arts colleges in America, including Williams, Amherst and Wellesley, use a company called Tuition Management Services, where the fee is 2.99 percent for each payment made by credit card. At Amherst, where tuition, room and board cost $53,370, that’s an extra $1,595 if all payments are made by credit card. Even at Swarthmore, which runs its plan in-house, the fee is 2.6 percent, or an extra $1,330 a year.

This hits the middle and working classes particularly hard. Struggling families often face rough patches during which they don’t have enough cash on hand to make such payments, and so have to go to their credit cards — and pay the fees. Meanwhile, wealthy families that can afford to simply write a check upfront each month avoid both credit card fees and interest payments.

To be fair, monthly payment plans intend to help lower-income families afford college. But they have also had the unintentional consequence of creating bonuses for the wealthy and added impediments to the less well-off.

Another way colleges and universities stack the deck is by allowing students or their parents to front the costs of two, three or even four years of school, thereby locking in current tuition prices; some schools even offer discounts for prepayment. Families receiving financial aid are typically excluded from prepayment options.

Of course, only the wealthy can afford to pay even a single year of college upfront, let alone multiple years. And yet, with annual tuition increases running between 4 percent and 10 percent, those who can afford to pay early end up paying significantly less.

Why do colleges and universities, which promote themselves as need-blind, even have programs like this? The original justification was to bolster their revenues quickly, so they could invest them in the stock market. But with the current economic malaise and unreliable financial markets, colleges can no longer depend on consistent or high returns.

Monthly payment plans, and prepayment plans, thus pack a double punch. On one hand, they make it more expensive for struggling families to send their children to college. On the other hand, they make it cheaper for wealthy families to do so. And given how long it takes these days to pay off college debt, these disparities will have ramifications long after students have graduated from college.

Our institutions of higher learning cannot continue to offer their best deals to a privileged few. Our country needs colleges and universities to recruit and cultivate talented young people from diverse backgrounds. To do so, we must ensure that children from working families have the mechanisms not only to obtain college admission and afford to attend without compromising their studies, but also to be free to enter the economy relatively unburdened by debt.

 

Noah S. Bernstein is an education program associate at the New World Foundation.

    The Hidden Costs of Higher Ed, NYT, 21.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/opinion/the-hidden-costs-of-higher-ed.html

School Discipline Study Raises Fresh Questions

July 19, 2011
The New York Times
By ALAN SCHWARZ

Raising new questions about the effectiveness of school discipline, a report scheduled for release on Tuesday found that 31 percent of Texas students were suspended off campus or expelled at least once during their years in middle and high school — at an average of almost four times apiece.

When also considering less serious infractions punished by in-school suspensions, the rate climbed to nearly 60 percent, according to the study by the Council of State Governments, with one in seven students facing such disciplinary measures at least 11 times.

The study linked these disciplinary actions to lower rates of graduation and higher rates of later criminal activity and found that minority students were more likely than whites to face the more severe punishments.

“In the last 20 to 25 years, there have been dramatic increases in the number of suspensions and expulsions,” said Michael Thompson, who headed the study as director of the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments, a nonpartisan group. “This quantifies how you’re in the minority if you have not been removed from the classroom at least once. This is not just being sent to the principal’s office, and it’s not after-school detention or weekend detention or extra homework. This is in the student’s record.”

The study, which followed every incoming Texas seventh grader over three years through high school and sometimes beyond, joins a growing body of literature looking at how to balance classroom order with individual student need.

Several experts said in interviews that the data, covering nearly one million students and mapping each of their school records against any entry in the juvenile justice system, was the most comprehensive on the topic yet. The report did not identify individual districts or schools.

The findings are “very much representative of the nation as a whole,” said Russ Skiba, a professor of school psychology at Indiana University who reviewed the study along with several other prominent researchers.

Several teachers and administrators in Texas were shocked to learn of the report.

“That’s astronomical,” said Joe Erhardt, a science teacher at Kingwood Park High School in the Houston suburb of Humble, Tex. “I’m at a loss.”

Doug Otto, superintendent of the Plano Independent School District, said the data showed that “suspensions are a little too easy.”

“Once they become automatic, we’ve really hurt that child’s chances to receive a high school diploma,” he added “We’ve got to find ways to keep those kids in school. Don’t get me wrong — we have to provide safe environments for all the other kids. But you have to balance it out and cut down the suspensions and expulsions.”

Almost 15 percent of students, a vast majority of whom had extensive school disciplinary files, had at least one record in the juvenile justice system, according to the report.

Minority students facing discipline for the first time tended to be given the harsher, out-of-school suspension, rather than in-school suspension, more often than white students, the study said. (The nature of the offenses was not noted.) A disproportionate number of minority students also ended up in alternative classrooms, where some have complained that teachers are often less qualified.

“What we really need to do is go in to those districts and see if these really are choices being made,” Mr. Skiba said. “We don’t really know enough about the reasons for African-American and Latino over-representation in school discipline. We have enough data to show that it’s more than just poverty and any greater misbehavior. My guess is it’s very subtle interactional effects between some teachers and students.”

Mr. Thompson, of the Council of State Governments, said one of the study’s most important findings was how demographically similar schools disciplined students differently. Although Texas law requires suspension or expulsion for certain offenses, Mr. Thompson said that 97 percent of suspensions were discretionary, and that suspension rates might say as much about administrators’ discipline philosophy as about student behavior.

“Schools are making very different uses of school discipline,” he explained. “And they can have an impact on how often a kid repeats a grade or graduates. We need to recognize that it’s something we need to improve upon.”

While the study found links between school discipline and criminal activity, there is no way to know whether one caused the other. Educators have long complained that many students, particularly from poor families, arrive in classrooms with problems far beyond academics that they have few tools to control.

A former alternative-education teacher in Texas, Zeph Capo still remembers the eighth grader who swore at teachers, threw books and pencils, and eventually was suspended and sent into the district’s disciplinary program. Mr. Capo said he did not know whether the student straightened out or slipped further. The study made him only more concerned.

“Are suspensions the tool to improve student behavior and help them be successful? No, I don’t think that’s the case,” said Mr. Capo, now a vice president of the Houston Federation of Teachers who trains others in classroom management. “Sometimes there’s not a lot of choice left but to risk chaos and anarchy in your school. There are potential times when human beings have had it and they drop the hammer, and maybe the hammer crushes too far.”

    School Discipline Study Raises Fresh Questions, NYT, 19.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/education/19discipline.html

Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off

June 25, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

ALMOST a century ago, the United States decided to make high school nearly universal. Around the same time, much of Europe decided that universal high school was a waste. Not everybody, European intellectuals argued, should go to high school.
 
 It’s clear who made the right decision. The educated American masses helped create the American century, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have written. The new ranks of high school graduates made factories more efficient and new industries possible.
 
 Today, we are having an updated version of the same debate. Television, newspapers and blogs are filled with the case against college for the masses: It saddles students with debt; it does not guarantee a good job; it isn’t necessary for many jobs. Not everybody, the skeptics say, should go to college.
 
 The argument has the lure of counterintuition and does have grains of truth. Too many teenagers aren’t ready to do college-level work. Ultimately, though, the case against mass education is no better than it was a century ago.
 
 The evidence is overwhelming that college is a better investment for most graduates than in the past. A new study even shows that a bachelor’s degree pays off for jobs that don’t require one: secretaries, plumbers and cashiers. And, beyond money, education seems to make people happier and healthier.
 
 “Sending more young Americans to college is not a panacea,” says David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who studies the labor market. “Not sending them to college would be a disaster.”
 
 The most unfortunate part of the case against college is that it encourages children, parents and schools to aim low. For those families on the fence — often deciding whether a student will be the first to attend — the skepticism becomes one more reason to stop at high school. Only about 33 percent of young adults get a four-year degree today, while another 10 percent receive a two-year degree.
 
 So it’s important to dissect the anti-college argument, piece by piece. It obviously starts with money. Tuition numbers can be eye-popping, and student debt has increased significantly. But there are two main reasons college costs aren’t usually a problem for those who graduate.
 
 First, many colleges are not very expensive, once financial aid is taken into account. Average net tuition and fees at public four-year colleges this past year were only about $2,000 (though Congress may soon cut federal financial aid).
 
 Second, the returns from a degree have soared. Three decades ago, full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree made 40 percent more than those with only a high-school diploma. Last year, the gap reached 83 percent. College graduates, though hardly immune from the downturn, are also far less likely to be unemployed than non-graduates.
 
 Skeptics like to point out that the income gap isn’t rising as fast as it once was, especially for college graduates who don’t get an advanced degree. But the gap remains enormous — and bigger than ever. Skipping college because the pace of gains has slowed is akin to skipping your heart medications because the pace of medical improvement isn’t what it used to be.
 
 The Hamilton Project, a research group in Washington, has just finished a comparison of college with other investments. It found that college tuition in recent decades has delivered an inflation-adjusted annual return of more than 15 percent. For stocks, the historical return is 7 percent. For real estate, it’s less than 1 percent.
 
 Another study being released this weekend — by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose of Georgetown — breaks down the college premium by occupations and shows that college has big benefits even in many fields where a degree is not crucial.
 
 Construction workers, police officers, plumbers, retail salespeople and secretaries, among others, make significantly more with a degree than without one. Why? Education helps people do higher-skilled work, get jobs with better-paying companies or open their own businesses.
 
 This follows the pattern of the early 20th century, when blue- and white-collar workers alike benefited from having a high-school diploma.
 
 When confronted with such data, skeptics sometimes reply that colleges are mostly a way station for smart people. But that’s not right either. Various natural experiments — like teenagers’ proximity to a campus, which affects whether they enroll — have shown that people do acquire skills in college.
 
 Even a much-quoted recent study casting doubt on college education, by an N.Y.U. sociologist and two other researchers, was not so simple. It found that only 55 percent of freshmen and sophomores made statistically significant progress on an academic test. But the margin of error was large enough that many more may have made progress. Either way, the general skills that colleges teach, like discipline and persistence, may be more important than academics anyway.
 
 None of this means colleges are perfect. Many have abysmal graduation rates. Yet the answer is to improve colleges, not abandon them. Given how much the economy changes, why would a high-school diploma forever satisfy most citizens’ educational needs?
 
 Or think about it this way: People tend to be clear-eyed about this debate in their own lives. For instance, when researchers asked low-income teenagers how much more college graduates made than non-graduates, the teenagers made excellent estimates. And in a national survey, 94 percent of parents said they expected their child to go to college.
 
 Then there are the skeptics themselves, the professors, journalists and others who say college is overrated. They, of course, have degrees and often spend tens of thousands of dollars sending their children to expensive colleges.
 
 I don’t doubt that the skeptics are well meaning. But, in the end, their case against college is an elitist one — for me and not for thee. And that’s rarely good advice.
 
 

David Leonhardt is a columnist for the business section of The New York Times.

    Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off, NYT, 25.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/sunday-review/26leonhardt.html

Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired

June 27, 2011
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

WASHINGTON — Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city’s roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. “It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job,” Ms. Strzelecki said.

Her fears were not unfounded: 165 Washington teachers were fired last year based on a pioneering evaluation system that places significant emphasis on classroom observations; next month, 200 to 600 of the city’s 4,200 educators are expected to get similar bad news, in the nation’s highest rate of dismissal for poor performance.

The evaluation system, known as Impact, is disliked by many unionized teachers but has become a model for many educators. Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.

Its admirers say the system, a centerpiece of the tempestuous three-year tenure of Washington’s former schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, has brought clear teaching standards to a district that lacked them and is setting a new standard by establishing dismissal as a consequence of ineffective teaching.

But some educators say it is better at sorting and firing teachers than at helping struggling ones; they note that the system does not consider socioeconomic factors in most cases and that last year 35 percent of the teachers in the city’s wealthiest area, Ward 3, were rated highly effective, compared with 5 percent in Ward 8, the poorest.

“Teachers have to be parents, priests, lawyers, clothes washers, babysitters and a bunch of other things” if they work with low-income children, said Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union. “Impact takes none of those roles into account, so it can penalize you just for teaching in a high-needs school.”

Jason Kamras, the architect of the system, said “it’s too early to answer” whether Impact makes it easier for teachers in well-off neighborhoods to do well, but pointed out that Washington’s compensation system offers bigger bonuses ($25,000 versus $12,500) and salary enhancements in high-poverty schools.

“We take very seriously the distribution of high-quality teachers across the system,” he said.

The evaluation system leans heavily on student test scores to judge about 500 math and reading teachers in grades four to eight. Ratings for the rest of the city’s 3,600 teachers are determined mostly by five classroom observations annually, three by their principal and two by so-called master educators, most recruited from outside Washington.

For classroom observations, nine criteria — “explain content clearly,” “maximize instructional time” and “check for student understanding,” for example — are used to rate the lesson as highly effective, effective, minimally effective or ineffective.

These five observations combine to form 75 percent of these teachers’ overall ratings; the rest is based on achievement data and the teachers’ commitment to their school communities. Ineffective teachers face dismissal. Minimally effective ones get a year to improve.

Impact costs the city $7 million a year, including pay for 41 master educators, who earn about $90,000 a year and conduct about 170 observations each. The program also asks more of principals. Carolyne Albert-Garvey, the principal of Maury Elementary School on Capitol Hill, has 22 teachers — she must conduct 66 observations, about one every three school days.

“I’ve really gotten to know my staff, and I’m giving teachers more specific feedback,” Ms. Albert-Garvey said. “It’s empowered me to have the difficult conversations, and that gives everyone the opportunity to improve.”

Several teachers, however, said they considered their ratings unfair.

A veteran teacher who said he did not want to criticize the school system openly, said that a month after he inherited a chaotic world history class from a long-term substitute, the visiting evaluator cut him no slack for taking on the assignment and penalized him because a student was texting during the lesson.

Another teacher who expects to lose her job next month because of low ratings said at a public hearing that evaluators picked apart her seventh-grade geography lessons, making criticisms she considered trivial. During the most recent observation, her evaluator subtracted points because she had failed to notice a girl eating during class, the teacher said.

“I’m 25 years in the system, and before, I always got outstanding ratings,” she said. “How can you go overnight from outstanding to minimally effective?”

A report issued by the Aspen Institute in March said one of Impact’s accomplishments was to align teacher performance with student performance, noting that previously 95 percent of Washington’s teachers were highly rated but fewer than half of its students were demonstrating proficiency on tests. Still, the report quoted teachers who complained of cold-eyed evaluators more interested in identifying losers than in developing winners.

“After my first conversation with my master educator, I felt it was going to be worthwhile — she offered me some good resources,” the report quoted one teacher. “My second master educator was kind of a robot, not generous in offering assistance, a much tougher grader.”

This month, Mary Gloster, who taught science in three states before she was recruited to Impact in 2009, was at Ballou High, one of the city’s lowest-performing schools, to share the results of some classroom visits.

She met with Mahmood Dorosti, a physics teacher who won a $5,000 award this spring. “Don’t even think about it — you’re highly effective,” she told him.

Next was Ms. Strzelecki, 23, who came to Ballou through Teach for America. The two sat at adjoining desks, with Ms. Strzelecki looking a bit like a doe in the headlights.

But Ms. Gloster, who had watched her teach a ninth-grade biology lesson the week before, offered compliments, along with suggestions about how Ms. Strzelecki might provide differentiated teaching for advanced and struggling students.

“You did a really good job, kiddo,” the evaluator ruled, grading her as effective, the equivalent of a B (the same rating she got on previous observations).

“What I liked about Mary was that I felt she was on my side,” Ms. Strzelecki said later. “Some teachers feel the master educators are out to get them.”

That is a common perception, said Mark Simon, an education analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, which receives teachers’ union financing. Ms. Rhee developed the system, he noted, during tough contract negotiations and did not consult with the teachers’ union in its design.

“That was a missed opportunity,” Mr. Simon said, “and it’s created a lot of resentment.”

    Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired, NYT, 27.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/education/28evals.html

In Homework Revolt, School Districts Cut Back

June 15, 2011
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

GALLOWAY, N.J. — After Donna Cushlanis’s son, who was in second grade, kept bursting into tears midway through his math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework.

“How many times do you have to add seven plus two?” Ms. Cushlanis, 46, asked. “I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge. I got to the point that this is enough.”

Ms. Cushlanis, a secretary for the Galloway School District, complained to her boss, Annette Giaquinto, the superintendent. It turned out that the district, which is northwest of Atlantic City and serves 3,500 kindergarten through eighth-grade students, was already re-evaluating its homework practices. The school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school — 20 minutes for second graders, an hour for sixth graders, and so forth — and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations.

Galloway is part of a wave of districts across the nation trying to remake homework amid concerns that high-stakes testing and competition for college have fueled a nightly grind that is stressing out children and depriving them of play and rest, yet doing little to raise achievement, particularly in elementary grades.

“There is simply no proof that most homework as we know it improves school performance,” said Vicki Abeles, a mother of three from California, whose documentary “Race to Nowhere,” about burned-out students caught in a pressure-cooker educational system, has helped reignite the antihomework movement. “And by expecting kids to work a ‘second shift’ in what should be their downtime, the presence of schoolwork at home is negatively affecting the health of our young people and the quality of family time.”

So teachers at Mango Elementary School in Fontana, Calif., are replacing homework with “goal work” that is specific to individual student’s needs and that can be completed in class or at home at his or her own pace. The Pleasanton School District, north of San Jose, Calif., is proposing this month to cut homework times by nearly half and prohibit weekend assignments in elementary grades because, as one administrator said, “parents want their kids back.”

Ridgewood High School in New Jersey introduced a homework-free winter break in December. Schools in Tampa, Fla., and Bleckley County, Ga., have instituted “no homework nights” throughout the year. And the two-year-old Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a program for gifted and talented elementary students, has made homework optional: it is neither graded nor counted toward progress reports.

“I think people confuse homework with rigor,” said Donna Taylor, the Brooklyn School’s principal, who views homework for children under 11 as primarily benefiting parents by helping them feel connected to the classroom.

The homework revolution has also spread north to Toronto, which in 2008 banned homework for kindergartners and for older children on school holidays, and to the Philippines, where the education department issued a memorandum in September calling on teachers to refrain from giving weekend assignments “for pupils to enjoy their childhood.”

Research has long suggested that homework in small doses can reinforce basic skills and help young children develop study habits, but that there are diminishing returns, said Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. The 10-minute guideline has generally been shown to be effective, he said, adding that over all, “there is a minimal relationship between how much homework young kids do and how well they test.”

Still, efforts to roll back homework have drawn sharp criticism from some teachers and parents who counter that there is not enough time in the school day to cover required topics and that students must study more — not less —if they are to succeed in life. In Coronado, Calif., the school board rejected a proposal by the superintendent to eliminate homework on weekends and holidays after some parents said that was when they had time to help their children and others worried it would result in more homework on weeknights.

“Most of our kids can’t spell without spell check or add unless it comes up on the computer,” said Karol Ball, 51, who has two teenage sons in the Atlantic City district, near Galloway. “If we coddle them when they’re younger, what happens when they get into the real world? No one’s going to say to them, ‘You don’t have to work extra hard to get that project done; just turn in what you got.’ ”

Homework wars have divided communities for more than a century, fanned by shifting social, political and cultural norms. In the 1950s, the launching of Sputnik ushered in heavier workloads for American students in the race to keep up with the Soviet Union. The 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” brought renewed demands for homework as American test scores lagged behind those of other countries. The testing pressures of the No Child Left Behind law over the past decade have resulted in more homework for children at younger ages.

A few public and private schools have renounced homework in recent years. But most have sought a middle ground, defining for the first time what homework should — and should not — be. In Galloway, the new policy will stipulate that homework should cover only topics and skills already addressed in class. And Coronado, having rejected the weekend-holiday ban, is now at work on grade-specific homework guidelines

“It’s been a fairly rote, thoughtless process for a long time, and schools are starting to realize this is a problem,” said Cathy Vatterott, an associate education professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and the author of the 2009 book “Rethinking Homework.”

But Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, views policies dictating when and how to do homework as micromanagement. It is “taking something that should be professional practice and making it into an assembly-line process,” Ms. Weingarten said.

Ms. Giaquinto, Galloway’s schools superintendent, said the goal of the policy proposed last month was to make homework “meaningful and manageable,” noting that teachers of different subjects would have to coordinate assignments so that a student’s total homework would not exceed the time limit.

Ms. Cushlanis, a single mother of triplets who are in different classes, is looking forward to having things standardized. Last year, in second grade, her son Nathan had twice as much homework as his brothers; this year, her son Jared has the most. If the boys do not finish their homework, they must do so the next day during recess.

“They shouldn’t be bombarded with homework,” Ms. Cushlanis said. “Kids need to be able to play; they need outlets.”

But William Parker, a construction worker who attended the Galloway schools and has a nephew in first grade, said the new policy might lead children to focus on the clock rather than on their studies.

“This is so stupid,” Mr. Parker said. “Part of growing up is having a lot of homework every day. You’re supposed to say, ‘I can’t come out and play because I have to stay in and do homework.’ ”

    In Homework Revolt, School Districts Cut Back, NYT, 15.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/education/16homework.html

U.S. Students Remain Poor at History, Tests Show

June 14, 2011
The New Yortk Times
By SAM DILLON

American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject, according to results of a nationwide test released on Tuesday, with most fourth graders unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War.

Over all, 20 percent of fourth graders, 17 percent of eighth graders and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrated proficiency on the exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Federal officials said they were encouraged by a slight increase in eighth-grade scores since the last administration of the history test, in 2006. But even those gains offered little to celebrate, because, for example, fewer than a third of eighth graders could answer even a “seemingly easy question” asking them to identify an important advantage American forces had over the British during the Revolution, the government’s statement on the results said.

Diane Ravitch, an education historian who was invited by the national assessment’s governing board to review the results, said she was particularly disturbed by the fact that only 2 percent of 12th graders correctly answered a question concerning Brown v. Board of Education, which she called “very likely the most important decision” of the United States Supreme Court in the past seven decades.

Students were given an excerpt including the passage “We conclude that in the field of public education, separate but equal has no place, separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and were asked what social problem the 1954 ruling was supposed to correct.

“The answer was right in front of them,” Ms. Ravitch said. “This is alarming.” The tests were given last spring to a representative sample of 7,000 fourth graders, 11,800 eighth graders and 12,400 12th graders nationwide. History is one of eight subjects — the others are math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography and economics — covered by the assessment program, which is also known as the Nation’s Report Card. The board that oversees the program defines three achievement levels for each test: “basic” denotes partial mastery of a subject; “proficient” represents solid academic performance and a demonstration of competency over challenging subject matter; and “advanced” means superior performance.

If history is American students’ worst subject, economics is their best: 42 percent of high school seniors were deemed proficient in the 2006 economics test, a larger proportion than in any other subject over the last decade. But Jack Buckley, commissioner of the statistical center at the Department of Education that carries out the tests, said on Monday that because the assessments in each subject were prepared and administered independently, it was not really fair to compare results across subjects.

On the 2010 history test, the proportion of students scoring at or above proficiency rose among fourth graders to 20 percent from 18 percent in 2006, held at 17 percent among eighth graders, and fell to 12 from 13 percent among high school seniors.

On the test’s 500-point scale, average fourth- and eighth-grade scores each increased three points since 2006. But officials said only the eighth-grade increase, to 266 in 2010 from 263 in 2006, was statistically significant. Average 12th-grade scores dropped, to 288 in 2010 from 290 in 2006.

While changes in the overall averages were microscopic, there was significant upward movement among the lowest-performing students — those in the 10th percentile — in fourth and eighth grades and a narrowing of the racial achievement gap at all levels. On average, for instance, white eighth-grade students scored 274 on the latest test, 21 points higher than Hispanic students and 23 points above black students; in 2006, white students outperformed Hispanic students by 23 points and black students by 29 points.

History advocates contend that students’ poor showing on the tests underlines neglect shown the subject by federal and state policy makers, especially since the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act began requiring schools to raise scores in math and reading but in no other subject. The federal accountability law, the advocates say, has given schools and teachers an incentive to spend less time on history and other subjects.

“History is very much being shortchanged,” said Linda K. Salvucci, a history professor in San Antonio who is chairwoman-elect of the National Council for History Education. Many teacher-education programs, she said, also contribute to the problem by encouraging aspiring teachers to seek certification in social studies, rather than in history. “They think they’ll be more versatile, that they can teach civics, government, whatever,” she said. “But they’re not prepared to teach history.”

    U.S. Students Remain Poor at History, Tests Show, NYT, 14.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/education/15history.html

Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite

May 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

The last four presidents of the United States each attended a highly selective college. All nine Supreme Court justices did, too, as did the chief executives of General Electric (Dartmouth), Goldman Sachs (Harvard), Wal-Mart (Georgia Tech), Exxon Mobil (Texas) and Google (Michigan).

Like it or not, these colleges have outsize influence on American society. So their admissions policies don’t matter just to high school seniors; they’re a matter of national interest.

More than seven years ago, a 44-year-old political scientist named Anthony Marx became the president of Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, and set out to change its admissions policies. Mr. Marx argued that elite colleges were neither as good nor as meritocratic as they could be, because they mostly overlooked lower-income students.

For all of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse, their student bodies remained shockingly affluent. At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.

In his 2003 inaugural address, Mr. Marx — quoting from a speech President John F. Kennedy had given at Amherst — asked, “What good is a private college unless it is serving a great national purpose?”

On Sunday, Mr. Marx presided over his final Amherst graduation. This summer, he will become head of the New York Public Library. And he can point to some impressive successes at Amherst.

More than 22 percent of students now receive federal Pell Grants (a rough approximation of how many are in the bottom half of the nation’s income distribution). In 2005, only 13 percent did. Over the same period, other elite colleges have also been doing more to recruit low- and middle-income students, and they have made some progress.

It is tempting, then, to point to all these changes and proclaim that elite higher education is at long last a meritocracy. But Mr. Marx doesn’t buy it. If anything, he worries, the progress has the potential to distract people from how troubling the situation remains.

When we spoke recently, he mentioned a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges. As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students.

“We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Mr. Marx says. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”

I think Amherst has created a model for attracting talented low- and middle-income students that other colleges can copy. It borrows, in part, from the University of California, which is by far the most economically diverse top university system in the country. But before we get to the details, I want to address a question that often comes up in this discussion:

Does more economic diversity necessarily mean lower admissions standards?

No, it does not.

The truth is that many of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all, research has shown. Incredibly, only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores.

“The extent of wasted human capital,” wrote the report’s authors, Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, “is phenomenal.”

This comparison understates the problem, too, because SAT scores are hardly a pure measure of merit. Well-off students often receive SAT coaching and take the test more than once, Mr. Marx notes, and top colleges reward them for doing both. Colleges also reward students for overseas travel and elaborate community service projects. “Colleges don’t recognize, in the same way, if you work at the neighborhood 7-Eleven to support your family,” he adds.

Several years ago, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, and two other researchers found that top colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-income students, despite claims to the contrary. Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage. But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. It’s pretty hard to call that meritocracy.

•

Amherst has shown that building a better meritocracy is possible, by doing, as Mr. Marx says, “everything we can think of.”

The effort starts with financial aid. The college has devoted more of its resources to aid, even if the dining halls don’t end up being as fancy as those at rival colleges. Outright grants have replaced most loans, not just for poor students but for middle-class ones. The college has started a scholarship for low-income foreign students, who don’t qualify for Pell Grants. And Amherst officials visit high schools they had never visited before to spread the word.

The college has also started using its transfer program mostly to admit community college students. This step may be the single easiest way for a college to become more meritocratic. It’s one reason the University of California campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego are so much more diverse than other top colleges.

Many community colleges have horrifically high dropout rates, but the students who succeed there are often inspiring. They include war veterans, single parents and immigrants who have managed to overcome the odds. At Amherst this year, 62 percent of transfer students came from a community college.

Finally, Mr. Marx says Amherst does put a thumb on the scale to give poor students more credit for a given SAT score. Not everyone will love that policy. “Spots at these places are precious,” he notes. But I find it tough to argue that a 1,300 score for most graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy — or most children of Amherst alumni — is as impressive as a 1,250 for someone from McDowell County, W.Va., or the South Bronx.

The result of these changes is that Amherst has a much higher share of low-income students than almost any other elite college. By itself, of course, Amherst is not big enough to influence the American economy. But its policies could affect the economy if more colleges adopted them.

The United States no longer leads the world in educational attainment, partly because so few low-income students — and surprisingly few middle-income students — graduate from four-year colleges. Getting more of these students into the best colleges would make a difference. Many higher-income students would still graduate from college, even if they went to a less elite one. A more educated population, in turn, would probably lift economic growth.

The Amherst model does cost money. And it would be difficult to maintain if Congress cuts the Pell budget, as some members have proposed. But when you add everything up, I think the model isn’t only the fairest one and the right one for the economy. It’s also the best one for the colleges themselves. Attracting the best of the best — not just the best of the affluent — and letting them learn from one another is the whole point of a place like Amherst.

“We did this for educational reasons,” Mr. Marx says. “We aim to be the most diverse college in the country — and the most selective.”

    Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite, NYT, 24.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhardt.html

Your So-Called Education

May 14, 2011
The New York Times
By RICHARD ARUM and JOSIPA ROKSA

COMMENCEMENT is a special time on college campuses: an occasion for students, families, faculty and administrators to come together to celebrate a job well done. And perhaps there is reason to be pleased. In recent surveys of college seniors, more than 90 percent report gaining subject-specific knowledge and developing the ability to think critically and analytically. Almost 9 out of 10 report that overall, they were satisfied with their collegiate experiences.

We would be happy to join in the celebrations if it weren’t for our recent research, which raises doubts about the quality of undergraduate learning in the United States. Over four years, we followed the progress of several thousand students in more than two dozen diverse four-year colleges and universities. We found that large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.

In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.

Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college.

Why is the overall quality of undergraduate learning so poor?

While some colleges are starved for resources, for many others it’s not for lack of money. Even at those colleges where for the past several decades tuition has far outpaced the rate of inflation, students are taught by fewer full-time tenured faculty members while being looked after by a greatly expanded number of counselors who serve an array of social and personal needs. At the same time, many schools are investing in deluxe dormitory rooms, elaborate student centers and expensive gyms. Simply put: academic investments are a lower priority.

The situation reflects a larger cultural change in the relationship between students and colleges. The authority of educators has diminished, and students are increasingly thought of, by themselves and their colleges, as “clients” or “consumers.” When 18-year-olds are emboldened to see themselves in this manner, many look for ways to attain an educational credential effortlessly and comfortably. And they are catered to accordingly. The customer is always right.

Federal legislation has facilitated this shift. The funds from Pell Grants and subsidized loans, by being assigned to students to spend on academic institutions they have chosen rather than being packaged as institutional grants for colleges to dispense, have empowered students — for good but also for ill. And expanded privacy protections have created obstacles for colleges in providing information on student performance to parents, undercutting a traditional check on student lassitude.

Fortunately, there are some relatively simple, practical steps that colleges and universities could take to address the problem. Too many institutions, for instance, rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades. (Indeed, the 36 percent of students in our study who reported spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone still had an average G.P.A. of 3.16.) On those commendable occasions when professors and academic departments do maintain rigor, they risk declines in student enrollments. And since resources are typically distributed based on enrollments, rigorous classes are likely to be canceled and rigorous programs shrunk. Distributing resources and rewards based on student learning instead of student satisfaction would help stop this race to the bottom.

Others involved in education can help, too. College trustees, instead of worrying primarily about institutional rankings and fiscal concerns, could hold administrators accountable for assessing and improving learning. Alumni as well as parents and students on college tours could ignore institutional facades and focus on educational substance. And the Department of Education could make available nationally representative longitudinal data on undergraduate learning outcomes for research purposes, as it has been doing for decades for primary and secondary education.

Most of all, we hope that during this commencement season, our faculty colleagues will pause to consider the state of undergraduate learning and our collective responsibility to increase academic rigor on our campuses.

Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, are the authors of “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.”

    Your So-Called Education, NYT, 14.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html

Can Teaching Overcome Poverty’s Ills?

April 29, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “The Limits of School Reform” (column, April 26):

Hats off to Joe Nocera for saying what has been obvious to teachers and principals for years. By the time a child starts public school, at age 5 or 6, he or she has been in an environment since birth that has largely shaped the outcome of his or her school experience.

There’s no question that can be modified for the good by dedicated teachers working in well-run schools. But there is serious doubt that school reform alone will accomplish that.

Children bring all the baggage of their home experiences with them when they come to school. Couple that with the dismal condition of many of the nation’s public schools, crumbling neighborhoods and parents who have little to no contact with the schools, and you have a recipe for failing schools.

Requiring school uniforms, adding hours to the schoolday, providing more rigorous courses — all may be helpful, but no combination of efforts confined solely to the schools will provide the magic answer.

Many of America’s schools are failing because for many Americans our society is failing. Pushing for more charter schools and standardized tests or excoriating teachers’ unions are only diversions if we fail to broaden our efforts beyond the schoolhouse door.

CHARLES MURPHY
Durham, N.C., April 26, 2011


•

To the Editor:

Joe Nocera’s point that good teaching alone cannot overcome the obstacles posed by poverty is a common counterpoint to the education reform movement. I, like Joel I. Klein, former New York City schools chancellor, reject this premise because it takes the entire problem of failing schools out of one’s control.

Of course poverty is a factor. So is how many parents the students live with. So is school funding. So is out-of-control school bureaucracy.

But, so what? The entire point of the teacher focus is that it’s the only thing the school systems really have control over. In the absence of an immediate plan to fix poverty, family structure and school funding, the only place where we can influence the fate of these students is in the classroom. That’s where the focus should be. 

NEAL SUIDAN
Memphis, April 26, 2011

The writer is a high school teacher.


•

To the Editor:

Thank you, Joe Nocera. I teach 11th-grade English and this term I have 60 low-performing students. I vowed to myself that not one would fail my class. I have worked harder than ever before to make relevant lesson plans, teach basic grammar and talk one on one with failing students.

And yet, what am I to do with the one who spent two weeks in a mental hospital, the two who have run away, the one with no ride to school, the three who have been suspended for drugs and the countless others who attend class only one or two days a week?

Short of adopting these teenagers myself (something that movies about inspiring teachers seem to suggest is a viable option), my impact on their lives seems limited. 

KATHLEEN MILLS
Bloomington, Ind., April 26, 2011


•

To the Editor:

Joe Nocera is right: To deal with the impact of poverty on students’ success in school, we must both improve schools that serve low-income children and provide the additional resources, services and supports children need to succeed. If we concentrate on only one of these efforts, we will continue to fail these children.

Most American children thrive academically because they enjoy the benefits of preschool, quality K-12 schooling, complementary learning opportunities out of school, health care and family support. For children from poverty, many of these vital educational resources are unavailable or inadequate. The result is dramatic gaps in academic achievement.

Research clearly shows that for disadvantaged children to obtain a meaningful educational opportunity, they need both important school-based resources like quality teaching, and critical out-of-school resources like quality early learning experiences, physical and mental health care, after-school and summer programs, and family engagement — what we call “comprehensive educational opportunity.”

In spite of all the new money promoting a more simplistic approach, this “both/and” approach continues to gain strength among researchers, practitioners, advocates and the courts.

JESSICA R. WOLFF
New York, April 27, 2011

The writer is director of the Comprehensive Educational Opportunity Project of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University.

    Can Teaching Overcome Poverty’s Ills?, NYT, 29.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/opinion/l30nocera.html

The Limits of School Reform

April 25, 2011
The New York Times
By JOE NOCERA

I find myself haunted by a 13-year-old boy named Saquan Townsend. It’s been more than two weeks since he was featured in The New York Times Magazine, yet I can’t get him out of my mind.

The article, by Jonathan Mahler, was about the heroic efforts of Ramón González, the principal of M.S. 223, a public middle school in the South Bronx, to make his school a place where his young charges can get a decent education and thus, perhaps, a better life. Surprisingly, though, González is not aligned with the public school reform movement, even though one of the movement’s leading lights, Joel Klein, was until fairly recently his boss as the head of the New York City school system.

Instead, González comes across as a skeptic, wary of the enthusiasm for, as the article puts it, “all of the educational experimentation” that took place on Klein’s watch. At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that’s required to improve student performance, so that’s all the reformers focus on. But it takes a lot more than that. Which is where Saquan comes in. His part of the story represents difficult truths that the reform movement has yet to face squarely — and needs to.

Saquan lands at M.S. 223 because his family has been placed in a nearby homeless shelter. (His mother fled Brooklyn out of fear that another son was in danger of being killed.) At first, he is so disruptive that a teacher, Emily Dodd, thinks he might have a mental disability. But working with him one on one, Dodd discovers that Saquan is, to the contrary, unusually intelligent — “brilliant” even.

From that point on, Dodd does everything a school reformer could hope for. She sends him text messages in the mornings, urging him to come to school. She gives him special help. She encourages him at every turn. For awhile, it seems to take.

Meanwhile, other forces are pushing him in another direction. His mother, who works nights and barely has time to see her son, comes across as indifferent to his schooling. Though she manages to move the family back to Brooklyn, the move means that Saquan has an hour-and-a-half commute to M.S. 223. As his grades and attendance slip, Dodd offers to tutor him. To no avail: He finally decides it isn’t worth the effort, and transfers to a school in Brooklyn.

The point is obvious, or at least it should be: Good teaching alone can’t overcome the many obstacles Saquan faces when he is not in school. Nor is he unusual. Mahler recounts how M.S. 223 gives away goodie bags to lure parents to parent association meetings, yet barely a dozen show up. He reports that during the summer, some students fall back a full year in reading comprehension — because they don’t read at home.

Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home.

Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant. “There is no question that family engagement can matter,” said Klein when I spoke to him. “But they seem to be saying that poverty is destiny, so let’s go home. We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty,” he insisted — notwithstanding the voluminous studies that have been done on the subject. “To let us off the hook prematurely seems, to me, to play into the hands of the other side.”

That last sentence strikes me as the key to the reformers’ resistance: To admit the importance of a student’s background, they fear, is to give ammo to the enemy — which to them are their social-scientist critics and the teachers’ unions. But that shouldn’t be the case. Making schools better is always a goal worth striving for, whether it means improving pedagogy itself or being able to fire bad teachers more easily. Without question, school reform has already achieved some real, though moderate, progress.

What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.

Over the long term, fixing our schools is going to involve a lot more than, well, just fixing our schools. In the short term, however, the reform movement could use something else: a dose of humility about what it can accomplish — and what it can’t.

    The Limits of School Reform, NYT, 25.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/opinion/26nocera.html

A Trial Run for School Standards

That Encourage Deeper Thought

April 24, 2011
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

Until this year, Ena Baxter, an English teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens, would often have her 10th graders compose papers by summarizing a single piece of reading material.

Last month, for a paper on the influence of media on teenagers, she had them read a survey on the effects of cellphones and computers on young people’s lives, a newspaper column on the role of social media in the Tunisian uprising and a 4,200-word magazine article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

A math teacher, José Rios, used to take a day or two on probabilities, drawing bell-shaped curves on the blackboard to illustrate the pattern known as normal distribution. This year, he stretched the lesson by a day and had students work in groups to try to draw the same type of graphic using the heights of the 15 boys in the class.

“Eventually, they figured out they couldn’t because the sample was too small,” Mr. Rios said. “They learned that the size of the sample matters, and I didn’t have to tell them.”

In three years, instruction in most of the country could look a lot like what is going on at Hillcrest, one of 100 schools in New York City experimenting with new curriculum standards known as the common core.

Forty-two states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have signed on to the new standards, an ambitious set of goals that go beyond reading lists and math formulas to try to raise the bar not only on what students in every grade are expected to learn, but also on how teachers are expected to teach.

The standards, to go into effect in 2014, will replace a hodgepodge of state guidelines that have become the Achilles’ heel of the No Child Left Behind law. Many states, including New York, lowered standards in a push to meet the law’s requirement that all students reach grade level, as measured by each state, in English and math. President Obama has expressed a desire to rewrite the law, and many experts predict the common core will be a centerpiece of the effort.

The new standards give specific goals that, by the end of the 12th grade, should prepare students for college work. Book reports will ask students to analyze, not summarize. Presentations will be graded partly on how persuasively students express their ideas. History papers will require reading from multiple sources; the goal is to get students to see how beliefs and biases can influence the way different people describe the same events.

There are a number of challenges.

There are guidelines for what students are expected to do in each grade, but it is still up to districts, schools and teachers to fill in the finer points of the curriculum, like what books to read.

There is no national body responsible for seeing that the standards are carried out, because of fears of giving too much control of education to the federal government. So far, only a few other large cities, including Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, have begun to apply the standards in the classroom. And depending on how No Child Left Behind is refashioned, it may still be left to each state to measure its own success.

“The standards create a historic opportunity in that we now have a destination worth aiming for, but only time will tell if they’ll create historic change,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., an assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration and the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a group that supports national standards.

With 3,200 students, Hillcrest is the second largest school in the city’s pilot. Its size and diversity — whites are a minority (4 percent), Muslims are the religious plurality (about 30 percent) and one-tenth of students are learning English — made it an ideal laboratory to test how the standards might work in the city, officials said.

On a recent Wednesday, Jill Lee, an English teacher, closed a unit on the meaning of the American dream not by assigning a first-person essay, as she once did, but by asking each student to interview an immigrant and write a profile of the person.

Eleni Giannousis made a change in her 10th-grade English class that might make some purists blanch. She had students watch the filmed stage performance of “Death of a Salesman,” starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman, before they read the play. The idea was to have students absorb information through a medium they use for entertainment, one way she was experimenting with her lesson plans to try to meet the new goals.

“It wasn’t about making things easier for the students, but about challenging them to experience a classic in a different way,” Ms. Giannousis said.

While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from “literary” and “informational” texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s chief academic officer, said the city plans to create an instructional package with exercises that teachers at Hillcrest and other schools have used; student work they have assigned; and guidelines for evaluating the work.

At a training session last month, teams representing several schools in the pilot were asked to list lessons they had learned. Teachers from the Forward School of Creative Writing, a middle school in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx, wrote on a piece of cardboard: “Visuals help students make meaning” and “Many students are reading far below grade level.”

Timothy Shanahan, a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who helped write the common core standards for how to incorporate reading into science instruction, said that as a whole, the standards make no adjustments for students who are learning English or for children who might enter kindergarten without having been exposed to books.

“If I’m teaching fifth grade and I have a youngster in my class who reads as a first grader, throwing him a grade-level text is not going to do him any good, no matter what the standards say,” he said.

Mr. Polakow-Suransky, too, cautioned against overly optimistic expectations.

“This isn’t one of those things where you flip the switch and tomorrow, everything is going to be different,” he said.

    A Trial Run for School Standards That Encourage Deeper Thought, NYT, 24.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/nyregion/100-new-york-schools-try-common-core-approach.html

Burden of College Loans on Graduates Grows

April 11, 2011
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

Student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time last year and is likely to top a trillion dollars this year as more students go to college and a growing share borrow money to do so.

While many economists say student debt should be seen in a more favorable light, the rising loan bills nevertheless mean that many graduates will be paying them for a longer time.

“In the coming years, a lot of people will still be paying off their student loans when it’s time for their kids to go to college,” said Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com, who has compiled the estimates of student debt, including federal and private loans.

Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt. Default rates are rising, especially among those who attended for-profit colleges.

The mountain of debt is likely to grow more quickly with the coming round of budget-slashing. Pell grants for low-income students are expected to be cut and tuition at public universities will probably increase as states with pinched budgets cut back on the money they give to colleges.

Some education policy experts say the mounting debt has broad implications for the current generation of students.

“If you have a lot of people finishing or leaving school with a lot of debt, their choices may be very different than the generation before them,” said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for Student Access and Success. “Things like buying a home, starting a family, starting a business, saving for their own kids’ education may not be options for people who are paying off a lot of student debt.”

In some circles, student debt is known as the anti-dowry. As the transition from adolescence to adulthood is being delayed, with young people taking longer to marry, buy a home and have children, large student loans can slow the process further.

“There’s much more awareness about student borrowing than there was 10 years ago,” Ms. Asher said. “People either are in debt or know someone in debt.”

To be sure, many economists and policy experts see student debt as a healthy investment — unlike high-interest credit card debt, which is simply a burden on consumers’ budgets and has been declining in recent years. As recently as 2000, student debt, at less than $200 billion, barely registered as a factor in overall household debt. But now, Mr. Kantrowitz said, student loans are going from a microeconomic factor to a macroeconomic factor.

Susan Dynarski, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan, said student debt could generally be seen as a sensible investment in a lifetime of higher earnings. “When you think about what’s good debt and what’s bad debt, student loans fall into the realm of good debt, like mortgages,” Professor Dynarski said. “It’s an investment that pays off over the whole life cycle.”

According to a College Board report issued last fall, median earnings of bachelor’s degree recipients working full time year-round in 2008 were $55,700, or $21,900 more than the median earnings of high school graduates. And their unemployment rate was far lower.

So Sandy Baum, a higher education policy analyst and senior fellow at George Washington University, a co-author of the report, said she was not concerned, from a broader perspective, that student debt was growing so fast.

Indeed, some economists worry that all the news about unemployed 20-somethings mired in $100,000 of college debt might discourage some young people from attending college.

A decade ago, student debt did not loom so large on the national agenda. Barack and Michelle Obama helped raise awareness when they spoke in the presidential campaign about how their loan payments after graduating from Harvard Law School were more than their mortgage payments.

“We left school with a mountain of debt,” Mr. Obama said in 2008. “Michelle I know had at least $60,000. I had at least $60,000. So when we got together we had a lot of loans to pay. In fact, we did not finish paying them off until probably we’d been married for at least eight years, maybe nine.”

Even then, Mrs. Obama said, it took the royalties from her husband’s best-selling books to help pay off their loans.

In 2009, the Obama administration made it easier for low-earning student borrowers to get out of debt, with income-based repayment that forgives remaining federal student debt for those who pay 15 percent of their income for 25 years — or 10 years, if they work in public service.

But if the Obamas’ experience highlights the long payback periods for student debt, their careers also underscore the benefits of a top-flight education.

“College is still a really good deal,” said Cecilia Rouse, of Princeton, who served on Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “Even if you don’t land a plum job, you’re still going to earn more over your lifetime, and the vast majority of graduates can expect to cover their debts.”

Even believers in student debt like Ms. Rouse, though, concede that hefty college loans carry extra risks in the current economy.

“I am worried about this cohort of young people, because their unemployment rates are much higher and early job changing is how you get those increases over their lifetime,” Ms. Rouse said. “In this economy, it’s a lot harder to go from job to job. We know that there’s some scarring to cohorts who graduate in bad economies, and this is the mother of bad economies.”

And there is widespread concern about those who borrow heavily for college, then drop out, or take extra years to graduate.

Deanne Loonin, a lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center, said education debt was not good debt for the low-income borrowers she works with, most of whom are in default.

Unlike most other debt, student loans generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and the government can garnish wages or take tax refunds or Social Security payments to recover the money owed.

Students who borrow to attend for-profit colleges are especially likely to default. They make up about 12 percent of those enrolled in higher education, but almost half of those defaulting on student loans. According to the Department of Education, about a quarter of students at for-profit institutions defaulted on their student loans within three years of starting to repay them.

“About two-thirds of the people I see attended for-profits; most did not complete their program; and no one I have worked with has ever gotten a job in the field they were supposedly trained for,” Ms. Loonin said.

“For them, the negative mark on their credit report is the No. 1 barrier to moving ahead in their lives,” she added. “It doesn’t just delay their ability to buy a house, it gets in the way of their employment prospects, their finding an apartment, almost anything they try to do.”

    Burden of College Loans on Graduates Grows, NYT, 11.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/education/12college.html

The Deadlocked Debate Over Education Reform

April 9, 2011
The New York Times
By JONATHAN MAHLER

Few would argue that she was a good choice. But as you watched the almost giddy reception that greeted the departure of the New York City schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, last week — “She wasn’t in the class for the full semester so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to give her a grade,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers — it was hard not to wonder whether the debate over school reform has reached a point where debate is no longer possible.

As is often the case with morally charged policy issues — remember welfare reform? — false dichotomies seem to have replaced fruitful conversation. If you support the teachers’ union, you don’t care about the students. If you are critical of the teachers’ union, you don’t care about the teachers. If you are in favor of charter schools, you are opposed to public schools. If you believe in increased testing, you are on board with the corruption of our liberal society’s most cherished educational values. If you are against increased testing, you are against accountability. It goes on. Neither side seems capable of listening to the other.

The data can appear as divided as the rhetoric. New York City’s Department of Education will provide you with irrefutable statistics that school reform is working; opponents of reform will provide you with equally irrefutable statistics that it’s not. It can seem equally impossible to disentangle the overlapping factors: Are struggling schools struggling because they’ve been inundated with students from the failing schools that have closed around them? Are high school graduation rates up because the pressure to raise them has encouraged teachers and principals to pass students who aren’t really ready for college?

In such a polarized environment, spontaneous outbursts of candor can be ill-advised. When President Obama was asked recently by a high school student in Washington if he could cut back on standardized testing, he expressed sympathy. Critics of education reform pounced, seizing on his comments as evidence that even Mr. Obama, a champion of the reform movement, recognizes that testing has gotten out of control.

Ms. Black, an Upper East Side publishing executive who had never attended a public school, let alone worked in one, might have been destined to fail. But given how entrenched the two sides of this debate have become, it seems fair to wonder whether there can be such a thing as a successful schools chancellor in New York or, for that matter, anywhere. Ask Michelle Rhee, Washington’s crusading former chancellor, who played a decisive role, it is argued, in the failed re-election bid of Adrian Fenty, the mayor who had appointed her.

Even Ms. Black’s predecessor, Joel I. Klein, effective as he was at pushing through his changes, was forever alienating teachers and parents, enduring approval ratings that were consistently below 45 percent. Jean-Claude Brizard, one of Mr. Klein’s deputies and now the superintendent of the Rochester schools, is encountering some problems of his own, having recently received a vote of no confidence from his city’s teachers.

The nominee to replace Ms. Black, Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott, will at least have the benefit of following a chancellor with a 17 percent approval rating, but the good will that he’s enjoying now may well disappear as soon as he makes his first move. To stand any chance in this climate, a chancellor must ingratiate himself with teachers even as he forces them to accept radical changes to their contract, and push testing and accountability even as he assures parents that curriculums won’t be narrowed. In short, imagine a Chimera, the mythological beast that was equal parts lion, snake and goat.

How did we get here? The modern school-reform movement sprang to life in 1983, with the release of “A Nation at Risk,” an education report commissioned by the Reagan administration that boldly stated — note the cold-war era metaphor — that the United States had embarked upon a “unilateral educational disarmament.” From there, a line, however jagged, can be drawn through the Clinton administration’s emphasis on national standards, to President George W. Bush’s declaiming of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and on to the current generation of reformers, with their embrace of charter schools and their attacks on the teachers union. The policies and rhetoric changed, often dramatically, but the underlying assumption remained the same: Our nation’s schools are in dire need of systemic reform.

Opponents of reform will tell you the movement was built on a false premise, that the Reagan report was based on declining SAT scores, which weren’t really declining; it was just that more people were taking the test. The anti-reformers (for lack of a better term) have their own founding document, too: “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” a federal study released a bit awkwardly in 1966, in the midst of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s efforts to persuade Congress to devote more resources to schools through programs like Head Start. It concluded that school-based factors like money and teachers actually have little bearing on student achievement, that what happens outside the classroom is actually far more significant than what happens inside of it.

Like all battles for public opinion, the school-reform debate is in large part a matter of what the political consultant George Lakoff has called “framing.” In this struggle over storylines, the documentary film “Waiting for Superman,” with its lionization of charter schools, represented a major victory for reformers. So, too, did stories about the “rubber rooms” where New York City’s Department of Education puts ineffective teachers whose jobs are protected by their union contract. These accounts helped create an image of public-school teachers as cosseted by government largesse, our nation’s new “welfare queens.”

The critics of the reform movement offer counter-narratives. Diane Ravitch, a tireless tweeter and author of the best-selling “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” argues that school reform is actually hurting students. Jon Stewart has taken to parodying the attacks on public-school teachers on The Daily Show. (“You are destroying America. Yeah. Look at you, with your chalk-stained irregular blouses from Loehmans, and your Hyundai with its powered steering and its wind shield. I guess bugs hitting you in the face doesn’t cut it for old Mr. Chips.”)

Presumably, the deadlock will eventually be broken, and a “winner” will emerge. Either the education reformers will manage to take control of a critical mass of school districts, or they won’t. Before that happens, perhaps the various narratives and counter-narratives will decalcify and some actual debate will take place.

    The Deadlocked Debate Over Education Reform, NYT, 9.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/weekinreview/10reform.html

The Fragile Success of School Reform in the Bronx

April 6, 2011
The New York Times
By JONATHAN MAHLER

On a recent morning, Ramón González, the principal of M.S. 223, a public middle school in the South Bronx, arrived at work as usual at 7:30, stripped off his coat and suit jacket, deposited his tea and toast from a nearby diner on the cluttered conference table in his office and hustled down the hallway to the school’s back door to greet arriving students. González had a busy agenda for the day. Among other things, he needed to get to work on a proposal for the city’s Department of Education to expand 223 into a high school.

At 10, González was finally about to sit down at his computer, when he was interrupted. A young teacher came into his office in tears, unable to figure out what was going on with an eighth grader who had just transferred to 223 from a public school in Florida, was way behind in class and had been wandering around the school’s hallways between periods, looking lost. González knew almost nothing about the girl. Like many of his students, she turned up at 223 with no more than a utility bill to prove she lived in the neighborhood. He calmed the teacher and started trying to figure out what was happening. (When he finally reached an administrator at the girl’s old school days later, he discovered that she had been classified with a severe learning disability.)

Next, González was informed that the three free books that each of his school’s students was entitled to — under a nonprofit program to promote literacy in poor communities — had never arrived. He needed to chase them down. (As it turned out, they wound up at the wrong school.) As he was doing so, he learned that a former teacher who had physically threatened him, members of his faculty and even some students, and whom González had spent years trying to remove from the classroom, was challenging his termination.

There was also the matter of the eye tests. For five straight days, González had been trying to get through to someone at an organization that does free vision tests at public schools and fits children with glasses on the spot. “I can guarantee you right now that at least 20 percent of our kids need glasses,” he told me, after leaving yet another message on someone’s voice mail to “please, please, please call me back.” González, a light-skinned, baby-faced Latino, was sitting at a table in his office, his untouched tea and toast in front of him. Hanging on the bulletin board above him were the school’s last three report cards from the city, straight A’s, and an elaborately color-coded chart tracking all of his 486 students’ test scores. “They’re in their classrooms right now, staring at blackboards with no idea what they’re looking at,” he said. “You can have the best teachers, the best curriculum and the greatest after-school programs in the world, but if your kids can’t see, what does it matter?”

González has been principal of M.S. 223, on 145th Street near Willis Avenue, since the school’s creation in September 2003. One of the first schools opened by Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor at the time, 223 was intended to help replace a notoriously bad junior high school that the city had decided to shut down. Thirteen percent of its first incoming class of sixth graders were at grade level in math and just 10 percent were at grade level in English. Last year, after seven years under González, 60 percent of its students tested at or above grade level in math and 30 percent in English. Not something to brag about in most school districts, but those numbers make 223 one of the top middle schools in the South Bronx. According to its latest progress report from the Department of Education, which judges a school’s growth against a peer group with similar demographics, 223 is the 10th-best middle school in the entire city.

Success stories like this in high-poverty neighborhoods are becoming more common in the era of charter schools, but 223 is no charter. There is no clamoring of parents trying to game a spot for their kids in a lottery, no screening of applicants, no visits from educators hoping to learn the secret of the school’s success, no shadow philanthropist supplying Kindles to all of its students. M.S. 223 is just a regular public school. González isn’t even allowed to see the files of incoming students before they arrive. “You know what you have to do to come to school here?” González told me. “Walk through that door.”

Late last year, as I was first getting to know González and M.S. 223, I spent some time with Klein during his final days on the job, joining him on a couple of his last school visits and talking to him about his tenure as chancellor.

Now that education reform has become an established national movement, backed by countless multimillionaires and endorsed by President Obama himself, it’s easy to forget that Klein was once a lonely pioneer, if not the first chancellor to try to overhaul his schools, then surely the first to undertake such an ambitious effort to do so, and in the city with the largest — 1.1 million students — and most complicated school system in the country.

During our conversations, Klein, a former lawyer, cloaked his revolutionary ideology in a technocrat’s rhetoric, describing how he implemented “disruptive strategies” designed to transform the city’s schools “from a provider-driven system to a consumer-driven one.” What he meant was that he turned the city’s school system upside down, opening hundreds of new schools and shutting down dozens of others. Individual schools were given control over their own budgets, hiring and curriculums. In exchange, they were expected to earn good grades on their report cards from the city — another Klein innovation — or risk closure.

Klein’s successor, Cathleen Black, has made it clear that she plans to continue the bold policies that he started implementing after his appointment by Mayor Bloomberg in 2002. While it may still be too early to evaluate Klein’s legacy, some statistics certainly suggest meaningful progress. When Klein started, for instance, less than 50 percent of New York’s incoming high-school freshmen were graduating in four years. That number is now 63 percent. Since 2006, the city’s elementary and middle schools have seen a 22-point increase in the percentage of students at or above grade level in math (to 54 percent) and a 6-point increase in English (to 42 percent).

At the center of Klein’s vision was the notion that New York should not aspire to have a great school system but a system of great schools run by talented and empowered educators. To help reach this goal, Klein created an academy to train principals in the new skills the job would require and dispatched its graduates to the city’s most difficult neighborhoods with a mandate for change and the authority and autonomy to try to effect it. “I think one of our core accomplishments is that we transformed the principal from an agent of the bureaucracy to the C.E.O. of his or her school,” Klein told me.

I thought about this notion a lot over the course of the months I spent with González at 223. It’s an incongruous metaphor to apply to someone whose office overlooks one of the largest, most dangerous housing projects in New York. Still, González has shown the kind of entrepreneurial thinking that, were he a C.E.O., would attract attention: he joined the board of the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation in part to gain access to its playing fields, hired a part-time grant writer to raise money for the school, brought in a number of nonprofits to support the school’s extracurricular activities and even rented out space in his building to underwrite 223’s two-week summer-school program.

In certain respects, 223 is a monument to Klein’s success: empower the right principals to run their own schools and watch them bloom. Thanks to Klein, González has been able to avoid having teachers foisted on him on the basis of seniority. He has been able to create his own curriculums, micromanage his students’ days (within the narrow confines of the teachers’ union contract, anyway) and spend his annual budget of $4 million on the personnel, programs and materials he deems most likely to help his kids.

And yet even as school reform made it possible for González to succeed, as the movement rolls inexorably forward, it also seems in many ways set up to make him fail. The grading system imposed by Klein that has bestowed three consecutive A’s on González also disqualifies him from additional state resources earmarked for failing schools. The ever-growing number of charter schools, often privately subsidized and rarely bound by union rules, that Klein unleashed on the city skims off the neighborhood’s more ambitious, motivated families. And every year, as failing schools are shut down around González, a steady stream of children with poor intellectual habits and little family support continues to arrive at 223. González wouldn’t want it any other way — he takes pride in his school’s duty to educate all comers — but the endless flow of underperforming students drags down test scores, demoralizes teachers and makes the already daunting challenge of transforming 223 into a successful school, not just a relatively successful one, that much more difficult.

The school day at 223 begins at 7:50 a.m. This is 10 minutes before the United Federation of Teachers officially permits New York City public schools to start, which means that every year a majority of 223’s teachers has to vote to approve the earlier opening bell. The early start is a way to create more time for after-school programs, especially academic tutoring, before it gets dark and the streets surrounding the school become more threatening. “The research says it’s better to start your school day later,” González says, referring to studies showing that adolescents often need to get more sleep in order to be at their best. “But those researchers don’t live in my neighborhood.”

M.S. 223 is in the heart of School District 7, which is part of the poorest Congressional district in the nation. More than 90 percent of its students live in one of five housing projects, most prominently the Patterson Houses, a sprawling complex of 15 towers across the street from the school. About 70 percent of its students are Hispanic, predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican. The remainder are black, either African-American or recent immigrants from West African countries like Senegal. Roughly 11 percent of the school’s students are ELLs, or English-language learners. (Another 60 to 70 percent of its students are former ELLs.) About 17 percent have learning disabilities.

Upon arrival at 223, students pass through a gantlet of smiling teachers. González requires that faculty members stand outside their doors at the start of the school day, part of his effort to set the school off from the grim streets surrounding it. “In our location, kids have to want to come to school,” he says. “This is a very sick district. Tuberculosis, AIDS, asthma rates, homeless shelters, mental-health needs — you name the physical or social ill, and we’re near the top for the city. Which means that when our kids come to school in the morning, when they come through that door, we have to welcome them.”

There’s another, no less compelling reason for this policy: posting teachers outside their classrooms helps maintain order in the hallways. It’s one of a number of things, like moving students’ lockers into their homerooms, that González has done to ensure that kids spend as little time as possible in the halls, where so much middle-school trouble invariably begins. (Chaotic hallways also tend to make for chaotic classrooms.)

Watching students pour into the school, some barely five feet tall, others over six feet, it can be hard to believe that all of 223’s kids are within just a few years of one another. This is the nature of middle school, which straddles childhood and adolescence, an awkward period for most children and one of the many reasons that educators will tell you that middle-schoolers are unusually challenging, even in the best of circumstances.

It’s hard to say definitively how successful González has been at controlling 223’s halls. During the weeks I spent at the school, I never saw anything much more serious than one kid yanking another’s backpack, but the wave of students crashing noisily toward their homerooms bore little resemblance to the silent, single-file lines you see in many charter schools.

Those schools have a distinct advantage over 223, though. Their families have already chosen to be at a charter and have often jumped through numerous hoops to get there. This makes it easier for charters to create their own cultures. They can define the length of their days, dictate exactly how children dress and enforce strict codes of conduct. Those students — scholars, in charter parlance — who fall out of line don’t last.

Much of what González does involves creating a culture for 223 too, one that he essentially tricks children into embracing. Look closely at just about any aspect of 223, and you will invariably discover a hidden agenda. Students at 223 are required to wear white shirts and blue pants or skirts. González would like all of his boys to dress more formally, but rather than insisting that they wear ties, the custom at many charters, he has encouraged the school’s athletes to do so in the hope that the trend would spread. Most charters extend the school day until 5 p.m., an easy way to maximize their influence over students. Traditional public schools, however, are permitted to require that children be in school for only about six hours each day, so González has had to find creative ways to keep kids in the building, for example, mandating that students attend math or English tutoring before participating in after-school sports, clubs and music programs.

Career Day was held at 223 on a Monday morning in late January. Participants, a professionally diverse crowd of about 25, mostly minorities, that included a fashion designer, a corporate lawyer and a parole officer, started assembling at around 9 o’clock in an overheated classroom. A few picked at an unappetizing buffet of cold eggs, dinner rolls and limp, greasy bacon. Most scrolled through their BlackBerrys and waited, with growing impatience, to be told where to go and what to do.

If they expected to deliver a perfunctory description of their jobs, answer a few questions and be done, González had other plans. At about 9:15 he strode into the room and got right to the point. “Some of these kids have never left the Bronx or even the area,” he said, casting a stern eye around the group. “For a lot of our kids, this is going to be a life-changing experience, and I want to make sure you see it that way. I’ll be out in the hallway cheering you on, keeping that fire going, but I have to stress that this is an opportunity for them, and you don’t want to lose it.” Then he walked out.

González, who is Cuban and Puerto Rican, has a term for encounters between his students and adults with the potential to affect them: touches. As he describes it, it was a touch that changed the course of his own life when he was in middle school. González was raised in East Harlem by his mother, who supported seven children on welfare. A Puerto Rican stockbroker who volunteered at the Boys’ Club where González spent most of his free time took an interest in him and encouraged him to take a test to qualify for a high-school scholarship. González aced the test and was accepted to Middlesex, a prep school outside Boston. “I always had this weird feeling of having one foot in one world and one foot in another,” he says. “My financial-aid package paid for me to fly up to Boston, then I’d fly home for vacation and kids in the neighborhood would be getting shot.” From Middlesex, he went on to Cornell.

González’s background is similar to that of many of his students, and he can personally relate to some of the obstacles that stand in the way of their academic achievement: as a boy, he would take a pillow into the bathtub and close the bathroom door, because it was the only quiet place to read in the apartment. But González had at least one thing going for him. While his father, a veteran who returned from the Vietnam War addicted to heroin, was in and out of jail for much of González’s life and ultimately died of AIDS during his senior year at Cornell, he was self-educated and politically aware, a member of the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican equivalent of the Black Panthers. He recognized that his son was bright, and even if he wasn’t a provider or a role model, he did have aspirations for his son. He wanted him to go to law school and become a neighborhood defense lawyer.

Instead, after graduating from college and moving back to his old neighborhood, González started working as a math teacher, biding his time and building his résumé until he would be considered qualified to run his own school.

The opportunity to start 223, which began with 150 students, all sixth graders, arose when he was 31. Things got off to an inauspicious start. González initially opened the school in another building with two other South Bronx middle schools, one of which was reserved exclusively for children with special needs. Special-needs students tend to be older and bigger than others at their grade level and often have behavioral issues, a mix that proved problematic for González’s students. “My kids were getting their butts kicked,” he says. After one such episode led to a broken nose, he decided that he had seen enough. In a freezing rainstorm on Christmas Eve, he found himself personally ferrying 30 computers out of one building and into the empty floor of another, where 223 now resides.

González still lives in East Harlem, a few blocks from where he grew up. Though his son, Laurencio, the oldest of three children, is in kindergarten at a private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, González told me that he hoped to send him and his two other children to middle school at 223. “That’s the goal, to have this school be a place where I’d want to send my own kids.”

One frigid night in December, I went with González to watch him give a presentation at a community-education council meeting at an elementary school in the South Bronx. González had recently introduced a literacy initiative at 223, asking all of his parents and children to drop whatever they are doing at 6 o’clock every Thursday night and spend the next two hours reading. As part of the campaign, 223 placed free-book bins in local bodegas, health clinics and Laundromats. Now González was hoping to expand Community Reading Night into a broader, districtwide event.

González was preceded by the school’s holiday concert. The moment the performance ended, parents started heading for the door. By the time González rose to speak, the auditorium, nearly full when we arrived, was mostly empty. He had prepared a PowerPoint presentation, but had to abandon it because there was a cord missing. “This community is in crisis,” he said. “The literacy test scores that we have in our community are 23 percent. That is a scary number. What that means is that 23 percent of our kids are on pace to graduate from high school and go to college. Go to college. That doesn’t mean they’re going to finish college. Twenty-three percent. We cannot sustain our community on 23 percent. We have to be reading with our children. That’s the only way we’re going to change this scary statistic.”

Klein may see González as a chief executive, but González prefers to think of himself as a community activist. His vision for 223 is in some respects anachronistic in the era of school reform. Klein’s animating belief, and surely what he will best be remembered for, is the notion that while low-income families may not be able to choose what neighborhood they live in, they should nonetheless be able to choose what school their children attend. It was toward that end that he brought more than 100 charter schools to New York — with at least 100 more still on the way — deliberately concentrating them in high-poverty areas like Harlem and the South Bronx to create competition for existing public schools. Without ever quite saying so, Klein was agitating against the very idea of the neighborhood school with deep roots in a community, which is precisely what González is now trying to revive and reinvent.

Broadly speaking, the modus operandi of most charter schools, or at least those in impoverished neighborhoods, is to separate children from their presumably malignant environments. González objects to this in principle. “I don’t want to be part of the history of taking talented kids out of the neighborhoods and telling them to move on,” he says. More practically, he doesn’t think it’s a realistic objective, considering 223’s population. “Most of our kids are never going to leave this area just for financial reasons; they can’t afford to live anywhere else, they don’t have the guidance, whatever. So how do we make those places better so that their kids aren’t going through the same cycle?”

Given his and Klein’s conflicting agendas, it’s no surprise that González is critical of many of the policies of education reform. He has no problem with schools being held accountable for their performance, but he worries that the reform movement’s infatuation with competition will undermine the broader goal of improving public education — that by grading schools against their peers you are encouraging them to hoard their successful innovations rather than to share them. He is concerned as well about the fact that the new principals being sent, disproportionately, into disadvantaged neighborhoods have little experience with or connection to the communities they’re supposed to serve. And he is made uncomfortable by all of the educational experimentation, the endless stream of pilot programs, being implemented in neighborhoods like his. “I’m just afraid that our kids are being sacrificed while everyone is learning on the job,” he says. “This is not some sort of urban experiment. These are kids’ lives were talking about.”

González tries to visit classrooms at least three days a week to provide informal feedback to his less experienced instructors. On a recent morning, I joined him on his rounds, sitting in on a sixth-grade science class taught by a second-year teacher named Garrett Adler.

A common assumption inside the school-reform movement, one often repeated in the wake of America’s sobering performance in the recent Program for International Student Assessment exam — the U.S. ranked 17th in reading and 23rd in science — is that our nation’s public-school teachers tend not to be high achievers themselves. (By contrast, in Finland teachers are drawn from the top 10 percent of their college classes.) You can’t get much more high-achieving than Adler, who grew up on the Upper West Side and attended Hunter College High School, one of New York’s most selective public high schools, before graduating magna cum laude from Brown University.

And yet when Adler came to 223 last year through the New York City Teaching Fellows program, which helps train and place aspiring teachers in the city’s public-school system, he was at best a struggling teacher. He was incapable of controlling his classroom. Students shot rubber bands at one another, fooled around with dangerous lab equipment and ignored his repeated requests to quiet down. “I used to go into his classroom first thing in the morning scared of what I might see,” González told me. “To be honest, at one point I was about ready to give him the hook.” Instead, he devoted precious resources to teaching Adler how to teach, hiring a personal coach to attend his classes regularly and meet with him for 45 minutes a week.

There were 30 students in Adler’s class, their desks divided into several clusters. The subject of the day was matter. Adler, a slight, anxious-looking 24-year-old with glasses and a beard, wore chinos and a button-down shirt and tie, per the unofficial dress code for male faculty members. (The U.F.T. contract prevents González from formally requiring that teachers wear ties.)

After a brief introductory movie starring an animated robot, Adler taught his students the “matter march,” warning them in advance that it was “incredibly dorky” but that once they learned it, they would never forget the definition of “matter.” Standing in front of his class, Adler proceeded to demonstrate the march — really more of a dance, with a spin and a clap and the words, chanted like a cheer: “Matter is anything that takes up space and has mass!”

Adler moved swiftly through the rest of the lesson, working hard not to lose his momentum. “Not right now,” he said brusquely, his eyes fixed on his clipboard, to a student whose hand was raised. Over the years, González and his staff have developed a simple, rigid plan meant to help new teachers manage their classrooms and progress through lessons without getting derailed. Each 45-minute period is divided into five sections, or waves, as they’re known. Adler facilitated his transitions with chants: “Work hard. Get smart. Woot! Woot!” The suggestion to do that came last year from his coach. “At first, I thought they were really cheesy; I felt like they weren’t me,” he told me later of the undignified sideshows he has come to deploy. “Now I feel like: You know what? They can be me.”

After class, González had some criticisms. Among other things, Adler never made it to the final wave of the lesson, known as the share, when the class gathers in a circle to review and reinforce what it learned that day. (“Circle up to talk it out, to get it, get it, get it.”) But González was pleased. The danger now is that like many young teachers, Adler will soon move on, and all that money González spent on his development will have been wasted. “Every time one of my teachers leaves, that’s $200,000 walking out the door,” he told me.

During his tenure, Klein often referred to the mission of improving our nation’s public schools as “the civil rights battle of our time.” Rhetoric like this helped the education-reform campaign blossom into a full-fledged movement. Young college graduates now go into blighted schools to teach in much the same way that an earlier generation went south to march. This has been a boon for González. Eight of his nine original faculty members were fresh from college via Teach for America, and today 60 percent of his teachers are in their 20s. “You really need idealists, people who are willing to do the extra work,” he says.

But this dependence on young teachers brings its own challenges. “First-year teachers are pretty much useless,” González says. “To me, the ideal teacher is a third-year Teach for America teacher.” The problem, at least from where González sits, is that Teach for America requires only a two-year commitment. It entices the best applicants not only with the promise of changing lives in impoverished schools but also by presenting itself as a résumé-builder for elite institutions like Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Company. “I’m trying to build people who are going to stay, who want to work with our kids,” González says. “This isn’t where they’re starting their careers; this is their life. We’ve had plenty of brilliant people here from organizations like Teach for America, and they lasted two years, because their hearts weren’t in it. I can’t afford that. That’s hurtful to our kids.”

Much as he has done with his student body, González has tried to create a particular culture among his faculty, relying equally on inspiration and incentive. Last year, to discourage teachers from taking advantage of a clause in the U.F.T. contract allowing them to miss 10 days of every school year, he gave everyone with a perfect attendance record a Flip video camera. (As usual, there was an ulterior motive: González wanted them to use the cameras to record themselves in the classroom.)

A few weeks after visiting Adler’s class, I stopped by his classroom at the end of the day. The place was a mess. He had just finished a lab that involved making ice cream in baggies with ice, salt, sugar, vanilla and milk. He made us a batch, spooning some into Dixie cups as we sat down to talk.

Adler said he was enjoying his job — “I like being the science teacher, being that figure in these kids’ lives” — especially when he considers his friends from Brown, many of whom are still stuck in a postcollege malaise. And González, he said, is certainly an inspiring boss. “When he gets up and gives his little spiels about how we’re here to change people’s lives and how we do that every day, that’s a powerful thing to hear as a teacher.”

Still, he isn’t convinced that he’s well suited to teaching, particularly at this level. He’s not organized enough to keep students on task and, indirectly anyway, he echoed González’s concern about fundamentally not being part of the 223 community. “I have a vocabulary that comes from always having gone to really high-level schools,” he said. “I feel like I’m probably talking over half the class half the time.” This, he feels, diminishes his already tenuous authority in the classroom: “Who am I, this 24-year-old white kid from the Upper West Side, to tell a bunch of kids from a very different background how they’re supposed to behave and act?”

M.S. 223 holds its parent-association meetings on the first Saturday morning of every month. During the preceding week, parents receive a robocall reminder from the school, either in English or Spanish. Not that such calls ever make much of a difference. Parent engagement, a given at most charter schools and middle-class public schools, is an ongoing struggle at 223. Like a door-to-door salesman, González is not ashamed to use every method at his disposal to prod participation. Each parent meeting is bookended by free raffles to encourage people to show up and to stay. Just to be safe, no one leaves empty-handed: goodie bags at the door are filled with soap, shampoo and other beauty products.

On a clear, cold Saturday in January, about a dozen parents gathered inside 223’s library, an oversize classroom lined with empty metal shelves, for the first parent-association meeting of the new year. Wanda Hill, the school’s parent liaison, started by raffling off a $30 gift certificate to Payless shoes. Later came a World Wrestling Entertainment clock and a set of queen-size flannel sheets from J. C. Penney. All three had been procured by Hill, who volunteers at World Vision, a Christian charity, in large part so that she can get first dibs on the corporate castoffs that the organization collects.

Sandwiched in between the raffles, in English with Spanish translation, was a presentation on gangs, as well as an update on the campaign to renovate the school’s library. In closing, Hill reminded parents that anyone who made it to one of the district’s monthly education meetings would be entitled to free clothes from Dress Barn, also arranged through her volunteer work at World Vision.

After the meeting, I introduced myself to the only English-speaking parent in attendance, Cheryl Thomas, the mother of a sixth grader named Terrell. Thomas told me that she moved her family to the Patterson Houses several years ago, when they had to go on public assistance after she quit her job to care for a daughter with spina bifida. Thomas said that she had decided not to enter Terrell in the lottery at a charter about 12 blocks away from 223. Because of the school’s long days, he wouldn’t have been heading home until close to 6, which made her nervous. She and Terrell went to an open house at 223 and liked what they saw. After he registered, Terrell returned to the school for a technology seminar run by a nonprofit; all attendees were given free computers.

On my way out of 223, I saw Hill, a cheerful, plain-spoken woman, putting away unclaimed gift bags in a supply closet. She was clearly frustrated by the school’s indifferent parents. “Even knowing that they’re going to get two free bags of clothing from Dress Barn, we can’t get one person — not one person — to come to a C.E.C.” — Community Education Council — “meeting,” she said, shaking her head. “At least we can say we’re trying.”

In a sense, the education-reform movement is out to demonstrate that the backgrounds of students’ families don’t need to be changed in order to improve schools. As reformers see it, those who cite economic circumstances as an explanation for failing schools are playing into the very “excuse-based culture” that Klein was trying to dismantle.

González has proved the reformers right, at least to an extent: his school is thriving without the benefit of consistently engaged, supportive parents. But as its English and math scores reveal, 223’s success remains relative. It’s also hard won. This should not come as a surprise. Studies dating to the 1960s have suggested that children’s experiences inside the classroom are responsible for as little as 20 percent of their overall educational development. No less important is how they spend their evenings, their weekends, their vacations.

González sees this firsthand every September, when tests show that many of his returning students have dropped a full grade level in reading over the summer. He is trying to reverse this trend by bringing parents into their children’s lives at 223 in any way he can, whether it’s through sporting events (one byproduct of the school’s large Dominican population is a great baseball team), plays, recitals or classroom celebrations. “We’re trying to change a culture here,” González says. “That’s going to take time. That’s going to take generations.”

Eric Lincoln, M.S. 223’s assistant principal, spends the first three weeks of every school year registering about 40 unplanned-for students who have just been assigned to the school by the Department of Education. This is typically a high-needs group. It includes children from failing schools who are entitled to transfer to 223 (or any other middle school in good standing) under the No Child Left Behind statute as well as children whose families recently moved to the city or the neighborhood, often under duress.

Two weeks into the 2009-10 school year, Lincoln registered a seventh grader named Saquan Townsend. Saquan’s family had been living in a project in East New York, Brooklyn, when their apartment was broken into by someone who thought that one of Saquan’s half-brothers had been involved in a shooting. For safety reasons, Saquan’s mother felt she needed to move her family as soon as possible, but she couldn’t afford another apartment. The city placed them in a one-bedroom apartment in a homeless shelter in the South Bronx. Saquan has two older half-brothers, ages 20 and 18, and a 12-year-old brother with a learning disability caused by lead poisoning that he contracted at their old apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. For about a year, all four boys and their mother slept in the same room. Saquan’s new zoned school was 223.

It didn’t take Saquan long to develop a reputation as a kid who never did his homework, spoke disrespectfully to teachers and seemed unwilling to follow even the most basic instructions. He spoke in a deliberately provocative, high-pitched voice in the classroom — some of his teachers called it “the alien voice” — and raised his arms high up over his head in mock stretches to elicit laughter from classmates. Most of all, Saquan had a problem with absenteeism, missing more than 50 days over the course of the school year. “Honestly, I thought there was some sort of mental disability or something weird going on,” says Emily Dodd, who had Saquan for seventh-grade science last year.

One Friday, Dodd, a 25-year-old graduate of Oberlin College, asked Saquan to stay late to catch up on some assignments he missed. Working with him one on one, she quickly discovered how wrong she had been. “I realized this kid is brilliant,” she told me. “He’s an intellectual. His ability to think critically, to reason critically is on a very high level.”

Dodd started sending Saquan text messages every morning urging him to come to school. (“Get on the bus!!!” she would write him when she first arrived at 223 at 7.) It took him three weeks to meet her initial challenge of making it on time a total of three days in a week. They celebrated the accomplishment with cheesecake, which Saquan had never eaten. “Honestly, more than anything, I think he felt rewarded by being able to spend a half-hour with me on a Friday afternoon,” Dodd says.

Having gotten the “touch” he needed from Dodd, Saquan’s attendance and behavior gradually improved. He also began participating in some of 223’s after-school programs. He was one of three students to join a new running club and was cast in a lead role in the school’s production of “West Side Story.” Directed by Dodd, it was the first play performed in 223’s building in years. (The stage curtain, having sat unused for so long, collapsed at the opening of the show.) Saquan missed a lot of the rehearsals, so many, in fact, that Dodd panicked and divided his part in two. When he was there, he was often disruptive, cracking jokes and distracting other cast members. “But he was amazing in the performance,” says Dodd, who recalls looking around the audience and seeing Saquan’s mother in tears.

As recently as a few years ago, M.S. 223’s bilingual-education program was the last place students or teachers wanted to be. Geared toward moving Spanish speakers into English-only classrooms as quickly as possible, it was known as a repository for slow learners. The perception became self-fulfilling, reinforced by the low expectations placed on students.

In an earlier era, González would have been hard pressed to change this situation, as the school would have been required to use the city’s bilingual-education curriculum. But Klein’s reforms gave González the freedom to try a different approach. In 2007, he asked a new teacher, Silvestre Arcos, to overhaul the program. Arcos mapped out a strategy to change virtually everything about bilingual education at 223, beginning with its primary aim. Rather than weaning children from their native tongues, the goal would be to develop and refine their Spanish skills as well as their English ones. Classes would be taught in both languages; the curriculum would include a course in which students hone their Spanish grammar and read Spanish literature.

The school’s dual-language program, as it is known, is now the pride of 223, a magnet for strivers rather than a dumping ground for underperformers. This year, it was a finalist in a national bilingual-education competition run by the Spanish Embassy. Three hundred children applied for the 30 spots in next year’s incoming sixth-grade class.

Evaluating teachers is an imperfect science, but by almost any measure Arcos is one of 223’s finest. González basically has to rig the school’s Classroom of the Month award, based on academic performance, behavior and class preparedness, to prevent Arcos from winning it every time.

A stout, goateed 33-year-old, Arcos grew up in South Texas. His father, a Mexican immigrant who worked as a gas-station mechanic, was a middle-school dropout, but Arcos excelled in school, winning a full scholarship to Cornell. He spent four years at a Kipp charter school in Los Angeles before moving to New York to get his master’s at Columbia. He considered teaching at a charter in New York while pursuing his degree but decided that the schedule would be too demanding to leave him time to study, so he came to 223 instead, bringing Kipp’s philosophy with him. The walls of his classroom are adorned with Kipp slogans like “All of us WILL learn” and “No shortcuts. No excuses.” (Whatever ideological issues González has with charter schools, their fingerprints are everywhere at 223, beginning with its décor: the school’s hallways are lined with college pennants, a design innovation popularized by the charter movement.)

Arcos’s classroom has a deceptively relaxed air. He stands casually at the front of the room, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his khakis, allowing students to banter as they figure out answers to his questions. But he works relentlessly, particularly during the early part of the school year, to create and reinforce academic expectations, discipline and accountability. At the start of classes, Arcos praises students who seat themselves quietly and take out their work without being asked. When he hands back quizzes or other assignments, he singles out students who “met or exceeded expectations.” Loud applause follows each name. All of his students, even the highest performers, are required to stay after school for tutoring.

I visited Arcos in his classroom one winter afternoon, the day after a huge snowstorm in New York. Even though the city’s schools weren’t closed, more than 50 percent of 223’s students were absent. Arcos called all 12 of his 30 homeroom students who weren’t there at the start of the day. Six of them came to school immediately. Arcos told me that he just received an e-mail from the United Federation of Teachers thanking its members for showing up at their jobs despite the storm. “I was like, You’ve got to be kidding; you’re praising people for coming to work on a day when they’re supposed to?” Arcos said. “I thought that was ridiculous.”

As a public-school teacher, Arcos is required to be a member of the U.F.T., but he doesn’t see eye to eye with the union on most issues. Among other things, he favors the public release of teacher-performance ratings, which the U.F.T. has been fighting aggressively to prevent. “What kind of message are you sending to families and communities if you’re like, We don’t want those evaluations to be made public?” he said. “Are you basically saying your teachers are doing a terrible job?”

Arcos told me that he has been impressed by the dedication of many of his colleagues at 223. Still, he misses the uniform standards of his Kipp school. “At Kipp, I wasn’t worried that once my students left my math class and I sent them off to science or social studies or E.L.A. [English Language Arts] that they were going to fall apart, that the expectations weren’t going to be there, academically, behaviorally, in terms of their intellectual habits,” he said. “Two years ago, when my sixth-grade math students left for seventh-grade math, they totally fell apart. After all of the hard work we did, they went from the top of the school in their math-test scores to the bottom. I took it pretty hard.” Earlier this year, Arcos was thinking about returning to a charter school, but he recently decided to stay, swayed by his commitment to the dual-language program and his faith in González’s broader vision for the school.

Last summer, Saquan’s family moved out of the shelter and into a small apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Saquan wanted to remain at 223 for eighth grade, even though that would mean getting up at 5:45 and making it to the subway by 6:15 for the one-and-a-half-hour commute to the South Bronx. If he stayed for after-school activities, he would not return home until after 6. Because his mother works nights, they would barely see each other. She would not yet be home when he had to leave for school and would be asleep when he returned.

I first met Saquan at a gathering of the Principal’s Book Club. It was a Monday afternoon in December, and he was one of a dozen students arrayed around the conference table that dominates González’s office. Manuel Santos, González’s hulking executive assistant, doled out half-slices of pizza, as González and the kids discussed “Fallen,” a young-adult novel about a group of fallen angels at a reform school. “Probably the biggest critique you might have of our reading program is that we don’t spend much time on the classics,” González says. “I can live with that. I just want our kids to read.”

Toward that end, González spends close to $200,000, or 5 percent, of his annual budget at Barnes and Noble on popular new books that are more likely to interest 223’s students. The strategy worked with Saquan, who joined the Principal’s Book Club last April, when the book of the month was “The Hunger Games,” which he had been wanting to read but couldn’t find in his local library. He hadn’t missed a meeting since then.

At 5-foot-3, Saquan is small for his grade, and his voice has not yet dropped, but his size 9 sneakers suggest a growth spurt in his near future. He is handsome, with smooth skin, a “faded” Afro that shoots straight up like a pencil eraser from his head, big, bright eyes and a sly smile. He poured himself a cup of orange soda and, slouching down low in his chair, said that he was annoyed by the book’s main character, who obsesses endlessly over a boy without ever directly approaching him.

Several weeks later, I picked Saquan up at school and rode the subway home with him. He fiddled around with my iPhone as we talked, playing down his various activities and relationships at 223. (The play was “kind of fun.” Dodd was “O.K.”) When we arrived at his building, his mom didn’t invite me in — she had left behind their furniture when they moved out of their place in East New York and still hadn’t replaced it — but suggested we get together after school the following day at an IHOP in Brooklyn.

When we met, Saquan’s mom, Tonya Henry, was operating on just a few hours of sleep. A tiny woman with dreadlocks and dark circles under her eyes, she had returned home that morning from her shift answering phones at a car-service company in Queens and gone directly to a dental clinic with Saquan to get one of his teeth pulled.

Saquan gingerly chewed his pancakes, cutting off pieces of turkey sausage to share with his mother. At one point, he told his mom with obvious pride that he’d been invited to join an after-school math program at 223 that could be applied toward his high-school credits. “You gonna do it?” his mom asked, disinterestedly. “Then do it.” She went on to explain her less-than-enthusiastic response: “I try to let him make his own decisions. Sometimes he gets upset with me. He wants me to have more input than I want to. He’ll ask my opinion, and he’ll say, ‘Mom, why can’t you just give me an answer?’ I’ll say: ‘Listen, I don’t want to say this, and I don’t want to say that. You’ve got to make up your own mind.’ ”

Saquan was one of 25 eighth graders at 223 who qualified for a prep course last summer for New York’s specialized high-school test, used to determine admission to eight prestigious public high schools. (Run by Kaplan, the six-week course cost González $8,000.) But even after the prep course, he was at a severe disadvantage. Some of 223’s students who take the test have been preparing since sixth grade, attending another twice-weekly class on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons that the city offers free to poor students.

The test was given in late October, and the results were released in mid-February. For the first time in 223’s history, one of its students was accepted at Bronx Science. Another got in to Brooklyn Tech. Saquan didn’t score high enough to be admitted anywhere, leaving him in the regular, citywide high-school application process.

Saquan is at grade level in reading and above grade level in math, which is nothing short of remarkable given everything he has been through. Still, his transcript is hardly impressive, and the city’s high schools place a great deal of weight on attendance records. What’s more, without Dodd’s full-time attention, Saquan’s academic performance has faltered this year. At the end of February, he was failing social studies, having not completed any of his class projects, and was barely passing English. All of this might be mitigated by a proactive parent, the kind of mother or father who diligently researches the city’s high schools until they find the right fit and a sympathetic principal. This is the sort of sophisticated shopper that Klein’s consumer-driven system, with its emphasis on choice, would seem to depend on. But parents like this are in short supply at 223.

It’s hard to disagree with the reform movement’s insistence that poverty, like ignorant or apathetic parents, should not be accepted as an excuse for failing schools. But watching Saquan, it’s just as hard to ignore the reality that poverty is an immutable obstacle in the path of improving public education, one that can’t simply be swept aside by the rhetoric of raised expectations. Is it really a surprise that a child whose family had been forced to move into a homeless shelter where he was sharing a bedroom with his mother and three brothers was having trouble getting himself to school and was acting out in class? Is it realistic to think that demanding more of him and his teachers is all that is required?

In late February, after hearing about Saquan’s poor grades, Dodd sought him out to encourage him to end the year strong. Even though he was no longer in any of her classes, she volunteered to personally tutor him to make sure he finished with only B’s or better. “Because he has never actually known what it feels like to get A’s and B’s, and because I know that he is capable of A’s and B’s, I want him to experience this before he gets to high school,” Dodd wrote me in an e-mail in early March. “He’s totally into it and believes he can pull it off.” By way of incentive, she was going to offer to give him and his mom tickets to a Broadway show.

Days after the meeting, though, Saquan stopped coming to school. A couple of 223’s administrators called his house, as did Dodd, but they were unable to reach him or his mother. When Dodd finally managed to speak with Saquan in mid-March, he told her that he decided to transfer to his neighborhood middle school in Brooklyn.

In February, 223 received an unexpected visit from a space planner for the city. To González, it seemed to be the equivalent of getting measured for his coffin. He figured that it could mean only one thing: a charter school was coming to his building.

González was furious. “You’re impacting my community, and you’re not even going to have a discussion with me?” he said. It also made no sense to him. “There are three, maybe four middle schools in our district with their heads above water,” he told me. “How are you not closing one of the failing schools and putting the charter there? Or better yet, you have a couple hundred more kids who need to be educated? Fine. Send them to me. I’ll take them. Now I have to fight with the D.O.E., and those are the guys who are supposed to be helping me.”

Battles between incoming charter schools and reluctant public-school hosts have become a recurring motif on New York’s education-reform landscape. The tension often carries over into the school year in the form of bickering over access to shared facilities like cafeterias and auditoriums.

To González, though, the arrival of a charter would represent more than just an inconvenience. Not only would he lose the extra space that he deliberately carved out for teacher training and student guidance, but he also feared that a charter school could jeopardize his plans to expand 223 into a high school, perhaps even a boarding school. The idea, which he enlisted a class of graduate students at New York University’s business school to help develop, is to create a nonprofit attached to the school and to purchase an abandoned building in the neighborhood that would be converted into a dormitory. It’s a radical notion — a public inner-city boarding school — but it’s also very much in keeping with González’s expansive vision for 223.

When González first told me about the charter, I couldn’t help sharing his outrage. It seemed a cruel joke, the most extreme example yet of him being punished for his success. From the city’s perspective, however, González’s building doesn’t belong to him or even, really, to the city. It belongs to the students. An opportunity to use it to create another potentially successful school is not one that the city can afford to miss.

González did everything he could to have the charter placed elsewhere, arguing that, among other things, 223 had less unused space than several other middle schools in the district. (He also made it known to the D.O.E. that this article was in the works.) In late March, he received a reprieve. For at least another year, there would be no charter moving into 223’s building.

The D.O.E. says that it was only considering a charter at 223 and that González’s lobbying was largely irrelevant to its final decision. González says that his impression, from his interactions with the D.O.E., was that the charter had basically been a done deal. Either way, it was just another obstacle for González to overcome, along with developing and retaining young teachers, engaging parents and getting free eye tests for his students.

During one of our last conversations, González told me about a new eighth grader with a learning disability who recently turned up at 223. Already almost 16, the boy had earned the lowest possible score on both the reading and math portions of the state’s standardized test. His mother had just moved to the neighborhood, and even though he was qualified to receive a host of free services connected to his disability that were not available at 223, she had heard good things about the school and waived her son’s privileges so that he could attend it.

Hearing about the student and the challenges he would present, yet another hurdle in the endless row of them that make up the days at 223, made me exhausted. González, who would have a matter of weeks to somehow get the boy ready for high school, had a completely different reaction. “It’s days like this that remind me why I get up in the morning,” he said.


Jonathan Mahler (jonathanmahler@hotmail.com), a contributing writer, is the author of “The Challenge,” about the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case. It is now out in paperback. Editor: Dean Robinson (d.robinson-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

    The Fragile Success of School Reform in the Bronx, NYT, 6.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/magazine/mag-10School-t.html

What I Learned at School

March 30, 2011
The New York Times
By MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE

Providence, R.I.

THE tumult over state budgets and collective bargaining rights for public employees has spilled over into resentment toward public school teachers, who are increasingly derided as “glorified baby sitters” whose pay exceeds the value of the work they do.

But how exactly do we measure the value of a teacher?

As a writer, I often receive feedback from readers I have never met. But the other day, I received a most unexpected message in response to one of my essays:

“I am so proud of you and all you have accomplished. I shared your opinion from The L.A. Times with my family and reminisced about you as my student at Hibbing High School.”

It was signed Margaret Leibfried, who was my English teacher — a teacher who appeared at a critical juncture in my life and helped me believe that I could become a writer.

Thirty years ago, in Hibbing, a town in northern Minnesota that is home to the world’s largest open-pit iron mine, I entered high school as a bookish introvert made all the more shy because I was the school’s only nonwhite student. I always felt in danger of being swept away by a sea of statuesque blond athletes. By 10th grade, I’d developed a Quasimodo-like posture and crabwise walk, hoping to escape being teased as a “brain” or a “chink,” and then finding being ignored almost equally painful. I spent a lot of time alone, reading and scribbling stories.

Ms. Leibfried taught American literature and composition grammar, which involved the usual — memorizing vocabulary and diagramming sentences — but also, thrillingly, reading novels.

Thrilling to me, that is. Many of my classmates expressed disdain for novels because they were “not real.” For once, I didn’t care what they thought. Ms. Leibfried seemed to notice my interest in both reading and writing, and she took the time to draw me out; she even offered reading suggestions, like one of her favorite novels, “The Bell Jar.”

That year’s big project was a book report, to be read aloud to the class. However, Ms. Leibfried took me aside and suggested I do something “a little different.” Instead of a report, I was to pick a passage from a book, memorize it and recite it in front of the class.

While I longed for the safety and routine of the report, I was curious how this new assignment might work out. By then obsessed with “The Bell Jar,” I chose a passage that I thought showed off the protagonist’s growing depression as well as Sylvia Plath’s sly humor.

The morning of the presentations, I remember my palms sweating so badly as I walked to the front of the class that I held my hands cupped in prayer formation, so I wouldn’t wipe them on my shirt.


I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.


It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.


It made me tired just to think of it.


I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.


Dr. Gordon twiddled a silver pencil. “Your mother tells me you are upset.”

I finished and, to my surprise, the class broke out in applause. “As a writer and a good reader, Marie has picked out a particularly sensitive piece of prose and delivered it beautifully,” Ms. Leibfried said, beaming. I felt, maybe for the first time, confident.

Ms. Leibfried was followed the next year by Mrs. Borman, quiet, elderly and almost as shy as I was. She surprised everyone when she excused me from her grammar class, saying my time would be spent more productively writing in the library. I took the work seriously, and on a whim submitted an essay I’d come up with to Seventeen Magazine. When they published it, it was big news for the high school — it was even announced on the P.A. system. Mrs. Borman wasn’t mentioned, nor did she ever take any credit; in her mind she was just doing her job.

I can now appreciate how much courage it must have taken for those teachers to let me deviate so broadly from the lesson plan. With today’s pressure on teachers to “teach to the test,” I wonder if any would or could take the time to coax out the potential in a single, shy student.

If we want to understand how much teachers are worth, we should remember how much we were formed by our own schooldays. Good teaching helps make productive and fully realized adults — a result that won’t show up in each semester’s test scores and statistics.

That’s easy to forget, as budget battles rage and teacher performance is viewed through the cold metrics of the balance sheet. While the love of literature and confidence I gained from Ms. Leibfried’s class shaped my career and my life, after only four short years at Hibbing High School, she was laid off because of budget cuts, and never taught again.


Marie Myung-Ok Lee, the author of the novel “Somebody’s Daughter,” teaches writing at Brown.

    What I Learned at School, NYT, 30.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/opinion/31lee.html

It May Be a Sputnik Moment, but Science Fairs Are Lagging

February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By AMY HARMON

Rarely have school science fairs, a source of pride and panic for generations of American students, achieved such prominence on the national stage. President Obama held one at the White House last fall. And last week he said that America should celebrate its science fair winners like Sunday’s Super Bowl champions, or risk losing the nation’s competitive edge.

Yet as science fair season kicks into high gear, participation among high school students appears to be declining. And many science teachers say the problem is not a lack of celebration, but the Obama administration’s own education policy, which holds schools accountable for math and reading scores at the expense of the kind of creative, independent exploration that science fair projects require.

“To say that we need engineers and ‘this is our Sputnik moment’ is meaningless if we have no time to teach students how to do science,” said Dean Gilbert, the president of the Los Angeles County Science Fair, referring to a line in President Obama’s State of the Union address last week. The Los Angeles fair, though still one of the nation’s largest, now has 185 schools participating, down from 244 a decade ago.

In many schools, science fairs depend on teachers who shoulder the extra work. They supervise participants and research, raise the money for medals and poster boards, and find judges — all on their own time.

To organize the Northeastern Minnesota Regional Science Fair this weekend, Cynthia Welsh, a science teacher at Cloquet High School near Duluth, has logged more than 500 unpaid hours since September.

“My husband helps,” Ms. Welsh said.

In middle school, science fair projects are typically still required — and, teachers lament, all too often completed by parents. And some high schools funnel their best students into elite science competitions that require years of work and lengthy research papers: a few thousand students enter such contests each year.

But what has been lost, proponents of local science fairs say, is the potential to expose a much broader swath of American teenagers to the scientific process: to test an idea, evaluate evidence, ask a question about how the world works — and perhaps discover how difficult it can be to find an answer.

The local fairs, which rose to popularity after World War II, have historically provided entree to science for those who might not consider themselves science fanatics.

“Science fairs develop skills that reach down to everybody’s lives, whether you want to be a scientist or not,” said Michele Glidden, a director at Society for Science & the Public, a nonprofit group that administers 350 regional fairs whose winners attend Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair, the world’s largest high school competition. “The point is to breed science-minded citizens.”

Comprehensive national numbers are hard to come by, but Ms. Glidden said that several major regional fairs have been unable to scrape together the number of high schools required to participate in the Intel fair in recent years. “At the high school level, it’s on the decline,” she said.

In Indiana, high school participation in the state’s science fairs dropped 15 percent in the last three years. One fair organizer in Washington described last year’s fair there as “heartbreaking,” with few projects and not enough judges. The fair in St. Louis was in danger of folding this year when its major sponsor, Pfizer, moved its operations and dropped its sponsorship.

One obvious reason for flagging interest in science fairs is competing demands for high school students’ extracurricular attention. But many educators said they wished the projects were deemed important enough to devote class time to them, which is difficult for schools whose federal funding hinges on improving math and reading test scores. Under the main federal education law, schools must achieve proficiency in math and reading by 2014, or risk sanctions.

The Obama administration has urged broadening the subjects tested under the law — possibly including science. But some teachers say they are already burdened by state requirements to teach a wide range of facts — say, the parts of a cell — which prevents them from devoting class time to research projects.

“I have so many state standards I have to teach concept-wise, it takes time away from what I find most valuable, which is to have them inquire about the world,” said Amanda Alonzo, a science teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif., who advises her science fair students during her lunch and late evenings after school.

Some time-strapped teachers seek out scientists in industry and at universities to work with science fair students, but such connections are difficult to make. Even in the heart of Silicon Valley, it took two months of concerted effort before Craig Young, a physics teacher at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, Calif., found a professional mentor to advise two students who wanted to use bacteria to generate electricity. He posted on the National Lab Network, a Web site devoted to such collaborations, but his requests went unanswered.

Still, several hundred thousand American high school students will participate in more than 350 science fairs during the next three months, with nearly a dozen on Saturday alone.

They include Melissa Rey, 17, who is glad that the St. Louis Honors Science Fair this weekend was able to find a new sponsor. “I love going around the science fairs and looking at everyone else’s projects,” she said.

A junior at John F. Kennedy Catholic High School, Ms. Rey, who has dyslexia, examined the effect of disabilities on the college entrance test scores of high school students.

Jeffrey Schwehm, a biochemistry professor at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, Wis., managed to recruit 16 high school participants for the fair he organized, in part by promising them that they would be done by 1 p.m. so they could get to their sporting events in the afternoon.

In St. Petersburg, Fla., on Saturday, more students from private high schools than public schools will be attending the Pinellas Regional Science and Engineering Fair, a shift over the last decade. And over all, there will be fewer students participating.

Still, Paul Dickman, a science teacher at Lakewood High School in St. Petersburg, who has run the fair for 20 years, said he was looking forward to it.

“I don’t know if you can generate that kind of excitement just teaching chemistry or physics in the classroom,” Mr. Dickman said, citing several former students who have called to say they are now working in a laboratory. “When kids get down and do a project themselves, they get excited about science.”

Mr. Dickman said he would spend Sunday getting the fair winners’ plaques engraved for the awards ceremony next week. Because whether or not they are hailed like Super Bowl champions, some celebration is in order.

    It May Be a Sputnik Moment, but Science Fairs Are Lagging, NYT, 4.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/us/05science.html

Slight Rise in Donations to Colleges Seen in 2010

February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

The nation’s colleges and universities received charitable contributions of $28 billion in 2010, an increase of 0.5 percent from the previous year, according to the annual survey by the Council for Aid to Education.

Support for higher education, measured in total dollars, is at the same level now as it was in 2006, the council said. But adjusted for inflation, it was 8 percent lower last year than in 2006.

“We’re still not out of the woods,” said Ann E. Kaplan, director of the council’s Voluntary Support of Education survey. “Charitable contributions to education are recovering very slowly.”

Stanford raised $599 million from private donors last year, more than any other university. It was followed by Harvard, which raised $597 million, and Johns Hopkins University, which raised $428 million. But all three raised less in 2010 than in 2009, the survey found, as did most of the top 20 institutions.

While the survey included 996 institutions, the top 20 colleges and universities accounted for a quarter of all gifts to higher education last year.

Four of the top 20 universities — the University of Southern California, Duke University, Indiana University and the University of California, Berkeley — received charitable contributions in 2010 that were more than 10 percent greater than the previous year.

Over all, alumni giving and participation declined last year, while donations from companies and foundations increased modestly.

The share of alumni who contribute to their college has been declining for years, even when the economy was strong. According to the survey, alumni participation averaged 9.8 percent last year, compared with 11.9 percent in 2006 — and the average gift was $1,080 last year, compared with $1,195 four years earlier.

    Slight Rise in Donations to Colleges Seen in 2010, NYT, 2.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/education/02gifts.html

G.O.P. Governors Take Aim at Teacher Tenure

January 31, 2011
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL and SAM DILLON

Seizing on a national anxiety over poor student performance, many governors are taking aim at a bedrock tradition of public schools: teacher tenure.

The momentum began over a year ago with President Obama’s call to measure and reward effective teaching, a challenge he repeated in last week’s State of the Union address.

Now several Republican governors have concluded that removing ineffective teachers requires undoing the century-old protections of tenure.

Governors in Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and New Jersey have called for the elimination or dismantling of tenure. As state legislatures convene this winter, anti-tenure bills are being written in those states and others. Their chances of passing have risen because of crushing state budget deficits that have put teachers’ unions on the defensive.

“It’s practically impossible to remove an underperforming teacher under the system we have now,” said Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, lamenting that his state has the lowest high school graduation rate in the nation.

Eliminating tenure, Mr. Sandoval said, would allow school districts to dismiss teachers based on competence, not seniority, in the event of layoffs.

Politics also play a role.

“These new Republican governors are all trying to outreform one another,” said Michael Petrilli, an education official under President George W. Bush.

In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has campaigned aggressively for the state to end “last in, first out” protections for teachers. Warning that thousands of young educators face layoffs, Mr. Bloomberg is demanding that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo scrap the seniority law if the budget he will unveil Tuesday includes state cuts to education.

Teachers’ unions have responded to the assault on the status quo by arguing that all the ire directed at bad teachers distorts the issue.

“Why aren’t governors standing up and saying, ‘In our state, we’ll devise a system where nobody will ever get into a classroom who isn’t competent’?” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “Instead they are saying, ‘Let’s make it easy to fire teachers.’ That’s the wrong goal.”

Tenure laws were originally passed — New Jersey was first in 1909 — to protect teachers from being fired because of race, sex, political views or cronyism.

Public-school teachers typically earn tenure after two or three years on probation. Once they receive it, they have a right to due-process hearings before dismissal, which in many districts makes it expensive and time-consuming to fire teachers considered ineffective. Tenure also brings seniority protections in many districts.

In recent years, research on the importance of teacher quality has sparked a movement to evaluate teachers on how well students are learning — with implications that undermine tenure.

The movement gained momentum with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant contest last year. Eleven states enacted laws to link student achievement to teacher evaluations and, in some cases, to pay and job security, according to the American Enterprise Institute.

Now some politicians and policy makers have concluded that if teachers owe their jobs to professional performance, then tenure protections are obsolete.

The former school chancellor of Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee, who campaigned against tenure as early as 2007, has made abolishing it a cornerstone of a new advocacy group, Students First, which has advised the governors of Florida, Nevada and New Jersey.

All are Republicans, but Ms. Rhee, a Democrat, insisted that the movement was bipartisan.

“There’s a willingness to confront these issues that has never before been in play,” she said, noting that some influential Democratic mayors, including Cory A. Booker in Newark and Antonio R. Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, have also called for making it easier to dismiss ineffective teachers.

In a speech in December, Mr. Villaraigosa — who once worked as a teachers union organizer — said, “Tenure and seniority must be reformed or we will be left with only one option: eliminating it entirely.”

The two national teachers’ unions insist that they, too, favor some degree of reform. The American Federation of Teachers endorsed a sweeping law in Colorado last year that lets administrators remove even tenured teachers who are consistently rated as ineffective.

Many teachers who accept linking job security to their effectiveness still want to require administrators to present any evidence against them in a hearing, which critics of tenure like Ms. Rhee say is unnecessary.

Ada Beth Cutler, dean of the education college at Montclair State University in New Jersey, said, “One of the fears I hear from teachers is that in these tough budget times, what’s going to stop someone from firing someone at the top of the pay scale?”

Mr. Van Roekel of the National Education Association labels tenure laws “fair dismissal laws” that protect from arbitrary firing.

“In all my years in education I don’t remember a time when there was this much concerted effort to eliminate fair dismissal laws,” he said.

In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie, whose combativeness with the teachers’ union has buoyed his national reputation, appears to have a good chance of getting a bill from the Democratic-controlled Legislature that reshapes tenure.

Under a pair of bills moving through the Indiana General Assembly, teachers would have to earn “professional” status based on evaluations tied to student learning, and their collective bargaining would be limited to salary, not seniority rules.

“Most of these reforms would have been dead on arrival” last year, said Tony Bennett, the Indiana superintendent of public instruction.

Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana has said that “teachers should have tenure,” but the bills introduced by his fellow Republicans call for teachers’ traditional protections to be sharply reduced.

It is similar in Florida, where lawmakers plan to reprise an anti-tenure bill from last year that provoked such an outpouring from teachers that the moderate Republican governor, Charlie Crist, vetoed it.

That is unlikely under the new Republican governor, Rick Scott, who told the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce last month: “Good teachers know they don’t need tenure. There is no reason to have it except to protect those that don’t perform as they should.”

And in Idaho, Gov. C. L. Otter, a Republican, presented an education plan last month that said bluntly, “The state will phase out tenure.”

Idaho’s schools superintendent, Tom Luna, argued that the plan would not subject teachers to arbitrary dismissal.

Mr. Van Roekel of the teachers’ union disagreed. Recounting a story that had the burnish of something told many times, he recalled that around 1980, when he was a union leader in Arizona, he had arranged to have a speech pathologist assess a teacher whom a principal was trying to fire because of a speech impediment. The pathologist determined that the teacher had a New York accent.

“She would say ‘ideer,’ instead of ‘idea,’ ” Mr. Van Roekel said. “The principal thought that was a speech impediment. Without a fair dismissal law, that principal could have fired her arbitrarily, without citing any reason.”

    G.O.P. Governors Take Aim at Teacher Tenure, NYT, 31.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/us/01tenure.html

Teacher, My Dad Lost His Job. Do We Have to Move?

January 30, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINERIP

WORTHINGTON, Ohio — Diane and Eric Kehler tried not to talk about it in front of the children, but as Jen Hegerty, the guidance counselor at Wilson Hill Elementary School, says, “Children have eagle ears.”

Mr. Kehler lost his $90,000-a-year job as an information technology manager. And though he and his wife discussed their problems in whispers, eagle ears don’t miss much. Their son Mathias, 12, a quiet, cerebral sixth grader at Wilson Hill, got quieter. “Our house was sort of in a state of despair. We weren’t as happy as usual,” Mathias said. “I stopped having good ideas to talk about with my friends.”

Mrs. Kehler has a college degree but had chosen to be a stay-at-home mother. That ended. She took a job at McDonald’s to cover the cost of groceries. At school, Mathias and his sister, Leah, a fourth grader, qualified for reduced-price lunches.

Keeping all that worry bottled up hurt. While Leah would not tell anyone her worst fear, she told her speech teacher, Shelley Smith, the second worst: that her family would have to move away and Leah would lose her friends. “I was worried and scared and very worried,” recalled Leah, who’s 10.

She chose Mrs. Smith to tell because the two have the same, exact birthday and every year they celebrate by eating Mrs. Smith’s homemade cupcakes. “She was just the right person,” Leah said. “She’s very calm.”

The Kehlers have lots of company. While Wall Street is pumping, Main Street bleeds. This middle- to upper-middle-class suburban town of 14,000 bordering Columbus has 22 percent of its students getting subsidized lunches. That’s up from 6 percent in 2005, when the economy was booming.

Statewide, 43 percent of Ohio public school students are disadvantaged, as measured by free and reduced lunches, compared with 33 percent in 2005, according to a recent survey by KidsOhio, a nonprofit educational organization based in Columbus. A sign of how deep this recession has reached into the middle class: here in Franklin County, 44 percent of the disadvantaged attend suburban schools, compared with 32 percent five years ago.

There may be other factors involved, including an increase of poorer families moving out of Columbus to the suburbs. But many here — the KidsOhio researchers; the superintendent of Worthington schools, Melissa Conrath; the principal of Wilson Hill, Jamie Lusher — agree that the recession’s impact has played a large part.

A few houses down from the Kehlers on Deer Creek Drive, Bill Cameron, who has three children in high school, has been out of work for two years since losing his $119,000-a-year job as a manager at American Electric Power.

Over on Eastland Court, Grace Koo and her now ex-husband, who have two children at Wilson Hill, were both laid off and went from making about $160,000 a year to zero. Ms. Koo, who had been a store design and construction director for Limited Brands, attributed the divorce to many things gone wrong, including their sinking economic status. “For months, both of us were home together, unemployed,” she said. “We’d fight over money.”

On Buck Trail Lane, the Hymers went from $150,000 a year to zero. Their son, Zachary, a second grader, and their daughter, Kennedy, who’s in fourth, qualified for reduced-priced lunches. The Hislopes on Friend Street also qualified for reduced-priced lunches, but as things worsened — the father, Mike, a shop foreman, has been out of work two years — they qualified for free lunches.

Recently Worthington got its first soup kitchen.

The emotional strain on children is plain from the names of the support groups the guidance counselor, Ms. Hegerty, has created: the Chicken Little group; the Volcano Management group; the Family Change group.

Even as the district’s budget gets cut and class sizes in the school’s fourth and fifth grades creep up to 30, the staff at Wilson Hill works to make a difference. While Washington measures a school’s worth by test scores, here, on Northland Street, there’s more to it.

A few weeks before Christmas, a girl in Mrs. Smith’s class went to school with broken eyeglasses patched together with tape. Each time the girl looked down to read, the glasses fell off. This is a small town, and Mrs. Smith knew the girl’s family was struggling. At 9 a.m., Mrs. Smith asked to borrow the glasses; during her lunch period she drove to her eye doctor; by 12:30 the girl had new pink and green frames.

Because the guidance counselor position is split between two schools, Ms. Hegerty gets overloaded and has found two unpaid interns from nearby universities to help with the caseload.

Most children this age can’t verbalize what’s wrong, and Ms. Hegerty watches their worries seep out in the guise of other problems. “Separation anxiety, nightmares, bed wetting,” she rattles them off, “Obsessive behavior, won’t stay in own bed, acting out at school, acting out at home.”

Ms. Koo’s daughter, Trinity, a second grader, scratched her arms so much they bled. Trinity’s brother, Eliot, was misbehaving in kindergarten.

Ms. Hegerty showed them how to make worry envelopes to store their fears. She gave them a buckeye to carry in their pockets. “If you’re feeling bad, you hold it,” said Trinity, who’s stopped scratching. “You think about stuff, and then ‘O.K., this is over now, I’m fine.’ ”

Every day, Eliot’s teacher, Regina Malley, starts off each kindergartner with five cubes. If you’re bad, she takes away a cube. But if you hold on to all five cubes for the day, you get one prize ticket. After 10 tickets, you get to turn on the classroom computer and sit in the big chair (“It elevates them above everybody,” Mrs. Malley said). Thirty tickets and you get the grand prize, lunch alone with Mrs. Malley.

For a few days, Eliot was stuck on nine tickets. “Poor Eliot lost a cube today,” Mrs. Malley reported. “He banged a kid on the back of the head.”

And then Eliot made a comeback, earning two tickets in two days. As Mrs. Malley promised, he got to sit in the big chair and was loudly applauded.

Mrs. Malley has taught kindergarten in the same room for 31 years, and in that time she’s learned a thing or two about little boys. She predicts good things for Eliot. “Eliot’s very bright,” she said. “Even if he listens 50 percent of the time, he’s getting 75 percent more than other kids.”

While several parents interviewed for this column eventually got jobs, no one was making anything near their old salaries. The Hislopes, Hymers and Kehlers are making half. Ms. Koo is making a third. Mrs. Hislope’s two daughters have been able to continue playing sports because their schools waived participation fees and the sports booster clubs helped. The Hislopes were one of 10 families that the middle school picked to give $300 toward Christmas.

It was only during a visit from a reporter that Mrs. Kehler heard Leah tell her worst fear. “I instantly thought we’d be homeless,” Leah said. Every fall the school takes part in the Penny Harvest, collecting for the homeless, and Leah feared that the next harvest would be for her family.

“Really?” Mrs. Kehler said. Like mother like daughter. This was Mrs. Kehler’s worst fear, too.

“I didn’t know how we’d survive,” she said. “I was afraid we’d be homeless under an underpass in Columbus and the kids would go into foster care.”

When, after many months, Mr. Kehler could not find work, they bought a print cartridge recycling business. It’s off to a promising start. The first year, the Kehlers outperformed the previous owner. “We’re up 18 percent,” Mrs. Kehler said.

Eagle ears still hear almost everything, but thankfully, for the last several months, what they hear has not sounded so dire. “When Dad and Mom talked, they were getting calmer,” Mathias said. “We’re definitely higher than we were.”

    Teacher, My Dad Lost His Job. Do We Have to Move?, NYT, 30.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/education/31winerip.html

Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen

January 26, 2011
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.

In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

Every year, women had a less positive view of their emotional health than men, and that gap has widened.

Campus counselors say the survey results are the latest evidence of what they see every day in their offices — students who are depressed, under stress and using psychiatric medication, prescribed even before they came to college.

The economy has only added to the stress, not just because of financial pressures on their parents but also because the students are worried about their own college debt and job prospects when they graduate.

“This fits with what we’re all seeing,” said Brian Van Brunt, director of counseling at Western Kentucky University and president of the American College Counseling Association. “More students are arriving on campus with problems, needing support, and today’s economic factors are putting a lot of extra stress on college students, as they look at their loans and wonder if there will be a career waiting for them on the other side.”

The annual survey of freshmen is considered the most comprehensive because of its size and longevity. At the same time, the question asking students to rate their own emotional health compared with that of others is hard to assess, since it requires them to come up with their own definition of emotional health, and to make judgments of how they compare with their peers.

“Most people probably think emotional health means, ‘Am I happy most of the time, and do I feel good about myself?’ so it probably correlates with mental health,” said Dr. Mark Reed, the psychiatrist who directs Dartmouth College’s counseling office.

“I don’t think students have an accurate sense of other people’s mental health,” he added. “There’s a lot of pressure to put on a perfect face, and people often think they’re the only ones having trouble.”

To some extent, students’ decline in emotional health may result from pressures they put on themselves.

While first-year students’ assessments of their emotional health were declining, their ratings of their own drive to achieve, and academic ability, have been going up, and reached a record high in 2010, with about three-quarters saying they were above average.

“Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past,” said Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University. “These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.”

Other findings in the survey underscore the degree to which the economy is weighing on college students.

“Paternal unemployment is at the highest level since we started measuring,” said John Pryor, director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at U.C.L.A.’s Higher Education Research Institute, which does the annual freshman survey. “More students are taking out loans. And we’re seeing the impact of not being able to get a summer job, and the importance of financial aid in choosing which college they’re going to attend.”

“We don’t know exactly why students’ emotional health is declining,” he said. “But it seems the economy could be a lot of it.”

For many young people, serious stress starts before college. The share of students who said on the survey that they had been frequently overwhelmed by all they had to do during their senior year of high school rose to 29 percent from 27 percent last year.

The gender gap on that question was even larger than on emotional health, with 18 percent of the men saying they had been frequently overwhelmed, compared with 39 percent of the women.

There is also a gender gap, studies have shown, in the students who seek out college mental health services, with women making up 60 percent or more of the clients.

“Boys are socialized not to talk about their feelings or express stress, while girls are more likely to say they’re having a tough time,” said Perry C. Francis, coordinator for counseling services at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. “Guys might go out and do something destructive, or stupid, that might include property damage. Girls act out differently.”

Linda Sax, a professor of education at U.C.L.A. and former director of the freshman study who uses the data in research about college gender gaps, said the gap between men and women on emotional well-being was one of the largest in the survey.

“One aspect of it is how women and men spent their leisure time,” she said. “Men tend to find more time for leisure and activities that relieve stress, like exercise and sports, while women tend to take on more responsibilities, like volunteer work and helping out with their family, that don’t relieve stress.”

In addition, Professor Sax has explored the role of the faculty in college students’ emotional health, and found that interactions with faculty members were particularly salient for women. Negative interactions had a greater impact on their mental health.

“Women’s sense of emotional well-being was more closely tied to how they felt the faculty treated them,” she said. “It wasn’t so much the level of contact as whether they felt they were being taken seriously by the professor. If not, it was more detrimental to women than to men.”

She added: “And while men who challenged their professor’s ideas in class had a decline in stress, for women it was associated with a decline in well-being.”

    Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen, NYT, 26.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/education/27colleges.html

Just Noise, or the Sound of Learning?

January 17, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “60 First Graders, 4 Teachers, One Loud New Way to Learn” (front page, Jan. 11), about a public school in Brooklyn:

I was appalled to read about the 60 children packed into one large classroom — even with four teachers. Although such large classes were common in the middle of the last century in parochial schools, discipline and high expectations were established by the nuns and reinforced by parents who paid to send their children to such schools.

Times have changed. The extensive body of research on how young children learn to read and solve mathematics problems does not support the idea of a chaotic and distracting environment, as depicted in the article.

I hope that the long-term effects of the “experiment” do not doom the educational careers of the children.

Frances R. Curcio
Flushing, Queens, Jan. 11, 2011

The writer is a professor of mathematics education at Queens College, CUNY.

•

To the Editor:

Exactly what is innovative about “four teachers in large, open classrooms of 60 students”? Have we lost all collective education memory of the ’70s, when children wandered through open classrooms in progressive schools across the country?

I attended one — a vast classroom of 50 fourth and fifth graders with excellent teachers. It took two years for someone to notice that I couldn’t read.

Anyone with experience with open classrooms will tell you they tend toward chaos. Students get lost (literally and figuratively), and classroom management is nearly impossible even when teachers are highly skilled, students are motivated and can self-monitor, and schools can select students.

Do these educators recognize the high level of experience necessary to manage even a single open classroom? Have they reviewed research on noise level and its interference with learning? We will lose children every day unless we pay attention to our education failures and use that information to inform innovation.

Naomi Hupert
Sebastopol, Calif., Jan. 12, 2011

The writer is a senior research associate at the Education Development Center, Center for Children and Technology.

•

To the Editor:

Thank you for your article about the New American Academy at Lincoln Terrace Park, and its frank depiction of the challenges faced at our school and other urban public schools across the city and nation. Like educators at many schools, we realize that there is much work to be done before we can fully realize our vision of a public school system where students are given the education they deserve.

Your article recognized the change in our classrooms between November and January, citing “significant improvements.” I give well-deserved credit to our dynamic and dedicated teachers, whose pedagogical skills have increased dramatically in this short period of time.

This growth is due in no small part to the transparent nature of our teaching, which allows us to quickly recognize and root out bad practice and nurture good practice. After four months, we have seen increased rigor in both of our classrooms, significantly higher levels of student engagement, improved learning environments, and great success in our interdisciplinary units, which allow our students to explore the world around them.

Our classrooms’ remarkable progress is a tribute to the model’s adaptability and to the team-based approach of collaboration. We look forward to sharing the lessons we have learned in these few short months, and those we will learn over the coming years, with any school looking for new approaches. May we all work toward a future in which all children can achieve their fullest potential.

Shimon Waronker
Headmaster, New American Academy
Brooklyn, Jan. 12, 2011

•

To the Editor:

I read with incredulousness about the philosophy of the New American Academy. If it stresses, as you report, “freedom and self-expression over strict structure and discipline,” then why are the children wearing uniforms?

Shimon Waronker, the school’s founder, says his ideas are inspired by practices at the Phillips Exeter Academy, but a hallmark of the experience at elite private schools is small classes led by teachers with deep content knowledge. This is far from the “out-of-control classroom situations” described.

In my own teaching in public and private schools, the essential commonalities were structure, consistent age-appropriate discipline and deep immersion in content-rich learning activities.

Janet Fortney
Winston-Salem, N.C., Jan. 11, 2011

    Just Noise, or the Sound of Learning?, NYT, 17.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/l18school.html

Florida Has Classes Without Teachers

January 17, 2011
The New York Times
By LAURA HERRERA

MIAMI — On the first day of her senior year at North Miami Beach Senior High School, Naomi Baptiste expected to be greeted by a teacher when she walked into her precalculus class.

“All there were were computers in the class,” said Naomi, who walked into a room of confused students. “We found out that over the summer they signed us up for these courses.”

Naomi is one of over 7,000 students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools enrolled in a program in which core subjects are taken using computers in a classroom with no teacher. A “facilitator” is in the room to make sure students progress. That person also deals with any technical problems.

These virtual classrooms, called e-learning labs, were put in place last August as a result of Florida’s Class Size Reduction Amendment, passed in 2002. The amendment limits the number of students allowed in classrooms, but not in virtual labs.

While most schools held an orientation about the program, some students and parents said they were not informed of the new class structure. Others said they were not given the option to choose whether they wanted this type of instruction, and they voiced concern over the program’s effectiveness.

The online courses are provided by Florida Virtual School, which has been an option in the state’s public schools. The virtual school has provided online classes for home-schooled and traditional students who want to take extra courses. Students log on to a Web site to gain access to lessons, which consist mostly of text with some graphics, and they can call, e-mail or text online instructors for help.

The 54 participating schools in the Miami-Dade County system’s e-learning lab program integrate the online classes differently. A representative from the district said in an e-mail that the system “provided lab facilitators, training for those facilitators and coordination” between the district schools and the virtual school.

Theresa Sutter, a member of the Parent Teacher Student Association at Miami Beach Senior High School, said she thought her daughter, Kelly, was done with virtual classes after she finished Spanish the previous year at home.

When Kelly said that she had been placed in a virtual lab, Ms. Sutter recalled her “jaws dropped.” Neither of them had been told that Kelly would be in one.

“It’s totally different from what classroom teaching is like, so it’s a completely different animal,” Ms. Sutter said.

Under the state’s class-reduction amendment, high school classrooms cannot surpass a 25-student limit in core subjects, like English or math. Fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms can have no more than 22 students, and prekindergarten through third grade can have no more than 18.

Alix Braun, 15, a sophomore at Miami Beach High, takes Advanced Placement macroeconomics in an e-learning lab with 35 to 40 other students. There are 445 students enrolled in the online courses at her school, and while Alix chose to be placed in the lab, she said most of her lab mates did not.

“None of them want to be there,” Alix said, “and for virtual education you have to be really self-motivated. This was not something they chose to do, and it’s a really bad situation to be put in because it is not your choice.”

School administrators said that they had to find a way to meet class-size limits. Jodi Robins, the assistant principal of curriculum at Miami Beach High, said that even if students struggled in certain subjects, the virtual labs were necessary because “there’s no way to beat the class-size mandate without it.”

In response to parental confusion about virtual classes, the Miami Beach High parent-teacher association created a committee on virtual labs. The panel works with the school toward “getting issues on the table and working proactively,” said Patricia Kaine, the association’s president.

Some teachers are skeptical of how well the program can help students learn.

“The way our state is dealing with class size is nearly criminal,” said Chris Kirchner, an English teacher at Coral Reef Senior High School in Miami. “They’re standardizing in the worst possible way, which is evident in virtual classes.”

While Ms. Kirchner questions the instructional effectiveness of online courses, she said there was a place for them at some level.

“I think there should be learning on the computer,” Ms. Kirchner said. “That part is from 2:30 p.m. on. The first part of the day should be for learning with people.”

But Michael G. Moore, a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University, said programs that combine virtual education and face-to-face instruction could be effective. This is called the “blended learning concept.”

“There is no doubt that blended learning can be as effective and often more effective than a classroom,” said Mr. Moore, who is also editor of The American Journal of Distance Education. He said, however, that research and his experiences had shown that proper design and teacher instruction within the classroom were necessary. A facilitator who only monitors student progress and technical issues within virtual labs would not be categorized as part of a blended-learning model, he said. Other variables include “the maturity and sophistication of the student,” he said.

Despite some complaints about the virtual teaching method, administrators said e-learning labs were here to stay. And nationally, blending learning has already caught on in some areas.

In Chicago Public Schools, high schools have “credit recovery” programs that let students take online classes they previously failed so they can graduate. Omaha Public Schools also have similar programs that require physical attendance at certain locations.

Julie Durrand, manager of the e-learning lab program, said the virtual school planned to work more closely with district schools to ensure success. She said virtual school officials wanted orientations to be mandatory in schools with labs. Ms. Durrand also predicted that labs would expand to middle schools and would include more grade levels in schools that currently limited the labs to juniors and seniors.

There are six middle and K-8 schools using virtual labs in Miami, including Cutler Ridge Middle School and Frank C. Martin K-8 Center.

“I truly believe this will be an option for many districts across the state,” Ms. Durrand said. “I think we just hit the tip of the iceberg.”

    Florida Has Classes Without Teachers, NYT, 17.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/education/18classrooms.html

Send Huck Finn to College

January 15, 2011
The New York Times
By LORRIE MOORE

Madison, Wis.

EVER since NewSouth Books announced it would publish a version of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with the “n-word” removed, reaction has split between traditionalists outraged at censorship and those who feel this might be a way to get teenagers, especially African-American boys, comfortable reading a literary classic. From a mother’s perspective, I think both sides are mistaken.

No parent who is raising a black teenager and trying to get him to read serious fiction for his high school English class would ever argue that “Huckleberry Finn” is not a greatly problematic work. But the remedy is not to replace “nigger” with alternative terms like “slave” (the latter word is already in the novel and has a different meaning from “nigger,” so that substitution just mucks up the prose — its meaning, its voice, its verisimilitude). The remedy is to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college — or even graduate school — where it can be put in proper context.

“Huckleberry Finn” is not an appropriate introduction to serious literature, and anyone who cannot see that has never tried putting an audio version of it on during a long car trip while an African-American teenager sits beside her and slowly, slowly slips on his noise-canceling earphones in order to listen to hip-hop.

The derogatory word is part of the problem, but not the entirety of it — hip-hop music uses the same word. Of course, the speakers are different in each case, and the worlds they are speaking of and from are very distant from one another. The listener can tell the difference in a second. The listener knows which voice is speaking to him and which is not getting remotely close.

No novel with the word “kike” or “bitch” spelled out 200 times could or should be separated — for purposes of irony or pedagogy — from the attitudes that produced those words. It’s also impossible that such a novel would be taught in a high school classroom. And if it were taught, student alienation might very well contribute to another breed of achievement gap.

“Huckleberry Finn” is suited to a college course in which Twain’s obsession with the 19th-century theater of American hucksterism — the wastrel West, the rapscallion South, the economic strays and escapees of a harsh new country — can be discussed in the context of Jim’s particular story (and Huck’s).

An African-American 10th grader, in someone’s near-sighted attempt to get him newly appreciative of novels, does not benefit by being taken back right then to a time when a young white boy slowly realizes, sort of, the humanity of a black man, realizes that that black man is more than chattel even if that black man is also full of illogic and stereotypical superstitions.

Huck Finn refers to himself as an idiot and still finds Jim more foolish than himself. Although Twain has compassion for the affectionate Jim, he has an interest in burlesque; although he is sensitive to Jim’s heartbreaking losses, he is always looking for comedy and repeatedly holds Jim up as a figure of howling fun, ridicule that is specific to his condition as a black man.

The young black American male of today, whose dignity in our public schools is not always preserved or made a priority, does not need at the start of his literary life to be immersed in an even more racist era by reading a celebrated text that exuberantly expresses everything crazy and wicked about that time — not if one’s goal is to get that teenager to like books. Huck’s voice is a complicated amalgam of idioms and perspectives and is not for the inexperienced contemporary reader.

There are other books more appropriate for an introduction to serious reading. (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” with its social-class caricatures and racially naïve narrator, is not one of them.) Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” which vibrantly speaks to every teenager’s predicament when achievement in life is at odds with the demoralized condition of his peer group, is a welcoming book for boys. There must certainly be others and their titles should be shared. Teachers I meet everywhere are always asking, How can we get boys to read? And the answer is, simply, book by book.

One reader’s sensitivity always sets off someone else’s defensiveness. But what would be helpful are school administrators who will break with tradition and bring more flexibility, imagination and social purpose to our high school curriculums. College, where the students have more experience with racial attitudes and literature, can do as it pleases.

Lorrie Moore is the author, most recently, of the novel “A Gate at the Stairs.”

    Send Huck Finn to College, NYT, 15.12011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opinion/16moore.html

Amid Cuts, Public Colleges Step Up Appeals to Alumni

January 15, 2011
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

As state legislatures cut back support for higher education, public colleges and universities across the country are turning to their alumni, hat in hand, as never before — hiring consultants, hunting down graduates and mobilizing student phone banks to raise private money in amounts they once thought impossible.

But many find themselves arriving late to the game, particularly in the Northeast, where state governments have traditionally been generous and a host of private colleges have dominated the quest for donations.

The rush to catch up has placed public campuses in an awkward stance: cutting academic programs and instructors at the same time they are expanding development staffs and investing in a fund-raising infrastructure. And for some, the challenges run far deeper than honing their sales pitches.

A culture of class reunions and identification with one’s graduating class — the ethos of belonging and giving back that has been ingrained at many private colleges for generations — is less developed at most public universities. While there are exceptions, alumni networks at public universities are not quite as deep-pocketed as those in the private sphere.

“Rutgers is not a rich kid’s school,” said Richard L. McCormick, the president of the New Jersey university, which kicked off a $1 billion fund-raising campaign in October. “Many of our students do very well, don’t get me wrong. But we don’t have the advantage of as many multimillionaires among our alumni as the private colleges do.”

Perhaps the biggest task, administrators say, is simply making alumni and other potential donors aware that public campuses can no longer get by on public money.

When the State University of New York at Geneseo surveyed its alumni three years ago as part of a plan to increase fund-raising, the initial response was heartening. Former students described their time there with words like “love” and “the best four years.” Then came what one administrator, Michael J. Catillaz, called “the cold shower.” Asked if they would donate, almost all said they thought the university was financed entirely by the state. The state’s contribution was actually 25 percent, and it has been dropping ever since.

“Inviting alumni in large numbers to actively support the college is a foreign notion,” said Mr. Catillaz, the vice president for college advancement.

Yet there is danger in emphasizing the loss of state support. Fund-raising experts estimate that at most colleges, more than 90 percent of private donations come from a small segment of wealthy alumni, in large gifts that are almost always earmarked for a lofty purpose, like a new academic building or endowed chair.

“Donors do not want to be seen as there to make up a state budget shortfall,” said John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. “They want to know that their contributions will make a difference, and making a difference is not lighting the lights and heating the buildings.”

Despite those hurdles, officials of public institutions say that tapping philanthropy has become a chief priority. At SUNY, where the state has cut $674 million, or 30 percent, from the system’s operating budget in three years, the chancellor, Nancy L. Zimpher, recently held what she called a “summit meeting” in Manhattan for fund-raising officials from the 64 campuses.

The meeting was meant, in part, to celebrate the conclusion of a $3 billion campaign, actually a collection of individual campus efforts. But it was also a rallying cry to put some serious muscle into the next drive, yet to be announced. “Was SUNY late coming to the table? Absolutely,” Dr. Zimpher said. “But our ambitions are now equal to those of other public universities.”

SUNY, in fact, was prohibited from mounting fund-raising campaigns when it was created in the early 1960s, to allay fears that the new system would compete with private colleges, she said. “That is unlike anything I understand about public education where I come from,” said Dr. Zimpher, who was previously president of the University of Cincinnati.

Indeed, in parts of the country where public colleges dominate higher education, large institutions like the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington and the University of Michigan have for decades run big, ambitious fund drives.

But now smaller public institutions are joining in. Donald M. Fellows, president of Marts & Lundy, a national firm that advises nonprofit institutions like hospitals and museums on raising money, said public higher education was the only field in which his company had not lost business during the recession. “You have this whole other tier coming on,” Mr. Fellows said. “It’s hard to make the decision to invest in something like this when you’re cutting your core, but you do have to invest in that to get the payback.”

San Diego State University has made the gamble. While placing staff members on furlough and increasing student fees, it is halfway through its first fund-raising campaign, with a goal of $500 million, and raised $11 million to open an alumni center a year ago.

“Alumni now have a place to come home to,” said Mary Ruth Carleton, vice president for university relations and development. “It was a catalyst and convinced a lot of our alums and board members that we could be successful with a campaign.”

A decade ago, the 23 colleges and professional schools in the City University of New York were raising $50 million a year collectively. Today, that figure is $200 million, and officials have set a goal of $3 billion by 2015.

Matthew Goldstein, CUNY’s chancellor, said he had made the presidents’ track records at gathering money an important part of their annual performance reviews. “Everybody has gotten the directive that fund-raising needs to be a fundamental activity,” he said.

In many places, that mission filters down to undergraduates, who cold-call potential donors. At Stony Brook University, one of SUNY’s four research universities, alumni meet often with students on the Long Island campus to build a feeling of community.

“It’s a cultural change,” said Samuel L. Stanley Jr., president of Stony Brook, which just wrapped up a $360 million campaign. “We’re trying to build a tradition among our students. Even if they just give $5 or $10, it’s the concept that we really rely on giving, even though we’re a state university.”

To that end, institutions are tracking affluent alumni and trumpeting athletic victories.

SUNY Geneseo, the system’s most selective college, held 67 alumni events last year, up from a few the year before, as part of an effort to raise $25 million. The college has redesigned its alumni magazine and started five quarterly newsletters, each with a different focus, like athletics or business education.

Rutgers has hired Marts & Lundy to help gauge the potential donating power of its 390,000 alumni and has consolidated 19 alumni groups into one. “We decided that was crazy,” Dr. McCormick said. “And we abolished the dues structure so that any alumnus gets the magazine.”

Even the University of Connecticut, whose sports prowess has won it a national profile, began its first big fund-raising campaign only about a decade ago. And a bruised economy has hurt. A $600 million campaign begun four years ago has so far raised $250 million rather than a projected $325 million, said John K. Martin, president of the University of Connecticut Foundation.

Some warn that there is such a thing as too much private money.

“If there is a risk in it, it’s that it will take legislatures off the hook,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. “They might get the impression that we can make up for the cuts through philanthropy, and that could make us vulnerable to further cuts.”

Still, Mr. Callan said, fund-raising has become a fact of life, adding, “Everybody has to do it.”

    Amid Cuts, Public Colleges Step Up Appeals to Alumni, NYT, 15.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/education/16college.html

60 First Graders, 4 Teachers, One Loud New Way to Learn

January 10, 2011
The New York Times
By SHARON OTTERMAN

Sixty children in a first-grade class can get loud — sometimes too loud for a teacher to explain a lesson.

So while waiting for her teacher to come by, one little girl arranged the pennies she had been given to practice subtraction into a smiley face. Another shook her pennies in a plastic bag. A high-pitched argument broke out over someone’s missing quarter.

“We don’t know what we are supposed to be doing, but we are learning about math,” Thea Burnett, 6, said.

Across the room, a second teacher, Jennifer McSorley, successfully led the class’s weakest students in a counting rhyme. But when she leaned forward out of her chair to write a word on an easel, a 6-year-old boy moved it, and she fell when she tried to sit back down.

“Jahmeer, sit down,” Ms. McSorley demanded, unharmed but flustered. “I could have hurt myself very badly.” Then another boy ran off to hide under an easel. Someone grabbed someone else’s pennies. The noise snowballed.

All this was the early stages of an audacious public education experiment taking place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, one that its founder hopes will revolutionize both how students learn and how teachers are trained. Instead of assigning one teacher to roughly 25 children, the New American Academy began the school year with four teachers in large, open classrooms of 60 students. The school stresses student independence over teacher-led lessons, scientific inquiry over rote memorization and freedom and self-expression over strict structure and discipline. The founder, Shimon Waronker, developed the idea with several other graduate students at Harvard. It draws its inspiration, he said, from Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding high school in New Hampshire where students in small classes work collaboratively and hold discussions around tables.

But Mr. Waronker decided to try out the model in one of the nation’s toughest learning environments, a high poverty elementary school in which 20 percent of the children have been found to have emotional, physical or learning disabilities. The idea, he said, was to prove that his method could help any child, and should be widely used elsewhere. “I didn’t want to create an environment that wasn’t real for everyone else and then say, look at my success,” he said.

The challenges have been considerable. Faced with out-of-control classroom situations, Mr. Waronker, 42, had to rethink his idea that his model could work for even the most disturbed children. By January, three children who were violent had been moved to more-structured environments; seven other first graders moved away or withdrew, reducing the class size to 50.

The school was founded with the strong backing of Joel I. Klein, the former schools chancellor, who frequently lauded Mr. Waronker for his efforts as the principal of a tough middle school in the South Bronx. They found a space in an elementary school three blocks from Mr. Waronker’s home in Crown Heights, and in a special deal with the teachers’ union, he won the right to pay teachers on a scale that considered performance.

While the model flies against efforts to keep class sizes low, Mr. Waronker notes that the teacher-student ratio is lower than in most schools. At its heart is the idea that the teachers, not to mention the students, will collaborate and learn from one another, rather than being isolated in separate classrooms. He hired one $120,000-per-year master teacher per class. Most of the others are novice early childhood teachers, which recreates the staff composition in typical high-poverty schools.

New American Academy opened with 126 kindergartners and first graders and at least eight adults per classroom, including intern principals and paraprofessionals assigned to disabled children. It will expand by one grade per year until it reaches the fifth grade, and the teachers will stay with the same children every year, to build accountability for their learning. There is no assistant principal, dean or art teacher, saving money for classroom salaries.

Lessons are a series of complex choreographies. In the 2,000-square-foot kindergarten, for example, each child is assigned a “university”— a grouping by skill level — and another group by color: blue, red or green. Every 40 minutes or so, the children regroup in a different part of the room. During a visit in November, an observer noticed that each move led to the children’s standing up, running, talking, and then having to quiet down again.

“This is the hardest moment of the day,” said Lorraine Scorsone, the master teacher in the kindergarten, as eight adults tried to wrangle the children into a semicircle for group reading time. “In early childhood, disengaging is very difficult, and moving to another activity is very difficult.”

Ms. Scorsone, with 23 years of experience, had what appeared to be a magical touch, and the children listened raptly one day in November as she explained how a banana travels from foreign lands to local stores. But the other teachers, who do the bulk of the teaching, had more trouble gaining the attention of the children, who lay on carpets looking at the ceiling or fiddled with belts and shoelaces on the outskirts of lessons.

“Ewww,” squealed a boy named Ethan when he was told that the class would plant a banana tree later that day. Other children began mimicking the sound, which they had been making earlier. “Ethan, stop it,” said his teacher, Pepe Gutierrez. “I don’t know why you are screaming.”

The first grade was tougher, with less-experienced teachers and more children who were violent. In the first two months of school, a student pulled a chunk of an adult’s hair out, and an ambulance crew was called twice to calm a child. Eight weeks into the year, the only student work visible on the blue-painted walls was a poster with finger-painted hand prints and the words “Hands Are Not for Hitting.”

“Many of the children have already had a year in what I would call a state of nature, when Rousseau spoke about people who live under no civilization,” Mr. Waronker said, referring to the children’s experience in a regular public school kindergarten. Fifteen children still could not recognize letters, and only one-third were at grade level. “This is messy work — this is the front lines.”

In the front of the room, Kathleen Kearns, a first-year teacher, strained to get her 20 students to understand how to use a chart to classify similarities and differences between two characters in a book. About half a dozen students refused to sit in their places.

“I need you here; your job is here,” she said to one, trying to be heard. After class, she said, “I am exhausted at the end of the day.”

It is the same struggle that first-year teachers across the city face, but the difference, Mr. Waronker said, is that in his school, it is out in the open. Other teachers can offer advice and pitch in, and they have 90 minutes of joint planning time each morning. The intensive collaboration, he believes, is what will cause his model, while admittedly still in a “trial-and-error” phase, to ultimately surpass others.

Indeed, by this month, there were significant improvements. Children appeared more focused during lessons. Jahmeer decided to play with pencils rather than do his counting work sheet, but he stayed in his seat, and another child asked if he needed help. One boy started crying, but not because someone pushed him; he wanted to have a turn writing his answer on the board.

“It’s tough on them, it’s tough on all of us,” Keema Flourney, the first-grade master teacher, said of her teachers, “but they are pulling through.”

Next year, Mr. Waronker said, he will hire more-experienced teachers, because expecting that novices could learn quickly enough from the master teachers was wrong. “I put added stressors that shouldn’t have been there,” he said.

Most of the teachers said they felt the school’s model would show good results over time. Several parents praised the school’s inclusiveness and its effort to offer something different. But one father, who withdrew his daughter, said the school was not for her because of her behavior problems.

The first-year teacher who had been leading the penny lesson in November for Thea and 19 other children, Daniella Schonbuch, while the master teacher was away, said she calmed herself after tough days by remembering that she would have years to build progress with her students. By January, she was leading a regular morning French lesson.

“It’s small moments, it really is,” said Ms. McSorley, the first-grade teacher whose chair had been pulled out from under her. “We are still in the process of figuring out what works for the kids, and what works today does not always work tomorrow.”

    60 First Graders, 4 Teachers, One Loud New Way to Learn, NYT, 10.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/education/11class.html

Study Finds Family Connections Give Big Advantage in College Admissions

January 8, 2011
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

A new study of admissions at 30 highly selective colleges found that legacy applicants get a big advantage over those with no family connections to the institution — but the benefit is far greater for those with a parent who earned an undergraduate degree at the college than for those with other family connections.

According to the study, by Michael Hurwitz, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants to a parent’s alma mater had, on average, seven times the odds of admission of nonlegacy applicants. Those whose parents did graduate work there or who had a grandparent, sibling, uncle or aunt who attended the college were, by comparison, only twice as likely to be admitted.

Legacy admissions have become an increasingly touchy issue for colleges. Admissions officers mostly play down the impact of legacy status. But a growing body of research shows that family connections count for a lot — and Mr. Hurwitz’s study found a larger impact than previous studies.

And at a time when admission to elite colleges has become increasingly competitive, critics say the legacy admissions advantage stands as an undemocratic obstacle to social mobility.

“It’s fundamentally unfair because it’s a preference that advantages the already advantaged,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a nonprofit research organization. “It has nothing to do with the individual merit of the applicant.”

Mr. Kahlenberg, the author of “Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions,” said a legal challenge to legacy preferences is becoming likely. Public university preferences could be attacked as unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, he said, while private universities might be vulnerable under an 1866 civil rights statute prohibiting discrimination based on “ancestry.”

Mr. Hurwitz’s study, published in “Economics of Education Review,” looked at data from 133,236 applicants for 2007 college admission, and analyzed the outcomes of the 61,962 who applied to more than one of the elite colleges. That allowed him to compare how much more likely they were to be offered admission where they had family connections.

“I was able to take into account all the applicant’s characteristics,” Mr. Hurwitz said, “because they were the same at every school they applied to. About the only thing that would be different was their legacy status.”

Family donations were not included in the data.

On average, Mr. Hurwitz’s study found, legacy applicants had slightly higher SAT scores than others. Education researchers point out that students whose parents attended elite colleges are also more likely to have advantages like family wealth and private school education.

Thomas P. Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist who has studied legacy admissions, said Mr. Hurwitz’s study was the first to compare the advantage to students applying to a parent’s alma mater with that of students with other family ties.

Mr. Espenshade pointed out that legacy status is just one of many possible advantages.

“We did a paper that found that if you are an athlete, you have 4.2 times the likelihood of admission as a nonathlete,” he said. “The advantages for underrepresented minorities are pretty big, too.”

Mr. Hurwitz said applicants with the highest SATs got the biggest legacy benefits.

Among the 30 colleges, the legacy advantage varied enormously: one college was more than 15 times as likely to accept legacy applicants, while at another, the effect was insignificant.

As a condition of access to the data, Mr. Hurwitz said, he agreed not to identify the colleges.

Given a table showing characteristics like high endowments and SAT scores and low acceptance rates, it seemed apparent that they are the members of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, a group made up of the Ivy Leagues and two dozen other private research universities and liberal arts colleges.

    Study Finds Family Connections Give Big Advantage in College Admissions, NYT, 8.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/education/09legacies.html

Georgia Facing a Hard Choice on Free Tuition

January 6, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

ATHENS, Ga. — Students here at the University of Georgia have a name for some of the fancy cars parked in the lots around campus. They call them Hopemobiles. But there may soon be fewer of them.

The cars are gifts from parents who find themselves with extra cash because their children decided to take advantage of a cherished state perk — the Hope scholarship. The largest merit-based college scholarship program in the United States it offers any Georgia high school student with a B-average four years of free college tuition.

But the Hope scholarship program is about to be cut by a new governor and Legislature facing staggering financial troubles.

The lingering effects of the recession and the end of federal stimulus funds have sunk many states into a fiscal quagmire. The seriousness of the problem, and a growing concern over how much worse it might become, have many states struggling to find ways to trim services or raise revenues.

In Georgia, that means taking a slice out of the Hope scholarship.

When it was begun in 1993, the program was covered easily by Georgia’s state lottery. Politicians enjoyed how happy it made middle-class constituents. Educators praised the way it improved SAT scores and lifted Georgia from the backwaters of higher education.

It was considered so innovative that 15 states copied it. And while the lottery-based scholarship programs in states like Tennessee are dipping into reserves to cover the costs, none have fiscal woes as big as Georgia’s.

Part of it is the program’s popularity. A majority of freshmen in Georgia have grades good enough to qualify for Hope, which covers tuition, some books and fees — but not housing costs — at any Georgia university or technical school.

And even though as many as two-thirds of Hope students let their college grades slip so much that they no longer qualify — “I’ve lost Hope,” they joke when it happens — Georgia still gives away more financial aid per student than any other state. Since the program started, 1.3 million Georgia students have received a total of $5.6 billion in educational support. The program offers as much as $6,000 a year for some students.

But the program has become so popular it cannot sustain itself. Lottery sales, which by law can pay for only the Hope scholarship and a free prekindergarten program, will be short $243 million this fiscal year and as much as $317 million the next, according to state budget estimates.

Last year, lawmakers had to pull millions of dollars from the state’s reserve fund just to cover the cost. But this year, there is nowhere to turn.

Like the other states that are facing the worst fiscal crisis in recent memory, Georgia heads into its legislative session next week staring at a budget deficit of as much as $2 billion. And that is after billions of dollars in cuts over the past two years that have reduced the state’s spending power to $17.9 billion for fiscal year 2011.

But trim the program that for years has paid to educate the children of the most reliable voters in the state?

“Undoubtedly, this is, in every sense of the word, a very strongly ingrained entitlement for a certain segment of voters, and politicians are indeed reluctant to touch it,” said Christopher Cornwell, a professor of economics at the University of Georgia, who has studied the effect of the Hope scholarship on the state, including an analysis of the positive impact the scholarship has had on car sales.

Politicians are hoping for mercy as they begin this month to make decisions that will surely have the parents of college-bound students scrambling to find new ways to pay for tuition.

“We trust and we hope the people in the state of Georgia understand the position we’re in,” said State Representative Len Walker, a Republican who leads the House Higher Education Committee.

They do and they don’t.

Cathy Ottley, a part-time office manager, and her husband, a management consultant, are raising three children in Marietta, north of Atlanta. One is a sophomore at the University of Georgia, courtesy of the Hope scholarship. A daughter who is a high school senior had her heart set on the University of North Carolina but has come to see an in-state college as the practical way to go. And then there is the youngest, a high school freshman with a promising future in athletics. Without the scholarship, Ms. Ottley said, college for her children would be a stretch at best.

“This just gives you options,” she said. “I don’t have peace about kids just starting out at 22 with $200,000 in debt for their education.”

Mr. Walker said no one was talking about cutting the program completely.

“It appears at this point that it will not be a 100 percent scholarship. It might be 90 percent. It might 80 percent,” he said. But the cost of books and fees will most certainly be eliminated.

Other options include raising the required grade-point average, which would cut the number of students who qualify, or giving more to exceptional students and less to merely above-average performers.

“That would make it so much harder,” said Myisha Price, a junior at Clayton State University in Atlanta, who relies on the scholarship and also works. “I don’t go to clubs. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke and I don’t party and it’s already hard.”

Another idea is to work economic need into the equation, though that idea does not have much support, both lawmakers and educators said.

The most likely plan, and one that Governor-elect Nathan Deal, a Republican, has indicated he supports, would be to create a flat rate for each student, regardless of the tuition bill.

At a cafeteria table here this week, a group of Hope recipients defended the program and debated a range of ideas to keep Hope alive, including raising taxes.

Allie McCullen, who is majoring in English and women’s studies, is in her fourth year at Georgia. She is the only child of a single mother who in 2006 lost her job in the mortgage industry. Ms. McCullen pieces together her living expenses and extra book costs through a small grant and two jobs.

“If I didn’t have it, I might not be able to attend at all,” she said. “Or I would just be in such severe debt that I might not ever be able to get out of it.”

If the scholarship ends or gets cut drastically, it could send the most promising students out of state and even end the era of new cars for incoming freshman.

Lauren Rice drives a Hopemobile (though, she concedes, it is only a Honda Civic). Her parents told her she could go to college anywhere. She was considering Auburn in Alabama. But her parents offered her what she called “the car incentive.” That, plus the daunting out-of-state tuition helped her select the University of Georgia.

But without Hope, Ms. Rice’s decision might have been different.

“If you’re going to have a bill in-state anyway,” she said, “then what does it matter?”

    Georgia Facing a Hard Choice on Free Tuition, NYT, 6.1.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/us/07hope.html