Further thoughts on Oprah; Savage Exaggerations; The Money Myth

Tonight I watched the Oprah show, Schools in Crisis, that aired this afternoon (don't forget to set your Tivo for tomorrow's show, which features KIPP prominently!) and want to temper what I wrote earlier.  It turns out that the summary from the Oprah web site that I sent out earlier (and upon which I based my comments) didn't capture a lot of good stuff, esp. Bill and Melinda Gates (and Oprah) pounding the table about what a crisis there is today in our K-12 public education system.

 

For those of us who are up to our eyeballs passionately fighting for genuine school reform every day and believe so strongly that this is the most important issue facing our nation, it's easy to forget that most Americans don't share our passion -- they either don't know how bad things are, or it doesn't really affect them directly, so they just don't care that much.  (Though the Time magazine/Oprah survey showed that 61% of Americans think there's a crisis in our educational system, that's an easy question to say yes to -- I'm not convinced that much of the electoral REALLY gets it and cares about it.)

 

Thus, when someone as smart, eloquent, passionate and influential as Oprah takes on this issue and brings our cause into the living rooms of 22 MILLION Americans in an emotionally powerful way, we should be standing up and cheering, not nit-picking about whether the initial analysis of the problem and solution is on the mark or not.  The glass is at least 80% full here -- and might become 95% full if Oprah becomes engaged in this issue going forward -- so let's toast that (and hope that tomorrow's show is even better!).

 

That being said, it would have been really nice if, when they visited the dilapidated school in Washington DC, someone had bothered to ask how much DC is spending per student.  The answer: a staggering $16,334 per student, a lot higher than any state except Alaska, yet student scores are FAR worse than any state (a horrifying 12% and 7% of 8th graders in DC are proficient in reading and math, respectively) (the next lowest state in reading is Hawaii at 18% and in math, Mississippi, at 13%).  The scandal here is NOT, as Kozol would have you believe, that as a country, we are spending an insufficient amount on our inner-city children, but rather that we are getting so little bang for the huge amount of bucks we're spending.

 

2) For more data on this, and a more detailed rebuttal of Kozol, read this article from the latest issue of Education Next.  Before doing so, I want to repeat what I said earlier: I applaud Kozol's passionate commitment to America's most disadvantaged schoolchildren and for shining a light on the (to quote the title of one of his books) "savage inequalities" in our schools.  That being said, his diagnoses of the problems and his remedies leave much to be desired...

 

Here's the key chart from the Education Next article:

 

 

And here's the opening of the article, which lays out the critique:

In the four decades that Jonathan Kozol, now 70, has been writing books—11 so far—his message has hardly wavered: minority children are unsuccessful because rich, white Americans have little interest in using their vast resources to help them. In each of his works Kozol seems intent on burdening other white upper-class Americans with guilt enough for them to see the light and share their wealth. With this attractive message Kozol has won a loyal following among school teachers, policymakers, and book-reading citizens...

The notoriety has perhaps gone to Kozol’s head. In his first book, Death at an Early Age, he described the horrific experience of teaching at, and being fired from, a segregated public school in Boston. The book has the feel of being written by a young, dedicated, public school teacher on the frontlines of a major battle, which is exactly what Kozol was. So open to new ideas was he at that time that in another of his earlier volumes, Free Schools, he even hinted at a solution not much different from the one advocated by choice supporters today. More on that later.

In the books that have followed, however, Kozol, no longer in the trenches, seems to have less to write about and offers little more than the old, tired, and failed solutions for the problems of our schools. He tells similar stories, revisits old haunts, has, essentially, the same conversations. Adding to the monotony, Kozol’s most recent books, in fact, are as much about him as about American education.

3) For more on the Money Myth, see the chapter by that title from Jay Greene's book, Education Myths.

 

In summary, my conclusion may appear somewhat contradictory: lack of money is not what ails our schools -- heck, we've DOUBLED per pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, in the past 30 years or so, yet absolute performance hasn't budged -- and relative performance has fallen off a cliff (relative to other countries and to the demands of the modern economy).  HOWEVER, I believe more money IS part of the solution, but only if the money is well spent and is part of broader reform -- a perfect example is the Joel Greenblatt-funded Success for All program, which transformed the results at a struggling Queens school for $1,000 per student per year (see article at

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/news/businessfinance/15958/).

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Savage Exaggerations

by Marcus A. Winters

http://www.educationnext.org/20062/71.html

Jonathan Kozol has made a good living talking with students. His books chronicle travels among poor, minority children, most of them African Americans in struggling public schools. They are not gentle accounts. His first book, published in 1967, was called Death at an Early Age. Nor are his books politically tepid: his latest, published in 2005, is called The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America ...