What are schools for?

The WSJ posted an editorial critical of Pres. Obama's goals for universal pre-school.  I wrote a letter in response.

To the Editor;

In your editorial "Head Start for all," (February 26, 2013), you make solid points against many of the current fads dressed up as education reform.

"All of this is consistent with the phenomenon known as "fade out," in which any tangible gains from preschool dissipate as students progress through elementary school."  Fade out occurs at all levels in the school system when achievement is measured through standardized exams.  They are distinctly incapable of telling us anything of lasting value about a student.

"Nearly 80% of enrollment is "just a transfer of income from the government to families of four year olds" who would have attended preschool anyway." Vouchers are indeed a sly method to redistribute taxpayer money to the wealthy, not just for preschool but all along the educational system.

"...it can't even be replicated in Georgia." No matter the promise, reforms do not scale.  What works in one classroom or even one state depends on specific goals, dispositions and needs. We are just too diverse as a nation to cut and paste school policies from one state to the whole country.

Standardized testing, vouchers and generalizing 'what works' seem logical. They are not.  Doubtful will the Common Core, longer school days, expanding charters, online education and other fascinations of the new-style reformists succeed to a significant degree as well.  Until we examine a more enlightened and animating reason for schooling, reforms simply serve vested interests rather than tomorrow's students.

Wolf in the herd

The New York Times got a letter today.

To the Editor;

Yuval Levin reiterates an incomplete and unhelpful dichotomy when he writes, "Democrats want to close the budget gap by having the government lean more heavily on the wealthy, while Republicans want to close it by having the government spend less money." (February 20, "Old and White? Less help for you").

A more representative depiction would be that many want to close the budget gap through higher revenues (which do not come from lower tax rates) and through lower government spending (which should not affect the needs of crucial public projects, like education, science and infrastructure).

Because we want what is impossible, we get nothing but commentary.

Brooks on character and ECE

Another letter, to the NYTimes, in response to David Brooks:


To the Editor;

David Brooks exposes the central contradiction in educational policy when he writes that "... There’s still a lot we don’t know about how to educate children that young. The essential thing is to build systems that can measure progress, learn and adapt to local circumstances." ("When families fail," Friday, February 15, 2013).

The difficulty of adequately measuring any progress is that it takes a long, long time.  End of year testing, at whatever level in the school system, create false consciousness about learning.  If the government creates oversight that is 'as simple as possible,' it risks creating systems that sacrifice valuable longitudinal knowledge for politically motivated insufficient data.  There is no 'real and ambitious' way forward through short-sided, coercive policy.

Slow destruction of the human condition

Roger Cohen is quite eloquent today:
"Urban livers wallow in emotion — about death among other things — because of a dearth of necessity. Cut off from natural patterns of life and death, they become sentimental. Reality shows take the place of the realities of life. You do not find heroes among the dales. The word would be considered indulgent. You do what has to be done.

Once most of humanity is estranged from nature, rootless, unfamiliar with the rhythms of the seasons and the cycle of passing and renewal, bound by material considerations alone, uncomfortable with solitude and silence and darkness, jostled by the crowd and the hum and the neon, the danger is that some essential ethical ballast and reference is lost."

WSJ on doctors (and teachers)

In response to a commentary, I sent the WSJ a letter:

To the Editors:

In his concern about the potential for doctors to strike, ("The doctor's office as union shop,") Wednesday, January 30, 2013), David Leffell explicates the inevitable danger of prioritizing corporate profits over health care.  

Doctors should be concerned that the economics of health care sift money out of the patients' well-being.   Teachers, to whom he offers in comparison, already worry that privatizing education pulls money away from learning to enhance shareholder value and quarterly returns.  When the focus of medicine is no longer patient welfare, as the purpose of education is no longer student learning, but corporate profit, Americans should, to rephrase Dr. Leffell, "expect the quality of their care and access to it decline." Collective action, though rarely and often poorly used, remains a bulwark against that threat.

The moral animal

A letter, to the NYTimes:


To the Editor;

Thanks are in order for Jonathan Sacks.  His insight ("The moral animal" December 24, 2012) can help us to celebrate the humanity in this season.

And yet, his comment, "Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age"  demonstrates the irony of modern personal salvation. Spiritual evangelicals of all faiths, including that of reason, engage in an other-directed and community-minded action for the sake of the enlightened self-interest.  In this new age of accumulative theology, we consume belief in order to better our selves.

Sacrificing Head Start?

A federal study demonstrates that by the end of 3rd, students who had been enrolled in Head Start, have little to no advantage over students never enrolled: "Yasmina Vinci, the executive director of the National Head Start Association, called the vanishing impacts of Head Start in the early grades "troubling," but noted that Head Start does its core job well by preparing disadvantaged children for kindergarten. "Our work with students ends when children graduate from Head Start, but it is clear that for many, their circumstances continue to hinder their success; circumstances including, but not limited to, the quality of their primary and secondary education," she said in a prepared statement."

There are those will use this report to call for Head Start to be defunded, at the federal level.  A thought experiment.  Suppose they win this call, based on this study.  As a result, Head Start is completely defunded, on the argument that the $8b spent on these kids has no residual effect.

That would mean that Congress accepts the idea that the long-term effects of education may not and perhaps can not be known until several years afterward.  In other words, would using this evidence to impeach the impacts of the Head Start program be the same thing as claiming that standardized tests should not be used to evaluate a teacher and the school because the effects of that teacher can not be determined for several years?

Yes, Head Start would need be sacrificed, at least in the short term.  The statistics given in the new report express success in the students while they were enrolled (as Ms. Vinci notes).  Proponents of the program would not doubt point to those real effects in an effort not to shuttle the program.  However, the longitudinal advantage of having (mostly) Conservative education reforms accepting the irrelevance of real-time testing is humongous.

If progressive-minded educators and politicos have already hatched this plan, forgive me for spoiling the secret.