The Jennings School District bought more than 2,500 hand-held computers back in 2006. Now, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, the district is getting rid of them. They were purchased with high hopes:

Students could use them to graph math equations, take notes, draw charts, and even, coupled with external probes, measure temperature and pH.

The north St. Louis County school district, now with about 3,100 students, bought one machine for each third- through 12th-grader.

Jennings made two mistakes when it bought all those devices. First, it didn’t have a specific purpose for the technology. The things students could have done with the computers, like taking notes and studying equations, were tasks they could do already with pencils or calculators. Teachers aren’t going to adopt new technology when the old technology does the job just as well. It’s no wonder most teachers said they didn’t use the computers and don’t intend to use them.

Second, the district bought the computers for too many students. It would have made more sense to introduce the devices to one grade, and wait for results before giving them to other grades.

Districts can easily get carried away by dreams of quick technological fixes, so I don’t blame Jennings for being so ambitious. What’s puzzling is that Jennings doesn’t seem to have learned from what happened. The district plans to get rid of the devices by giving them away to graduating students over the course of several years, even though the devices are almost obsolete and will probably be worthless in a year or two. It’s like Jennings can’t give up on its expectation that students will use the computers — if not in school, then after they graduate.

Jennings should sell the computers once and for all. And remember the moral of the story: More gadgets aren’t always better.

In the comments section to this article about Parents as Teachers, some Columbia Daily Tribune readers are brainstorming ways to limit eligibility to the program, to make the most of its remaining funding.

I agree that the program provides too many services for free to too many people, but not all suggestions for limiting it struck me as good ideas. One plan in particular that I think would be unsuccessful is restricting the program to children who are lagging behind in their development.

An argument for Parents as Teachers that I find persuasive (although not sufficient justification for free services to the wealthy) is that helping at-risk children when they’re young can prevent problems and save tax dollars later on. Parents as Teachers couldn’t do that if only children with below-average development were let in. That’s because the younger children are, the easier it is for their development to be considered satisfactory; not much is expected from a newborn baby. But when children are a few years old, they need to have passed several milestones to still be on track. The effect of screening by development would be to keep out most babies and bring children into the program years later, after their developmental problems have surfaced. Programs like Parents as Teachers shouldn’t look for children who are already behind, but for children who are fine now and likely to fall behind later.

Furthermore, “normal” means different things to different people, and there is some subjectivity involved in diagnosing developmental delays. In this radio interview, a representative from Parents as Teachers talks about the possibility that doctors and Parents as Teachers educators might disagree about whether a child has a developmental problem. (I can readily believe that such differences might arise, because Parents as Teachers educators don’t need to have any medical background and their training consists of short seminars and distance learning.) Who would have the final say in determining whether a child is eligible? And there’s still the question of which mothers should get home visits before their babies are born.

Although I hope Parents as Teachers will end its free home visits to families that don’t need help, it shouldn’t use developmental screenings to determine which people to serve.

The L.A. Times reports on the disagreement that is holding up a proposed Hebrew-language charter school in California. The school promises to teach languages (Hebrew and a few others), not religion, but some people still think it would violate separation of church and state. Here’s a quote by an opponent of the proposed charter from a previous article:

“By requiring the students study Hebrew, I think you’re effectively limiting (who would apply),” said Dennis King, a former Hart school board member of 20 years. “So it’s sort of an ethnic school. It’s a school that appeals to a particular culture. . . . I suspect 95% of the kids will be Jewish.”

I hope this way of thinking doesn’t become prevalent in Missouri, because I’m happy about the growth of language-immersion charters here and I’m afraid the argument could be used against them as well. The St. Louis Language Immersion Schools have suggested the possibility of opening new schools in the future. Would they be barred from opening a Japanese school because many students would be Buddhists, or an Arabic school because many Muslims would apply?

As long as the school does not promote religion, there’s nothing wrong with teaching a language that’s associated with a religious group. Public schools do it all the time; Ladue teaches Hebrew, and Bunche teaches Arabic. If public schools can teach these languages for an hour or two a day, charters should be able to focus on the same languages and teach them in more depth.

I’m not convinced by some economists’ assertions that offering merit pay and bonuses doesn’t make employees more productive. One of the economists professing that opinion is Dan Ariely, who describes his research in Wired. Here are some of the tasks he asked his subjects to perform:

We asked them, for example, to assemble puzzles and to play memory games while throwing tennis balls at a target.

When the subjects were offered big rewards, they did poorly on the puzzles.

I have no doubt that Ariely and his collaborators ran their experiments under rigorous laboratory conditions, but it’s a stretch to conclude from them that merit pay is bad. What goes on in the laboratory is far removed from day-to-day classroom activities. Good teaching depends more on verbal and interpersonal skills than on hand-eye coordination. And a controlled experiment with tennis balls is of necessity finished within minutes, whereas teaching takes place over the course of many months. The long work of establishing a rapport with students and building knowledge isn’t comparable to putting a little puzzle together.

To learn the true effects of bonuses and incentives, it’s better to look at studies that examine how real teachers in schools respond to merit pay.

Diner’s Journal writes that the proposed increase in federal spending on school lunches disappointed many advocates, who had hoped for a steeper rise in funding. By itself, the increase won’t allow schools to change their menus drastically:

Quick calculations show that at best, the president’s plan might offer less than 20 cents more per school lunch.

Schools can still improve the meals they serve, but they’ll have to find other ways to pay for better food. Schools might raise money specifically for their cafeterias, or they could divert resources from things they’ve been paying for that are less important than lunch. Some schools have already succeeded; this charter school, for one, spends a few dollars more on each student’s lunch than the typical public school. The Maplewood–Richmond Heights School District is another example of a school that changed its lunch offerings without federal help. The district was able to add fresh produce to its meals using a grant from a nonprofit organization.

Not every district needs to transform its cafeteria food. In some districts, the lunches aren’t great, but students live in households that can afford to send bag lunches if they choose. Other districts may decide that something else is holding back student achievement and that all resources should be focused on solving that problem before any additional money is diverted to making lunches tastier.

Districts that do want to spend more on food should accept the fact that they won’t receive unlimited appropriations from the federal government. They need to be frugal, and to buy the food they want at the cheapest price. They need to look for foods that are both nutritious and inexpensive. They can’t afford to squander money on pricey fads like “local” or “sustainable” food.

In an article about Massachusetts’ new law requiring certain preschools and day care centers to teach children how to brush their teeth, the New York Times quoted a teacher who opposes the regulation:

“I don’t want someone’s hand in my child’s mouth,” said Sarah Brodsky, a teacher at First Path Day Care in Watertown and mother of 4-month-old Noah. “It’s a little too much” government intervention, Ms. Brodsky added.

I’m not the Sarah Brodsky in this article, although we do have the same name and her quote is basically what I would have said. She’s right; the decision of whether to incorporate teeth brushing into the school day should be left to preschools and day care centers.

The new law is an intrusion into preschool management, and the fact that parents can opt out is little consolation from a preschool director’s point of view. Every preschool now has to set up sinks and take time away from other activities in order to brush teeth, all while keeping track of which students’ parents opted out. Preschool teachers are sure to hear complaints from parents if one child sticks someone else’s toothbrush in his mouth, or if an opted-out child inadvertently gets into the toothpaste. Those kinds of mix-ups are unavoidable when you have a bunch of little kids brushing their teeth at the same time.

I hope Missouri won’t follow Massachusetts’ lead and mandate teeth brushing in day care centers. But now that I think about it, I don’t know whether the in-school dental care policy would catch on in Missouri — people would probably demand taxpayer-funded home visits!

I’ve made my case against Parents as Teachers, and I suggested that the program limit eligibility to poor families. That idea was roundly rejected in the comments, on the grounds that Parents as Teachers would become another welfare program that taxpayers have to support but can’t benefit from. My answer to that is: It already is a program that many people have to pay for but can’t benefit from. Infertile couples and single people with no prospects of having children soon have to help pay the more-than-$1,000-per-family price tag for home visits to wealthy parents. And the Parents as Teachers educator doesn’t do anything your pediatrician couldn’t do just as well. You could spend a lot of time with a pediatrician for $1,000+.

This is a popular program that participants feel they gain a lot from, so I realize my opinions aren’t going to change how it’s run. That being the case, I wish people would stop making statements like this one in a letter published in the Post-Dispatch:

Studies have shown that parents who take part in Parents as Teachers are more involved in their child’s school once the child starts kindergarten.

Well-off parents who care about their kids will be the first to sign them up for programs like Parents as Teachers, and they’ll also be the most likely to be active in their kids’ schools. We can’t infer any causal relationship there as long as Parents as Teachers continues its current eligibility policy.

Anyone following the cyberbullying issue should read this article in the Columbia Missourian. (Thanks to Combest for the link.) The article reports on a proposed bill that would require all public school districts to write policies about online bullying.

The bill’s sponsor doesn’t see any drawbacks to it:

“I feel like this bill has the support of everybody,” Wilson said. “It’s simple, and it’s the right thing to do.”

The sponsor’s intentions are unimpeachable, but her bill still deserves to be challenged and debated. In particular, I see one potential down side to it: Passing such a bill could make people feel like the government had fixed something, when in reality little would change.

For one thing, the bill would apply only to public districts. I wouldn’t suggest expanding its reach; the state should not tell private schools which policies to adopt. But what if a student from a private school bullies a student from a public school, or vice versa? Or, what if someone’s cousin comes for a visit from out of state and bullies the neighborhood kids? How would districts’ anti-bullying policies help in those situations? Many instances of bullying wouldn’t fall under any district’s policy.

Furthermore, the bill just tells districts to write something down on a piece of paper. It’s not guaranteed that districts will enforce their policies well enough to prevent online bullying. Bullying can be difficult to detect and stop, because bullies usually harass their victims away from adults’ supervision. A district can’t track down all the emails and text messages that students send to each other, so the new policies probably wouldn’t affect communications between students as much as districts might want them to.

Few policy issues are as as uncontroversial as the idea that the federal government should provide some kind of national defense. Realizing that funding the military is almost universally considered to be a federal obligation, advocates of other policies try to piggyback on that popular support by associating their programs with defense or comparing their concerns to a battlefield.

The latest example is this essay in the Huffington Post by Debra Eschmeyer, Media Director of the National Farm to School Network. Eschmeyer argues for a direct link between school lunches and national security:

Do tater tots, pizza, and soda rise to the level of calling in Janet Napolitano or David Petraeus? Oddly, yes, because the National School Lunch Program was originally created to promote “nutrition in the national defense,” as a solution to young men who were unfit for service in WWI and WWII. The lunch line was actually designed to prepare soldiers for the front lines. (And sadly, 27 percent of the population for military service today are too obese/overweight to serve).

Eschmeyer then turns her attention away from history and calls for a “fight” against poor nutrition.

Is Eschmeyer correct that we need better cafeteria food to keep out foreign invaders? I don’t think so. There are many other factors that prevent people from joining the military, such as criminal records, lack of education, and health problems that are not related to food (including poor eyesight, mental illness, and others). It’s worth noting that the report Eschmeyer cites about military service recommends expanding preschool education in an effort to improve graduation rates, but makes no mention of school lunches.

Fortunately, we don’t need a large percentage of the population to defend the country right now, so it doesn’t really matter that so many people can’t serve for one reason or another. Problems like obesity don’t determine whether we have a military, but which people are employed by it. As a country, we can still enjoy the benefits of national defense. The only people who lose out when the army excludes lots of overweight people are the overweight people who want to serve. And if someone wants to join the armed forces but is barred by weight, he can make nutritional or other lifestyle changes to improve his fitness. In this sense, overweight people are in a better position than others who are disqualified, because it’s possible for them to bring their weight down to military standards through their own initiative.

The fact that a small percentage of the population is eligible for military service can be a good thing, depending on how you look at it. It means that we are living in such a peaceful time in history that our military can afford to be selective, excluding people who don’t have quite enough education or whose weight is just a little higher than the ideal.

The defense argument for better school lunches doesn’t pass inspection. If states like Missouri think kindergartners don’t eat enough vegetables, they shouldn’t frame that as a national security crisis. There’s no need to call in the federal government — or to call forth the militia.

The German family that fled to Tennessee in search of freedom to homeschool has been granted political asylum. They can stay in Tennessee and continue to educate their children as they choose — although, as I’ve written before, if they want to see really great homeschooling laws, they should check out Missouri.

Here’s another reason that allowing alternative teacher certification in Missouri was a good idea: Teachers who are anxious about math can transmit that attitude to their students, who may then lose confidence in their ability to learn math. Specifically, a study has found that girls who were taught by female teachers with math anxiety were more likely to believe that boys are better at math. The girls who formed that opinion also earned a lower average score than their peers on a math test. The difference in scores did not appear at the beginning of the year, before the students had been influenced by their teachers.

Alternative teacher certification is a good way to fill the teaching force with people who are both knowledgeable about math and comfortable with it. Proponents of alternative teacher certification have long highlighted the knowledge that teachers bring to the classroom. Obviously, a teacher with little math background won’t have the same level of expertise as someone who’s worked in a math-intensive field. But this study shows that a teacher’s feelings toward her subject are also important. A teacher who hasn’t developed confidence by using math can change how students think about their potential to learn. And that could prevent them from learning from other teachers later on.

While this study focused on negative effects of teachers, it would be interesting to see whether teachers can inspire previously reluctant students to like a subject. Can a confident teacher turn around students’ attitudes and make them enthusiastic about math and science?

A group of homeschooling parents in Oregon have applied to form a charter school. They want to continue homeschooling, and to use the charter for in-school resources and to meet weekly with a teacher.

Given Oregon’s track record on charters, I’m not expecting the idea to be approved easily. And I actually hope the district turns down this proposal. I see a few problems with it:

• The charter would give each student $1,000 to use for their education. Families’ ideas of educational purchases vary so widely that this is sure to lead to conflicts or allegations of misuse. What if a family thinks a golf lesson is physical education but the charter doesn’t?
• It seems extravagant to establish a school resource center for a couple hundred families who won’t spend much time there. People could just go to a public library and access most of the books, maps, or CDs that the charter would provide.
• If students in the homeschool charter perform poorly on state tests, other people might view that as an indictment of all homeschoolers. An unsuccessful homeschool charter could provoke stricter regulation of other homeschoolers who were never involved with it.

I would support a charter for homeschoolers if it were structured more like a part-time school. Students could attend the school two or three full days a week, and it could assign homework for them to do with their parents on the other days. Rather than give students money to spend, the school could lend them computers, musical instruments, or other things they need for their studies. Students would still get to spend lots of time at home, but it would be clear to everyone that the charter was a real school and not just a place to stop by for an hour.

Is a part-time charter a good idea for Missouri? Charters can form in St. Louis and Kansas City, so out-state homeschoolers won’t have this option. St. Louis families that want to combine homeschooling and public education are already free to choose the SLPS Virtual School. There might not be enough demand for a homeschooling charter there. That leaves Kansas City. I can imagine homeschooling families in Kansas City forming a charter, especially if they participated in the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program and are looking for something to take its place. However, the charter idea won’t go very far if homeschoolers are satisfied with existing homeschool coops and don’t want help from the state.

Missouri intends to give only half of its Race to the Top grant, should it receive one, to districts. The rest would pay for expanding high-speed Internet access.

When a state plans to spend a large portion of Race to the Top grant money outside of schools, that’s a sign that the Department of Education is offering too much money.

One objection to open enrollment is that districts would have trouble accommodating changing numbers of students. I explained in this post why open enrollment needn’t hamper districts’ planning; one reason is that districts could limit the number of additional students they’d accept. In my argument that open enrollment wouldn’t do any harm, I neglected to point out that open enrollment could actually make planning easier for some districts. In particular, districts like Ladue that are experiencing enrollment booms and space shortages would benefit from a policy that allows students to transfer out.

As more people move into the Ladue district, class sizes go up and its schools have to scramble to find space. Some of that enrollment growth is inevitable, because Ladue has a good reputation. But the problem could be mitigated if students were able to choose schools in neighboring districts. Not every family that moves into Ladue does so for education; some choose a house in Ladue for other reasons, and would prefer a school that’s less crowded. Those people wouldn’t mind transferring their children to nearby districts. Other parents originally moved in for the district’s academics, but after class sizes reached a certain point, they no longer thought it was worthwhile to stay. They would also choose to transfer under open enrollment.

Under the current system, people with the preferences I just described can’t send their children to a different school unless they sell their houses and move. That’s a time-consuming process, and many would consider it a last resort in today’s real estate market. So, people stay put and keep their kids in the district, contributing to the crowding problem.

This is not to say that if Missouri institutes open enrollment, everyone would flee Ladue. Rather, some families that care about class sizes would send their children to other districts — perhaps just for a few years, while Ladue acquires more space. Open enrollment would act as a safety valve so that enrollment doesn’t increase faster than Ladue can open new classrooms.

In an article about Missouri’s open enrollment proposal, the Post-Dispatch quotes the director of a Minnesota education center:

“I don’t see school choice as good [or] as bad,” he said. “It’s like freedom. You have to use it carefully, otherwise it will cause problems.”

This quote sheds light on the worldview of people who are indifferent to parental choice. Freedom isn’t good or bad? And it’s liable to cause problems if we’re not super careful? The attitude is even more astonishing in the context of an open enrollment discussion. We’re talking about parents choosing between public school districts, which receive funding and directives from local government, state government, and federal government. Open enrollment would not allow families to choose a school subject to any less government control. And, for most students, choices would be limited because there are only a handful of districts close enough for them to attend. I just don’t see what this proposal has in common with unbridled freedom.

Open enrollment as it’s proposed would be a small step forward for Missouri’s current system — not a revolution. The term “open enrollment” sounds like a free-for-all, but the vast majority of students would actually stay in their current districts. That’s because under the plan, districts would be able to set limits on how many students they’ll accept, or to close their doors to transfer students altogether. And parents would have to decide where they’d like their children to transfer to by January, many months before the start of the school year. So, last-minute switches that could prove a hassle for districts would be ruled out.

Besides, Missouri already does allow some students to cross district lines. The St. Louis Public Schools’ magnets haven’t descended into chaos by enrolling students from the county, nor does the arrangement set county districts behind SLPS. Other examples include St. Louis–area students who attend the Program for Exceptionally Gifted Students, and rural students who petition to attend nearby schools out of their districts. Inter-district enrollment isn’t dangerous in those cases, and expanding it to all districts would also do no harm.

John Combest links to a fantastic editorial in the Jefferson City News-Tribune that compares the Race to the Top to a reality or game show. The editorial recognizes how bizarre Race to the Top is: We pay taxes to the federal government, then our state jockeys with other states to bring the money back here. Finally, the fraction of our tax dollars that Missouri wins is used to provide services that should have been in the state’s jurisdiction from the beginning. It would be entertaining if it weren’t such a waste of resources.

The editorial concludes:

The unseemly competition for federal dollars will continue until state and local governments join forces on the principled high ground and refuse to play anymore.

Race to the Top is similar to this year’s Census marketing campaign. The end goal of each is for the federal government to distribute money to the states. The difference is that the Constitution mandates a census, whereas there’s no constitutional justification for a race to the top — or for any other federal interference in education.

If Race to the Top is a show, I’d like Missouri to call a friend; we should call Texas and learn from a state that won’t run for the tax dollars.

In the Race to the Top, Texas is prudently sitting on the sidelines. Texas’ education commissioner explains why it’s not worth it for the state to comply with the Department of Education’s conditions:

“Even if we won the full amount, it would only run our schools for two days, so for that we weren’t going to cede control over our curriculum standards,” Mr. Scott said.

One-time cash awards won’t be very helpful to Race to the Top winners in the long term, as Texas officials can foresee. Nor will the process give reforms a chance to sprint ahead. Race to the Top asks states to make changes on paper that might not affect what goes on in schools at all. For example, to be competitive, states have to remove legislative caps on the number of charter schools that can operate. But they don’t have to approve any new charters. So, states could lift their charter caps, win cash and praise from Arne Duncan, and then turn down all charter proposals for spurious reasons. The states would have more money, but students wouldn’t have any more choices than what they started with.

There’s good reason to be skeptical of Race to the Top demands including abolishing caps on charters. As we’ve seen in Oregon, legislative caps are not always the main barrier to opening a charter. Oregon requires charter proposals to be submitted to school boards. These boards govern the same districts that the proposed charters would compete with, were they approved. Understandably reluctant to admit competitors to their districts, the boards deny charters on weak grounds or force them to resubmit proposals with minute improvements.

The Department of Education can’t correct this problem with a blanket directive to all states. It would have to examine each state’s charter approval process and identify which policies are holding back charter expansion. And it’s the same for other Race to the Top priorities: In some states, laws separating teacher data from student data may rule out merit pay, while for other states, merit pay may be illegal or difficult to implement for unrelated reasons. And so on.

Thus far, Missouri hasn’t shown Texas’ discretion — the state plans to apply for a Race to the Top grant. I hope Race to the Top won’t distract the state from meaningful reforms. Missouri officials should bear in mind that the ultimate goal is to make substantive policy improvements, not to win an award.

A legislator in Washington state wants to rewrite laws that characterize poor children as “disadvantaged” or “at-risk,” so that they instead read “at hope.” She thinks there’s a significant difference between those phrases:

Positive labeling is more than a gimmick or political correctness, Franklin says. She believes her idea could lead to a paradigm shift in state government and to changes in classrooms across the state.

The paradigm shift won’t happen, although political correctness is not to blame. There’s a place for political correctness; in some cases, updating legal language to be more sensitive is the right thing to do. For example, laws that were written many years ago may refer to medical conditions or physical disabilities in terms we would now consider offensive. That’s the reason behind this proposal to change the name of a Missouri agency. Racial designations are also susceptible to obsolescence, although switching to the politically correct language is not always easy, as the Census Bureau has found with the word “Negro.” (While many people take umbrage at the name, a diminishing number of people still identify with it, so removing it from forms could impair the accuracy of the Census.)

Politically correct language is useful when you want to avoid antagonizing people. However, you can’t solve a problem just by describing it with different words. Proponents of the “at hope” label argue that children respond to expectations, but the phrase wouldn’t change anyone’s expectations. People form expectations based on their experiences and on available information, not on the legal lexicon. The phrase could actually lower people’s expectations if they suppose that the state wouldn’t establish a euphemism to describe children who really had potential.

Expecting a phrase to transform education is like asking children to learn music with the “think system.” It’s an attractive idea, but it lacks a basis in reality.

A school district in Michigan finds that partnering with K12, Inc. is beneficial both to students and to the districts’ finances. The director of the district’s virtual academy describes its profitability with candor:

“The district makes money whether we enroll one student or 160,” Prescott said. “K12, Inc. charges a fee for each course. It might be $400 a semester. For a student who takes six classes for both semesters, that’s $4,800 a year. We count that student as full time and we get $7,000 from the state, which nets the district about $2,000 per student.”

I wonder whether the St. Louis Public Schools’ Virtual School, which also contracts with K12, is equally lucrative. I would guess not, because SLPS requires students to meet with a district teacher in person at regular intervals. Those meetings could bring up staff costs.

Given that districts can earn a profit from teaching students online, why don’t more of them form virtual schools? I can suggest a couple of explanations. Most districts probably don’t know much about online courses or what they could gain by enrolling students in them. Until recently, distance learning was the domain of old-fashioned correspondence schools, online charter schools, and state-level virtual schools. Traditional districts weren’t involved. Districts are used to a system in which they get revenue based on how many students are sitting in classrooms. The concept of earning more by sending students to a different environment goes against their experience.

It could also be that some districts view virtual schools as an admission of failure. If students choose virtual instruction over in-class learning, maybe that means that the brick-and-mortar component of the district wasn’t so great all along. I don’t think that’s an accurate analysis, because no single educational method is right for everyone. But I can see how districts might reach that conclusion in a school system of few choices.

Is a fad robbing students of their right to an education? According to Caitlin Flanagan, the answer is “yes,” and school gardens are the culprit. Flanagan denounces school gardens in an essay in the Atlantic, arguing that for disadvantaged children, every minute spent in school can potentially be used to gain knowledge that will help them escape poverty, but some of that time is instead being wasted on manual labor (i.e., gardening) for the sake of politicians’ whims.

I agree that gardening should not be a top priority for most schools, but I think Flanagan overstates her case. For one thing, students don’t spend that much time in gardens. Flanagan gives the example of a school where students spend an hour and a half per week on gardening and food preparation; that translates into less than 20 minutes per school day. Supposing students spend twice as long on the cross-curricular activities Flanagan condemns so bitterly, there still remain several hours in the day for all the sound academics she believes students miss out on when they’re working with plants.

Second, gardening needn’t be as demeaning and stultifying as it is in Flanagan’s portrayal. Flanagan likens a gardening curriculum for immigrants’ children in California to a sharecropping curriculum for African-American children in the South. This is an unduly harsh analogy. I’m sure schools don’t send children out to the gardens when weather conditions would make the work difficult. And tending to a variety of plants is a small plot can be far more interesting and rewarding than picking a single crop in a vast field. Also, in the event that students don’t like the gardening, they’re free to slack off without fear of retribution from a taskmaster, or of losing their livelihood.

Flanagan is right that some students would gain more from books in the library than from plants in the garden. The problem is not gardening but the monolithic public school system, which mandates that if an activity is beneficial for some children, everyone has to spend time on it. For children who want to work in botany or landscaping when they grow up, or whose parents value gardening experience, offering gardening in school would be worthwhile. (So the garden at Clyde C. Miller Career Academy is entirely appropriate, because some students there study biotechnology and plant science.) Everyone else should be free to opt out. Whenever a public school incorporates gardening, or any task besides basic academics, parents should be able to choose whether their children participate.

One criticism I’ve received of my kindergarten readiness posts is that I’m talking about the readiness tests as if they were obstacles children had to get over, or tests to be crammed for, when in fact they’re just snapshots of a child’s ability.

Maybe some districts do use the tests that way, but many others use them as barriers to exclude “failures” from kindergarten. They also instruct parents to prepare their children for the specific tasks on the exams, either at home or through programs like this one:

“It came to our attention that there were children who didn’t pass the [Ohio Department of Education’s] Kindergarten Readiness Test” and therefore couldn’t get into kindergarten [...]

[T]he new program for four-and-a-half- and five-year-olds will offer individual instruction, at the child’s ability level, geared toward helping the child pass the readiness test, she said.

The Fulton Public Schools (the district whose readiness tests first prompted me to write about the issue) made it clear that coaching children for the exams is the parents’ duty:

“That green sheet is like your homework to work on between now and April.”

The district is not telling parents to work on their children’s overall development, only on preparing them for the kinds of questions they’ll encounter on the exam.

When districts treat readiness tests as barrier to kindergarten entrance, the arbitrary tasks on the exams become prerequisites for future learning. So while some children could learn to read and write even though they still wear velcro shoes, they all have to be taught to tie laces before they’re admitted to kindergarten.

A study has found Teach for America graduates to be less politically active than people who were accepted into the program but didn’t complete it. Several newspapers and blogs are reporting the finding as a poor reflection on Teach for America. This is from a New York Times article titled “Gauging the Dedication of Teacher Corps Grads”:

In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years, according to Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, who conducted the study with a colleague, Cynthia Brandt.

The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, Professor McAdam said, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America’s approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors.

The study isn’t online yet, but when it is, I’d like to read how McAdam concluded that burnout and disillusionment account for the graduates’ lower rates of political activity. Were those reasons self-reported by the graduates? Or are they the researchers’ conjecture?

I can think of a few other reasons that graduates might be less likely to vote or participate in campaigns. Perhaps the people who completed the program were the most dedicated to their teaching jobs, and now that they’ve graduated, they’re equally dedicated to the jobs they currently hold. Maybe they’re so busy working that they don’t have time to dabble in the political process.

Another possibility is that their teaching experience convinced graduates that the political process is not the best way to achieve their goals. Maybe graduates remain as idealistic as when they started, but they now want to pursue their ideals through means other than politics.

As for the lower rate of charitable giving, a licensing effect could be at work. Alyssa Curran explained what a licensing effect is in her post about a study that found a connection between purchase of “green” products and a decline in altruism. Researchers don’t think subjects in that study became disillusioned with the products; rather, subjects acted as though choosing a socially-valued product gave them a license to be less generous later on. Similarly, Teach for America graduates may feel that because their service was worthwhile and important, they have already done their part for society and are free to be less charitable later.

Whatever the true reasons are, it’s odd to evaluate Teach for America based on graduates’ behavior. What matters is whether participants in the program are effective teachers. It would make more sense to research students’ test scores after they’ve been taught by a Teach for America participant than to analyze their former teachers’ levels of civic engagement.

I hope residents of St. Louis and Kansas City don’t look unfavorably on Teach for America participants in their cities because of research findings that are beside the point.

Choice between school districts is up for consideration this legislative session.

Choice is a foreign concept for school districts, but it’s seen as normal in other parts of the public sector. For example, nobody has to go to a branch of the public library that’s assigned to them, nor do they have to buy stamps at the branch of the post office in their municipality.

I hope legislators will keep inter-district choice proposals simple and won’t create a lot of rules and exceptions. I’m thinking of Philadelphia, which has allowed inter-district choice for five years. There, only one district in each county can accept transferring students. Limits like that defeat the purpose of a choice program, which should aim to give everyone more options.

Field Elementary in Columbia offers optional single-sex classes, as does Carmen Trails Elementary in St. Louis county. But, unlike Carmen Trails, which added a grade to the program this year in response to parents’ demand, Field has no intention of expanding without proof that single-sex classes raise test scores.

Field will never get the proof it wants. To show that single-sex schooling improves student achievement, you would have to randomly assign some students to single-sex classes and others to coed classes. Otherwise, you can’t tell whether the students in the single-sex track are comparable to their peers in the coed track. Perhaps students who struggle are more likely to look for a change and to opt in to the single-sex classes. Or, it could be that the most involved parents seek out single-sex education, and that parental involvement gave those students an advantage. It’s impossible to sort out these factors as long as the program remains voluntary.

Reading this article about an all-girl charter school, I appreciate the parallel Leonard Sax draws between single-sex schooling and single-age schooling (thanks to the Panama City Renaissance School for the link):

Sax understands that single-gender classrooms may not be for everyone, but he believes people should have a choice. He also questions why schools segregate classrooms based on age but not gender.

It’s assumed that students will attend class with others of the same age because it’s gone on for so long. We’re used to it, and almost nobody protests age segregation in schools. But when a few single-sex charters open, or when districts allow single-sex classes, the idea threatens established educational policy and prompts knee-jerk condemnation. For example, the ACLU says it opposes single-sex public schooling “because it deprives both girls and boys of the benefits of co-education,” a statement that means nothing unless you specify what those benefits are and explain why students have a right to them. One could just as well criticize coed classrooms for depriving students of the benefits of single-sex education.

Sax brings up the analogy in order to argue for single-sex education, but it can also be used to justify teaching students of different ages in class together. Grouping students by sex isn’t for everyone; neither is grouping students by age. Like the parents who would choose coed classrooms even when a single-sex option is available, there are parents who would prefer multi-age classrooms if they had a choice.

It would be great if more public schools offered multi-age education. An easy way to do this is by opening charter schools; parents who want multi-age classes could enroll their children in charters with this specialty. Or traditional public schools could start multi-age tracks, the same way that Parkway’s Carmen Trails Elementary offers elective single-sex classes.

I discovered my calling while reading this article, which recounts psychics’ forecasts for the coming year. I’ll be shocked if this psychic’s predictions don’t happen:

There will be more children home-schooled. [...] Sports are going to be very big this year [...] In the youth community, the younger people will be brought together by playing sports [...]

Homeschooling has been steadily growing in popularity for years, so we can expect that trend to continue unless something out of the ordinary occurs. And kids will play sports in 2010? I could have told them that.

Another psychic weighs in on agriculture and the locavore movement, a topic I wrote about several times during 2009:

I see locally grown crops. I think people will band together and raise more local food.

I, too, see local food growth in the next year, especially in Springfield, Columbia, Kansas City, and other places where people have been interested in it — and lobbying for policies that would favor it — for a while now.

And there’s another prediction about kids and education, this time from a “spiritual adviser”:

I see a big change coming with schools and education. I see something major with education. I don’t know what that is.

It isn’t exactly precise, but you can’t expect anything more detailed from a quote that was given for free. If you want to know what changes are brewing in education, you’d probably have to pay a psychic for their expertise. Or just be patient and keep reading Show-Me Daily.

The Show-Me Institute’s Dave Roland was recently quoted in an article about charter schools in the Springfield News-Leader. He communicates some benefits:

“Part of the reason (traditional public) schools have gotten into the situation they are in — having quality problems — is they effectively have a captive audience. They don’t have to earn students,” said Dave Roland of the Show-Me Institute, a think tank that promotes free-market solutions to public policy.

“Wealthy parents already have the option of moving into the best school districts, or the best zoning within districts,” he said. “The idea of school choice is we make sure low-income parents have the same range of options.”

Charles Murray can’t be pleased with the New York City Department of Education’s plan to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on online SAT prep for public school students. Murray doesn’t believe policy can cause a significant rise in test scores, so he must view this expenditure — or any other program with a similar goal — as a waste of resources.

While I’m generally more optimistic that scores can rise, in this case I agree that student achievement is unlikely to change. A test prep course could help if students are simply unfamiliar with the test, or if they just need a little extra practice with the kind of questions that appear on it. But if low scores reflect a deeper problem, as I suspect they do for many New York students, last-minute test prep won’t make a difference.

The best course of action would be to improve schooling for younger students, years before they take college admissions exams. Then, by the time they get to high school, they won’t struggle with the math and vocabulary found in the SAT.

New York shouldn’t give up on current high school students, but it needs to help them build a stronger foundation of knowledge than what they’ll get from a course on test-taking strategies. The department could stick with the online education model, and instead of explicitly offering free test prep, it could open English or math courses similar to the St. Louis Public Schools’ virtual school. Course materials needn’t teach to the test, although students whose skills improved would do better on test day as a consequence. To preserve the college admissions focus, the department could use a practice SAT to place students into different course levels.

New York shouldn’t limit its use of online education to preparing students for one test. We want students to be prepared for the next high school course they take, and for whatever courses they take beyond high school, too.

… would state math standards improve?

Lest you think that’s an odd question, let me assure you that it was inspired by national standards — specifically, by this sample problem from a Common Core State Standards Initiative publication:

If everyone in the world went swimming in Lake Michigan, what would happen to the water level? Would Chicago be flooded?

Ze’ev Wurman, who helped write California’s state math standards, criticizes that problem in an op-ed today. Wurman comments that the problem tests students’ knowledge of facts such as “Lake Michigan’s surface area” and “whether the water will spill over to Lake Huron before flooding Chicago” (as well as testing students’ credulity, I might add), but that only low-level math is required to solve it. Wurman writes that most of the other sample problems suffer from similar deficiencies, and that someone who mastered the standards but didn’t go beyond them would be placed in remedial math in California’s public colleges.

California doesn’t stand to gain much from national standards, because its state standards are widely acknowledged to be excellent. Other states that signed on to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, including Missouri, might be able to improve their standards slightly by adopting the recommendations. But why should any state agree to the Common Core Standards when there are better standards out there — namely, California’s?

Samuel Meisels, the president of the Erikson Institute in Chicago, was quoted in this article about kindergarten readiness tests:

Meisels said readiness surveys are not accurate indicators of childhood success. He advocates for teachers to observe children over time, rather than a one-time evaluation.

Districts might be inclined to use a flawed assessment rather than none at all, but Meisels explains the damage a readiness test can cause:

“It changes people’s perceptions. It can change a teacher’s perception of likely success in school. It can create parental anxiety. Worst of all, it can make a small student feel stigmatized and less capable,” Meisels said. “If any one of those consequences occur, based on a poorly designed test, it’s inexcusable to me.”

Meisels’ suggestion to observe students over time is a good one, and districts like Fulton could adopt it in place of the readiness tests they use now. The districts could accept all five-year-olds and observe them in their kindergarten class for a week or two. Then, if it’s determined that some children aren’t ready to continue with kindergarten academics, the district could place them in a separate class, have them repeat a year, or make other arrangements.

This system would give children a better chance to prove themselves ready than a short assessment provides. Kindergartners can easily fail a short readiness test because they’re nervous or distracted at the time; observing them in a classroom over several days gives a better picture of how they interact with their environment. And the only downside is that a few children with below-average hand-eye coordination or counting skills would attend kindergarten with the others for a week. (Serious developmental disabilities are not diagnosed with kindergarten readiness tests, but through more involved — and medically meaningful — assessments. So, abolishing readiness screening for all need not interfere with special education services.)

Districts shouldn’t settle for faulty readiness tests when there are better alternatives.