Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas ”” reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start ”” produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.
Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” [Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist] wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying ”” literally and figuratively.”
These results are powerful evidence in a long-running debate. Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue that schools alone can’t produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on broader issues like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued that school-based approaches can produce big results. The Harlem Children’s Zone results suggest the reformers are right. The Promise Academy does provide health and psychological services, but it helps kids who aren’t even involved in the other programs the organization offers.
This approach is too serious, it’s hard and demanding work – for everyone. It doesn’t tolerate vested interests or mediocre teaching. It sets standards that are rigorous and it expects people to meet them. There’s no room for whining or excuses. Unfortunately, these are all reasons why there’s little chance that this approach will be replicated on a national scale.
That, #1, and the fact that this approach does absolutely nothing to advance the mission of government schools: That of providing high salaries for the unionized workforce and, by extension, the union bosses who live off their dues. They will fight hammer and tong to keep kids in their tax-funded gulags.
Exactly, Jeffersonian — not to mention the need for State re-education in the ways of progressivism, which is the second major point of the public school system.
Think how strange this is, and how much of the present damage lies correctly at the feet of no-standards liberals – that it should seem like an epiphany that structure and standards, steadily enforced, should turn out to be useful educational tools. What HAVE we been thinking of? Why have we let the Left push us around so far and so persuasively that we should ignore the utterly obvious. Brooks sound as if the light has come out of nowhere. L
Actually, the issue doesn’t fall neatly into the right-left trap. Plenty of “progressive” reformers would love to have these sorts of schools, but by and large, there are many institutional disincentives for cultural change. Plenty of teachers would love to have more freedom from administrators. But yes, it is also true that getting rid of the worst 10% of teachers would drastically change the way things get done, and unions don’t recognize this. HCZ isn’t, also, a for-profit organization. It’s mission focused.
His budget is $68 million for 8000 children. His endowment is $94 million. But with all the wall street cuts, it looks as though he’s going to have a hard time.
But spending that sort of money is a lot cheaper than the $50,000 per person cost for incarceration.
But also the salaries are competitive, and there is a low student-teacher ratio, and the institution works comprehensively. Further, it is a school that expects black children can succeed – while also giving entire families support from the beginning all the way to college. There are still plenty of guidance counselors in public schools who direct their minority students down the path of mediocrity.
[blockquote]But spending that sort of money is a lot cheaper than the $50,000 per person cost for incarceration. [/blockquote]
That would depend, of course, on the percentage of that same population that winds up in that condition, no? If fewer then 1/6 of the group winds up in prison, then it’s actually cheaper to not spend the money.
Of course, my math is in error as well, given that a large percentage of DC’s male population is in the slammer even with the wonderous benefits of their government-school education, currently going for over $15,000/yr as I recall. By my reckoning, we’re spending around $180,000 to get a diploma for each of those criminals.
Let’s see some of these “progressives” in Congress stand up to the…gee, what faction is against this program?…and get funding restored.
Of course, I’m talking about the DC voucher program, not the Harlem program.
33% of black men will go to prison, jefferson.
The issue is how schools are organized. I agree, of course, that the worst 10% of teachers must be fired; that teachers should have aggressive evaluations; and that plenty of school bureaucracies are money pits. What Harlem has done is replace bureaucrats with problem solving advocates. I also think that teachers should be paid wages that will appeal to the talented, there should be low student-teacher ratios.
The main point, of course, is that we can’t just blame “society” or “parents.” If we want to see things change, we can change them.
How do you know the worst are just 10% of the government teaching population, John, and not 30% or even 50% that are incompetent?
And is it really an either/or situation WRT education and prison? Any dispassionate look at individuals going to prison will reveal that they are going at an age where they have already consumed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in education in government schools, and ramping up the money doesn’t seem to have made a dent.
I agree we need new (or, given the better performance of students in the fairly distant past, not-so-new) thinking on schools, but how does one do that when the educrat special interests have captured the political process?
Jefferson, perhaps in an ideal world, we’d eliminate all incompetent teachers, period. I’d like that world also.
Back to reality. A more reasonable way is to eliminate the worst 10%, because there is empirical evidence that the worst 10% tends to affect the system as a whole.
As Malcom Gladwell notes: “Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.”
I’m all for changing the structure, Jefferson. I just don’t think we should teachers slave wages. In other words, big bad govnmnt is still going to steal your money to do it.