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Lieutenant General Benjamin C. Freakley is the commanding general of the United States Army Accessions Command (USAAC) and oversees recruiting for the U.S. Army's officer, warrant officer and enlisted forces. USAAC has joined forces with the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) to support young people and boost graduation rates. (We wrote about this partnership in a blog posting several months ago. NASBE is a member of LFA.)
LTG Freakley recently spoke with us about the promise of greater collaboration between the military and schools.
Education: A National Security Issue
Public School Insights: Why do you think the military is getting involved in K-12 education?
LTG Freakley: I believe that the preparedness of our youth through education, health and conduct is a national security issue. Right now our young people, regardless of the tact they take for postsecondary, are limiting themselves. They are limiting themselves because they are not getting a good foundational education in K-12. They are not as healthy as they should be, with childhood obesity becoming an epidemic. And they get off track in their conduct, limiting what might be brilliant careers because they chose to get involved with gang violence, drugs, teenage pregnancy, etc.
It is disheartening to see all of this potential being limited. We believe that we have got to help our youth to achieve success through supporting our educators who, I believe, are undervalued in America—not recognized like they should be or supported like they should be. We ought to be as close to education as we can so we can sustain our all volunteer force and also so we can have an economically ...
Should we turn a blind eye to the excesses of PR campaigns that advance a cause we support? Should we tolerate overstatements and hype, as long as they are in the service of something we believe in? Not if the dubious means undermine the noble ends. I worry that some recent PR campaigns launched by combatants in today's school reform wars may allow the means to swamp the ends.
A recent commentator on school reform took a different view. He praised aggressive campaigns and likened the school reform movements they support to past movements for civil rights.
Movements, whether Martin Luther King's exposure of segregation as morally illegitimate, or Gandhi's exposure of the immorality of 'British Rule," are actually the proper political culmination of good ideas, brought about by the impatience with the slow movement of the chattering class.
I'm not sure the analogy really works. Laws enforcing segregation were wrong, full stop. The moral thing to do was clear: Strike them down. School reform, by contrast, doesn't often present such clear choices. So we should be careful not to draw parallels that lump critics of one school reform or another together with those who opposed the movement to end segregation.
History also reminds us that not all movements are created equal. Some movements that are fueled by true outrage and conviction can run off the rails and pervert their original aims when the need to advance The Cause overpowers all tolerance for nuance or doubt. Such movements can begin with a noble vision, but they often end by merely replacing one ...
If there's a test, then there's a way to game it. It's crazy to think that we should therefore abandon standardized tests. But it also makes no sense to rely on test scores without looking for supporting or conflicting evidence elsewhere. Yesterday's New York Times piece on the City's gifted and talented Kindergartens drives this point home.
Two years ago, the score on a standard city-wide test became the sole basis for admission to those programs. Since then, the share of black and Hispanic children in those programs has plummeted. It appears that wealthy parents are buying pricey test-prep books and services for their children. Poor children are, of course, priced out of that market.
I don't know how healthy it is for wealthy four year olds to "turn to jelly on test day" because they've absorbed their parents' fears that a low score will blow their chances at Harvard. But I'm at least as worried about the fate of poor kids when the testing system gives rise to a market whose very premise is that money buys advantage.
As usual, the intentions behind the testing program were noble. Schools chancellor Joel Klein wanted an objective measure that put all children on an equal footing.
But I'm not sure the unintended outcome should really surprise us. We need look no further than the college admissions industry to see what can happen. Wealthy parents buy test prep services, and some even hire college consultants to help them craft the perfect ...
I'm getting more and more worried about the heated rhetoric of debates on school reform. This rhetoric is fueling a war without winners. Here's why:
The rhetoric of reform is killing the public school brand.
Too often, the rhetoric suggests that all public schools are schools of desperate measures, schools of last resort. The failing urban school has come to represent every public school. Some say public schools are impervious to reform. Others say they have capitulated to reform and become test prep factories. Public schools are battle grounds for ideologues of all stripes who attack them for straying from ideological visions of what is Good and Holy.
The message to parents of means? Get your kids out.
The rhetoric of reform is shrinking our vision for education.
The language of "high expectations" rings hollow when we consider just how little we expect of some reform models. The tests we use to measure our progress focus mostly on low-level skills. Subjects like world language are disappearing from the curriculum. Those who say tests don't measure everything that matters are sometimes derided as "touchy feely."
But visions that inspire us are by nature touchy feely. They push us to think well beyond our current impoverished measures. (Today, Jay Mathews praised a set of high schools that ...
Why has the recession turned into a Great Depression for African Americans, asks Orlando Patterson in The Nation. Why do they feel the brunt of tough economic times? One big reason, in his view, is segregation.
Times for African Americans are about as tough as they can be. More than one in six black men is out of work. The rate for black teens is 38 percent.
But tough times for black families aren't merely a product of this recession. Black median household income declined steeply between 2000 and 2008. Median black family wealth has been stagnant for the past 25 years at just $5000--a mere five percent of median white family wealth. And even more dispiriting: Most children from black middle class families earn less, and often much less, than their parents did.
For Patterson, the fact that so many African Americans live in segregated communities and go to segregated schools has a great deal to do with the slipping fortunes of black families. It all comes down to networks and "access to cultural capital," he argues. White Americans are ...
Another study of charter schools has dealt a big blow to the most die-hard supporters of the free market in schooling. It seems a charter school's popularity is no guarantee of its success. The invisible hand will not deliver better results.
The Department of Education just released the new study (PDF), which focuses on charters at the middle school level. The study examines schools that had more applicants than they could accommodate and compares students who were randomly selected to attend those schools with those who were not. It concludes that, on average, the schools "are neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement, behavior and school progress."
Charters, it seems, helped some students but hurt others. Like other studies before it, this report supports a far more cautious charter strategy than we're hearing from politicians and pundits these days. Here are some of the big lessons I drew from the study:
Even the Most Popular Charters Did Not Outshine Traditional Public Schools
First, let's not forget that this study did not review a representative sample of charter schools. It examined the small share of charters that had many more applicants than they could take. These are the charter schools parents are most likely to choose, so we would expect them to be the high fliers.
And that's a pretty select group. Of the almost 500 charters that had been been around long enough to meet the study's criteria, only 36 made the final cut. Some declined to participate, but the vast majority were not sufficiently oversubscribed to take part in the study. Would the less popular charter schools--or those that ...
Reform costs money. That's an inconvenient truth as school districts face their bleakest budget forecasts in decades.
Long before the first stimulus dollar made its way to a central office, some pundits felt that lean budgets would be a good thing, an antidote to the bloat and bureaucracy that, they said, were a deadweight on school performance. Now, as districts prepare to spend what may be their last stimulus dollar, the story of Locke High School should give the pundits pause.
The New York Times reports that the effort to turn around this LA high school has cost some 15 million dollars a year. But this isn't the story of bureaucratic bloat. Locke has all the features that should endear it to the reformiest of reformers. It's run by a charter management group. That group, Green Dot Schools, enjoys support from funders who have made big gambles on school reform: Gates, Broad, Walton and the New Schools Venture Fund, among others. Green Dot replaced most of the old teachers. And Arne Duncan has praised Locke as a successful turnaround.
But Locke hasn't hit on any secret for nickling and diming its way to success. And "success" is a relative term here. Locke made big improvements to the ...
The more we fixate on the "good teacher," the less we seem to concern ourselves with good teaching.
That's the thought that came to me as I read about new plans in Cincinnati to get top teachers in struggling schools. I don't know enough about the program to judge it. It does address a critical problem.
But the story also drove home how seldom we hear about the conditions that foster good teaching. Most news stories on ed reform leave the impression that a good teacher is a good teacher is a good teacher, no matter where he teaches, no matter what challenges he faces, no matter how toxic the climate in his school is. Good teachers, it seems, are widgets to be deployed to all manner of schools, where they'll climb every mountain and ford every stream.
In most of our policy discussions, we tend to treat teachers like a currency that carries the same value no matter where we spend it. (Let's find the five dollar teachers and spend them in the neediest schools, which too often have to make do with the one dollar variety). Perhaps that's what happens when the language ...
A new study finds that children who enrolled in the Harlem Success Academy (HSA) charter school did better than those who tried to enroll but were not selected in the school lottery. This type of study, which compares the fate of students who won the lottery with that of those who lost, challenges the notion that the best charters do well merely because they select students who would do just as well in any other environment.
But the study also suggests that there might be limits to the charter model.
For one, the study reveals a few differences between students at HSA and their peers in traditional public schools. Students who entered the lottery but lost did substantially worse than those who won. But those who never entered did worst of all. This finding suggests that the lotteries might attract students who are more likely to succeed. Perhaps they or their families are more motivated, savvier, or able to draw on resources the other students lack.
One group that is noticeably absent from the HSA lottery: students who are still learning English. A full 21 percent of third graders who had never enrolled in the lottery were English Language Learners. Compare that to the four percent of ...
Can the mere presence of books in a child's home make that child a better reader? If we're to believe recent research, that might just be the case. If so, a small investment in books for poor children might pay off.
That idea still meets with a great deal of resistance, even (or perhaps especially) among those who prize reading. Maybe we believe we cheapen books if we objectify them in that way.
But a trio of recent studies offers food for thought. First, there was the study Roland Fryer released a few months ago. He found that young children improved their reading ability when they were paid for every book they read. The children in his study even maintained their reading habits after the payments stopped. I'll admit that I recoiled a bit at this finding, because I hate to see reading become such a mercantile enterprise.
A more recent study out of the University of Nevada suggested that the number of books in a child's home has a greater bearing on that child's academic prospects than does the parents' education level. The study's author speculates that ...
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