Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Nicholas Lemann has a mystifying piece in the New Yorker about the “overblown crisis in American education.” The basic argument is that American schools are just fine, same as they always were. And while black and Hispanic kids may be stuck at the bottom of the charts, white kids are doing reasonably well. (And oh yes, any ambitious movement to reform schools is dangerous—akin to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, he did!)

No fewer than a dozen people have mentioned this piece to me at this point. All of them white, naturally. And since I am white, along with most American school children, I can see why this claim might be reassuring on some self-interested level, if it were true.

Let’s consider his arguments:

First, Lemann notes that, “by the fundamental test of attractiveness to students and their families,” the system is doing great. Evidence? Enrollment in public schools is up. Well, I suppose by the same fundamental law, our unemployment benefits are also phenomenally attractive. Enrollment is way up these days!

But given that most people do not have any choice other than public school (and that many of the parents who used to have a choice have recently pulled their kids out of private school due to the recession), I’m not sure this is such a solid indicator. Perhaps a better measure of “attractiveness” would be to ask people if they find the system attractive. That’s what Time Magazine did in an August 2010 poll, finding that only 37% of surveyed adults are satisfied with public schools. Among parents with children in public school, 50% are satisfied. Overall, 67% said our education system is “in a crisis.”

But OK, maybe the public is just being bamboozled by the media hype. What about the actual results of our system?

Lemann again:

“Measures of how much American students are learning—compared to the past, and compared to students in other countries—are holding steady, for the most part, even as more people are going to school.”

Holding steady? Really? Since 1969, the high-school graduation rate has dropped from 77% to 69% in America. Kids are now less likely to graduate from high school than their parents. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has decidedly not “held steady.” Germany, Japan, Korea and the U.K. now have high-school graduation rates of 90% or more. As for college graduation rates, the U.S. used to lead the world in the ratio of 25- to 34-year-olds with degrees. Today it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.

Over the past 30 years, many developed countries have radically improved their systems—largely by professionalizing their teaching force and raising their academic standards in ways that we have not begun to do. Since we now compete with these countries for jobs, these comparisons matter. On a 2006 international exam, American 15-year-olds ranked 21st in science and 25th in math out of 30 industrialized nations. That means our kids score about two grade levels below top-ranked Finland in math and science—even though the Finns actually start school a year later than we do.

Well then, what about the white kids? Aren’t they cruising along just fine? White kids are doing better than African-American and Hispanic kids, that’s true. But they are not doing so great internationally. On that same 2006 international test of mathematics, white American teenagers did about average for rich countries, but still scored below all kids in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany (sorry, this list just goes on and on…), Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland. Even by our own standards, our supposedly good (and often white) schools may not be as good as we think. One recent study of 300 middle or upper-class schools in California, from Silicon Valley to Orange County, found that 50% of kids were scoring below grade level on California’s own assessment test.

Lemann is correct when he says that our kids’ scores have not gotten worse: since the early 1970s, high schoolers’ math and reading scores have barely budged. But the scores of other kids around the world have gotten much better over the same time frame.  All the while, we have doubled the amount we spend per pupil on K-12 system—outspending most countries in the world. In return for this investment, we have seen no major improvement. Call me hysterical, but I tend to think that when you double your money and get nothing back in return, something is seriously amiss.

Not so, says Lemann: “Over all, the American education system works quite well.” Compared to what, I wonder?

He goes on:

“It should raise questions when an enormous, complicated realm of life takes on the characteristics of a stock drama. In the current school-reform story, there is a reliable villain, in the form of the teachers’ unions, and a familiar set of heroes, including Geoffrey Canada, of Harlem Children’s Zone; Wendy Kopp, of Teach for America, the Knowledge Is Power Program; and Michele Rhee, the superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. And there is a clear answer to the problem—charter schools.”

However, not one of these people has ever, to my knowledge, said that charter schools are the clear solution.

To wit:

* “The monopoly needs to be broken up. I could care less about the structure. I am just as happy to see great schools as traditional public schools and to shut down charter schools if they don’t work.”—Geoffrey Canada in my interview for Time this summer

* “Like anything else, you know, charter laws alone aren`t going to solve the problem, but they`re a huge enabler I think for many really committed visionary people who really want to change the way things are for kids.”—Wendy Kopp of Teach for America on the Charlie Rose show in 2008

* ‘‘Part of my job is to make sure that all kids get a great education, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s in charter, parochial or public schools.”—Michelle Rhee in the New York Times

Why don’t these reformers think charter schools are the clear solution? Because they know that only 17% of charter schools are significantly outperforming their public-school counterparts—and because, thanks in part to teacher-union opposition, there are only enough charter schools to enroll 5% of U.S. kids.

It’s time for this tedious debate about charter schools to evolve already. Charter schools are not The Answer; they are case studies in what’s possible. Just like the Mayo Clinic is not The Answer to health care reform.

As Atul Gawande masterfully explained (also in the New Yorker) last year, the Mayo Clinic offers evidence of what works. Excellent charter-schools show us how much better the rest of our schools could be—and offer lessons that we are foolish to ignore.

But Lemann (and others) warn that we should be careful before making any big decisions:

“One should treat any perception that something so large is so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true—especially before acting on it.”

Except, of course, for health-care reform, come to mention it—another large system that Lemann seemed to think was quite awry last year before Democrats passed reform legislation.

But schools? Ah, they’re fine. They were fine for me, right? Fine for Lemann, right? God forbid we get carried away and start worrying about everyone else.

 

 

If you turned the Empire State Building on its head and drilled it into the ground, you’d be about as deep into the Earth as the 33 miners trapped in a void in Chile since Aug. 5. What is happening down there? What will happen in a month when the men are rescued, as it seems likely they will be?

My Time colleague Jeff Kluger has a fascinating story about this in the Sept 20 issue. He writes about the importance of groups and leaders in these kinds of disasters—and about the civilizing influence of small tokens of normalcy.

“One of the first thing the men requested when a communication link was established was toothbrushes, and they’ve since been sent clean clothes and razors….Tidiness translates into discipline, and that can be lifesaving. ‘I talked to leaders in Vietnam who would take men into the jungle for 40 days at a time,’ says [West Point psychologist Col. Tom] Kolditz. ‘Every day the men would have to wash off their face paint and shave. That creates civility, and civility prevents conflict and even atrocities.’”

To learn more about how groups have functioned in past mining disasters, check out this detailed 2000 study (warning: PDF) on human behavior in underground fires. As I discuss in The Unthinkable, men in mining disasters (just like all humans in all disasters) tend to form groups and experience a profound desire to stay with the group at almost any cost. As the report details, this phenomenon may be even more powerful in mines, where hierarchy and rules are deeply embedded in the normal workplace culture.

These kinds of prolonged disasters have predictable phases. The first is the initial period of fear and uncertainty, followed by a kind of euphoria when it becomes clear that death has been averted. Now the miners are enduring what may be, in some ways, the most grueling phase. They have clean clothes and food, but the euphoria is long gone. The miners’ requests for wine and cigarettes have been denied, much to their annoyance. Recently, one of the miners returned a shipment of canned fruit in protest. Girlfriends of some of the married miners have allegedly begun showing up at the site, requesting financial compensation, which one can only presume makes for an intense conversation during the one-minute video conferences the miners get to have with their families.

If and when the miners are successfully rescued, the next phase will be another round of euphoria—followed, as the Washington Post foreshadows today, by a disorienting and surreal media circus:

“A half-dozen documentaries are in production - including the Discovery Channel’s look at the mechanics of the rescue and a planned HBO program. Tabloids are reaching out to families, offering thousands of dollars for the first interview, and hotels in the usually sleepy mining town of Copiapo are full….A ‘media platform’ half the size of a football field has been built at the scene to accommodate the estimated 500 to 1,000 reporters expected to flood the usually abandoned corner of the Atacama Desert.”

Thankfully, psychologists are working to prepare the men for this period, conveying lessons in how to talk to reporters and how to manage money. If history is any guide, the miners will do better if they try to maintain cohesion as a group—and resist the media’s powerful urge to personalize and elevate individual members and their stories. This will be hard to do, but as the 2000 report concluded, it is the way groups like this function best—above and below ground:

“...[I]n this environment, as in others where group survival is problematic, there is little tolerance for personal aggrandizement. Rather, a lot of concern is focused on the ideals of shared expectations and coordination of efforts.”

I have a cover story out in this week’s Time Magazine about the new film by the director of An Inconvenient Truth. This new movie, Waiting for “Superman,” which won the audience award for U.S. documentaries at Sundance earlier this year, tells the story of five kids trying to get into better schools—in DC, NY, LA and Silicon Valley. The filmmakers leverage all the tools of movie-making to tell a story that is as complex as it is powerful.

In the story, we use this film as an excuse to talk about where we are at this moment in the history of America’s long, tedious battle to fix its schools. Are we turning the corner at last? Almost everyone I asked said “yes,” but it was equally clear that the revolution has only just begun.

For decades, Hollywood has churned out movies about lone teachers saving poor kids (Think Stand and Deliver or, oh lord, Dangerous Minds). This year, we have not one but at least three films coming out about poor kids and their families trying to save themselves. (Another documentary, The Lottery, follows a similar trajectory as Superman, but takes place entirely in New York City.)

Meanwhile, journalism is also trying to save itself. So you can’t see my entire story online, unfortunately. Time has started putting large magazine stories behind a firewall, so you have to actually buy the magazine (!!) at the store, buy it on an iPad, wait until it goes online for free in a few weeks—or wait until you go to the doctor’s office in 6 months and read it in the waiting room. If you do see it, please let me know what you think.

Washington City Paper has come out with the most honest and knowing endorsement of a candidate I’ve seen in a long while: “Adrian Fenty for Mayor: The Jerk D.C. Needs.”

It’s hard to talk about this election intelligently. You either err on the side of unenlightened objectivity and endorse Fenty on his data alone; or you err on the side of emotion and punish Fenty for being callous in his treatment of a city with a tortured past.

As City Paper puts it:

Fenty has bungled the job of making poorer residents feel a part of the new D.C. Admirers say the only people who call Fenty a jerk are the hacks he’s ostracized. But as emotionally satisfying as it is to hear him elicit wails from the Washington Teachers Union, even a half-smart pol knows that gratuitous dissing of D.C. employees and insiders can play as disrespect for the African-American population that comprises most of those employees and insiders.

Personally, I worry about what Fenty’s opponent, Vincent Gray, might do on the issue that matters most in DC: the school system. With the future of 50,000 kids on the line, I don’t know how far nice gets you. Again, City Paper:

Michelle Rhee’s assault on the D.C. Public Schools status quo will go down as a rare attempt to raise local institutions above the low standards Washingtonians once accepted. Rhee shares Fenty’s abrasive traits, but in her case, it’s easy to be more charitable: When it comes to reforming a failed school system, you either go monomaniacal or go home.

The election is Tuesday, Sept. 14. Wherever you live, it will matter. Because if Fenty loses, the narrative will be that he and Rhee pushed too hard too fast to reform DC’s schools. Whether it’s true or not. And mayors everywhere will take note—and slow down.

Something remarkable happened in Los Angeles this weekend. The LA Times printed the first in what appears to be a groundbreaking series about teachers in LA. The newspaper somehow got access to the individual data for 6,000 public school teachers—and then, with the help of a Rand Corp. researcher, crunched the numbers to come up with a value-added analysis for these teachers. (To see the details of the methodology in PDF form, go here.) In other words, the newspaper now knows which teachers have dramatically increased their students’ test scores over time—and which have not.

Among the more interesting findings:

“Contrary to popular belief, the best teachers were not concentrated in schools in the most affluent neighborhoods, nor were the weakest instructors bunched in poor areas. Rather, these teachers were scattered throughout the district. The quality of instruction typically varied far more within a school than between schools.

Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students’ academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.”

I am very curious to hear more about how the LA Times got this data. I had always been told that this kind of data was considered part of the confidential personnel record, at least in DC. At the same time, I suspected it could not remain confidential forever. Once parents begin to understand how dramatically kids’ scores can vary from one teacher to another—even within the same school—parents will begin to demand this information. It’s all well and good to say testing is out of control—until you are offered the chance to see the data for your own kid’s teachers.

Later this month, the newspaper will release a searchable database of the 6,000 teachers with their data attached. It will be fascinating to see how LA parents use this information—and whether teachers take the opportunity to respond to the assessments (as the newspaper has invited them to do.) For now, the union has called the series “dangerous” and is calling for a boycott of the newspaper.