Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Introducing Tom, an 18-year-old from Gettysburg, PA, who is spending the year studying in a high school in Poland—a country that represents the great hope of my forthcoming book, The Smart Kids Club.

Before he arrived, Tom knew exactly one Polish person—his cello teacher back home. He thought it would be cool to play Chopin in Poland. And more than that, he thought it would be exciting to go somewhere where people might know who Dostoyevsky and Nabokov were. So instead of spending his senior year at Gettysburg Area High School, Tom applied to an exchange program organized by his local Rotary club. He was placed in Wrocław, a city of about 700,000 people in southwest Poland.

Tom arrived in a country with a powerful education reform story that almost no one outside of Poland knows. Starting in 1999, Poland made a series of education reforms that propelled the country into the upper tier of education systems around the world. From 2000 to 2006, the reading scores of Polish 15-year-olds shot up 29 pts—almost one year’s worth of learning (even though the age of the test takers stayed the same). Poland went from a below-average ranking in the OECD to above average, all while spending half what the U.S. spends per pupil.

For all those who say entire countries cannot reform their schools in a decade, I give you Poland; for all those who say American kids are too poor to learn at the levels of kids in the top countries in the world, I give you Poland. Evidence that change is possible—even in a place with a higher poverty rate than the U.S.

“My Polish school is completely different from my school in America,” Tom says. “It’s much more laid back in [some] ways and more intense in others.” Overall, Tom finds school to be harder in Poland, and the students to be more mature. “While the best students in American high schools stress over getting A’s,” Tom says, “the best students in Polish high schools stress over passing their classes.”

Poland is the only country in Europe to have avoided a recession during the current crisis. In 2010, Poland had the fastest growing economy on the continent. This year, Poland’s economy is predicted to grow 4%. (The U.S. economy is predicted to grow 2.3% in 2011.) There are many reasons for Poland’s economic strength, including infusions of European Union development aid that will diminish in 2012. But it’s also true that the country’s astonishing productivity in education spending is already throwing off economic benefits. Kids graduating in Poland have, on average, more marketable skills acquired for less money than kids graduating in America—something that was not true just a decade ago.

My thanks to Tom for sharing an insider’s view of life at a Polish school. (You can also follow Tom’s story in his own words on his blog.) In May, I’ll go visit him in Wrocław. Stay tuned.

I am not a believer in Webinars. It’s hard to really engage in something far away, particularly when your email is sitting right in front of you, daring you to ignore it for even a second. But I’m going to make an exception for this one on Tuesday, March 15—a live briefing from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on reducing the impact of a nuclear detonation.

I commend FEMA for going directly to the people (or at least to a web cam) about a real threat that no one wants to talk about—but is actually far more survivable and containable than the nuclear threat we faced during the Cold War (when we did, ironically, want to talk about it—all the time.)

This Citizen Corps Notificaton is provided by FEMA’s Individual & Community Preparedness Division to highlight community preparedness and resilience resources and activities recently announced by federal agencies and Citizen Corps partners.

FEMA’s Individual & Community Preparedness Division is excited to announce the next webinar in the Community Preparedness Webinar Series: Reducing Consequences of Nuclear Detonation. The Community Preparedness Webinar Series provides up-to-date information on community preparedness topics and resources available to citizens, community organizations, and Citizen Corps Councils. This LIVE webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, March 15 at 2:00 EST and will feature information from the Lawrence Livermore National laboratory (LLNL).   

Webinar login will begin 15 minutes prior to the start of the webinar and registration is not required.  A question and answer period will follow the presentation.

Live Webinar:
Reducing Consequences of Nuclear Detonation
March 15 @ 2:00 EST
http://www.citizencorps.gov/news/webcasts/reducingnuclearconsequences

Recent research and federal planning guidance has assessed that 100,000s of lives can be saved through adequate planning and knowledge about appropriate actions that can be taken by the public, responders, and the medical community in the aftermath of a nuclear detonation.  What would you do if an improvised nuclear device detonated in your community?  Brooke Buddemeier from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will present on research-based protective actions that individuals can take to lessen the personal impact of nuclear detonations.

The Community Preparedness Webinar Series features new community preparedness topics several times each month and is free to the public. Each webinar will accommodate the first 500 visitors that enter the website at the time of the webinar. In addition to airing live, the webinar will be recorded and viewable at your convenience on the Citizen Corps website (http://www.citizencorps.gov) usually within 24 hours after the live webcast.  To join the webinar live simply go to the landing page at http://www.citizencorps.gov/news/webcasts/reducingnuclearconsequences 15 minutes prior to the webinar, click on the link for the webinar and sign in as a guest.

If you need special accommodations or require additional assistance to view or listen to this webinar, please email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) no later than 5pm EST on Monday, March 14th and we will provide you with additional resources so you may participate.

More details on this webinar and upcoming webinars in the Community Preparedness Webinar Series are available at http://www.citizencorps.gov/news/webcasts.shtm.
This notice and other Individual & Community Preparedness news can be found on our website at http://www.citizencorps.gov.

Another day, another baffling front-page New York Times education story. Reporter Sam Dillon tells us that “since the 1980s, teachers and many educators have embraced research finding that smaller classes foster higher achievement.” But not until the 21st paragraph does he note that teachers and many educators may in fact be wrong on this point.

And in fact the biggest experimental study on class size reduction, in which 10,000 kids were randomly assigned to different-sized classes, found something far more nuanced than he suggests.

Andrew Rotherham did an excellent job explaining the class-size myth in Time last week:

What that research tells us is this: Smaller classes are better, but only if the teacher is a very good one. In other words, class size matters, but teacher effectiveness matters more. That means that as a parent, you’re better off with 28, 30, or maybe even more kids and a great teacher, than 24 or 22 and a mediocre one.

What’s more, to really make a difference smaller must mean much smaller. Fewer than 16, for instance. Even then the benefits are greatest in the early grades and for at-risk youngsters. Meanwhile, class size reduction is very expensive, so it doesn’t always work from a cost/benefit analysis relative to other choices schools can make with scarce dollars.

As is too often the case in education, that research is almost completely at odds with current practice. Instead of lowering class size a lot for the students who most need it, school districts generally lower it a little for everyone.

Understanding this complexity has never been more urgent, given that many districts are currently laying off teachers without regard to quality—and boosting class sizes for the teachers who remain. We need the Times to explain this complexity—even if it runs counter to what education reporters and their sources have long believed.

Round and round we go…

Always beware of stories that begin with a fuzzy reference to online comments. It sometimes means that the reporter could not find a real person to say what he wanted to be said.

Today’s New York Times has a front-page story entitled, “Teachers Wonder, Why the Scorn?”

The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.

Presumably, the reporter is paraphrasing, since there are no quotation marks. And weirdly, the online comments and placards seem to be saying the same very nasty thing… Hmm.

Reading this story, like reading most workaday stories about education, is like entering a kaleidoscope. There is a lot of color and spectacle, but there’s very little actually there.

There’s no actual evidence, for example, that most Americans think that teachers are pathetic baby sitters. What most Americans actually think, according to many surveys, is that teachers should be paid more—but they should be treated like professionals. They should not have lifetime job security regardless of their performance. They should get bonuses for great work. And so forth.

But the article is right that many teachers certainly feel like they are under attack. I hear from these teachers regularly, and they are genuinely distraught. This is partly, I think, a legitimate reaction to some of the overheated rhetoric coming from some politicians. But it’s also a natural response to a sudden change in the playbook. A job that has long been done in isolation without any meaningful feedback is now being dissected in public—and not always fairly.

It might help ground this debate if education reporters and pundits were held to a higher bar for accuracy. For example, in this same story, Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is quoted linking the alleged decline in teachers’ status to the success of unions in protecting tenure and lockstep salary schemes.

“They are reaping a bitter harvest that they didn’t individually plant but their profession has planted over 50 years, going from a respected profession to a mass work force in which everyone is treated as if they are interchangeable, as in the steel mills of yesteryear,” Mr. Finn said.

This is half true. The public is less and less willing to let teachers remain exempt from the basic rules of a competitive, meritocratic workforce—particularly since we spend more than any nation on earth to educate our children and get consistently unimpressive results.

But it is worth remembering that teachers were not respected 50 years ago, either. Or even 64 years ago, when the New York Times surveyed 300 deans of American universities and colleges—and reported on Page E9—that “the best students are not going into teaching.” Citing low salaries and low prestige, the deans said that teaching did not appeal to most college students. “Most of our students who become teachers do so because they are unable to meet the standards of other fields,” the dean of Oklahoma A&M College told the Times. It’s not immediately apparent if teachers (or education reporters) interpreted that quote as an attack on teachers back in 1947, but I am still checking the archives….

I’ll be moderating an event at THEARC in S.E. DC on Monday night, Feb. 28th. School leaders, parents and students will be talking about how to enroll parents in the quest to find, choose and help build outstanding schools. We’ll break it up with a few video clips, just to make things interesting. *And there will be refreshments & gift bags.* What’s not to love? See you there, I hope…

GreatSchools and HCM Strategists in Partnership with
Participant Media Invite you to:

  Parents and Schools Together:
A Town Hall to Discuss the Role and Impact of Parent Engagement in Education

Date: February 28, 2011
Time: 6–9pm
Place: THEARC
1901 Mississippi Avenue, SE Washington, DC 20020
Featuring Excerpts from WAITING FOR “SUPERMAN”

A Panel Discussion with
Khala Johnson, Founding Principal: KIPP DCl
Charles Adams, Head of School: The SEED School of Washington, D.C.
Natanya Levioff, DC Program Director: GreatSchools
DCPS Parents and Students

Moderated by
Amanda Ripley, Time Magazine reporter & author

After the panel discussion, visit the “Action Center” to learn more.
Participants include:
AppleTree Institute, Concerned Black Men, Donors Choose, FOCUS, Fight For Children, GreatSchools, Higher Achievement, KIPP DC, SEED School of Washington.
Light refreshments & Gift bags

RSVP to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or 202-469-8681 by February 24th

Event made possible through generous support
by the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust

My new TIME Magazine story investigates what government workers actually do all day long and whether they are actually overpaid. If you are not sure which side to love or hate in the Wisconsin imbroglio, this is the story for you. (If you are convinced in the purity of the unions or the righteousness of the governor, then I’d suggest reading something else. Or breathing deeply.)

After talking to many people, reading a lot and listening earnestly to both sides, I concluded that they are both wrong. There’s a third way, and there’s never been a better time to finally take it…

The opportunity before us is not to shrink or grow government: it’s to make it smarter. Over the past three decades, nearly every other job in America has gone through the productivity wringer. Starting with manufacturers and moving through retail and professional services, we have had our jobs galvanized by technology, stripped bare by efficiency metrics and honed by competition. It has been a grueling journey, but it’s the primary reason America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world.

Now it’s the government’s turn. If we seize upon this crisis to make basic changes—to start rewarding public employees in part on the basis of how effective they are, for example—we could do more than just stabilize our budgets; we could raise our entire economy.

For now, the efficiency gap between the public and private sectors is holding us all back. The U.S. ranked 68th (out of 139 countries) in terms of wastefulness of government spending in the 2010-11 World Economic Forum report on global competitiveness. Experts put our public-sector productivity about 10 years behind that of the rest of our workforce. If public workers could halve that gap, the annual savings would ring in at $100 billion to $300 billion, according to a new study by the McKinsey Global Institute. That would mean the equivalent of a recurring stimulus package every three to eight years.

I’ll be speaking at the House of Representatives tomorrow about how the brain responds to fear and uncertainty. I suppose it’s good timing...

There is a lot of confusion about what Teach for America is and is not. Is it a tiny nonprofit that will never have enough teachers to make a difference? Is it an elite conspiracy to take down the unions? Walking into Teach for America’s 20th anniversary summit in DC this weekend, the answer was obvious. This is basically a cult. Nothing less.

There were nearly 11,000 people in one huge hall, with five big TV screens hanging from the ceiling and pulsating lights strobing the audience. The crowd—mostly teachers or former teachers and a smattering of celebrities, from Malcolm Gladwell to Gloria Steinem to John Legend—made up a giant chorus of believers. The Ballou High School Marching Band carved its way through the hall, and a line-up of the country’s most battle-scarred reformers, from Geoffrey Canada to Joel Klein, called for nothing short of a revolution. It felt like a religious revival.

In the break-out sessions and in the one-on-one conversations in the hallways afterward, the anxiety crept in. The two most pressing questions I heard again and again were about the future: Are we finally turning the corner to fix America’s schools—or is this yet another education reform bubble? And secondly, Do reformers need to be nicer? Or more ruthless than ever? (In other words, is collaboration with the teachers’ unions a synonym for the status quo—or the only way to achieve real change?)

But the event answered one question with certainty: Teach for America is not really about its 8,000 active corps members or its 20,000 alumni; it’s about the Kool-Aid, the elixir that has found its way, after 20 years, into the bloodstream of the educational establishment. At latest count: 357 principals, 30 superintendents, 6 charter-school founders and dozens of elected officials, all of them convinced that every kid can learn, no excuses. Period.

John Legend Performs from TFA 20th Anniversary Summit on Vimeo.