Month: December 2012

Posting will be sporadic over the holiday break.  As a reminder, you can get a daily email with any Eduwonk content by subscribing here.  There is also an automatic Twitter feed of posts @eduwonk. And I am on Twitter @arotherham so you can follow there, too.

Talking with several friends on their way out to get a Christmas duck it occurred to me that as a conservation measure we’ve been able to create federal laws about how many shells a waterfowler’s shotgun can hold (3),  but can’t have a sensible conversation about firearm magazine sizes otherwise.  We’re better at protecting migratory waterfowl than young people. And while the 2nd Amendment confers a right, like all rights it’s subject to some limitations. The Supreme Court has been clear on both those points. But even with the collective outrage following the NRAs proposal yesterday (the New York Post hit the NRA today) the grim reality of a House of Representatives where more members are worried about a primary challenge than a general election loss may make durable progress on this issue as vexing as on the “fiscal cliff.”

Usually Reliable Robelen writes-up the bursting of the Finnish bubble.  IES’s Jack Buckely gets the money quote:

“I’ve always been a little puzzled by” the high level of attention trained on the Nordic nation of some 5.4 million people. “Finland captured the world’s attention for a variety of reasons, but as these results show,” he said, “there are other places to look for case studies.” 

I’ve been critical of the Finnish fetish (and ridiculous correlation-causation nonsense in international comparisons in general – eg country X does Y so Y is *obviously* why they do so well) but that doesn’t mean there are not some lessons there, and elsewhere. In Finland’s case the country’s rise in the postwar period is an interesting story with an education angle – if its limits are respected.  Amanda Ripley has a book coming on all this in 2013.

Happy Holidays!

Two Three columns today about how Sandy Hook has turned into a peg for all sorts of unrelated cultural, political, and policy agendas from Governor Huckabee and the Tea Party on the right to Karen Lewis and Diane Ravitch on the left:  Carl Cannon in Real Clear Politics here and Campbell Brown in Daily Beast here.  [Update: WSJs David Feith here*]

I honestly don’t know what to say to someone who doesn’t appreciate how inappropriate all this is. In our part of the world it’s not the specific issues (charters, Teach For America, teachers unions and so forth), reasonable people can disagree about them. It’s the rush to turn this tragedy into just one more talking point about this or that having nothing to do with what happened that’s so sad.  And sadder still that people are so wound up these various battles they can’t even step back and see that. Yesterday a colleague asked me what he should say to an employee, whose family is directly involved in Newtown, who was very upset by what Karen Lewis and Diane Ravitch were doing with the tragedy. I don’t have a good answer.

Speaking of answers, arming teachers or putting armed security in schools isn’t a good one to what happened at Sandy Hook.  Michele McLaughlin of Knowledge Alliance, and before that the American Federation of Teachers and Teach For America discusses that at TIME with Deborah Gorman-Smith.

*AFT President Randi Weingarten statement in the column: “Tragedy can bring out emotional excess, which is regrettable, but understandable. At the same time anyone engaged in perpetrating the education wars rather than focusing on the families in Newtown is wrong. Can’t we all agree on a moratorium on the fight until we bury our children and teachers?”

New class of Pahara Institute Pahara – Aspen Education Fellows announced today, amazing group of individuals (pdf).

New data out today from the Whiteboard Insider survey – includes new data on the Common Core assessment consortia, perceptions of state-level education advocacy organizations, and tracking questions on ESEA reauthorization and other issues.  The ESEA tracking question elicited pessimistic responses – meaning reauthorization is seen as unlikely – and the question was asked before Sandy Hook.  Now it seems likely that in addition to all the other issues hindering action on education gun amendments will further complicate the path for a big education bill.

The crazy thing about gun politics in this country is that the National Rifle Association is more or less the moderate wing of the gun lobby. Other groups bill themselves as “no compromise” alternatives to the NRA.  That has to change.  In a new TIME column that is not school focused (although has a tangential education hook at the end) I look at what a genuinely pro-sportsmen but pro-gun safety organization might look like and why one is needed:

 I used to live in the country and go to a gun club for the skeet and trap shooting. I went there on Sundays because that was the only day the club was open to non-members. Like many shooting clubs, this one would only grant membership if I also joined the National Rifle Association. That wasn’t going to happen. While I like some of the NRA’s youth gun-safety programs, I cannot support its policy aims….

…Unfortunately, this constituency has no organization speaking to and for them. That’s why if philanthropists and influential leaders really want to do something about gun safety, they should launch an advocacy group for sportsmen that will provide a legitimate alternative to today’s gun lobby. The solution to our gun problem is not to try to fight through the same old politics — rather, it’s to change the political landscape.

I’ve had little to say about the heartbreaking Sandy Hook Elementary massacre because for the most part I see it as a horrible societal problem that visited a school, not a school problem.  Our schools have their challenges but overall they’re safe places for youngsters.  I have a column coming in TIME on the gun issue, which is more germane to all of this than education policy.

Not everyone sees it this way.  On her blog Diane Ravitch has been waving a bloody shirt from Sandy Hook Elementary to make points about teachers unions, charter schools, teacher evaluations and other issues that have nothing to do with the tragedy at that school or the apparent heroics of its staff.  It’s obscene.

You wonder if you should even call attention to such rank behavior and there is something of a “yuck” factor to it, for lack of a better word. But Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers Union, the nation’s third largest teachers union and a force within the national American Federation of Teachers, found a way to make Ravitch look like a statesman while rushing to her defense.  Writing of a Teach For America teacher or staff member who criticized Ravitch’s linking of the massacre to education policy, Lewis writes:

There might have been a time where “politicizing” tragic events, especially mass shootings was thought to be in poor taste. That has changed with the 24/7 news cycle that continues to focus far too much time and energy on the perpetrator of the massacre than that of our precious victims. Rosenberg’s “false outrage” needs to be checked. That same false outrage should show itself when policies his [TEACH FOR AMERICA*] colleagues support kill and disenfranchise children from schools across this nation. We in Chicago have been the victims of their experiments on our children since the current secretary of Education “ran” CPS.

There’s more.  Ravitch, of course, posted the entire thing at the top of her blog to make sure no one missed it.

Encountering Ravtich’s disrespectful, and in my view revolting, use of this tragedy Lewis, the leader of thousands of educators and a senior leader in the American Federation of Teachers, could have:

Said nothing.  These were blog posts on a marginal blog that is mostly an echo-chamber anyway.

Or, seized the opportunity to unite and lead by pointing out that there is a big gun violence problem in our country- especially in Chicago btw – it makes everyone emotional, especially now in the immediate wake of this tragedy, but this is the time to come together to address this issue regardless of where else we might disagree.

Instead she took option C, which is to double-down on using this tragedy to make a point about unrelated education policy issues and make an unbelievable reference to Teach For America – whatever you happen to think of the organization – in the context of this tragedy. Poor taste doesn’t begin to cover it.

There is plenty of disagreement in education, people of good faith can disagree about many of  today’s hot issues, and those debates sometimes get heated and political. I don’t know anyone thoughtful who wouldn’t like to have something back or have said something differently at some point. That’s life.  There is also some bad behavior, dishonesty, graft, and the rest on all sides of these issues. That, too, is life. But  in almost two decades in education I’ve never been so ashamed for this sector as reading these things.  You hear this kind of rhetoric and see this sort of zealousness in private a lot, so perhaps it’s illustrative to see it in public.  But in the wake of what happened in Sandy Hook, and riding on the emotions of that tragedy, it’s disgusting and shameful. We have reached a very sad place.

*For the non-edutypes Teach For America is a national organization that places new teachers in high-need communities. Overview of major issues around it here.

A.O. Hirschman has died at 97. The Washington Post writes up his colorful life.  In the education part of the world his books Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and Rhetoric of Reaction timelessly offer plenty of explanatory leverage about our national education conversation.

Heartbreaking.

Even before all the details are known, what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary this morning is clearly a horrible human tragedy, unimaginable whether or not you are a parent. It’s also a gun violence tragedy and we have way too many of those – and I say that as someone who is generally pro-gun rights (“generally” means also pro-sensible regulation of some kinds of firearms). Still, and this is of course cold consolation to the families directly involved, while incidents like this at schools stun us and seize headlines, overall gun violence is not common in schools.  CDC data show that less than 2 percent of youth homicides even occur at school (while overall homicide is the second leading cause of death for Americans aged 25-24). In terms of risks to students in school there are other more prevalent issues – bullying and other safety issues.

So what happened today should lead us to have a serious conversation about gun violence – although many other awful incidents in the past should have as well, and have not. But other than common sense security measures the implications for schools are much less obvious and we should seek to disentangle what is a societal problem from what is a school problem.

Here’s David Saba – 0f the National Math and Science Initiative – with a Bahamas’ bonefish.  NMSI runs a few programs – including UTeach, an interesting teacher prep model.  This is Saba’s second appearance in Friday Fish porn, he visited with a cold water fish in 2008.  Don’t know what Friday Fish Porn is, or want to see more fish pics, then click here.  Learn more about the amazing and hard fighting bonefish by clicking here.