Mathews wrote a book on the KIPP network of charter schools, is a fan of innovations that are brought into school systems, and was a sympathetic observer of Michelle Rhee's reign. Strauss, on the other hand, is put off by the sudden emergence of so-called "reformers" on the education scene, she finds the obsession with standardized tests to be counterproductive, and was significantly less charitable than Mathews when analyzing Rhee's tenure.

In a mid-November post on her The Answer Sheet blog, Strauss pilloried Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Maryland Governor Mark O'Malley for giving Teach for America way too much credit for changing the education system. She believes that the five-week crash courses that TFA participants go through before being tossed in the classroom are insufficient and that its higher than normal attrition rate isn't doing any favors for kids.

Mathews took issue with it—among his arguments is that there would be no KIPP if there were no TFA (since KIPP's cofounders are TFA alums)—and provoked a dialogue between the education writers, asking: "Don’t you think our education system would be worse off without [TFA and KIPP]?"

Strauss's answer: "[N]ot so much," as well as that they're hogging money, both philanthropic and public, that should be going to efforts that will have a more widespread effect.

TFA has, it is true, helped make teaching sexy again among a certain young set, and I’m sure it produces some teachers who turn out to be terrific. But I don’t know what important question it answers. Our nation has more than 3 million teachers; we need to replace 300,000 who leave every year. TFA sent 4,500 teachers with little training into some of the nation’s neediest schools this past fall. Regular teacher attrition is about 50 percent after five years; the percentage is higher for TFA teachers after just a few years. How does that solve the need to improve the profession?

Mathews' retort gets to one of the central questions in education today: TFA is able to coax students who might go into careers perceived as more prestigious as teaching and expose them to the educational system. Some of those teachers then become lifelong educators. How else besides TFA would you attract the best and brightest coming out of our colleges and universities to the profession?

And I'll put that question to you, GOOD readers. Any ideas?

Photo (cc) via Flickr user Tulane Publications

While the U.S. Senate spent yesterday striking down progressive legislation (tabling the DREAM Act, blocking aid for 9/11 first responders, and failing to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"), the U.K. Parliament similarly tacked conservative, by voting to increase annual college tuition to approximately $14,000 a year, while simultaneously cutting government funding by an additional 80 percent. (The catch being that loans only have to be paid back if graduates go on to earn a salary of more than $34,000.)

All across London, Slate reported of students "throwing lit flares, storming the Treasury building, and pulling policemen from their horses." The Associated Press quoted a 16-year-old demonstrator, John Dawson, who vowed to keep on fighting: "The fact that so many students came out to protest today shows that, even after the vote, they will still do whatever they can to avoid paying this much for higher education."

Next week, if the DREAM Act isn't passed by the Senate, do you predict a similar student uprising?

Photo via Matt Dunham for the Associated Press

While the bill was expected to be voted upon by the Senate earlier this morning, legislators just voted to table discussion until next early week, with supporters fearing that Democratic leadership will fall short of the 60 votes needed for passage.

Last night, by a vote of 216 to 198, the House passed the DREAM Act, which would give legal standing to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students. In total, eight Republicans voted in in favor of the bill, while 38 Democrats voted against it.

Will the Senate pass the DREAM Act during the waning days of the 111th Congress? One thing's for certain: Time is running out.

Photo (cc) via Flickr user ediveritas

A report released last week by the management consulting firm McKinsey

According to a piece in Education Week, the study, titled "How the World's Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better," looked at close to 600 reforms carried out in 20 school systems of everything from regional charter networks to entire countries:

The researchers found that interventions fell in six different areas: revising curriculum and standards; establishing an appropriate reward and compensation structure for educators; building educators’ technical skills; assessing students; establishing data systems; and implementing laws and policies supporting the interventions. But the way those interventions manifested themselves at each performance stage differed.

An interesting note from the Ed Week piece is that initially low-performing systems that saw improvement relied on standardized test-heavy assessment of students and rigorous evaluations of faculty. When schools were in better situations, testing relaxed and teacher evaluation turned to collaboration.

Obviously, there's a lot of discussion about the report, which was released along with a webcast, but it occurs to me that the message of the report is that a one-size-fits-all No Child Left Behind-type bill isn't going to create massive improvement in the United States. Rather, whereas adopting Common Core Standards and the like can't hurt, city and local school districts will need to tailor options, like merit pay and teacher assessment, to suit their own needs.

Photo (cc) via Flickr user Vincent J. Brown

A piece in the Chicago Tribune

It's the sort of innovation that should unite both reformers and union representatives. Teamwork and these Cyrano-type helpers aid teachers in developing better classroom presence, lessons, and ideas for getting through to their students.

The crux of the new methodology: Teachers can't work alone; they want, need, and can benefit greatly from the support of their colleagues.

It's a quiet reform in an era of more extreme moves such as firing principals, opening charter schools or splitting dropout factories into smaller schools. But in the quest to improve achievement, many educators say the job of teaching can't continue to be modeled on the idea of one adult standing alone in front of 30 students.

But, it's these so-called "extreme reforms" that, at the conclusion of the piece, threaten to block the move toward teamwork. With accountability-focused reformers, ideas like performance pay and value-added data reign supreme. Those metrics tend to reward individual efforts and pit teachers in adjacent classrooms against one another. 

Is there a way that accountability and teamwork can coexist? Mentoring young teachers and creating lesson planning teams and collaborative atmospheres for those teachers deemed in need of improvement seems like the obvious way to go. But, relegating these paradigms to just inexperienced and lagging instructors seems silly when even excellent teachers could benefit from new ideas and feedback.

Photo (cc) via Flickr user Old Shoe Woman

Each week, Do Something U releases a new piece of video content dedicated to providing solutions to the problems many young activists face.

Their latest video offers advice for getting people to vote in crowdsourced contests. Watch Chad Bullock, who just won a $250,000 grant from the Pepsi Refresh Project, share a few of his tips. 

What are some of yours?

The recommendation to discourage minority students whose preparation in high school leaves them below the median of students enrolling in STEM programs at elite colleges is known as the "'mistmatch' hypothesis," according to a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Over all, the commission concluded that, at the colleges the panel studied, admissions preferences based on ethnicity resulted in higher attrition rates for minority students who entered intending to study a STEM discipline.

When black and white students enter with similar academic credentials, black students are actually more likely to graduate with a science degree, the report says. It is only when minority students' academic credentials are not close to those of their peers that the problem emerges, it says.

The commission said colleges should warn students whose academic credentials are less than the institution's median about the impact of that deficit, and urged guidance counselors to advise students on the problems they would face entering a STEM program at an institution where they fall below the level of the typical student.

The eight-person committee, which included four Republicans and two Democrats, was split on the recommendations, with the Democratic members dissenting. In essence, this is a fight on affirmative action, with the Republican faction essentially arguing against the practice for STEM applicants coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.

It may be true that minority students who want to enter STEM fields but whose preparation might not be up to snuff tend to leave these subjects (and possibly school altogether). But is discouraging them from entering competitive academic tracks the way to go? Shouldn't we encourage ambition and expect the best of minority (and non-minority) students?

Photo via National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering

Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, is administered to 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This year, high school students in Shanghai led the pack, with American students ranking average to below average by when compared to their global peers (full report, PDF).

In speaking to the Associated Press, Education Secretary Arne Duncan didn't mince words, stating that the results are "an absolute wake-up call for America." And adding that "we have to deal with the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investing in education.''

The Financial Times, in asking why Chinese schoolkids are so good, attributes its success to the recent implementation of various school reforms, namely: 

"The initiative shown by teachers, who are now better paid, better trained and keen to moldtheir own curricula. Poor teachers are speedily replaced. China has also expanded school access, and moved away from learning by rote."

Yesterday, President Obama, addressed a group of community college students, invoking the Soviet Union's 1957's launch of Sputnik, which after beating us into outer space, led to an increased investment in domestic science and education funding.

“Fifty years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back. In the race for the future, America is in danger of falling behind.”

But what if America has already fallen behind and our drop in global education rankings is but the latest indicator? Will this finally serve as our badly needed wake-up call—or is it already too late?

Thumbnail (cc) via Flickr user Extra Ketchup; infographic via The Economist

Back when I was a teacher, my principal would stand at the back of my classroom a few times each year, clip board in hand, ostensibly evaluating my skill as a teacher. For my annual designation of "proficient," few questions were asked and student test scores were never taken into consideration.

Many teachers are still evaluated using the same model. Today's New York Times reports that the occasional classroom visit typically elicits high marks in nine out of 10 cases.

Gates hopes that going forward, digital videos of a teacher's lesson would instead be evaluated by an objective panel of experts, allowing for a better understanding of what makes one teacher substantially better than the next.

From his interview in the Times:

“Some teachers are extremely good. And one of the goals is to say, you know, ‘Let’s go look at those teachers.’ What’s unbelievable is how little the exemplars have been studied. And then saying, ‘O.K., How do you take a math teacher who’s in the third quartile and teach them how to get kids interested—get the kid who’s smart to pay attention, a kid who’s behind to pay attention?’ Teaching a teacher to do that—you have to follow the exemplars.”

Is videotaping teachers a good idea, or does it border on surveillance?

Photo via Travis Dove for The New York Times

WABC-7, New York City's local affiliate scored the first interview with Cathie Black, the former publishing executive that Mayor Bloomberg recently appointed as the new chancellor for New York City schools who is now at the center of a huge debate as to whether she's qualified to run the system. (A father in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope filed a lawsuit on Friday against state educators for granting a waiver to Black to serve as chancellor despite having a background completely lacking in aggression.)

Whereas GothamSchools referred to the conversation as Black having "a friendly softball toss" with education reporter Art McFarland, there were some tough questions asked, especially in the second, more substantive part of the interview (which is embedded above) It does seem like Black knew the questions ahead of time and that the rules for the interview didn't allow for follow-ups. When all was said and done, McFarland characterized Black as "a quick study."

As to whether Black will carry on outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein's reforms, she left no doubt that she will. "I haven't seen anything that he's put in place that I would say, 'I don't concur with,'" said Black. "We're in complete alignment." 

How does she want to be remembered when her tenure (which officially begins January 3) ends, McFarland asked? "[A] champion for kids," she responded.

For further exploration, here are parts one and three of the interview.

Shamus Khan, a professor at Columbia University, questioned the rewards of going to college (but not for the reasons you think).

Based on our series about fixing education in America, we made a video, and also assembled a list of best practices for rethinking L.A.'s schools.

We asked: shouldd graduate degrees be earned on Facebook? Opinions were mixed.

Two extremely clever history teachers from Honolulu transform pop songs like Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" into video lessons for their students about European aristocrats.

Do Something U's latest instructional video encourages young activists to use social media for good.

Kids wrote hilarious and heartbreaking letters to First Lady Michelle Obama. The clever folks at 826 turned them into a book.

A City Year corps member reflected on what she's learned during her year of service.

Liz Dwyer covered Michelle Rhee's recent move to the Sunshine State and Cathie Black's refusal to speak to the press. 

And finally, Nikhil wrote about science cheerleaders and a battle brewing between Bill Gates and Diane Ravitch over the future of school reform.

Photo (cc) via Flickr user The White House

The child nutrition bill determines the reimbursement rate for school lunches, the type of food that can be sold in vending machines, and whether trans fats can be banned from the equation. Prior to the new legislation, schools were reimbursed up to $2.68 per school lunch. For the first time in 30 years, it will now be increased by six cents, to $2.74.

Dollars and cents aside, earlier this year, Nikhil reported that "kids who eat lunches served by their schools are almost 60 percent more likely to be overweight or obese when compared to children who bring their lunch from home."

The New York Times features research from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which sums up in a simpler way how this legislation will reform school lunches going forward:

Whereas before lunch may have consisted of a fried chicken patty, white roll, canned green beans, whole milk, and a package of snack cakes (likely from a vending machine), kids can now look forward to lunches that consist of the following: barbecued chicken patty, whole grain roll, locally grown carrots, one percent milk, and sliced apples. 

As a way of celebrating, maybe a new school lunch contest (adhering to the new federal guidelines) is in order?

Photo (cc) via Flicker user dancing_chopsticks

SUTD is a collaboration with MIT and China's Zhejiang University. The former will use the Singapore campus to field test fresh ideas for expanding the curriculum for its Cambridge, Massachusetts campus. The latter will export five courses that make clear to SUTD students that the world of the future will, in many ways, be centered around China (with titles such as "Business Culture and Entrepreneurship in China" and "Sustainability of Ancient Chinese Architectural Design in the Modern World").

Singapore is already collaborating with the University of Pennsylvania on creating a university focused on management and with Yale to form a liberal arts school. Add to that this engineering-centered effort, and Singapore looks as though it's next generation of college graduates could become its most coveted resource.

According to a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

That strategy, officials say, helps Singapore achieve its goal of building a competitive work force. "We've got nothing else," says Cheah Horn Mun, director of educational technology in the Ministry of Education. Singapore has no natural resources and no farmland, so its "knowledge workers" are its most important asset, he says.

Photo via Ben van Berkel for UNStudio

While Lady Gaga may be temporarily silent on Twitter, "Bad Romance" is being given new life, thanks to a couple of extremely creative history teachers from Honolulu, Hawaii.

Their YouTube channel features dozens of history lessons to the tune of pop songs. Besides a lesson on the French Revolution (see above for the refrain: "I need my bread/Bread, bread, bread/Off with her head."), the clever duo is also responsible for a lesson on Mary, Queen of Scots to the tune of Jennifer Lopez's "Jenny from the Block."

Via Jezebel; Thumbnail (cc) via Flickr user Naomi Lir

A college degree is still the best predictor of wealth in America. But new data reveals a painful truth: During college, students not only do little work, but learn virtually nothing while they're there.

A recent GOOD column argues that college is overrated. Unfortunately, this is dead wrong. The economic returns to a college education are increasing. There is a wealth of academic data on this. But it’s easiest to see from the first graph in this Economix post from the New York Times. If you want to be well-off in America, college is pretty much a prerequisite. In fact, over the last 20 years, the “college premium”—or wage bump you get from going to college—has increased. The question is, why?

If you were to ask colleges, they would tell you that they are helping to develop skills and capacities—human capital—essential to a modern marketplace. This is a good story. It is a story that makes sense, and it is one we want to hear. It might not be a bad thing that the rewards of going to college are increasing. That means that our society is cultivating an increasingly skilled population that is helping to create social and economic value.

But unfortunately, this is a lie, a fable that colleges are telling themselves and that we graduates (and professors) like to believe as we pat ourselves on the backs.

The truth is something much more worrying, and even horrific. The truth is that students hardly work in college, and that they learn almost nothing while they’re there. College is a place where already advantaged youths spend four years enjoying themselves, and upon completion, they receive considerable rewards for having done almost nothing.

Don’t believe me? Well, I ask you to do two things: First, if you’re under 35, think about what you did in college. What did you learn? Do you use those skills in your job? If you’re being honest, the answer is, that you didn’t do much work and you didn’t learn very much. Still don’t believe me. Let's look at the data.

In their recent work, Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks have shown that study time of students has fallen from 24 hours a week in 1961 to about 14 hours per week in 2003. And this isn’t explained by having a job during college, choice of major, the kind of school you attend (elite vs. non-elite), or technological innovations that make studying easier. Basically people in colleges are working a lot less. Almost nothing can explain the decline in work hours except an increase in leisure.

The results of such an increase in leisure are what you’d predict. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa show in their soon-to-be-released book, Academically Adrift, students in college aren’t actually learning much. Using the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which evaluated 2,300 undergraduates at 25 schools in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year, Arum and Roksa find that almost half of the students have no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. That’s no improvement after two years in college.

This makes it hard to argue that the rewards of college have anything to do with the development of skills. If you’re not working, and you’re not learning much, then how, exactly, are you developing skills that help you earn more?

These findings force us to ask a host of hard, and at times, unsavory questions. What, exactly, are we doing in our colleges and universities? And given the answer—not much—why is it that people who graduate from colleges make more than those who don’t? And looking further forward, what value, either social or economic, can college graduates be adding to our society if they are neither developing skills nor learning to work hard?

I am a college professor. And as I look at such data, I cannot help but think that I am part of a great credentialing mill. As I argued in a previous GOOD post, colleges are increasingly places for the rich. It’s too simplistic, but this is pretty much the story. Colleges admit already advantaged Americans. They don’t ask them to do much or learn much. At the end of four years, we give them a certificate. That certificate entitles them to higher earnings. Schools help obscure the aristocratic quality to American life. They do so by converting birthrights (which we all think are unfair) into credentials (which have the appearance of merit).

If this sounds like an angry indictment, it is. But until we critically evaluate what is happening in colleges, we will continue to perpetuate inequalities. And it won’t be long before the effects of no work, all play, and little learning are keenly felt by our society.

Shamus Khan is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming book, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School.

What began as a blog demonstrating that the art of cheerleading and the pursuit of a scientific career aren't mutually exclusive has evolved into a performance troupe-cum-activist group that's shattering stereotypes about what your typical scientist looks like. Started by a former Philadelphia 76ers cheerleader Darlene Cavalier, who's now a senior advisor to Discover magazine, Science Cheerleader is a group of rah rah girls who can hold their own in the scientific arena, as well as the sporting one.

From a chemist at Eli Lilly who once shook her stuff on the sidelines for the Indianapolis Colts to an engineer and dance choreographer who rooted on the Tennessee Titans, the group assembled 11 of its members to make an appearance at last month's USA Science and Engineering Festival, an event held on the National Mall intended to promote STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education to the nation's youth.

Appearing on the NPR program Tell Me More last week, Cavalier noted that the membership of Science Cheerleader is already at 50 women—and that she's yet to survey the NBA for its science-inclined dancers.

The New York Times op-ed page recently featured a sampling of student letters.

A 10-year-old from Seattle named Renea Harris-Peterson drew this portrait:

And Ofeiba Allen-Harding, a 6-year-old from Boston, creatively broke from the assignment altogether to instead address the family's Portuguese water dog, writing: "Dear Bo, Are you hungry?"

But my hands down favorite is the hysterical Andres Ortega, an 11-year-old Los Angeles resident, who wrote:

Dear Michelle Obama,

I think your husband should legalize immigration. Please put a statue of me in Echo Park. Thank you. J.K. No, really. I want a tuxedo on the statue.

Which question would you ask the First Lady?

Book cover courtesy of 826; illustrations courtesy of The New York Times

Time sure flies by when you’re working 50 to 60 hours a week, training for in-class service, and getting acclimated to a new team, school, and city. Originally from Aurora, Illinois, I’m still getting used to the 70-degree days in Los Angeles and late-night traffic on the highways, but I’m excited by this city’s willingness to innovatively tackle some of its toughest challenges.

Already three months into my year of service, I realize that while I spend a lot of time planning my next move at work and in my personal life, I rarely get the chance to reflect on everything I’ve already experienced. With that in mind, here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned during my year of service, or, as we like to call it in City Year, my “idealist’s journey.”

Times have changed.

I’m about twice as old as my sixth grade students, and it can be difficult to recall what life was like when I was 11. I remember that, like many of my students, I had a preoccupation with video games, my BFFs, the opposite sex, and the latest craze; I also struggled to form an identity, gain acceptance from my peers, and assert my independence from adults. Still, I’m amazed by the little differences between then and now, like students’ access to the latest technology in the classroom.

The school where I serve has a traveling Apple computer lab that allows students to do online research and assignments at their desks. For students who are already inundated with vast amounts of technology at home, this privilege can be distracting, drawing on their desire to focus on many things at once or none at all. I help my teacher keep the students focused while showing them how to take advantage of the technology in the classroom in a way that is beneficial to their academic development.

Teachers have a tougher job than I realized.

I’ve always respected teachers who exude passion for their work, but after observing and assisting my teacher in the classroom, my admiration has risen to another level entirely. Although they have a significant role in children’s lives, teachers are but one influence in their academic and personal development. Factors like family, community, culture, friends, interests, and peer pressure are not always checked at the door when students arrive to class or return from lunch. Teachers have to deliver lessons despite the many external factors and obstacles that may push against their efforts. The amount of flexibility, creativity, and energy that it takes to do this is mind-boggling.

I’m happy to have a supporting role in the magic that my teacher creates every day to help her students understand and engage in the material, regardless of their academic level. I do my best to make her job a little easier by helping our students remain focused; teaching them how to respect their peers; engaging them during class, breaks, and after school; and helping them discover all of the wonder that education has to offer.

This year is really what you make it.

Everyone has different reasons for joining City Year. Some want to gain experience in the classroom and become teachers. Others just want to spend a year giving back and believed that working with children would be a great way to do it. I originally joined because I wanted to become a school administrator, but I’ve decided to take a slightly different direction and am soaking up as much information as I can.

In addition to everything that I have been learning in the classroom and around the school, I’ve become involved in other aspects of City Year that help me understand how an education nonprofit constantly evolves to address the challenges of our society. As a team leader for City Heroes, City Year’s weekend leadership development program, I guide high school students through an interactive curriculum that asks them to reflect on injustices in their communities and participate in community service that will directly address those injustices. I also meet twice a month with the Corps Council, corps member representatives from each school that we serve in Los Angeles, to provide an update of our school’s progress and struggles, and to help propose improvements to the service experience. I also help plan member-led corps training sessions during our weekly professional development days. It is in this context that I have begun to frame my future career in education research and policy analysis.

These past three months have been intense but have taught me a lot about myself and the way I perceive the world around me. I can only hope that my brain has enough space left to absorb everything else I will learn and experience in the next seven months.

Kimberly Harris is a City Year corps member based in Los Angeles.