NYT editorial: National School Standards, at Last

Much of the current consensus in the educational "reform" debate is noxious:
the pro-school shutdown approach, the extolling of charter schools while ignoring the cynical bias behind the student selection process, the 60 or 70 hour work-week demands at charter schools.
The goal of national standards is one thing that is worthy of support. We cannot have an outrageous patchwork of 50 standards. Obviously, it represents different standards in different states. We are a geographically highly mobile country. Different standards result in a jolting change for students that migrate from one state to another.

The New York Times' March 14, 2010 editorial endorsement for national standards.

Shame of the City IV: in a small school: longer classes, core topics push aside variety of curriculum

Peer into a traditional large New York City school that has been broken up into four or so small learning communities or small schools.
"EMSiS"
You will see students with programs that concentrate only on core subjects, what we could call EMSiS: English/Math/Science/Social studies. A reform in the design of United States high schools in the first third of the twentieth century was that public education no longer was narrowly about reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic. It developed into a sort of junior university, with those four core subjects, and also topics that enrich the muse and work the body. Namely, arts, music and physical education were offered. Foreign language classes gave students and understanding of essential parts of cultures beyond America. Many people look back at subjects that touched them and kept them interested in returning to school each day. The EMSiS core didn't do it for all students. For many, art, music or shop classes gave them one subject that they enjoyed and thrived in. This variety, shall we say, "diversity," of subjects was in working class urban schools, and as well as in wealthier suburbs.
Joel Klein's "reform" of the city's large comprehensive schools has deprived students of the traditional varied menu of courses. A look at a student's schedule shows what is happening and gives a hint at why the "marginal," non-EMSiS fields are areas in which teachers are finding shortages of open positions. Typically in "failing" --read, lower income and minority-- schools or districts, students are being given long periods, called block scheduling, of 90 minutes. But these classes are in the EMSis core. This core pushes aside the traditional non-EMSiS classes: art, music, foreign language and physical education.
This core emphasis provides administrators with a cover: the students' school days are full; yet this allows the administrators to skip funding teachers in non-EMSiS subjects. Non-EMSiS subjects may be offered; but these are offered in a kind of random fashion: there are tokens: maybe a Spanish class here or an art class there. Students are placed in these classes, they do not choose them. The EMSiS model is given an exception two or maybe five times a week, but only with one class per student. Students do not have three non-EMSiS classes beyond their core classes; they have only one. Thus, the scheduling of one non-EMSiS exception per student is an empty gesture on the Department of Education's part. Again, herein lies the secret to the mystery of the vanishing of art, music, foreign language jobs in the system.

Robert Jackson and his Campaign for Fiscal Equity in the 1990s waged a noble effort to bring New York City schools funding up to par with suburban schools funding. He and other advocates of equity or civil rights for education should fight for parity with suburbs in terms of opportunities to take the muse-enriching and body-exercising exceptions to the EMSiS core. Let's be honest: the non-EMSiS subjects haven't vanished from the better-off suburbs. In many school systems, enrollment in foreign language classes is not a mere option or a right. It is often a mandate required for graduation. Yet, many New York City schools skimp on the availability of foreign language classes.
This denial of educational service is something that is hitting minority neighborhoods worst. Indeed, go into a public library and take a look at the public high school directory. You will see --unless Klein's new DoE has scrubbed this information in the latest editions-- the survival of much of the non-EMSiS educational menu in the schools in the "better neighborhoods," schools such as Midwood, Bayside or Cardozo, schools in this city. French is still offered; advanced placement ("AP") classes are still offered. Thus, students are better prepared to compete with non-city students for places in the more prestigious private universities. The trend of reducing non-EMSiS electives (in the wake of breaking large schools into small schools) is a trend of low income, particularly minority neighborhoods, not white neighborhoods. This detail sometimes makes its way into the larger media: Reporting on a parents' meeting on the closure of Canarsie High School, the New York Times quoted a parent: “You are not closing the white schools.”

There are rumors that William Thompson should not highlight the patterns of schools from his day. On the contrary, we should bring back many core features of schools from his days as president of the Board of Education.
We should:
*bring back the developmental lesson
*bring back diversity in topics: art, music, photography, dance, physical education, language options beyond Spanish
*bring back career-relevant vocational education topics: shop, culinary classes, accounting, up-to-date computer classes
*bring back such diversity in low income / minority neighborhoods
*bring back the neighborhood school / stop putting young children through the competition scramble that middle class suburban kids will only begin to worry about in preparation for college
*restore, not deny: English Language Learner (English as a Second Language) classes, special education classes
*roll back the for-profit charter schools that belie a class and ability preference (prejudice, dare we say) by keeping out "difficult" students, special education students or English Language Learners, that have deprived proximate schools or resources and have exacerbated the class overcrowding crisis

This is an issue of civil rights. Teachers should not only agitate on issues such as the UFT factions, ATR crisis, tenure or the rubber rooms. Teachers should reach out to parents, students and sympathetic voters in the general public. This is a two-tier system, plain and simple. With its block scheduling and its shunting aside varied electives, it is exercising a soft bigotry of lower expectations. We should recognize class and race bias when we see this. Bloomberg has suckered voters and whole community organizations with his pitch of his educational reforms as a civil rights issue, as an accomplishment. What a fraud! On the contrary, the new curricular patterns are a racial affront to black and Latino families.

Shame of the City III: city schools are not preparing NYC students for college

As it has been put before, the key question is:
"Is Our Children Learning?" [har, har] and the answer is No. Read on.

WNYC's Beth Fertig has an important story today on the station's website:

NYC students are ill-prepared for real college life.

NEW YORK, NY September 24, 2009 —A new study finds too many New York City high school students aren't prepared for college, and urges the state and city to take action. WNYC's Beth Fertig has more.

REPORTER: The study by the Annenberg Institute for School reform looked at students at the City University. More students are entering CUNY and fewer need remedial classes. But most students in community colleges still need remedial math or English; and the six-year graduation rate for an associate degree is less than 29 percent. Researchers say the problem lies in the lack of college readiness. They say state standards aren't well aligned to what students need to succeed. And too many students don't take four full years of math and science. The report urges public schools and colleges to collaborate in guiding students, so they'll know what they need in college. It also says students often don't aim higher on their Regents exams because they don't understand that they need a score of at least 75 to avoid remedial classes later. For WNYC I'm Beth Fertig.

A major crux of the problem is that high enough math standards are not being pursued with the students. Students' actual grade level in math and English lag at least two grade levels, throughout their careers, particularly as the tween years transition to adolescent years, i.e., in fifth grade. This lag is really not acceptable if the city expects students to have "on-par" literacy and "numeracy" by the college freshman year.
Let's look at how the basic skills are not honed in English and math. The city denigrates the focus on the fundamental ability to construct clear, grammatically sentences or spelling skills. The city subscribes --far more aggressively under Klein-- progressive education ideologies. It has allowed those ideologies to elide the development of the basic skills of written expression. In the crucial years of fifth through nine, when this skills should be refined in students, the city dogmatically avoids addressing these skills.
Regarding math, Klein's administration gullibly bought, hook, line and sinker, the constructivist dictates that students learn math best by developing theories and trying some experimentation. The city wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on worthless textbooks on the discredited "Everyday Math" and "Impact Math" series specializing in this avant garde nonsense. California experimented with this New New Math nuttiness almost two decades ago, and it rejected it with passion. Yet, the city has ruined the basic math skills of nearly a generation of students by using these approaches since 2002. (For more analysis of these discredited trends, visit the website of the venerable Thomas B. Fordham Institute.)
For those unfamiliar with graduation routines from New York State schools, final summation tests in the various academic subjects are administered in high school, mainly in ninth through eleventh grades. The bar is ridiculously lowered for the most commonly taken Math A Regents exam. Just try this January 2009 version of the test on your own, without any preparation. Most of it appears on the level of sixth or seventh grade math.

The education analysts that responded to the aforementioned reporter said that more years of math are needed in high school. Yes, maybe, but prior to that goal, they need to master pre-algebra fundamentals.

To boot, the state has lowered the passing score for one Regents exam, to make the question of judging passing scores, as the New York Times reports, even more suspicious, particularly when we are in the era of Bloomberg/Klein reform.

Further, the city schools have adopted the progressive education dictum that school must be fun and cooperative, well into high school. Thus, they coddle impulses of informality and they withhold the development of skills, mental and behavioral attitudes upon which high performance in the college level depnds. Walking around the classroom is sought as part of the lesson. Group-work is mandated.
Are these the modes of rigor in college? Are these habits that are constructive for working alone, and concentrating for long periods, on a test at the college level? No, no, no. Yet, Bloomberg/Klein have adopted and enforced this silliness that is doubtless not used in Singapore or Denmark.