Innovative teacher contract passes

Woo hoo! In an update to this post, Minneapolis teachers yesterday ratified a contract that, rather unexpectedly, gives principals the right to pick their staffs -- rather than letting teachers pick their own positions based on seniority.

The vote wasn't even close: 68.72% in favor. Teachers also get a 2% raise this year and a 1% raise next year.

It'll be interesting to see what happens next year when principals start assembling their staffs. But this is good news overall, putting the interests of students first.


education, Minnesota, politics, midtopia

An unusual school contract

This one caught me by surprise. Over in the troubled Minneapolis school district, teachers have tentatively agreed to let principals pick their staff -- rather than forcing them to pick teachers by seniority.

A lot of rank-and-file teachers aren't particularly happy with the idea, but I hope it survives. Seniority is a wonderful way to reward long-serving workers, giving them very strong job security. But the downside is that you're picking teachers by longevity, not talent. The two aren't necessarily linked, and even great teachers can get burned out as they get older. In those cases, what's good for the teacher isn't what's good for the students or the school.

My oldest daughter has had two wonderful-but-young teachers. Both were uprooted because they lacked seniority. One had to change from kindergarten (her strength and love) to first grade. The other had to leave the district. My daughter now is taught by an older teacher -- who does okay, but is not inspired. Even in a meritocracy not every teacher can be a marvel, but it is always sad to see teachers you love forced to go elsewhere simply because they lacked seniority.

Teachers do have a legitimate concern that the new plan would make it easier to get rid of the most senior -- and thus most expensive -- teachers. That's why most unions have a seniority rule, to make layoffs generally not worth the employer's while. Most of the time, when a union shop needs to shrink, employers opt for buyouts instead.

But that shouldn't be a big problem if principals aren't responsible for a teacher's salary. If they aren't the one's paying, they shouldn't care if a given teacher is pricey or cheap. I don't know how school budgets work, but that might be a tweak worth considering: principals fill slots, and the district picks up the bill.

Other criticisms are less persuasive.

With this being year-to-year, this doesn't give students the consistency in their schools. They need structure, and I can see a revolving door in the schools, and this would discourage teachers from even wanting to the work for the district.

This one doesn't fly. First, consistency is not a virtue in and of itself; if a teacher is consistently bad, they should go. Second, since students change grades (and teachers) every year, how much consistency can there be? Third, this assumes principals would want a school with high turnover. I can't think of a reason why they would.

Kudos to the teachers for agreeing (even tentatively) to a system that puts the kids' needs first. If it survives, I hope the district exercises it in good faith. If they don't, it will destroy trust and -- most likely -- precipitate a serious confrontation at the next contract negotiations.

I'm curious what Centrisity's Flash -- a working teacher in St. Paul -- thinks about all this. Flash? Care to comment? Or do a post of your own? I'd love to hear a teacher's perspective.

education, politics, midtopia

When one size doesn't fit all

The Star Tribune had an interesting piece this weekend about the latest refugee influx into Minnesota -- the Karen people of Burma (er, Myanmar), who are a growing presence in the St. Paul suburb of Roseville.

They're here because for years they've been part of an insurgency against Burma's military dictatorship. They're also a religious minority: about a third of them are Christian, and Burma is a majority Buddhist country.

But interesting as that is -- and it continues a Minnesota tradition of providing haven to various ethnic groups fleeing warfare in their homeland, like the Hmong and Somalis -- I found a detail buried near the bottom of the story to be telling in a different way.

The refugee kids -- about 140 -- know no English and are unfamiliar with American customs and culture. So the school district has been working overtime to educate them, scrambling to find translators and additional teachers.

Elementary schoolers attend regular classes for part of the day, but the nuances of English make it hard to keep up.

More than 10 percent of Roseville's students are classified as having limited English proficiency, meaning ELL teachers like Onstad have more than just Karen students to help, said Chris Sonenblum, district director of student services.

The Karen students need so much attention, however, that Onstad finds herself spending much of the day teaching the new refugees simple consonant-vowel-consonant words.

And no one expects much success when the students take state standardized tests for the first time, especially when everything, including how to fill out the test form, is new.

"We're teaching them how to bubble-in answers and write their name," Onstad said. "They're not going to be up to snuff to take grade-level tests."

That, undoubtedly, will hurt the district's chance of making "adequate yearly progress" with No Child Left Behind in coming years.

That's because NCLB requires that the kids meet testing standards after one year -- a flatly ridiculous requirement.

So unless an exception is made, the school district will be penalized thanks to circumstances beyond its control.

I have no problem with the idea of standardized testing -- it is useful, after all, to actually measure student achievement against a common standard, and it's a good way to identify underperforming schools that either need assistance or reform. My biggest gripes about NCLB were its inflexibility and the fact that Bush underfunded his own initiative.

The rigidity is on display in this example. It's ludicrous to expect immigrant kids to meet federal standards after only one year -- especially because they're going to hvae trouble just reading the test questions, much less answering them.

There are a million different kinds of students, and so when it comes to education policy "one size fits all" doesn't necessarily work. There needs to be flexibility for special situations like this one. If the federal government won't provide it, the state needs to weigh in on the side of the school district -- both as an advocate for change at the federal level and with specific help at the local level, so that the school district doesn't suffer unfairly while it absorbs this educational challenge.

Karen, education, Minnesota, politics, midtopia

You think we've got it bad....

If you think politics are corrupt in the United States, be thankful you don't live in either France or Peru.

In France, former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin faces charges that he helped forge bank documents to frame President Nicolas Sarkozy on bribery charges.

And in Peru, public school teachers walked off the job to protest a proposal that they pass competency exams in order to keep their jobs.

This might be just another brouhaha over arcane matters -- what the tests measure, what procedure is used to punish/help teachers who fail -- except for one thing: in the first round of exams, held in February, nearly half of the teachers couldn't solve basic math problems and a third had trouble with reading.

Further, the proposed rules would only fire teachers who failed the test three times. The teachers' union opposes that, saying it would lead to "arbitrary" firings.

O-o-o-o-kay.

It takes a certain brazen indifference to be confronted with evidence of widespread incompetence and still oppose efforts to fix it -- and to claim that firing anyone who can't pass the test on the third try is "arbitrary." I suppose it is, in that where exactly the line is drawn is an arbitrary decision -- why not fire them after the second failure, or the fifth? But the union is out in left field on this one.

Which may explain why only 15 percent of teachers paid any attention to them.

That last statistic provides another example of how bad Peru's teachers are at math. Half of them failed the test, and yet only 15 percent support a union that wants to protect them from any consequences for that failure. It's like they can't discern their own simple self-interest. Either that or they're nobly self-sacrificing, which strikes me as unlikely.

The U.S. has its problems, but it pays to remember that things could be far, far worse.

Villepin, education, Peru, France, politics, midtopia

Stupid teacher tricks

They don't get much stupider than this.

Staff members of a Murfreesboro elementary school staged a fake gunman attack during a school trip, telling them it was not a drill as children cried and hid under tables.

Usually it's the playground bullies who are responsible for terrorizing kids. I guess they've been put out of business by the teachers.

Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who was present, said the scenario was intended as a learning experience and only lasted five minutes.

Oh, okay; it only lasted five minutes. That makes it all better.

The details:

During the last night of the school trip to Fall Creek Falls, a state park about 130 miles southeast of Nashville, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose.

The students were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, said 11-year-old Shay Naylor.

"I was like, 'Oh My God,' " Shay said Saturday. "At first I thought I was going to die. We flipped out. (A teacher) told us, 'We just got a call that there's been a random shooting.' I was freaked out. I thought it was serious."

A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on locked door and pretended to be suspicious subject....

"The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them," said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.

I can understand one teacher thinking this was a good idea. It's hard for me to comprehend how all the teachers on the trip came to that conclusion.

The best part is that by crying wolf -- especially the "this is not a drill" part -- the teachers have pretty much ensured that in the event of a real emergency, some students will simply disbelieve their warnings and disregard their instructions. Great work.

One caveat: Almost all of the details in the story come from kids (who aren't necessarily the most reliable witnesses) and their parents (who weren't there). The school is investigating, and perhaps a different picture will emerge. But I don't imagine it will be substantially different. The kids were terrified, that seems clear. Whatever happened, it was misguided at best and downright mean at worst.

education, politics, midtopia

Student, school district reach settlement over proselytizing

The saga of Kearny high school student Matthew LaClair is over for now.

The Kearny Board of Education in New Jersey and the parents of Matthew LaClair, a 17-year-old junior at Kearny High School, settled their dispute on Tuesday night about a teacher who proselytized in class.

The settlement will include training for teachers and students about the separation of church and state and a public statement by the board praising Matthew for bringing the matter to its attention.

The training was already in the works, so mostly what happened here is the district agreed to recognize Matthew's actions as proper, not troublemaking. Which you'd think would be obvious, but bureaucracies act in reflexively self-protective ways sometimes.

So another educational kerfuffle appears to be over. Or is it? There is at least one loose end still hanging:

The settlement does not address the status of Mr. Paszkiewicz, 39, who has remained a history teacher at the high school. Mr. Paszkiewicz, who is also a Baptist youth pastor, had his classes switched in the middle of the school year so as not to have Matthew as a student.

Paszkiewicz's lawyer, commenting on the settlement, said, "there are people who think my client is the victim." In addition, it's not clear if the school's "no recording" rule remains in effect. So perhaps there's another chapter or two yet to come. But for now, common sense has prevailed.

religion, education, New Jersey, politics, midtopia

MIT dean resigns over fake credentials

Her name is Marilee Jones, and she's dean of admissions. She's been there for 28 years.

“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to M.I.T. 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my résumé when I applied for my current job or at any time since,” Ms. Jones said in a statement posted on the institute’s Web site. “I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the M.I.T. community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”

Ms. Jones, 55, originally from Albany, had on various occasions represented herself as having degrees from three upstate New York institutions: Albany Medical College, Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In fact, she had no degrees from any of those places, or anywhere else, M.I.T. officials said.

A spokesman for Rensselaer said Ms. Jones had not graduated there, though she did attend as a part-time nonmatriculated student during the 1974-75 school year. The other colleges said they had no record of her.

Okay, faking credentials is wrong. But is a mistake made as a young woman 28 years ago -- and not corrected since -- worth a resignation? A major concern in such cases is that the person is unqualified for the job, but that is clearly not the case here: Jones had been doing the job for years, and earned rave reviews for her work. She has even become a celebrity for her book and speeches on the admissions process.

It's also unclear if she was ever required to update those fake credentials, considering she has spent her entire career in the admissions office, rising steadily through the ranks. In such cases, hiring decisions are rarely based on a resume; it's based on personal knowledge of the applicant.

MIT says the issue is integrity, and I understand that. But it's a tragedy that a well-liked, highly competent employee should lose everything because of a youthful transgression that, once made, became too costly to own up to. It's a weird situation, where Jones' actions were plainly wrong, but nevertheless everyone would be better off if this had never come to light.

Maybe MIT is right, and they had to fire her. But while it might be fair, it doesn't feel like justice. Maybe there was room to find forgiveness for her based on her entire career, instead of reducing that career to the lie that began it.

ethics, Marilee Jones, MIT, politics, midtopia

Head-scratcher roundup

Three stories that explore the boundary between what's reasonable and what's not, what's criminal and what's not, and what's ethical and what's not.

What's reasonable?
A California school district has taken to billing parents who take their kids out of school for nonmedical reasons -- like a family ski trip. The price? $36.13 for each day missed. The reason? State aid is calculated based on daily attendance. So that's how much the district figures it loses when a kid goes absent. It's not really a bill -- parents aren't required to pay -- but some parents pay up either voluntarily or because they think it's a bill.

What's criminal?
Two Texas men were found guilty of mailing an obscene video. The video found to be obscene showed a woman being pierced with needles, but no sex. Meanwhile, the same jury said a rape video wasn't obscene -- even though the video had been deemed obscene in a 2003 trial. A third video featuring urination and defecation was also deemed unobscene.

What's ethical?
South Carolina is considering a bill that would let inmates cut their sentence by cutting out a kidney. Voluntary organ and tissue donations could shave as much as 180 days off of a jail term. While we're talking voluntary donations -- unlike, say, in China, where prisoners have been executed so the state could harvest their organs -- there's a question of whether prison is a coercive environment and whether prisoners fully understand what they're agreeing to. In addition, there's a legal hurdle: a federal law prohibiting organ donors from getting paid in any way for the donation.

All three situations raise interesting questions without any clear, easy answer. My initial reactions:

1. Parents can take their kids out of school if they want to, and a trip to Hawaii is arguably at least as educational as a week of school. I don't have a problem with the school educating parents about the importance of attendance and the costs of truancy, but the billing thing seems a little over the top.

2. I guess we'd have to see the videos in question (no thanks), but I have a hard time understanding how a video that shows no sex can be considered obscene, while the other two are not. Disgusting? Yes. Illegal? Why? At the very least we have a vague and muddy legal standard -- meaning the definition of what's illegal could vary by day and by jury. That's no way to run a legal system.

3. I'd be very, very wary of taking this step. I don't have a problem in principle with compensating donors. The problems are all practical. It only works if the entire transaction is fully transparent, and everyone is fully informed and truly a volunteer. The possibilities of abuse are high. And it exploits a vulnerable population. It's one thing to donate a kidney or bone marrow, even though both operations have their risks. What about muscle tissue or nerves or things like that? Suddenly we're in a grey area where we're mildly crippling prisoners. Do we really want people to start thinking about what body part they're willing to trade for freedom?

education, obscenity, civil liberties, politics, midtopia

Right-wing silliness, continued

More "teachers are terrorists" rhetoric, this time from Neal Boortz and Sean Hannity.

I get Boortz's point, and I agree that the NEA can be part of the problem in some places. I also agree that we should be worrying relatively more about education than about terrorism. But "worse than Al Qaeda?" Sheesh.

education, politics, midtopia

First step, get rid of the witnesses

Back in December, I wrote about a New Jersey student who recorded his history teacher engaging in lengthy religious harangues. I'll repost part of that story here:

Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.

"If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong," Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. "He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he's saying, 'Please, accept me, believe.' If you reject that, you belong in hell."

Classy, no?

After hearing one such harangue, one of his students, Matthew LaClair, tape-recorded eight subsequent classes, then complained to the school district.

At the time, the district said they had disciplined Paszkiewicz, but declined to say how. Now the other shoe has dropped.

After a public school teacher was recorded telling students they belonged in hell if they did not accept Jesus as their savior, the school board has banned taping in class without an instructor’s permission, and has added training for teachers on the legal requirements for separating church and state.

Training? Fine. But banning the tape-recording of classes? Besides obstructing learning -- some students record their classes to aid in their studying -- it seems an odd thing to do after a recording documented a problem that needed to be addressed.

The school board's stated rationale is privacy:

After several students complained to the school board that their voices had been broadcast on the Internet and on television news programs without their consent, the board adopted a policy in mid-January that requires students to request permission from an instructor to record or videotape a class.

Beyond the question of whether anyone has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a classroom (answer: probably not), the problem would seem to be with the act of broadcasting, not the act of recording. So the school board's ban seems unnecessarily broad -- and raises the question of whether they simply want to avoid any more embarassing revelations.

Especially because whatever disciplinary action they took apparently didn't work:

Meanwhile, Matthew said that Mr. Paszkiewicz recently told the class that scientists who spoke about the danger of global warming were using tactics like those Hitler used, by repeating a lie often enough that people come to believe it.

Context is everything here. Schools are supposed to be about intellectual inquiry, which can include lively debate on controversial topics. And at least this isn't religious proselyzation. But it's difficult on the surface to see what relevance global warming has to American history, Paszkiewicz's assigned subject.

That's not necessarily a problem; off-topic discussions should be allowable. So if this was an open debate, fine; if it was a teacher subjecting his students to a political diatribe, it's a problem. For my money, it's difficult to imagine a teacher legitimately invoking Hitler in such a discussion.

It's up to the school district how they want to handle the teacher. But banning recording devices strikes me as a poor decision intended more to shield the district from scrutiny than to protect legitimate privacy concerns.

education, politics, midtopia

Evangelism in the classroom

Here's a good example of why restrictions on religious speech in the classroom are necessary.

Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.

Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.

“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”

He also apparently told a Muslim girl that she was going to hell, although the story is unclear on that detail.

I'm not sure whether to be cheered by this:

Even some legal organizations that often champion the expression of religious beliefs are hesitant to support Mr. Paszkiewicz.

“It’s proselytizing, and the courts have been pretty clear you can’t do that,” said John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, a group that provides legal services in religious freedom cases. “You can’t step across the line and proselytize, and that’s what he’s done here.”

Or discouraged by this:

In this tale of the teacher who preached in class and the pupil he offended, students and the larger community have mostly lined up with Mr. Paszkiewicz, not with Matthew, who has received a death threat handled by the police, as well as critical comments from classmates.

Greice Coelho, who took Mr. Paszkiewicz’s class and is a member of his youth group, said in a letter to The Observer, the local weekly newspaper, that Matthew was “ignoring the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gives every citizen the freedom of religion.” Some anonymous posters on the town’s electronic bulletin board, Kearnyontheweb.com, called for Matthew’s suspension.

On the sidewalks outside the high school, which has 1,750 students, many agreed with 15-year-old Kyle Durkin, who said, “I’m on the teacher’s side all the way.”

Paszkiewicz is by all accounts a good teacher. But using his official capacity to proselytize his students in a history class is out of bounds. He has a First Amendment right to speak, which is why he isn't going to jail; that does not make such speech appropriate, however, nor protect him from disciplinary action by his employer.

education, religion, politics, midtopia

The educated class

When our children were little, their grandparents really liked talking "baby talk" to them. I'd watch as supposedly intelligent adults spent hours talking nonsense to unresponsive infants. both baby and adult seemed to enjoy it.

I hated it.

Why? Because my wife and I were convinced that it stunted brain development. Because of that, and because we had no desire to turn our own brains to mush by babbling like idiots, we always talked conversationally to our children from the day they were born. Sure, for the first year it was more of a monologue than a dialogue, but that was fine. We got used to speaking to them like they were adults.

We felt strongly enough about this that we eventually asked the grandparents to stop with the babbling. They thought we were killjoys, but they complied.

Vindication is oh-so-sweet. Not only were we right, but we were a living example of why there's an enduring achievement gap in this country.

This according to the New York Times, which hides its best stuff behind the Times Select wall. In an article in the Nov. 26 magazine, writer Paul Tough explores the challenges facing the No Child Left Behind act. After noting that black children are three times more likely to grow up in poverty than white children, he writes, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley decided to conduct an in-depth study of 42 families. What they found should surprise people only in its scope.

Vocabulary growth differed sharply by class.... By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children's I.Q.'s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

... By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child's home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child's vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 ''utterances'' -- anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy -- to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.

What's more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of ''discouragements'' a child heard -- prohibitions and words of disapproval -- compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another -- all of which stimulated intellectual development.

In other words, talk to your kids like they're adults, and they will rise to the challenge. Talk to them like they're servants to be ordered around (or worse yet, don't talk to them much at all) and they will stagnate.

So why do blacks do worse than whites on standardized tests? Trick question, because it's the wrong question. There is a gap in education, but it's not racial. Instead, race has become a misleading proxy for class.

Tough identifies other class-related differences. Poor kids tend to be taught not to question authority, for example, while middle-class kids grow up engaging in back-and-forth conversation and negotiation with their parents -- which is a lot more work for the parent, but ends up producing kids with more self-confidence, who expect their concerns to be taken seriously.

The article goes on to discuss what that means for equalizing academic performance, and it's not pretty: intensive (and expensive) intervention in order to compensate for the shortcomings at home.

But interesting as that is, it's not the point of this post. I'm going to use the article as a springboard to make two related points:

RACE IS OFTEN IRRELEVANT
It's time to look very hard at how race is viewed in our society, because education is not the only place where race is used as a proxy for other issues, with the result that actual causes (and thus actual solutions) are overlooked.

The most controversial way race is accounted for is in college admission and hiring, where schools or companies apply racial preferences as a way to increase minority representation. Laudable as that goal is, it isn't a long-term solution.

Because affirmative action is itself discrimination, it's only legitimate as a way to directly repair damage done by previous discrimination. It would have been unfair, upon repeal of Jim Crow laws, to simply say to blacks "okay, compete." Some degree of remediation was needed to level the playing field and make up for decades of discrimination. But such reverse discrimination must be narrowly tailored and carefully monitored, and ended as soon as the major effects of prior discrimination have been ameliorated. Which requires that objective standards be developed to decide when that has occurred, and that we are careful to separate the effects of racism from other, non-race-based effects for which affirmative action is not the solution.

I'm not saying affirmative-action should be ended; I'm saying it's way past time we had a conversation based around the question "when has the debt been paid, and how will we tell?" The Times article notes that black achievement soared between 1960 and the late 1980s, and then stalled. A reasonable explanation for that might be that by the late 1980s the major effects of racism had been accounted for, and after that the continued focus on race not only did increasingly little good but may have done active harm by diverting attention from underlying causes. It bears looking at.

BARRIERS ARE REAL
While race may not be the barrier it once was, barriers do exist. The biggest barrier, I believe, is class. We have a good degree of social mobility in this country, but the mythical Horatio Alger model simply doesn't work as social policy. From their home environment to the school they attend to the expectations ingrained in them from the day they are born, children from poor families must contend with things that most middle-class children do not.

My wife was raised in a blue-collar household. When she inquired about going to college (an ambition that itself set her apart from many of her peers), her parents didn't encourage her. Their response was "why do you want to do that?" and "don't expect us to pay for it." She was left entirely on her own to find the money, time and initiative to enroll in community college, then transfer to a four-year university. She worked full-time during her entire college career.

My dad has a PhD and my mom has a master's. From early in my childhood I understood that I was expected to go to college. Schoolwork was a priority. Money wasn't a problem; if I hadn't landed an ROTC scholarship, my parents would have paid for everything. Because I didn't have to work, I had plenty of time to study (I didn't, as a rule; but I could have....).

If our roles were reversed, would I have made it to college? Would I have made it through college while working full time? It's impossible to say. But in many situations, the answer would be "no".

And that's the key point. Is it possible to rise above adversity and succeed without help? Of course. But social policy shouldn't be based on the extraordinary exceptions, however convenient that may be for the comfortable.

So the challenge before us is this: identify the true barriers to achievement, and develop policies to address them. I suspect that such an approach would see racial preferences wither and die, while other measures -- primarily, class -- step up to replace them. Extra help for poor students would both address the real cause of disparity and, as a pleasant side effect, increase minority representation and performance.

And our kids? Big vocabularies. Further, one thing we discovered is that to them a concept is a concept. "Tree" is a concept, but so is "black hole." As long as both are explainable, one isn't drastically more intimidating or difficult to grasp than the other. Children teach themselves to talk; they're wired to assemble seemingly unrelated pieces into a coherent whole with minimal clues. If you don't tell them it's complicated (and thus encourage them to give up), more often than not they'll surprise you with their depth of understanding.

Every child deserves that chance.

affirmative action, education, race, politics, midtopia

Discriminating against poor students?

A California judge has suspended a statewide exam that high school students must pass to receive their diploma.

Today's Star Tribune had a brief on it, mentioning that the judge concluded the exam discriminated against "poor students" and those with limited English skills.

My first reaction was "Poor students? Isn't that the point of such an exam, to weed out the bad students?"

But upon further research, the judge meant students who are economically poor. And the argument there is an interesting one.

The lawsuit claimed that many students have not had the opportunity to learn the material on the exit exam because they went to substandard schools with unqualified teachers, insufficient textbooks and squalid conditions.

Freedman agreed, saying, "Students in economically challenged communities have not had an equal opportunity to learn the materials tested."

Freedman wrote in his opinion that the "record is replete" with evidence of California's underfunded schools and said his decision applies to students statewide.

Few people would disagree that students should graduate with certain basic skills. And a graduation exam is a good way to test whether they have those skills.

But as this lawsuit highlights, if a student has not acquired those skills, whose fault is it: the student's or the school system's? Who do you punish, the student or the school?

On the other hand, if you can get a diploma without learning those basic skills, what value does the diploma have?

It might come down to cases. But it seems to me the problem can be solved by focusing on the goal: turning out an educated populace.

If a student fails the exam, they don't get a diploma: they get shunted into a high-quality, well-funded remedial program that will bring their skills up so that they *can* pass the exam.

Meanwhile, if a school has a large percentage of students failing to pass the exam, it gets scrutinized. If the problem is funding, it gets more resources. If the problem is staff competence, it gets a housecleaning. If the problem is simply a highly challenged student body -- poor, large number of non-English speakers, unstable homes -- it gets something tailored to that.

Focus on the goal: A diploma should mean something, and if students are failing to learn we should place the blame -- and the resources -- where it belongs.

education, California, politics, midtopia

Military recruiters chased off campus

Some people just don't get it.

Four military recruiters hastily fled a job fair Tuesday morning at UC Santa Cruz after a raucous crowd of student protesters blocked an entrance to the building where the Army and National Guard had set up information tables.

Members of Students Against War, who organized the counter-recruiting protest, loudly chanted "Don't come back. Don't come back" as the recruiters left the hilltop campus, escorted by several university police officers.

For a detailed discussion of why everyone, including antiwar activists, should want the military recruiting on campus, see here. It's in everyone's best interest.

As for this specific case, I oppose the war in Iraq. But these students have made the mistake of confusing the war with the warrior.

"We're saying it's not OK to recruit on high school campuses, it's not OK to recruit on university campuses,'' Marla Zubel, a UC Santa Cruz senior and member of Students Against War, said. "In order to stop the war, you have to make it more difficult to wage war."

Nonsense. The military is a tool. If you object to the way it is used, take it up with the tool user. Don't damage the tool so it can't be used at all. I'm sure the survivors of the Asian tsunami were glad we had a globe-spanning military, as were the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. As were the residents of Kosovo.

Moreover, the students are trampling on the First Amendment rights of the recruiters and students interested in a military career.

But at least one student, Cody James, said he was disappointed that he couldn't get in to speak with the military personnel.

"It's frustrating,'' said James, a senior majoring in politics. "I'm not a Republican. I'm not a conservative. I don't support the war. It's about finding a career."

The way to counter speech you don't like is with persuasive arguments, not by drowning it out. Don't like the war? Protest the war. But don't deny other citizens their rights, and don't turn everyone in a uniform into scapegoats.

Students Against War, protest, campus, military, recruiters, politics, midtopia

Everyone should want the military on campus

The Supreme Court has ruled that colleges that accept federal money must allow military recruiters on campus. The case involved some law schools who had banned the recruiters because the military's policy on homosexuals violates the schools' own policies.

Justices rejected a free-speech challenge from law schools and their professors who claimed they should not be forced to associate with military recruiters or promote their campus appearances.

The ruling was unanimous, so there's not a lot of room for interpretation: if you want federal money, military recruiters come with it.

I sympathize with the schools to some extent. There's a fairness issue: Why should the military be exempt from rules that apply to every other recruiter or company that has access to a given school? In addition, there's the appearance of condoning discrimination.

But I bring another perspective to the case, having been commissioned through ROTC and witnessed the same debate and protests while I was in college in the late 1980s at the University of Minnesota.

First, let me be clear: I think the military's policy on gays is asinine, the discrimination both unfounded and unnecessary. The military has plenty of rules on conduct and fraternization that would maintain discipline even if soldiers were openly gay, just as they manage to maintain discipline in a military where heterosexual men and women serve alongside each other. And in an era when the military is having difficulty meeting recruiting goals, turning away thousands of otherwise qualified (in some cases, highly qualified) soldiers makes no sense from a national-security standpoint.

The problem, as I see it, is one of relative weight. Military access to college campuses is simply too important to be derailed by the military's gay policy. Protest? Fine. Work to change minds? Fine. Declare and demonstrate support for military gays? Of course. But banning ROTC and recruiters goes too far, doing real damage to our security and further isolating the military from mainstream society.

When I was in the military, 70 percent of officers received their commissions through ROTC -- including some of the brightest and best-educated soldiers. Simply put, that is an irreplaceable source of military leaders. If we ban ROTC and recruiters, we cripple the future of the military -- and thus our security.

A second point that opponents should consider is a bit more subversive. Soldiers recruited from college campuses tend to have a broader education and life exposure than those who are educated in the hothouses of service academies and military schools. They bring that with them into the military, forming the main part of what might be considered the "liberal" wing of the military. They help ensure that mainstream American values continue to be represented in military culture.

This is crucial, coming as it does at a time when fewer and fewer people know someone who is in the military. If military culture grows too separated from civilian culture we risk a "Prussification" of the military: turning it into an insular society led by elites that have little in common with the people whom they ostensibly serve. That would be a disaster on many levels.

The military must be given access to college students both to maintain our physical security and to save the military from itself.

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