In 2013, on the [New York] state exams that gauge proficiency in math and English, Success Academy schools far outscored not only the city’s regular public schools but also its most highly regarded charters, networks like Achievement First, KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program) and Uncommon Schools. At one of [Eva] Moskowitz’s Harlem academies, the fifth graders surpassed all other public schools in the state in math, even their counterparts in the whitest and richest suburbs, Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor...It might seem as if any New York mayor would be thrilled to have thousands of the city’s most underprivileged children educated so well. But during Bill de Blasio’s campaign last year and then as he claimed City Hall, he and Moskowitz took each other on in a ferocious political battle...For many critics, performance is almost beside the point. To [Diane] Ravitch [New York University professor and education historian], the [charter school] movement itself is destructive; “it undermines the public’s commitment to public education.”...What these philanthropists are all about, Ravitch says, is making themselves feel good while using charters as a halfway step in a covert effort to pull the country toward the privatization of education.

A terrific New York Times article on the battle between New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and charter school network leader Eva Moskowitz.
 
The data-driven accountability approach (read: a lot classroom testing) that charter schools emphasize removes the glossy image around child learning and development. And the growth of charter schools, that use public funds but operate under private authority, competes with the attractive national commitment to mandatory public education. However, that image of promising universal opportunities was actually tainted ages ago when it became clear that public schools were often not successfully educating the country's poor children. The fact that this network of charter schools is able to overturn the giant table of privilege and poverty is evidence of the inexcusable necessity of reform.

Learning is complicated and school reform is hard to do. And my experience has mostly been through my advisor, who mines global nooks and crannies for the specific things that improve learning in poor countries (which is enormously different from the US context).  In other words, I am playing outside my sandbox here. But if a school or charter network is actually improving learning outcomes and closing educational disparities, I think its worth putting Ravich's (and de Blasio's) issue with the principle of charter schools aside. These schools do privatize education to some degree (and certainly introduce competition), but failing to reform for the sake of a national vision is at the expense of too many children. If this network of charter schools is actually working, I say: don't fix it, de Blasio. 

In other news, Maskowitz's advocacy group, Families for Excellent Schools, sounds about as mysterious and ominous as a Koch brothers' super-PAC.

1. It turns out that contract farming shortens the duration of periods of hunger during the dry season (in addition to increasing income) for smallholder farmers in Madagascar. Is contract farming specific to developing countries? Nope; Tyson's popularized it in the chicken market in 1947. Don Tyson developed industrial chicken production (and contributed to the oligopoly of the chicken market) through a high-tech form of sharecropping.

2. Women in academia are less likely to collaborate with junior colleagues. Keep in mind that the sample size is 55 female faculty members in this study. That is less than the number of female faculty members in the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota.

3. How (the demand for) toilet paper (and other types of sanitation) explain (wealth in) the world

4. Images from Crimea.

Marc Bellemare, a fantastic new faculty addition to my department at the university wrote a couple of weeks ago about the things you can't get out of a MOOC (sidebar: it is awesome to have a professor in my department who doesn't think blogging is a waste of time).

He first discusses Pritchett's approach to education as a means of enforcing social norms, values and behaviors for its citizens. To me (as a daughter of an educator), this sounded wacko. But I think Pritchett explains it best in this Cambridge Nights interview. Right around minute 5:20.

As nation states strove to legitimate the rule... one of the ways [they did this] was through control of the socialization of the youth. Governments said: "Ok, kids are going to get educated, if we don't control the education, who knows what they're gonna learn vis-a-vis affiliation of the nation state, affiliation to particular ideologies. So it was really the ideology of affiliation of nation states combined with parental demand around their children's economic futures that led to more schooling and that schooling being controlled by the state.

This perspective doesn't solve the problem that Massive Open Online Courses might leave me unemployed in the future, but its something to keep in mind when we talk about education policy.

Meanwhile, my parents, in concern for their daughters possible future unemployment (economists read: parental demand around their children's economic future), brought a New Yorker Magazine all the way to Tanzania. In the May issue was an elaborate, New Yorker style, ten-page article about MOOCs.  Good thing they haven't seen this visual about my low prospects on the job market (until now: hi M&D!).

Bellemare discusses the social capital students earn in college, learning to work together with young people from various backgrounds, especially in American college students where students tend to live on campus all together. While I completely agree with this assessment of social benefits, I'm skewed with privilege because I attended a small liberal arts college that prided itself with academic community, cultural diversity and intimate brochure-photo gatherings over a shared text book on the pristine lawn. But, according to the New Yorker, my experience is not the reality:

When people refer to “higher education” in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It’s made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you’ll find a Byronic young man reading “Cartesian Meditations” on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder.... Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind. But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills.... This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.

For these students, at the eighty percent of colleges in the states, higher education is about simple cost-benefit analysis. It's about finding short-term child care and rounding up enough cash so you can finish that certificate in dental assistance or officially learn to operate the infrared spectrometer.

From a (hopefully) future faculty perspective, the impending imposition of MOOCs is ominous.  I can only hope that I will be lucky enough to become employed at an institution like Amherst, where the faculty voted against joining a MOOC program, and the administration and endowment were privileged enough to support that decision.

Hat tips: Mom and Dad.

A great article from Slate on charter schools and a thought-provoking response from an English teacher at a  Chicago charter school:

The way we have to teach in charters, for the most part, is skill based...This means that in a "writing" class, I am basically teaching basic grammar and how to approach the English section of a standardized test. With all of the "skills" that I have to teach and assess in a year there is barely time to teach things that I think would actually help get kids interested in writing, things like figurative language and creative writing.

Some people, and I think I mostly agree with them, think that this inherently shows the inequality of the education system. For instance, you would never hear an argument that students at New Trier need more "skill based" instruction because it is assumed that students who attend New Trier already have those skills when they enter the school.

We have also noticed with our students that we shelter them so much, and make them adhere to such rigorous standards, that they often struggle once they leave the charter model (even on full ride scholarships to four-year colleges). They have a hard time developing ideas on their own and being self-disciplined without all of the structures we have in place to try to teach them to be self-disciplined. My school is now trying to incorporate teaching (and assessing, naturally) character strengths to students to try to combat this problem. Sigh. I don't know what the answer is...

Hat tips: JMM & NAJ