It’s no secret that if you don’t toe the philosophical line in many teacher education programs, you encounter hindrances that range from brick walls to ambushes to professional punji pits. Sometimes it’s the administration; sometimes professors; sometimes peers. And sometimes all three work together to make sure you get the message that freedom of thought is fine – as long as you think the same way as the School of Education.

It plays hell with one’s career in education.

Occasionally we hear about a student whose worldview isn’t as malleable as the EduWeenies would like.

Michele Kerr is a 40-something who applied to Stanford University’s Teacher Education Program and was admitted. After letting it be known that she wasn’t on board with every element of the Program’s ‘social justice’ tenets, the problems quickly mounted. She was threatened with having her offer of admission revoked, including planning legal action to see that through. She was railroaded into being an enemy of the program, with administrators citing that students even felt uncomfortable sitting near her in classes because of her anti-progressive stances. The final straw was when the Program demanded a login and password for the blog on which she wrote anonymously about her challenges both with the program and the school environment in which she was training.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education [FIRE] – a champion of freedom in academia – stepped in. As they have so many times, they set the offenders straight and Kerr was guaranteed fair treatment. Adam Kissel of FIRE summarized the issue:

“Like STEP, too many education programs today are teaching by words and deeds that only one orthodoxy or ideology is acceptable in future teachers,” Kissel said. “This refusal to accept alternative views is no way to prepare teachers to cultivate effective citizens in our democracy. Fortunately, senior administrators stepped in to set things right for Michele Kerr.”

You can read FIRE’s press release about the case: Victory for Freedom of Speech at Stanford: Student Graduates Despite Ed School Efforts to Revoke Admission, Investigate Private Blog, and Declare Student Unfit for Teaching.

That an outfit even has to investigate an issue warranting a title like that should make you balk – and it’s more common than you think.

The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews should also be praised for swallowing that most bitter pill and highlighting Kerr’s case even though he’s on a different philosophical track. He gives a well-detailed account of Kerr’s saga in “They Messed With the Wrong Blogger.”

Too few people, both inside and outside of the education game, understand how common this is – and how pervasive social justice theories are in schools of education. But we’re not just talking about pointy-headed academics who regard 1968 as the high-water mark of American life; it shows up in everyday classes, too.

You know, like “frequently” discussing sexuality in your kid’s geometry/trigonometry class.

Taica Hsu is a 2006 alumnus of STEP. He teaches math at Mission High School, part of the San Francisco Unified School District, in the city’s Mission District. The setting:

“Mission High School has the distinction of being the first comprehensive high school in San Francisco and the first such school west of the Rocky Mountains. The first building was formally dedicated in 1897. Mission High School is proud of its rich history and we have our very own museum on campus which highlights the evolution of Mission High over the past 100+ years. Located in the heart of the Mission District in San Francisco, Mission High is proud of its ethnic diversity and we try to instill positive social values, acceptance and tolerance in our students.”

And “in [Hsu's] world, trigonometry points to justice.”

A MissionLoc@l article about Hsu’s classroom offers an inside view into how STEP students/teachers – and those in similar programs – approach education:

“On one wall, of his purple-painted classroom, posters proclaim the ills of war and social stratification. On another, algebra students’ projects statistically break down the injustices of homeless, drugs and teen pregnancy.

“My ultimate goal is to make students aware of the inequities in society,” he says. “I want to make them want to change their place in society.””

I’d rather they just learned math, but such trivialities are increasingly displaced by the pet projects of the education game’s social engineers.

“And in his class, where a rainbow flag hangs in the back of the room and the teacher wears a “No on 8? pin more than a week after the measure has passed, sexuality also comes up.

Gilberto [a student] had never met an openly-gay person before coming to Hsu’s class, he says. He thought homosexuality was “weird,” and he balked at the idea of having Hsu as geometry teacher.”

I’m pleased that Gilberto is more accepting and tolerant than he was on day 1 – after all, he’ll encounter people of all sorts throughout the course of his life. But Hsu’s efforts impinge on the authority of parents to address these issues at home. Simply put, I’d rather talk to my child about the merits and drawbacks of Prop 8 than have it woven into a lesson about trigonometric proofs.

Extracurricular clubs and events provide opportunities for students to go beyond rigid academic disciplines – and for Hsu to extend a social justice program that includes fostering a ‘them vs. us’ strain of victimization:

““He knows what it’s like to be discriminated against, just like us,” Gilberto says, with “us” meaning all undocumented immigrants. “He relates to us. He understands. So even though it doesn’t look like it, we both have something in common.”

Discrimination is everywhere – perhaps Mr. Hsu would allow me to come in and talk to the kids about Southwest London’s contempt for American, George W. Bush-supporting Republicans who enjoy country music and operate with a decidedly-rural panache?

It’s not all serious, thoughtful curriculum, though – sometimes he and the kids just dress up in drag:

“Hsu encourages awareness of queer issues on campus. He is the faculty sponsor of the gay-straight alliance, which hosts a drag show to honor the Day of Silence in the spring.”"

Surely Mission High School has so much time and so many resources for these forays because they’ve outperformed every other school in the SFUSD, routinely topping the charts in academic performance?

No. Mission High is one of the lowest-performing schools in the District, having received a rating of 1 out of 10 – with 1 being the lowest possible score – in the 2008 Academic Performance Index Report from the California Department of Education. The June Jordan School for Equity competes with Mission High for that last rung on the SFUSD ladder. And the problem isn’t that Mission High has a large population of non-native English speakers and English Language Learners [ELL] – Moscone Elementary, which, according to Mission Loc@l, has a majority population of ELLs, scored a 9 out of 10.

It isn’t necessarily Hsu’s fault – we have no idea how his efforts contribute to those scores. What we do know is that STEP and its graduates would do well to re-evaluate their priorities if they want to institute the fairness and commitment to academic achievement that they purport to uphold.

Or they can marginalize the Michele Kerrs of the education world, mix homosexual marriage rights with Euclidean geometry, dress in drag and retreat from abysmal test scores. Our students won’t be prepared for college, but at least they’ll be ready for the Folsom Street Fair.

And if you’re new to Twitter or aren’t sure how to get started, check out TwiTip’s 10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners. Give it a whirl!

Now for the Great Links… and some real stinkers that also deserve attention.

Via EIA, Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Rhee – two peas in a pod? Believe it or not, yes. I suppose even Sullivan gets to be sensible every once in a while. Blind squirrel, broken clock, etc. etc.

There aren’t too many men teaching K-12, reports Eduflack. In MA, fewer than 25% of K-12 teachers are men. And it’s everywhere, too – in April 2007 I wrote a post about male elementary teachers in NY dropping to 9%, a 40-year low. Some folks like MenTeach have been trying to raise awareness for a while now. Check them out and subscribe.

Ted Tedesco of Woodbury, Vermont is a hero. He’s worked to restore the Pledge of Allegiance in that small school district. The admins’ solution to his request is ridiculous, but at least everyone sees it. That, and a generation of kids in Woodbury knows how important it is to defend their country and their culture. As I wrote in the comments of the Core Knowledge post:

“A few months ago I attended a reunion banquet for a tiny, rural high school that closed shop during the consolidation efforts of the 1950s. Their meeting included the Pledge of Allegiance. When the Pledge came up in the agenda, all of the ~100 in attendance rose – and some with great difficulty, as they were in their 80s and 90s – to recite it.”

You know where I stand on this issue, and there’s a reason why I call the Green Mountain State “The People’s Republic of Vermont.” [Sorry, Jessie.]

Across the pond, here’s why I like the Tories. They’ve got a plan to re-introduce a bit of rigor to GCSEs and A-levels. The GCSEs in particular have been gutted – remember this physics teacher begging the government via petition to return mathematical rigor to secondary physics?

“Hot Boys”? I’d prefer that EdSector’s Quick and the Ed bloggers had a bit more self-respect. I already have trouble taking them seriously – these post titles don’t help.

Schools suing bloggers? You betcha. PRO on HCPS links to a libel case against an unhappy parent. Well, if “libel” means “a school district seething when held accountable by the public.” Guess who won? [UPDATE: PRO on HCPS gives us a better link for schools suing bloggers.]

Litigation is expensive when you’re trying to fire a teacher, administrator or school employee. In nearby Utica, NY, Craig Fehlhaber’s hearings have cost the Utica City Schools $250,000 – and counting. If Fehlhaber wins, the district will likely have to reimburse his attorney’s fees as well. We went through the same process in Cooperstown several years ago. If you ever wondered why schools tend not to dismiss bad employees, now you’ve got one reason.

Dave at ‘Friends of Dave’ – a very sharp blog, subscribe with all deliberate speed – highlights some recent irony in California. The California Association of School Business Officers have a conference at which they’ll discuss our tough economic times and how their districts can cope. And that conference is at a hotel/spa/golf course in Newport Beach. Dave has a sensible take on it all, but c’mon, CASBO. He says, “It is a bit ironic that the people who are typically the ones telling their co-workers that they can’t have an extra ream of paper are the ones having a really nice time at a Hotel and Spa on the beach.” Agreed.

Victory in Iraq Day – November 22, 2008. ZombieTime has declared 11/22/08 VI Day and I’m with him 100%. Read his post to see why it’s appropriate to declare VI Day and you’ll see why I support it, too.

“Building a GREAT teaching workforce,” described by American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence’s Dave Saba. Saba/ABCTE sing the praises – rightly – of a new report on the effectiveness of alternative certification programs.

[ Comic courtesy of Toothpaste for Dinner.]

Liam Goldrick at the Education Optimists gave the education portion of John McCain’s speech a yawn. After McCain said, to paraphrase, that we should encourage easier routes for talented professionals to enter teaching – and make that route out for bad teachers more quickly and easily navigated, too – Goldrick wrote:

“The education portion of McCain’s speech served up the same boring, rehashed Republicanism as the rest of his speech. Basically, it’s all about choice and competition–and firing bad teachers. You always need an enemy.”

Yes, yes, we’re all belligerent warmongers, we stomp on the throats of the poor [how do you think they get downtrodden?], etc. etc. I sense a little bias, but I digress.

He’s right that this is “rehashed,” though I didn’t consider it boring. We have to rehash problems when we’ve failed to implement effective solutions. I considered all the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk hoopla to be rehashing as well because we still face many of the same issues and we’ve failed to implement properly many potential fixes.

So, I like reading solid analyses/solutions for some of the problems with our teacher corps. Enter ABCTE’s Dave Saba with a post today called “Fixing Teacher Quality”:

“There are 3.2 million teachers. Jack Welch, the brilliant CEO of GE, made his managers rank all staff so that they knew the top 20%, middle 70% and the bottom 10%. The top 20% were fast tracked into leadership positions and the bottom 10% got fired.

We would have to fire 320,000 teachers per year. That would double the number of teachers we need to hire each year and since we can’t find enough to fill our positions now, we will never have enough if we start to really push an aggressive approach towards eliminating mediocre teaching.”

Common sense stuff. Whereas it would be nice to cull the herd and instantly improve quality, it just isn’t realistic. What can we do, then?

To solve teacher quality we need to do the following:

1. Fix recruitment – have enough candidates for each position so that the principal can hire the right teacher for his/her students – we need more routes to the classroom to increase the numbers
2. Be Selective – less than 40% of our ABCTE candidates make it through the program and we are starting to see great results from our teachers
3. Train principals in hiring – ensure they know how to match the teacher to the students
4. Develop great performance evaluations for teachers – outcomes and observations based and ensure the evaluation is more than once a year
5. Train principals on evaluations – ensure they know how to develop teachers
6. Develop truly great professional development for teachers – develop efficacy measure for the professional development to ensure it meets minimum standards
7. Train principals on how to assign prescriptive professional development from performance evaluations

Once that is in place, then you can start to move teachers who do not succeed with students out of the classroom. But we have a lot of work to do learning to walk before we can start running.

I’d add two more to that list:

8. Encourage the most talented high school and undergraduate students to enter teaching. Right now, they just aren’t interested.

9. Increase standards for content knowledge in education schools. We need our teachers to know math and English, at the very least, to a reasonably high degree.

Read on, lest ye think I’m a xenophobe.

The greatest moment in sports history – professional, amateur, Olympic, any – was the 1980 US Olympic Hockey team’s Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid. Coach Herb Brooks assembled a team of college kids from the hockey capitals of the East and Midwest. Then he trained them to defeat the Soviet hockey machine, itself arguably the greatest dynasty in sports history [sorry, Yankees].

But The Miracle, that singular story of David, Goliath and the American spirit, wasn’t for the gold medal. After defeating the Soviets, we weren’t even guaranteed any medal. We had to beat Finland in the next game.

At this point, all of the interviews, books, articles and clips are a big blur. I don’t know who said it – my memory tells me that it was fellow Terrier Mike Eruzione, though I might be wrong – but the Americans didn’t defeat the Soviets just to “lose to a bunch of friggin’ Finns” in the final game.

Herb Brooks, God rest his soul, and Eruzione would do well to steer clear of the medal count at The Education Olympics hosted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. 51 medals have been awarded so far, and with some countries not participating [China, India, etc.], the United States’ neck is unburdened by bling.

Finland leads the way with 14 medals; Hong Kong follows with 7, Estonia and New Zealand with 5. Even Liechtenstein and Slovenia have earned medals.

There are worse, more sinister countries to lose to – if we’ve got to lose the Education Olympics, I’m pleased that we’re losing to Finland.

But the truth is that 28 years after taking the gold in Lake Placid, we’re losing the Education Olympics to a bunch of friggin’ Finns – and I won’t pretend otherwise. American education needs a Herb Brooks, with some Mike Eruziones, Jim Craigs and Mark Johnsons, and we need them fast.

The title of this post is what it really boils down to – but there’s more to the story than apathy.

In “How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science,” Peter Wood argues that our dependence on foreign STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Math] students, including Bill Gates’ 2008 call for the extension of H-1B visas to these graduates, shows how poorly the United States develops its own STEMmies. Actually, we don’t develop too many – we just cross our fingers and hope that kids have their priorities straight and the resources they need:

“Success in the sciences unquestionably takes a lot of hard work, sustained over many years. Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed at the level where they can eventually pursue graduate degrees must have not only abundant intellectual talent but also a powerful interest in sticking to a long course of cumulative study. [...]

“It [contemporary American education] begins by treating children as psychologically fragile beings who will fail to learn — and worse, fail to develop as “whole persons” — if not constantly praised. The self-esteem movement may have its merits, but preparing students for arduous intellectual ascents aren’t among them. What the movement most commonly yields is a surfeit of college freshmen who “feel good” about themselves for no discernible reason and who grossly overrate their meager attainments.”

That isn’t terribly conducive to the study of science, math and its brethren. If you needed one line to sum up Wood’s argument, here it is:

“The intellectual lassitude we breed in students, their unearned and inflated self-confidence, undercuts both the self-discipline and the intellectual modesty that is needed for the apprentice years in the sciences.”

At PhiBetaCons, Mr. Leef beat me to a point Wood didn’t make:

“I think that a significant part of this problem is that to do science you need to be good at math. Sadly, as this recent NCTQ study found, math is often poorly taught in elementary schools because many of the teachers are weak in math themselves and ill-prepared to teach it.”

Not only are they ill-prepared to teach it, they don’t know it in the first place.

Elementary school teachers have a tenuous grasp of the most basic mathematics – and that isn’t an understatement.

Our elementary teachers score about 521 [out of 800] on the Quantitative section of the GRE, a subset of the test that examines algebra, geometry and basic statistical reasoning skills. A score of 520 is not only well below the national mean of 584; it’s around the 31st percentile of all test-takers. In other words, 7 out of 10 test-takers with undergraduate degrees score better on a basic math skills test than elementary teachers en route to graduate school [pages 13 and 18, available for download, 4.1mb Adobe PDF].

Our high school teachers fare little better. They pull in at 576 – about the 42nd percentile of all test-takers.

And these aren’t just statistics, they’re personified in communities everywhere. When I was in high school, I chose not to take AP Calculus because the teacher was such a useless dolt – he just plain didn’t know math [he still teaches at my alma mater, so if he's reading this, Hi!]. I waited and took calculus with the engineering students in my first semester of college.

K-12 teachers don’t know much about even the most foundational mathematics. That our schools don’t cultivate students interested in STEM careers shouldn’t surprise anyone.

From The Homeroom, the LA Times’ Southern CA Schools blog: The misnomer that is ‘teacher.’

One thing that education blogosphere is wonderful at is saying something and meaning nothing. Take, for example, this re-definition of ‘teacher’:

The problem with the label that educators have cornered themselves into is that it doesn’t provide a clear picture of what a teacher does. New teachers, student teachers and still developing teachers can teach until they are blue in the face and –- if they aren’t engaging their students –- not actually have a class of young people learning anything.

As a result, much of the beginning of the year, my classroom interaction with students is such that I try to make it clear to my students that we are a community of learners, committed toward common thematic and academic objectives. As such, I am aiding these students in their quest toward literacy and content proficiency.

Perhaps instead of framing the job as a “teacher” a new phrase would be more appropriate. I’m happy to hear your proposals. For now, I think I’ll try out “Learning Practitioner.”

… or you could stick with the unpretentious “teacher,” which works just fine. Relax, do your job, and the professional respect follows.

From InsideHigherEd.com: “The Innumeracy of Intellectuals.”

Professor Orzel, who blogs at Uncertain Principles, has a remarkable ability to restrain himself:

Ignorance of math can even be a source of a perverse sort of pride— the bit of the blog post that reminded me of this is a call-back to an earlier post in which he relates his troubles with math, and how he exploited a loophole in his college rules to graduate without passing algebra. To me that anecdote reads as more proud than shameful— less “I’m not good at math” and more “I’m clever enough to circumvent the rules.”

It’s not entirely without shame, of course.

Not without shame, indeed.

When I was in a Ph.D. program in the social sciences, I was floored by the innumeracy of my peers [and, at times, professors]. If I were a dean or provost, I’d expect that those to whom I awarded a doctorate would have a command of 10th grade math.

… and I’d be sorely disappointed.

From the Freedom of Information Committee Blog: “Cheap e-mail archiving software eliminates technical barriers to access.”

In some states – like New York and Florida – e-mail communications between public employees/servants are in the public domain. You can FOIL them because you’re entitled to them.

And if you ever request this information, you’ll likely get two reactions:

1. “What?” After which you explain that the information is public, and that you’d appreciate it in a timely fashion pursuant to the regulations in your State;

2. “What?” Followed by a litany of excuses, one of which is usually, “… but that’s too hard/costly to be practical.”

Sorry, public employees, but Waterford Technologies just eliminated your reliance on #2. For $99, a public institution can have unlimited licenses for e-mail archiving software.

#1, however, will still present itself nearly every time – such is life.

If your message fails, blame the medium – or otherwise go for semantics over substance.

That’s a fair charge for Jay Mathews’ latest WaPo-whine titled “Why I Am A TV Loser.”

You’ll remember that Mr. Mathews debated Two Million Minutes’ Executive Producer Bob Compton about a month ago. And if you’ve forgotten, or missed it the first time around, here’s a recap:

• Fisking Jay Mathews on the Global Economy and Education, Part 1

• Fisking Jay Mathews on the Global Economy and Education, Part 2: Analyzing Creativity

It’s apparently taken Mathews a good six weeks to get up the courage to seethe publicly.

There are two major issues here. The first is about his latest piece; the second is about the global economy/education. I think we’ve got to look at these one at a time.

From Mathews’ opening line, you’d think that he’d been shouted down by Malik Shabazz:

“Don’t ever go on CNBC to debate Bob Compton, one of America’s most energetic prophets of doom, without careful preparation and a willingness to be rude.”

One of the things that initially interested me in Compton’s film was that he wasn’t a “prophet of doom.” He and his associates don’t wear sandwich signs warning that the end is nigh, or that our traffic signs will be in Hindi in 10 years if we don’t shape up. Two Million Minutes is a sensible, realistic look at how we approach education in comparison to India and China. Reality, though, doesn’t get in Mathews’ way:

“I appeared with Compton on Erin Burnett’s show “Street Signs” in early June. He killed me. I thought we would have a scholarly discussion of American public schools. Were they, as Compton argues, losing out to the rising Indian and Chinese schools or were they, as I had written, needing help but unlikely to cause a collapse of the U.S. economy? I got a few words in occasionally, but Compton — whose enthusiasm I applaud, don’t get me wrong — interrupted, sideswiped and left me looking like I was incapable of completing a sentence.”

The tendentious implication that Compton’s contribution wasn’t “scholarly” aside, Mathews appears to have gotten his own television appearance wrong. Mathews was, however, “killed,” partly by his own sputtering ineptitude, partly by Compton’s spirited argument.

And really, Jay, if that interview was the harshest, most rude encounter you’ve had in your 37 years at the Post, you’ve had a Hell of a gentle journalistic career.

99.99%+ of Washington Post readers haven’t – and won’t – see the interview in question. They’ve got to take him at his distorted word. You, dear reader, can watch the video and judge for yourself.

Mathews attempts to re-frame the debate for his unknowing readers. It was Compton’s “enthusiasm,” not evidence; it was his fascist, tour-de-force aggression, not the swift rebuttal of Mathews’ useless arguments. Again, watch and draw your own conclusion.

“That was, of course, exactly what he was supposed to do. It was cable TV, for goodness sake. Discussions there are supposed to be fast and loud. Compton tells me he thought he was being aggressive, not rude. That’s not the way my mother would see it, but I agree with Bob. I just wasn’t ready.”

The debate was your standard splitscreen talking-head matchup with the occasional full shot. But this was CNBC, and Erin Burnett isn’t Jerry Springer [though a love triangle or paternity test would have been that unexpected cherry on top].

Mathews got beat because, as he said so gently about himself, he “wasn’t ready.” And though Mathews’ mother would apparently scowl at the treatment of her little boy, I think mine would’ve found his drubbing a fairly unremarkable result considering the mismatch [my mother tends to value the substance over semantics].

Thankfully, the whining stops:

“I interviewed Compton and responded to his film twice, in a Feb. 11 column and in a piece in the spring issue of the Wilson Quarterly. I confessed I, too, was distressed to see, in his film, Carmel High’s Brittany Brechbuhl watching “Grey’s Anatomy” on television with her friends while they were allegedly doing their math homework.”

Since we’re all being honest here, I should disclose that I’m watching re-runs of “Charmed” as I allegedly write this.

“Many economists argued, I said, that our social, political and economic freedoms, not our education system, make us more productive and creative than other countries. I said Compton, an admittedly mediocre student at James Madison High School in Vienna and Principia College in Elsah, Ill., exemplifies the point. His energy and imagination found the room they needed to prosper in this country which, I said, “gives even B and C students more chances than A students in China and India have.”"

This is the second time, curiously, that Mathews has mentioned Compton’s academic “mediocr[ity]” without referencing Mr. Compton’s Harvard Business School pedigree.

“”I tried to say this on CNBC, too. But Compton cut me off, saying I obviously didn’t know what was going on in Asia because I have never been to India and haven’t visited China (where I was once The Post correspondent) since 1989.”"

This is a terribly important point, and it’s one I held off from writing about the last time I fisked Mathews because I was fairly certain he’d give me another opportunity.

It isn’t always necessary to engage in something or to witness something firsthand in order to know it. If either of those two were requirements for knowledge, we’d have no way to study history, or a host of other disciplines, with any degree of certainty.

I can’t get in Bob’s head, but I assume that he was suggesting that Mathews visit India and China because his information was, in Bob’s assessment, inaccurate. If your information isn’t solid, the most efficient way to acquire better information is to go get it yourself. This is why our most earnest politicians visit Iraq and Afghanistan to meet with our military commanders [and it's also why other politicians posture with these visits].

“Vivek Wadhwa, a high-tech entrepreneur teaching at Duke University, has shared with me some of his research, and his occasional e-mail exchanges with Compton. Wadhwa, like Compton, is a successful businessman with a first-hand grasp of the difficulties American companies have finding engineering talent. He tells both sides, supporting Compton on some points and criticizing him on others.”

Mr.  Wadhwa appeared in Two Million Minutes and has written recently about global education. In May, he wrote “US Schools: Not That Bad.” If I could fund it independently, I’d invite Mr. Wadhwa to do a speaking tour in upstate New York where he told taxpayers burdened by ever-rising school taxes [oddly enough, in the face of decreasing enrollments] that they should relax because, after all, their local schools aren’t “that bad.”

BusinessWeek couldn’t get enough of Mr. Wadhwa; they published his piece, “What the US Can Learn From Indian R&D” just this week. Its implications for this debate are clear, but there is one facet directly related to public education: Wadhwa’s latest article sweeps so broadly that it reminds me of those gigantic brooms a custodian uses to clean an entire hallway in one pass.

“What is happening in India and China is that private companies, not public school systems, are doing the training that is producing the technical elite building those economies, Wadhwa said. If U.S. corporate leaders such as Bill Gates, he said, are worried about losing to competing nations, they should do more as executives to train their own workforce. “All they are doing now is to blame our teachers and put the burden on our children,” he said.”

This is partly accurate – private companies in India and China are making up for the public school’s shortcomings [we'll get to the truth about that next time]. It also misses the point; we aren’t just concerned with our economic success, as we may be able to shore that up privately as Wadhwa claims. We have to be concerned with bleeding anywhere from $7k to $25k in per pupil expenditure – a significant factor in local taxes in some areas – and seeing little benefit for students or their communities.

Wadhwa is wrong, though. Some of us blame principals as well.

“I hope I am in better shape if Compton and I have a rematch.”

Doubt it.

“But whatever the outcome, it won’t mean much. I encourage scholars and journalists living China and India to further examine those economies and education systems and give us something more than two-week-visit impressions.”

Touche, Mr. Mathews.

“Personally, I think prosperity in other parts of the world is good news. It means happier people with more choices. It may even mean more freedom and less war. Compton and I agree that would be a good thing.”

I hasten to point out that the German higher education model was excellent; that’s why we modeled our universities after theirs. Despite this, Germany was the aggressor in two World Wars that left about 90 million dead.

If one wasn’t sure why I had to split this up into two posts, there you go – what started as a whine and a moan ended up as a third-rate college admissions essay about how better education will end war.

We’ll handle that other issue – the arguments re: Indian and Chinese businesses and how they cope with the education of their hires – next time.

A hearty thanks goes out to the National Association of Secondary School Prinicipals for advocating less administrative responsibility for their members. The less they do, the better – until we start making better administrators.

From Flypaper:

Richard Flanary, the director of professional development services for the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP for short), who was quoted in Thursday’s Education Daily (available to subscribers only, of which I think there are about 74) responding to John McCain’s call for greater authority for school principals:

“Certainly we support greater spending autonomy, but there needs to be more clarity on the criteria on which principals make these decisions. Principals already  have very busy schedules, and I would hate to think that they would get caught in a situation where they are the purveyors of funds.”

Yes, that would be terrible for the managers of large organizations (in this case, high schools) to “get caught in a situation” where they are responsible for making funding decisions! But why stop at schools? Someone should alert the private sector that it’s stressing out its managers by expecting them to manage budgets. After all, managers already “have very busy schedules.”

You get the point. This is the primary lobby for high school principals, and it’s lobbying against giving principals more authority.

The NASSP is a funny bunch – that they’re the “primary lobby for high school principals” is the truth. The rub is that they’re absolutely awful at it, and in any given month, the NASSP exposes more about the inadequacy of administrators to lead our schools than any education advocate could do in 10 lifetimes.

I excoriated the NASSPismires re: Two Million Minutes, a film about which they issued a useless, ill-conceived rebuttal that embarrassed public education in the United States. This time, as Flypaper points out, they’ve done it to themselves.

And, of course, I agree with them. The average secondary school principal has the mathematics skills of the average 10th grader in my county. Why, then, would anyone want them messing around with money?

Before you write me a nasty, pseudo-scathing e-mail, remember: I’m not saying that all principals roam the halls unburdened by academic knowledge. There are very good, accomplished principals who know both management and scholarship, and there are terrible ones. That’s the way distribution goes.

So… if you’re a principal reading this and your mouth is starting to froth, relax. You’re probably not the one who can’t pass a trig test, it’s just every other principal you know – right? Right?

These charges aren’t speculation, either [page 19 of PDF]. One thing principals, taken as a whole, can’t do is math. They do beat out librarians/archive scientists, social workers, and those who declared “other” Social Science majors.  Even the English Lit. majors stomp them by 20 points on Quant.

From ETS’s GRE page, a summary of the Quantitative section of the exam:

Quantitative Reasoning — The skills measured include the test taker’s ability to

• understand basic concepts of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and data analysis
• reason quantitatively
• solve problems in a quantitative setting

Again, the average 10th grader in Otsego County, NY can thump the average principal in our nation in a head-to-head math matchup. [If you're really curious about the Quant section of the GRE, check out a practice test.]

The NASSP won’t address this glaring inadequacy. They won’t release a statement on it, they won’t make a push to raise the academic achievement of their principal core, and they won’t try to recruit higher-achieving students to become administrators.

The only debate here is the question of where, exactly, their heads are – stuck in the sand, or stuck elsewhere [hint: their heads, apparently, aren't stuck in books].

I received an e-mail a few days ago about some research into problems with high school principals; they’re canvassing principals to find out about the “problems HS principals face.” I’d be more than happy to go over some of those problems with them, because God knows the NASSP won’t say a word about it.

UPDATE at 8.11pm, July 22:

To further demonstrate how badly out of touch the NASSP is with its own professionals’ inadequacy, the front page of their website has a piece called “The Elephant in the Room.”

That “Elephant?” No, not the total inability of most principals to write coherently and do math beyond converting fractions to decimals.

The “Elephant in the Room” is, of course…

… “Unauthorized Use of Staff Computers.”