The XX Factor: What women really think.

"Precious" Gets A Few Things Wrong

A post from DoubleX writer Beth Fertig:

In the new movie Precious, Clareece Precious Jones is beaten by her mother and raped so often by her father that she’s pregnant with his second child. She’s also illiterate.

I’ve spent the past three years profiling illiterate young adults, and I decided to take two of them to a preview screening. Yamilka and her brother, Alejandro, now 26 and 24, are Dominican immigrants. They’d gotten all the way to high school without learning to read. After a hearing officer ruled in 2005 that New York City had violated a federal law that’s supposed to protect them because they are students with disabilities, the siblings received a combined total of more than $250,000 in private tutoring.

Yamilka and Alejandro expected the movie to get the Hollywood treatment. And they were fine with some of that, so long as they found it generally believable. Yamilka—who was overweight and self-conscious in school—related to the way Precious sat in the back of her class in junior high. “I didn’t want people to notice me, to notice something was wrong.” When she saw Precious guessing her way through a multiple choice test, Yamilka said she had done the same thing ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Zero Tolerance Means Zero Critical Thinking

School is where we send our children not only to learn—reading, writing, arithemetic—but also, one would hope, to think. It’s hard to see how kids are supposed to do that, though, when they go to schools where the grown-ups appear incapable of engaging in any form of critical thought or useful decision-making ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Private School vs. Public School

A post by Katharine Mieszkowski:

A decade ago, going public meant frothy tech IPOs. Now, it's what private school kids do when their parents can no longer pay their tuition. Private school enrollments are down everywhere, from Washington D.C. to Tennessee to California, while requests for financial aid are up. Yet recessionary budget cuts have hit many public schools hard, forcing them to lay off teachers (which increases class size), scale back instruction in art, music and theater, and even shorten the school year. Given the cutbacks, public school parents who can afford it may consider sending their kids to private schools.

Spelling Sisters

You Never Forget Your Last

Ann, the Spelling Bee makes me squirm too, sometimes. But it also makes me want to jump up and down—kind of like those hyperactive contestants—and squeal, because I love spelling bees so much.

Should the National Spelling Bee Make Us Squirm?

Traditional Childrearing: Send Them Away Before They Are Adolescents!

Dayo, you write that you were sent away to boarding school at age 14. In that, you had a more traditional upbringing than most Americans.

Contrary to popular opinion, American children now spend far more time living under the same roof with their bio-parents than have most children in Western history. Traditionally—by which I mean, until capitalism separated work from home—children were sent away to live with others somewhere between ages 8 and 14 (at the latest). The aristocracy sent adolescents off to be pages and maids-in-waiting, to get an education in manners. Working folks sent children off to be apprentices (boys) or domestics (girls—although some girls might instead work in laundry, spinning, or weaving). They'd work for about 7 to 10 years, when they'd finally be paid (no weekly wages!), giving them a lump sum that was enough to marry and start a little shop of their own. Working through adolescence was how most girls earned their dowries and boys learned their trade...and how most working women (and aristocrats as well) avoided being their own children's nannies. Adult women ran the house and shop, in partnership with their husbands. Diaper-wiping was the work of teenagers.

That was the system even if you were lucky enough to have two bio-parents who survived until you were an adult. Most lost at least one parent before then, and had to live under a step-parental regime (cf: Cinderella), or, for impoverished gentry, were sent off to be governesses or law clerks.

Which makes me wonder: Is it a healthy system for anyone, parents or children, to keep adolescents home until age 18? But I agree that boarding schools for poor children whose parents are in flux and financial distress might be a good—or at least, a very traditional—idea.

Send Them Away Already

I’m really glad Kai Wright wrote about a boarding school experiment for kids in poor public schools. He frets about disconnecting teens from their families—which could have particularly pernicious effects on black households. I dissent: Having attended boarding school hundreds of miles from home from age 14 on, I think the experience is well worth it. All other things (East Coast WASP culture, cough, cough) being equal, boarding school provides first-class, real-time instruction on how to fend for yourself—setting your own bedtime, developing study skills on your own, managing money—at an age when these skills are most prone to underdevelopment, perhaps losing out to after-school deliberations over whether to get plain or pepperoni from the local slice joint.

I don't know tons about the sleepaway plan (read the Time piece), but Barack Obama has already come out and said that he favors a longer school day and school year (American kids spend less time in school than kids in just about any industrialized nation). Why not take it a step further and institute the faintly Colonial, but more rigorous six-day school week I had in high school?

The big knock on boarding school, actually, seems to come from clingy parents:

"It sounds very exciting, but the devil is in the details," says Ellen Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness in Newton, Mass. "What's it like to separate a third- or fifth-grader from their parents?"

My parents left for boarding school in Nigeria at age 11, and so at 14 I was definitely not allowed to whine about my “disconnected” educational experience. I know every child is different—but I think the option of greater discipline (and deeper relationships with teachers) should be available to more children, particularly from underserved and underperforming school districts. Maybe I'll feel different when I have my own chickadees, but for now, parents and policymakers shouldn’t brandish family ties as a weapon against what could be, as Kai writes, a “holistic education solution.” What do you think?

(cross-posted at the Browntable)

Wanted: Smart Teachers Who Will Stick Around

A few years ago, Education Next ran a terrific article about how the teachers assigned to Manhattans smartest high-schoolers are there because of seniority rather than expertise. According to that piece, half of the teaching vacancies at Stuyvesant are reserved for teachers seeking transfers from other New York City schools, and those must be "filled solely on the basis of seniority." 

As someone who had to suffer through a computer science course taught by a fairly batty, near-retirement woman who seemed to be gazing upon Microsoft Word for the first time, I know how painful it is to be taught by someone whose only qualification is having put in some time. I hope Obama strives not just for getting smarter teachers in the classrooms but for creating a system that encourages them to stay there. Teach For America hasn't quite nailed that. TFA puts smart, motivated, overachiever types straight from their elite college campuses to impoverished school districts, and studies show they are effective. But most of my friends who've done it burn out almost immediately—not a huge surprise, given that they're idealists used to succeeding, having to face their failure not only to change the world, but even to get their students to sit down. What we need are smart teachers who can stick around long enough to get that last stint at Stuyvesant.

How Do You Measure a Good Teacher?

Obama's practical commitment to education is heartening, Meghan, but I am curious to hear how he plans to measure the efficacy of public school teachers. You quoted Obama saying, "If a teacher is given a chance, or two chances, or three chances, and still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching." Obviously a deadbeat teacher like the lazy Stuyvesant Latin teacher you described, is not what we want for America's youth.

However, I have a friend who teaches in a much less-esteemed New York City public school. She teaches a high-school basic literacy class, and her "improvement" as a teacher (and her school's improvement as an institution) is measured entirely with test scores. She described to me a student whose test scores did not improve over the course of a year, but his comprehension of literary themes and ability to participate actively in discussion of books was far deeper in June than it had been in September. It was something that wouldn't show up on a test, but for that student it was a real victory.

Voted Most Likely To ... Rehaul Education?

Obama gave a speech about education yesterday, and I was glad to see he tackled the issue of rewarding better teachers and weeding out bad ones. According to Politico, Obama said,

“Let me be clear: If a teacher is given a chance, or two chances, or three chances, and still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. ... I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”

This notion dovetails with Obama's pragmatism, which I've writen about, and his liking for evidence and results. And siphoning off bad teachers is one of the ways we can most quickly improve our education system. I remember when I first learned, as a teenager, that if you went to public school, you might get a "tenured" teacher. My friend J. who went to Stuyvesant was telling me about one of his, a Latin teacher who was totally checked out and would go around the room calling on students in order to translate. One day, J.'s friend wasn't in class, and this teacher ended up translating the lines for him, attributing the student's "silence" to confusion and failing to notice that he just wasn't there.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell had an excellent piece about the price of bad teaching and the upside of good teaching in The New Yorker last fall. In it, he observed that an economist at Stanford estimates that, for students, the difference between a very good teacher and a very bad teacher amounts to a year's worth of learning. Here's another key bit from his essay:

Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

No wonder Obama is stressing teaching as the key to improving our education. Of course, the trick is going to be implementing this system, not just talking about it.

Teen Parents in School

Did anyone else see the piece about teenage parents in high school in the Washington Post Outlook section on Sunday? It's rare to get the kind of close-up look offered by Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School, where 70 girls—almost all low-income black or Hispanic students—out of a 2,000-plus student body are either pregnant or already mothers and now have an in-school day care facility, Tiny Titans. He focused on an issue blurred in the Bristol Palin coverage: mainstreaming adolescent parents and its dilemmas. Welsh was unsettled less by the absence of stigma and more by the not-so-tacit atmosphere, and assumption by the girls, of approval. Sure, there is a required "family life" course at school that duly covers the dangers of teenage sexuality and pregnancy, and the Adolescent Health Center is a few blocks away. But as a social worker in the support network put it, "I don't personally accept it, but once a girl is pregnant, I have to be all open arms."

It made me wonder if schools have considered even more mainstreaming, with a twist. What might be the impact of having teen mothers—after they're done boasting about their pregnant bellies (as they evidently do) and deep into dirty diapers—help give those "family life" classes? Welsh quotes one mother who sounds ready to give her classmates an earful about "how difficult their lives are going to be if they have a baby." Are there enough others to be a group of peer advisers? If the adults can't convey disapproval, maybe the kids could help—and convincingly.

Give the Teacher a Carrot

I'm intrigued by today's story in the New York Times about Washington, D.C.'s, reform-minded superintendent, Michelle Rhee, wanting to end tenure for public school teachers in the district. Let me begin by saying that I've always been a skeptic of the ever-popular scapegoating of teachers' unions as the sole cause of poor performance in inner-city schools. That's not to say that unions, or at least some of their members, aren't occasionally a big problem. (Even Albert Shanker, the late head of the United Federation of Teachers, used to concede as much.) But they aren't the only problem, or even, always, the main problem.

At the impoverished, inner-city public school where I taught third grade in the early 1990s, there were indisputably some bad actors who desperately needed to be shown the door. But the same could be said of a lot of workplaces where unions don't exist. (Were this not the case, a TV show like The Office would have no resonance.) These few unproductive or inefficient teachers typically paled against the other problems the school faced: gross overcrowding, no supplies (I had to buy my own chalk), an endless stream of incoherent educational fads foisted on teachers from district headquarters, and students who couldn't be sweeter (third graders still want to hold your hand) but who were desperately poor and often saddled, through no fault of their own, with dysfunctional or absentee parents.

The union, in fact, was often one of the few forces maintaining minimal conditions at my school. I have no doubt but that for the union, my already overcrowded, third-grade class—it had 34 kids, the legal limit at the time under the teachers' contract—would have had dozens more students. And we all know of superb suburban public schools that manage to succeed despite the presence of organized labor. Obviously, labor, alone, isn't the crucial difference.

Indeed, one of the biggest problems in poor districts is that a school is often the only decent employer. Given that school board members are typically elected and the high turnover rate among superintendents, it's easy for such schools, over time, to become patronage mills. In such an environment, job protection really is a legitimate concern. There's no guarantee that those who’ll be fired will be the right ones or that they will be replaced by anyone better. One district head tried to fire me because I'd written an article that he found embarrassing to the school system; what saved my job was the union contract. Then again, the person who apparently urged him to give me the ax was the likewise-offended union rep at my school. In sum, unions aren't all good or all bad; like most institutions in American life, they're typically something of a mixed bag but one teachers have tended to prefer rather than not.

I'm also impatient with Rhee's charge that teachers' unions are only about adults and their concerns, not the kids. So what? This could be said about the compensation package at almost any job. Few people, for example, expect pilots to forgo their union just to help out the frequent flier in Seat 3A (even if that passenger is an innocent, chubby-cheeked child). Or for the UPS driver to give up his union contract just because the packages he delivers are for a kid's birthday. Why, then, are teachers, alone among the nation’s professionals, expected to labor selflessly with no regard for their own self-interests? (After all, self-interest is "market forces" at work—something many school reformers are forever touting.) The attitude that teachers should labor solely for love, not money, strikes me as a carryover from a time when teaching was seen as "women’s work"—and thus not really worthy of pay. One of the many reforms Shanker ushered in was to equalize pay between women, who were typically given the lowest-paying jobs in elementary schools (as the assignment was regarded as akin to motherhood), and men, who were disproportionately awarded higher school positions because these were regarded as "real" jobs.

The above said, unions' complaint that Rhee doesn't properly regard teaching as a lifelong profession strikes me as outdated. This idea might have made sense 50 years ago (when schools benefited from a captive employment pool of talented women and blacks, who had few other professional options). Nowadays, the labor force is far more mobile. Few people stay in one job their entire careers. Today’s selfless community organizer might be tomorrow’s president of the United States. In this environment, Rhee is right, I think, to insist that schools must be able to look beyond career educators to train and attract talent.

What's potentially promising about Rhee’s approach, I think, is that she is at least offering teachers a carrot instead of just a stick. She wants to significantly boost salaries (by as much as $30,000 a year) for all those (not just the few in "combat" positions) who are willing to voluntarily forgo tenure. To foot this bill, Rhee isn’t relying on taxes but on charitable donations. That brings up the question of whether these pay increases will be permanent or just an elaborate bait and switch. (Unions have reasons to worry: Rhee's eventual successor might have entirely different priorities.) But given that many school system heads want to abolish tenure without offering teachers anything in return, this at least seems like a step toward a more genuine compromise. In the meantime, Rhee would do well to remember that teachers unions are powerful not because they're inherently malign but because, in many ways, they continue to represent teachers' interests. I, for one, don’t begrudge these teachers, like any other workers, negotiating for the best contract.

Kindergarten Is Not a Democracy

Bonnie Goldstein just posted a great "Hot Document"—the police report filed by the mom in Port St. Lucie, Fla., whose 5-year-old son was "voted out" of his kindergarten class by his teacher and classmates because he was disruptive. I was grateful to read the police report because my reaction to the initial story was, "There's GOT to be more to this." Alas, the only thing the complaint clarified for me was that the teacher meant for the little boy to be dismissed from the class for the day, not forever. But how is a 5-year-old, especially an autistic 5-year-old, supposed to figure that out?

It does seem that the little boy was a distraction to his classmates, and the fact he was "in the process of being diagnosed with autism," as the article says, would explain that. I would hope that, had the voting-off incident not happened, the school and his parents would have worked hard to find the right classroom situation for him, whether special needs or some combination of special needs and time in a "typical" classroom. No child deserves to be humiliated like that. Kindergarten is not a reality show. But more importantly, kindergarten is not a democracy. Sure, let the 5-year-olds vote on what story they read or whether to have cookies or crackers for a snack. But if a child is causing a problem in class, the teacher needs to be a grown-up and deal with it.

Snacks, Snails, Puppy Dog Tails

Whatever You Say, Senator

Closer to Home

It would have been just one more distressing story about a controversial, possibly threatening student essay; gun possession on campus; and an expulsion and involuntary hospitalization in Virginia. There are almost too many layers to untangle: The 23-year-old student who wrote the violent short story for a college writing class was a former sailor in the Navy. Guns found in his car were legally owned, although in violation of campus policy. His work of fiction references Sueng-Hui Cho and the killing spree at Virginia Tech last year. And the professor subtly threatened with death in the work of fiction is named "Mr. Christopher." That’s because the assistant writing professor at UVA-Wise—the one whose life may have been threatened—is Christopher Scalia, son of the U.S. Supreme Court justice.

"Babies" Having Babies

I have no doubt it can be difficult to decide whether to have children before your career truly takes off or to wait until you're established. Alas, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to that dilemma. But the fact remains that, whether one is 28 or 33 or 38, if you are a college-educated, married professional, raising a child is a heck of a lot easier than it would be if you were 22 and single and struggling to make ends meet. I'm sure there are plenty of such TRULY young parents out there who are doing an admirable job—even if they are too busy to reflect that "parenthood is giving them a new level of ambition that is sophisticated and rejuvenating"—and I think their stories would be vastly more interesting than what was deemed worthy of front-page treatment in the Washington Post.

From the Department of Decrepit Parentage

Did anyone else find the Washington Post’s front page story today about “young” college-educated parents just surreal? (Disclosure: They own us.) First off, all these extremely young parents who are not hanging out in bars or brunching with their buddies are all either 29 or 31. Where are these playgrounds in which all the parents are “old"? And what, precisely, are “older-looking” parents anyhow? Apparently something to do with Rolling Stones T-shirts but, er, wait, wouldn’t those dads be 60, then?

Unexplored and unexamined is the assumption that it’s best for your kids to have your attention while they are toddlers, so you can be free to make partner when they’re potty trained. Except every mom I know says the opposite is true. Thoughts?

Why the Stink Over Pink?

Via Ann Althouse comes word of an annoyingly frivolous potential lawsuit. Outraged over the fact that the University of Iowa outfits the visitor's locker room at its football stadium entirely in pink, a former law professor at the university is threatening to sue the school under Title IX.

Some background: Decades ago, then Iowa football coach Hayden Fry, a psychology major in his undergrad days, had the visitor's locker room painted pink "because it had a calming and passive effect" on people. It always seemed like more of a stunt to me, something to make the boosters chuckle as they make out those five-figure checks to the university, or to distract opposing teams.

But professor Jill Gaulding complained about the locker room in 2005. She was rebuffed and cites the issue as a reason she left the school. Now Iowa has a new president--a woman, incidentally--so Gaulding has renewed her efforts, thus far to no success, and so is threatening a suit.

Title IX has been a boon to women for more than 30 years: More than 55 percent of college students are women. Before Title IX passed, about 16,000 women played college sports every year; now the number is more than 150,000. I hate to see an instrument of so much good abused because someone has an ax to grind. But even worse, to me, is the single-minded devotion to victimization. It's these kinds of stories that make me reluctant to indentify as a feminist. Aren't we strong enough to laugh at something like this, even if it bothers us?