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My mom, a teacher, sent me a link to an article with this headline:

Senate Majority Leader Seeks Passage Of Child Nutrition Bill Before Recess

"I read that twice," she wrote, "trying to figure out how schools could 'do' nutrition before recess."

When I was in kindergarten, Mrs. Wilson taught us how to pass scissors.

Gripping them by the blades, rather than the handle, she passed them, safety-side-first, to her teacher's aide, Mrs. Martin. Mrs. Martin then turned them around and passed them back. Then they showed us the "wrong" way to do it. Mrs. Wilson took them by the handle and thrust the blade at Mrs. Martin. We oohed and tsked judgmentally at this act of unprovoked aggression.

"Do you see why that's dangerous?" she asked us. Yes, we said. "What if you were carrying them that way and you fell?" We could die, we said. I pictured my classmates face-down on the floor, impaled on their purple Friskars scissors, blood staining the linoleum. In a few cases the images were sort of satisfying, but I put that out of my mind.

"Now we'll practice," Mrs. Wilson said. And we did. We went around the room, each one of us passing our blunt plastic scissors to a neighbor, handle-first. Then our neighbor would switch the scissors around, just as Mrs. Martin had, and pass them back. There were about 25 kids in my class that year. I don't know how long that exercise took, maybe 15 minutes or so, but when I remembered it later, as an adult, it seemed like a long time to spend on such a basic task. Or at least it would have — except that I graduated from high school with those same 25 students, and throughout the rest of our school careers I cannot remember a single instance of misbehavior involving scissors. That 15 minutes in kindergarten not only saved Mrs. Wilson the headache of constant correction, it was a favor to every other teacher in the building.

What's more, I don't remember being insulted by the exercise. Had I understood her the first time? Yes. I was a girly swot in kindergarten, the kind of child who sat still and paid attention (usually). But I didn't feel condescended to when she went around the room and made us all practice such an elementary skill. On the contrary, I felt proud. I was showing off my expertise in scissors-passing. Look at me. I'm awesome at this. Someone should give me my own TV show.

I thought about this incident much later, as I was staring, dejected, at the library at the afterschool program where I work. I had spent all day cleaning and arranging it –chapter books here, nature books there, we have twelve children's dictionaries, really? — and, as proud as I was of my accomplishment, I knew that it was going to be a disaster area within three weeks. It happened every year. Books would be strewn everywhere, upside down and out of order, some of the pages ripped. I'd feel resentful of my job, resentful of the kids, resentful of Johannes Gutenberg and of literacy itself. Then I remembered Mrs. Wilson.

I enlisted the help of one of my favorite students, a bookworm who wanted order in the library as much as I did. On our first day of the new school year, we gathered the kids on the carpet in the library and she role-played the part of a messy student. She sauntered into the library and tossed a cheap paperback on top of the computers, where it fell behind the table and got caught in the electrical cords. Then she sauntered out. The kids laughed. "Was that the right way to do it?" I asked. No!, they cried. She tried again, this time shoving it spine-first into the dictionary section. "How about that?" I asked. No, they giggled. She tried one more time, putting it carefully in the dictionary section, spine out. "How about that?" I asked. This time they weren't sure. There was disagreement in the ranks. I asked her to pull it out and put it where it belonged, in the chapter books section. Then we went around the room, and each of the kids practiced re-shelving books: neatly, spine out, in the correct section, right-side-up.

It took about half an hour. My library stayed clean the rest of the school year.

Most of the 49 techniques described in Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov's study of excellent teachers and their classroom management practices, fall somewhere near Mrs. Wilson's approach to scissors-passing. If you want your students to line up in a certain fashion, teach them exactly how to do it. The DVD that comes with the book shows one teacher timing his students with a stopwatch as they pass papers across the room; Lemov notes over and over that spending 20 minutes on a skill like this will save X hours throughout the year, as transitions become tighter and as the teacher spends less time reminding, repeating, and cajoling students to come to order.

What I love about this book — and judging from the other comments I've read about it, I am definitely not alone — is that it teaches classroom management as a series of specific, concrete skills that any teacher can learn. Lemov does not talk about abstract concepts like having "high expectations" or "well-planned lessons," and he rejects the notion that teachers must have innate charisma. Though it helps to be a natural performer, anyone can learn to articulate expectations so clearly that students have no doubt what they are supposed to be doing at any given moment. His 49 steps include such minutiae as where to stand in the classroom, how to greet students at the door, and how loudly to speak in different situations. He spends considerable time on the art of calling on students who never volunteer.

But as much as I appreciated each individual technique, taken together they started to wear on me after a few chapters. Although he notes in the introduction that no teacher can or should use every method he describes, the DVD shows classroom after classroom run so efficiently that I started feeling claustrophobic. Students sit in neat rows. There are no extraneous materials on desks. Backpacks are put away. Kids are attentive to their posture. The teacher monitors their eye contact, which must be on the speaker at all times. Worksheets are passed out, and students fill in short answers as the teacher leads them on the overhead: item one, item two, item three. "Are you with me? I see someone's eyes are elsewhere. We'll wait." Item four. Item five.

It's no child left behind, for sure, but it's also no child racing ahead. I didn't see any examples of thoughtful conversation between teacher and student, much less among students themselves, and there was very little time for reflection. It was skill, assess, skill, assess, skill, skill, skill, assess. Woe to the child whose mind wanders now and then, and woe also to the child who's ready to skip ahead. Every kid is literally on the same page, every second of every class. In the book, Lemov often notes that skills learned well the first time leave more time for engagement with the material later — time discussing Hamlet's motives or the causes of the Civil War, for example — but I saw almost none of that in the DVD, and couldn't tell from the book where there would be space for it. Eyes on me. We're waiting. Item six.

I am not one of those hippie New Agey teachers who believes classrooms should be free-for-alls and all learning should happen inductively. In fact one of the reasons I like Lemov's book is that it goes well with one of my favorite education books, Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children. Delpit argues that ALL classrooms have rules and expectations, whether or not they are articulated, and that classrooms where the culture remains implicit favor white middle-class students, since they already know the unspoken rules. She advocates making expectations very explicit, e.g. if you want a student to shut the door, tell them to shut the door. Don't say, "Would you like to shut the door?", which some students will interpret as the question that it is. No, I'm fine with it being open, they think, and so they don't. Now the teacher is angry and the student is confused. I have seen versions of this interaction so many times in classroom situations, including situations where I have been the confused student myself. (Did I miss something? How come everyone knows this but me? I must not belong here…)

So I appreciate Lemov's exhortation to delineate the exact parameters of acceptable behavior, leaving no room for error or misunderstanding. Like Mrs. Wilson with her scissors, there is no option to fail or get distracted. Everyone can learn this and everyone will.

But I also wonder what gets left out. He notes at the beginning of the book that teachers must know their lessons cold, but otherwise doesn't spend much time talking about content. Most of the examples in the book, as well as the examples on the DVD, are of teachers teaching lessons with one right answer. Find the verb, the predicate, the area of the triangle, the meaning of this vocabulary word, the location of a river on a map. If this had been my first introduction to teaching, I'd have chosen a different career. It's not surprising that students in the classrooms he's chosen to highlight score well on tests, because these are skills that are easy to assess on a standardized exam. But those requiring more creativity and deeper reflection would not make the cut. They're messy. They're inefficient.

Ultimately, the question I have to ask is whether I'd want my own child in a class run this way. And the answer is a tentative yes: for some classes, for some of the day, especially in the early years, when discrete skills need to be mastered. But not all day. I would hope that she'd have the space to learn to monitor her own behavior, even in the absence of constant vigilance. And not in every class, especially as she gets older. Over time, I'd hope that the ideas themselves would become intrinsically interesting, that she would get annoyed at having her engagement with them micromanaged, and that her teachers would know when to step back.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of good ideas in here (despite the corny title). It's a book I wish I'd had ten years ago, and one I'd recommend to any new teacher. At the same time, though, it's one of those books that's been heavily hyped in a climate of NCLB, and that always makes me nervous. Did I like it? Yes. Would I want to see it be the next and only model of what classrooms should look like? Ummm, not without further discussion…

My friend Sarah is co-editing a special issue of Radical Teacher on teaching and technology, and is looking for submissions. Read the full call here.

Possible topics include:

* Classroom deployments of digital tools such as blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), wikis, video, and other digital and new media technologies to enhance or encourage radical teaching.
* The implications of changing forms of digital labor in the academic environment, including demands to build technology skills, learn software packages, contribute intellectual material to university-owned and/or commercial databases, creating and populating online learning environments, etc.
* How to harness technologies for their empowering potential, including supporting and training students to be active users of technology.
* Commodification of intellectual material, including the modularization and "just in time" delivery of teaching material via commercial courseware on university-owned servers.
* The surveillance and control of teachers and students when learning takes place in digital environments.
* The ethical implications of the underlying political and ethical logics we teach when we use technology in our instruction and research.
* Limitations on material and other types of access; or when "One Laptop Per Child" is simply not enough.
* Demands on instructors to provide vocational training for careers to students; training them to use commercial software packages and delivering a labor force that skilled in technology, as opposed to having support, space and resources for the teaching of academic material.
* The lopsided funding of technology projects over all else in academic institutions over the past decade and a half, and the collusion of academic institutions with high-tech business on joint ventures and for-profit activities.
* The relationship between contingent labor and on-line teaching.
* The relationship between technology and assessment.
* Classroom and institutional use of open source and noncommercial softwares (e.g., Drupal) as alternatives to privatized and for-profit technologies.

Feel free to circulate this!

Newsweek has an article about the differences between Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Michelle Rhee, chancellor of D.C. schools. Anyone familiar with Rhee's work can see where this is going; as chancellor, she has become (in?)famous for her almost single-minded determination to "demand accountability" in schools — read: blame and fire teachers. As head of one of the country's largest teachers' unions, Weingarten predictably disagrees.

Both women are also known for their uncompromising personalities. I have my misgivings about both of their stances on educational reform and labor issues; I'm sure I'm not alone there. But I'm also capable of recognizing this argument for what it is, which is a professional disagreement. Newsweek, however, seems to think it's a sequel to Mean Girls. Under the headline Schoolyard Brawl, we get a story that might as well come with a cartoon of them pulling each other's braids in the girls' bathroom. It's creepy and it's sexist. To wit:

Rhee has a chance to set a strong example for weeding out incompetent teachers—if she doesn't overplay her hand against Weingarten, who is a formidable foe. "You have two strong-willed and very smart and determined women with very different agendas," says Chester Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education and a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. "It has an almost gladiatorial aspect to it."

"Gladiatorial"? Really?

I think what's really going on here is the Bechdel test playing out in real life. The Bechdel test is an idea from an old Dykes to Watch Out For comic, in which a character says she will only watch a movie if it has 1) at least two women 2) who talk to each other 3) about something other than a man. It's amazing how many movies fail.

Out in the real world, we're accustomed to seeing women in the public eye when they're in fields where their bodies are paramount (actors, athletes), and, increasingly, in politics (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi). But how often do we see a woman engaged in a public debate with another woman, over ideas?

Rhee and Weingarten, who first tangled about five years ago when Weingarten was running the New York City teachers' union and Rhee was testifying against her as the head of a nonprofit organization promoting school reform, clearly dislike each other.

Well I would hope so! It would be hard to have much integrity if they were having tea every week.

This isn't Jennifer and Angelina. It's a debate about one of the thorniest problems in school reform: how to get rid of bad teachers without any fair and reliable measure of what constitutes bad teaching. Rhee and Weingarten occupy the extreme ends of the argument. In a field that is overwhelmingly female, but where administrative positions are still largely held by men, it is refreshing to see women in leadership roles. As I said, I disagree with both of them on any number of issues. But it would be nice if those ideas could be discussed without falling back on stupid gendered stereotypes.

Alternative classroom approaches to teaching Thanksgiving

New program will teach students about 9/11

The 9/11 curriculum, believed to be the first comprehensive educational plan focusing on the attacks, is expected to be tested this year at schools in New York City, California, New Jersey, Alabama, Indiana, Illinois and Kansas.

It was developed with the help of educators by the Brick, N.J.-based Sept. 11 Education Trust, and was based on primary sources, archival footage and more than 70 interviews with witnesses, family members of victims and politicians, including Giuliani and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a New York senator at the time of the attacks.

The curriculum is taught through videos, lessons and interactive exercises, including one that requires students to use Google Earth software to map global terrorist activity.

Teaching Students About 9/11

At a press conference on Tuesday at a hotel blocks from the World Trade Center site, Giuliani said the program can help students think critically about the attacks as both a historic event and one that shapes the present, noting the continued threat of terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Teachers say that today's middle and high school students might be too young to have strong memories of the attacks, so the program can help them develop insight into what actually happened.

"Students are getting progressively younger as we move further and further away from the events," says Torres. In a few years, students who are taught about the attacks will not even have been alive when they occurred, adds Anthony Gardner, executive director of the Education Trust, whose brother died in the World Trade Center.

9/11 as a Lesson, Not a Memory

Eight years later, this is an example of what Sept. 11, 2001, has become for a generation that's too young to remember much, if anything, about that day: It is an educational DVD, a 167-page textbook, a black binder of class handouts titled "A National Interdisciplinary Curriculum." In Room C215 at Lincoln High School, images of the collapsing Manhattan skyline are now a classroom "warm-up exercise." "Militant," "imploding" and "rubble" are boldfaced vocabulary words for students to memorize. Homework assignments and essay questions ensure that Sept. 11 will indeed be remembered by millions of schoolchildren, if with a new sense of detachment.

More:
The September 11 Education Program
The September 11 Education Trust

For the last month I've been researching American K-12 textbooks and looking at how they depict immigrant groups, especially religious minorities. Today I found this gem, from an 18th-century public school textbook:

Fifteen Christians and 15 Turks bound at sea in one ship in a terrible storm, and the pilot declaring a necessity of casting one half of these persons into the sea, that the rest might be saved, they all agreed that the persons to be cast away should be set out by lot in this manner, viz., the 30 persons should be placed in a round form like a ring and then, beginning to count at one of the passengers and proceeding regularly every ninth person should be cast into the sea until of the 30 persons there remained only 15. The question is, how these 30 persons ought to be placed that the lot might fall infallibly upon the 15 Turks, and not upon any of the 15 Christians.

This is part one of "Children Full of Life," a documentary about Toshiro Kanamori, a schoolteacher in northwest Tokyo, who not only prizes empathy but teaches it as a skill. In other words he doesn't just model "niceness" and then chastise the kids who can't intuitively figure it out and copy him — he actively explains how empathy works, and gives his 4th graders ample opportunities to exercise it.

A few things I noticed here… One is that this class is huge! I count 34 children. I've read elsewhere that small class sizes are not prized in Japan the way they are in the U.S., and that it's common to have classes with 40 or more kids. I would love to know more about how they manage this.

Another is the noise level. The classroom doors are open and you hear a steady stream of shouting coming from other parts of the building, but no one seems annoyed or distracted by this. I find this interesting because the American stereotype of Japanese schools envisions kids in identical uniforms bowed silently over their desks. "We could have their test scores," we say, "if only we were willing to stifle children's will like they do." As you can see from the scenes of children sliding around in the mud during recess, that's not really what's happening.

Part three is amazing. I've never seen a child take this kind of risk on behalf of another child:

I also find it interesting that the kids took collective responsibility for one child's actions. In one telling story I read about Japanese middle schools, a 9th grader had stolen some money from the treasury of one of his extracurricular clubs. Stop and think about how that would be dealt with in an American school — probably by isolating the child, giving him detention or a suspension, involving his parents and possibly the police. How connected would such a child feel to his club or to the school after such an incident? What pathway would he have to get back in everyone's good graces? And how frustrating would that be? It's easy to see how kids who make a few mistakes quickly go down the path of total disengagement.

In Japan, however, they took a totally different approach. They called in one of the older boys in the club and criticized him for not providing leadership and mentoring for the younger boy. The older boy apologized, and right away the younger boy (i.e. the thief!) felt guilty and embarrassed and promised to make amends. He was welcomed back into the group despite his actions… but also with a dose of "hey, dude, quit making the rest of us look bad." It worked.

It's easy to see where this approach could go wrong. I remember spending more than one recess standing by the wall with my whole class, being punished for the actions of one or two kids. It felt profoundly unfair. But in those cases we weren't given the responsibility, or even the option, of interacting directly with the "problem" kid, except I suppose by teasing and bullying him, which the teacher probably hoped we'd do. In the case above, the older boy was punished (lightly) for someone else's actions, but he was _also and simultaneously_ reminded of his power and responsibility in the situation.

One of my first instincts is to wonder how inefficient it must be to spend so much time working on group dynamics and social skills. When I step back, though, I think it must be time-saving in the long run. A few years ago I took an intensive workshop for ESL teachers, and was surprised that we spent the first 3 or 4 days just talking about the culture of "the group." Isn't this a waste of time, I wondered? We're only here for a month! A couple weeks into it, though, I realized how beneficial that had been. As everyone started to get burned out from the intensity of the workshop they naturally started to turn on each other, but knowing that this was a normal stage in the process, and that it would pass, made it easier not to take things personally. We also worked better as a team, because we'd already discussed the kinds of problems that typically come up with the kind of group projects we were doing. We didn't spend a lot of time on petty resentments.

I imagine it would be even more important with young children, who are still getting used to school culture and who might lack the vocabulary to talk about shame, fear, anger, justice, and other emotional concepts that are difficult to articulate. Spending time learning exactly how to do this gives them the tools they need to avoid eruptions later. It also helps them feel safe in the classroom and invested in the classwork, which is good for the teacher because it's easier to explain things one time well than to repeat the same information all year long to kids who are half-engaged, anxious, or defensive: kids who don't feel like their classmates are allies or their teachers advocates.

I've never been to Japan, and I realize this teacher is unusual there, too, but from what I've read Japanese schools do spend more time than American schools on fostering group dynamics and a sense of inclusion and belonging. It's funny to me because in the United States these are considered useless feel-good hippie concepts — get back to your basal readers, everyone! — but Japan is hardly known for its lack of rigor. It would be nice if we could discuss the importance of emotional learning outside the culture wars framework.

The last segment is just beautiful:

I've added a curriculum review of Rosetta Stone's Arabic software. I apologize for its length, but it was the product of several months of frustration.

I'd like to add more reviews of Arabic language learning books and software to this site. The more I think about education and pedagogy, the more I find it useful to be a student myself. How do I learn? How do I not learn? I think learning a foreign language is an especially good way to keep you humble. When I was first learning the Arabic script, I found I had a lot more sympathy for the kids I was working with who were learning to read.

WordPress doesn't allow me to put a comment box on static pages, so this post will serve as the comment space for Rosetta Stone. If you've used it in the past, in any language but especially in Arabic, feel free to share your experience here. I'm especially interested in the changes they've made since version 2.

'The new liberal arts': this is so worth reading.

I don't agree with all the choices, but it's an interesting thing to ponder. If you could update the liberal arts curriculum, what would you add? What would you subtract? Many of the suggestions revolve around the collection, organization, presentation, and marketing of information. As a few commenters point out, these are really "skills" more than new "fields," but either way I think it's true that schools don't teach enough of them, considering how much they'll be used.

Others also mention design. I couldn't agree more. I always liked art as a kid, but like most people I thought of it as an "extra" subject, not up there with math. Then I started working with kids, and realized what an advantage the artistic kids had when it came to core subjects. Being able to hold an abstract idea in one's mind is SUCH an important skill, but five- and six-year-olds really struggle with it if they haven't spent much time imagining something and then making a picture of it. As we get older we spend more and more time "reading" graphics, signs, photos, and other visual content. We also need to produce that content, even in ostensibly non-creative fields — think PowerPoint presentations. Yet when schools need to cut something from the curriculum art is one of the first things to go, and most people have no shame when they say "I'm not artistic," even though they'd be embarrassed to say "I'm not so good at reading."

Art also teaches critical thinking. Someone mentioned being able to recognize a "real" photograph from one that's been manipulated. Others mentioned cartography. I thought of anatomy. The other day I heard someone say he felt like his hands were enormous, almost as big as his head, and I thought, well, they are. Your hand should cover your face. We think of heads as large and hands as small because that's how we drew them in kindergarten, and for many of us our art education never went too far beyond that. But once you get into figure drawing you start learning that your mental representations don't match reality. Drawing things properly forces you to grapple with what's really in front of you; it's like taking a class in logic. Even the impressionists understood this. If you look at Van Gogh's early sketches you can see he was still struggling with proportions, but he eventually worked it out.

I'd also like to see statistics be a required course in high school. And have foreign languages begin in kindergarten. I could go on. But read that thread.

I've added a page of free online resources for learning German as a Foreign Language. I was moved to do so after being impressed with the quality of some of these sites. All languages should be so lucky.

http://laura.fo/german-language-resources/

Yesterday On Point did an interview with Maya Frost, author of The New Global Student, a book advising teenagers to quit high school and go abroad, where they can pick up college credits, foreign languages, and global skills. I bought her book and had finished it by the time the program re-aired in the evening.

I followed a path similar to the one she recommends and I agree with most of what she says (although how she says it sometimes grates — more on that below). When I was fifteen I studied abroad in Germany, but not on any formal exchange program. I just moved in with my grandparents and enrolled directly in the local public high school. That same year an American girlfriend moved in with my aunt and uncle, also living in Germany, and their daughter went to live with my friend's parents in California. Arranging these exchanges is pretty straightforward if you know someone — or know someone who knows someone who knows someone — willing to swap children for a few months. It makes no sense to pay an agency $10,000 or more to go to the trouble for you, and Frost's book provides several tips on setting something up in a country even if you have no contacts (yet). She rightly calls most of these agencies a waste of money, with the notable exception of organizations like Rotary that provide scholarship funding.

She argues that students shouldn't wait until college (or later) to do this. Young brains are still flexible, she says, and the impact of living in another culture will do more for a teenager than it will for someone over twenty. Adolescence is a period of intensity. Teenagers notice everything around them; they are not even capable of shutting that part of their brain off, of getting stuck in a rut, of saying "but we always do things this way…" That intensity is inevitably going to go somewhere, and it's better to direct at something real, like foreign travel, than to stifle it in the world of shopping, malls, prom queens, and video games. Young people also pick up languages faster. Exposing the teenage brain to another culture will pay off for a student's entire life in ways that travel when s/he's older will not.

Most teens who come back from such an experience will have different priorities about their future. This, she argues, is a feature, not a bug, although it's often the thing that scares parents most. The tiny world of high school seems so limited after you've spent a year managing on your own in another country, in another language. It was in Germany that I decided I wanted to graduate early; when I came back home I heaped on the correspondence classes in order to make that happen. Apparently I'm not alone. Her book is filled with stories from other high school exchange students who've had the same experience of wanting to get high school over and done with as soon as possible — or who simply decided not to come home at all. This possibility terrifies most parents, but again she argues it's a positive. The world needs global citizens, and the flexibility and language skills acquired abroad are more useful in the long run than staying on the regular high school track would be. She advises teens not to worry about having the typical four-year college experience and to just pick up as many college credits as they can through a combination of CLEP tests, community college and correspondence courses, and foreign language programs abroad. Transfer the whole lot to any affordable college, spend a year or two there, and you'll have a BA by the time you're twenty or so. It doesn't matter if it's a name-brand university; what matters is that you're fluent in Spanish or Swahili, you have no debt, you're young, and that you know how to travel the world.

Predictably, most of the criticism she's gotten focuses on class. "This is a rich white kid thing," she's told. She (and her husband, who seems to be the primary breadwinner) argue that actually it's cheaper than the regular high school-to-college track. A Rotary program might cost a couple thousand dollars, which is cheaper than having your sixteen-year-old live with you in your own home for a year; after all, they're being fed by some family in Paris. And colleges abroad are usually cheaper than their American counterparts, since most countries subsidize higher education.

I feel strongly both ways. Frost's audience is the suburban family for whom college is a non-optional expectation. She tells them to get out of the rat race and quit worrying about AP classes and SAT scores, to not be so overprotective of their children, and to teach them the virtue of getting by on less. She's clearly not thinking about the kids who know all about getting by on less, who live in dangerous neighborhoods where children being "overprotected" is the least of their parents' worries, who don't stress about AP classes because their school doesn't offer any, who will have to fight to get a high school diploma at all because the teaching they receive is so ineffective, or who have disabilities that can't or wouldn't be managed by an unrelated family in a foreign country. When she says parents can save tens of thousands of dollars on their children's educations she's assuming they have college savings or will be contributing to their kids' educations out of pocket, but five or ten thousand dollars isn't "cheap" if your starting expectation was zero. And when she says it's less expensive to send your child abroad than to have him/her live at home, she's assuming your child doesn't contribute anything to the household, like income from a part-time job that goes towards the utility bill, or unpaid care for younger siblings. Most of all she's assuming that duh, of course your kid is going to college somewhere: it's just a question of where and how. The better part of her book is about dealing with criticism from people who will think you're crazy for sending your kids abroad and letting them miss rites of passage like prom. But for a lot of families, that's the least of their worries.

She also assumes that your kids will be competing with other monolingual white American kids, and won't they be lucky to have this global advantage? Absent are the kids who are already bilingual, by virtue of growing up in an immigrant family. She constructs many hypothetical situations in which your global child is favored in a job interview over Jessie and Steve, who've only been to England, but in my experience the real competition is Noriko, who speaks Japanese without an accent. On the surface this may seem like an argument for pushing a global view even harder — after all, other countries have much greater facility with giving their students a multilingual education, and the world is increasingly transnational — but underneath it there needs to be a discussion of white/American-born privilege. If Ben who spent two years in France is getting a job over Emmanuel whose family is from Haiti, well, what's going on with that? Did Ben really get his job because he's "a global citizen," or is there a little bit more to it? Would Emmanuel's summer working on a farm abroad really look the same on a college application as Ben's summer doing the same? Are we allowed to talk about that? Or are we just supposed to celebrate Ben's ability to order a meal in a Romance language?

All that said, I appreciate that she's taking a machete to the view that traveling abroad is reserved for the children of the elite. Although more than half of graduating high school seniors say they plan to study abroad, very few of them actually do, because they look at the price tag for these programs and assume they're out of the question. One of the things she hammers home is that "official" study abroad programs are far more expensive than organizing one's own travel — what she calls "indie" programs — because when you go with a study abroad program you are paying the university fees at your home institution, too. She advises students to enroll directly in foreign schools.

This is what I did as a college junior at The American University in Cairo, and I was shocked to learn that some American students had spent an extra ten or twenty thousand dollars for the exact same credits I was earning. I also learned that there were even cheaper options I hadn't known about. Later, in grad school, I went back to Egypt and arranged independent study credit for research I was doing and for taking Arabic language classes at a private language school. This cost even less than AUC, which was already cheaper than most American colleges. And Egypt, like most countries, had a lower cost of living compared to the United States. Here she is absolutely correct: getting most or all of one's college education in another country is potentially far cheaper than entering the American system of higher education, where even public universities charge tuition.

Unfortunately, Frost's book is mainly concerned with convincing you that this is a viable option. That's great, but what would have been more helpful would have been lists, lists, and more lists of universities abroad, high school correspondence options, short-term study options, foreign language schools, work abroad programs, Peace Corps alternatives, and tips for funding it all. Luckily this information is available online for the dedicated student who is willing to search for it, but it'll be nice when it moves into the realm of common knowledge, when parents, teachers, and guidance counselors stop telling kids there is only one — monolingual, monocultural — path into adulthood. Frost's book is a start.

What's Hurting the Middle Class: The myth of overspending obscures the real problem is an older (2005) article, but one worth revisiting in light of the mortgage crisis and subsequent recession. Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi argue that, despite rhetoric about Americans' dependence on credit cards and their inability to save, the average family's spending on things like appliances, gadgets, and designer clothes isn't up significantly since the 1970s and in many cases has gone down. The biggest increase is in what we spend on homes, but not because we're all buying mansions ("the median owner-occupied home grew from 5.7 rooms in 1975 to 6.1 rooms in the late 1990s—an increase of less than half of a room in more than two decades"). The main reason behind this increase is the quest to live in a "good" school district:

Why such a staggering increase in the cost of housing? That is a long, separate discussion, but one point is worth underlining here: when a family buys a house, it buys much more than shelter from the rain. It also buys a public-school system. Everyone has heard news stories about kids who can’t read, classrooms without textbooks, and drug dealers and gang violence in school corridors. Failing schools impose an enormous cost on the children who are forced to attend them, but they also impose an enormous cost on those who don’t…

Consider University City, the West Philadelphia neighborhood surrounding the University of Pennsylvania. In an effort to improve the area, the university committed funds for a new elementary school. The results? At the time of the announcement, in 1998, the median home value in the area was less than $60,000. Five years later, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “homes within the boundaries go for about $200,000, even if they need to be totally renovated.” The neighborhood is otherwise pretty much the same: the same commute to work, the same distance from the freeways, the same old houses. And yet, in five years families are willing to pay more than triple the price for a home, just so they can send their kids to a better public elementary school.

As inequity between school districts grows, or is perceived to be growing, middle-class parents will do almost anything to buy their way into a better home. (I'd argue that a lot of parents don't understand how to evaluate a school system, a fact that works to real estate agents' advantage, but that's a topic for another post.) Looking at data from 1984 to 2001, the authors find that housing prices for families with at least one minor child grew at a rate three times that of other families.

While I was visiting my mother last December I was going through old things in her basement and I found the English textbook I used as a sophomore in Germany. I remember going back to my regular (American) high school the following year and being told, by my principal, that I wouldn't get credit for that class because it wasn't a "real" English class, it was English as a Foreign Language. "But it was harder than my English classes here," I protested. It just popped out; I didn't mean to be insulting. He sneered. But it was true.

I was showing the book to my daughter tonight, and she commented on its size. It's small. All my German textbooks were. My cousin, who grew up in Germany and now teaches in the United States, has said that the first thing she would do, if she were to reform American education, would be to get rid of the monster-truck-sized textbooks and replace them with shorter, more challenging books like they use in Germany. Then she'd devote more classtime to conversations. That's something else I remember from my German high school — how little lecturing there was, and how much discussion.

I was thinking of this tonight because I was reading this piece by Tamim Ansary, a former textbook editor. In it he talks about the politics of textbook development, which is done by committee and carefully avoids controversy, leaving students with the heaving books we remember so well, the ones that somehow manage to take genuinely interesting subjects (revolution! pirates! the plague!) and make them god-awful boring. He also talks about the role of Texas in influencing curriculum content, which means whatever their local school boards are doing is likely to trickle down into classes throughout the country.

From MSNBC:

"Every day I wish I had never gone to college," Castillo said. "It has been the biggest mistake of my life. Sometimes I wish I had gone to prison instead of college. At least I would have learned a trade or two and started being independent once I got out."

This article references StudentLoanJustice.org, a site I've been hearing about more and more lately.

It seems to me there are several different conversations that should be happening simultaneously, but rarely are. One is the issue of student loans. But another is the cost of tuition, which varies wildly from "free" in some state systems to over $36,000/year at some private institutions. Even within the public system, it depends a lot on what state you're in. I'm in Massachusetts, where public universities cost more than double what most public schools in the Midwest do. When I was at The University of Iowa about half the students were from Illinois, a choice they often made because paying out-of-state tuition to Iowa was cheaper than paying in-state tuition in Illinois. University of Iowa tuition has more than doubled since I went there, but that's still a bargain compared to UMass-Amherst.

I hear so much about tuition going up (which it is, and this is a huge problem across the board) but so often this is reported as though all schools have a similar starting line. Princeton was praised for "setting its lowest tuition increase in decades." Yay. Now it's a mere $47,020/year to go there.

But then of course there are endowments, which is why it can be advantageous to apply to schools that seem, on the surface, to be outrageously expensive. The richer the school, the more money they have to give — not loan, give — to incoming students. And not just students whose families are in dire straits. Is this common knowledge? I know my parents didn't understand it when I was applying to college. They'd look at a sticker price like $16,000 and think they'd be responsible for every penny, or that I'd have to take out loans to make up the difference. They didn't understand — and I didn't know either, and my guidance counselor never told me — that private colleges habitually write thousands of dollars off the initial cost. For this reason it can be cheaper to attend an ostensibly "expensive" private college than to go to a public school, since public schools, already subsidized, give their students less money in aid. But first you have to ignore the sticker price and apply there, which I think a lot of kids don't bother doing because it looks so hopeless.

Another conversation that needs to be happening here is the cost of living. My parents worked their way through school by bagging groceries part-time. Which was possible… in 1968. Not because tuition was so much cheaper, but because they weren't paying as much in rent. At one point I calculated that my first post-college job paid 6 times more than my mom's first post-college job (not adjusted for inflation), but that my rent was 24 times higher. If full-time workers at Wal-Mart are living in their cars because they can't earn enough to support themselves, there's no way students working there 20 hours a week could support themselves AND pay their college tuition. Yes, there are people who still work their way through college (I'm doing it now!) but they make other compromises along the way: they supplement their income with loans, they go part-time, they take time off, they get grants, they have spousal or parental help, they dip into their savings, or they wait until their "work" is the professional, full-time, salaried variety (which is still difficult to do on top of school, mind you, but not quite the Horatio Alger story of which my parents are so fond).

And this gets worse all the time. When I went to school in the early 1990s, my parents' story was no longer realistic but at least the $3.35/hour I earned at the library could pay my rent. It would only pay my rent, not my tuition, books, and food as well, but that still looks impressive in retrospect when I try to imagine my daughter paying for a Boston apartment on a part-time minimum wage job. At my previous job I'd get discouraged sometimes at how so many parents would try to talk their kids out of college — in some cases forcing them to forfeit impressive scholarships — but there was a real reluctance, in some cases panic, at the thought of losing a productive member of the household. Not only would it mean setting up a whole additional household for the student, but it meant losing their income, if they worked, or their labor, if they were the oldest child in the family and responsible for younger siblings. Financial aid will give you a break if you have two students in college at the same time, but they aren't going to factor in your newfound day care and afterschool costs for your younger children now that the resident 18-year-old is out of the house. Living at home while going to college is one solution, but that drastically limits your school options, and might also require buying a car.

And all of this assumes students really will be more employable after getting a degree than they were when the started. See above: the guy who wishes he'd gone to prison instead.

I still think college is important enough that I'd get depressed whenever it wouldn't work out for the kids I knew who really wanted to go and had so much promise, and I'm willing to do about anything to make sure my own daughter gets a four-year degree, assuming it's what she wants and she puts in the effort. But there are a whole mess of things going on here, and it's not enough to talk about any one of them in isolation. If and when the U.S. ever gets socialized health care I hope we can take a similar look at higher education.