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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.

'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.

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.

California ESL teacher fired after explaining off-color words:

After all, Lieberman said, his students were all adults – and needed to know the meaning of certain words in order to avoid making embarrassing mistakes on the job or with friends.

"These were bad words the students didn't want to mix up with other words, like 'sheet' or 'beach,'" said Lieberman, a six-year veteran of the adult school…

Firing someone over this is absurd. The caption on the piece says he was fired for "teaching his students about how to swear in English," but it sounds like he was actually teaching them how not to swear in English. This is a cultural issue as well as a linguistic one. In Germany, for example, the word "sheisse" is thrown around much more casually than is its English counterpart ("shit"), so when German students come to the U.S. it's not uncommon for them to say "shit" in situations where it's inappropriate. This is something you'd want your English teacher to tell you, no? By the same token, I would have been grateful if a German teacher had told me I can't translate "I am hot" to its logical German equivalent, "Ich bin heiss," without it carrying a sexual connotation. I went around saying that for 3 or 4 years, completely oblivious, thinking I was making mundane small talk. In A Place for Us, Nicholas Gage's memoir about growing up in a Greek immigrant family in Massachusetts, he writes about his father intending to say "I can't" to one of his female customers, and having it come out, simply, "cunt." That exchange ended poorly.

Some people have said teaching swear words is justifiable because Lieberman's students were adults, but I'd argue this is appropriate and necessary for younger students, too. Lately I've been reading about the need for students from "outsider" cultures to be explicitly told the "rules" of the "insider" culture (where "insider" is defined as the dominant culture of the school — which is usually white and middle-class and English-speaking). I'll write more about that later, but I wanted to note this case because it seems like such a clear example of it.

Last week's Newsweek had a good feature section on higher education and how it's changing internationally. I especially appreciated Ballad of the Old Cafés, about how Gulf states, through much higher education spending, are usurping the old, cosmopolitan learning centers of Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad:

The Gulf states have been happy to take advantage of this collapse. But a rearguard of academics contends that the new schools there are academic Disneylands that can't eclipse the old centers. "Intellectuals and academics don't want to live in a mall," says Osama El-Ghazali Harb, the Egyptian former head of the Arab Association of Political Scientists. "Science is more than labs. It's the people, it's the environment."

Egypt has even started fighting back, by trying to recruit U.S. universities to open campuses on its soil, too. But it's had relatively little success. "Do you really expect us to open a campus in a country that could be run by the Muslim Brotherhood in a few years?" said one high-ranking NYU official involved in the school's search for a Middle East campus.

Closer to home, I agree with almost every word of this critique of American secondary education ("almost," because I think early college isn't the answer; high schools themselves should be reformed):

To make secondary education meaningful, more intellectual demands of an adult nature should be placed on adolescents. They should be required to use primary materials of learning, not standardized textbooks; original work should be emphasized, not imitative, uniform assignments; and above all, students should undergo inspired teaching by experts. Curricula should be based on current problems and issues, not disciplines defined a century ago. Statistics and probability need to be brought to the forefront, given our need to assess risk and handle data, replacing calculus as the entry-level college requirement. Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete. They were designed decades ago for large children, not today's young adults.

The school K. attended for 5th and 6th grade had, as part of its original charter, a model for teaching that was closer to being a professor. Teachers taught fewer classes, had more prep time, were given sabbaticals, and received bonuses for research and artistic contributions in their field. Over time they moved away from this, which was part of the reason I wasn't as excited about it by the time she finished her second year there. But I still think it's a great model for secondary education.

1.
A Democracy Now! story about a teacher who was fired for "indoctrinating her students with Afrocentrism," and a legislative panel in Arizona that endorsed a proposal cutting funding to public schools whose courses "denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization" and denying funding to state-funded universities and community colleges that sponsor clubs based in whole or in part on race (fast forward to minute 49:30 if you want to skip Ralph Nader, or just read the transcript).

2.
An hour-long NPR program about the differences between Muslims' experiences in Europe vs. the U.S. I was actually pretty impressed with this. You can't go into any depth in an hour, but they hit all the major points about why these are such different demographics — namely, why the U.S., despite its bootstraps attitude towards immigration and its greater participation in international imperialistic adventures, is nevertheless having fewer problems with integrating Islam.

It also has this great quote from Aminah McCloud:

Interviewer: But, isn’t it possible that this internal dynamic could turn into something more outwardly destructive? Could America’s young Muslims follow the path of some of their European counterparts?

McCloud: I want to say that they wouldn't, but I also know that there's always a chance for anything. I don't think they could ever emerge on the scale that they are in Europe. There are non-Muslims here who don't particularly care about Muslims, but they care about freedom of speech. They care about opportunities for everybody. There are also that indigenous groups of Muslims who say, no you're not going to bomb the street on which my mom lives, because then you won't have to worry about the US, you'll have to worry about me.

Another good discussion on the Education and Class blog, about college students' resistance to abandoning the "working hard" theory of immigrant success, particularly as it pertains to learning English.

I'm not studying linguistics or ESL, but in the course of researching immigrant children's experiences in American schools I've come across a lot on the subject of kids learning English as a second language. I'm not going to try to be comprehensive here, but there are a few common myths that deserve debunking:

"Children learn second languages faster than adults."

Given the same exposure and instruction, older learners will generally learn faster than younger ones. People persist in believing children "just pick up" other languages for a several reasons:

– We expect less of children. The younger the child, the fewer words needed to appear fluent, meaning a 3-year-old who speaks like a native-speaking 3-year-old will appear more fluent than will a 15-year-old who speaks like a native-speaking 10-year-old, even though the second child has mastered much more of the language. We also confuse "knowing enough English to get around in an English-speaking country" with "knowing enough English to write an academic paper." The latter skill can take seven to ten years to develop (and, I'd submit, is something many native speakers never do ). Since a third-grader isn't held to that standard anyway, it's easier to be impressed with his or her accomplishments, compared with the long hard slog a college-bound high school junior has in front of him/her.

– Extroversion is highly correlated with the ability to learn languages, regardless of age, and children are assumed to be much more extroverted than adults are. Overall, this is true. But there are ranges of introversion and extroversion within any given age group, and the adult assumption that kids learn faster because they "don't care if they make mistakes" does a disservice to shy kids, ones who care very much. In classroom situations, these introverted children may be pegged as obstinate or unintelligent if they are reluctant to speak the new language even after several months of exposure.

– Pre-pubescent children in full immersion settings will usually learn to speak the second language without an accent. For adults, accent reduction is an aspect of language learning that may never be mastered, even after they achieve fluency, so they envy children's facility with this. But accent is a very small part of "knowing" a language. It is common for teachers to mistake a child's accent-free English for fluency. Like their shy counterparts, these children may be believed to be obstinate or unintelligent if the complexity of their ideas (expressed verbally) doesn't match their facility with idiom and accent.

(Lest anyone dismiss these things as obvious, let me say I was told repeatedly as a teenager that my parents had "missed the window" by not speaking German with me at home, so that by age 14 or 15, when I started studying German in earnest in an immersion setting, teachers and relatives alike treated me as though I were no better than a dabbler and that teaching anyone as old as me was a waste of their efforts. You definitely see this attitude in American high school teachers as well, when faced with immigrant teenagers: by 13 they're already believed to be "too old" to ever learn English well, so why waste resources on them? Go pick lettuce instead. Meanwhile their younger siblings are considered addled if they're not speaking in complete sentences within five minutes of arriving in an American classroom. After all, don't kids learn languages immediately, as if by magic, just by breathing English-speaking air?)

"My grandfather got off the boat at Ellis Island and was speaking English fluently within a month. Why can't everyone do that?"

Your grandfather probably did no such thing. As the blog post linked above says, "It sometimes seems as if some of these students project their own relative comfort back several generations, even while they also claim a family legacy of "working hard to make it"." A look at the historical data prior to the 1920s (when national origin quotas were introduced) tells us several things.

One, your grandfather probably got off the boat and moved immediately to an immigrant enclave, where he socialized primarily with other immigrants. If he was financially successful it was likely because he found a niche in that community.

Two, if and when he did learn English, it was limited at first to the phrases and simple sentence constructions required for his work. (He would not have aced the SAT a month of that boat.)

Three, it's unlikely your grandfather went to college. That usually took a few generations.

Four, prior to WWI and the Depression, when nativist sentiment dramatically increased, the U.S. had a great deal of linguistic diversity. It was very common for German immigrants to send their children to German schools, for example. There were hundreds of foreign-language newspapers in New York City alone. It was possible to achieve a reasonably fulfilling working-class lifestyle without ever learning English, just because support for one's home language was so strong. (There are parallels with that today in some regions and communities, but they are proportionately fewer than in earlier eras.)

Five, the reason he is your grandfather is because he was a member of the successful minority, one who was able to stay, marry, and survive to have children in America. The "sink-or-swim" climate of the 1910s and 1920s meant a whole lot of people sank: a third to one-half went back to their country of origin; of those who stayed, many died of illnesses that could have been treated if they had more financial, social, and linguistic resources. As rough as your grandfather had it, when you speak of him you are actually speaking of a privileged minority, given the brutal class and ethnic divisions of the time. Which is fine — good for your grandpa and everything — but his experience doesn't provide much of a road map if we're talking about creating a model in which all immigrants will learn English, since that emphatically did not happen in the early part of the 20th century.

Six, your grandfather probably benefited from white privilege, which compensated for some of his language issues. With the caveat that modern paradigms of race should not be applied retroactively (Jews, Greeks, Italians, etc. were seen as, referred to, and treated as separate "races" back then), and the acknowledgment that therefore modern immigration issues do not constitute an entirely new framework in that regard (despite the oft-repeated claim that racial pluralism is "new"), a Jewish/Greek/Italian man in the Jim Crow era was going to have some competitive but wholly unearned advantages over other workers that a modern Somalian refugee will not.

Seven, your grandfather probably had more trouble assimilating than you think he did. Italians in the 1930s, for example, were considered truants, drop-outs, and troublemakers, and folks often wondered if there was something inherent to the Italian character that made them less hard-working and less intelligent than proper English stock. Then, like now, ethnic discrimination outside the school system was less likely to be entertained as a factor.

"Bilingual education is the answer."

The flip-side of the above argument — that everyone should learn English but without any support — is that schools should become fully bilingual, teaching kids one week or half the day in one language, and the rest of the time in English. Data shows this is the best way for immigrant children to learn, because it allows them to develop content knowledge appropriate to their grade level in their language of origin, and that it's useful for monolingual (English-speaking) children as well.

The trouble is that it's a Spanish-centric argument. In some regions you might have a critical mass of other students, say Chinese, to merit their own bilingual school, but at the end of the day you are always going to have kids who speak Amharic, Swahili, and any number of other languages who will not be served by the fully bilingual option. And even within Spanish schools you have dialect diversity and students who are considered minorities-within-a-minority. (One of the saddest case studies I read this year was of a Salvadoran girl who had been ostracized by her Mexican classmates in her ESL class, a division her teacher was oblivious to. Since she couldn't speak English, either, she had literally no friends in school.)

None of this is an argument against bilingual education where it's practical; only that as a mass solution it's unworkable. Students will still need more traditional ESL support.

"Schools should be preparing kids for The Real World^TM, not engaging in these PC debates about multiculturalism."

The irony here is that The Real World^TM has already embraced multiculturalism, sheerly because it's profitable. The book Pledging Allegiance: Learning Nationalism at the El Paso-Juarez Border has a good discussion of border cultures and how business has embraced bilingualism faster than the education system has. McDonald's, for example, "makes sure even monolingual English-speaking employees know how to ask if customers want their papas to be chicas o grandes." I know plenty of isolationists who will treat that as cause for alarm — my kid can't even get a job at McDonald's without learning Spanish! — but they are often the same people arguing for a pro-business, up-from-your-bootstraps vision of success. And there they face a contradiction, because you don't get to have it both ways: you don't get to claim capitalism=God AND demand that immigrants learn English (thereby becoming bilingual) WHILE still believing your own monolingual children should have some natural advantage in a workplace that favors linguistic pluralism.

Luckily, that view is rare. I don't know many parents who are opposed to their children learning languages, although living in the U.S. we have less experience with how that's accomplished. What I do see, though, is a lot of educators forced to abandon ESL and foreign language programs to accommodate No Child Left Behind, as well as a sense of nervousness about prioritizing this issue because they believe there will be strenuous parental and political opposition. There's also a lack of teachers of languages other than Spanish, and of course never enough funding to overhaul the system, ground up.

Countries with Higher Gender Equality Produce Girls Who Are Better at Math

This is why I think international studies in education are so valuable. You cannot argue that something is purely biological if you're not seeing the same result in other countries.

In this case, an analysis of PISA scores shows girls in Iceland outperform boys in math and that boys and girls have roughly equal scores in Scandinavian countries. In the U.S. and Britain, boys slightly outperform girls. The gap (in boys' favor) grows larger in countries like Italy, South Korea, and Turkey. Researchers studied a total of 40 countries and found that girls' math scores generally correlated to their countries' rank on gender equity as measured by the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index and other similar research. The study was controlled to ensure the findings "are related not to economic development, but directly to improvements in the social position of women."

The reading gap (where girls traditionally outperform boys) did not disappear with increased gender equity. The average reading gap is also larger than the average math gap (6.6% to 2%) and there is no country where boys outperform girls. But overall scores for boys were higher in both areas in countries where women have the most advantages: "This is important because it shows that advances for girls do not come at the expense of boys," Sapienza says.

There's room to quibble with the results, and I'm sure people will be falling all over themselves to do just that. There were a few anomalies: Germany has a larger math gap than its high gender equity rank would suggest; Indonesia and Thailand have lower gender equity but girls and boys perform equally. One gender equity index can be found here (pdf); the PISA scores can be downloaded here (xls — look at table 6.2c). One thing that jumps out is that the country where girls outperform boys most is Qatar — by 14 points to Iceland's 4 — and yet the country earns a dismal 109th place on the gender equity scale. Expect that to be headline news in every article and blog post questioning these findings; as an Arab Muslim country it will serve as convenient shorthand for a Handmaid's Tale-style learning environment. Having never studied Qatar I have no idea what's going on there, but I do know that the "boys study math, girls study languages" trope is not universal, and that in the Middle East medicine and engineering are valued for both genders to the point of being a cultural cliche. It would be interesting to tease out what's going on with these outliers, but the fact that they exist does not, in and of itself, negate the entire study. There may be other things that do, however, so it's worth watching to see how this does or doesn't change the discussion around learning differences.

At a bare minimum, though, research like this shows how inadequate it is to use American data alone (or British, or Namibian, etc.) to try to explain biology. Especially when even -that- data evolves over time. Biological differences may still play a role — the researchers themselves discuss this — but it's not the result you'd get if you limited yourself to a single country's test scores.

A couple of articles about the media:

One on the presentation of the Iraq situation prior to the war, from the founder of FAIR:

In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers — no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.

In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I explained why I lost my airtime:

There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq — a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. Countdown: Iraq featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.

It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals — many working for military corporations — were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor. (I wasn’t allowed on MSNBC unless balanced by at least one truculent right-winger.)

Except for the brazenness and scope of the Pentagon spin program, I wasn’t shocked by the recent New York Times report exposing how the Pentagon junketed and coached the retired military brass into being “message-force multipliers” and “surrogates” for Donald Rumsfeld’s lethal propaganda.

The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism….

What makes me really angry? Is that this article is followed by comment after comment saying versions of "I don't watch TV," "who watches cable news?" "who believes this stuff in the first place?" "we all know Corporate Media lies," on and on.

Hurray, you don't watch television. HOW FANTASTIC FOR YOU. I appreciate non-participation as one strategy — will even call it the best strategy — against the way the Big Media^TM machine is currently constructed, but that yawn-and-dismiss tactic is INSUFFICIENT. Not when millions of other people DO watch television, DO get the majority of their international news from cable television, and DO use that information to vote and otherwise influence political events. I don't have any great answers here myself; it's not like I run something larger than the Pentagon and can combat this kind of thing in my spare time. But this guy is making some excellent points, if not strictly new ones, and I would appreciate having many more discussions about the issue without seeing them consistently bogged down in "you watch Hardball? what's wrong with you?" discussion-closers.

Sheesh.

Another one, this one about Debbie Almontaser, the Yemeni-American woman who was forced to resign as the principal of NYC's first Arabic bilingual high school. It's long-ish, but worth reading, especially pages 4 and 5, for another example of the oh-so-helpful role media (this time local media) play in defining political issues. Even I — who had been following this case, and wrote about it elsewhere last summer — was under the impression that she was fired because she was wearing an "intifada" t-shirt. While I personally don't have any problems with that, this article says she wasn't even doing that much: she was on the board of an organization that had an office that was sometimes used by a group of young women who were selling an "intifada" t-shirt:

Critics of the Madrassa Coalition say its tactics are typical of campaigns singling out Muslims: They lean heavily on guilt by association. The nuances of the claims against Ms. Almontaser were lost as the controversy lit up the blogosphere, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal organization outside Boston that studies the political right. One Web site, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, displayed photographs of Ms. Almontaser wearing her hijab in different styles, suggesting that she had undergone a public relations makeover to “disguise” her “Islamist agenda.”

But no worries. "She's certainly not a terrorist" –Mayor Bloomberg.

Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding

A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the "writings" that got him arrested are being taken out of context.

Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole's home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.

Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.

"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."

Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

Poole disputes that he was threatening anyone.

"It didn't mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn't mention (George Rogers Clark High School), didn't mention no principal or cops, nothing,"
said Poole. "Half the people at high school know me. They know I'm not that stupid, that crazy."

On Thursday, a judge raised Poole's bond from one to five thousand dollars after prosecutors requested it, citing the seriousness of the charge.

Poole is being held at the Clark County Detention Center.