NEWSTEACH FOR AMERICA

Republicans and Democrats in Washington are going toe-to-toe over this year's budget. And if they don't find a compromise soon, the U.S. government will shut down on Friday.

If that weren't drama enough, one important program hangs in the balance in this epic fight over spending cuts: AmeriCorps. The volunteer program that has allowed 600,000 young Americans to touch the lives of thousands of their fellow citizens is on the chopping block. Republicans proposed a bill to cut all funding. Democrats countered with a plan to leave AmeriCorps alone. So in these last days, while partisan politicans play chicken to see if the business of government will come to a grinding halt, supporters of AmeriCorps and other national service plans are coming out in droves, calling and writing to demand their elected officials save a program they love.

AnnMaura Connolly is the campaign director of Save Service, a coalition of three organizations - America Forward, Voices for National Service, and Service Nation - banning together to save funding for the Corporation for Community Service, the government arm that funds AmeriCorps.

When Caleb Jonas started his petition on Change.org, he was just one lone voice, telling Congress to save a program he cared about - AmeriCorps, often called the "domestic peace corps."

But today, his voice has been multiplied by the more than 90,000 Change.org members that have joined him, all agreeing that our country needs the important work that AmeriCorps members do.

“AmeriCorps is a vital program that provides critical services to millions of Americans across thousands of communities,” Jonas said this week. “AmeriCorps members help millions of Americans to access food, education, shelter, health services, and other lifesaving resources.”

AmeriCorps is just one of the many programs that Republicans in the House of Representatives recently voted to cut, in addition to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and family planning services at Planned Parenthood. Although more than 600,000 volunteers have served with AmeriCorps since 1994, this bill would cut all federal funding to the program. It's up to the U.S. Senate to reject the House's bill and save AmeriCorps - all while a potential government shutdown looms as soon as March 4.

NBC's Education Nation has focused national attention on education. As part of that national focus, one of the more insightful pieces of commentary came from Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC who declared, “I think Snooki highlights the problem in public education."

Referring to all of the characters on the television show Jersey Shore, he added, "What teacher could possibly have reached anyone of them, to get any one of their scores up, in any subject?"

O'Donnell suggests that some things are beyond a teacher's control and that it might take more than teachers to improve the achievement of the stars of Jersey Shore. You might say that Snooki, who was recently hospitalized for alcohol poisoning after partying too hard in a Miami club, is not that much different from any child who suffers from problems that teacher could not address alone.

The Gates Foundation, along with others, argues that we must improve teaching because teachers are the single most important factor in improving student achievement.

But  if we let student achievement rest only the shoulders of teachers, we let everyone else off the hook for the problems that students bring with them to school.

A constant complaint from graduates of teacher education programs (myself included) is that they do not prepare teachers for the real world of teaching. My own teacher education program taught me the theories of adolescent development, curriculum design, and of schooling in general, but did not tell me what to do in front of a group of 25 screaming 9th graders when I wanted to get their attention. Now I am on the other side, as a teacher educator, and I struggle with the best ways to prepare future teachers.

Teacher education programs generally have three components: Foundations courses (courses in the history, philosophy and/or psychology of education), Methods courses (how to write curriculum), and a Practicum, or what is commonly called student teaching (usually a semester or a year of teaching under a mentor teacher). Teacher candidates take between one and two years to complete the course of study for which they are awarded a master's degree. Then they enter a classroom.

Students complain that they are not prepared, that the more theoretical courses did not give them the nuts and bolts of what they need to teach in a real classroom. They want to know how to discipline students, how to keep a grade book, or when to call a parent when they are not succeeding with a student. In one to two years where maybe only a semester of which is devoted to time in the classroom, it is very hard to prepare teachers for what they will face. It takes years to develop and become a good teacher. Experts say that teachers do not even gain competence until they have been teaching after three years. So, programs that try to do it more quickly — without much real classroom time  — may not be very effective. Yet, 1-2 year programs are the industry standard.

Taking a new direction in teacher education, The Board of Regents of New York State has agreed to allow organizations like Teach for America to grant master's degrees in teacher preparation without any connection to a university. That program promises to focus more on nuts and bolts, less on theory. It will be one of the first programs of its kind.

For New York City public school students, there is nothing but bad news for 2010. Seventeen public schools are being closed down this year, there are across the board budget cuts, students will have to start getting higher scores on the required Regents exams, and, to top it off, they may have to start paying for public transportation to get to school.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) recently announced that their budget shortfall will necessitate asking students to pay for buses and subways -- the way that the majority of public school students get to school. Students and their families have not been silent, protesting these detrimental school policies. But the mayor, the MTA, and state have not backed off.

Just like when the city appealed to Washington for help in 1975 with its budget crisis, and then-president Gerald Ford refused to bail the city out, current political leaders seem to be unsympathetic to city students and families. Why are the city’s pubic school students getting treated this way? City students have always had to do more with less, but making them pay to get to these under-resourced schools? That may be crossing the line.

In this economy, we are all doing some belt tightening, but this is no way to improve the education of city kids. If we want to improve urban public schools, the first step is to do right by the students. Support them by funding their schools, helping struggling schools improve, and, if nothing else, making sure all students can get to school for free. You can make your voice heard by signing a petition which will ask the MTA to restore monies to make the subways and buses free to students in New York City.

Photo credit: gothamschools.org

Getting college graduates to teach in high-need classrooms has long been criticized for a way to replacing costly and experienced teacher with younger, cheaper, under-prepared teachers. The Boston Teachers Union recently filed a complaint that their contract deal has few of the benefits that Teach For America teachers enjoy (though some TFA teachers are in the union.)

The superintendent of Boston schools agreed that the preferential contract for TFA teachers was unfair. But that's not the end of it explains Chadwick Matlin, he says "The Boston union’s victory is a potential bellwether for the rest of the country." With teacher unions keen to protect jobs it's expected that similar complaints will be filed nationwide. But TFA continues to grow, filling 10-30 percent of new teacher positions, with its program hugely oversubscribed — 35,000 applications for 4,100 positions. Stimulus funds won't last for ever, and TFA may continue to come into indirect conflict with the unions as the money runs out and cheaper teachers are sought.

But of course, TFA students aren't always college graduates who's lack of experience is a problem. We recently heard of a Navy submarine commander now working in Indianapolis. And this week the Times featured a profile of Tom Dunn who went from working with death-row inmates (Troy Davis was one of his former clients) to teaching at Martin Luther King Jr School in Atlanta, explaining “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

Some explain that teachers who go through TFA programs struggle to deal with more complicated problems in the classroom such as learning difficulties, but Tom Dunn chose to specialize in helping these exact students. Though he's likely the exception to the rule, he and the program should be applauded. And the more applications TFA can attract, the better.

Photo credit: Carnavalet

Participatory Learning - Join Us from Plearn on Vimeo.

After 15 years of working in schools and observing and reflecting on the practice, I’d like to attempt something different. I’m curious to know if it’s possible to get fifty people (and possibly an institution or three) on this wired planet to take just one foot out of the mainstream of education and participate in a course that operates under a very different educational paradigm than the one they’re used to. I’d like to know if learners are willing to put their own creative desires and curiosities ahead of doing what’s educationally safe. Is the dissonance between how people learn on their own today and how they are taught in schools jarring enough to make them want to try something new? Can the Internet’s currently evolved state and the culture of sharing, collaboration and participation that it has fueled, lead to a new educational paradigm where independent educational contractors (IECs), working in more decentralized environments, are able to offer a variety of courses serving the long tail of educational consumers in a way that more hierarchical institutions cannot?

In order to try to answer these questions, I’ve quit my job as a classroom teacher for next school year and built an online space–-a class (ParticipatoryLearning.net)–-based on the principles of participatory learning, among others.

The definition of participatory learning which I find most useful, is the one which was offered for the Digital Media and Learning Competition:

Participatory Learning includes the ways in which new technologies enable learners (of any age) to contribute in diverse ways to individual and shared learning goals. Through games, wikis, blogs, virtual environments, social network sites, cell phones, mobile devices, and other digital platforms, learners can participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another’s projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together. Participatory learners come together to aggregate their ideas and experiences in a way that makes the whole ultimately greater than the sum of the parts.

Here's the pitch:

Join international educator Bill Farren for two semesters as he travels through four different South American countries, connecting students to real people, real communities and real issues. The journey will begin in Peru. From there, the class will vote on what country they will visit next. Participatory Learners (Plearners) will be able to track their teacher who will be acting as their “reporter/guide in the field” via global positioning satellite. Through a request system, Plearners will be able to assemble information such as pictures, video footage, interviews, etc. for their learning use and for the creation of various learning objects including collaborative projects. Students will decide what projects (challenges) to tackle, and working with a variety of other people, get on with the business of changing the world today.  Freedom of choice and expression will be an important part of this course. Students will be encouraged to extend their expressive abilities using a variety of tools and genres.

This class seeks to do more than simply take the classroom model and move it online. It seeks to challenge the status quo in various ways:

• Students will be active managers of their learning; with some guidance, they will manage what to learn, how to learn, who to pay attention to, how to learn from peers, how to assess their learning, and when needed, learn to redirect their efforts
• It will be democratic, bottom up.
• The class will self-organize, catering to the long tail. It will form itself, and it will largely run itself. We will investigate "the power of organizing without organizations". (Clay Shirky)
• Authority will be earned. It will be turned on its head.
• Outcomes will not be prescribed. We do not know how things will turn out. We may have to change direction as we see fit.
• Failure will not be punished. It will be treated as information.
• It will be open, inviting interested others to look in, collaborate, participate, assist... (There will be mechanisms for private communication between class members, as needed).
• It will not be graded. Assessment will come in various non-graded forms from teacher/guide, peers, visitors, and most importantly, self-reflection. The space will become a deep, rich electronic portfolio for each class member. Additionally, students will be provided with a formal, networked, electronic portfolio that they can manage as they see fit. They will decide what goes into their portfolio, who gets to see it, and when it's available for viewing. This holistic approach seeks to, “transform accountability driven by testing into richer conversations around inquiry into learning” ¹ (more)
• It will be multidisciplinary, anchored around various themes.

In their book, Disrupting Class, authors Christensen, Johnson and Horn state that innovation and change often happen when individual actors work outside of the regulated sectors, offering goods and services through independent commercial channels, eventually getting noticed by the regulatory systems once enough people, through their own choice, opt out of the dominant offering. The authors mention that change rarely happens from within institutions, being that those institutions are more likely to hammer down the sharp edges of innovation to fit their current way of thinking, in the process, sustaining the approach it has always used.

It is hoped that if this approach works, many other independent educational contractors will be motivated to hang out their own e-shingles. Students of all stripes and ages will have a much larger selection of courses and learning formats to choose from. Classes offered by experts, many in unique circumstances, connected to interested others, unshackled from obtuse regulations, could provide an incredibly rich, eclectic and tailored experience in ways that today’s institutions simply could never match.

Teachers with various specialties and interests, using a similar approach, could create some interesting learning opportunities by, for example, spending a semester:

• In a cloud forest, helping add to the EOL
• Traveling throughout the rivers of Europe, connecting students with local history and art
• On a sailboat studying themes related to oceanography, climate change, marine biology, meteorology...
• On a container ship learning about globalization, trade, economics...
• On an Amish farm, reflecting on appropriate use of technology

The possibilities are limitless. It seems like the TFA crowd and Peace Corps types might be attracted to this type of work, improving educational opportunities for all (including teachers!).

Will this type of learning obviate the need for schools or classrooms? Absolutely not. There are many times when people want and need to be in each other's presence. Often, that's the optimal situation. However, being together is not always feasible. What these technologies offer us today is the ability to find and then interact with people that we may never have had the opportunity to connect with otherwise. They offer us the ability to get information, create information, experience places, and work and learn with others in ways that previously were impossible. They lower costs. They make failure cheap and worthwhile. Clay Shirky reminds us that things get interesting when the technology gets boring. Today, nobody cares that you have a blog or use Facebook. It's time for things to get interesting.

I invite you to visit ParticipatoryLearning.net. In the spirit of learning from others, I ask that if you have ideas on how to increase the likelihood that a project of this type succeeds, please send them my way. I’d also kindly ask that if you find this approach good for education, to help spread the message via your own networks.

Thanks for reading.

¹ from Making Common Cause: Electronic Portfolios, Learning, and the Power of Communication, Cambridge, Cambridge and Yancey

Yesterday I described my ideas for investigating fundamental change in how American schools function, but a big part of this change must come in how we find, recruit, train, and support our teachers.

Teachers are the least respected professionals in America. Oh, lawyers get all the jokes. And doctors - whose professional organization keeps trying to block universal health insurance for the U.S. - are seen as greedy. But George W. Bush's first Secretary of Education called teachers "terrorists," Obama's Secretary of Education lectures teachers on blocking change, and a whole bunch of rich and powerful people think that the teaching profession is so easy that any reasonably smart graduate of college can do it after listening to five weeks of lectures. And then, it sure seems like most of the U.S. population thinks teachers are overpaid and underworked.

I just want to remind everyone that these are the people we have placed in charge of our future. These are the people who change the lives and save the lives of our most vulnerable children.

There's history here. In the years after the American Civil War, as public education spread through the unique U.S. "local pay" system, school boards did not want to pay male salaries to teachers. So teaching switched from a male profession to a female profession at a time when pay for females was deplorably low. Of course, so were rates of female higher education. So teachers, at the beginning of the American system, were disrespected women, paid incredibly poorly, and virtually untrained.

This contrasts, for example, with Europe, where schoolmasters were clergy, and deeply respected members of the community.

As the 19th Century ended, "Normal Schools" (teacher training colleges) were appearing everywhere, and the march toward professionalism had begun. But in the early 20th Century, when doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers - all almost exclusively male - organized themselves as "professional organizations" with real public policy and public relations clout, female teachers were left out.

So today, no matter how much money the friends of Wendy Kopp have, no one like her could get away with suggesting that she could train people to perform surgery with five weeks of summer camp training, or build bridges, or design the new World Trade Center, or even take on a death penalty case in court (she has as much experience with those four skill sets as she has with teaching). But she can put completely untrained young people into life or death control of poor people's children, and can be treated as a national expert on teacher certification and education policy.

A profession, not a temp job

I think many teachers are doing a lousy job. I think much of our teacher training is hopelessly disconnected from the needs of our students. I think students lack a diversity of role models among their educators - African-American males, people with learning and attention "issues" especially.

But I can not imagine that "less training" is the solution - because I understand all which anyone must learn to become good at teaching.

On Twitter one day, a "charter school advocate" wondered why Michigan would not certify Civil War filmmaker Ken Burns to teach history. I asked, "What does Ken Burns know about LD, ADHD, EBD, ELL, AAC, UDL?" Because teaching, as anyone who has attended university and slept through the horrid lectures of an expert knows, is about a great deal more than content knowledge. All "human professions" are - which is why, though I might know much less about the law than many Law School professors, I was probably a better New York City cop than most of them could be.

Like all professions, teaching requires a vast amount of both factual and operational knowledge. It requires a constant update of both of those knowledge bases. And it requires an effective peer mentoring and peer review structure. A teacher needs subject knowledge, needs to know the DSM-IV, needs to know brain research, education research, communications technology research. A teacher needs to be a critical thinker, a creative developer of tools of engagement for a wildly diverse audience, and needs a rather stunning level of observational skills and people skills.

How do we find those people? recruit them? train them? support them? reward them? retain them?

Diversities

I want to find more new teachers from a few under-represented populations. I want more who have done poorly in K-12 schools, more survivors of special education, more from chronically failing groups. I want more who grew up in, who live in and are committed to, impoverished communities. And I want more teachers who arrive later in life, having collected big world experiences.

So step one is creating alternate certification routes which make sense in the building of diversity. This means we stop diverting resources to programs like Teach for America, and invest instead in the following:

Community-based Teacher Certification - A decade ago I ran a project in an inner city school, the kind of place which really struggles to hire teachers - especially at the secondary level. The community was impoverished and the tax base shattered. There were great teachers, but many others had checked out.

But there was a group of adults who held the school together. They were para-pros and bus drivers, cafeteria workers and custodians. They lived in the community. They were committed to the school. They knew the kids, in school and on the street. In many ways they were teachers in every way except content knowledge.

Of course they lacked much of that content knowledge, and they all lacked any kind of post-secondary degree. But I thought then what I think now - I'd rather try to teach community-committed, kid-committed adults the content knowledge they need to teach than try to turn uninterested content experts into teachers.

So let's fund in-community evening teacher-training in all those places which now hire those bright Teach for America corps members. Let's pay community members to get fast-tracked degrees and relevant educational training. And let's create life-long teachers who'll be legitimate role models in their communities.

Second Careers - I'm not interested in finding suddenly unemployed investment bankers who want to hide out in education until Wall Street recovers. But there are a ton of people out there who could make fabulous teachers if they could pause, and train. But America is hard:  you quit your job, you lose your health insurance; you go to school, you get charged.

There are alternative certification programs for people like these in certain places, but too many are "district quickies" where the teaching is rote, the curriculum scripted, and the time to grow extremely limited. We need a national program to pay (and insure) these career changers for as long as two years, as they learn about education and spend time every week in schools working directly with students. Only then can they see if this is really the job for them, and only then can "we" see if they've got the people skills to do this complicated job.

The best undergrads - How do we bring our best and brightest to education? And how do we know if those "best and brightest" will be good teachers?

We encourage commitment from freshman year and we insist on time in schools/time with students from the very start.

Now at Michigan State we require time working with "urban" students from the very first education course - at the freshman level. And before our pre-service teachers enter their internship year, they will have probably interacted with more diverse students than a TFA member will during his or her "career" - and so we know who's got the stuff to be a teacher. But we don't have the incentives.

I want to nationalize that kind of time-in-school teacher education while offering tuition and room and board pay-backs for those who become teachers - with those pay-backs starting from the year an undergraduate student began education courses. In other words, try out teaching from the start, and if it works for you, and you work for it - college is free. If we build great teacher education programs, and we get great students to sample them, we'll find our share of great teachers. And if we find and train great teachers, paying for four years of college is a very small price for a nation committed to its children.

Supporting and Keeping Teachers

Finding great teachers, training great teachers, isn't the end. We need to support great teachers. I won't even discuss "merit pay" now, because it remains a ridiculous idea until we decide what "merits" bonuses. America lacks a reasonable track record on that issue.

But we know that teachers cannot continue to be paid the most for working with the easiest students. Teachers in the Bronx cannot earn less than teachers in Scarsdale. Teachers in Los Angeles cannot earn less than teachers in Beverly Hills. Teachers in Gary, Indiana cannot earn less than teachers in River Forest, Illinois. If they do, America's economic system will bring a different set of teachers to those poor communities. We know that.

And we know that we cannot let teachers continue to try to solve their on-the-job problems in isolation. We need to pay them to attend summer institutes and conferences. We need to increase pay to cover more days of in-service training, and we need to make that training excellent, make it differentiated by teacher need, and make it engaging and relevant.

We need to connect our teachers to the information and communication technologies of our times, so they can be comfortable with them and work with them in the classroom. Basic teacher perks must include anywhere broadband access, new computers, and smartphones - and support to learn what they can do.

But we need to do something more. We need to make the teacher workplace a safe place in every way possible. Physically safe and safe for professional experimentation. Because we cannot have teachers who come to work afraid - of students, of administrators, of parents, of tests scores. Just as with students, we can demand more from teachers only if we create high expectations and the kind of space which allows any human to reach their potential.

The role of teachers

If our schools are to be anything better than they are today, the role of teaching must radically change. Teachers will be "guides" rather than an information delivery system. They will function more like librarians than lecturers, helping students find both information and tools. They will need to operate on a critical thinking/creative plane all the time, if we are to get our students to do the same.

That change is going to be difficult. And we need great people, backed by great training and great resources, if we're going to do it.

- Ira Socol

You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange. You can find my books on Amazon.com

Teachable Moment a critical resource for new kinds of teaching

We don’t need Teach for America.

We need Geeks for America.

The TFA program, at best, is only a plug in the dike of an exacerbated American educational system. It assigns recent college grads to two-year terms as instructors in our most under-resourced schools as if it were sending them out on a tour of duty to Afghanistan. Or even worse, as Ira Socol put it in an interview with Open Education:

“Teach for America is a ‘colonial project.’ It is a ‘missionary project.’ It begins with the basic premise that the solution for the underclass in America is to make them ‘as much like’ rich white folks as possible. When you listen to the TFA leadership, they don’t really talk about ‘education,’ probably because they don’t really believe in education. They talk about ‘leadership’ instead.

“This is essentially the British Colonial conversion concept. ‘We’ll fix Nigeria/Ireland/South Africa/India. We’ll just teach them to speak the Queen’s English, give them a Parliament, and make them wear powdered wigs in court. Then they’ll be civilized.’ And like the British Empire, this strategy is adopted because TFA’s board and supporters have no desire to ever relinquish power to a rising colonial population. If it’s all about ‘follow the leader,’ the leader never changes."

Whichever way you see it, the last thing our most needy kids need is another person with opportunities lined up down the road to come in and ‘handle’ them for a few years before getting out.

What we need are Geeks for America. Geeks who aren’t there to put another pretty smile in front of the poor kids, but to help reconstruct and build their local infrastructures to sustain local community development in the Digital Age. Geeks whose mission has nothing to do specifically with teaching, but rather with erasing the Digital Divide so that real teachers can begin the 21st century teaching that needs to happen in every neighborhood in America.

Erasing the Digital Divide is not a matter of charity or volunteerism. It’s a matter of justice and community empowerment.

We need geeks to help get Wi-Fi and access devices into our school buildings. We need geeks to mentor and advise our career teachers on the best ways that they can personalize tech naturally into their teaching so that they can best keep on top of things happening in the culture-at-large and best prepare our children for a 21st century future. We need geeks to demonstrate to our administrators that they could save thousands upon thousands of dollars a year by going open source and weaning the schools off of textbooks, paper, and proprietary software packages. We need geeks to find out what our kids know about tech and help them build on that knowledge to become responsible digital citizens.

One of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard is that younger teachers are either a) better teachers or b) more Geek. The two best teachers I’ve ever worked with have both been 35+ year veterans. The first was the feisty chair of large high school English department where a fifth of the incoming freshmen were functionally illiterate. She took it upon herself to personally teach each and every one of these kids. The second is the current chair of my art department; a veteran and old-fashioned photography teacher with nothing to prove. He’s the one who has so fully embraced Web 2.0 that he worked out an entire school wide summer reading program to introduce students to interactive digital graphic novel creation.

Many of the younger teachers I’ve met, meanwhile, as I travel to different schools and conferences, tend to know how to use Facebook and iTunes but are lost when it comes to integrating real viable social and participartory media into the classroom. And that’s not to dog younger teachers. It was not so long ago that I was one of them. But I fully consider my first three years of teaching to have been a time where I was learning how to teach. It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth year that I really hit my stride. By that time, most TFA volunteers are off working in a different profession.

So we need to stop the blatant agism associated with the likes of TFA and open up a Geeks for America program that includes Geeks of all ages who wish to volunteer.

Geeks are different. They don’t have to be your teachers (though as I mentioned in a post a few weeks back on my blog, it sure helps if you hire teachers who are geeks). The Geeks are your support system. The Geeks for America are the folks who will support your teachers. They will support your administration. They will support your students and parents.

I envision the Geeks going out into the community itself and teaching workshops on Internet access and social media. I see an entire non-profit movement towards closing the digital divide by supplying communities with free hardware and devices with which to access free and universal Wi-Fi, whether in our inner-cities or on our rural byways. I see groups of organized Geeks being there in those communities, almost like Voting Rights volunteers were so many years ago. Geeks to organize, educate, motivate, and supply access. Geeks to teach the communities how to do it themselves; and Geeks to advocate on behalf of universal digital rights.

The TechFoundation in Cambridge, MA has laid down some ground work (including, as far as I can tell, coining the title 'Geeks for America'); but as evidenced by what's on their webpage, noble as it is, this is only a small step towards taking on the big problem. We need a continent-wide tech volunteer core to go into every neighborhood and to bring technology, ed tech mentoring, and tech mentoring for community development.

Will this in and of itself answer all of our problems? No. But, a serious national movement backed by the support of the White House and Congress with the express purpose of ending the Digital Divide is exactly what we need in this moment. Because only with that divide closed can we start to take on the serious problems that face us in the 21st century.

To deny this now, is to tempt fate as we trod further into the Digital Age.

Photo by Half Alive cc 2.0.

[Part One here. Two here. Three here.]

Friedman still hasn't said exactly what "we should have done," though, to prevent our hypothetical "education recession." He delivers that in his conclusion:

It is not that we are failing across the board. There are huge numbers of exciting education innovations in America today — from new modes of teacher compensation to charter schools to school districts scattered around the country that are showing real improvements based on better methods, better principals and higher standards.

In other words, pretty much the Duncan-Klein-Rhee agenda. I mis-spoke in an earlier post when I said Friedman parrots the McKinsey report's conclusions. They only touch on teacher compensation, better standards, applying best practices from better-performing districts to worse-performing ones. Still, Friedman's only re-hashing the bromides echoing from Arne Duncan and, sadly, President Obama across all the mainstream media, most of which are far more problematic than the media suggests.

But it's Friedman's conclusion that really saddens me:

With Wall Street’s decline, though, many more educated and idealistic youth want to try teaching. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, called the other day with these statistics about college graduates signing up to join her organization to teach in some of our neediest schools next year: “Our total applications are up 40 percent. Eleven percent of all Ivy League seniors applied, 16 percent of Yale’s senior class, 15 percent of Princeton’s, 25 percent of Spellman’s and 35 percent of the African-American seniors at Harvard. In 130 colleges, between 5 and 15 percent of the senior class applied.”

Part of it, said Kopp, is a lack of jobs elsewhere. But part of it is “students responding to the call that this is a problem our generation can solve.” May it be so, because today, educationally, we are not a nation at risk. We are a nation in decline, and our nakedness is really showing. (emphasis added)

Let's parse this: "Wall Street's decline" is causing more elite school grads to apply for teaching jobs. And we're supposed to believe this is due to a sudden "idealism" instead of a sudden evaporation of the usual options for Ivy grads. (And let's note that Friedman here reports an opinion straight from Kopp's chummy and conflict-of-interest-laden phone chat with him - another instance of parroting instead of questioning.) As the Daily Beast puts it,

For other students, the sinking economy is increasing interest in jobs whose low-pay, high-karma profile used to make them less sexy than higher-paying jobs in fields like investment banking. Apparently it’s easy to be altruistic when no one else is offering you a job, and nonprofits are reporting large increases in applications.

Is this a new wave of Obama-inspired community service, or just would-be investment bankers looking to take a few years to build their resumes, earn a small but steady paycheck and continue with their more lucrative plans once the Dow is back over 10000? Probably a combination of both.

Even assuming idealism is at the core of this, there are almost four million teachers in America. Elite schools don't graduate a sliver of that number. It's not a scalable solution, even if the "idealistic" (and option-less) young stayed on the job. And they typically don't.

Dan Brown, also responding to Friedman's piece, expands on these obvious facts, showing the lead beneath Friedman's silver-plated bullet:

I'm concerned that [Teach for America is] being propped up by many as a cure-all for America's education woes, when it is nothing of the kind. Teach For America currently contains 6,200 corps members, which constitutes about 0.16 percent of the 3.9 million K-12 teachers in America. And for many within that fraction of a percent, it's a two-year jump in the pool, not a long term endeavor.

. . . . Sure, many Ivy Leaguers are interested to work in underserved schools. TFA may represent an "island of excellence," as Friedman puts it, but it's not a replicable model, since the premise of its success is predicated on exclusivity. Its model of skimming the cream of America's top colleges to serve in 29 regions around the country (the Pacific Northwest is ostensibly on its own) is unequipped to strike at the heart of our costly teacher turnover crisis and its searing impact on our achievement gap.

Brown proceeds to offer another scenario of different economic costs related not to the sensationalistic (and hypothetical) "long-term recession" purportedly caused by the achievement gap, but to the failure to retain more career teachers over the long term:

In 2007, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) conducted an extensive and illuminating study on teacher turnover, which calculated an annual nationwide cost of over $7 billion for the replacement of people leaving the profession.

That's staggering, and doesn't take into account the invaluable institutional knowledge or student-teacher relationships lost when experienced teachers depart the job early and overwhelmed rookies run for the exit. The study's findings on the importance of recruiting and retaining quality teachers speak directly to the long term health of our education system-- and our economy.

Overall, the most saddening thing about both Friedman's piece and the McKinsey study itself is that they do not say anything to address the poverty at the root of the achievement gap. No talk of the absence of parental support - or even presence - for poor children due to the absence of a living wage law; no talk of all the other roots of poverty that the United States chooses not to address when it views schools through on Overton Window opening out to a thoroughly rightward view. That rightward view got its biggest push with the release of "A Nation at Risk" back in 1983, which the McKinsey Report echoes resoundingly - this time with an appeal to all our pocket-books. (It's worth noting that the economic model created for the McKinsey report, and upon which the whole "recession" scenario is founded, is based on the theories of Eric Hanushek, a free-market fundamentalist and long-time advocate of vouchers whose research has been criticised for cooking data to support his ideology.* Thomas Friedman doesn't say that, but it's true.)

If America's most educated elite in Washington and on Wall Street - whose elite college children are now signing up in droves to save us all, we're to believe, through Teach for America  - hadn't given 1.3 trillion in tax cuts to the very wealthiest during the Bush administration, spent another trillion on the Iraq invasion, and cost the rest of us trillions more in bailing out Wall Street after de-regulating it (out of trust for its Ivy-educated leaders), we'd be in a completely different America today - and one that could withstand these hypothetical costs.

Friedman writes in this piece that, to deal with this "decline," we need a "sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand." A truly moral stance would be to look away from the McKinsey report's manufactured crisis, and address instead the real one: the economic decline, for all but the very wealthiest, that has overtaken America in the past three decades.

And when Friedman, quoting the far-from-average Warren Buffett, says that the economic meltdown shows that schools are "swimming without a swimsuit," I can't help but wonder if Friedman is not revealing his own nakedness. We all have opinions, and Friedman's piece is just an opinion column, after all. And I'm sure Friedman is a decent man in many ways. But the opinions in "Swimming Without a Swimsuit" seem to come from one who has for far too long been swimming with . . . the Suits.

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(More to come on the McKinsey Report itself.)

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*Here's a snippet from Hanushek that should give us more pause now than it did before the deregulatory crows came home to roost last year:

The United States has led the world in fostering the elements of a strongly functioning and growing economy. These include a mature system of property rights, the maintenance of generally open and competitive labor and product markets, minimal intrusion of government through regulations and taxation, and, of course, a broad system of education and human-capital development.  (Source: Hanushek, “Education and the Economy:  Our School Performance Matters,” Education Week 24(21), February 2, 2005. Pdf here.)

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