Lefty in the TIMES - & the return of instructivist!

"Lefty" has a terrific letter in the New York Times:

Re “Education Is All in Your Mind,” by Richard E. Nisbett (Op-Ed, Feb. 8):

I don’t doubt that removing “stereotype threat,” discussing the benefits of hard work and asking children to consider their futures and personal values improve student performance.

But if changing the curriculum and training teachers “typically produce little in the way of educational gain,” I must conclude that only certain curriculum changes and training protocols have been examined.

How about replacing today’s popular “reform math” programs, which some mathematicians estimate ultimately delay students by up to two grade levels, with a more challenging, pedagogically principled one like Singapore Math? How about specifically training teachers who understand upper-level arithmetic?

Education is, of course, ultimately all in your mind, but neither work ethic nor future focus will help you multiply large numbers efficiently or convert arbitrary fractions into decimals — unless either your teacher or textbook takes time to address these topics.

Katharine Beals
Philadelphia, Feb. 10, 2009

The good news:

• Nicholas Kristof has taken Goldin & Katz's thesis to heart and may be in the process of retooling himself to become an education columnist [news flash: have just this moment noticed that instructivist - he's back! - has already covered this ground]
  

• While the first 2 columns Kristof devoted to The Race Between Education and Technology repeated Fareed Zakaria's assertion that "White suburban schools still offer an excellent education, comparable to those in Singapore, which may have the best education system in the world," his third column does not. Since Zakaria appears to have drawn this claim from a trade publication article that got the TIMSS research wrong, I'm hoping Kristof won't adopt the white-schools-good/black-schools-bad approach that so badly mischaracterizes what has gone wrong in U.S. public schools.
  

Although he has dropped the comparisons to Singapore, Kristof does claim, without citing evidence, that the best teachers are teaching the most privileged students. And he thinks spending $100 billion to save all public school teaching jobs no questions asked is self-evidently a good thing.

Still and all, the contradictions inherent in Kristof's second column are bound to occur to him sooner rather than later:

a) teachers matter more than class size
b) many disadvantaged children are being taught by not-so-great teachers (according to Kristof)

and

c) no teacher in any public school anywhere in the country should lose a job

As an elected official here in Westchester County once said of the evacuation plan for Indian Point, "All three things cannot be true at once."

As to the $100 billion for education, now that my own child has been rescued by a Catholic school^* I'd like to see a good portion of that money go to private and parochial schools that have been successfully educating children for years:

Through a laserlike focus on a no-frills, core academic curriculum, and by resisting progressive-education fads, Rice takes most of the students who enter in ninth grade—many of them two years behind in reading and math—and gradually gets them up to grade level. The kids pass most of the necessary state Regents exams. There are no Jaime Escalante miracles here, no AP calculus whiz kids. But Rice’s graduation rate is a legitimate 90 percent, compared with the public schools’ rate of 50 to 60 percent—despite per-pupil spending in the city’s public high schools triple that of Rice’s. Most Rice graduates go on to some form of higher education.

School-reform experts often argue that money is overrated as a factor in school improvement. For the most part, I agree. But in the case of Rice High School and most of the other Catholic schools in the city, money is the issue. With a little extra each year, we could almost guarantee that Rice will go on doing an excellent job of educating at-risk black boys far into the twenty-first century, just as it educated underprivileged white boys throughout the twentieth century. I estimate that if the city’s Catholic schools could get just 1 percent of the budget for the public schools, there would be no more Catholic-school closings. And if the people and political leaders of this wealthy city can’t figure out how to get such a small amount of money into the Catholic schools, Patrick McCloskey’s inspired book can serve as a requiem for one of New York’s most noble institutions.

Kristof says he's still on the steep part of the learning curve, and I'm thinking he's headed in the right direction. In his follow-up blog post to the second column, he writes that "you’re much better off with a great teacher in a big class in a bad school than with a poor teacher in a small class in an excellent school." That's not something you hear every day of the week.

Maybe by the time Column #3 rolls around, Mr. Kristof will have discovered that education is dominated by charlatans and a noxious ideology!


Nicholas Kristof on The Race Between Education and Technology:
Obama and the Schools November 12, 2008
Throwing Schools Out the Window Feb 6, 2009
Our Greatest National Shame Feb 14, 2009
Your Comments on My Education Column Feb 14, 2009

Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

^* For passersby: I am a Protestant, and my husband is Jewish; our public school is funded at $25K per pupil spending and rising.