parent-oriented colleges

C. tells me that at his friend's Jesuit college, the R.A. had the students all make Christmas cards for their parents.

That would NEVER happen at NYU.

NYU students don't have parents.

At least, that's the vibe you get attending 'Parents' Day, which didn't feel like a Parents Day at all. When the various speakers referred to our children, they used the term "your student."

"Your student" is the same formulation administrators here in my peer-oriented school district always used, even for kids as young as 10.

"Please share with your student."

"Please discuss with your student." (My personal favorite: the letter home asking us to discuss bomb threats with our student.)

I don't have a student, bub! (Well, actually I do.)

I have a child.

C. told me the Christmas card story and said, "I wish I'd gone to a Catholic college."

I wish he had, too.

update from the Comments:

I teach at a Catholic college, and my husband used to teach at one of the elite Jesuit colleges. Trust me, they aren't worth drooling over. The elite Jesuit college was pretty much like small elite liberal arts colleges of all stripes, except the student body was 95% Irish. My large Catholic university has all the woes of large private universities everywhere, and the Catholicism mainly shows up in the form of trying to force professors to tack service learning into every course. Your kid is better off at NYU.

C.'s friend is attending a Jesuit college, come to think of it. Not sure whether it's an elite Jesuit college. C. will know.

Stanley Fish on teaching writing in college

Stanley Fish answers the question Isn't the mastery of forms something that should be taught in high school or earlier?

By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all. The exception seems to be Catholic schools. More than a few commentators remembered with a mixture of fondness and pain the instruction they received at the hands of severe nuns. And I have found that those students in my classes who do have a grasp of the craft of writing are graduates of parochial schools. (I note parenthetically that in many archdioceses such schools are being closed, not a good omen for those who prize writing.)

I really want to start a Catholic school. Really, truly. My building used to be a Catholic school; I'd like it to be a Catholic school again.

By the way, I do realize that if I had actually attended Catholic schools as a child I might feel different. But I was raised a flat-footed Methodist, as I think I once heard Huston Smith say on TV, and to me the Catholic Church was magic. The nuns in their black habits, the priests, the Holy water in the doorways and the crucifixes on the wall ---- and the sign of the cross! Oh my.

A couple of years ago I asked my second to oldest sister whether she had liked the sign of the cross as a child, and she said at once and with great enthusiasm, "Of course!" She had been so taken by the Catholic Church she wanted to be Catholic. I had no idea. Were all 4 of us kids having our own private Catholic crush?

Truth to tell, my own Catholic crush wasn't so private. I took piano lessons from the nuns for years, and my parents made arrangements for me to attend the Catholic school one day each school year.

I remember reading somewhere that charter schools copied Catholic schools, and the observation struck me as true. I bet, if you scratched the surface, you'd find a lot of charter founders who as children pressed their noses against the windows of a Catholic school, outside looking in.

Can you spell 'hegemony'?

from the Times:

Catholic schools have been bleeding enrollment and money for years, and many have been forced to close. But some, like St. Stephen of Hungary, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, have found a way to thrive — attracting a more affluent clientele by offering services and classes more commonly found in expensive private schools.

Selling points include small class sizes and extracurricular activities beginning in the youngest grades. And by often charging far less, these schools have been able to stabilize themselves and even grow.

“Our competition or our standard isn’t another good Catholic school,” said the Rev. Angelo Gambatese, the pastor at St. Stephen of Hungary church, which shares a building with the school. “It’s the best independent schools in Manhattan, and we intend to achieve the same level of performance that they do, academically, developmentally.”

[snip]

While 70 percent of the students are Catholic, a figure that has not changed, it has a more Franciscan focus on kindness and respect rather than papal edicts, which makes it more palatable to families not traditionally in the Catholic school market.

“I don’t feel like it’s holy rollers over there,” said Richard Sher, a parent of two at the school who is half Jewish, half Protestant.

Mass is every other week; the homily is more of a discussion than a lesson. When Father Gambatese talked in May to the youngest students at Mass about Adam, he wondered why Adam asked God for more humans. “He wanted people to talk to and play with,” Sabrina Vidal, 8, said. “Yes!” Father Gambatese said. “Don’t you get tired of hugging a lion?”

St. Stephen offers the kind of extras found at far more expensive schools, like French for 3-year-olds, violin for fourth and fifth graders, and iPads for sixth to eighth graders. But some parents, Catholic and non-Catholic, said they were also drawn to the discipline and values-based approach at St. Stephen, elements that have fallen out of fashion at most nonreligious schools.

“We were looking for structure, and that’s what we got,” said Deirdre O’Connell, a parent who works in banking.

In Katherine Peck, the entrepreneurial 33-year-old at the heart of St. Stephen’s revitalization, the parents also got a principal schooled in progressive teaching. Classrooms are no longer teacher-focused, with students at desks, but student-centered, with children at tables. Students have publishing parties every month to showcase their writing, textbooks have been de-emphasized in favor of hands-on learning and every classroom has an interactive projection system.

Mrs. Peck, who is Catholic and attended Teachers College of Columbia University, said Catholic schools gave her more flexibility than the public schools where she had taught. (She also taught at the Epiphany School before coming to St. Stephen.) “Everything I was doing at Teachers College, I could do in the classroom,” she said, compared with the public school where she said everyone had to teach from the same page.

To Survive, a Catholic School Retools for a Wealthier MarketBy JENNY ANDERSON | New York Times | Published: August 19, 2012

I need to start a Catholic school. A real one. A real Catholic school, only with precision teaching.

Of course, I'm not Catholic. So I wouldn't be anyone's first choice to start a Catholic school. Also, the Catholic Church isn't starting new schools, not here in Westchester County anyway. The church is closing them.

Yesterday I taught my first class (freshman composition) in Victory Hall, a building that up until two or three years ago housed a Catholic girls high school. I love teaching in Victory Hall, and I was happy to be assigned a room there again. The place has an aura.

Jimmy's group home, originally built to serve as a convent, has an aura, too.

But when I arrived at Victory Hall, I discovered that I wasn't teaching in the building itself; I was teaching in one of the ancient modulars out back. I didn't even know the modulars were there, and now I'm teaching in one.

Catholic schools used to have so many students they had to buy trailers to expand the plant.

Now they're all going or gone.

Ed has often asked how much longer Chris's Jesuit high school can hold out. It's housed on the same campus with a major education school, and major education schools have no truck with the Jesuit tradition.

and see:
cultural hegemony

thought for the day

I want to open a Catholic school.

Seriously.

public versus private high school

interesting discussion at College Confidential

I was struck by this observation:

One thing that I feel was so worth while at that private school where I sent my kids was the Composition course. Every Monday starting with freshman year until the end of first semester of senior year, they have to write an essay on what is usually an unannounced subject. THey have to handwrite the essay in those old blue books used for final exams at colleges. Those essays are scrutinized and corrected and graded. The student then has a chance to rewrite the essay--in class during the week to better the grade. So no out of school help is available for that part of the grade, and the kids really do learn to write. Sometimes a general topic is given and the kids have to research a subject and can bring a page of notes and cites to use for the essay, but still, the exact question is not known.

What makes this work are dedicated teachers who read and grade those essays. One thing I despised about our public school experience were teachers who did not follow up on corrected papers and tests. They would mark off the answers, sometimes not even reading the work carefully, and then just hand back the paper, If they bothered to look in their wastepaper basket, they would find those returned papers for the most part, thrown in there. The kids would learn nothing from the assignment. X School teachers read every single answer and would make the kids redo what they showed they did not know. But that is not always the case for even private schools. The top privates, the selective ones with the top reps tend to offer this as a matter of course.

And here's a parent talking about Rice:

I want to share with you the experience I had going to the last commencement for Rice, a Catholic all boys school in Harlem run by the Christian Brothers. The CB are a dying breed, their extinction accelerated by the priest scandals, and this school never did make any money. The school graduated a group of all African American young men from Harlem, none of them deemed smart enough to be accepted to any of the top magnet schools the NYC city offers to its brightest students. The graduation rate of this school is remarkable, given who goes there, and nearly every single one of those kids is going to college, even more remarkable when you look at the stats for inner city AA young men. Now this is not a school that most middle class folks would want for their kids, but when you look at the accomplishments for those young men, given what the alternatives are, the result are phenomonal. I do not support school vouchers, but this a case that really makes me pause, and would the type of exception that I would support.

I personally know a number of young men who graduated with my son. They did not do well in the NYC high school lottery, so their parents, came up with the money to send them to a Catholic high school. It was a difficult 4 years for these families, who even with discounts and transportation vouchers found it very difficult to go to this school that often required transportation transfers to attend. Some of the kids lived in far away boroughs. They were NOT the brightest or best by any public or private school standards. But every single one of them are going to college with enough merit/financial aid to make it work. I talked to the mom of one who told me that less than half her sons' peers who did not get into the great NYC magnet schools are going to college and if they are, are going to community colleges or at best the CUNYS maybe. What a difference in results.

in Portugal

In the Wall Street Journal:

Just 28% of the Portuguese population between 25 and 64 has completed high school. The figure is 85% in Germany, 91% in the Czech Republic and 89% in the U.S.

Ireland

There is substantial evidence from elsewhere that education confers broad economic benefits. Ireland was one of the EU's poorest countries a generation ago. But it threw EU subsidy money into technical education and remade itself as a destination for high-tech labor, made doubly attractive by low corporate taxes. Ireland is now, even after a brutal banking crisis, among the richest nations in Europe.

"They had an educated-enough work force that they could move into a technology industry, and they rose out of nowhere," says Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University professor.

Portugal

Prof. Hanushek and a professor from the University of Munich have linked GDP growth with population-wide performance on standardized tests. They calculate that Portugal's long-term rate of economic growth would be 1.5 percentage points higher if the country had the same test scores as super-educated Finland.

Education long was an afterthought here. "The southern countries like Portugal and Spain and the south of France and Italy, we have always had some problems related with education," says António Nóvoa, a historian who is rector of the University of Lisbon. "That's been like that since the 16th century."

The repressive dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974 had the idea "that people should not have ambition to be something different than what they were," Mr. Nóvoa says. The result was widespread illiteracy and little formal schooling; just three years were compulsory. Huge leaps have been made since the 1970s, he says, but "it is not easy to change a history of five centuries."

Portugal has just begun phasing in 12 years of required schooling; now, Portuguese can leave school after ninth grade. Many do.

[snip]

A push to evaluate teachers triggered searing strikes and demonstrations in 2008, souring relations between powerful teachers' unions and the government. The political life of education ministers is measured in months: since the dictatorship ended in 1974, there have been 27.

parents protest cuts to quasi-private schools

To the system's critics, a fight that has developed over quasi-private schools is emblematic of what's wrong. With budgets tight, the government has imposed deep cuts on schools that are at the margin of the state's control—no matter that some are among the best.

[snip]

In one town, A Dos Cunhados, the local school isn't run or owned by the government. It is managed by the Catholic Church, in an arrangement that dates to the end of the dictatorship, when the new Portuguese state found it didn't have enough facilities.

At the school, Externato de Penafirme, as at 90 others with what are called "association contracts," the state pays a management fee to a private entity, which broadly follows the state curriculum but hires its own teachers.

The deputy principal, Carlos Silva, once taught chemistry in the public school system. He was shuffled through four schools in four years. Frustrated, he quit and enrolled in a seminary. Afterward, as a priest, he asked his bishop about returning to the classroom, and was assigned to Externato de Penafirme.

[snip]

Faced with the cuts, students and parents organized. In December, 4,000 people held hands in a big ring around the Penafirme campus. The pictures hit television. A Facebook group sprang up. In January, students walked out of dozens of the privately run schools for three days. To dramatize a claim the cuts would mean the death of their schools, students and parents from 55 schools ferried mock coffins to Lisbon and put them on the median strip outside Ms. Alçada's ministry.

Last month, the education ministry eased somewhat, agreeing to restore part of the lost funding for this semester.

A Nation of Dropouts Shakes Europe
By CHARLES FORELLE
March 25, 2011

Merryl Tisch & religious education

In the wake of contemplating whether American citizens will ever be allowed to use vouchers to pay for religious schools, I came across this opening passage from a NY Times profile of Regents Chancellor Meryl Tisch:

Speaking to a group of Catholic educators in a conference room high above First Avenue, Merryl H. Tisch interrupted a dry barrage of bureaucratic references to attendance mandates and Title 2A with a seeming non sequitur.

“When my refrigerator is broken, I don’t call the service department,” said Dr. Tisch, the newly elected chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents and, by marriage, part of one of New York’s wealthiest families. “I call the head of G.E.”

Dr. Tisch, who tends to lower her voice just as she is making an important point, urged her audience to enlist the soon-to-be head of the Archdiocese of New York, Timothy M. Dolan, to make the case in Albany for religious education. She said that she happened to watch the announcement of Mr. Dolan’s appointment, which was televised live from the Vatican at 3 a.m., and was impressed by his style. “Lay it on the line,” she advised.

Advancing Education, Through Work Ethic and Connections

By LISA W. FODERARO
Published: April 4, 2009

Tisch began her career teaching first grade in Jewish schools.

the way of proceeding

Thirty-five years ago, the nation's Jesuit high schools were reeling from an identity crisis. Jesuits were leaving both the schools and the Society; social action ministries seemed more relevant than teaching high school. Should the Jesuits continue to run high schools for upper- and middle-class students or focus on serving the poor?

Simultaneously, urban riots slashed enrollments at some inner-city Jesuit schools, and single-sex education seemed to some to be a chauvinistic anachronism. Replacing Jesuits with lay faculty raised tuition. Some of the nation's best Catholic high schools were in danger.

Fast-forward to 2006. The "long black line" of Jesuits is gone, with just a handful of priests and brothers remaining in most of the forty-nine American Jesuit high schools. However, the Society of Jesus is committed to its high schools, because Jesuits now realize that they provide outstanding opportunities for the spiritual formation of young people, says Fr. Ralph Metts, SJ, president of the Jesuit Secondary Education Association (JSEA). AMDG still rules at today's thriving schools. Consider these developments.

• Inner-city Jesuit Cristo Rey high schools, where low-income students work for their tuition, are opening rapidly. Two were added to the network in 2006, with more planned.

• Most of the traditional Jesuit high schools are at capacity, with competitive enrollments. This includes inner-city schools once threatened with closing.

• The schools are raising at least four hundred million dollars in capital campaigns alone to upgrade campuses and enhance endowments/financial aid.

• Jesuit schools all over the country are still academically and athletically elite.

What lies behind this turnaround?

That's what I sought to discover in writing this book.

They Made All the Difference: Life-changing Stories from Jesuit High Schools by Eileen Wirth

Catholic Schools & crime

This paper represents the second stage of an effort to test previously unstudied implications of a dramatic shift in the American educational landscape, namely, the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods. In a previous study, we used data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to measure how Catholic school closures affected perceived levels of disorder and social cohesion in Chicago neighborhoods. In this paper, we use data provided by the Chicago Police Department to test two related hypotheses about the effects of Catholic school closures on violent crime rates. The first is that Catholic school closures will lead, in relatively short order, to increased crime in a neighborhood. The second is that that crime will increase most dramatically in those police beats where previous school closures led to elevated levels of physical and social disorder and suppressed levels of social cohesion in 1995. We find that Catholic school closures are linked to increase in violent crimes, and that the most significant increases occur in police beats with the highest levels of school-closure-related disorder and -suppressed social cohesion in 1995. Our study contributes in unique ways to two critical legal-policy debates about policing and education policy. First, and most significantly, our data provides a novel means of testing the broken windows hypothesis. We know, from our previous investigation, where school closures have elevated disorder and suppressed social cohesion, and, using a 3SLS analysis to solve simultaneous equations, we are able to link these findings with subsequent elevated levels of serious crimes. These findings suggest a connection between disorder and serious crime, even if not the direct one posited by Wilson and Kelling. Second, the study contributes new and important evidence to debates about school choice, especially in light of the very real possibility that urban Catholic schools will continue to disappear unless new sources of tuition assistance become available to the students that they serve.

Margaret Brinig & Nicole Stelle Garnett
Notre Dame Working Paper, March 2010

We need vouchers.

Has anyone else noticed that a lot of charter school imagery looks like Catholic schools of yore?

Angela's Ashes

When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, page 11


We go to school through lanes and back streets so that we won’t meet the respectable boys who go to the Christian Brothers’ School or the rich ones who go to the Jesuit school, Crescent College. The Christian Brothers’ boys wear tweed jackets, warm woolen sweaters, shirts, ties and shiny new boots. We know they’re the ones who will get jobs in the civil service and help the people who run the world. The crescent College boys wear blazers and school scarves tossed around their necks and over their shoulders to show they’re cock o’ the walk. They have long hair which falls cross their foreheads and over their eyes so that they can toss their quaffs like Englishmen. We know they’re the ones who will go to university, take over the family business, run the government, run the world. We’ll be the messenger boys on bicycles who deliver their groceries or we’ll go to England to work on the building sites. Our sisters will mind their children and scrub their floors unless they go off to England, too. We know that. We’re ashamed of the way we look and if boys from the rich schools pass remarks we’ll get into a fight and wind up with bloody noses or torn clothes. Our masters will have no patience with us and our fights because their sons go to the rich schools and, Ye have no right to raise your hands to a better class of people so ye don’t.
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, page 272-273

Frank McCourt,Whose Irish Childhood Illuminated His Prose, is Dead at 78
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: July 19, 2009

Frank McCourt dies at 78: late-blooming author of 'Angela's Ashes'
LA Times

Only a Teacher: Teachers Today interview with Frank McCourt

God's soldiers

Voltaire, eager to undermine the claims of conventional religion by contrasting the infighting of the Catholic Church with the sedate purity, unity and rationality of the students of Euclid, boasted that there were no sects among geometers. This, with the arrival of non-Euclidean geometry in the next century, would prove to be overly optimistic, but more important, invoking geometry as some kind of antithesis of revealed religion was a rhetorical mistake. After all, some of the best geometers of the past two centuries (including Christopher Clavius, the author of the preeminent early-modern version of Euclid's Elements; including Fracois d'Auilon; including Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri, author of books which, after a period of long neglect, would help lay the basis for non-Euclidean geometry) were Jesuits.

God's Soldiers: Adventure Politics, Intrigue, and Power -- A History of the Jesuits
by Jonathan Wright
p. 193-194

military schools

Only in the military?

After my first visit to Hogwarts, on Sports Orientation Night, I came away thinking the place felt like a "happy military school." As it turned out, that was by design; the principal told us so on Family Orientation Day. I've forgotten how he put it, but the gist was that Jesuit schools have much in common with military schools.

Loyola himself, of course, was a soldier.

My point: happy military schools work.

Knowing what I do now, I take issue with this observation:

Behavioral problems are not an issue [inside military schools] due to the values students are taught at home.

I would wager a very large sum of money that a person who has actually taught in a military school would read this passage and hoot.

Your typical classroom pits 20 to 30 kids against 1 adult. That's not quite the Battle of Thermopylae, but close enough.

Kids in groups are like dogs in packs^* (I say that with affection for kids and dogs): they rev each other up, and beyond a certain point parents can't control their kids from home no matter how sterling their values. It is the school's job to keep order and a cheerful spirit.

Most schools don't: because of political correctness that dictates "radical inclusion;" because ed schools don't teach classroom management skills; because public schools seem to believe that classroom discipline begins and ends in the home.

It doesn't. The public schools in my district, where the school population is upper middle class children from well-organized families, are safe and reasonably orderly, but there are constant complaints about disrupted classrooms, kids not being able to hear because of commotion made by the 'hyper' kids, etc. At the high school, students and parents have been told that disruptive kids in honors courses "don't deserve to be in the class."

I think it's unlikely that military kids are better behaved than kids in my district when they're not under their parents' direct supervision, and I credit military school personnel, not military parents,^** with the orderly environment inside military schools.


^* "In 2008, 39% of the fatalities involved multiple dogs."

^** Not a criticism of military parents or anyone else. All I'm saying is: if a parent isn't inside the classroom, he isn't the one keeping order.

save the schools

re: the loss of Catholic schools

The American public school system is vast. More than 15,000 school districts govern over 95,000 schools employing over 6 million people serving 50 million students and spending $500 billion per year (Hess & Finn, 2007). Public schooling, in short, is a colossus casting a very long shadow. Major reform efforts within the public education system will inevitably influence the private school sector, sometimes profoundly so.

Even as by far the nation’s largest system of private schooling, at 2.3 million students (McDonald, 2006) the size of the Catholic school system pales in comparison. Nevertheless, Catholic schools have a proud tradition of outperforming public schools, in particular with disadvantaged students. In vast swaths of urban America today, Catholic schools remain the highest performing schools available to inner-city youth.

THE IMPACT OF CHARTER SCHOOLS ON CATHOLIC SCHOOLS: A COMPARISON OF PROGRAMS IN ARIZONA AND MICHIGAN (pdf file) by Mathew Ladner

I was wondering this morning whether Kitchen Table Math could sponsor a student through an Adopt-a-Student program. Tuition at Mt. St. Ursula is $6,300 a year.


The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem by Patrick McCloskey

why parents pay for Catholic school

C's summer assignments from Hogwarts:

• read the first 15 chapters of the AP Euro textbook
• read & outline the first 6 chapters of the AP bio textbook
• watch Franco Zefferilli's Jesus of Nazareth
  
• read 3 books for English
• read 1 book on dealing with stress (guidance assignment)
  

Here's what Lefty's going-into-7th-grade son will be doing:

A Mathematical Scavenger Hunt at the Library

Go the the city library--either the main library or a branch library. Do the following activities and record all of this information in an attractive booklet or on a poster. Plan ahead since you may need more than one visit to do everything on the list

1. Draw a sketch of the front of the library on 8.5 X 11 paper. Show the windows and doors. Estimate the width and height of the building and show these dimensions on your sketch. Explain the strategy you used to make your estimate.

2. Go to a room in the library. Make a sketch of the floor plan of the room. Estimate the length and width of the room. What is your estimate of the area of the room? Explain the strategy you used to make your estimate

3. Find a section of the books that you like. Write down the types of books you chose. Place your forearm along the shelf and count how many books there are from the tip o your elbow to the tip of your fingers.

4. Estimate the number of books in this room. Explain what strategy you used to come up with your estimate.

5. Find a chart showing the Dewey decimal numbers for the categories of books in the library. Copy the information to the chart.

6. If you do not already have one, sign up for a library card.

7. Check out a non-fiction book that you would like to read. List its title, author, and Dewey decimal number.

Bring the project to school on the first day. Your teacher will use the data you have collected for class.

Left offers a suggested summer assignment for her school's teachers.

more is less

What a Texas town can teach us about health care: Costlier care is often worse care.

McAllen [Texas] has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.

[snip]

I gave the doctors around the table a scenario. A forty-year-old woman comes in with chest pain after a fight with her husband. An EKG is normal. The chest pain goes away. She has no family history of heart disease. What did McAllen doctors do fifteen years ago?

Send her home, they said. Maybe get a stress test to confirm that there’s no issue, but even that might be overkill.

And today? Today, the cardiologist said, she would get a stress test, an echocardiogram, a mobile Holter monitor, and maybe even a cardiac catheterization.

“Oh, she’s definitely getting a cath,” the internist said, laughing grimly.

[snip]

Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents.

[snip]

Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic dominates the scene, has fantastically high levels of technological capability and quality, but its Medicare spending is in the lowest fifteen per cent of the country—$6,688 per enrollee in 2006, which is eight thousand dollars less than the figure for McAllen. Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be.

[snip]

That’s because nothing in medicine is without risks. Complications can arise from hospital stays, medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens.

[snip]

I talked to Denis Cortese, the C.E.O. of the Mayo Clinic, which is among the highest-quality, lowest-cost health-care systems in the country. A couple of years ago, I spent several days there as a visiting surgeon. Among the things that stand out from that visit was how much time the doctors spent with patients. There was no churn—no shuttling patients in and out of rooms while the doctor bounces from one to the other. I accompanied a colleague while he saw patients. Most of the patients, like those in my clinic, required about twenty minutes. But one patient had colon cancer and a number of other complex issues, including heart disease. The physician spent an hour with her, sorting things out. He phoned a cardiologist with a question.

“I’ll be there,” the cardiologist said.

Fifteen minutes later, he was. They mulled over everything together. The cardiologist adjusted a medication, and said that no further testing was needed. He cleared the patient for surgery, and the operating room gave her a slot the next day.

The whole interaction was astonishing to me. Just having the cardiologist pop down to see the patient with the surgeon would be unimaginable at my hospital. The time required wouldn’t pay. The time required just to organize the system wouldn’t pay.

The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible.

“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.

No one there actually intends to do fewer expensive scans and procedures than is done elsewhere in the country. The aim is to raise quality and to help doctors and other staff members work as a team. But, almost by happenstance, the result has been lower costs.

“When doctors put their heads together in a room, when they share expertise, you get more thinking and less testing,” Cortese told me.

[snip]

The Mayo Clinic is not an aberration. One of the lowest-cost markets in the country is Grand Junction, Colorado, a community of a hundred and twenty thousand that nonetheless has achieved some of Medicare’s highest quality-of-care scores. Michael Pramenko is a family physician and a local medical leader there. Unlike doctors at the Mayo Clinic, he told me, those in Grand Junction get piecework fees from insurers. But years ago the doctors agreed among themselves to a system that paid them a similar fee whether they saw Medicare, Medicaid, or private-insurance patients, so that there would be little incentive to cherry-pick patients. They also agreed, at the behest of the main health plan in town, an H.M.O., to meet regularly on small peer-review committees to go over their patient charts together. They focussed on rooting out problems like poor prevention practices, unnecessary back operations, and unusual hospital-complication rates. Problems went down. Quality went up. Then, in 2004, the doctors’ group and the local H.M.O. jointly created a regional information network—a community-wide electronic-record system that shared office notes, test results, and hospital data for patients across the area. Again, problems went down. Quality went up. And costs ended up lower than just about anywhere else in the United States.

Grand Junction’s medical community was not following anyone else’s recipe. But, like Mayo, it created what Elliott Fisher, of Dartmouth, calls an accountable-care organization. The leading doctors and the hospital system adopted measures to blunt harmful financial incentives, and they took collective responsibility for improving the sum total of patient care.

The Cost Conundrum
by Atul Gawande
June 1, 2009
The New Yorker

When the needs of the patient come first, medical care costs less.

Judging by the amount of money charter & parochial schools spend to educate children, compared to the amount public schools spend to not educate children, I'd say that principle will turn out to be true of schools, too.

indentured service

a reader left this comment:

I live in the area of the Webster Magnet School. Although my kids do not attend that school, I have had a snootful of service learning projects assigned to my kids throughout the years. We have partnership schools in the suburbs where kids get together to "make friends" with kids in other areas of the city. I'm all for Feed the Children, but my daughter's class has been working on this project for the last 3 weeks, taking a field trip to the center. "Let's not teach history or proper English, let's teach service." The kids miss a lot of instructional time doing these projects. No wonder my husband and I are so tired. We have to teach them school subjects after they get home from school.

I feel I can't say anything negative about these programs because it is just not politically correct. Teachers love them. The principal loves them. Parents love them. "They are soooo good for the students and the community. A good way to build community in the school." I think it turns kids off to volunteerism.

Hogwarts has some service trips that are fantastically fun, I'm told: especially the summer trip to Tennessee, where I think the kids help build houses.

I don't begrudge a Catholic school having a service requirement -- it's a Catholic school, after all. It's supposed to have a service requirement. The Jesuit motto is "Men for others," and that is what they teach.

One of the things I like about the service requirement in a Catholic school is that often a student's service is given to the school. In a wealthy public school that might get on my nerves, but in a Catholic school operating on a shoestring, I like it.

the years

C. has just 4 school days left of his first year at Hogwarts.

Last fall the principal told us, "There will be some long days and long nights, but the years will go by in a blink."

We didn't have any long days or long nights at Hogwarts; we seem to have left those behind, in our public school.

And so the year has gone by in half a blink.

Teacher and Teaching by Richard Henry Tierney, S.J.

Google Books has a pdf file of the book available for downloading.

the Jesuit teachers

The Jesuit teachers also knew that fixing the impression was extremely important. This fits in with their stress on memory-work—and it was not automatic memorizing, it had to be thorough understanding. Their manuals of teaching never tire of saying: Repeat, repeat and repeat. They nearly always add that the master must watch carefully and vary his questions to ensure that there is nothing mechanical about this repetition, but then they urge once more Repeat and once more Repeat.

The Art of Teaching by Gilbert Highet
p. 147-148

middle school advisory

Seeing as how CT has apparently mandated advisories in middle school, it's time to post this article by Daniel Deitte (pdf file):

When I was first hired as a middle school sixth grade teacher, I was thrilled. This was a position I had coveted for over four years....Soon after I started, however, I realized that one piece was missing; we did not have a strong advisory program. Yes, we had a structured advisory period for 29 minutes at the end of every day, but there was very little focus to our advisory. Something needed to be done about the lack of interest and focus during that time.

[snip]

As I spoke about this with several of my colleagues, something else became very apparent to me …none of us had a clear picture of what was supposed to happen in a true advisory program.

Good reason to institute an advisory program and pay teachers a stipend to advise!

The worst part about running the advisory I described above was that I found myself dreading the last 29 minutes of each day. Inevitably, I had students who did not want to participate in S.Q.U.I.R.T [Super Quiet Uninterrupted Reading Time], or who never had any homework to do. Additionally, somewhere, early in my first year of teaching, I had decided that my advisory time would be a quiet time with the students needing permission to speak.

"A quiet time with the students needing permission to speak" is not an advisory.

In order to achieve this, I found myself yelling and constantly getting frustrated with the students.

Definitely not an advisory.

My first plan of action in making my change was to do some heavy research over the summer. I did not have a clear understanding of what an advisor’s role was. The Internet provided me with resources that would help me move toward this goal.

Taxpayers, take note.

We are paying certified teachers to assume roles that have not been defined by their superiors or the school board and for which they have no training. No one in this woman's school knows what an advisor or an advisory is and yet they've got advisors and advisories up the ying-yang because the middle school model includes advisories.

I found this definition to be the following: “An organizational structure in which one small group of students identifies with and belongs to one educator, who nurtures, advocates for, and shepherds through school the individual in that group” (Cole, 1992, p. 5).

Bingo. That is what takes place inside an actual advisory group headed by a teacher in a private or parochial school. One educator nurtures, advocates for, and shepherds through school the individuals in that group.

Furthermore, I found that, “Advisories should help students develop meaningful interpersonal relationships” (Dale, 1995, p. 3). Lastly, “Activities should be provided … that lead to the development of positive attitudes, values, and emotional control” (Connors, 1990, p. 165).

oops

That's not an advisory.

An advisory (called a mentor group at Hogwarts) is focused on school first, relationships and attitudes second & then primarily as they relate to school. The mentor follows the kids' grades and steps in if grades start to slip. Since Hogwarts is a Catholic school, charity activities take place inside the mentor group, too, but the focus is academics and the kids' progress in their studies.

It bears repeating that the mentor advocates for the student. If the student is having a problem with another teacher, the advisor straightens things out. When we toured Rye Country Day, the student showing us around actually called the person heading advisory "your mom at school." Those were her words.

These definitions clicked immediately with me. It was that affective domain that seemed to need the most work with middle school students. It did not take me long to realize that my focus for advisory would be character education, teamwork, and community building.

Not an advisory.

Not worth the stipend taxpayers are shelling out.

As I delved deeper into my research, I found that out of 9,000 letters sent from middle school students to their U.S. Representatives, “Over 15% were concerned about their home and school environments” (Hoversten, Doda, & Lounsbury, 1991, p. 9). The question I formulated from all of my research, which would be the root of my year-long inquiry, was, “Will the development of character education, in the sixth grade advisory, create a strong sense of community, nurture teamwork, and help develop a sense of pride between each student and his/her fellow advisees?” This became my focus for the 2000-2001 school year.

The advisory is not a research project.

[M]y next task was to figure out how I would go about facilitating the implementation of character education into this advisory. I knew I did not want it to be in a lecture format. The last thing I wanted was to conduct lectures, and then to require them to take notes. My feelings were that I would quickly lose the kids if I tried this type of structure. Then I found a book written by Tom Jackson that discussed the importance of “Active Learning.”

Saw that one coming a mile away.

“Active Learning has people participate in their own learning process by involving them in some type of activity where they physically become a part of the lesson” (Jackson, 1995, p. 2). I knew I had what I wanted; I would use Active Learning to foster character, teamwork, and community building. I remember feeling the excitement building inside of me after having found a place to begin.

Character Education Provides Focus for Advisory by Danielle Deitte (pdf file)

There's plenty more where that comes from, none of it having to do with academics or responsible adults advocating for the students in their charge.

bonus points: Advocacy for Children by Siegfried Engelmann