What would happen if parents had choice?

This question has come up in the comments thread of "If you want your children to sit in rows, you have to pay extra."

I strongly support choice, partly because Ed and I had sufficient income to exercise choice by, first, moving to a district we couldn't afford^* (because we thought affluent suburbs had private school education at public school prices)^** and, second, withdrawing our 'neurotypical' son from our public school and enrolling him in a Jesuit high school.

Choice number 2 was the best money we ever spent.

As a simple matter of fairness, I believe that if we had choice, other parents should have choice, too.

How school choice would turn out is another question, and I certainly agree with froggiemama that the prospect of public schools taking the path colleges and universities have taken (more, more amenities) gives me the willies.

On the other hand, we do have evidence from other Western countries that I think should be part of the conversation.

We also have evidence from Project Follow-Through, in which low-income parents chose Direct Instruction over progressive education (must rustle up the link - sorry it's not here).

My two favorite what-do-parents-want stories:

• Holland and the project method
• What happened when Sweden adopted choice

Which reminds me: I recall reading that the U.S. has the least free school system among Western countries . . . is that the case? I no longer remember where I picked that up.

In any event, it's definitely the case that a number of Western countries fund parochial schools (or fund parents who want to send their children to parochial schools).

Also germane to the discussion: Andrew Cuomo is supporting tax credits for school choice.

In his fifth State of the State speech, the governor also called for an education tax credit for donations to public schools or scholarship funds that aid students in parochial schools, a top priority of Timothy Cardinal Dolan.
Cuomo proposes sweeping education changes 

I'm ambivalent about Governor Cuomo, but he does seem like a pretty savvy political operator:

While the bill is supported by some 20 unions, who say that it would help the children of their members, the New York State teachers’ union staunchly opposes it, calling it a backdoor voucher program that directs tax dollars to private schools.

Cuomo’s Education Agenda Sets Battle Lines With Teachers’ Unions

^* Almost sufficient income
^** Reality turned out to be exactly the opposite: public school education at private school prices.

copy that

The associate director of the learning center at my college told me a fascinating story this week.

Her son was hired by a major copy editing company (I had no idea copy editing companies existed). When he took the job, he was required to copy, by hand, several well-written and well-edited articles: each one three times!

She said she'd never heard of such a thing and neither had her son, but then a friend told her that's the way the Jesuits taught writing when he was in school.

Is that true?

Did the Jesuits have students copy good works by hand?

what paradox?

ABSTRACT

Chinese classrooms present an intriguing paradox to the claim of self-determination theory that autonomy facilitates learning. Chinese teachers appear to be controlling, but Chinese students do not have poor academic performance in international comparisons. The present study addressed this paradox by examining the cultural differences in students' interpretation of teacher controlling behaviors. Affective meanings of teacher controlling behaviors were solicited from 158 Chinese 5th graders and 115 American 5th graders. It was found that the same controlling behaviors of teachers had different affective meanings for different cultural groups (Chinese vs. American) and for groups with different levels of social-emotional relatedness with teachers (high vs. low). Chinese children perceived the behaviors as less controlling than American children and, in turn, reported that they were more motivated in their teachers' class than American children. Regardless of culture, children with high social-emotional relatedness with teachers perceived the behaviors as less controlling than children with low social-emotional relatedness with teachers. It was also found that internalization mediated the relation between social-emotional relatedness and children's learning motivation in both cultures. The findings revealed cultural differences as well as similarities in the psychological process of internalization.
The Chinese Classroom Paradox: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Teacher Controlling Behaviors
Zhou, Ning 1; Lam, Shui-Fong 1; Chan, Kam Chi 2
Journal of Educational Psychology
Publish Ahead of Print, 19 March 2012

High discipline/high joy.

The secret of success.

The Jesuits figured it out 400 years ago.

US public schools forgot it back in the 1960s, I think. The 60s, or maybe not 'til 1985.

update 9/11/2012:
Doug Lemov on warm/strict
all Teach Like a Champion posts

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

the Jesuits, again

Escalante was born Dec. 31, 1930, in La Paz, Bolivia, and was raised by his mother after his parents, both schoolteachers, split when he was about 9. He attended a well-regarded Jesuit high school, San Calixto, where his quick mind and penchant for mischief often got him into trouble.

Jaime Escalante Dies at 79; math teacher who challenged East L.A. students to 'Stand and Deliver'

the Jesuits

Every now and again I find myself chatting with some wonderfully cultured and learned person from India or Lebanon or wherever, and it turns out that s/he was educated by Jesuits (this happens enough that I have ceased to be surprised by it).

- observation made by a colleague & friend of Ed's when told that C. would be enrolling in Hogwarts

Bob Compton likes surprises

After 30 years and six Blue Ribbon panels how can .. discussion [of the challenges facing America's public education system] be "ground breaking." Have some new, unknown challenges suddenly sprung up??

As Intel CEO Craig Barrett - who served on 4 of the 6 Blue Ribbon panel - has stated publicly, all the reports say the same thing. There has not been a fresh idea in 30 years. We know the problems - we just don't have the guts to address them.

Unless you consider it gutsy to use celebrity influencers as the way to "maximize the potential of our nation's young minds - expensive, yes. Gutsy...I think not.

If America would just listen to Craig Barrett we'd be half way to a world class education. The steps are simple:

1- set the curriculum to the same level of difficulty as your economic competitors (sort of like training to win in a globally competitive sport - train as intensely as your competitors and you may have a shot)

2- hire teachers with Masters degrees in the discipline they are to teach and then coach them on being effective teachers. It is much easier to coach an MS in Physics on how to teach, than to coach an Education major to be a physicist. Try it at home; see for yourself.

3- measure results - use the AP exams as national standards and test to see how students and teachers are progressing.

Has anyone other than a few US Charter schools (and 400 million Indians and Chinese) tried that simple formula?

ding! ding! ding!

I know the answer to that.

The Jesuits.

(How did I not know Bob Compton had a blog??)

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

The Foundation of Ingenuity

"To Make Ourselves Indifferent"

A colleague once asked Loyola how long he would need to recover if the pope was ever to disband the Jesuits.^* Loyola's response surely shocked his questioner, and it quickly found its way into Jesuit lore: "If I recollected myself in prayer for a quarter of an hour, I would be happy, and even happier than before."

Perhaps there was a smidgen of posturing in his answer. Loyola had built what was rapidly becoming the world's most influential and successful religious organization. Could he see it dismantled and then stroll away whistling after a mere fifteen minutes in prayer?

Posturing or not, Loyola was sending an unambiguous message grounded in the lessons of the Exercises. Jesuits achieved what we today would call ingenuity--a mix of adaptability, daring, speed, and good judgment--only by first cultivating the attitude he called "indifference."

Trainees approach indifference by imagining three different men who have each legitimately acquired the fabulous sum of ten thousand ducats, then considering their varying reactions to their newly obtained wealth All three feel more than niggling discomfort with their growing attachment to the fortune. There's more to life than money, . . . but it feels so nice to have it. Suddenly it seems impossible to imagine doing without it. The first two types do little or nothing to rid themselves of the wealth that is leading to such inordinate attachment. What does the third type do about the ten thousand ducats? Here is the punch line of the meditation, the person we are to emulate, so the answer seems obvious: he generously distributes the money to the poor and piously rejoices, right?

Wrong. The role model for Jesuit indifference rids himself of the attachment to the money, "but in such a way that there remains no inclination either to keep the acquired money or to dispose of it." In other words, the money is not the issue. The problem is slavish attachment to money or to anything else. Inordinate attachments fog one's vision. . . . Only by becoming indifferent--free of prejudices and attachments and therefore free to choose any course of action--do [Jesuit] recruits become strategically flexible. The indiferent Jesuit liberates himself to choose strategies driven by one motive only: achieving his long-term goal of serving God by helping souls.

The meditation isn't about the money; it's about the attachment.

[snip]

This is what Loyola was really after: the internal fears, drives, and attachments that can control decisions and actions.

[snip]

Indifference is the right stuff of ingenuity. And once early Jesuits attained it, Loyola usually set them loose to lead themselves. "In all, I much desire a complete indifference; then with this obedience and abnegation supposed on the part of the subjects [i.e. individual Jesuits], I am very glad to follow their inclinations."

Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Yaer-Old Company That Changed the World by Chris Lowney

I believe this absolutely.

In fact, I have a fair amount of what I think is indifference myself. Not to be confessional here, but I probably couldn't do my job (writing) or my edu-politicking (more writing) if I were "inordinately attached" to either.

Until I read this passage, though, I hadn't been able to put it into words. With education politics, whenever I have tried to explain to a friend why I'm happy to spend years of my life tilting at edu-windmills, the best I've been able to come up with is, "I don't care if anything I do makes a difference." Same thing with writing a book, or a book proposal. I don't care if it's a success.

That's not right, of course. I do care, or I wouldn't be doing it.

"Indifference" doesn't exactly describe my state of mind, but indifference as freedom to choose any course of action ---- that's it.

I need to do the Exercises.

Actually, I needed to do the exercises starting when I was 20.


^* Ed says the Jesuits were kicked out of France altogether at one point.

house

One of the questions in my mind this year, with C. attending Hogwarts, has been: why is the place so happy?

Somehow, the school motivates the kids to work hard and strive, and yet the winner-take-all burnout culture that often exists in high-performing public high schools doesn't exist there.

Why is that?

I don't know the answer, although I think it has to do with the fact that the kids develop a group identity the first day they arrive, when they attend a formal induction ceremony held in a nearby chapel.

In the ceremony a senior escorts each of the new boys up the center aisle of the sanctuary to the chancel, where a priest holding a mace blesses him and presents him with a freshman pin he is to wear on his jacket. Then he joins his mentor group standing off to the side.

I assume the mentor groups are related to the house system in British boarding schools:


the house system

Can competition and camaraderie coexist? They do in Highlands Latin School’s house system.

At first it may seem that competition and camaraderie are at odds, and sometimes they probably are. But in Highlands Latin School’s house system, they seem to go together quite well. A traditional fixture of many British schools, the “house” system has enabled Highlands to accomplish a number of goals that can be elusive for many schools.

The Origins of the “House” System

The house system is widely used in British schools and schools that model themselves after the British system in countries with past British colonial ties, such as Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, and Singapore. The system began in boarding schools, where students actually ate, drank, and slept in individual houses during school terms. The house system still operates this way in prestigious British boarding schools, such as Harrow, Eton, and Winchester College.

But, perhaps because of its obvious merits, the system is now used even in day schools, where the term ‘house’ refers simply to groupings of pupils, with no buildings involved. The houses are usually named after Christian saints or for famous persons historically connected with the school.

[snip]

At Highlands Latin School in Louisville, Kentucky, the advantages of the house system have been manifold. The houses provide not only an increased sense of identity and belonging, they also provide students with a sense of tradition. Leadership opportunities also abound in the house system.

Highlands, which is an outgrowth of the work of Cheryl Lowe, founder of Memoria Press, has seen a marked change in the attitude of students as a result of the establishment of the houses. “Because of the competition and the identification of each student with a house,” says Martin Cothran, a Highlands instructor and a co-director of the school, “there are constant opportunities to cheer your fellow students on. The positive attitudes of students toward one another and toward the school have been quite amazing since we started our program.”

The sense of tradition is palpable too. The Highlands house system, which is only a year old, already has about it the sense of history.

[snip]

The feature of the houses most popular with students is the competitions. At Bingley Grammar School in West Yorkshire, England, houses compete on the basis of academics, attendance, and sports. Sports competition includes cross country, netball, rugby, and table tennis. At Highlands, students compete in academics, community service, and sports, including dodgeball, soccer, ultimate frisbee, kickball, and volleyball. They also compete in chess and Latin Scrabble.

Academic competition is based on GPA. Houses are given points on the basis of how house teams perform in academic quick recall competitions. Community service points might be given on the basis of which house turned out the most members to sing at a rest home.

House

If I were starting a charter school I'd want it to have a House system.


how to create a virtual culture
Anonymous on competition & "positive compulsions"

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

cranberry on advisories in private schools (& building good habits)

In my other child's private school, the advisor is a great system. It's one of your child's teachers. If you think your child is developing a social or academic problem, you raise the issue with your child's advisor. This is marvelous, because it provides a listener for the parent, who may very well have a legitimate complaint about the other teacher. Let's say, a child feels that the homework is assigned, but not collected, by a new teacher. The child's advisor can speak with the new teacher, encouraging him to collect the homework. The parent is not left in the position of having to complain either to the teacher, or to the principal, neither good options. As a parent, I don't want to make a stink about a small problem. In the public school, though, I've seen small problems balloon into huge problems, because there are no avenues for parents to provide rational feedback on their child's academic experience.

Hogwarts has "mentor group," which is similar -- although they don't seem to invite parents to talk to mentors, particularly.

C's mentor keeps track of the kids' grades and intervenes if grades start to slip. She also is a bear (that's a good thing) on the issue of kids using their planners. She checks their planners every day to see if they've written down their assignments; if they haven't, she has them do so.

She is building a habit. She isn't just haranguing the kids on the importance of being organized (which is what public schools do & what I've often done myself), she is teaching them how to be organized, and she is giving them practice each and every day until using the planner becomes automatic.

We have only recently realized our job as parents isn't just to produce a "good kid" and a good student, our job is also to build good habits. In the past couple of years, as C. has gotten older and more responsible, Ed and I have both taken to scolding him about his messy ways. We find his stuff all over the house, we get mad, we remonstrate.

That's not the way to do it.

We need to set a time each and every day when we have him do a quick clean-up of his room and his desk, and we need to keep doing this until it becomes second nature for C. to do a quick clean-up of his room and his desk.

Speaking of building habits, a commenter recommended Glenn Latham's The Power of Positive Parenting awhile back. I've only dipped into it, and don't know what he has to say on the subject of teaching kids to clean up their rooms and use their planners, but it is a fantastic book.

Wonderful.

middle school advisory

has it been 30 years?

Fifty per cent of DISD teachers fail to pass test, said the headline in the Dallas Times Herald last summer, and the wire services relayed the news to much of the civilized world. Poor Dallas. Twenty years in court over desegregation and busing, and now this. Actually, the Wesman Personnel Classification Test was given not to all Dallas teachers but to 535 first-year teachers. Half fell below the score considered acceptable by the DISD—and that standard itself was far from rigorous. The teachers were considerably outperformed on the same test by a volunteer group of juniors and seniors from Jesuit College Preparatory School, a private high school in North Dallas.

Why Teachers Can’t Teach
by Gene Lyons
Texas Monthly
September 1979

Gilbert Highet on competition

Amy P pointed me to Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching, which has a number of passages on Jesuit education:

The Jesuits, who worked out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries one of the most successful educational techniques the Western world has seen, used the spirit of competition very strongly and variously. They treated it not as a method of making the boys learn, but as a way of helping them to learn by bringing out their own hidden energies. As well as pitting the best individual pupils against each other, they used the technique familiar to modern leaders of mass meetings, and balanced groups against groups, half the class against the other half, teams of six against each other, and finally the whole class against another class slightly more or less advanced. They got the best boys to challenge each other to feats of brainwork which would astonish us nowadays. A top-notch pupil would volunteer to repeat a page of poetry after reading it only once; another would offer to repeat two pages. (The Jesuit teachers paid the greatest attention to the development of memory. Even their punishments were often designed to strengthen the memorizing powers, making a late or lazy pupil learn a hundred lines of poetry by heart, and the like.) A group of specially gifted boys would challenge another—always under the smiling, flexible, encouraging, but canny Jesuit supervision—to meet them in debate on a series of important problems, and would spend weeks preparing the logic, the phrases, and the delivery of their speeches. Perhaps the fathers overdid it, although we do not seem to hear of nervous breakdowns among their pupils. Certainly they made more of the spirit of competition than we could possibly do nowadays. Yet that was part of the technique which produced Corneille and Moliere, Descartes and Voltaire, Bourdaloue and Tasso. No bad educational system ever produced geniuses.

It is, then, the teacher’s duty to use the competitive spirit as variously as possible to bring out the energies of his pupils. The simple carrot-and-stick principle does not work, except for donkeys. Really interesting challenges are required to elicit the hidden strengths of really complex mind. They are sometimes difficult to devise. But when established, they are invaluable. It is sad, sometimes, to see a potentially brilliant pupil slouching through his work, sulky and willful, wasting his time and thought on trifles, because he has no real equals in his own class; and it is heartening to see how quickly, when a rival is transferred from another section or enters from another school, the first boy will find a fierce joy in learning and a real purpose in life. In this situation—and in all situations involving keen emulation—the teacher must watch carefully for the time when competition becomes obsessive and the legitimate wish to excel turns into self-torture and hatred. Long before that, the competition must be resolved into a kindlier co-operation.

The Art of Teaching by Gilbert Highet
p. 131-132

This reminds me of something I once read about race horses.

West Wing & the Jesuits

The first time I saw this pro-voucher clip from West Wing, I didn't know anything about Jesuit schools.

Mayor of DC: I have a few thousand names on a waiting list for vouchers already. Go into any one of my schools. Ask kids who want to go to college what they think of vouchers. They'll ask you where they can sign up.

President Bartlett: Could you ask Charlie to come in, please?

[Charlie arrives; sits]

President Bartlett: Tell us where you went to high school.

Charlie: Roosevelt.

President Bartlett: A public school.

Charlie: Yes sir.

Mayor of DC: Where'd you want to go to school, Charlie?

Charlie: Gonzaga. A parochial school. Near Union Station.

Mayor: Why?

Charlie: There's never been a shooting there, they don't even have metal detectors, almost everyone goes to college.

Mayor: Couldn't afford it?

Charlie: Couldn't come close to affording it.

President: You know what this meeting's about?

Charlie: Yes, sir. The mayor told me.

President: What do you think about trying an experimental voucher program for DC schools?

Charlie: I wish they would have had one when I was in school.

President: You planning on telling me that any time soon?

Charlie: Can't say that I was, sir.

President: Your Honor, I'm going to need your help putting out some fires within the Party on this one.

Mayor: You got it. Thank you, Mr. President.

music up

Gonzaga Prep is a Jesuit high school.


Voices of School Choice
A Vote for Ignorance Chicago Tribune
Will Obama Stand Up for These Kids? Wall Street Journal
Voucher Subterfuge Washington Post
School Choice Has Media Mainstreamed CATO
President Bartlett signs on for vouchers
Senate votes down funding for DC vouchers

Rules of Discernment

What shall we do? We should not do anything wicked and we should not do anything absurd. Between these boundaries lie a vast number of possibilities. 

What Is Ignatian Spirituality? by David L. Fleming, SJ

p. 89

I love the Jesuits.