Literature&Literacy » John Spencer http://matthewkoslowski.com matthewkoslowski.com Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:52:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Weekly Review: December 11th to December 17th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/18/weekly-review-12-11-12-17/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/18/weekly-review-12-11-12-17/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:00:46 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=791

I am ambivalent when there are too many good things over the course of a week.

My attention is caught among trying to sift through all these different news articles and bring you some of the best that I can find. I want to share all the interesting things that I found but if my attention is strained trying to find them, your attention is just as strained because of the information with which you are trying to keep up yourself.

I hope that you will enjoy the articles that I have included here.

Do you have suggestions on how I can make the Weekly Review more interesting or more useful? Please comment below. I want you to enjoy the Weekly Review and get something out of it. I don’t want to be another aggregator that you ignore.

These Things Caught My Eye

Ready for Take-Off!

Anything is possible, and you are never too old. If you don’t believe me, ask Anne Osmer. She began taking flying lessons after she turned 80. Yes, you read that right she began flying lessons after 80. She’s now 83 years old and took her first solo flight.

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School Reforms

The other night, I sat out a dance to talk with Erin, a teacher’s aide for the deaf, who I met recently. We talked about school reforms and she had some interesting insights. She suggested, since we are no longer a predominantly agrarian society, that we should eliminate summers and instead institute six weeks of school followed by two weeks of break, or some similar rotation. After each six week segment, kids who did not fully understand the concepts could receive remediation — literally, a remedy for their misunderstanding — much sooner than having to wait until summer school an having failed once.

My friend John Spencer writes in these two essays about what he sees wrong with education. I don’t agree with everything that he says. For example, he thinks that we should lengthen the school day but I disagree. I’m more inclined to agree with Erin about altering the school year and keeping the days short. I remember seeing an article a while back that said the schools in the foreign countries that we are constantly pointing to as beating our students have a different schedule for breaks but less hours each day.

The human brain is like a muscle. Repeated practice of certain skills strengthens those areas of the brain. But, the brain can also suffer fatigue which makes its attempts to retain less effective. We need to make sure we take a balanced approach.

I just picked up two more books by Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities and The Shame of the Nation. Perhaps after I read them I will have a few more ideas on school reform myself.

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How to Think

While I thought I would find information relevant to improving my blog on Copyblogger.com, I did not think that I would find articles applicable to a classroom.

I am glad that I was wrong.

In “10 Suprising Books That Will Transform Your Writing,” Demian Farnsworth mentions one of my favorite books, Letters to the Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and another I’ve wanted to pick up, The Complete Odes and Epodes of Horace. Some of the other books on the list are the kind of business books that you would expect to find on a site about blogging and turning a profit from your blog.

At the end of the article, Farnsworth writes

The more you have in your brain — both from study and from direct experience — the more fresh, new, killer ideas you’ll come up with.

And that reminded me of an article I read back in September in the Boston Globe, which I linked to in one of my longer posts, Children Left Behind in which I tried to cover too much and everything got diluted. But Ms. Ravitch reminds us “Critical thinking? You need knowledge,” that the ability to draw conclusions requires us to synthesize our direct experience alongside our indirect experience to what currently analyzing.

Have you ever met someone who knows everything about a particular topic, the minutest of details, stuff that only real adherents would know, but who knows nothing else? Those people are a little boring, aren’t they? They also cannot see beyond the scope of their interest.

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Edgar Allan Poe and the Frogpondians

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston. He would not have been happy to admit it.

For a long time we Bostonians have not wanted to admit he was a son of Boston. I think we are still upset that he called us “frogpondians,” after the Frog Pond in the center of the Boston Common.

Dr. Paul Lewis, curator of the exhibit “The Raven in the Frog Pond,” thinks that Poe was referring to the writers and publishers around Boston when Poe spoke of “frogpondians.” Dr. Lewis conjectures that

…when he thought about those writers, he thought that they were cause-driven in their writing. So they were constantly croaking out in defense of their causes.
–Dr. Paul Lewis quoted in “Claiming Poe” in The Boston Globe

Now, 160 years after the author’s death, Boston is trying reclaim Poe as their own. With the talk of Boston Noir that I’ve seen in the pages of the Boston Globe — a new genre name for Boston’s rough and tumble, tragic stories of working class city dwellers that includes work such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle to The Departed — I can understand why we would be giving Poe a second look.

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On Whose Merit?

I have written about my disagreement with merit pay for teachers previously. This will be a contentious issue for some time.

The issue has been in the news a lot around Boston since August. A non-profit in Massachusetts won a grant from ExxonMobil to reward teachers for their students’ performance on Advance Placement exams. The Massachusetts Teachers Association said that the payments violated the terms of the teachers’ contracts and they could not take them.

I am on the side of the Massachusetts Teachers Assocation. I have read Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards and I have worked two sales jobs in which I could earn bonuses. The incentive of earning bonuses did not motivate me to work harder. And I have seen it cause co-workers to consider compromising on their ethics to earn the extra money.

I cannot more elegantly summarize why merit pay is a horrible idea than by recommending you watch this TED Lecture, Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.

Here’s the big secret. All of our social science proves that incentives only work on clearly defined tasks. So, if the task is to get a student to pass a test, incentives would motivate the teachers to teach to the test.

If the task is to raise intellectually curious, independent minded, responsible adults, then incentives will not work.

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]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/12/18/weekly-review-12-11-12-17/feed/ 0 Weekly Review: October 30th to November 5th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/06/weekly-review-10-30-11-05/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/06/weekly-review-10-30-11-05/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:00:01 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=607

The Weekly Reviews are a lot of fun to write. I enjoy scouring the web for interesting articles and blog posts. But, all the same, the project had begun to become a unmanageable. There are so many websites and blogs to check out everyday. I had been afraid that I was going to miss something.

What I repeatedly missed was my own deadline. You may have noticed that the past two weeks I had postponed my Weekly Review until Saturday.

I have been working hard but I haven’t been working very smart. Then I remembered a quote from one of my favorite writers:

Novels are written in the same way that farms are made productive, or houses are kept clean, or baseball penant races are won: with steady work each day.
–Andre Dubus

Substitute “Weekly Reviews” for “Novels” and you get the same concept. Rather than gathering up work throughout the week and then trying to throw something together slapdash on Thursday night, starting this week I will be working on the Weekly Review throughout the week.

Thursday afternoon I spent some time setting up a feed reader through Google. Though I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet — unlike Gmail, the posts disappear after you’ve read them unless you ask them to stay — but I am glad to consolidate many of my different websites into one place.

In addition to that, I’ve also setup Literature&Literacy on Feedburner.com. You can now subscribe to Literature&Literacy through an RSS Reader or through email.

These Things Caught My Eye

Fixing Education

There has been a lot about this since Arne Duncan came out and said that he wants to improve teacher training programs. Newly minted teachers come out of these programs and feel overwhelmed by having to manage a classroom.

Most actual training for particular jobs happens on the job. I have read that it takes a year to just begin to feel comfortable at your job. When I first began my job at the bank, I remember feeling overwhelmed. I know that many of my other friends felt the same.

It is quite easy to take potshots at educators:

  • They work in a rarefied realm where they are not held accountable for their results.
  • They don’t work very hard because they cannot be fired.
  • They work only half a year! Every time you turn around they have another vacation! They get summers off!

People pay lip service to the idea that educators play a vital role in our nation. But I do not believe they actually believe that. Teachers are paid very poorly for the work that they do, especially as class sizes grow and resources are reduced. If people truly believed that teachers and educators were vital to our economy, they would pay teachers more.

There is no end to commentators and news writers who are willing to offer advice on how to improve our education system. Everyone has an opinion on this matter.

One idea that is being passed around is the idea of merit pay for teachers. I believe in what Alfie Kohn writes in Punished By Rewards that you can get diminishing results when you attempt to tie rewards to performance. And there are economists and business theorists who believe that as well. I remember seeing articles arguing that Golden Parachutes are necessary because CEOs who are not allowed to pursue ideas that may fail will not innovate and will not advance the economy.

I also fear that you will get unethical behavior. I have met salesmen and saleswomen who will do whatever they can to get a sale, tell customers whatever they want to hear. Do we want teachers and principals who are fighting to get rewards rather than educate our children?

We need to go back to basics. We need to have a national conversation about the why of school, its purpose.

If we decide public education is vital to the lives of our children and our success as a nation, we need to align our teachers paychecks with that belief. People choose careers in college based in part on what they expect to get paid after leaving school. There are some people who want to be teachers and would be excellent educators, but instead become engineers or computer scientists for fear that they will be unable to support their future families on a teacher’s salary.

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Fighting What You Believe

Get Rich Slowly was one of the very first blogs that I started reading. Practical, down to earth financial advice for people who understand that there is more to life than earning money.

Much like Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Get Rich Slowly has a broad definition of rich. Rather than limiting richness to wealth, these blogs talk about living a rich life.

Granted they take it as a starting point that you cannot live richly if you are living in debt with no financial plans.

April Dykman is a new staff writer at Get Rich Slowly. And she never thought she would be able to make a living as a freelance writer. She had had this belief before she entered college. One of her professors reinforced that belief.

And for years she clung to that belief.

That belief became part of her personal narrative. Each of us keeps this personal narrative of who we are and what we can and cannot do. Many of these beliefs are locked away in our minds, invisible chains that restrict our realities.

Read through April’s article and ask yourself, what narratives are you carrying with you that are holding you back?

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Failings

I found a fortune cookie fortune in the pocket of a pair of trousers the other day as I was cleaning:

The two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success.

And then I saw this article through boston.com. I think that it is timely, especially with all the talk of fixing education swirling around. But I also thought this so important that it deserved its own discussion.

I fear that my generation has been too mollycoddled. We grew up during the age of self-esteem and the idea that hurt feelings were too much to bear. Self-esteem means nothing. Self-respect means everything and the only way to gain self-respect is to earn it.

Throughout my life I have been told that I am a gifted mind, that I can do whatever I set my mind to, and a lot of other things that I believe are platitudes. These were fed to me to encourage me. I don’t know whether they served their purpose.

When I was in college, I shared some of my poems with a professor I admired. He thought my works were utter drivel and told me so. Afterward I discussed the conversation with my adviser, thinking he would keep the conversation to himself, and let vent to my feelings.

I had been hurt and because I was not used to being told that I couldn’t do something. I gave up. My adviser tried to encourage me to think of this time as an apprenticeship.

But I had never been given the tools to handle failure.

So rather than think of this failure as a temporary setback, as an assessment of where I was on that day, I became a failed poet. There is a world of difference between being a beginner with a handful of failed poems and being a failed poet.

And perhaps if I had had experiences with failing prior to that, I would have been able to see the difference. Perhaps I could have picked myself up and begun to work again.

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The Humbling of Philip Roth

  • Darkness visible by Richard Eder, The Boston Globe via boston.com
  • Roth on Roth by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com

As with John Irving, I am not familiar with the work of Philip Roth. And, again as with John Irving, after reading these two book reviews though I want to read Philip Roth as well.

The Humbling follows a down and out actor. The theme is the end of inspiration and the end of creativity. I don’t know Richard Eder’s taste in books but I can tell that The Humbling is not his cup of tea.

A great actor is suddenly unable to act; the misery and the humiliations to which this leads bring him to the verge of suicide. It is not the business of a review to be telling what happens. It is telling, though, that the reader rather wants him to go ahead with it.
–Richard Eder on The Humbling

Yet even that dismissive review entices me on. Philip Roth is considered one of our times’ greatest writers. I want to read the book for myself and see if I can detect Roth trying to convey the struggles of creativity after a life time.

]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/11/06/weekly-review-10-30-11-05/feed/ 5 Weekly Review: October 2nd to October 8th http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/09/weekly-review-10-02-10-08/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/09/weekly-review-10-02-10-08/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:00:12 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=341

Exploring back archives of interesting blogs is a wonderful idea. I came across a number of great essays on The Word Blog on boston.com. Anyone have any suggestions of good blogs about language, literature, or education? I am going to need to setup an RSS Reader…

Otherwise, it seemed like a slow week for news that interested me that had deep coverage. Some of the stories were too short, leaving me wondering for more. As we roll back our print media, we lose the ability to cover depth of different topics. Many things tantalized me. But the stories I found really fulfilling was one about imaginative play and its positive effects on early childhood behavior and education.

These Things Caught My Eye

Getting Her Message Across

How many of us, in a romantic flight of fancy, have imagined throwing a bottle into the sea and having someone receive it?

One woman from Illinois and her boyfriend made throwing bottles in the sea an annual ritual on her birthday. After having a champagne picnic on the beach of Thatcher Island, she would throw the bottle into the sea. She was smart to use a champagne bottle — they are thicker than regular wine bottles because the built up carbon dioxide could not be contained otherwise — and are strong enough to survive a 3,200 mile trip. The story is bittersweet. And well worth the read.

If Imagination Be the Food of Learning, Play On

I just wrote about the spirit of playfulness and how it increases my own sense of vitality. Then I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about how group-based imaginative play, that is to say play in which a group of children gather and adopt roles, improves a child’s ability to perform tasks. Your child can’t stand still? Tell him to imagine that he’s a soldier guarding the house and is stationed where you want him to stand and he will be more successful.

We often imagine play to be hedonistic or an abandonment of responsibility: think of going on a vacation and you conjure images of getting away and forgetting our day to day lives. But play does not need to be this. Practicing the piano is a form of play if you enjoy playing the piano but it’s not hedonistic. Reading literature is a form of play but, with any luck, you learn something about yourself or your world and can as a result be more responsible.

You need to include reading things that are outside of your normal interests, works that are really challenging and include elements of the absurd if you want your reading to be playful. Although it can be disorienting, “a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.” Works that challenge you and works that include the absurd are stirring and stimulating. When you experience the absurd, it can make the rest of the world appear more sensible and, if this study is valid, actually makes you more perceptive of the world.

I hate extrapolating from studies of animals, but I remember wondering on a study of laboratory rats. They were split into three groups: rats prevented from playing, rats who could play but in a dull environment, and rats who could play in a stimulating environment. There were noticeable and statistically significant differences in the weight of the brains of the rats. The rats who could play in a stimulating environment had the heaviest brains.

Learning carries over from one subject to another. The more we know, the more connections we can make, the more we can think critically. Our ability to closely read a novel increases our ability to analyze a news report or a historical document. Learning to interpret and read a painting allows us to make a connections with literature and history, allows us to imagine a narrative. Some schools are now using art and architecture to fully engage their students. We remember things that delight us and fill us with wonder. Before now, were we limiting our students to playing in dull environments?

Chartering a Course

What is the purpose of public education? I believe that education is a civil right, equal to that of voting. Even more important that voting, actually. Somewhere along the way, however, education has become a commodity. Jonathan Kozol makes a passionate argument about this in one letter in Letters to a Young Teacher.

And charter schools may be limiting our ability to provide an egalitarian education. As I discussed in my post, Children Left Behind, the claims made by charter schools need to be viewed in a wide context when evaluated.

Faraone quotes the the Massachusetts Teacher Association study mentioned in Vaznis’s article:

“The number of seniors is routinely below 60 percent of the freshmen enrolled four years earlier. Looking at it another way, for every five freshmen enrolled in Boston’s charter high schools, there were only two seniors.”

I haven’t investigated this but when those schools cite their college acceptance rate, do they acknowledge how many students left the school? Faraone points out that at least two charter schools in Boston only enrolls students for ninth-grade. Students have only one opportunity to get into these schools but can leave and go back to the Boston Public Schools whenever they want. When we evaluate the successes of a charter school, do we factor their failures? How can we best do that?

Can Grammar Make Us Better People?

Jan Freeman published a column of books that explore the English language in the Boston Globe in November of 2008. She had more picks than she could fit into her column. One, in particular, caught my eye: Grammar for the Soul: Using Language for Personal Change by Lawrence A. Weinstein. I don’t know if proper punctuation and grammar can be employed for personal change, but the title and her little blurb about certainly made me think about seeking it out at my local library.

Self-Assessment

I stumbled across John Spencer’s blogs — he keeps a half dozen of them, I swear — through a link on TeacherLingo. He’s a teacher out in Arizona and I appreciate his perspective. I’m not sure he titled his post well, I’m not really sure he answers the question he poses. But it’s important to remember the power teachers have and the responsibility that comes with it.

What Are You Doing Wrong?

I was wrong to reprint Signe Wilkinson’s editorial cartoon here on my blog. I have removed the cartoon. It may have been copyright infringement. If it was, it was made out of ignorance. If it was not, better safe than sorry. I have updated the link, however, since Ink Tank on boston.com seems to change the ID number of images.

2009 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner

Herta Mueller, a Romanian-born German author, won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature today. I am not familiar with her work. Although she has written 20 novels, only 5 of them have been translated into English.

I was a little surprised at the lack of reporting of this in the Boston Globe and New York Times today. Though, granted, I’m not sure when the Swedish Academy contacts an author and when they hold their press conference and if there is time for the print papers to include stories that day.

And, yes, winning a Nobel Prize does boost book sales. I certainly want to know more about this year’s winner. Though, I’m predisposed: one of my goals is to read at least one work by every Nobel Laureate.

Stopping by the Wal-Mart on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
–From “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

For a time, Robert Frost lived on a small farm in New Hampshire. His uncle, fearing that he would never be a man of any means, bought the farm for him. Now, the town that the farm resides in, fearing in this recession that it will be a town of no means, is looking to relax its zoning laws in such a way that the Frost Farm may be surrounded by commercial developments.

Although the town will try to keep the Frost Farm safe from too much encroaching, unless they specify that an area around the Frost Farm is a buffer zone, there is no way to protect the Farm. I hope they build a buffer zone because we need to be reminded of the important of hermitages and monasteries, of those special places that allow us to get away from commerce and business and be alone with ourselves, something increasingly more difficult in our always on, always connected culture.

Let Frost Farm be a reminder of a safe space to breathe.

]]> http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/10/09/weekly-review-10-02-10-08/feed/ 0 Children Left Behind: Statistics and Abstractions http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/09/23/children-left-behind/ http://matthewkoslowski.com/2009/09/23/children-left-behind/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:00:19 +0000 Matthew Koslowski http://matthewkoslowski.com/?p=237

In This Essay

“No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education”, Why School? by Mike Rose
Monday Metaphor: Growth, Learning with Impact by John Spencer
“Why Our Standards-Based Grading Sucks”, Learning with Impact by John Spencer
“MCAS scores fall shy of target”, Boston Globe, by James Vaznis
“Charter schools see more attrition”, Boston Globe by James Vaznis
“The next chapter on education reform”, Boston Globe by Gov. Deval Patrick
“Critical thinking? You need knowledge”, Boston Globe by Diane Ravitch
“These test-score jitters are a sign of high standards”, Boston Globe

Ideals and Realities

I had some great conversations about education and public policy with a friend. She would take the pragmatic side of the argument while I would take the idealistic side. While I would speak of sweeping visions of what education should be, she would want specific plans on implementation.

Our arguments usually ended with me saying that so much depended on implementation, that what I thought could really have a great impact, and her saying that no implementation would be perfect and I needed to get my head out of the clouds.

Implementing High Stakes Testing

Last week saw the publication of the test scores for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. Part of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, this standardized test fulfills the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

Even before the test results were released, I have been thinking about testing and No Child Left Behind as evidenced by my past posts. John Spencer’s video post, Monday Metaphor: Growth was one thing rolling around in my head a few days before the MCAS release.

His next post but one, “Why Our Standards-Based Grading Sucks”, published the day after the MCAS results, the same day I was in the midst of rereading “No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education” in Why School?, ramped up my thinking even more:

  • Do we have reasonable expectations for children’s achievement?
  • Where do our expectations of academic achievement come from?
  • Are the tests we are using sufficient to gauge academic achievement?
  • Are there better ways to gauge academic achievement?

Single Modalities, Multiple Modalities

The assessment system being implemented at Mr. Spencer’s school is going to be single modality: a multiple choice test. Those tests are easy to write and easy to administer and easy to analyze. But what kind of feedback do such tests give us about student achievement? These tests only provide an assessment of one type of intellectual and cognitive capacities.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is a grandiose name. So many years have passed since I took one of the proto-types that I had forgotten its structure. I had assumed it was a simple, straight-forward multiple choice test just like I remember the SATs. But comprehensive may not be ironic in the title. The MCAS uses the following forms of assessment:

  • multiple-choice questions
  • mathematical short answer questions
  • short open-response questions
  • long open-response compositions

Unlike straight objective tests, the MCAS in the ideal assesses recall, recognition and synthesis. In reality, the recall and recognition sections also assess the ability of students to form educated guesses.

More of a child’s abilities are measured on tests like these. Think of an analogy to the physical body. Just as you cannot get a complete picture of someone’s fitness and health by testing only their upper body strength, you cannot get a full picture of a child’s academic and intellectual fitness by testing only their ability to recall and recognize and guess.

Asking the Right Questions

“But there are, in fact, a host of procedural and technical problems in developing, administering, scoring, and interpreting such tests. (And there are also concerns about how schools and districts can manipulate them.) ‘In most cases,’ writes measurement specialist Robert Linn, ‘the instruments and technology have not been up to the demands placed on them by high-stakes accountability.’ No wonder, then, that there is a robust debate among testing experts about what, finally, can be deduced from the scores about a student’s or a school’s achievement.”
– Mike Rose from “No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education” in Why School?, pages 45-46.

Are we asking the right questions? I don’t think we are. Much like the recent Town Hall Meetings, if we can even call them that, there is a lot of shouting without a lot of discussion. Rather than delve into the deep, complex questions we are looking for simple solutions.

I applaud the editors of the Boston Globe for their recent editorial “These test-score jitters are a sign of high standards”. They argue that if the MCAS shows we fail to make the No Child Left Behind’s mandate for adequate yearly progress, it is because the test has integrity and has not been dumbed down to artificially inflate our success rate. I hope that this is true. By 2014, No Child Left Behind requires that 100% of students — including 100% of vulnerable populations, English language learners, and special needs students — will be expected to achieve “proficiency” the MCAS.

Is expecting every student to pass really a useful metric? Won’t some critics cry out that if every student passes the test was too easy?

Since we are going to continue to use high-stakes testing, I hope that our government can look at the scores, include the subsets of vulnerable populations, and allocate resources to help boost achievement. Use the MCAS as an assessment of the health of our education system, like a CAT scan so that we know where to focus in and where the illness is most severe.

But at the end of the day, a test score remains a statistical abstraction. If the MCAS is used to gather statistics, then it is an opportunity wasted.

Implementing Charter Schools

Talking about high stakes testing and the performance of our public schools often leads to a discussion of charter schools.

There is a lot of controversy around charter schools in this country. You cannot deny that they take resources away from public schools: even if they don’t take the cream of the crop, which many people including myself believe they do, tax money is taken from the public schools for each student enrolled in a charter school.

I am very confused by the claims about the success of charter schools. Neither side agrees: proponents say that charter schools are an undeniable success; opponents say that charter schools are no better than public schools. I heard of one study that said charter schools performed no better, and in some cases performed worse, than Boston’s public schools. I saw news articles about charter schools outperforming Boston’s public schools.

Gaming the System?

But are we using the correct metrics? Are we looking at only the students that graduate from the schools?

An article in the Boston Globe struck me. James Vaznis tells us that “Fewer than half of the students who enrolled in Boston charter high schools as freshmen over the past five years made it through to graduation, usually departing for other schools, according to a new study,” that was published on September 17.

Many students who left the charter schools re-enrolled in Boston public schools. Critics may claim that the students who left wanted to get an easier diploma. That is possible. That needs to be investigated.

Can a charter school like MATCH Charter Schools really judge itself successful when 25% of its seniors left during the academic year, with “some students [transferring to Boston public schools] just a few weeks before graduation”? What does it mean when a charter school publishes its graduating class’s college acceptance rate if 25% of its seniors dropped out?

Just as we need to be sure that we are using the correct metrics when we are evaluating a child’s achievement, we need to be using the correct metrics in our discussions of public schools versus charter schools. Especially when their is so much talk of expanding the role of charter schools. What if we were to eliminate public schools and look at the statistics of a world of charter schools? We might just find that they perform no better than the system we have now.

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