Corporate America and Education.

Education is definitely a hot topic these days in the United-States as it is in France. Recently for instance, NBC devoted an entire week of programs to what it called "Education Nation", and there has been lots of talk about "Waiting for 'Superman' ", a documentary critical of the school system.

Yet I am dumbfounded by the shallowness of the talks and the lack of actual debate and how the so-called 'discussion' has become what seems to be an idealogical war waged by corporation America.

In fact, the 'debate' seems to be run by CEOs such as Bill Gates (here), Rupert Murdoch (in his own newspaper) or Mark Zuckerberg (on The Oprah Show) who are given tons of interviews and are treated by journalists and anchorpeople as if they were experts in education.
Why? Simply because they have succeeded in making their own business and subsequently in becoming super wealthy, as if that made you an expert in education. It makes you wonder....

And guess what, they all have in common one thing: they all push business-based school reforms, such as performance pay for teachers.

The Gates initiative for instance has a program called Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching means to evaluate teachers in all grades and subjects based on student test gains:

"Every profession has to have some form of measurement," Bill Gates said in a late June interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. "Tuning that, making sure it's fair, getting the teachers so they're enthused about it" are the keys. (MSNBC)

As for Rupert Murdoch the solution to fix the problem is very simple: give parents more choice, and for that you just need to make the labels clear as for products in the supermarket:

For choices to mean anything, however, parents also need transparency so they can make real comparisons.
The Los Angeles Times just gave us an excellent example of this kind of transparency when it published a database of about 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers ranked by their effectiveness in raising student test scores. If you are a mom with a son or daughter in one of these classrooms, you know this information is vital. Unfortunately, it's the kind of information that seldom sees the light of day.
We all know that good schools begin with good teachers. We also know there are many heroic teachers. Unfortunately, our system is set up to protect bad teachers rather than reward good teachers.(WSJ)

Whenever you read "there are heroic teachers" you can be sure the next sentence will bash them.

And now, you have all the hype about "Waiting for Superman" (with a very dramatic trailer) which made the opening of NBC Education Week and has become one of the most successful documentaries:

"Can One Little Movie Save America's Schools?" asked the cover of New York magazine. On September 20 The Oprah Winfrey Show featured the film's director, Davis Guggenheim, of An Inconvenient Truth. Tom Friedman of the New York Times devoted a column to praising the film. Time published an education issue coinciding with the documentary's release and is planning a conference built in part around the school reform strategies the film endorses. NBC, too, will host an education reform conference in late September; Waiting for Superman will be screened and debated there, and many of the reformers involved in its production will be there. Katie Couric of CBS Evening News has promised a series of segments based on the movie.
(The Nation)

From what I have read, the movie is not only critical of the US school system, it also promotes charter schools (here and here) while blaming teachers unions and so it is no surprise that Bill Gates, who appears in it should promote the movie.

For our European readers who might not know charter schools are special schools which have been given a charter with increased autonomy as well as greater accountability in return. In principle, if they don't achieve educational outcomes within a certain period (usually three to five years) they may have their charters revoked by the local school board, the state education agency, or the university which sponsors them. One last important note, whenever there are too many students to enroll, admission is then usually allocated by a lottery system - a lottery that appears in "Waiting for Superman".

But the results of charter schools are mixed at best: nearly half of charter schools nationwide get no better results than local public schools, and 37 percent get worse results. (read 2009 report here). The problem with the movie - as in many others - is that it follows the fate of five kids and universalizes their experience.

Yes there are problems in the American school system
- for one, it is very costly: the United-states spends 7.% of its GDP (while the OECD countries as a whole spend 6.1% on average (France spends 5.9%) (OECD)
- and second, the results may be very disappointing, especially in maths and science: :

On the mathematics literacy scale, U.S. students scored lower than the OECD average. 31 countries (23 OECD and 8 non-OECD) scored higher on average than USA in mathematics literacy in 2006. Only 4 countries had average lower scores than USA.(source here)

But the question may not about how much is spent but rather how it is spent, and in this respect, the teachers are not what drive up spending:
According to the OECD:

In the United States, salary cost as a percentage of GDP per capita is well below the OECD average [the United States ranks 20th for primary, 24th for lower secondary, and 25th for upper secondary], despite the high overall spending.
The salary cost per student is 6.5% in the U.S., way below the OECD average of 11.4% (it is 11.8% in France).
While other factors can influence these differences (such as salary level, teaching time, and class size), in the United-States, this is mainly because the nation spends an above-average share of its educational spending in primary and secondary education on capital investments as well as compensation of non-teaching staff. (OECD)

Besides, the United-States has expectations of its schools that many countries do not, such as sports program or modern technology that drive up costs.

So as Mr Gates or Mr Murdoch claim, yes, teachers are what makes the difference, but maybe things would be different if teachers were better paid in the first place. The funny thing is that they all look up to Finland which has the best results but they never look at the system there, either because of ignorance or because it does not match their ideological/political agenda.

In Finland:

The system is built on a sense of trust and confidence in teachers. Essentially, Finnish children learn well because they’re taught well. All teachers are required to have a masters degree; most will spend a minimum of five-and-a-half years acquiring expert knowledge and learning how to teach it.
Securing a place in teacher training is much coveted even though salaries are at average levels across the OECD. Less than 10 per cent of those who apply will be successful. Finnish academics routinely refer to their teaching force as the crème de la crème (Irish Times).

It must be also noticed that Finland does not evaluate teachers at all even if Finland's students come out right at the top of international student assessments. (here)

One of the problems of the education in the United-States is a problem of American society at large - the lack of trust and respect for teachers and the academic world in general. This is a problem that is never addressed and that has gotten much worse in the last 10 years.
Unfortunately, the free-market anti-government view has made teachers the scapegoat for everything going wrong in American schools. The teaching profession is despised, and it makes it really hard to have the best and brightest to want to teach. Not only do teachers have to face the problems of unruly students, not only do they have to compete with video-games and the Internet, but they are also looked down upon by the rest of society, especially by the business world (This is no surprise since corporate America tends to value a profession by how much money is made in it).
And so now teachers have to suffer another ordeal and be shamed in public because their students don't pass a test, and soon enough their own living conditions may very well depend on the success of their students.

Not only has corporate America nothing to teach us about schools but it poisons the minds of millions of Americans by giving a false quick fix that is based on ignorance and ideology. It is one thing for philanthropists to help or found private schools, it is another for them to mingle with public schools and government decisions.

Learning is complex and so is teacher evaluation, and it is about time to have a real debate based on facts and experience, not on ideology.

To the U.S. Constitution Worshipper.

Having a personal interest in national myths, I found this week's opinion column Lexington in the Economist totally right on. I wish more people had this perspective. Maybe something that can also help restore sanity....

The perils of constitution-worship : One of the guiding principles of the tea-party movement is based on a myth, from Lexington.

.... there is something infantile in the belief of the constitution-worshippers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written in the 18th century.

(.../...)

The constitution is a thing of wonder, all the more miraculous for having been written when the rest of the world’s peoples were still under the boot of kings and emperors (with the magnificent exception of Britain’s constitutional monarchy, of course). But many of the tea-partiers have invented a strangely ahistorical version of it. For example, they say that the framers’ aim was to check the central government and protect the rights of the states. In fact the constitution of 1787 set out to do the opposite: to bolster the centre and weaken the power the states had briefly enjoyed under the new republic’s Articles of Confederation of 1777.

When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim. The framers were giants, visionaries and polymaths. But they were also aristocrats, creatures of their time fearful of what they considered the excessive democracy taking hold in the states in the 1780s. They did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone slaves, should have the vote. Many of their decisions, such as giving every state two senators regardless of population, were the product not of Olympian sagacity but of grubby power-struggles and compromises—exactly the sort of backroom dealmaking, in fact, in which today’s Congress excels and which is now so much out of favour with the tea-partiers.

More to the point is that the constitution provides few answers to the hard questions thrown up by modern politics.

(.../...)

Pace Ms Bachmann, the constitution is for all Americans and does not belong to her party alone. Nor did Jefferson write a mission statement for the tea- partiers. They are going to have to write one for themselves.

The Politics of Fear.

Should I feel ashamed of my country because my government does shameful things?

That's a question that both French and Americans can ask at different times. G. W. Bush gave a bad name to the U.S. just like Sarkozy is giving a bad name to France these days:

Following a riot of a few "Gypsies" against French gendarmes in the south of France, French president Nicolas Sarkozy decided not only to "severely punish" the rioters but also to expel all the (illegal) Romani gypsies from France.
The French government gave assurances that no ethnic group was singled out - which would be illegal under European law and a breach of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. But a leaked instruction from the Interior Minister to the Police showed that the "Romani" were indeed actually specifically targeted.
So it appears that France has actually violated a document which (oh the irony....!)President Nicolas Sarkozy pressured others (like Ireland or Poland) to sign up to the Lisbon treaty.
Faced with a wave of criticisms in Europe - which may even take the form of legal action against France by the European Commission - France's official position has remained defiant, thanks to Sarkozy's inflated ego. Condemnation was not limited to Europe, it went from the Pope to the United Nations, and marches against "hate and xenophobia" were organized throughout France (here).
The French president did not back down and his quick temper even turned the summit meeting of E.U. leaders that followed into a circus of mud-slinging and division.
This comes in a context of a French president weakened by one of the lowest presidential approval rates in the last 50 years - a mere 32% (not even close to Obama's at 42%) so he has been trying to revive his popularity by cracking down on crime and illegal immigrants which made him popular with his electorate in the past.

The interesting point is that just like the American right these days (i.e. the Tea Party), the French government has been using fear to regain popularity and votes. This politics of fear is nothing new but with it seems to be working really well with older white folks.
In the last few months, French Minister of the Interior Brice Hortefeux who smacks of racism has been keen on playing this dirty trick, blaming the immigrants, the Romani (and confusing Romanians with Romanis) or even the Judges (here) when new figures show the Sarkozy's crackdown on crime doesn't work (it has doubled in the last decade).

“Nationality should be stripped from anyone of foreign origin who deliberately endangers the life of a police officer, a soldier or a gendarme, or anyone else holding public office. We are suffering the consequences of 50 years of insufficiently regulated immigration which has led to a failure of integration,” said Sarkozy.

In addition, this government has been making all sorts of populist moves as attempts at diverting the French from recent political scandals and a bad economy. Examples abound : the ban on the full Muslim veil, the two-year jail sentences for the parents of minors convicted of crime, an unnecessary debate over national identity (with the implied idea that foreigners may be a threat to the French identity) a number of tough security laws, including laws to restrict the Internet (called Loppsi 2 which may potentially undermine freedom of expression), and the alleged attempt to stifle freedom of the press.

While comparing France's removal of Romani the plight of Gypsies during WWII and France to a fascist state is ridiculous.

Yes, like most French people I am sensitive to France's image in the world because it has repercussions on me when I travel or when I meet foreigners and no one likes to be given a bad name, but more importantly, there is a question of collective responsibility as I am associated with Sarkozy even if I didn't vote for him, but what can a citizen do? Vote him out, I guess, but takes another election... and the agreement of a few other million people.

As much as I may disagree with the right over the economy, there is room for discussion (I also disagree with the left), but what is unforgivable and non-negotiable is the tactic of fear and populism to get elected. Unfortunately, it seems that this is something very easy to do these days that the right both in France and in the U.S. is very good at. That tactic may take different forms, but it is basically the same strategy. Not only is it a morally wrong, it is also dangerous. One the best is out and has been fed, there may be no way to control it!

Grading the Teachers.

The start of the school year holds a lot of similarities between France and the U.S. but it also underlines huge differences between our two countries in how they see the teaching profession - and no, I am not even talking about the French teachers' strikes -

When I was in California this summer, the Los Angeles Times came up with a series of article on education, but it was not about the grades of the students this time, it was about grading teachers. The series was about "exploring the effectiveness of public schools and individual teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District.". LATimes.

Since I'm a teacher myself, it got my attention.

Here's how the assessment was made:

The reporters requested and received seven years of students’ English and math elementary-school test scores from the school district. The economist then used a statistical technique called value-added analysis to see how much progress students had made, from one year to the next, under different third- through fifth-grade teachers. NYTimes.

Or put it another way , "Value-added modeling"....

... looks at each student's past test performance and uses it to project his or her future performance. The difference between the child's actual and projected results is the estimated "value" that the teacher or school added (or subtracted) during the year. LA Times.

But that was not the end of it, the newspaper actually published a list of names of some of the teachers, along with their value-added performance, they be very good or very bad results, and they eventually released the rankings of all teachers and their rankings in the LA district. That's about 6,000 teachers.

The "value added" score is actually nothing really new, and a few states have even adopted legislation which mandates that teacher evaluation be linked to student test data.

Legislation adopted in states like Colorado, Louisiana and Kentucky and legislation vetoed in Florida follow a template of requiring that teacher evaluation for pay increase, for retaining tenure and ultimately for dismissal must be based 50% or 51% on student “value-added” or “growth” test scores alone. That is, student test score data could make or break a salary increase decision, but could also make or break a teacher’s ability to retain tenure. Schoolfinance.101

This may please a lot of parents with unquenchable worries about their kids' teachers and schools and it will give them a simple tool to measure their kids' teachers' performance but the problem is that it is precisely too simple to be true.

As Kevin Drum pointed out, assessing teachers' performance isn't just hard, it's even harder than any of other professions. I don't want to get too technical here but there are reports (see here or here) that have seriously questioned the methods used in this VA modeling :

VA modeling is not an exact enough methodology to justify identifying individual teachers as “effective” or “ineffective” based solely on a particular VA score. UCLA.

Any teacher will tell you that tests can easily be questionable and it is really hard to make a test that will reflect all the skills necessary in acquiring a certain competence :

While the math and reading California Standards Tests (CSTs) capture some math and reading skills, these tests do not measure the full range of skills, attitudes, and behaviors students should learn over the course of a school year.UCLA.

And I'm not even talking about teachers that may not be so good but may have good VA results because they're teaching to the test.

While I won't deny there is a problem of accountability in the teaching profession- a problem especially acute in France where teachers cannot be fired - assessing most teachers' true performance is impossible. You may have a good idea of the very bad ones, and in my opinion, those should be fired, but the average or even the very good ones are much harder to assess That is because teachers work with complex beings who are very sensitive to anything happening in their lives, including but not exclusively what happens in the classroom with the teachers but also with the other students.

Now of course in this day and age, it seems rather fashionable to model teachers' evaluations after what supposedly happens in the private sector, expect that... it does not :

In truth, although payment for professional employees in the private sector is sometimes related to various aspects of their performance, the measurement of this performance almost never depends on narrow quantitative measures analogous to test scores in education. Rather, private-sector managers almost always evaluate their professional and lower-management employees based on qualitative reviews by supervisors; quantitative indicators are used sparingly and in tandem with other evidence. Management experts warn against significant use of quantitative measures for making salary or bonus decisions. EPI Report.

Kevin Drums states the obvious: "teachers work alone in a classroom, and they're usually observed only briefly and by one person. And their output — well-educated students — is almost impossible to measure.".

The thing is that students, and especially children and teenagers cannot be reduced to commodities or mere products that one can fashion one way or the other. They are complex beings..... very complex.

I can't help feeling sorry for those teachers whose names were made public by the L.A. Times but this should not come as a surprise in a country that has so little regard for teachers anyway. I once considered teaching in the U.S. but I am now so glad I changed my mind. Between the pressure of the parents, the politics of school boards and their sometimes biased decisions, the neon-lit classrooms with no windows in many schools.... and the overall despise of many Americans, it is a very hard profession to have. Of course, this is no surprise in a country which values jobs according to the money you make. It is really too bad since after all, teachers play an important role, even if not exactly measurable, in the well-being of the next generations and the future of the country.

France still No. 1 for tourists

According to the UN’s World Tourism Organisation, just 25 million people travelled abroad for holidays in 1950. Today, the figure is more than 800 million, representing an annual growth rate of about 6.5%.

Just as it’s been for the past 15 years, France remains the world’s favourite destination, attracting just under 80 million visitors in 2008 (the most recent year for which full data is available). The United States is second, with about 58 million visitors from abroad, while Spain is third, with just over 57 million.

NOTE: France has more tourists -80 million - than its population - 65 million - .

Shrinking Sarkozy.

I love the cover of the Economist this week. Very well put. Sarkozy must hate it though - he has such a complex with his size. Funny, isn't it?

Here are extracts of their pretty good analysis of the French presidency:

The man who urged the French to reconcile themselves to globalisation later declared that “laissez-faire capitalism is finished”. The man who implored the French to stop knocking wealth creation then vowed to stop French carmakers building vehicles in low-cost countries for the French market. His own voters have been left thoroughly confused.
His failure to delegate has also created a clannish atmosphere at the Elysée, in which advisers hesitate to tell Mr Sarkozy, who has a fearsome temper, when he is wrong. “It’s very difficult to talk to him as an equal,” comments one old friend. This has led to some staggering errors of judgment.

The French did want a leader who would shake things up, he argues, but he went too far in the wrong places, touching sacred elements of the presidency: dignity in office, a respect for parliament and judicial independence, the separation of private and public life. The clubbish links between the Elysée, certain business and media bosses, even the judiciary, are troubling. In a country where public life has traditionally stopped at the bedroom door, many French people are dismayed to hear the president’s advisers comment publicly on the state of his marriage to Carla Bruni. Nobody wants a return to the hypocrisy of the past. But something of the solemnity of office has been damaged.