Reason Foundation - Authors > Joanne Jacobs

Sen. Obama Is Right: Parents Are the Key to Fixing Schools

info@reason.org (Joanne Jacobs) — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Forget about the village: It takes parents to educate a child, says Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).

"Parents if you don't parent, we can't improve our schools," Obama recently said in Gary, Indiana. The parents clapped and cheered.

"You've got to parent. You've got to turn off the television set in your house once in a while, you've got to put the video game away once in a while," the presidential candidate told the audience, which cheered louder.

"You should meet with the teacher and find out what the homework is and help that child with the homework," Obama continued. "And if you don't know how to do the homework, don't be embarrassed, find someone to help you."

By now, almost everyone was yelling.

"And the last thing is, if your child is misbehaving at school don't curse out the teacher. You know who you are. It's not the teacher's fault that your child is misbehaving. That's some home training…Don't blame the teachers, and the government and the schools if you're not doing your job."

The message of personal responsibility was something many parents need to hear. But in some ways Obama was preaching to the choir. People who turn out for political rallies tend to be homework checkers. What about the teacher-cussing parents? How do schools help get their kids ready to listen to the teacher, play nicely and learn?

Plenty of parents would do better if they were told explicitly what they could do to help their children succeed. No one is teaching the parents. How much sleep does a 10-year-old need? Many parents don't know. How much TV is enough on a school night? Which shows are educational? Teachers and schools should empower parents with this information.

A Mexican-American mother told me she'd learned in parenting class that "homework matters." She'd thought it was just busy work. Once she started making her kids finish their homework before they could play or watch TV they became good students.

The best schools and teachers don't take it for granted that parents, especially low-income families, know how to help. These schools use homework hot lines where children or parents can call to get quick answers to their questions. Lesson plans and homework assignments are being posted online with links to assistance. And an increasing number of schools will loan cheap computers to parents who don't have a home computer to receive e-mail or go online.

Years ago, I met a teacher who knew many of her students' parents were poor readers. She sent home a video of herself reading a book to a child with a copy of that book, so any mother could watch the video, follow along with her child in her lap, turn pages, point to pictures and enjoy a cuddly reading experience. They loved it.

Policy-wise, the best way to get parents involved is school choice. Expanding school choice energizes passive parents. Middle-class parents decide whether to move to an area with good schools or pay for private school; they know how to work the system to get their children into a good school. Poor parents often are stuck with the local district-run public school. The more choices they have -- via vouchers, charter schools or accessible magnet schools -- the more involved they'll be.

Let's say School A requires parents to volunteer one hour a week. School B has an eight-hour school day and lots of homework. School C emphasizes science and technology but offers no music and arts classes. School D offers lots of field trips, but test scores are low. Which one's the best choice for your kid? Parents, it's not up to the system to decide. It's on you.

Parents can't do it all though. When inner-city children go to dangerous, disorderly schools staffed with poorly trained teachers, even students who do their work and try their best may fail. Low expectations are a hope killer. But Sen. Obama is right on this one: More money won't save troubled public schools if parents aren't parenting.

Catholic Schools Struggle to Stay Open

info@reason.org (Joanne Jacobs) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST

Jane Q. Public, an inner-city parent, doesn’t want to send her kids to the local public school, despite promises of future improvement. Schools with slightly better scores are too far away or have no open seats. She has two choices in her neighborhood: A new, unproven charter school or a parochial school with a long history of educating inner-city students. She likes the Catholic school’s experienced teachers, orderly atmosphere and explicit teaching of values, but not the price tag. The charter school, supported by tax dollars, is free. Furthermore, the charter is growing, while there are rumors the parochial school is going to close.

In his State of the Union speech, President Bush called for $300 million for ‘Pell Grants for Kids’ “to help liberate poor children trapped in failing public schools” by giving them money to pay for an out-of-district public school or a private or church-run school. Students would be eligible if they’re assigned to schools that have missed No Child Left Behind standards for five years or those that graduate less than 60 percent of students.

Pell Grants for Kids would boost the survival chances for Catholic schools struggling to stay open in low-income neighborhoods. But a lame-duck president isn’t going to overcome Democrats’ hostility to vouchers. If poor children are going to be liberated, private philanthropists will have to take the lead.

More than a thousand Catholic schools have closed since 2000 and more are being lost every year. Enrollment, which peaked at 5.2 million in 13,000 schools in 1960, has fallen to 2.3 million students in 7,500 schools, reports the National Catholic Education Association.

Lawsuits to settle sexual abuse cases have drained church coffers and alienated parents. As middle-class Catholics leave cities for suburbs, urban parishes are finding it impossible to support their schools without outside help. And with few nuns to call on, Catholic schools have raised tuition to pay competitive salaries to lay teachers.

In 2006-07, the average elementary school tuition at Catholic schools was $2,607, while the cost per student was $4,268. The average Catholic high school charged $6,906, but spent $8,743.

While parochial schools are much cheaper than most private alternatives, they are having trouble competing against tuition-free charter schools, which are expanding rapidly in urban areas with low-performing schools.

In a few cities, such as Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee, tax-funded scholarships are helping students afford church-based private schools. Nearly half of Milwaukee’s Catholic school students come with vouchers. In Arizona, Catholic enrollment is inching up, helped by a state tax credit for donations to foundations that provide scholarships to private schools.

Some Catholic leaders figure it’s easier to join the charter movement than beat ‘em. Seven money-losing Catholic schools in D.C. are trying to become charters, giving up religious instruction for funding. A Denver parochial school that serves low-income Hispanics also is considering converting.

In most cities, Catholic leaders are trying to keep their schools Catholic -- and open. The model is Memphis, which was building new Catholic schools in the suburbs while inner-city religious schools serving poor students closed. An aggressive campaign to save the schools inspired a $15 million donation from several donors -- non-Catholics who chose anonymity, writes Peter Meyer in Education Next. In the six years after the donation, nine schools reopened. “Almost 90 percent of the students lived at or below the poverty level; over 80 percent were non-Catholic,” Meyer writes. “Students are reading at grade level within a year of arriving; they are then outperforming their peers on standardized Terra Nova tests.”

In Washington, D.C., the Center City Consortium (CCC) has taken over 14 at-risk schools. The CCC handles teacher training, financial planning, fund-raising and public relations. Test scores are up significantly in consortium-managed schools.

In Philadelphia, Business Leadership Organized for Catholic Schools is raising funds -- the goal is $50 million -- to endow Catholic elementary schools in poor neighborhoods.

Ninety-nine percent of Catholic high school students graduate and 97 percent of graduates go on to college, says the National Catholic Educational Association. That track record has drawn support from donors of all religious backgrounds. For donors who want more brains for the buck, the Catholic schools are a good investment.

It Isn't the Bullying, Stupid, It's the Parenting

info@reason.org (Joanne Jacobs) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:20:00 EST

DC Examiner

Once again, this time in Finland, a teenage boy with Nazi fantasies went to school to kill. Calling himself Sturmgeist89 ("storm spirit"), Pekka-Eric Auvinen posted a YouTube video, entitled "Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007," before killing his principal, seven students and himself.

In Cleveland, Asa Coon achieved video fame: security footage from SuccessTech Academy shows the short, pudgy boy walking with a gun in each hand, passing a terrified student, searching for victims. The 14-year-old wounded two teachers and two students on Oct. 10 before killing himself. A photo of Coon's bloody body, snapped by a police officer with a cell phone, is circulating online. For a moment, the self-declared Satanist is a star.

The conventional wisdom casts school shooters as victims striking back at bullies. The conventional remedies, therefore, start at school. Programs try to teach children not to bully classmates by touting the virtues of other races, religions, sexual orientations, etc. This misses the point.

You have no right to assault other students, physically or verbally, for any reason. Period. Disabled kids? Fat kids? Nerds? Not OK. Bullying is not wrong because Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Walt Whitman or Helen Keller were admirable people. And it's not wrong because the worm might turn up with a gun. It's just wrong.

The Columbine killers and their imitators want to be famous. They're not seeking justice against bullies, just TV coverage and the online adulation of adolescent losers.

Coon's problems started early. His father abandoned the family; his mother was suspected of child neglect. Coon was suspended from middle school for attacking a classmate and arrested for hitting his mother. He attempted suicide while in a mental institution, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

SuccessTech was considered a safe school by Cleveland's standards. It fell victim to a very troubled kid.

The day Coon shot up SuccessTech, a 14-year-old named Dillon Cossey, was arrested in Plymouth Township, Pennsylvania on charges he planned a "Columbine-style massacre" at the local high school.

Two weeks later, Cossey admitted the charges and apologized. There are now reports that Cossey chatted online about web sites and videos with the Finland school shooter Pekka-Eric Auvinen.

His lawyer, J. David Farrell, meanwhile, portrayed Cossey as a victim of "protracted and profound peer abuse," and the boy says he told a friend, "The world would be better off without bullies." But Cossey told police he'd only been bullied a few times in middle school.

Homeschooled for 18 months, Cossey withdrew from reality. His MySpace page reveals his admiration for the Columbine killers and his fantasies of being a mercenary.

His parents supplied him with real weapons -- though no ammo -- to match his fantasies: His bedroom contained a .9 mm semiautomatic rifle, homemade grenades, knives and swords. He also had a swastika flag, neo-Nazi literature and a Columbine massacre video.

His mother, Michele Cossey, has been charged with buying him the .9 mm, a Ruger .22 handgun, a single-shot .22 rifle and black powder for the grenades.

Father Frank Cossey is on house arrest because he lied about his criminal record when he tried to buy his son a .22-caliber rifle. Dad was convicted of manslaughter in a 1981 drunk driving case.

Classmates would have rejected Cossey, if he'd stayed in school. They would have told Dillon he's crazy, which would have been useful feedback. Instead, he was nurtured, accepted and loved by the world's dopiest parents.

Sometimes, it's not bullies at school. It's mental illness and incompetent parenting.

Sending Poor Kids to Middle-Class Schools Doesn't Fix the System

info@reason.org (Joanne Jacobs) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:33:00 EDT

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Proximity is not destiny, educationally speaking. A generation of experience with racial integration has taught a clear lesson: Sitting black kids next to white kids in school is not a silver bullet that zaps unequal achievement.

However, the faith that proximity leads to equal achievement remains the cargo cult of education. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court barred school assignments based on race to increase racial diversity. So school leaders immediately began considering economic integration plans instead.

Sit poor kids next to middle-class kids. That should work!

Presidential candidate John Edwards -- Mr. Two Americas -- has made this the core of his education proposals. He promises "a million housing vouchers" over five years to move poor kids to better schools in the 'burbs plus $200 million to create magnet schools that will lure affluent kids to inner city schools.

The magnet school scheme was tried from 1985 to 1997 in Kansas City, Missouri, at a cost of $2 billion. To lure suburban white students, Kansas City's inner-city schools were equipped with lavish facilities: Indoor pools, gymnasia, high-tech science labs, computers, etc. But programs designed for the needs and interests of middle-class white suburbanites did not serve inner-city blacks. And few suburban students were willing to commute to city schools for a luxury athletic complex or a classics magnet. Test scores remained dreadful. By 1997, the district actually had a smaller percentage of white students than when the plan started.

Well, what about moving poor kids to better schools?

That's been tried too with no effect on academic achievement. The journal Education Next reports on a study of families who moved out of public housing projects and into better neighborhoods in Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York: "A randomized evaluation of the 'Moving to Opportunity' (MTO) program — a federal housing program piloted in five major U.S. cities that sought to relocate poor families by providing housing vouchers — shows that, contrary to expectations, moving families out of high-poverty neighborhoods has no overall positive impact on children's learning."

The new neighborhoods were significantly less poor and their residents were better educated. But researchers found no difference in children's reading or math scores or in behavior or attitudes toward school when comparing families that won the housing lottery with those who didn't. There also was no effect on retentions in grade or suspensions.

Researchers thought the youngest children might gain more than older students who'd spent years in schools with low expectations. Nope. Children who moved in the early grades did no better, compared to the control group, than older children.

You can take the poor out of the ghetto or barrio -- and they're usually delighted to move to safer areas. But they take with them the same habits and attitudes that undercut school success.

In Baltimore, parents who used vouchers to move often didn't enroll their children in better schools, Johns Hopkins researcher Stefanie DeLuca writes, "Many MTO parents told us about frightening conditions in their children's schools and their concern for their children's well-being. Yet these fears and realities did not always translate into efforts to remove their children from these environments. Poor mothers and their children juggle myriad extreme conditions, and schooling is not always on the top of the list."

In my book, Our School, I describe the struggles and triumphs of a charter high school in San Jose, California, that recruits 'D' and 'F' students, works their butts off and sends all graduates to college. Downtown College Prep succeeds because it targets instruction to struggling students who come from low-income and working-class families; most are the children of poorly educated Mexican immigrant parents. Mixing in middle-class whites would dilute the focus.

Success may require explicit teaching of behaviors and skills that middle-class students don't need to be taught and extra counselors to deal with family problems and reach out to parents. It almost certainly requires a longer school day. What isn't essential is proximity to white or middle-class students.

California's Lost Students

info@reason.org (Joanne Jacobs) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:51:00 EDT

Walk into a kindergarten class in a California school. Out of 18 students, six are "English Learners." One comes from a middle-class Asian immigrant family. The other five are the children of poorly educated, low-income, Mexican immigrant parents. Like more than 90 percent of California English Learners (ELs), they're being taught in English in a mainstream classroom.

Flash forward to high school graduation: Linda, the Asian-American girl, walks across the stage to get her diploma. Reclassified as proficient in English in third grade, she'll be a pre-med at University of California at Davis. Maria, proficient in fourth grade, waves at her proud family. She'll start at community college, and then transfer to a Cal State campus with hopes of becoming a teacher. Juan, reclassified in fifth grade, collects his diploma. He'll take auto mechanics at community college.

Carlos, Anna and Roberto stayed ELs in middle school, speaking English fluently but testing poorly in reading and writing. Carlos will try to earn missing credits and pass the high school graduation exam in summer school. Anna dropped out in 10th grade. She works at Wal-Mart and cares for her baby. Roberto, who gave up in 11th grade, joined his father's gardening crew. They are California's lost students.

Only 9.6 percent of ELs were reclassified as proficient in English in 2005-06. That's up since 1998, when the state's voters passed Proposition 227, which limited bilingual education. But it means many English Learners don't learn English well enough to complete high school and qualify for college, trade school or an apprenticeship.

Only 60 percent of EL students who began school in California as kindergartners will be reclassified as proficient by seventh grade, estimates a study by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.

It's worse, concludes a study on Prop. 227's after-effects by the American Institutes for Research and WestEd: After 10 years in California schools, less than 40 percent of ELs will be reclassified as proficient.

If students don't leave EL status by the end of elementary school, their prospects diminish, researchers agree. In middle school, they may be placed in separate EL classes with lower expectations. In high school, they're even more likely to end up on the "EL track," which leads nowhere. The drop-out rate is enormous: In Los Angeles Unified School District, 71 percent of ninth-grade ELs are gone by 12th grade.

"Is keeping kids EL more likely to give them services that will let them excel? Or will it keep them in a watered-down curriculum?" asks Robert Linquanti, WestEd researcher who co-authored the 227 study.

By some measures, English Learners are learning English. Nearly half of ELs pass the California English Language Development Test (CELDT), which measures speaking, listening, reading and writing, with an "early advanced" or "advanced" score. Yet only a quarter of students who pass CELDT are reclassified, concludes a study by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Some don't meet the state's second criteria, which calls for scoring "basic" or better on the English Language Arts portion of the California Standards Test. Others qualify by state criteria but don't meet higher standards set by their districts. Some meet all the criteria and are kept as ELs anyhow.

Some students score a 4 or 5 on CELDT year after year without moving on. "You get kids who are sitting around forever, languishing," says Jeanette Ganahl, a program consultant for the education department. "If they pass CELDT, they have adequate skills in English. They should be able to compete in the classroom."

But many educators disagree. They think it's better for students to remain ELs, eligible for extra help, until they perform at the same level as their native-English-speaking classmates.

Because the bar is set high, ELs who've been reclassified often outscore English-only students.

Perverse incentives encourage districts to hang on to ELs. Combining state and federal funds, an EL is worth an extra $860, the Legislative Analyst estimates. If a student becomes proficient, the money goes away.

State and federal testing also creates an incentive to keep high-scoring students as ELs: Retaining the most successful pumps up scores. However, on federal and state accountability measures, California schools count reclassified students as ELs until they've achieved proficiency for three years on state tests.

That leaves only one significant perverse testing incentive: A state rule credits districts for students who advance a level each year on CELDT or who stay at the advanced level on CELDT; this rewards failing to reclassify fluent students.

Administrators say they're not motivated by money or scores in their EL policies, but it's clear some districts work harder than others to reclassify eligible students.

Among large districts, reclassification rates vary widely: In Glendale Unified, 19.7 percent of ELs reach proficiency annually. Alvord Unified, a predominantly Hispanic district in Riverside County, reclassifies 1 percent. By the state's minimum standards, 61 percent of Alvord's fifth graders could be reclassified. But Alvord requires higher test scores, math scores and C's in all subjects for two semesters. The reclassification rate for fifth graders is close to zero.

Many districts with high reclassification rates also set extra criteria. The difference seems to be that they follow students' progress closely.

Long Beach Unified, with many low-income Hispanic EL students, boasts a 15.2 percent reclassification rate. Twice a year, schools are sent a list of students who meet state criteria for reclassification. "We don't let them forget who's eligible," says Rosemary Perry, research director. If the school team decides the student isn't ready for reclassification, they send a "why it's a no" report back to the district justifying their reasons. "We can compare the eligibles versus the actuals and look at what's holding up their progress," says Perry.

Statewide, seven percent of the state's ELs are in bilingual classes. Whether students are taught in English or partially in their home language makes little difference, concluded the 227 report. While students in bilingual classes made slower progress on CELDT, these tend to be children who start with weaker English skills and come from more disadvantaged families. When that's factored out, language of instruction didn't affect results. Quality of instruction did.

In "Similar EL Students, Different Results," EdSource found a huge gap -- 256 points -- in Academic Performance Index scores for EL students in California elementary schools with similar demographics. Effective schools for English Learners -- and all learners -- hire good teachers and invest in up-to-date learning materials, analyze data to see who is learning and what lessons aren't getting through, link curriculum to standards and keep expectations high for all students.

I talked to principals and administrators at schools and districts where most ELs succeed to research a paper for the Lexington Institute, "How Good is Good Enough?" All talked about improving reading and writing instruction, using data, linking to standards and setting high expectations.

It's simple: Teach well and the kids will learn. OK, not so simple to do. But worth doing.

Flash forward again: Carlos is a computer tech, Anna is a nurse, Roberto is an apprentice carpenter -- because they learned to read and write competently in English in elementary school.