Education

The East Ramapo School District: Hasidic Jews, Education, and Taxes

/ Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

The most recent episode of This American Life devoted an entire hour to the tell the fascinating and unfortunate story of the East Ramapo school district.  The story involves the all too common reality of a school board making draconian budgetary cuts.  What makes East Ramapo unique and the cuts more contentious is the fact that the board is dominated by Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jews who send their children to private religious schools, or yeshivas.

Here is a description of the story from the TAL website:

We take it for granted that the majority calls the shots. But in one NY school district, that idea — majority rules — has led to an all-out war. School board disputes are pretty common, but not like this one. This involves multimillion-dollar land deals, lawyers threatening to beat up parents, felony criminal charges, and the highest levels of state government. Meanwhile, the students are caught in the middle.

Before the war in the East Ramapo, New York school district, there was a truce. Local school officials made a deal with their Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbors: we’ll leave you alone to teach your children in private yeshivas as you see fit as long as you allow our public school budget to pass. But the budget is funded by local property taxes, which everyone, including the local Hasidim, have to pay — even though their kids don’t attend the schools that they’re money is paying for. What followed was one of the most volatile local political battles we’ve ever encountered

The History of Education: Race, Gender and Standardized Testing

/ Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

In a recent episode of NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Dana Goldstein author of the new book The Teacher Wars, a book which chronicle the American history of teachers, which the subtitle states is America’s Most Embattled Profession.  The book discusses how education in America intersects with race and gender as well as the controversial issues in modern education, including the role of standardized testing.  

 Here is a description an introduction to the interview from the NPR website:

As students return to school, the national dialogue on controversies surrounding teacher tenure, salaries, the core curriculum, testing and teacher competence will get more fervent.

In her new book, The Teacher Wars, Dana Goldstein writes about how teaching became “the most controversial profession in America,” and how teachers have become both “resented and idealized.”

In the New York Times, critic Alexander Nazaryan described the book as “meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced.” Although it’s largely a history, it also draws on Goldstein’s reporting on recent controversies surrounding teaching.

“One of the things I noticed, especially after the recession hit in 2008 and coming into President Obama’s administration, was we were having a big national conversation about inequality,” Goldstein tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “And teaching was something that was discussed again and again as a potential fix — a fix for inequality, something that could help poor children achieve like middle-class children and close these socioeconomic gaps that we’re so concerned about as a nation.”

For the book, Goldstein researched 200 years of teaching in America.

“What surprised me … was that we’ve always had these high expectations,” she says. “This idea that teachers have a role to play in fighting poverty and inequality has been with us since the early 19th century.”

 

The History of Education: Race, Gender and Standardized Testing

/ Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

In a recent episode of NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Dana Goldstein author of the new book The Teacher Wars, a book which chronicle the American history of teachers, which the subtitle states is America’s Most Embattled Profession.  The book discusses how education in America intersects with race and gender as well as the controversial issues in modern education, including the role of standardized testing.  

 Here is a description an introduction to the interview from the NPR website:

As students return to school, the national dialogue on controversies surrounding teacher tenure, salaries, the core curriculum, testing and teacher competence will get more fervent.

In her new book, The Teacher Wars, Dana Goldstein writes about how teaching became “the most controversial profession in America,” and how teachers have become both “resented and idealized.”

In the New York Times, critic Alexander Nazaryan described the book as “meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced.” Although it’s largely a history, it also draws on Goldstein’s reporting on recent controversies surrounding teaching.

“One of the things I noticed, especially after the recession hit in 2008 and coming into President Obama’s administration, was we were having a big national conversation about inequality,” Goldstein tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “And teaching was something that was discussed again and again as a potential fix — a fix for inequality, something that could help poor children achieve like middle-class children and close these socioeconomic gaps that we’re so concerned about as a nation.”

For the book, Goldstein researched 200 years of teaching in America.

“What surprised me … was that we’ve always had these high expectations,” she says. “This idea that teachers have a role to play in fighting poverty and inequality has been with us since the early 19th century.”

 

Professor/Alumni Saturday – Stephen Lentz, L ’02

/ Daniel Ramsey / 1 Comment

Reform with Results: Why Juvenile Justice Policy is succeeding as Education Policy Falters , Part 1 of 2

Stephen Lentz is an Assistant District Attorney in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania and an Adjunct Instructor of Educational Leadership at Marywood University in Scranton.  Following graduation from Syracuse College of Law in 2002, he taught elementary school for nine years before returning to the legal field as a prosecutor in juvenile delinquency proceedings.

Our nation’s juvenile justice system and its public schools share many of the same goals; mainly, they both seek to create capable and productive adult citizens.  However, despite a litany of overlapping interests and constituencies, policy makers in the two fields have spent the last decade following very divergent paths.  In this first of two parts I will describe some of the national policy trends that have dramatically changed the way public schools operate in this country.  In the next entry, I will contrast controversial developments in education with the remarkable reforms that have occurred in the field of juvenile justice.

When I graduated from the College of Law in 2002, we lived in a dramatically different social and political climate from what exists today.  September 11th was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and No Child Left Behind, George Bush’s sweeping and signature education reform law, passed through Congress with broad bi-partisan support.  It was in that environment that I decided to become a teacher and to postpone, and possibly forgo altogether, a career in law.  While my classmates studied for the bar exam, I moved to the South Bronx and spent the summer training to be an elementary school teacher with the New York City Teaching Fellows.

Those were heady days in education reform, and I believe that in 2002 most educators were on board with many of the core ideals behind No Child Left Behind: that children should learn from “highly qualified” teachers, that testing should provide data that drives instruction, and that underperforming schools should be identified and given the support needed to improve.

For three years I taught elementary school in the South Bronx, followed by two years in Philadelphia, and then four years in rural Tennessee.  Across the arc of this teaching experience, I personally observed the bi-partisan policies of 2002 morph into something completely different by the time I left education in 2011.  Whereas narrow testing data was largely used as a curricular guide in 2002, it regrettably had become the primary determinant of student and teacher success by 2011.

For anyone who is not directly involved with K-12 public education, this might not seem like such a bad thing.  After all, most professions do use data extensively to drive both assessments of work performance, as well strategic decision making.  And as I argued before, it does have its place in teaching.  However, the way student testing is now applied to public education differs enormously with virtually all other professions and their use of data.

Virtually every component of public school curricula is now scripted down to the day so that students can prepare for federally required state exams.  When I first started teaching, “drill and grill” test prep was something that we really only did for a few weeks before the spring exams.  As the years went by though, the drill and grill testing climate transformed the schools where I taught.  It was really hard to see welcoming, child friendly places of learning transformed into largely sterile, imagination free centers of constant test preparation.  I was not alone in my feelings about the effects these changes were having on both my students, as well as the profession.  Nearly every teacher and administrator that I worked with criticized, at least privately, the wide-spread reforms that flew in the face of what anyone who has ever spent time in a classroom knew to be good pedagogy.

I believe, and I think many others do as well, that the purpose of public school in an industrialized democracy is to create productive, educated adults who are able to participate meaningfully in our society.  Our current educational policies are having the opposite effect.  Even if we assume for a moment that it is developmentally appropriate for eight year olds to sit for two to three hours at time for multiple days in a row to take paper-based, written exams, how can we possibly argue that students who struggle within this system are being adequately prepared to become confident and capable adults later on?

By not taking a more holistic view of the many ways that students both struggle and succeed at both school and life, we have created a climate where more students than ever feel that they are not good at what they have been told is the end all and be all of success in our country.  The way our public schools now narrowly define success for both students and teachers is dangerous.  While it may raise student academic standards as measured by testing (more on that in a later post), it only does so at the expense of hampering students who struggle within that system.  It leaves them psychologically damaged and without truly useful skills for the world they will face once they leave school.

It is also important to point out that the laws that created this testing climate.  George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top apply only to public schools; private schools are basically free to do whatever they want.  The fact that so many politicians send their own children to private schools, where they are not drilled and grilled all year, but are instead exposed to robust curricular offerings that are taught and assessed in a more nuanced manner, really demonstrates that creating capable, confident students is not the end goal of their policies.  If it was, our public school policies would look a lot more like those of private schools.

After nine years of teaching under increasingly dysfunctional policies, I decided to take the bar exam and return to the legal profession.  I was fortunate enough to obtain a clerkship with a senior juvenile delinquency judge in New Jersey, and it was there that I learned first hand about the sweeping reforms and success stories that were taking place nationally in juvenile justice.  In my next piece, I will describe how the juvenile justice system has used a more balanced approach to data to create truly-evidence based programs that benefit not only youthful offenders and their victims, but also our society as a whole.