June 30, 2011

The single most effective school reform

Everybody in Washington is worked up over a WaPo article Young DC Principal quits and tells why about a public elementary school principal in an expensive white neighborhood, a white guy named Bill Kerlina, who quit after two years on the job. He's a white suburbanite True Believer:
Kerlina was also intrigued by then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s vow to close the black-white achievement gap. He joined a contingent of Montgomery educators who signed on with Rhee ...

The article is boring for awhile because it gingerly sidesteps around the racial stuff that's the point of most  article about DC schools, but normally, you have to read between the lines. Finally, at the end, we get to the good stuff: he was offended to discover that his bosses wanted him to work harder to persuade local white people to send their kids to the local public elementary school:
A few days before he quit, [Bill] Kerlina received his annual evaluation from Instructional Superintendent Amanda Alexander. It was a positive appraisal, school officials confirmed, and Henderson sent Kerlina a letter of reappointment. But Alexander raised a concern, he said: Why were there not more white families at Hearst? 

White people are pushing African-Americans out of D.C. for sometime now, but the sticking point has been when the kids are ready for school: Do you pony up exorbitant private school fees or move to suburbs like Fairfax and Montgomery County whose public school systems are welcoming to talented white kids? The awfulness of the black-dominated public schools in D.C. hasn't kept the white population from growing, but has kept it largely childless or rich.
The question is sensitive in the D.C. system, where only about a third of students attend neighborhood schools. It is especially sensitive in affluent and largely white areas of Northwest Washington. At Hearst, 70 percent of the 241 students come from outside the neighborhood. Most are African Americans. 
D.C. officials say they simply want more neighbors in neighborhood schools. But Kerlina took offense at Alexander’s question, which implied that as a white male, he should have been more successful at recruiting. The next day, in an e-mail to Alexander that he wrote but decided not to send, he laid out a taxonomy of Northwest parents in an effort to show the hurdles to recruiting more neighborhood families. 
The well-to-do private school families, “the majority” in the neighborhood, he wrote, were a lost cause. “I have not courted them and do not plan to do so, since they will never consider DCPS,” Kerlina wrote.  
Next were those afflicted with what he called “Murch and Eaton envy,” a reference to two much-in-demand Northwest elementary schools. He told Alexander that six in-boundary families had enrolled at Hearst for the fall but pulled out when slots at Eaton and Murch opened up. 
“I have been working with these families but it’s hard to change a culture of thoughts and ideas,” he wrote. 
Finally, he wrote, there were families with racial prejudices. He said this conclusion came from a series of conversations he had with prospective neighborhood parents “that delicately asked about the number of out-of-boundary families and made reference to the ‘diversity’ of Hearst.” 
“They will never come to Hearst because of the number of out-of-boundary black families,” he wrote. 
One way to lure neighboring families — restricting the number of out-of-boundary seats — would be a “horrible mistake,” Kerlina wrote, as “the diversity at Hearst is what makes it a great school.” 

Presumably, Hearst is a black-dominated school, so getting some more local white families to send their kids would, technically speaking, increase the diversity. But we all know that "diversity" doesn't mean diversity, it means, black, NAM, nonwhite, or just plain good
He offered another solution: Move the school toward “inquiry-based learning,” stressing group activities, hands-on projects and student curiosity. It’s standard practice, he said, at the private school across 37th Street NW. 
“The reason people spend [more than $30,000] a year to send their children to Sidwell is because they believe in inquiry-based learning,” Kerlina wrote. “DCPS does not — the approach is too scripted and doesn’t allow for students to think outside of the box.”

Well, I don't think that's the only reason people pay a lot of money to send their kids to school with the President's children. I don't even think that's the only reason the President pays $60,000 to send his children to school with the children of people who pay that kind of money to send their children to school with the President's children.

But there is one reason, and it's not something for which there is any obvious solution even if the DC school district wasn't corrupt, indolent, and incompetent. Rich white smart people tend to like more free-form education for their kids. On the other hand, what seems to work best for most black children is KIPP-style boot camp drilling on the fundamentals. This has been a continuing source of tension within, for example, the Berkeley school district. The white parents tend to be Berkeley professors and the like who live in the hills, and they prefer progressive "inquiry-based learning" for their kids. The black parents who are active in the Berkeley schools (obviously, not a large number, but people who deserve respect and solicitude) tend to be strivers who scraped together enough money to get their kids out of the Oakland school district by moving to the flatland of Berkeley, and they want for their kids the 3Rs, discipline, order, and bourgeois values. They have ambitions for their children like enlisting in the Army that are incomprehensible to white Berkeleyites like Rick Ayers of Berkeley H.S.

The most practical solution for public school reform is to break up big city school districts into small districts that compete for young, education-oriented families. Big city districts like DCPS or LAUSD have a monopoly on public schools in the city, so they aren't under much pressure to provide a good product. Small districts like New Trier (Wilmette, IL) or Arcadia (San Gabriel Valley, CA) know that young families moving to the suburbs have a lot of different suburban school districts to choose from, so they better be on the ball. And they don't have to be all things to all people. Arcadia, for example, has been taken over by Tiger Mothers, so its one medium-sized pressure cooker public high school now has 30 National Merit Semifinalists per year.

I sent my son to an LAUSD middle school in pleasant Sherman Oaks that turned out excellent. See, in the 1990s, the school's students had gotten so bad that, after a middle school student killed a neighbor, the locals, affluent white upper middle class people tired of being murdered by middle schoolers -- tried to get the school shut down. In desperation, LAUSD did something very unusual -- it assigned an outstanding principle to the school and let him do whatever he thought best. He put in place all sorts of programs to lure in middle class and above parents. The one complaint I have had is that my son's homeroom and science teacher, Mr. L., was so charismatic -- he had come quite close during his 1990s movie career to making the jump from villain's right hand man to leading man in Hollywood action movies (at the climax of one well-known 1990s sci-fi movie, my son's teacher fights a famous movie star for about five minutes until the hero finally chops his head off and then, for good measure, blows my son's teacher's head up with a nuclear bomb, causing my son to comment: "Well, no sequel for Mr. L." -- that every teacher he's had since has seemed a little deficient on the Teacher Awesomeness scale.

So, much of the motivation behind all these charter schools is an attempt to outmaneuver the system. But, it's a drag trying to constantly outmaneuver the system, especially if you have two or more kids. Say you get your first kid into a really exclusive program but then your second kid doesn't qualify? The nicest thing is to know that you can always send all of your kids to the local well-managed public school that reflects the nice demography of where you live. People in places like NW DC and urban Portland are increasingly figuring out how to solve the problem of keeping people they don't like out of living in their neighborhoods. So, why shouldn't they have their own school districts so they can afford to have families? Similarly, why shouldn't the better black neighborhoods in D.C. have their own district?

37 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Well, I don't think that's the only reason people pay a lot of money to send their kids to school with the President's children. I don't even think that's the only reason the President pays $60,000 to send his children to school with the children of people who pay that kind of money to send their children to school with the President's children."

Best paragraph I've read today. I'd like to tweet it and link to it, but I'm a coward.

Anonymous said...

Just a couple of typos, and feel free to delete my comment when corrected.

In the first sentence you use "principle" instead of principal, and in the second-to-last paragraph you've got "no that young families" rather than "know that young families".

Chuck said...

Edit: "Small districts like New Trier (Wilmette, IL) or Arcadia (San Gabriel Valley, CA) [know] that young families"

Outside the Fishbowl said...

Why shouldn't the better black neighborhoods in D.C. have their own district?

Because those powerful enough to enact such change don't care because they send their kids to private school.

In fact, the most powerful whites are happy to gut the DCPS by supporting the latest patently idiotic leftist retreaded "reform". It enhance their proper-thinking status.

DC is a fishbowl of bureaucratic group think. No wonder conservatives go there to die (and be reborn RINOs).

ben tillman said...

Not intended for publication:

Please change "principle" to "principal".

ben tillman said...

D.C. officials say they simply want more neighbors in neighborhood schools. But Kerlina took offense at Alexander’s question, which implied that as a white male, he should have been more successful at recruiting.

I don't think that was implied; I certainly didn't infer it.

fish said...

the hero finally chops his head off and then, for good measure, blows my son's teacher's head up with a nuclear bomb

According to Google your son's teacher was just in an Itchy and Scratchy episode....and there are always sequels for those!

You're not going to drop any more hints are you?

Anonymous said...

Uh, when I went to New Trier, it had graduating classes in four figures. Maybe it's gotten smaller, but it's not a "small" school district. The districts that feed into it -- Wilmette, Winnetka, Kenilworth, Gelncoe are a bit smaller. (Am I forgetting one? If so, somebody will no doubt tell me.)

I think I had one black student in my graduating class. His father was a surgeon, and he was on the fencing team. He was quite possibly the whitest black person I've ever met.

Anonymous said...

Off topic: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6716942/the-movie-star

Starts off in a very Bill Simmons way, combining advanced baseball statistics with Hollywood actors. Where it get interesting is the second page, where he describes Will Smith's career. By the last few paragraphs I couldn't help but think that Obama is his political equivalent. I doubt Bill would ever make the connection.

Svigor said...

If he doesn't drop any more hints, HOW am I supposed to watch the flick where the villain is decapitated and his severed head nuked?

Anonymous said...

Given the races' different priorities, it almost seems like there should be separate schools.

OH did I really say that??

Anonymous said...

How about looking at it this way? Would you send your kids to a school where the sixth graders and the eighth graders shared the classroom and 'learned' all together? No? Neither would I.

But isn't that what effectively happens when there are two groups of kids sharing classrooms, with mean IQs about 20 points apart?

Anonymous said...

Where it get interesting is the second page, where he describes Will Smith's career. By the last few paragraphs I couldn't help but think that Obama is his political equivalent. I doubt Bill would ever make the connection.

Or the connection between the Smith film Bill is lauding (SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION) and Obama. I've said it before on this blog and I'll say it again: I never really doubted Obama was born in Hawaii--but I will probably go to my grave wondering if we'll ever know if BHO and David Hampton ever met. They both hit Manhattan at the same time (the early 80s), went to the same clubs, and both learned the same craft that was to become their life's work--conning gullible, liberal, monied-SWPLs.

Anonymous said...

I'm deeply conservative, and I sent my kids to the most progressive schools I could find, where they did lots of projects, etc. I'm white and smart and so are my kids. I had to put up w/ tons of idiotic liberal parents, Bush-bashing, etc., but I had no doubt about the wonderful education my children were getting.

bjduubds said...

I don't get why they don't just stop importing the kids into the school district. That way the racial balance changes, then sell that to the white parents in the neighborhood, and suddenly the neighborhood school is majority white.

My sister lives in an upper NW neighborhood and of course sends her kid to an expensive private school. She's a liberal who would never in a million years think that she's racist for not using the local public schools.

Her neighbor pulled her kid out of the local school because the classroom was too dirty. She visited the classroom and cleaned it one afternoon and offered to come back regularly to clean the classroom, but for some reason her offer was turned down. So she pulled her kid out in the middle of the school year.

Anonymous said...

Hey dumbasses, the movie Steve's kid's teacher was in was Julie and Julia. It was a deleted scene. Also, quit harping on grammar- Steve is 10x smarter than all of you and sometimes just doesn't have time for it

Dan in DC

hbd chick said...

and Mr. L dances, too! he is awesome! (~_^)

Anonymous said...

Steve, from your wiki page and prev writing, you went to ND High Sherman Oaks. A very impresive list of grads matriculated from that school .... do you still support it? Do you send your children there? Why bother with pub school when affiliated with such an impressive Catholic school?

Steve Sailer said...

Yeah, he played the head of Col. Sander's mercenary army. Meryl Streep as Julia Child saws off his head with a paring knife, deep fries, then sets off a nuclear bomb in the KFC headquarters.

Steve Sailer said...

"A very impresive list of grads matriculated from that school ..."

Most San Fernando Valley high schools have an impressive list of alumni from the postwar decades. There was a fair amount of talent and a whole lot of opportunity. At Van Nuys HS, Don Drysdale and Robert Redford were on the same baseball team. At Birmingham HS, Sally Field and Michael Milken were on the same cheerleading squad. It would be fun to make up a list of stuff like that.

Get Off My Lawn! said...

Small districts like New Trier (Wilmette, IL) or Arcadia (San Gabriel Valley, CA) know that young families moving to the suburbs have a lot of different suburban school districts to choose from, so they better be on the ball.

"Small" districts like Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools with 142,000 students or even "smaller" Fairfax County (Virginia) Public Schools with over 170,000? You correctly refer to both as systems that parents flee DC to send their children to, but each is more than twice as large as the DC public school system.

Meanwhile, here in the Philly 'burbs, we have dozens of school districts. The most affluent ones have great schools, of course. The middling ones do OK, and the poor ones have lousy schools. The result is that kids living in the city or poor suburbs have less chance at a decent education than they would in a larger system, where a certain amount of cross-subsidization occurs.

If you carved up Montgomery County MD, for example, you could recreate the same phenomenon simply by sectioning off the poorer, more immigrant-heavy, parts of the county into a separate school district. What good would that do? The only result would be a worse education for the kids in Wheaton and Silver Spring (and the transformation of those currently "diverse" but livable suburbs into near-slums), while the kids in Bethesda, Chevy Chase and Potomac would get the same great education they already do.

As you yourself have pointed out many times, Steve, the quality of education in any school district is determined largely by the wealth of the families who send their children to those schools. When you engineer districts to segregate the poorest students in a separate system, you further reduce whatever small chance they might have had to get a decent education and move out of poverty.

Anonymous said...

Would you send your kids to a school where the sixth graders and the eighth graders shared the classroom and 'learned' all together? No? Neither would I.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I would. My daughter has been in a Montessori school since the age of three, and, other than nursery school, I don't think she's had a year where grades weren't mixed. She's 13 now, and she just finished 7th grade with a class of 7th and 8th graders combined. She'll be in the same classroom next year, as an 8th grader.

Montessori has definite hippie overtones - every year, they erect a "Peace Pole", and there's lots of caring about things, but my daughter has been taught how to write proper papers, how to research, how to speak effectively in front of others, to debate and argue her points, how to think for herself. She's streets ahead of where she would be, if I'd put her in public education.

Ed said...

I was educated in a private school, and I'll admit I never understood the US public school system. Public schools are a state government responsibility, right? And the state can create or abolish any more local tier of government as it sees fit. Why not make all of California one big school district, and let parents send kids to any school in California they want? If a school has more parents trying to send students there than it can handle, it gets more money and can expand. If parents avoid a school, it gets shut down. Presumably this will weed out the weaker schools and the money will find its way to the stronger programs. And you can turn the shut-down schools into juvenile prisons, and if students start forming gangs and terrorizing the other students, send them there.

There has to be a really good reason why it doesn't work this way, but I just want to know what it is.

Anonymous said...

Would you send your kids to a school where the sixth graders and the eighth graders shared the classroom and 'learned' all together? No? Neither would I.

But isn't that what effectively happens when there are two groups of kids sharing classrooms, with mean IQs about 20 points apart?


If the difference were between IQ 110 and IQ 90, then the smart kids would be fiddling around with Algebra I, while the dumb kids would still be stuck on "long subtraction" ["carrying" digits], so I'd say that the difference would be between the eighth grade and the SECOND grade.

[And let's be honest with ourselves: Over the course of their entire lifetimes, the IQ 90 kids would never really advance beyond about second (or maybe third) grade material.]

Anonymous said...

Ed, I think the reason is that public schools, like all government programs, are designed to favor the weak as an expansion of the goal of saving their feelings from being hurt. Legislators feel good about themselves when they dump money on failing school districts.

P.S. It was God's love of man that killed Him.

Has to be said...

How come this post doesn't have the Political Correctness Makes You Stupid tag?

Whiskey said...

I'll note that the first Harry Potter book deals with which school Harry and his cousin Dudley (the fat bully) will attend. Dudley is set to go to "Smeltings" a low-rent Eton, while Harry is set to go to a nasty local public school where kids get bullied even more. So even among a fairly uniform population who your kid goes to school with is an issue. [Rowling seems to have written the book in the late 1980's to early 1990s.]

Anonymous said...

"long subtraction" ["carrying" digits]

Ooops - meant to say "borrowing" digits.

"Carrying" would be long addition.

Simon in London said...

Interesting about the American SWPL and other upper-middle-class white interest in ensuring their children get "inquiry based learning".

I think here in the UK, whites have been so traumatised by educational faddery that there is very little demand among non-hippie parents for anything other than traditional education, the more traditional-looking the better. I think most of the population here resembles the striving-middle-class blacks in Berkely who Steve mentions. The teacher training colleges and hatchet-faced government bureaucrats push "student centred learning", but for most parents this is something to resist, not seek out. Only a very small Hampstead SWPL elite who can be very sure of both their children and their children's schools will willingly risk anything 'progressive'.

I know the boys' private school I'll be sending my 4 year old to on 1st September places great emphasis in its advertising on its 'traditional' education. And the vast bulk of their clients are well-off white families, much more solidly upper-middle-class than we are.

Kylie said...

"Also, quit harping on grammar- Steve is 10x smarter than all of you and sometimes just doesn't have time for it."

I live with soemone like that. My husband is so smart about the things he's smart about that it's not funny. You'd never know it from reading anything he wrote, though, unless you could mentally edit out all the spelling mistakes, grammmatical and syntactical errors, etc. He writes at about the same level as, say, Huck Finn. Last night he was trying mightily to figure out how to spell "quirk". He started it with a "k".

I notice Steve's frequent errors but don't bother mentioning them, unless I think they affect the meaning of what he's saying.

The quality of his thought is so uniformly high that I think any schoolmarming is totally out of place here.

Anonymous said...

A 20 point IQ difference is actually quite problematical. And in a mixed ethnic classroom, the differential between some side-by-side students is likely north of 30 points.

Even carrying on basic conversations is difficult.

This is the elephant in the room, and it always will be. We're doomed, actually, because the 'solution', which would be best for EVERYONE, is segregation --- and of course we will not and cannot go there.

The word 'intractable' comes to mind. It's a tragedy for all involved.

Sideways said...

Hearst is 70% black, 23% white, and New Trier is in Winnetka.

Anonymous said...

Even carrying on basic conversations is difficult.

This.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of it.

People with disparate IQs can't find much to talk about other than the weather and MAYBE sports [probably the NFL; the NBA would be out because the smart guy wouldn't be able to talk about it, and MLB or the PGA would be out because the stupid guy wouldn't be able to talk about them].

Xenophon Hendrix said...

The standard deviation of IQ is 15 points. Anyone who has trouble dealing with a 20 point IQ gap will also have trouble living in the real world.

Anonymous said...

As an employed adult looking back on k-12, its mostly day care. Send your kids to whatever school, it wont make the smarter or dumber... They might get beat up at bad schools, but thats good. It will either toughen them up or give them a real hdb education. No loss.

HS = Day Care.

Anonymous said...

Xenophon Hendrix said...
The standard deviation of IQ is 15 points. Anyone who has trouble dealing with a 20 point IQ gap will also have trouble living in the real world.


Have ya looked around ya lately, friend? I would guess that the folks on the south side of the >20 gap might eventually let their anger-born-of-frustration, spill over. The media calls them 'flash mobs', but I prefer the phrase 'chimping out'.

LBK said...

In Michigan, there is competition between school districts because parents can enroll their children across district boundaries. That is, you don't have to live in a district to send your children to school there.

Also, local taxes no longer support the schools. Instead, schools are supported by the state government, and all districts get the same amount of money per student. Since a school's budget depends directly on how many students are enrolled, there is real competition for students.

As a result of these laws, the district boundaries don't mean much anymore. The state hands out the money, and dictates the curriculum. There really isn't much for the local school boards to do. They will probably be abolished eventually.