Dana Goldstein

Journalism's Elitism Problem

Journalism is a really fun job. Everyday, I get to research topics that interest me, call smart people and ask them to tell me about their ideas and beliefs, and then write-up what I learn. Sure, it's stressful: there's constant deadline pressure, sort of like being a student during finals week...forever. And if you can't write cleanly and quickly, forget it. But this job is so awesome that sometimes, I'm pretty astounded that I get paid for it at all.

So it's not hugely shocking that journalism has evolved into a career with significant entry barriers, one of which is the unpaid internship. This makes the profession whiter, wealthier (in terms of family wealth; salaries remain modest), and less concerned with public policy issues that affect the poor and even the middle class. While journalism was once a career that didn't require a college degree, today it is highly elitist and dominated by graduates of selective colleges. In some fields, like political "think" journalism, the Ivy League schools are grossly overrepresented. (Yep, that includes me. I went to Brown.)

A report by the British Cabinet Office, "Unleashing Aspirations," now documents the trend. In the U.K., 98 percent of journalists are college graduates, and under 10 percent come from working class families. In fact, journalism has become the third most socially exclusive profession in Great Britain, just behind medicine and law. Another fascinating tidbit:

Between the 1958 and the 1970 birth cohorts, the biggest decline in social mobility occurred in the professions of journalism and accountancy. For example, journalists and broadcasters born in 1958 typically grew up in families with an income of around 5.5% above that of the average family; but this rose to 42.4% for the generation of journalists and broadcasters born in 1970.

At the blog Working-Class Studies, Alyssa Lenhoff and Tim Francisco focus on the problem of unpaid (and barely-paid) internships. These are, indeed, a culprit, but the issue is far more complicated. The average student debt burden in the United States is $23,186. Believe it or not, that's also a typical entry-level salary at a "thought-leader" magazine. It is economically irrational for a highly-educated person with that level of debt to choose journalism over law, consulting, advertising, or public relations. That's not to say journalists don't have student debt -- many do. But it's a difficult, sometimes discouraging slog, and you have to truly love this work.

What's the solution? Federal student loan reform, currently in front of Congress, would help. So would an agenda of actually pressuring colleges to decrease their tuition, which Michael Dannenberg outlined in our pages last month.

At Slate, Jack Shafer is critical of non-profit journalism, because donations from foundations often come with "strings." This is a fair critique, though the influence of social justice-oriented donors is hardly more nefarious than that of corporate advertisers or local elites, the kind of people who have been influencing the news for centuries. But one thing media-interested philanthropists can definitely add to the profession is funding for paid internships, and recruiting efforts that target low-income people of color. It should be a major priority.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Paulites, Progressives, Health Reform...and the U.S. Constitution

The United States Constitution has taken on major significance in the health reform debate, with grassroots "teabaggers" calling universal health care -- and indeed, much social spending -- unconstitutional. In a piece for the Daily Beast, I reported on how this Constitutional originalism is borrowed from the Ron Paul campaign. (Ironically, many Paulites and teabaggers, while complaining that the Constitution doesn't explicitly provide for a universal health care system, would like to amend it to ban abortion. They can't seem to decide if the document ought to be interpreted strictly or loosely.)

Considering the current foment around Constitutional interpretation, it was poignant to see the House of Representatives pass yesterday, on a voice vote, a bipartisan resolution recommending that every high school in America devote one week each fall to teaching seniors about the Constitution. Resolutions, of course, are non-binding and mostly symbolic. And who doesn't support exposing students to their government's foundational document? What's more surprising is the partnership between the two co-sponsors of the resolution: Ron Paul and freshman Democrat Alan Grayson, a member of the Progressive Caucus who recently hired Netroots blogger Matt Stoller as a senior policy adviser.

Grayson and Paul agree on some issues. Both are staunchly opposed to Obama's policies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Paul told me several weeks ago, "You can’t keep expanding a war in the Middle East and pretend you can come up with a $2 trillion medical-care program." In a Vanity Fair interview last May, Grayson said, "What I care about is our surviving these difficult economic times, and when I’m asked to vote for $100 billion to extend occupations that fundamentally served no purpose that could not be accomplished any other way—in lieu of spending for the things that human beings need...I have to say, 'No, there’s a better use for that money.'”

On health reform though, the two politicians are polar opposites. Grayson's press secretary, Todd Jurkowski, says Grayson has hosted four health reform town halls in his Florida district, and that at each one, the congressman was confronted by health reform opponents waving the Constitution. Like Ron Paul, Grayson carries a copy of the Constitution with him. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and clerked on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals before going into business.

"The Congressman knows the Constitution," Jurkowski says. "From the Congressman's point of view, the preamble itself is one justification for health reform," since it vows to "promote the general welfare" of the American people. "So is the interstate commerce clause," Jurkowski added, which allows for national markets such as the proposed health insurance exchanges.

If more students read the Constitution in school, perhaps some will come around to Grayson's way of thinking. But in the end, debates over the Constitution and health care are less about logic and the law than about activist attempts to paint the concept of universal health care itself as un-American and "socialist."

cross-posted at TAPPED

On Edu Reform, Bill Gates v. Harvard Law

Yesterday Bill Gates -- one of the nation's leading education reform philanthropists -- delivered an address to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Over 90 percent of American school funding comes from states and localities. That means state legislatures are where education policy actually gets made, despite fireworks at the federal level. Let's take New York state as an example: Albany controls whether Mike Bloomberg's mayoral control of schools will continue. It decides how many charter schools can open in a year. After lobbying from the teachers' union, it prevented individual student test scores from being considered in the tenure-granting process for teachers.

So when Gates -- a proponent of merit pay, standardized testing, national curricula, and charter schools -- speaks to state lawmakers, he is appealing to the folks who can either empower or put the kibosh on his agenda. And in a nutshell, here is his statement on what that agenda is:

No factor advances student achievement more than an effective teacher. So a true reformer will be obsessed with one question: “What changes will improve the quality of teaching, so every student can have an effective teacher?”

Note that Gates is setting up a litmus test. This is why the "education wars" can get so nasty. Bill Gates is an absurdly wealthy computer scientist and businessman with a side interest in education policy. He happens to believe that data systems, merit pay, and charter schools are panaceas. Lots of people broadly agree, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. But other education experts are skeptical.

For example, yesterday the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, at Harvard Law School, released a short paper noting that research on charter schools has found, on aggregate, that they are no better and no worse than traditional public schools. Of course, a handful of elite charters have extraordinary success teaching poor kids, and are national models. But the majority of charter schools are mediocre and racially and socioeconomically segregated. Research shows such isolation is bad for kids, bad for society, and bad for getting good teachers in front of struggling kids. If we're going to expand the charter sector, the Institute suggests, why not also commit to integrating some charter schools?

Incentives to create charter schools that enroll students from several racially and economically distinct school districts – say, one city and several suburbs – could result in better schools that, as research suggests, are better equipped to reduce inequalities. Why not take what we have learned from the well-functioning charter schools and attempt to replicate that in desegregated settings?

Existing regional cross-enrollment programs between cities and suburbs are popular and have long waiting lists. Hartford, St. Louis, and Milwaukee offer good examples. And yet, Bill Gates never talks about integration.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Teaching and the Miracle Ideology

Speaking to the American Federation of Teachers on Monday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, "Great teachers are performing miracles every single day." Later on, when asked during a press conference about what makes a good teacher, he replied, "An effective teacher? They walk on water."

On the surface, Duncan's "miracle" ideology might seem like an innocent pander to teachers, akin to saying, "You guys are awesome!" But in actuality, the concept of "good" teachers as miracle workers has long been one teachers' unions have resisted. Why? Because their ideology tends to push back against the notion that given just a few hours each day with a child, it is a classroom teacher's responsibility to undo the effects of a student's background, which might include poverty, hunger, domestic violence, cramped quarters, and families that do not emphasize academic success. Just because some teachers are successful at turning around the lives of a small number of impoverished children, the thinking goes, it doesn't mean that it's fair to ask all "good" teachers to perform such "miracles," especially in a society without universally affordable health care, child care, and housing.

While acknowledging that social problems enter the classroom, folks like Duncan and D.C. schools superintendent Michelle Rhee are far more optimistic than unions are that teachers can counterbalance them. Because they believe "miracles" are necessary for poor kids, they want to set up salary reward systems for teachers that incentivize 24/7, passion-driven work. For young elites choosing a profession, that is very attractive. But to many veteran teachers, it seems naive.

The jury is still out on merit pay. But the bottom line is that debates over the very nature of teaching -- not just debates over how teachers are compensated -- are at the heart of all the education policy differences roiling the Democratic coalition.

--cross-posted at TAPPED

Duncan Faces Skeptical Teachers' Union Crowd

Yesterday in Washington, D.C., a week after taking his pro-merit pay message to the National Education Association, Arne Duncan conducted a Q&A with members of the American Federation of Teachers. While the AFT is known as the more "reformist" union -- in large part because of the careful political positioning of its president, Randi Weingarten -- the education secretary was greeted with real skepticism by the AFT rank-and-file.

Members of the Chicago local laughed, almost theatrically, when Duncan claimed to have supported broad, community-based anti-poverty efforts while working as that city's superintendent. A series of questioners pressed Duncan to reevaluate his positions. One teacher from West Virginia told him that after merit pay was instituted at her school, "The result of this has been a crash in morale. ... We are looking upon it as a very elaborate process of favoritism." Duncan was conciliatory. "That system...has a lot of work to do," he said to the West Virginia woman, "I appreciate your frustration." To a questioner concerned about charter schools weeding out special-education students, he replied, "To be clear, I'm not a fan of charters. I'm a fan of good charters." For that, he was gifted with disbelieving boos.

Indeed, while Weingarten and Duncan presented a united front -- both have said merit pay plans must have teacher buy-in -- their professed mutual admiration covered up some significant differences within the Democratic Party coalition. Just last week, Duncan appointee Joanne Weiss, the administrator for the education department's $5 billion Race to the Top fund, said states that do not allow student test scores to be considered in teacher tenure decisions, such as New York, should be ineligible for the coveted grants, intended to foster innovation. Duncan has also made clear that states should lift caps on the number of charter schools allowed to open in a year. Weingarten, on the other hand, has lobbied Albany in opposition to test score-based tenure and in support of charter caps. She did so even as she managed two union-run charter schools in New York City and actively worked to unionize charter school teachers across the country.

That's not to say there were no genuine points of comity at the event. Duncan's take on No Child Left Behind won him plaudits. He praised NCLB's success at dis-aggregating achievement numbers by race and class, while criticizing the legislation for being underfunded and stigmatizing "failing" schools. Most significantly, he used NCLB's existing state-by-state standards system to make a plug for common national standards, a concept that seemed popular with the crowd. Under the Bush administration, NCLB was "very, very loose on the goals...and they were very, very tight on how you get there. I want to fundamentally flip that," Duncan said. "I think it's backwards."

cross-posted at TAPPED

Photo of Arne Duncan courtesy House Committee on Education and Labor

Edu Secretary Brings Merit Pay Message to Union

Photo of Arne Duncan courtesy the Department of Education.

Last Thursday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan brought the Obama administration's carefully calibrated school reform message to the San Diego annual meeting of the nation's largest teachers' union, the National Education Association. As he has in a series of recent speeches, Duncan focused on how the Department of Education will distribute the competitive grants in its $5 billion "Race to the Top" fund. Between eight and 12 states are expected the receive the funds, which are intended to foster and "scale up" successful education "innovation."

While $5 billion sounds like a lot of money, it is actually just a drop in the bucket of the $100 billion the DOE received as part of the president's nearly $800 billion economic stimulus package. Still, Race to the Top excites more interest in education circles than any other federal school program, because of its emphasis on "reform." In front of the skeptical union audience, Duncan emphasized, as he has in the past, that states with experimental performance pay programs for teachers will have a leg up in the process.

...let's also be honest: school systems pay teachers billions of dollars more each year for earning [professional development] credentials that do very little to improve the quality of teaching. At the same time, many schools give nothing at all to the teachers who go the extra mile and make all the difference in students' lives. Excellence matters and we should honor it—fairly, transparently, and on terms teachers can embrace.

The President and I have both said repeatedly that we are not going to impose reform but rather work with teachers, principals, and unions to find what works.

Politically, the key signal here is that Ducan supports differentiated compensation only if teachers and their unions are involved in implementing these systems. In the Democratic Party, which relies on teachers' unions for funding and campaign season organizing, this is crucial. But that doesn't mean the NEA is thrilled about the administration's messaging. As the Los Angeles Times reported, during the event's question-answer session, one union delegate said to Duncan, "Quite frankly, merit pay is union-busting."

That statement reflects an old-school belief that differentiated pay -- based upon measures such as student test scores and principal's classroom observations -- will lead to so much competition between teachers that unions would no longer be able to cohesively operate on their behalf. In Denver, the site of the largest performance pay experiment to date, there has been some union infighting -- particularly between younger and older teachers -- but the union remains the key player in collective bargaining. That said, there is little conclusive evidence, so far, that merit pay raises student achievement. Rather, it may emerge that the policy's key success is in attracting high-achieving young people and career-changers into the profession, who would otherwise be turned off by flat, experience-based pay scales.

cross-posted at TAPPED

SCOTUS: School Districts Must Pay for Private Special-Ed Costs

Amid the excitement over yesterday's Supreme Court ruling upholding key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, another decision was lost in the shuffle: In Forest Grove School District v. T.A., the Court reaffirmed that local school districts must reimburse the parents of special education students for private school costs. The case concerned a high school student, "T.A.," who, after years of public schooling, was placed in a $5,200 a month boarding school, and thereafter diagnosed with a number of learning disabilities. T.A.'s home school district, in Oregon, is now on the line for those fees.

Many education reformers will be disgruntled with this decision: In D.C., for example, gadfly schools superintendent Michelle Rhee has frequently cited special education costs as a major road block to her planned overhaul of the public schools, which includes a merit pay proposal that would allow teachers to earn as much as $130,000 a year. As the New York Times reports, about 90,000 American special-ed students are enrolled in private school, most of them there via a referral from a public school that is footing the bill. Last year New York City paid $89 million in private school special-ed tuition. The city had filed an amicus brief in support of Forest Grove.

In the decision -- in which only Justices David Souter, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas dissented -- the Court actually expanded the situations under which public schools are responsible for these costs, saying that student tuition must be provided even if the child was never classified as "special ed" by the public district itself.

Diagnoses of autism-spectrum disorders and ADHD are increasing faster than many schools can deal with them, so parents of special-ed students will undoubtedly celebrate this decision. But that won't quiet debates over whether such large revenue streams should be directed toward educating just a few students outside of the public system -- especially amid state budget crises, when so many public schools are in dire need of financial support.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Legacy Preferences...At Public Elementary Schools?

My new column today discusses why the public school choice movement must embrace the rights of urban kids to transfer into high-performing suburban schools. Unfortunately, in many communities the tide is shifting away from the socioeconomic integration of suburban schools, not toward it. Here is a particularly egregious story out of California: In the uber-affluent districts of Beverly Hills and Santa Monica-Malibu, the public schools are admitting out-of-district students who are children of alumni. In exchange, the kids' parents or grandparents sometimes give generous donations. Yep -- these are legacy preferences.

Beverly Hills High does host a program in which high-achieving, non-white Los Angeles students are allowed to attend the school with a "diversity permit." Education research shows, though, that early intervention is key for low-income children. These districts suffer no paucity of funding. If they are going to open their elementary school doors to outsiders, why not reach out to the neediest children instead of the most privileged? I guess the answer to that is that the folks running these systems simply are not motivated by social consciousness.

Hat tip: Alexander Russo, who calls these policies "gross." Indeed.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Who Supports National Curriculum Standards?

Eduwonk Andrew Rotherham points toward this Walter Isaacson Time piece in support of national curriculum standards, which notes that two-thirds of American kids attend schools whose curricula leave them unprepared for higher education and the workplace. I'm a fan of national standards, which are a common feature of the highest-rated school systems in the world. But Isaacson's article hardly provides a sophisticated understanding of the politics at play here in the U.S. For example, he writes:

Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope that the politics surrounding national standards has become a little less contentious. A growing coalition of reformers — from civil rights activist Al Sharpton to Georgia Republican governor Sonny Perdue — believe that some form of common standards is necessary to achieve a wide array of other education reforms, including merit pay for good teachers and the expansion of the role of public charter schools.

But as Isaacson notes later on, it isn't just self-styled "reformers" and "Republicans" who support moving toward a national curriculum. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has written a Washington Post op-ed advocating for the idea. If the national standards movement is going to gain any bipartisan traction, it must embrace all of its supporters, regardless of where they stand on other education reform issues, such as teacher merit pay or expanding the charter sector. And it must fight the battle for curriculum guidelines separately from those other issues, in order to attract the broadest base of support.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Girls: Just a Distraction

So many of the problems inherent to single-sex public school classes are embedded right in the lead of this Washington Post story, about an all-black and Hispanic all-boys honors English class at Albert Einstein High School in suburban Maryland:

When sophomore Richard Scott enters his honors English class at Albert Einstein High School, he knows he will spend the next 45 minutes focused on his work instead of checking out the girl in the next row.

That's because no girls are in teacher William Lee's class.

"I would be distracted if girls were around," Scott said. "Now, it's just a bunch of dudes in class. I can pay attention."

Wow. I wouldn't try to deny that raging hormones afflict 15-year olds the world over. But what kind of lesson are we teaching teenagers when we tell them we don't actually expect them to control themselves? When we imply to boys that girls aren't their colleagues or intellectual partners, but are sexual objects -- mere distractions? It is true that in addition to the single-sex classes, the Einstein High School program gets at-risk boys involved with community service and offers them counseling. In 2007, I wrote a feature article about an after-school program in my hometown of Ossining, New York that had similar goals. But the key difference is that the Ossining program offers the single-sex environment as an extra, not as a replacement for a core academic subject.

In addition, the Post piece doesn't delve into the debate over whether single-sex education really has any effect on student achievement. In public schools, such programs are also, much of the time, illegal. The ACLU has succeeded in abolishing them in both Kentucky and Alabama.

cross-posted at TAPPED