Week Links: Tomorrow Is Another Day

This week, some glimpses into the future (if not the present) of education:

Nicholas Kristof on how teacher quality impacts test scores and lifelong workplace earnings.  Reading a study by the economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Johan Rockoff.  Kristof's willing to carry the evidence a bit further than the authors seem to be, so the actual report is worth a look.  One cautionary piece from the exec summary: "For example, using VA in teacher evaluations could induce counterproductive responses that make VA a poorer measure of teacher quality, such as teaching to the test or cheating."

LearnerWeb is a nifty Web-based system, developed in Portland, that allows adult learners (from GED to ESOL students) to pace their own learning.  Most breakthrough-ishly, students can cycle between online learning and real-life classes or tutoring led by real-life teachers.  It attempts to mimic how most adults learn most things: by doing a little on their own, then taking a class or getting coaching, then doing more on their own.  Endless possibilities, doesn't mean it's a panacea.  Would be intrigued to see how interactive language learning (especially at the beginning levels) happens.  Also, while it creates space for self-directed learning (very adult-friendly), how much can online portals respond to adults' individual needs, contexts, concerns?

And finally, a short but hopeful column at the Boston Globe about Active Minds, which is trying to raise mental health awareness, make talking about such issues okay, and prevent suicide.  Student-led.  More power.

Wondering ...

... if the best place to attack poverty through education is in schools, in nonprofits, or in policy.

... if I should finally give in to the lifelong temptation of working in politics.

.... if there is a place for me in a school, and if so, where?

... when I'll have to finally decide this.

Sharing the Love

I've written before about my fascination with--and questions for--cradle-to-career programs like the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati.  Education Sector just put out a report on Strive, a collaborative effort by countless schools, nonprofits, and businesses to support positive academic achievement for children along a continuum from birth to college completion.

There's a lot that's promising and new about Strive.  To name just a few elements: First, from a partnerships standpoint, universities have taken the lead in new ways.  Strive emerged, six years ago, out of conversations among more than 200 education and nonprofit and community leaders.  Who convened them?  Then-University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher.  It's refreshing to witness the active role of local universities not just in supporting these initiatives, but finding ways to measure their own success in relation to K-12 work.  Second, from a policy standpoint, there is a long-overdue focus on early childhood education--often the forgotten stepchild of ed funding.  Third, from a jurisdictional standpoint, Strive is not just Cincinnati: it also involves the smaller Kentucky cities of Newport and Covington, just across the Ohio River.  And the efforts don't just comprise public schools--multiple parochial schools are actively included in the partnership.

The report covers a lot of the same ground dealt with elsewhere, but here are some nuggets I haven't seen in other reports:

• Strive's shared accountability is both in line with the edzeitgeist in its focus on data, and cuts against it by moving the focus beyond individual teachers or schools
• The Feds' Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, which echoes Strive and is centered on schooling, nevertheless requires that the lead partners of each PNI be a nonprofit or institution of higher education: this "serves to broaden the range of desired outcomes beyond the purely academic to include the developmental needs of student"  
• Sharing data is really, really hard--many partners at Strive "often collect, store, and analyze data in incompatible and disconnected way"; but they're working on improving the scene

The whole report is short, to the point, and free, so it's worth a complete look.

The Week's Links: You Better, You BTR, You Bet

Picked-up edpieces from the edworld:

The Strive Partnership gets still more positive press in a short Education Sector write-up about a report on community-wide education accountability which I look forward to reading in whole.  Strive, Promise Neighborhoods, Harlem Children's Zone, etc.  Will be interesting to see what sort of critiques the report puts forward.  The burgeoning writing on Strive is almost all breathless--perhaps for good reason, it's a cool new model, but one gets concerned with anything that looks (or is portrayed as) too perfect.

Incisive post at Eduwonk on Boston Teacher Residency teachers' effectiveness, and how it relates to larger rhetoric about in-district vs. out-of-district approaches to teacher development.   btr vs. tfa and what it says about standards, bigger issues, etc.  as always cuts to the bone.

Coach G has a good piece on the role of making errors.  Whole set of other implications for ESOL classrooms, but that's for another day.  Time to go outside and play; it's like 30 degrees warmer than usual for the 30th straight day.

Next Steps for Adult Learners: Collaboration

Helping connect students to next steps, so they can avoid language attrition, is an important consideration for adult ESOL learners.  Especially if they're studying in one of the many small programs cropping up in urban areas, which may be nimble but don't always offer a full continuum of classes.  In my former one-level ESOL program, students undertook a sequence of activities to seek out and get enrolled in their next class.

That's all well and good.  But how can different programs collaborate to help learners at one connect to classes offered at another?

As I discussed in my first piece in this sequence (linked above), mammoth waitlists await many adult ESOL learners in my state (Massachusetts), and others.  Thus, the best way to assure a student moves on to intermediate English after finishing beginning level would be to increase funding--but this isn't the place to discuss that.  Just because most programs are filled to capacity, and have four, five, or six months' worth of names waiting to join, doesn't mean there aren't gaps in enrollment that could be filled by students, if only they knew about them.  For instance, every year there are numerous classes at numerous sites find themselves in August looking for students to fill their remaining spaces for class in September.

"Collaboration" is a watchword in the nonprofit and human-services sectors, but how is it converted from platitude to practice?  It seems worthwhile to point out that collaboration is not a mere parntership, but the actual pooling of labor--co-laboring--or a joint effort to achieve a unified end.  In putting collaboration into authentic practice, a promising model is the Strive Partnership, which is a cradle-to-career educational initiative in the Cincinnati area.

Strive has advanced a model of "collective impact" built on five key principles (as wonderfully detailed here):


(1) a common agenda built on shared understandings of the problem and of actions to solve it; 
(2) shared measurement systems to assess and report effectiveness, arrived at by a consensus that ensures continued alignment, accountability between organizations, and the opportunity for participants to learn from each other;
(3) undertaking of mutually reinforcing activities in which each agency focuses on activities it can do well in coordination with other agencies' actions;
(4) continuous communication in which leaders must meet regularly and over the long term to build trust, develop a common language for their work, and keep open channels for communication; and  
(5) a backbone support organization to provide a range of supports for the initiative, from staff time to help with technology and data. 

There are many challenges to implementing such a system, but Cincinnati educators believe they are seeing some results, five years into Strive.  What could be applied to the adult-education sphere to ensure students successfully move from one program to another without seeing their language gains slide backwards?

Here are a few ideas.  It's a brainstorm: doubtless I'm leaving things out, and doubtless some of these have been tried already:

1) Draft a vision for ESOL students: What does the field hope to impart to students?  What different types of students are there, and how should their needs be met?  What do students themselves want?

2) Define success: In a given urban area, leaders could get together and outline what success might look like for different types of learners.  They could decide when to revisit these goals, how to assess their progress, and how to make corrections if students aren't benefiting from the collaborative work.

3) Communicate through Twitter: 160 characters is enough to say where a program's located, say how many spaces it has for its next classes, and link to its Web site.  Educators who may not have the time to wade through dozens of emails about job postings, professional development, and the like on adult-education listservs could get feeds of tweets targeted to issues of outreach.  This could also be done on modified listservs set up just for outreach coordinators, through Facebook pages, or the like.

4) Make the most of literacy collectives: In many areas of Boston, literacy collectives meet every month or few months.  Representatives at these meetings could bring and share lists of students who are about to leave one program and need a class at another, and actively follow up with them.  Rather than opening doors to whoever walks through, the process would guide those students already in the pipeline.

5) Use funding to incentivize collaboration: Money could reward and follow programs, or collectives of programs, that demonstrate a commitment to helping students connect to continued language support.

Just a few ideas.

What are yours?

What I Did Over My Winter Vacation ...

Southern France: could hardly believe I was there.  Espresso, red wine, delicious meals, rented bikes.  A few shots from an amazing Christmas:

Daily market in Nice

Options: Pretty decent

Ville Franche

Eze Village

Sunrise over the Mediterranean

Remembering Hitchens

I first became a regular reader of Christopher Hitchens as I was beginning a year abroad in Chile in 2003, through a pair of his pieces addressed to the life and work of the literary scholar Edward Said: first, an ambivalent Atlantic Monthly review of the updated edition of Said’s Orientalism, and then, a few weeks later, a touching Slate obituary to Said, who had recently succumbed to leukemia.  Living, studying, and volunteering thousands of miles from home—and from anywhere else I knew—constantly tested the borders of my independence and experience, and in the occasional lonely or unscheduled moments of those months abroad I often found myself, for 20 or 30 minutes or more, plumbing Hitchens’s new or old writings wherever I could find them online.

My ability to lose myself in his work would continue when I bought some of his books over the next few years.  At one moment, I’d be rearranging my bookshelf; at the next, I’d be flipping open an anthology of his, vowing to snap it closed again; and an hour later, I would have gotten myself accidentally engrossed in explorations of Kipling, Saul Bellow, the death penalty.  His command of politics and literature was impressive, his perspectives incisive, and his prose punchy.  At his best, he achieved a beauty of both language and analysis that was perhaps most on display when he joined books and politics.  Only one such example was his wonderful, counter-narrative Atlantic essay on Churchill, “The Medals of His Defeats,” which I found myself reading and rereading one Christmas vacation.  His writing also found a unique register when he was on attack.  He could sometimes allow personal slights and vendettas into arguments where they did not seem to belong, but when the target was clear, and the target’s character legitimately at stake, it was a thrilling ride.  I practically tore through The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and would again.  The fire extended to non-personal matters: he wrote frequently, and devastatingly, against capital punishment. 

Pieces like these showed, further, that he could both revel in American ideals while subjecting his adopted homeland to a skepticism for which he was famous.  He underwent waterboarding, for heaven’s sake, and found yet more reason to oppose torture.  At their best, his writings evinced a concept he once advanced (I don’t remember, and can’t find, where): that the measure of intelligence is in one’s tolerance for contradiction—which indeed he turned into the title of his Atlantic piece on Kipling, “A Man of Permanent Contradictions.”  If Hitchens’s views of America and its leaders could be multidimensional, his ardent defense of the Iraq war was at times indulgent, and led him to gloss over both the effects of battle and legitimate criticisms of it.  Yet his constant reminders of the authentic threats to organized civilization were a healthy counterpoint to my own opposition to the Iraqi conflict, and more.  Reading Hitchens gave me deeper, more nuanced ways of viewing post-9/11 politics.  Most of all, it made me skeptical of the widespread skepticism--felt on the Left, and which I’d felt myself--toward American purpose and power.

After a couple years reading his work, I was thus well aware of the qualities of Hitchens’s prose and persuasive power—to say nothing of his brash, biting public persona.  But it was a serendipitous meeting with Hitchens in the summer of 2005 that exposed me to a perhaps less prominent feature—his personal generosity. 

I was on campus at Stanford that summer doing research for my senior thesis.  I noticed Hitchens would be coming to the Hoover Institute as a Media Fellow.  I contacted the coordinator of the fellowships: Would the writer be holding any public events?  She got back to me: No, he would be here for a week, and would have no such events, but you should keep an eye out for other appearances in the future.  Very well, I thought, it was worth a shot, and I sent an email thanking the woman for getting back to me.  It was to my great surprise, then, to receive another email, the next day, from this same lady: Mr. Hitchens would be happy to meet with you one-on-one.  Please go ahead and contact him at the following email.

I don’t remember where I was sitting when I got this, but I surely catapulted out of my chair.  I emailed an introduction, and to at least attempt to justify this meeting that I had not solicited, stated an interest in discussing various topics I’d touched on in school and knew he was interested in: Chilean politics, Kipling, the Iraq war.  On the appointed day, when I knocked on the door to the Hoover office he’d asked me to come to, he turned from his computer with his characteristic slight smirk, cocked his head, and intoned, in full throaty British, “It is I.”  

This wasn’t going to my normal afternoon, that’s for sure.  He stuffed me into his maroon Volkswagen, and before we’d even gotten to the nearby Trader Joe’s to pick up lunch, he was discussing Jefferson and Paine.  At his in-laws near campus—where he spent the summer—he kicked off his shoes, padding into the kitchen to pull out the choice of spirits.  (It was more than a double-take to see my literary hero in his socks.  What can I say?  He didn’t look quite poised to confront Islamic fundamentalism at that moment.) 

As we sat outside, eating lunch and drinking, I’d lob him a topic and sit back to enjoy the response, emitted between puffs on his cigar.  He talked about Kipling’s poem White Man’s Burden, acknowledging the author’s contempt toward the colonized peoples yet elucidating a connection to the way American intervention in Iraq would one day be viewed.  He discussed the Pinochet investigations in Chile.  He recited some poetry aloud.  We were joined for some time by his wife, Carol Blue, whom I found very engaging (in one jaw-dropping moment for me, she came out to the patio, and asked her husband, in my paraphrase, “Sean Penn wants to know what’s better for us, Thursday night, or Saturday?”).  When he drove me back to campus a couple hours later, he curbed the VW, stretched out a paw, and nodded at me: “It’s been real.”

While I can’t say our meeting was exactly a two-way conversation—it didn’t take much to get Hitchens talking, and I was happy enough to listen—it represented quite a generous act on his part.  I hadn’t asked for a one-on-one, he had plenty going on, I was young.  He didn’t have to reach out, but he did; he didn’t have to invite me to his home for a long lunch, but he did.  About a year later, when I was considering applying for journalism jobs or internships, I emailed him for advice.  Again, there was no reason he should have felt he had to do anything, but he referred me to a contact at Slate.

The personal connection to Hitchens was meaningful, but tiny in the grand scheme of things.  Nevertheless, it made it all the harder to hear of his diagnosis with esophageal cancer 18 months ago.  The fact that he could be so battered by a disease—that it might at one point take his life—was so at odds with the verve and conviction I’d seen both publicly and in private.  As he confronted cancer, it brought out a new dimension in his writing.  His portraits of others—Said, Sontag—had shown Hitchens’s capability to be empathetic, even affecting.  But in a series of essays he wrote about sickness and death, he turned those skills on himself and rendered tender and deeply intimate reflections.  His June essay in Vanity Fair detailing the loss of his voice ended this way:

What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

When I heard Hitchens had passed away, early Friday morning, I was surprised by how socked I felt by it.  It wasn’t so much the small personal connection we’d made a half-dozen years ago as the larger impending absence to the world of words.  His voice punctuated the Web six, seven, eight times a month.  It was a voice not just frequent but muscular, a voice that stood out.  And it was singular, a voice that forwarded unique ideas, made unlikely connections, took on unassailable targets.  It is not clear who could say the things he was able to say, say them as often as he did, say them as well as he did--or who will.