July 27, 2008 - August 2, 2008 Archives

Here’s a modern day David and Goliath tale. San Diego’s city attorney is taking a stand against the lending institutions that are partly to blame for a housing market that has gone haywire across the country, but particularly in Nevada, Florida, and California.

San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre has aimed his legal sights on Bank of America, which purchased the troubled mortgage lender Countrywide last month, as it was being sued by California Attorney General Jerry Brown for misleading and misinforming borrowers about the intricacies of interest-only, adjustable rate, and other subprime loans.

Aguirre’s lawsuit, which he filed on Wednesday, is attempting to halt home foreclosures in the area, which so far this year have totaled 20,000 in San Diego County, with financial analysts speculating that number could double by the end of the year.

“We would like to see San Diego become a foreclosure sanctuary,” Aguirre said at news conference on Wednesday.

It’s a mighty effort, to be sure, and one that in the short-term could benefit the county’s nearly four dozen school districts whose budgets rely heavily on property taxes, and in the long-term have an impact on other school systems with law enforcement agencies that follow suit.

But Aguirre’s suit, which he plans to expand to Washington Mutual, Wachovia, and Wells Fargo, seems like a long shot. If someone had an answer on how to stop the housing market from continuing to slip even further, I’m sure they would’ve come forward by now.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor

How would you finish this sentence?:

“If I ran the world … ”

Too difficult? How about this one: “If I ran the school district …”

Or, maybe: “If I chose the curriculum…”

Or: “If I could just run the school … ”

I’ve been an editor here at ASBJ for 11 years, and in that time I’ve naturally formed some rather strong opinions about how to achieve what’s become known, broadly, as school reform. I’m sure others who write about education -- and those of you who work in the field -- have made similar observations and judgments.

So where do I stand on issues as diverse as technology, standardized testing, portfolio assessment, teaching the Bible, sex education, bilingual education, and a basic core curriculum versus a more expansive one?

Well, in the center, of course. And just who defines “the center?” I do, silly!

You see the problem here, and it was not lost on me when I did research for ASBJ’s August cover story: Taking Risks for Reform: The Difference Between Success and Failure in Education Reform.

We all tend to think that our ideas are the right ones, the rational ones, the most reasonable. Trouble is, those with vastly differing views probably think their ideas are pretty rational too. Which means there is conflict. Which means we must compromise.

In the article, I quote Michael Fullan, of the University of Toronto, who says in The New Meaning of Educational Change that it is critical to develop “shared meaning” among groups and individuals for educational reform to have any chance of success. Even rationality -- however one defines it -- is not enough.

“Forceful argument and even the power to make decisions do not at all address questions related to the process of implementation,” Fullan writes. “The fallacy of rationalism is the assumption that the social world can be altered by seemingly logical argument. The problem, as George Bernard Shaw observed, is that ‘reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.’”

As you know, school reform doesn’t happen in a laboratory but in a complex social environment where myriad ideas, opinions, hopes, and prejudices influence the course of events and help determine whether reforms succeed or fail.

Accompanying my article are stories from four districts from around the country that are dealing with these competing interests as they seek to improve education for all. Tell me what you think of these efforts and of your own experiences with school reform as well.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

A few months ago, a writing assignment jogged a memory of my (gulp) middle school career. It’s been more than 20 years since I set foot in McMurray Middle School in Nashville, Tenn., and I can’t say I’ve really thought about the place since I spent my seventh- and eighth-grade years there.

I do remember that the vast majority of students were white (the rest were African American), usually from middle-class families. Most of the teachers already had spent years in the classroom, and the surrounding 1950s-era suburbs were modest and considered safe. All in all, it was a rather unremarkable place.

My curiosity piqued, though, I Googled McMurray. And assuming the data and news clips I found are accurate, things have certainly changed.

It’s now a Title I school, grades five to eight instead of seven and eight (Nashville’s court-ordered desegregation plan had resulted in some unorthodox grade configurations in the 1980s). Now, only about 30 percent of its student population is white, another 40 percent is Hispanic and a quarter is African-American. Eighty percent receive free and reduced-price lunches. More than 30 languages are spoken and the school occasionally holds diversity day celebrations.

Thanks to the reporting requirements of No Child Left Behind, I can tell that students’ test scores are quite a bit below state averages, particularly in the subgroups, and the school missed AYP for several years. Just this week, though, the Nashville district announced that the school had been moved from the “high priority” to the “good standing” category under NCLB.

In the mid-1980s, the only reported assessment we had was that it was a “good” school, from the neighbors who sent their kids there.

When the ASBJ editors began discussing the need for a series on diversity and the changing demographics of schools across the country, I knew I wanted to go to the South and visit a suburban secondary school. I chose a high school in suburban Atlanta, which has seen an amazing influx of students from all points of the world. Look for our package of stories in the September issue of ASBJ.

And one of these days, I hope to drop by McMurray to see firsthand all its changes.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

More than one outraged parent, when angry with how their community schools are run, has spread rumors designed to cause grief to school officials.

But New York City parent Gary Babad has taken his dissent with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s oversight of the schools to a more high-tech—and troublesome—level. He writes satirical news reports for a blog aimed at NYC parents, and on more than one occasion, he’s convinced people to complain about issues that don’t actually exist.

These fictional reports—which Mr. Babad told the New York Times was “a kind of therapy and my form of quiet dissent”—has proven a minor headache for school officials.

Last fall, a member of a community education council complained to school officials over news Blackwater Worldwide—the military and security training firm that garnered some controversy for its work in Iraq—would be taking over security for the NYC schools.

Then there was the Columbia University student who called with questions about a military plan to recruit teachers “who had been removed from the classroom and placed in so-called rubber rooms, where they are paid but do not teach until their cases are resolved.”

As the July 30 Times article makes clear, some of Babad’s parodies are pretty obvious. One of his first took aim at a consulting firm that he believed had fouled up school bus routes. He announced the firm would take over reconstruction plans in Iraq, with the logic that “if you can’t beat the insurgents militarily, we’ll cut off their transportation and starve them out.

Kinda funny, really. But I wouldn’t say that aloud around any NYC school officials, one of whom the Times reported “had nothing to add about Mr. Babad’s hobby.”

Nothing to add publicly, you mean.

Still, let’s hope this is a “hobby” that doesn’t gain adherents elsewhere. There’s already plenty of misinformation and rumor mongering online.

By the way, did you hear that the CIA is performing experiments on kindergarten kids in . . . .?

Del Stover, Senior Editor

The Leading Source is one year old today. We, the editors of ASBJ, couldn't be prouder. When I wrote the first entry last summer, none of us knew where this blog would take us.

Over the past year, we've written about nearly every topic of concern to educators and school leaders: achievement, school finance, student health, No Child Left Behind, bullying, technology, school security, and many, many more.

We've found that the blog allows us to write about the things that didn't make it in to our ASBJ articles. We're also able to talk about personal issues, something we're not able to do in the print magazine. Each editor has developed his or her own "blog" voice. Those diversity of voices are the strength of The Leading Source.

Diversity is going to be a theme here in the upcoming weeks. The September issue of ASBJ focuses on how schools and communities are dealing with immigration and diversity issues around the country. We'll be blogging about our stories and asking you to particpate in the discussion with us.

Happy birthday, The Leading Source! Let's blow out the candles and cut the cake.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor

There have been varying schools of thought on the part emotions play in student learning.

While no one would suggest that a depressed or angry student is the best kind of learner, few absolutes extended beyond that. For example, a few years ago I interviewed someone from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, a non-profit research center at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

From that conversation, I gathered it was just as important, at least in the opinion of the center researchers, to spend as much time and attention cultivating children’s social skills and building a supportive learning environment than it was to build knowledge in academic areas.

Yet I remember talking to another professor months later, who criticized the craze on boosting students’ self-esteem, saying all that praise and adulation sometimes backfired, confusing students (and parents) on the real purpose of learning and completing tasks: to acquire knowledge, not bumper stickers.

Now comes a new finding from the academicians: Students in a neutral and even sad mood actually perform better academically than happy students. University of Virginia psychology professor Vikram Jaswal along with colleagues from the University of Plymouth in England tested 6- and 7-year-olds’ and 10- and 11-year-olds’ ability to perform detail-oriented tasks when induced into emotion states through music and films.

The researchers found that students who were “induced” into a happy state had a harder time finding shapes hidden within a larger object than the children who were feeling neither really good nor really bad, or those who were a bit down in the dumps.

“What our study shows is that artificially inflating a child’s mood may make it harder for them to pay attention to details, which could be important in school contexts,” Jaswal told the Charlotte News.

What do you think? Let us know by posting a comment.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor