Sickness be darned!

Dissent Magazine – Winter 2011 Issue – Got Dough? How Billion…

I have to look up the sources cited in this article (as well as finish the article…it’s quite long), but it brings up some very interesting points. Credit goes to Yuan Hou, a buddy of mine still kicking it in the Big C (does that work as a nickname for Chicago?).

Interesting points:

• Three major foundations: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and Walton Family Foundation
• Stanford University did a study in 2009 finding 83% of charter schools perform no better or worse than public school peers.
• Vanderbilt University did a study in 2010 that showed “definitively” [I’ll have to look into this] that merit pay does not raise overall student scores.
• Schools that have lower levels of poverty score rather well internationally, drawing the conclusion that it is poverty in our country that is the problem, not public education.
• The cognitive, physical, and social gap that has a rippling and crippling effect on students is set by age three.

First off, it’d be interesting to learn more about the other foundations–we all have definitely heard of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but not so much the Broad or Walton ones, I’d venture to guess. The article at first glance seems to be an at least semi-attack on them so I’ll take everything I read with a grain of salt, but it also seems well-informed (a title of “dissent” for the magazine name is off-putting, but then again, my blog’s name is “come fight me”).

The two studies mentioned bear further research. I seem to recall reading about the Stanford U study, but it also seems to conform with our regional experience of charter school performance. Being employed by a charter school as I am, I will nonetheless note some of the failings charter schools tend to have (not adhering to its outlined charter vision, lack of funding/resources available to a public school district, politics, not using a charter’s natural advantages such as at-will employment). The merit pay study I definitely want to find. I question any study’s ability to “definitively” show something as contentious as merit pay not working, but its findings are certainly worth reading and discussing.

Finally, the point about poverty being the problem hits home and seems to be true, but from an educator’s perspective, we have to focus on our “locus of control”–what we can directly impact. Teachers and education policy makers cannot affect a child’s cognitive development before that student enters school, but it definitely brings up an interesting point about early childhood education (every deficit hawk’s dream–make pre-K mandatory across the nation).