Dog Days of Summer Edition
Puffy white clouds, gifted education, creativity and humor, and jade plants!
When I think of August, the scene that usually pops into my mind is puffy white clouds on a blue sky day, usually in someplace like Colorado (one of my favorite places). Such as this picture of our daughter, sitting on a crest around 10,000ft, contemplating life as the clouds floated by. This was probably at least a decade ago and remains one of my favorite pictures. Enjoy your summer activities and good luck with back-to-school season at the end of the month!
Something Short
With my colleagues Alli Aldis and Jen Madsen, we shared additional results from our ongoing project to study public attitudes about advanced/gifted education. Thanks to Alli for leading the charge on this piece and to EdChoice for publishing it. Tl;dr: The lack of advanced education options is a factor when parents consider moving their child to a different school. Interestingly, that appears to be true even if their child does not currently receive advanced services. We wouldn’t tolerate a school that didn’t have any services to help struggling students; why have we been so tolerant of schools that don’t offer services to students who need more challenge?
Something a Bit More Involved
NYC just released the admissions stats for their eight selective high schools, and the demographics continue to disappoint. The treatment of the story, especially this NYT version of it, made my blood boil.
I’m not upset about the admissions stats (which remain very disproportionate), but the inability of NYC media, policymakers, and educators to see the obvious solutions drives me to distraction.
The NYC gifted education situation has been written about extensively for many years, yet the issue is still portrayed as a mystery, yet we know exactly why the city’s selective high schools don’t reflect the demographics of the district. I won’t get into the weeds here, but suffice it to say that changes to the city’s schools in the early-aughts led directly to the current problems. You didn’t need to be a fortune-teller to predict that eliminating gifted education in elementary schools, eliminating grouping in middle school, and having the key entry point be a standardized test for parent-nominated four-year-olds was going to remove opportunities for huge swaths of students. (I predicted all of this in a New York Magazine cover story on the city’s gifted education changes roughly 20 years ago, for which I was harshly criticized.)
But our focus here should be on solutions. The situation doesn’t need to stay so vexing, and researchers have been sharing research-backed and real-world-tested interventions with a succession of mayoral administrations (I’ve personally shared ideas with the DeBlasio and Adams teams, to no avail). Yet the options under consideration by NYC policymakers are (again predictably) not going to move the needle at all.
Although the NYC schools can take several concrete steps to address the problem, the foundational issue is artificial scarcity. Simply put, the supply of advanced education services is not adequate to meet the demand. Whenever this happens with advanced ed, you run into huge representation and equity issues. Every. Single. Time.
This is really Econ 101: When you severely restrict access to a highly valued good or service (and advanced ed is a highly valued service), people with better resources - social capital, financial capital, etc. - will use all of their advantages to get those services.
For this reason, I struggle when I listen to education leaders harshly criticize disproportionality in gifted education, advanced math, AP courses, university honors programs, etc., when they’ve also called for elimination of those programs for decades. They have their causality wrong: Rather than disproportionality justifying program elimination, they should consider how their fervent calls for program elimination have led to the disproportionality they are so upset about. I give more examples here.
Critics love to talk about “pushy gifted education parents,” but what they see as “pushy,” I see as “completely rational behavior by people doing right by their kids due to artificial scarcity that the critics created.”
So the first thing I’d do is massively expand advanced education throughout the NYC system. Every school should have advanced services, automatic enrollment in advanced coursework should be implemented, and universal screening with local norms should be used to identify students who need more academic challenge.
Here’s the kicker: This doesn’t need to cost more! Sure, you probably have some initial retraining costs to help teachers learn advanced teaching strategies, but over time it’s the same number of teachers working with the same number of students.
I could write about this for hours, but I’ll spare you that for now! (A think tank asked me to write a brief synopsis of the issues for them a few years ago; I submitted my 66,000 word overview a few months later, which remains unpublished!). The take-away here is that we can do so much better for our children, and the fact that the obvious solutions to this particular problem are so invisible to policymakers and educators is very telling.
Some Things That Intrigued Me
This is why we can’t have nice things. A friend once took me on the (at the time) new high-speed train in Taiwan. Taiwan is essentially a jungle mountain, and they built the line straight through the terrain. It’s an impressive feat of engineering, and it paid for itself years ahead of schedule. Yet the inability to build high-speed rail (and really any major public works projects) in the U.S. is much-discussed. I stumbled across this podcast with a rail/infrastructure expert who goes ballistic on the “we just can’t build here” argument regarding high-speed rail in the northeast (I read the interview transcript, which allowed me to quickly skip over the super technical stuff). He makes a strong case that it needn’t be nearly as expensive as feared, and he doesn’t shy from naming the major culprits that he feels are holding us back.
I share this because it’s interesting, but also because seemingly unrelated issues such as transportation policy, housing policy, tax policy, etc., all impact our ability to offer high-quality education to our children. In this spirit, check out this weekend’s New York Times online feature about the proposed Brooklyn-Queens train line.
Public perception of school choice is nuanced. Mike McShane recently shared some results from the monthly EdChoice polling , specifically public attitudes toward school choice. I found this piece to be especially thought-provoking, given that policymakers often focus on targeted choice programs; this is partly political expediency and partly keeping up with what their peers are doing in other states, I suspect. But polling data provides evidence that parents find universal choice (the ability to choose any option for their child’s education) to be more attractive that targeted choice (the ability to access an ESA, a magnet school, private school vouchers, public school open enrollment, etc.).
This surprised me at first, because it flies in the face of the conventional wisdom in policy circles. But the more I think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Americans are used to lots and lots of choice. Think of it this way: Universal choice is walking into a huge grocery store and have lots of options for everything you want to buy. Targeted choice is walking into that store and being told that you have lots of choices for laundry detergent, hot dog buns, and Greek yogurt … but nothing else. Not the best metaphor, but you get my point: Americans like universal choice.
Irony is dead. I read recently that OpenAI, a company whose product is derived from farming the work of others without permission, is clamping down on security due to foreign spying threats. Darkly funny, no?
There’s always more to the story … such as we find in this FT story (paywalled) about twentysomethings not saying anything when they answer the phone. The headline and lede make it sound like the youngsters are freaks, but then you find that there are good explanations for the seemingly weird behavior. Here’s the headline: “A fresh phone hell in the office: Younger workers who don’t say hello when they answer a call need to know it’s a problem.” But when you get into the article, the journalist acknowledges that this is learned behavior in response to phone scammers. By the end of the piece, you think, “Oh, this is surprisingly rational behavior.” We don’t need generation-conflict clickbait in major news outlets. If policymakers start taking prevention of spam calls and phone fraud seriously again, maybe people would use their phones more “correctly?”
Some Things I Found to be Cool
Dept. Q. This Netflix show was lots of fun. It’s dark, but the storytelling and acting are first-rate. I assumed it was a UK import, but it was made for Netflix by the same team that created Godless (the best TV western in years) and Queen’s Gambit. Here’s hoping for more seasons.
Bonne Maman Red Fruit Spread. Loyal readers know of my love for Nature’s Own Perfectly Crafted Thick Sliced Multigrain Bread, which we’ve established is the perfect toasting bread. I recently came across Bonne Maman More Fruit, Less Sugar Red Fruit Spread while grocery shopping and decided to give it a try. FIVE STARS! It is delicious, doesn’t feel “diet-y,” and pairs magnificently with Nature’s Own Perfectly Crafted Thick Sliced Multigrain Bread.
Comedy = creativity. We can learn a lot from professional comedians about creativity. They also have a lot of lived experience with performance, so a good interview with a star comedian can be packed with insights. I’ve made no secret of my fanboying for James Acaster, and I came across this interview with him on the Good One podcast. It’s a very deep dive into humor and comedy, but it’s not hard to pick out the implications for creativity.
Wildlife is awesome, part I. I love a good eagle sighting. Maybe because, due to DDT and other factors, there were so endangered as I grew up? Regardless, it never gets old to run by the ocean marshes and spot an osprey, other type of raptor, heron, egret, etc., watching me hobble by. The sea eagles will soon leave their nesting sites, but the egrets will arrive with their young ‘uns as we head into the fall weather. Big birds are cool!
Wildlife is awesome, part II. A couple issues ago, I noted that a neighbor’s plastic coyote had become a favorite grazing spot for a large flock of Canada geese. The coyote disappeared this week, along with all the geese. What gives? My working hypothesis is that (a) the dock owner gave up, (b) the fledglings have all grown up, and the geese are starting to migrate, and (c) there’s a real coyote on the peninsula now. I’ve come across the real coyote twice, which would also explain the decrease in wild rabbits over the past two weeks!
Jade Plant of the Month
This issue’s green beauty is a sunset jade variant. I picked up a tray at Lowe’s about a year ago, and they’re really taking off this summer. I planted them together, and although they haven’t shown the yellow striping that most sunsets develop in full sun, they’ve turned a pleasant lime-green. Check out those red edges! This is one happy, fast-growing jade plant!
Where to Find Me
email: jplucker@jhu.edu
http://Amazon.com/author/jonathanplucker
www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanplucker
Steve, I've made a note to discuss the BLS kerfuffle in the next issue! To clarify, I'm not arguing for or against any choice policies - but the finding that parents want essentially unlimited (i.e., all options on the table) educational choice flies in the face of how most policymakers - on both sides of the issue - tend to approach it. That would suggest very important policy implications.
Thanks for the comments, Joy! Your work has greatly influenced my thinking on these issues! Great point about how few people call parents of struggling learners "pushy."