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A growing body of research has examined how cultural capital, recently broadened to include not only high-status cultural activities but also a range of different parenting practices, influences children's educational success. Most of this research assumes that parents' current class location is the starting point of class transmission. However, does the ability of parents to pass advantages to their children, particularly through specific cultural practices, depend solely on their current class location or also on their class of origin? The authors address this question by defining social background as a combination of parents' cur- rent class location and their own family backgrounds. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement, the authors examine how different categories of social back- ground are related to parenting practices and children's academic achievement. The results offer novel insights into the transmission of class advantage across generations and inform debates about the complex processes of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility.

What IF schools created a culture of "DO" instead of a culture of "KNOW?" Doesn't that action-oriented stance reflect the kind of real-world learning environment that we know resonates with kids? 

Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

What effective CMOs do rely on heavily is trust, relationships, and clear communication. In well-run charters, there is a common belief about teaching and learning, and teachers are hired and retained based on whether they share that belief. Teachers know they are getting ongoing feedback and no surprises. They know that the principal doing their observations and evaluations is a master teacher operating on the same definition of good instruction as they are. They know that every other teacher in the building is a potential collaborator. In other words, they trust their coworkers and operate in a culture of common understanding and mutual respect. Evaluation is understood to be more about organizational improvement than about passing judgment on an individual. In fact, some CMOs have tried and dumped merit pay because they felt it disrupted this collaborative culture.

I may not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students' test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By "using data to inform instruction," as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck's novels of the opportunity to read them. It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for "cultural neutrality." This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level - not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.

Maybe we can all agree on a basic starting point: no one is perfect, and every individual and organization should strive for growth and improvement. To go a step further, perhaps we can all agree that it is our shared responsibility to monitor public institutions - including schools, school districts, state and federal governments - and hold them to high standards. What happens when we fall short?  Or when "they" fall short?  How do we respond?  What do we want to see happen?  Too often in this culture, I think we assign blame.  Someone must be held accountable - and if it wasn't my job, then I certainly can't be blamed for the results.  By shaming or punishing those responsible, we feel like we've done our job as monitors or guardians of whatever values we uphold and whatever institutions have let us down.  It feels good, doesn't it - seeing the scandal hit home, the lies revealed, the hypocrites exposed, the inept upbraided and the corrupt brought low?

"Would I send my child to this school?" This is a question I asked myself every day while working at Achievement First and helping to build their first high school in Brooklyn, NY in 2009 and 2010. I served as the Director of Student Life at Achievement First Crown Heights High School (now called AF Brooklyn High School), which entailed developing and managing all after-school and summer enrichment programs, building the advisory system for both college skills and character development, counseling students, and organizing and leading community events each week to contribute to school culture. As a member of the founding team, I was involved in almost every aspect of the school, from hiring, to behavior management, to building systems for school culture and discipline, to working with others in the Achievement First network to find and implement best practices for our new school.

"The answer here is very simple, you just have a culture of integrity and you have better security measures in place," said Secretary Arne Duncan in response to the Atlanta cheating scandal. Other testing proponents offered similar suggestions. "A culture of integrity" is not easy because of the corruptive power of test-driven accountability as I have discussed in previous posts and "better security measures" will only incur more costs to tax payers without stop cheating.

"The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers-typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)-and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points. This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction. Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the "ends-justify-the-means" assumptions and practices-the broader "no excuses" ideology-underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP. Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools)."

Judging by the applause lines at GOP campaign stops and debates this winter, a significant segment of the Republican electorate understands public education not as a crucial civic institution, nor as a potential path from poverty to the middle class, nor even as a means of individual betterment. Instead, this coalition of religious conservatives and extreme tax-cutters prefers to vilify public schools-and actually, pretty much any traditional educational institution, including liberal arts colleges-as potential corruptors of the nation's youth; as unwanted interlocutors in that most sacred relationship: the one between a child and her parent. It is a curious thing, because with some 90 percent of American children enrolled in public schools, there must be significant overlap between the consumers of public education and the approximately one-third of Americans who describe themselves as Tea Party-type conservatives. Never mind: It is clear that in the American political economy, there is nothing unusual about a voter hating and resenting a government program even while relying heavily upon it.

Over 1,000 attendees gathered Saturday morning in Maples Pavilion for the sixth annual Reunion Homecoming Roundtable at Stanford, titled this year "Education Nation 2.0: Redefining K-12 education in America before it redefines us." Topics explored included charter schools, finding and training good teachers, the role of teachers unions, the role of technology in the classroom and creating cultures of success in low-achieving districts.

"In the debate over charter schools, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools are hailed by charter advocates as illustrative of what these alternatives to public schools can produce. With KIPP, poverty need not impede academic success. Enroll students from economically impoverished backgrounds in a "no excuses" school like KIPP and their chances of attaining academic success would soar markedly. There, neither hunger, poor health, relentless stress, lack of access to the material sustenance and cultural experiences available to students from more affluent homes, nor other adverse effects of poverty are impediments to learning and the attainment of good test scores. If only poor youngsters were not in the nothing-but-excuses public schools where they are taught by nothing-but-excuses teachers. So the story goes and so it was conveyed to me by a KIPP schools manager who, in an oped exchange, presented what the chain considers its best supporting evidence. Whether this evidence actually makes the case for KIPP I will discuss below"

"The shame that many teachers and principals feel at being made responsible for a school's low academic performance is a recent phenomenon. Historically, policy elites and educators explained poor academic performance of groups and individual students by pointing to ethnic and racial discrimination, poverty, immigrants' cultures, family deficits, and students' lack of effort. School leaders would say that they could hardly be blamed for reversing conditions over which they had little control. Until the past quarter-century, demography as destiny was the dominant explanation for unequal school outcomes. Things began to change by the mid-1970s."

"The democratic mission of public education is under assault by a conservative right-wing reform culture in which students are viewed as human capital in schools that are to be administered by market-driven forces."

"In this study, we test the idea that new charters hit their mark early in their operations and do not vary much after that. The notion originated from time spent in young charter schools studying their experience as new organizations and as agents of education reform. Interviews with school staff along with our own observations of school activities and operations have formed the impression that the "rules" of a school get set early on in the life of the school. By rules, we mean the adult and student cultures, the formal and informal procedures for identifying and addressing problems, and the school community's commitment to student learning as the primary focus of the school. These are obviously richly nuances facets of a school with myriad potential interactions among them, just as with any social organization. Yet, however they come about, we have observed that they are shaped quickly in new schools. Moreover, these norms and behaviors are sturdy and difficult (though not impossible) to change later on."

"It is, for example, quite common for charter schools to lead to an increase in inequality based on culture, race or socio-economic status," says Professor of Teacher Education, John O'Neill. "The evidence overall is that while a few highly motivated individuals and families may benefit, charter schools do not provide more choice for most families," he says. "Also, they often promote greater inequality of educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, and fail to eliminate the long tail of underachievement that the Government is rightly concerned about."

Now that I have a blog where I can write what I want, when I want, I have the luxury of revisiting some good and bad ideas. In this post, I will revisit a really pernicious idea that appeared about a month ago in The New Republic. You see, the odd thing about our culture is that it is so attached to the present moment that anything that happened or was written about a month ago tends to disappear in the ether. But this editorial was so outrageous that it still annoys me, and I want to explain why. In an editorial called "Making the Grade: The Case Against Tenure in Public Schools," the editors argued that it was a fine idea to remove any job protections from public school teachers because they don't need them. In making this assertion, the editors of this once-liberal magazine were giving support to the far-right Virginia legislature, which was at that moment not only trying to strip teachers of tenure but to require women to have "a trans-vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion." The editorial of course condemned the latter as harsh, but thought that the far-right effort to remove job protection from public school teachers as a "halfway decent idea." Indeed, the editorial went on to decry teacher tenure as "the least sane element" in our country's education system.

After months of studying, stressing and - yes - some crying, our kids are finally done with this year's state English Language Arts and math exams. This happens every year, and each year seems more intense than the last. But after all the fuss and agony to rate our kids, their teachers and their schools, what have our children really learned? If your kids are anything like our kids, they've learned more about pressure and bureaucracy than math and English.

So, this all has me wondering if the real objective here - among advocates of these seemingly contradictory policies - is actually to make traditional public schooling so utterly unbearable for both teachers and students by expanding the testing and standards driven culture, expanding curricular standards across areas previously untouched, sucking any remaining creativity out of teaching, and mechanizing the teaching workforce in traditional public schools, making even the worst of the less-regulated alternatives seem more desirable for future generations of both teachers and students?

Many of our country's enduring dilemmas are the products of inequalities in power and wealth created by social class, race, culture, and sexism. Challenges exist inside and outside the education system. Although the society has made visible historic progress on many fronts, our nation's most pressing educational problem remains the opportunity gap between the children of the haves and those of the have-nots; this gap has grown with the mounting social inequality of the last 40 years. We believe the schools can and should do much more to make progress in many areas. Yet we recognize that improving schools for the families of the have-nots on any large scale will in the end depend on broader steps toward democracy and equality. In any case, we are unlikely to renew our democracy without a fresh commitment to quality public education.