Group items tagged

Talitha cumi, Damsel arise, was the rallying cry among nineteenth century feminists, the words were used to lead the campaign for educating women. It would be appropriate for use today to combat the attacks on teachers. In his State of the Union message President Obama avers "stop bashing teachers." (see video clip here) 3.6 million elementary and secondary school teachers were engaged in classroom instruction in fall 2010, some 76 percent of public school teachers are female. The attack on teachers, to use the president's words, the "bashing of teachers," is an attack on women who make up the vast majority of teachers.

I have a theory: in recent times, parents are too time-crunched to advocate vigorously on behalf of public schooling. They are too consumed with working for a paycheck and/or volunteering at the school, plus doing the actual childrearing and chauffeuring of nondriving children. The recession has only worsened the situation and pushed women to the breaking point. Into the vacuum created by their absence in the public sphere rushes all sorts of nonsense, from greedy Big Ed (as with Big Pharma or Big Ag, corporations that are happy to soak up federal dollars) to the latest research trend. On top of that, let's name what's really going on: it's mostly women (moms) who volunteer at the school in the PTA, on fundraising committees, or as boosters for sports and other activities. And it's mostly women (many of them also moms!) who are teachers and have recently been blamed for poor student test scores, however inadvertently, through the film "Waiting For 'Superman'". Add in the time-poverty and I say there are gender politics that subtly and powerfully undercut true education reform in several major ways

I've said it before and taken heat for it, but I'll say it again: this is a result of straight up sexism. Christie never goes after the cops or the firefighters or even the CWA workers like he goes after teachers, and the reason is clear: he is comfortable verbally abusing women. He did it to Valerie Huttle and Loretta Weinberg and Marie Corfield without the slightest hesitation. Is it such a stretch to believe that he thinks that a profession with a majority of women is a profession that is full of bubble-heads that can be easily duped by their union?

Blatant forms of discrimination against women in academia have diminished since the Equal Pay Act and Title IX became law in 1964 and 1972, respectively. Yet gender differences in salary, tenure status, and leadership roles still persist among men and women in higher education. In particular, wage differences among male and female professors have not been fully explained, even when productivity, teaching experience, institutional size and prestige, disciplinary fields, type of appointment, and family-related responsibilities are controlled for statistically (see here).

We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families. Among men, inequality in educational attainment has increased slightly since the early 1980s. But among women, inequality in educational attainment has risen sharply, driven by increases in the education of the daughters of high-income parents. Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every demographic group. The female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution. These sex differences present a formidable challenge to standard explanations for rising inequality in educational attainment.

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.

The Virginia state legislature has been making headlines for discussing whether women should have to undergo a trans-vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion, but the same legislative body is receiving kudos, from the liberal New Republic, for seeking to abolish tenure for teachers in public schools. In backing the proposal, the editors of The New Republic drew a distinction between higher education, where they think tenure is appropriate, and K-12 education, where they want tenure "abolished." Universities are "our country's ideas factories," they write. "And so it makes a certain amount of sense that we would want university professors-the people our society relies on to explore ideas, including unpopular ones-to enjoy protections from ideological or intellectual retribution. But this rationale doesn't apply at the K-12 level." The editorial goes on to say that "there isn't a good" rationale for tenure in elementary and secondary education. "Indeed, tenure is so illogical that it's impossible to see why it shouldn't be abolished."

It's well-known that patterns of occupational sex segregation in the labor market - the degree to which men and women are concentrated in certain occupations - have changed quite a bit over the past few decades, along with the rise of female labor force participation. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is still a persistent feature of the U.S. labor market (and those in other nations as well). There are many reasons for this, institutional, cultural and historical. But it's interesting to take a quick look at a few specific groups, as there are implications in our current policy environment.

One of the common assumptions lurking in the background of our education debates is that "quality" of the teaching workforce has declined a great deal over the past few decades (see here, here, here and here [slide 16]). There is a very plausible storyline supporting this assertion: Prior to the dramatic rise in female labor force participation since the 1960s, professional women were concentrated in a handful of female-dominated occupations, chief among them teaching. Since then, women's options have changed, and many have moved into professions such as law and medicine instead of the classroom.

"We have a parenting problem, not a poverty problem," Mike Petrilli writes at Flypaper. I agree that parenting matters greatly to a child's academic success or failure, and in fact may be the single largest determining factor. But Petrilli concludes that the best way to solve the "parenting problem" is through cultural messaging promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce, so that kids benefit from growing up in two-income households. This ignores, I think, the concrete reality of life in many low-income neighborhoods, where many women are making a rational choice when they remain single.

"What is the purpose of education? This question agitates scholars, teachers, statesmen, every group, in fact, of thoughtful men and women," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in the 1930 article, "Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education," in Pictorial Review. If you were to ask even a relatively small group of teachers, administrators, students, parents, community members, business leaders, and policymakers to address the question of purpose, how difficult do you think it would be to reach a consensus?

"While I may be compelled to find some problems with Jones's conflicting messages between how she promotes herself and her religious claims, on balance, I cannot see Jones as the problem, but as a powerful embodiment of the forces that are the problem. In the same way, our public schools are mirrors of our social inequity: Regardless of how many times edu-celebrities say otherwise, poverty is destiny in the U.S. And let's be clear about some things here: Women are objectified in our culture, and they shouldn't be, and poverty is destiny in U.S. society and its public school, but it shouldn't be."

In short, there are different ways to measure the gender gap, and their "accuracy" is not about the statistics as much as how they're interpreted. The gap is 75-80 cents on the male dollar if you're making no claims that the difference is attributable solely to discrimination. When you account for the underlying factors - and you must do so to interpret the data in this manner - you get a somewhat different picture of the extent of the problem (problem though it still is). Now, think about how easily this all applies to test data in education. We are inundated every day with average scores and rates - for schools, districts, states, subgroups of students, etc. These data are frequently compared between groups and institutions in much the same way as wages are compared between men and women.

"The U.S. working class was slow to respond to the hard times it faced during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Finally, however, in February, 2011, workers in Wisconsin began the famous uprising that electrified the country, revolting in large numbers against Governor Scott Walker's efforts to destroy the state's public employee labor unions.  A few months later, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which supported many working class efforts, spread from New York City to the rest of the nation and the world. Then, in September 2012, Chicago's public school teachers struck, in defiance of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel's attempt to destroy the teachers' union and put the city's schools firmly on the path of neoliberal austerity and privatization. These three rebellions shared the growing awareness that economic and political power in the United States are firmly in the hands of a tiny minority of fantastically wealthy individuals whose avarice knows no bounds. These titans of finance want to eviscerate working men and women, making them as insecure as possible and wholly dependent on the dog-eat-dog logic of the marketplace, while at the same time converting any and all aspects of life into opportunities for capital accumulation."

The results from the recent Gallup/PDK education survey found that 71 percent of surveyed Americans "have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in public schools." Although this finding received a fair amount of media attention, it is not at all surprising. Polls have long indicated that teachers are among the most trusted professions in the U.S., up there with doctors, nurses and firefighters.

When Frederick J. Kelly invented the multiple-choice test in 1914, he was addressing a national crisis. The ranks of students attending secondary school had swollen from 200,000 in 1890 to more than 1.5 millionas immigrants streamed onto American shores, and as new laws made two years of high school compulsory for everyone and not simply a desirable option for the college bound. World War I added to the problem, creating a teacher shortage with men fighting abroad and women working in factories at home.

Uneducated Guesses challenges everything our policymakers thought they knew about education and education reform, from how to close the achievement gap in public schools to admission standards for top universities. In this explosive book, Howard Wainer uses statistical evidence to show why some of the most widely held beliefs in education today--and the policies that have resulted--are wrong. He shows why colleges that make the SAT optional for applicants end up with underperforming students and inflated national rankings, and why the push to substitute achievement tests for aptitude tests makes no sense. Wainer challenges the thinking behind the enormous rise of advanced placement courses in high schools, and demonstrates why assessing teachers based on how well their students perform on tests--a central pillar of recent education reforms--is woefully misguided. He explains why college rankings are often lacking in hard evidence, why essay questions on tests disadvantage women, why the most grievous errors in education testing are not made by testing organizations--and much more.

"WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers. We don't say, "It's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That's why we haven't done better in Afghanistan!" No, if the results aren't there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition. And yet in education we do just that..."

Although the past several generations have seen declining gender inequalities in educational attainment, gender-based differences in the fields of study we choose seem to persist (see here). For example, the percentage of women obtaining degrees in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields has remained exceedingly static in the last few decades (see here).

"In a Louisiana public school, female students who are suspected of being pregnant are told that they must take a pregnancy test. Under school policy, those who are pregnant or refuse to take the test are kicked out and forced to undergo home schooling. Welcome to Delhi Charter School, in Delhi, Louisiana, a school of 600 students that does not believe its female students have a right to education free from discrimination. According to its Student Pregnancy Policy, the school has a right to not only force testing upon girls, but to send them to a physician of the school administration's choice. A positive test result, or failure to take the test at all, means administrators can forbid a girl from taking classes and force her to pursue a course of home study if she wishes to continue her education with the school."