[Ohiogift] Fwd: The Education Gadfly Weekly: Playing the gifted-student race card

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Subject: The Education Gadfly Weekly: Playing the gifted-student race card














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THE EDUCATION GADFLY WEEKLY


       

A weekly bulletin of news and analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
VOLUME 13, NUMBER 3
January 17, 2013


     
In this Edition      


      


OPINION + ANALYSIS
OPINION
		Playing the gifted-student race card
Shame on the New York Times
		By Chester E. Finn, Jr.

OPINION
		A bad precedent for charter schools
Be careful what you wish for
		By Adam Emerson

OPINION
The progressive view of school choice
Options for students, not parents
By J. Martin Rochester


REVIEWS
REPORT
		Quality Counts 2013: Code of Conduct
Like a bad penny
        By Andrew Saraf
BOOK
		Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools
A crash course in portfolio management
		By Andrew Saraf

JOURNAL ARTICLE
		Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, At Least Some of the Charges: Forgetting Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-Induced Forgetting
How I stopped worrying and learned to love the multiple-choice test
        By John Horton


GADFLY STUDIOS
PODCAST
Scapegoats
Mike and emerging scholar Morgan Polikoff discuss accusations ofdiscrimination in gifted-and-talented programs, Quality Counts, and lightning rod/tiger mom Michelle Rhee. Amber contemplateswhether multiple-choice tests lead students to learn or forget.
VIDEO
Exam Schools & 3 Myths
ChesterE. Finn, Jr., co-author of Exam Schools:Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools, discusses three mythssurrounding exam schools: that they serve only rich white kids, that they arecharter schools, and that they teach students more effectively. His commentsmay surprise you!




        
       

QUICK LINKS: Best of the Gadfly DailyBriefly NotedAnnouncements




 
OPINION + ANALYSIS
OPINION
Playing the gifted-student race card
By Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 17, 2013
Oh, how I wouldwelcome and laud a nationwide education regime in which every high-abilitystudent has access—beginning in Kindergarten—to teachers and classrooms readyand able to expedite and accelerate that youngster’s learning; in which everychild moves at her own best pace through an individualized education plan andreadily gets whatever help she needs to wind up truly college- andcareer-ready, whether that happens at age fifteen, eighteen, or twenty-one; andin which every teacher possesses the full range of skills and tools necessaryto do right by every single pupil for whom he is responsible, regardless oftheir current level of achievement.



Millions of high-ability, academically promising youngsters are not receiving the challenging education they need to reach their maximum potential.
Photo by mrcharly


That’s what weshould aspire to—and work to make happen. Alas, that’s not how many placescurrently function. Among the victims of our present dysfunction are millionsof high-ability, academically promising youngsters who are not getting thekinds of “gifted-and-talented” education that would likely do them the mostgood and help them to realize their maximum potential. (Collateral victims area society and economy that thereby fail to make the most of this latent humancapital.)
There’s noagreed-upon definition or metric for “giftedness,” so there are no truly satisfactorydata on how many such youngsters reside in the United States. But assume, forthis purpose, that we’re talking not about rare geniuses and prodigies butabout the “talented tenth,” the one child in ten with the greatest potentialfor high-level cognitive achievement. That would translate to about 5.5 milliongirls and boys.
Nobody today cantell us how many of these kids actually make it into gifted-and-talentedprograms and classrooms, Advanced Placement (and International Baccalaureate)programs, specialized “exam schools,” and the myriad but motley other specialofferings that do a decent job of serving such youngsters. (One encouragingdatum: The College Board reports that 18 percent of 2011 high school graduatesearned a score of 3 or better on at least one AP exam during their high schoolcareers.)
States, districts, and individual schools differdramatically in terms of the arrangements they make for such students, theextent and accessibility of their offerings, and the mechanisms by which theydo and don’t successfully identify high-potential kids. Not many of them,however, are well-disposed towards creating separate classes, courses, programs,or schools for such youngsters—nor towards “ability grouping” them withinschools and classrooms. Indeed, the education fraternity is dominated by thetwin beliefs that “tracking is evil” and that “smart kids will do OKregardless.” The same fraternity is also under considerable pressure fromfederal and state policies to focus attention and available resources onlow-achievers. As a result, high-potential kids are often neglected.
Insofar as teachers, schools, and programs do exist for themwithin U.S. public education, it’s well known that children from middle- andupper-middle class families with educated—and education-minded—parents are mostapt to take advantage of such offerings and that poor and minority youngsters,particularly those without a lot of educational sophistication at home, areleast likely to. Here is how the College Board frames the problem:
Hundreds of thousands of prepared students were either leftout of an AP subject for which they had potential or attended a school that didnot offer the subject. An analysis of nearly 771,000 graduates with APpotential found that nearly 478,000 (62 percent) did not take a recommended APsubject. Underserved minorities appear to be disproportionately impacted.
This is a greatshame, of course, but it’s not exactly a surprise that more affluent kids are likelier to end up in giftedprograms. Their families don't face the stress of poverty, and they tend tohave two parents who read to their children, send them to preschool, etc. Thesocioeconomic achievement gap (see Mike Petrilli's appearance in Dr. Josh Starr's podcast) is well documented—and a corollary of it is thatkids from more fortunate circumstances are more apt to end up in giftedclasses. (Note, though, that Jessica Hockett and I found almost the sameproportion of low-income youngsters in the country’s handful of “exam schools” asin the broader high school population in our book Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools.)
The problembegins well before high school, of course. Indeed, for many youngsters itbegins at home in the early years, leading to ill-prepared (though possiblyvery bright) kindergartners and first graders, then to middle schools with gifted-and-talented classrooms dominated by kids whose parents did prepare and pushthem—and helped them navigate complicated access arrangements.
The NewYork Times on Sundaymade a huge fuss about this as it plays out in our largest city—specifically,in a K–5 school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that is 63 percent black andHispanic but in which such kids comprise only 32 percent of the enrollment inthe gifted classes.
Following standard Times(and Upper West Side) ideology, reporter Al Baker chose to focus on the city’smechanisms for screening and selecting kids for entry into its gifted programs(and high-powered high schools, etc.). The burden of his article is that NewYork’s education department discriminates against “children of color” viaselection mechanisms that result in white (and Asian) youngsters receiving thebest odds of accessing such programs and schools.
One may well yawn because this is so predictable aperspective. It’s also the wrong perspective. We might first acknowledge thatmany urban school systems would be thrilled—and praised—if a third of the kidsin their gifted classrooms were black and Hispanic. But the more importantpoint is that the supply of such classrooms is skimpy almost everywhere andAmerica’s entire K–12 education enterprise does a lousy job of identifying andcultivating high-ability kids whose parents (for whatever reason) are notprepping and steering them into the available seats in such classrooms.
We’d be outraged—as would be the Times —if we learned that there weren’t enough special-edclassrooms, teachers, or programs to accommodate the population of childrenwith disabilities. (Indeed, a big problem in the special-ed realm is over-identification of such kids.) Butwhen it comes to high-ability students, instead of lamenting theunder-identification challenge and the dearth of suitable classrooms, teachers,programs, and outreach efforts, the Times—anda lot of others—settle for playing the race card.
Shame on them.



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OPINION
A bad precedent for charter schools
By Adam Emerson / January 16, 2013
TheNational Alliance for Public Charter Schools should be careful what it wishesfor. Although a recent case before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was decided in the directionfavored by the Alliance,by vacillating opportunistically on the issue of whether charters are public orprivate, the organization has weakened the charter movement’s long game.



Two years ago, teachers at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy voted to form a union by card check.
Photo by Photo from ACTS Michigan


Here’swhat happened: Two years back, teachers at the Chicago Mathematics and ScienceAcademy voted to form a union via card check—a power granted to publicemployees under Illinois labor law. In response, the charter school asked theNLRB to intervene, arguing that it was a privately run institution, not a“political subdivision” of the state—and, therefore, that attempts to organizeits employees should fall under federal law and be done by secret ballot.
InMarch 2011, the Alliance, led at the time by Peter Groff, filed abrief supporting the Academy’s position. Charter schools are indeed publicschools, the Alliance reasoned, but they’re run by private entities. Hencetheir employees should be treated like other private-sector employees. “To impose state labor lawobligations on private charter school employers, even in a public schoolsetting, is inconsistent with the goal of differentiating these schools from‘traditional’ public schools,” the Alliance argued.
And the NLRB agreed with that position,though it did so by invalidating an earlier ruling from the director of itsChicago region (akin to a “lower court”). In the overturned ruling, the NLRBregional director had determined that even though the government hired andfired no one at the Chicago Mathematics and Science Academy, the charter schoolwas still a political subdivision with responsibilities to the public. “CMSAand its Board of Directors are subject to statutory restrictions, regulations,and privileges that a private employer would not be subject to,” the regionaldirector said. Not the least of those privileges is public funding.
Interestingly—and confusingly—his position resembled that taken by theNational Alliance on a separate matter involving pensions in February 2012. Atthat time, the Alliance objected to proposed IRS regulations forcing states toprohibit charter school teachers from participating in government retirementplans. In its statement on the draft pension regulations—whichwould have reversed previous IRS rulings that charters are state“instrumentalities”—the Alliance argued,
Theevidence is clear: charter schools are public schools; the degree of statecontrol over charter schools and public funding of such schools justifyamending the Proposed Regulation such that public charter schools areconsidered agencies or instrumentalities of the state for purposes of theInternal Revenue Service’s ‘governmental plan’ definition; and to holdotherwise would harm more than 93% of our national public charter schoolworkforce.
So arethey public or are they private? You cannot argue that charter schools are not governmental subdivisions forpurposes of escaping hostile state labor laws and sundry public regulations inone breath, and then urge the IRS to deem charters “agencies orinstrumentalities of the state” so that their employees can continue to benefitfrom government retirement plans in the next.
Suchinconsistency does no favor to charter schools—particularly when it comes tofunding. The Alliance had endeavored for years—and with mounting success—to codify the proposition that charter schoolsare public schools and therefore deserve allthe funding and access to facilities that one would expect public schools tohave. Their public-ness is also vital to their constitutionality in a number ofstates. But how can they be public schools if it is also contended that they’reprivate entities?
To be sure, the NLRBdecision was limited to the Chicago charter school. But by helping to convincethe board that even one such school is not an “instrumentality of the state”and therefore should come under federal labor jurisdiction, the Alliance mayhave subjected other charters to federal labor laws and unionization they neverbefore had to worry about, thereby playing right into the hands of teacherunions keen to organize the instructors in these new schools. Bad.



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OPINION
The progressive view of school choice
By J. Martin Rochester / January 17, 2013
While visiting a local high school as aliaison between my department at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and thehigh school’s Advanced Credit program, I had occasion to speak with its youngprincipal—a newly minted doctor of education. I told him about a challengefacing those of us who teach in K–16 education: the difficulty of gettingstudents to summon the patience, stamina, and will to read dense text,particularly book-length writings, in an age of instant gratification,sound-bites, jazzy graphics, and condensed versions of knowledge. In short, Iasked him, do students still have the capacity for deep reading, followed bydeliberation and reflection? Can they conduct serious discourse? Theprincipal’s response struck me: “Today’s students are actually smarter andbetter than students of yesteryear, since students today get to choose theirown readings.” Really? I immediately wondered whether we should trust thejudgment of adolescents, much less pre-adolescents, to decide for themselveswhat makes educational sense. And for that matter, since when has the mere actof “choice” been a measure of intellect?



Should we trust the judgment of pre-adolescents to decide for themselves what makes educational sense?
Photo by slightly everything


Bizarre as this principal’s commentseemed at the time, it was grounded in mainstream progressive thinking—thestudent-centered, active, discovery-learning paradigm—that goes back toRousseau, Dewey, and Piaget and that was more recently promoted by disciples ofLucy Calkins’s “Reading and Writing Project” at Columbia University’s TeachersCollege. A 2009 New York Times article,“A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like,” noted the example of a Georgia teacherletting her seventh- and eighth-grade English students select their own books,reflecting “a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught inAmerica’s schools” that “is catching on” in New York City, Seattle, Chicago,and other school districts. “Voice and choice,” as this perspective has beendubbed, means giving students themselves more choices. Indeed, voice and choicehas been extended to preschoolers through the so-called “emergent curriculum,” “Reggio Emilia,” and other offshoots of progressiveeducation. (Little Johnny and Shirley cannot find the potty, but somehow theyare expected to think critically, including about what it is they should read—or even if they should read at all, as opposed to playing in thesandbox.)
Of course, there is much to be said forencouraging students to take ownership of their own education, to take personalresponsibility for choices in their lives, to be active rather than passivelearners, and to think more self-consciously about their abilities andinterests. This all sounds well and good, but the educators pushing these ideashave been guilty of considerable pretentiousness, hypocrisy, and self-delusion.
First, the lectures on personalresponsibility suddenly give way to a “kids-will-be-kids” mantra, with regardto enforcement of rules and standards. When students turn in late papers andflunk exams, for example, the consequences of their behavior can be easilyreversed via grade-inflating redos, test retakes, and extra credit. Want toenforce cheating and plagiarism rules? You won’t get far in most Americanschools.
Second, unless one believes in theOrwellian logic of “less is more” promoted by Ted Sizer and others, studentworkloads are becoming lighter, not heavier. Popular perception and warningsabout K–12 students being overburdened with homework are belied by trends thatseem to be in the direction of assigning shorter books or articles (albeit withmore pictures) and shorter papers. Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has noted that only about 10 percent of Americanhigh schools—predominantly located in affluent suburbs—maintain a culture ofhigh academic expectations reflected in lots of homework. Rather, most fifteen-through seventeen-year-olds study less than one hour a day, while the homework done byelementary-schoolers takes “less time than watching an episode of‘Hannah Montana Forever.’”A 2011 study by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found thatonly 39 percent of incoming college freshmen “report that they studied 6 ormore hours a week on average as high school seniors.” Not surprisingly, thislack of academic engagement has carried over into college itself. In the 2010study Academically Adrift, RichardArum and Josipa Roska found an overall 50 percent decline in the number ofhours a student spends studying from previous decades; less than half of the studentssurveyed had ever written more than twenty pages for any class, and relativelyfew had been assigned more than forty pages of reading per week.
What is the likelihood that the voice-and-choice movement in K–12 will produce an increase in academicstandards rather than further erosion? After all, as Diane Ravitch once framedthe issue, “What child is going to pick up MobyDick?” Where all this “choice” leads can be seen in the recent case of anHonors English course at my local high school where at least one student,entrusted with selecting a “great book” to read as the basis for a semesterproject, opted for Paris Hilton’s autobiography. I guess we should be impressedthat this student was reading a book rather than watching and reporting on EntertainmentTonight. If you believe that the average student, when given a choice, willchoose to read a 200-page book rather than a book half that size, or willchoose to write a twenty-page paper rather than a ten-page paper, well, thenyou probably also believe in E.T. Have we carried the idea of empoweringstudents with “choices” a bit too far? You be the judge.



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REVIEWS


REPORT


Quality Counts 2013: Code of Conduct
By Andrew Saraf

Nowseventeen years old, Education Week’sannual Quality Counts (QC) reportgrades states (and the U.S. as a whole) on six indicators: K–12 achievement;standards, assessment, and accountability; the teaching profession; schoolfinance; “transitions and alignment” (which investigates early-childhoodprogramming and college and career readiness); and the ever-controversial “chance for success”index. In this iteration, only the latter three have been updated—whichstrengthens the feeling that we’ve read this book before: The top five statesretained their positions (with Maryland at the head with a B-plus), as did thelowest (South Dakota, D-plus). The U.S. average crept from 76.5 to 76.9. Eventhe most notable shifts aren’t exactly page-turners: West Virginia bumped fromfourteenth to second on the school-finance indicator by upping its per-pupilfunding $1,000. And Georgia earned the series’ first perfect score on“transitions and alignment” by embracing QC’s fourteen pet policies (likedefining school or work readiness). Beyond the state rankings, this year’s QCalso explores the intersection between school-discipline policies and studentlearning, calling attention to a key tradeoff: How do education leaders balancethe need for a safe environment (not just by keeping weapons out of schoolsbut by keeping other violence and disruption out, as well) against the benefitsof keeping kids in school? Conventional wisdom says that too many students arebeing suspended or expelled—but “fixing” that problem might create new ones. If quality is to“count,” then classrooms need to be places of learning, not disruption.



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SOURCE
EducationWeek, Quality Counts 2013: Code of Conduct (Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education, January 10,2013).


        


BOOK


Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools
By Andrew Saraf

For over a decade, and almost entirely under the leadershipof the prolific Paul Hill, the University of Washington’s Center on ReinventingPublic Education (CRPE) has promoted the “portfolio-district strategy,” inwhich districts manage a “portfolio” of diverse schools (charters, magnets,traditionals), each with a high degree of school-level autonomy andaccountability. Since beginning this work, CRPE has written myriad reports on the PMM (portfolio-management model)and partnered with an ever-larger number of districts to help them roll outthis strategy. Strife and Progress—a new book by Paul Hill and twocurrent CRPE firecrackers, Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross—compiles theirimmense amount of knowledge and experience. First, the authors outline andexplain the seven components that any successful portfolio-district strategymust embrace: school choice, school autonomy, equitable school funding,talent-seeking and retention, support from independent groups,performance-based accountability, and public engagement. Drawing on casestudies of several portfolio districts (mainly New York City, New Orleans,D.C., Chicago, and Denver), it then probes both the strategy’s promise and challenges.Clearly, for example, it cannot succeed without political support: The book isadmirable in its acknowledgement of past public-relations failures withindistricts of this sort (e.g., the contentious tenures of Michelle Rhee andCathie Black), and it expends much ink on the need to build relationships withlocal organizations and clearly communicate such measures as school closingsand openings. Further, establishing the success of the portfolio model provesproblematic, mostly because of numerous confounding variables. The authors do,however, offer concrete ways to deal with this complexity, including naturalexperiments through school lotteries and time-series analyses (which might, forinstance, look at a student’s performance in one school versus another). Thechallenges, then, are real but not insurmountable. At a time when somepeople want to give up on urban districts entirely, the strategies set forth in Strifeand Progress may offer this governance structure a fighting chance forsuccess.



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SOURCE
Paul T.Hill, Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross, Strife and Progress:Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools (Washington, DC:Brookings Institution Press, 2012).




REPORT


Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, At Least Some of the Charges: Forgetting Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-Induced Forgetting
By John Horton

Successful Common Coreimplementation will hinge on a number of factors. Among the largest of thesewill be getting the assessments right—in terms of both design and cost. Centralto these issues are the controversial multiple-choice “bubble” tests, which arewelcomed by some as fast and efficient means of gauging student knowledge andskills and derided by others as the cause for “teaching to the test” andsuperficial knowledge. This recent report found within the Journal of Psychological Science finds merit in the bubbletest—if designed well. It explains findings from two small-sample studies (onehad thirty-two participants, conducted out of UCLA, the other ninety-six,conducted out of Washington U.). The upshot: Both found that properlystructured multiple-choice tests (those which offer plausible wrong answersalongside the correct response) “trigger the retrieval processes that fostertest-induced learning and deter test induced forgetting.” In other words,bubble tests with competitive responses trigger actual knowledge-retrievalprocesses rather than simple recognition processes—and do so better thancued-recall (fill-in-the-blank) tests. The bottom line is both cautiously encouraging.Multiple-choice tests—done correctly—can be a useful tool in an assessor’s kit(a point that we have previously argued).The CCSS assessment consortia would be wise to keep that in mind.



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SOURCE
Genna Angello, Elizabeth Bjork,Robert Bjork, and Jeri Little, “Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, At LeastSome of the Charges: Forgetting Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-InducedForgetting,” Psychological Science 23, no. 11(October 2012): 1337-44.



               
         

BEST OF THE EDUCATION GADFLY DAILY


FLYPAPER
         Mike Petrilli's testimony on Indiana and the Common Core
By Pamela Tatz on January 16, 2013
FLYPAPER
The MET study: implications, winners, and losers
By Andy Smarick on January 14, 2013
CHOICE WORDS
The threat of the parent trigger and the change it begets
By Adam Emerson on January 11, 2013




                     
         


BRIEFLY NOTED
Assault weapons are out, math is in



On Wednesday afternoon, PresidentObama recommended a package of national reforms aimed at preventing tragedies like last month’s inNewtown, Connecticut. Amidst the high-profile ban on assault weapons andmandatory background checks on all gun buyers, he included a slewof proposals designed to help schools prepare for and respond to violentthreats and improve access to quality mental-health services, including new moneyfor new school counselors and training in identifying students with mentaldisabilities. And the President’s approval ratings leaped in response.
In the least surprising newssince the New York Times told us thatSAT scores correlate with family incomes, Arne Duncan has announced he will stay on asSecretary of Education during President Obama’s second term. (We can also blamethe New York Times for tantalizing uswith the faint hope that he would take on a much more surprising role.)
A new study found that studentswho struggle on college-readiness tests use different brain processes for simple problems than do high-achievers. Researchersasked forty-three students to perform basic arithmetic while having theirbrains scanned via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It turns out thatlow-performing students’ brains seemed to be performing calculations to solvethe basic problems, while high-performing students appeared to solve theequations by rote memory. To our eye, this research buttresses the CommonCore’s call for “automaticity”of math facts in the early grades. 

 

A group of professors at ColumbiaUniversity’s Teachers College are apprehensive about New York’s participation in the edTPA, a performance-based teacher-licensingtest, which—among other things—requires teachers to record and analyze parts oftheir own instruction. Their concerns were threefold: the privacy of thechildren in the recordings; that not enough information is currently availableon the qualifications of those who would score the exams; and the very notionthat Pearson, a for-profit company, was contracted to administer the test.Sounds like sour grapes to us.
After profiles in PBS’s Frontline and the WashingtonPost, both of which coincided withStudentsFirst’s release of its 2013 State Policy Report Card, Michelle Rhee is squarely in the limelight. Andwhile some love her and some love to hate her, it cannot be denied that herpersonal celebrity and willingness to play the heavy have helped attractattention to education and its reform. For more on Michelle Rhee, check out this week's Gadfly Show podcast.




FEATURED PUBLICATION
Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools

What is the best educationfor exceptionally able and high-achieving youngsters? Can the United Statesstrengthen its future intellectual leadership, economic vitality, andscientific prowess without sacrificing equal opportunity? There are no easyanswers but, as Chester Finn and Jessica Hockett show, for more than 100,000students each year, the solution is to enroll in an academically selectivepublic high school. Exam Schools is the first-ever close-up look atthis small, sometimes controversial, yet crucial segment of American publiceducation. This groundbreaking book discusses how these schools work—and theircritical role in nurturing the country's brightest students. Click here to read more about it. 

       
         

ANNOUNCEMENT
Fordham seeks a research + staff assistant
Would you like to work at the forefront of the national education-reform movement? Are you a personable, organized, and detail-oriented self-starter? Are you comfortable handling varied responsibilities? Calm under fire? A born multi-tasker? A resourceful researcher? A savvy writer/editor? A great dancer? If so, you might be the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s new D.C.-based research + staff assistant. For more information and to apply, please visit the job description on our website.

 
ANNOUNCEMENT
January 31: Cato hosts a policy forum
As our nation comes ever closer to being “majority minority,” Americans will look increasingly to our education system to unite us. A natural impulse will be to force, or at least nudge, children from different ethnic, religious, or other backgrounds together in public schools. But physical proximity does not guarantee affinity or trust, and the question of how to structure education to maximize social cohesion has a complicated—and uncertain—answer. To get at that answer (and mark National School Choice Week), the Cato Institute will host Mike Petrilli, Richard Kahlenberg, Neal McCluskey, and Greg Toppo to debate how great a role the choices of parents and educators must have in order to maximize social harmony. For more information on this event, visit the Cato Institute’s web page.




         

ANNOUNCEMENT
Educators 4 Excellence seeks an executive director
This exciting new role will be charged with launching Educators 4 Excellence–Connecticut. As a member of the E4E senior leadership team, the founding executive director will have strategic and operational responsibility for E4E-CT staff, programs, growth, and execution of its mission to elevate the voices of teachers in Connecticut state and local education policy. He or she will implement a comprehensive strategic plan, recruit E4E-CT team members, build a membership base, and launch E4E’s full host of programming. This is an exciting opportunity for an innovative and entrepreneurial leader. For the full position description, visit Educators 4 Excellence’s web page.

 
 






       

The Education Gadfly is published weekly (ordinarily on Thursdays), with occasional breaks, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Regular contributors include Aaron Churchill, Adam Emerson, Daniela Fairchild, Chester E. Finn, Jr., John Horton, Greg Hutko, Emmy Partin, Michael J. Petrilli, Kathleen Porter-Magee, Matt Richmond, Terry Ryan, Andrew Saraf, Andy Smarick, Pamela Tatz, Amber Winkler, Brandon Wright, and Dara Zeehandelaar. Have something to say? Email us at thegadfly at edexcellence.net. Find archived issues or other reviews of reports and books here.
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