Back to School for the Billionaires

They hoped their cash could transform failing classrooms. They were wrong. NEWSWEEK investigates what their money bought.

Brent Humphreys / Redux

This story was reported and written by Center for Public Integrity.

The richest man in America stepped to the podium and declared war on the nation’s school systems. High schools had become “obsolete” and were “limiting—even ruining—the lives of millions of Americans every year.” The situation had become “almost shameful.” Bill Gates, prep-school grad and college dropout, had come before the National Governors Association seeking converts to his plan to do something about it—a plan he would back with $2 billion of his own cash.

Related: Corporate Titans Who Spent a Fortune on Schools »

Gates’s speech, in February 2005, was a signature moment in what has become a decade-long campaign to improve test scores and graduation rates, waged by a loose alliance of wealthy CEOs who arrived with no particular background in education policy—a fact that has led critics to dismiss them as “the billionaire boys’ club.” Their bets on poor urban schools have been as big as their egos and their bank accounts. Microsoft chairman Gates, computer magnate Michael Dell, investor Eli Broad, and the Walton family of Walmart fame have collectively poured some $4.4 billion into school reform in the past decade through their private foundations.

Has this big money made the big impact that they—as well as teachers, administrators, parents, and students—hoped for? In the first-of-its-kind analysis of the billionaires’ efforts, NEWSWEEK and the Center for Public Integrity crunched the numbers on graduation rates and test scores in 10 major urban districts—from New York City to Oakland—which got windfalls from these four top philanthropists.

The results, though mixed, are dispiriting proof that money alone can’t repair the desperate state of urban education. For all the millions spent on reforms, nine of the 10 school districts studied substantially trailed their state’s proficiency and graduation rates—often by 10 points or more. That’s not to say that the urban districts didn’t make gains.

The good news is many did improve and at a rate faster than their states 60 percent of the time—proof that the billionaires made some solid bets. But those spikes up weren’t enough to erase the deep gulf between poor, inner-city schools, where the big givers focused, and their suburban and rural counterparts.

“A lot of things we do don’t work out,” admitted Broad, a product of Detroit public schools and Michigan State who made a fortune in home building and financial services. “But we can take the criticism.”

Related

• America’s Best High Schools: The Top 20
• The 13 Best Movies About High School

The bottom line? The billionaires aspired to A-plus impact and came away with B-minus to C-minus results, according to the NEWSWEEK/CPI investigation, which was based on specially commissioned data and internal numbers shared by the philanthropists’ foundations.

Despite the money, graduation rates in Oakland actually fell by 6 percentage points—though less than the rest of California’s schools, which fell by 9 points. In Houston, graduation rates dropped about 6 points, while the remainder of Texas fell only 2. Graduation rates in New York City, on the other hand, while still trailing state averages significantly, improved markedly—up 18 points, compared with the state’s 10-point rise. Washington, D.C.’s graduation rates dropped slightly, while students’ math and reading proficiency generally improved (not being part of a state, its reading and math performance was measured against the district’s independent charter schools). The city’s education achievements, which have helped fuel a national debate over education reform captured in the hit documentary Waiting for Superman, have lately come under investigation amid suspicions of cheating (a charge the city’s recently resigned schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, denies).

Oakland more often than not was improving faster than the rest of California, but still fared poorly at the high-school level, where reading scores trailed the rest of the state’s average by 18 percentage points in 2010. Similarly, Los Angeles over the five years often outpaced the state’s rate of improvement, but its scores lagged, including by 19 points in middle-school reading.

The confidence that marked Gates’s landmark speech to the governors’ association in 2005 has given way to humility. The billionaires have not retreated. But they have retooled, and learned a valuable lesson about their limitations.

“It’s so hard in this country to spread good practice. When we started funding, we hoped it would spread more readily,” acknowledges Vicki Phillips, the director of K–12 education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “What we learned is that the only things that spread well in school are kids’ viruses.”

Gates has abandoned his $2 billion high-school campaign focused largely on shrinking the overall size of schools in favor of a massive new effort to encourage effective teaching. And Broad put a school-principal training initiative on pause—and focuses instead on charter schools, training administrators and improving teacher performance.

Meanwhile, on the ground in the districts these billionaires selected, the excitement of being chosen for philanthropic funding has all too often given way to diminished expectations.

“The foundations are looking for rapid-fire turnaround. That’s not realistic,” said Hae-Sin Thomas, a former principal who helped manage the Gates-backed small-schools effort in Oakland before the Microsoft guru dropped that campaign.

Oakland’s school system was a case study in dysfunction. Eight years ago, the district’s financial woes led to a state takeover.

That made it a magnet for the billionaires. The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation chipped in $6.2 million for its first experiment with broad data-collection methods used to monitor student and school progress. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ponied up some $30 million to help expand on a grassroots effort to shrink the schools. And Broad’s foundation invested $7 million for charter and district schools. “It was a chance to rethink how the district was designed, moving from a concept of a highly bureaucratized school system to a portfolio of schools,” explains Kevin Hall, chief operating officer for Broad’s foundation at the time.

Hopes soared—only to crash back down to earth. The district went through five superintendents in seven years. Enrollment at many schools shrank, and the district is still plagued by a 40 percent high-school dropout rate. In lower grades, better-performing students are fleeing: a third of the kids who are deemed academically proficient by sixth grade are defecting to private, suburban, or charter schools. And at least seven of the 49 new, smaller schools funded by Gates have closed; others are hanging on by a thread.

“There wasn’t a clear and thoughtful long-term plan on how you scale something that everyone needs and sustain it over the long haul,” concedes Tony Smith, the cur-rent school superintendent. “There was a strategy in place to support the creation of schools that would hopefully get to those kinds of ends, but there was no comprehensive shared commitment or framework.” What’s worse, the students who needed the most help, from the “most distressed” families, were often unaware there were better school choices available, he says.

These days, Smith is trying out his own vision of a “full-service community district”—one that tries to address challenges outside the classroom like nutrition and racism. But Gates, Broad, and Dell did leave a legacy for Smith to build on, at least in the lower grades where some schools have seen strong academic growth. The district increased from 11 to 50 the number of schools attaining a score of 700 toward the California achievement target of 800. And between 2008 and 2010, Oakland has outpaced the rest of California in improvement at the elementary- and middle-school levels.

The reform era also left its own financial mess. The officials imported during the salad days left Smith a $25 million deficit, including nearly $6 million in state fines for audit failings.

Smith sees another factor for failure inside a horrific scattering of red dots on a city map he displays on a PowerPoint in his office. Each dot is a student lost to gun violence—a dozen African-American and Latino boys gone since last summer, all slain on the hardscrabble streets of the city across the bay from San Francisco’s famed skyline.

The business titans entered the education arena convinced that America’s schools would benefit greatly from the tools of the boardroom. They sought to boost incentives for improving performance, deploy new technologies, and back innovators willing to shatter old orthodoxies.

They pressed to close schools that were failing, and sought to launch new, smaller ones. They sent principals to boot camp. Battling the long-term worry that the best and brightest passed up the classroom for more lucrative professions, they opened their checkbooks to boost teacher pay.

It was an impressive amount of industry. And in some places, it has worked out—but with unanticipated complications.

One of those places was New York City. Boasting 1 million students spread across 1,700 schools, New York City drew the lion’s share of philanthropy—$270 million from the four billionaires—and saw results. Graduation rates improved from 37 percent in 2002 to 55 percent by 2007 (New York state’s overall graduation rate by the end of that stretch: 71 percent).

The big-money donors benefited from a well-placed ally. New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, a former Clinton White House lawyer, launched his own package of reforms that dovetailed with the billionaires’ goals—reorganizing the power structure and replacing failed schools with smaller, mission-driven ones.

He also installed “CEO”-style principals, and bucked criticism that his laser focus on core math and reading curricula was narrowing the scope of learning.

“From our point of view we were getting good results,” Klein said in an interview. “[The problem] wasn’t about the breadth of the curriculum. It was the failing of the kids.”

The numbers began to move in the right direction. But the tactics bred resentment among some educators and parents. Klein stepped down last year with low approval ratings. The CEO approach took a further hit when his successor—publishing executive Cathie Black, who had no background in education—flamed out after just 100 days on the job.

What’s worse, last year, New York state declared only a quarter of the city’s graduates college-ready, sending officials back to the drawing board. While acknowledging gains in New York, Gates decided to scrap the small-schools project, decreeing that the initiative overall had failed to produce students who were ready for the rigors of college.

“The call in many ways was made prematurely, based on evidence that wasn’t as comprehensive as it should have been,” says James Kemple, author of a study just published by Harvard Education Press that cites real gains from the Klein reforms in New York. “We are now finding the positive effects.”

No reform has won more philanthropic favor than public charter schools. Now numbering 5,000 across the country, charters receive tax dollars to operate with considerable autonomy and innovation. The quality of charter schools varies widely, and some have posted dramatic gains, owing to strategies like longer school days and strong teacher support for students. Drawn by the results of charter networks like KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program seen in the Waiting for Supermandocumentary, the billionaires have poured more than $900 million into charters, including $466 million from the Gates foundation alone.

The Walton Family Foundation hoped that its $8 million investment in Milwaukee charters would produce strong schools and a competitive environment to raise the bar across all the city’s schools. But the charters failed to outperform traditional schools. Reading scores were mostly flat over the past five years citywide. In math, elementary- and middle-school gains were stronger than in the rest of Wisconsin, but high-school proficiency dropped 2 points.

“All good philanthropy is based on testing a hypothesis. If you really peel away, you can uncover each foundation’s hypothesis. Essentially we all have a theory,” said Jim Blew, education-reform director for the Walton Family Foundation. “All the foundations are trying to tackle the same problem. And that problem is very low student achievement, especially in low-income areas.” Blew said the Waltons maintain their theory that charter competition can raise scores across school districts, and still hope that all Milwaukee schools will improve.

Michael Dell’s family foundation, too, placed a big bet on charters, along with its signature work on data and technology systems that help schools track and respond to student needs. Dell, a University of Texas dropout who was in such a hurry to enter the business world he asked to take a high-school equivalency exam at the tender age of 8, has spent heavily on children’s causes through the foundation he launched with his wife in 1999. He started in his native Texas, where his foundation helped insert a high-performing charter school onto a traditional Houston high-school campus.

Lee High School officials were excited at the prospect of copying the strongest elements of the charter. But it turned out the district wasn’t ready to let Lee try charter practices like a longer school day and taking more control over hiring, said Steve Amstutz, Lee’s principal at the time. “The premise that we were going to learn from each other really never occurred,” he explained. “It evolved to just being a lease agreement”—that is, until the charter moved to another location.

The executive director of Michael Dell’s family charity, Janet Mountain, concluded: “Should we ever try it again, we now have knowledge we can bring to the table that will set it up for better success the next time.”

The setbacks had to be a humbling experience for titans accustomed to outsize success.

Broad entered the education-reform arena with riches amassed at two Fortune 500 companies. Thinking his billions might make a difference, as he did in the Los Angeles arts and cultural community, Broad embarked on a yearlong investigation of education. “It was clear to me that if we wanted to have an impact, we could look at what others had done and then what we could do,” he told NEWSWEEK. “There weren’t many positive results that we could identify with. There was always pushback from powerful interests.”

Undaunted, Broad plowed ahead—investing in attempts to upgrade school governance and management, charters, and experiments to pay teachers for their performance instead of their length of time on the job. “We said we were not going to just write checks,” Broad said. “We were going to make investments.”

School boards seemed an especially ripe target. Broad began training efforts to get them away from what he saw as mind-numbing minutiae, like choosing paint colors for buildings or fixing stadium lights. The effort proved frustrating. Board members themselves, as he saw it, were often problematic; too many were well-meaning but not especially savvy parents, micromanagers, or excessively political.

Broad moved on to the front lines: superintendents, principals, and school-district management, ultimately spending $116 million on training people to work in schools and district offices, and another $71 million on central-office reforms and teacher evaluation, preparation, and pay schemes.

“Our role is to take risks that government is not willing to do … People question my motivation,” Broad said. Not least is a growing unease with the prominent role of private foundation money that doesn’t have the accountability constraints of public tax dollars. “The fact that I don’t concern myself about criticism or pushback helps,” Broad said.

He’s had to take some lumps. Several principal-training programs, to the tune of $45 million, were a bang-for-the-buck disappointment; student test scores under most of the principal graduates did not meet his expectations.

He pulled the plug and reevaluated before trying a “more rigorous” approach for the next round of training programs.

Graduates of his Broad Superintendents Academy and the dozens of M.B.A.s he has placed in school-district management, on the other hand, have largely measured up. Even so, superintendents sometimes shake things up only to see their efforts falter in the face of political pressures, Broad said. “Even if some of our original high expectations are not realized, we don’t give up. If we’re going to move America’s students forward, we must continue to be bold and try new approaches.”

—With Laura M. Colarusso

Methodology
The analysis examined how graduation rates changed between 2002 and 2007—the most recent years for which the data is available from the nationally recognized Editorial Projects in Education Research Center—in 10 districts targeted by the big spending. The study also measured the holy grail of the education-reform movement—standardized test scores in reading and math for kindergarten through 12th grade—and compared the proficiency rates in the urban districts that benefited from billionaire bucks against the average for the rest of the schools in their states over the past five years. (That data was provided by MPR Associates, Inc., a respected education-statistics agency based in Berkeley, Calif.)

No yardstick is a perfect measure. And the billionaires’ gifts are a drop in the bucket when compared with the $600 billion spent annually on America’s schools. But the city-to-state comparison is one of the measures Broad’s own foundation uses in determining his annual award for the most improved school district. For complete data, go to publicintegrity.com.

Why more kids in handcuffs?

Amity Shlaes:

OC Register    Sunday May 1, 2011

Another week, another tot gets his rights violated. A few days before Easter, police in Maspeth, New York, handcuffed a first-grader who had a temper tantrum after coloring an egg at school.

“I want those cops to say sorry to me and the principal for calling the ambulance on me and handcuffing me,” the 7-year-old told a TV station, about the time his mother retained a lawyer.

In Shreveport, La., the American Civil Liberties Union is looking into the case of a sixth-grader handcuffed in the principal’s office. Last year authorities in Port St. Lucie, Fla., sent a 6-year-old girl to a mental health facility after the 40-pound child acted up. The Citizens Commission on Human Rights in Florida is all over the case.

This looks like yet more evidence that the U.S. is becoming the creepy militaristic state that the anti-body scan, Guantanamo-obsessed crowd warn about.

But there’s something awry in these school scenes. Child. Tantrum. Principal. Police. Mom. Civil Rights. Lawyer. Lawsuit. There are a lot of players in such scenarios, but someone is missing. It’s the one person who has dedicated years of training to help a freaked-out child through a difficult moment without creating a federal case: the teacher.

The real scandal is that our teachers are desperate enough to abdicate or absent themselves when kids have tantrums. This is due to a series of changes in precedent, statute and regulation that took place over decades. The changes were well-intentioned, says Philip Howard, founder of Common Good, a nonpartisan legal reform group that works on education issues. But over time, “law, like acid, has corroded teacher authority,” Howard said.

What happened? Education once was a local affair. Children didn’t have rights. Parents scarcely had rights. The teacher wielded a lot of authority, and usually a ruler or stick as well. So did the teacher’s backup, the terrifying principal, who has the power to suspend.

Looking back, two features of these policies couldn’t be tolerated – corporal punishment and racial segregation. The general attitude became: This must change.

Change it did. The Supreme Court intervened on the racial integration issue in 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education. The case itself did nothing to undermine teachers or principals.

Brown proved to be only the start of the expansion of pupil rights. In another case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the court upheld the constitutional rights of children to freedom of expression. In 1975 the Supreme Court heard Goss v. Lopez, a lawsuit filed by high school pupils. In that case several Columbus, Ohio, high schools responded to rioting by suspending students for 10 days without hearings. The pupils claimed their 14th Amendment rights to due process had been violated. The court sided with the pupils.

Again, it sure sounds fair. But as the author of the dissenting opinion in Goss v. Lopez, the late Lewis Powell, noted, the emphasis on child rights altered the balance of power in the classroom, creating “avenues for judicial intervention that may affect adversely the quality of education.” Powell also noted that teens are exquisitely sensitive to changes in the power structure. The high court’s support for the Ohio rebels, he wrote, might spur many other rebellions.

A child, Powell warned, “is rendered a disservice if appropriate sanctions are not applied or if procedures for their application are so formalized as to invite a challenge to the teacher’s authority – an invitation which rebellious or even merely spirited youngsters are likely to accept.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, new rules restricted teacher autonomy. Governments, state and federal, pushed schools to provide more support for children with disabilities and to include them in regular classes. Schools that resisted new plans or philosophies were running the risk they might be accused of violating a disabled child’s civil rights.

We don’t know enough to comment on the incidents in Maspeth, Port St. Lucie or Shreveport. Yet it’s clear that legal changes make it harder for teachers to do their jobs. Teachers and their principals realize they have to tread carefully. No one will back them up. Small children sometimes respond best when they get a hand to hold or a lap to sit in. Still these days an educator who lays a friendly finger on a child may be accused of corporal punishment, sexual harassment or some combination of the two. Powell was a visionary, but even he couldn’t foresee the extent to which parents would use civil rights issues to contest school policies.

Teachers, Howard says, now ask themselves: “Why take the risk of legal hearings or threats by an angry parent?” It’s easier to dial 911. The child’s rights may win in such a case, but the child does not. In a child’s life, a good lawyer can’t substitute for a good teacher.

The perversity here is that laws meant to protect children acquaint them far too early with police stations, courtrooms and handcuffs. You don’t have to bring back the paddle or racism to undo this dynamic. All you have to do is give educators the chance to educate. It’s time. Just ask a teacher.

When Big Government Goes to College

The more the feds try to lower the cost, the worse the problem becomes.

By WILLIAM MCGURN

Schools do the math to shape critical thinkers  OC Register 1-30-2011

A student who has mastered algebra by the eighth-grade is ready to succeed in high school and on the right path to college.

That’s the philosophy at Spring View Middle School, where no course is more important than algebra, said the school’s Principal Jason Blade.

Some students spend up to three extra hours a week in algebra, while teachers continuously comb through testing data to target the weaknesses of those struggling and provide additional lessons and support.

That approach has helped Spring View more than double the percentage of algebra-proficient students over the past two years, the highest improvement of any Orange County middle school. In 2010, nearly two out of three eighth-graders at Spring View tested proficient in algebra.

“It used to be that only your high fliers, those honor or advanced students, would take algebra in middle school,” Blade said. “Now, the movement is to make algebra available to all students. So we have to work toward that goal.”

Across Orange County, other middle schools have taken on the responsibility of helping an increased number of students forge ahead in algebra.

In 2010, about 57 percent of all eighth-graders in Orange County were enrolled in algebra, an increase from just 20 percent enrollment in 2000.

Over the same period, the rate of eighth-graders passing state algebra tests has nearly tripled.

Leaders of algebra renaissance include Mendez Fundamental Intermediate in Santa Ana, C.E. Utt Middle School in Tustin and Lexington Junior High in Cypress.

Principals, teachers and counselors at these campuses not only try to enroll as many students as possible into algebra courses, they also work to ensure all students have the support they need to succeed.

GATEWAY COURSE

Educators often describe algebra as a gateway course to critical thinking. It’s a necessary first step toward college, they said. The state also recommends that students complete the course in the eighth-grade so they can enroll in a higher number of advanced math, and science classes before they graduate high school.

Lawmakers also made algebra a high school graduation requirement and spent tens of millions of dollars to train teachers, buy textbooks and tutor students. They then approved the state high school exit exam, which calls for students to know algebra, among other subjects, to receive a diploma.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger even called in 2008 for a requirement to teach algebra to all eighth-graders, but a lack of state funding for teacher training and other resources effectively killed the initiative.

O.C.’s ALGEBRA BOOM

At Mendez Fundamental, 99 percent of eighth-graders enrolled in algebra in 2010, with 62 percent of all eighth-graders testing proficient.

Teachers and administrators funnel nearly all eighth-graders into the course and students spend two hours each day in algebra classes, twice as much time as in any other course. During weekends, many students attend an algebra academy for tutoring and other support in the course.

Lexington Junior High had about 97 percent of all eighth-graders enrolled in algebra with half of those students testing proficient.

The school is part of Anaheim Union High School District, which has prioritized the enrollment of as many students as possible by the eighth grade.

The entire district’s eighth-grade algebra enrollment rate of 93 percent was among the highest in the state last year. But because the district reaches out to include more students, its schools generally have lower proficiency rates.

Only three of the district’s nine middle schools had proficiency rates higher than 30 percent.

District officials the approach gives more students the opportunity to reach higher standards.

They also said for students who fail, a second year of algebra can provide the additional support they need to eventually pass the course.

Utt Middle School had the county’s highest rate – 65 percent – of algebra-proficient eighth-graders in 2010 countywide.

The campus has consistently had a record of high enrollment and high success attributed to a series of intervention programs and support strategies. They include algebra readiness courses for seventh-grade students to help them prepare.

“With the competition for college entrance at an all-time high, it’s our duty to do everything we can to ensure our students have a fighting chance,” said Tustin algebra teacher Pam Johnson.

Tiger Mom

Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011

Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?

By Annie Murphy Paul

It was the “Little White Donkey” incident that pushed many readers over the edge. That’s the name of the piano tune that Amy Chua, Yale law professor and self-described “tiger mother,” forced her 7-year-old daughter Lulu to practice for hours on end — “right through dinner into the night,” with no breaks for water or even the bathroom, until at last Lulu learned to play the piece.

For other readers, it was Chua calling her older daughter Sophia “garbage” after the girl behaved disrespectfully — the same thing Chua had been called as a child by her strict Chinese father.

And, oh, yes, for some readers it was the card that young Lulu made for her mother’s birthday. “I don’t want this,” Chua announced, adding that she expected to receive a drawing that Lulu had “put some thought and effort into.” Throwing the card back at her daughter, she told her, “I deserve better than this. So I reject this.”

Even before Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua’s proudly politically incorrect account of raising her children “the Chinese way,” arrived in bookstores Jan. 11, her parenting methods were the incredulous, indignant talk of every playground, supermarket and coffee shop. A prepublication excerpt in the Wall Street Journal (titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”) started the ferocious buzz; the online version has been read more than 1 million times and attracted more than 7,000 comments so far. When Chua appeared Jan. 11 on the Today show, the usually sunny host Meredith Vieira could hardly contain her contempt as she read aloud a sample of viewer comments: “She’s a monster”; “The way she raised her kids is outrageous”; “Where is the love, the acceptance?”

Chua, a petite 48-year-old who carries off a short-skirted wardrobe that could easily be worn by her daughters (now 15 and 18), gave as good as she got. “To be perfectly honest, I know that a lot of Asian parents are secretly shocked and horrified by many aspects of Western parenting,” including “how much time Westerners allow their kids to waste — hours on Facebook and computer games — and in some ways, how poorly they prepare them for the future,” she told Vieira with a toss of her long hair. “It’s a tough world out there.”

Chua’s reports from the trenches of authoritarian parenthood are indeed disconcerting, even shocking, in their candid admission of maternal ruthlessness. Her book is a Mommie Dearest for the age of the memoir, when we tell tales on ourselves instead of our relatives. But there’s something else behind the intense reaction to Tiger Mother, which has shot to the top of best-seller lists even as it’s been denounced on the airwaves and the Internet. Though Chua was born and raised in the U.S., her invocation of what she describes as traditional “Chinese parenting” has hit hard at a national sore spot: our fears about losing ground to China and other rising powers and about adequately preparing our children to survive in the global economy. Her stories of never accepting a grade lower than an A, of insisting on hours of math and spelling drills and piano and violin practice each day (weekends and vacations included), of not allowing playdates or sleepovers or television or computer games or even school plays, for goodness’ sake, have left many readers outraged but also defensive. The tiger mother’s cubs are being raised to rule the world, the book clearly implies, while the offspring of “weak-willed,” “indulgent” Westerners are growing up ill equipped to compete in a fierce global marketplace.

One of those permissive American parents is Chua’s husband, Jed Rubenfeld (also a professor at Yale Law School). He makes the occasional cameo appearance in Tiger Mother, cast as the tenderhearted foil to Chua’s merciless taskmaster. When Rubenfeld protested Chua’s harangues over “The Little White Donkey,” for instance, Chua informed him that his older daughter Sophia could play the piece when she was Lulu’s age. Sophia and Lulu are different people, Rubenfeld remonstrated reasonably. “Oh, no, not this,” Chua shot back, adopting a mocking tone: “Everyone is special in their special own way. Even losers are special in their own special way.”

With a stroke of her razor-sharp pen, Chua has set a whole nation of parents to wondering: Are we the losers she’s talking about?

Americans have ample reason to wonder these days, starting with our distinctly loserish economy. Though experts have declared that the recent recession is now over, economic growth in the third quarter of 2010 was an anemic 2.6%, and many economists say unemployment will continue to hover above 9%. Part of the reason? Jobs outsourced to countries like Brazil, India and China. Our housing values have declined, our retirement and college funds have taken a beating, and we’re too concerned with paying our monthly bills to save much, even if we had the will to change our ingrained consumerist ways. Meanwhile, in China, the economy is steaming along at more than 10% annual growth, and the country is running a $252.4 billion trade surplus with the U.S. China’s government is pumping its new wealth right back into the country, building high-speed rail lines and opening new factories.

If our economy suffers by comparison with China’s, so does our system of primary and secondary education. That became clear in December, when the latest test results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) were released. American students were mired in the middle: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math — 17th overall. For the first time since PISA began its rankings in 2000, students in Shanghai took the test — and they blew everyone else away, achieving a decisive first place in all three categories. When asked to account for the results, education experts produced a starkly simple explanation: Chinese students work harder, with more focus, for longer hours than American students do. It’s true that students in boomtown Shanghai aren’t representative of those in all of China, but when it comes to metrics like test scores, symbolism matters. Speaking on education in December, a sober President Obama noted that the U.S. has arrived at a “Sputnik moment”: the humbling realization that another country is pulling ahead in a contest we’d become used to winning.

Such anxious ruminations seem to haunt much of our national commentary these days, even in the unlikeliest of contexts. When the National Football League postponed a Philadelphia Eagles game in advance of the late-December blizzard on the East Coast, outgoing Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell was left fuming: “We’ve become a nation of wusses,” he declared on a radio program. “The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium. They would have walked, and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.”

These national identity crises are nothing new. During the mid–20th century, we kept a jealous eye on the Soviets, obsessively monitoring their stores of missiles, their ranks of cosmonauts and even their teams of gymnasts, using these as an index of our own success (not to mention the prospects for our survival). In the 1980s, we fretted that Japan was besting us with its technological wizardry and clever product design — the iPod of the ’80s was the Sony Walkman — and its investors’ acquisitions of American name-brand companies and prime parcels of real estate.

Now the Soviet Union has dissolved into problem-plagued Russia, and our rivalry with the Japanese has faded as another one has taken its place: last year, China surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy. The U.S. is still No. 1 — but for how long? We’re rapidly reaching the limit on how much money the federal government can borrow — and our single biggest creditor is China. How long, for that matter, can the beleaguered U.S. education system keep pace with a rapidly evolving and increasingly demanding global marketplace? Chinese students already have a longer school year than American pupils — and U.S. kids spend more time sitting in front of the TV than in the classroom.

The document that finally focused the nation’s attention on these crucial questions was not a blue-ribbon study or a hefty government report, but a slender book that sprang from one mother’s despair over her daughter’s teenage rebellion.

Amy Chua lives in New Haven, Conn., in an imposing mock-Tudor mansion — complete with gargoyles — that was built in the 1920s for a vaudeville impresario. The woman who descends the winding stone stairway and opens the studded wooden door, however, is wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and a friendly smile. As we take a seat in Chua’s living room, the laughter of her older daughter Sophia and her boyfriend (yes, she’s allowed to have a boyfriend) floats down from the second floor, and the fluffy white dog that Chua tried, and failed, to discipline stretches comfortably on the rug. (Disclosure: This reporter also lives in New Haven and has heard Chua regale friends with parenting stories.

The first thing Chua wants you to know is that she is not a monster. “Everything I do as a mother builds on a foundation of love and compassion,” she says. Love and compassion, plus punishingly high expectations: this is how Chua herself was raised. Though her parents are ethnically Chinese, they lived for many years in the Philippines and immigrated to America two years before Chua was born. Chua and her three younger sisters were required to speak Chinese at home; for each word of English they uttered, they received a whack with a pair of chopsticks. On the girls’ report cards, only A’s were acceptable. When Chua took her father to an awards assembly at which she received second prize, he was furious. “Never, ever disgrace me like that again,” he told her.

Some react to an exceedingly strict household by becoming permissive parents, but not Chua. When she had children of her own, she resolved to raise them the same way. “I see my upbringing as a great success story,” she says. “By disciplining me, my parents inculcated self-discipline. And by restricting my choices as a child, they gave me so many choices in my life as an adult. Because of what they did then, I get to do the work I love now.” Chua’s path to her profession was not a straight one — she tried out the premed track and a major in economics before settling on law school — but it was made possible, she says, by the work ethic her parents instilled.

All the same, Chua recognizes that her parents’ attitudes were shaped by experiences very different from her own. Her mother and father endured severe hardship under the Japanese occupation of the Philippines; later they had to make their way in a new country and a new language. For them, security and stability were paramount. “They didn’t think about children’s happiness,” Chua says. “They thought about preparing us for the future.” But Chua says her children’s happiness is her primary goal; her intense focus on achievement is simply, she says, “the vehicle” to help them find, as she has, genuine fulfillment in a life’s work

The second thing Chua wants you to know is that the hard-core parenting she set out to do didn’t work — not completely, anyway. “When my children were young, I was very cocky,” Chua acknowledges. “I thought I could maintain total control. And in fact my first child, Sophia, was very compliant.” Then came Lulu.

From the beginning, Chua’s second daughter was nothing like her obedient sister. As a fetus, she kicked — hard. As an infant, she screamed for hours every night. And as a budding teenager she refused to get with her mother’s academic and extracurricular program. In particular, the two fought epic battles over violin practice: ” ‘all-out nuclear warfare’ doesn’t quite capture it,” Chua writes. Finally, after a screaming, glass-smashing, very public showdown, the tiger mother admitted defeat: “Lulu,” she said, “you win. It’s over. We’re giving up the violin.” Not long after, Chua typed the first words of her memoir — not as an exercise in maternal bravado but as an earnest attempt to understand her daughters, her parents and herself.

That was a year and a half ago. Today, Chua has worked out some surprising compromises with her children. Sophia can go out on dates and must practice the piano for an hour and a half each day instead of as many as six hours. Lulu is allowed to pursue her passion for tennis. (Her mother’s daughter, she’s become quite good at the sport, making the high school varsity team — “the only junior high school kid to do so,” as Chua can’t help pointing out.) And Chua says she doesn’t want to script her children’s futures. “I really don’t have any particular career path in mind for Sophia and Lulu, as long as they feel passionate about it and give it their best.” As her girls prepare to launch themselves into their own lives — Sophia goes off to college next fall — Chua says she wouldn’t change much about the way she raised them. Perhaps more surprising, her daughters say they intend to be strict parents one day too — though they plan to permit more time with friends, even the occasional sleepover.

Most surprising of all to Chua’s detractors may be the fact that many elements of her approach are supported by research in psychology and cognitive science. Take, for example, her assertion that American parents go too far in insulating their children from discomfort and distress. Chinese parents, by contrast, she writes, “assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.” In the 2008 book A Nation of Wimps, author Hara Estroff Marano, editor-at-large of Psychology Todaymagazine, marshals evidence that shows Chua is correct. “Research demonstrates that children who are protected from grappling with difficult tasks don’t develop what psychologists call ‘mastery experiences,’ ” Marano explains. “Kids who have this well-earned sense of mastery are more optimistic and decisive; they’ve learned that they’re capable of overcoming adversity and achieving goals.” Children who have never had to test their abilities, says Marano, grow into “emotionally brittle” young adults who are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

Another parenting practice with which Chua takes issue is Americans’ habit, as she puts it, of “slathering praise on their kids for the lowest of tasks — drawing a squiggle or waving a stick.” Westerners often laud their children as “talented” or “gifted,” she says, while Asian parents highlight the importance of hard work. And in fact, research performed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has found that the way parents offer approval affects the way children perform, even the way they feel about themselves.

Dweck has conducted studies with hundreds of students, mostly early adolescents, in which experimenters gave the subjects a set of difficult problems from an IQ test. Afterward, some of the young people were praised for their ability: “You must be smart at this.” Others were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.” The kids who were complimented on their intelligence were much more likely to turn down the opportunity to do a challenging new task that they could learn from. “They didn’t want to do anything that could expose their deficiencies and call into question their talent,” Dweck says. Ninety percent of the kids who were praised for their hard work, however, were eager to take on the demanding new exercise.

One more way in which the tiger mother’s approach differs from that of her Western counterparts: her willingness to drill, baby, drill. When Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test at school, Chua made her do 20 practice tests every night for a week, clocking her with a stopwatch. “Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America,” she writes. In this, Chua is right, says Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “It’s virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extensive practice,” he notes.

What’s more, Willingham says, “if you repeat the same task again and again, it will eventually become automatic. Your brain will literally change so that you can complete the task without thinking about it.” Once this happens, the brain has made mental space for higher-order operations: for interpreting literary works, say, and not simply decoding their words; for exploring the emotional content of a piece of music, and not just playing the notes. Brain scans of experimental subjects who are asked to execute a sequence of movements, for example, show that as the sequence is repeated, the parts of the brain associated with motor skills become less active, allowing brain activity to shift to the areas associated with higher-level thinking and reflection.

Cognitive neuroscience, in other words, confirms the wisdom of what the tiger mother knew all along. “What Chinese parents understand,” says Chua, “is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it.” That may be an overstatement — but if being good at reading or math or music permits a greater degree of engagement and expressiveness, that would seem to be a very desirable thing.

All that said, however, psychologists universally decry the use of threats and name calling — verbal weapons frequently deployed by Chua — as harmful to children’s individual development and to the parent-child relationship. So just what does she have to say about the notorious episodes recounted in her book?

About “The Little White Donkey”: she was perhaps too severe in enforcing long hours of practice, Chua says now. Still, she says, it was important for Sophia and Lulu to learn what they were capable of. “It might sound harsh, but kids really shouldn’t be able to take the easy way out,” she explains. “If a child has the experience, even once, of successfully doing something she didn’t think she could do, that lesson will stick with her for the rest of her life.” Recently, Chua says, Lulu told her that during a math test at school that day she had looked at a question and drawn a blank. “Lulu said, ‘Then I heard your annoying voice in my head, saying, “Keep thinking! I know you can do this” — and the answer just came to me!’

On calling Sophia “garbage”: “There are some things I did that I regret and wish I could change, and that’s one of them,” Chua says. But, she notes, her father used similar language with her, “and I knew it was because he thought well of me and was sure I could do better.” Chua’s parents are now in their 70s, and she says she feels nothing but love and respect for them: “We’re a very tight family, all three generations of us, and I think that’s because I was shown a firm hand and my kids were shown a firm hand.”

And Lulu’s birthday card? Chua stands by that one. “My girls know the difference between working hard on something and dashing something off,” she says firmly. “They know that I treasure the drawings and poems they put effort into.”

More than anything, it’s Chua’s maternal confidence — her striking lack of ambivalence about her choices as a parent — that has inspired both ire and awe among the many who have read her words. Since her book’s publication, she says, e-mail messages have poured in from around the globe, some of them angry and even threatening but many of them wistful or grateful. “A lot of people have written to say that they wished their parents had pushed them when they were younger, that they think they could have done more with their lives,” Chua recounts. “Other people have said that after reading my book they finally understand their parents and why they did what they did. One man wrote that he sent his mother flowers and a note of thanks, and she called him up, weeping.”

So should we all be following Chua’s example? She wrote a memoir, not a manual. She does make it clear, however, that Chinese mothers don’t have to be Chinese: “I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too,” she writes. The tiger-mother approach isn’t an ethnicity but a philosophy: expect the best from your children, and don’t settle for anything less.

Among those who are decidedly not following Chua’s lead are many parents and educators in China. For educated urban Chinese parents, the trend is away from the strict traditional model and toward a more relaxed American style. Chinese authorities, meanwhile, are increasingly dissatisfied with the country’s public education system, which has long been based on rote learning and memorization. They are looking to the West for inspiration — not least because they know they must produce more creative and innovative graduates to power the high-end economy they want to develop. The lesson here: depending on where you stand, there may always be an approach to child rearing that looks more appealing than the one you’ve got.

Marano doesn’t see us whistling Chua’s battle hymn just yet. “Kids can grow and thrive under a wide variety of parenting styles,” she says. “But American parenting, at its best, combines ambitious expectations and a loving environment with a respect for each child’s individual differences and a flexibility in parental roles and behavior. You can set high standards in your household and help your children meet them without resorting to the extreme measures Chua writes about.” Western parents have their own highly effective strategies for promoting learning, such as free play — something Chua never mentions. On a national scale, the U.S. economy may be taking a hit, but it has far from collapsed. American secondary education may be in crisis, but its higher education is the envy of the world — especially China. We have not stopped inventing and innovating, in Silicon Valley or in Detroit.

There’s no doubt that Chua’s methods are extreme (though her stories, she hints, may have been slightly exaggerated for effect). But her account, arriving just after those unnervingly high test scores from Shanghai, has created a rare opportunity. Sometimes it takes a dramatic intervention to get our attention. After the 1957 launch of Sputnik, America did rise to the Soviets’ challenge: less than a year later, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which invested billions of dollars in the U.S. education system. Within five years, John Glenn was orbiting Earth, and less than a decade after that, we put a man on the moon.

Clare Boothe Luce, the American playwright, Congresswoman and ambassador, called the beeps emitted by Sputnik as it sailed through space “an intercontinental outer-space raspberry,” a jeer at the notion that America had some “gilt-edged guarantee of national superiority.” Think of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother as a well-timed taunt aimed at our own complacent sense of superiority, our belief that America will always come out on top. That won’t be the case unless we make it so. We can get caught up in the provocative details of Chua’s book (did she really threaten to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals?), or we can use her larger point as an impetus to push ourselves forward, the way our countrymen often have in the past.

For though Chua hails the virtues of “the Chinese way,” the story she tells is quintessentially American. It’s the tale of an immigrant striver, determined to make a better life for himself and his family in a nation where such dreams are still possible. “I remember my father working every night until 3 in the morning; I remember him wearing the same pair of shoes for eight years,” Chua says. “Knowing the sacrifices he and my mother made for us made me want to uphold the family name, to make my parents proud.”

Hard work, persistence, no patience for excuses: whether Chinese or American, that sounds like a prescription for success with which it’s very difficult to argue.

The real reason we are so divided

Some Americans have strong, sometimes unyielding preferences for Mac computers, while most others have similarly strong preferences for PCs and wouldn’t be caught dead using a Mac. Some Americans love classical music and hate rock and roll. Others have opposite preferences, loving rock and roll and consider classical music as hoity-toity junk. Then there are those among us who love football and Western movies, and find golf and cooking shows to be less than manly. Despite these, and many other strong preferences, there’s little or no conflict. When’s the last time you heard of rock and roll lovers in conflict with classical music lovers, or Mac lovers in conflict with PC lovers, or football lovers in conflict with golf lovers? It seldom if ever happens. When there’s market allocation of resources and peaceable, voluntary exchange, people have their preferences satisfied and are able to live in peace with one another.

Think what might be the case if it were a political decision of whether there’d be football or golf watched on TV, whether we used Macs or PCs and whether we listened to classical music or rock and roll. Everyone had to comply with the politically made decision or suffer the pain of fines or imprisonment. Football lovers would be lined up against golf lovers, Mac lovers against PC lovers and rock and rollers against classical music lovers. People who previously lived in peace with one another would now be in conflict.

Why? If, for example, classical music lovers got what they wanted, rock and rollers wouldn’t. Conflict would emerge solely because the decision was made in the political arena.

The lesson here is that the prime feature of political decision-making is that it’s a zero-sum game. One person’s gain is of necessity another person’s loss. As such, political allocation of resources is conflict-enhancing, while market allocation is conflict-reducing. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater the potential for conflict. It would not be unreasonable to predict that if Mac lovers won, and only Macs could be legally used, there would be considerable PC-lover hate toward Mac lovers.

Most of the issues that divide our nation, and give rise to conflict, are those best described as a zero-sum game where one person’s or group’s gain is of necessity another’s loss. Examples are: racial preferences, school prayers, trade restrictions, welfare, Obamacare and a host of other government policies that benefit one American at the expense of another American. That’s why political action committees, private donors and companies spend billions of dollars lobbying. Their goal is to get politicians and government officials to use the coercive power of their offices to take what belongs to one American and give it to another or create a favor or special privilege for one American that comes at the expense of some other American.

You might be tempted to think that the brutal domestic conflict seen in other countries can’t happen here. That’s nonsense. Americans are not super-humans; we possess the same frailties of other people. If there were a catastrophic economic calamity, I can imagine a political hustler exploiting those frailties, as have other tyrants, blaming it on the Jews, the blacks, the conservatives, the liberals, the Catholics or free trade. The best thing the president and Congress can do to reduce the potential for conflict and violence is reduce the impact of government on our lives. Doing so will not only produce a less-divided country and greater economic efficiency, but bear greater faith and allegiance to the vision of America held by our founders – a country of limited government. Our founders, in the words of Thomas Paine, recognized that, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

Two Californias

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

DECEMBER 15, 2010 12:00 P.M.  NATIONAL REVIEW

Abandoned farms, Third World living conditions, pervasive public assistance — welcome to the once-thriving Central Valley.

The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.

During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.

Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas — which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment — have largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself — from almonds to raisins — has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the regulators’ defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?

Many of the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on former small farms — the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground lying fallow. I pass on the cultural consequences to communities from  the loss of thousands of small farming families. I don’t think I can remember another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley have gone out of production, even though farm prices have recently rebounded. Apparently it is simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a new orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly — with suddenly soaring farm prices, still we have thousands of acres in the world’s richest agricultural belt, with available water on the east side of the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle or in disuse. Is credit frozen? Are there simply no more farmers? Are the schools so bad as to scare away potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all terrified by the national debt and uncertain future?

California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California’s rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.

In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.

We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants. There are no “facilities” such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.

At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.

In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned by the user and the car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.

By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses, had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just ridden by the day before. I don’t editorialize here on the logic or morality of any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who apparently are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer of the middle class. California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent source of income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits from Washington explain some of this?

Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.

Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20 years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico, a vast expansion of California’s entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from many of these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California.

Fresno’s California State University campus is embroiled in controversy over the student body president’s announcing that he is an illegal alien, with all the requisite protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won’t comment on the legislation per se, but again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think it fair to say that the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American Studies program’s sizable curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I mean that students in those classes heard of the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town, Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American counterparts.

I note this because hundreds of students here illegally are now terrified of being deported to Mexico. I can understand that, given the chaos in Mexico and their own long residency in the United States. But here is what still confuses me: If one were to consider the classes that deal with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays of national chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is a far more attractive and moral place than the United States.

So there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, “Please do not send me back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me stay in the culture that I ignore or deprecate.” I think the DREAM Act protestors might have been far more successful in winning public opinion had they stopped blaming the U.S. for suggesting that they might have to leave at some point, and instead explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What it is about America that makes a youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or demonstrate to be allowed to remain in this country rather than return to the place of his birth?

I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed “indifferent.” California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant — no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California’s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd — to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta — that California is at once both the nation’s most unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.

Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both into and out of California — and the result is a sort of social, cultural, economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.

US Schools doing OK

WASHINGTON – Almost everyone who worries about America’s “competitiveness” in the world bemoans the sorry state of U.S. K-12 education. The Chinese and others do better. We need to catch up. From President Barack Obama to CEOs, the refrain is to “fix the schools,” almost as if it were an engineering problem. “The urgency for reform has never been greater,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently wrote in The Washington Post. The diagnosis spans the political spectrum. But what if it’s not true?

There are grounds for doubt. For starters, economic competitiveness depends on more than good schools, which are important but not decisive. To take an obvious example: The Japanese have high test scores, but Japan’s economy languishes. Its export-led growth has foundered. Next – and as important – American schools are better than they’re commonly portrayed. We now have a massive study of the reading abilities of 15-year-olds (roughly 10th-graders) in 65 systems worldwide showing that U.S. schools compare favorably with their foreign counterparts.

The most pessimistic view of the study is that, on average, American schools do as good a job as schools in other wealthy nations. We’re worse than some and better than others. The overall loss of economic competitiveness is likely modest and would be swamped by other factors (government policies, business management, exchange rates, the willingness to take risks). But a more detailed evaluation of the study – comparing similar students in different countries – suggests that U.S. schools still rank high in the world.

The study, called the Program for International Student Assessment, was conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. It covered the OECD’s 34 mostly wealthy member nations (including the United States, most European countries and Japan) and 31 others. The test was scored on a zero-to-1,000 scale, and the best-performing students were in Shanghai, China, (one testing area that’s not a country) with average scores of 556. South Korea (539) and Finland (536) were next. The United States ranked 17th (500), slightly above the average (493) of the OECD’s advanced countries. This was behind Japan (520) and Belgium (506) and just ahead of Germany (497), France (496) and Great Britain (494).

Good, perhaps. But not great.

However, the overall scores don’t tell the full story. The U.S. Department of Education examined the American scores by race and ethnicity. This report (“Highlights from PISA 2009”) allows comparison with countries whose ethnic and racial compositions are more homogeneous than ours. For example, you can compare the scores of white non-Hispanic Americans with the scores from Canada, a country that is almost 85 percent white. This is an admittedly crude approach, but it suggests that U.S. schools do about as well as the best systems elsewhere in educating similar students.

Among non-Hispanic white Americans, the average score was 525 – not very different from Canada’s 524, New Zealand’s 521 or Australia’s 515. All these countries are heavily white, and all ranked in the top 10 of the 65 participating school systems. The story is the same for Asian-Americans. Their average score was 541 – somewhat below Shanghai, about even with South Korea and ahead of Hong Kong (533) and Japan. Again, all these other systems were in the top 10.

American schools are hardly perfect. Math scores, though showing the same pattern, are lower than reading scores. But the most glaring gap is well-known: the stubbornly low test scores of blacks and Hispanics. In the PISA study, their reading scores were 441 (blacks) and 466 (Hispanics). Changing this is the great challenge for schools, because the share of black and Hispanic students is growing. It was 23 percent in 1980, 35 percent in 2009.

Americans have an extravagant faith in the ability of education to solve all manner of social problems. In our mind’s eye, schools are engines of progress that create opportunity and foster upward mobility. To the contrary, these persistent achievement gaps demonstrate the limits of schools to compensate for problems outside the classroom – broken homes, street violence, indifference to education – that discourage learning and inhibit teaching. As child-psychologist Jerome Kagan points out, a strong predictor of children’s school success is the educational attainment of their parents. The higher it is, the more parents read to them, inform and encourage them.

For half a century, successive waves of “school reform” have made only modest headway against these obstacles. It’s an open question whether the present “reform” agenda, with its emphasis on teacher accountability, will do better. What we face is not an engineering problem; it’s overcoming the legacy of history and culture. The outcome may affect our economic competitiveness less than our success at creating a just society.

Robert J. Samuelson

OC Register

Sunday January 16,2011

Tutoring Rich Kids Cost Me My Dreams

MSNBC.com

‘Tutoring’ Rich Kids Cost Me My Dreams
It took me a while to figure out what my boss already knew: I had been hired to do their work.

By Nicole Kristal

Newsweek

April 11 issue – For three years, I was an academic prostitute. I ruined the curve for the honest and ensured that the wealthiest, and often stupidest, students earned the highest marks. I was a professional paper-writer.

It all started when I quit my journalism job in order to pursue my dream of being a singer-songwriter. I snagged a job tutoring inner-city foster children, but it didn’t pay the bills. One day, I found a TUTORS WANTED flier on the UCLA campus. A small tutoring agency that serviced affluent families hired me.

“Just sit at her computer and type for her,” my boss advised me with my first client, a private-high-school student. But as I typed her name at the top right corner of the screen, she slithered onto her bed to watch “Are You Hot?” I asked her what she remembered about Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

“She’s a slut,” my client said with a sigh, referring either to the character of Lenina or the woman on TV. After a handful of three-word responses like that, I realized she didn’t care. I was hired to do the thinking. The parents knew it. So did my boss.

Welcome to the world of professional paper-writing, the dirty secret of the tutoring business. It’s facilitated by avaricious agencies, perpetuated by accountability-free parents and made possible by self-loathing nerds like me. For three-hour workdays, the ability to sleep in and the opportunity to get paid to learn, I tackled subjects like Dostoevsky while spoiled jerks smoked pot, took naps, surfed the Internet and had sex. Though some offered me chateaubriand and the occasional illicit drug, most treated me like the help. I put up with it because I feared working in an office for $12 an hour again.

Six months into the job, my boss sent me on a problem-solving mission for $10 more per hour than I was already making. He had earned C’s and D’s on papers for Evan (not his real name), a USC freshman my boss described as a “typical surfer retard.” Evan’s parents had hired “tutors” to compose their son’s papers since he was 12 because he “wasn’t going to be a writer anyway.” They were furious.

In Evan’s penthouse, surfers carved across the screen of his 51-inch television, next to a poster of “Scarface.” The former clothes model handed me his assignment: to describe utopia. “I couldn’t ask for a better life. I mean, —— was my soccer coach,” Evan said, naming a famous studio head.

Despite living in utopia, during the session Evan purchased an ounce of weed and a bag of Xanax. His WASPy girlfriend washed down a pill with some Smart Water and offered me one. I declined. Evan sent me home with his $3,000 PowerBook to write his paper because he was “too busy” to work. Before I left, his girlfriend hired me to write her paper on “Do the Right Thing.” I drove home at midnight, once again missing my chance to hit the music scene and battle my stage fright.

No matter. After I scored an A on Evan’s paper, he promised to pass my demo on to a legendary music producer—a family friend. He also promised a few leftover pairs of designer jeans. He never mentioned either again, and I knew I’d been played. The only help Evan offered came in the form of new clients, such as his roommate, who had one-night stands with strippers and said things like “Why should I care about some little black girl?” in regard to Toni Morrison novels.

When my streak of A’s ended after I scored a B-minus on Evan’s paper about clanship in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” I never heard from him again. His teenage sibling, for whom I composed countless high-school English papers, revealed that Evan had replaced me with a classmate.

That summer break, my boss referred me to a junior at a private Christian university who couldn’t spell “college.” Come fall, the kid leased my brain three hours a day, five days a week. Depressed, I lounged around in my bathrobe until he finished class, then waded through rush-hour traffic to demoralize myself. One day, my Ford Bronco lost all power on the freeway and I could have died. I hadn’t played a gig for seven months. I could barely pay my bills because I refused to take on more paper-writing clients.

Last spring, two months shy of my client’s graduation date, I snapped while staring at a term-paper assignment on Margaret Thatcher. “I can’t do this anymore,” I mumbled. I had completed nearly two years of college for him. He replaced me with a teacher about to earn his Ph.D. who charged $15 less per hour than I did.

Despite my intellect, I handed over my self-respect to rich losers. I allowed myself to be blinded by privilege and the hope that some of it would rub off on me and help my flailing music career. Ultimately, trading my morals for money cost me the confidence I needed to turn my dreams into reality. Unemployment was a small price to pay to restore my fractured dignity.

Kristal lives in Los Angeles.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

Fads and Reform in Education

BY APRIL 1998, it was clear that the much-ballyhooed effort had collapsed on itself. A Los Angeles Times editorial said, “All hopes have diminished. The promised improvements have not been realized.” The program had become so bogged down by politics and bureaucracy that it had failed to create any significant change.
How did I know this would be the result of Annenberg’s well-intentioned efforts? Easy. There has never been an innovation or reform that has helped children learn any better, faster or easier than they did prior to the 20th century. I believe a case could be made that real learning was better served then than now.
Let me quote Theodore Sizer, the former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which received some of the grant money. A few years ago a reporter asked him if he could name a single reform in the last 15 years that had been successful. Sizer replied, “I don’t think there is one.”
I taught in the Detroit public-school system for 30 years. While I was there, I participated in team-teaching, supervised peer-tutoring programs and tussled with block scheduling plans. None of it ever made a discernible difference in my students’ performance. The biggest failure of all was the decentralization scheme introduced by a new superintendent in the early 1970s. His idea was to break our school system into eight smaller districts—each with its own board of education—so that parents would get more involved and educators would be more responsive to our students’ needs. Though both of those things happened, by the time I retired in 1986 the number of students who

graduated each year still hadn’t risen to more than half the class. Two thirds of those who did graduate failed the exit exam and received a lesser diploma. We had changed everything but the level of student performance.
What baffles me is not that educators implement new policies intended to help kids perform better, it’s that they don’t learn from others’ mistakes. A few years ago I read about administrators at a middle school in San Diego, where I now live, who wanted a fresh teaching plan for their new charter school and chose the team-teaching model. Meanwhile, a few miles away, another middle school was in the process of abandoning that same model because it hadn’t had any effect on students’ grades.
The plain truth is we need to return to the method that’s most effective: a teacher in front of a chalkboard and a roomful of willing students. The old way is the best way. We have it from no less a figure than Euclid himself. When Ptolemy I, the king of Egypt, said he wanted to learn geometry, Euclid explained that he would have to study long hours and memorize the contents of a fat math book. The pharaoh complained that that would be unseemly and demanded a shortcut. Euclid replied, “There is no royal road to geometry.”

There wasn’t a shortcut to the learning process then and there still isn’t. Reform movements like new math and whole language have left millions of damaged kids in their wake. We’ve wasted billions of taxpayer dollars and forced our teachers to spend countless hours in workshops learning to implement the latest fads. Every minute teachers have spent on misguided educational strategies (like building kids’ self-esteem by acting as

“facilitators” who oversee group projects) is time they could have been teaching academics.
The only way to truly foster confidence in our students is to give them real skills—in reading, writing and arithmetic—that they can be proud of. One model that incorporates this idea is direct instruction, a program that promotes rigorous, highly scripted interaction between teacher and students.
The physicist Stephen Hawking says we can be sure time travel is impossible because we never see any visitors from the future. We can apply that same logic to the subject of school reforms: we know they have not succeeded because we haven’t seen positive results. But knowing that isn’t enough. We should stop using students as lab rats and return to a more traditional method of teaching. If it was good enough for Euclid, it is good enough for us.

Keliher is the author of “Guerrilla Warfare for Teachers: A Survival Guide.”

© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.