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The Street Where You Live Leads to a Better Chance for Success
David Leonardt’s Upshot column last Thursday reported on several reports that underscored the importance of place.. and highlighted the shameful reality that black middle class families live in markedly poorer neighborhoods than white middle class families. This resonated with me based on my experiences as a young adult in Philadelphia where banks, realtors, and politicians conspired to “red-line” certain neighborhoods, practice that led to the phenomenon called “block-busting”, practice that took place subtly and explicitly in many northern cities.
I witnessed this block-busting first hand when I rented an apartment in West Philadelphia in the late 1960s in a neighborhood that was bordered on one side by a railroad line and on the other by the University of Pennsylvania. The homes on the “Penn Side” of the rail line were becoming gentrified as the University City neighborhood moved slowly and inexorably westward. The homes on the “other side” of the tracks, however, were slowly deteriorating. One of my many part-time jobs in college was working for Philadelphia Gas, doing door-to-door canvassing in the neighborhood on “the other side of the tracks”. That neighborhood was targeted by Philadelphia Gas because many “new residents” were moving in due to “turnover” in houses because “older people” were moving to the suburbs. After spending a week knocking on doors it became evident to me that every “new resident” was black. Some of the blacks were clearly middle class: their living rooms looked like the one in my suburban home and they were interested in doing everything they could to improve the new home they purchased. Other blacks, though, were clearly struggling. I recall one family in particular who had spent every dollar they had on their home. They had hardly any furniture and could barely afford their electricity let alone gas heat conversions. The man who answered the door was clearly exhausted from working, but he told me he was proud that he had put together enough money to buy the home and hoped someday he’d have the furniture to fill it and maybe someday he’d be able to get gas heat. The few white residents who answered the door did so cautiously: they looked through the curtains to see who I was and peered through a cracked door. They were not interested in any home improvements because like their former neighbors they were looking to move elsewhere.
Fast forward fifty years and you have the reality described in Leonardt’s article: “the typical middle-income black family lives in a neighborhood with lower incomes than the typical low-income white family.” And where you live matters greatly in terms of the schools you attend and the quality of your life. As Leonardt notes at the end of this piece, which is full of data from many carefully researched reports, improving the quality of housing is the best way to address poverty… but it is not a policy that is likely to be pursued any time soon:
Housing developments that allow low-income families to move into higher-income neighborhoods appear to be a cost-effective antipoverty strategy. Vouchers that help lower-income families move into better neighborhoods may be even more so.
Partly inspired by the new research, federal housing officials, including Julian Castro, the housing secretary, have recently shown more interest in varying the value of vouchers to encourage families to move to better neighborhoods. Current policy — both federal and local, on both vouchers and taxes — goes in the opposite direction, creating incentives to put up buildings in worse neighborhoods and for poor families to remain there.
The notion that your neighborhood matters is almost a cliché. But it’s also true — and yet much of the nation’s housing policy effectively pretends otherwise.
Let me conclude this post by concluding my anecdote about life in Philadelphia. Two years after knocking on doors in the neighborhood on “the other side of the tracks” I was teaching in a junior high school in that same neighborhood. The value of the houses had declined and many of the homes were rented. The school was overcrowded and among the worst in the city in terms of its standardized test scores (yes… even in the early 1970s they ranked schools by test scores). As I patrolled the halls and bathrooms to ensure that fights did not break out I often wondered how the homeowners I visited two years earlier felt about their neighborhood.
Student Data Collection and Data Sharing… and Corporate Profits
I read earlier this month week that NYC schools recently replaced their student data web site, as described in this paragraph from the NYTimes article:
The city’s Education Department created NYC Schools to replace Achievement Reporting and Innovation System, or ARIS, a data system built at great expenseunder Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration that was used by only a small fraction of parents. At the end of last year, the department ended its contract with Amplify, the company that maintained ARIS and is run by Joel I. Klein, who was schools chancellor during the system’s creation. Since then, parents have not had a way of viewing their children’s information online.
As one who began my college career as an engineering major and who ended up with a major in Humanities and Technology, I’ve long been an advocate of the power technology could bring to education. When I was Superintendent in upstate NY from 1997-2002 I aggressively expanded the use of technology in our offices and schools. With the technological capability to collect and use data, my staff and I sought ways to use data warehousing to improve our tracking of student progress and management of the reams of information we collected on our students. When I concluded by career working in an interstate school district in Hanover NH and Norwich VT we instituted the use of Powerschool, Apple’s data management system, It helped us schedule MS and HS students, maintain a common set of baseline information on students, and made each student’s grades available to parents through the use of a password protected portal. Both states in the interstate district developed (or bought) and ultimately required the use of on-line IEP programs and both states developed (or bought) management systems that enabled teachers to use data from State assessments to inform their instruction.
The introduction of technology was difficult in both venues. In New York, where the implementation preceded the widespread use of cell phones, I-pads, or even lap top computers, the daily or even periodic use of computers in lieu of paper was new and different and resisted by teachers, administrative assistants, and even parents. A decade later when we instituted the use of the parent portal the debates had more to do with security (e.g. are we SURE that a hacker won’t get into this?), the change in work expectations (e.g. you mean I have to post my grades on-line within a week of giving a test?), and process (e.g. we usually use a democratic process at THIS school to decide issues like the parent portal!).
To those who questioned security I indicated we WERE acting on faith that Apple had thought this through and was confident their system was secure— much the same way we took on faith that Amazon, our local banks, and our credit card companies are secure.
To those who questioned work expectations I responded in honest bewilderment. “I hope you don’t expect me to defend your right as a professional to make a student wait a week to find out how they did on an examination or a term paper… because I can’t.” Fortunately the professionalism of the great majority of the staff stopped that rebuttal in its tracks.
To those who questioned the process I had to acknowledge that decisions about what kind of operating system we would use had to be made in a hierarchical fashion…. and computers made it imperative that we abandon the old days where each school had its own system of listing and collecting names, addresses, and other baseline data which then required the successive school and/or teacher to needlessly re-enter the same information in a different format. This was a clear waste of staff time and resources. Of course this also meant that everyone would need to adapt to whatever changes resulted from the new system that was dictated from our office. While each Principal was involved in the decision regarding the kind of system we would design or buy… once the decision was reached EVERYONE had to use the same system. Bottom line: Choosing the system was democratic; implementing the system was dictatorial.
It’s been four full years since I led a school district, and much has changed in that time period. Indeed, even as I was leaving the office I had a sense that change was in the offing relative to data warehousing and student management systems. The small operation that offered the district in NYS a free demo on school warehousing got bought up by a bigger organization and the last I read they were somehow connected with Pearson. Oh, and Pearson bought Powerschool and became the developer of the assessments whose results would be stored on Powerschool… along with lots of information about a student’s health and well-being. And then I read blog posts like the one in last week’s Mathbabe that included this provocative information:
…EBay and PayPal recently changed their user agreements so that, if you’re a user of either of those services, you will receive marketing calls using any phone number you’ve provided them or that they have “have otherwise obtained.” There is no possibility to opt out, except perhaps to abandon the services. Oh, and they might also call you for surveys or debt collections. Oh, and they claim their intention is to“benefit our relationship.”
(And) Given how much venture capitalists (who have invested in many on-line services) like to brag about their return (on investment), I think we have reason to worry about the coming wave of “innovative” uses of our personal data. Telemarketing is the tip of the iceberg.
Schools have a trove of electronically stored information that parents and teachers clearly need and want to use… and private for-profit corporations are gobbling up these services and, as the Mathbabe notes, when they DO take them over they can unilaterally change the see agreements.
There IS a solution to all of this… and that is to pass some kind of legislation to regulate the use of student data so that it is not sold or disclosed to anyone. We can’t go back to filing cabinets stuffed with reams of papers that are impossible to sift through and expensive to keep… but we don’t want to compromise the confidentiality that paper documents generally provided.
“Teach to One” in Brooklyn Elicits a Flashback to Shaw JHS in 1971
I am slowly but surely shedding boxes of papers from the past and in doing so have reviewed journals I wrote in college, papers I wrote in graduate school, newspaper articles I wrote as superintendent of schools… and lesson plans from my two years of teaching middle school mathematics at Shaw Junior High School from 1970-72. As described in earlier posts, Shaw Junior High was a rough-and-tumble urban school with 3000 students on a split shift the first year I taught there and a 1600+/- school on a single shift the second year. During the first year, I found that the grade-level materials the district provided were inappropriate for my eight grade students, most of whom had not mastered the basic skills. Like most of my first-year colleagues, I encountered many discipline problems— most of which were brought on as a result of the difficulties I faced getting students engaged with the materials.
I was taking a graduate course on “Curriculum” and to complete an assignment for that course AND help me with my classroom management, I decided to write my own material for one of the sections I taught. I used some of the funds allocated to me to mimeograph a 30+ page set of materials that student could go through at their own pace. My wife, who was an artist, illustrated some of the pages with cartoon caricatures of me exhorting the class to “Do Your Math!”. With over 30 kids in the class, implementing this individualized learning was a challenge, especially since the notion of proceeding at their own pace was alien to the students. After a couple of weeks the students got the knack of it and settled into work on the material. The brightest kids in the class completed the packet quickly, but I found I could assign those same students supplementary problems and they worked on them without disrupting the class. Unsurprisingly, the most disruptive students in the class struggled the most with the work, but they were getting my personal attention to help them. I was observed in the class and while the assistant principal noted I was “not following the prescribed curriculum” he acknowledged that the class was orderly and on task… and my classroom management skills had improved.
This experience flashed before me when I read Tina Rosenburg’s Fixes column, “Reaching Students One By One” in yesterday’s NYTimes. The “Fix” Rosenburg describes is “Teach to One” a computer-based individualized program that can deliver exactly what I was attempting to deliver 44 years ago… and with Khan Academy, a wealth of web resources, and all kinds of tracking software teachers in PS 29 in Brooklyn are capable of accomplishing the goal of matching lessons to students far more effectively than I could. Rosenburg concludes her essay with this paragraph:
Critics ask a good question: Why should a school try an expensive, disruptive high-tech platform that’s still unproven? The answer is: in order to prove it. School of One takes comprehensive advantage of technology in ways that let teachers concentrate on teaching. That’s worth getting right. There may be ways to make it cheaper and more effective, but only through further experimentation. As for being disruptive, does anyone defend the current system? “We’re not aspiring to create the least disruptive program,” said Rose. “Our goal is a model that works.”
Taken to its ultimate conclusion programs like “Teach to One” could compel schools to engage in the ultimate disruption: the replacement of age-based grade level cohorts with individualized tracking. Here’s hoping that the standardized testing protocols, with their implicit assumption that all children learn at the same rate, don’t marginalize programs like “Teach to One” that help each and every student experience success.
Vote even if you think it doesn’t matter…. and be grateful you still can!
Network Schools - Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for 