This story in yesterday’s Times reveals the frustrations parents increasingly face in upscale urban neighborhoods: you’ve paid, maybe overpaid, for a house in a neighborhood that features a great public school. But…you’re not alone and all of a sudden there’s not room in the building.

You’re out of luck.

And…upper middle-class parents are coming to realize what many parents in struggling neighborhoods have long known, that you have no right to a school. A school district, so long as they violate no laws or so long as a lawyer can’t prove that the district is purposely discriminating against a certain group, can assign students anyway they like.

How do you teach revision when revision, for most students, is about the grade? What happens when students re-work a paper, not because they’re engaged or even care about the topic or the craft of writing, but because they want a better grade?

I have allowed students to re-write papers since I began teaching and I’ve usually graded the paper afresh and taken the highest grade.

But I’m finding that students are using the re-write process as a way to avoid completing drafts. I’m also finding that it’s seen as a right rather than a responsibility; students feel that they deserve to submit as many drafts as they want. That’s my fault for opening that door.

I think next semester I’ll demand drafts and engage in the peer-editing process while making it abundantly clear that the final draft is indeed the final draft. And I’ll make the students paste the rubric into the paper so that the expectations are even clearer.

I wonder what experienced teachers would say when asked what they want students to come out of teacher certification programs with, particularly if they were limited to things that can be taught. In other words, the traits I’d identify as necessary to succeed in a classroom — humility, intellectual curiosity, self-awareness, compassion — are very difficult to teach.

What kinds of things, then, can be taught?

My first thoughts:

1. the ability to look at a state standard and immediately have several ideas as to how to shape a classroom so that students could attain it.
2. the ability to look at a topic and see multiple approaches to teaching it.

More to come.

It’s not shocking that someone reported that Reading First was ineffective; what’s hard to believe is that the report came from within the Department of Education.

Glad to see that the magic of repeating “science” and “research” as often as possible will eventually fade.

So I often wonder what drives people to become superintendents of large urban districts. The newcomer to Philadelphia, Arlene Ackerman, will arrive to this situation: a grim budget with little chance of any real increase in funding.

Why would take a position when you wouldn’t really be given the tools to do the job? Unless you’re a politician with an understanding of how to leverage certain kinds of funding from the state (see Vallas, Paul), you’ve got no real chance of success.

In the introduction to her recent book, Schools Betrayed, Kathryn Neckerman quotes Kenneth Clark:

“The dominant and disturbing fact about the ghetto schools is that the teachers and the students regard each other as adversaries. Under these conditions the teachers are reluctant to teach and the students retaliate and resist learning.”

It’s a cool quote, for its continued relevance, and I’m very interested in this book. I’m particularly interested in two portions of her argument:

One, she claims in the introduction that the policies and institutional structure created in the early portion of the twentieth century would play a critical role in the creation of an unequal education after 1945. I’d like to see how she makes her argument as I can see both sides for Philadelphia. On one hand, many of the kinds of inequalities that would become pervasive in the 1960s and 1970s already existed; on the other, the vast new migrations shifted the political and social fabric of the city during the 1950s.

Two, she seems ready to base her argument on the daily interactions occurring in classrooms and hallways across Chicago’s schools. I’m very interested in the source base for this portion of the argument.

Neckerman, Kathryn M. Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-city Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

This article describes the difficulty most parents who want to remain in the city face in negotiating the bureaucracies of large school systems.

Twelve years of constant struggle vs. six months of deciding which suburb to live in, selling one’s home, and moving.

I don’t want to live in the ‘burbs but I do envy the ability of folks to buy a home and not have to face the “which school” question again.

There’s a cool editorial here about different programs in Chicago schools that keep kids engaged.

While I whole-heartedly agree with the premise — if school kids have one thing they look forward to, be it computers, music, sports, comic books, or one great class, they’ll perform better — there’s a false note in the opening paragraphs:

In most communities, students attend school every day because they are convinced that educational achievement is essential to their future success.

There are many reasons why kids go to school — socializing, parental pressure — but future success? That feels like an adult category that kids will make a nod towards without really buying it.