Mid-Riffs contributor Stuart Buck has a book coming out in May.  The book titled “Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation” investigates the origins of the pejorative ”acting white” slur. You can pre-order the book here at Amazon, and you can find Stuart’s author pages here and here .

Monday’s Atlanta Journal Constitution had a good op-ed about the book. Stuart’s thesis is summed up in the following excerpt from that piece.

“The analogy I would draw is treatment for cancer,” said Buck, speaking by phone from Arkansas. “Segregation is like a cancer that we had to get rid of, but the treatment that saved our lives had unintended side effects.”

While black students often attended segregated schools that lacked the resources of white facilities, Buck says the schools served as the connective tissue in a community that historically valued education.

“In segregated schools, black children had consistently seen other blacks succeeding in the academic world,’’ he says. “The authority figures and role models — teachers and principals — were all black. And the best students in the schools were black as well.”

While black parents welcomed integration, they had hoped for a merger of black and white schools. Instead, they witnessed the destruction of black schools and the erasure of the culture, community and closeness that the schools had created. Their children marched off to white schools where they experienced hostility and were tracked into lower-level classes. In his research, Buck found many examples of new facilities that had housed black schools being abandoned because white parents weren’t willing to send their kids to black schools.

“They did not want to send white schoolchildren into black schools, to be taught by black teachers and disciplined by black principals,” he says.

*******

Once reassigned to desegregated schools, black students “were sitting in a classroom with mostly other black students in what they believed to be the ‘dumb’ class, watching as the white students headed to the ‘smart’ class down the hall,” writes Buck.

Dispirited, black students began to associate achievement with white students and ostracize peers who joined the white kids in the “smart” classes.

Stuart also did a radio interview on Monday. You can listen here. The book should be a good read. I encourage you all to check it out.

The CBS News show 48 Hours Mystery will have Johnny Depp as a guest this Saturday and the topic will be the West Memphis Three case.  Depp, like many people around the world, believes that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Miskelley are not guilty of the crimes they were convicted of.

I can’t imagine how they could possibly try and summarize this case into an hour-long show.  The story has been developing since 1993, and two documentary films and a great book by Arkansas author Mara Leveritt have been devoted to the complexities of this story.  I urge Arkansans to watch the 48 hours episode, which will air Saturday night at 9 pm.

*UPDATE: Here’s the full episode. I actually think they did a pretty good job of condensing the important elements into a one hour show.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Also, Arkansans should be aware that the prosecutor in the video (the one sporting the moustache who says that on a scale of 1 to 10, the integrity of his case is an 11) is John Fogleman, a current candidate for the Arkansas State Supreme Court.  He’s going to have a hard time, as he should, overcoming supporters of the West Memphis Three.  Mara Leveritt sufficiently makes the case against Fogelman’s candidacy here.

On the matter of grade-inflating high schools and the Arkansas lottery scholarships, the state legislature is poised to take a step in the wrong direction.  At issue are eligibility requirements that, under current law, require students who attend identified grade-inflating high schools to jump through additional hoops in order to receive scholarships.

Currently, in order to qualify for a scholarship, high school students must complete the Smart Core curriculum and either obtain a 2.5 GPA in high school or score a 19 or better on the ACT.  Students from grade-inflating schools, however, must have both a 2.5 GPA and get an ACT score of 19 or score at a proficient level or better on the state’s End-of-Course exams to qualify for a scholarship.

Concerned members of  the state leg, such as State Sen. Joyce Elliot, are on the right track by insisting that the requirements amount to “blatantly unequal treatment” and that in effect the policy amounts to punishing students for the actions of adults.

The leg’s planned move is to delay the additional requirements by a year.  Under that scheme, any high school student with a 2.5 GPA will qualify for a scholarship.

Lame.

Removing the additional requirements isn’t the answer. I agree that punishing students for what is ultimately a failing of the adults running their schools is a mistake.  But removing additional measures of achievement and ability is not the answer.  If anything, they should make the tougher requirements proposed for students of  grade-inflating schools apply to everyone.

Using GPA as a sole indicator of eligibility is problematic.  Making it possible for every student in Arkansas to get a scholarship with a 2.5 GPA is only going to lead to more grade inflation in Arkansas’ high schools.  Teachers will be put in the uncomfortable position of having their grading decisions mean a great deal more than they already do, and the pressure to inflate grades will be even higher.  Just look at the situation in Georgia, where scholarships are based on GPA.  Grade inflation there is rampant, and USA Today reports that 40% of college freshman lose their scholarships after the first year.

Another problem with basing scholarships on GPA is that it gives students an incentive to take less challenging courses.  This is especially problematic when one considers that future scholarship renewals will be based upon college GPA.  Again, Georgia provides an example.  A study by Thomas Dee and Linda Jackson found that:

“students whose major course of study is in engineering,  computing, or the natural sciences are 21 to 51% more likely to lose their HOPE Scholarships than students in other disciplines. These results suggest that the eligibility standards used in Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship program may have some important and unintended consequences. In particular, such standards appear horizontally inequitable in that they financially punish those HOPE Scholars whose chosen course of study provides fewer opportunities to earn high grades. This differential may also be noteworthy since it could constitute a strong incentive that influences the course and major selection of subsequent college students. Such a change in the incentives facing college students could be particularly relevant to policy given the recent evidence on the growing importance of science and math skills for the distribution of wages.”

In other words, students will have an immediate financial incentive, in both high school and college, to take easier classes.  In Arkansas, students with a C- average while in college will lose their money, while students with a C+ won’t.  Bad news , unless maybe you think the world needs more communications and marketing majors.

The bottom line is that, at a minimum, all students who receive Arkansas lottery scholarships should have at least a 2.5 GPA, AND be able  to score at least proficient on End-of-Course exams, AND score a measly 19 on the ACT.  Such a policy might actually curb grade inflation while diminishing the incentivisation of mediocrity.

UPDATE: The bill that passed the House and Senate yesterday removes the extra requirements for grade-inflating schools. Only Reps. Burris and Hobbs voted against removing the restrictions. To my knowledge, no one in the legislature suggested making the requirements universal.

A new study by respected economists finds large academic benefits from a KIPP school, especially for minority children:

Who Benefits from KIPP?

by Joshua D. Angrist, Susan M. Dynarski, Thomas J. Kane, Parag A. Pathak, Christopher R. Walters

Charter schools affiliated with the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) are emblematic of the No Excuses approach to public education. These schools feature a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behavior norms and a focus on traditional reading and math skills. We use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of KIPP Academy Lynn, a KIPP charter school that is mostly Hispanic and has a high concentration of limited English proficiency (LEP) and special-need students, groups that charter critics have argued are typically under-served. The results show overall gains of 0.35 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at KIPP Lynn. LEP students, special education students, and those with low baseline scores benefit more from time spent at KIPP than do other students, with reading gains coming almost entirely from the LEP group.

.35 standard deviations in math improvement per year is HUGE. That’s enough to eliminate the achievement gap in just 2 or 3 years of schooling.

As someone who canceled cable television about 4 years ago and who has the above bumper sticker on his car, I loved Obama’s advice to parents:

President Barack Obama, who is spending billions of dollars to overhaul the U.S. public education system, says there’s one sure thing parents can do to help their kids learn, regardless of financial means: Forbid them from watching television on school nights.

Of his own daughters, Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8, Obama told Essence magazine: “The girls don’t watch TV during the week. Period.”

So are we going to see an overall drop in Nielsen ratings? Probably not, but aspirational advice like this is still useful.

In Arkansas, and in many other states with large rural populations, policymakers struggle to develop appropriate strategies to deliver high quality courses with high quality teachers to students in sparsely populated rural schools and districts.  And of course, the state mandates that each of these districts deliver the full array of curricular options to students each year.

Recently, our policymakers have chosen consolidation as the preferred strategy to ensure high quality for all students.  In doing that, we have reduced the number of school districts in the state by about 60 to about 250 and we have eliminated most districts with total enrollments of under 350.    Nevertheless, Arkansas still is populated with many tiny schools in many small districts throughout the rural areas of the state.  How can these schools afford to hire a high quality high school math teacher, for example , for upper-level math classes with only a handful of students enrolled?

The short answer is: they can’t.  And this brings us to a recent seminar at the UA Fayetteville earlier this month in which a Harvard Prof stopped by to tout the achievements of a virtual cyber- school in Florida and argue that the improvements in technology will help improve school coursework — whether we like it or not!

As reported in the local paper, the Harvard Prof argued for a mix of virtual coursework with traditional coursework.  And in Florida, this works as schools can purchase individual courses for their students from the Florida Virtual Academy.  In this case, the traditional schools do not have an interest in battling the virtual school as a competitor.  If the students want to take one class from the Florida Virtual School,  so be it; the brick and mortar school in the neighborhood still delivers the bulk of the curriculum and, importantly, receives the bulk of the per-pupil funding.

Unfortunately, in Arkansas, we can’t adopt such a model.  We do have an Arkansas Virtual Academy (serving K-8) and an Arkansas Virtual High School, but these are not as flexible as the Florida model.  The K-8 school is an all-or-nothing proposition — that is, students must be enrolled in all classes in this school or not at all.  And the virtual high school is a pilot program aimed at providing options for struggling students in need of an alternative learning environment.

State Policymakers — let’s step up and make technology our friend.  Let’s loosen the rules and allow school districts or students to take some coursework from the virtual schools while remaining enrolled in the local smaller schools.  If nothing else, this seems like an ideal model for upper-level math and science courses.  Teachers skilled in these disciplines are in such high demand that it is impossible to think that we will find them for all of our 250 or so districts.  Let’s instead, find several excellent teachers in these areas, and have them build and teach online versions of these courses from our virtual school site so that districts throughout the state can all have access to such skilled teaching.

And I think that math is the way to try this out.  Universities and community colleges are already employing technology to teach college algebra and college calculus to thousands of students across the country.  Why?  Perhaps because interactive technology lends itself perfectly to courses focused on learning mathematical formulae and problem solving and the need for constant practice.  Some might worry that students need teachers to interact with while learning challenging math.  However, it may be true (and I have observed some college-level cyber-classes that support this) that interactive computer-based programs may be better able to interact with students in a 1-to-1 way than are teachers in traditional classrooms with 20-or-so students.  With each student performing at his or her own pace, it is not clear how teachers can efficiently work; however, interactive math programs can easily pay attention to each student’s pace, move her own to the next skill after she has mastered the earlier skill or provide additional explanation or practice when it is needed.

Sure, cyber-classes are not as tailored for a seminar discussing Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, or a Separate Peace, but they may be just what the Professor ordered for isolated schools in rural Arkansas who cannot find qualified math or science teachers.   We are at the point in Arkansas where two small school districts named Weiner and Delight have recently proposed a district merger, despite the fact that they are more than 200 miles apart! The Arkansas State Board of Education said no to this peculiar proposal.  Perhaps our policymakers — with the help of technology — can offer a better way for these small districts to stay in business and offer quality curricula to our state’s rural students.

As a lifelong Arkansan it is almost a foregone conclusion that I am not all that fond of the state to our southwest.  And I just discovered another reason to dislike Texas.  Wingnuts on the Texas Board of Education are working to single-handedly rewrite history. Don McLeroy, the same board member who attempted to remove science from the science books, and his band of imperialist “Christians” want the Texas social studies guidelines rewritten to portray America “as a nation intended to be emphatically Christian.” The New York Times had a great article on Sunday detailing the battle.

Why, exactly, should the rest of us care? Well because Texas’..

… $22 billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in the country. Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State.

McLeroy contends that “textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict.” He may have a point there, but he goes too far when he attempts to force his particular brand of religion on other people’s children.

While it is true that a Judeo-Christian world view certainly influenced the founders’ thinking and that at the time of the nation’s founding, religion was more a part of civic life than it is today, it is also true that the authors of the constitution took great pains to protect individual liberty and choice. They did not set in place a system to ensure people remained Christian. They created a system of government which they thought would ensure that people remain free.

Religion is not at odds with liberty; McLeroy’s authoritarian nature is.

I made a trip down to Little Rock with Jay Greene today, and for lunch we met up with Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times and Warwick Sabin of the Oxford American. As you would expect, this meeting of the minds lead to some pretty spirited discussion of education and politics in Arkansas. I found the conversation quite enjoyable, and it appears both Jay and Max did as well.

The four of us found much common ground over some excellent burgers at the Copper Grill. We seemed to agree that there are some glaring inequities in education opportunity, and that schools need more flexibility to recruit and retain the best and brightest teachers (rockstar teachers as Jay puts it). We also agreed that high standards are a must and that rewarding students for their achievement shows promise.

I hope that this initial conversation leads to some more lively discussions in the future. Next time you guys are up in Fayetteville, drinks are on me.

On Monday, the Northwest Arkansas Times ran an op-ed from a local tea-partyer, James Laubler, that went on at length about the Fayetteville School Board’s plan to use a combination of reallocation and refinancing  to pay for improvements to the current high school.

Laubler made a couple of reasonable points.  It is reasonable to wonder if the Board can make good on their promise of budget cuts (which have yet to be spelled out) and whether or not expected future revenues will hold true.  But it isn’t accurate to say that the board has decided to “circumvent the voters.”  The Board has a budget that they are free to work with, and they are free to allocate the approved budget as they see fit.  Unlike the situation with the proposed millage that was defeated, the overall size of the district’s budget is not being grown under the current plan.  If anything, the Board should be commended for coming up with a fiscally responsible way to improve the current high school.

Laubler even seems to take issue with the very idea that the federal government is subsidizing the rate at which the district will have to pay back any stimulus money it receives, but one can hardly blame the Board for making sure that Fayetteville takes advantage of what’s being offered.  If Laubler has an issue with the provisions of the stimulus money, then he should take that up with federal lawmakers.  From our local perspective, it would be ridiculous to not take advantage of the opportunity.

The real problem with Lauber’s rant, though, was that his arguments dissolved into outlandish melodrama.  He said the Board must be “socialists, communists, or bought politicians with no moral compass,” and he reminds us all that “this is not a socialist or communist nation.”  He says there is a movement in this country to take back “our country from these types,”  followed up with threatening language that he “wouldn’t want to be the one to ultimately challenge these patriots.”  He closes with more threatening innuendo, as he references the American Revolution and tells the Board not to “anger us the way the last king did.”

Ugh.

Ultimately, and with sweet irony, the tactics employed by those who rely on  this type of  grandstanding are the architects of their own undoing.  While there are some segments of our population who may be moved by such demagoguery, most Americans prefer common sense and reasonable discussion.   They respect the opinions of reasonable people, and reject those who aren’t.

If anything, Lauber’s letter assured sensible Fayettevillians that the Board’s plans are sensible.  There’s not many who want to be on the side of the local McCarthyite.

Apparently, political ineptitude runs throughout the “tea party” movement.  Recent events at their national convention were downright embarrassing.

In the previous post, I said that I would address whether Arkansas reading tests do a good job of covering material that is actually taught in the rest of the curriculum.

So I looked at the grades 3-8 Benchmark tests available here. I wasn’t impressed with what I found.

In a recent year, Arkansas students collectively faced the following reading passages:

• A passage on Olympic bobsledding

• A recipe for cookies
• A fictional story about children writing mean notes
• A story about kings, dragons, and princesses
• The history of a set of duckling statues in Boston
• Instructions on how to make a toy car
• A fictional story called “My Mom Hates to Cook”
• A passage titled “The Invention of the Trampoline”
• A passage about snowboarding
• A fictional story called “Priscilla and the Wimps”
• A biography of a female French painter from the 1800s
• A passage about buying a skateboard
• A story (possibly fictional, possibly not) about growing up in an old farmhouse
• The history of Jumbo the elephant in P.T. Barnum’s circus
• An inspirational story called “You Can Do Anything,” in which Boy Scouts plant trees
• A biographical passage about Alexander the Great
• A story about a female working at NASA
• A historical passage about George Washington

To be sure, these reading passages — considered collectively — do cover a few topics that touch on historical, scientific, or cultural knowledge (such as fertilizing trees or NASA or the history of colonial America). Even the story about kings and dragons implicitly requires that students be familiar with the concepts of “king,” “princess,” etc.

But it seems obvious that these reading tests could do a much better job of covering the actual knowledge that we expect children to learn in particular grades. Why do Arkansas tests have so much inane and poorly written fiction — not to mention passages about bobsledding, snowboarding, and skateboarding (none of which are important parts of the curriculum, I hope)?

One theory, of course, is that by testing how kids can read inane passages about random facts, the Arkansas tests won’t unfairly privilege the cultural knowledge of a few rich kids. But that’s not true: rich kids from Bentonville who vacation in Colorado are probably much more likely to know about snowboarding and bobsledding (for example) than is a rice farmer’s kid in the Delta.

To replace all of this fluff, the reading tests should include more passages about works of art or music, American government and history, and the sciences. And those passages should be directly tied to the official curricular Frameworks. This would be fair(er) to the poor Delta kid who might at least have had a chance to learn about the material in various other classes. On top of that, reading tests would effectively be testing the entire curriculum, not just a detached skill called “reading.”

P.S. I’m not considering here whether the Frameworks themselves are well written. On a quick glance, some of them are specific enough to be useful to a classroom teacher, but there are plenty of standards like the following, which could mean anything and which would be very difficult to test: “Analyze the impact of ideas, information, and technology on global interdependence” (that’s for 4th graders).