Book Reviews – Education Next

The Evolving Science of How We Read

Natalie Wexler — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:00:36 +0000

The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America
by Adrian Johns
The University of Chicago Press, 2023, $32.50; 504 pages.

As reviewed by Natalie Wexler

If you’ve been following the debates on the “science of reading” over the past several years, prepare to be surprised when you delve into Adrian Johns’s recent book on the subject.

In its current incarnation, the term “science of reading” is primarily used to refer to a substantial body of research showing that many children—perhaps most—are likely to experience reading difficulties unless they receive systematic instruction in phonics and other foundational reading skills in the early years of schooling. Those who advocate that approach are on one side of the debate.

On the other side are the proponents of “balanced literacy,” the currently dominant approach to reading instruction in the United States. The educators and literacy gurus who lead that movement acknowledge that phonics is important, but they maintain that it’s generally sufficient to teach bits of phonics as the need arises—perhaps when a child is stuck on a particular word—while also encouraging children to use pictures and context clues to guess at words.

That stance is a modification of the one taken by the philosophical predecessor of the balanced literacy movement, known as “whole language,” which swept the country in the latter part of the 20th century. Whole language maintained that children learn to read by grasping whole words rather than sounding them out using individual letters. Science-of-reading proponents say that the balanced-literacy school’s approach to phonics doesn’t align with science any more than whole language did.

The revelation in Johns’s book is that throughout most of the 20th century the contemporaneous science of reading was firmly on the side of whole language. Johns, a professor of intellectual history at the University of Chicago, spends almost the entirety of his 500-page book on that era. For a reader whose understanding of the subject has been formed in the recent past, the result is a topsy-turvy, Alice-in-Wonderland experience.

Johns begins his account with the 19th-century American psychologist James McKeen Cattell. Like many of his peers, Cattell engaged in precise measurements of physical reactions and often used himself as an experimental subject. Initially, that led him to attempt to read and write under the influence of various substances—hashish, alcohol, cannabis, morphine—and assess, as best he could, the results.

Adrian Johns

But it was another aspect of his research that had a lasting influence: he invented a device that limited a reader to viewing just one character at a time to ascertain the shortest time in which people could identify characters correctly. His experiments led him to conclude that readers perceived whole words—or even complete sentences—more quickly than individual characters. Later researchers repeatedly confirmed that finding.

Cattell’s device was the granddaddy of a slew of similar contraptions—the kinetoscope, the ophthalmograph, and, most notably, the eye-movement recorder and the tachistoscope—that, judging from the illustrations in the book, resembled medieval torture instruments. The objective, through about the 1960s, was the precise measurement of eye movements with the goal of increasing reading speed.

Johns does his best to make the minutiae of these painstaking experiments engaging, but it’s an uphill battle. He quotes William James as remarking of these studies—many of which were conducted in Germany—that they could only have arisen in “a land where they did not know what it means to be bored.”

And the question, as Johns eventually acknowledges, is whether this research made much difference. To the extent that scientists focused on improving the reading ability of the populace—which then, as now, was a cause for great concern—the assumption seems to have been that a faster reader was necessarily a better one. The focus was on training readers to move their eyes more quickly, leading to the “speed reading” boom of the mid-20th century. While some researchers still measure eye movements, merely increasing reading speed is no longer the goal.

On the other hand, the scientific consensus that readers grasped whole words rather than individual characters made a huge difference to reading instruction—and not a positive one. By the 1930s, Johns writes, “it was simply impossible to buy elementary books that were not written on the whole-word principle.” One prominent reading scientist, William S. Gray, was the moving force behind the Dick and Jane readers, the best-known embodiment of the “look-say” method, which predated whole language. Children who could memorize sentences like “Run, Spot, run” were thought to be learning to read.

Johns takes us on journeys down many and various byways. We learn, for example, that researchers applied what they knew about pattern recognition to help World War II pilots identify distant aircraft and avoid crash landings. We get a tale about how in the late 1930s, fading movie diva Gloria Swanson hatched a plan to develop a “luminous paint” by recruiting European inventors who were being persecuted by the Nazis. But readers may wonder what this information is doing in a book about the science related to reading.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot about the science of reading that Johns leaves out of his account—including applied science having to do with reading instruction. He mentions that Jeanne Chall’s famous survey of reading pedagogy research, published in 1967 as Learning to Read: The Great Debate, found that the consensus of some 30 experimental studies “was overwhelmingly in favor of including at least some phonics instruction.” But Johns doesn’t describe any of those studies or the researchers who conducted them. Similarly, when discussing Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 bombshell Why Johnny Can’t Read, Johns ignores the experimental studies cited there that—according to Flesch—demonstrate the superiority of phonics instruction.

This is a significant omission. The studies done by Cattell and his successors were, according to reading researcher Timothy Shanahan, accurate and reliable basic research: adult readers do recognize words more quickly than letters. The mistake was to conclude that children should therefore be taught to read by memorizing whole words. “Studies quite consistently have found decoding instruction to be advantageous,” Shanahan notes in his paper “What Constitutes a Science of Reading Instruction?”

Johns acknowledges that point only obliquely, remarking toward the end of the book that he is not questioning “the current consensus that a ‘decoding’ model is the preferred basis for teaching early readers.” To the extent that he discusses recent science-of-reading research—much of it focused on brain imaging—he seems skeptical. Neuroscience, he observes, “rarely has much to suggest about how to teach.” True, but Johns could have said the same about the basic research of the past that he spent the previous 400 pages detailing.

Johns’s skepticism about current reading research stems from his intuition that reading is about much more than decoding. Reading, he observes, “is a variegated and dynamic practice, not reducible to one basic and unchanging perceptual skill.” Indeed it is, but Johns has omitted from his account another hugely significant yet far more complex aspect of reading: comprehension.

In a way, that omission isn’t surprising, given that in current usage the “science of reading” often denotes only studies of decoding. But, as with his omission of experimental studies of phonics instruction, Johns’s failure to include any of the extensive research on reading comprehension renders his history seriously incomplete. That research, which includes studies on the roles of knowledge and metacognitive strategies in the reading process, began as far back as the 1970s.

Still, The Science of Reading is a thorough summary of at least part of the science of reading, if not all of it. It’s also a useful reminder that science can change radically over time.

Natalie Wexler is an education writer and author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—And How to Fix It.

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Why Do Schools Cling to ‘Stupid’ Ideas?

Frederick Hess — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 09:01:16 +0000

Rick Ginsberg and Yong Zhao are out with an intriguing new book, Duck and Cover: Confronting and Correcting Dubious Practices in Education. The title refers to the mantra of 1950s-era school drills, back when a nation living under the threat of nuclear holocaust taught its children to “duck and cover” in the event of a Soviet attack.

As the authors explain in their introduction, “The practice was simple. If there was imminent fear of a bomb hitting a school or landing in its vicinity, students were trained to dive under their desks and cover their heads with their hands.” The implication, of course, was that kneeling under their desk would protect students from a nuclear blast. Spoiler: It wouldn’t. But the Federal Civil Defense Program produced the 1951 film “Duck and Cover,” anyway, in which Bert the cartoon turtle cheerfully taught a generation to “duck and cover.”

As Ginsberg and Zhao drolly observe, “This has to be one of the most stupid educational policies ever enacted.” Why did so many policymakers and educators go along with a policy that terrified young students while doing nothing to protect them? Ginsberg and Zhao argue that policymakers and educators felt obliged to do something—and, if something stupid was the only option, well, they’d do that. They offer this as a metaphor for many foolish, ineffectual policies in American schooling.

I’m a fan of both authors. Ginsberg is dean of education at the University of Kansas, former board chair of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, a savvy observer of school reform, and an old friend. Zhao is a distinguished professor at Kansas and a refugee from communist China, whose contempt for bureaucracy and quasi-authoritarian meddling has made him one of the nation’s more heterodox education thinkers.

In the course of the book’s brisk 156 pages, Ginsberg and Zhao skewer a lot of sacred cows. The 19 chapters cover the educational waterfront: social-emotional learning (SEL), educational technology, college and career readiness, class size, dress codes, professional development, teacher evaluation, gifted education, testing, school board governance, and much more.

The breadth of topics hints at both the strengths and the weaknesses of this volume. Its great strength is its evenhanded willingness to say critical things about a lot of popular ideas. Readers of every ilk can rest assured that they’ll find some things to delight them and others that infuriate them. In our polarized world, this marks a welcome departure from the familiar groupthink. The authors deserve kudos for that alone.

Their approach also allows them to cover a lot of ground, making a number of provocative observations and offering a number of useful cautions. But the trade-off is that they don’t spend a lot of time or energy making the case that a given idea is stupid. Most of the chapters didn’t offer parallels to “duck and cover” or so much as thumbnail sketches of the good, bad, and ugly of how these ideas work in practice.

Thus, when it comes to SEL, Ginsberg and Zhao note the pressure school leaders face from “experts and researchers, do-gooders, and sometimes snake-oil salespersons shopping their wares.” They then sketch the rationale for SEL and a number of concerns about it, before offering some sensible advice about the need to move deliberately and clarify goals. This is all fine. But none of it really makes the case that SEL is a “dubious practice” (and I say this as someone who’s been plenty skeptical of SEL). As a reader, given the promise of the book’s subtitle, central metaphor, and setup, this felt like less than I bargained for. This is pretty consistent throughout.

And I would’ve liked to see them push harder when explaining how dubious ideas catch on and why we can be so reluctant to confront them. After all, I’ve explored the frenzied pace of school reform and why some reforms might appeal more than others. Given that, I hoped for more than the broad reminder that “schools actually implement a lot of different things” and the observation that “duck-and-cover policies persist because they aren’t questioned.” At the outset, the book promises a bold exploration of folly; on this count, it delivers something less than that.

Ultimately, though, this is a timely and valuable contribution. Ginsberg and Zhao have penned a fair-minded survey of education policy, with a healthy emphasis on the need to think more deliberately about how things actually work. And that’s a worthwhile exercise and a much-needed reminder, one that educators, policymakers, and advocates should take to heart.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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Think Deep, Aim High

Matthew Levey — Tue, 09 May 2023 09:00:46 +0000

David M. Steiner asks us to “imagine a student in front of a Rothko painting.”

A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools
by David M. Steiner
Rowman & Littlefield, 2023, $80, 225 pages.

As reviewed by Matthew Levey

In the four decades since A Nation at Risk warned that American schools were failing, we’ve increased education spending, tried to improve curriculum and teacher training, unleashed market forces, attended to the “whole child,” and imitated Finland—among other efforts. Yet millions of K–12 students still read, write, and add as poorly as ever.

David Steiner, former head of Hunter College’s School of Education and later state education commissioner of New York, has seen it all, and now he offers his approach. As his book’s title signals, he believes the fundamental challenge is that high school students are not asked to think deeply enough.

Based on his family history—which he elides—his concern is not surprising. David Steiner is not only an education scholar and administrator but also the son of George Steiner, one of the 20th century’s most revered literary critics and scholars of language. George Steiner was an unapologetic elitist. When he was six, his father taught him to read the Iliad. In Greek.

The apple fell right under the tree. David Steiner grew up in Cambridge, England, attended Oxford and Harvard, and went on to a career in academia, the arts, and education leadership. The state of K–12 education is grim, he tells us. But, borrowing from John Webster, one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known contemporaries, Steiner declares, “Look you, the stars still shine!” By “thinking further,” we can help children realize the pursuit of happiness promised them in the Declaration of Independence. We must ground education firmly in ethical reflection, aesthetic sensibility, and academic learning, Steiner tells the reader. “All three are crucial in forging a fulfilling life.”

Steiner believes every child can rise to the highest heights, if only leaders and educators aim higher. Schools should impart eudaimonia, “the shared and universal telos of human existence,” he writes. Guided by Aristotle, students should be taught to steer themselves, using reason. “In contrast to previous failed efforts at teaching explicit ‘rudimentary ethical systems,’” Steiner argues,

we need to reconsider ethical behavior from the ground up. Aristotle is especially helpful here because he directly links eudaimonia (human flourishing) and ethics. He also argues that it is our ability to employ reason guided by virtue that is indispensable to a well-lived life.

Steiner asks us to “imagine a student in front of a Rothko painting.” The student struggles because “there is no immediately accessible ‘meaning.’” She wants to walk on. “Aware of this reaction, the teacher prompts the student to stop, to encounter, to keep looking, making the student hyper-aware of what is going on in the visual encounter.” A high school run in accord with this vision would be a wonder to behold.

Steiner knows “raising educational outcomes will almost certainly lead to more students being overqualified for the jobs they will occupy.” Nonetheless, he writes, “a higher level of education is desirable because it represents an absolute good.” The thought reminds me of playwright Garson Kanin’s line, engraved on the sidewalk leading to the main branch of the New York Public Library: “I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world full of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.” Observing our current politics, many readers will agree with Steiner.

Steiner acknowledges that we have to ameliorate several problems with K–5 schooling before we can tackle his lofty goals for learning. Because phonics is not taught consistently, despite growing awareness of its foundational importance, students struggle to read fluently when they begin to encounter more-sophisticated books. Because curricula vary from classroom to classroom, students don’t build background knowledge from a set of common texts. Because advances in cognitive psychology are not incorporated into teacher-training programs, teachers are less effective than they could be.

David M. Steiner

The author recognizes that myriad “shiny distractions” like grit, growth mindset, and social-emotional learning further impede progress toward his vision. He worries that the public-education system’s “conflicted and fragmentary aims and disparate educational tools” make realizing his ideals “next to impossible.” Regardless, he says, “the most pressing problem in American K–12 education is that the teaching of academic knowledge in our middle schools, and still more so in our high schools, leaves students bored, undermotivated, and often unable to move beyond the most basic levels of understanding.”

If Steiner had supported this inspiring vision with the wisdom he has gained from experience, it would have strengthened the book. He curiously avoids recounting lessons he learned as dean of an education school and then education commissioner of one of the nation’s largest states. His support for Hunter College’s alternative teacher-certification program, developed in partnership with leading charter-school networks, garnered headlines and criticism. Did teachers certified under this program prove more effective than their traditionally certified peers? Does he think we should change the way teachers are certified in general? I agree that “policymakers and parents cannot give up pressing for . . . educational changes across the entire spectrum of public schools,” but Steiner provides few insights from his career as to how these reformers can be more successful at improving student outcomes.

A second challenge is that many parents don’t share Steiner’s aspirations for their children. They’re not philistines, but they define success differently—perhaps in terms of athletic achievement or working in a part-time job. Like it or not, the number of parents concerned that their high school graduate doesn’t understand Kant’s deontological ethics is small. American school governance tolerates such dissent, as we’ve seen in recent debates over how to teach about race, gender, and even the Holocaust. Sharing any lessons he learned about the compromises democracy demands would have enriched Steiner’s book.

Independently run schools like the one Steiner attended as a child can pursue academically demanding approaches because they do not serve all students. The closest public-school analogues in America are charter schools. Steiner knows of Success Academy, the largest charter network in New York, which makes no excuses for students or staff who don’t aim high. He cites charter schools’ academic achievements and popularity among Black families but doesn’t comment on whether Success or other charters could help realize his vision.

Finally, Steiner discounts the impact of curriculum reforms of the last decades. He praises the Common Core State Standards because they “insist on the importance of teaching decoding skills in early education” but then decries as “drastically reductive” standards that call for students to “analyze” and “determine” points of view or central ideas of a text. He concurs with E. D. Hirsch that “building a storehouse of knowledge is indispensable” to becoming a fluent reader but later calls Hirsch’s “overarching claim about the importance of background knowledge . . . flawed.” Steiner agrees that, to change society, students need to acquire the language and knowledge “of those protecting the status quo.” But Hirsch’s approach is too transactional for Steiner, producing “impoverished” English and history classes. Hirsch doesn’t demand enough of teachers, in Steiner’s view. Steiner wants students “to develop a more sophisticated experience of reading, and at an earlier age.” As a guide, he offers an excerpt from Book 10 of Plato’s Republic.

I share Steiner’s wish, but, having used Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum—which Steiner promulgated as exemplary—I can say teachers are still learning how best to teach reading; few are ready to follow the guidance of ancient philosophers. Hirsch’s transactional approach may not lift us to Steiner’s Platonic ideal, but it strikes me as a predicate step, and one that we do poorly, if at all, in most schools.

A system of school choice that allows sympathetic leaders to put Steiner’s vision into action and attract families might realize his admirable and beautiful ideals to some degree. That was my intention with the International Charter School, which I founded in Brooklyn 10 years ago. The Great Hearts network does similar work, at a larger scale, in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana. Classical Charter in the Bronx is a third example. The school system imagined in A Nation at Thought would be a light unto nations, a city upon a hill, inspiring to us all. Alas, despite his decades of experience, Steiner includes little concrete advice on how schools might realize this inspiring dream.

Matthew Levey headed the International Charter School and writes on K–12 education.

This article appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Levy, M. (2023). Think Deep, Aim High: A grand vision of American education, with scant practical advice. Education Next, 23(3), 72-73.

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A Distorted Lens on the Teaching Profession

Daniel Buck — Wed, 03 May 2023 09:00:14 +0000

The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession
by Alexandra Robbins
Dutton, 2023, $29; 384 pages.

As reviewed by Daniel Buck

Almost every American has gone to school, so teaching is a familiar profession. But attending school gives us as much insight into the job of teaching as riding in an airplane tells us about piloting.

In The Teachers, investigative reporter Alexandra Robbins attempts to demystify the profession by following the lives of three teachers over the course of a year. As a teacher myself, I found moments in the book humorously accurate. However, as Robbins moves from discussing the day-to-day teaching experience into larger political debates, her book becomes heavy on rhetoric and anecdote while lacking in investigative rigor. Her narrow point of view is shared by many decisionmakers in American education, and it influences policy in ways that waste taxpayer money and hamper student learning.

First, the positives: A few of the book’s themes ring particularly true. For example, perhaps the most stressful aspect of a teacher’s job is classroom management. For at least a decade, the trend in school discipline has been toward leniency, which has made behavior ever worse and classroom management harder. Robbins writes that, in one of her focal teacher’s schools, “disciplinary issues were on the rise because the principal didn’t hold people accountable for them.” One teacher lamented that many faddish disciplinary approaches that seemed humane, such as “trauma-informed pedagogy,” often amount to little more than zero consequences for poor behavior.

Alexandra Robbins

A handful of other examples stand out: the incompetent district trainer who provides no real training but instead merely hands a teacher a list of web links and then smiles, blinking in confusion at the teacher’s disappointment; students getting up to sharpen a pencil or blow their nose in a brilliant display of work avoidance; the student who has selective mutism, though no one has informed the teacher of it.

But that ends my list of the book’s merits. The discussion of pandemic policies is perhaps the most galling example of Robbins’s unwillingness to engage seriously in complex education debates. She complains that “as school systems in many areas of the country” remained closed for in-person instruction, “sentiment toward teachers nose-dived among certain vehemently one-track-minded parents.” Meanwhile, Betsy DeVos and other politicians evinced a “clear indifference to people’s lives.”

In Robbins’s telling, advocates of returning to in-person learning sooner rather than later were motivated solely by indifference and bad faith—not by a concern for student learning, or for students’ mental well-being, or for the strain placed on working parents, or by the evidence early on that schools weren’t super-spreader sites. Robbins sticks by her analysis even as it becomes clear that school closures obliterated two decades of learning gains and worsened a downward trend in adolescent mental health.

Moving on to other political debates, Robbins peddles caricatures of dissatisfied parents and conservative critiques.

Consider her analysis of the “parents’ rights” movement. She laments that “parents’ mistreatment of teachers has accompanied an increasingly pronounced ‘us-versus-them’ mentality.” A few pages later, though, she asserts that the mass connectivity enabled by social media has turned parents into “monsters indeed.” Rather than investigating why parents have grown antagonistic and trust in public education has reached historic lows, she villainizes the parents’ movement, reinforcing the us-versus-them mentality.

Regarding Florida’s 2022 law limiting public-school instruction on sexual content—and similar legislation introduced in other states—she writes that the policies “put LGBTQ teachers in a really difficult situation where they’re forced, essentially, to disguise their identity or the status of their relationships in order to fend off running afoul of these bills.” Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act (dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by detractors) does not limit teachers’ ability to discuss their identity with students. What’s more, when Americans were presented with the real goals of Governor Ron DeSantis’s bill—prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity until 4th grade—a majority of them, including 55 percent of Democrats, supported the bill. The popularity of the legislation, and the reasons for it, get nary a consideration from Robbins.

In discussing the critical race theory debate, she defines CRT as an academic framework “which is not taught in K–12 schools.” She sees conservative outrage over CRT as merely a false narrative that “politicians and activists intent on galvanizing parents co-opted.” This story line, she avers, became a stand-in for reactionary activists to oppose “teaching about racism, equity, identity, and oppression.”

Opposing CRT, however, does not necessarily equate to wanting a ban on teaching about the middle passage or American segregation. My students learn the history of Jim Crow; they read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography; we discuss America’s founding sin. Informed opponents of CRT take issue with the ideas of its founding scholars, including Richard Delgado, who said that “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

Ultimately, what astounds me most about this book is just how frequently Robbins vilifies the very teachers she claims to defend. The three main characters in the book are flawed, certainly, but they are portrayed as caring, dedicated professionals. More often than not, their greatest antagonists are other teachers: incompetent airheads on field trips, gossiping shrews, and lazy do-nothings. At times, the implicit message of the book seems to be that there are a few teachers who still care, and everyone else hates children.

The pandemic created, or at least exposed, real strains in the relationship between parents and teachers. That relationship is now dysfunctional in many ways. This book tries to explain what it’s like to be on the teacher’s side of that equation, and at times it succeeds (even if it portrays many teachers unsympathetically). But, like a marriage counselor who shows empathy for only one party in the dispute, Robbins presents a one-sided take, painting a caricature of conservative parents rather than seeking to understand them.

Many of the parental concerns mischaracterized in this book touch on real, meaningful debates. How should we fund schools? What ought children to learn? Who controls curricula? These are not questions that can be brushed aside, suggesting that anyone who raises them merely opposes education. The Teachers might work better as part of a series that includes The Students, The Parents, and The Taxpayers—all equal stakeholders in public education. On its own, the book tells only part of the story, and if policymakers and the press focus on it at the exclusion of the other actors, they’ll be making a costly mistake.

I love the teaching profession. I love the education sector. I love both the theory and practice of helping children learn. I love the political debates around schools. Unfortunately, if people read this book uncritically, they will walk away with a diminished understanding of the field. Teaching is an honorable profession, and this book does it no honors.

Daniel Buck is a teacher, senior visiting fellow at the Fordham Institute, and author of the book What Is Wrong with Our Schools?

This article appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Buck, D. (2023). A Distorted Lens on the Teaching Profession. Education Next, 23(3), 74-75.

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How Teachers Unions Became a Political Powerhouse

Daniel DiSalvo — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 10:00:34 +0000

How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education
by Michael T. Hartney
University of Chicago Press, 2022, $35; 312 pages.

As reviewed by Daniel DiSalvo

During the Covid-19 pandemic, school districts with strong teachers unions were slower to bring students back to the classroom than districts with weaker unions were. Controversy over the unions’ power to determine the mode of instruction capped off a decade in which teachers unions were the most polarizing aspect of American education politics. School reformers blame them for blocking changes to improve public education; union advocates argue they defend teachers, improve conditions for students, and prop up the labor movement.

In a new book, How Policies Make Interest Groups, Michael T. Hartney makes a courageous but careful foray into the highly charged debate over the causes and consequences of teacher unionization in America. Regarding the causes, he traces how state labor laws impelled teachers from being a politically disengaged group to becoming a “potent force in American politics.” In short, state governments created modern teachers unions. As for the consequences, Hartney argues that teachers unions have blocked many of the initiatives of the bipartisan education-reform movement and largely succeeded in preserving the traditional organization of most public schools. He also finds evidence that union political clout “can reduce [student] academic performance.” Recently, teachers unions have suffered a few setbacks, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, which prevents unions from exacting fees from nonmembers and has led to declines in membership. Yet despite such obstacles, Hartney argues that teachers unions will remain powerful players in education politics. (Disclosure: I co-authored an essay with Hartney for Education Next that was a first cut at this last claim. See “Teachers Unions in the Post-Janus World,” features, Fall 2020.)

Drawing on a wealth of data, How Policies Make Interest Groups is a statistically sophisticated study of the role of teachers unions in education policy. Hartney pulls from a number of sources, especially the National Education Association’s extensive historical records, along with his own surveys, the American National Election Study (ANES), contract data from the National Council on Teacher Quality, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, public records from a variety of states, and much more. He tries mightily to support nearly every claim with the best data available, all the while being candid about the data’s limits.

The first half of the book details the remarkable transformation of teachers from a politically disconnected group in the 1950s to a political powerhouse by the 1980s. In the 1950s, teachers did little politically besides vote, according to ANES surveys. By the 1980s, the teachers unions had established PACs in all 50 states and were sending more delegates to the Democratic National Convention than the state of California was. The change was sparked, according to Hartney, by new state collective-bargaining laws, which created an ensemble of “subsidies” that facilitated union organizing. By “organizing all teachers in a school district into a single employee bargaining unit,” Hartney writes, the new laws “made it both logistically easier and financially less costly for unions to recruit teachers to participate in politics.” Collective-bargaining agreements negotiated under the new laws established a host of privileges that facilitated union recruitment and the political mobilization of teachers. These benefits included free use of school buildings and equipment; access to teacher contact information, school mailboxes, and bulletin boards; presentation time at faculty orientation; and paid release time for teachers to work on union business.

The results were a major uptick in political activity by both individual teachers and their union organizations. After collective-bargaining laws went into effect, teachers—and only teachers—reported to the ANES a large increase in their willingness to participate politically. This is because the new laws solved the unions’ collective-action problem, creating organizations with stable memberships and revenues that could mobilize teachers. For instance, the NEA could unify its membership into a national federation and raise dues without losing members—something many other membership organizations have tried and failed to do. State labor laws thus created a “massive federated interest group capable of coordinating political action in fifty states and thousands of school districts.”

Michael Hartney

The second half of Hartney’s book examines effects of teachers unions as government-made interest groups. He shows how teachers and their unions strategically prioritize state politics for voting, lobbying, and campaign contributions. The unions give 90 percent or more of all PAC contributions in state politics made by education advocacy groups. Teachers and their unions are also very successful in school board elections—nearly a quarter of all school board members are current teachers or former educators. Because teachers unions are almost always more politically powerful than their opponents, elected officials have strong incentives to pay attention to union demands.

To assess how power translates into policy, Hartney provides a “scorecard” of the consequences of teachers union political activity. It shows that when teachers unions are on “offense,” trying to win things for their members, their record is mixed. They’ve clearly won some things they wanted, such as establishing a federal department of education. They’ve clearly lost on other things, such as the enactment of a federal public-sector collective-bargaining law. Meanwhile, they’ve had some success reducing class size and raising teacher pay (despite these two goals being in tension). However, when the unions are on “defense,” trying to block changes deemed antithetical to their interests, they are much more successful. Teachers unions have mostly thwarted efforts to impose teacher testing, merit pay, and school vouchers, as well as moves to alter tenure and seniority rights. Reformers have won some victories here and there (most notably in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans) and have had some success in creating charter schools. What’s more, the federal government now requires schools to test students in grades 3 through 8 every year and make the results transparent at the school level. But in most of the country, public schools operate pretty much the same way they did 30 years ago.

The biggest question is what it all means for kids. Sometimes teachers unions’ interests jibe with students’ interests, but sometimes they don’t. Hartney takes a stab at the most difficult and controversial topic: assessing whether union influence lowers student performance. As he stresses, the data and measurement problems of such assessments are formidable. Therefore, any results should be treated cautiously. And yet, when Hartney analyzes better measures of union power and student achievement than previous studies used, he finds that “states made less progress on the NAEP when organized teachers interests wielded greater resources in state politics.” His findings are congruent with more-methodologically sophisticated recent scholarship than with older studies that found the teachers unions had either no impact or a slight positive impact on student learning.

All told, Hartney has written a meticulous, nuanced, and thoughtful book that should be read by anyone who cares about public education in the United States. Readers on all sides of the education-policy debate will find support for their views in it. Supporters of teachers unions will find evidence that the unions are pretty good at advancing members’ interests, such as smaller class sizes and higher pay, and at blocking reforms championed by billionaire philanthropists. Critics of teachers unions will find evidence that their political power obstructs efforts to improve America’s public schools and that it may lead to lower student performance at higher cost.

Whether this book will prompt readers to revisit their prior convictions is hard to say. But Hartney’s fine-grained empiricism cuts through much of the cant and hyperbole in debates over the role of teachers unions in education policy. In that respect, among many others, it is big step forward.

Daniel DiSalvo is a professor of political science at the City College of New York-CUNY and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

DiSalvo, D. (2023). How Teachers Unions Became a Political Powerhouse: A nuanced look at the role of unions in education policy. Education Next, 23(2), 69-70.

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How to Get to Sesame Street—in 1990s Russia

Frederick Hess — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 10:00:12 +0000

Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia
by Natasha Lance Rogoff
Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, $26.95; 302 pages.

As reviewed by Frederick M. Hess

Thirty years ago,in the wake of the Cold War, the powers that be at Sesame Workshop recruited a young documentary filmmaker to bring Sesame Street to Russia. This is her story. Natasha Lance Rogoff found herself courting Russian oligarchs, assembling financial deals, recruiting puppeteers, assuaging bureaucratic sensibilities, and seeking to promote a culture of empathy amidst the violent, anything-goes culture of early 1990s Moscow.

Today, Lance Rogoff is an award-winning television producer and the wife of globe-trotting Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff (whom she meets and marries in the course of the narrative) and Putin’s Russia has little use for children’s television. But this is a tale firmly rooted in the early 1990s. And it’s quite a tale, one that doubles as an evocative primer on educational entrepreneurship, cross-national collaboration, cultural literacy, and puppet design.

In launching Ulitza Sesam, Lance Rogoff was tasked with landing Russian and American stakeholders, finding a production partner, and then producing the show. Early on, Lance Rogoff meets with Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, a former Soviet mathematician who controls Russia’s largest television network. Berezovsky, described as “Russia’s Don Corleone,” meets Lance Rogoff and her sidekick for dinner at Moscow’s first sushi restaurant, where he agrees to provide the necessary $3 million.

Thus the reader appreciates Lance Rogoff’s distress when she receives word that Berezovsky’s car has been blown up. She frantically tries to find out if he survived, and learns that no one knows but that the blast decapitated his driver. Berezovsky did survive the assassination attempt, only to flee to Europe. The deal was kaput. As one Russian television executive had warned, “It’s impossible to negotiate any deals with Russian television executives today, because one year from now any of the people in charge could be fired, in prison, or worse—dead.”

Lance Rogoff eventually connects with post-Soviet oil tycoon Vladimir Slutskyer and his circle of new-money Russian oligarchs (including Russia’s “Sausage King”). She meets them at a cement warehouse with 12-foot-high steel gates, armed guards, and a barbed-wire fence, after Slutskyer explains that the group never meets in the same place twice. Lance Rogoff drily tells the reader, “This is disconcerting, but I guess it’s a good sign they’re taking precautions. Maybe one of them will live long enough to become our partner.” The oligarchs pledge $12 million, but the deal is nixed by Lance Rogoff’s boss, who tells her, “What you’re proposing is a Ponzi scheme—cooked up by a bunch of corrupt businessmen.”

It was back to square one.

Natasha Lance Rogoff appears on set as producer of Ulitza Sesam in Moscow. Her memoir details the challenges of bringing an American-based children’s program to Russia.

Producing the children’s show featured its own frustrations. At an initial meeting with the writer and directors that Lance Rogoff hopes will anchor the show, the backlash is harsh. She shows them some Sesame Street clips. One director shakes his head, “The Sezam Street-style Monsters are not Russian, and they are too strange looking for Russia.” Lida Shurova, who gets hired as head writer, adds, “Russia has a rich, and revered puppet tradition. . . . We don’t need your American Moppets.”

Foreign-language versions of Sesame Street typically use a combination of the original American Muppets and local creations. When Lance Rogoff meets with the celebrated Russian puppeteer Kolya Komov, though, he suggests that the new show simply use his puppets instead of the Muppets. Komov sends the room into gales of laughter when he picks up his traditional folk puppet Petrushka, has it grab a tiny stick, and starts beating the sock puppet in his other hand while shouting in Russian, “I’m going to kill you!” Komov gloats, “You see? Everyone loves my puppets.” There’s also an insistence on including Baba Yaga, a Russian witch who eats children. Lance Rogoff sighs, “We have moved from Petrushka, who beats people, to a cannibal witch.” They eventually settle on three new Slavic Muppets, though the Russians complain that orange monster Kubik doesn’t look sufficiently Russian. Lance Rogoff figures the problem is the spare eyebrows. She explains to the New York puppet designers, “He has to look more like Brezhnev.”

There’s not much smooth sailing. A major curriculum-planning confab is interrupted when Chechen rebels seize Budyonnovsk. Lance Rogoff’s honeymoon ends after 12 hours when she gets a call informing her that soldiers with machine guns have seized her Moscow offices. Getting her Russian production partner to deliver promised funds is a losing struggle. As one director tells her, “It’s best to avoid delays by never writing anything down; that way you’ll never know if there are delays or not.”

At a planning session, a Russian math consultant impatiently explains, “Our preschoolers are much smarter than American children. We will need a more advanced curriculum for our show.” Dubbing American footage is a challenge because the Soviets hadn’t really dubbed international film or television for three decades; they’d had a single announcer read all the dialogue for all the characters in a monotone. And the story of the Russians’ first trip to New York City is rife with telling details—including Lance Rogoff learning that she can’t take them to a highly regarded Italian restaurant because they’d be insulted by the pasta. As her consultant tells her, “Only poor people eat noodles. Find a steakhouse.”

In the end, the show comes together, wins coveted prime-time commitments on both of Russia’s major networks, and is able to recoup its substantial costs. But the cultural tensions are stark, and revealing, throughout. Lance Rogoff muses that, despite the enthusiasm for Western products and entertainment, Russians fear for their national identity and fret over “American culture hijacking Russian childhood.” When Lance Rogoff suggests a show segment on kids running a lemonade stand, it’s rejected because it would portray children engaged in “dirty mercantile activities.” The head writer, a veteran of the old regime, rejects scripts from younger writers, sniffing that they lack “any scientific understanding of writing” and that they’re unrecognized by the Soviet-era Union of Writers.

For those of us who fear that Americans today are too flip about the evils of communism, Lance Rogoff’s frank discussion of the Soviet legacy is most welcome. She relates what one Russian executive tells her: “Every successful Russian enterprise needs a good spy. Unless someone is watching us, we Russians do not work. We’ve lived in a police state for seventy years and are creatures of habit.” In seeking the right musical mix for Sesame Street, she laments, “Since the days of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jim Morrison, the Soviet Ministry of Culture had outlawed rock music as ‘decadent, bourgeois, and incompatible with the aims of socialism.’” She notes that the Soviet state silenced “artists whose music aesthetic did not conform to communist cultural ideals.” Those unfamiliar with the realities of Soviet Russia might just get a new appreciation for life in the totalitarian superpower.

Lance Rogoff’s unsparing account is a testament to the power of perseverance, flexibility, and the conviction that this children’s show could matter in the lives of little kids in a land where people had suffered under decades of oppression. It’s ultimately a deeply inspiring tale, even if (as might be expected from a Russian history) it’s also one tempered by an epilogue that notes that Putin canceled Ulitza Sesam in 2010 and has ravaged the shoots of freedom that arose during the post-Soviet pathos.

The volume is far from flawless. There are times when the tenor grows mawkish, the narrative unclear, or the personalities indistinguishable. But such complaints are outweighed by the volume’s charms, such as this: On his first night in America, a Russian staffer tells Lance Rogoff, “People here seem so free.” He sadly ponders, “Everyone looks happy. . . . I wonder what I might have accomplished as a young man if the choice in my country had been greater.”

Lance Rogoff doesn’t know what to say. Finally, the Russian breaks the silence, his voice cracking slightly, “Natulya, I hope you realize how lucky you are that you grew up here.”

Indeed. It’s a sentiment that those of us involved in American education would do well to recall more often.

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Hess, F.M. (2023). How to Get to Sesame Street— in 1990s Russia: A tale of perseverance, flexibility, and the conviction that a children’s show could matter for kids in a land of oppression. Education Next, 23(2), 64-65.

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Resisting the Youth Sports Industrial Complex

Jonathan V. Last — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 10:00:02 +0000

Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids’ Sports—And Why It Matters
by Linda Flanagan
Portfolio, 2022, $28; 304 pages.

As reviewed by Jonathan V. Last

My younger daughter is a gifted runner. Midway through this year’s cross country season, her times started increasing. She was getting slower. I asked her what was going on. She explained that she didn’t like the feeling of total exhaustion she experienced at the end of a race, or the pressure and expectations of being out in front. So she’d decided to run at a comfortable pace and enjoy being in the pack, with her friends.

Her decision struck me as crazy. The whole point of racing is to run as fast as you can. To find your limits and push past them. To discover the drive to accomplish more than you think possible.

Also: My daughter is nine years old.

It does not matter—at all—what she does in 4th-grade cross country. And yet I almost suggested she should be running her hardest and not focused on “having fun” with her teammates.

The crazy person, it turned out, was me.

That’s the point of Linda Flanagan’s Take Back the Game, a book about the corruption of youth sports. It should be required reading for every parent. It should be handed out in the hospital along with What to Expect the First Year and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.

Flanagan, a journalist and former running coach, has pulled off a rare trick: she diagnoses a societal sickness, traces the roots of the malady, and prescribes a cure.

Linda Flanagan

The problem is that we have a Youth Sports Industrial Complex that forces kids into single-sport specialization before they hit middle school. It demands that children be involved in (expensive) club and travel sports programs starting in elementary school. It turns parents into ATMs for the businesses in this sector and Uber drivers for their progeny, because Madison must go to practice three nights a week and then, on Saturday, to the tournament that’s three hours away.

Because it’s good for her. Or something.

This sickness has many causes—including declining public funding for recreational sports and free-market dynamics—but the most significant is “college.”

I put “college” in quotation marks, because the problem is not undergraduate education, but what the idea of “college” has come to mean to us. Since 1980, the real-dollar cost of a public, four-year degree has increased more than 350 percent. At the same time, the admissions process for elite—or even just pretty good—colleges has come to resemble the Hunger Games.

My oldest kid is a high-level baseball player. He’s played with dozens of talented boys over the years, and not a single one has ever said he hoped to make it to the bigs. All of them talked about getting college scholarships.

As such, relying on achievement in youth sports as a ticket to college has become something like playing the lottery. Parents and kids hope that if they put enough time and money into a sport they can one day cash out with a scholarship—or at least entrance to a “better” school.

As is true with all lotteries, this delusion is based on a warped perception of reality. As Flanagan shows, being a recruited athlete is a huge boost in the college-admissions competition. Accomplished athletes get in to elite schools at four times the rate of legacy candidates. And at smaller schools, the athletes can be a nontrivial percentage of the yield. For instance, Georgetown University holds 158 slots for athletes in each class of 1,600 students.

But the mundane reality is that putting Jimmy into an intensive travel baseball program at age 10 costs at least $5,000 a year. If you invested that money annually in a no-load mutual fund, then you’d have about $50,000 for college by the time Jimmy packed off to State U, whether or not he got a sports scholarship. (This is not financial advice.)

Of course, people play lotteries because they’re desperate. And the evolution of college has made many parents plenty desperate.

***

The most valuable section of Take Back the Game is Flanagan’s conclusion, which reads as part policy tract and part self-help book for parents. Her suggestions are powerful because they’re so obvious.

Her first dictum is to delay entry into organized sports as long as possible. Don’t sign them up for pee-wee soccer to get a jump on the club scene—send them out into the yard to kick the ball around. Have a catch with them. Shoot baskets. Let them tumble and do cartwheels in the grass. As Flanagan says, “Just let them play.”

It really is that simple.

Flanagan understands that at some point kids may want to progress to the organized level—and from there, they might get sucked into the maw of travel sports. That’s because, as the 19th century journalist Walter Bagehot observed about financial leverage, once one person has it, everyone else must use it just to keep pace.

So if your kid winds up inside the Youth Sports Industrial Complex, give her off-ramps. All the time. Make it clear that the only reason for her to do the sport is that she wants to. That if she decides to stop swimming and take up the oboe, then all of the time and resources put into swimming over the years won’t have been “wasted”—that those experiences will have helped shape who she is.

In short: when it comes to your kid’s athletic development, present-value considerations should always dwarf future-expected returns.

Another key precept from Flanagan: The family is more important than kids’ sports.

I know people who put off family vacations because their 7th grader had a basketball tournament over winter break.

Think about what that means. Fifty years from now you, the parent, might be dead and gone. Your family could have gone on vacation and made memories that would have lasted their whole lives. And you traded that away for a couple of meaningless basketball games that no one will even remember next month?

No. The moment you get involved in travel sports, make certain that both your kids and the organization understand that family always comes first. And if the club isn’t okay with that, then find one that is.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson from Take Back the Game is that parents have agency. Youth sports have become warped, but parents don’t have to go along with it. They can carve out better paths for their families by being clear-eyed and intentional.

Jonathan V. Last is the editor of The Bulwark.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Last, J.V. (2023). Resisting the Youth Sports Industrial Complex: Children’s sports are corrupted, but parents don’t have to play along. Education Next, 23(2), 62-63.

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Tip 39: Don’t Cram

Stephen M. Kosslyn — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 10:00:04 +0000

Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy
by Daniel T. Willingham
Gallery Books, 2023, $28.99; 336 pages.

As reviewed by Stephen M. Kosslyn

In Outsmart Your Brain, Daniel Willingham has written three useful books in one, seamlessly integrated and mutually reinforcing. The book in the foreground offers a series of tips and advice to help students learn effectively and, more generally, navigate the school experience. One of the books in the background provides a review of research findings in cognitive science that buttress his tips and advice. The other gives advice to instructors on how to help students make the most of the suggestions.

Each of the book’s 14 chapters begins with a brief overview followed by a box containing two sections, one labeled “What Your Brain Will Do” (that is, what your default behavior will probably be) and the other “How to Outsmart Your Brain” (that is, how to avoid falling into the default-behavior trap). Willingham then unpacks the “How to Outsmart Your Brain” idea with a series of numbered tips (the book offers a total of 94). He describes most of these tips in a page or two and concludes each with a one-sentence summary. At the end of each chapter is a section for instructors, which itself ends with a brief summary of the main points in that section. The chapters not only cover bread-and-butter topics—such as how to understand a lecture or a difficult book, how to take notes, and how to study for and take an exam—but also offer useful tips on life skills, such as how to avoid procrastination, stay focused, and cope with anxiety.

The book is chock-full of useful, specific, and concrete advice that will help students of all stripes, from high school through graduate school. No learning stone has been left unturned, and I would venture to say that there’s something here for everyone. The writing is clear and compelling, with a warm and inviting tone. Moreover, the numerous analogies, brief demonstrations, clear explanations, and wise reflections serve to bolster the author’s points. For example, he points out that the brain evolved to function in everyday conversation, which is not organized hierarchically, and thus if you just relax and do what comes naturally while listening to lectures (which are typically organized hierarchically), you will often fail to mentally organize and understand the content. Similarly, he notes that memory is the residue of thought, and thus thinking is a crucial part of learning—even while you are listening to a lecture. In spite of the humility that he often expresses in the book, Dan Willingham was an impressive grad student when I was one of his teachers, and he has clearly grown even more capable with the passage of time.

No book is perfect, of course, and this excellent book is no exception. My main critique is that, in many cases, carrying out Willingham’s advice would require a lot of work. As I read, I jotted a “W” in the margin whenever I thought the extent of this work might discourage students from actually following the advice; I made 109 such notations. The author readily acknowledges that the student will have to put in some work to follow his advice, and he makes a good case that the investment in time and energy will ultimately be worth it. Unfortunately, we humans are prone to “temporal discounting”—we tend to discount future rewards as compared to current efforts. Thus, the sheer amount of work required may hinder students from drawing full value from this book.

Aside from this workload, students will have to contend with another hurdle, which I’ll call “meta-cognitive load”—how difficult it is to keep the material in mind, recognize later when it’s relevant, and then see how to apply it appropriately.

I think the most effective tips and advice will be those that don’t require too much effort to execute and that have low meta-cognitive load (for example, Tip 4: advice on when it’s better to do assigned readings before vs. after a lecture; Tip 39: do not cram; Tip 63: how to use a calendar effectively; Tip 76: choose your work location with care). Tips such as these offer relatively simple, straightforward advice that can be followed immediately.

Daniel T. Willingham

However, much of the book’s advice requires considerable work to execute (for example, Tips 1 and 21: analyze a lecture into a hierarchical structure; Tip 17: master a six-step process to learn general skills; Tip 28: write a summary and about three statements for each of a book’s headings; Tip 56: categorize mistakes made on an exam; Tip 32: create an encyclopedic study guide that includes absolutely everything you need to know). Similarly, many tips entail high meta-cognitive load (Tip 47: when taking an exam, remember to engage in a four-step process to get oriented and check your work; Tip 55: remember to follow three specific steps when writing essay exams; Tip 70: when you are about to procrastinate, reframe the choice to highlight the opportunity cost and focus on the least aversive part of the task; and Tip 92: if you know you will be doing something that will make you anxious, use a specific three-step process a day or two beforehand).

The book’s subtitle—“Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy”—is not quite apt. Willingham certainly makes it clear why learning is hard, but it’s a bit of a stretch to say that he shows how to make learning easy, as he acknowledges at the end of the introduction and at various points throughout
the book.

To use all of the advice in this book, the reader would need to be highly motivated to learn, have a lot of energy, be very organized and focused, and have a lot of time. For example, the author recommends that students meet with a study group to discuss what will probably be on the exam, then create encyclopedic individual study guides, then meet again (perhaps 48 hours before an exam) to quiz each other (Tip 38); this is no doubt a good idea but not realistic for many students. In fact, most college students today are not “traditional”—they need to work, or they have other responsibilities that prevent them from devoting the time to, say, preparing the kind of study guide that is recommended here (Tip 32). Willingham knows this and, at the outset, suggests that students pick and choose which chapters to read, try out tips to see whether they work well for them, and try another one if they don’t.

The author is clearly aware that he is asking a lot of students, and he has tried to help in various ways—for example, by putting key phrases or sentences in boldface and including the one-sentence summaries. However, there is some tension between these devices and some of the advice offered. For instance, providing bolded terms may reduce the need for the student to think through the material to decide what’s important, and such thinking is known to enhance learning (Tips 3, 13, and 33); and putting terms in boldface can actually undermine learning if students use that material as a substitute for doing the reading (Tip 29).

Most of the tips and advice sit on a solid foundation of research, and, to Willingham’s credit, he tells the reader when his guidance is based on intuition or personal experience rather than empirical data. Each chapter has its own list of references at the end of the book, but it isn’t always clear which references support which points in the chapter. The author probably made the right call in not using standard academic references, which would have undercut the flow and the friendly tone, and footnotes would have injected an unwanted sense of formality. However, it would have been helpful if the citations had included the page number and a brief phrase from the text to anchor specific references.

What to make of all of this? At the outset of this review, I observed that Willingham has written three books in one. The book in the foreground, tips and advice for students, is probably most useful (as Willingham suggests) for students who are highly motivated to do better in school and need to identify a few techniques to help them improve. The book in the background that reviews research findings is superb and should be read by anyone interested in applications of cognitive science. And finally, the advice to instructors on how to help students make the most of the suggestions was sometimes too abbreviated to be very useful. However, that said, instructors can easily use the tips and advice as a springboard to improve their own teaching—and, crucially, to enhance student learning.

Stephen M. Kosslyn is president and CEO of Active Learning Sciences, Inc., chief academic officer of Foundry College, and John Lindsley Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Harvard University.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Kosslyn, S.M. (2023). Tip 39: Don’t Cram: And other techniques for successful learning. Education Next, 23(1), 78-80.

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Give Boys an Extra Year of School, a New Book Suggests

Scott Winship — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 09:00:20 +0000

When Eagle Academy for Young Men opened in the Bronx in 2004, it was New York City’s first all-boys public school in more than 30 years. Reeves objects to single-sex classrooms and schools because the evidence in their favor seems weak.

Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It
by Richard V. Reeves
Brookings Institution Press, 2022, $28.99; 256 pages.

As reviewed by Scott Winship

Of Boys and Men is the rare policy book with the power to jar even readers who have thought long and hard about its subject. Those readers will find much to debate between its covers, but Reeves deserves great credit for starting a public conversation around what has happened to boys and men in the modern world.

Reeves is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he studies inequality and opportunity. His previous book, Dream Hoarders, swam against the tide of populist outrage at the “top one percent” to argue that, actually, there’s a more uncomfortable inequality problem we need to discuss: that between the bottom half of Americans and those in the upper middle class, including the core audience of Dream Hoarders. Of Boys and Men again finds Reeves taking seriously an unfashionable form of inequality: the widening socioeconomic disparities and trends running against boys and men and in favor of girls and women.

Boys and Young Men Have Fallen behind in School

I worked at the Brookings Institution a decade ago, just across the hall from Reeves. (I should disclose that Reeves is a great friend who once goaded me into singing at a piano bar.) At Brookings, it seemed as if not a day went by without someone asking, “What’s wrong with men?” The issue has been on my radar for some time. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by the striking educational gaps that Reeves presents in his new book.

Start with little kids. Along one broad measure of “school readiness,” boys entering kindergarten are about as far behind girls as Black children are relative to white children. Language-arts test-score gaps in primary and secondary school strongly favor girls, while math gaps (sometimes favoring boys) are relatively small. Nationally, two thirds of 9th-graders in the top 10 percent of the grade-point-average distribution are girls, while two thirds in the bottom 10 percent are boys. Reeves cites Chicago numbers showing that this male-female GPA gap is as large as the GPA gap between the richest and poorest neighborhoods in the city.

College enrollment and graduation rates are correspondingly lower for men. The problem has apparently become large enough that private institutions of higher education have quietly adopted affirmative action in admissions to ease standards for male applicants.

Reeves argues that these sex-difference gaps are essentially the result of biological differences crashing into an educational system whose design favors the developmental profile of girls. This unintentional bias only became consequential once more professional opportunities opened up for women. Men’s and women’s brains, broadly speaking, end up in the same place, but girls and young women get there sooner, and, in the meantime, boys’ brain chemicals do their best to gum up the works.

To address these educational disparities, Reeves offers a number of worthy proposals, including increasing the supply of male teachers. But his headline idea is his most radical: to “redshirt” boys at the start of school, so they begin a year later than girls by default. (Actually, it is even more radical than that: he favors universal pre-K and giving boys an additional year of it while girls enter kindergarten. That would leave boys with an additional year of schooling by the time they graduate from high school.) This reform would, of course, be a huge departure from historical education policy, but Reeves’s discussion of sex disparities leaves me hoping that a few school districts—or, more likely, private schools—will give it a try. In contrast, Reeves objects to single-sex classrooms and schools because the evidence in their favor seems weak—a thinly argued rejection, given that he acknowledges that we don’t know whether redshirting would work.

Men Have Fallen behind at Work

In addition to these large educational disparities, and perhaps related to them, women have gained ground on men in economic terms. The wage gap between men and women has closed considerably, for instance. (In Reeves’s analysis of the remaining gap, he implicates occupational preferences and work demands unfriendly to caregivers, offering as clear a summary of the evidence as I have seen.)

Richard V. Reeves

Like many observers, Reeves paints a picture of an economy that has failed men. Their labor force participation has fallen sharply, for instance. However, Reeves’s contention that the drop is due to “a one-two punch, of automation and free trade” is undermined by his subsequent concession that no academic consensus exists on these points. Reeves also writes that the “median real hourly wage for men peaked sometime in the 1970s and has been falling since.” But analysts ranging from the liberal Economic Policy Institute to, well, me, have found that, after a lengthy period of decline, men’s pay has rebounded back to historic highs over the past 30 years.

The fact that wages have risen (or at least not fallen) raises the issue of whether men, over time, are doing worse in absolute terms (rather than just relative to women). For instance, as of 2019, high school and college graduation rates among men ages 25 to 29 were higher than ever before. It is just that women have pulled ahead dramatically after starting behind.

Men are clearly less likely to be working than in the past, but this trend has occurred through the boom years of the mid-twentieth century, the following decades when men’s wages were declining, and over the past 30 years of rebounding male wages. That roughly three quarters of the long-run decline involved men who tell government surveyors they do not want a job suggests that at least some of this trend need not worry us. Affluence—including the expanded work opportunities it provided married women—has likely given men more freedom to lean out. At the same time, many men have replaced working in jobs traditionally held by men with dependence on disability benefits.

Reeves recommends a concerted public-private push to recruit more men into what he calls “HEAL” occupations—jobs in health, education, administration, and literacy that are often coded as feminine. He has in mind the successful philanthropic and government efforts made getting more women into “STEM” positions. Successfully increasing the number of men in HEAL jobs would not only help male workers, but it would also likely benefit boys in school (who might learn better from male teachers), men in therapy, and other male consumers of services dominated by women.

Men Have Fallen behind in . . . Life

Absolute gains or losses aside, Reeves is right that the relative balance of power between men and women has shifted. He argues that the result has left men without purpose or well-defined roles as fathers. Having filled a one-dimensional provider role for millennia, men are now existentially adrift, without purpose or identity.

His analysis here is, I think, one of the more important in the book. Until 50 years ago, before women were able to expect they could have a fulfilling professional life, they had minimal incentive to pursue educational success. But patriarchy gave men incentives to follow a script—do decently in school and get a stable job so as to be able to raise a family. Now, with many women serving both the main caregiver role and an important provider role, the incentives may be reversing. Today, girls and young women have a vocational script to structure their choices, while boys and men may be unmotivated to adhere to the old script that presumed they would shoulder the primary-breadwinner responsibilities.

In my view, this problem has been grossly underappreciated and undertheorized. But I suspect it is not primarily about men falling behind educationally or economically in absolute terms or relative to women. On a plethora of indicators, Americans have seen depletions in the strength of their relationships and their connection to institutions. Why this should have hurt men more than women is unclear, but Reeves’s discussion of the fragility of the male identity offers a great place for future scholars to start.

While he identifies a number of ways in which men seem lost—their identities are less multifaceted than those of women, they have fewer friends, they succumb to deaths of despair at much higher rates—Reeves focuses specifically on rebuilding their roles as fathers. Conservatives and liberals alike can agree on the importance of dads, but most conservatives will find the direction Reeves takes in this regard curious.

Reeves discusses research showing that engaged fatherhood improves child outcomes. However, he devotes remarkably little attention to research finding that two-parent families also boost those outcomes. A recent Substack post from Reeves conveys well the stance Of Boys and Men takes toward the demise of the two-parent family. After noting that women are increasingly primary breadwinners (often because they are single parents), he writes:

About 40% of births in the U.S. now take place outside of marriage, up from 11% in 1970. (A particularly striking trend is the decline in “shotgun” marriages). From a feminist perspective, which to be clear is my perspective, these are marvelous developments. But we should also ask: what do they mean for men?

The biggest shortcoming of the book, in my view, is its neglect of the question of what trends in marriage mean for boys and their development. What if the major part of the story of girls overtaking boys in school, for instance, is about the disproportionate effect on boys of rising father absence? This is a hypothesis unexplored in Of Boys and Men. Particularly given the attention Reeves devotes to the problems of poor and Black boys and men, the omission stands out, because single parenthood is more common in those communities.

The most intuitive way to ensure that more fathers are engaged with kids is to strengthen marriage. Nevertheless, Reeves takes as given that we as a society cannot alter the decline of marriage as an institution. I am dubious that we can revive the institution of fatherhood without doing so.

The policies Reeves proposes—more paid paternity leave, child-support reforms, and more family-friendly workplaces and career ladders—seem inadequate to me for shoring up men’s social roles and identities, as fathers or generally. However, the real value of Reeves’s book lies elsewhere. Sixty years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Of Boys and Men should similarly inspire conversations about a “problem that has no name” that is much like Betty Friedan’s in its ineffability and importance.

Scott Winship is a senior fellow and director of poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Winship, S. (2023). Boys and Men Have Fallen behind in School, in Work, and in Life: Widening socioeconomic disparities underlie a new form of inequality. Education Next, 23(2), 66-68.

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A Veteran Teacher Pens a Not-Your-Typical Novel About Schools. And That’s a Good Thing

Frederick Hess — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 09:00:14 +0000

There aren’t many good novels about K-12 schooling. I tend to think this is for the same reason there aren’t a lot of good novels about sports. With sports, the story usually comes down to a big game. Win or lose, the tropes are familiar. And the emphasis on cathartic victory or growth-inducing loss leaves little room for character depth, complexity, or whimsy.

Novels about schooling suffer from a similar problem. They’re usually about a teacher’s heroic journey or success in helping that hard-to-reach kid. The themes are worn-out, and the tales tend to feature the moral complexity of a grade-B Western.

Well, Class Dismissed ditches the familiar school novel formula, and it pays off nicely. Published last year by 30-year teaching veteran Kevin McIntosh, who has authored Pushcart Prize-nominated short stories, Class Dismissed traces the eventful journey of high school teacher Patrick Lynch from Minnesota to New York—and then back to Minnesota.

It takes a tale that could’ve been familiar and subverts it in interesting ways. Lynch is a talented young teacher who heads to New York City, does good things for kids, finds like-minded allies, and takes on the burned-out cynics in the faculty lounge. But rather than plodding along the predictable path, the story heads off in some unfamiliar and unexpected directions.

Opening with a shell-shocked Lynch, who’s retreated to the comfortable confines of small-town Minnesota, it flashes back from there. From the first page, it’s clear that Lynch’s is less a hero’s journey than an examination of where insecurity, arrogance, good intentions, frustration, and happenstance take him.

Lynch is a sympathetic figure but no plaster saint. Meanwhile, it turns out that those burned-out faculty lounge cynics possess some street savvy and hard-won wisdom. The reader gets a revealing glimpse of faculty spats, game-playing parents, teacher exhaustion, the pull of the classroom, and New York City’s infamous “rubber room” for displaced teachers.

There are interactions that feel overripe, but there are also plenty of places where McIntosh shows a good feel for classroom dynamics: “Second period wanted to look good too. Some classes—fourth period, fuggedaboutit—had no pride. But second period, even Abdul, sat up a little straighter when Silverstein flitted through. They didn’t want to be caught caring but they did.”

Throughout the book, McIntosh captures a teacher’s interior monologue as deftly as I’ve ever seen: “Maria was evaluating her crimson nails. Abdul was about to punch Julio’s shoulder. Josh was sleeping. Angela—Angela!—was sketching on her desk. She was his canary in the coal mine; if he lost her, it really was over.” Lynch is a teacher as a person rather than an avatar.

The characters are more richly drawn than is typical in novels about education. And one can’t help but get the sense that McIntosh has closely studied Tom Wolfe works like Bonfire of the Vanities, as his set pieces radiate some of that same flamboyant pathos and attention to detail.

McIntosh has some set pieces that are true-to-life, delightful, and maddening, all at once. There’s one where a newly-hired Lynch is struggling to get his first paycheck from the board of ed. It elegantly captures the frustration that so many teachers have shared when battling central-district intransigence. There are scenes with an out-of-control pushy parent and with Lynch’s AFT attorney that just pop. And the rubber-room scenes are terrific.

The plotting that fuels the crucial twist of the novel is rather elegant, and the follow-through shows attention and care. Character motivations are consistent, and all the various pieces of the story feel earned. Indeed, there’s a pivotal New York Post headline tied into the plot twist so cleverly conceived, it would’ve done Wolfe proud.

That said, the book also has its shortcomings. The most jarring of these is the weirdly dated setting. For reasons that are never made clear, the author sets the book nearly three decades ago, in an educational landscape that now feels a bit like a time capsule. There are a number of occasions, when the narrative drifts into talk about reform, the union, the New York City leadership, or classroom norms, that I’d find myself reflexively checking the publication date.

The whole thing is something of a mystery, given that McIntosh doesn’t make particular use of that era. So, what’s going on? Did he have the manuscript in a drawer for two decades? Was there some time-contingent plot device that got trimmed along the way? Maybe other readers will shrug it off, but I found it to be a real distraction. This setting, of course, also means the book is wholly removed from the debates and cultural shifts that have riled schools during the 21st century, so some of the faculty and student-teacher interactions may feel strangely dated. So, be forewarned.

I mentioned a bit earlier that the book came out last year. It says something about the publishing industry that I only saw Class Dismissed because the author reached out and shared a copy. I wish the publisher had done a better job getting this book out there. Because education would benefit mightily from more popular accounts that foster honest conversations about teaching, its frustrations and rewards, and what we ask of teachers.

At a time when schools are struggling with staffing and teachers feel unappreciated, that kind of talk is sorely needed. And here Kevin McIntosh delivers it. Class Dismissed isn’t a perfect book, by any means. But it’s a revealing, gripping, and highly readable volume that’s well worth your time.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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