Sherry Chandler

I am a great supporter of public education, so I was interested to see this highly sensible post by Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly:

The Department of Education has released a new report on the quality of education offered by public schools vs. private schools. The release was timed for Friday and, according to the New York Times, “was made with without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.”

If this suggests to you that public schools came out OK in this new study, you’d be right. Basically, it was a review of NAEP scores in math and reading that was controlled for things like gender, race, English proficiency, poverty level, etc. Here are the average scores for public schools compared to private schools:

4th grade reading: +1.1 points.
4th grade math: +4.1 points.
8th grade reading: -5.7 points.
8th grade math: +0.6 points.

This obviously suggests that private schools haven’t discovered a magic bullet for educational reform, despite what their supporters might sometimes claim. Still, I don’t think this report is exactly cause for breaking out champagne among public school champions.

…

I don’t have any answers here except for a guess: namely that the pedagogy wars don’t really matter much. Phonics vs. whole word? New math vs. old? Open classrooms vs. strict discipline? Without disparaging the people who work hard trying to figure this stuff out, it seems as if practically any of these approaches can succeed or fail depending how well they’re implemented.

But what does seem to show up over and over again is the effect of concentrated poverty. Nearly everything I’ve read suggests that when the number of kids in poverty reaches about 50% in a school, teaching becomes nearly impossible — and that this matters much more in secondary school than in elementary school.

Unfortunately, nobody has any good answers for this, so instead we mostly fuss around on the edges.

Here’s a thing I’ve wanted to show you for some time. It’s Harry’s close-up photo of a wasp’s nest that plumbers found in his attic. I just think these colors are amazing.

There’s another of these photos here, taken on a sunny day. It’s more colorful and has wonderful depth and texture, like a braided rug, but I like the tones and symmetry in this one, those gorgeous grays and pinks.

Harry’s full set of wasps nest pix at flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/heracliteanfire/sets/72157594182441669/

Gin Petty’s hornet’s nest can be seen here: http://ginpetty.com/pix/paper/hornet1.jpg