I taught the usual load minus three hours allotted for attending seminars. I was also expected to mark papers, prepare to teach classes, and observe fellow teachers on a regular basis while concocting elaborate lesson plans for 10 observed teaching visits. I was initially undaunted and looked forward to becoming an expert in my craft.

The first step involved constructing lesson plans, an exact science in NRW, down to the verbs that are permitted when describing pupil progress in the space of a single lesson (“students are able to summarize, to analyze,” etc.). Germans are great fans of the scientific method and enjoy being able to measure and quantify things, a laudable trait. But is it ever possible to prove that all pupils have learned in a given hour what the teacher set out to teach? In this unexpectedly Kafkaesque world, I was stymied as to how one might go about doing this. This led to the first furrow in my brow.

Next we learned the desired lesson format. One should begin each lesson not by asking to see homework but with introductory material, such as a video clip designed to jump-start class discussion. The material should lead the students to state the aim of that day’s lesson themselves, an interesting reversal of those dinosaur days in which the teacher would write the aim on the blackboard. I frequently spent 10 minutes trying to get my students to intuit the question I’d had in mind. Was this really time well spent, I wondered? Furrow number two made its appearance.

Once the question of the day is sorted out, the class discusses how to go about answering it. Students, rather than the teacher, decide whether a debate, role play, mind map, or some other method best suits the topic at hand. Furrow number three was born.

Students then work in groups, jointly preparing their results. I hated group work when I was in school, as I knew who would take responsibility for completing the assignment. Mandatory here, group work is intended to build social skills.

After the presentation phase, members of the class summarize what has been accomplished (“What have we learned today that we didn’t know before?”) and apply the results to an analogous situation, a step referred to as “transfer.”

At this juncture, the teacher may assign a thoughtful homework assignment that encourages in-depth transfer while not overburdening the students. Enter furrow number four.

Despite my confusion about what was expected of me, I looked forward to my first observed teaching visit, in which the class was to compare and contrast speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. My students picked out themes and metaphors and persuasive techniques like nobody’s business. At the end of the hour, I floated out of the room, expecting to hear high praise. The wise reader will have a sense of foreboding at this point.

The observer quickly cut to the chase: “So what would you say the students did during this lesson they hadn’t done before?”

“Um,” I stammered. “They read and analyzed speeches by two important civil rights activists.”

“Am I to assume, then, that they were unable to read before?”

“No, of course not.” I regrouped. “They did a close text analysis and compared and contrasted the use of rhetorical devices in the texts.”

“Were the students unfamiliar with such devices before?”

“Well, no, we had previously worked on alliteration, metaphors, and similes,” I admitted meekly.

“So what is it you would say was actually learned by your students in the past hour?”

I stared at him. Technically, applying what one has already learned did not qualify, so I bowed my head in resignation and understood. My students had learned nothing from me. Nothing at all.

Tamara Braunstein is an educator and writer from Brooklyn, New York, who (usually!) embraces intercultural exchange, having taught high school in Senegal and Germany.

In a matter of weeks, I went from delivering lessons to observing them. I was visiting classrooms, not managing them. My focus shifted from employing strategies that engage student learning to providing the tools for a new teacher to do the same. In short, this teacher had become a coach.

I wanted to experience the same level of success I had as a teacher in my new role as an induction coach, but I wasn’t sure what that would look or feel like. It was important that I obtain tangible evidence that my work was having a positive impact on teacher success and ultimately student achievement. What I have seen and learned so far has affirmed my core beliefs about teaching.

Effective teachers are reflective. Every time I enter Michaela’s kindergarten class, waiting on her desk is the composition notebook I gave her at our first meeting. While observing her teach, I read her thoughtful reflections and questions, and the joys and concerns she has taken the time to record. I respond with words of encouragement, advice, and questions of my own. When the children are packed up and on their way, we talk about the day’s lessons. She opens up about her students, her strengths, and her challenges. We analyze the data as a snapshot of her instruction but also discuss how they fit in the context of her overall professional growth. She exhibits a consistent willingness to examine her own practice and is guided by what she learns.

Teachers need support in order to take risks. Pam is a 3rd-grade teacher who didn’t take long to establish routines that help her classroom run effectively and efficiently. Recently I spent a morning scripting (taking notes on what I see and hear) as she delivered a reading lesson. After the students had left the room for lunch, we took the opportunity to look at my notes. Pam quickly noticed that the majority of her time was spent asking recall questions and seeing the same hands in the air. She was determined to increase student participation but was unsure about ways to do so. A discussion ensued about literature circles and the various ways teachers manage them. She decided to try a new approach that very afternoon and asked me to stay and offer feedback.

Teachers grow through collaboration. Professional relationships thrive when individuals share common experiences and learn from one another. I find this to be especially true when working with Amanda, a beginning teacher in a Developmental Learning Program. Given my limited experience in special education, supporting her work with three- to five-year-old nonverbal learners is a challenge. Week after week, I watch Amanda shine. And I learn, as she engages students in meaningful activities. Our work is often centered on communicating with parents, managing the teaching assistants and specialists working in the class, and advocating for her students. Recognizing one’s own limitations is a very uncomfortable place to be, but it is the underpinning for growth.

Having a coach and being a coach both present real challenges. The professional relationship may evolve over time, as roles are continuously redefined based on needs, circumstances, personalities, beliefs, and philosophies. But throughout, the goals and benefits of mentoring are clear: moving our profession forward with better-prepared and more-effective teachers in our classrooms.

Gino Sangiuliano teaches in Barrington, Rhode Island, and is supporting 15 beginning teachers in his second year as an induction coach.

Students need a learning environment that encourages success, but how can a teacher create such a place? In thinking about this question, I explored how the physical layout of my classroom, our academic schedule, and my behavior in class affected my students’ ability to succeed. I also investigated how teachers around me set their students up for success or failure.

Just as a store owner must lay out his store for maximum sales, a teacher must set up her classroom as an effective learning environment. The structure may vary with the teacher’s style of teaching and her students’ needs. A teacher who typically introduces a lesson and then instructs the students to work individually might arrange desks in a “U” shape. The teacher can present a topic with minimal distractions and easily monitor students while they work independently. Students with diverse academic abilities might warrant “clustered” or “grouped” seating instead. Seating students in heterogeneous groups maximizes the learning environment: weaker students see how stronger students learn and approach problems, while stronger students gain a deeper understanding of the subject by teaching it to others, creating a “technical success.”

It is important to think not only about where students’ desks are located, but also about what’s on top of them. Does one student always color on his desk? Maybe he focuses better while doodling. I can help him out by covering his desk with oversized paper and replacing it when necessary. Who knows, maybe he will grow up to be a famous illustrator.

Classroom practices should provide students with the path of least resistance to academic success. Facilitating students’ cooperation, independence, and ability to focus is the key. Consider common technical failures in the classroom, such as asking students to “think hard” right after lunch or recess or to listen quietly when they have a lot of energy. A teacher faced with these challenges can allow students to read independently or write in a journal after lunch or play an educational game that the students can get excited about.

A teacher concerned about students who finish assignments early can create a “must do/may do” chart. This chart can be student-specific or for the whole class, but the idea is that students complete “must do” activities before beginning those in the “may do” column. Students take responsibility for their own learning and time management. Most important, it prevents the technical failure of students who complete their work early and sit idle or, worse, distract students who are still working.

Imagine that we are reviewing last night’s homework assignment and I ask, “Who has the answer to problem number two?” Several hands go up. I call on a student, who asks to go to the bathroom, effectively stopping the lesson. Or I call on one student for the answer and several others shout out, “He stole my answer!” These students may be left so frustrated that they find it difficult to focus. To avoid these technical failures, at the beginning of the year I teach my students a few basic signs in American Sign Language (ASL). If students want to go to the bathroom, they show me the sign, and I silently respond with “yes” or “no.” Likewise, students sign “me too” when they weren’t called on but want to demonstrate that they knew the answer. I acknowledge them verbally or with a thumbs-up. As a result, these students feel good. The use of ASL effectively eliminates student-initiated distractions, a clear technical success.

Rebecca Friedman teaches elementary-school and college students in Baltimore, Maryland. Chavi Abramson studies education at Thomas Edison University.

When I learned that I would be a participant in the Fulbright-Hays 2011 Summer Seminar in Mexico, a five-week program run by the U.S. Department of Education, I was eager to taste the cuisine in each of the eight states on the itinerary. It never occurred to me that I’d be eating bugs—at least not on purpose.

As a high school teacher, I’d always thought of cultural differences as opportunities to broaden my perspective. Yet there’s something about having to eat the culture that makes accepting cultural differences more personal and much more challenging.

When I teach literature, I talk about the importance of perspective in interpreting novels. Our way isn’t necessarily the right way; it’s just the way we know. With that credo in mind, I lathered my worm in guacamole, closed my eyes, and swallowed.

The trip awakened me to other cultural misconceptions as well. When visiting San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, I toured San Juan Chamula, a Mayan community. Our guide, archaeologist Chip Morris, began at the graveyard, which frankly resembled the outskirts of a garbage dump. Empty plastic soda bottles littered the areas around headstones. I saw this as a sign of disrespect. Morris set me straight: in the Chamula tradition, he explained, the dead must be remembered and honored. Having graveside parties and leaving bottles show that the family is meeting its obligations.

Travel regularly yields such epiphanies.

Travel is also a great way to discover and reflect on the sometimes surprising interactions between cultures. Morris next took us into the church in the town’s central square, where we saw a significant blending of ancient Mayan practices and Catholic influences. Chickens are sacrificed, as the statues of Catholic saints look on. Posh, a homemade rum drink, is offered by families who want to invite others to witness their audible prayers. And so is Coca-Cola.

Coke as a Mayan ceremonial beverage?

It’s true. In the 1960s, Coca-Cola made local Mayan leaders partners in the distribution of their beverages. By the 1970s, community leaders agreed that Coke and other soft drinks could be substituted for posh, deemphasizing the use of alcohol during religious ceremonies. The billboard on the road coming into Chamula shows a man in traditional festival dress celebrating with a Coke. Whatever one might think about Coke—and it has a checkered record in Latin America—it has played a significant role in reducing alcohol abuse in Mayan communities.

By the end of the trip, I had even come to have a better understanding of the Mayan practice of human sacrifice. After visiting Chichén Itzá and other Mayan sites, I came to see that these sacrifices involved not only enemies, but also what was most important to the Maya. They sacrificed their bravest soldiers during wartime. They sacrificed children and women, who shed the most water in tears during times of draught. In short, they sacrificed not because life was cheap, but because it was precious and their gods deserved the best of who they were.

I choose seemingly outrageous examples because they best illustrate why teachers must travel. We rightly insist that students share different points of view, but we often don’t demand the same of ourselves. And until we are out there “eating” another culture, we might not be scrutinizing our own misconceptions about place, people, and history.

Elaine Griffin is the English Department chair at the University School of Milwaukee.

As a policy wonk, I push for high academic expectations for all students. I know that American competitiveness requires excellence in subjects such as math and science that our schools do not teach very well. As a father, however, I find that what matters most to me is that my daughters are happy in school.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, academic expectations are extremely high. Our school district aims to teach math, for example, in a rigorous way. I appreciate this goal, but to date “increased rigor” has primarily meant that some students skip grade-level math classes and enroll in classes meant for older kids. Basic skills that are taught and reinforced in the grades being skipped are often given short shrift. In 2nd grade, my daughter brought home worksheets on probability before she had any real understanding of the concept, or even a strong foundation in simple division. Her frustration with probability, and consequently math, grew as we substituted times-table drills for play dates. Last year, to my horror, she said that she hated math. This year, which has included an increased focus on math facts and an inspiring teacher, math has become her favorite subject.

With my policy hat on, I know that a teacher’s academic background is critical. As a father, however, I want a teacher who manages a calm, safe, and fun classroom, and who loves children. One of the best teachers my children have had is our regular babysitter, who speaks English as a second language and never graduated from high school.

Of course, there are some gems at our school (thank you, Ms. Bederman, now retired) who are knowledgeable, skilled, passionate about learning, and passionate about children. To a father, Ms. Bederman was a gift from heaven; to a policy wonk she is the Holy Grail. Why can’t we identify and train more of these treasures? Why wasn’t every teacher in our school crowded into Ms. Bederman’s classroom to witness her magic? Why didn’t the principal require every teacher to crowd into her classroom?

As a policy wonk, I believe that student learning flourishes in classrooms that include students with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds. As a father, I want my daughters to appreciate diversity of all types. But I also want them to be surrounded by children who come to school ready and eager to learn. These goals come into conflict when some students are constantly disruptive; the policy wonk must preach patience to the father who wants the class disrupter out.

My daughter’s kindergarten class included a troubled boy who was going through the foster-care placement process. He is exactly the type of child that can benefit most from an excellent education, but he regularly disrupted class. One day, when I was in the classroom, the teacher—talented, but inexperienced—spent more than half of her time trying to keep this boy on task.

I feel for children like him; my company works with schools and districts to improve outcomes for these kids. But I was angry. The other children were clearly uncomfortable. His disruptions reduced learning time for my daughter, and seemed to steal some of her innocence and excitement about school.

The tension between my understanding of good education policy—driven by a deep commitment to equity and the belief that an outstanding education can transform lives, and this country—and what is right for my daughters makes me both a better policy wonk and a better father. The tension also illustrates why school reform is so difficult.

Scott Joftus is the president of the education-consulting firm Cross & Joftus.

Education—or, as economists refer to it, “investment in human capital”—is a cornerstone of every model of economic growth: if our children are not well educated, innovation and productivity will wither away. In other words, our long-term collective quality of life depends on the quality of our schools. And, by most measures, they are inadequate to the task. What are we doing wrong?

My view is that many problems in education are economic in nature. By this I don’t mean that more funding will solve the problem. I mean that the way we run public education violates virtually every basic tenet of economics. We have constructed a public school system that seems intentionally designed to provide the wrong incentives to administrators, teachers, and students.

Take teacher tenure. Job security with few conditions allows teachers to settle, to become lazy and professionally static. Tenure creates a strong disincentive to innovate or work harder. Tenure attracts to the profession security-seekers rather than risk-takers and provides no upward mobility for the ambitious few.

Now imagine a job where one not only cannot get fired, but where one receives automatic raises simply by being there. Even for the most conscientious teachers, there is no incentive to do more than the minimum, because no matter how hard those teachers work, they cannot be paid more. There are no cash bonuses, no rewards for performance. After working many (truly exhausting) years, few teachers could be faulted for either shifting into a lower gear or moving on.

These are hardly the only disincentives to becoming a teacher. When, at age 37, I started teaching high school, I began, in both salary and rank, as a “first-year” teacher. Despite my having worked in intelligence, diplomacy, and business, I was treated like, and earned essentially the same salary as, a 21-year-old teaching second grade. And, like my first-year peers, I was subject to the seniority system’s stubborn adherence to a last-in, first-out policy.

It doesn’t take the sharpest imagination to understand why this would be a disastrous way to run an organization. If I were, say, managing a pharmaceutical company, would I pay someone with 15 years of experience in pharmacological research the same salary as the new undergraduate intern simply because they were both new hires? Could I expect the same outcomes from both? The same productivity? Of course not. Then why would I pay them identically or fire the last one hired, regardless of performance? This is nonetheless the norm in public education.

When I first thought about teaching, I called my county school system. I explained my professional background, including graduate degrees in international affairs and, later, in international economics. They told me to apply immediately. Then I found out that, despite my background, according to the state of Maryland I was not qualified to teach history, political science, or economics. Until I completed 29 credit hours of teacher training and became certified, I would be employed as a “long-term substitute,” a job with full hours, low pay, no benefits, and the real possibility of my being released at the end of the year.

State-mandated teacher certifications (backed by No Child Left Behind–based rules) are preventing highly qualified candidates from becoming teachers. I was an all-too-rare exception. At the time, my wife and I were in a secure enough financial position that I could take two years off without any income to become a teacher and then earn around $45,000 a year once employed. How many experienced professionals, especially those with families, could do that? Why should they have to? I had the academic background and pedagogical skills I needed to be a teacher before expending all that time, money, and effort on a graduate degree in education.

Teacher quality is the key to improving public education in the United States. Nonetheless, we systematically dissuade highly capable people from becoming teachers. If we are to improve our educational system, we must instead create economic incentives that draw the best people to the profession and keep them there.

Vann Prime teaches Advanced Placement (AP) economics, AP European history, and international relations at Mount Hebron High School in Howard County, Maryland.

My classmates complained that her class was too hard.

One of my other instructors spent class sessions badly summarizing the readings, instigating awkward and often one-sided class discussions, or trying to explain the homework assignments and projects she thought up. When she assigned one of her own articles for us to read, it became clear that despite having completed a doctorate at our university, she could not write a coherent academic article.

Desperate for a more challenging academic experience, I increased my course load for the second semester and handpicked my instructors. I actually enjoyed most of my classes that semester, but it was at this point that I began to deeply question the university’s approach to preparing future teachers.

It baffled me, for example, that I could get a master’s degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) after having completed only one rudimentary course in linguistics and one in English grammar. Almost all of my classmates struggled greatly in these two courses, leading me to wonder whether perhaps the admission requirements might also need refining. A class in adolescent development was useful, but the program offered no course in child development, despite the fact that my certification would be for grades K–12. It seemed that they were skimming over the important topics while bogging me down with courses in “theory and practice,” which did little to make me feel prepared to begin teaching on my own.

The focus of the third and fourth semesters was student teaching. My first placement was in high-school foreign language, for which I was also receiving certification. I was fortunate to work with a relatively strong supervising teacher; the infuriating aspect of this first placement was how I was evaluated. A supervisor from the university observed me during three lessons over the course of the semester. After each observation, she completed a write-up and made a few minimally helpful suggestions. During the final observation, she leaned over to my supervising teacher and casually asked, “So, what grade would you give her?” No criteria for evaluation, no request for a report on what I needed to work on. Fortunately, I did receive some valuable feedback from my supervising teacher that semester; I cannot say the same about my English as a Second Language student-teaching placement the following semester.

The final task I was asked to complete for the program was an “individualized project,” which sounded to me like a dumbed-down version of a thesis or capstone project. I have to confess that I took the easy way out. I knew I wasn’t going to get the kind of academic support I would need to complete an actual thesis, so I settled for designing a unit based on what I was already working on with my ESL students. After meeting with the professor a few times and receiving some vague suggestions, I handed in a project that earned me the last of a full transcript of easy As, with a friendly note on the cover and not a single comment or suggestion for how the unit could have been improved.

After observing and teaching in a variety of classroom settings over the course of my graduate studies, I have concluded that good teaching depends on three things: mastery of the subject, a keen understanding of how children learn, and an ability to maintain a disciplined yet positive learning environment. It is hard for me to express how disheartening it is to have spent two years and more than $80,000 in student loans on a program that did justice to none of those objectives.

The author earned a masters degree in education at a private university in the Northeast. Julia Harvey is a pseudonym.

Richard was considered a home schooler at the time, but “hybrid schooler” would have been more accurate: He took classes from an online provider, a small private school, and a performing arts program.

Richard made the team, and by midseason lots of new baseball buddies were hanging around our house on weekends. Soon we discovered that Richard wasn’t the only “hybrid student” on the ball club that year. Leon’s first baseman spent his mornings taking online courses through the Florida Virtual School, the knuckleball pitcher was taking a “dual enrollment” English class through the community college, and the left-handed pro prospect had enrolled in a financial management course at a local college (in case he was drafted).

Moreover, one of Leon’s outfielders had figured out an ingenious way to get a music education few families could afford out of pocket. This kid took mostly music classes at Leon by day and then several online courses at night and during the summer. He ended up being a four-time All-State musician and getting a college offer from Juilliard.

When I first encountered all these hybrid students, I figured there must be something in the water at Leon High. But I came to realize that many of these unconventional schooling options were the by-product of reforms former governor Jeb Bush had initiated, especially the creation of the Florida Virtual School.

The rise of hybrid schooling bodes well for students whose needs, gifts, interests, and learning styles do not align with the factory school model of the 20th century, and for parents who know that no school can maximize the potential of every child every year in every way. (There is a Magic School Bus, but no magic school.)

Customized education is good for all kids and not just for academic reasons. Several years ago, Richard entered a local talent competition structured much like American Idol. Different singers would perform at big community gatherings and then people would vote for the ones they considered the best. Richard kept advancing week after week, until on the night of the finals, one of the organizers took me aside and said, “I don’t get it. You guys just moved here a year or so ago, and yet Richard seems to have a really strong base of support.”

As Richard’s proud papa, I wanted to tell this guy, “Of course, Richard’s got lots of support—he’s the best one.” But I knew what this guy was getting at, so I explained, “See that guy over there? That’s Richard’s drama teacher at Young Actors Theatre. He gets all his thespian friends to vote for Richard.” Then I said, “See that family over there? They know Richard from baseball. Those kids over there took classes with Richard at the classical Christian school. The college students way back there know Richard from Young Life youth ministry. And those kids over there are in the AP classes Richard is taking at Leon.”

The contest organizer realized that Richard’s social network was far larger than he’d expected. What I marveled at was how diverse his friendship network was. Gay. Straight. Christian. Non-Christian. Jocks. Thespians. Nerds. Cool kids. Richard’s friends reflect the diversity of his hybrid-schooling life.

Now, I’m not so naive as to think that hybrid schooling will eradicate high school cliques or classroom bullying. But customized schooling can offer kids a far richer, and more varied, social experience than they might otherwise get. And when you add these social benefits to the educational advantages of customized schooling, you can see why I’m glad that Jeb Bush and other reformers had the Hank Greenberg–like chutzpah to change the way that Florida does education.

William Mattox is a resident fellow at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida.

Not that it’s easy. If I had a dime for every time someone said, “Oh that must be a piece-of-cake job,” or “I would love to sit at home all day,” I would be a wealthy teacher.

However, for this full-time virtual teacher and mother of three, it works. My day begins at 6 AM, a quiet time in my house. I spend the early hours working on grade books. I teach 6th- and 7th-grade math to 90 students. Parents and students go online to the grade book to view the student’s progress. My goal is to give each one of them the productive, positive, and personalized feedback that will enable the student to turn mistakes into learning opportunities.

FLVS provides the curriculum, so I don’t have to plan lessons or develop tests and can easily individualize instruction. I can personalize my classroom via the announcement page, which works like a virtual bulletin board.

By 8 AM, grading is done and overnight e-mails are answered. I view my calendar, noting any scheduled meetings and appointments. I sit down for breakfast with my youngest son, nine-year-old Camron, to prepare him for his day. Camron is enrolled in the FLVS full-time virtual instruction option for elementary school students and follows an accelerated curriculum for gifted students. I make sure he has his assignments organized before he traipses off to his own virtual world. Being able to oversee his schooling is a major benefit of working as a virtual teacher.

I jump back to the computer and my morning call list. My students vary in how much one-on-one instruction they need. Some students I speak to weekly, others less often, but at least once a month. Whenever students do not understand a concept, they can pick up the phone and call me for help. If their questions require that they be able to see what I am talking about, we have two options: We can use the “whiteboard,” where they can see what I am doing and talk to me on the phone at the same time. Students can write on the whiteboard and go step-by-step through a problem so that I can see where they are making mistakes. We can also use the web-based program Elluminate to work through problems together using a microphone instead of the telephone.

Navigating through FLVS courses is easy for students. Tabs enable them to move around the site at the click of a button. The lessons tab is where they learn the content, see examples, and work on practice problems. The assessment tab is where they submit their assignments for grading. If they want to, students can go to the grade book to reset an assessment and do the assignment again for a new grade. They can interact with each other in the discussion board area.

Before I know it, it is time for lunch, and I can step away from my computer to enjoy some quality time with my son: eat a sandwich, go for a walk, or play a video game. Pretty soon, it’s time to get back to work.

This afternoon, I’ll be taking my job on the road. Camron plays travel baseball for Gatorball Academy in Gainesville, an hour’s drive away. I make a call list: Who needs a welcome call? Monthly call? Do any of my students want to go over an assignment? I pack up my computer, grab my list and cell phone, and out the door we go. For the next few hours, I make good use of my cell phone, calling my students, answering their cries for help, letting parents know how wonderfully well their child is doing.

Once we’re home, I make a few notes for tomorrow. The day is done.

Is this a typical virtual teacher’s day? Will tomorrow be the same? There is no telling. What I can say, and what my students know, is that together we have the tools and the flexibility to meet whatever challenges the day brings.

Karen Faucett taught middle-school math in a traditional school setting for 13 years before moving to virtual education.

Cell phones are a significant feature in kids’ daily lives. According to Generation M², a 2010 Kaiser Foundation media study, nearly two-thirds of 8- to 18-year-olds have cell phones. Among 8- to 10-year-olds, 31 percent have their own phone, as do 69 percent of those ages 11 to 14. Eighty-five percent of teenagers 15 to 18 have them. A study by Mediamark Research & Intelligence found that most of the younger kids use the phone to contact their parents. Girls are more likely to use the phones for social uses, while boys are more inclined to play games or access the Internet.

The Pew Research Center in April 2010 released results from a survey that confirmed the ubiquity of cell phones among teenagers, some of whom manage to send text messages from class, even when the technology is banned in their school. While the Pew survey focused on texting, kids use their cell phones for all kinds of things. Along with brief calls to their parents and hours spent texting their friends, kids use their cell phones to listen to music, play games, and watch videos. Kids whose cell phones have cameras take pictures and send them to their friends. Older teens use smartphones like iPhones and Blackberrys to check Facebook and e-mail, get directions, and to obtain any other information they might need during the day.

Businesses have certainly caught on. Phone manufactur­ers and wireless carriers target their advertisements to young people. (Nearly all backpacks have cell-phone pockets.)

So have other groups. The New York Times has reported a rise in education apps, as they’re called. At a summer camp held at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, kids used smartphones and probes with Bluetooth capabilities to test and record levels of air pollution, part of a project run by New Youth City Learning Network. With other new mobile applications, students can take a picture of an insect or his­torical site, send it off, and receive a message back with full identification of the image.

Surely schools could make productive use of a technology that is relatively cheap, por­table, and already in the hands of the majority of U.S. schoolchildren.

The simplest use for students’ cell phones is keeping track of assignments. Rather than carrying around an assignment notebook, stu­dents could use their phones. The calendar and reminder functions can easily handle home­work and tests. Kids are much less likely to leave the phone at home, at school, or some­where else than they are a notebook.

A pilot program in North Carolina extends the cell phone’s reach far beyond keeping track of deadlines. Project K-Nect, a pilot program in Onslow County, uses smartphones as a learning tool in math classes, supplementing traditional math instruction with alternative teaching strat­egies. The project provides at-risk high-school students who lack computer or Internet access at home with smartphones. Teachers assign math problems for students to solve on the smart­phone. If students need help, they can connect with their classmates through instant messaging and dedicated blogs. If they still can’t solve the problem, they can access digital content through the phone. Project Tomorrow, which has evaluated the pro­gram, found improvement in student test scores, engagement and participation in class, and collaboration among students.

Cell phone use is typically forbidden in public school class­rooms. Teachers rightly object to phones ringing and students updating their Facebook profiles or texting during class. But educators could view cell phones differently. For adults, they are engaging, interactive tools—for communicating and for storing and accessing useful information. The same could be true for kids in school.

Rebecca Fortner teaches special education in Livingston County, Kentucky.

I was stuck between (F) the screech owl, because its call rarely approximates a screech, and (I) the long-eared owl, because its real ears are behind its eyes and covered by feathers. The passage explains that owls hear through holes behind their eyes, so the term long-eared owl seemed misleading. Then again, a screech owl that rarely screeches? That is pretty misleading, too.

According to the FCAT creators, each question on the practice tests corresponds to a specific reading skill or benchmark. Teachers are supposed to discuss test results in afterschool “data chats” and then review weak skills in class.

Here is a sample conversation from a data chat, as imagined by promoters of this idea:

First Teacher: Well, it looks like my students need some extra work on benchmark LA.910.6.2.2: The student will organize, synthesize, analyze, and evaluate the validity and reliability of information from multiple sources (including primary and secondary sources) to draw conclusions using a variety of techniques, and correctly use standardized citations.

Second Teacher: Mine, too! Now let’s work as a team to help students better understand this benchmark in time for next month’s assessment.

Third Teacher: I am glad we are having this “chat.”

Here is a conversation from an actual data chat:

First Teacher: My students’ lowest area was supposedly synthesizing information, but that benchmark was only tested by two questions. One was the last question on the test, and a lot of my students didn’t have time to finish. The other question was that one about the screech owl having the misleading name, and I thought it was kind of confusing.

Second Teacher: We read that question in class and most of my students didn’t know what approximates meant, so it really became more of a vocabulary question.

Third Teacher: Wait … I thought the long-eared owl was the one with the misleading name.

At this point, data chats often turn into non-data-related gripe sessions.

When I interviewed teachers for See Me After Class, the unintended consequences of high-stakes tests came up most often among language arts teachers. They know that answering comprehension questions correctly does not rest on just one benchmark. Separating complex skills into individual benchmarks may well work in math class. Symmetry and place value, for example, can be taught independently of one another, and benchmark-based data may indicate which of these skills needs work.

Reading is different. After students have mastered basics like decoding, reading cannot be taught through repeated practice of isolated skills. Students must understand enough of a passage to utilize all the intricately linked skills that together comprise comprehension. The owl question, for example, tests skills not learned from isolated reading practice but from processing information on the varying characteristics of animal species. (The correct answer, by the way, is the screech owl.)

Unfortunately, strict adherence to data-driven instruction can lead schools to push aside science and social studies to drill students on isolated reading benchmarks. Compare and contrast, for example, is covered year after year in creative lessons using Venn diagrams. The result is students who can produce Venn diagrams comparing cans of soda, and act out Venn diagrams with Hula–hoops, but are still lost a few paragraphs into a passage about owls. When they do poorly on reading assessments, we pull them again from subjects that give them content knowledge for more review of Venn diagrams. Many students learn to associate reading with failure and boredom.

It is difficult to teach kids to read well if they don’t learn to enjoy reading. It is impossible to teach kids to read well while denying them the knowledge they need to make sense of complex material. Following the data often forces teachers to do just that.

Roxanna Elden is the author of See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers. She teaches high-school English in Miami, Florida and is a National Board Certified Teacher.

But as they confront their chaotic lives, kids in jail share the same goals as their peers in the world outside: get a high school diploma, secure a decent job, go to college, make something of themselves. These young men wanted their school, albeit a cramped space off a noisy prison corridor, to be a “real school.” Though beaten down by negative experiences as learners, they still set high expectations for themselves. My job was to prepare them for the state’s comprehensive and demanding English exam. Curriculum would be the key.

New York State allows individual districts to choose literary texts based on community demographics and students’ educational needs and interests. I designed a curriculum that would be engaging and relevant, yet honored the state’s standards. Students read Greek, Norse, and Aztec mythology and such works as August Wilson’s play, Fences; the poetry of Luis J. Rodriguez and Pablo Neruda; and Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy.

Although the readings hooked students as they came to identify with characters and situations, I knew we had to go beyond cultural relevance if they were to pass the state test. So we slowly assembled the skills they would need. Working with the “critical lens,” they learned how to respond to such statements as, “All literature must teach a lesson as well as entertain,” explaining why they agreed or disagreed. Students compared and contrasted readings. Two favorites were the urban classics Manchild in the Promised Land and Down These Mean Streets. They worked to identify and explain the use of foreshadowing, allusion, and conflict (something they felt well grounded in). I encouraged them to hone their facility with these concepts by applying them to situations they encountered on the cell block, the music they listened to, and the TV shows they watched.

My students not only discussed, they wrote. They wrote every day. They wrote persuasively—taking a stand on a current issue, as one young man said, “Like a lawyer in court”; informatively—gathering, organizing, and presenting facts on topics such as drug prevention and teen violence; and critically—analyzing a story, novel, or poem. Most hated writing, but they knew writing skills were crucial for their diploma. Instruction was a blend of mechanics and content development, confidence building and critiquing, as students learned to identify “audience,” establish “voice,” structure arguments.

Understandably, not every student mastered the skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. No matter what progress they made, it was still jail. A kid might come to class with a bruised face from a fight on the block or be missing for weeks, put on disciplinary lockup. The temptation is to “dummy down.” Too many of my students had been shortchanged by that approach in the past, and they knew it.

Through all the disruption and turmoil, most of the young men managed to sustain their connection to school, even showing pride in what they were doing, be it organizing thoughts into paragraphs or discussing the role of institutionalized discrimination in Mark Mathabane’s South African autobiography, Kaffir Boy. Occasionally, some young man might even quip about his situation, to show what he had learned. One I recall in particular said, “It’s pretty ironic, Mr. C. Here I am locked up in jail, but finally going to school.”

He may have casually dropped that literary term into conversation, but the mischievous glint in his eyes spoke volumes about what he had accomplished.

David Chura is author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup and a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcerated youth.

Alternative East High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, was modeled after the famous Parkway alternative school in Philadelphia. From 1971 to 1983, Alternative East drew students from Philadelphia and the surrounding suburban school districts of Abington, Cheltenham, and Springfield. The principal, Gisha Berkowitz, took the job after first becoming known as an “active parent.”

At Alternative East, students could create their own courses. As long as the course met college entry requirements, students could develop it, find a faculty member to teach it, and then advertise the class on a poster. If 15 students expressed interest, they could register for the course during master scheduling days held twice during the year. Students seldom sat in classrooms all day. Instead of looking at slides, for example, an art class piled into a van to visit local galleries.

Alternative East was continually evaluated and received positive reviews. Berkowitz carefully kept the budget from getting “out of balance.” So why did the school close?

As is often the case, the answer at the time was money. In 1983, Abington’s school board, in a 5–4 vote, withdrew the district’s participation, forcing the school to close its doors. Nevertheless, minutes from board meetings praised Alternative East and its programs, which included production of a children’s play at a local mall and learning activities in genetics. The board justified its decision by saying that district schools had “highly skilled, highly paid people, and we should be able to provide for the needs of these [students].”

The underlying causes were probably more deep-seated. Times had changed. When the school opened, according to Berkowitz, students were politically alienated by the Vietnam War, racial segregation, and traditional schooling. There was a passion for hands-on, personally relevant education. But by the 1980s, Berkowitz explained, the students at Alternative East were “less interested in exploring.” The teachers weren’t as enthusiastic either, and that sapped energy out of the school. “The political milieu has to be [there]—everything has to be ‘right’…and unfortunately, [that] doesn’t happen enough.”

Even the storied Parkway Program, which in 1970 Time magazine called “the most interesting high school in the U.S. today,” fell victim to the changing political climate. Parkway was known as the “school without walls,” because students learned about journalism at local newspapers, auto mechanics at auto shops, and art from museum historians. I spoke with Dr. Leonard Finkelstein, the second director of Parkway, who said that as a concept, Parkway was “magnificent.” But reality did not always match up to its promise. Some students thrived in the loosely structured environment, while it became a “free-for-all” for others.

Dr. James Lytle, Parkway’s first principal, said that by the late 1970s and early 1980s the middle-class students angry at the system had disappeared. Parkway became a safe alternative to the neighborhood schools and had to recruit “very aggressively” to maintain a diverse student population.

In 1990, the district asked Ms. Odette Harris to become Parkway’s principal. For more than 30 years, Harris had been the principal of William Penn, a large, traditional urban high school. Her style and Parkway’s had little in common, and she remained principal long enough to alter most things alternative. As Ms. Catherine Blunt, Parkway’s union representative at the time, put it, the school changed “because we were in the district.”

As districts like Philadelphia seek to “turn around” their public schools, let’s not forget the lesson of the lost alternative schools. Inventive programs, even when successful, are easily swept aside and replaced by standard fare.

Lynne Blumberg is an ESL and English instructor and freelance writer.

I have been able to travel all over the country to compete and train because online schooling has afforded me extra time. But don’t think online schools are not as challenging as traditional ones. At Kaplan, students choose their course loads, and each course has a syllabus of 8 to 12 modules. Each module includes lessons, quizzes, and a final test or two. In my AP English class, each module typically covered a specific genre and focused on a central novel. By the end of the year, I had read 12 literary classics, exploring each one by analyzing its components and comparing and contrasting it to other works of literature. My junior year I took six classes: three APs, two honors level, and an SAT prep course. I pushed myself academically while I trained and competed athletically.

Although one might think an online school experience would lack student-teacher interaction, Kaplan courses require regular contact between students and teachers. At the beginning of every semester, each teacher works individually with each student by phone, e-mail, or both to create an outline of dates and assignments. With my tennis schedule, attending to my schoolwork isn’t always easy, but with clear deadlines, courses become manageable.

My teachers have been my companions while I travel, whether it’s my physics teacher giving me computer passwords at 11 at night or my history teacher taking time on a holiday to explain a concept. Questions I have on everything from homework to college and my future have me calling them to talk at least once or twice a week.

I’ve formed lasting friendships with teachers I’ve never met in person. One of my English teachers has even become a very close friend. How is this possible when I live in Texas and she lives in Indiana? We’ve come to know each other through essays, poems, short stories, and seemingly endless piles of outlines and rough drafts. Whether I was writing my own rendition of Cinderella, creating a sonnet in iambic pentameter, or learning to appreciate the romanticism in Frankenstein, this teacher has been on call and ready to discuss my work.

During my travels, I have been able to augment my education by visiting the homes of authors and the settings of many of the stories I’ve read in my classes. I’ve experienced the tranquillity of Walden Pond; I’ve studied in Harlem, England, Scotland, Spain, and other locales across the globe. I’ve followed the path taken by the characters in The Grapes of Wrath and I’ve walked through plantations reminiscent of those in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Frederick Douglass’s autobiography. At every tournament site, my mom and I try to take a little time to find a bit of history in that place and learn about it. To have that frame of reference has made my schooling infinitely more colorful and tangible than it would have been had I spent the time in a classroom.

Brett Ellen Keeler lives in Austin, Texas, and is a nationally ranked tennis player. She plans to attend college in the fall and study pre-law and public policy.

The quality of our public schools has been measured in innumerable ways, and stakeholders may draw on any number of sources for rankings to support a particular agenda. Each winter, Education Week issues Quality Counts as a magazine supplement to its weekly newspaper. Report cards track and compare state education policies and outcomes in six areas: chance-for-success; K–12 achievement; standards, assessments, and accountability; transitions and alignment; the teaching profession; and school finance. For example, the grade for transitions and alignment is based on 14 indicators related to “early-childhood education, college readiness, and economy and workforce,”  while the school finance indicators measure spending patterns and resource distribution. Through these report cards, Education Week purports to “offer a comprehensive state-by-state analysis of key indicators of student success.”

The Quality Counts rankings are eagerly anticipated, thoroughly perused, and widely quoted. After the 2009 rankings were released, the Maryland State Department of Education issued a press release touting the state’s place at “the top of the list in Education Week’s tally, just ahead of Massachusetts.” Florida governor Charlie Crist celebrated the news that Education Week’s Quality Counts rated Florida’s schools 10th in the nation, based on its average rating across the six categories that comprise the analysis. Are Florida’s schools among the nation’s best? It depends on what you measure. By November of 2009, two lawsuits had been filed in Florida claiming the state was failing to provide high-quality education to its students. The plaintiffs claimed the state has low graduation rates, frequent school violence, and low levels of education spending and teacher pay compared to other states.

The rankings are also frequently misunderstood. Among the most widely cited of the Quality Counts ranking schemes is the Chance-for-Success Index (CFSI), which attempts to measure a state’s capacity for helping young people succeed. Here’s what Education Week’s Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center has to say about the index:

The Chance-for-Success Index captures the critical role that education plays at all stages of an individual’s life, with a particular focus on state-to-state differences in opportunities. While early foundations and the returns in the labor market from a quality education are important elements of success, we find that the school years consistently trump those factors. In every state, indicators associated with participation and performance in formal schooling constitute the largest source of points awarded in this category, and help explain much of the disparity between the highest- and lowest-ranked states.

The CFSI’s stated aim is to show the role that education plays as a student moves from childhood through the formal K–12 system and into the workforce, but then the rest of the description is fairly ambiguous. Many states nonetheless interpret the index as a simple measure of school quality. Maryland came in fifth in 2009, with a B+. The Maryland schools’ press release cited above reported that the state “ranked among the nation’s leaders in ‘Chance for Success,’ which looks at how well graduates achieve beyond high school.” Of course, some states choose not to emphasize their CFSI score. For example, the New Mexico education department’s January 2009 press release led with its number-two rank and A grade for transition and alignment policies and buried in the middle its 51st-place CFSI grade of D+.

Does CFSI measure the school system’s contributions to achievement beyond high school? It’s hard to say. Most of its components, described as “key facets of education spanning stages from childhood to adulthood,” are a grab bag of demographic characteristics. The index combines indicators related to family background, wealth, education levels, and employment with schooling measures, including kindergarten enrollment and selected National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores. The 13 components of success are identified in the sidebar. Not all of these have a clear relationship to postsecondary success, and several are beyond the control of state policymakers.

Consider the parental employment indicator and its role in an index that is updated annually or even every other year. Short-run trends in parental employment may not have any impact on the overall quality of a state’s education system; even the direction of possible influence is unclear. Parents who see how difficult it is to get and retain employment without education may stress the value of school completion, but it is also conceivable that underemployed parents may seek to accelerate their children’s entry into the labor force, even at the expense of their education. A similar problem exists with annual income: many factors outside of education quality influence the vitality of a state economy. Even if strong gains in public education are realized, it will be years before the effects are reflected in adults’ annual income. Income trends over the next few years will have little or nothing to do with current levels of education quality.

A Different Approach

Absent a sound theory of action, it is easy to go on a data spree. As seen in the CFSI, the more the merrier. As an experiment, we reconstructed the Chance-for-Success Index. First, we selected a clear standard for our index: we defined “success” as the percentage of young adults, aged 18 to 24, who are productively engaged in postsecondary endeavors (pursuing a college degree, active military service, or full-time employment). We limited the indicators to only those factors for which a reasonable empirical base of evidence shows an association between the indicator and our definition of success and that are plausibly under the control of education policymakers. Five indicators have a clear bearing on education outcomes: preschool enrollment, kindergarten enrollment, 4th-grade reading, 8th-grade mathematics, and high school graduation. Using the same source data as the 2009 CFSI and giving each factor equal weight, we computed new averages for each state and compared the new rankings to the originals.

Our results show marked divergence from the CFSI rankings (see Table 1). Only Maryland (5th) and Arizona (43rd) retained their rankings, although four of the top five stayed within that band. Looking down the list, however, 34 states moved 3 or more places, 21 shifted by 5 or more places, and 13 states moved by 8 or more places. Does our revised index precisely rank states’ public education systems? Probably not. The ideal index would be one that measured how well states and schools did, given their demography. Still, this exercise shows how sensitive the CFSI is to the choice of indicators.

Removing family background characteristics from the index changes states’ rankings substantially. The states that drop the most in the revised rankings are Hawaii, Rhode Island, Indiana, Alaska, Nebraska, and North Dakota. The states that gain the most are Florida, Texas, Maine, Idaho, Arkansas, and Mississippi, mostly poor, rural states.

Is the CFSI largely a measure of parental education? We looked at where the states would fall if we ranked them by individual family background variables. The variable that by itself provides a ranking with the closest fit to the CFSI is percentage of children with at least one parent with a postsecondary degree (parent education). Ranked by that measure alone, only 8 states would move by 8 or more places from their positions in the CFSI. Indicators of family income and adult education levels also produce rankings similar to the CFSI. Ranking states by either the percentage of children in families with incomes at least 200 percent of poverty level (the family income indicator) or the percentage of adults (25–64) with a 2- or 4-year postsecondary degree (adult educational attainment), only 15 states would move 8 or more places.

Measuring the Measure

Report cards must meet a number of conditions if they are to be reliable. First, they need to clearly define the condition or result being examined. None of the descriptions provided by the CFSI editors accomplish this—they never reveal exactly what they take the “chance for success” to be, asserting only that some states provide better opportunities than others. Explained the EPE Research Center’s director, “a child’s life prospects depend greatly on where he or she lives.”

Second, the indicators that are employed should have direct and proven association with the outcome being measured. The CFSI’s current approach mixes inputs such as demographics with outcomes like academic results to arrive at a single score. The result is a tautology: success is the sum of the parts; the parts are by default the components of success.

The editors of Quality Counts gather and report a variety of measures that reflect current education and policy performance across all 50 states and the District of Columbia and, through comparison, encourage states to take actions that would lead to improvements in their ratings. Nowhere do the Quality Counts editors show how or why the Chance-for-Success Index is a good predictor of success. Instead, they provide statistics that divert attention away from the things that actually do matter, such as high-quality teaching, a good range of school options, and success in early elementary schools. There is risk in including variables that have no real impact on the result being studied. States may view the results as motivators to improvement, and ineffective indicators may lead to ineffective attention and investment. Narrowing the scope of the Chance-for-Success Index to factors both causally related to school achievement and under the control of state education officials or school districts would improve its value and deliver the right signals to states.

CREDO at Stanford University supports education organizations and policymakers in using research and program evaluation to assess the performance of education initiatives. The team is led by Margaret Raymond and includes Kenneth Surratt, Devora Davis, Edward Cremata, Emily Peltason, Meghan Cotter Mazzola, Kathleen Dickey, and Rosemary Brock.

Columbine
By Dave Cullen

This book is clearly the last word on Columbine. The author has reported on the Columbine high-school massacre in various magazines and newspapers since 1999; he has interviewed, it appears, everyone interviewable; he has studied all the many official reports and all the evidence, listed here in a bibliography of 14 pages; and one can only regret the form in which he has chosen to cast his account. There have been many such shootings over the years, and one, the Virginia Tech massacre, far exceeded in numbers those killed at Columbine High in Colorado on April 20, 1999, but Columbine—it is no longer necessary to define for American audiences what it was—had some distinctive features that helped impress it into the American mind as the epitome of school killings.

There were two killers, rather than one, suggesting a degree of collaboration or conspiracy that made Columbine different from the typical school shooting by one disturbed or deranged perpetrator. It was the first school killing covered live on continuous news television, which contributed to both widespread knowledge and widespread confusion as to what drove the killers. The two young students had also left an enormous trail of video recordings, web pages, notebooks, and all kinds of other evidence of acquisition of guns and bomb-making materials, which could be, and were, used to determine how the plot developed, why they did it, what they had in mind.

Perhaps of greatest interest to school administrators and teachers, the two left a substantial trail of recorded misdemeanors, crimes, and treatment for them that raised the question, How could their preparations, undertaken over months, for the killing of hundreds—fortunately, partly foiled by the failure of the two huge bombs they set up to explode in the lunchroom—not have received notice in time for someone to stop them?

Cullen tells the story of the massacre twice, both times weaving in stories about students, victims, teachers and administrators, parents, and investigators, about whom we learn more than we need to know, in the style of The New Yorker. The first telling has the virtue of communicating the confusion attendant as the events occurred. Hundreds of police officers surrounded the school and prepared to invade it; the TV news stations were on the spot almost immediately (“breaking news,” after all); terrified students were calling parents, 911, and news channels on their cell phones; and many things heard contradicted other things. All this is well documented by Cullen.

But early on, when information about the intended targets and even the number of killers was unclear (as they appeared and reappeared in different locations and shed the trench coats they had worn for their initial shootings), there emerged a widely accepted story line: Two marginalized students had been subjected to sneers and social rejection and in revenge were shooting athletes and Christians. Actually, the killers were not marginalized, were good and even popular students, were not members of the Gothic “trench coat mafia,” and were killing at random. All initial views of their motivation were misguided.

The second telling of the massacre, incorporating all we have learned since, concentrates on the development of the two killers and their ideas and plans, and on their encounters with the law and school authorities. One was clearly a psychopath, and Cullen has a good and extensive discussion of what we know of this disease and how to treat it. The second was dominated by the first and suffered from an extreme version of lovesickness directed at a student whom he never addressed. The first killer, influenced apparently by admiration for Germans, from Nietzsche to the Nazis, thought that the world and all its people were terrible and deserved to die, and he was ready to die with them. He was able to persuade the second killer, who was miserable, but just why is unclear. Both boys killed themselves when they ran out of available targets and weapons.

Despite the general confusion during the massacre and for some time later, the identity of the two shooters became available almost immediately, presumably from reports by students streaming out of the school and being rapidly interviewed by police. “A simple search on Jeffco [Jefferson County] computer files found something stunning. The shooters were already in the system. Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold] had been arrested junior year. They got caught breaking into a van to steal electronic equipment. They entered a 12-month juvenile treatment program, performing community service and attending counseling. They’d completed the program with glowing reviews exactly 10 weeks before the massacre.

“More disturbing was a complaint filed thirteen months earlier by Randy and Judy Brown, the parents of the shooters’ friend Brooks. Eric had made death threats against Brooks. Ten pages of murderous rants printed from his web site had been compiled. Someone in Battan’s [the lead investigator] department had known about this kid.”

We learn in the course of the book a good deal more about the available record. There was apparently no way for the counselors in the treatment program to unveil the murderous intent of their counselees, who put on a good show of remorse. The papers that called for a search as a result of the Brown complaint, a search that might have uncovered astonishing evidence of intended mayhem in Eric’s room had it been executed, were never acted upon, and the file on the case kept getting lost, owing one assumes to the embarrassment it would cause the Jeffco officials.

Consider also a paper written by Dylan Klebold shortly before the massacre: “His instructor, Judy Kelly, read it and shuddered. It was an astounding piece of writing for a seventeen-year-old, but she was deeply disturbed… Dylan’s protagonist was killing civilians, ruthlessly, and enjoying it. Kelly wrote a note at the bottom instructing Dylan to come to see her…. ‘You are an excellent writer and storyteller, but I have some problems with this one,’ she wrote.”

The teacher went further. She called Dylan’s parents and spoke with them. “They did not seem too worried.” Both sets of parents were middle-class and ran respectable households, and while they were held in some way responsible by public opinion, they hardly seem to deserve censure from this account. Judy Kelly went on to the school counselor, who spoke with Dylan and “downplayed it again…. Kelly had done the right thing: she’d contacted the three people most likely to have information on Dylan…. If the counselor or parents knew Dylan had been setting off pipe bombs and showing them around at Blackjack Pizza [where he worked], they could have connected fantasy with reality and NBK [the boys’ code name for the massacre] might have come to an end. They did not. Jeffco investigators had most of the pieces. Most of the adults close to the killers were in the dark.”

Lessons? “The FBI and the Secret Service each published reports in the first three years, guiding faculty to identify serious threats. The central recommendations contradicted prevailing post-Columbine behavior [which was “zero tolerance,” “every idle threat…treated like a cocked gun. That drove everyone crazy”]. They said identifying outcasts as threats is not healthy. It demonizes kids who are already struggling…. Oddballs are not the problem. They do not fit the profile. There is no profile….

“The FBI compiled a specific list of warning signs…. It was a daunting list…. Few teachers were going to master it. The FBI recommended that one person per school be trained intensely, for all faculty and administrators to turn to.”

Cullen gives references to these reports, which are clearly worth reading. But the main effect of his well-researched book is to leave one sober about any program that might prevent such horrible events from recurring in the future.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

At some point, all parents must rely on others to tell them what is going on with their children. When ours were in day care, we knew what they ate, saw, and drew, and the frequency of diaper changes. It was easy to believe that we, as parents, were part of the action.

All that went out the window when real school started. Apart from injuries and stomach aches, the school day was one big black hole. From time to time, the school would invite parents in to observe the action, but it was clearly staged, and the children were not behaving as they would on a normal day.

Now the burden of finding out what is going on in school falls largely to the family dinner. We are a household that dines together. One of the benefits of having our dual incomes come from academia and public service is that we can all be at home by five or so. And that means dinners together almost every night.

There are studies showing that family dinnertime is a good thing. Dinner is where the meaningful conversations take place. From this, I take it that continual pleading to sit still or eat your vegetables or don’t wipe your dirty face on your shirt doesn’t cut it. At our dinner table that last one leads to instant shirt removal without replacement, so our dinners could, to an outside observer, look like a one-sided game of strip poker.

“How was your day at school?” meets the typical response: “Good” or “I don’t want to say”—this one always piques my interest, making the child wish he hadn’t said he didn’t want to say. Sometimes the response is more intriguing and we hear about playground politics and engage in thoughtful responses of how to deal with it.

“So-and-so won’t let me play this and that.”

“Well, have you tried asking nicely?”

“Yeesss, it doesn’t work. They just tell me to go away.”

“Well, maybe this and that is pretty dull. How about doing something more interesting? You play something else and that just shows them!”

“There isn’t anything more interesting.”

“You know maybe I can just come into school and flog those creeps for ignoring you.”

“Dad, you’re not helping.”

And so it goes. On a good day we can find out that a child actually learned something (e.g., do long division), although more often than not they learned not to do something (e.g., leap off the fence). With the latter we can balance the affront to civil rights against a legitimate concern for public safety.

This is surely far removed from the intellectual discussion that is thought to be associated with dinnertime togetherness. We are supposed to reinforce the learning or journey together in a process of joint discovery. So sometimes one attempts to engage by dropping an interesting fact into the conversational mix:

“So they think they discovered water on Mars today.”

“We already have water here.”

“True and we have life here, too. If they find water on Mars that might mean there is life there, too.”

“Why can’t they just look around for the life and not bother with the water?”

“Well, it may be that the life died out many years ago. So the water indicates life might have been there.”

“In that case, the water didn’t do them much good, did it?”

“I guess not.”

When it comes down to it, maybe our problem is that we, as parents, try to take an increasingly active role in our children’s schooling while our children are becoming more independent and less in need of our intervention. Perhaps technology might one day provide the solution: the schools will keep us well informed about what our children are learning and what, if anything, is needed from us. Then we can just sit at dinner, eat, and smile knowingly at one another.

Joshua Gans is professor of management (information economics) at the University of Melbourne and author of Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting (The MIT Press, 2009).

Students will test the limits of acceptable behavior in myriad ways better known to school teachers than to judges; school officials need a degree of flexible authority to respond to disciplinary challenges; and the law has always considered the relationship between teachers and students special.
— Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

In Morse v. Frederick, a 2007 First Amendment student free speech case, the Supreme Court held that a school official may restrict student speech at a school-supervised event when that speech is viewed as promoting illegal drug use. Filing a separate opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer echoed concerns expressed by his conservative colleagues that school authority was being undermined by legal challenges. Since the 1960s, courts have become increasingly involved in regulating U.S. schooling in general, but especially in the area of school discipline. Justice Breyer noted in his opinion, “Under these circumstances, the more detailed the Court’s supervision becomes, the more likely its law will engender further disputes among teachers and students.”

School discipline is a critical area for research, as student interaction with school institutional authority is one of the primary mechanisms whereby young people come into contact with and internalize societal norms, values, and rules. It is thus significant that the number of cases reaching state and federal appellate courts has surged back up to levels attained during the early 1970s when civil rights cases had a central place on the national political agenda (see Figure 1). Our research indicates that both educators and students understand the former’s authority to be more limited and the latter’s rights more expansive than has actually been established by case law.

School Discipline in Court
Until the late 1960s, parents and students rarely challenged the disciplinary actions of school authorities, viewing common schools as providing instruction, instilling virtue, and fostering the ideals of our nation. Then, as conceptions of youth rights began to shift, and as institutions that provided support for the expansion of these rights emerged, students and parents, with the support of public-interest lawyers, began to question and challenge school disciplinary practices in court.

Table 1 summarizes key school-related rulings from the Supreme Court over the last 40 years. From 1969 to 1975, amid increasing legal challenges to the regulation of student expression in school, the Court’s rulings largely confirmed students’ rights to various free expression and due process protections. The most important decision affecting how schools approach student discipline was Goss v. Lopez, decided by the Supreme Court in 1975. During a patriotic assembly at Central High School in Columbus, Ohio, in 1971, expressions of student unrest over the lack of African American curricula turned into a week of demonstrations and disturbances. Dozens of students were suspended for up to 10 days without formal hearings or notification of the specific charges against them. The Supreme Court case hinged on whether the disciplinary actions improperly denied students their rights to a public education. In ruling for the students, the Court granted “rudimentary” due process rights to those suspended from school for fewer than 10 days, as well as “more formal protections” for students facing longer exclusions.

In recent years, courts at all levels have dealt with cases challenging the enforcement of “zero-tolerance” policies that establish severe and nondiscretionary punishments for violations involving weapons, violence, drugs, or alcohol. At the same time, an increasing number of cases have appeared in lower courts that involve students and families suing schools for failing to provide adequate discipline within school facilities. These cases have alleged climates that permit bullying, sexual harassment, or other forms of school violence (including school shootings). Thus, in recent years, schools have been sued for both disciplining students and not disciplining them.

Since 1975, the Supreme Court has generally been less favorable toward students than it was during the early years of the civil rights movement.. This shift in orientation occurred for diverse reasons, including growing public concern about the level of violence and disorder in public schools, the changed political climate following the end of the Vietnam era, and a pattern of increasingly conservative judicial appointments during the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations. The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Morse v. Frederick continued the post-1975 pattern of sympathy with schools that are facing challenges to their disciplinary authority, but did not, as some of the media coverage implied, alter the general contours of student rights as previously established. Its June 2009 decision in Safford United School District v. Redding, in which eight justices agreed that a near strip-search of an 8th-grade girl suspected of concealing prescription-strength ibuprofen was unconstitutional, at first glance appears to be an exception—a sign that the courts will continue to watch over the shoulders of school officials to ensure that reasonableness and proportionality prevail. Yet a majority on the court ruled that the administrators who conducted the search could not be held personally liable because of the uncertainty of the law in this area.

Appellate Case Patterns
While Supreme Court decisions are important because every school in the nation must adhere in principle to its rulings, these few landmark cases do not encompass the universe of legal challenges regarding school discipline and related policies. To discern the larger contours of the legal climate facing schools, we analyzed all appellate-level federal and state court cases in which school efforts to discipline and control students have been challenged. As a whole, decisions in these cases are often complex and contradictory in providing practical guidance to schools regarding specific disciplinary matters. We included cases involving the use of state agents (such as the police) acting on behalf of school authorities to deal with students in the vicinity of school grounds. We excluded instances of conflicts between schools and teachers (such as teacher dismissal cases) and between schools and nonstudent outsiders (such as drug- and weapon-free-zone cases that did not involve students), as well as student rights cases focused exclusively on free speech issues (that is, those not combined with the school’s use of suspension, expulsion, corporal punishment, and transfer). We also excluded cases in which students allege that school authorities have breached their duty to maintain safety in the school and to protect students from harm.

Of course, we did not include the vast majority of litigation, which was either settled before hearing or never reached state and federal appellate courts. Still, our methods provide a way to gauge the general character and broad trends in legal challenges that contemporary educators face. Appellate-level court cases define case law, generate media coverage, influence public perceptions, and can be tracked over time as an empirical indicator of the broad parameters of court climate toward school discipline. We found that not only has the frequency of legal challenges greatly varied over time, but the content and direction of outcomes has shifted as well.
The newfound willingness to challenge school authority became evident in the surge of litigation during the late 1960s. In part because of increased institutional support from public-interest legal advocacy groups and the legal services program of the Office of Economic Opportunity, from 1968 to 1975 an average of 39.1 public school K—12 cases per year reached the appellate level. After important legal precedents were set and institutional support waned, the average number of cases declined but then took a sharp upturn from 1993 on, with a peak of 76 cases in 2000 and a total of 65 in 2007. We present here the overall number of cases rather than a relative measure accounting for public school enrollment, given that media coverage and individual understandings reflect the former indicator. Nevertheless, a measure of state and federal court cases calculated per enrolled student would demonstrate similar upward trends, more than doubling from the years 1976—1992 to the 2003—2007 period.

The substance of the cases brought before the courts has also varied over time, with protest and free expression cases decreasing markedly through 1992 (see Figure 2a). Recently, courts have witnessed a reemergence of these issues. Cases involving alcohol and drugs rose during the intermediate time periods that coincided with national attention to the “War on Drugs” and then diminished. Those involving weapons and violence have increased to nearly 40 percent of all K—12 public school discipline cases since 1993. In addition, school discipline court cases increasingly have involved student disability. From 2003 to 2007, 18 percent of cases included discussion of student disability status. Since the 1970s, legal entitlements and protections have grown for students classified as disabled because of learning, physical, or behavioral handicaps (including psychological disorders that are associated with the manifestation of student misbehavior). Special education students thus gained additional protections related to school discipline, particularly in cases in which infractions could be attributed to the individual’s disability.

Over time, we found that courts in general have become less favorable to student claims across these areas of litigation (see Figure 2b). However, since the number of court challenges has increased in recent decades, the likelihood of a school facing a legal environment in which a student has recently been successful in a court challenge over school discipline has not significantly diminished.

Socioeconomic Disparities
Many of the early school discipline cases were brought to ensure that the rights of less-advantaged students were protected. New evidence suggests, however, that litigation is increasingly used strategically and instrumentally by families from relatively privileged origins to promote the interests of their children. Research (by Irenee Beattie, Josipa Roksa, and Richard Arum) that examined appellate court cases from 2000 to 2002 found that, on average, those cases emerged from secondary schools with 29 percent nonwhite students compared to 37 percent nonwhite students in the national population of secondary schools (the latter weighted for enrollment size to be comparable to the court case data); appellate cases also emanated from schools with more educational resources per student (student/teacher ratios of 16.3 compared to 17.5 nationally).

National surveys of teachers and administrators reveal a similar middle-class bias in legal challenges. A reanalysis of a Harris survey of teachers and administrators conducted by Melissa Velez and Richard Arum for Common Good in 2003 examined the proportion of public school educators (a combined sample of teachers and administrators) who reported that either they or someone they knew personally had been sued by a student or parent. Educators in suburban schools with less than 70 percent nonwhite students had a 47 percent probability of having experienced contact with an adversarial legal challenge compared to a 40 percent chance for educators in all other schools. Although much of the development of student rights originally emerged from concern about nonwhite students in urban areas, educators in those settings had only a 41 percent probability of contact with a legal challenge.

In collaboration with colleagues working on the School Rights Project (Lauren Edelman, Calvin Morrill, and Karolyn Tyson), we conducted a national telephone survey of 600 high school teachers and administrators and site-based surveys of 5,490 students and 368 educators on perceptions and experiences of the law in schools. In our site-based work, which included in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we examined 24 high schools with varying legal environments situated across three states (New York, North Carolina, and California), stratified by school type (traditional public, charter, and Catholic) as well as by student socioeconomic composition. We found that 15 percent of public school teachers and 55 percent of public school administrators have been threatened with a legal suit over school-related matters. For administrators with more than 15 years of experience in the position, the figure rose to 73 percent. Administrators’ actual experience with being sued for school-related matters occurs at a lower rate (14 percent), but is still the source of considerable professional anxiety, given that these cases—following Wood v. Strickland (1975)—include vulnerability to personal liability claims. We again found that legal challenges are concentrated in schools with more-privileged students. When we looked solely at administrators working in urban public schools with more than half of students eligible for free lunch, we found—albeit with a sample of only 16 cases—not a single report of administrators being sued for a school-related matter.

That legal mobilization is dependent on economic resources needed to pursue such challenges is in general not surprising. We documented evidence of this association, however, to illustrate that regardless of the institutional and political origins of student rights, today legal mobilization in schools largely reflects patterns of socioeconomic inequalities. In the School Rights Project, we found that white students were nearly twice as likely as nonwhite students to report having pursued a formal legal remedy for a perceived rights violation.

Legal Understandings and School Practices
Legal mobilization is a relatively rare occurrence, a small tip of a much larger legal-dispute pyramid. School discipline today is profoundly shaped by legal understandings that are only partially and indirectly related to formal regulation and case law. We highlight here the extent to which both students and educators have developed an expansive definition of legal rights of students, the relationship between this sense of legal entitlement and school disciplinary practices, and perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy of various school disciplinary practices.

The institutionalization of student due process protections goes well beyond appellate case law, having been enshrined in extensive state statutes and administrative regulations. The accompanying sidebar (page 65) provides a sense of the extent to which law has come to permeate school practices by highlighting codified disciplinary procedures in New York City. While discipline policies vary across schools, districts, and states—and as the nation’s largest school district the New York City public schools are likely more bureaucratized and formalized in matters of school discipline than smaller districts—the scale, scope, and level of complexity of the legal regulations affecting day-to-day school practices appear quite formidable.

Generally speaking, educators and students have developed a set of legal understandings that assumes a broad and expansive definition of student legal entitlements. Following the Goss decision, students have been granted rudimentary due process protections when facing minor discipline and more formal due process protections when facing more serious forms of discipline (such as long-term expulsion or suspension). The Goss decision delineated procedural safeguards, stating that “the student be given oral or written notice of the charges against him and, if he denies them, an explanation of the evidence the authorities have and an opportunity to present his side of the story.” More formal due process protections may include the right of students to “summon the accuser, permit cross-examination, and allow the student to present his own witnesses. In more difficult cases, he (the disciplinarian) may permit counsel.”

We are interested in individuals’ perceptions of such protections, since students’ and educators’ beliefs about rights likely have real consequences for school authority and disciplinary procedures. In the School Rights Project, we specifically asked students and teachers which due process protections were required when students faced various disciplinary sanctions. We found that while expectations of formal due process protections were broadly diffused for students when facing major disciplinary actions, many of them had also come to expect these legal entitlements when facing minor day-to-day discipline. For example, 62 percent of public school students in our sample believed that, if faced with long-term suspension or expulsion, they were legally entitled to at least one of the following: a formal disciplinary hearing, opportunity to be represented by legal counsel, opportunity to confront and cross-examine witnesses bringing the charges, or opportunity to call witnesses to provide alternative versions of the incident. Approximately one-third of students also believed that they were legally entitled to some form of formal due process protection when they had their grades lowered for disciplinary reasons (33 percent), were suspended from extracurricular activities (36 percent), or faced in-school suspension (35 percent).

We found that students’ sense of legal entitlement was expansive, and that teacher and administrator expectations of required student due process protections were even more so. For example, when asked about lowering student grades for disciplinary reasons, approximately half of public school teachers and administrators responded that this action was prohibited; among the educators who did think such disciplinary actions were permissible, 32 percent reported that students subject to such disciplinary sanctions were entitled to formal due process protections.

In the School Rights Project, we found that increased perceptions of student legal entitlements correlate with decreased reports of the fairness of school discipline. This conclusion mirrors James Coleman’s finding that Catholic school students in the 1980s were significantly more likely to perceive school discipline to be fair than public school students, who possessed far greater formal legal protections. Educators and students have developed a generalized sense of legal entitlements, while school practices have, in many settings, become increasingly authoritarian, with student misbehavior often subject to criminalization and formal legal sanction. These internal contradictions enhance students’ sense of the unfairness of school discipline. Longitudinal research has demonstrated that students who perceive school discipline as unfair are more likely to disobey teachers, disrupt classroom instruction, and in general fail to develop behaviors conducive to educational success and related positive outcomes.

Also, in recent decades schools have moved away from disciplinary practices that rely on the judgment, discretion, and action of professional educators and have turned instead to reliance on school security guards, uniformed police, technical surveillance, security apparatus, and zero-tolerance policies. The latter techniques are ill suited to the pedagogical task of enhancing the moral authority of educators to support the socialization of youth, that is, the internalization of norms, values, and rules.

Conclusion
Citizens, legislators, judges, and policymakers have begun to recognize and question legal interventions in situations involving school discipline and authority. We add to this discussion our findings that the legal understandings underlying school discipline policies depart in significant ways from the case law on which they are assumed to be based, according expansive rights and protections to students, even as the courts have tended to side with school authorities. We also document that although public-interest lawyers were initially motivated to expand student legal rights as part of a larger strategy to reduce social inequality, legal challenges to school disciplinary actions are disproportionately the province of white and higher-income students and their families.

The expansion of student legal entitlements has been accompanied by the increasing formalization and institutionalization of school discipline. As educators’ discretionary authority over school discipline has been challenged and undermined, counterproductive authoritarian measures such as zero-tolerance policies have been implemented in its place. But to be educationally effective, school discipline requires that educators have moral authority and students perceive their actions as legitimate and fair. Ironically, the expansion of student legal rights, rather than enhancing youth outcomes, has increased the extent to which schools have relied on authoritarian measures, decreased the moral authority of educators, and diminished the capacity of schools to socialize young people effectively.

As various social and political actors consider legal regulatory reforms, it is important to recognize that the expansion of students’ legal entitlements has also increased the potential for student dissent in U.S. schools, whether of a political, religious, or ideological character. At the same time, individual students and families with sufficient resources are able to contest what they perceive as unfair disciplinary sanctions or rights violations. These gains have come at a pedagogical and societal cost, as the resolution of school disciplinary matters has increasingly moved—as Justice Breyer feared—from the schoolhouse to the courthouse.

Richard Arum is professor of sociology and education at New York University, where Doreet Preiss is a research fellow and doctoral candidate. This essay is adapted from “Still Judging School Discipline,” in Joshua M. Dunn and Martin R. West, eds., From Schoolhouse to Courthouse: The Judiciary’s Role in American Education (Brookings, 2009).

Fortunately, after spending just a few days instead of a few years in lockup, I was exonerated. Two weeks later, I met my wife, Lisa, dedicated myself to reading two books a week to improve my speaking and writing skills, changed my peer group, and moved on with my life.

In 1993 I returned home to Madison, Wisconsin, from Hampton, Virginia, having spent three years in the U.S. Navy and one year attending Hampton University. I immediately went to my old neighborhood to check in with everyone, to see my guys and the girls on the block where I’d spent so much time as an adolescent. I was shocked and dismayed to find that so many of the young men I grew up with had succumbed to the crack cocaine trade and were either addicted to it or selling it, died or were killed for it, or were in jail because of it. Most of those still around were not in the labor force, were not attending any education or training program, and expressed little optimism about their future or their value to society.

I switched my academic major at the University of Wisconsin from pre-medicine and nutritional sciences to urban education and spent the next decade working with city youth. I soon became determined to expose how unproductive our education system was at graduating students and preparing them for college. I enlisted the support of a then up-and-coming researcher named Jay Greene to help me identify a reliable formula for calculating high school graduation rates and secured the support of the organization I was then presiding over to spend $15,000 on a study.

At the time, I was concerned that “dropout” statistics were masking a much larger problem that many in government knew existed but weren’t sharing: hundreds of thousands of black and brown students nationwide were not graduating high school. That initial study and others that followed have stimulated national interest and growing financial investment in high school graduation and college-readiness initiatives. But the central problem that drove me down this road in the first place—the lack of educational and career success among young black and brown men—has garnered very little attention.

As we celebrate the election of our country’s first black president, I can’t help but ponder how very few black males are being prepared to successfully complete a college education and assume leadership roles in the fields of business, industry, government, family, and community. How will this brain drain affect the future of families and children in our country? How will this affect our economy and national interests? How many public and private prisons are we willing to pay $38,000 annually per inmate to have black men imprint license plates and pick up debris on U.S. highways?

The 2008 Schott Foundation report on high school graduation among black males found that only 19 percent of black males in Indianapolis, 20 percent in Detroit, 27 percent in Norfolk, Virginia, 29 percent in Rochester, New York, and 47 percent nationally were graduating from high school. When I read that report, I felt as if I’d been impaled by fragments from a hand grenade. I asked myself, If our school systems are producing such small numbers of graduates, what is the purpose of K—12 education for black males? Why are we allowing our children to languish in schools and school systems that produce far more failures than successes?

Kaleem Caire is the president and CEO of Next Generation Education Foundation, an organization that prepares young men to succeed in college, careers, leadership, and life.

Understanding whether troubled children in fact generate spillover effects in school is important for two reasons. First, the existence of substantial spillovers caused by family problems such as domestic violence would provide an additional compelling reason for policymakers to find ways to help troubled families. Second, because many education policies change the composition of school and classroom peer groups, it is important to understand how such changes may affect student achievement. For example, a common concern regarding the ongoing push to “mainstream” emotionally disturbed students in regular classroom settings is that doing so may undermine the performance of other students. Similarly, the tracking of students into classrooms based on ability or academic performance may group disadvantaged children with the most disruptive students. The validity of these concerns hinges on whether and how classroom exposure to troubled peers affects student achievement and behavior.

Credibly measuring negative spillovers caused by troubled children has been difficult. Most data sets do not allow researchers to identify troubled children. Even when such students are identified in the data, it is difficult to determine if a disruptive child causes his classmates to misbehave or if his classmates cause him to be disruptive, what scholars of peer effects call the “reflection problem.” In addition, troubled children are likely to attend the same schools as other disadvantaged children. One must rule out the possibility that the disruptive student and his classmates misbehave due to some common unobserved factor.

We overcome these problems in this study by utilizing a unique data set in which information on students’ academic achievement and behavior is linked to domestic violence cases filed by their parents. This data set allows us to identify troubled children more precisely than we could by using conventional demographic measures. Moreover, we can identify children who are troubled for specific family reasons and not because of their peer group. This allows us to measure peer effects free from the reflection problem, providing a rare opportunity to test the notion that even one “bad apple” impedes the learning of all other students.

Our results confirm, first, that children from troubled families, as measured by family domestic violence, perform considerably worse on standardized reading and mathematics tests and are much more likely to commit disciplinary infractions and be suspended than other students. We find also that an increase in the number of children from troubled families reduces peer student math and reading test scores and increases peer disciplinary infractions and suspensions. The effects on academic achievement are greatest for students from higher income families, while the effects on behavior are more pronounced on students who are less well-off. The results of our analysis provide evidence that, in many cases, a single disruptive student can indeed influence the academic progress made by an entire classroom of students.

Data

In our study, we use a confidential student-level data set provided by the school board of Alachua County in Florida. This data set consists of observations of students in the 3 rd through 5th grades from 22 public elementary schools for the academic years 1995–96 through 2002–03. The Alachua County school district is large relative to school districts nationwide, with roughly 30,000 students; in the 1999–00 school year, it was the 192nd largest among the nearly 15,000 districts nationwide. The student population in our sample is approximately 55 percent white, 38 percent black, 3.5 percent Hispanic, 2.5 percent Asian, and 1 percent mixed race. Fifty-three percent of students were eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program.

The test-score data consist of reading and mathematics scores from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford 9, both nationally normed exams. Reported scores indicate the percentile ranking on the national test relative to all test-takers nationwide. Because the reading and math results are so similar, we use a composite score calculated by taking the average of the math and reading scores. The average student in our data scored at the 53rd percentile, or just above the national norm.

Yearly disciplinary records, which include incident type and date, are available for every student in our sample. Incidents are reported in the system if they are serious enough to require intervention by the principal or another administrator. We focus on three behavioral outcomes from these records: the probability the student was involved in a disciplinary incident, the total number of disciplinary incidents per student, and the probability the student was suspended. In a typical year, 18 percent of the students in our data set were involved in a disciplinary incident, the average student was involved in 0.56 incidents, and 9 percent of students were suspended.

We gathered domestic violence data from public records information at the Alachua County courthouse, which included the date filed and the names and addresses of individuals involved in domestic violence cases filed in civil court in Alachua County between January 1, 1993, and March 12, 2003.Cases are initiated when one family member (typically the mother) petitions the court for a temporary injunction for protection against another member of the family (most often the father or boyfriend). Students were linked to cases in which the petitioner’s first and last name and the first three digits of the residential address matched the parent name and student’s residential address in the annual school record. In that way, we were able to identify the set of students who could be matched to a domestic violence case from1993 to 2003. In total, 4.6 percent of the children in our data set were linked to a domestic violence case filed by a parent, split equally between boys and girls. Sixty-one percent of these children were black, while 85 percent were eligible for subsidized school lunches.

Students linked to a domestic violence case performed at lower levels academically and were more likely to have been involved in a disciplinary incident than other students in the district. Boys exposed to domestic violence, for example, performed at the 37th percentile academically, as compared with the 52nd percentile for boys who were not exposed. Forty-three percent of boys exposed to domestic violence were involved in a disciplinary incident, as compared with 25 percent of boys who were not exposed. Girls exposed to domestic violence performed at the 41st percentile academically and 19 percent of them were involved in a disciplinary incident, as compared with the 55th percentile and 11 percent for girls who were not exposed to domestic violence (see Figure 1).

Measuring Peer Effects

Our main analysis examines the impact of troubled children on their peers. We assume there is no feedback loop in which a student’s peers cause the domestic violence in the household. This assumption appears reasonable, as none of the most likely determinants of domestic violence can plausibly be caused by an elementary school child or her peers.

To overcome the bias that results from self-selection into peer groups, our main analysis compares cohorts of students in the same grade at the same school in different years. For example, we compare the 3rd graders in a given school this year with the 3rd graders in the same school last year to see whether the cohort with more students exposed to domestic violence had higher or lower student achievement. Restricting the comparisons to students attending the same school ensures that any effects we observe reflect the impact of troubled students and not the fact that schools with more such students differ in unobserved ways from other schools. We measure peer domestic violence at the cohort level (that is, across all students in a grade at a school) as opposed to the classroom level due to the possible sorting of students into classrooms according to their achievement and behavior. We also adjust for differences among students in a large set of individual characteristics—most importantly whether particular students had been directly exposed to domestic violence—but also race, gender, subsidized lunch status, and median zip code income.

Results

Our results indicate that troubled students have a statistically significant negative effect on their peers’ reading and math test scores. Adding one troubled student to a classroom of 20 students results in a decrease in student reading and math test scores of more than two-thirds of a percentile point (2 to 3 percent of a standard deviation). The addition of a troubled peer also significantly increases misbehavior of other students in the classroom, in effect causing them to commit 0.09 more infractions than they otherwise would, a 16 percent increase. These are effects that could accumulate over time if the same students are repeatedly exposed to troubled peers.

These average effects also mask a few interesting differences across student groups. We find that troubled peers have a large and statistically significant negative effect on higher income children’s math and reading achievement, but only a small and statistically insignificant effect on the achievement of low-income children. However, we find the opposite pattern for disciplinary outcomes. The presence of troubled peers significantly increases the misbehavior of low-income children, but does not increase the disciplinary problems of higher-income children (see Figure 2).

Results of examining the differential effects of peers from troubled families by race and gender show relatively large negative and statistically significant test-score effects on white boys and statistically insignificant effects on black boys, black girls, and white girls. Adding one troubled peer to a classroom of 20 students reduces white boys’ reading and math scores by 1.6 percentile points and black boys’ reading and math scores by 0.9 percentile points (the effects on girls are negligible). Troubled peers increase disciplinary problems for all subgroups except for white girls. The effects are largest for black girls. One troubled peer added to a classroom of 20 students increases the probability that a black girl commits a disciplinary infraction by 2.2 percentage points (an increase of 10 percent over what would otherwise be the case).

Finally, we examined whether troubled boys affect their peers differently than do troubled girls. Across all outcome variables, both academic and behavioral, the negative peer effects appear to be driven primarily by the troubled boys, and these effects are largest on other boys in the classroom. The results indicate that adding one troubled boy to a classroom of 20 students decreases boys’ test scores by nearly 2 percentile points (7 percent of a standard deviation) and increases the probability that a boy will commit a disciplinary infraction by 4.4 percentile points (17 percent). Apparently, troubled boys generate the strongest adverse peer effects, and other boys are most sensitive to their influence.

Testing Key Assumptions

Of critical importance to our method is the assumption that students are not systematically placed into or pulled out of a particular grade cohort within a school depending on the domestic violence status of the student or his peers. For example, if parents who really value education were more likely to pull their children out of a cohort with a particularly high proportion of peers from troubled families, such nonrandom selection would cause us to erroneously attribute lower performance to the presence of the troubled peers.

We performed several additional analyses to probe the robustness of our results to this critical assumption. As a first test for nonrandom selection of students into or out of particular schools and cohorts of students, we examined whether peer family violence appears to have an effect on cohort size or student characteristics such as race, gender, and income. In the absence of nonrandom selection, we expect to find no correlation between these characteristics and the peer family violence variables. This is indeed what we find.

Next, we noted that some parents may be more likely than others to put their children in private schools or move to a different school zone because of a particularly bad cohort, but that parents may be less likely to pull one child out of the school due to a particularly bad cohort when that child has a sibling in the same school. When we calculated peer effects only on children with siblings in the school, the results were essentially the same as those for the full sample.

One might also be concerned that some families are, for some reason, unable to remove their children from cohorts with a large number of troubled peers. To check this potential cause of nonrandom selection, we calculated results based only on comparing students to their siblings. We found that the sibling in the cohort with more children from troubled families has lower test scores and more disciplinary problems. These within-family results are roughly two-thirds the size of the estimates for the full sample, but the differences between the two sets of results are not statistically significant.

For a final check, we added controls for a full set of cohort-level variables, including race, gender, participation in the federal subsidized lunch program, and median zip code income. These variables control for any potential changes in cohort characteristics not captured by our full set of individual controls in the main analysis. In addition, this allows us to examine whether the presence of children exposed to domestic violence is merely a proxy for other peer characteristics, such as family income. The results indicate that the negative peer effects are not likely driven by observable factors, such as family income, that are correlated with domestic violence.

Collectively, these tests provide strong evidence that our findings are not the result of families changing schools in response to the number of children from troubled families in their child’s grade at an assigned school.

Discussion

In addition to knowing how children from troubled homes affect their peers through interaction with their cohort at school, one may also wish to know the precise way in which the troubled families cause the peer effects. This is a particularly challenging task given that researchers have consistently found, as we have, that domestic violence is correlated with other negative family characteristics, such as poverty, unemployment, low levels of education, and substance abuse. While we cannot conclusively attribute the effects found to the causal effect of domestic violence per se, we can exploit the timing of the domestic violence filings to provide suggestive evidence of whether the negative spillovers are due to domestic violence or some other factor correlated with it.

Specifically, we examine whether the negative spillovers associated with children from troubled families are smaller after the parent files the case than before the case is filed. Survey research shows that on average, violence had occurred in the family for more than four years prior to the reporting of the incident. However, 87 percent of the respondents indicated that the reporting of the incident “helped stop physical abuse.” Consequently, if domestic violence itself is causing the negative spillovers on the child’s classmates, then we would expect the spillovers to be smaller when the parent of the peer had already filed for the injunction against domestic violence.

To investigate whether exposure to domestic violence is the potential mechanism through which the spillovers occur, we constructed two peer domestic violence variables: reported and as yet unreported violence. By definition, reported domestic violence means that the petition for the injunction was filed before the student test was taken and unreported domestic violence signals that the filing occurred after the test date.

We find substantially larger effects for the proportion of peers with unreported domestic violence (that is, those whose parents had not yet filed for the injunction) than for those with past domestic violence. For example, the test-score effects for troubled boy peers on boys are statistically insignificant for reported violence, while they are large and highly significant for unreported violence. The larger peer effects for unreported domestic violence suggest that the violence in the home may itself be playing a role in driving the effects. However, we remain cautious with this interpretation, as we have no direct information regarding the details of the family environments for students in our sample.

Conclusion

Our findings have important implications for both education and social policy. First, they provide strong evidence of the validity of the “bad apple” peer effects model, which hypothesizes that a single disruptive student can negatively affect the outcomes for all other students in the classroom. Second, our results suggest that policies that change a child’s exposure to classmates from troubled families will have important consequences for his educational outcomes. Finally, our results provide a more complete accounting of the social cost of family conflict. Any policies or interventions that help improve the family environment of the most troubled students may have larger benefits than previously anticipated.

Scott Carrell is assistant professor of economics at the University of California–Davis. Mark Hoekstra is assistant professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh.

It’s not that these words immediately struck me as a profound revelation or that they turned my life around that same day. But the idea that the things I do actually matter, even the small routine things, did sink in. I became motivated to “apply myself,” in the phrase that my teachers were beseeching me with at the time. In the term that I now use in my research and writings, I gradually became more purposeful about my efforts, and my schoolwork did start to improve. What my teacher had said made a difference to my way of thinking about what I was doing in school and beyond. And it has stuck around as a kind of touchstone, decades later.

If you ask any teacher to list the top problems in schools today, “student motivation” will surely be among them. Yet our national priorities for education mostly ignore this concern. Indeed, with our sometimes single-minded focus on test scores, we may well be subverting the message that my English teacher offered me long ago: that it is best to be purposeful about whatever we do.

This is not to dispute the value of serious testing, which I support, but testing must be presented to students as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. It should never become the primary focus of classroom instruction. Not only does such a narrow focus restrict teachers’ judgments about how and what students should learn, it crowds out teachers’ time for discussing with students broader questions, such as what a person can and should do with academic knowledge in the world beyond school, the all-important question, What is the purpose of learning?

Schools must address the “why” question with students about all that they do. Why do people study math and science? Why is it important to read and write? To spell words correctly? Why have I (the teacher) chosen teaching as my occupation? Addressing this question in front of students, which unaccountably teachers rarely do, not only helps students better understand the purpose of schooling but also exposes them to a respected adult’s own quest for purpose. Why do we have rules against cheating? This is a good opportunity to convey moral standards such as honesty, fairness, and integrity and is a missed opportunity in most schools, even those with strong character-education agendas. Why are you, and your fellow students, here at all?

Every part of the curriculum should be taught with the “why” question squarely in the foreground. Some believe that the humanities are especially suited for this. I have found that instruction in the sciences offers a vivid context for raising the questions why and why not. Some years ago I was given a chance to try out this idea during a summer school program for gifted students. We discussed recent research in microbiology in the context of ethical questions such as the social desirability of cloning. Students tore into their difficult scientific lessons, motivated at least in part by their appreciation of the enormous moral issues at stake.

Schools can introduce students to an equally rich array of purposeful pursuits through art, music, sports, language, theater, and other activities that have unfortunately become targets for elimination in many schools. We must be careful not to allow an intense concern with testing or any single educational objective, well-intentioned as it may be, to crowd out the activities that may best kindle the flames of learning and purpose in our students.

William Damon is professor of education at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence. This essay was adapted from The Path to Purpose (The Free Press, 2008).

As an educator today, I draw on the writings of University of Washington political science and education professor Walter Parker, who has noted that “engaged citizens do not materialize out of thin air. They do not naturally grasp such knotty principles as tolerance, impartial justice, the separation of church and state, the needs for limits on majority power, or the difference between liberty and license.” If our students are to understand the pressing issues of the day, they must be exposed to myriad viewpoints and able to synthesize information from multiple sources.

Forensics challenges students through events in both speech and debate. In the discipline of platform speaking, students select a controversial subject and conduct extensive research before trying to persuade the audience. Competitors in extemporaneous speaking have 30 minutes to prepare a seven-minute response to a question, complete with source citations. Topics the National Federation of State High School Associations developed for extemporaneous speaking contests in 2008 included, Should public schools be allowed to segregate along gender lines? Should phone companies that aided in illegal wiretaps by the government be immune from prosecution? Should China relax its one-child policy?

In competitive debates, students do not choose which side they will defend. Most tournaments involve switch-sides competition, in which debaters defend the proposition (affirmative) and opposition (negative) sides an equal number of times. To prepare, student competitors must look at the issue through a nonpartisan lens or from multiple perspectives, thereby gaining a deep understanding of issues that confront our national (and world) leaders. Over several years of teaching and coaching debate, I have witnessed students shift their views on a host of topics as a result of their debate experience. Most often, they grow to acknowledge, accept, and empathize with those who hold opinions contrary to their own.

Students who hope to succeed in forensics must possess wide-ranging knowledge of current issues. It is not uncommon to catch my students reading from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Political Science Quarterly, not to mention pocket copies of the Constitution, Common Sense, and inspirational books of quotations.

A few years ago, while driving home from work in Alaska, I received a call from a former student who was at a tournament in Florida. At the time, students commonly used Foucault’s writings to argue against federal action to alleviate the harms of the status quo. As the student launched into a description of how an opposing team had presented a unique twist on Foucault, I thought, “Man, I don’t know how I would answer that.” Before I had a chance to respond, he blurted out, “It was sweet. Do you know what we did?” He then explained how he drew on his understanding of readings from social ecologists, professors of intercultural communication, and John Stuart Mill to develop his own criticism of Foucault’s thoughts on power, knowledge, and discourse. The tournament judge commended both teams for developing new takes on a common argument.

Whether forensics is a mainstay in the curriculum, an extracurricular club, or used occasionally by teachers in the classroom, it has the power to inspire students to learn and to help them grasp the concepts we aim to instill.

Shawn Briscoe is debate coach and adjunct professor in the Department of Communication and Discourse Studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage and coaches speech and debate at South Anchorage High School.

For my fall 2006 course, Calculus I for the Biological and Social Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), I administered the same final exam I had used for the course in the fall of 1989. The SAT mathematics (SATM) scores of the two classes were nearly identical, and the classes contained approximately the same percentage of the Arts and Sciences freshman class.

The content of the calculus I course had not changed and, from a math standpoint, using the old exam was completely appropriate.

The average exam score for my 2006 calculus I class was significantly lower than for my 1989 class. Comparing the effects of scaling in the two years reveals the extent of the decline. In my 1989 class, 27 percent of students received As on the test and 23 percent Bs. When I graded my 2006 class on my 2006 scale, 32 percent received As and 37 percent Bs. But if I instead graded my 2006 class on the 1989 scale, only 6 percent would have received As and 21 percent Bs. If I graded the 1989 class on the 2006 scale, 52 percent would have received As and 26 percent Bs.

Why did my 2006 class perform so poorly? With the proliferation of AP calculus in high school, one might think that the good students of 2006 place out of calculus I more frequently than did their 1989 counterparts. However, in 1989, 30 percent of the Arts and Sciences freshmen either took the harder engineering calculus course or a higher level mathematics course (calculus II or III, linear algebra, or differential equations). The percentage in 2006 is only 24 percent.

I am inclined to conclude that the 2006 JHU students are not as well prepared as the corresponding group was in 1989, despite there being significantly more competition to get into JHU today than ever before.

This phenomenon is probably shared with many other universities. The year 1989 is, in mathematics education, indelibly tied to the publication by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics of the report “Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics,” which downplayed pencil-and-paper computations and strongly suggested that calculators play an important role in K–12 mathematics education. My 2006 students would have been about two years old at the time of this very influential publication, and it could easily have affected the mathematics education many of them received. A 2002 JHU study found that students for whom “in K–12, calculator usage was emphasized and encouraged” had lower mathematics grades in the large service courses.

As it stands, universities have no way of rejecting applicants who do not know arithmetic adequately for college-level mathematics. Since 1994, the College Board has allowed the use of calculators on the mathematics SAT. The College Board’s calculator policy states, “Every question on the SAT Reasoning Test [SATM] can be solved without a calculator; but you will gain an advantage by using a calculator with which you are familiar.” I believe it is precisely this gained “advantage” that causes the SATM to fail universities in the admissions process.

My findings spread like wildfire through the mathematics community. Finally, we have data that confirm what we all thought. The surprise was the general indifference that administrators at JHU had toward the study. This kind of drop in SAT scores would be a crisis, but the news that high-performing students were less prepared for college math than students 17 years earlier didn’t seem to bother anyone, at least not enough to contemplate taking action. I urge universities to join together to negotiate with the College Board for a more appropriate test or to look to an alternative test that adequately gauges mathematics preparation.

W. Stephen Wilson is professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. The unabridged version of the study is available here.

By the end of the year, I had learned to teach. Successful colleagues translated passionless collegiate philosophy into the vigorous reality of educating adolescents in the late 1960s. My department chair said, “Read Up the Down Staircase immediately!” Bel Kaufman’s 1964 depiction of English teaching and kids was, she said, “right on.”

I learned more from that book and from discussions with fellow English teachers than I had in four years of traditional teacher preparation and my brief bout of student teaching.

Over the past 40 years, I have served as department chair, assistant principal, high school principal, and now university-based supervisor of teachers in training and professional development schools (PDS) coordinator. The one-year, fast-track program through which I train teachers (Towson University’s Master of Arts in Teaching [MAT]) and similar programs aim to replace the much-maligned teacher training programs of the 20th century. MAT pre-service teachers, or interns, work in a real classroom with a mentor who is an experienced master teacher. My two off-campus seminars add practical knowledge needed for classroom survival and success.

I supervise interns in four secondary schools in Howard County, Maryland. MAT interns tend to enter teaching from a love of content and are eager to prove they are knowledgeable; they tend to forget that students don’t care about either. Peeking at their cell phones, students check their MEdia Net favorites or IMs if the teacher is not vigilant. One of my assignments requires interns to examine, reflect on, and discuss what they discover in the hallways and cafeterias of their schools. One intern realized that a cafeteria scuffle had an impact on instruction after lunch. After witnessing the altercation, the excited students were not at all interested in reading about the escapades of American robber barons. The intern said, “I watched my mentor redirect the students after giving them a short time to talk about how they felt. It made me understand how we will get nowhere in the curriculum without caring about their feelings and building relationships with our students.”

As interns co-plan, co-teach, and advance into a program of teaching five days each week, they experience the life of a teacher but with safety nets in place. The mentor provides continuing discussion about what works with student assessment or classroom management and how to navigate positively in a school’s culture. (Eager to share their observations, students are important contributors to the learning curve. As one student said, “I could learn a lot better if the new teacher would just shut up.”) A Bel Kaufman passage I share with my interns says much about the adolescent mind and valuable, timeless feedback from mentors:

Your lesson plan is excellent—except for the Emily Dickinson line: “There is no frigate like a book.” The sentiment is lovely, the quotation apt—only trouble is the word “frigate.” Just try to say it in class—and your lesson is over.

Although MAT interns are university trained to write lesson plans, it is with fictional students and often by professors who have not been in a secondary classroom for a decade or more. Without appropriate mentoring, I have seen social studies interns cheerfully click through countless PowerPoint slides without creating a context for students. Watching 20 slides about the life of Asian immigrants in 19th-century California with unexplained vocabulary is not a learning experience. With mentors, interns learn how to plan and pace lessons for real adolescents. Interns learn that it’s better to analyze one Shakespearean sonnet effectively than to expose students to ten while blathering about the joys of iambic pentameter.

Pre-service and new teachers need to experience a continuing loop of lesson planning, implementation, one-on-one coaching, feedback, reflection, and lesson revision with mentors who have proven track records of student achievement. With a passion for teaching and practical approaches to classroom success, mentors can build in one year a group of educators who will stand the test of time.

Dorothy Hardin is a freelance writer and consultant.

We were also realistic: the district was one of the ten most liberal in the country. Had nearly 14 years of charter school experience in Minnesota moved them from lightning rod to mainstream in the education debate?

I did not prevail in the primary election. The new congressman, Keith Ellison, was endorsed by labor and the Democratic Party and favored by the teachers union. On the campaign trail, Ellison spoke against public charter schools and private school vouchers, casting them both as a Bush administration plan to weaken public schools.

It’s no surprise that pro-charter Democratic candidates struggle so much around the country. Consider the results of polling we commissioned early in the campaign. This message garnered the most negative reaction from likely Democratic primary voters: “The candidate sponsored charter schools, which take away significant funding from public schools.”

We adopted a plan to confront the problem: 1) raise more funds than opponents, and 2) organize the charter community.

We took the fundraising lead early. Bipartisan charter friends around the country contributed to my campaign. Ironically, several prospective donors declined because charter school issues were not featured enough in my education platform.

In June, we set out to organize charter school families. Though we invested significant staff time, it was difficult to reach these voters during the summer for a September 12 primary. Many were new Americans who had never voted before. Local charter school leaders were supportive, but their naiveté about the political process stood in sharp contrast to the strategic organizing in the labor community.

Five days before the primary election, the local teachers union sent out a mailing to likely primary voters describing me as “no friend of public education,” though I was endorsed by the union in four prior legislative campaigns. The attack dropped my support numbers significantly in one day.

Of course, this issue was just one of several factors shaping the outcome of the primary race. But my campaign erred in not being more prepared to respond on the charter school issue. Here are lessons learned for future candidates and the charter community:

• Shape the charter school issue; don’t retreat from it. Make it part of an overall education agenda, reinforcing charters as public (not private) schools.
• Host a press conference with testimonials at a charter school early in the campaign, so negatives can be rebutted and the issue becomes old news.”
• Respond immediately if attacked. Prepare a response piece to mail that reframes the hostile message as an attack against charter families in the district.
• Encourage state charter organizations to involve charter school families in political activities. This infrastructure must be in place prior to the next election cycle, with extra effort committed to traditionally nonvoting neighborhoods.
• Recruit friendly policymakers to run for higher office. Offer volunteers and early financial assistance.
• Create a national and state charter school political action committee (PAC) to raise funds and target candidates to support or oppose at the federal and state levels.

Public school choice originally caught fire from the grass roots. An advocacy infrastructure is essential to capture the power of the grass roots and elect friends of charters and public school choice. The future of chartering depends on it.

-Former state senator Ember Reichgott Junge is president of Ember Communications, Inc. (www.embercommunications.com) and an attorney, writer, and broadcast political analyst.

Finally, I shout, “Throw it in the freezer!”

My wife laughs. She turns the little black doll over and fiddles with, yes, the key.

I was first introduced to Baby Think It Over® several years ago, when the 13-year-old babysitter arrived carrying—my God!—a baby and promptly tripped on the steps, flinging the little bundle onto the bluestone sidewalk. I gasped. The babysitter screamed. The bundle went Waaah!

My son’s school paid $300 apiece for a dozen or so of these computer-assisted dolls. According to his teacher, Ms. Ferraro, they are meant to teach prepubescent kids how difficult it is to take care of a baby and thus make them “think it over.” And for the past few years it has been a ritual of fall to see 8th graders in the supermarket, in church, at football games, carrying their “little babies,” which Waaah! at the appropriately inappropriate times and embarrass the kid.

But this is serious business. On the Baby Think It Over web site (www.realityworks.com), you’d think you were shopping for a new car:

“As of July 1, 2007 Realityworks will discontinue support for older models…Standard Baby (Generation 4) released in 1996, Realistic Head Support Baby (Generation 5) released in 1998, Original RealCare Baby released in 1999…. Please consider the Trade-In Program.… We’ll give you a $50 discount toward the purchase of the latest Realityworks infant simulator.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

The students must take the “babies” for a weekend, everywhere they go. They fill out a chart, noting when it cried, what the student was doing, how long it cried, how the student felt, and how others were affected. My son was reading a book (good for him) at 3:46 p.m. when the baby started crying. “I felt fine,” he wrote.

The next entry is in my wife’s handwriting. Crying started at 4:55 and ended at 4:55. And what was she doing at the time? “Talking to our dog.” How did she feel? “Anxious.” Her next entry, 20 minutes later, is “Key breaks.”

She elaborated in her own journal (I refused to keep one): “In order to let our son attend his first snowboarding night with the City Youth Department, I volunteered to babysit. Trying to stop the baby’s crying, I broke the plastic key. I drove to the Middle School and threw myself on your mercy.”

She got a new key (for $6), and our son took over later that night. He made another dozen or so entries; he was, variously, sleeping, riding in the car, watching TV, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, brushing teeth, when the baby cried, and he always felt “fine.” The crying never affected anyone else except once, in church. “It scared my dad,” he noted.

After my son turned in his baby, he came home from school dejected, with a note. “I had it 66 hours. Let neck down 13 times. 5 neglects. 2 rough handling. Let cry 37 minutes.”

My wife was incensed. She penned “an addendum” to her journal. “I think that a piece of the missing broken key could be a cause of the result. Please advise.”

I could have advised: a piece of broken logic got stuck in the educational cerebellum.

Later that year, on the way to my son’s 8th-grade graduation, we stopped at the hospital to visit his classmate, Katlyn, and her new baby boy. “Did he come with a key?” I asked. She laughed, beaming, as any new mother would. Of some 80 girls in the class, 4 were pregnant that year. They were barely 14.

I recently called Ms. Ferraro to ask how things were going. She explained that she probably wouldn’t get any new babies. “I was chaperoning at a football game, and these kids had the babies in shopping bags. They had figured out how to put duct tape over the babies’ heads and on to their chests so the head wouldn’t move.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that some kids play football with the babies.

Peter Meyer, former news editor of Life magazine, is a freelance writer and a contributing editor of Education Next.

During my first month, I spent a lot of time in the classrooms of two high school social studies teachers. Mr. Hayes taught American History. He took a businesslike approach to teaching, and he taught me how to grade student work efficiently. When students misbehaved, he brought them into the hallway where he would discuss the problem, instruct the students to change their behavior, and shake their hands before they returned to the classroom together. Mr. Raymond’s World History classroom looked traditional, but his teaching style got everyone up and out of their seats to work together on projects. He was widely adored. On the first day of school, he was two minutes late entering the classroom because so many of his former students had stopped to give him hugs and say hello. I was certain I would ask Mr. Raymond and Mr. Hayes to be my mentors.

In late September, my internship supervisor shared devastating news: I had to observe in the middle school. In my experience, middle schools were horrible places filled with unhappy students. To my surprise, it was wonderful! The kids were happy and enthusiastic. The social studies content was engaging—ancient world cultures and geography. And I discovered Ms. Brook, who used humor in her teaching, storytelling as an alternative to lecture, and project-based learning; she managed her classroom with a firm yet caring approach. I quickly decided that I would like to student teach with Mary Brook.

From January to May, Mary and I taught three classes of 8th-grade world cultures and two classes of 7th-grade geography. She proved to be a true mentor, even after I left her classroom. During my difficult first year teaching in a tough inner-city school, I was overwhelmed by the discipline issues I faced. Mary spent more than two hours with me on the phone after my first day in my own classroom.

In a traditional teacher-training program, I would have been asked before beginning my internship only to indicate a preference for a middle- or high-school placement. My request would unequivocally have been for a high-school assignment, and I would not have been assigned to Mary. With traditional student teaching assignments, university administrators or school districts assign pre-service teachers to in-service teachers with little or no knowledge of either person’s personality or teaching style. Not surprisingly, many mentoring relationships are strained and troubled. Today, as a student teacher supervisor, I see few genuine mentoring relationships develop between student teachers and randomly assigned mentors.

Ideally, a mentor offers support while communicating clear, meaningful feedback specifically designed to help the student teacher improve her practice. Such a “critical friendship” develops most easily when the mentor and student teacher have compatible teaching styles and personalities. Mutual selection allows student and mentor teachers who are already acquainted, and know they are compatible, to agree to work together, making a successful partnership far more likely.

Sara Fry is assistant professor of education at Bucknell University.

The road to my lawsuit, Locke v. Davey, began more than four years ago, when the state of Washington revoked my “Promise Scholarship.” The scholarship was available to students from low- and middle-income families who finished in the top 10 percent of their graduating classes and enrolled at a college in Washington State. Only in October of my freshman year at Northwest College did I learn that my decision to major in church ministry ran afoul of the state constitution’s ban on public support for religious instruction.

I believed that the state’s exclusion of theology majors from the Promise Scholarship program was wrong, both as a matter of constitutional law, which guarantees the free exercise of religion, and as a matter of social policy, which ought to promote freedom and equality and prevent religious discrimination. Accordingly, I decided to take a principled stand against what I considered a grave injustice. I kept my major, thus forfeiting my scholarship.

I soon contacted the American Center for Law and Justice, a public-interest law firm that specializes in religious liberties litigation. With their pro bono representation, I sued several Washington officials, among them Governor Gary Locke, arguing that the state’s exclusion of theology majors from the Promise Scholarship program violated my rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, and equal protection under the laws.

The scholarship money was never my primary motivation in the suit. At less than $3,000, the funds were a relatively small portion of the total cost of a college education. Much more important was my desire to fight injustice, to force the state to end its discrimination against theology majors, and to secure state aid for thousands of students like myself.

I was 19 then, largely ignorant of the law and without appreciation for the importance of the constitutional questions raised in my case. I certainly never imagined my case would be heard by the Supreme Court. As my legal drama unfolded, though, it began to have a profound impact on my own education and career goals. My focus shifted from the ministry to law. After graduating from college in 2003, I began my first year at Harvard Law School. To some, it might seem as if ministry and law could not be more removed from one another or even that it would be impossible to be both a good lawyer and a faithful Christian.

To me, nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the very same motivations that led me toward the ministry-a desire to live out my faith in a practical way, to help others, and to make a positive contribution to society-now lead me toward the law.

As it turned out, I did not attain my goals in filing suit; Washington and other states are free to bar theology majors from all forms of state financial aid as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision. The decision is a tremendous disappointment, on a personal level and because a great injustice has been done. Still, I have no regrets. Despite my loss, the fight for religious freedom and equal access to education will continue, and I am only strengthened in my resolve to further those goals.

-Joshua Davey is a rising second-year student at Harvard Law School.

It is 1:15 on a Sunday afternoon. We are standing in the children's department of our public library, twelve 2nd graders and their parents sprawled on carpet-covered risers in front of us. On one side is a pink three-little-pigs chair; on the other, a table piled with cookies, juice, and grapes.

It is parent-child book day. Today's selection is one of our favorites, Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White.

"Okay," we say, "Let's start by taking nominations for protagonist."

Hands go up all over the room.

"Charlotte," answers a boy.

"No, I think it's Wilbur," says a mom.

We have been running these groups for six years now. The kids range in age from seven to ten, and they can identify a book's protagonist and antagonist, characterize its setting, isolate the climax, and dig out underlying themes. They've wrestled with the notion of prejudice, debated the definition of totalitarianism, and discussed the nature of bravery. When we mention this to people, they often treat us as if we'd just announced that we're Napoleon and Josephine. Before we began the groups, we solicited advice from reading specialists, who told us that the most important thing was to keep the books easy. It doesn't matter what they read as long as they read something.

We were confused, and not a little disturbed. We believed that it mattered a great deal what a child read. The real danger of turning kids off from reading and hurling them permanently in the direction of electronic media, we were convinced, was in making books too superficial. Restricting children to pop culture denied them the excitement of discovering the beauty of language and the power of meaningful ideas. We felt certain that engaging children in a sophisticated discussion was only a matter of the way in which the dialogue was structured.

For example, the words "protagonist" and "antagonist" scare off elementary-school teachers, because they think the words are intimidating. But to a 2nd grader, who does not know that he or she is not supposed to be able to learn this, protagonist and antagonist are just words, like "vegetable" or "download."

To explain protagonist, the character that pushes the action forward, we ask a child whether he ever wants to stay up past his bedtime.

"Sure," says Tommy.

"And who stops you?"

"MOM."

So Tommy is the protagonist, pushing forward the action of gaining personal freedom, and Mom is the antagonist, holding that action back.

We have also found that children's analytic abilities are every bit as acute as those of their parents; it's just a matter of presentation. We begin by telling our groups that every work of fiction is actually a mystery. Will Charlotte save Wilbur? Then we explain that there is also the mystery of what the author is writing about, the theme of the story. We tell the kids that plot, setting, character, and central conflict are the clues that will help them find out what a book is really about. Every kid loves a mystery (as do their parents), and what's more, every kid wants to be the detective who solves the puzzle.

The children (and parents) in our Charlotte's Web group got this right away.

"Charlotte is the protagonist," said Lucia. "She writes the words in the web."

"Yes," agreed Zach's mom. "Wilbur just sits around waiting to be saved."

They also understood that the antagonist must be Templeton the rat, not Mr. Zuckerman, even though Mr. Zuckerman is the one who suggests eating Wilbur for Christmas dinner. This is again because Templeton is an active character. Charlotte is pushing forward the action of living life by helping others, and it is Templeton's unabashed greed and selfishness that she must overcome.

On to Ulysses.

Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone are the authors of Deconstructing Penguins: Parents, Kids, and the Bond of Reading.

Before school this morning, excited groups of girls had huddled together in our hallowed halls of academia, where emphasis is placed on math and science. Much to the faculty’s chagrin, the girls were not philosophizing about Homer or discussing Euclidian geometry. Nor were they even whispering the usual fare: how cute the cast of “Survivor” is or how the Bachelorette picked the wrong hopeful. Instead, despite the faculty’s best effort to keep that day’s concert a secret, the word was out: boys were on their way.

Give Me an X!

And arrive they did, boys outfitted in matching white shoes, baggy khaki pants, green polo shirts, and oversized, floppy Santa hats. They even brought a foreign-exchange student to add that mysterious bad-boy flavor. His brooding presence helped elevate the girls’ excitement to a code-level red, which, in middle-school concert-speak, translates into “extreme risk of screaming once the boys start to sing.”

As the bandmaster readied his young charges, an audible “ahhhhhhh” echoed throughout the hall as the smallest member of the band, the requisite cute one, wearing the biggest floppy Santa hat, stepped forward and belted out the opening solo. The boys held all the eyes, ears, and hearts of the girls, as they sang and semi-gyrated their way to middle-school stardom.

After numerous encores, the boys ended their set, and the girls wanted answers: “How old are you and you and you?” and, “Where do you and you and you live?” And straight to the heart of the matter (and straight to the faculty’s goal of teaching assertive communication), “Do you or you or you have a girlfriend?”

Lunch period followed the morning assembly, and the student council received the coveted honor to dine with the boys, in a private room. In the cafeteria, on regular lunch duty, I found myself confronted by an angry female mob, which hurled a barrage of accusations and complaints (direct communication at its finest) about school favoritism toward the student council. Fortunately for me, middle-school girls seem to like food on a par with boys, and soon, despite wonderful displays of assertiveness, their lunches got their attention.

Give Me a Free Throw!

After lunch, with time to spare, the cafeteria girls went to the gym and grabbed a basketball. As if on cue, the door opened and out came the boys, to be immediately besieged.

In the ensuing melee, one of the boys, without a thought to the consequences, grabbed the ball, aimed, shot, and watched it drop, with a satisfying swish, through the hoop. With his graceful shot, this poor boy unknowingly set the middle-school girl world on a collision course with his. In the blink of an eye, a nonleague, nonsanctioned, rough-and-tumble, boy-versus-girl basketball game erupted.

The boys found themselves the visiting team on a court filled with home-court advantages. To their credit, they played valiantly and with heart in a last-ditch effort to defend their crumbling world. Alas, the boy band eventually bore the brunt of this middle-school world collision. Broken on the court were stereotypes so ingrained in our society. Perhaps that is what single-sex education is all about.

-Ian Earle is a Spanish teacher and athletic director at Julia Morgan.

The city’s focused determination and unity of purpose seemed to affect almost everyone. I say “almost” because focused and determined isn’t an entirely accurate description of my high-school experience. The truth is, I was an average student at best, more interested in running track and occasionally getting in trouble than focusing on studies.

Basics + Innovation = Success

Even though I goofed off too much, I learned enough of the basics in Detroit’s Central High to continue my education at another public institution, Michigan State University, in 1951. MSU changed my life. In contrast to high school, my college professors invited students to challenge their beliefs and question what they read in textbooks. I majored in accounting, with a minor in economics. I remember the lessons of Walter Adams, an economics professor who taught that anyone who developed innovative new products could succeed during the 1950s economic expansion. That may sound like a tame idea now, but 50 years ago it was quite a revolutionary thought for a bunch of public-school graduates far from the traditional centers of American wealth.

As a young accountant I saw people starting businesses and making money, and I knew I could do the same. With a partner and $25,000 borrowed from my father-in-law, I began to build houses and sell them with affordable mortgages, with monthly payments that were less than what people were paying in rent. Today Kaufman and Broad Homes is known as KB Home, and it’s one of the largest home builders in the world. I also helped build a retirement savings company, Sun America (now AIG Retirement Services), into a Fortune 500 success.

Giving Something Back

I had a wonderful career in business, built on a lot of hard work, a little luck, and the education foundation I gained at Thirkell, Central High, and MSU. And when I retired six years ago, my wife, Edye, and I wondered how we could best give back our family wealth. That’s when I thought again about education. Edye and I knew that the country was fast losing its competitive advantage, and we firmly believed that the cause was lowered standards of education. Too many kids dropped out of school, and too many other countries were rapidly gaining ground and passing us intellectually.

I thought about today’s seniors at Central High, struggling to achieve in an economically depressed region. Do they have the skills necessary to succeed in college? Central High did not make the Adequate Yearly Progress standard under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, and less than 20 percent of its students score “proficient” on state standardized math tests. We need to fix that.

To help struggling students, educators, parents, and policymakers need data. In response, I’m proud to say, our foundation helped to establish a new online data analysis service, SchoolMatters.com, a source of information and analysis about our nation’s public schools.

When I graduated from Central High, college graduates earned 50 percent more than high-school graduates and twice that of dropouts. Today those college grads earn 80 percent more than high-school graduates and three times as much as dropouts. This is all the more reason to fix our schools. Public school gave me a foundation from which I was able, with hard work, imagination, energy, and an entrepreneurial spirit, to create success. And that’s what I want public school to be again.

-Eli Broad founded The Broad Foundation in 1999.

In doing this, Wendall would turn out to be one of my greatest teachers.

I was smart enough that first week to know that I had much to learn. So I turned to the ultimate source of information about Wendall: his mother. Mrs. Jefferson informed me that her son had been a successful student in the elementary grades, but had become involved in activities outside of school that were taking him down a less-positive path.

When I asked her how to approach Wendall, she gave me the most important piece of education advice I may ever have received: be firm with him, but simultaneously “reach out” and connect, in a meaningful way, beyond math lessons.

When I learned that Wendall had earned honors in elementary school for his chess acumen, I invited him to play a few matches after school in an effort to get to know him better, as his mother had suggested. I must admit I was startled that first afternoon when Wendall defeated me match after match after match.

Even more humiliating, the next day I agreed, as a consequence of my defeat, to proclaim to the class: “Wendall is a chess beast. He beat me five times in a row.”

But this minor embarrassment was worth the reward of having made even the smallest connection with one of my students. Things weren’t always easy thereafter. We had our ups and downs. There was the afternoon at the end of the first quarter when I informed Wendall that he had made the Honor Roll, and there was the afternoon a few weeks later when I had to temporarily suspend our after-school tutoring sessions because he refused to follow my class rules. But we persevered—together.

Even after he left my 6th-grade class, we would meet in the afternoons to play chess, go over math assignments, or just talk about music, movies, or politics. He matured quite a bit during his middle-school years, and when 8th-grade graduation finally arrived, Wendall walked across the stage as class valedictorian. He then went on to Banneker Senior High School, one of Washington, D.C.’s flagship academic schools.

Throughout Wendall’s high-school years, we kept working together, first on math, and then on many other subjects. We also read and analyzed nonschool novels, and we explored museums across the city.

After his sophomore year, in an act of incredible loyalty, Wendall decided to leave Banneker and move to his neighborhood high school in order to watch over his younger brother, a young man who, like Wendall years earlier, had begun to go down a negative path. I was particularly moved by this as I have two brothers myself.

But Wendall never let go of his own dreams. After years of hard work and an SAT score in the mid-1300s, he is now a 20-year-old junior at Morehouse College with his sights set on Columbia University’s prestigious postgraduate engineering program. Last April, he honored me, more profoundly than he will ever know, by flying up from Atlanta to be in the Rose Garden when the president presented me with the National Teacher of the Year award.

I’m honestly not sure who helped whom the most over the past nine years. I know one thing for sure. I certainly would not have been standing in the Rose Garden last April had it not been for Wendall. He made me the teacher I am.

Jason Kamras is a mathematics teacher at John Philip Sousa Middle School, a District of Columbia public school, and the 2005 National Teacher of the Year.