Class Struggle

One of the great failures of high schools, my favorite subject, is the lack of effective training in productive behaviors and attitudes, such as cooperating, being on time, making eye contact, speaking persuasively, offering suggestions and focusing on tasks.

Many educators are trying to develop programs that teach these traits. Some call this character education, which has been around for decades. A few schools and school systems have made progress. Most have not.

Now a study offers renewed hope. An approach called social and emotional learning (SEL), which trains students to think and act in positive ways, can make a significance difference in school achievement, according to this research. The next step will be to see if it has the same effect on life and work after graduation.

I saw a piece by Sarah D. Sparks in Education Week and looked up the report, “The Impact of Enhancing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning: A Meta-Analysis of School-Based Universal Interventions,” by Joseph A. Durlak and Kriston B. Schellinger of Loyola University Chicago and Roger P. Weissberg, Allison B. Dymnicki and Rebecca D. Taylor of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Are we watching too much TV? Maybe so. Rarely have I received as many e-mails as when I sought help picking the five best high school television series of all time.

Some of the suggestions were what I expected. Leigh Ann Cahill of Alexandria said she was a big fan of NBC’s “Friday Night Lights,” particularly Connie Britton’s role as Tami Taylor, the much-besieged principal of Texas football power Dillon High. Chuck Anderson said he and his wife planned their evenings around the school drama “Boston Public” when it was still on Fox. There were lots of votes for “Glee,” “Head of the Class” and “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

Other choices surprised me. Katya2, a commenter on my blog, was among many who urged the selection of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The choice made sense, Katya2 said, because the monsters infesting the show were “often just an exaggerated or disguised version of ordinary high school problems — dating, social competition, parental pressure, etc.”

Some nominations were clever. Some were weird. But they kept coming. Just when I thought we had identified every possible candidate, someone dredged up “Greatest American Hero,” canceled 28 years ago, because its clumsy version of Superman was a teacher. Someone else suggested “Medium” because the eldest daughter of the psychic main character sometimes read the minds of her classmates.

I’m moving back to California this summer. (You will be relieved or annoyed to learn I am not leaving The Post.) This will be my last spring, at least as I define the term.

I grew up in the Golden State, the balmy sea breezes of Long Beach in the south and later the sun-splashed hillsides of San Mateo in the north. There was more rain in the winter, but otherwise I didn’t notice seasons.

When I transferred to a college in Massachusetts, I felt for the first time the full, disagreeable weight of winter: icy sidewalks and dorky earmuffs. Then winter was gone. I rejoiced. The arms and shoulders of female students were suddenly bare. I took off my boots and put on my tennis shoes.

Spring break became special, as it is for many families in the Washington area. How should parents use it to bond with their children? Educators gave me eight ideas for doing spring break right.

1. Watch something grow. Deanna Wheeler, a science teacher at J.C. Parks Elementary School in Charles County, said she prefers a botanical approach to spring that is best for elementary school children but might also intrigue an otherwise bored teenager. “Pick one plant, tree branch, shrub or flower that is beginning to grow,” she said. “Observe it each day. Record its changes throughout the week with drawings, paintings, photos or measurements.” This fits nicely with the idea of Judy Heard, instructional services manager at Fairfax County schools, to have your children help you start a garden or put planters on your patio.

The Los Angeles Board of Education shocked the city, and much of the education world, last week by ordering six charter schools shut down after a charter official was found to have orchestrated cheating on state tests. It is rare for a school board to close that many charters at once. Even the local teachers union, often hostile to charters, advised against it.

But more surprising, and perhaps a sign of a significant shift in the national debate over testing, is the fact that the jump in scores at the Crescendo charter system was investigated at all. USA Today, in a series of stories launched this week, has compiled nationwide evidence of inexplicable test score gains, followed by equally puzzling collapses, that experts say suggest cheating but are ignored by the officials responsible for those schools.

Looking at test results in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and the District, the newspaper found 1,610 examples of grades at schools that increased three standard deviations or more over the average statewide gain on the same test. That means the students in that school and that grade “showed greater improvement than 99.9 percent of their classmates statewide,” the story by reporters Greg Toppo, Denise Amos, Jack Gillum and Jodi Upton said.

If you overlook the 12-foot-long purple dinosaur in the front yard of their stone-and-brick Bethesda home, the Demarees appear to be a typical American family of the Washington suburban variety.

Debby and Larry are commercial real estate brokers with incomes above the national mean. Their children went to private schools and are active and ambitious. Liz, 22, is a straight-A graduate student planning to teach. Tim, 22, has his own business. Cat, 20, is at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts studying to be Meryl Streep.

I mention the Demarees only because one part of their family story is so contrary to the character of their neighborhood and this region that it may inspire astonishment, disbelief and maybe even censure. When their three kids were applying for college, Debby and Larry never let them know what their SAT scores were.

“We told them that the scores were unimportant and not a measure of who they are or what they want in life,” Debby said. “Did we test prep? No. Did we tutor? No. Did we apply to 15 colleges? No. . . . Did we use private college counselors? No. Did we even rely on the school counselors? No.”

Yesterday afternoon I got a call from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. She was responding to my request for her union's view of the charge that union rules might force KIPP to close its high-performing schools in Baltimore.

Weingarten was not happy. She unloaded the harshest assessment of KIPP, the nation's best-known charter school network, and its dealings with her and her union I have ever heard from her.

She said KIPP is playing by its own set of rules. She said the network, with 99 schools in 20 states and the District, has undermined her repeated attempts to establish a relationship that would allow them to work together for the greater good of children and public schools.

She said a year ago she helped give KIPP schools in Baltimore a special agreement with the Baltimore Teachers Union, part of the AFT, that allowed them to have longer school days without paying teachers the financially back-breaking full hourly rate under the city's teacher contract. Weingarten said she helped KIPP as a gesture of good faith in the discussions they had been having about national cooperation. KIPP repaid her initiative on its behalf, she said, by criticizing the New York local of her union and by going to the press rather than negotiating seriously an extension of KIPP's deal in Baltimore.

I was a surprised that Weingarten was sharing this with me, since I am the biographer of KIPP co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg and have often praised its schools. But I have also called Weingarten is one of the most innovative labor leaders in the country. I respect both KIPP and the AFT, and wonder if there is a way to work out their differences.

I write mostly about public schools, but private schools have their own methods and rituals that affect many families. At this time of year, for instance, parents looking for a good private school often find themselves in trouble.

They have applied to a school they had their heart set on. They have been rejected. Actually, it is their child who has been turned down, but you know what I mean.

This can create panic. But education consultants who handle such cases say there are many options, even when many people assume the admissions process is essentially over for the year. Some consultants go so far as to suggest there are ways to add private school extras to a public school education.

The first thing consultants do is try to calm their clients by explaining that a rejection does not mean their child has some irredeemable flaw. “I explain that often schools reject children and families who are not the right fit for their school, rather than it being a reflection of numbers or anything wrong with their application,” said Liz Perelstein, a consultant based in White Plains, N.Y.

Jerry Heverly, a high school English teacher in the San Francisco Bay area, posted a comment recently that resonated with me and other readers. He suggested that the money his school and others pour into getting more kids ready for college is a waste.

Is Heverly right to doubt the worthiness of the programs his school is asked to fund? What should he say to persuade his school committee colleagues to stop falling for what Heverly sees as something of a con?

By Jerry Heverly

I'm on my school's governance committee (called the Site Council: it includes parents, students, admin, teachers) and we are making financial decisions right now based on what I think are false assumptions, assumptions that originate from some of the numbers you cited.

First I'm told in these meetings that because a majority of our students drop out before getting a degree that we must spend money to hike up our college prep credentials. I believe the 40% completion rate reflects quite sensible cost-benefit calculations that young people make every day. {Insert stipulation here that some kids are ill prepared} Read David Labaree on 'credential inflation'. Read Marty Nemko on the inflated cost of a college degree.

By all accounts, he is one of the best math teachers in the country. The Mathematics Association of America has given him two national awards. He was appointed by the Bush administration to the National Mathematics Advisory Panel. For 25 years he has prepared middle-schoolers for the tough admissions standards at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the most selective high school in America.

Yet this year, when Vern Williams looked at the Jefferson application, he felt not the usual urge to get his kids in, but a dull depression. On the first page of Jefferson’s letter to teachers writing recommendations, in boldface type, was the school board’s new focus: It wanted to prepare “future leaders in mathematics, science, and technology to address future complex societal and ethical issues.” It sought diversity, “broadly defined to include a wide variety of factors, such as race, ethnicity, gender, English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), geography, poverty, prior school and cultural experiences, and other unique skills and experiences.” The same language was on the last page of the application.

“This is just one example of why I have lost all faith in the TJ admissions process,” Williams said. “In fact, I’m pretty embarrassed that the process seems no more effective than flipping coins.”