The Decline of American Manufacturing was the Plan All Along

Harold Meyerson:

At bottom, the decline of American manufacturing has deep systemic roots. The combined forces of technology and globalization have reduced the number of industrial workers in most advanced economies, but nowhere has the decline been so precipitous and profound as in the United States. What made us different is that these two trends coincided with the rise of the most extreme form of shareholder capitalism—elevating the concerns of investors, the primacy of profits and share value, over those of the workers and communities to which the earlier, pre-1980 form of stakeholder capitalism also paid heed.

It’s no coincidence that Germany, the only advanced economy to expand and upgrade its manufacturing sector in the age of globalization, is also the primary practitioner of stakeholder capitalism. Corporate boards are composed of equal numbers of labor and management representatives, while an entire sector of banking is devoted to funding small and midsized manufacturing ventures, freeing them from the pressure of capital markets. The resulting quantity and quality of German manufacturing have produced an economy that’s the envy of the world. “Germany is socialistic, it’s green,” says U.S. Steel CEO John Surma, “and it’s kicking our ass by any capitalistic measure.”

The United States is not likely to become significantly more socialistic or green anytime soon. But through trade policies and industrial policies that promote domestic manufacturing, we can begin to realign the practices of American business with the urgent needs of the nation and its people.

Coming of Age in a Dead Zone

Louis Ferleger:

There are 216 defined metropolitan (metro) and micropolitan (micro) areas — with populations ranging from 10,000 to 4 million — that have had unemployment rates at least two percentage points higher than the national average for either 20, 10 or 5 years (see tables 1, 2, 3 at the end of this article). These are America’s dead zones. Here employment growth is stagnant or non-existent and high levels of joblessness dominate. Some areas were once prosperous while others have recently experienced economic distress. In these communities paid work is hard to find for those who have not given up looking, and widespread involuntary idleness is the norm. ...

While different methods of gathering government data make it harder to assess the unemployment picture in New England, long-term dead zones exist in former manufacturing and mill towns such as Lawrence and Fall River, Mass., Waterbury, New Britain and New Haven, Conn., and Providence and Central Falls, R.I. These cities have characteristics similar to dead zones. In more and more American cities the lack of opportunities and poor job prospects point to the existence of more areas that have not been, but should be, recognized as emerging dead zones.

So while I didn't find Providence or Pittsburgh on the dead zones list, I was surprised to find my little home town of Huntingdon, PA on there as a 20 year dead zone. Not so much because I was surprised that it has had persistently high unemployment, but that it was big enough to be counted at all. And really, the past 20 years have almost certainly been easier on Huntingdon than the previous 20.

This may give you some perspective on my outlook on the world...

Is It Possible RI Might Not Lose Its Shirt On This Thing?

Gabe:

Once again I was able to beg an early copy of a game. This time I scored Kingdoms of Amalur. I’ve been playing it now for a few days and I am in love. I’m probably not supposed to talk about the game yet but I figured it would be much easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission as the old saying goes.

In the end I just want to make sure this game doesn’t slip past your radar. I think it would be easy to look at it and think it’s a pretty standard RPG. In reality Amalur is a unique experience full of great ideas. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

We've got $75 million in guaranteed loans riding on it.

When Will We Get the Craigslist or Pinboard of Search Engines?

Dave Winer:

So Google started out on the right path, but eventually they went wild and desperate, and did all the things with their product that users probably thought they would never do. So now I'm shopping for a search engine to invest in. DuckDuckGo could be that, except for this one problem. Imho, it's inexorably on the same path that Google was on. That means they're going to spend years of our time pretending that they are still on our side, until one day it'll be blatantly obvious that we just wasted years waiting for them to give take us somewhere we'd want to go . They are using us as pawns, as big techco's always do.

There is an antidote to VC-driven mission creep that "big techco's" are susceptible to. It is essentially the craigslist model, where you have a small privately held company that is perfectly happy to not maximize profits or expand its reach or really change at all as it grows.

Pinboard just does bookmarks and Maciej seems to have planned it well enough that he can smoothly scale it up with steadily growing profits and no need for big outside investors. It is a profitable small business that seems to suit his needs just fine.

So the question is, when will the understanding of search and the availability of storage and processing power make a similar search engine inevitable? Perhaps soon:

Sebastian Thrun, who taught the massive on-line AI class with Peter Norvig at Stanford, has left Stanford to join a startup to offer more online courses. Their first course will teach complete novices how to build their own search engine, in seven weeks.

Google's drive into social may be motivated by a fear of being disrupted in the basic search market. Regardless of what is really going on, Google's actions are making real competition for search likely for the first time in decades.

There Seems to be Some Confusion Over Who Will Be Attending the Grace School Academy

Mayor Taveras's cover letter: "306 students serving Providence and North Providence."
Mayor Charles Lombardi's cover letter: "local school districts, including Providence and North Providence,"
Cover sheet: "Multiple districts, including but not limited to Providence and North Providence."
John M. Kelly, cover letter: "students from local school districts, including Providence and North Providence"
John Galvin, Meeting Street Board of Directors, cover letter: "students from grades K-8 who live in Pawtucket and Providence."
Executive summary: "students from multiple school districts, including but not limited to Providence and North Providence."
"These students will attend school with approximately 54 students with severe and profound disabilities that come to Meeting Street from across Rhode Island as well as from nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut."
Statement of Need: Only covers Providence and North Providence.
Governance: Nothing about representation from other communities (RIGL 16-77.4-1.a: "such mayoral academies shall have a board of trustees or directors which is comprised of representatives from each included city or town").
"In terms of Board composition, the Board will be chaired by either the Mayor of Providence or the Mayor of North Providence. The Mayor of Providence will also appoint one designee to the Board and will be encouraged to make this designee his or her school superintendent. Five (5) Board members will be appointed by Meeting Street’s Board of Trustees. Grace School Academy Founders, a group of parents that have helped to create our inclusive model, will recommend three (3) parents to serve on the Grace School Academy Board of Directors, as well."
Student Enrollment and Demand: "The Grace School Academy will seek to attract a diverse student body from the communities of Providence and North Providence."
"All students who enter the lottery will have an equal chance of being selected and The Grace School Academy will abide by lottery rules and regulations and enrollment procedures. At the same time, we request that siblings of students, children of Founders, and children of staff have admission preference."
School Community:
"Given that Meeting Street’s school already draws from the surrounding community; we are confident that we will be able to increase the number of children from the South Providence neighborhood who enroll."
"Finally, Meeting Street has a long history of working in North Providence. Over the past decade, children of all ages and abilities have been served by Meeting Street in home, school, and community based settings."
Budget Narrative: "a minimum of 85% of students will reside in Providence"

Can (and Should) Public School Teachers Teach Private School Students (In RI)?

The biggest issue regarding The Grace School Academy application should be the question of whether or not public school teachers can or should teach in classrooms of mixed public and private school students. To quote the application:

At full maturation, each classroom will have approximately 20 students; 17 from The Grace School Academy who will enroll through the lottery. These students will be joined by approximately three (3) Meeting Street School students.

One would hope that this is just illegal, but I'm not going to bother figuring that out. It appears that in the budget figures for the school that the cost of classroom teachers is shared between the public and private school budgets, but I'm not really sure how it works, and it isn't clearly explained at all, which is pretty weird considering I've never heard of anyone trying such a thing anywhere before. Seems worthy of some elaboration.

And even if in this case it is legal and actually makes sense, I would still want to see some very clear standards for what is and is not permissible for this kind of situation, because if lots of private schools decide they want their own embedded/integrated charters for some reason, things could get out of hand quickly. This could turn into a kind of de facto voucher program.

Rhode Island Should Be One School District

Elisabeth Harrison:

“In the year 2000, Woonsocket had a $75 million school budget. Now it’s down to $59 million,” said Donoyan, adding that the decrease comes as expenses for everything from heating oil to personel continue to rise. “The costs across the board have escalated just to keep the bare minimum. The things we can control, we do our best to control, but there are uncontrollable costs.”

I don't want to completely forget to praise Brian Chidester for ending last week's anti-AF rally on Martin Luther King Jr. Day by calling for unifying Rhode Island in to one district for the purpose of equity and desegregation.

It is not a magic bullet, but it is the "one demand" that would do the most good for moving education forward in Rhode Island. Now is a good time, since multiple districts seem to be entering fiscal death spirals.

It would even make charter school expansion a lot easier with fewer negative side effects!

The Perpetual Return of the CD-ROM

John McDaid:

At a press event at the Guggenheim Museum in NY, Apple yesterday introduced a new, free application for creating electronic books called iBooks Author, and while it has some notable limitations, it promises the kind of step-function increase in user empowerment not seen since the days of Hypercard. Seriously, it gave me flashbacks to 1987. And I don't say that lightly.

The iBooks Author software is essentially a page-oriented multimedia creation tool; that is, you can imagine PowerPoint on steroids, or for those familiar with high-end production, Quark or inDesign. But in addition to allowing you to easily create pages with rich media assets, it takes you to the next step, automatically packaging everything up in an electronic publication format distributable on the iPad.

If you time traveled back to 1986 and showed me an iPad, I would have been really excited, particularly with its size (and, oh, THE INTERNET). If you came back two years later and said "Look, now you can publish and distribute a multimedia book on this device!" I probably would have said "Wait, you mean you couldn't before?"

iBooks Author is a big deal -- for example, my sister desperately needs to be able to write a textbook illustrating her methods of teaching digital media to artists -- but it is yet another case where Apple is doing the obvious thing and the rest of the industry is just flailing around. Or, not even that, just lying still.

Also, I don't really understand why this isn't just an extension to Pages.

Where the Web Went Off the Rails

Now that people are getting worried again about the architecture web and its future -- as Google+, Apple and Facebook seem to be devouring everything -- it is worth noting where things went wrong. I'd point to two things:

• No static IP addresses for home broadband. The internet was designed with static IP addresses in mind. Your computer should have an IP address just like your phone has a phone number. If we all had static IP addresses at home (and IPv6, which we should have had a long time ago) then we'd also all have home servers hosting or at least backing up all our photos, videos, etc. It would be a large market. It would be much easier to roll out a decentralized social network, etc. Instead, we're just dependent on Google, etc. This isn't actually Google's idea, it is more the way the telecoms want it. It just happens to benefit the big hosting companies.
• Windows' horrible insecurity. Not so much anymore, but at the time the 'net was growing, Windows was not ready at all for it, and that fed into the idea that static IP addresses for home users not only aren't necessary, but dangerous.

Grace School Mayoral Academy -- First Reaction

OK, so, the application for the Grace School Mayoral Academy popped up on RIDE's site some time in the past few weeks. This is a Providence/North Providence school, run by the private Meeting Street school in South Providence. Meeting Street always seemed nice enough, as they say on their website:

We’re known for helping children with multiple and severe challenges, however, we also work with children who have minor delays.

In terms of the actual school, this is much more palatable than the Achievement First proposal, of more appropriate scale (esp. not in combination with AF), and generally few would have batted an eye at it as a regular charter school 15, 10 or even five years ago, especially when the district was exceeding its capacity to add schools.

Of course, having this proposal come from a mayor who is directly responsible for closing a bunch of PPSD schools puts the whole thing in a dim light.

We should probably think hard about the precedent of a charter school essentially within a private school, including mixed classrooms. Has anyone anywhere actually tried that anywhere or is this really "innovation?"

One thing I'm happy about is that it isn't a RIMA school, the charter holder will be a non-profit controlled by Meeting Street, which is less offensive than having a bunch of suburban jackass politicians and out of state wonks running a school in Providence.

Like the AFMA application, this one violates the legal requirement to provide an equal number of enrollments to each sending community. Basically North Providence (and Providence City Council) need to get a clear ruling on this issue. In particular, there is a much stronger motivation for a North Providence parent to sue over the issue -- because this is actually a significant opportunity to North Providence parents with special needs students.

By the straightforward application of the law, there would be 17 guaranteed spots per grade for N. Providence, making it much more likely that N. Providence students could get in. In one big pool, they'll be swamped by Providence parents in the lottery, both because of size and location (although at least the school is right off 95). But anyway, people sue to get resources for their special needs students all the time, so if this issue isn't resolved now I'd expect this from someone in North Providence within a couple years, which could dramatically change the cost and enrollment structure of both PVD mayoral academies.

Also, I guess it is legal to accept an application submitted December 23, 2011 for a charter school opening this fall, but the "deadline" was in March.

Projected size in year 8 is 306 students K-8. If 250 students come from Providence -- likely under the proposed lottery -- it would cost $3,500,000 a year (if it was at full scale this year).

Test Prep is Partially Effective

Kathleen Porter-Magee:

Similarly, Pondiscio derides both “dumb test prep” and “reciting lesson aim and standard.” There is no question that test prep is virtually useless. In fact, the fact that test prep is used so widely, but that reading scores have remained essentially flat for more than a decade, should help demonstrate just how ineffective it is. Why it is still the go-to method for preparing students for state tests is beyond me.

But state test scores aren't flat, they almost always go up at a steady rate, everywhere. Test prep is partially effective, to varying degrees, in the short run, for the specific test in question.

The iBooks Author License is a Halfassed Mess

Dan Wineman:

Interestingly, as the author of the document and presumed signatory to the iBooks Author EULA, you’re the only person to whom that restriction applies. If you gave your iBook to a friend, Apple would have no control over what your friend did with it. And you could sell your friend’s iBooks too, because you aren’t the one who used iBooks Author to generate them.

That was my reading too.

From Last Wednesday Night's Session

Tailslide at Skaters Edge photo: Scott Criv

Nora Vasconcellos, photo by Scott Criv. I was waiting my turn off camera to the right.

What is Hispaniola?

Jennifer and I don't spend a lot of time discussing "surprising things high school students don't know these days," which is sort of a whole genre unto itself. But she did bring up something this week -- her freshman seemed completely unfamiliar with "Hispaniola," that is, that it is the name of an island. Not in the "OK class, on what island did Columbus set foot establish a settlement in 1492? Bueller? Bueller?" sense. Just that when it came up in whatever context they were discussing, it was like they'd never heard the term.

This seemed particularly telling since it is a curriculum issue that cuts across the usual ideological divide. If you're content-oriented and/or a traditionalist/conservative, of course you'd expect kids to know the name of the island that Columbus landed on, be able to label the major islands in the Caribbean, etc. This would be core knowledge for any middle schooler if not elementary student.

On the other hand, any coherent progressive (politically and/or pedagogically) curriculum would be very concerned with connecting immigrant students -- many of whom are the children or grandchildren of immigrants from Hispaniola, if not immigrants themselves -- to their own family history and heritage. And while it is not a major point, you'd think the name of the island containing the Dominican Republic and Haiti would at least come up enough that the kids would recognize it.

The progressive/traditionalist dichotomy is out of date in American urban education -- not because we've learned how to get along -- but because things have gone in a third direction.

In a Perfect World, This Would Be the Focal Point of the Achievement First Mayoral Academy Debate

Jim Horn:

Now we have a federal charter school policy that actually calls for high poverty quotas of 60 percent minimum of poor children to win the federal grants to fund “successful” charter expansion. This is exactly the opposite of what needs to be done, if charter schools are going to continue at all. They should, in fact, have a cap of 40 percent of low-income children, so that the social capital that James Coleman and hundreds of other scholars have shown to be so important over the years can help to equalize the punishing effects of poverty, particularly when poverty is concentrated. Why is this segregating incentive to contain poor children in the guidance for winning federal grants for schools?

I'm becoming even more conscious of how much more favorable RI charter school law still is than other states, but we could do a better job of taking advantage of it.

Shared Links

I finally got around to adding a widget at right that shows the last five things added to my Pinboard bookmarks. They all can be viewed here. The RSS feed is here.

The Real Widget Effect

Pasi Sahlberg:

Second, some observers have concluded that the secret of Finnish educational success is its well-trained teachers. Yes, it is true that teachers and leaders have higher academic education in Finland than in many other countries. But that alone is not the way to whole-system change. What is significant in the Finnish approach is that it has focused on improving the professional knowledge and skills of teachers and leaders as a collective group, not only as individuals, which is the common practice in many current reform programs elsewhere. Finnish teachers learn to work together with other teachers. Finnish education system development has systematically focused on improving schools as social organizations. This includes leadership development that is, according to external reviewers, aimed at enhancing shared and distributed models of leadership. In brief, Finnish educational change is driven by building social capital within the system in concert with individual professional growth.

Why do school reformers think teachers are interchangeable parts (of varying quality)?

Facts on the Ground II

Karran Harper Royal:

I’ve been in so many meetings day and night with various community groups fighting off Recovery School District Superintendent John White and charter school vultures.

Several local communities have applied for and have been denied charters for their community schools. This process began shortly after Hurricane Katrina, when several of us attempted to be part of the reforms coming to our city with the state takeover of our the majority of our schools. For years, myself included, we were kept busy serving on steering committees to help our schools. Initially, we were promised that these schools would be community-driven schools and we did not have to charter them.

Former RSD superintendent Paul Vallas promised me and my community this over and over when we pressed him to comply with what was written in the Walton Family Foundation grant he received for supporting our community’s schools. We were told that if we wanted that type of power in the school we had to apply for a charter for the school. The Recovery School District received 6 million dollars from the Walton Family Foundation to help us plan and drive what happens at our schools. The RSD squandered the money on their consultants and many of us are still shut out of the process.

Skating with Nora

One thing about skating the late Wednesday at Skaters' Edge in the winter is that the intensity and quality of skating goes up dramatically as the weather gets worse. So it wasn't that surprising that when I arrived last night to skate the bowl there was an array of flashes set up for a photo shoot and probably the top female skater in the Northeast, Nora Vasconcellos, trying to make some tricks. I wasn't sure what the protocol was for this kind of situation but gradually mixed in my pleasure runs with her semi-business ones. Nora is part of a new generation of girl skaters which I imagine has been nurtured in the new public (and private, Nora mostly skates vert at Rye Airfield), which have a lower (social) barrier to entry than backyard ramps and secret spots.

Here's a nice piece on Nora from Blue Tile Obsession.

Rotherham on Choosing Teachers

Andy Rotherham's article on the importance of parents playing an active role in choosing their children's teachers within a school is a perfect example of the macro/micro dissonance which plagues ed reform. If you really care about equity, you can't allow this. If you really care about the precision of teacher evaluation, particularly value-added calculations, you can't have systematic selection bias.

Of course, the obvious explanation is that Andy Rotherham does not care about either of those issues.

As I've said before, increasing market efficiency for teacher quality will only ensure those teachers will go to the highest bidders. The more you demonstrate the importance of teacher quality, the more those that can pay more for it will do so. Can these people really not think more than one step ahead?

Nothing 13 Years of High Value Added Teachers Won't Solve

USA Today:

In 2008, the mean annual income of blacks with a four-year degree was more than $13,000 less than that of whites with the same level of education.

Just to keep things in perspective.

The Facts on the Ground

Jackie Bennett:

How does the DOE decide which high schools to close? For the third straight year, and all claims to a nuanced review of quality aside, the schools the DOE chooses to shut are simply those that dare to teach the students with the city’s highest needs. There’s nothing terribly nuanced about it at all. (For previous years, see here and here).

It starts with this chart (and then gets worse).

Even though DOE claims that the Progress Report grades are demographically neutral, DOE did not fail a single high school with lowest concentrations of high-need students (that top 1/3 in dark green).¹ And, though the D’s and F’s are spread across the bottom 2/3 (in blue and red), it was overwhelmingly the D’s and F’s with the highest needs that made the “pre-engagement” list — the short list from which DOE would ultimately choose the final closures. 65% of the highest-need D’s and F’s were put on the short list, but only 15% of the schools in the middle where the students on average had fewer challenges to overcome.

And it gets worse.

Because to be on the short list only means that you might or might not close. Once they create the short list, the DOE claims it “reviews the school data, consults with the superintendents and other experienced educators who have worked closely with the school, and gathers community feedback.”

That’s what they say, and it is certainly true that they make a good show of it, running from school to school and having all sorts of sympathetic meetings. But in the end? Take a look at which ones land on the final list.

In the end, this is how it works. The schools that serve the neediest populations are closed. I still don't really understand if that's the goal, a side-effect, or if reformers even notice. But it is what is horrifying about the whole process.

PPSD Registration

I should note that last Friday we registered Vivian as an incoming kindergartner in the PPSD. They've started the process early this year, which is probably a good thing. Days are assigned by first letter of the last name. I wasn't sure how many people would be aware of the early start, but the office was certainly busy. Nonetheless, please don't spread the word because the less competition for the selection lottery the better. Thanks.

It is crazy how many "neighborhood" (within 1 mile) elementary schools we have here. Six? I don't even know where some of them are. I bring this up to aggravate my friends on the West End.

So we have one longshot lottery PPSD school, one longshot lottery neighborhood charter, a "might as well apply" longshot charter, and a fallback neighborhood school which would be fine for at least the next two years. Whether or not I think this is a good system depends on whether or not we win the lottery.