Educated Guesses

Reflections on a New Job (and dress code)

2010-09-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

I recently started working at a K-5 charter school in New York City (the school will remain nameless) as an administrative assistant in the main office. I'm still learning the ropes, but a few things have come up already which inspired me to reflect here.

First, I have to talk about uniforms. The school is pretty adamant about uniforms, which consist of khaki pants and a shirt which MUST have the school's logo on it. Well, since charter schools generally--and certainly this one--serve low-income communities and struggle to engage parents, the uniform issue has been contentious, with parents neglecting to get the shirts embroidered with the logo. As we entered the 2nd week of school, students were sent home if they weren't in full uniform. So first graders who showed up impeccably dressed, very neat, are brought to the office and have to wait there until a parent either brings an appropriately embroidered shirt or takes them home. Students lose out on really valuable instructional time because of parental neglect AND, in my opinion, because of lousy school policy.

I understand the argument in favor of being strict about uniforms, and to some extent I agree with it; I'm in favor of being strict in this regard, but not to the point of pulling her out of class and forcing her to miss an entire day of school. One boy in kindergarten missed three days in a row because the embroiders were slow to finish his shirts. My concern here is twofold: on one hand, irresponsible parents are nothing new for this school and for others like it, but in addition, kids are being punished for something they have no control over.

It's a truism in education that parents have a lot of impact, especially in high poverty populations where parent involvement is most important. Many kids at this school are negatively impacted by the behavior of their parents or guardians, and as a school, we cant do much about that. Home life is outside of our purview, end of story. Public schools must provide a safe haven, a respite from what is often an extremely difficult home life.

Rigorous academics are also important. The kids in this school, even the 5-year-olds, work hard. Missing a couple days is a big deal, and they do fall behind in as little as a day out of school, let alone three straight. When a kid wants to come to school, I'm of the mind that they have to be allowed to come unless they're carrying a contagious disease or for some other reason a threat to others. Because the kids need to learn, they need to be there, or else we as school professionals are wasting our time.

Keeping kids who don't have the full uniform out of school is purely punitive. Discipline is important, but kids cant be held responsible for their parents' behavior any more than they already are. Our students' future is largely determined by their circumstances before they ever get to school. When they enter our school, the goal is that they can transcend whatever limitations they were born with--lousy parents included. When kids are punished for things they have nothing to do with, it sends a terrible message first off, and secondly, it has the effect of reinforcing the idea for kids that they aren't fully responsible for their own success (which of course as elementary schoolers they aren't, but nonetheless its an important idea).

A lot of charter schools are very serious about uniforms and such, and I really do understand why. But for professionals at our school to waste time with things like removing nail polish, calling parents about clothes and writing letters about embroidery is just silly. It's not only silly, it has a deleterious effect on student learning and overall school culture. When a school decides that a kid cant come until he wears the right shirt, the school is deciding for that kid "you won't learn anything today." That's the opposite message we ought to be giving to these kids.

How Moneyball ruined Education

2010-09-09T07:49:00.000-07:00

Michael Lewis published Moneyball in 2003. The book was a profile of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane, who at the time was overseeing a dramatic shift in the way baseball talent was evaluated. The baseball stuff is really interesting, and a movie is currently in production, featuring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. Beyond that, Beane and his Moneyball tactics were credited with helping the Oakland A's compete with teams spending much more on their teams. The A's were perennial playoff contenders during the late 90's and early 00's, but they perennially lost to bigger market teams like the Red Sox or Yankees.

The key to Moneyball as practiced by the A's is that it valued complicated, sometimes obscure statistics, called sabermetrics, over the conventional wisdom of baseball veterans. Instead of looking at a young player's attributes and batting average, scouts would compile tables of data, looking at WHIP and DIPS for pitchers and VORP and WAR for hitters. The statistics within sabermetrics are complicated, and when it comes down to business in baseball front offices, some teams follow these stats religiously. It isn't outside the realm of possibility that some GM's make decisions based on numbers they don't totally understand. This is what's happening in education policy today.

The Los Angeles Times recently released a value-added analysis of all the 3-5 grade teachers in the LA Unified School District. Parents, policy-makers and everyone else can now go to the linked website and search for any of these teachers to see how well the LA Times has concluded they are doing. Value-added analyses make sense on a large scale, and the logical basis for these types of analyses is solid: judging teachers based purely on test scores isn't quite fair, nearly everyone has agreed. But we need some kind of data to evaluate teachers and determine effectiveness. So we take test scores from 2006, for example, and attach the scores to individual kids. If their scores go up after a year with Mr. Ehrenfeld, that improves my value-added score. Looking at each of the kids in my class, we can see how effective a teacher I am.

This analysis is useful for entire schools with lots of kids. For individual classes and teachers, it can be disastrous. Lots of factors affect student test performance; many of these are impossible for a teacher to affect, including family situation, student health, personal circumstances on the day of the test, there's a huge range. Also, classes are never assigned randomly, so there is selection bias. But don't simply trust me: there is significant debate, and many smart people agree that VAA analyses are not perfect and indeed are very flawed.

Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford advised President Obama on education issues during the campaign and his transition, only to be passed over for a position in the DoE for neophyte Arne Duncan. She wrote "Unfortunately...these measures are highly unstable for individual teachers." Her insistence on contextualizing test scores if they are to be used in evaluation is the most compelling argument on this issue; test scores alone, just like OPS alone, cannot be used to evaluate how well an individual does his or her job, be that a teacher or a third-baseman.

Diane Ravitch, a respected and controversial education historian, writes that VAA models are "problematic" and subject to extremely high measurement error, meaning that the results of the test could simply be wrong based on sample size and experimentation issues. With 3 years of student scores, Diane points out, the error rate is 25%, meaning many good teachers will be identified as "needing improvement" and some bad teachers will even be rated "highly effective."

Statistics can be accurate and correctly measured, but they can still be misleading. From year-to-year, baseball players, like teachers, have divergent statistics. In all likelihood, there are a few Alex Rodriguez teachers out there who are good consistently, but the more common teacher will be comparable to Eric Chavez, former A's third-baseman who Billy Beane frequently said was a better value and competitive with A-Rod. He was wrong, and so are the policy people who argue that VAA models can tell how effective a teacher is and will be.

The best, fairest teacher evaluations are comprehensive. Student test scores, even a value-added model, ought to play a small role in this process, but the biggest piece should be administrator and peer review. It's the only way to get an accurate picture of teacher effectiveness.

Moneyball and sabermetrics revolutionized the way Major League front offices evaluate players. But look at the case of Jeremy Bonderman, who was drafted by Beane's A's in the 2001 draft. Beane was so incensed that the player had been drafted that he reportedly threw a chair at the wall so hard that it exploded on impact. But looking at the career of the player, even using the advanced sabermetrics, Bonderman has been excellent, vindicating Beane's scouts who drafted Bonderman back in 2001.

But this is only baseball. Teachers and students and public education as a whole are too important to allow mistakes like this to happen. A great teacher who is fired for being ineffective loses his or her livelihood and deprives future students of all he or she has to offer. Denying students the opportunity to be taught by truly excellent teachers--those who really inspire greatness and help students develop--is a travesty beyond the mistake Beane made by trading Bonderman the year after he was drafted.

The obsession with statistics now commonplace in baseball and growing in import in education is extremely problematic. Just look at the recent scandal in New York: the bar for passing tests is extremely subjective, and it moves. Also look at David Leonhardt's review of teacher evaluation and test score obsession in last week's New York Times Magazine. Campbell's Law holds true in education as elsewhere: the more a quantitative indicator is used for social decision-making, the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt that which it was originally intended to measure and the more subject it is to corruption pressures.

Overvaluing test scores in teacher evaluation is wrong, and basing teacher evaluations wholly on VAA models is criminal. Thanks for nothing, Billy Beane.

Beware High-Stakes Testing

2010-07-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

Before I begin, a few disclaimers. I'm not opposed to tests, not even multiple choice tests like the SAT which, for many high schoolers, are extremely high-stakes. National, well-researched tests are important, and the results can be meaningful and ought to inform practice at every level. I'm not opposed to judging schools and teachers--in part--on students' test scores. But test data, like anything else, must be looked at critically before running with it. And that has not happened many times.

Today, the New York Times reported on what should really be called a scandal for the New York Department of Education. Test scores were artificially inflated by making the tests easier to pass. When critics of the Bloomberg/Klein regime pointed this out over a year ago, the Times and the state looked the other way. Repeated claims of rising test scores should have been accompanied by the note that the benchmarks are moving, but instead, credit-claiming was all that we heard. It was obvious that test scores were rising due, at least in part, to manipulations of the test and the scoring, but the mainstream media remained silent.

Every year, test scores in many states rise and rise, but that only reflects manipulation of the tests! A few intelligent folks have pointed this out in the past: Diane Ravitch comes to mind. Here she notes that No Child Left Behind actually hurt student achievement and slowed student progress, particularly for racial minorities.

I'm pleased that the state of New York, at least, has finally realized the disservice they are doing when they advertise that an outrageously high percentage of students are "proficient" when, in truth, many high school students still are unable to read or do basic math. The "Shock Plunge" in test scores is actually not a plunge at all; instead, it's a realization that calling a kid proficient doesn't actually raise numeracy or literacy.

In defense of the state board of regents, they have been warning us for months that this was coming. The raising of proficiency levels for state tests has indeed been a long time coming, but the warning disguises the fact that the proficiency level for years was decreased specifically so that folks like Joel Klein could brag about improving test scores year after year, despite the fact that actual student achievement had remained constant or even decreased. It's dishonest, embarrassing and shameful, and those responsible ought to be held accountable.

from the NYT story:

And the results could cast doubts on the city’s improvements over the past several years; both the mayor and the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have used increases in state test scores as evidence that schools have improved.
“It certainly complicates the Bloomberg administration message, because the state test is completely unreliable,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a researcher with the Fordham Institute, a Washington-based research group.

Just unconscionable. This is why tests should be just one measure of success for students, teachers, and schools. Test scores--clearly so malleable to the point of being almost meaningless--should only be considered as one part of a larger review. If tests are too important, they are likely to be manipulated, and that's exactly what we've seen in New York. The one major takeaway for ed reformers from this story: pay attention! Don't believe everything you here, and hold on to a healthy dose of skepticism.

The Failure of Obama's Education Reform Efforts

2010-07-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

President Obama entered office as the great hope of many segments of the population, ranging from racial minorities to political progressives who were hoping for particular policy changes. Teachers and education reform activists were also excited by the ascendancy of Obama, and for good reason: he had detailed, exciting plans to reform public education, and during the campaign he had advisors like Linda Darling-Hammond on staff, leading many to believe that his efforts would encapsulate a certain set of policy prescriptions. Darling-Hammond was in fact a leading candidate for Secretary of Education, the post currently occupied by the controversial Arne Duncan.

Duncan was firmly ensconced in the "reform" camp of candidates, balanced by Darling-Hammond and others on the "pro-union" side. The reformers are folks like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, people with little teaching experience who believe in reforms like the removal of tenure, mayoral control of schools, expanding charter schools, and test-based accountability for both teachers and schools. The opposition, led by teachers unions and their spokespeople like Randi Weingarten, disagrees with the "reform" banner given to the other camp, because they too believe in reform.

Since Duncan was chosen, he has led the administration's education reform efforts--though some claim that none other than Bill Gates is truly in charge. He has followed in the footsteps of those like Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein in New York City and Rhee in Washington, pushing test-based accountability, closing struggling schools, and other reforms without input from teachers.

The biggest criticism of Obama's efforts thus far has been just that--he has disrespected those on the frontlines of education reform: teachers. The Race to the Top, the largest, most visible piece of a larger reform effort, is entirely top-down, without consultation even from principals and district leaders. It proscribes particular reforms that states should enact in order to become eligible for a huge pot of federal money.

Teachers have voiced significant complaints about RttT and other efforts. In early July, the National Education Association had their national conference in New Orleans. Union President Dennis Van Roekel summed up his feelings and a sentiment apparently shared by many in attendance this way: “Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced." This was one of many pokes and criticisms of Duncan and Obama throughout the conference, which last year warmly welcomed Secretary Duncan.

The NEA conference is far from an isolated incident. Critics of the administration come from every corner, which is to be expected. Unfortunately, one huge camp of critics are essential stakeholders in education reform: teachers. Across the country, teachers have voiced their disapproval loudly and clearly, protesting appearances by Duncan frequently. The teachers have latched onto a few points of criticism, but the substantive claims they have--meritorious or not--are fairly irrelevant.

Whatever reason given by teachers for their bitter opposition to the plans, the mere fact that teachers are opposed is enough to doom Race to the Top and other programs. Qualified, experienced, effective teachers are necessary for any education reform effort to succeed--Duncan and some of his compatriots have repeatedly stated that effective teachers are the most important piece of reform. The disrespect and resulting alienation of the nation's teachers in and of itself is the death knell of Arne Duncan's entire tenure in the Department of Education. Without teachers on your side, very little is possible in the field of education.

To be fair, what could we have expected from Arne Duncan? An old crony of Obama's from Chicago's Hyde park neighborhood, his efforts as Superintendent in that city have proven to be ineffective at best, and harmful at worst. Test-and-punish schemes like No Child Left Behind have been positive only for test-writers, and observers from every side have repeatedly pointed this out. Also, the accountability and stricter licensing guidelines he has proposed would have certainly disqualified Duncan from many of his former positions and certainly his current post. His resume includes highlights like a brief pro basketball career in Australia and the highest degree he has received is a BA from Harvard. Teachers in many states are now required to hold Masters degrees, but the Secretary of Education cant be bothered even to work towards a Masters of Arts degree in Teaching, or public policy, or something else relevant to his very difficult job. This hypocritical stance is particularly damning and has turned many against him; highly-qualified educators are important, and one should be installed at the DoE with all due haste.

Trimming RttT

2010-06-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

The priorities emphasized in Race to the Top were always controversial and unsettling to me. Despite the fact that I supported President Obama all the way back when he was an underdog in the primaries and am, in fact, a Democrat for Education Reform (in a manner of speaking), I was always uneasy about the Obama/Duncan platform for reform. If you were a casual observer of education policy news, you might think there was a growing consensus around the program of reform: that is, charter expansion, test-test-test, standards, accountability, etc.

The reason this seems like consensus is because it isn't new; this is the reform embodied initially in No Child Left Behind, the much-lambasted reform program of the Bush administration. Though Democrats voted in droves for the bill initially, it became extremely controversial rather quickly. So instead of calling Race to the Top and current DoE policy the Obama/Duncan platform, let's correctly identify it as the Bush-Obama program for education reform. Kind of removes the luster, huh?

So when it came out today that Rep. David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, was planning to cut about $500 million from the Race to the Top fund in order to fund a new education jobs bill, I had mixed feelings. There are elements of RttT that I really appreciate and admire. Innovation is crucial in education, and new approaches are more than welcome. On the other hand, the RttT hurts teachers, damages community schools and threatens the foundations of public education in our country.

In the end, it has to be looked at as a good thing that money is going to save edujobs instead of promoting tests, test-based evaluation and charter expansion. If Race to the Top included more expansive and more meaningful types of reform, I might feel differently, but teachers truly need support. Cutting jobs in education is not the way to reform the system. And to be fair, $3.5 billion is still up for grabs in the second round of the Race--I think states will still apply for the funds and work hard to reform education in the way the Dept. wants.

The Race to the Top is unusually effective public policy. States around the country are passing legislation to move them in line with the DoE's expectations for reform in order for a shot at the money. Unfortunately, this move takes the control out of the hands of teachers, principals, even superintendents. Decisions made at the top levels without consultation are unlikely to prove durable in the classroom.

Teaching is an unusual job because it puts you at the crossroads of total independence and at the bottom of a complex bureaucracy. In the classroom, teachers are totally in charge, but in the scope of the larger education system, they are institutionally disrespected and disempowered. This has troubling consequences for education policy, but more importantly, it implies stark concerns for education reform. The major takeaway is that reforms must be democratic. That is, in order for teachers really to buy into reform, they must have a hand in shaping those reforms. This makes sense, because nobody knows how education works and doesn't work like those who are in the trenches every day. It also is logical because ultimately, reform will be implemented by teachers and principals, so these folks need to feel like they are part of the solution.

Ultimately, Race to the Top, while effective at shaping reform, is misguided in its attempt to institute policy shifts from the top-down instead of after consultation and discussion with educators. Trimming it in order to save teachers' jobs is an excellent idea, and I hope Rep. Obey's version of the Edujobs bill is the one that reaches Obama's desk, and I hope it happens soon.

Negative Learning

2010-05-15T10:21:00.001-07:00

As I wrap up my undergraduate education--just over a week until commencement--I find myself thinking a lot about how different people learn. I was even asked at a recent job interview to create some type of art project in 15 minutes to explain, without words, what intelligence means. The conclusion I seem to be reaching more and more is simply that nobody knows how others learn. At least, the pontificators and the talking heads in the education world certainly don't. And neither do I, but I'm becoming convinced that there are different modes that some use effectively, and other modes of thinking--I consider them varieties of non-thinking, but that's not a great way to introduce them. These latter forms can be thought of as passive and disengaged forms of thinking or, better yet, forms of "knowledge enhancement." Because thinking implies an active process, we will only consider active forms of learning as involving thinking in a meaningful way. Passive learning, including rote memorization, homework, and following directions is really opposed to thinking.

Think back to when you were in school, especially high school. If your background is anything like mine, you probably survived high school, but only barely. I was miserable for huge parts of my public school education (in suburban, middle class Connecticut), and the hierarchical system in place ensured that I would continue to be pretty unhappy in that school. Without the money to afford independent school tuition and without good charter/magnet options, I just stuck around and found myself getting by fine. There were high points and low points, but on the whole, I think we all remember high school being a pretty lousy time.

When we're 15 or 16 and unhappy with what's going on in school, we're told--indeed, taught--that this is the way things work. We are trained to be satisfied with dissatisfaction, to get used to subpar experiences. When your 7th grade teacher can't pronounce the word "anecdote" or "tortilla," you aren't surprised when you have an open-book spelling test in the same class. This is not a joke, although it is funny. That teacher continued working for years, and I only hope she's since retired. In 9th grade, when my Spanish teacher disappeared for unidentified medical reasons for the second half of the year, we were told by the principal that substitutes were good enough, even if they didn't speak Spanish. This teacher pulled the same move in years prior and has done the same since. Administrators always say there's nothing they can do, this is just the way it is.

So we're taught obedience, sure, but we're also taught that bureaucracy is powerful. The lesson from the stories above is pretty clear, right? Don't rock the boat, this is just "the way it is," and there's nothing you can do about it. These are lessons of disempowerment as much as anything. Public schools don't teach kids to be active, discerning adults, they teach passivity. It should be no surprise that kids misbehave and cause trouble in public schools; they are treated like prisoners to be kept under wraps, and this treatment results in unsurprising behavior. Teachers become even more hesitant to cede control after such pushback. Now there's an entrenching effect and a vicious cycle developing, where teachers and school leaders treat students like robots, kids act like....well, like kids, in response to this treatment, and then teachers get nervous about control and take away any remaining freedoms kids might have. This has been status quo in public schools for decades.

As a result, conversations about school reform and education reform continue to focus on doing the same things over and over again. The call comes for "better" teachers, higher standards, more accountability. The discourse rarely touches on questions of why we do what we do and whether other approaches might work better. God forbid, of course talk never gets to the point of examining values and goals in education.

The way I learn best, and this is thanks to my family and university, but certainly not to my public school education, is through negative experiences and observations. It's this inclination that would make me a lousy investment banker, but I hope makes me a decent social scientist and politics/policy nerd. I see things and my mind first goes to what's wrong, what needs fixing and what we can do about it. So when I'm sitting in my fourth 82-minute class of the day, playing Trivial Pursuit in an Advanced Placement class, I'm not thinking about Coca-Cola ads or Oprah's career trajectory, I'm thinking about what a waste of time my whole day has been. I cant help but reflect on problems, which can lead to bouts with depression but also leads to what lots of smart people call "critical thinking," a key element of the 21st century skills that are being pushed into education in the U.S.

Alfie Kohn says it best:

"I suspect the key is a phenomenon that might be called “negative learning,” in which people regard an unfortunate situation as a chance to figure out what not to do. They sit in awful classrooms and pay careful attention because they know they’re being exposed to an enormously useful anti-model. They say to themselves, 'Here is someone who has a lot to teach me about how not to treat children.'"

From this, we get things like progressive, student-centered education. Well-intentioned, ambitious folks like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein seem to have forgotten both what it was like to learn and what teaching was like (both Rhee and Klein had brief stints in the classroom, Rhee with Teach for America). No student thinks the cure for his or her shitty high school is more testing and "accountability." The kids in Rhode Island whose entire teaching force was fired largely disagree with that decision, too. When I was in high school, I wasn't thinking about more hours spent in school as a potential solution for my classmates who were dropping out--they were dropping out because they didn't like high school, not because they wanted more of it!

But we keep hearing the same tired suggestions about how to fix struggling schools: longer school days, more testing, analysis of date, accountability and higher expectations. These are all tweaks, when what we really need is a revolution. Incrementalism won't get us there, but put Joel Klein back in a classroom in a poor public school, and I bet he'll remember some of the complaints he surely had when he was younger. If not, maybe somebody else would be better for the extremely important job of fixing New York City's public schools. Conveniently enough for Mayor Bloomberg, I'm available.

Thoughts on Health Care Reform

2010-04-16T16:36:00.000-07:00

Below you'll find a reprint of another article I wrote for the Tufts Observer, this time focusing on health care reform, focused on students and the political implications.

My own thoughts on reform are more complicated than might be revealed by the (hopefully impartial) news article. I'm genuinely happy that the bill passed, but it's just grossly inadequate. Doesn't do nearly enough. And I worry especially that this will allow Congress to ignore health care for many years into the future--when in reality, reform is still needed. That being said, enjoy the article.

Healthcare Cram Session: Ensuring You Know the Facts
Will Ehrenfeld

Minnesota Governor and potential 2012 presidential nominee Tim Pawlenty called it an “unprecedented overreach by the federal government.” Georgian Congressman Paul Broun called it “a war of Yankee aggression” (really). But Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma put it in terms everyone can understand: “To our seniors, I have a message for you: you’re going to die sooner.”

What are these Republicans responding to so angrily—and some might say outrageously? The recently passed health care bill, of course. Few pieces of legislation in recent memory have been so divisive, caused such national furor, or fueled so many protests and rallies on both sides of the political spectrum. Likewise, rarely has legislation brought with it such a dramatic change.

For all the discussion and debate regarding the health bill, knowledge of its key provisions is sorely lacking. The news media has focused on sound bites and all the outrageous rhetoric flowing from competing sides of the senate floor. For some, it has be difficult to find out how we may actually be affected by the bill, signed into law by President Obama on March 23.

Senior Andrea Lowe, president of the Tufts Democrats, highlighted the primary effect of the bill on college students nationwide—including, of course, the impact here at Tufts. Until age 26, young adults will be able to remain on their parent’s health insurance, which she said “will have a profound impact on young adults.” Previously, individual states regulated the age of maturity when children were no longer covered by their parents’ policies, generally age 18 or, in some cases, upon the completion of an undergraduate degree. Now, a universal cutoff age for health care coverage under family plans has been set, ensuring care for most undergraduates.

The reform’s impact on college students is enormous. While salvaging draining funds, undergrads will no longer need to worry about establishing an independent insurance plan apart from that of their parents until the ripe age of 26—a time when (hopefully) carefree college kids have transformed into responsible and financially secure adults. With the passing of the health care bill, a heavy burden has certainly been lifted across college campuses nationwide.

Beyond its effects on college students, the healthcare reform will help millions of other Americans. Insurance coverage will be extended to 32 million Americans who are currently uninsured. The bill also mandates that individuals cannot be denied coverage due to preexisting conditions, a provision that will be put into effect immediately for children and in 2014 for adults.

The response from Tufts’ Right, unsurprisingly, was less positive. “They are just reinforcing the status quo system of heavily regulated, private insurance,” according to senior Xander Zebrose, a member of the Tufts Republicans. The primary effect of the bill, he said, is “just forcing more people into a system that doesn’t work particularly well.”

Like the new ban on restricting coverage based on pre-existing conditions, many of the bill’s more audacious reforms will not be implemented until 2014. The individual mandate to enroll in an insurance plan—the lynchpin of Massachusetts’ health regime, which was in large part echoed in the federal program—will also be delayed until 2014, along with the ban on lifetime caps for insurance coverage. These caps, which limit the amount of money a patient can receive regardless of need, often leave families with huge debts after loved ones pass away.

A large point of contention surrounding the bill is how it will affect prices for consumers. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan body that reviews legislation for its financial impact, said that by 2016, it expects little if any increase in premiums for those with employer-sponsored plans. While individuals and families enrolled in unsponsored plans may see some rises in cost, according to the CBO, more than half of these people will qualify for federal subsidies—reducing costs by 60% on average.

Generally, these reforms will benefit middle-class families, while upper-class individuals and large corporations are likely to see increased costs and higher taxes in order to cover the cost of the new changes. Yet President Obama has taken pains to highlight the bill’s positive effects on small businesses: “This year, millions of small-business owners will be eligible for tax credits that will help them cover the cost of insurance for their employees,” he remarked in a speech in Iowa a few weeks ago.

Many commentators and pundits argue that the bill’s biggest impact will be seen in November, when mid-term elections roll around. What effect will healthcare reform have on the prospects for both parties in the 2010 elections?

The health reform bill “gives the Democrats a platform to run on,” in the words of sophomore Seth Rau, the Speakers Coordinator for the Tufts Democrats. “Once people start to know that they will be saving [money] from the bill, some more popular support will come about,” he predicts, forecasting that the Democratic Party will retain control of both chambers of Congress.

Xander Zebrose of the Tufts Republicans agreed. “I don’t think the Democrats are going to be any worse off because they passed it,” he said. The reason for this, he explained, is timing. “All the costs are delayed…the real effects will probably be farther down the road, once the bill has a real impact.”

No matter the political ramifications, it is clear that the passage of health care reform marks a dramatic shift in US social policy. It seems almost inevitable that this bill will indeed extend coverage to millions and make health insurance available and affordable to all Americans—a change that is long overdue. And, if anything, this healthcare reform will guarantee us Tufts students at least a couple more years of free insurance, courtesy of mom and dad.

Teach For America not all it's chalked up to be

2010-04-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

This piece was originally written for the April 12 issue of the Tufts Observer magazine. It is published below in its unedited format, (edit) and here is the link: http://tuftsobserver.org/2010/04/teach-for-america-not-all-its-chalked-up-to-be/

Nobody wants to see a pop quiz outside of class, but bear with me: what program is more selective than Harvard Law School, more popular than the Peace Corps, and pays better than most entry level positions? The answer is Teach For America, and it’s taking college campuses by storm. TFA is one of the most popular programs for college graduates, particularly at Tufts: 8% of all seniors applied this year.

Teach For America is extremely selective, rejecting over 90% of applicants for the 2009-10 class of corps members, which is what TFA calls their teachers. But twenty or more current Tufts seniors will join over 4000 college graduates from around the country for five weeks of intensive summer training before becoming public school teachers in September. TFA places corps members for two-year terms in some of the roughest, most challenging schools in the country, typically in underserved urban and rural areas.

This year, over 46,000 applications were received for around 4000 positions. The program has grown immensely since its founding in 1990, and it continues to expand: next year, they plan to open sites in Rhode Island, Alabama and San Antonio. And just last year, TFA began working in the Boston region.

Welcome to Boston
Politically, the program’s rapid expansion has become quite contentious. 2009 saw the first group of corps members move into the Greater Boston region, which includes Chelsea, Cambridge, Revere and Boston. This September, 75 more new teachers will arrive in the region, 20 of whom are headed to Boston, which has been the flashpoint of a serious controversy.

Richard Stutman is the president of the Boston Teachers’ Union, and he has publicly lambasted both the district and TFA for adding corps members to Boston’s already swelled ranks of teachers. Indeed, in the fall many current teachers will not be returning to their classrooms, victims of layoffs as a result of budget cuts.
“We’ve had people with three years experience moved aside for Teach For America candidates,” Stutman said. “People from Harvard were moved out of their positions for TFA—why? Committed people with experience are being moved aside for people with no experience.

“Most people I represent feel it’s an insult,” Stutman continued. “I really can’t buy that somehow it’s better to have a 5-week program [than traditional certification]; I don’t even think the superintendent thinks it makes for a better teacher…how could it?”

Josh Biber, Executive Director of TFA in Boston, made a point to rebut Stutman: “our teachers apply for open vacancies and interview just like any other teacher candidate from anywhere else.” Elaborating on the benefit to the city TFA provides, he continued, “At the end of the day, the achievement gap is an enormous problem that unfairly holds too many kids back,” explaining that “our corps members, through their teaching, long-term leadership, and unflagging commitment to kids…can be one important piece of the solution.”

Elton Sykes (’09) began his teaching career in Tulsa, OK last September as a high school English teacher with TFA. Like Biber, he has strong feelings about what Stutman mentions above: “I do not agree with the criticism made by others,” he said, referring to Stutman’s public comments. “I feel like those criticisms are not solving the problem of educational inequality and closing the achievement gap.”

The comments from Biber and Sykes are indicative of a single-mindedness that extends throughout the organization: closing the achievement gap is their only concern. Yet, critics of TFA like Richard Stutman share this goal, as do others who are willing to criticize TFA, like freshman Laurel Starr and senior Adam Weldai.

Starr attended a K-8 school in Minneapolis where she was taught by corps members. “I remember liking these teachers on a personal level. Unfortunately, their classes were often out of control and quite frankly we didn’t learn much…they were a bit too idealistic and lacked the experience and training necessary to conduct a successful classroom.”

Weldai is a member of the Malden School Committee as well as an incoming graduate student in the Tufts M.A.T. program, and he worries about the program’s impact on young teachers and their students. “Quite frankly, you need more than two years to become a good teacher. Sending unprepared teachers into low performing districts is equally as harmful to the teacher as it is to the student, a student who needs a highly trained teacher with an education background to help them thrive.”

Robbie Havdala is a senior who will be joining TFA next year as an elementary school teacher in New York City. Not surprisingly, he disagrees with Weldai’s argument. “In my opinion, there is a certain unrecognized benefit, sometimes, of having fresh, new teachers. It adds creativity, new ideas, makes organizations more forward thinking and challenges the status quo.”

Smart people disagree on how best to train teachers and how to reform education. Yet everyone agrees on the need to address the achievement gap in schools. The question is how.

Is Teach For America Effective?
There are multiple ways to test a program’s effectiveness, but perhaps the best method is the testimony of a student. Laurel Starr spoke of mixed feelings many seem to share. “I definitely sympathize with the goals of TFA and am glad that they are working towards fixing the horrendous achievement gap….However, I feel that this program is a reflection of how public, inner city schools are severely marginalized in our society.

“Why should we give our poorest students the added disadvantage of being forced to accommodate these [inexperienced] teachers? I see it as completely unjust.” Starr’s unease with TFA’s methods extends into the academic community as well, and the organization has often been the subject of research intended to answer some of these questions.

Teach For America has been studied by various researchers, looking at different metrics and finding divergent results. Notably, the Urban Institute found in a 2008 study that “TFA teachers tend to have a positive effect on high school student test scores relative to non-TFA teachers.” On the other hand, another study found that students taught by TFA teachers performed worse on standardized tests than those taught by certified teachers (Berliner and Laczko-Kerr, 2002).

“I deeply believe the [achievement gap] is solvable, but it will take enormous commitment from people in all levels of education and in all sectors of society,” said Biber, TFA’s Boston chief. Through collaboration with other dedicated people, he said, TFA has an important role to play. With a problem as daunting as closing the achievement gap, more ideas and approaches will always be welcome, but it is important to realize that no program currently exists that can singlehandedly solve the problem—lest we forget, a staggering gap continues to exist between the school achievement of black and white and rich and poor students, and TFA is one of many approaches out there.

Influential books game

2010-03-25T18:59:00.001-07:00

NYT columnist Ross Douthat outlines this exercise pretty well. I enjoyed writing this but am now tired, so I'll leave you with his explanation:

More than a week ago, Tyler Cowen kicked off an irresistible blogospheric listing exercise: In this case, the theme is “10 books which have influenced your view of the world.” You can find Matthew Yglesias’s list here, Will Wilkinson’s list here, and many more at this link. My own follows below. Note that these are not my 10 favorite books, nor the 10 best books I’ve ever read, but the books that quickly came to mind — I was following Cowen’s “go with your gut” admonition — as having shaped my writing or pushed me in one intellectual direction or another over the years. As an experiment, I’ve also tried listing them in rough chronological order, starting with the books that influenced me as a child and working my way upward (or downward, perhaps) toward adulthood. And like many people, I’ve cheated and gone over 10 — in my case, by doubling up on a few that share an author or a theme.

1. The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein
I recently picked this childhood favorite up again, reading it to a class of first graders at an independent school in Washington, D.C. as part of a job interview. I led a short discussion about the book and its themes after reading it aloud, and that reminded me why I loved the book so much growing up. I was initially drawn to it because my older cousin really liked it, but after reading through it on my own (probably one of the first books I ever read, in fact), I was struck immensely by the simplicity and beauty of the parable and its themes. It's a story of self-sacrifice, altruism, and a powerful relationship that was out of balance; The Giving Tree was my first exposure to these ideas, many of which stuck with me through the years.

2. The Client, by John Grisham
The Grisham series of legal thrillers served as my introduction into "adult" literature. I remember picking this one up during a summer where I was too adult to be content at my grandmother's house, but not yet old enough to stay home alone. I became immersed in Grisham's suspenseful prose, and this book, along with other well-known novels like The Pelican Brief and A Time to Kill, helped enhance my nascent love of reading.

3. The Diary of Anne Frank and Anne Frank: The Biography, by Melissa Muller
I read the biography first, which led me into the diary itself, and the story told pairwise in such a way was immensely powerful. The story is I think universally known, but it was important to me because I picked the biography up just a few years after my father died--I think it was in 7th grade, or not quite 5 years later. Without realizing it, I had been shortchanged of half my identity in a way, cut off from the part of myself that is Jewish by my father's passing. These readings started me on a path of self-discovery which eventually brought me to Israel. Though I'm far from converting formally to Judaism, the Anne Frank story inspired me to learn more and embrace that part of my background, even though it wasn't always easy.

4. Animal Farm and 1984, by George Orwell
This was another book read during a lazy summer at my grandmother's house in Long Island, also suggested by a cousin, if memory serves. After reading through once and missing many of the subtleties (remember, this was many years ago), I started again at the beginning. This time, the metaphors and allegories jumped off the pages, and the seeds of a political malcontent had been planted. When I read 1984 during freshman year, I remember being fascinated by the dystopic view Orwell so vividly outlines. I also caught so many parallels from Animal Farm that my understanding was really improved.

5. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
This was also read during my 9th grade year, and it was the first great war novel I ever encountered. In addition to opening this genre up to me and training me to hate war from an early age, I learned an early lesson about existentialism and nihilism. Yossarian's prime goal was to "stay alive or die trying," which in a war zone might be a pretty fair life goal. This view emphasized the questionable value of staying alive, a crazy idea which led me to explore ideas like structural violence and warm peace later in life.

6. Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, by (now Senator) Al Franken
When a comedy writer for Saturday Night Live came out with a political book...well, I don't remember why I saw the need to read this, but I'm so glad I did. It actually served as my introduction to blogosphere, netroots politics, because so much of Franken's political writing belongs on a blog, with links and source material. He actually composed a carefully reasoned, well-researched dismissal of Faux News, and his argument helped sway me farther to the left of U.S. politics.

7. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
I don't remember when I first picked this book up, I just remember it as the only book I've ever read 4 times, cover to cover. Changed my life so much.

8. Racism Without Racists, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
One or two academic books have to appear on this list. This one actually was assigned in probably my least favorite class at Tufts, but it was so educative that I won't hold the class against the book, which I enjoyed even at the time. Bonilla-Silva opened a world of blind, unspoken prejudice to me which I wasn't aware of, and through the course and this text in particular, I learned about structural inequality and the racism (and accompanying privilege) that exists beyond consciousness.

9. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
Take one part dystopia in the style of Orwell or Huxley, mix well with social commentary unparalleled in anything I've read, and finish with the style of Douglas Adams and you've got Heinlein in a nutshell. It was the discussion of the human experience that caught my interest, and I took one quote out in particular which I still remember:

"I've found out why people laugh," the Martian immigrant explained. "They laugh because it hurts...because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting." He follows this thread on the next page: "I had thought--I had been told--that a 'funny' thing is a thing of goodness. It isn't. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to...The goodness is in the laughing. I grok [understand] it as a bravery...and a sharing...against pain and sorrow and defeat."

10. Death at an Early Age and Shame of the Nation, by Jonathan Kozol
This is why I want to work in education. Kozol's dramatic writings, first as a new teacher in Boston Public Schools and later as an experienced critic, opened my eyes beyond the inequality I saw growing up. He convinced me that education reform really is the civil rights struggle of my generation.

"Whatever It Takes"

2010-03-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

I just finished "Whatever It Takes" by Paul Tough, an account of all the amazing things Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone have been doing to essentially save the children of Harlem from the cycle of poverty. It was really a fascinating read, kudos to Tough for an easy-to-read, well-researched account of one of the most innovative programs around the country.

The unique aspect of HCZ is not any particular program or strategy; it's the whole organization. The book describes it as the "conveyor belt model." Essentially, Canada starts with parents before they even have children with a program called Baby College. From there, HCZ has a program for kids and parents called the 3 year-old journey, and after that kids go straight into the pre-k program called Harlem Gems, and from there kids are expected to progress into the Harlem Promise Academy charter school, which is also operated by HCZ.

The most fitting metaphor for this approach to poverty reduction is one Canada uses about gravity and orbits. Day-to-day life in Harlem, he says, is the gravity that tries to pull kids down to Earth, but the solid start and consistent programming from HCZ is pushing kids up, up into orbit so that no amount of gravity can bring them down. It is still to be seen how much is needed in order for kids to get up and stay in orbit; HCZ has kids who make it through different parts of the conveyor belt, due to any number of reasons. What is the tipping point for them? Can they make it if at age 13, for example, they move to the Bronx and have to find a new high school without all the supports from HCZ?

I'm a huge fan of what Canada is doing in Harlem, for the most part. He is exactly right that inequality in school and the much-discussed "achievement gap" begins way before school does. Disparities in pre-k programs have been addressed federally by things like Headstart, but studies have shown the positive impact of Headstart starts to diminish as early as 2nd or 3rd grade. Constant, sustained effort is so important if we want to have an impact on poverty.

Nothing is perfect, of course, and the ability of Canada and HCZ to make a real impact in the Harlem community--an impact beyond the direct scope of its programs--the focus of its schools must change. In Tough's account, Canada and the HCZ Board discuss testing and test scores ad nauseaum. The way they measure success is simply by the numbers, and that has huge impacts on students. At one point the board encourages Canada to bring in KIPP to restructure the Promise Academy middle school, and although they end up going in a different direction, many of KIPP's main tenets find their way into the school. Especially the exclusive focus on testing.

A lot of things cant be measured by standardized tests. The NCLB-mandated tests that Canada and wealthy donors like Stan Druckenmiller use to evaluate the school's progress rarely even measure the things they are designed to measure. At one point Tough reports one teacher acknowledging this, explaining that the reason certain students don't do as well is that they don't know the tricks to test-taking that were certainly taught in my school and are taught in most middle and upper class schools. But what's the educational benefit of learning process of elimination and avoiding "red herring" trick answers? Is this cognitively significant? (NO!)

Likewise, by focusing so much time on test prep, other subjects lose out. Do inner city kids not deserve enrichment like music, art and history? Learning isn't only about tests, it isn't only about math and reading. School has to be about more than that, or kids will (and empirically do) simply shut down. Even if scores go up and the reputation of the school improves--so what? Is quality of education truly linked to reputation? When Tough relayed the heavy emphasis on testing and Canada and Druckenmiller's obsession over scores, I couldn't help but think that they were more interested in their reputations and the reputation of HCZ than they were about helping kids learn and grow into successful, productive adults.

Terri Grey was the founding principal of Promise Academy middle school, but she was quickly discarded after she refused to compromise her belief in comprehensive schooling in order to appease Dept. of Ed bigwigs or her bosses. She has since moved onto a more progressive school environment, discussed at length in a recent Ed Week piece. She has continued to focus on learning and not testing, which, to me, seems like the obvious thing to do.

Geoffrey Canada is really a hero for youth growing up in poverty, especially in Harlem. During his campaign for President, Barack Obama talked of a proposed federal effort to expand HCZ's key components to 20 cities around the country, and as a proud supporter of both Obama and Canada, I applauded this plan (and I still hope it happens). However, if the KIPP ethos of test first and test often continues to pervade these schools, kids will suffer. It's too bad that test scores are the only data most people look at when measuring student achievement, because learning is about so much more, and it's about a lot that simply cannot be measured.

The long-term focus of HCZ has a lot to say about other efforts to reduce poverty and raise student achievement around the country (and the world). I see an unspoken commentary on Teach For America, in fact. Canada and his organization recognize that two years in a child's life is the blink of an eye; it isn't long enough to make an impact, and it is nowhere near enough time to launch those kids into "orbit" and out of the cycle of poverty. TFA is a two-year resume builder. It isn't a substantive effort to address the achievement gap, it cant be unless it's dedicated to not only spending many years in classrooms, but to training teachers for more than a few weeks as well. (I apologize for the constant TFA-bashing, I just cant help it. I feel like the organization is brainwashing college kids and even policy makers, and it irks me to no end.)

The Ultimate in Tracking

2010-02-17T16:47:00.000-08:00

Detroit is recognized nationally as a city that is nearing bottom--outlandishly high unemployment, rampant crime, and just awful public schools. Never having visited, I cant say more than that, but suffice it to say that Detroit's national reputation is nothing to brag about.

And now this, what I call in the title "The Ultimate in Tracking." Since I'm not sure I can improve on the utter idiocy encapsulated in the title, I'll just give you the link with the original title: Detroit schools offer class in how to work at Walmart.

Yes, you read that right. Four inner city public high schools in Detroit are collaborating with the retail giant to offer for-credit courses on "job-readiness training". Leaving aside the, ahem, questionable reputation Walmart enjoys nationally, the message of this kind of offering is blatantly offensive. Train inner city (almost entirely black and minority) kids to be cashiers and low-paid associates in Walmart stores as part of the school curriculum? When were maxims like 'aim high', 'follow your dreams' and 'anything's possible' replaced with the less inspiring 'take what you can get' and 'a paycheck's a paycheck' or, more damning, 'this is the best you can do'?

Also, we mustn't ignore the racialized undertones--perhaps overtones--of such a program. Do we see similar courses offered at suburban (read: white) schools? Of course not. Middle and upper class kids, first of all, don't want to work at Walmart, but more importantly, they and their parents are encouraged to imagine a better future. Detroit kids? They're being told that this is what's available, go to it. It's abominable, really.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for job training and vocational education (I know that's a dirty word now--career preparation? what's the proper term nowadays?) in schools. I think it serves an important purpose; while I was in high school, the courses I took in English, history and even drama helped prepare me for my hoped-for career as an educator or policy analyst. There's a difference, of course. My courses helped prepare me for a career while also broadening my horizons, teaching me valuable life-skills and alighting a love of learning. This is what school should be all about--not training for a menial, low-paying job that's unlikely to lead anywhere. If schools impart one thing to their students, it should be encouraging that love of learning. Walmart does the opposite.

I've bloviated about my feelings enough; take a look at the Freep article, this segment in particular. It's just...unbelievable is an understatement.

Sean Vann, principal at Douglass [one of the four participating schools], said 30 students at that school will get jobs at Walmart. He said the program will allow students an opportunity to earn money and to be exposed to people from different cultures - since all of the stores are in the suburbs.

Follow me on Twitter! @WillEhrenfeld

Thanks to @arotherham for the link (and check out his blog)

An Argument Against Teach For America

2010-02-14T19:33:00.000-08:00

As a college senior with a liberal arts degree coming and difficult job prospects, I, like many others, was interested in Teach For America (TFA) and similar programs. I applied for and interviewed for the New York City Teaching Fellowship, but without any skills in math or science I was rejected from that program and, I don't mind admitting it, after a phone interview I was rejected from TFA as well. I hope to assure you that this post isn't revenge-based or personal in any way, I had nothing but pleasant interactions with the folks at TFA, and I have lots of friends who are planning on becoming Corps members in the fall. I wish them nothing but good luck.

I have three main arguments to make against Teach For America and imitator programs: the first is about the schools where corps members are placed and those students, the second is about teacher preparation, and the third is about effects on current teachers and schools. But first, I want to make a thematic, more broad-based argument about the fundamental beliefs espoused by TFA.

When you listen to Wendy Kopp and others in the braintrust of TFA talk about what they seek to accomplish, rarely is the word "education" mentioned. Their buzzword of choice is "leadership". Some have argued that TFA doesn't really believe in education. I wouldn't go that far, but their approach implies a fundamental disrespect for the teaching profession. The clear implication is that current teachers are inadequate, poorly-educated themselves or, to co-opt some of TFA's language, not truly leaders. As a result, TFA offers its corps members as an alternate to regularly-trained teachers.

But, the really important thing here, the really offensive bit about TFA, is that they only train corps members for about two months before thrusting them into a classroom--in a poor, high-need school, at that. Regular M.A.T. programs last at least one academic year, include practicums in classrooms and involve apprenticeships, at least in some programs. TFA only trains their corps members for a brief period, and as a result they aren't as well-prepared as they could be. Furthermore, think about the language that's used by TFA: the new teachers they employ are called "corps members" instead of teachers. Why?

Effects on Students

This follows smoothly into my first substantive argument: Teach For America corps members are poorly prepared to do the job they are assigned and, as a result, students suffer. This isn't to besmirch the fine young people who participate in TFA--in fact they are often very smart, capable, and motivated. But to effectively teach in a high-need school, experience is necessary. Talk to some older teachers, and the consensus is clear: years of experience are required before you become even an adequate educator. In the first years of being a classroom teacher, you're learning about classroom management, curriculum design, pedagogical methods, and navigating a school culture. For TFA teachers, add the element of adapting to a new city/culture and your life becomes so harried as to be nearly impossible.

TFA is designed in such a way as to make life difficult, not only for teachers but for students. Teaching is a demanding profession by its nature, and it is not for the faint of heart. Additionally, teaching is high pressure--no one is there to catch and correct your mistakes, so if you fail to teach your kids how to read, that's it. You may have permanently screwed up some kids lives. Experience as an assistant or apprentice teacher is essential to success as a first year solo teacher, but TFA has no patience for this kind of preparation.

The Best Way to Prepare for a Career in Education

If you are a college grad from a place like Tufts or, hell, even our pretentious neighbor to the south, Harvard, pursuing a career in education is admirable and, outside of Teach For America, relatively rare. 11% of Ivy League seniors applied to the program this year--over 35,000 applications were received for positions starting in Fall 2009 (source: USA Today). For everyone planning an entry into the field, teaching is something that must be learned. Even those with extensive tutoring or "leadership" experience will have an adjustment period when s/he first moves into a classroom and is left responsible for 20-35 students.

As a college senior in just this situation, I want to share my own perspective. As I said, I'm not yet a teacher and have limited direct experience in education, so take my ideas with a grain of salt, certainly. In any case: to be an effective teacher, especially without graduate school, young teachers need to learn from those around them. In the schools where TFA members are typically placed, there is a dearth of experienced teachers and, generally, a pretty lousy infrastructure. The opportunities to learn from colleagues are limited. If you, like me, want to be an effective teacher in your first year, the ideal situation is to work at a really successful school and learn how it works. Being at a suburban or independent urban school doesn't fit within the philanthropic ethos of our generation, but seeing and being part of something that works is hugely valuable for aspiring educators.

The idea that you (or I) could go into a school with few resources and inadequate funding, a place that chews teachers up and spits them up--to think that a 22-year-old kid could show up in September with no training and really thrive is ludicrous. Working in a school that works and eventually moving into higher-need schools makes more sense from every perspective. Experience is uncontroversially important in education, so the spitting in its face by TFA is particularly galling.

TFA's Effect on Teachers and Unions

TFA placed its first corps members in Boston in 2009, which led to this reaction from Boston Teachers Union president Richard Stutman: "We are not disturbed but furious that the department would lay off teachers with excellent credentials and bring in people with no experience and little training." He added, "They are sending a very bad message to teaching staff."

In Detroit, which also hosted corps members for the first time in 2009, teacher's union president Keith Johnson called them "educational mercenaries." Teachers, almost all better qualified than TFA corps members, are being laid off and then replaced by union-busting kids who have no intention of staying in the job for more than two years. It's wrong, it's unjust, and Stutman and Johnson have very legitimate grudges as expressed above (source: Boston Globe).

People have been making fun of TFA and Wendy Kopp, who founded the organization as part of her senior thesis, as far back as 1994. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the phenomenal memoir written by Dave Eggers, he quotes a segment from the upstart Might Magazine, which Eggers co-founded, which pans Kopp and TFA pretty accurately and intelligently. It is a satirical profile of "Cindy Kahn," who is identified as the founder of "Streets For America."

"Streets For America, an idea born from Kahn's senior thesis at Harvard, is now a multibillion dollar nonprofit corporation. Placing recent college grads on the streets of America's most dangerous cities, the program's purpose is to reinvigorate the country's police force with fresh faces, open minds and good breeding. 'All the regular cops seemed to be so stupid and ugly,' says Kahn. 'It was time to bring some class to law enforcement. You can bet hardened criminals will sit up and take notice if the person who's cuffing them is well-dressed and, say, has a master's from Yale.'"

The idea that recent college grads with no experience can teach in high-need schools is just about as appalling as the thought that these same young people could up and become police officers. I'm proud to say I've come to the conclusion that I am not qualified or prepared to teach in an urban school yet, and I'm pursuing alternate opportunities next year.

I'll leave you with an interesting proposal from Ira David Socol , a noted critic of TFA. Not my advocacy, but something to think about:

"I say, over and over, that if TFA wants to prove itself, replace the faculties of the schools in Scarsdale, NY or Greenwich, CT, or at Groton and St. Bernard’s, with TFA corps members. And let those teachers – holding their current salaries – go to the TFA placements. If TFA improves the education in those wealthy places, it will have proved itself. If the teachers from those top schools have better impacts than TFA teachers do in the impoverished districts, we’ll know that better teacher training, better teacher pay, and redistributing resources is the way to go."

New Directions

2010-02-14T13:38:00.001-08:00

Hi, faithful readers.

I want to make an announcement here: up until this point, this blog had been serving as a sort of repository for published pieces of mine or about me, without a lot of unique content. Moving forward, I'm changing this blog into one focused more directly on educational issues.

I want to focus on education, both domestic and international. I'll include links, opinion pieces, independent research that I conduct, and lots more. I hope you all enjoy, and stay tuned for a piece coming up.

For now, I'll include links to some of the most interesting education resources on the web and good articles I've come across recently.

-----
This is an ongoing debate between Debbie Meier and Diane Ravitch, both of whom are fantastic writers and speakers and who have great things to say about education reform. See their blog on Education Week.

New York Times' piece on the destruction of higher education in Haiti following the earthquake: "Education Was Also Leveled by Quake in Haiti"

Roundtable on Charters and Equality from Democracy Now.

In Schools We Trust?

2010-02-10T16:24:00.000-08:00

Below is a reprint of the op-ed I co-wrote about education reform. It was published on Feb. 5 in the Tufts Daily. Link.

In schools we trust?
By Will Ehrenfeld and Shana Hurley

Published: Friday, February 5, 2010

Below the radar, using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are making radical changes to public education. They have established a grant called the "Race to the Top Fund" that offers competitive grants to "encourage and reward states that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform." The Fund is a $4.35 billion investment incentive for significant reforms in education policy. Among the improvements sought after, Obama and Duncan are planning on removing the state charter school caps and mandating the inclusion of students' test scores in teacher evaluations.

During last week's State of the Union Address to Congress, Obama heightened his pitch for education reform and reinforced his commitment to fundamentally changing the way schools function. "The idea here is simple," the President said. "Instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success. Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform." The administration is proposing an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, such as changing school financing to reward schools based on academic progress rather than the number of students within the district.

Even before Congress had considered the changes to No Child Left Behind, the impacts of Obama's education plans are already experienced in Massachusetts. In January, lawmakers passed a bill that expands charter school access in Massachusetts. Governor Deval Patrick affirmed that the education bill is "the beginning of the end of the achievement gap." There was, however, disagreement among Democrat legislators who were unsatisfied by the authorization of changes in teacher contracts outside of collective bargaining, the lack of funding provisions in the bill and the weight given to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam as a factor in determining which schools are to be considered underperforming. Lawmakers were also frustrated by the timeline of the bill. The bill was passed quickly to accommodate Massachusetts's Race to the Top Fund application deadlines. Because of this, important stakeholders felt they were left out of the process.

Though the increased attention for education reform is certainly laudable, there are also matters worth considering. Rushing to accommodate the top-down pressure for policy change is not without risk. There is no consensus over what educational success really looks like. There is only a broad agreement over the need for reform. However, exactly in what form that change should manifest -- and how should that change be measured -- is extremely controversial.

Scholars of education, parents and school professionals consistently debate the goals of schooling in America. To assume that all well-educated students can also perform well on a standardized test is not a widely accepted assertion; however, the White House plans on using to supposition as high performance will now correlate to an increase in funding.

Although a benchmark of the new policy is to remove the charter school cap, it is unclear that the expansion of charter schools will increase student achievement even if defining achievement through test scores. Charter schools have existed in the United States for a mere 20 years and in the more than 3,400 charters currently operating around the country, the report card is mixed. Extensive research of charter schools has not found that they provide significantly better educational outcomes than traditional public schools. So why is the White House pushing to expand charter schools? What about the needs of traditional schools?

Reforming public education is a project that has been taken on by nearly every president and Congress in recent history. From desegregation in the 1950s and '60s to No Child Left Behind up to the present Race to the Top contest, many approaches have been proposed, some have been implemented, and yet there is still a fervent desire for change. While no consensus exists on the path forward for public education reform, now is one of the most exciting moments in the history of American education. With a wide array of innovation occurring, options are expansive and few are without controversy.

The Tufts Democrats will host the fifth annual Issues of the Future Symposium: Education Reform on Saturday, Feb. 6 at 12 p.m. in the Alumnae Lounge. Deborah Meier, the founder of multiple schools, the award-winning author and the recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Grant, will provide the keynote speech, followed by two panels featuring leaders of public education in Boston and nationally.

The first panel, examining different educational models and best practices in public schooling, will feature three education professionals with fantastic, varied experience and backgrounds. Among these speakers are Kevin Brill, Larry Myatt and Alan Safran. Brill is the current Associate Head of School at Fenway High School, an innovative public school located across the street from Fenway Park. He has experience teaching in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and will be presenting with Myatt, the founder of Fenway High School. Myatt co-founded Boston's Center for Collaborative Education and serves as a Convener for The Forum for Education and Democracy. Safran, Executive Director of Media and Technology Charter High (MATCH) Charter Public High School in Boston. MATCH is nationally known as a leader in no-excuses schooling, with rigid discipline and extensive one-on-one and small-group tutoring helping them to achieve exceptionally high MCAS scores and plaudits from politicians and educators alike. Each of these men will provide their unique perspectives on education reform through a discussion of what works and what doesn't as well as the way forward for reform.

The second panel will consider some of the challenges, political and practical, of school reform. It will feature Josh Biber, Teach for America (TFA) Boston's Executive Director and Richard Stutman, President of the Boston Teachers Union. The two have fought publicly over contract issues and TFA's expansion into the Boston area, but share a common desire to improve public education. Joining them will be Dr. Tony Pierantozzi, Superintendent of Somerville Public Schools, who will provide insight about the diverse community in our backyard. With only one charter school at present, Somerville provides an interesting case study on which to consider the opportunities and challenges posed by the introduction of new school models into a community. Finally, Tufts' very own faculty member, Professor of Education Steve Cohen, will fill out this panel as a moderator, contributing his wealth of experience and knowledge to what we know will be a very lively discussion.

To consider these issues and others related to school reform, the Tufts Democrats are inviting the community to the Issues of the Future Symposium.

Thoughts on Israeli Politics

2010-01-12T18:37:00.000-08:00

I'm just back from 10 days in Israel, and I have a lot to think about. I'll try to update a few times over the next few weeks as thoughts come up, but this first one is going to be short because, even though it's 9:40 on the East coast, it's 7 hours ahead in Israel and I'm tired.

We talked a lot about Israel being the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and that's certainly the case presently. It also has the most diverse and successful economy, vibrant politics and political culture. In comparative politics, Israel is often considered to be an "ethnic democracy," which by definition it is. It was established as a Jewish state for the Jewish people, but what I've learned over the past few days has entrenched my view that ethnic democracy is a contradiction in terms. In order to have an explicitly ethnic state, Israel has been forced not only to encourage immigration from around the world and promote aliyah (diaspora Jews moving to Israel), but also to expel and reject outsiders to a significant extent. Both inclusion and exclusion play a role.

Definitionally, democracy requires an embrace of pluralism and diversity. If different backgrounds, opinions and values aren't important to the state and the population, neither is democracy. In Israel, which is a state with significant diversity, most citizens are only interested in Jewish diversity in their explicitly Jewish state. Arabs, Druze, and other minorities are locked into their status as minorities regardless of increasing demographic change. In a few years, if the current trends hold, Arabs will comprise a majority in the land of Israel. This means, essentially, that in a few years an Arab--a non-Jew--could be the Prime Minister of Israel.

One of the Israeli soldiers on our trip, Mattan, suggested a Constitutional amendment allowing only a Jew to be the Prime Minister. This anti-democratic reform would ensure Jewish domination, even if Jews become the minority in the land of Israel. If this position were widely held or enacted, it would mark the end of true liberal democracy in Israel.

In short, ethnic democracy cannot exist. There is an inherent disconnect between pluralism and an ethnic state, which means Israel has to make a choice in the future.

Health care and the waning of progressive enthusiasm

2009-08-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

This was initially written and has been cross-posted at Red, Brown and Blue, which is the politics blog for Tufts Office of Undergrad Admissions.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to see a debate on this topic.

I know it’s summer and some of us have more important things going on than following politics and reading this blog, but luckily for you all, I don’t. I’m relaxing and mentally preparing to head back to Tufts in the fall for senior year, but politics never fade far from my mind. This summer we’ve seen a very intense health care debate flaring up all over the country (even in liberal suburban Connecticut: check this out).

Commentary from the left and the right persistently asks the question: why are conservatives so passionate, so mobilized, and getting so much publicity, when all of those Obama liberals might as well be invisible? Well, for one, Democratic activists haven’t been silent, health care demonstrations around the country have attracted hundreds and even thousands of participants in support of reform, and amidst the loudest anti-reform voices, there are quiet, more polite liberals in the background. But I digress.

Democrats who supported Obama haven’t been as vocal in support of this reform bill as they could have been. The progressive grass- and netroots that did most of the legwork to elect President Obama have been relatively quiet and laid-back as the health care debate gets going. The energy and excitement coursing through Obama supporters in the campaign of 2008 is nowhere to be found.

Jonathan Cohn calls it “The Enthusiasm Gap” in a recent article in The New Republic. Polls are showing that Americans still largely support the major components of health care reform as proposed by the White House, but…well, no one seems to be doing anything about it. Crazies on the right are up in arms, hanging their representatives in effigy and accusing Obama and Democrats of being everything from socialists to granny-murderers, and the response from the left has been…casual, to say the least. No one seems to know why, but I have a few ideas.

Liberals are ambivalent about the legislation on the table to reform health care because, in essence, they’re worthless, watered-down proposals that won’t have much of an effect. As a proponent of single-payer health care, which would not only reduce costs to the individual but actually cover everybody, the bill Barack Obama is pushing is disappointing, to say the least. Most depressing, we can look back at the Hillary-care effort from 1993 longingly; that proposal included many of the provisions we are losing every day. Now, Obama-care is but a shadow of the long lost reform efforts of the Clinton administration. There is even talk that the public option may be dropped entirely.

Is this change we can believe in? More importantly, the first few months of the Obama administration have disappointed progressives on numerous other levels. One of the President’s first official actions was to bailout corporations like AIG to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, and he has been slow to act on many campaign issues that got him elected in the first place: Afghanistan is getting worse, not better; the pull-out of Iraq has been slow and with only mixed results; and the Bush-era crimes against humanity have yet to be investigated, let lone prosecuted. The list of disappointents is miles long.

As any self-respecting liberal ought to tell you, we as a movement are far from giving up. The recent Netroots Nation convention of progressive bloggers and activists confirms that there is still energy and excitement on the left for “change we can believe in”. But we’re tired of the endless compromises coming out of the White House and the Democratic caucus in both chambers of Congress. We worked to elect the President, and finally, for the first time in my political life, I expected to have a voice, however small, in the decision-making process in Washington. It hasn’t quite materialized–although I’m not ready to give up yet.

And whenever I get really down about the lack of progress on important issues like health care, I remind myself that it could certainly be worse. Imagine the country under President McCain and–I shudder to think–Vice President Palin. A scary picture indeed.

The New York Times writes about me

2009-07-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

Here's the story: on one of the paper's blogs, The Choice, of which I am relatively frequent reader, they asked for college students who were living at home for the summer to talk about how the recession is affecting them and how the summer is going with internships drying up and parents' largely not being able to afford to support kids doing unpaid work away from home. So, I responded, not expecting anything to come of it, and day or 2 later the writer responds to me, asks a few more questions, and we go back and forth via email. THEN, when I'm out of town for a weekend, I get a call from a photographer for the Times, and she wants to come to my house to take my picture for this article. And now I'm in a huge photo on the cover of the Style section of the Sunday New York Times. check it out

Will Ehrenfeld, right, a Tufts senior, hoped for a White House summer internship but ended up with no job. He’s shown with Josh, his brother, a college graduate who is also jobless.

Say Hello to Underachieving

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: July 2, 2009

ERIN McAULIFFE had a vision for this summer. A 20-year-old junior at Bowdoin College, she had lined up an internship at a New York publishing house and imagined stimulating days leafing through manuscripts, and evenings of sparkling conversation with friends at downtown cafes.

She ended up starring in a real-life version of the movie “Adventureland” instead. In that recent comedy, a recent college graduate is forced by economic hardship to work at a suburban amusement park.

Life is imitating art for Ms. McAuliffe. With her parents unable to help bankroll three months of unpaid work in Manhattan, she gave up the internship offer and moved home to Andover, Mass., where she took the one job she could find: working 12-hour days at an amusement park. For $7.80 an hour, she tends bumper cars and the big swing, and endures the many carny jokes of her friends.

“It’s rain or shine,” Ms. McAuliffe said dryly about her job. “You’d be really surprised how many people go to an amusement park in the pouring rain.”

School’s out for summer 2009, and instead of getting a jump on the boundless futures that parents and colleges always promised them, students this year are receiving a reality check.

The well-paying summer jobs that in previous years seemed like a birthright have grown scarce, and pre-professional internships are disappearing as companies cut back across the board. Recession-strapped parents don’t always have the means or will to bankroll starter apartments or art tours of Tuscany.

So many college students and recent graduates are heading to where they least expected: back home, and facing an unfamiliar prospect: downtime, maybe too much of it. To a high-achieving generation whose schedules were once crammed with extracurricular activities meant to propel them into college, it feels like an empty summer — eerie, and a bit scary.

“Things have changed drastically,” said Ron Alsop, author of “The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace,” a book that only last year portrayed young workers as entitled and in a hurry. “It has to be a huge wake-up call for this generation.”

Numbers provide the backdrop to the story — not just the grimly familiar national unemployment rate, 9.5 percent in June, but the even scarier, less publicized unemployment figure for 16- to 19-year-olds, which has hit 24 percent, up from 16.1 percent two years ago. Internships available to college students have fallen 21 percent since last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Across the country, there are countless tales like that of Morgan Henderson, a student at the University of San Francisco, who, along with friends, planned a big road trip to Las Vegas this summer. With so few of the friends finding jobs, they downgraded plans to a road trip to Reno, then to no road trip at all. They’re spending time watching DVDs at one another’s houses.

Or Kathryn Estrada, a high school senior in Hialeah, Fla., who has no summer job after Circuit City, which employed her during the school year, went out of business. She is finding that even this early in the summer, attempts to while away the hours playing Scrabble and Cranium have grown stale. “We all just wish school would start so we would have something to do,” she said.

Or Will Ehrenfeld, a political science major at Tufts, who worked at a think tank last year and this summer was aiming higher: a White House internship. When the White House didn’t come through, and neither did the State Department or dozens of companies he applied to, Mr. Ehrenfeld, 20, moved back home to Vernon, Conn. Even the local Boston Market had no work.

Mr. Ehrenfeld, a top student who has always held leadership positions in clubs and academic groups, loafs through days, rolling out of bed around 11 and reading or playing trumpet or guitar. Nights, he sometimes meets up with friends who also have nowhere that they have to be in the morning, and they share a few cheap beers. “At worst, misery continues to have company,” he said.

While young people in earlier decades might have cherished the chance to goof off and sleep in for a few months, the current generation, experts like Mr. Alsop are apt to point out, “have always been told they can achieve anything they can put their mind to.”

“They were always given trophies just for showing up,” he said. “Now, they’re being told ‘no’ when they really want a job or an internship.”

To them, a staycation at Mom and Dad’s can feel more like house arrest.

If the only problem were tedium, students might find a recessionary summer unpleasant but endurable. But some expressed concern that the economic gloom might be a preview of harsh career realities that await.

“The worst thing about this summer is the lack of hope felt by so many kids,” Lydia Wiledon, a Barnard undergraduate, wrote in an e-mail message. “College students ready to thrust themselves into work find nothing, and those most in need are edged out by older, more skilled individuals who are overqualified for such foot-in-the-door opportunities. I worry about how this employment drought will affect my generation in the future.”

There may be reason for concern. Students who enter the job market during a recession can see their wages lag behind comparable students who graduated in better times for as long as 15 years, according to a recent study by Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at the Yale School of Management.

Even for students who remain optimistic about their long-term career prospects, an unexpected move home — back under the roof of Mom and Dad, where many had barely alighted in years except for brief Thanksgiving breaks — can require an attitude adjustment.

“Communication patterns are different when students come back from college,” said Roni Cohen-Sandler, a clinical psychologist in Weston, Conn., specializing in adolescent issues. “Kids may not be as interested in sharing who they’re hanging out with and why. The level of disclosure is different, and parents have not made the shift in their mind. They’re asking a lot of questions, and students are chafing.”

When students try to stave off the boredom by watching television, parents may wonder aloud if there is not a more productive use of their time. Curfews and household chores that seemed natural at 16 can seem oppressive at 20.

This has been the experience of Kelly Fabian, an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, who hoped to study art history in Rome this summer, but returned home to Orange County, Calif., instead, when her family asked her to work to help pay her tuition.

It’s an adjustment, she said. Living on her own for two years, including summers, she got used to doing chores like washing dishes and taking out the recycling — but not when instructed to.

“It’s not weird doing them, it’s weird having someone tell you to do them,” she said.

Ms. Fabian said she was close to her parents and valued the time spent together, but the new proximity did take getting used to, on all sides. Ms. Fabian, 20, found work at a cable-television company, and with four family members sharing two cars, she commutes for nearly an hour each way with her father, Jim Fabian.

The opportunity to bond is, in theory, delightful, she said — but does it have to be at 7 a.m.? “My Dad is a morning person and I most certainly am not,” she said. She needs a second cup of coffee just to make her lips move. When they reach for the radio knobs to pass the time, father and daughter encounter a generation gap: He likes sports talk radio; she would rather listen to the New Pornographers.

“I’m a relic of the ’70s — I still listen to the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac,” said Mr. Fabian, a financial consultant. “Her music, I’ll just describe it as different.“

Some other college students unexpectedly back home described frictions with their families that were less amusing and more fraught. Daniel Bortz, a junior at Syracuse University who was unable to find a summer job for the first time in five years, told of unpleasant friction in his household over money.

In the short term, the lost summer of 2009 might actually be a blessing, some psychologists said, especially because members of this generation have lived their lives like track stars trying to run a marathon at the pace of a 100-meter dash — their parents typically waiting at every turn with a stopwatch.

“Parents have really put a lot of pressure on the kids — everything has been organized, they’re all taking A.P. courses, then summer hits and they’re going to learning camps,” said Peter A. Spevak, a psychologist in Rockville, Md. Now, he said, with opportunities for achievement at a minimum this summer, “there is something to be said about sitting out on a warm evening and looking at the stars — they need more of this contemplation and self-evaluation.”

Sara Germano, a senior at Fordham University who was hoping to find a journalism internship in New York, ended up moving home to Albany, where she found part-time work as a research assistant. And she has gotten to know her family again after an educational career that usually led her off on one adventure or another during vacations, so that, she said, “I come home on Thanksgiving, they don’t even know who I am.”

Now she has time to watch Yankees games with her younger brother and sister, and in the evenings, she sometimes drops in to the bar that her father owns. At 21, she is now able to share a drink with him and to talk sports and politics with the regulars.

“I think he enjoys having a child who’s matured and can talk about adult things and enjoy adult pastimes,” she said. “Since I’ve been gone so long, it’s all new territory.”

Her father, Phil Germano, agreed. “She completes the family,” he said.

SIT Ireland

2009-05-06T21:50:00.001-07:00

When I was studying abroad in Ireland during the fall semester of 2008, I composed a lengthy research paper which, turns out, was pretty ok. It was one of three that was posted by the program on World Learning's website.

Here's the link. Check it out.

Last Regular Column

2009-05-06T21:46:00.000-07:00

This is the final "Stuff Tufts People Like" column published in the Tufts Daily during the Spring semester of 2009. There is a commencement issue, to be published May 17 (commencement), with one more column from yours truly in it, but this is the last thing most readers will see from me.

The Bubble

Published: Tuesday, April 21, 2009

If you spend most of your time at Tufts and rarely venture off campus for anything more than a latte at Starbucks or a movie in Davis Square, you might become convinced that there no longer is a world outside the gates of our Medford/Somerville campus. Even if you regularly visit, shop and dine all around the Boston area, it’s easy to forget what real life away from Tufts is like. It happens to me on occasion. I get stuck in a routine: wake up, go to class, club meetings, anti-bias rallies, party on the weekend, then repeat ad nauseum. It can be difficult to keep in touch with what happens in the “real world” when we’re so insulated inside the Tufts Bubble.

Likewise, people can forget societal norms and the way things tend to work elsewhere when they are at Tufts for long stretches. When I go home for a weekend or for break, I’m often surprised that my friends do, in fact, say words like “fag” without a second thought about the impact it might have. After freshman year, I got in a serious argument with a good friend of mine over his use of that word because after living at Tufts, I knew that it promoted societal bigotry and heteronormativity (a word that, honestly, I have never heard outside of Tufts).

Then, as I became re-attuned to the norms of my hometown, I started thinking that if he wanted to use “fag” as an insult after I had laid out my arguments against it, I really had no place to tell him otherwise. Unlike Tufts, the real world — in my experience, at least — doesn’t have a bias awareness team; there is no thought police, and so slurs which really hurt people are occasionally uttered.

I’m not sure that I made the right decision to overlook future uses of the word, but I was concerned that I was starting arguments for the wrong reasons — I was never personally offended by the word “faggot,” but I still thought I should try to stop it from being used, for whatever reason. Doesn’t it feel good to accuse someone of bigotry? I enjoyed it, I really did. The moral indignation and self-righteousness just flowing through your veins — you feel empowered, like you’ve grabbed the higher ground and you’re not giving it up. In that moment, it feels good to be angry because you’re right, the “other” is wrong, and you’re fighting the good fight.

This is what occurred with many of those at the anti-bias, anti-drunk-freshman rally on Thursday. Even people from outside Tufts came and basked in the glow of righteous indignation emanating from people at the rally who take any and every opportunity to get angry and offended, regardless of whether they themselves have been specifically targeted. It becomes like an addiction — if you’re not decrying racism or sexism or whatever the -ism of the day is, you start to feel adrift and without direction. But that doesn’t justify the idiotic behavior being exhibited.

The real anger we have all seen in the pages of the Daily and at the rally wasn’t, in my opinion, over the alleged racial violence that occurred two weeks ago. It was about puncturing the Bubble. Let’s admit: Most of us are very proud to tell people that we go to Tufts, and when something like this happens, it betrays the image most of us have of our school. We think we go to a progressive, unbiased university that is not only not racist, it’s anti-racist.

So, when I write a column that questions the campus’ reaction to a particular incident that seems extremely clear-cut to some, I become a target. I’ve been ridiculed for my opinions in any number of ways and called terrible names that I won’t repeat in print, but the only comments that bothered me were those that suggested that there must be some unknown reason belying my opinions, whether it was my own race, my lack of education or sheer ignorance. I was told to take classes, read books, and even invited to meet by some readers, all in the interest of enlightening me and/or converting me to buy into every bit of liberal orthodoxy that Tufts represents to these individuals.

Want to know a secret? I have read books. I’ve taken classes that deal very explicitly with racism and discrimination, and I can’t control my whiteness any more than the Korean Students Association students who were involved in the fight can control their race. The fact that I have a different point of view doesn’t mean that I don’t know or understand the issues, and this assumption that I must be unaware of critical race theory because I don’t buy into it really bothers me.

This punctured my Tufts Bubble. I foolishly thought that, while Tufts has many viewpoints and a variety of backgrounds represented on campus, mutual respect exists which makes discussing and acknowledging our differences so fruitful and beneficial. I also was under the (apparently ridiculous) impression that no one’s view would be disregarded or given less credence because of his or her background — even if that background is straight, white and male. It turns out that I was wrong.

Shout out? What what!?

2009-05-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

So, in the wake of the previous column, I got called out in an "anti-bias rally" that happened a few days later (in response to the original incident, not my column--at least ostensibly). See below the article from the Tufts Daily.

Rally goers: We will not be silenced
Ben Gittleson

Published: Friday, April 17, 2009

Around 200 people gathered on the Tisch Library patio and steps midday yesterday, decrying hate crimes and bias incidents against all groups and demanding that the administration take substantive action to prevent racism and hatred from continuing to pervade the Hill.

Under a sunny sky, students, administrators, faculty members and others spoke against the prevalence of discrimination, stereotyping of and biases against Asian-Americans and other minority groups. A large percentage of attendees wore red clothing to mark the rally, which had the goal of raising awareness of what many presenters said were often seemingly invisible acts of hate.

An altercation in the early-morning hours last Thursday between members of the Korean Students Association (KSA) and a freshman spurred the organization of the event. The administration is conducting a judicial investigation into the alleged bias incident, which many rally participants yesterday labeled a hate crime.

"If this was truly an isolated incident, we wouldn't have given it too much thought," said Jenny Lau, the incoming president of the Asian American Alliance, during a speech yesterday. Lau, a junior, explained the rally's aims and said the incident was representative of a much greater problem.

"As students, we have the right to feel respected and safe on ... campus," she said, calling on the administration to include the study of Asian-Americans in the curriculum. "The Asian-American voice is only one example of many voices of people who have been ... marginalized."

Last Thursday morning, a drunken freshman shouted racial slurs at a group of 13 Korean students practicing in the main lounge of Lewis Hall for their weekend culture show, KSA members at the scene said; the freshman told the Daily in a statement that he yelled obscenities, but he did not mention uttering racial epithets or being drunk.

The racially charged alleged remarks came after violence broke out between the KSA members and the freshman, according to KSA members. Both parties said the other side started the scuffle.

The Daily is withholding the freshman's name because the administration has not taken any action against him.

Yesterday's rally did not focus primarily on the details of the event itself, but rather on the wider implications of what many speakers called hate incidents that occur too frequently.

KSA Co-President Young Jeong spoke on behalf of two members of his group who were in the Lewis Hall lounge on Thursday morning.

"'F--k you ... Go back to your country,'" he told attendees the freshman had said that night. "Imagine these words being thrown at you."

"We are not here to ask for retaliation or revenge or any kind of punishment," Jeong, a senior, said. "We are here to raise awareness ... to give voice to those who have been silenced."

Senior Lecturer of American Studies Jean Wu denounced certain online discourse, including comments on TuftsDaily.com, that suggested rally organizers and supporters are "addicted" to reacting to bias incidents and hate crimes, she said.
The remarks the freshman allegedly made, she explained, cut deep.

"For Asian-Americans, these words are not the garden-variety putdown," she said.
University President Lawrence Bacow's chief of staff, Michael Baenen, attended the meeting in Bacow's place.

"Expressions of bias are insidious ... they are always hurtful, they erode community and they are not what we want Tufts to be about," he said. "I don't think any of us, especially those in Ballou, thinks we are where we want to be."

But later during yesterday's event, Lau chastised Bacow for sending a representative in his place and Baenen for not using a stronger term than "bias."

Reached later for comment, Baenen said that Bacow had been on the Boston campus attending meetings with overseers of the School of Medicine. Those meetings had been planned months in advance, Baenen added.

Boston City Councilor Sam Yoon, the city's first Asian-American councilor, spoke at the rally, too. He said that he had experienced hateful speech when he was on the campaign trail.

"This is not an isolated incident," said Yoon, who is running for mayor of Boston. "It's something that's endemic in our society."

Asian-Americans have long had to face stereotypes of them as passive, defenseless members of society, although other groups have had to endure hate, as well, Yoon said.

"When injustice or racial hatred happens to one of us," he said, "it happens to all of us."

Seniors Sofia Nelson and Jen Bailey told the crowd about similar incidents that have occurred in the past few years, saying the fact that they were attending yet another rally against bias was disappointing.

Nelson also railed against what she called "unacceptable" media coverage of the incident, particularly calling out Daily columnist and junior Will Ehrenfeld's Tuesday article, "Stuff Tufts People Like: Alleging bias." She criticized the piece in an op-ed she co-authored with senior Sarah Robbins that appeared in yesterday's Daily.

Nelson expressed anger at a decision by Daily editors to insert the word "allegedly" at certain points in her article that dealt with the particulars of last Thursday morning's events.

"Nothing about this incident is alleged," Nelson said yesterday. "I know what happened."

Two students delivered spoken-word pieces during the latter half of yesterday's presentation, poetically expounding on race and stereotypes in America. A Harvard University lecturer and a lawyer from the University of Massachusetts Boston also spoke.

Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin, who delivered a short speech, said that he was proud of yesterday's rally, even though it came during the biannual diversity-focused Telescope event that yesterday brought admitted students to campus.
"I want prospective students to see Tufts in action," he said.

Over 40 student groups co-sponsored the event, which was organized by members of the KSA and other students encouraged to act after last week's incident, according to Kim. Part of its title, "We will not be silenced," became a refrain during the rally.
A number of Greek organizations came out for the event, including a couple Alpha Omicron Pi sisters who handed out stickers reading, "Hate is not a Greek value."
Estelle Davis, a senior, wore red and stayed on the patio after the event. She said she attended yesterday because the conversation that arose after last week's incident was "an incredibly emotional, personal experience" for her.

"This points to ... a lack of understanding about the way race and power structures work at Tufts," she said, calling on the administration to act by altering the curriculum and hiring more diverse faculty. "It's more than just talking about it ... Not just saying racism is bad, but saying that we understand that this is part of a deeper issue."

Alleging Bias

2009-05-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

This article discusses the issues surround an altercation, the events of which can be learned about here. This is the one that made me famous (sort of), and also probably the most hated guy on campus, for a little while at least. Check out the comments (and myriad op-eds in response).

Published: Tuesday, April 14, 2009

By now, everyone on campus has heard about the alleged “bias incident” that occurred in Lewis Hall last week involving a dance group from the Korean Students Association (KSA) and a drunk freshman. Personally, I got multiple e-mails from friends and one from Dean of Students Bruce Reitman, and an invitation to a Facebook group (which at last count had 1,824 members), and I came across multiple Facebook “notes” about the situation.

I’m not going to rehash the story. It’s been told many times, with input from both sides. My question, though, is this: What makes this a bias incident? Was there “bias” when the drunk kid started imitating the dance the KSA was doing? Maybe — they were, after all, practicing a dance for a cultural show and not just an average, mainstream dance for an average, mainstream show; if TDC were rehearsing and the incident proceeded similarly, I don’t think it would be called a bias incident, and I doubt people would be quite so up in arms about the situation in general, but I’ll get to that.

Was it a bias incident because of what the kid said? He allegedly employed racial slurs to verbally abuse the dancers after the physical altercation had ended, calling them names and telling them to “go back to China.” I suppose this makes what up until then would have been considered merely a fight or, depending on which side you fall, assault, into an incident of racial bias. I know what you’re thinking: Well, duh. But think — what do the kid’s words after a fight have to do with the apparent motivations for the fight?

Before the violence began — we’re not sure who made the situation physical, although I’m inclined to believe the KSA members as they corroborate each others’ stories and they were sober — there was no mention of race or ethnicity. According to the Daily, the freshman allegedly called the dance “gay,” but most of us have been in groups where using that word as a placeholder for “stupid” or “bad” is common. That doesn’t make it acceptable, but it happens all the time, and the student body doesn’t get up in arms over something like that. In any event, no epithets were uttered, and no racial threats or comments were made before the violence began.

With these facts in mind, I find it hard to call what happened a bias incident; there was bias, and there was a conflict, but they seem somewhat disjointed. I’m really disconcerted by the focus on comments that were made at the tail end of the incident as a whole when a lot occurred beforehand that’s worthy of our attention. All signs point to serious physical violence with injuries sustained on both sides. And then — afterward — a drunk freshman allegedly said something stupid and yes, offensive, inappropriate, “biased” and totally unacceptable. I’m not here to defend this kid who, for the record, I don’t know and have never met. I don’t know any of the people involved, for that matter.

The real issue here isn’t racial insensitivity. It’s not “bias,” no matter how you define the word. We should be talking about violence and resorting to violence as a solution to our problems. My biggest worry is not a stupid comment that was obviously hurtful enough to raise a ridiculous furor at Tufts. Tufts people love an uproar, but apparently we also like overlooking the real issue. There’s no evidence the attack was motivated by racial anger or “bias,” but it’s obvious that both the freshman student and the five KSA members thought it totally acceptable to use violence to solve their dispute. I don’t want to discount the danger and perniciousness of racism, but it’s more worrisome to me that violence has so pervaded our school and our society that we find a racial slur more notable than a serious violent conflict.

Cliques (a lousy title, I'll admit)

2009-04-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

This column definitely got the...most interesting reaction on the Daily website. Check out the comments here.

Published: Tuesday, April 7, 2009

As a resident assistant in a freshman residence hall last year, I had to make and put up name tags on each door before freshmen moved in. As move-in day approached and more upperclassmen arrived to help with orientation, I noticed that a few doors had something else posted next to the name tags that I had painstakingly created. On my floor these included welcome and invitation messages for international students, African-Americans, and Hispanics. The messages included encouragements for students to stop by the Africana Center or other locations for the respective groups and contact information for a potential mentor of a similar background.

At the time, I was curious but not really bothered by these messages. My thought was that it’s really not my place to pass judgment on overtures from and within communities that I don’t belong to and can’t identify with. Tufts people, including those mentioned above, have this need to belong — naturally. But the need here is more than just membership in a group of friends or even in a larger group with which they can identify.

Tufts people love belonging to a minority group or, at the very least, a group that at one point has been discriminated against. I’m going to call this a thirst for victimhood. Me? I tried pretty hard to find a maligned group that I could be a part of, but I’m a straight white male from Connecticut, I don’t identify with any religious sect, nor do I have particularly outrageous political views (although I have conservative friends who might disagree). I also wonder if there are some Republicans on this campus who are really moderates in disguise — political affiliation or beliefs can be an outlet for the thirst for victimhood too.

The interesting thing isn’t wanting to belong to a group of similar peers; psychologically and sociologically, it makes sense for a minority individual to seek out other minority group members within a larger group with whom they can identify. My concern is the self-segregation of these cliques, where groups typically don’t mix and “outsiders” aren’t welcome. We can have diversity, but it’s meaningless without social interaction.

I’m not talking about affirmative action or anything to do with admissions — it’s the orientation process and the Dean of Students’ Office’s explicit focus on encouraging cliques that concerns me. The Group of Six is comprised of the Africana Center, Asian American Center, International Center, Latino Center, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Center, and Women’s Center. The centers are under the auspices of Dean Reitman’s office and also receive funding directly from his office. In their defense, the Group of Six houses mainly hosts events that are at least nominally open to all members of the Tufts community regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Sometimes this is true in practice, too — I’ve availed myself of the delicious food at several barbecues at the Africana and LGBT centers. But that isn’t really the point, is it?

Why is the Dean of Student Affairs pushing self-segregation within the student body? I applaud efforts from the Group of Six to make Tufts a welcoming environment for students from groups that have faced historical and often current discrimination, and I’m not trying to make an attack on these groups individually or the students involved. My problem, instead, is the compartmentalization and yes, segregation, albeit voluntary. What’s the benefit of diversity if everyone is separated?

Column 3/31: Wingnuttery

2009-04-11T13:33:00.000-07:00

Wingnuttery

Published: Tuesday, March 31, 2009

People at Tufts love thinking that they are the first to have an idea or hold a particular position, but if that’s not a tenable stance, Tufts people act this out by staking out extreme positions. This is particularly popular when it comes to politics. There aren’t a lot of moderate Democrats or conservative leaners, but there are lots of people who could be called radical. Conservatives at Tufts especially like to venture into wingnut territory.

Enter David Horowitz, wingnut extraordinaire, who came to campus on Monday to discuss ... well, since this column was submitted before his speech, I’m going to make up what he said, and feel free to fact-check me when I exaggerate or blatantly fabricate things (which is possible, but probably unnecessary given the subject matter*). The planned topic of his talk, given in Barnum 008 at 8:30 last night, was academic freedom. As a liberal peace and justice studies major, I have an odd feeling that he’s not that worried about my academic freedom.

You might remember Horowitz’s name from Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, organized by Horowitz, which brought Daniel Pipes to campus. The gist of the week was not only to raise awareness of Islamic terrorism itself, but also to highlight what he perceived as leftist support for terror.

Besides nobly raising consciousness of the threat from Islamo-Fascism — a term that I don’t quite understand, to be honest — Horowitz has been working on academic freedom for years. When I hear “academic freedom,” I picture unfettered class discussions and a general atmosphere of open and unconditional exchange of ideas. Horowitz’s conception of the term is a bit different. In addition to blaming them for terrorism, he derides left-leaning academics for indoctrinating students rather than teaching them. For Horowitz, academic freedom means hewing to a strict conservative ideology.

To prove his claims of liberal bias in higher education, Horowitz probably told a story about a student at the University of Northern Colorado who was supposedly failed for refusing to write a paper arguing that George W. Bush was a war criminal. Well, as it turns out, the story is pure fantasy. The university disputes each piece of the story, including the assignment, the grade, and the reasons for the grade. He may have also talked about a Penn State biology class which showed Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) before the 2004 elections, with the professor hoping to influence his students’ votes. Later, he admitted that this story couldn’t be verified and maybe could be untrue — which is the best we can hope for from Horowitz.

Unlike him, I have no problem with anyone speaking on campus — academic freedom, what it actually means, allows Horowitz to have a voice here. Good for him. But maybe we should warn him: His arch-nemesis Noam Chomsky was here this past Friday, speaking to a peace conference. In April 2005 at Columbia University, Horowitz distributed pamphlets portraying Chomsky, a linguistics professor at MIT, with a turban and long beard and the heading “The Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate.” I’ve met Noam Chomsky — he has extreme political views, certainly, but he’s really a nice, mild-mannered guy, and he’s certainly not a Muslim — not that there’s anything wrong with that. What point is Horowitz trying to make by dressing his foe in Middle Eastern garb? Unlike Horowitz, Chomsky doesn’t rely on theatrics or overblown rhetoric to make a point, and he doesn’t engage in attacks based on race or ethnicity — something else I bet you heard from Horowitz on Monday. That kind of “academic freedom” has no place at Tufts

Column 3/24

2009-04-11T13:29:00.000-07:00

Organic food

Published: Tuesday, March 24, 2009

With Michael Pollan coming to campus today to give the Richard E. Snyder lecture, I decided it was time to address a glaring gap in knowledge that many Tufts people seem to have. It's about food. Organic food. Michael Pollan will almost certainly shed some light on this issue, and more intelligently than I ever could, but since the Daily comes out before the lecture, I get first dibs.

Lots of people assume that organic food is healthier, more ethical, better for the environment and, in nearly every way, superior to food without that organic label. But what does organic really mean? If you're walking through Shaw's or any other grocery store, how do you make a decision between the bananas with the organic sticker and those without? They look the same and taste the same to me; to most consumers, the only noticeable difference is the price and that sticker.

Organic food, according to the USDA, is free of chemical fertilizers and insecticides, does not contain genetically modified ingredients and is free of hormones and antibiotics. Well, mostly. In fact, food that carries the USDA organic label is only required to be 95 percent organic; that is, a product can display the label if everything in it is organic except a small amount. Products with between 70 and 95 percent organic ingredients can display an alternate label that promises "made with organic ingredients."

This still sounds good, right? Organic food is good for a number of purposes -- if you want your food to be friendlier to the environment, for example, organic seems like the way to go. No pesticides or insecticides means organic food must be great for the environment, right? Sort of. If you really hope to reduce the carbon footprint from your diet, experts agree that locally grown food is the best way to go. Likewise, a vegetarian or vegan diet would have a significantly lower impact on the environment than even an organic, locally grown omnivore diet.

Perhaps you eat organic food because you're concerned about the way animals are treated before they are slaughtered. I'm not a vegetarian, but it occurs to me that if you are concerned about cruelty to animals, you probably shouldn't be eating steak at all -- even if the beef is organic. But organic meat isn't necessarily raised in a more humane way than other types of meat. Animals must be given time outdoors; how much time is left up to the farmers. And, interestingly enough, much controversy has arisen over the organic labeling process itself. Inspections are contracted out by the USDA, and oversight is minimal at best.

This begs the question: Is organic food safer or better for you? This is the third and arguably final potential reason for selecting organic products. Around the beginning of February, there was an outbreak of salmonella in peanut products. The contamination was traced back to factories in Texas and Georgia that were found to be totally unsanitary but, according to the USDA, organic. Some of your favorite organic companies like Clif Bar and Cascadian Farm had items that were contaminated with salmonella and pulled from shelves.

So should you buy organic? Sure, if you can afford it. Organic food is generally safer, though not always, and the label does require all-natural fertilizers and pesticides, which is good. But if you have the choice, buy local AND organic. Try to limit the meat you eat in order to improve health and reduce your carbon footprint. And lastly, as Michael Pollan will surely explain, stop eating processed food-like substances and stick to fresh produce as much as possible.

Being Busy

2009-04-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

Next column

Being busy
Will Ehrenfeld

Published: Tuesday, March 10, 2009

OMG! It's the week before spring break, and I can't believe how much work I have to do in one week! This is so ridiculous; I don't even understand how any five professors in the world could assign so much work in such a short period of time. Don't they know that I have 32 club meetings and a study group to go to this week? I am crazy busy and it's out of control!

Just kidding. I'm only a little busy, but as a Tufts student, I feel this strange urge to act busy all the time. Don't get me wrong, I often have a lot of work and meetings and rehearsals and -- you know -- other stuff, and my life gets as hectic as anyone's ... but I deal with it. I have a hard time understanding how so many of my friends and acquaintances at this school manufacture ways to keep busy. It's shocking, really, because I love having free time. I was busy this weekend, though. Between waking up at noon, watching television, playing online poker, picking up dinner and stopping by a few parties, Saturday was an extremely full day. But you don't hear me complaining.

My housemate Kevin is a perfect example. He is up and out of the house before me every morning -- not a difficult feat by any stretch of the imagination -- and he's never home before 9 p.m. He doesn't sleep, either. I don't know exactly what classes he takes or all the clubs he's involved in; we talk about being busy more than anything substantive. What does he do all day and night? I can't figure it out exactly, but my guess is that he's either a drug mule or a horse whisperer (what a great movie), or possibly a combination of the two. The point is that he, like so many of our peers, invents ways to be busy and fill all 24 hours of the day with activity, even if it's meaningless -- not that drug smuggling and horse whispering aren't worthwhile pursuits.

Tufts people are also excellent at one-upping each other about the amount of work they have. I have stopped talking to other students entirely about my workload, because it just makes me feel like I'm not working very hard (and I've always taken 4.5 to 5.5 credits).

Oh, you've got a test and a 20-page paper due this week? Well, your friend has three tests and an Arabic composition. And that's not all: I know a girl who has two 15-page papers, a math test and a quiz in econometrics. I imagine Kevin has twice that much work anyway, so she shouldn't get a big head about her workload, either.

I'm not sure if it's some sort of sadistic characteristic or just the underground competitiveness of Tufts shining through in a curious way, but this is a ridiculous part of this school that I can't wrap my head around. Is it a coping mechanism? Maybe if you keep running around like a chicken with your head cut off, you won't actually have to worry about the real problems you have. Perhaps talking about having a lot of work is another method for procrastination -- if you're talking about midterms, you certainly aren't studying for them. Of course, this is counterproductive and, in fact, exacerbating the problems of constantly being busy because you're wasting time talking about being busy. It's ironic, really. I have a feeling, though, that this is one part of most students' schedules that won't get skipped over in favor of more work or studying.

First Post @ Red, Brown & Blue

2009-03-09T19:23:00.001-07:00

I'm the newest addition to the Tufts University admissions office's politics blog, and I'll cross-post my entries from there right here for your enjoyment.

Hello and Introduction

After realizing that this blog has quickly turned into Mike Hawley’s private soapbox for his crazy rantings, I decided that I have to get on here, if only for a brief post. Also, I suppose I should introduce myself as that new guy on the Left of the banner (the good-looking one). I’m Will Ehrenfeld, class of 2010, and as you may have guessed, I’ll be representing the Democratic point of view here. A little more about myself: I’m twenty years old and originally from Vernon, Connecticut, which is a town of about 27,000, located in Eastern Connecticut, about halfway between Hartford and the University of Connecticut. Vernon is home to another famous Democratic Jumbo (in addition to me); 2nd district congressman and family friend Joe Courtney is a Tufts Alum (A75) and neighbor. I’m a double-major in political science and peace & justice studies (ask me about it!) and I’m involved in a bunch of clubs on campus, including the Tufts Democrats. I blog occasionally at a few other sites–some you may have heard of, like Daily Kos and MyDD, others are a bit less prominent, like MyLeftNutmeg.com, which focuses on Connecticut politics, and one I’m sure you’ve never heard of: my personal blog, which among other things will contain cross-posts from here and from my column in the Tufts Daily–always an interesting, if rabble-rousing addition to campus news.

I will briefly get in to my political background and, yes, philosophy, although Mike certainly knows after taking Western Political Thought II with me a year ago that he’s much more knowledgeable and interested about that subject than I am. I first got seriously involved in Democratic politics in the leadup to the 2006 cycle, just before my freshman year at Tufts. At this point, my now-congressman Joe Courtney was an up-and-coming challenger to incumbent Republican Rob Simmons. I volunteered for the campaign a few times over the summer, but when I got to school I was quickly distracted by the million and one things going on during the first few weeks of anyone’s freshman year. One day I fortuitously saw a flyer advertising a Tufts Democrats’ campaign trip to Connecticut to campaign for the Courtney campaign, and I eagerly attended the first meeting and ended up going on a few trips to my home district to campaign. We were able to attend the results-watching party, held right in my hometown, but it ended up not being much of a party at all. The results were agonizingly close, and it was only weeks later that Courtney pulled out a razor-thin 83-vote margin of victory.

After this, I was hooked. I started to follow political news more closely, reading mainstream newspapers, watching cable news and reading and contributing to a few blogs. And then, one thing led to another, I led the charge at Tufts for President Barack Obama’s primary victory, and here we are today. In the hopes of not boring you all too much with my first post (and also getting back to writing that mid-term…), I think I’ll leave it at that. Look forward to future posts on issues such as education reform and NCLB, healthcare, and whatever else comes up in the news.

My Column, 3/3/09

2009-03-03T11:35:00.000-08:00

Trying to hide their wealth
Will Ehrenfeld

Published: Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Recently, TCU President Duncan Pickard wrote a really interesting letter to the editor, attempting to bring up issues of class on campus and encouraging conversations about the subject at Tufts. I wholeheartedly agree with his idea in this case and am grateful that the topic has been raised. Yet there are some pretty serious flaws in his letter, and I need, on one hand, to correct him and on the other, to discuss a few ideas that are not explicitly related.

At our great university, as with many of its peers, the student body comes from a primarily upper-class background. That’s just a factual statement. Only 41 percent of undergraduates receive financial aid from Tufts, and usually financial aid comes at least partially in the form of loans and work study jobs rather than direct grants. And, to be ineligible for financial aid, you either need to have a lot of money in the bank or parents who are taking in a very significant income — or more likely both. If you’re not getting financial help from Tufts, you’re not middle class. There might be a bit of debate about that term, middle class, and what it really means. Part of it is cultural and social, sure, but there are numbers here to look at. What do you think is middle class? Where do we draw the lines delineating upper middle class and simply rich?

Maybe for an average household, a $100,000 annual income is roughly middle class. That sounds right, doesn’t it? Well, in 2006, the top quintile (20 percent) of households made $91,705 or above, so that could hardly put someone in the proverbial (not to mention literal) middle. Let’s try $60,000; I know, you couldn’t afford that new Lacoste polo or spring break in Europe for your whole entire family with that amount, but some people can survive on $60,000. In fact, 60 percent of American households manage to scrape by with $60,000 or less. It gets worse: Lots of people barely have enough money to afford the rent and the grocery bill, let alone private school tuition or that new car. The median household income in the United States as recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2007 was $50,223. That’s barely enough to cover a year at Tufts.

With those numbers in mind, let’s look at Tufts. Most people at Tufts are clearly not middle class, no matter how you slice it. Whether the middle class is defined as the middle 20 percent or 60 percent, Tufts students are well outside the national average. You could consider yourself middle class — a large majority of Americans do — but we as a student body are on the whole extremely wealthy and from privileged backgrounds. If only 41 percent of students here receive Tufts financial aid, that means the other 59 percent must come from places where money really is no object. You need to be in the top quintile in terms of income to even come close to being above the threshold for financial aid. That’s a lot of money.

Also, the way somebody dresses is typically not correlated with class. Maybe that Louis Vuitton bag sticks out, but most Tufts people, even if they can afford those bags, won’t carry them on campus. The same goes for many other ostentatious articles of clothing. In fact, I find anecdotally that wealth and clothing are generally negatively correlated — that is, only rich students dress like they are homeless, and poorer ones spend more money than they can afford in order to appear wealthier. It’s the reverse of what you might expect because people don’t want to be identified as rich. Well, to these people, I have only one thing to say: You go to Tufts. In the rest of the country and world, you’re already considered rich.

So Duncan, sorry to say it, but if you don’t qualify for financial aid here, you’re not in the middle class. And to you, average reader, odds are that your friends are probably better off than average, too. We can discuss socioeconomic status and class at length, and I know that I could learn a lot as well as teach others a few things, but where does that get us? The amount of mutual learning that can take place is limited by the fact that one end of the income spectrum is heavily, heavily overrepresented here.

We can’t entirely blame the university for the situation. Tufts does offer fairly substantial financial aid, even to those in the upper class. And while going here is very expensive, it isn’t far outside of its peer group in terms of tuition or general expenses.

What to do? For one, Tufts could really be need-blind in its admissions instead of maybe-kinda-sorta need-blind. Or Tufts could lower tuition, or at the very least not raise it every year. But in a relatively small way, Tufts’ exorbitant price tag helps redistribute wealth, at least in theory, because only very wealthy people pay the full price while less privileged students get financial aid, some of which comes from money paid in the form of rich kids’ tuition.

The Senate is doing excellent work in trying to eliminate ticket costs for most on-campus events, and I really hope that effort succeeds. It isn’t enough when rents around campus are astronomical — still cheaper than living on campus though, at least sometimes — and one meal block costs over $10. A great effort needs to be targeted to recruiting more students from the actual middle class and the working and lower classes as well. If we are going to talk about class, which I think we should, we need to start from the same set of facts and realities. And the fact is, most Tufts people are not in the middle class, no matter how you define that term.

Posted here without any sort of permission

2009-03-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

Today, much to my...what's the opposite of chagrin? Delight? Much to my delight, I opened today's Tufts Daily to see an angry, hilarious, and all-around outrageous op-ed written about yours truly and my column. It's posted below, in its entirety. Enjoy.

--
How’s this for offensive?
Will Nichols

Published: Tuesday, March 3, 2009

This is now the fourth week in a row that I’ve read Will Ehrenfeld’s column, “Stuff Tufts People Like.” Coincidentally, this is also the fourth week in a row that I’ve been wholly unimpressed and vaguely annoyed with said column. Last week, his topic of choice for stuff that Tufts people like was “Getting offended too easily.”

As a decidedly cynical fellow, I was satisfied to see that the Daily had picked up a weekly column that pokes fun at the sometimes overly reactionary culture that exists here at Tufts. I was also pleased to see that the column’s author had taken a cue from StuffWhitePeopleLike.com, the very funny blog that highlights some of the more comical aspects of white culture (i.e., adopting markedly non-white children from war-torn nations and giving them names like Pomegranate, Biloxi or Kanye). But I was soon aggravated to learn that in trying to copy the well-known humor blog’s style, Mr. Ehrenfeld had tragically omitted one key component: humor. Mr. Ehrenfeld has effectively taken the “humor” out of “humor column” with this poorly written attempt at cynicism.

So, Mr. Ehrenfeld, please consider this my answer to your call for readers to write an “indignant op-ed in the Daily.” I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that this is not quite the sort of indignation you hoped to stir up. No, I’m not offended by your (unfunny) attacks on the Jumbo Janitor Alliance or by your disdain for “self-righteous liberals” on campus. Instead, sir, I am offended by the tragic lack of humor in your humor column. (It is supposed to be funny, right?) I am offended by the glaring shortage of witty cynicism in your wannabe-subversive weekly piece. Are we also suffering from a humor recession? Your words have as much bite as my grandmother when she spits out her dentures. Your topics are as bland as a stale matzo cracker. Your “inflammatory” accusations are softer than a pudgy ZBT brother. I know you’d like to think otherwise, but your column is offensive only in its mediocrity.

To your credit, however, you did hit the nail on the head in your most recent column. I, as an overly sensitive member of the Tufts community, am highly offended by your excruciatingly uninteresting writing. You asked, “What will happen if I start saying truly inflammatory things?” I’m more curious to see what will happen if you start saying truly interesting things. If you’re aiming for “truly inflammatory,” I’d advise you to take a page from Daily sex columnist Logan Crane’s playbook and write a piece about queefing noisily while engaging in public intercourse on the Joey. Until then, I’m not entertained.

I respond to your call for an “indignant op-ed” with another challenge: Try to make me laugh with your next column. Write something truly cynical — and funny! — and stop giving cynics everywhere a bad name. If that doesn’t work out, you might consider enrolling in a freshman writing seminar; I think there’s one called “Humor for the Non-Humorist.” And if that still doesn’t pan out for you, I’d suggest making amends with whomever you offended at the Jumbo Janitor Alliance. Maybe they’ll hire you to write their press releases; that probably won’t require humor.

My favorite so far

2009-02-25T10:52:00.000-08:00

Getting offended too easily
Will Ehrenfeld

Published: Tuesday, February 24, 2009

This is a column that I’m really excited to write. On Friday, if you didn’t see it, senior Kevin Dillon (no, not Johnny Drama) wrote an op-ed in the Daily called “Things Tufts’ Campus Needs,” which basically criticized me and my column, specifically the one titled “Unnecessary activism.” As an apparent necessary activist, I am not surprised Kevin took issue with some of the ideas from my column.
But that’s not (directly) what this column is about. With Dillon’s passionate and somewhat jumbled response piece as exhibit A, I’m hoping to discuss that characteristic of Tufts that everyone surely is intimately aware of: the proclivity to get offended. I can’t imagine how those at Tufts who commonly get offended — so offended, in fact, that they may write an angry letter to the Daily — will fare in the future. I really worry about people like Dillon who seem to get worked up very quickly and often, even about things that really aren’t a big deal. This column? Not a big deal. The Jumbo Janitor Alliance, of which Mr. Dillon is the founder, is not the biggest deal in the world, either — although, after mentioning them in a column, several people have defended them, both in person and in print, so I’ll leave that alone.
I don’t want to focus on one person, though. Dillon isn’t the only one who gets irrationally offended by irrelevant things. Ben Silver, author of the infamous Feb. 5 op-ed attacking the Primary Source for their cover featuring President Obama as the messiah, also appears to be offended very easily. I worked with Silver on the Obama campaign, so I realize this is an issue close to his heart, but ... really? Of all the offensive things the Source does, this is what you pick out to criticize? And then the editors of the Primary Source, not to be outdone in the easily offended department, were eager to respond in similar fashion, nitpicking and attacking Silver’s letter. Is that what the Daily’s op-ed section has become — a forum for silly flame wars?
Why do people do this? Think of the boy who cried wolf. But I suppose this is more like the upper-middle-class white kid who cried, “That’s offensive!” What will happen if I start saying truly inflammatory things? It could happen. The activists who would lead an uprising have already used their primary weapon, the sanctimonious letter to the editor — so what next? After my next “offensive” column, will there be rallies and demonstrations on the quad, replete with signs featuring creative slogans?
It actually seems like people at Tufts enjoy getting worked up and offended, so much so that they invent things to get upset about. Why? Illogically, Tufts people often seem to seek out things that are unrelated to themselves to get offended by. Take the Primary Source, for example. One would think that the primary offend-ees of the Source would be the groups it tends to attack — Muslims, African Americans, peace and justice studies students — the list goes on and on. But who do we see writing angry letters to the editor about the offenses the Source commits? Self-righteous liberals — a sad trend, especially because I am a proud liberal, although apparently my level of self-righteousness is not quite up to par.
While I work on that, I have an assignment for the (surely myriad) readers of this column. I want this column to be participatory. I know I’m not the only one with ideas about stuff Tufts people like; in fact, this column was partially inspired by a suggestion from a reader. So e-mail me your ideas! Or, better yet, write an indignant op-ed in the Daily. Even if it’s not always complimentary, I want to hear from you.

Column 4

2009-02-25T10:47:00.000-08:00

Will Ehrenfeld | Stuff Tufts People Like
Trying, and failing, to change the world

Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Following last week’s column about unnecessary activism, I want to focus more directly on activism and its role on campus and in a Tufts education. “Civic engagement” is one of the big buzzwords that admissions and public relations spout relentlessly; the university depicts itself as a socially active institution that is heavily involved in community issues and service. Tufts people especially like working with poor or disadvantaged people who “need our help,” and this becomes more central to our time at Tufts than any other ideas about education that might follow a more traditional path.
Those of us (I include myself here) who came to Tufts expecting to change the world immediately upon arrival in Medford have likely been disappointed in the progress so far. You (we) have almost certainly failed rather miserably in your (our) attempts to change the world and impact humanity in a positive way. And, sorry to burst your bubble, but your immediate prospects don’t look too good, either. I’m not chastising you for your idealistic beliefs and outlandish ambition — I have those things, too — but I think you’re confused.
Matthew Arnold, a 19th century English writer, once suggested that “poetry can save us.” In this time of relatively deep unrest and growing economic turmoil, every prescription for salvation must be reviewed, so let’s examine Arnold’s idea in a larger context. Everyone need not read copious amounts of poetry, although Robert Frost never hurt anyone. Instead, poetry here is a metaphor for the humanities in general and education in its purest form, which is sadly lacking at our potentially great institution.
I believe that Tufts students are some of the smartest people I have ever met, and the potential here for deep engagement with education and learning is great, yet what many of us have been doing here is wasting our time. Stanley Fish, a professor and occasional blogger at the New York Times Web site, calls his column “The Last Professor” in a not-so-subtle jab at current academics that focus on changing the world instead of learning. One of his books on higher education, “Save the World on Your Own Time” (2008), pretty well describes his opinion on civic engagement and its role inside the classroom.
In multiple columns, Fish has argued that higher education, understood properly, can be distinguished by the lack of a relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world around us. I can only bemoan the absence of this type of learning and engagement here. Tufts people seem more interested in appearing compassionate and involved than focusing on their own education. We are missing out on schooling for schooling’s sake — poetry, philosophy and literature for example — where the goal is specially focused on understanding, comprehension and enlarging the mind; it is individual rather than instrumental.
You can spend hours, days or even weeks volunteering at a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen or, if you’re lucky, traveling to Africa to help refugees. In fact, you ought to, if you have the opportunity — but that’s not really an education. Don’t delude yourself into thinking you are getting educated and learning how to create change as you do it. You might be helping a few people, but you are missing out on something wonderful if you avoid learning for your — and its — own sake.

New Column...on newsstands now

2009-02-10T17:30:00.000-08:00

Unnecessary activism
Will Ehrenfeld

Published: Tuesday, February 10, 2009

How many times have you been walking into or out of Dewick when some overly aggressive freshman shoves a pamphlet in your face or asks you to complete a survey on the merits and/or drawbacks of bottled water, for instance? At Tufts, we are all simply unable to steer clear of nervy volunteers looking for signatures for a petition, more volunteers or, worst of all, donations. This campus is absolutely saturated with volunteerism and activism, which isn’t a bad thing in a vacuum.

The problem at Tufts isn’t the energetic and vehement spirit of activism coursing through campus, but rather the target of that activism. The campus and our world face huge, seemingly insurmountable issues that need just this energy and activism. Poverty, hunger, safe and affordable housing, public safety in general, especially around the Tufts campus: All of these are significant issues deserving of the voluminous energy that has recently been targeted at “problems” like bottled water and the Primary Source.

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m no defender of the Source. I actually hate it, but I have better things to do than get all worked up about something that, if I choose not to read, has absolutely no effect on my life. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they make fun of me personally sometimes — I’m a peace activist, a pretty staunch liberal, and I’m not afraid to speak my mind — but who cares? My mom always used to tell me that the best way to deal with something (or someone) that upsets you is to just ignore it. I think it’s good advice, particularly when that thing doesn’t really affect you … or anyone else.

Also, when it comes down to it, I tend to agree with the Think Outside the Bottle campaign that was all the craze at Tufts last year. I realize that bottled water contributes to fossil fuel use and pollution, empowers the corporate elite, blah blah blah. But when it comes down to it, I think I speak for a rather large majority of students here when I say that I don’t really care.

In the interest of constructive criticism, let me offer the Think Outside the Bottle folks some advice: A campaign against bottled water when millions of people have no access to clean water, from the tap or a bottle, really isn’t good for your image. It isn’t particularly useful, either. If people do in fact drink a little bit less bottled water, is that the glorious endpoint of your campaign? Will you celebrate, I mean really rejoice at, a moderate reduction in plastic usage? Get real.

You might be wondering if what I’m complaining about is all that prevalent at Tufts. Let’s look at TuftsLife.com for supporting evidence. A cursory review of this week’s event listings is especially revelatory on this topic. There are daily encouragements to “Find Out More About Vaginas,” something I’ve always meant to do, really; a meeting of the Friends of Israel group, which is obviously gratuitous at a campus as saturated with Jews as Tufts is; and the Jumbo Janitor Alliance, which I support in principle but similarly don’t care about.

Am I just apathetic? Perhaps, but I maintain that the activism we see at Tufts is, for the most part, poorly designed and ultimately misguided. If I’ve convinced you, and you want to reform, it’s very easy. Work on real problems; there’s a real litany of options to choose from. Against the Primary Source? Join the Tufts Democrats or write for its magazine, The Forum. Against bottled water? Advocate for clean water for all and improvements to international infrastructure. Work on real problems, don’t construct new ones.

Column 2

2009-02-03T12:32:00.000-08:00

Here it is, the moment you've been waiting for, my second column in the Tufts Daily (link).

Seeing their names in print
Will Ehrenfeld

Published: Tuesday, February 3, 2009

This week’s topic is one close to my heart. As a freshly minted columnist in this fine paper, it should be obvious that I, as much as anybody, really enjoy seeing my name in print. And I’m especially lucky: My beautiful picture also gets printed every Tuesday along with this column. I am not alone, though, in my enthusiastic support of, well ... myself.

Tufts students, more so than students from other schools, appreciate seeing their names in print — be it in The New York Times, The Tufts Daily, or even The New Bedford Standard Times. A friend of mine at Tufts recently sent an e-mail to a large number of friends, asking us to read an article his local newspaper at home wrote about his internship at the White House. “It looks at the experience in a more comprehensive way, not just focusing on my time in the office, but the complete Washington experience,” he wrote, taking himself far too seriously. “I hope you will take the time to read the article.”

That’s one example; I’m sure most Tufts people could add similar anecdotes from their social circles. This e-mail wasn’t particularly off-putting, and the article was moderately interesting — but it’s indicative of a broader issue. Tufts people urgently self-promote like few others. Any publication that has even a very narrow readership (see Source, Primary) attracts many writers, photographers and people with no interest in journalism, so long as they are assured of seeing their name somewhere in print. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a largely ignored magazine or newspaper or if it’s only for serving as assistant copy editor for The Public Journal.

By my count, Tufts has more than ten separate, (relatively) regularly produced publications, ranging from this paragon of journalism, The Tufts Daily, to the lowly, rarely published Forum, a project of the Tufts Democrats (and for which I occasionally write). The vast majority of these projects are funded by the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate through the student activities fund, and I suppose the publications are fulfilling the purpose of this fund that the Senate, in its unrivaled wisdom, allots to various student groups. One of the greatest desires of Tufts students is to see their names in print, so maximizing the outlets for this desire is really the ideal use for the money.

Speaking of the TCU Senate ... I’m convinced that the only reason people run for Senate is so that they can enjoy excessive publicity from the Daily. The notoriety attached to such glorious, glorious coverage is not only a big ego boost, but it gives the person being interviewed — let’s say TCU Treasurer Matt Shapanka — the pleasure of feeling superior to the lowly Daily staff writer who has to call Matt on a Sunday night to ask him about the latest development in the saga over the recovered funds. By the way, I’m looking forward to a lengthy thank-you note from Shapanka for the excellent publicity I’m giving him. Don’t forget the little people, Matt.

With this interviewer-interviewee dynamic factored in, I’m a relative bottom-feeder in the publicity scheme, but at least my notoriety is guaranteed. I can write whatever I want in this column, really, and my ugly mug will keep showing up at the top of the page once a week. And here you are, slaving away in the MAB lab to perfect the photo layout in the forthcoming issue of Tufts Traveler. I almost feel bad.

Want to see your name right here in this very column? Contact me with something that you think Tufts people like, and you could provide the topic of an upcoming column.

First Column

2009-01-27T11:55:00.001-08:00

The first column (of 13) in the series called Stuff Tufts People Like is included in its entirety below. You can also read it in hard copy of the Tufts Daily or at the Daily's website.

Bragging about their awesome adventures
Will Ehrenfeld

Published: Tuesday, January 27, 2009

As the semester -- and this column -- gets started up, I hope you'll enjoy reading. This column will focus on the Tufts community and things that students really enjoy.

To get started, I think everybody here knows how much Tufts people love service-learning and active citizenship. But there's something that I have found that rivals the enthusiasm people have about their volunteerism: spreading the word about their adventures abroad, especially those related to saving the world. I'm sure you have overheard people talking -- before class, in the dining hall and when they obnoxiously ask ten-minute questions during your political science lecture -- about meeting the First Minister of Northern Ireland, working with the Red Cross in Sudan or that time they built an outhouse in El Salvador.

The important part isn't the actual trip to El Salvador at all, or even anything unique to El Salvador -- they definitely didn't go for the pupusas, anyway. (Pupusas are thick, handmade tortillas popular in El Salvador; they're delicious, and you can actually get them in Somerville.)

Obviously, you traveled to El Salvador so you could impress people at Tufts with your stories about using an outhouse and talking to "real" Salvadorans. You went so you could tell your friends about the life-changing experience you had talking to guerillas in the jungle, convincing them in your broken Spanish to lay down their weapons and pursue their goals through peaceful means. It makes you different, perhaps better even, and Tufts people love making themselves look different and better than their peers.

In addition, Tufts people work hard to accumulate articles of clothing from unique locales all around the world. Forget that really cool hat you bought at the Guinness factory in Dublin -- the new fashion is the one with sequins spelling out "Guinea-Bissau" on the front. Really, the less well-known a location is, the better -- and, consequently, the more Tufts people like it.

Traveling to Ireland is a lot of fun, but it's almost routine at a school like Tufts. If you want to impress your friends, tell them about your trip to Suriname. (It's in South America.) On several occasions, I have been tempted to follow up a story about their time in Togo or Laos with my own story about a totally made-up place. I'm convinced I could get away with it (though now I suppose the word is out).

Location isn't the only important part of Tufts peoples' stories about their adventures. Ask someone about their semester abroad and you're sure to be regaled with stories about the "amazing people" and how things are so different -- and invariably better -- than in the United States. Even people who traveled to a place as ordinary and uninteresting as Ireland can't stop talking about how the people are so nice and it's just nothing like where they're from.

After spending Fall 2008 in Ireland, I can confidently tell you that Irish people are a lot like Americans and most actually think they are American. Dublin is extremely similar to Boston, which I was reminded of by plenty of locals.

And here I go, talking about my adventures and trying to impress you with my awesome experiences. I acquired a taste for a local type of alcohol (the stout in America is not the same) and really did meet a lot of nice people, just like everyone else. I even brought home a cool T-shirt.

Welcome

2009-01-25T22:12:00.000-08:00

This effort, aptly titled "Whatever You Like," in honor of my wrongly imprisoned comrade TI, represents my 5th effort at maintaining a blog since, well, since blogs have been around. I hope this is more successful (and less embarrassing) than some of my previous efforts, and I will make every effort to keep it clean, interesting, and perhaps educational (more likely, it will be a huge joke and not serious at all. Well, one or the other).

Principally, this blog will serve as an outlet to promote and preserve the column that I will be writing for the Tufts Daily this semester, called "Stuff Tufts People Like." Every Tuesday this column will be published both in the online and print versions of the Tufts Daily, and I will try to post it here Tuesdays (or soon after) as well. I'll post random thoughts as they occur as well, and you may even get a glimpse into my personal life if I keep this up (but hopefully not too close a look).

Read, enjoy, and wish me luck.