The Time-Traveling Fashion Reviewer: Observations of an Unusual Sixth-Grade Writing Class

Listening to Each Other
Original artwork created for Dewey to Delpit, by Paris Mancini

This is the first in a series of posts that I intend to write on an innovative literacy program that I've been observing for the past six months at a public school in Chinatown. (Read previous observation-based posts on Dewey to Delpit)

At 2:15pm on a Wednesday afternoon, the students in Amy Piller’s sixth grade humanities class gather on the rug at the front of the room. Some take seats on low, wooden benches, most kneel or sit cross-legged on the floor. A girl with wavy brown hair takes her station at the document camera—the digital version of an overhead projector—and begins to read from the hand-written manuscript projected on the pull-down screen in front of the board. “A Review of European Fashion in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s,” she announces. The writing is her own and the subject just what the title promises, but the approach is novel: the writer has placed herself in an imaginary 17th century English clothing boutique, in which the opulently-dressed proprietor comments on our narrator’s “poor looking, filthy” 20th century clothes, before stuffing her into an elaborate outfit so heavy she can barely walk. (“The women must have to have muscle to carry this elephant on them every day”). She departs the boutique happy with her new finery but worried about her wallet. It cost “a lot of euros,” she concludes. “I figured I didn’t have enough for dinner.”

Quirky and playful as the story may be, like all writing done in Ms. Piller’s class it’s based on detailed research. According to the writer, she used five sources on 17th century English apparel, and the background work is visible in her elaborate descriptions of dresses, wigs, veils, jewelry, and embroidery.

When she has finished reading, the class thanks her in unison for sharing, and it is then that, from a pedagogical standpoint, the really interesting part begins. A cup of popsicle sticks, each bearing the name of a student in the class, is handed to the writer, who moves from her position at the document camera to a seat amongst her peers. She picks a popsicle stick at random and calls out the name written on it. A blond girl in a white t-shirt has been selected, and she pipes up without hesitation: “I really like your piece,” she begins—but she thinks the writer needs to check the thesaurus for some synonyms for embroidery, because that word is overused. She also wants more description of setting—she doesn’t feel like she’s getting a sense of the context.

Crisis-Point Interventions, Part I

I've been working on a new post for five days now, and it keeps squirming out of my grasp. The fact is that the data on the topic is a lot more ambiguous than I wish it were. My goal was to use last Friday's Times article on Chicago's new program to reduce gun-violence against grade-schoolers (actual article; my summary) as a jumping-off point for a discussion of crisis-point interventions versus early interventions and prevention programs: the Chicago program is taking highschoolers who are currently in gangs or have been in the past, and trying to get them safely out of gangs and out of the way of former gang-contacts who are seeking retaliation; why not, I wondered, target younger kids and try to prevent them from joining gangs in the first place. It's harder than I expected to make that argument.

When you're talking about a program like this, the big question is cost-effectiveness. You only have so much money—six million dollars, in federal stimulus funding, in this case—and you want to use it to have the biggest impact you can. By my admittedly rough estimation, the Chicago program is costing around $6,000 per student, per year. (See my calculations.) To put that number in perspective, that's about 60% of the total cost of sending these kids to school every year.^[1] By that estimate, the program will cost a total of around nine million dollars, when it's expanded to cover 1,500 students next year.

Based on the data in the article, it's impossible to be sure what the real impact of the program is—there were 40 fewer students shot this year than last year, a reduction of about 16%, but there's no way of knowing whether that's due to the program or not, especially since the article gives no information on the variance in number of shootings from year to year.^[2] Even if we assume that the reduction in shootings was due entirely to the advocates program, though, that doesn't mean the program was cost-effective—after all, there might be another program that could prevent more shootings for the same amount of money.

I assumed, naively, that the motivations for the Chicago program were sentimental: the city was devoting all its resources to the neediest few, rather than stepping back, practicing a little triage, and fixing the problem at its source. Turns out, I may be the sentimental one. The current wisdom on how to reduce youth gang activity is decidedly cool-headed—possibly even cold-headed.

Overhaul of Locke Highschool not That Pricey

The New York Times reported today on the $15,000,000 Charter-based reform effort at Locke High School, in Los Angeles; but that number's not really as big as everyone thinks it is.

(You can see the original article here.)

The further you read, the mathier this post will get, so, as they say in ancient Rome, cave lector!

According to the Times article, Locke High, located in South Central LA, was a prime example of America's failing urban public schools, when it was turned over to a Charter School Group, Green Dot Public Schools, in 2008. Since taking over, Green Dot has cleaned up the school: "gang violence is sharply down, fewer students are dropping out, and test scores have inched upward." (The only state-test data we have for the reform effort come from the spring of '09, just a few months after Green Dot took over. Given the other data, we're likely to see much larger gains in test scores when the '09-'10 results comes in.)

The projected cost of this overhaul is $15 million over the course of a four-year transition period—which sounds like a lot at first blush. The Times article, which is entitled "School is Turned Around but Cost Gives Pause," splits its time between reporting on the changes in the school and discussing the debate over whether that price-tag is exorbitant. Let's get a little perspective on that number, though.

In America, public money is assigned to a school on a per-pupil basis: within a given school district, each public school gets a given amount of money for each pupil that attends that school. This money constitutes the school's operating budget. For Locke High, that is expected to come to about $115 million total over the course of the four-year turnaround period. The $15 million price-tag on Green Dot's turnaround effort is above and beyond the operating budget and is paid for largely by donations from private foundations.

$15 million over four years amounts to an expenditure of 13% above the regular operating budget for each of those four years. Put another way, it's an investment of $1,172 per student per year, for four years. That's a small and fairly short-term investment to turn a failing school into a good school; or, put another way, to give 3,200 students a decent education.^[1]