International Women's Day: Inspiring Literacy

This year's theme for International Women's Day is Connecting Girls and Inspiring Futures.  To me it is very clear what young women need to succeed: education and literacy. There are currently 793 million illiterate people in the world, and nearly 2/3 are women and girls. Overall, worldwide education of girls in primary schools are increasing, but there remains a significant gap in the continued education of females across the globe. From the many refugee women working to create better lives for themselves, to the future policy makers of the world, literacy enables all women with the empowering gifts of confidence and security for our futures.

I would like to take this International Women's Day to thank my mother. She was never an avid reader but always expressed to me what it felt like to read a book and get lost in another world. She always had a fascination with words and language, but felt stifled by her inability to use them properly to express herself. With this she instilled in me a ceaseless curiosity and propensity to read and write, and to explore the potential of my knowledge. Your support of these personal endeavors of mine means more to me than you know. Thank you.

The Problem With the Evaluation Release: Both Sides Agree With It

"Education is inherently political" stated Richard Brody of The New Yorker last Friday. Brody goes on to note Socrates as the first successful challenger of the teachers' unions. Socrates seems to have set the tone for today's political agenda, wherein seemingly everyone but the teachers' union themselves were in favor of the public release of personal evaluation data on New York teachers.

The consensus that seems to have crystallized around the issue...is disturbing. It’s one of my political rules of thumb that, when liberals and conservatives advocate the same policy, it’s a harbinger of disaster, because they agree on a course of action for different reasons and neither faction poses serious questions regarding the other side’s logic.

The Liberal argument for linking teachers' pay to the performance of their students, is that it transcends racial and economic lines and provides greater opportunity for educational equality. The free-market rewards system and weakening of union benefits is what appeals to Conservatives. The result according to Brody:

And if the point of education really is the production of abstractly and measurably skillful people who don’t necessarily know anything in particular, it’s a vision (maybe a chilling one) that, at least, should be articulated for parents—and voters—to decide on. It may turn out that the substance and style of teaching and learning that they want schools to cultivate is exactly the kind that resists easy reduction to standardized testing. They may resist the paradox of an increasingly rigid and normative educational system that aims at fostering freedom of thought.

From Mike Bloomberg's defense of empowering the choices of parents to Rick Santorum's fear of Liberal education and "indoctrination", the problem with the direction of our education system is the debate around the motivations behind it.

Deporting the Potential of the Country

The "smart immigration enforcement", a policy enacted by Obama in 2011, was intended to order Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) prosecutors to concentrate their efforts on removing criminals. The year saw a record 396,000 deportations, mostly to Latin American countries. Despite their orders, and although nearly half that number consisted of convicts and felons, ICE prosecuted a remarkable number of students and professionals with no criminal records, many of whom had resided in the United States since childhood.

One example is 18 year old Daniela Palaez of Miami, Florida who was recently ordered by ICE to return to her native Columbia by the 28th of this month. This high school valedictorian who has lived in the U.S. since age 4 has been gaining tremendous regional and national support.

Palaez has a 6.7 GPA, is a student tutor, and leader in her community. That's a hell of a lot more than I can say of myself in high school. I dropped out of the Math and Science magnet program, and only had a high GPA due to the overload of music and performance classes I was enrolled in (easy A's). My best friend however worked her ass off taking AP biology and history, challenged herself with extra-curricular activities, and took on leadership roles. She was an all-American English speaking cheerleader in a Hollister sweatshirt, and also in the country illegally. I went on to an expensive Liberal Arts college then on to business school, where I've finally learned to apply myself. She cannot get a driver's license, job, or private scholarships, and takes a few classes at the community college every semester.

Jonathan Padilla offers a succinct reflection on the results of these two examples and the many more occuring everyday:

Most of the business leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond agree that attracting the best-educated workforce possible makes America's economy not only stronger but also more competitive in the long-term. Our immigration policies however, seem to be limiting the flow of high-skilled workers and our ability to concentrate the best minds in the world here in the United States. Limits on H-1B visas mean companies can't attract all the top-talent they need to keep innovation moving as rapidly as possible and the failure of Congress to act on issues like the DREAM Act means that tens-of-thousands of undocumented immigrants who are tying to invest in a better life through education will not be able to use those skills to make America better.

Rather than exclusively striving to increase manufacturing jobs, the United States should be working to ensure that the ambition and hard work of individuals in this country who want to contribute to the potential of the economy in a meaningful way, are rewarded. I believe The Startup Visa Act and The DREAM Act offer two steps in the right direction.

The Value and Evaluation of Educators

In the wake of the recent release of personal performance data of 18,000 teachers in New York, last night I watched the 2011 film Detachment starring Adrien Brody. Uncanny timing. Detachment tells the story of Henry (Brody), a substitute teacher who suffers every unbearable weight of life, admits failure, yet defies nihilism and tries only to do good by the seemingly hopeless inner-city kids he teaches. The film offers a harrowing look at the education system during No Child Left Behind, and after the suicide of a student, calls to question the roles and obligations of educators to their students.

The New York City Education Department's release of personal performance data not only fundamentally restricts the potential of educators by neglecting to measure many of their important, non-standardized contributions, but its data is ill-gotten on many different levels. Individual teachers' scores reflect the performance of their students in math and english over the five years leading up to the 2009-2010 school year. The quality of the evaluation itself is questioned in The Atlantic, which points to the study's admitted 53 point margin of error in its findings.


Additionally, Joe Hines acknowledges the political disparity of such a release:

Obviously how school's are performing is going to be political, but this seems like Bloomberg's attempt to play politics with the lives of individual teachers. Transparency is important, and maybe releasing the data on schools or school districts themselves would be in the public's interest.

The optics of this decision are terrible, though. New York's billionaire mayor shaming public school teachers to advance his political agenda.

The Times itself looks as if they're going to be publishing the rankings. Is this the proper role for the paper of note? Does publishing the rankings give Bloomberg exactly what he wants?

It will be interesting to see the inevitable ramifications of this outdated analysis shrouded in statistical error, ambiguous methods, political bias, and shame.