We must begin to hold all physicians accountable, regardless of specialization, to certain quantifiable measures of health, namely cholesterol levels, blood pressure, weight, and BMI. All patients assigned to a physician must meet specific annual minimum standards of health. Bad doctors will be those who do not meet their patients’ annual minimums, and they may be subject to certain penalties if the health scores of their patients do not improve in a reasonable amount of time.

The analogy doesn’t always hold up, and some readers will probably think that certain points would be just as good an idea in medicine as they are in education. But the core points are pretty solid:

I can predict some of the responses that physicians might make: “We can’t control what our patients do or eat outside of our offices to maintain minimum levels of health. Also, these variables — BMI, cholesterol, blood pressure — are limited and don’t adequately measure a healthy person. And one other thing, you can’t expect us to be evaluated based on all patients equally, regardless of family history, poverty, and other complications.”

No. Kidding.

Of course, the difference is that in this country, medical care is mostly private and education is mostly public. We have all these high expectations for Return on Investment when our taxes contribute to something, even though of course most of us pay far more for health care than we do for education. And the government has more room to stretch its regulatory muscle over a public service like education than when it’s “interfering in private companies.”

I still think we need public health care desperately; tying health care to full-time employment is insane and amounts to giving every poor or working-class person in this country the finger. And, for the same reasons, we need good public education. But this analogy does help me see part of the conservative argument against public health care: what if we screw it up the same way we’ve screwed up public education? (…How about we try to fix both now please?)

For me, the crux is in this passage:

[I]n Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master’s degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal’s responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And this one (emphasis mine):

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as [Pasi] Sahlberg [director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility] describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Treat teachers and principals like professionals. Give them training and autonomy. And then do the best you can to give students a level playing field in the school, despite the mess they may come from at home. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

As a private school teacher, I feel I need to address the “Finland has no private schools” issue, which the article really emphasizes. Private schools are a symptom of the fact that the American public school system is appalling. Eventually I think we need to do away with them, yes — if everyone’s part of the same system, there’s far more political will to keep that system functioning well. (…See that disclaimer up there about how my opinions are not necessarily my employer’s?)

But I do not think that outlawing private schools tomorrow would make a damn bit of difference. Everyone is not part of the same system, even in the public school world. It’s no longer an option to send your kid to an expensive private school? Fine, buy an expensive house in a good school district instead! There are districts that might as well be private schools, for the educational resources they have and what it costs to attend, and there are districts that might as well be in the developing world. Until educational expenditure is no longer tied to local taxes, we are screwed.

(I have a million questions about the rest of the Finnish system. Is there a national curriculum, or are teachers entirely autonomous? Are there teachers’ unions? How do urban schools differ from rural schools? The article briefly addresses heterogeneity in Finland vs. the U.S. as measured by immigrant populations, but what about poverty? What about absentee fathers, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, and all the rest of the crap that puts “at-risk” kids here at an almost insurmountable disadvantage before they get anywhere near a classroom? How does Finland handle special education? Kids are doing well by educational measurements; how about jobs? Has educational equality improved economic equality? I really want to read Sahlberg’s book now.)

KS: What do you think about the role of wrongness in education? It seems to me that making mistakes is crucial to learning, yet by and large mistakes are discouraged and punished in our schools.

DR: We have reshaped the education system — largely through federal legislation — to an approach of “right answers, right answers, right answers.” But life’s not like that. We’re putting a tremendous amount of value on being able to pick the right one out of four little bubbles. But this turns out not to be a very valuable skill. You can’t take this skill out into the workplace and get paid for it.

I love hearing a policy-maker admit that she changed her mind and talk about how she got there. If you care about public education (or wrongness in politics), I encourage you to read the whole thing.

The interview is a year old, part of Kathryn Schulz’s series in Slate The Wrong Stuff, in which she interviews people about being wrong. It’s kind of brilliant, and I definitely plan to read her book, Being Wrong.

(Irritatingly, Slate’s formatting doesn’t distinguish between when the interviewer and the subject are speaking. I added the “KS” and “DR” above to make it easier to follow.)

Try this the next time you meet a little girl. She may be surprised and unsure at first, because few ask her about her mind, but be patient and stick with it. Ask her what she’s reading. What does she like and dislike, and why? There are no wrong answers. You’re just generating an intelligent conversation that respects her brain. For older girls, ask her about current events issues: pollution, wars, school budgets slashed. What bothers her out there in the world? How would she fix it if she had a magic wand? You may get some intriguing answers.

I bet little girls and boys aren’t asked about their minds often enough. This seems like good advice for both genders.

And while we’re at it, we talk about this “fixed mindset vs. growth mindset” stuff a lot in faculty meetings. I frequently find myself checking “You’re so good at this” statements before they come out of my mouth now and switching to “You worked so hard”:

…the students with a growth mind-set felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard work in high regard, believing that the more you labored at something, the better you would become at it…. The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability.

Ok, so there’s a lot of dark YA lit because teens want to read it — both the Literature and the popcorn. There’s also tons of light YA lit. (And if the mother at the beginning of Gurdon’s column couldn’t find any, perhaps she should have asked an experienced professional — at an indie bookstore or library if she couldn’t find one at Barnes & Noble — rather than fumbling through the YA section on her own.) Sure, there are trends, but YA is no more one-note than adult lit is.

But there is an awful lot of dark, heavy stuff on the recommended lists — the books we as educators assign and give awards to. In the last few years of Printz winners there’s abject poverty, environmental apocalypse, child labor, abusive parents, children as murderers, terminal illness, child abandonment, suicide, terrorism, and teen pregnancy, just to name a few. These are excellent, deserving books and I adore many of them, as do my students. But the darkness seems over-represented. (Note: tone is important, obviously, and I don’t want to make this all about a context-free list of content markers. But I would argue that while every one has some form of “happy ending,” the tone of most of these books is just as dark as their content implies.)

There are plenty of exceptions, obviously, but there is a general belief in our culture that “dark and heavy” = quality. This reaches far beyond YA lit; for instance, how often does a romantic comedy win Best Picture? Every year our high school students look at the summer reading list and say, “Is there anything on here that’s not depressing?” And the list is mostly adult books! (The answer, by the way, is definitely yes, but we had to add some lighter books deliberately for that reason, and they often aren’t “canon.”) Do we believe that it requires more skill to make someone cry than laugh? Is it more worthy to address painful subjects? Do we feel that stories have more truth if they end tragically with a touch of uplift? I’m asking these questions honestly; my mind’s not set here and I hope you’ll tell me what you think about my premise or the reasons behind it.

It does seem worth taking a look at our instinct, as gatekeepers, to recommend the intense Holocaust novel as “Literature” over the love story with a happy ending. If some kids at some moments need dark YA to save them (and I do believe that they do), they also sometimes need to be saved by a light or funny book about people whose lives aren’t perfect but mostly turn out all right. I know I do.

Oh, there’s so much going on here. I can’t address all of it right now, but here’s a start:

[F]our-year college is perhaps not for everyone. Rather, for a growing proportion of students, the report contends, internships, apprenticeships, and vocational training would be far more beneficial.” And then later, “[F]inancial columnist Michelle Singletary writes, ‘I’ll be honest. I think if college students and their parents have a harder time getting loans, that’s a good thing. Perhaps now more people will stop and consider the long-term implications of taking on so much of this so-called good debt.”

So for whom would internships and vocational training be more beneficial? People who can’t afford college. The truly brilliant would often still be able to get scholarships, but the merely above-average without money would likely go the vocational route, whereas the wealthy with the same intellectual caliber would go to college. I haven’t seen anyone explain how to get high-level white-collar careers to result from vocational tracks (with the possible exception of computer programming, which at least ten years ago was a new enough field to make a career without a degree; not sure about now). That’s pretty elitist. The solution can’t just be to tell people “avoid debt”; we have to give people without financial means a fair shot at any career they’re capable of. That is the American Dream.

[A] new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, makes the case that students at elite colleges are being left to fend for themselves while their impressively credentialed professors take constant sabbaticals and leave the actual teaching to inexperienced assistants.

Yes! Let’s blame those fat-cat teachers some more. Those “impressively credentialed professors” are impressively credentialed because they spend their time on what higher education values: research and publishing. Research and teaching are different jobs with different skill sets, but “elite colleges” tend to make one the condition of the other. Don’t hate the players, hate the game.

I was expected to coax critically reasoned research papers from students who possessed no life of the mind at all: young and not-so-young men and women who didn’t read and thought not a whit about ideas.

This is a problem. But it goes back to the elitism issue — do these kids simply lack some sort of “intellectual gene,” or is it more that they haven’t been raised to exercise those parts of their brains? Is it possible that — gasp! — an education system based on high-stakes testing and one-size-fits-all standards might not encourage intellectual rigor and curiosity? Is it possible that kids whose parents work long hours to make ends meet, who come from dangerous home environments, who attended poorly funded schools, might be less well prepared for college than those who avoided those challenges?

It’s not higher ed’s responsibility to take unprepared kids and turn them into academics. But we’re all part of one education system, and we need to be working together. If the goal is to “leave no child behind,” we need to have a national conversation about what that means. We can’t have secondary schools just shooting for basic reading and math proficiency, university academics who want to turn out more professors, university business offices that want to enroll as many students as possible, and a President who talks about “winning the future” but doesn’t seem to get that that involves something more systemic than sending scientists in to inspire students at the occasional assembly. And we absolutely can’t go back to the days when higher education was a “solipsistic” “four years of intellectual crunches and sets and reps” for the wealthy elite.

Nine months after effectively banning most fund-raising food sales in city schools, a city panel will vote Wednesday on an amended regulation that will allow student groups to sell items like Pop-Tarts and Doritos during the school day, but not brownies, zucchini bread or anything else homemade.

Ostensibly this is about “health”: they have a whole list of proposed regulations about percentage of calories from fat and allowable ingredients. It could also be about allergies. (My theory, based on the sort of things I’ve heard people say at my school, is that it’s at least partly about sanitation: who knows what could be going on at those other parents’ houses? At least if it’s pre-packaged I know it’s safe!)

Shall we count the things that piss me off here? “Childhood obesity” is a bogus bogeyman. Let’s teach our kids to make healthy choices about their diets rather than micromanaging everything. A list of ingredients and a portion size doesn’t make something healthy — in fact, I would argue that, whatever the fat content, brownies made from scratch are healthier than Pop-Tarts because they’re made out of actual food ingredients pronounceable by human beings. Baking together at home is an educational family bonding activity; stopping by Costco is not so much. And for crying out loud, can schools stop [insert gross metaphor here that I won't use because this is a family site] huge corporations already?

That’s five things, and I didn’t even include my made-up sanitation theory!

2. From Wired: How to Raise Racist Kids.

Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.

Or at least, so says the authors of a recent book researching how kids think about race.

3. And back to food… The Anti-Fridge

While the wall-mounted “anti-fridges” are pretty cool, I’m not sure they’re so practical for large quantities. My current eating lifestyle involves very little refrigeration in production or transportation, but lots in my home. Turns out you have to chill a lot of produce if you a) live in New England, b) don’t buy produce except from the farmer’s market, and c) want to eat something other than root veggies all winter. But it does concern me to be so dependent on refrigeration… clearly I’ve found my next Crazy Hippie Food Project!

The best thing about this link, though, is that it introduced me to You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” It’s not quite as amazing as Material World: A Global Family Portrait, but darn close.

(Thanks for the links, Martini-Corona!)

For my first meal at the grown-up table, I picked The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta (author of Election, among other things).

Ruth is a divorced mother of two and teacher of human sexuality at a small-town public school. Despite her own depressing lack of a sex life, her personal credo is that “pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power” — so you can imagine the kind of sex ed she teaches, and have probably already guessed where her career will end up by the last chapter.

Tim is a divorced father of one, a recovering alcoholic and sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n roll-er, and a recently born-again Christian. He’s a member of the Tabernacle, the new fundamentalist church in town, which is shocked — shocked! — by Ruth’s assertion that “some people enjoy oral sex,” and convince the school board to force her to teach a pre-packaged abstinence curriculum.

Tim also happens to coach Ruth’s daughter’s soccer team, and one day he feels moved to lead the team in prayer. Ruth gets predictably pissed…and off the plot goes from there. (Perrotta is good about not portraying the Christians as whackjobs, by the way — though maybe I just think that because I have more stake in Ruth’s portrayal than in the Tabernacle’s. Christians who’ve read it, please weigh in!)

It’s a book about honesty, really — how to figure out who you are and live a life that’s true to both your morality and your identity. Unfortunately, the end didn’t provide satisfying answers to those questions for the main characters. As they made their last choices, were they content with them? Maybe it’s just that I liked the characters so much I wanted more time with them.

The moment that underscored the biggest difference for me between this and YA had nothing to do with any of the sex or parenting or big choices. It was a throwaway line, from a character you only meet once. Ruth is trying to convince a fellow soccer parent, a Muslim, to support her in her official complaint about Tim’s prayer session:

“Do you know what my name is?” he inquired, pulling a paper towel from the dispenser. “My first name?”

“It’s Hussein, isn’t it?”

The doctor smiled sadly. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Ramsey, I think my family and I will sit this one out.”

And that’s the end of the scene. No, “Hey, you know, because of September 11th and all! With the persecution!” The book assumes that we, as reasonably intelligent adults who’ve occasionally read the news in the last seven years, get it. Obviously there are plenty of adult books in which you can’t turn a page without getting bonked with another anvil, and there are plenty of YA books that do expect a lot from their readers. But in general, you can’t expect as much ability to infer from young adults; they just aren’t there yet.* It was cool to read a book that assumed I had a grown-up brain.

* I remember a passage in The Night Journey, by Kathryn Lasky, which I adored as a kid. A Jewish family is escaping early 20th century Russia, and they’ve enlisted the help of a haunted old man whose family was killed in the pogroms. The young protagonist, Rachel, is dying to find out what the old man’s deal is — what, exactly, happened to him to make him so hollow and disturbed? One day she finds him looking at a dead, mangled squirrel family, and he says, “The father fled.” That drove me crazy — wtf, he was that fucked up because he saw some dead squirrels?? It took me years of re-readings to figure out that it was a metaphor, duh.