A Tale of Two Michelles
by James Na ~ November 12th, 2008. Filed under: Education, Koreans in America, Washington Views.[Another Update 11/30/08] Chancelleor Michelle Rhee will be on the cover of Time Magazine. Here is the juicy bit:
Inside the magazine, Rhee reveals she’s a Democrat but came close to voting for Republican John McCain for president. She says a close friend begged her to give Democrat Barack Obama a chance.Rhee says she is “somewhat terrified of what the Democrats are going to do on education.” [Boldface mine.]
[Update 11/19/08] There is more on Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s plan here.
[Original Entry] Having grown up in South Korea and attended schools there and in the United States, I am in a position to be able to compare the educational systems of the two countries.
One of the arguments I often encounter in the United States is that more funding for public schools — leading to smaller classes (low student head count per teacher) — is the way improve the failure that is our public education system through the secondary school. That is certainly what the teachers’ unions advocate, which not so coincidentally benefits teachers and the unions (they also oppose merit pay for teachers, which says something).
In Korea, I often had classes with 80 students or more, the vast majority of who were highly motivated and hardworking. These classes often had (dirty) coal-fired heating in winter, obviously no air conditioning during summer and very spartan furnishings and supplies. In other words, resources were highly limited to say the least. Yet the students performed well, even superlatively.
I suppose one can discuss various cultural circumstances that differ in the two educational systems (in Korea, teachers are more respected, etc.). But the primary difference I saw was this: the level of parental involvement in education. Korean parents generally obsess about the education of their children. Many American parents do not. And it shows in the performance and behavior of their children. But what does this have anything to do with “Two Michelles”?
President-elect Barack Obama attended a private school in Hawaii. According to this stinging op-ed, he is reluctant to extend that opportunity and choice (i.e. school vouchers) to other black parents of lower income and, as I write this, the First Lady-to-be Michelle Obama is shopping for a suitable private school for their kids.
In fact, it seems that teachers — who are also opposed to low income parents having the choice of sending their kids to private schools — are more likely than the general public to send their own children to private schools too!
Black students disproportionately find themselves in under-performing schools. In fact, opinion polls by think tanks like the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies have found black parents favor vouchers by larger majorities than white parents do.Yet teachers unions lead opposition to such alternatives, even though studies like a 2004 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report find big city public school teachers to be more likely than the general population they serve to have their own children in private schools.
In Obama’s hometown, Chicago, for example, 38.7 percent of public school teachers sent their children to private schools, the Fordham study found, compared to 22.6 percent of the general public.
In Washington, D.C., 26.8 percent of public school teachers sent their children to private schools, versus 19.8 percent of the public.
And during the debate over the education issue, both candidates Obama and McCain cited the inconoclastic Korean-American Michelle Rhee, the Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public school system.
Unlike the other Michelle, however, this Michelle backs up her principles with action:
Michelle Obama offered a clue to what her family’s choice will be. She flew to Washington this week (Monday, Nov. 10) ahead of her husband and toured the private Georgetown Day School. Another clue: Their daughters currently attend a private school in Chicago. [Snip]
Chancellor Rhee, by contrast, is a 38-year-old single Korean-American mother with two young daughters in her troubled 46,000-student system. With the backing of Mayor Fenty, she has closed 23 schools, restructured 27 others, fired more than 250 teachers and dumped about one-third of the system’s principals. Still there’s more work to be done.
She recently put the critical question to a principal who was defending a teacher, according to Washington Post columnist Fred Hiatt: “Would you put your grandchild in that class?”
“If that’s the standard,” the principal replied, “we don’t have any effective teachers in my school.”
Rhee’s response: “That is the standard.”
In education, as in much else, some talk the talk and others walk the walk.
November 12th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Ms. Rhee also fired the principal of the school where she sends her two daughters. She didn’t get her fired, she fired her. I wonder if her two daughters would be in D.C. public schools if she didn’t have that kind of power.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Well, we can always wonder… and I’m sure the teachers know who the kids’ mom is. But the fact of the matter is, power or not, she chooses to send her kids to public schools whereas more than a quarter of the public school teachers in D.C. send their kids to private schools.
She could be like other powerful hypocrites who talk up public schools and send their kids to private schools. She just doesn’t.
November 12th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
” But the primary difference I saw was this: the level of parental involvement in education”
Exactly. And I would add that in Korean schools the discipline is much stricter. I put two kids through public schools in the US, and although my kids went to some “bad” schools, I didn’t blame the school or the teachers. I think they genuinely wanted to provide a quality education. But those schools are full of kids who don’t give a damn about their education, and spend their days raising hell and disrupting the classroom, preventing the good kids from getting an education. The teachers spend so much time babysitting these delinquents that they don’t have time to teach. My daughter (who is in high school now) is an A student, but she is an outcast among the student body becuase “cool” kids don’t study or pay attention in class. It is a constant battle to shore up here morale against the peer pressure from all the other kids in her school who are giving her grief for going to school and actually trying to learn something.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Absolutely. Although teachers don’t get to beat their students as they did during my day in Korea, parents still back up discipline from teachers. This is generally NOT the case in American public schools.
I remember when a Korean teacher of mine hit me for misbehavior in grade school. I told my mother about this travesty indignantly, and she took me hand in hand back to the teacher. I thought he would hear an earful from my mother.
Instead, to my utter surprise, she thanked him (!) and told him “Please do it more often” (!!!). As we left, the teacher had that “You are mine, now, buddy” look. I never misbehaved in his class again.
I am, of course, most certainly NOT suggesting that corporal punishment is warranted or effective (I have a mixed view of it in both moral and pragmatic terms). But my mother was hardly alone in respecting the teacher’s ability to control his own classroom and to expect good behavior out of his students (and to enforce discipline).
Now, while I do think that parents have the greatest impact on student performance, I have to say that the quality of public school teachers in the United States is often not good. Korean teachers were often star students during their own education. Many — and I am not suggesting all — American public school teachers seem to be “washouts” from other professions and are otherwise wedded to their own interests and union influence.
There was a shocking expose in Seattle a few years back in which teachers and coaches having sexual relationships with female students (obviously minors) were passed around different districts instead of being terminated. The schools did not want to fight the powerful unions. Very sad.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:08 am
James,
A very typical liberal Democratic hyprocracy in action. Even Chelsea Clinton attended private schools in DC. Sure Obama and Clinton had to say they do not support voucher program in front of liberal public teachers union to get their support.
I also went through very similar experience as a grade school student in Korea. I attended the class with 80 other kids but only half day due to shortage of class space from 7am to 12noon or from 12noon to 5pm.
November 14th, 2008 at 3:57 am
While I wholeheartedly agree that the US education system is flawed, as a public high school teacher in Korea, I have to say that there are serious flaws in this educational system.
Cheating is much more common (and not looked upon with the same disdain as in the US) and creativity is generally non-existent. Korean students are world-class when it comes to memorization, but often lack the ability to problem solve and analyze data.
And don’t get me started on the pro-Pyongyang teachers union, brainwashing the kids with their anti-American rhetoric.
I guess I’m just saying the grass is always greener…
November 14th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Sure, sometimes things do look greener on the other side… sometimes it IS because the other side is greener.
I am not convinced that cheating is less common in the United States. In particular, I have seen (firsthand) and heard reports of much cheating at highly competitive schools in America. I think, to some extent, prevalence of cheating is tied to the level of competition and the amount of pressure pupils face.
Generally, that competitive pressure is much more intense at Korean secondary schools, so I would not be surprised if there were more cheating. But I would like to see some concrete numbers to establish that.
As for the leftist anti-American teachers unions, that’s not unique to Korea. American teachers unions can be quite leftist, quite anti-American, anti-religion, anti… you get the point.
As for this notion that Koreans students are great at rote memorization but poor at “problem solving and analysis,” I have yet to see any evidence for this. That is certainly what some Americans claim. But it is hard to subscribe to this rather popular notion when Korean high school students excel in math and science competitions, subjects that require far more than simple, rote memorization and, in fact, dig deeply into problem solving skills.
I think the American teaching ideology of “teach them to think, not to memorize” is flawed. More and more research has shown that young children need a substantial “database” of facts before they can learn to relate one to another. In other words, they need to build up their knowledge base of reading, writing, arithmetic, followed by geography, history, and so on, before they can become adept at abstract thinking.
Recent research shows that abstract thinking and knowledge (accumulation or memorized facts) cannot be isolated and that the two are very strongly tied.
The Korean public education system up to the secondary level has some rigidity and uniformity that I do not particularly care for, and the jury is out on whether the high degree of competition (exam hell) is, in the end, healthy for the students’ mental development. Nonetheless, overall, I think it serves the education of the children (after all, that IS what the school system is purportedly for) better than most American public schools.
After all, you can’t develop much creativity or problem solving if many of your high schoolers can barely read at 5th grade level.
Now, the university systems of the two countries — that’s a different story entirely. Perhaps I will write about that in the future.
November 15th, 2008 at 4:27 am
I’ve been in two state’s educational systems: California and New Jersey. I’ve looked up the recent spending for my two respective high schools.
The California high school spent $4,000 per pupil.
The New Jersey high school spent $18,000 per pupil.
The NJ high school had somewhat better scores for white and black students, however the socioeconomic base is completely different: bedroom communities, basically. The top students came from the town with the highest income. (For the record, Asian students topped academically at the California high school, despite the relatively low-spending per pupil.)
The California teachers’ union clearly has nothing on the NJ teachers’ union. They hemorrhage money like a Russian prince hemorrhage’s blood.
November 15th, 2008 at 8:03 am
[...] is even more discussion on this topic by James Na over at DPRK Studies which also brings up some good points about the differences between the US and Korean educational [...]
November 15th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I have taught in two Title I (60%+ free and reduced lunch) US public schools. Tagging on to James Na’s point about parental involvement, the most significant difference I see is not the teachers, the curriculum, the teaching methods, or the facilities, but the students themselves and their home and community environments. I am an ESOL teacher who works with both LEP kids and low SES kids in an after-school program for at-risk students. Some of these kids come from homes where drugs are or were used. Some bear permanent damage from being exposed to drugs in their mother’s wombs. Some kids have to get themselves up and out the door because their custodial parent spent the night elsewhere. Most US city schools have breakfast programs because otherwise, some kids wouldn’t eat in the morning. Parental neglect more than poverty is the problem. Some have to be sent to the nurse for clean, properly fitting clothes. Nearly every city school, including ours, has family preservation, child protective services, or some other family/child agency staff on site to support these children. I’m pretty sure most Korean urban schools don’t have such personnel because they don’t need it.
As an ESOL teacher, I am struck by the differences between my mostly low SES students and their counterparts from non-immigrant families. My children come to school in clean clothes, bright smiles, and the girls often sport meticulously styled braids. They look well-cared for. Hispanic parents aren’t known for their strict discipline, but by and large, they are fit parents.
My ESOL children are generally well-behaved. I just don’t see the hardcore non-compliant children who pose a challenge to classroom teachers. I suspect diet might be one reason why. Immigrant children are more likely to eat meals prepared from whole foods at home and less likely to eat out of bags, cans, and jars. I don’t have a link off-hand, but I recall reading about an alternative school for behaviorally challenged children in Minnesota switching from standard cafeteria fare to freshly made meals from scratch. Discipline infractions dropped about 30%. Diet is another important difference between Korean children and US children, a critical difference that starts even before conception. No wonder our average IQ is about 7 points lower than that of Koreans. It’s not the genes. It’s the diet and home/community environment.
All this talk about school choice and vouchers ignores the reality that the neediest children are the least likely to benefit because either their caregivers lack initiative to get involved in their children’s education or because schools won’t take them.
November 15th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Yep, yep, yep. Although I am an ESOL teacher, I provide math remediation to both LEP and non-LEP students. When these kids start performing more complex arithmetic in third and fourth grade, they get frustrated and make a lot of mistakes because they can’t add 4+7 or multiply 3×5 in their heads. They have to count on their fingers, make tally marks, or draw arrays to do basic computation. The long time spent drawing out 4×6 distracts them from the main problem, and they have to refocus once they’ve figured out the answer that any kid who’s memorized the times tables can spit out immediately. A principal once argued to me that kids make mistakes when they rely on memory. I responded that kids make mistakes when they tally or draw, too. Kids don’t know basic math facts because teachers have been explicitly discouraged from doing fact drills. Some teachers and math education professors have finally figured out that kids need both algorithms and more abstract concepts to be successful in math, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward the center.
Spelling and writing are another weak area. They’re not tested on state achievement tests, so by necessity, teachers devote little time on instruction in these skills. Like math facts, spelling involves a fair bit of memorization, which is still out in the cold.
November 15th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Sonagi,
You make some interesting and thoughtful points that reflect your experience from the frontline of public education.
When I wrote earlier about “abstract vs. memorization,” the main example that came first to my mind was exactly what you cited — the multiplication table. My mother had me memorize that long before I was taught multiplication at school, and once I internalized that, as if by instinct through repeated memorization exercises (”Sam-Sam-Goo, Sam-Sah-Sip-Yee, Sam-Oh-Sip-Oh,” or to non-Korean speakers “3-3-9, 3-4-12, 3-5-15,” etc.), more complex equations were made much easier.
Later on, when I made a little side money tutoring Korean grade schoolers while attending high school and college, I noticed that this method I learned from my mother produced far better progress among my pupils than what the they learned from their own math teachers at school — essentially an abstract look at multiplication.
Another example is language. I picked up English rather quickly compared to most Korean 1.5 gens, and I owe that mostly to my father who forced me to learn 1) as many English words as possible and 2) imitate every English word I heard.
He could not care less for grammar, that is to say, how one word relates to another in a sentence. He was multilingual and he had picked up most of his languages (aside from Korean, English, German, Japanese, Swedish, Mandarin Chinese and few others less fluently) by intensely learning vocabulary first.
Once I acquired the ability to understand a wide variety of English words, learning grammar was much easier and more comprehensible. Other Koreans who started with grammar first and learned vocabulary along the way often struggled with the language as they would strain their brains trying to form the right sentence structure rather than develop instinctive mental pictures of the words they heard and were trying to use.
However, I disagree with the above point. School choice/vouchers are not designed to save children whose parents just do not care or are habitual drug addicts, etc. They are designed to save children whose parents do care, but are trapped by socio-economic circumstances to (currently) only one option that fails their kids.
They are also designed to weed out (and frankly force closure of) failing public schools where, by market force of sorts, there would be inevitable exodus of students by their parents once they get a choice.
As for the poor, sad children whose parents do not care, I am not sure whether the state/public schools can do much for them. Throwing vast amount of public money won’t really salvage them from their most influential environment — as you pointed out (and with which I agree), their parents and their homes.
Also, I would like to know what you think about the role of the teachers union in the United States.
During the recent election, I was irritated, but certainly not surprised, to find out that one of the largest givers (some say the largest giver) to the “Say No to Prop 8″ movement in California was the teachers union. Whatever one may think of homosexual marriages, is it really the place of teachers union to spend its membership dues — themselves derived from the public purse — on that issue?
November 15th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
TESOL professor and researcher Keith Folse wrote a great book called Vocabulary Myths, in which he uses research to draw conclusions about what works and doesn’t work in teaching vocabulary. In his introduction, he highlights the importance of vocabulary by pointing out that without grammar, one can say very little but without vocabulary one can say nothing.
Sadly I would agree. Our school’s behavior intervention strategies have established a climate conducive to learning, but there are some high needs children who do not respond to any of the strategies. Some of our future tax dollars will be used to incarcerate these children when they become older.
I have worked in a union state and a non-union state but not long enough in either to make a judgment other than to note that some of my colleagues have grumbled about Virginia’s “right to work” laws against unions.
I recall reading an international survey of teacher salaries relative to average wages in the country. Korea came out on top; that is, Korean teachers make good wages relative to other workers in other occupations. The US was somewhere in the middle.
I question your perception about so many teachers being career switchers. I don’t know how representative my small city school is, but most of the staff, including myself, are lifelong educators. Elementary education in particular is highly competitive with hundreds of applicants for each vacancy in schools in middle-class communities. The sad truth that Michelle Rhee learned a long time ago is that kids who most need a competent teacher are the least likely to be taught by one. Our principal has high expectations, and I would evaluate our teaching staff as good to outstanding. I suspect that most would not be willing to teach in DC or Prince Georges schools because of the multiple stresses. Rhee’s biggest challenge isn’t firing principals and teachers but finding competent replacements. Rhee’s proposed voluntary probation merit contract is fair, and it is unfortunate that the DC teachers’ union is fighting it. If our country expects teachers to work in unsafe, high-stress environments, it needs to compensate just as soldiers get hazard pay for combat assignments. However, there needs to be accountability to ensure that the teachers are worth the extra money.
November 15th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
And one more thing:
Agree, agree, agree based on my experience teaching Korean students at an international school in China. Korean students sneered during math lessons that they had already learned that content one or two years ago. The Western teachers would remark in staff meetings that Korean kids were good at computation but not at problem-solving. I argued loudly that this was not the case. I shared observations of my fourth grade students huddled together excitedly discussing math problems in Korean. A language barrier was the reason why Korean students struggled with story problems and mathematical reasoning questions.
“But the problems are translated into Korean,” protested the Western teachers.
“Translated by other students who may not have translated accurately, especially the “explain your thinking” type questions,” I countered. “In class, I have given bilingual Korean students the option of either translating themselves or letting me try. They often defer to me, a non-native speaker, because while they understand the question, it’s hard to phrase it in Korean.”
I was unsuccessful in persuading these teachers, who clung to the stereotype of robotic Asian learners, a stereotype that bugs the heck out of me. Fourteen years of teaching Koreans in Korea, China, and the US has given me a healthy dose of respect for Korean students in diverse learning environments.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:57 am
Many thanks to Mr. James J. Na and Sonagi 선생님 for their very fine dialogue on the current state of public education in these United States. Much endorse the vocabulary-centric approach to language learning, principally through extensive reading, which inculcates vocabulary through context. Grammar studies have their place, principally as agents of calcification of grammatical patterns which should have developed through..extensive reading.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
I believe the “privacy” factor is probably weighed heavier in choosing private schools over public for the Obamas and not necessarily which schools will provide a better education for their daaughters. That’s HUGE when you consider these are the daughters of the president of the US (or even senator of Illinois).
I know Bloomberg “tries” to walk the walk by taking subways to work and I know his security team spend more money accomodating this behavior.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Of course, soldiers do not have unions.
But I agree with the idea of merit pay coupled with accountability, which sounds very… free market. I am convinced that the idea would NEVER be accepted by any union.
By the way, there is a little update on Rhee’s plan for DC at the top of the entry.
November 20th, 2008 at 6:43 am
People talk on about unions, yet unions are prevalent mainly in the north and in the west. Teachers in my non-union state rejected a proposal for an alternative merit pay system because of a number of concerns, such as the criteria for evaluation. The teachers that sat on the committee were highly competent and easily would have passed any probation. Among their concerns was the use of student test data. Although the school tries to balance the class rosters, inevitably every year some teachers end up with more high needs children than others.
November 30th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Another update at the top. Rhee, although a self-declared Democrat, apparently does not think highly of Democrats or teachers unions on education!
December 1st, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Also, regarding this “Korean students cheat more” business, here is an article about increases in cheating, lying and theft among American students: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113001906.html
The key variable seems to be, as I pointed out earlier, increased pressure — to save money, to get into the right universities, to do better athletically, etc.
December 4th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Interesting, very interesting. I was an emergency math teacher in LA CA before coming to Japan. I teach English here. As a member of the LA teachers union, and living and teaching and attending workshops, I share many of the thought expressed here. As to the original theme of this article, the hypocrisy or not of Michelle Obama. I was going to move into another neighborhood in order to qualify for our daughters to attend the school I intended to teach full time at. You have to know the environment (who is the principal, who are the teachers what kind of PTA exists). And all that could change VERY Quickly if a highly sought after principal leaves the school. Whereas here in Japan it doesn’t take much brain power to aim your kid for East Public High School of whatever town you live in. The statistic that public school teachers put their kids in private school, to me shows that teachers value education more than the average American member of the public does. If public schools were a safe, no-nonsense place that attracted teachers who were excited about learning and teaching, the private schools would not be such a factor.