Thoughts on business, engineering and higher education

"Hollowing Out The Middle"

I recently finished reading "Hollowing out the middle: The rural brain drain and what it means for America" by Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas. It is a thin book (172 pages without counting the lengthy notes and references at the end) which raises as many questions as it answers, but it provides a fascinating glimpse into the life of small-town America by studying an Iowa town the authors lived in for several months in 2001, using funding provided by the MacArthur Foundation. (Carr and Kefalas are associate professors in sociology at Rutgers and St Joseph's University, respectively.)

The name of the town has been disguised to protect residents' privacy, as the authors say it is customary to do in their field; surprisingly, they have one slip-up toward the middle of the book, although this might simply be another fictitious name they had chosen for the town in an earlier version of the work, which was many years in the making. Suffice it to say that the town, which counts a little over 2,000 residents, is in the middle of nowhere - one hour away from the closest mall and eighty miles from the closest Starbucks. (It seems that many Iowa towns have fewer residents than "Ellis" - if you download the files about cities in the state of Iowa from this US Census Bureau page, and rank cities by increasing order of estimated population in 2006, you will notice there are almost 800 "incorporated places", to use the census bureau's terminology, out of about 950 with population less than 2,000. Only 10 have a population higher than 40,000.) All this to say "Ellis" is not an atypical town by far.

One of the most important contributions of the book is the characterization of residents into four groups:

1. Achievers are A+ high school students who use college as a way to escape small-town life and don't come back, except to visit their family.
2. Stayers don't go to college, and sometimes don't even graduate from high school. They quickly transition into adult life, get married and have children at a young age. They are enticed to work at the nearby factory by wages that their seventeen-year-old selves find quite high, but they fail to realize that there is almost no opportunity for advancement, i.e., they will make little more than that twenty years later. 
3. Seekers either don't have the Achievers' grades or don't have the money to afford a college education, but want to discover the world (or at least the rest of the country) beyond their small town, and use military service to that effect.
4. Returners are either High-Flyers ("twenty-somethings who return to small towns armed with college degrees and entrepreneurial ambitions"), or Boomerangs ("former enlisted men and women who move back to Iowa after leaving the armed forces and the mostly female graduates of community colleges").

The authors spend most of the book describing these four categories in detail, and end with their reflections on what can be done to save rural America. They point out the apparent contradiction of lavishing so many resources on Achiever-type students, who are bound to leave town, while neglecting Stayer-type students, who will make the bulk of the local workforce and therefore play a critical role in small towns' survival. (Small towns die, for instance, when there are no longer enough students to keep the school open.)

The authors comment on some of Richard Florida's theories (the Florida of The Rise of the Creative Class fame) and their applicability to rural America. In particular, they wonder "whether creative towns can be conjured in places that have been largely emptying out." In addition, "most creative-class counties are in metropolitan areas [...] most nonmetro creative counties are found in New England and in the Mountain West states such as Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah." It is "difficult to see how Heartland small towns will compete with areas in the West that have more abundant outdoor amenities such as mountains, hiking trails, and ski resorts." Another issue Carr and Kefalas mention is that some small towns may not have the high-speed Internet access the creative class has come to rely on, and which has become a necessity to compete in a global world. The authors' key recommendation is to revamp the rural educational system to better serve the non-college-bound student population, a recommendation they detail at some length.

Serious PhD Comics

PhD Comics usually makes me laugh, but the latest strips struck a darker note. They are apparently based on the author's real-life experience at the detention facility at Heathrow Airport. Please read for yourself: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Thankfully, the story has a happy ending.

For a PhD Comic strip in the usual comic vein, I predict this recent addition ("Vacation relaxation?") will soon become a classic.

Teaching science to K-8 students

The September/October 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind has an article on how "recent studies from neuroscience and psychology suggest ways to improve science education in the U.S." ("A new vision for teaching science," by J. Randy McGinnis and Deborah Roberts-Harris) The authors quote the results of the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which found that "the average science score of U.S. 15-year-olds dropped below that of teens in 28 out of 57 participating countries." (This Excel file from the OECD website contains much more information on the results, for those of you who are interested.)

The authors summarize the findings of two recent reports, "Taking science to school" and "Ready, Set, Science!", which advocate an absolute (rather than relative to other countries) level of science proficiency based on the following four targets:

1. "students must be able to know, use and interpret scientific explanations of the natural world,"
2. "they must be able to generate and evaluate scientific evidence and explanations,"
3. "they must be able to understand the nature and development of scientific knowledge,"
4. "they must be able to participate meaningfully in scientific activities and discourse."

Two points the authors make particularly resonated with me:

• Science is currently packaged to students as "a collection of unproblematic facts", leading students to believe that "most knowledge results from direct observation." This gives them a distorted image of what scientists do and deprives them of the excitement of discovering knowledge.
• "[T]he most successful route to mastery in any subject follows a spiral path, in which students regularly revisit and refine their conceptual underpinnings [of a topic across grade levels]." This has been called a "spiral curriculum" in the education literature and builds upon the fact that "students master an idea more readily when they have some foundation of knowledge to build on."

According to the authors, even young children can develop abstract thinking skills in an age-appropriate fashion; it was previously believed, because of a 1958 (that is, five decades old!) study, that "no form of instruction could hasten the onset - typically at age 12 - of logical thinking." This led to the current focus on memorization, rather than understanding, for elementary and middle school students. But new studies show that this development really depends on "a child's prior learning experiences."

The article is full of valuable information, including: comments on the weaknesses of the U.S. science curriculum ("the [U.S.] curricula lay out too many discrete pieces of knowledge, with no hierarchy or meaningful sequencing [...] countries that teach fewer topics overall produce higher scores" in the PISA study), an example of how the reports' recommendations can be incorporated into a fifth-grade science class, and potential issues that could slow down the adoption of these groundbreaking ideas.

On reading workshops

The New York Times ran an article in late August about a new trend in education: letting middle school students decide which books they want to read in class ("A new assignment: pick books you like", August 29, 2009, by Motoko Rich). The students do not choose books for the whole group; instead, they select the book they are going to read on their own and discuss it with their teacher. This approach is known as "reading workshop", and predictably generates a wide range of book selections (from young-adult chick-lit to "The Bluest eye" by Nobel-Prize winner Toni Morrison), as well as heated discussions among educators about the dumbing down of reading, in a futile attempt to make it more enjoyable for students who simply do not care.

Opponents say that the tradition of reading a novel as a class "builds a shared literary culture among students, exposes all readers to works of quality and complexity and is the best way to prepare students for standardized tests"; of those three arguments, I found the second one most convincing. (According to the NYT, students' choices in the reading workshop included "James Patterson's adrenaline-fueled “Maximum Ride” books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the “Captain Underpants” series of comic-book-style novels.") Proponents of the reading workshop argue that "[l]etting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading." (To which one wants to retort that a lifelong love of reading People is not necessarily better than not reading at all. Thankfully, the rest of the article did an excellent job convincing me that the approach has merit, when students are offered a limited amount of choice in their book selection and the teacher still nudges them toward high-quality works. More on that below.)

While I find myself opposed to students reading comic-book-style novels in English class, I do not care for "the classics". I was never forced to read the American classics, since I only arrived in this country for graduate school, and I've never particularly missed not reading Moby Dick. (Here is what I've picked up about the book from my extensive other readings: (1) it has a famous opening line, "Call me Ishmael", (2) the narrator, Ishmael, is a sailor on Captain Ahab's ship, (3) Captain Ahab is obsessed with finding a whale called Moby Dick, (4) the book is lengthy and full of digressions. Now, do I really need to know more than that?)

In my case, I had to read the French classics, by Balzac, Zola, Hugo, and other luminaries who have left their mark on French literature. I don't remember whether I enjoyed reading them or not, mostly because I was already reading so many books outside school that I didn't pay much attention to what I had to do for French class; fifteen years later, I read almost exclusively nonfiction books written by contemporary authors, and it is hard to tell whether the French classics I was forced to read as a fifteen-year-old have had a measurable influence on my considerable reading in the English language.

I read very little fiction, and I believe high schools should consider a broader range of reading materials, such as inspiring biographies and even articles from the best newspapers and magazines, to help students develop an interest in reading. I am not sure whether English courses would be an appropriate venue for that, but the best biographies have plenty of excellent writing and could provide a wonderful way for teachers to show students how to analyze the facts, ask pertinent questions and not take everything at face value.

But after its somewhat extreme example of reading workshop, the NYT journalist moves on to a more convincing illustration of the approach, in the classroom of the founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. Students and teacher "gave short talks recommending books"; "[d]espite the student freedom, [the teacher] constantly fed suggestions to the children. She was strict about not letting them read what she considered junk. [...] But she acknowledged that certain children needed to be nudged into books by allowing them to read popular titles". Some research studies indicate that "giving children limited choices from a classroom collection of books on a topic helped improve performance on standardized reading comprehension tests."

Then the journalist returns to the teacher introduced at the beginning of the article, showing her in her reading workshop and giving us more details about her work, and we start sharing the woman's enthusiasm for a new approach that could engage her students more deeply and make them lifelong readers. (That woman was so dedicated that she "spent about $1,000 of her own money buying books.") The first few paragraphs of the article brushed over the teacher's efforts, making it easy to dismiss her method as absurd and move on to another news item; by the third page, though, I found myself rooting for her and delighted to read that "[o]f her 18 eighth graders, 15 exceeded requirements, scoring in the highest bracket. When the same students had been in her seventh-gradeclass, only 4 had reached that level." I hope most NYT readers will have stuck with the article to the end, to see what a wonderful, dedicated educator that woman is, and how much potential lies in reading workshops.

Shutting Off Opportunities

Paul Krugman has an insightful op-ed in the October 8 issue of the New York Times, entitled "The Uneducated American." He argues that America's economic success is linked to the quality of its educational system; the funding of public education, however, has suffered from "the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars."

I did not know that "these days young Americans are considerably less likely than young people in many other countries to graduate from college," but a 2007 article from Inside Higher Ed provides many statistics to support that claim, including: "Although the United States ranks among the top 5 countries in the proportion of young people who enroll in college, it ranks 16th in the proportion who finish college." In 2001, the New York Times wrote: "For the first time, the United States' college graduation rate, now at 33 percent, is not the world's highest. Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Britain have surpassed it." (As an aside, that article starts as follows: "Teachers in the United States earn less relative to national income than their counterparts in many industrialized countries, yet they spend far more hours in front of the classroom, according to a major new international study." But I digress.)

Also, 29,000 of the 273,000 jobs lost last month were in state and local education, "bringing the total losses in that category over the past five months to 143,000." This is surprising because education is usually viewed as a safe sector during recessions, on the grounds that children always need to be educated. Krugman points out that "education is mainly the responsibility of state and local governments, which are in dire fiscal straits. [...] As a result, education is on the chopping block." This has had dire consequences for college students from families with limited means, who can't afford to pay thousands of dollars in tuition fees for four years, and sometimes spend two years at community colleges before transferring into a public school for their junior year. (See this October 2009 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.) More than most, those students rely on education to give them a better future, and are deprived of this opportunity by the current budget crisis.

In related news, BusinessWeek ran an article earlier this month about how the economic crisis is affecting young people's career prospects. It echoes many of the themes we have heard throughout the summer; see these two old posts of mine for more details: Post 1, Post 2. About Post 2 - I wonder how some of the graduates who turned down offers because they believed a better job would come along are faring now. Companies are definitely hiring college students; the first-round interviews at Lehigh are in full swing and some second-round interviews are already taking place. But entry-level hiring is a highly choreographed enterprise, where students submit their resume through the school's career portal and first-round interviews happen on campus. It is not clear whether last year's unemployed graduates looking to fill one of these positions can attract the attention of the human resources departments through any other channel. Hopefully universities, some of which have garnered praise for their efforts to help jobless alumni, let them return to campus for the career fairs and give them access to the same resources they would have if they had stayed in college for a fifth year.

BusinessWeek concludes: "The unemployment crisis among the young is not as dramatic as the financial crisis of a year ago. But it may turn out to have longer-lasting effects."

It's the smart people's fault, stupid!

I read the op-ed "Wall Street Smarts" in the New York Times this morning, where Calvin Trillin recalls a conversation he recently had at a bar with a gentleman who offered to give him the reason "why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008." The reason can be stated as follows: "The financial system nearly collapsed because smart guys had started working on Wall Street."

The stranger observed that "income [among attendees of his 25th college reunion] was now precisely in inverse proportion to academic standing in the class" - in part because A+ students tend to go to graduate school and earn, as judges or professors, much less than the average Wall Street employee. (There is a case to be made about enjoying intellectual pursuits and the feeling of contributing to society instead of purely monetary rewards, but Trillin has a point.)

Trillin then provides some reasons as to why smart people started working on Wall Street, as explained to him by this anonymous bar patron. I particularly liked the following quote: "When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich[.]"

This echoes Felix Salmon's conclusions in his Wired article, "Recipe for disaster: The formula that killed Wall Street," about which I wrote here. While Salmon did not comment on the academic prowess, or lack thereof, of the quants' managers, he did write: "[T]he managers empowered to apply the brakes didn't understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop."

As an academic, I did appreciate the point that the stranger in Trillin's column makes about top students focusing on lesser-paid intellectual endeavors. Most professors like to encourage their star undergraduates to give graduate school a try, although of course, as people who have trodden down the academic path and presumably found satisfaction in that career choice (otherwise we would no longer be there), we might not be the most objective advice-givers.

At the same time, I do feel that super-star students are more at risk of disillusionment than most when they enter the workforce, in part because they have to work with, and sometimes work for, people who are not as "on top of things" as they are. Of course, I have had many outstanding students thrive in industry too (Lehigh students are famously well-rounded), so the situation is a lot more nuanced than "average students can face the real world but top ones can't," but the lack of interference from higher-ups does play a role in the appeal of academia, and maybe of judgeships too. There is certainly a financial price to pay for this greater freedom. I like to think, though, that the greater freedom (flexibility in work hours, autonomy in research topics, choice of research assistants), and of course the feeling of contributing to the greater good, are rewards big enough.

In any case, Trillin's column is wonderfully written and I encourage everyone to read it.

E-learning in high schools: the BLOSSOMS project

(Today's post is a re-run of a post I wrote as a blogger for the INFORMS annual meeting in San Diego.)

I attended the semi-plenary by MIT’s Richard Larson this (Sunday) afternoon, on an initiative, called BLOSSOMS, that he recently started with other educators using funding provided by the Hewlett-Packard Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. BLOSSOMS stands for Blended Learning Science or Math Studies and is spearheaded by MIT LINC (Learning International Networks Consortium).

The idea behind BLOSSOMS is to develop videos about science topics that high school teachers show in the classroom. A key aspect of the videos is that they are cut into well-defined parts (the screen fades to black between segments) to allow teachers to discuss the ideas presented in the footage with their students, before starting the video again. Larson explained that he (and the other people involved with the project) views the videos as “teaching duets” between the educator who is shown on the screen – professor or graduate student – and the teacher & his or her students in the classroom.

I particularly liked Larson’s point that some high school teachers dislike any environment that takes students out of the classroom and in front of a computer for one-on-one interactions. They do not want to be bypassed, for understandable reasons. So while BLOSSOMS’s videos can be downloaded from the Internet, they are also available on CD-ROMs and videotapes. The “teaching duets” are designed to create a high level of engagement in the classroom and keep the teacher in control.

Another interesting aspect of the project is that educators in partner countries – especially Jordan and Pakistan – have also contributed their share of videos. This is important because members of developing countries wanted to take an integral part in creating this online repository, and not just receive videos from the US telling them how to teach this or that subject, no matter how good the videos are. Jordan and Pakistan have some excellent professors too, who have thus been busy creating videos for high school audiences.

Larson treated us to a video showing his former graduate student, Karima Nigmatulina PhD’09, introducing graph theory to an intended high school audience through the famous problems of the seven bridges of Königsberg and the Chinese Postman Problem. It is important to note that the videos are not only aimed at schoolchildren in far-away countries, but also at high school students in the US. Because the Ministries of Education, both in Jordan and Pakistan, have been highly supportive of the project, it has been easier to spread the word about BLOSSOMS there than in the US, where education is not as centralized and curricula are determined at a state level. To quote this afternoon’s slides, the overarching goal is to “give every young person a quality education regardless of his or her place of birth.”

The videos also include teachers’ guides, which explain the activities recommended in the videos in more details; in addition, transcripts are available on the BLOSSOMS website. (I believe that some of the videos, possibly all, are also translated in Arabic.) As a next step, Larson plans to move the site to a Web 2.0 version where viewers would be able to comment on the videos and rate them, to better showcase the videos that are judged outstanding by users. But what he would particularly like is for other INFORMS members to create operations research modules for BLOSSOMS – operations research is a great way to get teenagers interested about math using practical problems. Of course, INFORMS members would not be left to their own devices. For more information in contributing a video, please click here and here.

The Spellings Commission Report on the Future of US Higher Education

Here are a few highlights from the 2006 Spellings Committee Report on the future of US higher education, which I recently found online:

• "We acknowledge that not everyone needs to go to college. But everyone needs a postsecondary education. Indeed, we have seen ample evidence that some form of postsecondary instruction is increasingly vital to an individual's economic security."
• "While many Americans still envision the typical undergraduate as an 18- to 22-year-old with a recently acquired high school diploma attending classes at a four-year institution, the facts are more complex. Of the nation's nearly 14 million undergraduates, more than four in ten attend two-year community colleges. Nearly one third are older than 24 years old. Forty percent are enrolled part time."
• "Ninety percent of the fastest-growing jobs in the new knowledge-driven economy will require some postsecondary education. Already, the median earnings of a US worker with only a high school diploma are 37 percent less than those of a worker with a bachelor's degree."

The name "Spellings" will be familiar to some: Margaret Spellings was the Secretary of Education under the previous administration of President George W. Bush and played an instrumental role in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which "requires all public schools to administer a state-wide standardized test annually". Although the act was passed "overwhelmingly" with the help of a "bipartisan coalition" (source: this article dated May 24, 2001 in the New York Times), it has now become controversial enough for even House Republicans to consider "leaving 'No Child' behind", as this Washington Post article dated July 13, 2009 could not resist putting in its headline.

According to this USA Today article from February 2009, Margaret Spellings will "remain until 2010, spending part of her time burnishing Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which is due for reauthorization." She also says that "she's confident her successor, former Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan, will keep the law's core goal intact: closing the achievement gap between middle-class and poor children." In a conversation with a ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, as described in the Post, Duncan said that "he wants to push for higher academic standards but giving schools more flexibility to achieve them."

As for the Spellings Committee Report, here are a couple of interesting points it raises regarding US higher education:

1. "Substandard high school preparation [...] often creates an "expectation gap" between what colleges require and what high schools produce." (p.1 of the report, which is p.17 of the PDF file)
2. "Although the proportion of high school graduates who go on to college has risen substantially in recent decades, the college completion rate has failed to improve at anywhere near the same pace." (p.1)
3. Affordability is of course a concern, even more so now than in 2006 when the report was written. "In our view, affordability is directly affected by a financing system that provides limited incentives for colleges and universities to take aggressive steps to improve institutional efficiency and productivity." (p.3)
4. The commission also proposes restructuring the confusing financial aid system and increasing need-based financial aid. (p.3)
5. "Employers report repeatedly that many new [college] graduates they hire are not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today's workplaces." (p.3)

Spellings also gives important statistics in this speech: "only nine percent of low-income students earn a college degree by age 24, compared with 75 percent of students from wealthier families" and "only 10 percent of Hispanic students earn a bachelor's degree by age 29". This is referred to as "significant attainment gaps between white and Asian students and black and Hispanic students" in the Spellings report.

Overall, I felt the report made good comments on the current state of higher education, but I was left unconvinced it would push anyone to action. The recommendations it outlines are rather vague; besides, colleges and universities are more likely to change in order to create some kind of competitive advantage than because a governmental report told them to. But it is good to have this information out there, so that students and parents can ask more informed questions.

A High School Teacher Who Quit

The Washington Post recently published an article by one Sarah Fine, former young DC schoolteacher, who quit after four years on the job and wrote an article explaining why (Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I Just Can't Stay, August 9, 2009).

She describes being drawn to the teaching profession because of her grandmother's example and her own desire to have an impact. ("Urban classrooms struck me as seductively gritty, and it only seemed right that I "give back" after spending 22 years in a suburban, Ivy League bubble.") She does not come across as someone who picked that career path half-heartedly, and certainly not as someone who considered that quitting was an option when she first signed up for the job. Her resignation fills her with guilt ("By throwing in the towel, I have become one more teacher abandoning her students.") Yet, she stands by her choice.

She gives the following reasons for her decision to quit:

1. Burnout. How many inexperienced young people have launched into a new endeavor with great hopes of changing the world, only to become tired and disabused? Public high schools are a particularly harsh environment, even with dedicated teachers. They can only do so much when many students' reading and math skills are far below their grade level. ("Of the 130 freshmen who entered the school [where she was teaching] in 2005, about 50 graduated this spring." That's a 38.4% graduation rate.)
2. "[T]he way that some people, mostly non-teachers, talk about the profession." Ms Fine feels that she has to justify her career choice much more often than if she had opted to go into business or law. "When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it's unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. [...] [I]t's not for the ambitious." Someone on a plane told her that career path was "nice". In the end, being "systematically undervalued" hurt her feelings the most.

While the media has popularized the image of the young teacher winning over students from gritty neighborhoods and leading them to success against the odds (see, e.g., Hillary Swank's Freedom Writers or Michelle Pfeiffer's Dangerous Minds), Ms Fine's disillusions reminded me of the other "big idea" in teaching, namely, using retirees who want to give back to society after a successful career outside education. I wrote about this in March 2007. The idea has proved popular in the math and science fields, which are plagued by a shortage of instructors but could be taught by former scientists or engineers.

While these techies would require some guidance to manage their classrooms and design grade-appropriate lectures, they would know the technical part of the material very well and would be less sensitive to issues that weigh down younger hires, such as the potential futility of their efforts. Retiree-teachers would have already proven themselves in the workforce, and would not let others define them solely by their teaching career. (A drawback: they might get even more frustrated with the administration, building on their own real-life experiences to come up with better ideas on how to run the school.)

High school teaching might become more and more a second career or even a part-time job - something people do after, or in addition to, pursuing another path. Then maybe people will be able to focus on its rewards without being constantly reminded of its position at the bottom of the prestige ladder.

Sadly, the talents of enthusiastic twenty-somethings like Ms Fine or of former-scientists-turned-teachers might not be best put to use in public high schools from blighted neighborhoods, or charter schools like the one Ms Fine worked at. If the students are already so far behind that only a third of freshmen will finish high school, an Ivy League graduate full of the best intentions probably isn't going to make much of a difference. (Ms Fine got her BA in English from Harvard with highest honors. According to this page, she "focused on 20th century poetry"; "[b]eyond language arts, her teaching experience has been in the fields of environmental science, outdoor education, and classical music.") If anything, I suspect the average high achiever becomes frustrated more quickly with the job, because he can't replace the status he enjoyed as a Yale or Harvard or UPenn student (high school kids won't suddenly turn their life around because he wants them to), status he lost when he selected a career path many of his classmates look down upon. (This statement is not meant as a reference to Ms Fine, whom I do not know and had never heard from before.)

Maybe Ms Fine would still be in the profession she seemed to love so much if she had applied to work elsewhere. Teaching at a solid suburban school certainly sounds less glamorous than reaching to inner-city kids - it does not make Hollywood material and might not appeal to Ms Fine's generation, with its big dreams of saving the world. It can, however, tremendously affect the lives of the middle-class students who are encouraged to apply to colleges when they don't realize admission is within reach, discover an interest in a field they end up majoring in, get higher SAT scores because of the better training and possibly better financial aid packages, and so on. This is not the "sexy", let's-change-the-world kind of work young people are attracted to, but it matters too.

I do absolutely love success stories where kids from disadvantaged families get admitted to top colleges, beat the odds, and ultimately lead very productive lives. (See this post of mine, among others.) My point is not to take the good teachers who are not burnt out away from the inner-city kids who need them and place them in suburban schools instead. It is that, if you are an Ivy League graduate and high school teacher looking for an impact in someone's life, and you are growing disillusioned with your work at a charter school, maybe you should come to peace with the fact there is nothing dishonorable in trying to get good kids from good schools to fulfill their potential. Instead, Ms Fine "plan[s] to travel, write and try not to think too much about what [she has] left behind." I don't feel sorry for her.