Chipotle's Menu Change Should Excite Vegetarians

Vegans and vegetarians will soon be able to chow down on Chipotle's pinto beans at any of the chain's U.S. stores. Previously, the beans were made with a small amount of bacon. But no longer.

Consumerist shared a picture announcing the recipe change at one Chipotle location and confirmed with a spokesman that the new beans will get a national rollout.

“We are phasing in a new bacon-less pinto bean recipe around the country," a Chipotle spokesperson told the site. "In testing some recipes, we simply didn’t think the bacon added anything and, by removing it, we make the pinto beans vegetarian."

About two years ago, Chipotle was under fire for failing to mention the beans' pork content on its in-store menu. (Chipotle does disclose on its online menu that the pinto beans are made with pork.)

Seth Porges, who at the time was a senior editor at Maxim and does not eat meat for religious and cultural reasons, was shocked to learn that he unknowingly had consumed bacon over the course of several years prior. Porges complained directly to Chipotle CEO Steve Ells in an email, who apologized and said menus would be changed to reflect that the beans are made with pork.

Chipotle's pinto bean mixup is the latest of the chain's posturing toward the meat-free crowd. Early this year, Chipotle announced it was testing a new tofu filling for its burritos called "sofritas."

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Time for required writing should be made

In my search for signs of serious writing instruction in American high schools, I have stumbled across a rare creature: a physics teacher in Fairfax County who makes everyone in his honors classes enter a national science essay contest.

The 67-year-old West Springfield High School instructor, Ed Linz, is unconventional in other ways. He is a retired naval officer who once commanded a ballistic missile submarine. He was an All-Met Coach of the Year in cross country. He had a heart transplant 16 years ago. (When I asked how that was going, he said, "I woke up this morning.") He wrote a book, "Life Row," about the experience and does a weekly column for a newspaper in Spokane, Wash.

Teachers with dynamite résumés are not uncommon in the Washington area. Like Linz, they don't take any nonsense from me. When I gushed over the writing he was teaching his students, and mentioned my view that all schools should require major essays, he said that showed how naive I was about demands on teachers' time.

I think public high school students need to write a serious research paper before they graduate. Private schools insist on it. Students who do the International Baccalaureate program write 4,000-word essays, and many say it was their most satisfying academic experience. But Linz snorts at the notion of essays for all. "I cannot imagine how any high school teacher with five classes can do a 4,000-word project," he said. "To be done even semi-correctly, the teacher would have to do virtually nothing else for much of the year."

Still, Linz has had success requiring his honors physics students to enter the DuPont Challenge, an annual competition requiring a researched 1,000-word science essay. I have never encountered a science teacher who insists on a major writing project, but it works for Linz. He likes the essay contest much better than the science fair. To him, competing experiments mean stacks of liability forms and debates about outside help. "I got tired of judging parents' work," Linz said.

He has no honors classes this year, but last year he had three. "We began by choosing appropriate topics in late October," he said, "and then worked our way through at least three drafts before submitting the documents in late January. This assignment consumed at least half of my outside-of-class time for the second quarter of school to assess the work and four full class periods to discuss the papers with the students." Having students do much of the work in class reduced the parental over-involvement he found with science fairs.

Like IB essay writers, Linz's students groan about the high standard they are forced to meet but eventually admit it was good for them. Topics are as varied as why there are no square drums and why botox is more than a beauty treatment. Five Linz students have received DuPont honorable mentions in the past three years, more than in any other high school in the United States or Canada, he said.

"The real benefit for high school students is to sit with the teacher and receive critical feedback," he said.

Exactly. I want Linz, who solved much more daunting organizational problems as a nuclear sub officer, to design a way to make that happen for everybody in high school.

If we raised class sizes for courses that did not require research papers and freed time for teachers with writing skill to meet with students as they wrote their successive drafts, it might work. Linz has handled a heavy load of writing students even though he is older than even I am and on his second heart.

Good writing is crucial to success in the era of the keyboard. High schools should teach it.

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D.C. schools' performance should not be measured by focusing on achievement gap

The D.C. mayoral race is deeply split on most issues, but everyone agrees on one thing: We must reduce the achievement gap between minority and white students. It is too bad, then, that the gap is such a mindless measure of school progress.

D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray says: "The achievement gap . . . really has not been reduced over the past three years irrespective of test scores. It really is an important thing." Mayor Adrian Fenty's campaign Web site endorses the gap's significance but insists the mayor has "narrowed the achievement gap by as much as 20 percent . . . from 2007 to 2009." The Post's columnist Colbert I. King says the gaps in test scores between children of the city's affluent and poor, between white and black, "go to the heart of school reform efforts."

The numbers tell another story. Here is what my colleague Bill Turque reported in his Aug. 19 story on education issues in the mayoral race: "Average math scores of white D.C. fourth-graders [on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)] grew from 262 in 2007 to 270 last year (on a scale of 500). Scores rose three points for D.C. African American students, from 209 to 212. So the gap widened from 53 points to 58."

He compared students in Ward 7, relatively low income, with the more affluent students of Ward 3 on the DC-CAS tests. "In Ward 7, reading proficiency rates for secondary students rose from 17 percent in 2007 to 28 percent in 2010 -- 11 points," he wrote. "But Ward 3's rate rose almost 13 points in that time, and the disparity between the two wards remains about 50 points."

So, nearly everyone seems to agree, math scores of black D.C. fourth-graders went up three points, reading scores of mostly black and low-income Ward 7 secondary school students went up 11 points, and somehow that's bad news. Why? Because the scores of white students and Ward 3 students went up more. If their scores had not changed, or gone down just a bit, we would all be celebrating a narrowing of the achievement gap, our favorite measure of city schools.

Here are some other dubious ways to make the gap smaller and be happy: Have no improvement in black scores but a drop in white scores, or have black scores decline but white scores go down even more. We seem to have taken our concern about the income gap in America and adopted the same vocabulary when we talk about schools, even though making more money and learning to read are very different activities. Achieving proficiency in math, and particularly in reading, is key to the futures of both black and white children, both rich ones and poor ones. Focusing on the gap encourages us to ignore or downplay the success of children in one group in favor of comparing their gains with others. Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless says this has, among other things, led us to overlook meager improvement in some groups.

Worse, it has denied recognition to hardworking minority and low-income students, and their teachers, when they score gains but don't close the gap. We know some D.C. minority children have been improving, but a large chart accompanying Turque's recent story on the gap made it impossible to determine how much. The numbers were about differences, not gains.

Why not work at raising achievement for every child, in every demographic category, instead of obsessing about the gap? I don't blame politicians or journalists for enabling this deceptive mind-set. Everyone does it. It is woven into the way we think about schools, from the president on down. But that doesn't mean it makes any sense, or that we shouldn't try to rethink school progress in a more useful way.

For more Jay, go to washingtonpost.com/class-struggle.

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Rhee should take herself out of D.C. mayor's race

I can't blame D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee for getting herself pulled into the D.C. mayor's race. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty wants her support. She wouldn't have her job if it had not been for him.

Although she didn't ask for the assignment, now that she has had some initial success in raising achievement for D.C. children, she apparently feels obliged to help the guy who is more likely to let her follow through.

But suggesting she might leave if D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray beats Fenty, as she has in recent days, is turning her back, at least in part, on those children. Rhee has vowed to focus on the problems of students, not adults. Until now she had been true to her word. That has led many adults whose advice she has ignored and prerogatives she has overridden to wish she would go find some other school district to save.

Saying she would leave if Gray is elected is good news to those people. It is bad for the principals she has appointed, the teachers who share her commitment to raising achievement and the parents who are beginning to see the teamwork, creativity and persistence in regular city public schools that they have found in many charter schools.

In Gray's plan "for ensuring a quality education for all children," released last week, he has not committed himself to keeping Rhee. That is smart politically. He does not want to alienate her supporters or detractors. I like his plan. It is full of good intentions and reminders of how he supported mayoral control of the schools and the hiring of Rhee, although she is to my mind the most unconventional and stress-inducing administrator ever put in charge of an important American school district.

But there is something lacking in Gray's plan that indicates either he doesn't care, or doesn't understand, how important his decision about Rhee will be. He gives no hint of what a disaster for public education it would be to lose this chancellor.

Reasonable people say that's not so. There are other good administrators who could do the job. Nobody is indispensable. In the abstract, that is true.

But the D.C. reality is this: Educators who know what makes schools work -- high expectations, more time for instruction, taking testing seriously, strong principals who foster teamwork -- would realize the minute Rhee is let go that they can no longer depend on powerful support in difficult situations. The school veterans who preferred the status quo and decided to hold tight until Rhee failed would be proved right. It may take another decade or two to regain the momentum for change that Rhee developed in the past three years.

In his plan, Gray says he wants a "strong chancellor" who will make "hard choices with regard to staffing, hiring and firing to get bad teachers out of the classroom and keep good teachers in the classroom." Rhee should take him at his word, step away from the mayor's race and get back to strengthening the many fine principals she has installed.

If Gray wins, she should not falter. He will hear from many people that he should fire her. But his plan suggests he has not made up his mind about that. Rhee should not make it easy for those who want her gone.

She needs to tune out the politics and stay on the job. If Gray fires her, he will take the blame for what happens next, which I think he knows will not be good. Give him a chance to prove he is as smart as his education plan suggests, and let Rhee keep working for our kids.

For more Jay, go to http://washingtonpost.com/class-struggle.

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D.C. presumptive Mayor Gray should keep Bedford team at Dunbar, Coolidge highs

As prospective mayor Vincent C. Gray's education advisers begin to discuss changes in the way Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee ran the D.C. schools, it should quickly become apparent that they should keep their hands off one of Rhee's smartest moves -- handing management of Coolidge and Dunbar high schools to a sharp team of educators from New York.

Lost in all the primary election skirmishing over teacher dismissals and conflicting test score data was this encouraging statistic: Under the Friends of Bedford group, in just its first year here, the portion of students testing proficient or advanced in reading went from 38 to 53.6 percent at Coolidge and from 18.2 to 31.9 percent at Dunbar. No other high school in the city came close to making such gains in a subject in which improvement here has been rare.

The three Bedford partners I discussed this with at their office at Dunbar are a wily bunch. Their leader, George Leonard, has known his partners, Niaka (pronounced Na-KEE-ya) Gaston and Bevon Thompson, since they were his star biology students at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. They usually refrain from comment on the bizarre twists of D.C. politics.

They compliment Rhee for what she has done for them and the school system but say they expect the Gray team will give them similar backing. "Our body of work should be good for something," Leonard said.

They acknowledge that the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests that made their language arts program look so good were given to only 110 students at Coolidge and 141 students at Dunbar, because only 10th-graders take the DC-CAS in high school. Still, those students came from the same disadvantaged homes as sophomores at most of the other schools and did much better.

The Bedford team junked a block schedule that confused students and teachers, installed classroom walls to end Dunbar's hideous open-space design, provided intensive volunteer tutoring after school and worked hard to make sure students took advantage of it. The team hired and trained teachers carefully. It sought the safe and orderly school environment that brought success to the small public Bedford Academy, the school it created in Brooklyn that initially caught Rhee's eye.

Not everything worked. A small school-within-a-school at Dunbar for dropouts and frequent absentees failed to get the results Leonard wanted, so he brought those students back into the main student body. An unexpected change in the school system's security company slowed efforts to end wandering in the halls during classes, a scourge of urban high school culture.

The team is working on that and says order has improved. Getting students back to class after lunch is still a struggle. "If you say you are going to clear those halls every day, that means every period," Gaston said. Otherwise, they "go right back to the way they were."

Teacher problems such as broken locks on classroom doors are fixed immediately. When D.C. officials asked the group what it expected in terms of student suspensions during its first months, the Bedford partners saw shocked looks when they said suspensions would go up if order was to be restored. They made several changes in the way math was taught after the DC-CAS results showed proficiency at Dunbar dropping from 24.4 to 23.8 percent and increasing only from 43 to 48.2 percent at Coolidge.

Leonard has installed himself as principal at Dunbar this year. It is not going to be easy to maintain the momentum, but he says he thinks his teachers and students trust him more. He hopes the same will be true of the new Gray administration.

For more Jay, go to http://washingtonpost.com/class-struggle.

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