The politics of many aspects of American life are more or less 'owned' by their associated interest groups, often just one, the interest group making money from that aspect of U.S. life. But education is not one of those, and that might be a blessing, except that actual learning for our young people is not 'the prize' for either of the two interest groups -- 'anti teachers union' and 'pro teachers union' -- that do dominate. And we do have problems making sustained progress and resisting regress if we follow either of those interest groups all the way down their road. (A sidenote that these days the anti-teachers-union crowd is much more media/politically powerful and therefore potentially dangerous than its opponent.)
However, progress sometimes really happens when, somehow, an actually good idea from one side is implemented. For example, by the teachers union side, introducing free day care and kindgergarten, and reducing class size in primary grades. And, from the anti-teachers union side, using (in theory fair, predictive and reliable) tests to put some accountability pressure on teachers. While none of the preceding has worked miracles (maybe it's not helpful or 'real' to promote expectations of rapid improvement), the numbers (here's another take on them) indicate the U.S. has made solid progress in elementary school education. The chart below, on writing, reading, and mathematics test scores from the 'testing gold standard' NAEP in the 2000s, shows half-grade (10 points is roughly one grade level) or better improvements in 26 of the 38 comparisons, in the short span of 5 or 6 years between 2003 and 2009 or 2002 and 2007 (less than half-grade progess blocks are in grey):
The American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess Patrick McGuinn has a DC-centric column up this week spotlighting what he believes to be the two competing factions in the Democratic Party attempting to determine the destiny of the so-called school reform movement.
In his view, the argument over education policy in the Democratic Party is between competing "equity and accountability narratives". On the one side - the "Equities" - are the more traditional Democrats linking back to the Great Society who insist the role of the federal government in education is to ensure that educators and schools that serve impoverished kids are given resources equal to what their better-off peers get. In Hess's McGuinn's view, "the first narrative sees public schools as generally well-performing and attributes poor student performance to the effects of poverty."
The second faction is the "accountability" driven Democrats. This faction "sees the status quo in American education as untenable, and believes that it is unlikely to change absent strong reform pressure from Washington that holds states and schools accountable for improving student performance."
In this simplistic view, one sees the same sort of story playing out in other conventional views of the Democratic Party - that there is a liberal "old guard" tied to "tired" government programs from the New Deal and Great Society vs. a more dynamic reformist "new guard" that is full of bold thinking and "innovation." And at the heart of this contest is a determination to find solutions for poor kids.
A man who worked for the Urban League back in the 60's once told me a story about how people's perceptions are influenced by the powerful in our country. He was working on a project to encourage local business start-ups in a rural black community, and one of their first projects involved setting up an icehouse run by a black family. This was before most poor rural communities had refrigeration, so ice was a necessity that they felt the community would buy into right away. Unfortunately they were wrong, and the business struggled.
What they found was that the blacks in the community continued to purchase their ice on the other side of the tracks at the white-owned icehouse. So they sent a task force back to the neighborhood to interview the locals and ask why they weren't buying their ice from their black-owned neighborhood icehouse. What they were told again and again in their interviews was "the whiteman's ice is colder."
This story is analogous to the way that school reform is being sold to us. Just as ice can be made colder only by its chemical substance being altered, schools can only be made better if the very substance of them - their safety and inclusiveness, the curriculum and instruction, and the involvement and engagement of the community - is altered.
But in the face of this undeniable fact, what we're hearing from the Obama administration is that a strange alchemy of "test scores," "data tracking," and "charter schools" are going to alter the substance of education.
OpenLeft has asked me to turn my semi-regular diary on education into a weekly feature that updates our community on what's happening with K-12 public schools -- giving Paul a bathroom break every Sunday at 4:00pm. I'm calling the feature "Left Ed" unless someone's got a better idea.
My hope is that each recurring post will use a progressive political lens to review weekly education news (veering occasionally into in-depth commentary on a specific topic), follow-up conversations from previous diaries with pertinent new events, and counter-balance the typical blather from the MSM with what real educators and people who actually know something about education are saying about the trends in public school policy.
The feedback I've gotten on this site to my previous diaries has run the gamut from effusive to frustrated to perplexed. I'm very grateful for this response and want to continue to generate conversation that can lead to a broad understanding of where the progressive community stands on public education issues, school reform, and the Obama administration's policies regarding public schools.
So why am I doing this? Mainly, as I stated in a comment to Mark Matson in my most recent diary, to "bridge what I perceive to be the gap between progressive views of education and what most liberals see as sane and responsible policy."
To kick-off Left Ed, I'd like to hear what others in this community want my weekly effort to address. What can I provide to better prepare us all to understand and, hopefully, influence the broader public dialogue about education policy? What should we track from week-to-week to keep ourselves informed of the pros and cons of the Obama administration's actions? What should we be advocating for at local, state, and federal levels? And who are the politicians that get it right and how can we support them?
(By invitation, following Jeff's great diary about Gerald Bracey. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
The Center for American Progress is "progressive." Right? After all, CAP's website touts it as a source for "Progressive Ideas." The homepage lists its "progressive priorities." And the "About Us" blurb declares CAP's mission to draw from the great progressive "social movements of the 20th century."
So you would expect that any thoughts about education policy emanating from The Center for American Progress would be, well, progressive, wouldn't you?
CAP's most recent opportunity to push for a more progressive agenda for reforming America's public schools was released to the world earlier this month with the publication of "Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Innovation," a follow-up report to another one bearing the same name two years ago. Even though the report was created in partnership with two well-known conservative organizations, you would expect that CAP would have inserted some fairly substantial representation of progressive education values in the report.
For instance, you would expect there to be some reference to educating children in ways that are similar to those pioneered by Francis Parker, who believed that children learn best by doing and that schools have to be child-centered. You would expect to find the influence of the great American thinker John Dewy, whose laboratory school proved that schools work best when they function as a community. And you would expect to see at least some reference to the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and the work of Jerome Bruner who established that children aren't empty vessels that schools can just pour a standardized content into.
After all, the research base that proves that progressive education practices are effective has a pretty long history and is fairly well understood.
But anyone looking for a progressive influence in the "Leaders and Laggards" report will be sorely disappointed. Because there's none. Phrases such as "active learning" and "child-centered" never even occur. Nothing about schools functioning like communities, or kids being encouraged to construct their own meaning about academic content.
(I would have done this myself, but I knew that Jeff could do a much better job. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Quick! Who is your go-to expert on American education policy?
In a lot of political arguments, that's frequently the crux of the matter, isn't it? On the economy, you go to Robert Reich or George Will. For the Middle East, Juan Cole or Max Boot.
But when you're looking for opposing sides in the debate on America's public schools, the initial appearance is that, well, there aren't any opposing sides. For sure, there are differences of opinion on specifics that people often argue about with great passion - whether to give out school vouchers so students can attend private schools, whether to teach intelligent design in science classes. But among political leaders in Washington DC and prominent pundits in the MSM, there's a startling uniformity of belief about the state of American education - an over-arching narrative that provides a context that is rarely disputed even when people argue about the merits of year-round schools or whether or not to teach phonics.
For instance, when you look at the education policies that Republican presidential candidate John McCain was pushing for in his campaign, you'll find that these are the exact same policies - school accountability based on standardized test scores, merit pay for teachers, charter schools to compete with public schools -- that are being implemented by the Obama administration. And when the Bush administration's Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings passed the policy baton to the Obama administration's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, she welcomed him as a "fellow reformer" of what's wrong with US schools.
The reason for this is that, for decades, the popular perspective on American education has been dominated, almost exclusively, by a single, simple narrative. Whether you listen to E.J. Dionne or Lou Dobbs, America's schools are "failing." American education is in a "crisis," we've been told again and again. Our students can no longer "compete" against the students of other nations in the race to, um, whatever we're all supposed to be racing toward. Educators themselves are seen as part of the problem. And only the leading business captains or the famed entrepreneur dé jeur - such as Bill Gates or Louis Gerstner - can possible know what to do to fix our "broken" schools.
For years, the most prominent and powerful antidote to this contagion of lock-step thinking has been the writings of Gerald Bracey. Like the impertinent youth who persistently remarked that the emperor had no clothes, Bracey wrote a different story about our schools, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what was really true and not true about what was being said about them. In his books, his recurring column in Kappan magazine, and his diaries at HuffingtonPost, he argued persuasively - with actual facts and steel-eyed reason - that the conventional wisdom about our nation's public schools was not only false; it was a cover-up for what is, at the heart, a problem of our democracy.
Unfortunately, Dr. Bracey has left us. And as commenter craigspinks lamented at washingtonpost.com, "Who will take his indispensable place?"
In the latest iteration from our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan declared that
"But to somehow suggest we should not link student achievement to teacher effectiveness is like suggesting we judge sports teams without looking at the box score."
Given the fact that we don't really judge sports teams by the box scores (hello, it only matters who wins!), let's think about the whole highly questionable idea of framing education endeavors around a sports analogy.
I know that there are always a lot of lame sports analogies in our culture:
* sports as a formula for success in business (yeah right, who "won" in our current financial debacle?)
* sports as a framework for personal fulfillment (go ahead, try using "winning" as a productive framework for personal relationships)
* sports as an analytical argument for politics (currently being vigorously applied in the MSM with awful consequences for the rest of the country)
But in what way is sports really analogous to schooling? Should schools and teachers really "compete"? Don't we want everyone to "win"? Is there really a direct relationship of teacher behaviors to student achievement, or isn't there a lot of influence on student achievement that is outside the teacher's control (research says there is)?
But perhaps even more frustrating than the overly simplistic argument that determining success in schooling is somehow analogous to determining success in sports is the indescribable vagueness of what Herr Duncan is maintaining, which is that teachers "be judged on student performance, though not solely on test scores," without ever giving a clue as to what else is involved in his private criteria for evaluation.
(During his great rightwing year of reform, one of several issues on which Governor Gropenator made a total fool of himself was school reform, wherein he touted the elixer of merit pay, along with the need to axe tenure so that poor teachers could be fired. Local State Senator Alan Lowenthal, head of the Education Committee at the time, told me, as a reporter covering the story, that no testimony or evidence whatsoever had been submitted to his committee, so it was impossible to evaluate the governor's argument.
Is Obama smart enough to heed such examples? - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In yet another iteration of the media's account of the Obama administration's probable intentions toward school reform, Jonathan Alter at Newsweek has come down from the mountain after his interview with his expert on education, with the proclamation that "we know by now what works for at-risk kids. The challenge is trying to replicate it." That expert? None other than Bill Gates. And what works? Teacher merit pay. Or what Gates euphemistically calls "effectiveness-compensation systems."
That anyone would turn to Bill Gates for advice on how to guide America's schools is not so bad. His involvement in the funding of technology initiatives in schools is highly commendable. But that all of the rhetoric on school reform is coalescing around one idea for solving all our education problems is the height of reductionist folly. As I explain on the flip . . .
That's right, we're expecting a vote as early as Tuesday September 9th. This is a huge leap forward for the environmental education movement. Not familiar with the No Child Left Inside Act? You can learn much more here. You can also see what the media has been saying about the bill lately here.
While we expect this bill to pass, it is important to get as many "Aye" votes as possible when this hits the floor next week. That is where you come in. With all of the political press focusing exclusively on the Presidential election, it is hard to break through the clutter. That is why we need YOU to make a big deal of this. We need YOU to push your Representative to vote the right way on the No Child Left Inside Act.
[I hope this post proves interesting. It was written by UFT President Randi Weingarten, and previously posted on Edwize.]
The United Federation of Teachers has long supported high academic standards and meaningful accountability measures including testing in our public schools. We have also focused much-needed attention on the achievement gap between poor and often minority children and their more affluent, mostly white neighbors. We consistently shine a light on the importance of high quality teachers in every classroom. So we initially had high hopes when Congress passed President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act with bipartisan support in 2002.
Unfortunately, it has become clear that serious flaws in NCLB are preventing it from helping all children succeed. In fact it guarantees its own failure by requiring all children to be proficient in math and reading by 2014, a laudable but increasingly unrealistic goal. Now that NCLB is up for reauthorization, we have a chance to fix what's wrong. Here's what we would change:
[I hope this post about the changes to No Child Left Behind proposed by Congress proves interesting. It was originally posted on Edwize and written by Edwize blogger Maisie.]
Lest you think that the debate over reauthorizing No Child Left Behind is hard-to-follow/wonkish/a tempest-in-a-teapot or anything like that, note that Jonathan Kozol today entered his 76th day of a partial hunger strike over NCLB.
In protest over that law, Kozol, the widely-published, passionate advocate of educational equality, has taken himself into the realm of serious danger.
He's sick of NCLB. Mandating math and reading tests and punishing schools and students who do not meet their targets is "turning thousands of inner-city schools into Dickensian test-preparation factories," Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page quoted Kozol as saying. It has "dumbed down" school for poor, urban kids and created "a parallel curriculum that would be rejected out-of-hand" in the suburbs.
[I hope this post about the changes to No Child Left Behind proposed by Congress proves interesting. It was originally posted on Edwize and written by Edwize blogger Jackie Bennett in response to a New York Times editorial.]
Every corner of the educational community has protested the consequences of No Child Left Behind, including that the law has narrowed the curriculum and unfairly penalized schools already making progress.
In spite of that, an editorial in the NY Times defends the status quo. Referring to proposed NCLB revisions, the Times complains that the changes will "allow schools to mask failure in teaching crucial subjects like reading and math by giving them credit for student performance in other subjects."
Yet, just one paragraph earlier the Times has this to say: "Faced with poorly educated workers at home - especially in science - American companies are increasingly looking abroad."
Iraq is only the half of it. Quite possibly, less than half.
As CQ barely sketches in today, a legislative logjam of epic proportions is in prospect.
For a start, we finally see that continuing resolutions are being discussed:
Pelosi, D-Calif., and other House leaders have been looking at two versions of the continuing resolution that is sure to be moved the week of Sept. 24. One version would last for five weeks, ending Nov. 2, the other for six weeks, ending Nov. 9.
Senate aides said an end date of Nov. 16 is also under discussion.
If on September 13 they're talking about November 16 - that's not frightfully promising!
This diary is copied from a posting on MyDD as part of the candidate series for Bill Richardson. I am not part of his campaign.
Congressman, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of Energy and in his second term as Governor of New Mexico after a landslide victory in November 2006, Governor Bill Richardson is running for President to heal America and restore our place in the world. He possesses the experience, vision and leadership skills to be a great President.
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