In anticipation of this week's State of the Union address from president Obama, rumor has it that education policy will be one of the principal themes of the speech. And anyone who cares about this nation's public schools and universities should ready themselves for the sick feeling in their gut they get when the president equates education policy with "bipartisanship" and members of Congress rise in unison and huzzah in agreement.
To set the stage for the speech, Arne Duncan began the month with a call for a bipartisan push for education "reform" to focus on better tests. Specifically:
People across the political spectrum support the work of 44 states to replace multiple choice "bubble" tests with a new test that helps inform and improve instruction by accurately measuring what children know across the full range of college and career-ready standards, and measures other skills, such as critical-thinking abilities.
On cue, White House courtiers waiting in the wings, from the Center for American Progress, chimed in with supportive rhetoric for a bipartisan agreement on "better tests" as well. CAPer Matt Yglesias explains:
Insofar as we're thinking about the federal level, to me it seems like the most important thing is developing better tests. Almost any approach to assessing the performance of a school or a school system is going to be on some level based on test scores, so there's always a risk of a "garbage in, garbage out" phenomenon where bad tests lead to bad decisionmaking. And since you'd like to see results comparable across states this is something where the federal role is crucial.
[emphasis mine]
Then, to illustrate just how the focus on more and better tests is going to be raised to the levels of panacea, the CAP rolled out a new report last week that based just about everything on the notion that test scores are the be-all and the end-all of education attainment in our country.
As I noted in a Quick Hit here on Open Left, CAP's analysis of school performance "relied on the results of 2008 state reading and math assessments in fourth grade, eighth grade, and high school" along with "spending data from the 2008 school year" to calculate a Return on Educational Investment for nearly every major school district in America.
So now this new ROEI metric joins all the other test-based metrics driving school improvement efforts - including VAM to measure teacher effectiveness, AYP (or whatever its new derivative will be) to measure school effectiveness, and HST to determine an individual student's progress in learning.
Unfortunately the test-based alphabet soup that Obama and the neoliberal idealogues will serve up to the American public on January 25 is in reality a shit sandwich.
"The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers" ~ Jean Piaget [Swiss Psychologist. Pioneer in the study of child intelligence. 1896-1980]
"The purpose of education is to enable us to develop to the fullest that which is inside us" ~ Norman Cousins [Essayist, Editor associated with Saturday Evening Post 1912-1990]
"America's noble experiment, universal education for all" may have become but an idealized theory. In practice it long seemed the impossible dream. However, for the hopeful this statement was a reverie, although the veracity was virtually unrecognizable at best. Still the notion lived on. The powerful prose marveled many. That is all but believers in a for-profit privatized educational system. Today, corporate aficionados have conquered. Commerce controls School District Administrators. It shapes decisions made. Countless elementary and secondary school campuses are transformed in accordance. Big business buys and sells city classrooms. Our forefathers would have thought present-day headlines could only appear in fictional accounts. Nonetheless banners blare, "This Class Is Brought to You By. [fill in the corporate enterprise of your choice]"
In last week's installment of Left Ed, I held up Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress as the prime example of how off-base, even anti-progressive, the leadership on the left is in the education debate. I pointed out how his Washington Post op-ed - a supposed "defense" of public school funding - actually does more damage to public schools by perpetuating the rightwing frame that America's system of public education is broken and "lagging" behind the rest of the developed world. I explained why Miller's interpretation of the results from the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, reveal how little the DC-centric leadership on the left understands about the strengths and weaknesses of the nation's education system. And I concluded that rather than accepting, as Miller does, the rightwing frame that America's public schools are "broken," and giving credence to irrelevant and erroneous yet popular conventional wisdom about education "reform," it's time for people on the real left to take the advice of George Lakoff and "shift the frame" of how the media communicates about public education.
This tendency of the leadership of the Democratic party to start political debates from a rightwing frame and then resort to the very same erroneous "data" that conservatives use as supporting evidence unfortunately is now often seen in the conventional media as "progressive," as evidenced by edublogger Alexander Russo, who called Miller's advice something from "angry ideal-less progressives."
Instead of fighting for progressive ideals, however, what Miller and the CAP are doing is, to quote Lakoff, "surrendering in advance." Real progressives know what this looks like on economic policy. A progressive economic policy argues that alleviating economic disparity is a moral and practical imperative and producing serious economic stimulus during a recession is more important than reducing the deficit. So why does Obama begin the debate with a compromise with conservatives on tax cuts for the wealthy and concerns about reducing the deficit? Because Obama, like so many others populating our nation's capital, is a sell-out to what Lakoff calls, "the superior message machine" that conservatives wield, which states that "deficits" are evil and "reduced taxes for everyone" are always good.
In the education debate, the message machine is 100 percent owned by the forces of the anti-progressive. Public schools are "broken" and "lagging behind" the rest of the world, the problem is "bad teachers" (and who among us hasn't had a bad teacher?), rigid standards enforced by high-stakes testing are the solution, and the force of the "free market" - in the form of nationwide charter school franchises and increased privatization - must be unleashed to lead the way to a brighter future.
Backed by billions in funding from philanthro-capitalists, fed with report after report of objective sounding BS from well-endowed think tanks, and animated in powerful media channels like Oprah, NBC "news," and Waiting for Superman, the anti-progressive message machine in the education debate has achieved near-hegemonic predominance.
Like Yertle the Turtle, it's time for progressives at the bottom of the heap to start speaking out. But the pushback can't be focused merely on negating the anti-progressive arguments. "That will only make their arguments more prominent", as Lakoff explans. Instead, the pushback has to be focused on building a "movement" based on some very basic and understandable moral "truths," such as equality, empathy, and human rights.
So, confronted with the current landscape in the media, what would a more progressive side in the education debate be saying?
(Another special edition from a regular Left Ed commentator known to all. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
To listen to the discussion going on right now about teacher quality one would think that most teachers were suspect, poorly trained, over paid, inefficient and in need of firing. All we need to do, the reformers cry, is the simple task of reforming America's failing education system. Of course the key to doing so rests universally with dealing with the rampant hordes of bad teachers. Bolstered by their evil teacher unions, these bad teachers have systematically taken over our schools, held local school boards hostage, and under the guise of fair wages and better working conditions looted taxpayer coffers with their outrageous salaries and benefits. Then thanks to tenure's legendary job for life benefits, they get to kick back and ruin our children's futures care free.
Sigh. The fairy tale above throws so much crap at the wall that its easy for the public to lose one's way in figuring out is what is truth or fiction. That's probably by design. It allows "reformers" to move the Overton Window on Education to the right more effectively that way because something is going to stick. For example, what were you people thinking in New Jersey when you elected this guy:
On merit pay, Christie said he wants to prohibit seniority or graduate degree attainment in fields other than math and science from influencing salary increases for teachers. The large pool of funding needed to start a merit pay program would come from the savings of firing bad teachers through tenure reform, Christie said.
In this short quote there is so much being flung at the wall that one might miss the larger arguments being made by "reformers" like Gov. Christie.
Although you wouldn't know it from reading the national press and following the blogosphere, education is a critically important issue in Tuesday's midterm election. Unfortunately, it's important for reasons other than what it should be, as a referendum against the awful school reform policies inherited from George Bush and fortified by Arne Duncan.
Instead of mistaken reform policies, the overall foundational narrative for education among the candidates' competing debates is the impact of the financial crisis on school funding. And while there are many insipid perspectives on education that both Democratic and Republican candidates generally share - that our system of public education is "broken," teachers need to be held more accountable for test scores, charter schools will lead the way to dynamic new education practices that can be scaled up across the country, etc. - there are very clear and obvious themes that differentiate Dems from Repubs and gives good reason to vote Democratic if you care about public schools.
First off, one of the most divisive issues in the election is the worthiness of the stimulus funds provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that were injected into the economy by the Obama administration after the financial crisis hit. Quoted in this article from Education Week, Joel Packer, the executive director of the Committee for Education Funding points out "there's no question that for education, [cuts and layoffs] would have been demonstrably worse without the stimulus." Republicans - even those who hypocritically accepted the funds - are generally critical of ARRA while Democratic candidates generally speak positively of the legislation even though, as Packer says, "generally, the stimulus has become a negative brand."
Beyond the issue of stimulus funds, though, the differences between the education policies and provisions of Democratic and Republican candidates become more diverse but significant, nevertheless. Scanning across a map of the 2010 election relevant to education, on a race-by-race basis at the state level there are races in particular that have significant impact on the direction of education policy. For instance, Democratic candidates in many of these races - such as the gubernatorial races in Iowa and Texas - are pushing for increased attention and funding of early childhood education, which would be a huge improvement in the well being of children and families in those sates.
On the federal level, the overriding edu-issue at stake in the upcoming election is the role of the federal government in public schools. As Paul Rosenberg wrote about in this diary earlier this week on Open Left, "the spread of anti-federalist ideology in the realm of education" is a commonly alarming theme among the majority of Republican candidates, and many of these extremist candidates want to shut down the Department of Education altogether and abandon critically important federal policies such as ESEA.
While I'm no big fan of many of the interventions - such as Race to the Top and i3 competitive grants - being pushed by the Obama administration, the federal government has been responsible for many of the historic landmarks that have made education in this country more accessible and equal for minorities and the less-well-off. Preserving the federal government's role in education is a priority that every progressive should feel motivated to fight for, even if the policies of the current administration are out of whack.
Now, I wouldn't be upset to see a new Republican majority in Congress cease funding for Race to the Top, as some have predicted. But as Diane Ravitch explains, a Republican majority would also likely reinforce many of the really bad elements of the education reform movement:
"There will be more votes for the Billionaire Boys Club, who hope to take charge in city after city with noblesse oblige policies. There will be more support for naming and shaming teachers by publishing test scores, even though this approach produces high error rates and demoralizes teachers. There will be increased support for policies that ignore poverty while blaming teachers for low scores. And even greater demands to rely on testing of basic skills as the best and only way to measure quality."
I'm not being naïve at all about the Obama administration's agenda. Regardles of the the outcome of the election, he all too clearly revealed his plans for education in this comment he made in a conversation with progressive bloggers earlier this week:
"Look, the -- I'm a pretty stubborn guy when it comes to, on the one hand, trying to get cooperation. I don't give up just because I didn't get cooperation on this issue; I'll try the next issue. If the Republicans don't agree with me on fiscal policy, maybe they'll agree with me on infrastructure. If they don't agree with me on infrastructure, I'll try to see if they agree with me on education."
In other words, Obama will quite likely keep education policy as a compromise crutch he can haul out to show-off his "bipartisanship" to the media. But his alone is not reason enough to abandon the Democratic party, in my mind.
Most of the wailing, weeping, and gnashing of teeth for an alternative to the duplicity of the Obama administration and the tepid politics of the Democratic party in general are not compelling enough in my mind to persuade progressives to sit this election out or vote Libertarian (the only viable third party in my state). If you happen to like a single one of your local leaders or favor a candidate who is trying to unseat a Republican office holder at the local level, that is reason enough to vote Democratic despite what you think about Obama. Holding high your displeasure with Obama at the expense of a local office holder or challenger who, in some respects, matters more to your immediate needs would be more than irrational. It's stupid.
This Week's Duncehat Award: Andrew Rotherham
Writing in Time magazine, edu-corpratist Andrew Rotherham shares his profound insights on how political leadership should respond to the resegregation of American public schools. His advice? Give up.
"No one in the mainstream of the education debate wants segregated schools. But while such schools are not an immutable condition, they are an unfortunate fact of life today. That's why so many in the reform community see issues such as improving teacher effectiveness, providing a better curriculum, and expanding high-performing charter schools into underserved communities as more impactful and immediate steps than grand schemes to change housing policy or school district boundaries. And, of course, there are plenty of schools that demonstrate that high poverty rates and low achievement are not inexorably linked. These reformers, myself included, are not opposed to efforts to create more economically integrated schools. We're just keenly attuned to the practical constraints."
This "the poor will always be with us" attitude is pure hogwash.
Based on an analysis of NAEP data, minority students made tremendous strides in achievement when school desegregations were at their height in the 1970s. True, the gap in achievement remained. But it is in the last few years, as resegregation and poverty have surged, that gains among minority students have diminished.
Writing in Educational Leadership Jonathan Kozol sums up pretty well what Rotherham's callous indifference amounts to:
"People who devote their lives to tinkering with clever ways to close the race gap by 'demanding more' of children and their principals and teachers within segregated settings are, knowingly or not, upholding the same failed and tainted promises given to people in the United States more than a century ago by Plessy v. Ferguson. They are ripping to shreds the legacy of Brown and Dr. King. Only those oblivious to history would dare deceive us in this shameful manner."
Metrics, metrics everywhere. In this brave new world of education "reform," its the great god of "data," we are told, that will lead the way to a brighter world for all children.
Never mind that "data" do not necessarily equate evidence. Never mind knowledgeable skeptics, such as Alfie Kohn, warn that the more educators allow themselves to be fixated on numbers, "the more trivial their teaching becomes and the more their assessments miss." Never mind that experienced classroom teachers, such as Walt Gardner, point out that data on how students perform on tests is not the same thing as learning. And never mind that research from the UK has just revealed that students actually do better at school when teachers aren't obsessed over test data.
At no time has data mania been more on display than the past week when two enormous - some say historic - events played out across the education and (occasionally) general media. The first event was the announcement of the winners of the much-coveted money from Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top competitive grant competition. RTTT winners were determined by an elaborate scoring formula that reform enthusiasts assure us rewards state school systems that are being the most "data-driven" in their approaches to policy.
Then, the day after the data-filled revelry surrounding the RTTT winners, Duncan endorsed using data derived from student testing as a means for evaluating individual teachers too. Following a series of reports by the Los Angeles Times, where reporters used a value added analysis of test score data to evaluate the "effectiveness" of individual teachers, Duncan apparently decided that such a flawed methodology should be spread around universally.
Certainly, tallying up numbers related to the inputs and outcomes of education has its place. We don't need a data-free world. But how, pray tell, do the people running USED know they are looking at the right data - data that are both fair and effective indicators of educational progress? If Duncan is so sure of his methodology, then maybe, for instance, he would feel okay with applying it to his own track record as a leader of Chicago public schools?
Addressing a group of civil rights leaders and advocates at this week's meeting of the Urban League, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan accused people who criticize his Race to the Top grants and other education policies of being "intentionally misleading or profoundly misinformed." As highlighted by Paul here at Open Left the other day, President Obama immediately reinforced the message by scolding critics of his education reforms for making "a fuss" over something that shouldn't be seen as "controversial." Then, to complete the triumvirate, the supposed progressives at the Center for American Progress castigated Congress and anyone else who would dare lay a finger on the Obama administration's Race to the Top and other "reforms."
As Paul explained yesterday, what's seldom discussed - not only among leaders of the Democratic party but also in the progressive community - is the actual "evidence" for and against the dangerous proposals being championed by those who consider themselves to be "on the left" of America's political spectrum. Instead people on the left are generally in denial about issues of race and class that are at the heart of the matter. And educators themselves are being played for suckers by the Democratic establishment.
Nowhere was this situation more painfully obvious to me than at last week's Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas. As lots of lip service was being paid to "saving teachers' jobs," not much of anything in the agenda addressed the destructive education policies of the Obama administration. Of course, lots of presenters had high-minded declarations about the importance of schools to democracy and the progressive cause. But no one had anything particularly progressive to say about the direction of school reform.
As news came out during the conference that another 241 teachers were being fired by Washington, DC's autocratic chancellor Michele Rhee for being "ineffective," no one of any prominence at the meeting pointed out the blatant unfairness of the Obama administration's push to evaluate teachers on the basis of students' scores on standardized tests.
In fact, an attendee I was having coffee with as the news broke was absolutely gleeful about it. "There are too many bad teachers," she explained to me while coolly scrolling through the headlines on her Blackberry, "And they're never made accountable for anything."
At the conference's Education Caucus, which all too symbolically never made it to the final agenda distributed to attendees as they arrived, educators exhorted the progressive blogosphere to push politicians in DC to pass the "edujobs" bill to save hundreds of thousand of teaching positions, a prospect, by the way, that seemed incredibly remote even as the declarations were being made.
The NEA's terrific spoksperson Lily Eskelsen informed the caucus crowd about the vagaries of for-profit education entrepreneurs, the creeping corporate influence on local schools, and out of control charters. And D Kos education blogger annie em backed her up with information about the corrupt Imagine charter schools chain. Yet in the ensuing discussion, a frontpage blogger from MotherTalkers (sorry, didn't get your name) explained how much her audience "like charter schools."
So as the rest of Netroots Nation rolled along on the general affirmations of the first year-and-a-half of the Obama presidency, all of us who care about public schools were left talking among ourselves about the abyss that we all too clearly see our country's school children heading toward.
In the mainstream media, the reporting was far less nuanced as both union meetings were cast as sharply at odds with the Obama administration and openly combative to "reform."
The different way these meetings were being reported on in the MSM, compared to the trade media, reminded me of how reporting on education in the mass media - what little of it there is - is so distorted by what I call "spokesperson laziness" and "false polarities." All too often, reporters in the MSM simply look for the easiest-to-reach representative of a "constituency" rather than digging into various points of view. And the goal always seems to be to develop a narrative of combat in which two "opposing" constituencies are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for dominance.
When it comes to education, this approach to "journalism" is probably more damaging to public awareness than on other issues. Because what's reported about education is so miniscule in the first place, people only seem to be aware that the Obama administration is pushing for "reform" and that teachers have all coalesced behind their unions in bitter "resistance to change." And this is totally false.
It is only when you start listening to educators themselves that you get the real story of what's going on in schools as the new politics of "education reform" steamrolls across the country.
Yet, as veteran educator and edublogger Walt Gardner points out here, teachers are the "potted palms" in reporting about education.
In fact, surveys of teachers have clearly shown that what they think is important to focus on in their work isn't at all aligned with what the Obama administration's policies are pursuing.
So what would we learn if we listened to educators?
According to the Washington Consensus on public education, all the Serious People agree that the one important "success" of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy was that it had "advantages for low-income and minority students" because it forced states to focus on the interest of these children. This is, of course, utter nonsense.
As Linda Darling-Hammond points out in The Nation, after eight years of NCLB, "the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988," and a "growing share of African-American and Hispanic students" now find themselves in "highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities."
The reality is that no one in DC-land is any more "focused" on addressing the issues of race, income and school reform than they've ever been. Instead, America's first black President is ironically perpetuating America's blindness to the history of racial and socioeconomic inequality in public schools and taking our country in the exact opposite direction of what could create a brighter future for children raised in poverty.
It's true that the political leadership of our country has never openly embraced the connection of race and income to education. But the policies of the Obama administration so fly in the face of what is known about the relationship of race and income to school reform that one has to consider if what is afoot is a concerted attempt to undo any progress that's been made since Brown vs. Board of Education broke the back of racially segregated schools.
"School's Out" may be on the minds of most children and teachers right now. But in the halls of Congress, the debate over education policy and reform raged on this week.
As a broken Senate failed America's children by not passing legislation that would prevent mass teacher layoffs, politicians in another committee room held a hearing on oversight of the for-profit college industry. Many of the same rhetorical points from the argument over K-12 reform were brandished in that hearing as well.
The rapid expansion of privatization in education is the overwhelming trend at all levels. "While enrollment at institutions of higher education increased by 31 percent from 1998 to 2008, the number of students entering for-profit schools soared 225 percent over the same period."
This explosive growth of for-profit higher education is being likened to the housing bubble and the unscrupulous profiteering by the home mortgage industry that recently wreaked havoc on our economy:
"Steven Eisman, portfolio manager of the FrontPoint Financial Services Fund who has studied how the for-profit education industry operates and derives its revenue, did not mince words in his testimony. 'Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime- mortgage industry. I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task,' he said. 'It is my hope that this administration sees the nature of the problem and begins to act now. But if nothing is done, then we are on the cusp of a new social disaster.'
Eisman testified that the for-profit industry has grown at an extreme and unusual rate, driven by easy access to government-sponsored debt in the form of Title IV student loans, where the credit is guaranteed by the government. Thus, the government, the students, and the taxpayer bear all the risk and the for-profit industry reaps all the rewards, he said. When the Bush administration took over the reigns of government, the Department of Education gutted many of the rules that governed the conduct of this industry, he said. Once the floodgates were opened, the industry embarked on 10 years of unrestricted massive growth. Federal dollars flowing to the industry exploded to over $21 billion, a 450 percent increase."
On the K-12 side, the same Wall Street operators who recently sent our economy into oblivion are now amassing huge amounts of wealth behind the charter school industry. The reason:
"There are about 5000 charter schools in place now at about 4% of the total public school system in the United States and it's grown at about 400-500 units per year, which is about a $2 billion dollar annual investment opportunity set. So it's a very big and high growth category that is going to continue to represent opportunities . . ."
Perfectly symbolic of this "partnership" between public schools and the private sector was the recent announcement that former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will now be working for America's most prominent and well-funded lobbyist for big business, The US Chamber of Commerce.
Meanwhile Diane Ravitch, one of the most well-known and outspoken critics of the Obama administration's education policies, reported on having her say in DC and at the Whitehouse. Her conclusion:
"Living outside the Beltway, I am struck by the fact that the education think tanks in DC are like an echo chamber. Almost all share the 'consensus,' and because they agree with one another, they think they are right. The Obama administration bought into that consensus, and seems utterly tone-deaf to how their agenda is received outside the Beltway."
The frustration that educators are feeling at the tone-deafness of the political debate in DC is palpable, impassioned, and pervasive:
"It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school 'reform,' with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom's after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) . . ."
(emphasis not added)
It's not just educators either. Parents don't like Sec. Duncan's "overly disruptive" turnaround models that rely on closing schools and firing teachers. Christian churches are appalled at "the administration's effort to push states to increase the number of charter schools, its plan to turn some of the federal money used to help poor children into competitive grants, its punitive approach to dealing with low-performing schools, and the 'ugly' demonization of public school teachers." (h/t FunkyGal)
Yet so little pushback against the Washington DC Consensus on education reform is registering among politicians. Even the most progressive Democrats in Congress have mustered an opposition that can be characterized as mild at best.
So one wonders why the messages about the Obama administration's education policies aren't getting through - not just to the politicians, but also to the media, the progressive blogosphere, and even bloggers in the education industry.
True, there are fundamental structures standing in the way of ordinary people getting their voices heard in our corporate-media dominated society. But that set of circumstances does not absolve one from straining harder and striving harder to get better at being heard above the fray.
It's also true that it's not that unusual for professionals in a specific discipline to feel that their voice isn't being heard. For instance, doctors and nurses frequently complained that their voices weren't being heard in the recent debate over health care reform. But the scale at which educators are being ignored in the Obama administration's education agenda is truly off-the-charts. And no one in the Democratic Party ever went after the American Medical Association with the vehemence that teachers' unions are being vilified in the debate over education policy. So what gives?
It's not that educators aren't able and articulate advocates for their side. And people voicing their discontent with President Obama's education policies certainly know what they're talking about. But it could be that "knowing what they're talking about" may in fact may be part of the problem.
So it all comes down to this. As schools across the nation are winding up their academic calendars, test scores are ruling the lives of educators and families to an unprecedented extent. Some kids -- especially those enrolled in special education programs or those whose primary language isn't English -- are having their futures forever altered by a score from a single test given on a single day. And teachers' lives are also being thrown into turmoil as "technical glitches" delay test results and sew confusion. From my own perspective, high-stakes tests meant that my child could take the last of school week off from classes so teachers could use that time to drill and retest students who failed end-of-year exams.
So as teachers dutifully marched through their orders to impose a test-driven approach to education that is antithetical to everything they believe to be in their students' best interests, they are nevertheless being told that that their jobs must be made harder and their work held to an ever tougher scrutiny.
Leading pundits such as David Brooks hailed this year as the year that public school teachers have rightly become "fair game." According to Brooks, the whole reason for 27 years of school reform failure is that we haven't been tough enough on teachers. What's needed is to get "Patton-esque" on these lay-abouts and adopt "stubborn, data-driven" policies that have a "low tolerance for bullshit."
The recurrent call to "get tough" on teachers and schools now dominates the discourse on education in our country. Time and time again, we are told that the solution to boosting student test scores is to ratchet-up the pressure on educators. Teachers are told that they have to work harder and for longer hours; their training has to be tougher, and their jobs made less secure.
From their cushy chairs and air-conditioned offices in DC thinktanks and corporate headquarters, education reformists chant the get-tough mantra to make standards "tougher" and make teaching more "rigorous." Addressing an audience of educators that is mostly female, their prose bristles with masculine exhortations to be tough-minded with teachers and "stiffen" requirements.
And some wonder why teachers feel they are being beat up on?
The big news in the edusphere this week was the release of the final version of common core standards outlining "what experts decided are the knowledge and skills students should have in mathematics and English/language arts."
"Reformists" immediately hailed the release, some even going as far as to claim that they will help "cure" poverty.
Many states, however, expressed their reservations to immediately adopt the standards. One of the most powerful incentives for states to accept the common core standards is the Race to the Top competitive grants that Arne Duncan is dangling in front of them. States that adopt the standards increase the eligibility for RTTT funds, and no doubt, many states will rush to accept the standards for this reason alone.
I've already written extensively about my reservations with national standards. And there's certainly an array of experts who disagree with me. But I found it ironic that in the same week that one of the cogs in Arne Duncan's grand mechanism to transform public education -- national standards -- was falling into place, two more of his precious ideas were proven to be complete and utter shams.
In the education community, it's hardly a cause for celebration when the latest results of a National Assessment of Education Progress hit the media, as one did this week when the results of a NAEP report on urban school districts was announced. And NO, that's not because NAEP results are always bad, as indeed the results of this latest NAEP are not all bad. And NO, it's not because educators are inherently resistant to assessments. In fact, according to surveys, the vast majority of teachers welcome being assessed based on student engagement, principal observations, and locally made and administered student performance evaluations.
What makes announcements of NAEP and other broad assessments unnerving to educators is that the results are used by politicians and pundits as the basis to propose, well, just about anything.
Unfortunately, some of those people using NAEP and other studies to make ridiculous pronouncements about the state of public education are people who are supposed to be allies of public education, specifically people who call themselves "Democrats." In her weekly blog post, Diane Ravitch spotlighted the clout of a particularly powerful group of Democrats known as Democrats for Education Reform who are actively undermining traditional public schools.
"This is a small and politically powerful organization that involves some of the nation's wealthiest hedge-fund managers. A story in The New York Times explained that when New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wanted entrée to the hedge-fund crowd for his political fundraising, he had first to meet with Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. No money for his candidacy unless he showed a favorable stance towards privatization. Democrats for Education Reform-referred to as DFER (dee-fer)-is active nationally, promoting the candidacy of pro-charter candidates for state legislatures and for national office."
The rightwing is elated at the tendency of people who call themselves Democrats to support Bush-era ed policies that undermine teachers' unions and public schools:
"From enacting new curricula standards to school choice measures such as charter schools, the NEA has been bested by the coterie of centrist Democrats, conservatives, libertarians and idiosyncratic left-learners who make up the school reform movement. The fact that Democrats -- including prominent liberals such as Green Dot Schools founder (and Rock the Vote cofounder) Steve Barr -- are also some of the most-prominent backers of school reform means that the NEA can no longer count on the Democratic National Committee for unquestioned support."
I've often been perplexed at the tendency of Democrats - even those who profess to be progressive - to support education policies that are not the least bit democratic, let alone progressive or even liberal. Is it because the Washington consensus on education policy is just a front for corporate takeover of public schools? Is it because they're all engaged in a global capitalistic plot hatched by the World Bank to subvert publicly funded schools? Is it because there is a failure of the minds of our leaders to grasp, as William Timberman suggested in comments to last week's Left Ed post, the importance of public education in the scheme of all the other overwhelming problems they face?
Today on Left Ed, let's consider another option. Let's explore the idea that much of the Democratic party and its leadership is seriously off-kilter on education and willfully ignorant of the destructive nature of their policies because they suffer from a case of Education Deficit Disorder.
One of the more important items in this week's education news was a new bill sponsored by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin proposing a $23 billion "bailout" fund for saving tens of thousands of teaching positions that states and school districts will not be able to fund in the coming school year. A WaPo article reported that Education Secretary Arne Duncan stopped just short of endorsing Harkin's bill but said that unless Congress acts, there will be "an education catastrophe" resulting in 100,000 to 300,000 teachers losing their jobs. "It is brutal out there, really scary," Duncan waxed empathetically and took care to note that schools and kids "suffer" when teachers are laid off, class sizes balloon, and summer sessions get canceled.
At the same time Duncan was lamenting the effects of teacher lay-offs on children, his staff was busy on Capitol Hill pushing a "blueprint" for education reform. A key element in the blueprint is that at least 5% of the nation's schools - potentially 10% - that are deemed "lowest performing in state" will be forced to adopt a federally mandated "intervention model." Of the four models prescribed in the blueprint, only one does not involve mass firings of teachers.
As Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, pointed out, adopting Duncan's blueprint will quite likely "cost teachers their jobs."
In another fit of cross-purposeful policy making, Duncan's team is also pushing a National Education Technology Plan (NETP) that urges schools to pursue ambitious learning goals such as teaching students twenty-first century skills, critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication. The plan also "calls for engaging and empowering learning experiences for all students," where teachers conduct "personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all" approach to curriculum and instruction.
While most educators would probably regard NEPT's goals as worthy, they can't help but point out how these goals conflict with the Obama administration's overall blueprint for education. How can a school system that emphasizes high-stakes testing in just two subjects - reading and math - fulfill the curriculum goals of teaching "collaboration and multimedia communication?" How can an approach to schooling that values test data more than any other output at the same time assert that it is "personalizing learning? "As one commenter in the previous link states,
"The focus of the federal and state governments on high-stakes testing is in direct contradiction to creating an environment where humans learn best... Stop attaching funding to only standardized test scores. Then, perhaps schools could begin moving towards creating an environment where 21st-century skills can develop."
So here's the deal: At the same time that our federal government is mustering financial resources to save teachers' jobs, it's also pushing measures to eliminate them. And at the same time that the US Department of Education is urging educators to focus their programs on ambitious learning goals and qualitative learning experiences, it's doing everything it can to undermine those goals by focusing on a narrow curriculum and strict, quantitative measures. This cognitive dissonance that characterizes the Obama administration's approach to education reform isn't anything new.
Last month, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claimed that the "best thing that ever happened" to public schools in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. (To be fair, here's the quote in context.) Although two days later Duncan apologized for his remarks, what he said - when he was thinking in his self-described "really honest" mode rather than perhaps a less than honest mode - actually reveals an essential aspect of the destructive school reform policies being carried out by the Obama administration.
Across the country, literally, from Rhode Island to California, Minnesota to Louisiana, federal policies are being used as leverage to shutter hundreds of public schools, eliminate teachers, disrupt the lives of families who are least able to cope with upheaval, and relegate many kids to gangs and street violence. When public schools deemed to be "under-performing" based on federally mandated standardized tests are not closed outright, they are being put on the auction block for take-over by the highest corporate bidders. The wave of closings and privatization washing over American schools is being labeled as a "turnaround" approach to reshape public education into something that will better serve children and youth.
According to Duncan, the intent is to turnaround approximately 5,000 schools, which is about 5 percent of US public schools. But the narrow scope of the turnaround approach has catastrophic effects on the schools that get targeted. Of the three "turnaround models" proposed by Duncan, only the third and final option doesn't include firing the school faculty or leadership. Because at least half of the targeted schools are in big cities, and many others are in suburbs and medium-sized towns, where schools have higher than average student populations, the numbers of students and families affected by these policies are potentially in the many tens even hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, kids only get one shot at an education. And any approach that puts their schoolyears at risk will have lifelong negative effects.
With all that's potentially at stake, you would think that a school reform strategy that is as far-reaching as Duncan's turnaround approach would be backed up with some solid research and a track record of success. Alas, such is not the case.
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