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.
(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 . . .
In major newspapers and in op ed columns by Washington DC insiders, Obama's choice for Secretary of Education, and thus a signifier of the potential direction for education reform, is being portrayed as a continuation of the ongoing struggle between "the reformers" and the teachers' unions. In an article appearing in the Boston Globe and a column by The Washington Post's David Brooks, the real choice for education reform basically comes down to this:
Either pick a "real reformer," such as New York City superintendent Joel Klein, who espouses teacher merit pay, strict accountability based on test scores, pro NCLB, and all for parent choice (i.e., charter schools). Or pick Linda Darling-Hammond, who Brooks dismisses as " the establishment view" and Seyward Darby at The New Republic contends is "vexing education's boldest change agents."
And then there's Arne Duncan, Chicago Public Schools chief, who has been positioned as the Goldilocks candidate who is potentially "just right" for everyone, even though he has previously espoused many of the same beliefs (sub required) as Klein and other "reformers."
It's a convenient narrative that adheres to the longstanding rightwing frame. This frame maintains that the real problems with America's schools are due to teachers' unions and a "bureaucracy" that is immune to the purifying force of the "free market." So basically, there's only two sides to this argument: the "reform minded" who adhere to continuation of NCLB-like "accountability" and the "establishment" which is always framed as an ally of the teachers' unions.
What is totally left out of the picture is that there is a real alternative to this frame that is rarely reported in the MSM and whose voice is rarely heard in the debate that leaks from the Obama transition team. Join me on the flip to explore what that is . . .
