This week, the conservative movement in our country ushered in the "New Washington Consensus on Education." As noted on Flypaper, blog site for the rightwing thinktank Fordham Institute, backers of this bipartisan effort to make public schools conform to a vision of "competition, choice, and accountability" is the product of a confederacy of leading conservative pundits such as George Will, business interests who see opportunities for expanding profits, Senators from conservative and swing states, and the current presidential administration whose point person for leading the charge to bipartisan school "reform" is Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
The "New Washington Consensus" differs from the old one in that it favors more "flexibility" in allowing states to determine the thresholds for accountability and a form of federal support based on "competition" typified by the Obama administration's Race to the Top grant program, which was heralded by the president in his recent State of the Union Speech as "the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation."
This may sound all well and good to some concerned citizens on the left of the political spectrum in that this new consensus resonates with themes of concern and commitment to public education and promises to lift the more punitive demands of No Child Left Behind. But anyone who considers themselves progressive should pause to remember that bipartisanship brought us the destructive path of NCLB to begin with - and the Iraq War too, for that matter.
Bipartisanship, in fact, hasn't been working so well for education. As Amy Stuart Wells pointed out at Education Week,
While it is a difficult moment to not support greater agreement across our political parties, the reality is that this increasing bipartisanism in education reform is not working for our students. In fact, the most agreed-upon solutions-testing, privatization, deregulation, stringent accountability systems, and placement of blame on unions for all that is wrong-are doing more harm than good. Achievement overall has not improved, and the gap between the privileged and the disadvantaged has widened. Parents across the country are fed up with the stress and boredom their children feel in schools that are driven by tests and competition. Internationally, countries with better safety nets to support children's well-being are leaving us in the dust. As President Obama noted, while the United States once led the world in education, we are now falling rapidly behind.
Despite this bad news, there appears to be no dramatic change of course on the political horizon, no healthy debate on the bipartisan agenda. Indeed, consensus on bad ideas in education has become much like a naked emperor-no one wants to break from the ranks and state a bold vision.
The reasons that bipartisanship on education isn't working are multiple. But rising to the top of the heap of the problems it spawns is the unified mantra for "competition" as a means to improve schools. After Obama hailed his RTT competitive grant program as a grand solution to our faltering schools, public school advocates at the Shott Foundation posted a stinging rebuttal:
Piecemeal programs like RTT, that require states to compete for resources in the form of grants, have not systemically solved the problem over the past two years, nor will they in the future. The role of the federal government is not one of a foundation, but as an agent of the people working to ensure opportunities for all. To date, 39 states either were non-participants or losers in RTT. How can the United States win if 39 states lose, let alone stay on a trajectory to increase the number of college graduates by 23 million above the current number? After two years of implementation and allotting close to $4 billion dollars, the initiative has only distributed resources in states that touch 24% of African American students, 15% of Latino students, 5% of Asian students, 0% percent of American Indian students, and 6% of ELL students. Additionally, poor rural states and their students have been grossly underrepresented in RTT.
In this "Sputnik moment," pairing the nation's 2020 goal with a RTT policy frame is analogous to challenging the nation to reach the moon and forcing states and communities to develop their own rockets to get there. As one Long Island grandparent passionately stated after New York Gov. Cuomo announced a similar competitive plan for that state, "Our kids are not game show contestants where parents should be forced to compete on getting them in the right districts or schools."
Education is a civil right and the federal government has the obligation to ensure all students' right to an opportunity to learn are protected, whether in strong or strained fiscal climates.
(emphasis in original)
That the competitiveness frame has never been proven to work for improving public schools never seems to be a consideration of the Washington Consensus. The whole concept of competition is in fact antithetical to what progressive education is trying to accomplish, as Alfie Kohn has long maintained and argued thoroughly.
If you believe that access to high-quality education is a fundamental human right, you should be just as suspicious of a competitive model for education as you would be of injecting competition into your community's fire and police protection. Forcing people to compete for essential services is not only unworkable - as those who are on the lower rungs of the economic ladder invariably are denied those service - it's immoral.
Again, from the Shott foundation:
A competitive-based frame like RTT works against the very purpose for which ESEA was created in 1965 as a part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty-to prevent states, districts, parents, and America's children from competing to have their right to an opportunity to learn protected. We urge the President not to lead America back to the pre-ESEA status quo days of states jockeying and politicking for federal funding; this approach has historically proven to do what the first two years of RTT has-leave poor, disadvantaged, and rural citizens behind.
The time has come for us to end the practice of avoiding the size of our challenge by creating limited initiatives like RTT that work only on the margins. As the President proclaimed, "America does Big Things," and a race that only impacts 11 of 50 states is far from "big."
So if competition has little to offer to public schools in both its lack of a proven track record and its conceptual clash with the values of public education, then why has the Obama administration colluded with others to embrace it?
The quick answer to that question is that it makes for good "politics." As George Lakoff wrote this week, Obama's "competitiveness narrative" serves a number of purposes in keeping him electable in 2012. But progressives have every cause to be suspicious of this strategy.
The competitiveness frame excludes half of what progressives care about. Abortion rights, under attack nationally by conservatives, don't help competitiveness, nor does gay marriage, worker rights, clean air and water, saving species and preserving natural environments, public financing of elections, helping the homeless, ending the war in Afghanistan, arts and humanities education, helping immigrants who are not well-educated, and on and on. Can these be made to fit the competitiveness frame?
Maybe.
Can you have unity without equality? Can you have productive industries without fair wages and organizing rights? Can you have long-term prosperity while destroying nature? Can you be economically productive without good health? Can you maximize production without women's rights? Can you educate a population without educating them in empathy and introspection and a vibrant sense of the aesthetics of life?
My sense is that in regards to the intentions of the New Washington Consensus on education, and by association the Obama administration, there is something more than just politics afoot here. Going back to the other pillar of the Consensus - "flexibility" - it's easy to see how those who are in power will have increased means to manipulate the system to conform to their own ideological - and financial -goals.
For instance, gaze upon the current debacle occurring in Wake County, North Carolina. As teacher and edublogger Nancy Flanagan recently wrote, Wake County, NC's largest school system, has enjoyed much success and widespread acclaim through, in part, enforcing - yes, enforcing, through government mandate - a diversity policy intended to rescue children of low-income families from being herded into high-poverty schools where they are, research shows, much less likely to flourish academically than if they were integrated into the schools that serve more affluent children.
However, a new Tea Party-backed majority of the Wake County School Board wants to shatter that track record of success. Under the guise of "flexibility" and "neighborhood schools," these ideologues want to enforce a system of competition and "choice" that will quite likely lead to a resegregation of black and brown children from their more well-off peers and, in turn, create a concentration of "failed" schools that can be immediately charterized into the hands of "education entrepreneurs."
As the ever-useful Jim Horn observes, there is a "financial incentive" at work in these "reform" efforts being pushed by the Washington Consensus. And that ends is to sequester black and brown children "in corporate charters" while "white children can be nurtured and sheltered behind the gates of their leafy communities," and doing all this "at public expense and under corporate direction."
Progressives everywhere need to push back against this New Washington Consensus. And fortunately, many are already organizing to do just that. Daily Kos' teacher and edu-blogger teacherken recently posted about the broad-based grassroots effort, Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action, and just this weekend he posted the first in a series of diaries describing the leadership behind this activism.
So what'll it be follow progressives? Are we going to stand on the sidelines? Or are going to join others to fight against the efforts of the Washington Consensus to privatize the public good and limit our rights to quality education for all?
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.
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?
This week, as the progressive blogosphere seethed in resentment over President Obama's cave-in to Republicans on tax cuts for the wealthy, at least one commentator linked the debate over tax policy to education reform.
It was depressing enough when the president caved on extending $120 billion in tax cuts for the highest-earning 2 percent of Americans at a time of war and surging debt. As proof of White House fear and timidity, and Republican greed and myopia, the news doesn't get much worse.
That's $120 billion over two years that won't go to boost job creation. Nor will it fund a portion of the $300 billion we'll spend on wars during same period - instead, we'll borrow that abroad and hand the bill to the kids. Worse, none of that cash will be available to lure America's top young talent to the classroom by finally making teaching a prestigious, well-paying career.
Oops - I forgot - no one in the tax and budget talks was talking about transforming the teaching profession as part of America's long-term economic recovery plan. After all, that would mean thinking beyond 2012. Yet the education world was rocked Tuesday when students in Shanghai, in that city's debut on a respected international test, outscored dozens of other countries in math, science and reading.
The "respected international test" that Miller is referring is, of course, the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, and the supposed stunner about this year's results is that PISA ranked American school kids 23rd or 24th in most subjects while students in the city of Shanghai outscored the rest of the world.
Miller laments how this is yet another "grim reminder of our lagging schools" and concludes that the argument about taxes and school improvement needs to be re-framed into one where retreats on tax cuts need to be equated to our deteriorating education system. In his call to arms, he exhorts the education reform movement's famed poster-person, Michelle Rhee, to lead the charge:
As part of her newly launched advocacy group, Students First, former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee should take these scary new findings to editorial boards, business groups and PTAs in every state. Only when enough of us wake up to the fact that we're losing badly in today's global education race will we have a hope of getting serious about turning things around.
Although Miller's thinking might strike many on the left-end of the political spectrum as sensible and logical - i. e., tax cuts for the rich = less money to improve our deteriorating schools - his argument will actually be quickly and summarily dispensed with in the broader debate. And it should be.
In a widely-syndicated column earlier this week, Richard Reeves ruminated darkly on the future of robotic war-making as it was presented in an earlier report from the New York Times In wondering about the consequences of using robots to replace soldiers on the battlefield, he asks, "The new Dr. Strangeloves are trying to revolutionize and, in a way, sanitize warfare. Why should the public, the masses, be bothered with unpleasantness when we can zap the bad guys from afar?"
That very same question can be asked in America's debate about the future of schooling, as "new Dr. Strangeloves" of education are striving to revolutionize and sanitize one of America's messiest problems that the elite levels of our country desperately want to ignore. Over the past two weeks, a full-court press pointed to how the ruling elite in business, government, and philanthropy showed how this is going to play out. Let me explain . . .
Beginning with this diary in memory of the great education research expert and commentator Gerald Bracey, I've been posting regularly about education policy on the frontpage of Open Left for a little over a year now.
I'm well aware that most of these posts have been harshly critical of the policies promoted by both President Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the crowd of neo-liberal, conservative, and corporate/foundation-backed ideologues who call themselves "reformers." However, it is very important to pause now and again and remind ourselves what the progressive community is fighting for in the education debate.
So it being a holiday weekend and all, I thought a quick re-cap of what's essential to a progressive view of education was in order.
My first treatment of this topic appeared here on Open Left in a diary focusing mostly on the writings of Alfie Kohn. But progressive thought about education certainly isn't limited to him. Nevertheless, I find the short checklist I paraphrased from his writings to be a useful launching pad for advancing a progressive view about education that truly is progressive.
What follows is a brief recap of those key points with an update of where we progressives are in advancing our cause:
In this weekly diary, I have frequently argued that the Obama administration's cluelessness about education policy provides the perfect lens into this presidency's detachment from the daily lives of his most supportive constituents - teachers, parents, the young, the poor, black and brown families across the country. The consequences of this detachment came crashing down on Obama, and more specifically, the Democratic members of the House, in this week's midterm election.
Pundits on both the left and the right share lots of unanimity in what the election "tells us" about the mood of the electorate. On the left, I agree with Markos Moulitas that the wave of Republican victories on Tuesday was much less about a conservative referendum than it was about extending a big fat middle finger at DC politics.
And on the right, I agree with George Wills' assessment of the House Republican victories being the result of widespread anger at how "one group of people (the politically successful)" have attempted to "engineer" everyone else's lives to align with the "Big Ideas" emanating from the ruling elite in DC. (An aside: Wills laughably calls this ruling elite "progressive." It's not. It is the essence of neo-liberal and he should know better.)
No doubt, people voted their frustrations with the economy and their rapidly deteriorating personal wellbeing. As Mike Lux pointed out on Open Left the other day, people who said their personal economic situation had gotten worse and who identified Wall Street as the culprits were more likely than not to vote-out the incumbent Democratic candidates. Why? Because they could! As the overlords of Wall Street continue to get DC politicians to do their bidding, people's sense of powerlessness has gotten to the boiling point. And the only power they have left is their vote.
Public school educators know all about this feeling of powerlessness. For years now they've seen politician after politician, backed by big business and thinktank pundits, forcing on them policies that every inch of their professional spirit and intelligence tell them are wrong. Only they don't get to vote on Arne Duncan!
Anyone who has been following education policy has known for years that "both parties are now part of the hostile takeover we (progressives) seek to confront," as David Sirota stated this week on Open Left. The "hostile takeover" of public education has been an incessant effort by both parties, as they seek to sell off the future of our children - especially those who are poor and minority - to profit- and fame-making endeavors, turning classrooms and school yards into a playground for investors and wealthy philanthropists.
If you've been following education policy, it didn't take Tuesday's midterm election to reveal that the leadership of both Democratic and Republican parties is alternately pandering to the oligarchs of Wall Street and the US Chamber of Commerce for the privilege to have a job in Washington DC. Public schools have been targeted relentlessly as an incentive to dangle before corporate America to shower political campaigns with money.
There really is no other realm where the depravity of DC politics is more revealed than in education. The "phantom left" that Chris Hedges wrote about this week is perpetually on display in the debate about school reform. While "the liberal class" uses the crutch of bipartisanship to remain "morally and politically disengaged" about the fate of our nation's schools, and the rightwing harps incessantly about the "moral degeneration and fiscal chaos" of public education, "the engines of corporate power - masked, ruthless and unexamined - happily devour the state."
In the education debate there is no "left" and certainly very little progressivism. And there's every indication that President Obama, conspiring with the Republicans once again, is about to use this political convenience to throw poor black and brown school kids under the bus.
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."
This week in the general media and internet there was an interesting rhetorical scrum among pundits and bloggers that revealed a lot about where the debate in education is heading and, in particular, what it may mean for the fate of poor brown and black kids in the most impoverished neighborhoods of America.
The tete-a-tete started with a column in Monday's Washington Post by Robert J. Samuelson in which he declared that nearly 40 years of school reform have been a "failure." To buttress his argument he points to results from tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress which show that while "some improvements have occurred in elementary schools . . . they're erased by high school." He also points out that even though "there has also been a modest narrowing in the high school achievement gaps among whites, blacks and Hispanics; unfortunately, the narrowing generally stopped in the late 1980s." Then he adds an aside that "(Average test scores have remained stable because, although the scores of blacks and Hispanics have risen slightly, the size of these minority groups also expanded. This means that their still-low scores exert a bigger drag on the average. The two factors offset each other.)" Samuelson concludes his column by blaming the lack of progress in school improvement on a decrease in student motivation and his observations that "more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well."
The next day, Jonathan Chait of The New Republic blasted Samuelson for being an out-dated, hang-dog curmudgeon who doesn't understand that "American education policy has been on auto-pilot," "the current wave of reform" has never been tried before, and that charter schools, specifically KIPP schools, "have shown revolutionary improvements among poor, inner-city students and have rapidly expanded."
Joining the fray soon after is the Daily Howler's Bob Somerby who accuses Samuelson of spewing "disinformation" and accuses Chait of being a "liberal" who doesn't "care about blacks." His argument is that from 1971 to 2008 17-year-old black students gained 29 points in reading and the fact that neither Samuleson or Chait acknowledge this shows that these authors are "dissembling" at best, or at worst, have "no earthly sign" of understanding the matter at hand. His conclusion, in a Friday post, is that "we're surprised by these test score gains; we wouldn't have thought that an increasing focus on testing, 'standards' and accountability would have produced this type of result. But these large score gains exist-and they simply beg for analysis, unless you don't give a flying fig about the kids who achieved them."
Not to be left out of the fun, Matthew Yglesias from the Center for American Progress sided with Somerby to a point, but wants to assert that the main message from looking at the most recent data from NAEP is to realize that "history gives us no reason to doubt that it's possible for black kids to do better in school." (Earth to Yglesias: Is there anyone to the left of a Tea Party troll asserting that it's not "possible for blacks to do well in school"?)
The last one hurtling into the moshpit is Kevin Drum of Mother Jones who concludes that what all this brou-ha-ha over NAEP scores shows is:
"You can say that black and Hispanic scores have risen dramatically since the early 70s. Or you can say that black and Hispanic scores have stagnated (or even dropped slightly depending on how you cherry pick your dates) since the early 90s. Or you can say that white kids have made slight gains. Or you can say that the black-white gap closed considerably for a while but hasn't changed much lately."
So according to Drum, there aren't any conclusions about the NAEP data really worth making, and he nonchalantly dismisses the whole crossfire by saying that "there's just not much there there."
What none of these supposedly informed observers of educational progress dare to address though is the 50,000 pound gorilla staring at them from the NAEP report (pdf).
The gorilla makes its first appearance on page 4:
"the reading score gaps between White and Black students at all three ages showed no significant change from 2004 to 2008, the gaps did narrow in 2008 compared to 1971. White - Hispanic gaps in reading scores also showed no significant change from 2004 to 2008 but were smaller in 2008 than in 1975 at ages 9 and 17. Across all three age groups, neither the White - Black nor White - Hispanic gaps in mathematics changed significantly from 2004 to 2008, but both were smaller in 2008 than in 1973."
Then on page 14:
No significant change in White - Black score gaps since 2004
Page 16:
No significant change in White - Black score gaps since 2004
And page 17:
No significant change in White - Hispanic score gaps since 2004
In other words, one of the most overwhelming conclusions of the NAEP data - that four years of NCLB-driven "reforms" produced nothing in terms of narrowing our country's achievement gap - is either being denied or brushed away by those who proclaim to speak for the interests of poor black and brown school children. And it is the very same NCLB-styled reforms - "accountability" based on standardized testing - that are driving the current administration's education policy and its KIPP-inspired charter school benefactors.
by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
After a long summer of name-calling and absurd attempts to deny birthright citizenship to children of immigrants, immigration hawks are now bullying immigrant children on their own turf: Public schools.
California, New York, Iowa and Colorado are among the states that have cracked down on immigrant students by hiring ICE agents to investigate residency statuses or unlawfully barring students from enrolling. Such blatant discrimination flies in the face of the 14th amendment and Supreme Court precedent, both of which guarantee all children the right to a public education regardless of immigration status.
The latest assault on immigrant students comes not from over-zealous school districts, however, but from state lawmakers adamant about stripping immigrants of the few rights they possess.
Kicked out of school
As Matt Vasilogambros of the Iowa Independent reports, Iowa's lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Kim Reynolds recently came out in support of denying public education to undocumented children, a sentiment she shares with her running mate, former Gov. Terry Branstad. Branstad's position is even more extreme, however. He has argued that the Supreme Court decision in Plyer v. Doe-the 1982 case which guarantees immigrants the right to public education-should be overturned.
So far, only Colorado third party gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo has fully endorsed Branstad's extreme opinion. Tancredo has even gone so far as to say that, if elected, he would ignore the Supreme Court ruling altogether.
Branstad and Tancredo may be on their own for the moment. Bu, if this summer's birthright citizenship fiasco is any indication, anti-immigrant conservatives must be delighted to fall back on the age-old myth that immigrants are here to steal social services.
New York Stands Up
Last week, the New York Department of Education fired back at anti-immigrant activism in schools by issuing a memo directing schools not to investigate the immigration status of their students.
According to Braden Goyette of Campus Progress, the memo came in response to a New York Civil Liberties Union report charging that 139 New York school districts were collecting information about prospective students' immigration statuses-and barring or discouraging children from enrolling if they failed to provide proof of their citizenship.
Goyette notes that federal law only requires students to fulfill two simple requirements before enrolling: residency in the school district, and intent to remain in the school district. Immigration status is not a factor.
The memo is a victory for immigrant rights advocates, especially as it comes on the heels of reports that two California school districts are adopting even harsher anti-immigrant policies.
Negating Pylver v. Doe
As New America Media's Jacob Simas and Elena Shore translate from a La Opinión, a daily Spanish-language newspaper based in Los Angeles. Both the Unified School District of Calexico and the Mountain Empire School District near San Diego have hired staff exclusively to investigate the immigration statuses of their students. The school districts are attempting to get around Pyler v. Doe by arguing that their proximity to the border necessitates stricter enforcement of federal residency requirements.
In other words, they're worried that Mexican children are crossing the border to take advantage of our first-class, world-renowned public school offerings. The simple fact that student residency can be determined without revealing immigration status is obviously beside the point.
Cutting Social Services in New Jersey
Meanwhile, immigrants in New Jersey may be robbed of their own social services, as the state threatens to removes 12,000 non-citizens from the it's low-income family insurance plan.
As Change.org's Prerna Lal reports, several legal immigrants have joined a class action lawsuit against New Jersey's Department of Human Services, alleging that the state is violating "the equal protection guarantees of the United States and New Jersey Constitutions" by denying health care subsidies to legal permanent residents. Lal notes that legal permanent residents possess nearly all of the same rights as U.S. citizens, and pay taxes to both state and federal governments. They should, therefore, be safe from public policy discrimination.
But, while it's well documented that both legal and undocumented immigrants pay into our social services system through income taxes, that fact is persistently overlooked by the anti-immigrant zealots who want to keep immigrants off Medicaid and out of public schools.
Given their immense contribution to the social services net, guaranteeing immigrants' access to those public services is more than a matter of justice-it's a matter of fiscal responsibility.
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In January, when Arne Duncan proclaimed that Hurricane Katrina "was the best thing" that ever happened to New Orleans public schools, there was a firestorm of protest that pressured him into apologizing. Today, in the observance of the 5 year anniversary of that tragedy, many are implying the very same thing that Duncan overtly stated, with nary a word of disagreement.
My first warning of this concerted effort to herald the "success" of "education reforms" made in post-Katrina NOLA came from OpenLeft commenter LiberlWingofLiberalWing who pointed me to this extremely shallow and one-sided piece on HuffPo last week. Today, the message is practically everywhere in the MSM and the web.
The major thrust of the PR is to tout NOLA's "new hybrid model, whereby charter schools outnumber traditional public schools two to one." And the goal of course is to tout this as a model for schooling worthy of being rolled out across all major cities where there are lots of impoverished brown and black children.
So what's wrong with that?
First, as Jim Horn reveals in a fantastic series of posts over at Schools Matter, it's important to understand what this shiny new model for education in NOLA is. He quotes from a new study (pdf) to explain how "rebuilding of the public school system in post-Katrina New Orleans has produced a five 'tiered' system of public schools in which not every student in the city receives the same quality education."
This tiered system has created highly segregated schools on the basis of race and income. Schools perform highly unequally across these sectors because a "tiered performance hierarchy" ensures students who perform higher on standardized tests attend higher performing schools while "the majority of low income students of color" attend lower performing schools.
The result of this institutionalized segregation is to, Horn contends, "skim the healthiest, wealthiest, and highest-scoring students into charters, and then to dump the most challenging students into the public schools."
And this skimming and sorting isn't just related to race and class. It's well known that among the most challenging students to educate are those who require special education and English language learning services. And NOLA's hybrid school system restricts the mobility of those students as well.
As evidence, Horn points to a video clip from a PBS news story that reveals how NOLA charter schools engage in "dumping" special education students on traditional public schools. How can they do that? Simply by not offering those services, which traditional public schools are required by federal law to offer. You see, charter schools are not governed in the same way that traditional public schools are.
Another critical facet of the NOLA post-Katrina education story that news outlets - major and minor - are getting wrong is that charters are greatly out-performing traditional public schools. While it's true that the charters in the top tiers out-perform traditional public schools in lower tiers, they don't outperform traditional public schools in their tier.
Finally, I suppose you could dismiss all these counter-narratives to the NOLA school reform "miracle" by saying "yes but, the schools are doing better after Katrina."
But as Horn reveals today, that contention is not so clear cut when you look at year-over-year progress (the basis of NCLB requirements):
"Between 2002 and 2005 (based on numbers from the Times-Picayune), test score growth in 4th grade among all NOLA public school children was 18 points in ELA [English language arts] and 16 points in Math. Between 2007 to 2010 test score growth among NOLA children was 19 points in ELA and 10 points in Math.
In 8th grade between 2002 and 2005, NOLA students gained 21 points in ELA and 8 points in Math. Between 2007 and 2010, 8th graders gained 13 points in ELA and 11 points in Math."
So the results are indeed mixed.
Furthermore, NOLA charter schools - the darling of the ed reformist movement - are not in any way living up to the narrative trumpeted throughout the media. In fact, "charters are getting trounced in terms of test score growth by the regular public schools." Based on figures from a 2010 report, regular public schools had a "growth advantage of exactly 2:1."
So despite the reformist plan in NOLA to "improve" education through increased segregation and charter schools for the elite, traditional public schools continue to beat the odds stacked against them.
Finally, much has been written in the press about the increased suicide rates along the Gulf since Katrina, and it's still trending up. What's not been pointed out is that charter schools that decline to offer the special education services needed by students experiencing learning disabilities related to PTSD, depression, and poverty, are complicit in further destabilizing youth populations.
So yes, New Orleans public schools have made "great strides" since Katrina. Indeed, the fact that they are doing as well as they are, given the poor performance of our government to come to their aid, is the real "miracle." But don't believe for a minute that their comeback is purely the result of some reform effort hatched by a DC think tank and backed by Wall Street financiers. And don't' for a minute think you want this sort of school system coming to your neighborhood.
This past week's "reporting" by the mainstream media on the number one issue on many people's minds - the "ground zero mosque" - is a great example of how bad our media culture has gotten in this country. Even people who don't normally write about political matters could easily point out how the MSM's narrative about the Park 51 community center has been perpetuating "lies or intellectually dishonest arguments designed to bring out the very worst in all of us," namely:
1. It ain't a "mosque."
2. It ain't at "ground zero."
3. It ain't American to restrict private activities of any kind based on religion.
But while prominent bloggers in the progressive community - Glenn Greenwald, digby, and others ¬ continue to seethe about the media's miasma regarding Park 51, they hardly ever challenge how the media distorts America's perspectives on something that's really a whole lot closer to home for most people: our neighborhood schools.
As I've stated in previous editions of Left Ed, the "disappearance" of education news in the media (and by derivation, the blogosphere) leaves the American public with a void that is all too easily filed with half-truths, distortions, and outright lies. And even when education makes it into the headlines, reporters rarely get it right.
A better case in point cannot be found than this week's example of "education journalism" in the Los Angeles Times.
Just as the citizens of Los Angeles are heading back to schools, the intrepid journalists of the LAT thought it would be a smashing idea to trash local teachers, not in the abstract, but by name. In this video, the crack-reporting team of Jason-and-Jason declare in sweeping generalization that teacher evaluations in America are across the board a "subjective" effort and that only those states using a "value added" approach can illuminate the way forward to better instructional practice.
Based on this totally "subjective" judgment, the LAT announced that it was going to publish a series of articles called Grading the Teachers that would ostensibly show "how effective Los Angeles Unified School District teachers have been at improving their students' performance on standardized tests." The article that followed the announcement went so far as to identify to the public individual teachers as being "effective" or "ineffective" based on an evaluation method known as "value added" analysis.
Although US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was fine with the LAT's series, most people remotely cognizant of quality education practice were not. Two prominent authors and commentators, Diane Ravitch and Rick Hess, who often don't see eye-to-eye on school policy-related matters, had no problem agreeing that the LAT's public outing of teachers was a mistake.
"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.
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.
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?
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