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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.
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| The chief symptom of EDD presents as blindly following rightwing hegemonic messaging about education when you haven't got a clue about the reality of the situation.
There are a number of possible causes of EDD. But the obvious ones were revealed in a recent report from the Brookings Institution that made the rounds in the edublogosphere and here on OL the other day. As Brookings points out, most people aren't going to get much information about education from their personal experience because "only a third of American adults currently have a child in elementary or secondary school." So because of this, mass media has to take on more of the burden in communicating the facts about public schools.
However, as Brookings points out, "there is virtually no national coverage of education" in the mainstream media."
"Despite the importance of media coverage for public understanding of education, news reporting on schools is scant. As we note in this report, there is virtually no national coverage of education. During the first nine months of 2009, only 1.4 percent of national news coverage from television, newspapers, news Web sites, and radio dealt with education. This paucity of coverage is not unique to 2009. In 2008, only 0.7 percent of national news coverage involved education, while 1.0 percent did so in 2007. This makes it difficult for the public to follow the issues at stake in our education debates and to understand how to improve school performance."
Even on those rare occasions when education issues make the news, the reporting is generally poor or extremely misinformed. More examples of shoddy education journalism arose this week from the New York Times Magazine (published today but available online earlier) and Forbes magazine.
The Times Magazine article written by Steven Brill is a great example of how journalists writing about education often make claims that are both not backed up by factual evidence and are, on their face, utter nonsense. Take the following gem from Brill's article:
"Charter schools are not always better for children. Across the country many are performing badly. But when run well - as most in Harlem and New York's other most-challenged communities appear to be - they can make a huge difference in a child's life."
Although I can't argue with Brill's first point that charter schools are generally no better for children than traditional public schools are, his claim that the ones in New York "appear to be" better is not backed up by any evidence. And to say that "when well run" charter schools can "make a huge difference" is the same thing as saying traditional schools "when well run" can "make a huge difference". So what's his point?
It doesn't take long for someone who really knows something about education, rather than the "reform" enthusiasts and bureaucrats that Brill favors, to completely destroy this article's credibility in short order.
As Ed Notes Online reports, educator Leonie Haimson explains why the NYT Magazine article does little more than put a sunny gloss on the Obama administration's education policies and the charter schools movement:
"The article blames all our educational problems on the union (as usual); doesn't mention any of the controversial charter co-locations that are squeezing space from our regular public schools; doesn't mention any of the charter school financial scandals, or their abuse of student and parent rights, the opposition of the charter school industry to audits, or the hedge fund guys who are driving these policies."
But the most criminal oversight Brill commits is to fail to understand that many of the "improvements" that charter schools in NYC tout are the result of excluding the most difficult-to-teach students, such as students in special education, students who don't speak English as their first language, and the homeless. Writes Haimson:
"This New York magazine article received over 240 comments [online], many of them by former teachers and parents of [Harlem Success Academy charter school] writing about the overwhelming predominance of test prep and the high number of students pushed out or counseled out of the school. The fact that Steven Brill and his editors at the Times didn't see the need to provide accurate data or a less biased depiction of this issue is not just shocking; it represents journalistic malpractice.
The rapid expansion of charter schools is leading to our public schools becoming more concentrated with high needs students, while taking away valuable funds and space from our public school system, at a time when already their budgets have been slashed to the bone."
The Forbes piece is equally appalling in its uninformed and one-sided treatment of so-called education reform efforts. As Kenneth Libby, eudblogger and guest-blogger here on Left Ed, points out, the entire article comes from the slant of corporatists who
"define students as products, learning as test scores, and good schools as quiet schools. That's their model, the only way they're capable of thinking (and, hence, the only way they can 'solve' the problems faced by public schools). It's a form of intellectual sterilization reserved only for the poor, black, and brown - not for the children in affluent suburbs or private schools like Sidwell Friends [the private school where the Obama's send their daughters]. Most educators - particularly those with real classroom experience and knowledge of child/human development - are smarter than these crooks and corporatists, but their wisdom is disregarded in favor of 'data' and 'scientific management' imposed by MBAs and their ilk."
So when you get this kind of situation - where most people, including Democrats, have very little if any first-hand information about schools and the tiny bit that they get in the media is fraught with biased and erroneous information - you're bound to get a contagion of EDD. And when EDD goes pandemic, you end up with:
* teachers being blamed for low test scores despite the pervasiveness of lead poisoning in kids, which is scientifically known to inhibit learning;
* budget cuts targeted at preK programs even though the benefits of better preK education are known to extend all the way into the teen years;
* test score irrationality leading to the "inevitable nastiness" of a single digit on a single test making the difference between whether a school is labeled as "failing" or achieving "rock-star status";
* and, believe it or not, the leading business outlet in America actually calling for Americans to become less educated.
This Week's Duncehat Award: Richard Whitmire, Andrew J. Rotherham
Let's send dual Duncehats out to Richard Whitmire and Andrew J. Rotherham for this wet sloppy kiss to education reformists in the US News and Report.
Hailing the "significant education breakthroughs that promise to pay dividends for years to come, " Whitmire and Rotherman declare that just three things are going to lead our country to the holy grail of "the top of international education rankings." The three profound "lessons" that the authors send worshipful prose toward essentially boil down, to just two things: charter schools and privatization.
In this mostly fact-free marketing piece (full disclosure: I'm a marketing consultant by profession), the authors rush exuberantly past anything having any real data behind it - such as the proven impact of school-based health clinics, the link between school factors and teacher success, the proven benefits of ensuring that poor kids have access to books, etc. - to advance the completely fictitious narrative that American public schools will be made better by the magic wands of reformists and the false goal of "competitiveness."
Quick, get these guys an EDD intervention.
(Apologies in advance to any reader who thinks I'm mocking the very serious problem of ADD. I'm well aware that ADD is a real-life problem with serious consequences and not a state of willful ignorance.) |
