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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.
Writing in the Washington Post, Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress castigated the President for short-sightedness and inattention to the pressing problems of schools:
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.
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| Writing the very next day in the same newspaper, columnist Connor Williams strongly disagreed with the notion that "What's good for teachers is often times very good for students, " which is something that had been uttered by the newly-elected teachers' union president Nathan Saunders.
Next in line to skewer "the left's" argument for school improvement was a leading voice in the education community, edublogger Alexander Russo, who called Miller's advice something from "angry ideal-less progressives."
I would suggest, however, that what Miller - and indeed much of the punditry on "the left" - is putting forth in the education debate is not only replete with "ideals" - although not the kind of "ideals" that the authors of this agenda intend - but it's also about as far away from being "progressive" as you can get.
Because Miller is the one contending that improving America's schools is "related to the tax debate," allow me to extend the analogy by explaining how his "defense" of America's public schools is every bit as lame as the President's limp opposition to Republican tax policies.
Although Miller is puffing out his rhetorical chest at the Obama administration's tax policies, he is, while doing so, adopting the same failed strategy that Obama uses when countering the Republican agenda on tax policy, namely, begin by adopting the frame of your opposition, use it as a platform to hang out your own argument for a different remedy, then undermine everything you've said by completely ignoring the facts of the matter.
First, I question this tactic of the Serious People on "the left" who seem to think that the best way to get more resources for schools and a constructive policy focus on public education is to state categorically how crummy American public schools are.
Take the issue of America's performance on PISA. Why is it that so many on "the left" start the conversation about PISA with the same frame as conservatives do, that this is "yet another example" of America's "broken" public schools and yet another "wake-up call" for doing something about "bad" teachers"?
How, in fact real progressives should respond to PISA and other international measurements should be totally different. First, as the late Gerald Bracey reminded us in 2008:
Comparing nations on average scores is a pretty silly idea. It's like ranking runners based on average shoe size or evaluating the high school football team on the basis of how fast the average senior can run the 40-yard dash. Not much link to reality. What is likely much more important is how many high performers you have.
Second, test scores, at least average test scores, don't seem to be related to anything important to a national economy. Japan's kids have always done well, but the economy sank into the Pacific in 1990 and has never recovered
[snip]
Third, even if comparisons of average test scores were a meaningful exercise, it only looks at one dimension--the supply side. Predictably, the results gave rise to calls for more spending on science instruction. This ignores the fact that we have more scientists and engineers than we can absorb . . . Schools are doing a great job on the supply side. Business and industry are doing a lousy job on the demand side.
Furthermore, progressives need to acknowledge what the ability to score well on standardized test really entails, in terms of good education, and question whether or not we want to go there. Yong Zhao explains:
It is no news that the Chinese education system is excellent in preparing outstanding test takers, just like other education systems within the Confucian cultural circle-Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong.
[snip]
I found a story that has caught the attention of many readers (in Chinese) that provides the real reason behind Chinese students' top performance.
The story, entitled A Helpless Mother Complains about Extra Classes Online, Students Say They Have Become Stupid Before Graduation, follows a mother's online posting complaining about how her child's school's excessive academic load have caused serious physical and psychological damages:
Since my daughter began 7th grade (first year of middle school), she has had extra evening classes. At that time, the class ends at 18:50 and I accepted it. But ever since she entered 9th grade, the evening class has lengthened to 20:40. For the graduating class, the students have to take classes from 7:30 to 20:00 on Saturdays. There are also five weeks of classes during the winter and summer school vacation. All day long, the students don't have any self-study time, or physical education classes...
This kind of practice has seriously damaged students' health. They have completely lost motivation and interest in studying. My child's health gets worse day by day. So is her mental spirit. She has begun to lose her.
...
This is not the end. After coming home after 10pm, she has to spend at least one hour on her homework. She has to get up at 5am. She is still a child. May I ask how many adults can endure this kind of work?
The posting has received lots of comments online praising the mother's courage and adding more exposures of similar experiences.
"I am exhausted and have become stupid, even before I graduate from middle school," says one student. "You adults work from 9 to 5, but we have to work 18 hours a day," says another student to the reporter.
That's the secrete [sic]: when you spend all your time preparing for tests, and when students are selected based on their test-taking abilities, you get outstanding test scores.
Finally, over at Huffington Post, Kevin Welner director of the National Education Policy Center, explains how progressives need to be taking any "new evidence" of education's "failings" and framing that evidence as more indication of just how badly the education reform agenda has damaged American schools:
Whatever we think of these tests, however, there's a hypocrisy emanating from Washington, DC (yes, that's shocking news) that we shouldn't ignore. Secretary Duncan is telling teachers and schools that they should live and die by students' standardized test scores. But when it comes to charter schools and when it comes to the record of two-decades of test-based accountability reforms, he won't heed the clear wake-up call from those tests: It's not working.
Rather than accepting, as Miller does, the rightwing frame that America's public schools are "broken," and then using whatever seems to be making headlines in the news - regardless of its validity - to support a supposed remedy, it's time for people on the real left to take the advice of George Lakoff. Instead of letting the right have their way about assessing our public schools, and giving ground to irrelevant and erroneous yet popular conventional wisdoms, it's time to "shift the frame to the major causal factor that is being ignored on both sides: the role of communication in shaping what Americans understand" about the education debate. I'll have more to say about that next week. |
