OpenLeft has asked me to turn my semi-regular diary on education into a weekly feature that updates our community on what's happening with K-12 public schools -- giving Paul a bathroom break every Sunday at 4:00pm. I'm calling the feature "Left Ed" unless someone's got a better idea.
My hope is that each recurring post will use a progressive political lens to review weekly education news (veering occasionally into in-depth commentary on a specific topic), follow-up conversations from previous diaries with pertinent new events, and counter-balance the typical blather from the MSM with what real educators and people who actually know something about education are saying about the trends in public school policy.
The feedback I've gotten on this site to my previous diaries has run the gamut from effusive to frustrated to perplexed. I'm very grateful for this response and want to continue to generate conversation that can lead to a broad understanding of where the progressive community stands on public education issues, school reform, and the Obama administration's policies regarding public schools.
So why am I doing this? Mainly, as I stated in a comment to Mark Matson in my most recent diary, to "bridge what I perceive to be the gap between progressive views of education and what most liberals see as sane and responsible policy."
To kick-off Left Ed, I'd like to hear what others in this community want my weekly effort to address. What can I provide to better prepare us all to understand and, hopefully, influence the broader public dialogue about education policy? What should we track from week-to-week to keep ourselves informed of the pros and cons of the Obama administration's actions? What should we be advocating for at local, state, and federal levels? And who are the politicians that get it right and how can we support them?
In addition to getting your feedback, I want to follow-up last week's diary -- which received quite a lot of comments -- with some updates on the push for national standards and increased standardized testing.
In a Quick Hit this week, I pointed out how the push-back against standardized testing is getting much-needed reinforcement from the people who actually know something about testing. And in another QH, I revealed the little-known fact that most teachers never get to see the results from standardized tests that are supposed to reveal to them the effectiveness of their teaching. And part of the reason for this is that the companies that provide the tests don't want to reveal item-by-item results.
Regarding national standards, when Diane Ravitch declared in her book Death and Life of the Great American School that enacting national content standards would be a shew-in because (in her words) "the curriculum wars of the 1990s have ended," she should have made this explicitly apparent to the people of California. The debate in that state over new "common core standards" being pushed by the Obama administration is starting to "echo California's 'math wars' that raged in the 1990s," and anyone who feels that the push for national content standards won't reawaken the culture wars is being foolish.
In the most recent issue of Educational Leadership (sub required), nationally prominent education pundits sound-off on the topic of content standards. (Full disclosure: publisher is a client of mine.) In the "For" column, William Schmidt and Chester Finn argue that standards are required primarily to stay "competitive internationally" and to reinforce "national school 'brands,'" such as KIPP charter schools.
Countering this argument, Deborah Meier enlightens us that "it's a fact that we don't know how to teach math well to everyone. Maybe we never will." And "setting fixed standards for what students should learn means aiming either too low or too high -- never on target for each individual learner."
To bolster her point, Phil Schlechty explains that "standards should not be fixed points. Rather, they should mark a horizon." He counters the "everybody else does it" argument of Schmidt and Finn with the case of Finland.
"Finland has a system of national standards, but it leaves assessment of students up to local communities. Before we establish national standards, we must do as Finland did and arrive at some agreement about the purposes of education in the 21st century and the kind of society we aspire to be. I find little in our discussion about standards that addresses such issues."
And finally, Yong Zhaou thrusts the ultimate skewer in the argument for national standards based on international "competitiveness" by pointing out that "China is a well-known example of how establishing a national curriculum does not necessarily reduce achievement gaps. Despite years of a highly nationalized system and a homogeneous culture, China still sees significant gaps in test scores among students in different regions." His refutation of national standards is an affirmation of why they are anathema to democracy:
"The negative consequences of national standards are well documented. Common standards lead to distortion of the purpose of schooling and deprive students of a real education. Governments inevitably use high-stakes testing to enforce standards. Such testing forces teachers to focus on what is tested and spend less time on what is not. The focus of curriculum gets narrowed to a few subjects, and students wind up with a depressed education experience overall.
National standards stifle creativity and reduce diversity. To be creative is to be different, to deviate from the norm-but common standards demand a uniform way of thinking, learning, and demonstrating one's learning. Standardized testing rewards those who conform and penalizes those who deviate."
Finally, Richard Rothstein points out how Obama's new "Blueprint" for education reform is just an extension of the Bush administration's failed NCLB policy but "with a twist. Only the bottom 5 percent of schools (called 'Challenge' schools) will suffer severe sanctions (such as firing or replacing the staff) as a result of low test scores."
"The result of all this is that schools serving a large proportion of minority students will behave under the Blueprint very similarly to how they behaved under NCLB. If the Administration succeeds in raising the proficiency cut points (now called "college and career ready" standards), even more students will be ignored because they are too far below the passing point to matter.
Schools with largely middle class populations will effectively be exempt. The political consequences of this could be dangerous: federal officials will no longer be besieged by middle class parents upset that their schools have turned into test-prep factories; only poor and minority communities will suffer the punitive hammer of federal policy."
Get that? Shutting down schools based on high-stakes test scores not only makes no sense on a practical level; it's also potentially volatile politically. So again, why is this the policy direction?
