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One of the more important items in this week's education news was a new bill sponsored by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin proposing a $23 billion "bailout" fund for saving tens of thousands of teaching positions that states and school districts will not be able to fund in the coming school year. A WaPo article reported that Education Secretary Arne Duncan stopped just short of endorsing Harkin's bill but said that unless Congress acts, there will be "an education catastrophe" resulting in 100,000 to 300,000 teachers losing their jobs. "It is brutal out there, really scary," Duncan waxed empathetically and took care to note that schools and kids "suffer" when teachers are laid off, class sizes balloon, and summer sessions get canceled.
At the same time Duncan was lamenting the effects of teacher lay-offs on children, his staff was busy on Capitol Hill pushing a "blueprint" for education reform. A key element in the blueprint is that at least 5% of the nation's schools - potentially 10% - that are deemed "lowest performing in state" will be forced to adopt a federally mandated "intervention model." Of the four models prescribed in the blueprint, only one does not involve mass firings of teachers.
As Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, pointed out, adopting Duncan's blueprint will quite likely "cost teachers their jobs."
In another fit of cross-purposeful policy making, Duncan's team is also pushing a National Education Technology Plan (NETP) that urges schools to pursue ambitious learning goals such as teaching students twenty-first century skills, critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication. The plan also "calls for engaging and empowering learning experiences for all students," where teachers conduct "personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all" approach to curriculum and instruction.
While most educators would probably regard NEPT's goals as worthy, they can't help but point out how these goals conflict with the Obama administration's overall blueprint for education. How can a school system that emphasizes high-stakes testing in just two subjects - reading and math - fulfill the curriculum goals of teaching "collaboration and multimedia communication?" How can an approach to schooling that values test data more than any other output at the same time assert that it is "personalizing learning? "As one commenter in the previous link states,
"The focus of the federal and state governments on high-stakes testing is in direct contradiction to creating an environment where humans learn best... Stop attaching funding to only standardized test scores. Then, perhaps schools could begin moving towards creating an environment where 21st-century skills can develop."
So here's the deal: At the same time that our federal government is mustering financial resources to save teachers' jobs, it's also pushing measures to eliminate them. And at the same time that the US Department of Education is urging educators to focus their programs on ambitious learning goals and qualitative learning experiences, it's doing everything it can to undermine those goals by focusing on a narrow curriculum and strict, quantitative measures. This cognitive dissonance that characterizes the Obama administration's approach to education reform isn't anything new.
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| As I have written before on OpenLeft, since the 1980s there has been a Washington Consensus on education that holds the two contradictory concepts that: (1) Schools are the best means of alleviating poverty and achieving equality, and (2) schools consistently fail to resolve the broad social ills of poverty and inequality.
The Obama administration's approach to education reform is just the latest rationalization that attempts to soothe the political psyche of the Washington DC establishment's contradictory framework.
The fact is that schools, alone, are not and will never be a solution to poverty and inequality. In yet another example of this reality, edublog This Week in Education pointed to a report this week about the disappointing results generated by a charter school operated by Stanford University's School of Education and Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading education authority who advised the Obama administration. The school purposefully chose to locate its facility in a chronically disadvantaged neighborhood and take on the challenge of educating poor minority students, many who lack English language efficiency.
Despite the leadership of one of the nation's top education schools and a higher per-pupil-expenditure than any other school in the district, the school persistently ranks in the district's "worst performing" category. While some would say this is another failure chalked up by establishment educators, I'm more inclined to agree with Diane Ravitch:
"Maybe this demonstrates that schools alone cannot solve the very deep problems kids bring to school. You cannot assume that schools alone can raise achievement scores without addressing the issues of poverty, of homelessness and shattered families."
Nevertheless, the Obama administration and Arne Duncan continue to push cognitively dysfunctional education policies despite the fact that there is no evidence that they will achieve results any better than what was achieved by the Bush administration (which was disastrous).
Don't get me wrong. By no means does diagnosing Arne Duncan with cognitive dissonance trivialize the effects of his policies. After all, this is a man who said that Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that ever happened" to New Orleans public schools. He based that remark on studies like this one (pdf) from the rightwing Reason Foundation that asserts that because New Orleans schools "improved" after they were wiped out by Katrina and allowed to reopen as charters, then the "recipe" for all failing city schools is to close them down, fire the teachers, and allow them to reopen as independent charters.
But cognitive dissonance often leads to confirmation bias where people look for information "that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses, independently of whether they are true." And this week, a Think Tank Review (pdf) put out by Education and the Public Interest Center confirmed that the work done by the Reason Foundation is total bunk. The Reason study not only fails to "provide readers with any valid, generalizable research supporting the claims of beneficial outcomes" and disregards "large-scale studies that show charter schools do not, on average, improve student achievement." It also ignores that
(a) the New Orleans district was already showing steady improvement before the post-Katrina reforms
(b) other districts in the state not devastated by the hurricane have continued to improve in the post-Katrina era as well
(c) Katrina led to a disproportionate exodus of poor families from the district, where enrollment is less than two-thirds of pre-Katrina levels
(d) post-Katrina resources for the city's public schools have been significantly greater than before the hurricane.
But still, where I see cognitive dissonance, others see something far more sinister. In a QuickHit I posted earlier this week on OpenLeft, I pointed to this diary at the edublog Borderland where Doug Noon includes a transcript of Lois Weiner's remarks at a joint discussion with Diane Ravitch on school reform. Since then, Weiner's remarks have rocketed through the edublogosphere (see here and here). And for good reason.
Weiner makes a strong argument that current school reform policies are a neoliberal plan to destroy public education:
"NCLB, all these policies that Diane just described, are neoliberalism coming home. They are policies that were imposed for the first time under Pinochet - under Pinochet. Next in Argentina. Next in Uruguay. Throughout all of Latin America and Central America.
So let us understand that this is a global project that began 40 years ago, was tested, refined - if you want to use that word - imposed on Africa, Asia, and Latin America by the World Bank. Why? Because developing countries wanted aid. If they wanted aid, they had to undergo economic restructuring AND educational reform."
According to Weiner, the "four pillars" that support this international project are: (a) privatization, (b) fragmentation of oversight and regulation and creation of individual schools, (c) standardized testing, and (d) assault on teachers' unions. In other words, all the essentials being pushed by both Republican and Democratic school "reformists" here in the US.
But whether you see the nation's current school policies as a critical dysfunction or a grand scheme, the conclusion you have to draw is the same. Most grand plans for school reform have failed, and this will continue to be the fate of the current Obama-Duncan construction. What is at most at issue is how extensive will the damage be before the entire enterprise collapses.
A final note before I hand out his week's Duncehat award, in an incredibly valuable QuickHit here on OL, TGeraghty pointed us to a new study that quantifies "the value of public education . . . as an inter-generational entitlement program on a par with Social Security and Medicare." I've yet to thoroughly read the entire study and will have more to say about this topic next week.
Now onto this week's Duncehat award . . .
This Week's Duncehat Award Winner: Mickey Kaus
This week's Duncehat goes to Mickey Kaus, the Slate.com columnist and candidate for the California US Senate, running against Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary, for his stand against teachers' unions. I use the word "stand" loosely because it's really hard to figure out what Kaus has against teacher's unions other than some vague generalization about them standing in the way of "reform".
If Kaus actually made the effort to read-up on the reform efforts that teacher's unions are calling for, he'd learn that they are all for many of the so-called reforms that Kaus may be referring to, such as "a comprehensive and robust evaluation system," "a fair, expedient process to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom," and many other measures.
What teacher's unions are indeed consistently against is the completely unfair and unproven notion that their certification and pay should be linked exclusively to student test scores. But instead of actually learning something about a subject before shooting his mouth off (try googling "mickey kaus, education" and see if you can come up with anything substantive) Kaus chooses the lazy, stereotypical rhetoric of Versailles-obsessed pundits - both Republican and Democratic - who opt for teacher-bashing rather than actually developing a meaningful policy argument. |
