A jeffbinnc Golden Oldie
From Aug 15, 2010. Original HEREIn compiling the news for this weekly feature on OpenLeft, I find myself straddling two practically parallel worlds of education and the progressive left. And unfortunately neither understands the other very well. You would think that because Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the truly landmark events in the progressive movement, that there would be a permanent synergy between these two communities. But even though the Wall Street Journal seems to believe that teachers and the Democratic Party are grand partners in a money laundering scheme, the reality is that there is disconnect and dysfunction between these two communities that is readily obvious and sorely debilitating to each.
In the world of education, there's a peculiar language that seems impenetrable to outsiders: i3, RTTT, CMOs, Response to Intervention, differentiated instruction. Sides are taken over issues that seem only tangentially related to mainstream news. And not only is "politics" rarely brought up, but any kind of left-right polarity resembling the political world seems sketchy at best. For a profession that you would think would epitomize a progressive outlook - that of cultivating the minds and souls of future generations - educators only occasionally refer to the existence of something "progressive" about their calling, and when they do, it is obscured in some hazy academic debate that happened a long time ago in a university far, far away.
In the progressive left, education is rarely a point of discussion among prominent bloggers and pundits, and when it is, the discussion is usually uninformed or not particularly, well, progressive. A quick glance at the dkosopedia entry for "education" gives you a pretty good idea of the sad state of the progressive left's knowledge of education.
Furthermore, even when the two separate worlds of education and the progressive left intersect, which is all too rare, the cross-over tends to benefit neither.
Why does this matter? It matters to educators because today, more than any other time in recent history, they find themselves to be reduced to pawns in a political war not of their choosing. Unable to practice their profession to the standards they would hold themselves to, fearful of the future of their livelihood, and saddened by the sight of underserved children forced into test-taking factories, they find themselves powerless and without a strong political base to push back against the Washington Consensus that is ruling their world. It matters to the progressive left because how can it profess to be a legitimate force for positive change if it's willing to turn its back on the nation's children - which I've been maintaining in Left Ed that it currently is doing.
Events this week provide the perfect examples of what I'm talking about.
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 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.
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.
Metrics, metrics everywhere. In this brave new world of education "reform," its the great god of "data," we are told, that will lead the way to a brighter world for all children.
Never mind that "data" do not necessarily equate evidence. Never mind knowledgeable skeptics, such as Alfie Kohn, warn that the more educators allow themselves to be fixated on numbers, "the more trivial their teaching becomes and the more their assessments miss." Never mind that experienced classroom teachers, such as Walt Gardner, point out that data on how students perform on tests is not the same thing as learning. And never mind that research from the UK has just revealed that students actually do better at school when teachers aren't obsessed over test data.
At no time has data mania been more on display than the past week when two enormous - some say historic - events played out across the education and (occasionally) general media. The first event was the announcement of the winners of the much-coveted money from Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top competitive grant competition. RTTT winners were determined by an elaborate scoring formula that reform enthusiasts assure us rewards state school systems that are being the most "data-driven" in their approaches to policy.
Then, the day after the data-filled revelry surrounding the RTTT winners, Duncan endorsed using data derived from student testing as a means for evaluating individual teachers too. Following a series of reports by the Los Angeles Times, where reporters used a value added analysis of test score data to evaluate the "effectiveness" of individual teachers, Duncan apparently decided that such a flawed methodology should be spread around universally.
Certainly, tallying up numbers related to the inputs and outcomes of education has its place. We don't need a data-free world. But how, pray tell, do the people running USED know they are looking at the right data - data that are both fair and effective indicators of educational progress? If Duncan is so sure of his methodology, then maybe, for instance, he would feel okay with applying it to his own track record as a leader of Chicago public schools?
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.
In compiling the news for this weekly feature on OpenLeft, I find myself straddling two practically parallel worlds of education and the progressive left. And unfortunately neither understands the other very well. You would think that because Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the truly landmark events in the progressive movement, that there would be a permanent synergy between these two communities. But even though the Wall Street Journal seems to believe that teachers and the Democratic Party are grand partners in a money laundering scheme, the reality is that there is disconnect and dysfunction between these two communities that is readily obvious and sorely debilitating to each.
In the world of education, there's a peculiar language that seems impenetrable to outsiders: i3, RTTT, CMOs, Response to Intervention, differentiated instruction. Sides are taken over issues that seem only tangentially related to mainstream news. And not only is "politics" rarely brought up, but any kind of left-right polarity resembling the political world seems sketchy at best. For a profession that you would think would epitomize a progressive outlook - that of cultivating the minds and souls of future generations - educators only occasionally refer to the existence of something "progressive" about their calling, and when they do, it is obscured in some hazy academic debate that happened a long time ago in a university far, far away.
In the progressive left, education is rarely a point of discussion among prominent bloggers and pundits, and when it is, the discussion is usually uninformed or not particularly, well, progressive. A quick glance at the dkosopedia entry for "education" gives you a pretty good idea of the sad state of the progressive left's knowledge of education.
Furthermore, even when the two separate worlds of education and the progressive left intersect, which is all too rare, the cross-over tends to benefit neither.
Why does this matter? It matters to educators because today, more than any other time in recent history, they find themselves to be reduced to pawns in a political war not of their choosing. Unable to practice their profession to the standards they would hold themselves to, fearful of the future of their livelihood, and saddened by the sight of underserved children forced into test-taking factories, they find themselves powerless and without a strong political base to push back against the Washington Consensus that is ruling their world. It matters to the progressive left because how can it profess to be a legitimate force for positive change if it's willing to turn its back on the nation's children - which I've been maintaining in Left Ed that it currently is doing.
Events this week provide the perfect examples of what I'm talking about.
Addressing a group of civil rights leaders and advocates at this week's meeting of the Urban League, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan accused people who criticize his Race to the Top grants and other education policies of being "intentionally misleading or profoundly misinformed." As highlighted by Paul here at Open Left the other day, President Obama immediately reinforced the message by scolding critics of his education reforms for making "a fuss" over something that shouldn't be seen as "controversial." Then, to complete the triumvirate, the supposed progressives at the Center for American Progress castigated Congress and anyone else who would dare lay a finger on the Obama administration's Race to the Top and other "reforms."
As Paul explained yesterday, what's seldom discussed - not only among leaders of the Democratic party but also in the progressive community - is the actual "evidence" for and against the dangerous proposals being championed by those who consider themselves to be "on the left" of America's political spectrum. Instead people on the left are generally in denial about issues of race and class that are at the heart of the matter. And educators themselves are being played for suckers by the Democratic establishment.
Nowhere was this situation more painfully obvious to me than at last week's Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas. As lots of lip service was being paid to "saving teachers' jobs," not much of anything in the agenda addressed the destructive education policies of the Obama administration. Of course, lots of presenters had high-minded declarations about the importance of schools to democracy and the progressive cause. But no one had anything particularly progressive to say about the direction of school reform.
As news came out during the conference that another 241 teachers were being fired by Washington, DC's autocratic chancellor Michele Rhee for being "ineffective," no one of any prominence at the meeting pointed out the blatant unfairness of the Obama administration's push to evaluate teachers on the basis of students' scores on standardized tests.
In fact, an attendee I was having coffee with as the news broke was absolutely gleeful about it. "There are too many bad teachers," she explained to me while coolly scrolling through the headlines on her Blackberry, "And they're never made accountable for anything."
At the conference's Education Caucus, which all too symbolically never made it to the final agenda distributed to attendees as they arrived, educators exhorted the progressive blogosphere to push politicians in DC to pass the "edujobs" bill to save hundreds of thousand of teaching positions, a prospect, by the way, that seemed incredibly remote even as the declarations were being made.
The NEA's terrific spoksperson Lily Eskelsen informed the caucus crowd about the vagaries of for-profit education entrepreneurs, the creeping corporate influence on local schools, and out of control charters. And D Kos education blogger annie em backed her up with information about the corrupt Imagine charter schools chain. Yet in the ensuing discussion, a frontpage blogger from MotherTalkers (sorry, didn't get your name) explained how much her audience "like charter schools."
So as the rest of Netroots Nation rolled along on the general affirmations of the first year-and-a-half of the Obama presidency, all of us who care about public schools were left talking among ourselves about the abyss that we all too clearly see our country's school children heading toward.
It's been one helluva week on the education front, and I'm sure Jeff will have plenty to say in his Left Ed column this Sunday (new time, for those not paying quite enough attention: 1 PM, EST). It began on Monday, when Jeff noted in a quick hit that a coalition of civil rights groups had issued a document critical of Obama's education policies. Although there would be a somewhat confusing walk-back of criticism afterwards--particularly as Arne Duncan and President Obama both addressed the Urban League--it seems clear that the cat's out of the bag, and it's going to be a whole lot harder going forward for Obama and Duncan to pretend there aren't problems. On Wednesday, data was released showing in the reform showcase NYC schools, the racial and ethnic achievement has shot back up to 2002 levels. Links to a number of related stories can be found here, including one by Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzales. And speaking of Democracy Now!, today its first half-hour was devoted to a renewed look at Obama's initiative and the mounting criticisms. To start things off, here's what Jeff wrote on Monday:
"a 17-page framework for education reform being released Monday by a coalition of civil rights groups amounts to a thrashing of President Obama's education policies and it offers a prescription for how to set things right"
Excerpts from the report highlighted by Strauss . . .
on Race to the Top:
"By emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left behind as a global leader."
on charter schools:
"while some charter schools can and do work for some students, they are not a universal solution for systemic change for all students, especially those with the highest needs."
on so-called reform:
""Rather than addressing inequitable access to research-proven methodologies like high-quality early childhood education and a stable supply of experienced, highly effective teachers, recent education reform proposals have favored "stop gap" quick fixes that may look new on the surface but offer no real long-term strategy for effective systemic change."
In the mainstream media, the reporting was far less nuanced as both union meetings were cast as sharply at odds with the Obama administration and openly combative to "reform."
The different way these meetings were being reported on in the MSM, compared to the trade media, reminded me of how reporting on education in the mass media - what little of it there is - is so distorted by what I call "spokesperson laziness" and "false polarities." All too often, reporters in the MSM simply look for the easiest-to-reach representative of a "constituency" rather than digging into various points of view. And the goal always seems to be to develop a narrative of combat in which two "opposing" constituencies are pitted in a zero-sum struggle for dominance.
When it comes to education, this approach to "journalism" is probably more damaging to public awareness than on other issues. Because what's reported about education is so miniscule in the first place, people only seem to be aware that the Obama administration is pushing for "reform" and that teachers have all coalesced behind their unions in bitter "resistance to change." And this is totally false.
It is only when you start listening to educators themselves that you get the real story of what's going on in schools as the new politics of "education reform" steamrolls across the country.
Yet, as veteran educator and edublogger Walt Gardner points out here, teachers are the "potted palms" in reporting about education.
In fact, surveys of teachers have clearly shown that what they think is important to focus on in their work isn't at all aligned with what the Obama administration's policies are pursuing.
So what would we learn if we listened to educators?
According to the Washington Consensus on public education, all the Serious People agree that the one important "success" of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy was that it had "advantages for low-income and minority students" because it forced states to focus on the interest of these children. This is, of course, utter nonsense.
As Linda Darling-Hammond points out in The Nation, after eight years of NCLB, "the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988," and a "growing share of African-American and Hispanic students" now find themselves in "highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities."
The reality is that no one in DC-land is any more "focused" on addressing the issues of race, income and school reform than they've ever been. Instead, America's first black President is ironically perpetuating America's blindness to the history of racial and socioeconomic inequality in public schools and taking our country in the exact opposite direction of what could create a brighter future for children raised in poverty.
It's true that the political leadership of our country has never openly embraced the connection of race and income to education. But the policies of the Obama administration so fly in the face of what is known about the relationship of race and income to school reform that one has to consider if what is afoot is a concerted attempt to undo any progress that's been made since Brown vs. Board of Education broke the back of racially segregated schools.
"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.
