In this weekly diary, I've written often about the Washington Consensus on school reform - how both Republican and Democratic leaders have colluded to make public schools a brunt of political rhetoric focused on "what's wrong" with America while, in the meantime, these leaders ignore what's really at the root of most of our nation problems. The truth is, what's behind the Washington Consensus on schools is the agreed-upon decision to avoid doing anything about poverty.
Our national neglect of poverty is made more apparent in the argument about public schools than it is in any other policy discussion - even healthcare - because schools are where the private impact of poverty on families' lives is finally and most definitively made public. Think about that for a moment: how the brutality of a childhood where healthy food is in short supply, books are unheard of, and homelife is filled with constant parental anxiety about making ends meet is suddenly exposed to the world in the glares of a teacher and a room full of strange of kids.
On this site, Paul Rosenberg has written about how an "Underpants Gnomes approach to politics" sometimes plagues the left's thinking about launching a formidable opposition to president Obama. He described it thusly:
"The South Park 'Underpants Gnomes had a simple business plan:
Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit
A similar sort of thinking seems to persist with many who are justifiably frustrated with the Democrat's failure to substantially break with Republican rule:
Phase 1: Ditch Democrats
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Progressive Victory
God, I really do wish it would work.
But it won't. It can't. '?' is not a plan."
In a surprisingly insightful diary this week from Sara Mead - I say "surprising" because Meade is an education reform enthusiast herself - the very same Underpants Gnomes brand is securely affixed around the necks of those who believe that improving schools is all about tinkering with structures such as standardized testing, teacher merit pay, and charter schools.
Although Meade tepidly suggests that incentive/accountability-driven reformers merely "risk" the Underpants moniker, I think the brand fits perfectly. To wit:
Phase 1: Convert Traditional Public Schools to Standardized Test Driven Charter
School Franchises
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Better Schools, Brighter Students
(From one of our most knowledgeable commentators in the weekly "Left Ed" series. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In their recent article at Ed Week, Rob Manwaring and Tim Sullivan pen a nice article that makes is clear just how terrible seniority clauses in teacher contracts are. In "When School Improvement and Teacher Seniority Collide" (subscription required) Manwaring and Sullivan paint a bleak picture of how as a principal of a failing school in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Sullivan became "all too aware of the damage that can occur" due to seniority.
But even as the article hammers "senior teachers" between the lines as the cause of for failure, the repeated nature of the problem is glossed over and ignored.
"Waiting for Superman" (WfS), the much hyped movie on Education reform, is directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also directed "Inconvenient Truth". Guess who produced it? Details below fold.
In the Fall, this year and every year, in this nation talk turns to Education. The President of the United States delivers a speech to students. Articles appear in the news. Television broadcasts beckon us to think about our Education Nation. In 2010, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, did what many thought novel. He donated $100 million dollars to Newark City Schools. Some were skeptical of his motives. More rejoiced. Certainly with abundant cash in the coffers, change would come to the nations schools, or at least to the chosen educational institutions. However, it might not.
Proponents of so-called school reform would have us believe that the demand for their agenda - charter schools, increased emphasis on standardized testing, etc. - is widespread. The reality is quite a bit different.
This was apparent most recently and prominently last week in the form of a number of high-profile elections where education policy was central to the contests.
In Washington DC's mayoral primary, which is tantamount to a general election, voters gave Mayor Adrien Fenty - and quite likely his handpicked reformists acolyte School Chancellor Michelle Rhee - the heave-ho in favor of Council Chairman Vincent Gray. Rhee immediately dubbed the voters' verdict as "devastating" to the future of "reform."
In New York's primary contest "all three State Senate candidates supporting education reform - Basil Smikle, Lynn Nunes and Mark H. Pollard - lost by huge margins, with none cracking 30 percent of the total vote in primary contests against union-backed rivals." (h/t Schools Matter)
Even the much more talked-about victory by Tea Party-backed Christine O'Donnell over establishment candidate Mike Castle in Delaware had some connections to rejecting the school deformist agenda.
Updated...
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.
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.
A man who worked for the Urban League back in the 60's once told me a story about how people's perceptions are influenced by the powerful in our country. He was working on a project to encourage local business start-ups in a rural black community, and one of their first projects involved setting up an icehouse run by a black family. This was before most poor rural communities had refrigeration, so ice was a necessity that they felt the community would buy into right away. Unfortunately they were wrong, and the business struggled.
What they found was that the blacks in the community continued to purchase their ice on the other side of the tracks at the white-owned icehouse. So they sent a task force back to the neighborhood to interview the locals and ask why they weren't buying their ice from their black-owned neighborhood icehouse. What they were told again and again in their interviews was "the whiteman's ice is colder."
This story is analogous to the way that school reform is being sold to us. Just as ice can be made colder only by its chemical substance being altered, schools can only be made better if the very substance of them - their safety and inclusiveness, the curriculum and instruction, and the involvement and engagement of the community - is altered.
But in the face of this undeniable fact, what we're hearing from the Obama administration is that a strange alchemy of "test scores," "data tracking," and "charter schools" are going to alter the substance of education.
This week, the blogosphere was seething with accounts of the deteriorating state of public education in the United States. On OpenLeft alone, there were far more than the usual number of posts related to public schools.
In a Quick Hit, Paul Rosenberg pointed to some of the gory details that appeared in an op-ed by Derrick Z. Jackson in the Boston Globe entitled "The death of public education: Lack of money is killing our schools." Specifically:
• Detroit is closing more than 40 schools
• Kansas City wants to close more than 40 percent of its school buildings
• Boston is slashing custodial staff and postponing building repairs
In a comment to Paul's QH, VLazlo linked to a news story about how charter schools in Philadelphia put taxpayer money is "at risk" by using public funds to develop lucrative side businesses that have nothing to do with educating kids.
In another QH, Bruce Dixon sent us to his insightful post at HuffPo where he made us aware that "Obama's version of school reform will dis-employ tens of thousands of highly qualified teachers, mostly minority women between 35 and 55 and pillars of whatever social life exists in those communities where unemployment is already at historic levels."
And in a diary on OL frontpager Adam Bink warned about the unprecedented influence that private foundations are having on public education. He questioned, quite rightly, whether giving rich foundations such as those backed by Bill Gates and WalMart's Walton family a "seat at the table" might lead to these institutions -- which tend to favor so-called reform measures such as charter schools and teacher merit pay -- "setting education policy."
Elsewhere on the 'net, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal reported that America's longest and most ambitious experiment on using private school vouchers to create competition with public schools has produced absolutely nothing in terms of academic gains for students:
"About halfway into a five-year evaluation of Milwaukee's 20-year-old school voucher program, new data shows that groups of low-income students in the city who use public vouchers to attend private schools are still scoring about the same academically as their peers in Milwaukee Public Schools."
In the education press, alarm bells were also sounding. Susan H. Furman warns in an op-ed at Education Week that the Obama administration's most-favored methods of tying teacher evaluation to student tests scores, called "value added measurements," are being wildly over-sold. The problem:
"• Many tests cover sufficiently different content from one grade to the next that score gains do not have the same meaning across grades. Many state assessments, in fact, are not scaled to measure grade-to-grade growth or to make growth comparisons.
• Value-added estimates for a teacher can fluctuate for a variety of reasons, many not necessarily related to actual effectiveness at producing student gains on achievement tests. For example, high turnover of students throughout the year can affect the gains students make on achievement tests; and, if the class size is small, the scores of only a few students can affect the size of the gains.
• Factors other than an individual teacher's efforts affect student performance in any given year."
In the same issues of Education Week, William A. Proefriedt stated that today's "reformers" are "are blind to the complexity of the task" of improving teacher performance through changing teacher education and preparation.
"We go beyond all reasonable limits when we take the test scores as a proxy of student achievement or as a measure of the quality of the programs from which teachers graduated. We have been bewitched by the real promise of quantifying certain abilities, by our understandable desire to hold our institutions accountable, and by the significance we attach to our calling."
Among educators themselves, the American Association of School Administrators reported that a majority of school districts have eliminated personnel -- and anticipate further cuts. A total of two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents reported having to eliminate personnel positions for the 2009-10 school year, and 83 percent anticipate having to eliminate further positions in 2010-11. The reason for the cuts? Lack of state funding.
According to the National Governors Association:
"Due to the revenue declines, 43 states cut $31.3 billion in 2009. For fiscal year 2010, even with nearly $30 billion in new revenue, 36 states have been forced to cut $55.7 billion, with 30 states having cut both K-12 and higher education."
States foresee fiscal year 2011, which starts for most states July 1, 2010, to be the most difficult to date, and few see fiscal year 2012 much better. 36 states will have to fill a collective gap of at least $16.5 billion to return to fiscal 2008 state spending levels for K-12 education."
In fact (via multiple sources), about half of all states are poised to slash spending on K-12 education in fiscal 2011, while another handful are expected to keep funding level. Only a small number of states-Massachusetts and Pennsylvania among them-are proposing any kinds of increases, and those are modest.
Last but not least, an article in Education Week revealed the large number of rural high schools in the US that are "drop out factories." What makes the problem especially perplexing is that there is no widely agreed-upon method for measuring dropout rates. And schools that are rated as dropout factories by some methods are given top notch ratings by state officials and outside sources such as U.S. News & World Report.
With all the bad news about the state of public education in the United States emanating from multiple sources around the country, anyone who is at all concerned about the welfare of our nation's children and youth would want to get some sense that progressive leadership in our country has a grasp of the situation. Fortunately, that message was delivered at the end of the week in the form of an email from the Center for American Progress.
When Congress passed the health care bill, with it came a momentous education reform. Signed into law by President Barack Obama, its intention was to help relieve the ever-rising burden imposed by soaring college fees and tuition rates.
This reform was funded by ending a government subsidy to big banks in the business of student loans. Money for poor people to attend college was expanded. Money was also saved by ending these government subsidies.
Under the previous system, the government ensured that student lenders would always make money; if students defaulted on their loans, the government would pay the money to the student lenders. In a CBS 60 minutes report, think tank expert Michael Dannenberg characterized this as:
a socialist-like system," he says. "It's not as if this private entity is assuming any risks. No, no, no. The law makes sure that this so-called private entity has virtually no risk."
Unfortunately for students, this lucrative government-funded industry did relatively little to benefit them.
Several months ago I wrote about the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, a bill which aims to make college more affordable.
The bill does this through several mechanisms. Firstly, it expands federal Pell Grants, which are government grants to low-income college students. These individuals would not be able to attend college without such types of aid (although an average Pell Grant these days would cover barely more than one-tenth the cost of attending a place like Harvard). The bill also sets Pell Grants to rise year after year, in line with inflation. President Barack Obama perhaps best explains the significance of this reform:
...we are also changing the way the value of a Pell Grant is determined. Today, that value is set by Congress on an annual basis, making it vulnerable to Washington politics. What we are doing is pegging Pell Grants to a fixed rate above inflation so that these grants don't cover less and less as families' costs go up and up. And this will help prevent a projected shortfall in Pell Grant funding in a few years that could rob many of our poorest students of their dream of attending college. It will help ensure that Pell Grants are a source of funding that students can count on each and every year.
Unfortunately, if the bill does not pass, this year's Pell Grants will be cut by more than half. In a bad recession and with ever-rising college tuition prices, this would severely impact a large number of Americans. Many individuals seeking to better their lives through college would be deeply hurt. Some might be forced to drop out. Others might have to add on yet more crushing student debt, forced to take exorbitant loans from private lenders.
In the latest iteration from our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan declared that
"But to somehow suggest we should not link student achievement to teacher effectiveness is like suggesting we judge sports teams without looking at the box score."
Given the fact that we don't really judge sports teams by the box scores (hello, it only matters who wins!), let's think about the whole highly questionable idea of framing education endeavors around a sports analogy.
I know that there are always a lot of lame sports analogies in our culture:
* sports as a formula for success in business (yeah right, who "won" in our current financial debacle?)
* sports as a framework for personal fulfillment (go ahead, try using "winning" as a productive framework for personal relationships)
* sports as an analytical argument for politics (currently being vigorously applied in the MSM with awful consequences for the rest of the country)
But in what way is sports really analogous to schooling? Should schools and teachers really "compete"? Don't we want everyone to "win"? Is there really a direct relationship of teacher behaviors to student achievement, or isn't there a lot of influence on student achievement that is outside the teacher's control (research says there is)?
But perhaps even more frustrating than the overly simplistic argument that determining success in schooling is somehow analogous to determining success in sports is the indescribable vagueness of what Herr Duncan is maintaining, which is that teachers "be judged on student performance, though not solely on test scores," without ever giving a clue as to what else is involved in his private criteria for evaluation.
