Dear Diane,

Yes, Diane, we do have a few reasons for being hopeful of late. I was delighted to hear that California's Governor Jerry Brown has spoken out about testing. I had a good conversation with him recently about early childhood. It, too, left me optimistic.

It's interesting to speculate on why liberals are so divided on schooling issues. One consistently useful predictor of who's on which side is their attitude toward organized labor. The shift from seeing "labor" as underdogs to "big labor" or labor "bosses" goes back a while. From World War II to the early 1980s, trade unions were all-American favorites. The Left was more mad at them, it seemed, than the Right. (I'm exaggerating.) The shift coincided perhaps with the end of the war on Communism?

The other night I found myself muttering under my breath, "and the feeble strength of one." It took me a minute to remember where that line came from, and I decided to Google the lyrics of "Solidarity Forever." It's a song that's been sung perhaps at all AFL-CIO gatherings for many years. The first verse goes:

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run.
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
For what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

It seems old-fashioned now. "Feeble strength of one"? It conflicts with an equally strong message about the power of individuals to change the world. "As long as there is one, ..." I preach to kids. "You," I say over and over, "make a difference." Like lots of such common aphorisms—I like both. But one without the other is perhaps dangerous.

I've known good teachers who would tell me in disdain: "I want to succeed on my own individual merits. If I'm a good teacher, I can take care of myself. Only weak teachers 'need' a union to protect them." Joining a union seems to some a way of accepting one's "feebleness;" to others, it's a way of gaining dignity.

A year substituting in Chicago's public schools made me a radical/"reformer" from Day One. I saw the teachers' union as a force for good—including the individual good. For example, two of my 'children' became teachers and both have had to protect themselves via union-enforced due process at some point in their careers. In the absence of due process, none of us is safe from unjust bosses or benign rulers. (It's one reason I'm also such a fan of the Association for Union Democracy, which protects union members and staff from injustices by their "union bosses.")

Perhaps the dividing line on reform has something to do today with our gut reaction to calls for solidarity with our peers—our identification with the powerless. And thus our devotion to due process: "There but for the grace of God goes me."

The tension between individualism and solidarity even interacts with a puzzle I've been concerned with of late re. neighborhood schools vs. "schools of choice." Can choice sometimes be good for an individual and bad for the larger community, and if so ...? It needs more discussion, but here's my problem:

It stands as "common sense" that it's easier to create a productive, shared culture if one is joined together by mutual choice. But it's not synonymous with democracy. It's too easy to say in a school of choice, "if you don't like it, choose another school." In a democratic community one cannot use such language because the community belongs to both winners and losers, majorities and minorities. That's why democracy is so essential! It's why, I think, my mentor Lillian Weber had some misgivings about my work in East Harlem's District 4 creating district-wide schools of choice rather than tackling changing neighborhood schools.

Central Park East has a strong sense of community, but its members are together by choice. Weber feared that ultimately the "choici-est" choices would go to those best served by the existing system and that it would undermine the needed cohesion of existing besieged communities. She was prescient.

I sent my own children to our neighborhood schools despite their weaknesses because I wanted us embedded in our neighborhood. I largely avoided the politics of District 4 and was instead very active in District 3 (where my kids went to school). I served as an elected school board member, for example. Did I make the right decision? I'm not sure. My own son and his wife chose to look for the public school in New York City that they liked best. Did they make the right decision? (Of course, I didn't have their choices.)

Is there a way to give us the strengths of both? A way that honors communities and individual choice? That promotes solidarity without sacrificing individualism? I thought District 4 had it right. In one small geographic community (East Harlem covers probably a little over one square mile) there were both neighborhood schools and schools of choice. Furthermore, then-New York City Schools Chancellor Anthony Alvarado worked hard, I thought, to be as proud of his neighborhood schools as his "alternatives." I think his hope was that these alternatives would influence new practices in all schools.

I originally saw charters through my nostalgia for East Harlem. That was a possibility. I met some fascinating folks last week in Baltimore, where charter teachers are all union members and where progressive education has a strong hold in the charters. I visited the City Neighbors School there and fell in love with it. But, why only there?

It seems clearer than ever to me that we need to re-explore issues of choice, so that they are not used to undermine the political communities that are at the base of our political democracy or to glorify the segregation of schools by race. We need unions and public education and strong communities: for the sake of the kids. Only self-confident and respected adults can provide students with the adult company they need.

I'm just skimming the surface. Diane, readers, join me on this.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

One of the signature issues of the Obama administration's education reform strategy is "turning around" low-performing schools. We have been led to believe that schools with low test scores can be dramatically changed by firing the principal, replacing half or all the staff, closing the school or turning the school over to private management.

Part of the corporate reformers' message is that turning around a school may be painful but that it can produce transformational results, such as a graduation rate of 100 percent or a startling rise in test scores. The turnaround approach assumes that it is bad principals and bad teachers who stand in the way of school improvement. Any mention of poverty or other social and economic conditions that might affect students' motivation and academic performance is dismissed as excuse-making by the proponents of "No Excuses."

Today there is a burgeoning industry of private-sector consultants devoted to "turnarounds." One of the leading turnaround specialists is a company called Mass Insight. I recently received an email in which Mass Insight hailed several schools that had turned around. The stories seemed too good to be true.

So I turned to Gary Rubinstein, my favorite pedagogical detective, and asked him to investigate each of these schools. Gary did, and the results are on his blog. This is a short and fascinating read. Like the miracle schools about which I have written on this blog and elsewhere, the turnaround schools turn out to be less impressive than the hype.

As Gary Rubinstein writes, one of the supposed turnround schools "got rid of 70 percent of their staff. ...Their math scores shot up from 4 percent to 14 percent in just two years!...but then went back down to 10 percent. And this is despite the fact that their demographics changed drastically, leaving them with a much 'easier' group of kids. Title I went from 97 percent down to 75 percent.[English-language learners] went from 13 percent down to 4 percent."

Fortunately, Gary is not the only one who has figured out the games that politicians play. Matt Farmer, whom I don't know, wrote a stunning expose of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's effort to sell Collins Academy as a turnaround triumph.

After Arne Duncan closed Collins in 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped over $1 million into turning around the school. When Mayor Emanuel spoke at its graduation ceremonies in 2011, he congratulated the school for its graduation rate of 100 percent and the fact that nearly all were college-bound.

But Matt Farmer inconveniently pointed out that the test scores of Collins students were lower in 2011 than in 2006, when the school was closed down. Only 15 percent of the students met state standards in reading and math, and the school was officially classified as "level 3," on academic probation. Other schools have been closed for this kind of poor performance. To ease this embarrassment, school officials moved Collins to "level 2," making it a school in good standing, despite its poor scores. But on the most recent state tests, only 14.9 percent of the students met state standards in reading and 6.8 percent in math. Some turnaround.

I am happy to report, however, that turnarounds are possible. Researchers at the American Institutes for Research scoured the state of California to find low-performing schools that had achieved real and sustained improvement. The AIR researchers did something remarkable: They started with a clear definition: A turnaround was one that began with three years of low performance (bottom third in the state); that showed a specified level of growth over three years for all subgroups; that sustained its improvement into a fourth year; that improved relative to other schools in the state; and whose student population remained demographically similar over time.

The researchers identified 2,407 schools in the bottom third of the state rankings. Only 44 schools, or 2 percent of these schools, met their criteria. Few of these schools made "dramatic" progress; typically, it was "slow and steady." The successful schools described the elements that contributed to their improvement: instructional strategies focused on subgroups that need extra help; professional development; teacher collaboration; instructional leadership; wise use of data; district support; and parent involvement.

Why does the media swallow the tall tales of turnaround specialists? Why do politicians and big foundations promote wildly inflated claims of success? Why don't they recognize how hard it is to achieve reasonable goals? Why are they so eager to persuade the public that a school can "turnaround" in two or three years by firing the staff and starting over? The hyperbole of politicians, policymakers, and foundation leaders serves only to undermine confidence in public education and set the stage for privatization. There is no evidence that their slash-and-burn tactics improve the education of American students.

Diane

P.S. Here is yet another example of the hyping of turnarounds in Chicago: "School reform organization gets average grades."

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Your California trip sounded wonderful. (I realize I'm a little late in saying this. By now you've probably been to half a dozen other states!) I'm encouraged by your positive experiences and that you can keep up the pace. I'm encouraged also by the shift in the language of politics of late, surely stimulated by the Occupy movement. Inequality now is at the top of list. Perhaps, fingers crossed, there will always be openings for pushing a pro-democracy agenda.

Meanwhile, I've been here and there meeting such wonderful, if often demoralized, colleagues: Baltimore is an interesting place (all charters are unionized, and the number of interesting ones encouraging). And Rochester, N.Y., where I met with the union president and the superintendent. It's an atypical city, too, and full of signs of hope.

We won't always win, and democracy is not a sure bet by any means, but the drive for personal liberty and our insistence that we actually are our "brother's" keeper is hard to kill. (On the same theme of optimism: Reading Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" has not entirely convinced me, but it has shed a different light on some of my depressing fears. It was once worse.)

The latest issue of Commonweal has a piece by Peggy O'Brien Steinfels on Vaclav Havel which I recommend. Once again, a reminder of what's possible. Remember that many once held it to be impossible to overthrow a totalitarian regime from within. Havel's "The Power of the Powerless" strikes a deep chord. One we need to remember when "they" try to make teachers, parents, and students powerless.

Somewhere inside lurks a reminder that our task is to nourish the better part of our "natures" or, more simply perhaps, to be vigilantly on the side of those who get pushed around and to commit oneself not to push others around! Especially those less powerful than you. I thought about that while in Japan last month—having grown up in a culture filled with stereotypes of the ugliest sort about anything Japanese. The relative success of democracy in Japan cannot be the result merely of American dictates in the post-WWII period. There's something more to Japanese (and human) history that allowed democracy to take hold—some continuity that I know so little about. Something that accounts perhaps for that brief news piece about Osaka that I mentioned earlier. Teachers in Japan are refusing to comply with renewed demands to sing traditional patriotic songs, etc. (Three strikes and you're out is the government's solution.)

Years ago a wise mentor, Ted Chittenden (of Educational Testing Service!), suggested that it would help if we thought of education by imagining an axis, with one arrow standing for student initiative and the other intersecting arrow for teacher initiative. An
education for democracy would lie, he suggested, in the sector where both student and teacher initiative are high, while the current "reforms" lie in the opposite corner—where both student and teacher initiative are zero-to-low. (Traditional education is high on teacher and low on students, and "free schools" are high on student initiative, low on teachers'.) Can you picture this? Try drawing it. And I suspect one could produce a similar diagram with one arrow representing individual liberty and the other communal values. Democracy is the square where both are high! It was useful to me.

Oddly enough we offer a lot of my favored sector in the way we educate preschoolers, and after that we go in the opposite direction! In part because we simply can't control the very little ones as easily as we can pre-teens and teenagers. Besides the adult-student ratio makes it easier to substitute affection for coercion. Little kids don't yet know about shame and despair. But remember that some of the kids who "act out" or "refuse to learn" are exercising that powerful human ability to resist powerlessness! They're just not as lucky as Havel was.

I hope you have followed me enough to respond. It's more fun when there's an audience and an argument, as Parker Palmer notes in Healing the Heart of Democracy, his very recent book. I'll write more about it some other time, but meanwhile read it and tell me what you think.

What troubles me most about the KIPPs of the world are not issues of pedagogy or the public/private issue, but their "no excuses" ideology implemented by a code that rests on humiliating those less powerful than oneself and reinforcing a moral code that suggests that there's a one-to-one connection between being good and not getting caught. It tries to create certainties in a field where it does not belong. (Maybe that's why I enjoy Commonweal's religious essays; they remind me of a good Talmudic dialogue—always probing further.) Life is never so simple that we can award points for "badness" on a fixed numerical scale of bad-to-good. As we once reminded colleagues, Nazi Germany had a successful school system—so what? I'd be fascinated to interview some KIPP graduates to learn how its work plays out in their lives. My friend and former Mission Hill colleague, Emily Gasoi, is finishing her doctoral dissertation looking at the underlying adult culture of Mission Hill and a particularly interesting KIPP school, which intrigue her for their differences and similarities.

So, we come back to my other recurring theme: trade-offs. I'm for making the trade-offs that hold fast to values of democracy, even if inconvenient. But ... it's not easy to sort this out without more long-term argumentation and investigation.

I look at curriculum the same way. There is no perfect curriculum, but I base my preferences on precisely the principles underlying democracy. It's our teacherly obligation to consider what students will "need" to join fully into the life of a democratic community. But one of those qualities is celebrating self-initiative, personal passion, the power of the heart, as Parker Palmer uses that tricky word. Ditto for society and teachers! There's an essay in the latest Dissent magazine by mathematician Joi A. Spencer. He reminds me that what to "cover" lightly vs. what to "uncover" deeply even in a math class rests on judgments we need to make explicit between mathematical understanding and democracy.

More on this another time. But test preparation of the kind we now call math teaching won't help. I like that Occupy rests its case on a mathematical model: 99 percent vs. 1% rather than on slogans about equity.

And one more last thought! Everyone must read Michael Winerip's marvelously funny/sad piece entitled: "In Race for the Top, the Dirty Work Is Left to Those on the Bottom" in The New York Times.

Best,
Deborah

P.S. Sometimes what I remember most about other countries are oddities. For instance, I miss the warmed toilet seats in Japan! Imagine bus and subway schedules that are accurate to the second. People actually bowing to each other. No tipping ALLOWED.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

I don't know about you, but I am growing convinced that President Barack Obama doesn't know what Race to the Top is. I don't think he really understands what his own administration is doing to education. In his State of the Union address last week, he said that he wanted teachers to "stop teaching to the test." He also said that teachers should teach with "creativity and passion." And he said that schools should reward the best teachers and replace those who weren't doing a good job. To "reward the best" and "fire the worst," states and districts are relying on test scores. The Race to the Top says they must.

Deconstruct this. Teachers would love to "stop teaching to the test," but Race to the Top makes test scores the measure of every teacher. If teachers take the President's advice (and they would love to!), their students might not get higher test scores every year, and teachers might be fired, and their schools might be closed.

Why does President Obama think that teachers can "stop teaching to the test" when their livelihood, their reputation, and the survival of their school depends on the outcome of those all-important standardized tests?

Funnily enough, President Obama said something similar last year during a town hall meeting. He said that his daughters, who attend the elite Sidwell Friends school, took a standardized test, and they didn't have any preparation for it. He said:

"Malia and Sasha, my two daughters, they just recently took a standardized test. But it wasn't a high-stakes test. It wasn't a test where they had to panic. I mean, they didn't even really know that they were going to take it ahead of time. They didn't study for it, they just went ahead and took it. And it was a tool to diagnose where they were strong, where they were weak, and what the teachers needed to emphasize.

"Too often, what we've been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. And so what we've said is let's find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let's apply it in a less pressure-packed atmosphere; let's figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let's make sure that that's not the only way we're judging whether a school is doing well."

Teachers must have been excited when they heard what the President said then because he showed that he really understood the dangers of high-stakes testing. He said:

"So what I want to do is—one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in. They're not going to do as well if it's boring."

Teachers must have been jumping for joy when they heard this, because they know that states and districts have been reducing the time available for the arts, history, civics, physical education, everything other than the tests of reading and mathematics. That excellent teacher-blogger Anthony Cody pointed out in his review of his speech that the President was "blasting his own education policies."

Do you think that President Obama just doesn't understand that Race to the Top has encouraged states to double down on high-stakes testing? Maybe he doesn't realize that the strategies of his administration rely totally on test scores. Do you think no one from the U.S. Department of Education has explained that merit pay has been tried again and again and has never succeeded? Did anyone tell him about the Vanderbilt study of 2010, in which Nashville teachers were offered bonuses of $15,000? Did anyone tell him that those big bonuses didn't lead to higher test scores? Did anyone tell him about the New York City plan for school-wide bonuses, which cost the city $56 million, and produced no difference in test scores? Has anyone told him or First Lady Michelle Obama about the districts and states (like Florida) that may eliminate (or have eliminated) their requirement for physical education because more time is needed for test prep?

Do you think he understands that his Race to the Top program is demoralizing teachers across the nation? Does he know that teachers are not allowed to teach with creativity and passion because they might be fired for not following their district-mandated script?

He's a smart man. I can't believe that he really doesn't know that Race to the Top is no better, and in some ways is even worse, than No Child Left Behind. NCLB holds schools accountable; Race to the Top holds individual teachers accountable. Does he know that almost one of every three principals in the state of New York has signed a letter of protest against the test-based evaluations that Race to the Top imposes?

He wants the teacher-bashing to end, but I wonder if he knows that the worst teacher-bashing started because of his and Arne Duncan's rhetoric about firing teachers if their students got low test scores?

When I saw Linda Darling-Hammond last week in California, she gave me charts from the U.S. Department of Education's Schools and Staffing Survey which show that the modal years of teaching experience in 1987-88 was 15 (meaning that there were more teachers with 15 years of experience than any other group); in the latest published survey, 2007-08, the modal years of experience was one. That means that in 2008 there were more teachers in their first year of teaching than any other group. This is frightening. What sane nation would want to lose its experienced teachers and rely increasingly on newcomers?

Of course, teachers should be evaluated, but they should be evaluated by knowledgeable professionals—their supervisors and peers. Of course, incompetent teachers should be fired, but first they should have a chance to improve. If they can't improve, they don't belong in the classroom.

The irony of all this is that President Obama opposes high-stakes testing. He has now said so twice. Why does he endorse policies that require what he personally opposes?

The President also said that states could reduce the dropout rate by requiring students to stay in school until they are 18. Do you think students drop out because they aren't required by law to stay in school? I think the President should learn more about the reasons students leave before he proposes a law to force them to stay against their will. If he did, he might have better suggestions for lowering the dropout rate.

And one other thing. President Obama referred approvingly to the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study of value-added assessment and said that "good teachers" would produce lifetime gains of $250,000 per classroom. Did anyone tell him that if there are 25 students in a class and each of them works for 40 years, then each one will gain $250 a year? Now, I'm not putting down a gain of $250 a year (that's four or five times to fill your gas tank), and I certainly believe in the importance of good teachers. I don't think that doubling down even more on standardized tests in reading and math is the right way to identify good or great teachers. If we push more on that line of thinking, teaching to the test is a necessity, not a choice.

I just wish that the president would change course on Race to the Top. It's even more demoralizing for teachers and principals than NCLB. It emphasizes testing at every turn, and it will not allow anyone to "stop teaching to the test."

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I've had an epiphany so I'm tossing the piece I wrote for this week to "spread the word."

"Can America Make It?" is the headline on the cover of the December issue of The American Prospect. The lead article is written by an old friend, Harold Meyerson, who argues that, "with the right trade and industrial policies," we can be a nation with a strong middle-class majority.

It's a fascinating piece and makes me think that the debates we're having about school reform have so distracted us that we forget that a good education system depends on a strong society. There's no point in scaring 5-year-olds into thinking if you don't work hard, you won't get a good job—when in fact virtually no one (well-educated or not) is going to have a good job in the future. Except the 1 percent—or maybe it's 5 to 10 percent?

Meyerson's vision is not going to be realized through reforming our schools, although they have a role to play. But it depends on whether we think having such an America is what we want to do—for all sorts of reasons. So our own grandchildren will earn decent livings, for example. So that we can sustain democracy, which in turn rests on a certain level of economic wellbeing and security.

Meyerson convinces me anew of what I already suspected. Most American companies that are thriving hire more people abroad than here at home. Think about Apple, for example. Hurrah! It's an American company. But it doesn't employ many American citizens. And the industries that have maintained a domestic workforce are increasingly doing it by paying somewhere between minimum wage and $15 an hour—more or less, without pensions and minimal benefits. In short, by paying wages BELOW the poverty line.

Patriotism, nationalism, or whatever you call it, isn't a motivator for American companies. Let's accept that as a fact about capitalism, unless it's the Chinese sort in which industrial policy ultimately rests with the Communist Party's best interests.

We need to be having serious and public discourse—frank and open—about where our economy is going. We need leadership that educates the public from kindergarten through old age. We need to face the truth ... or else.

We can look abroad not to everyone else's education systems, but to the way they're tackling this worldwide problem. We used to have lots of "look at German education" articles way back when—the '70s? Now it's Singapore. And China.

Instead, we might even go back to looking at Germany, which has nowhere near the industrial crisis, the job crisis that we do. Why not? Maybe because it's a semi-socialistic society in which the government is not afraid to come to the aid of workers and management? Or, are we so afraid of "socialism" that we'd rather look for our future to a nation controlled by the Communist Party?

I like the Finnish school system. I think we can learn a lot from it. But the Finnish political and economic system is also not in a crisis. Ours is. And if we allow ourselves to get bent into pretzels arguing about education as though it held the key to our future, we're wasting our energy.

I care about our schools because our children spend 12 or more years in them—school is at the heart of their lives. And, children deserve good lives, even if school doesn't lead to a better job. They deserve to be respected and treated with dignity so they get accustomed to that as the norm. They need to be safe so their parents can go about their adult working lives without fear.

I'm not regretting having spent 50 years trying to reform American public education, and I think it's more imperative today than ever. But the future doesn't depend on it the way it does on our economic crisis, our political system crisis, and our planetary self-destruction.

There, I've gotten that off my chest. That's why the Occupy movement has made such a difference. It has collapsed a complicated message into an easy-to-remember slogan: We're the 99 percent. Oligarchies create educational systems that don't threaten them. It's just the way it is unless we dismantle the oligarch's power to dictate national policy.

Deb

P.S. In addition to Harold Meyerson's piece, I recommend you read Linda Darling-Hammond's current article in The Nation.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend