Dear Deborah,

And so the school year 2010-11 begins. As seen from Washington, D.C., it is another year in which the U.S. secretary of education will push and prod the American education system and make it more "competitive" in the global economy, imposing incentives and sanctions aligned to produce higher test scores. As seen from the schools, it is another year in which teachers and principals will be blamed and punished unless their scores go up and up.

Now that the nation is experiencing the eighth full year since No Child Left Behind became law, we can anticipate that more punishments will be visited upon those whose schools failed to meet their annual targets for test-score improvements. More principals will be fired, more schools will be closed.

Now that the Race to the Top has gone through two rounds of competition, its close affinity to NCLB has become evident. Indeed, NCLB, Race to the Top, and President Obama's plan to reauthorize the federal law, which he calls the Blueprint, are all variations on the same themes: accountability and choice. Since NCLB produced such meager improvement, the Obama administration has decided to tighten the reins of accountability and choice and make plainer the consequences of failing to raise test scores.

In our absence this summer, there were many important developments, and I hope we will discuss them all in detail.

Among the most notable were these:

a. The nation's leading civil-rights groups issued a statement in opposition to the Obama-Duncan vision of school reform, expressing profound opposition to the idea that schools should compete for federal funding that they desperately need. Secretary Duncan persuaded their representatives to cancel their press briefing, and the document was quietly released.

b. The Los Angeles Times began a series of articles based on the value-added test scores of 6,000 elementary school teachers, which its reporters obtained from the Los Angeles school district. In their introductory article, the reporters published the names and pictures of teachers whom they described as ineffective because their student scores had not gone up. The articles produced a firestorm of controversy. Secretary Duncan lauded the L.A. Times for being brave enough to publish the data about teacher effectiveness. Most educators who commented in the blogosphere castigated the newspaper for naming and shaming individual teachers, or for making a pretense of caring about "multiple measures" while giving credence only to test scores.

c. The Economic Policy Institute released a paper co-authored by many of the nation's leading testing experts explaining why value-added test scores should not be a major factor in evaluating teachers. It is not likely to cause the administration to reflect on their favored cause, but maybe members of Congress who are worried about the schools in their own communities will pay attention.

d. Secretary Duncan's Race to the Top identified the second round of winners of the government's billions intended to reform schools by promoting more private management of public schools and more reliance on student test scores to evaluate teachers. Losers complained bitterly that states west of the Mississippi (except Hawaii, the president's home state) were shunned. Conservatives groused that Colorado and Louisiana, two shining examples of Duncan-style reform, lost out. Duncan promised to get more money from Congress to spread his vision.

e. Catalyst, the Chicago-based publication that regularly examines the Chicago schools, reviewed the results of that city's program called Renaissance 2010, which was the strategic plan of Mayor Richard Daley and then-Superintendent Arne Duncan. Renaissance 2010 may well be the template for Race to the Top and the Obama Blueprint. Catalyst summarizes the results: 100 new schools featuring "shaky budgets," "high teacher turnover," and "mediocre
test scores."

f. A recent Phi Delta Kappa-Gallup poll reported that public support for the Obama education agenda has dropped from 45 percent to 34 percent. The more the public sees, the less it likes what Obama and Duncan are doing.

In the weeks ahead, I will look at each of these developments more closely.

There are two observations that I draw from this brief sketch: One, federal control and direction of education policy have largely replaced state and local control, a decisive and historic change that can be credited to (or blamed on) President George W. Bush and NCLB; two, the models for Race to the Top—Chicago and New York City—indicate that our schools will see a great deal of change in the years ahead, but not much improvement in the quality of education, if any. To the contrary, the search for higher scores is likely to promote a significant narrowing of the curriculum, cheating, teaching to the test, and other negative outcomes. To the extent that our students learn less history, science, civics, geography, foreign languages, and the arts, their education will be far worse than it is today.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

[Editor's note: After today's entry from Deborah Meier, the Bridging Differences blog takes a summer break. Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch (and their blog) will return to edweek.org in September.]

Dear Diane,

A good summer read (see below for other ideas): Mis-Measuring Our Lives, Why GDP Doesn't Add Up, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi (The New Press, 2010). Sometimes one discovers that ideas from different fields are remarkably in sync with each other. Here are a few quotes from this book that should keep us busy this summer. His bete noir: GDP

"Our statistics reflect...the values that we assign things...Treating these as objective data, as if they are external to us, beyond question or dispute, is undoubtedly reassuring, but it's dangerous because we get to the point where we stop asking ourselves about the purpose of what we are dong, what we are actually measuring, and what lessons we need to draw.... We begin to march ahead blindly while convinced that we now where we're going."

Two examples: "If our measuring systems overvalue the usefulness to society of speculation compared with work, entrepreneurship, and creative intelligence, then this dangerously reverses the value system underpinning our vision of progress." Or "We don't know the value of an asset because the market prices it every second. ...In the quest to increase GDP, we may end up with a society in which citizens are worse off."

That's precisely the point I think you and I have been making in so many different ways. In short: "In the quest to increase test scores, we may end up with a society in which citizens are less well educated."

Stiglitz et al argue, as we do, "how easily accessible numbers...lead us to make incorrect inferences...and metrics that seem out of sync with individual perceptions are particularly problematic. If GDP is increasing, but most people feel they are worse off ... confidence in government is eroded..."

And finally: "A single metric or a dashboard?... a metric designed for one purpose may be ill-suited or another." "To define what well-being means a multi-dimensional definition has to be used" or we will miss the varied dimensions that shape people's economic well-being.

Amen to all the above. In every field the same danger exists, of re-ifying whatever can be measured. Made even more dangerous when we use the data for so many conflicting purposes. For example, certain tests may be useful for purpose X, but entirely misleading for purpose Y, much less X, Y, and Z simultaneously.

But another reason to think about a dashboard is that in fact we don't all agree with the ends. Or we may agree, but our priorities may differ so that we are prepared to make different trade-offs. Sara Mead, who put together a section on early childhood for the latest American Prospect magazine tuned me into an E.D. Hirsch fan. The others, arguing on behalf of teaching reading as early as possible, ignore what he and co-author Robert Pondiscio remind us: that there is simply "no such thing as a reading test" because everything we read contains content. The simple, worded directions "that any 8-year-old can follow" are incomprehensible to many a 79-year-old if she isn't familiar with the concepts and terms embedded in the "3rd grade level" directions.

It's precisely because Hirsch and you (and I) value reading so much that we fear that hours spent on getting children to read earlier and earlier would be better spent reading to children or immersing them in experiences that build their knowledge, language, and ideas about the world, and in their conviction that the world—all of it—belongs to them. The highest-scoring nation—Finland—may have other advantages in terms of greater social and economic equality, but it may also be that they use the ages between 3 and 8 so differently.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, amidst all the talk about closing gaps, reality rears its ugly head: "We're within a few years of having some of the pension funds run out of money. Funding for the schools is going to be cut radically. Funding for Medicaid. As these things all mount up, there's going to be a lot of outrage." R. Eden Martin, president of the Commercial Club of Chicago. But no one expects test scores to fall and gaps to increase as a result. We're still less willing to raise taxes on the rich than to raise our educational aspirations—that's a tradeoff we hope to deceive ourselves into ignoring.

By the time you read this, Diane—I may be riding on a higher cloud of hope. At the moment, however, the best I can do is fall back on one of those childhood songs that inspired me at school assemblies:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

And thus we keep speaking and writing our blogs and "knowing" that someday we will have a greener and pleasanter childhood to offer the young. It's time to go jump into my pond and watch the clouds roll by.

Deborah

P.S.
To read: Our two books--of course. Others from 2010: My friend Kathy Cushman's, Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery; DIY U: Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, by Anya Kamenetz--provocative thoughts on higher education; Tony Judt's, Ill Fares the Land; Kenneth Strike's Small Schools and Strong Communities, with an introduction by the late Mary Anne Raywid. And an oldie by David Hawkins, The Informed Vision: Essays on Learning and Human Nature , and up a different alley--Michael Lewis's The Big Short.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Editor's Note: Bridging Differences begins its annual summer break after Deborah Meier's upcoming post on Thursday. The blog will return in September.

Dear Deborah,

This is my last blog until the fall. Time to take a break and recharge our batteries or whatever it is that keeps us going.

I have two parting thoughts before I head for the beach and the garden. First, I want to recommend a fascinating book. It is Michael Edwards' Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World. Edwards led the Ford Foundation's program on governance and civil society. His book analyzes efforts by philanthro-capitalists to impose business principles and market thinking on institutions of civil society, where they are inappropriate.

The philanthro-capitalists, he writes, develop metrics for everything; it's a means of control. They love competition, and they love measurement. They don't understand that the values and qualities of civil society are different and are not measurable. Civil society relies on participation; it changes the world by activism and social commitment. It teaches tolerance, love, solidarity, sharing and cooperation. Its goal is not the achievement of certain metrics, but social transformation. Edwards points to the great social movements of our lifetime—the civil rights movement, the women's movement—as examples of civil society at work, transforming society in ways that are fundamental. These were bottom-up movements, not movements that were controlled from the top by a master planner armed with data.

It is a good read, and a short one. My copy is littered with underlining and brackets and exclamation marks in the margins. (A new website tracks the activities of philanthro-capitalists: www.dferwatch.wordpress.com. This is worth reading and following.)

I highly recommend the book I am reading right now: Stephen L. Koss's China, Heart and Soul: Four Years of Living, Learning, Teaching, and Becoming Half-Chinese in Suzhou, China. A math teacher and public school parent, Steve Koss is a regular contributor to the New York City Parent Blog (one of the best in the nation). He writes insightful, incisive, hard-hitting posts about the latest distortion of test scores and other depredations of the New York city and state education bureaucracy. I bought the book on Amazon.com as a matter of loyalty to someone I admire (and have not yet met), but once I started reading, I found it hard to put down. It is funny, engrossing, informative, and delightful. Koss is a wonderful writer.

Other books that I plan to read: Barbara Torre Veltri's Learning on Other People's Kids: Becoming a Teach for America Teacher, Alan Furst's Spies of the Balkans, and Martha Minow's In Brown's Wake. And I look forward to re-reading favorite poems.

My last thought before we say adieu. Critics say that I do not offer an alternative vision, merely complaints. This is not the place to sketch out a full-fledged vision, nor do I think it is my role to provide one. I am a historian, not a visionary. When a train is headed for the edge of a cliff, Job One is to stop it. If I could succeed in getting the powerful in D.C. and in the foundation world to rethink their commitment to high-stakes testing, closing schools, and firing teachers; if I could persuade them that poverty does impair school achievement and that schools alone can't close the many gaps that are rooted in income inequality; if I could get them to seek positive ways to help schools and strengthen the teaching profession, I would be happy indeed. Just to stop the beatings would be a great outcome. Then together, we can hammer out a better set of strategies to improve education. We don't need a guru or a mastermind to shape our destiny. At present, federal education policy is like a great beast trampling a garden that should be lovingly weeded and tended. If we can get the beast to stop the trampling, then we can all work toward wiser policies.

So here is a snapshot of one alternative vision. Grant you this is not an answer to every question, but it is a good beginning to a different approach. In April, I visited Dallas at the invitation of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. When I got to Dallas, I learned about the work of the Institute, and I was impressed. It offers summer programs for teachers and principals where they study and discuss important classic and modern writings. I met with a dozen teachers who had gone through its program, and they talked with animation about their excitement as adult learners. One teacher introduced her English-language learners to Shakespeare and discovered that they became as excited as she was by reading Julius Caesar. Others reflected on what it meant to them to experience once again the joy of learning.

When I lectured in Dallas at the Booker T. Washington High School, I was preceded by Dr. Louise Cowan, the brilliant literary scholar who founded the Institute in 1980. Dr. Cowan spoke about re-reading Moby Dick, and she had the audience enthralled with her depiction of Captain Ahab as the first modern terrorist, determined to sacrifice everyone's life, including his own, in pursuit of vengeance. By the time she was done, this grand woman of 90-plus years had inspired many of her listeners to re-read that wonderful classic novel with new eyes and an open mind.

I left Dallas not only with an appreciation for the Institute, but as a newly appointed fellow of this organization (no remuneration, no privileges, just the pleasure of being associated with an admirable group).

So, here is my alternate vision: Respect teachers as adults and professionals. Give them the time and opportunity to refresh their intellectual energy. Provide opportunities for professional development that promote their intellectual, spiritual, and professional renewal. Take concrete steps to strengthen the profession. Avoid policies and programs that imply quick fixes to serious problems.

A modest vision, to be sure. But unlike current federal policy, it is constructive, and it respects the men and women who staff our nation's classrooms.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Every day, some new, unexpected voice pipes up confirming views on the quality of the tests in use to judge our children, their teachers, and their schools. The much-vaunted New York Regents math exams turn out to be shockingly shabby, etc. Ditto for new reports on the financial scandals taking place under mayoral control—hardly surprising. Ditto for the number of financial and other scandals in charter schools.

When we proposed a highly decentralized experimental zone in 1992 (with money from the Annenberg Foundation) there were two things we said should not be dropped: our obligations to the laws regarding civil rights and fiscal integrity. We also set up two independent university control groups to monitor our work and an independent board of experts. And, since we chose to remain New York City public institutions, we accepted the final authority of NYC's Board of Education and the state's department of education. It turns out that the present "marketplace" concept of "public" schooling gets rid of almost all of those safeguards. Should all this make me optimistic—a precursor to a turning of the tide? Or just a reminder that our democracy is not working well (note that odd victory in South Carolina—Green—who intended (so he says) just to be an irritant). Or the amazingly open role of money in politics. [Editor's note: Paragraph updated with correction to replace "centralized" experimental zone with "decentralized."]

But let me change the subject. Maybe once a month we should put out a fact sheet on these matters—reporting on newspaper stories and academic reports. They are rolling out daily.

While cleaning up the piles of mess on my desk, I came across a speech Susan Sontag gave at Vassar College's graduation in 2003, as reported by The New York Times. I consider it an incendiary speech, exactly the kind of troublemaking I so love. I recognize in her words my own aspirations for education and the degree to which they may not be shared by even my own friends, much less my fellow citizens.

"Despise violence. Despise national vanity and self-love. Protect the territory of conscience."

"Try to imagine at least once a day that you are not an American. Go even further: try to imagine at least once a day that you belong to the vast, overwhelming majority of people on this planet who don't have passports, don't live in dwellings equipped with both refrigerators and telephones, who have never even once flown on a plane."

That's Mission Hill's Habit of Mind # 1. Of course, to imagine also requires knowledge—deep knowledge—and the capacity to shift identities, however tentatively. (Read Playing for Keeps, from the Teachers College Press—just out!—by me, Brenda Engel, and Beth Taylor. This habit starts very young and takes constant practice.)

"Be extremely skeptical of all claims made by your government. Remember it may not be the best thing for America... Be just as skeptical of other governments, too."

That's Habit # 2: the habit of demanding credible evidence, beyond "I think." "I have a right to my opinion," etc.

Let me just type out excerpts from the rest, because I love her language.

"Be less afraid.

"It's good to laugh, as long as it doesn't mean you're trying to kill your feelings.

"Don't allow yourself to be patronized, condescended to....

"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. ...It's all about paying attention...and not letting the excuses and dreariness...narrow your lives."

"Attention is vitality. It connects you with others." (Habit of Mind # 3)

And finally.

"Be a person who can be happy a lot of time, without thinking about being happy is what it's all about. ...It's about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be."

That last part about happiness reminds me of 1985, the year we started Central Park East's secondary school. We were determined to be trusting and respectful and not condescending to each other, our students, or their families. But we were also determined not to be pushovers, to be strong grownups. So we fell back on a "slogan" that I enjoy. We posted it all over the school. When kids complained that "you never let us" or "it's soo booring," we pointed to the sign and moved on.

This is what it said: "It's not our job to make you happy, but rather to make you strong."

We knew it was corny but it was really, of course, meant for ourselves.

I'm amazed at our own daring—starting a grade 7-12 school that would be different than any public school we knew about—with permission to not count "credit hours" or give standardized tests. In Susan Sontag's words: "It's hard not to be afraid." And we often were.

It helped that nearly half the kids had been with us through elementary school in the 1970s. I have been the recipient of a mini-avalanche of mail on Facebook (which my son set up for me) from the first graduates of CPE elementary school's 6th grade. I quote just one about an often-forgotten aspect of good schools—the friendships they create for life.

"...the paradise in the photo was taken in St. John's in the Virgin Islands. We were there celebrating her big 40! See, Deb, relationships from CPE have lasted over 34 years. Our school created a huge extended family!"

Best,
Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

This has been an interesting few weeks. On June 12, I was the keynote speaker at the Reverend Jesse Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH Coalition annual conference in Chicago. Rev. Jackson was gracious, warm, thoughtful, and concerned about the future of public education. I don't think I have ever prayed so often in just a few hours, but the prayers were good: Prayers for the children, for their families, for lifting the burdens of poverty and homelessness and despair from them and for their lives to be better.

Two days later, I was in Washington, D.C. I went to the White House, where I was invited to meet with the highest-ranking members of the administration's domestic policy staff. The conversation was off the record, so I can't report anything specific. I stated my views, they stated theirs. We disagree on things like merit pay, high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by their students' test scores, and giving public dollars to privately managed charters. I think Race to the Top will turn out badly, they don't. I don't think I changed anyone's mind, and they didn't try to change mine

Then on June 15, I was guest of honor at a buffet dinner hosted by a member of Congress in her home. About 30 members of Congress attended, including key members of the House Education and Labor Committee and the administration. I explained what I believe will be the negative consequences of high-stakes testing, merit pay, and Race to the Top. The exchange was spirited and off the record. I felt that most of those present agreed with my concerns, but I concluded that the Democratic leadership will support President Obama's agenda.

Here is my overall impression of what is happening in D.C. The federal government now controls education policy in the United States, thanks to No Child Left Behind, which caused an unprecedented expansion of federal power into every public classroom. As you know, I believe that NCLB did not raise standards, but actually caused a dumbing-down of American education through its accountability provisions, which emphasize only basic skills. When schools are incentivized to measure only basic skills, then everything else loses time and is de-emphasized: the arts, history, geography, civics, science, foreign languages, even physical education. When the test results are used to reward or punish teachers, principals, and schools, then there is even less time for anything that is not tested. When education becomes warped in this way, quality goes down. John Dewey's mythical "best and wisest parent" would not enroll his or her child in such a school.

Perhaps I will be proven wrong. Yet I don't see how it is possible to improve education while neglecting everything but basic skills. Even privately managed charter schools are affected negatively by high-stakes testing; to claim ever-rising test scores, they are prompted to avoid low-performing students, thus bypassing the very students that charters were originally intended to serve.

The Obama administration's answer to the problem that I pose—the shrinking time for non-tested subjects in an environment of high-stakes testing—is this: Test everything. I recoil in horror at the thought. Imagine the cost and waste involved in designing and administering tests in history, civics, science, geography, the arts, foreign language, and so on. With so many tests and so much test preparation, would there be any time for instruction? Add to this scenario the burden that will be imposed by value-added assessment. To do it right in any subject, tests must be administered in September and again at the end of the school year: Twice as many tests as are now required by NCLB. Add to this the new data systems, with every teacher accountable for every individual score.

At some point, parents and teachers will rise up and say, "Enough. We are drowning in data. Turn off the computers that measure everything and treasure nothing. Education is getting worse, not better." We must earnestly hope for that day. Indeed, borrowing a page from Rev. Jackson, I will pray for it.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend