June 2009 Archives

Dear Deborah,

The current effort to develop national standards in English and math is something to which we will surely pay close attention. I understand that you reject consequential curricular decisions made outside the school, but my view is that “it depends.” That's my view of lots of things. Ideas that sound good in theory may turn out to be even better or worse in practice. If you live long enough, you become a devotee of “it depends.”

National standards, in my view, are a good idea, but it all depends on whether they are done well, whether they leave room for teachers to teach without dictating how to teach, whether they truly raise standards of practice across the nation, and whether they avoid narrowing the curriculum. In this country, with our strong tradition of federalism and localism, there are more ways to do national standards badly than to do them well.

The promise of national standards is equity and excellence. Equity because national standards should assure that students across the country, no matter where they live, will encounter the same expectations. Excellence because national standards should (hopefully) identify the learning goals that are common in high-performing nations.

I grant you that this is a tough order to fill. To make equity real, the resources available in poor communities must be sufficient (what used to be called “opportunity-to-learn" standards). One can’t expect kids in poor areas to learn more just because a document got published, nor can one expect kids to do better because officials set the bar higher. Indeed, if performance is already low, setting the bar higher will cause more students to fail.

And it seems paradoxical, if not impossible, to fulfill a mandate that serves both equity and excellence. Maybe this is a circle that can be squared by wordsmiths, but not by most teachers and schools.

So, I grant the good intentions of the groups that hope to create national standards. I know why they want to do it, and I wish them well. At the same time, I am cautious, perhaps even wary, because I see how many terrible state standards already exist and fear that the same dumbed-down, vague blather might be foisted upon the nation and called “standards.”

We will watch as this project develops. But in the meanwhile there was good news this past week. The group that we both support—the Broader, Bolder coalition—released its plan for accountability, after briefing U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. This is indeed a valuable set of ideas that could easily be folded into the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as NCLB rides off into the sunset.

I especially like the proposal for state-directed school inspection teams. People ask, “What could we rely on if we didn’t do all this testing?” Here is a good answer. Establish state inspection teams that regularly visit schools to survey the quality of teaching and learning. Use these inspections to identify schools in need of extra help, and then send in the extra help. A number of other nations use inspection teams, because seasoned educators can diagnose problems and come up with valuable assistance far better than a test alone.

What do you think?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:35 AM | Permalink | 14 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

The diverse views we get in response to our exchanges is a reminder about why we should not expect one right answer to the question of “why educate?" We need enough consensus to persuade the public that it should be paid for with public dollars, and enough leeway to let many views flourish. In some ways that’s an impossible task, but it’s at least a “direction” I want to keep us struggling for, rather than settling for whoever’s in power in D.C. setting curriculum and assessment for the whole nation!

Distributing such powers includes acknowledging different answers to the what and the how. More local control promises more variety (and more sense of ownership)—if nowhere near as much as I would actually like. But it too has its down-side, its trade-offs which I also need to frankly face. This is at least as true of schooling as many other policy questions—like health, transportation, energy, and myriad other issues.

Which is why I enjoy Paul Hoss and John Doe’s unremitting and single-minded criticisms. Even if John Doe may be a front man, or provocateur, who cares?

Paul raises the question that many of my friendly critics do. But “you” are the exception—think of all those other people who would carry out your ideas irresponsibly or stupidly, etc. It’s a familiar argument—one of some merit in arguing on behalf of democracy in general. One answer: Think of all the dumb policies we’ve arrived at in this nation democratically. Is that an argument for trying another system? Second, even my ideas are better for having to listen to and abide by what others think as well—to have to “persuade” rather than mandate. Third, if I want more people to be “like me,” then I have to allow them to not be like me, I have to try to imagine the settings in which both adults and kids can best learn from each other, and arrive at independent and free choices. Within limits. Its those limits that seem to me to be the interesting question—in a democracy who sets "limits," and how do we set them?

John Doe seems partly to misread my not-so-cleverly stated concern about whether “standards” are a euphemism for a national curriculum—where all schools are on the same page at the same time. The other part of my argument is that such a curriculum takes the adventure out of teaching, and without that adventure the kids miss too much of what is at the heart of intellectual achievement. It weeds out teachers to whom doing the same narrow curriculum year after year is stultifying, and it doesn’t help those with the intellectual liveliness to engage children’s minds. So it fails my test on all grounds.

Alas, my California friend couldn’t switch schools, or even cities or states if we had a national curriculum in order to find a more compatible intellectual climate. Nor could I as a parent.

So here again, means and ends connect. The ends I’m after require the risks involved in encouraging people to expose kids to adults who have different approaches to the meaning of history and literature, who can spend far more time on one aspect of science and skim at most other important topics, who can pick up on students' interests and shift direction, or use the occasion of a hurricane, flood, election, Supreme Court controversy to focus attention in their particular field.

But it is a risk. Of course, democracy itself is based on such a risk. That’s why we get all these absurd balancing institutions, parliamentary rules, etc. They each cause us trouble at times, a waste of precious time and sometimes we have to change them to get anything done. But they are safeguards. “Getting things done” may be easier in a dictatorship of one sort or another, but we have decided that the drawbacks are greater than the benefits. ( Still, Canada is a democracy and does it differently….)

Democracy rests on an argument, one that we have not done such a great job at convincing young people of or older ones either. Our Constitutional “balance of powers” and basic human inertia has saved us from ourselves, time after time. But it would be useful if we understood the trade-offs well enough to design a school “system” that took them seriously—and helped kids and teachers tackle them in real time and real life. Always, also, keeping in mind the risks, and doing our best to explore ways to minimize them. When and why does consensus sometimes work better? Or a unicameral legislative body? (For me, at present, for example, the issue of maximizing choice runs into the issue of strong neighborhoods and diversity and how we can have both.)

Meantime, I believe we are headed in a dangerous direction by ignoring the risks of a national curriculum—which is really what’s at stake. The lure? Higher test scores, or better educated adults, standardization or standards?

Deb

Posted by educationweekly at 10:44 AM | Permalink | 21 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Ah, data. A new study from the Center on Education Policy finds that state tests scores have been rising steadily since the passage of NCLB. But the report is based only on state tests, which are notoriously unreliable and even invalid because of the test-prepping that every district is doing. We should have learned by now that when state scores soar, but NAEP scores don’t, trust NAEP. It is the audit test. No one can practice for NAEP.

I am sure that you, like me, have been inundated with reports about how charter schools will save American education, especially because of their ability to impose military-style discipline and to accept “no excuses” (e.g., poverty, poor health, other disadvantages). How many times have we heard that the “no excuses” schools have proved that they can close the achievement gap because they are so much better than regular public schools?

Last week, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes released a major national study of charter schools that examined the performance of more than half the nation’s charter schools. It found that only 17 percent of charters recorded improvement that was better than the local public schools. Another 37 percent showed gains that were significantly below those of their local public schools. In the remaining 46 percent, student performance was indistinguishable from that of local schools. Overall, the performance of 83 percent of charters was either the same or worse than the local public schools.

The lead researcher, economist Margaret Raymond, said that “If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters. That’s a red flag.” The study was funded by foundations known for their support for charters, among them the Walton Family Foundation. I give Raymond a blue ribbon for intellectual honesty; it is not often that we see a report or study that conflicts with the political agenda of its funders.

Charter boosters Andrew Rotherham of Education Sector and Richard Whitmire, former editor of USA Today, wrote in response to Raymond’s report that it is time to close down low-performing charters. They noted that there are about 4,600 charters operating currently, but only 300 of them are part of a high-performing charter network. Undoubtedly there are some others, beyond the 300, that are successful, but by Raymond’s analysis, more than a third of current charters are worse than their neighboring public school and most are no better.

Yet because of the constant hype in the media by charter promoters, most of us have been sold a bill of goods. That includes President Obama. He has called for states to lift their caps on charters so that we can have thousands more of them. This would allow poor kids to escape their “bad” public school to attend an even worse charter school.

If the charter sector doesn’t clean up its act, and if the federal government doesn’t take a strong stand on behalf of quality, we will be inundated with even worse schools than we have now. The only difference is that they will be managed by private entrepreneurs collecting public dollars.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 1:29 PM | Permalink | 30 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Yes, it seems so obvious to you and me. Using their metrics, the boosters of mayoral control can hardly point to any trend that supports their claims. On NAEP data, the two biggie mayoral control cities show no change, and on graduation data, NYC shows some improvement, but Chicago shows none, even if we go by the city's data. If we look at the data in the recent RAND study, it confirms many others—charter schools do no better re. test scores than their comparable neighborhood schools—some better, some worse. The data on merit pay don’t exist, of course—and it’s already a national priority. But that most comparable jobs use “performance-based” pay just isn’t a fact. The Economic Policy Institute has published a report on the subject that hardly is conclusive, but the logic suggests serious trade-offs that none of the folks in D.C. seem to be even aware of. If you do X, there are “unintended” but inevitable consequences—especially if you’re not even aware of them. (As for the charge that local control leads to more corruption? Having the right friends in the right place may lead to millions under mayoral control vs. hundreds under local control.)

School reformers perhaps should be required to publish “cautions” the way drugs do—if you do this, watch out because….(In bigger print, however.) In fact, it’s an essential “habit of mind” of a well-educated person—paying attention to trade-offs.

Regarding the kind of national standards being proposed is really a national curriculum. One of the arguments for it is a give-away: with national standards, if a kid moves from school x to y, he’ll barely miss a heartbeat. Again, no concerns over unintended consequences—teacher burn-out at the very least. There are forms of standards that could avoid this—if we feel the need for them—such as those CPESS modeled (“habits of mind”) alongside some broad sweeping propositions in each field. More like the Advanced Placement English test (at least the way it used to be). It didn’t require everyone to read the same books or spout the same answers. It directed “attention” to certain themes and ideas so that students could use what they had read and studied to come up with their own responses to timeless issues in literature. Ditto for history or science. These wouldn’t be “specs” for test producers, but specs for schools to consider in designing curriculum and assessments.

The class-size debate isn’t on the “reform” agenda. But it has been assisted by two excellent books. An EPI (Economic Policy Institute) book in the form of a debate and a wonderful study and brief in favor of smaller classes by Garrett Delavan, "The Teacher’s Attention."

NAEP then could do the deeper and broader job of seeing how these play out over time, including a look eight years down the line—in college, on the job, as a voter.

I had a fascinating conversation with a teacher who has been teaching physics for 15 years in L.A. and the surrounding area. She teaches 200 students on most days (in groups of 40 or so), at least three of the classes have the same test-prep curriculum. She feels bored. Ready to “move on”—but to what? I asked her to describe what she wishes she could do—even if it were unrealistic. Her wishes? Small classes so she could explore science more deeply with kids, the opportunity to do some interdisciplinary teaching with colleagues, to be able to approach physics from directions that might not match the state exam, to expand her own intellectual horizons alongside of and separate from her students. What kid wouldn’t say, “amen”?

In such settings, a teacher with 15 years of experience wouldn’t be at the end of her career (and wits) in the classroom. Imagine schools, in collaboration with universities, as the site for teacher-training—prolonged apprenticeships. My friend would then also be teaching other colleagues and would-be colleagues and learning from some interesting scientists on campus.

This was the “reform” idea of the late '80s. But it’s getting harder, not easier, to imagine this happening today. But, you ask—how did we move so far from this vision in such a short time, so that we now have a bipartisan plan for schools that make the old factory-model look innovative? Partial answer: We left practitioners like me and educational scholars like you out of the loop and instead turned to financiers and lawyers!

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:05 AM | Permalink | 26 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

If you recall, I took some heat from readers when I said some while back that the Obama administration was adopting the same policies as the Bush administration and that Arne Duncan sounds amazingly like Margaret Spellings on issues like accountability and choice.

I just read a fascinating description of "Obama's Bipartisan Triumphs" by Matt Miller, who is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, one of those Beltway think tanks that sets the tone for federal policy. CAP is especially important because its director John Podesta ran the Obama transition.

Miller writes: "In Republicans' eyes, Obama sinned by not fighting to renew the Washington, D.C., voucher program that provided a lifeline to a few thousand desperate families. But the rest of his school agenda hits every Republican erogenous zone. The president is pushing charter schools, higher standards, differential teacher pay, alternative teacher certification, and even tenure reform in ways far beyond anything any president has attempted before. What's more, with Education Secretary Arne Duncan's savvy management of the administration's union ties, Obama has a chance to make more Nixon-to-China progress on ideas conservatives have long urged than has ever been possible."

Miller confirms what I earlier spotted: The Obama agenda is the Republican agenda with a smile and $100 billion in stimulus dollars to encourage districts and states to adopt conservative reforms. I recall back in the 1980s and 1990s, during the Reagan and Bush years, when Republicans wanted choice and accountability, and Democrats fought back with their own ideas. Now Democrats, with an overwhelming edge in Congress, have Republican ideas.

What happened?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:30 AM | Permalink | 50 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Thanks for being there at the venerable old Julia Richman high school building last week, Diane. So many old friends, some new ones, and a nice net profit for FairTest—the little David facing the Harcourts, McGraws, ETS's, et al Goliaths that sponsored the event. Actually, Diane, FairTest is not anti-test, but skeptical about the instruments used for mass standardized testing and, above all, the uses to which they are put. The same publishers that once warned us against any test prep, other than the practice tests they sent out with the real test, now probably make as much in preparing for tests as testing. They once said that it destroyed the psychometric reliability and validity of the data. Then they discovered that it was either (1) too hard to enforce and/or (2) that test-prepping was too lucrative a market to overlook.

It was only in the middle of my acceptance remarks last week that I realized that my son, Nick, and his father had polar opposite test responses. Nick always found ingenious ways to read test questions and interpret test directions that lowered his scores and Fred found equally ingenious ways to answer them right. Fred was good at the game of testing, but not schooling (he never got a high school diploma, but got into the University of Chicago via testing); Nick reversed it. Son Roger loved standardized tests and managed to avoid doing much schoolwork because he was so good at acing them. (The anecdote that I told, which those in the back like you may not have heard, was Nick’s insistence on covering up the reading passages before answering the questions because he considered it cheating to do otherwise.)

This story posted in an MSP working group by one Eric Jakobbson on June 5th is a delight and a reminder:

In the book of Richard Feynman's letters compiled by his daughter, she tells the story of being told by her mathematics teacher that a particular way of solving a problem that her father showed her, was in fact wrong. So Feynman and his daughter went to see the teacher, who proceeded to lecture Feynman on the mathematics. Feynman then revealed that he was a world-famous theoretical physicist, at which point the teacher was quite embarrassed. But the Feynman letter for which this was the context was the letter of apology that Feynman later sent the teacher, for invoking his stature to intimidate the teacher, rather than sticking to the mathematics to clear up misunderstandings.

Upon discovering the oddities of ”statistics, damn statistics,” I’ve enjoyed noticing every day how the media handles statistical information. Graphs, tables, etc. It takes a lot of perusal to be sure one gets them right. For example, if one graph bar looks enormously higher than the next one, it may mean very little because their starting point distorts the difference. And on and on. The headlines about our declining rate of unemployment offer another instance, and I’ll bet a large portion of the lay public confuses the declining rate of increase with a decline in unemployment. Probably if mathematics is to serve democracy (not just those going into mathematical professions) we need a drastic overhaul of how we teach and what we teach.

Exercising good judgment about complex matters—which is at the heart of education for democracy—includes knowing when to trust and who to trust since our expertise in any particular field is bound to be limited. There’s no escaping this, but it’s surely a serious weakness of democracy. Except for the fact that there’s no easy solution to it that isn’t worse. But it also requires knowing enough about some basic skills and subjects to apply good sense to the reported data or narrative account.

If we understood standardized testing better we’d know, as Daniel Koretz et al remind us in the New York Daily News piece you quote, that shifts in scores cannot and should not follow the bizarre patterns we’re seeing. Two tests of reading are only as valid as they are alike. If one test produces higher scores than another, one or both are misleading—defining reading in seriously different manners, being prepared for it in ways that distort the product, or plainly being cheated on. I claim all three are widespread. The higher the stakes, the greater will all three thrive.

Are there alternatives? This week at my 60th high school reunion, the old friends at my tables, while agreeing with me about tests, insisted that there was no alternative. (Disclosure: They were all good testers.) But there are alternatives. Let’s explore how NAEP could be better used, Diane, and also how schools and professional associations can help school communities—parents and teachers above all—better zero in on local information, down to “how’s my kid doing?” There are schools in NYC and nationwide that have solved the latter, including schools whose founders were in the room the other night—who started small and extraordinary high schools in the early '90s. These include the schools in Julia Richman where we met (Vanguard, International, and Urban Academy), and the schools started to take in kids otherwise served by Julia Richman, including Mary Butz’s The Manhattan Village Academy and Sylvia Rabiner’s Landmark. And many more. Our elaborate alternative to standardized testing is both more educative and more revealing, as a group of renowned psychometricians testified to 10 years ago in a remarkable document directed to the state Department of Education.

Deb

P.S. The “civil rights” trio of Klein, Sharpton, and Gingrich is falling apart—with Gingrich calling Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” because she thinks being Latino has been valuable to her judgment.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:05 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

I enjoyed seeing you honored as a hero of education by FairTest last week, which established an annual award named for you. If anyone had told me five years ago that I would be at that event, I would have thought them mad. This is what “Bridging Differences” has done for me, I suppose.

At the event, I was surrounded, not surprisingly, by educators who have long believed that standardized tests are more wrong than right, or that they are a crime against children’s nature, or worse. I continue to believe that we can get valuable information from standardized tests and that they can help with diagnosing problems and needs. The information derived from testing can be useful, but lately I have begun to see how often test scores are being misused to punish kids, teachers, and schools and to mislead the public.

As it happened, New York state just released the results of its annual tests of English language arts and mathematics, and the scores soared across the state to an extent that was literally unbelievable.

The state Education Department released the math scores last week. From 2006, when the current testing regime’s trend line begins, to today, the percentage of kids meeting state standards (that is, scoring a 3 or 4 on a four-level proficiency scale) has gone from 65.8 percent to 86.4 percent. In 8th grade, the proportion meeting or exceeding standards leapt from 54 percent to 80 percent. The gains for black and Hispanic students across the state were huge—for black students, from 45 percent to 75 percent, and for Hispanic students, from 51 percent to 79 percent. White and Asian students are already close to the ceiling, at 92 percent and 95 percent respectively.

Some districts saw increases that defy anyone’s wildest dreams: In Buffalo, the proportion passing flew up from 28.6 percent to 63.3 percent; in Rochester, it went from 33.1 percent to 63.4 percent; in New York City, from 57 percent to 82 percent; and Syracuse nearly doubled from 30 percent to 58 percent. All in four short years! At this rate, everyone will be proficient well before NCLB's deadline of 2014.

The news media reported the dramatic gains with a straight face. The superintendents of Rochester and Buffalo basked in the limelight. Mayor Bloomberg said the scores proved the value of his one-man control of New York City's schools, although surely his reign had nothing to do with the even larger gains in other cities in the state. Only the Rochester newspaper asked in an editorial whether these gains made any sense.

Now the New York Daily News has done an analysis of the math tests and concluded that the state tests got progressively easier from 2006 to 2009. Kudos to reporters Meredith Kolodner and Rachel Monahan, who beat The New York Times to this statistical scandal. Kolodner and Monahan had the smarts to turn to Jennifer Jennings of Columbia University, who was formerly the blogger for Education Week known as eduwonkette; Jennings analyzed the tests and discovered that the state has been testing only a fraction of its math standards, and teachers are able to predict which standards will appear on the tests.

Jennings also found that nearly identical questions have appeared every year. “In 2009, at least 14 of the 30 multiple-choice questions on the seventh-grade exam, for example, had appeared in similar form in previous years,” said Jennings. Teachers and principals chimed in and agreed that the questions were predictable and students are taking frequent practice tests that teach them the format.

A teacher explained to me recently that “we drill down into the state test to predict what will be tested," and then students practice those questions, again and again.

My guess is that if the students in New York state were given a math test from another state—one that they had not been primed for—their scores would be much lower.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan keeps telling states and districts that they are “lying” to kids when they tell them that they are doing just fine, but they really are not. Just last week, Duncan said that many states are "lying to children and their parents, because states have dumbed down their standards." New York is a perfect example of what Duncan means. The proportion of students who pass the tests keeps going higher and higher every year, but when the 2007 NAEP scores were released, the state had flat scores in everything but 4th grade math.

What we see in New York state is institutionalized lying, according to Secretary Duncan’s definition. The state is well on its way to becoming a national laughingstock if it keeps up this Ponzi scheme whose victims are its students.

Mark Twain wrote, “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"

The New York State Education Department is showing how easy it is to lie with numbers.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:59 AM | Permalink | 82 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

You are right. We agree on the civil rights movement’s history. Schools were never the primary focus—but one of many interconnected ones.

The connection between schooling and the economy interests me—but for different reasons than the usual PR-linkage (you’ll make more money). As long as there are jobs that pay poorly there will be “the poor,” but a well-educated underclass will have a better shot at defending their social and economic interests—as citizens. And a well-educated citizenry in general will give us a better shot at a healthy economy. Maybe. It depends on what we mean by being “well-educated.” And the latest headlines about 46 states joining together to decide year by year school curriculum (and tests) is not the way to decide this.

I was talking about the end of childhood play in Washington last week to legislative aides et al—the hours spent in front of TV and the hours spent at prescribed “literacy” tasks. When we speak of the “information age,” or the “knowledge age,” we act as though the brain lived in a world of its own, rather than one interacting all the time (even in sleep) with the world around it—people and things. When we complain that poor children don’t think in abstractions and have limited conceptual understanding, we imagine “concepts” as disembodied, disconnected, and alien to ourselves. It’s the interplay—the “conversation”—the back-and-forth between ordinary “things” and “ideas” that education must build on. TV and worksheets are not appropriate 5-year-old discourse.

We forget that the American economy lived off the ingenuity of “ordinary” people, including many with limited or no formal educations, and not just “the best and brightest.” They sometimes saw themselves as anti-intellectuals—because we mistakenly created a false divide. Too many so-called intellectuals missed the connection between hand and eye and brain—not to mention ear, feet, and stomach! Americans turned their “ordinary” fascination with the world of work into hobbies and into finding new ways to do old things and old ways to do new things as well. They produced actual goods and products—good decently paid work was a source of pride.

In less than half a century we have lost it. “We” (Americans) produce less and less. We give General Motors our taxpayer charity so they can close factories here and open them elsewhere? I was stunned to read that we put a financier in charge of rethinking the auto industry. We need dreamers and tinkerers to invent a new America, not more fancy financial handlers.

Obama, alas, has surrounded himself with all the financial wisdom that got us into this economic meltdown, people who couldn’t predict it a week ahead of time, and he is, alas, doing the same in education. Hosts of rich or would-be-rich young people are now eagerly planning to save our schools as long as they can own a few. (Eva Moskowitz was paid $371,000 for running four charters with a total of 1,000 students in the 2006-07 school year. And, the retiring leader—not the principal, more like a CEO—of the Beginning with Children charters was paid close to $700,000 for her last year on the job.) Yes, it’s scary.

The leaders of business and industry (of which there are not many left) may have messed up our economy, but they still have enough money left over to bring the same mindset to schooling. The masters of manipulating symbolic goods—money in all its varied forms—are now designing our schools with the same manipulative mindset.

But “if they work, Debby,” say a few of my critical friends, "why not?" But what do we mean by “it works?” Oddly enough, even on the measures they have chosen, the answer is, “they don’t.” But it wouldn’t convince me either way. How kids do on school tests that measure (at best) school learning is petty compared with…. It’s not a good stand-in for achievement. I want to see how those kids “produce”—the books they write, the movies they make, the cars they invent, the families they raise, the gardens they plant, the medicine they practice, the songs they sing, the fast train system they put into place, the better ways they show us to grow food, to produce energy, and on and on and on. I want to see graduates coming back to see us who are good cops, teachers, nurses, architects, furniture-makers, inventors of new products and new ideas. (And powerful, noisy, feisty citizens.)

We need studies on the impact of schools on real life. We need not only the quantitative data on their future lives, but the anecdotal, the narrative ones that help us see our uniqueness, not only our uniformity.

I visited a school last week, a charter in D.C. that I’m enthusiastic about. It’s an outgrowth of the work of Experiential Learning (which grew out of Outward Bound) and the Coalition of Essential Schools. It’s got its feet in both as it seeks to grapple with the conflicting pressures of our times. But for all its immense strengths I worried at the lack of time devoted to work/play stemming from children’s own interests and passions, or even the passions of the particular adults. When I re-read what the CPE/CPESS kids said about our school 10 years later I was struck with how often they reflected on the school’s impact on their strong life-enduring pursuits. My granddaughter referred to something similar when she described a seminar with a particular faculty member at her high school: “I literally felt my mind expanding.” He had passed on something no test can measure. But not everyone in class, she noted sadly, felt the same way about her teacher’s philosophical musings. We are not, conveniently, all the same.

I suspect there is a connection between such schooling and real-life achievement, between schools that prepare us for "The 2lst Century" rather than schools that expect us to actively invent it.

Deb

P.S. Diane, I just re-read "Keeping the Promise?: The Debate Over Charter Schools" * with chapters by Ted Sizer, George Wood, and Linda Darling-Hammond that fit nicely into our conversation.
*A Rethinking Schools Publication. 2008.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:05 AM | Permalink | 21 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

You say that schools are now, for “the second time…at the center of the civil rights movement.” The schools in the 1950s were certainly at the center of the legal battle for civil rights, to be sure, and the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 was the key decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that paved the way for court rulings and legislative actions on many other fronts.

But the civil rights movement of the 1950s had much larger goals than school desegregation. To have won the Brown decision without also moving on many other fronts would have been a hollow victory indeed. Let us not forget the freedom riders who put their lives at risk to call attention to segregated bus lines across the South, or the civil rights workers who were murdered while registering black voters (a black mayor was elected last week in Philadelphia, Miss., a town near the spot where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964). From this movement grew the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal anti-poverty program, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So, yes, schools were at the center of the legal battle in the 1950s, but the goals of the movement went far beyond schooling.

In my previous blog, I said that education is not the civil rights issue of our time. Let me clarify. I believe in education as passionately as anyone on this planet. Every society should have great schools and great teachers. I believe that education is the greatest asset that any individual can have.

But I also believe that the most important challenge to our society today is poverty. So long as large segments of our society live in desperate poverty, their children enter school far behind. Education surely plays a role in ameliorating poverty, but schools alone are not the most effective anti-poverty program. If we want to reduce or eliminate poverty now rather than 20 years from now, then we must take action to help people find employment, to create jobs, to bolster adult literacy and adult education, and to provide access to health care to those who cannot afford it.

The schools today are not at the center of a new civil rights movement. Usually a movement is composed of the powerless bringing their grievances to the powerful. This contemporary “movement” (if it is one) is led by people who are themselves in the seats of power. Who are they confronting? Themselves? Their common grievance is the existence of an achievement gap among students of different racial groups, which all of us deplore. Is anyone defending or condoning the achievement gap? Do schools cause it? What do they propose to do to close it? Who is stopping them?

Here is one definition of the new civil rights movement. A few days ago, Brendan Miniter of the Wall Street Journal wrote that “School Choice is the New Civil Rights Struggle.” Miniter says that the new civil rights movement is a combination of black Democrats and political conservatives; their goal is school choice, that is, charter schools, tax credits, and vouchers, anything that will help poor and minority students escape from regular public schools.

It is interesting that this strong push for school choice arrives well after the precipitous decline of Catholic schools. There has been a vigorous debate in Congress about whether to preserve the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which gives vouchers to some 1,700 students. A recent evaluation of the program’s third year showed that students in the program made significant gains in reading, but not in mathematics (apparently the gains were limited only to girls, not boys, so if we follow the logic, only girls should get vouchers in the future). Initially, the Obama administration intended to close down the program, but its supporters reacted with outrage, and now the administration apparently plans to “grandfather” in the students already enrolled without adding new ones.

Father Andrew Greeley, the Catholic priest who is both a brilliant sociologist and a best-selling novelist, once told me that the first voucher would arrive on the day that the last Catholic school closed. He was not quite right, since the D.C. program, the Milwaukee program, and another one in Cleveland arrived before the last Catholic school closed. But the reality is that vouchers are almost a dead issue because so many Catholic schools have closed that there are not enough seats to solve the problems of any large city.

So the civil rights struggle of our time, it seems, comes down mainly to charter schools. If the states remove their caps, as President Obama wants them to do, and if the public money is there, we can anticipate that the charter sector will expand dramatically to meet the demand for escape from the regular public schools. The Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and other major private foundations are putting many millions into the growth of charter schools in urban districts.

What do you think, Debbie, is this good for kids? Good for society? What do you think about the multiplication of privately managed schools?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:28 AM | Permalink | 40 Comments | Recommend