September 2009 Archives

Alternate title: What Does the Best and Wisest Parent Want?

Dear Deborah,

I am glad to see that you are trying to draw us back to the issues where we have genuine differences! You and I agree that testing and accountability—as currently practiced under NCLB—have become enemies of good education. We would probably disagree on the value of testing. I do think that testing, when sensibly deployed, is valuable. I am not part of any anti-testing movement. I think it is important to know how students are doing, as compared with their past performance and as compared with others in their grade or age group, and even as compared with their peers in other nations. I also see the value of testing for admissions purposes, as there would be no point in bringing a poorly prepared student into a highly selective institution; he or she would certainly fail. The biggest problem today is not testing, but the misuse and abuse of testing, the way that schools, districts, states, and now the federal government are misusing the results of tests to make high-stakes decisions about teachers, students, principals, and schools.

The list that you draw up to describe the kind of curriculum for which schools should be accountable reminds me of the recently released core curriculum standards developed in English Language Arts and mathematics by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Like you, they would be comfortable with non-specific outcomes, though they do not make recommendations for history, science, the arts, and other subjects.

We could get into a heated argument about literature, history, and the arts. I don't agree that the value of these subjects and of what is taught must await empirical evidence. While it is not true that "everyone should" read Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Homer, and it is likely the case that only a tiny proportion of the population has done so, I don't think that this far-out reference should be used to bludgeon anyone who would argue for specific curriculum content.

I don't agree that knowing history leads any to repeat and relive old enmities. Most old enmities are based on ignorance, fear, and misinformation. The more we know of history, the better able we are to defuse ignorance, fear, and misinformation. Nor do I agree, as you suggest (I hope playfully), that America's success "correlates with its disdain for history."

As for science, I suspect that superstition and belief in supernatural phenomena and conspiracy theories is the result of poor education in science. To the extent that we can teach students to seek evidence and rational explanations, we will reduce magical thinking and encourage the application of reason and intelligence.

For better or worse, I will always side with those who favor more education, not less. We have words for those who don't know history, who have not read worthy literature, who know no science, and who are indifferent to the arts (and think that their doodles while daydreaming belong in a museum): Ignorant. Those who have no basis for reaching an educated judgment rely on hearsay, biases, prejudices, and the opinions that they picked up from their family and friends.

Thomas Jefferson said it first: Those who expect to remain both ignorant and free in a state of civilization expect what never was and never will be.

The Founding Fathers were themselves highly educated. They knew the muck of ignorance that had produced war after war in Europe, unending conflict over religion, and bitter enmities. They wanted something better in the new nation they were creating. To read their writings is to see how widely they read in history and literature, and how much they cared about learning the principles of science. To read them is to raise questions about whether we are as well educated today as they were. Some are, most aren't. As Neil Postman titled one of his books, we are amusing ourselves to death and allowing popular culture—often degraded and corrupting—to determine the content of our minds.

Jefferson would be appalled. I think John Dewey would be, as well. It was Dewey who wrote that what the best and wisest parent wants for his child is what we should want for all children. I expect that Jefferson, Dewey, and that "best and wisest" parent could find common ground were they to break bread together. I would like to be there when they do!

Diane

P.S.: Please let's turn to Arne Duncan's latest statement about his plans for the renewal of No Child Left Behind!

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:17 AM | Permalink | 50 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

We can go on forever about why "testing as we know it" cannot lead to becoming a well-educated people. We agree, we need to invent a road test—which might in some cases look like AP exams. Or, it might look like the examination system used at Central Park East Secondary School or Mission Hill (my old schools) or other formats now used by Consortium schools in New York. On the federal level, what we need are deeper and better NAEPs—where sampling continues to be wise. (They can thus be cheaper and more authentic at the same time.) Since sampled tests do not all have to be identical to be comparable, we can afford to explore "what kids must all know" both deeply and broadly enough to take them seriously.

More important than why we test is "Why School?". It's the title of Mike Rose's latest wonderful book (The New Press). What I want to argue out with you, and our readers, is the nature of the kind of curriculum or subject matter for which schools in a democratic society, funded by public monies, should be held accountable. What can we demonstrate is essential for 100 percent of all voters—18-year-olds—to understand?

1. Reading the newspapers or non-fiction magazines—or their equivalent. Being able to report to others on stories, engage in a discussion about them, and write a letter to the editor and op-ed column on a few with which they disagree. Maybe on two levels—one at around ages 11-12 and the other at 16-18.

2. Sufficient mathematics to make sense of what they find in the media—statistics, probabilities, forms of graphing, percentages, et al to a high degree of sophistication by the time they are 16. Basic arithmetic computation by 13.

3. Then comes the subject matter, the stuff that is worth reading and writing about and for! Science, history, literature, all the arts, law, governance, philosophy/ethics, politics, and economics. The criteria? Whatever is needed to be a knowledgeable and powerful member of a democracy!

Literature. A learned academic book reviewer in The New York Times recently claimed that "no one disagrees that everyone should..." have read Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Homer. What's the "evidence" for such a claim—much less that "everyone" would agree? (Maybe one definition of well-educated people is that they know better than to make claims about "no one" or "everyone.") While great fiction can lay claim to take us into worlds we never could otherwise experience, including the personal worlds of people unlike ourselves, thus making one a better democrat—more empathetic, for example—I've found insufficient evidence that this is what requiring the reading of Milton does.

History. Everyone tells kids that those who don't know their (or our?) history are doomed to repeat it. In fact, there are no empirical studies to demonstrate this. Some nations certainly know their own history better than most Americans—even though theirs is often far longer. Still we were more, not less, innovative. In fact, knowing history can lead some to constantly repeat and relive old enmities. One might argue that America's success correlates with its disdain for history. (Students usually rate history as their most boring subject—it was my favorite.)

Science. While certainly U.S. citizens have traditionally been exposed to much more science education than their counterparts in other democratic western nations, superstition is far higher in the U.S. and suspicion (and misunderstanding) of science greater.

The arts. Most adults are sure they can't "do" or "appreciate" any art—and few and far between are those who visit art museums, concerts (except for teens, and it isn't quite the music they study in school), or live theater, or who write creative stories or poetry.

All this may sadden me, but it doesn't surprise me. And I haven't found studies that suggest that schools that accept "ordinary" kids have managed to get other results by age 16 or 18—or in most colleges. Alas, not even my schools.

I believe strongly that we shouldn't give up; but, meanwhile, we should rethink what is "essential." Because, more serious than students not having read Dante, is when they haven't been exposed to any tough examination about the wherefores of the world they live in, nor any understanding of a strong reason to care about the survival of the democratic process. They haven't experienced or practiced democracy—through literature or life. They haven't learned to argue in ways essential to a democracy—which requires empathy, respect, reasoning power, AND a half-way open mind to other possibilities—on matters hard to dismiss with, "Well, I have my opinion, you have yours." Politics remains a dirty word.

We don't need schooling to have opinions. Even strong ones. But we do need schools to begin to imagine arguments in favor of democracy that might keep citizens from letting it go whenever a crisis appears. (See rethinklearningnow.org for an interesting Web site on this topic.)

Julian Bell, in an article in this week's New York Review of Books entitled "Why Art?", quotes an art historian who suggests that the origins of art might simply be—to escape boredom! (I suspect that more students' art takes place while listening to a boring classroom lesson than happens in school art classes.)

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:32 AM | Permalink | 29 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Over the past week, you and I have each weighed in on the defects of testing. You have been arguing for many years that standardized testing is replete with flaws. I have only recently recognized the ways in which pressure to raise scores, mainly prompted by NCLB, has corrupted testing and accountability.

Our policymakers have fallen in love with the idea that incentives and sanctions can "drive" educational improvement. They believe that if we promise rewards when test scores go up, we will see test scores go up. So they commit hundreds of millions of dollars to give "merit pay" or "performance pay" to teachers and principals, even to students—if the scores rise. Simultaneously, they threaten to inflict serious sanctions on those schools, principals, and teachers if their students' test scores do not go up. They don't dock their pay, but do something worse: They threaten to close their schools, fire the staff, and tarnish the reputation of anyone who taught there.

Behind these promises and threats lies a simple theory: scores are not high enough, because teachers are either lazy, don't work hard, or aren't motivated enough to do a good job. So teachers will work harder and be more successful if they can get more money, and they will work harder and be more successful if their livelihoods and reputations are on the line.

The problem with the incentives and sanctions approach is that it works. It does produce higher scores. We see scores going up in many states, sometimes at rates that defy belief. Some states may actually reach that dreamy goal of 100 percent "proficiency" by 2014.

So what's the problem? The problem is that schools, principals, teachers, and students will reach the goal by hook or by crook. Some states, like New York and Illinois, will play statistical games (like dropping the cut point, or creating conversion tables to change low scores into high scores). Some states will dumb down their tests, carefully field-testing the tests and removing any questions that are too difficult. Some districts will scrub their scores to remove low-scoring students (yes, this has happened). Some districts will find other ways to exclude the low-scoring students, such as by giving accommodations to students who are not usually entitled to them. Some schools will reclassify students to put their lowest scoring students in a group that doesn't "count" because its numbers are so small. Some will even cheat.

Ultimately, we will have what I call the NCLB Paradox, wherein scores go up, but actual educational improvement does not occur. We will see districts where the reading and math scores are through the roof, and where graduation rates have climbed, but where the rate of college-ready students is unchanged. I expect there are many such districts. The one I know best is New York City, which won the Broad award in 2007 for its excellence in improving urban education. Test scores have soared, based on dumbed-down tests; graduation rates are up across the board. Yet when graduates of the New York City public school system enter the community colleges of New York City, 74 percent of them require remediation in basic skills! These are students who passed five state Regents examinations, yet they need to be remediated in reading, writing, and mathematics! This suggests, does it not, that there is something amiss with those impressive test scores and graduation rates?

This raises the question: With scores so often rigged and fraudulent, how can we use them to pay bonuses or to close schools? New York City's last round of phony test scores (noticed as phony even by the august New York Times) triggered a payout of $33 million in bonuses to teachers; the union is laughing all the way to the bank! So millions are awarded in fraudulent bonuses at the same time that school budgets are cut to the bone. Is this the way that big business operates? If so, it is no wonder that we had a financial meltdown.

I fear that American education has now entered into a twilight zone, where nothing is what it appears to be, where numbers are meaningless, where public relations and spin take the place of honest reporting, where fraud is called progress.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:02 AM | Permalink | 38 Comments | Recommend

Note to readers: Bridging Differences will be off-line on Saturday, Sept. 19, while the edweek.org staff attends to technical issues. The blog will be accessible again on Sunday. Edweek.org apologizes for any inconvenience.

Posted by Mary-Ellen Phelps Deily at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Yes, the ways in which standardized bubble-in tests are open to abuse are rampant—and gaming of test scores has increasingly important repercussions. In the long run it leads to an increasingly toxic education in the name of “standards.” I urge you to read the two chapters in "In Schools We Trust" on my own experience and subsequent investigation of standardized testing for 7-year-olds. I discovered, in my effort to “prep” them, that while reading tests may in part test the ability to read—comprehend (vs. re-code into sounds)—they are even better at detecting one’s class and cultural sub-group. Of course, there were exceptions. There are ways to raise scores via prepping, but it can only diminish the “gap” if those at the top get less effective prepping. I published the recorded interviews I conducted with students—in 1972, and Jay Rosner has shown how it works for the SATs, and many have followed. Between 1980 and 1990, it seemed we had won the battle. By 2000, they had returned with a vengeance. Thus many friends and allies suggested I give up on this particular line of reasoning.

Meanwhile, we’ve witnessed a massive redistribution of wealth. Everyone has their culprit. Too often, "lazy" children, parents, or educators/teachers? In a nation that ranks near the bottom in services for the young, not to mention a bigger gap between rich and poor than we’ve seen since the 1920s, maybe this is myopic? “Forget it,” friends suggest. You’ll just be accused of making excuses for bad schools.

What you have documented, Diane, is eerily close to the kind of data abuse that helped create our current financial crisis. We go blindly ahead. There seem equally few lessons learned from either crisis. It’s apparently easier to hold children and teachers’ “feet to the fire” than the creators of the greatest economic crisis of our lives—especially Harvard grads. Note: The latter did fine on their SATs.

Many reputable studies have also demonstrated that, based on such tests, no evidence exists for most of the Race to the Top-NCLB-like reforms. Just rhetoric. Just more shifting of power away from the public sector. The CREDO study you mention suggests that only 17 percent of the charter schools do better on tests than their comparable noncharters, and more do worse. Try that with a drug test, and how long would it remain on the shelf? (Even though, in fact, low scores is not one of my complaints against charters.)

What’s the alternative, critics argue! Is a bad drug better than none at all, I respond?

In fact, we have alternatives—some pioneered in the good old USA and others in those much-vaunted international comparisons. For example, there is no competitor that relies as much as much as we do on testing of our sort. None. None. None. (A light bulb should go on.)

Alas, there are no simple magic bullets even among the reforms I like. Partly because we don’t all have the same agenda when it comes to outcomes—our priorities differ, what we’re willing to trade off or risk differs. Also, any reform package depends on its implementation and few recipes are foolproof. Trying to copy the KIPP model or the Deborah Meier “model” won’t produce the same thing.

And, then there’s the ornery fact that when today’s reformers refer to proof of “achievement” they mean something different than you and I do, Diane. Achievement equals standardized test scores in reading and math; others add test scores in other subjects, including aptitude/IQ tests. Everything else gets called “soft skills.” It’s as absurd as calling the written driving test the real achievement and the road test a measure of “soft” skills.

I’d argue that this applies to most intellectual knowledge and skills. We’re relying on an absurd definition of achievement—at best. It’s not lack of alternatives, but a lack of interest in having real standards that take into account that we are all not the same and that we actually don’t want to be all the same. Our interests, passions, talents, and even our priorities differ. High standards can be met in honest and serious ways if we are prepared to take the harder route—starting with each child. If we care enough about both means and ends consistent with democracy it will not be easy and will not be based on the need to rank order individuals, schools, or nations. There are plenty of good alternatives.

Any publicly funded school must serve, for better or worse, the public good—the complex demands of a modern democracy. But the public good is also met best when each individual's private good (his/her passions and interests) are also met. But how we sort out what best serves both will always be an art, not a hard or exact science.

There is no single “best” model—but there are bad ones. Neither the common good nor personal good can come out of schools that do not treat all members of their community with respect. (Respect, of course, is no easier to define than achievement.) Perhaps the reason I love "Tales of Priut Almus*" by Robert Belenky—which describes the time he spent in a Russian shelter for homeless youth—is the unmeasurable respectfulness with which they responded to the young people in their care. Belenky says “offering a short-term, flexible, familial, community-based home may be the most useful gift (offered) these young people.” But he actually describes far more than that. So, too, in any respectful school there is more than that—but nothing without that.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:24 AM | Permalink | 48 Comments | Recommend

Editor's note: See author's "P.S." added since entry was first published.

I will have to delay a bit before I can get to the book you recommended. When I finished "Daniel Deronda," I immediately plunged into Robert Caro's wonderful biography of Robert Moses, "The Power Broker," which I am enjoying very much. It is fascinating from the start as a description of the life and times of a man who did so much to redesign New York City, who was celebrated and powerful, but in the end...was the subject of a very unflattering biography by a master historian. The book gives perspective to some of the events that you describe. In the end, people in public life are judged by their real accomplishments and their integrity, not by their wealth, their power, or their press releases. The latter fade, and eventually the record speaks for itself. This is one of the reasons that I love to write history and read history, as over time phony laurels disintegrate, and the applause that is generated by flacks disappears.

I would like to engage you in one of your favorite issues, which is the use and abuse of tests. Over the past few months, as I was finishing my book, I became aware of the startling extent to which the New York State Education Department has manipulated the state test results. So, while politicians crow about their "success" in raising test scores (as if they had anything to do with students' learning!), it turns out that the tests have been rigged in recent years to produce higher scores. The more I learned, the more I wondered if New York was on its way to becoming a national laughing-stock.

I wrote two articles about this. The first one appeared in the New York Post in August under the headline "Toughen the Tests." The article actually was NOT a call to toughen the tests, but a call to tell the truth. I wrote it to alert our new state education commissioner, David Steiner, who assumes his position on Oct. 1, to the scandalous manipulation of test scores by the agency he will lead.

The second article was published by the New York Daily News ("Bloomberg's Bogus Report Cards Destroy Real Progress"). There I discussed the Bloomberg administration's zany school report cards, which this year awarded an A to 84 percent of the city's elementary and middle schools, and a B to 13 percent more. In other words, 97 percent got an A or a B, including seven of the schools that the state says are "persistently dangerous." Only two of 1,058 schools scored an F. The administration thinks this is progress, but even its most ardent supporters on the editorial boards of the New York Post and the New York Daily News complained about rampant grade inflation.

Oh, by the way, the school that saw the biggest drop in its overall score was the Harlem Promise Academy Charter School, the school that David Brooks of The New York Times held up as a national model, claiming that it had closed the achievement gap. Our blog had quite a lively exchange of letters about that school last spring. Seems it dropped from an A to a B; in the present regime of inflated scores, a B in New York City today is nothing to brag about.

I wrote these articles to draw attention to the games that the state is playing with test scores. From 2006, when the state started testing grades 3-8, to the present, the proportion of points that a student needs to advance to a higher level has steadily fallen in many grades. One of our faithful readers, Diana Senechal, conducted an experiment for gothamschools.org, in which she took two of the middle school tests and answered the questions at random; she "earned" enough points to advance to level 2. The number of students who are level 1 (the lowest) has dropped precipitously in these past three years; some very low-performing schools have few or no students in that category, not because instruction has improved, but because the state dropped the bar. The public doesn't know this.

Over these past three years, the proportion of students who are allegedly "proficient" (level 3) leapt from 29 percent to 63 percent in Buffalo, from 30 percent to 58 percent in Syracuse, and from 57 percent to 82 percent in New York City. In 2006, a student had to earn 60 percent of the points on the state tests in math to be proficient; by 2009, the student needed to earn only 50 percent. The public does not know that the bar has been quietly lowered.

The reporters at the New York Daily News have diligently exposed the corruption of state testing by New York's education department. For reasons that I cannot fathom, the reporters at the New York Times have completely ignored the story and continue to refer to the state scores as though they have real meaning. Perhaps the Times will take notice later this year when the NAEP results come out and the public realizes that the claims of double-digit gains are phony. Unfortunately, what the Times does and does not report matters, as some people will believe nothing unless they read it there.**

In June, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago issued a report showing that the score gains in that city (which President Obama cited when he nominated Arne Duncan as secretary of education) were mostly a result of the state's decision to lower the cut scores on the state tests.

When states play games with cut scores and conversions from raw scores to scale scores, testing becomes a mighty scam. As Secretary Duncan said when he spoke at the National Press Club last May, we are lying to our children when we give them a false picture of their progress. When district officials know that the scores are manipulated, yet report their "gains" with a straight face, they become complicit in these lies. When public officials boast about score gains knowing that the scores are the result of game-playing, they too are complicit.

Have testing and accountability become a massive fraud against our children? Do they now serve adult interests while ignoring, indeed disregarding, the needs of children?

Diane

**P.S. The New York Times Faces Facts about State Tests: In my blog entry that was posted today (and written a few days ago), I complained that the New York Times had failed to acknowledge the dumbing-down of New York's tests. Yesterday, Sept. 14, the Times ran an article by Javier Hernandez on that very subject ("Botched Most Answers on New York State Math Test? You Still Pass"). The article pointed out that a student could pass the 7th grade math test by getting only 44 percent of the questions right, and that the passing mark had dropped so far that students could actually pass by random guessing.

Officials at the state Education Department told the Times, apparently with a straight face, that they dropped the passing mark because they made the test "harder." They did not explain why passing rates had soared if indeed the test was harder and comparable to previous years. Apparently the officials think that the rest of us are fools.

So the Times at last has weighed in, but has not yet given the full picture of the extent to which intensive test prep—using clone items—has corrupted the state tests, not only in math, but in ELA as well.

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:37 AM | Permalink | 7 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I’m in the midst of reading a marvelous book by Danielle Allen called Talking to Strangers. I’d love to discuss it with others. Do read it so we can converse about it soon. Her concept of “political friendships” between strangers intrigues me.

Which relates to my unpleasant encounter between NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg that you refer to in your letter yesterday. The New York Post reported that the mayor’s aides claim: Bloomberg demanded that the Senate’s grant to NYU be redirected it to CUNY, because of … Deborah Meier! My critical stance toward the mayor’s educational policies (the story quoted me as regarding the absence of parent voices in school policy) seemed a sufficient explanation. Why the Senate capitulated, and why The New York Times didn’t report it, and why the mayor’s aides “leaked” this explanation to the media I do not know. What’s more interesting to me is that this public attempt to threaten NYU, by one of the most powerful and richest politicians in America, was apparently seen as uncontroversial. It’s clearly an abridgement of academic freedom, an abuse of his enormous power; and, perhaps above all, so petty. (In fact, I’m “merely” an unpaid—hopefully not un-honored—member of the NYU faculty.)

I’ve always loved NYC’s feistiness, a quality of mind that seems often missing in more laid-back sections of the country. But even New Yorkers can be cowed by the kind of power and intimidation that the Bloomberg oligarchy has exercised for so many years.

Which gets me back to Allen’s argument in favor of bending over backwards to encourage reasoned, thoughtful dialogue between political friends—arguments not crippled by fear of retaliation or retribution by the authority of the State. The habits of a democratic citizenry are precious, and schools are the only institution I know of that might be training grounds for such citizenship. They are both the potential lab and think tank for reasoned discourse—in a climate of friendship and mutual respect. The art of listening to each other requires careful nurturing.

And, of course, reasoning requires judgment—and both require knowledge (including experience).

Which leads me to E.D. Hirsch’s latest book (The Making of Americans). He and I even agree on many matters. But I’m intrigued by the unexamined assumptions we disagree about! He does not even acknowledge any risks inherent in a nationwide imposition of a single year-by-year curriculum. Local school boards, parent organizations, and teachers' unions can be a pain in the ass (and I speak as one who has been at both ends of each). But I see democracy resting on our reviving these institutions, not in abandoning them. The ease with which we seek to “overcome” unwelcome citizen voices by pushing power ever higher—or to more elite experts—has a long history. It’s not “unreasonable,” just dangerous. “It’s too important to get this right’” is a cry I’ve heard over and over as respected friends seek to circumvent democratic procedures. “We dare not let them vote on this” is not the defense of just fools or demagogues. Yes, democratically delegating some decisions to experts, as well as recognizing when decisions are best made in collaboration with other governmental units, are reasonable objections to placing authority in local democracies. But years of such rationales have led me to be hard-pressed to find places left where ordinary citizens experience decision-making processes. Surely not in many schools. Even hearing each other out is not something we often do in our schools, although we do grow accustomed to not talking back to the textbook, teacher, or principal—more out of boredom (or its uselessness) probably than courtesy. (How rarely do we confront any passionate convictions in our lives in school.)

We’re bad at imagining other ways of seeing the world—and probably always have been. But it is our unique human capacity. While I think that if we devoted the 13 years from K-12th grade to nurturing and training such capacity we’d get better at it, probably it will always be hard. It takes, as does science, mathematics, and the arts, hands-on-practice in a good old-fashioned “apprenticeship.”

Ah, too much rhetoric! There are some wonderful books out by practitioners that describe how we can organize schools that serve both the academic disciplines and democracy better than a “standardized one-size-fits-all” curriculum. Next week.

Deb

P.S. The health debate is instructive—reminding us of how difficult it is to engage in serious debate when the stakes are high. But the solution is not to invent a behind-the-scenes, pretend consensus where none exist, as Duncan et al seem to be doing with regard to so-called educational “reform.” For more on meaningful school reform, I highly recommend that readers seek out an excellent opinion piece by Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves that appeared recently in The Boston Globe. Among other things, they write: "Why not choose the bolder paths not yet taken in our educational system’s much-hailed “race to the top’’ and join those schools at the top of the world already?"

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:02 AM | Permalink | 7 Comments | Recommend

Editor's Note: Bridging Differences returns today from its summer hiatus. The blog will resume its regular Tuesday-Thursday publishing schedule next week.

Dear Deborah,

School is open, and it is time to talk! What a busy summer for all of us who care about education.

I had a good summer, finished editing my new book, and got it off to the publisher. I also managed to finish George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, my main summer reading. It took 140 pages before I became fully engaged, but then the plot and the characters grabbed me.

The big education events of the summer were huge. Starting locally, the New York legislature renewed Mayor Bloomberg's one-man control of the New York City public schools. No surprise there. What was surprising and really shocking was a debate about whether to create a $1.6 million parent training center, a tiny bone tossed to critics of the mayor's high-handed rule. The legislators wanted to place the new center at New York University. Then the New York Post ran a scare headline warning that someone who had criticized the mayor's education reforms—Deborah Meier—would run the parent training center. This was laughable, since you are an adjunct and would have had nothing to do with the program. Nonetheless, the terrified legislators promptly shifted the appropriation (a grain of sand in our city's $21 billion education budget) to City University of New York, where the mayor can keep it under his thumb and where it will be harmlessly divided into five separate centers.

Nationally, the most important event was the release of the federal government’s regulations for the “Race to the Top.” Those regulations made clear that the Obama administration has fully aligned itself with the edu-entrepreneurs who favor market-based reforms. As I predicted on this blog, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are now the spear carriers for the GOP's education policies of choice and accountability. An odd development, don’t you think? The Department of Education dangles nearly $5 billion before the states, but only if they agree to remove the caps on charter schools and any restrictions on using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research. They just happen to be the programs and approaches favored by the people in power. Under normal circumstances, the Department of Education would need congressional hearings and authorization to launch a program so sweeping and so sharply defined. Instead, they are using the "stimulus" money to impose their preferences, with no hearings and no congressional authorization.

Is any charter school better than any public school? As we learned from the Stanford CREDO study of charters a few months ago, only 17 percent of charter schools are superior to comparable public schools; the rest were either no better or worse. Yet the Obama administration wants to open up the nation’s public schools—especially in urban districts—to massive privatization.

And with the encouragement of Secretary Duncan (and the support of the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation), privatization is taking root. Just last week, the Los Angeles board of education voted to turn over nearly one third of its schools to private management; this despite the fact that in the same week it was reported that the Green Dot takeover of Locke High School produced no gains. At Locke, 2 percent of the students met state standards in math; after a year of massive publicity about the Green Dot miracle at Locke, the scores came out, and 2 percent of the students met state standards in math. The excuses came thick and fast: the dropout rate was down, more students came to school, but…the scores were flat.

There is also no research that justifies the Obama administration’s belief that tying teacher evaluations to student scores will improve schools. I commend to our readers the response to the RTTT regulations by Professor Helen Ladd, an economist who has studied teacher evaluation for many years, as well as the one by Paul Barton, who has studied education issues for many years. What both of these responses clearly demonstrate is that there is no research basis for the priorities favored by Secretary Duncan.

This will be an interesting year. But also a very dangerous year for American public education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:14 AM | Permalink | 89 Comments | Recommend