June 2010 Archives

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

Dear Diane.

I've been mulling over the well-organized attack on the concept of seniority and tenure. The roots of both have long been forgotten. Seniority as a concept has been fundamental implicitly, if not explicitly, to most societies. Tenure was added for public service and academia, because politics was perceived as a threat to public service workers, especially "mind-workers." This preceded teachers' unions and exists in states without unions! Even with tenure, teachers are vulnerable, especially troublemakers. But some might argue that this is a good reason to support merit pay since principals will have to base their decisions on objective test scores.

Thus, we're back to defining our educational purposes as raising external test scores. Alas, I've known awful teachers whose student test scores went up, and the reverse. The reasons are many. Do publishers still send technical manuals with tests, including date on measurement error? It's an inescapable factor reflecting chance mistakes, mechanical errors by students or test companies, the happenstance of the particular content of any sample of items, testing conditions, children's moods, and students' socioeconomic status. Using samples of 20-30 scores is statistical nonsense.

Then add in cheating. If Wall Street'ers cheated us for money, greed being part of human nature some would argue, why would we expect it to only have a beneficial impact on teachers if their livelihoods were at stake?

Steve Eisman, whose investment strategies were chronicled in The Big Short, has found the next "big short"—education stocks. Who would want to go into such a profession for the long run? A great English teacher who also helps students become orally articulate while developing a love of the written word may well be a loser for failing to spend more time on test preparation.

And still baffling to me: (1) How will all the teachers in untested subjects be paid or evaluated? Answer (maybe): Tests at every grade-level starting at prekindergarten, and in every license area for which teachers are hired. (2) Who will set the benchmarks used to set teachers' salaries or for retention purposes? (3) What happens if teachers switch grades?

Diane, it's beyond belief. I'm speechless. But one nice thing about a letter versus an essay is that I can change the subject. Enough on this!

Having reached a consensus on merit pay, they're now putting the finishing touches on national standards—leading to a single nationwide test. I fear that the idea of using them (as we do NAEP) to inform, and not for high stakes, is unlikely to fly. If so, will we find ourselves then on different sides? I hope not.

I know we view our ideal curriculum differently. To quote you: "we need a "well conceived, coherent, sequential curriculum" covering the time-honored liberal arts and sciences. (Actually the sciences didn't enter in until the end of the 19th century; and Harvard faculty argued that only 4 percent of the college's applicants in 1890 were able to write acceptably.) Apparently, the Harvard faculty didn't take Stanley Fish's advice: "put {teachers} in a room with students who are told where they are going and how they are going to get there," and all will be well. It "worked for me," he adds. But something different worked for me, Stanley! What to do about that?

Schools like Central Park East Secondary School graduated ordinary students who have done well in college and led interesting lives and careers following a different definition of "intellectual habits of mind" than Fish's, closer to the definition practiced by the best New York City independent schools. And CPESS-like exams came closer to responding to the virtues Fish also describes: "to speak and write persuasively and eloquently about any topic."

The sequence and particularities of such "topics" is precisely what neither a plebiscite nor a consensus should dictate. Like you, I insist that virtually all human beings can be equipped intellectually to tackle being "rulers" of a complex modern society—as an ideal and as a practice. These are not in conflict with job skills, but they come closer to what employers and ordinary citizens measure each other by. For example, a recent study indicates that while we spend five times as many hours in school on mathematics vs. music and the arts, only 9 percent of gainfully employed adults claim to ever use algebra in their workplace. Standards, yes, but a "sequential," "coherent" curriculum always also contains a viewpoint.

Before we put in place another failed, one-size-fits-all list of MUSTS, let's stop and think together about who should decide if it's worth it. We are, after all, deciding on our shared future. Do we assume that the state legislators who will vote on the new standards will actually have read them? I once proposed the following law: "No legislature will vote for a required test until they agree to take the same test and have their scores reported publicly." They'd read them then.

Like all competent "revolutionaries," the "cabal" in charge has learned to grab the moment before anyone blinks. Make changes quick and make them that hard to take back. So we better be sure we have thought about the consequences before we lock ourselves into another century of school failure. Perhaps you and I could agree that, in a labor-intensive industry (schooling) designed to prepare people's character as well as their skill set, the revolution can't lose sight of ends as it argues over means.

Deborah

P.S. That huge, gushing faucet of oil is still called a "spill" or a "leak." It would be interesting to trace the history of this usage.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

The evidence continues to accumulate that our "accountability" policies are a great fraud and hoax, but our elected officials and policymakers remain completely oblivious to the harm caused by the policies they mandate.

Over the past several years, efforts to "hold teachers accountable" and "hold schools accountable" have produced perverse consequences. Instead of better education, we are getting cheating scandals, teaching to bad tests, a narrowed curriculum, lowered standards, and gaming of the system. Even if it produces higher test scores (of dubious validity), high-stakes accountability does not produce better education.

In their eagerness to show "results," states are dumbing down their standards. The New York state education department dropped cut scores on the state tests from 2006 (the year that annual testing in grades 3-8 was introduced) to 2009. In 2006, a student in 7th grade could achieve "proficiency" by getting 59.6 percent of the points correct on the state math test; by 2009, a student in the same grade needed only 44 percent of the available points. Back in the pre-accountability days, a score of 60 percent would have been a D, not a mark of proficiency, and a score of 44 percent would have been a failing grade. According to a report by The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, the gains registered in the elementary schools of Chicago during Arne Duncan's tenure were almost entirely the result of changes to the scoring of the tests, rather than evidence of any genuine improvement in student learning.

When gains are manufactured in these ways, children are cheated. Children who need extra help don't get it, but adults trade high-fives for their "success" in raising scores and enjoy the adulation of the media.

When New York state's education department was criticized for dropping the cut scores on its tests, officials responded by insisting that the department dropped the cut scores because the tests were actually harder than in previous years. This was utter nonsense because the passing rates soared as the cut scores fell, which would not have been the case if the tests were "harder." So, although it never acknowledged its past chicanery, the state education department claimed that the tests would really, really, truly be hard this year and that standards would once again be high.

However, some whistle-blowing teachers tipped off the New York Post that the scoring rubrics for this year's test recommended giving half-credit for wrong answers and even for no answer at all. Here are examples from the 4th-grade scoring guide, as reported in the Post:

• "A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12.
• A miscalculation that 28 divided by 14 equals 4 instead of 2 is "partially correct" if the student uses the right method to verify the wrong answer.
• Setting up a division problem to find one-fifth of $400, but not solving the problem—and leaving the answer blank—gets half-credit.
• A kid who subtracts 57 cents from three quarters for the right change and comes up with 15 cents instead of 18 cents still gets half-credit.
• A student who figures the numbers of books in 35 boxes of 10 gets half-credit despite messed-up multiplication that yields the wrong answer, 150 instead of 350."

One hopes that these students never become pharmacists or engineers or enter any other line of work where accuracy matters.

The scandal of high-stakes testing is not limited to New York and Illinois. Last week, Trip Gabriel of The New York Times reported in a Page One story about the ubiquity of cheating scandals across the nation. My guess is that he revealed only the tip of the iceberg. I was in Baltimore on May 27, when The Baltimore Sun wrote about a major cheating scandal at an elementary school that had been widely recognized for its excellent test scores. In 2003, only one-third of the students in the school passed the state reading test, but within four years, almost all did. This was a "miracle" school; it won a federal Blue Ribbon for its remarkable gains. But it turned out that the school's success was phony: Someone had erased and corrected many student answers.

The more that test scores are used to measure teacher effectiveness and to determine the fate of schools, the more we will see such desperate efforts by teachers and principals to save their jobs and their schools.

Yet even as more cheating scandals are documented, even as the perfidy of state testing agencies is documented, our federal policymakers plunge forward, blithely imposing unproven policies as well as "remedies" that have been tested and found wanting. Latest example: The June 9 issue of Education Week has a front-page story with this headline: "Merit-Pay Model Pushed by Duncan Shows No Achievement Edge." The inside jump headline reads "Student Progress No Better in Chicago Schools Using TAP." (TAP is the Teacher Advancement Program, which gives extra compensation to teachers for higher "performance.") In the same issue, on Page 24, is a story about the $437 million for the federal Teacher Incentive Fund program, which will dispense dollars to do what failed in Chicago. Secretary Duncan hopes to expand funding for this program to $900 million next year. Mr. Duncan says of the program, "There's no secret that historically there's been some apprehension about doing this kind of stuff. You have to expose yourself a bit and put things on the line, but where folks are willing to do that and do it together, we see the benefits for students. It's remarkable."

Merit pay has been tried and found ineffective again and again since the 1920s, but repeated failure never discourages its advocates, who are certain that if the incentives were larger, or if some other element was adjusted, it would surely work. We hear that about every failed experiment. If only we had done it differently....

More emphasis on test scores. More money for teachers if the scores go up. More punishment for teachers and schools if the scores don't go up. More cheating. More gaming the system. More concentration on basic skills (they count) and more indifference to the arts, history, science, foreign languages, etc. (they don't count).

Are we in an era of National Stupidity or National Insanity? Or is this what happens when educators imagine they are thinking like corporate executives? If it is the latter, I recommend that they read the writings of W. Edwards Deming, the management guru, who steadfastly opposed merit pay because it destroys collaboration and teamwork, undermines long-range planning, and incentivizes the wrong behavior. If it is the former, well, we will just have to ride out this terrible era and hope that wiser heads someday prevail.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I couldn't resist this piece from the Rev. John Thomas of the Chicago Theological Seminary, entitled "It's Not OK to Hate Teachers."

When you travel across the country through numerous county seat towns and cities, it's easy to see what was important to those who established those communities. They built—at great personal sacrifice—churches, schools, libraries, and courthouses—public institutions that provided for the general welfare of their communities rather than simply the private mercantile interests of its citizens. Usually these buildings were architecturally grand, dominating the landscape, announcing to all that the spiritual, intellectual, and moral enrichment of the public was a central priority. What do we build today? Sports arenas. In the New York area alone, the last five years have seen the building of two new baseball stadiums, a football stadium, and a basketball arena, all built around lavish accommodations for those privileged few who can buy luxury boxes.

When we moved from P.S. 171, built in the 1920s, into I.S. 13, built in the 1960s, we went from grand to pedestrian, from castle to factory. Looking at high schools, it's even more startling. The old buildings were statements about the power and glory of education. Of course, they weren't for everybody—especially the high schools. The trouble is that once we claimed them for "everyone," we forgot to build them to be inspiring.

Our definition—ala the "Race" to the Top—is built on a pyramid, just as the invention of standardized testing was (although we called it a bell curve). The castle disappeared. No matter how fast we run, there can only be exactly one who crosses the finish line first and exactly one in last place. (A few decades ago, we built a castle of a sort for NYC's elite along the Hudson River with a bridge over the highway that cost more than the average. The whole model upon which testing was built followed the same pattern.)

We claim we can't afford the kind of testing that former elites used. And efforts to create a test based on "common standards" may sound egalitarian, but it, too, is based on a predetermined scoring pattern. We can't imagine a whole new ball game, and one for which the current crop of testing experts were not trained. Maybe it's possible? Probably only if we can also acknowledge that there might be more than one instrument, even (horrors) more than one "core curriculum"? Could we ever settle not for a ranking of scores, but pass/fail on a short list of "essentials"—the public core of what being a citizen of democracy demands of one and all? It's a conundrum. And, toughest of all, such a "common core" would not be the task of elites, but based on a citizen-led discussion about the common purposes of education in a democracy.

A hard task given that we devalue anything that everyone can pass, and don't trust a rank order that doesn't privilege certain fields of knowledge and expertise over others—on grounds that are beyond public debate. We want equality and diversity, but we also want a pyramid based on a single standard—that we can justify as objective and unbiased.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, we confront reality. In the past two decades, we've experienced both a startling increase in the wealth gap between whites and blacks/Hispanics, rich and poor, and an explosion of standardized testing.

Maybe there's a correlation between these two facts? Maybe "no excuse" is just a slogan for dismissing this ugly new reality?

Yes, we're all inclined to believe in things that confirm our own self-interests and prejudices. Democracy is essential, in part, as a check on this very human fact of life. The folks at the bottom of the pyramid are compensated for their absence of wealth by the plenitude of their voting power. (And, I would argue, by their equal access to the kind of knowledge that is needed to steer the ship of state.)

When things look good for "our side," we have an amazing capacity to delude ourselves into thinking it's—in the end—good for everyone. Reading Michael Lewis's amazing account in The Big Short of how very smart, "well-educated" people deluded themselves—for some with the noblest intentions (spread the wealth to those who were poor mortgage risks)—into believing in one of the grandest Ponzi schemes ever confirmed this for me. One might argue that they really knew that they'd be bailed out, that they'd end up somehow being winners. Maybe. (And they did.) But Lewis convinces me that they deluded themselves out of self-interested stupidity. They counted on the bean-counters (just as we count on the test-makers and data-producers), the experts in the media, and their colleagues (who seemed to be going along, so it must be ok). They had the same kind of sketchy access to the real data, just as we do about the world of schooling. If their data were corrupted, why can't we imagine that our data about schools has been, too? Corrupted in so many ways that that would take a whole column to list.

As former voucher champion Paul E. Peterson of Harvard notes, all our favorite silver bullets have failed to change scoring patterns over the past half-century: the end of legal segregation, extra federal dollars for students in poverty, high-stakes tests, schools of choice—via charters or vouchers, teachers with more degrees, teachers' unions, improved wages for teachers, and even smaller schools. Of course, we've never done any of these wholeheartedly, but would we want to? We've in reality increased the separations across race and class. And no legal victory has produced equal school resources for the rich and poor. At one short moment in the 1980s we contemplated rethinking the nature of the "evidence" for improved schooling—shifting from "credit hours" and standardized tests to an older form of assessment:"Show me." It didn't last even a decade. Peterson's latest hope is technology and distance learning. Actually, I lived through that once before. Remember? But, I wouldn't dismiss it entirely—as I wouldn't any of the fads. We will not be a nation in the forefront of invention, however, if we stop inventing different answers to the $64-million-dollar questions: What do we want? And, how much do we all have to agree?

If, as Rev. Thomas suggests, we believed everyone deserved a royal education, we'd build castles for learning, not football stadiums, and the best seats would be for those who need them most. And we'd invite everyone to join the discussion about what's essential before making it The Law of the Land.

Deb

P.S. Speaking as I was last week, Diane, about how language shapes perception: How come we are calling that huge oil spouting hole in the sea's floor a "leak"???

Note: See also New Republic review by Richard D. Kahlenberg of Paul E. Peterson's book Saving Schools

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Over the past few months, I have traveled the country and spoken to thousands of educators—teachers, administrators, and school board members. At the same time, I have kept close tabs on the national discussion about the Obama administration's Race to the Top.

I have discovered a strange paradox. With few exceptions, the national media are excited by the Race to the Top, especially the expansion of charter schools, the tough accountability measures directed at teachers, and closing down of "failing" schools. But educators are overwhelmingly disheartened by these same measures.

The people who have the closest involvement in schools see the Obama administration's policies as misguided, if not disastrous, yet these same policies are celebrated by journalists and pundits who see education as just one more policy issue with obvious answers.

Consider these two journalistic celebrations of Race to the Top: one, by Stephen Brill in The New York Times Magazine, and the other, by David Brooks in his column in The New York Times. Brill, a lawyer who usually writes about legal topics, has no credentials as an education journalist, yet he uses his platform to extol charters, accountability, and other hallmarks of the new "reform" era. He shows no familiarity with the extensive research that questions the value of these policies.

Brill wrongly asserts that a charter school in Harlem in New York City achieves success with precisely the same children who attend a regular public school in the same building. If Brill knew anything about education, he would have sought data from the New York state Education Department. If he had, he would have discovered that the charter school and the regular public school do not serve the same kinds of students. (See "More on Steve Brill's imperviousness to the facts," from the NYC Public School Parents blog.)

The charter school, Harlem Success Academy, has higher test scores for its 3rd grade (the only grade tested so far), but it serves fewer needy students, fewer students who are limited-English proficient, and fewer students with disabilities. Brill was right that the two schools are in the same building, but they don't enroll similar students. The students in the charter school are more advantaged than those in the public school. As any teacher or researcher knows, that difference has a significant impact on the schools' test scores.

David Brooks loves the competitive ideas behind Race to the Top. Brooks is a Republican, so it is not surprising that he believes that competition will cure the ills of American education. So does Newt Gingrich, who has toured the nation with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to tout the benefits of the Race to the Top.

Brooks lauds the Race to the Top because it "uses federal power to incite reform, without dictating it from the top." Educators disagree. Carlos A. Garcia, the superintendent of schools in San Francisco, says it is a strong-armed approach, no different from No Child Left Behind, and "we're tired of all that stuff."

Like Brill, Brooks is unaware that competitive pay plans have a record of consistent failure and that even when they "succeed," such plans incentivize the wrong behaviors among teachers, who are compelled to do more counterproductive teaching-to-the-test and more curriculum-narrowing. Such behaviors do not produce good education.

The Obama administration has benefited mightily by winning the approval of the national media. But the media have failed to ask what the race is about, what the "top" is, who will lose the race, and what will be accomplished by the government's expenditure of nearly $5 billion for these purposes.

I think the Race to the Top is a massive waste of money that will produce perverse consequences. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of schools will be privatized, handed over in some cases to incompetent or unscrupulous organizations. Teachers will be pushed to focus more of their energy on unworthy tests. Many schools will discover there is less time to teach the arts or sciences or foreign languages or history.

Based on my travels these past few months, I conclude that my views are by no means unusual. Our nation's educators are strongly opposed to the Race to the Top. They know these policies will harm and degrade education. Our policymakers in Washington, D.C., should pay attention.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Alice in Wonderland, I'm told, has now been released as a horror movie. Life imitates art: Nonsense that once amused me is also turning into a horror documentary.

The prologue to Michael Lewis' amazing new bookThe Big Short is out of Lewis Carroll too; except it's based on fact. The folks Michael Lewis describes are identical to the ones you now run into at the New York City department of education headquarters--amusingly called Tweed--maybe one rung down in "smarts?"

The language nonsense on Wall Street may be more intimidating but it's just as much of a cover up as the jargon we've invented for schooling (like "high expectations," "no excuses" "children first"). They blur our understanding rather than clarify it. Which is why I enjoyed Warren Buffet's reminder that sometimes "low expectations" are a better road to happiness.

Like Wall Street no one at Tweed wants to acknowledge blame. Instead we hear lots of excuses. Why don't we ask why we should trust the financial wizard to invent a new system of schooling for the most victimized kids in America after all the harm they've done to our financial system (without, on the whole, hurting themselves or their children much) ?

Doublespeak of the sort that would make Orwell wince is part of the everyday language of reform on both fronts. "Anything goes" (if it raises standardized test scores) is a mindset that has been around since I began teaching in 1963. No questions asked. Much as we did with the stock exchange--as long as the Dow goes up. By the mid-1970s we were in the midst of a colossal media-advertised "Education Crisis": The U.S. was then competing against U.S.S.R. schools and we (not they) would soon collapse economically if we didn't correct it. Most leaders of foundations and the corporate sector viewed teachers as too dumb (they didn't come from Ivy-League colleges and weren't rich either) to look to for advice.

This was the climate that I met with when I became a teacher in the early '60s--and that still rules my world. Much of the work I did for the next 40 years was to explore how to work within this mindset, while also discovering what schools could accomplish regardless of the failures outside their sphere of influence.

Growing economic worries and flat test scores over the past decade have led to blaming teachers, more tests, and tying test scores to teacher's salaries. This focus on test scores is a strictly American thing--maybe one could even claim that the nations who are outscoring us are doing so precisely because they gave so many fewer tests and paid so little attention to test data? This narrow U. S. test-based agenda has blocked the advance of slower long-term reforms that might have made a difference to the lives of our youth--and the culture of our country. If...

There was no golden age. Schools in poor communities aren't the victim of some new-fangled schooling foisted on us by unions, progressives, parent empowerment, or senior teachers! In the old days most children who now do poorly in school either weren't there at all (special needs, etc.), or were expected to leave between 6th and 9th grade or when they reached 16--whichever came first.

But other things have changed too. Never in my lifetime have wages been so unequal, alongside of the disappearing job-related benefits that working class whites and blacks had begun to think of as "the American standard of living." We did, indeed, have a short and unfinished "golden age," before equality was declared un-American.

And never in my life have I witnessed as much nonsense being paraded as fact on behalf of shifting the blame to "the victims." All will be well if we get rid of the monopoly of public education, local control, unions, and seniority. Only disinterested wealthy philanthropists (and hedge-funders) can be depended on to save the disadvantaged from absent fathers, unwed mothers who don't read to their children at home (some are busy reading to wealthier children), greedy union bosses, and selfish senior teachers. It's the new civil rights project. Just as the subprime mortgage fraud was justified by some as a wealth-equalizer, the privatizing of education becomes a civil rights crusade.

The high test-scoring classes have joined together to ask: "if 'they' did it," pointing to those rare individuals and schools that have broken the correlation between poverty and test scores, "then why not YOU?" Central Park East Elementary I and II and CPE Secondary school were such exemplary schools in the '70s. I wonder these days why there was no comparable interest on Wall Street in the work of the dozens and dozens of public schools that followed our path in the '80s and early '90s.

Maybe we didn't interest them because there was no money to be made from our kind of work? Maybe because it rested on teachers being powerful--"special people?" Maybe because we operated with the blessing of our local teachers' union, not their hostility? Maybe because our youngsters' families had strong voices in our schools? I used to think it was simply because we were hard to replicate. Because, it's true, we weren't a solution that could be mandated from above. We supported making schools smaller, but we were not hellbent because we believed smallness was simply one of the critically linked deep changes needed. It was how smallness was used that made a difference. As the late Ted Sizer warned us, building a responsible community of parents, teachers, and youngsters takes time. The "proof" would come in the form of public demonstrations of the school's work. His ideas rested on trusting those closest to the children, not those most distant.

Sizer's work has survived, barely, despite current threats posed by competitive marketplace reforms. Plus more test scores. And no excuses.

The campaign against public education took coordination and planning. And lots of money. Whether it's greed, power or ideological satisfaction that drives the reformers I don't know, and assume some of each. Good intentions even: After all if I can believe Michael Lewis' account of his protagonist's motives, why not?

The comic quality of the educational nonsense that surrounds us these days is not up to the comic standards set by Lewis Carroll or the straight thinking by that other Lewis. Defining high expectations to children in terms of a race to get the top score is mean, shabby, and pointless. Racing, like casino betting, may be designed to have only a few winners. Like any good Ponzi scheme one can temporarily have a lot of winners. Kids deserve better.

Deborah

p.s. Playing for Keeps, by Meier, Brenda Engel, and Beth Taylor is now for sale.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

This year the federal testing program (the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) expanded to include 18 urban districts. The testing of urban districts is known as TUDA (or, Trial Urban District Assessment). TUDA was launched in 2002, in response to a request by the Council of the Great City Schools.

In 2002, the following districts voluntarily participated in testing a sample of their students in reading in 4th and 8th grades: Atlanta, Chicago, the District of Columbia, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City. In 2003, both reading and math assessments were administered in 10 cities, with the addition of Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Cleveland; and San Diego. Austin, Texas, joined the program in 2005.

The new participants in 2009 testing include Baltimore; Detroit; Fresno, Calif.; Jefferson County, Ky.; Miami-Dade (County); Milwaukee; and Philadelphia.

NAEP is recognized as the gold standard of achievement assessment: its tests are excellent, combining multiple-choice questions with short-answer questions and constructed-response questions so that students actually have to explain what they know or how they would solve a problem or write a short essay. NAEP is a no-stakes exam; no teacher or student gets a reward or a punishment based on its results. And no one can prepare for NAEP because no one knows who will take it. For all these reasons, NAEP tends to be more trustworthy than state exams, which typically produce inflated scores.

In 4th grade, the highest-performing district is Charlotte, followed closely by Austin. The districts that have made the biggest gains since 2002 are Atlanta and Washington. The new additions to TUDA include some very low-performing districts, such as Baltimore, Detroit, Fresno, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. The districts in which 50 percent or more of 4th grade students are "below basic" are Atlanta, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Fresno, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit. In Detroit, a depressing 73 percent of students in 4th grade are "below basic." Nationally, 34 percent of students in this grade are "below basic."

A demographer would probably see a close correlation between NAEP scores and poverty.

Eighth grade reading scores have been stagnant nationally. The overall reading scores for the nation in this grade were precisely the same in 2009 as they were in 1998. Among the TUDA districts, two saw significant improvements in this grade: Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Four urban districts are at the national average for this grade: Austin, Charlotte, Jefferson County, and Miami-Dade. This is very impressive. These four districts seem to be doing something very right: Their profile for 8th grade students looks very similar to the national profile and is significantly higher than the large-city average. What is especially impressive about Miami-Dade is the strong performance of its Hispanic students in 8th grade; the white-Hispanic gap in Miami is only 12 points, compared with 28 points in New York City, 30 points in Houston, 31 points in Austin, and 32 points in Los Angeles.

Cleveland, Milwaukee, and D.C. are the three cities with large numbers of students using vouchers and charter schools. Charters are folded into the public school numbers, though they can sometimes be disaggregated. Nick Anderson of The Washington Post analyzed the D.C. numbers and concluded that Washington was one of the few districts (other than L.A. and Atlanta) that made gains in 8th grade, if one excluded the charters. The regular D.C. public school system made gains, he found, but the scores of D.C.'s charter schools declined, giving the impression of stagnant performance. By excluding the charters (which are supposed to be "public schools"), Anderson found that D.C. had made significant gains in reading in both 4th and 8th grades.

Another interesting point: New York City often describes the closing of achievement gaps, but the gaps remain distressingly large: in 8th grade, 40-41 percent of whites and Asians are proficient readers, compared with 12 percent of blacks and 13 percent of Hispanics.

One other city bears mentioning, and that is Chicago. Chicago is important because it seems to be a model for Arne Duncan's national strategy of opening charter schools, closing public schools, and placing greater emphasis on testing. Duncan became superintendent in Chicago in 2001. Fourth-grade students made a significant gain on NAEP from 2002-2003, but have seen no improvement since then. Eighth grade scores have been completely flat since 2002. Scores for black, Hispanic and low-income students in 8th grade are unchanged since 2002. In 4th grade, there are fewer students "below basic" (down from 66 percent in 2002 to 55 percent in 2009), but there has been no improvement whatever at 8th grade.

There is a lot to digest here. Here are a few thoughts: Beverly Hall, the superintendent in Atlanta since 1999, is making a difference. Miami-Dade showed some impressive results in its first appearance in the TUDA. The much-ballyhooed successes in Chicago were a mirage. In the future, I hope that the National Assessment Governing Board displays the public-charter differences so we can learn more about their relative performance over time. Bottom line: Some improvement, and, with some notable exceptions, continued stagnation in 8th grade.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend