January 2011 Archives

Dear Diane,

It's interesting to imagine what world view drives my enemies. Reading your piece about economists provided an insight! Maybe. Most of the current members of the billionaire's club make or produce nothing. None of their friends or neighbors are in the producing classes either. I used to try to appeal to them with the book by H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Broms called Profit Beyond Measure describing why Scania and Toyota reject the kind of data-driven accountability that business has imposed on schools. They were concerned with quality—the long-term viability and impact of their products. Meanwhile, education reformers are interested only in numbers. Even what's still called "school quality review" is, in New York City at least, now taken to mean how schools use numbers.

The "smart" graduates of our "best" universities are not dreaming of producing a new and better mouse-trap. They can't point to the highways they built or the dams they designed with a proud "I made it." To be leaders of finance requires a different kind of bragging rights. Wall Street data may tell us the economy is improving even if more and more Americans face long-term unemployment and lowered wages and benefits, and public pensioners face disaster. "The economy" is an illusive concept. I used to have this New York Times headline on my refrigerator: "Employment Up, Stocks Drop."

Schools rest their laurels on meeting the needs of students, and that runs on an entirely different track from serving financial "needs." Schools rest on a different moral base.

Still, I realize that data, used in another way, drives you and me, too—if I can extrapolate what being well-educated means in human terms. Last week, one of my favorite magazines, Commonweal, focused on an aspect of our culture that says perhaps more about our culture than the state of our schools or jobs: justice. I urge you to look at "Cruel and Unusual," by Robert DeFina of Villanova University (he is also the co-editor of the Journal of Catholic Social Thought) and Lance Hannon, also of Villanova. They write about the impact of our prison system not only on the prisoners, but on entire communities. They remind readers that an unjust system of punishment cannot restore or maintain justice. The connection between means and ends once again raises its ugly head.

In my spare hours I watch "Law and Order" (et al) and realize how "normalized" our view of torture is—how readily it includes bullying others both psychologically and physically. How glibly lying to bad guys is at the core of almost all our cop shows, along with frightening people even if they are innocent. First and foremost, they are reminded that, especially if they are small and well-educated, they will be raped until they wish they were dead if they go to prison. And we accept such cruel and unusual punishment as if it's a normal part of imprisonment? It's not then surprising that we have grown accustomed to Guantanamo.

What does it mean that our prison population is larger than those imprisoned in all the modern industrial nations? How can we claim racism is no longer a serious problem when something like one out of every nine young black men are imprisoned, that vast numbers lose their voting rights forever, and more. I keep forgetting the exact numbers because I can't bear to let it sink in.

The data demonstrates that the cause is not the "violence" of those imprisoned, because in fact most black men are in prison for non-violent crimes, and for crimes more fortunate people often engaged in without consequence. Like shoplifting. I run into white friends all the time who acknowledge their petty crimes as though they were rites of passage!

How can we sleep at night knowing that at the very moment probably some prisoner is being raped by some other prisoner (occasionally by a guard)? How dare we admit we cannot protect prisoners from being subject to a criminal assault.

I want schools to imagine the impact of such a world on those who know it is happening to their brothers, uncles, and fathers, and maybe someday themselves? Yes, we want to teach them how to avoid such a future, to elude the ire of the cops, escape being victimized. But is the answer teaching boot-camp compliance? Is it in designing schools that mirror prisons? Although, of course, the worst are far more benign than most prisons. Or do we want to teach kids in ways that instill a different model of what democratic relationships could be like, what it means to treat each other with dignity and respect, and to expect to be treated the same way. That wasn't one of our "habits of Mind" at Central Park East Secondary School, but it should have been. We hoped that this would be a habit that was learned in the normal everyday life of the school, as so much else must be (like meeting deadlines, being reliable, and all those other traits that we cannot test).

I'm not planning to lessen my work for education reform, but I do have to occasionally remind myself that what partly drives you and me are so many other crimes being committed against the dignity of grown-ups, including those our students will soon enough become.

There is never a time when we "finally" hit bottom and have nowhere to go but up. We have to take our stand right now, wherever and whenever justice is betrayed.

Deb

P.S. Have you read Joanne Barkan's essay in Dissent?

And, now, dear readers, at long last the answers to the "Education Now and Then" exercise I posted on Jan. 6 in my entry, "Public Education and Fact vs. Fiction:"

1. "Attack Mounted ..." New York Daily News; June 5, 1986
2. "New York's Greatest ..." National Elementary Principal, January 1980
3. "Diagnostic reading tests..." The New York Times, by Leonard Buder, 1974
4. "The University of California..." "Education Past and Present," 1898, from Richard Rothstein's The Way We Were?
5. "Hope for ..." The Wall Street Journal; June 7, 1974, by John Rings Adams
6. "Even Boston's brightest..." "The Old and New in Education: 1845-1923", World Book encyclopedia, 1924 (from The Way We Were?)
7. "Tougher Standards," Better Homes and Gardens, September 1983
8. "City Pupils Remain Beyond ..." The New York Times; March 8, 1979, by Edward Fiske
9. "Our standards ..." U.S. News and World Report; Jan. 24, 1958
10. "During the past 40 or 50 years.." Commonweal magazine; Jan. 17, 1941, by Walter Lippman

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

I have received many informative letters this past year from teachers, principals, parents, and others, who tell me what is happening on the ground. One of the most informative arrived a few days ago. I must keep the letter-writer's identity hidden, for reasons that will be obvious.

A superintendent in a small district in the Midwest wrote to tell me that his district wants to adopt higher standards than the ones prescribed in federal law (which rely on the state tests). His district would like to use the ACT for its standards, because its tests are content-based, not skills-based.

But the district needs a federal waiver to switch to higher standards. The superintendent has received the written support of the local school board, the state school board, the state commissioner of education, and the local congressman. He has written to the U.S. Department of Education seeking a waiver from the federal requirements, but has waited for several months with no answer.

He wrote me, thinking I might have some way to help. Of course I don't, not having any access to the seat of power these days.

How did it happen that a district must obtain the approval of the U.S. secretary of education for what is surely a local and state matter? When did Congress decide to abandon federalism? When did the U.S. Department of Education take control of decisions that rightly belong to state and local authorities?

I worked in the department long ago and respect the professionalism of the career civil servants there. But the U.S. Department of Education has no greater expertise—and very likely less—than state and local departments of education. Its employees are not school reformers, but administrators of grants and contracts, enforcers of compliance with laws and regulations, and the executors of similar functions. And Congress has far less expertise about school reform than any of the 100,000 schools for which it is now making rules and regulations.

So long as educational decisions continue to be made not by seasoned educators (who engage with parents about the well-being of their children) but by politicians, bureaucrats, think tanks, businesspeople, foundation functionaries, and pundits—few of whom have been in a school since they got their diploma—our nation's education system will be in deep trouble.

Diane

P.S. I think that last sentence was the longest I have ever written. But it says what I want to say.

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

When it comes down to it, what motivates me is my dislike of bullies. I can't recall who recently wrote this—or words to this effect, but it struck me that my dedication to democracy boils down to precisely this—a loathing for bullies. And, I suppose, a fear of them, which goes back a long way to my youth. Part of our task is connecting that natural aversion (and attraction) to bullying to democracy. A substantial state of equality is the key ingredient.

Are we born with it?

Who cares, I suppose. But it's a good place to unravel what democracy is and isn't about. Like all things good, it also reminds us that getting rid of bullies probably comes at a price. We are always in the process of making unintended trade-offs, with consequences we later rue. But often don't learn from.

There is no way to avoid such trade-offs, but the more consciously we make them, the more prepared we are to handle the less-desirable consequences.

I think of this often when colleagues/allies with whom I align on current educational policy disagree with me on other fundamental issues. I remain silent often because it seems to me that it's "the wrong place or time" to quarrel among "ourselves."

Yet we need to do so. We need to make alliances with open eyes to what we are ignoring or overlooking and what the consequences might be of doing so. Ignoring them allows us to pretend to innocence later on, rather than accepting some blame for what we helped create.

Diane, as you and I have come to agree more and more, are we purposely avoiding some topics because it's pointless and risky to our alliance? Pointless because we don't imagine we will succeed in persuading each other, or just because the energy involved is not worth it, or because our enemies will use our differences to undermine our collaboration. (Or they will try—they will fail.)

One list serve I fondly read, especially to keep up with New York City doings, is run by a group called Class Size Matters with the persevering dedication of Leonie Haimson (who also prominently boosts your work). But I realize that much of the energy behind the faithful fans of this site is in conflict with some of my own favorite ideas. For example, small schools and choice. It always surprises me that small class size is understood to be critical to teachers and students knowing each other well by some who then condemn small schools. It surprises me that so many of this blog's regulars see choice itself as a misleading goal, but favor choice in so many other areas.

But there's another reason for my "going-along." I've become more wary of such terms myself! I see how they have been abused by the current wave of reforms and shrink back from my own history of support for both small schools and choice.

I think, however, that we are mistaken to avoid these topics precisely because they must be part of our better solutions. Our critics are right—JUST pouring money into the existing schools will not work. Just smaller classes or just ... Our critics are right that just defending teachers and teacher rights and teachers' unions will not suffice. Nor are school boards the obvious solution to the absence of democracy. Our critics are right that people with choices feel more powerful and more dedicated to the work that needs to be done than people without.

But we do not have to abandon public education's bottom-line virtues to honor these three ideas: smaller schools; the role of teachers and their organizations to protect due process and fight on behalf of schools that are good for adults, too; and the advantages of choice being distributed to all families, not just the families of the rich and powerful. We don't have to abandon the idea of accountability: "I owe you an account of what we did and what we plan to do," nor must we abandon "high stakes" for kids or teachers—or communities that hold each other to standards for which they take responsibility, as we did at Central Park East Secondary School. "We'll stand behind you forever, but we will also insist that you meet our mutually agreed-on standards." But mutual agreement requires a school small enough for all voices to be heard and sufficient choice so that it's not "those standards or no standards," so that one's disagreement isn't a dead end. Representative democracy is a necessary evil, not the ideal.

Yes, "if you don't like it, leave" ("go back to where you came from") OR, "if you don't like it, tough—you have no choice." These are two ugly comebacks in some choice settings. Both of these positions undermine democracy; both are stated in the language of the bully.

We must continually imagine what schools that support democracy, that do not bully, might look like. We must acknowledge that some of the allies of privatization and marketplace choice probably do so as their answer to bullying. We can't begin to answer these challenges if we avoid tackling their existence. Acknowledging their existence is one critical step to the bold thinking needed to imagining alternatives to My Reform or No Reform.

Deborah

P.S. Diane: "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is an example of a terribly untrue saying. But to use language powerfully, one must not be afraid of words—that's the nub of truth in the expression which you tackled in your letter about the N-word. Thanks.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

A few weeks ago, Mike Rose posted a list of his New Year's resolutions. One of them was that we should "make do with fewer economists in education. These practitioners of the dismal science have flocked to education reform, though most know little about teaching and learning." Mike suggested that so few economists were able to give useful advice about the financial and housing markets that we should now be skeptical about expecting them "to change education for the better."

I agree with Mike. It is astonishing to realize the extent to which education debates are now framed and dominated by economists, not by educators or sociologists or cognitive psychologists or anyone else who actually spends time in classrooms. My bookshelves are chock full of books that analyze the teaching of reading, science, history, and other subjects; books that examine the lives of children; books that discuss the art and craft of teaching; books about the history of educational philosophy and practice; books about how children learn.

Now such considerations seem antique. Now we are in an age of data-based decision-making, where economists rule. They tell us that nothing matters but performance, and performance can be quantified, and those who do the quantification need never enter a classroom or think about how children learn.

So the issue of our day is: How do we measure teacher effectiveness? Most of the studies by economists warn that there is a significant margin of error in "value-added assessment" (VAA) or "value-added modeling" (VAM). The basic idea of VAA is that teacher quality can be measured by the test-score gains of their students. Proponents of VAA see it as the best way to identify teachers who should get merit pay and teachers who should be fired. Critics say that the method is too flawed to use for high-stakes purposes such as these.

Last July, the U.S. Department of Education published a study by Mathematica Policy Research, which estimated that even with three years of data, there was an error rate of 25 percent. A few months ago, I signed onto a statement by a group of testing experts, which cautioned that such strategies were likely to misidentify which teachers were effective and which were ineffective, to promote teaching narrowly to the test, and to cause a narrowing of the curriculum.

None of these cautions has stemmed the tide of rating teachers by student test scores and releasing the ratings. Last year, the Los Angeles Times published an online database that rated 6,000 teachers as to their effectiveness (one of them, elementary school teacher Rigoberto Ruelas, committed suicide a few weeks later). New York City is poised to make a public release of the names and ratings of 12,000 teachers, if the courts give the go-ahead (in the first trial, a judge ruled that the data could be released even if it was inaccurate).

This trend did not just happen. It was encouraged by the Obama administration's Race to the Top, which urged states to develop quantitative measures of teacher effectiveness. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has issued statements endorsing the publication of teachers' names and ratings, although few testing experts agree with this practice.

The bulk of studies warn about the inaccuracy and instability of these measures, but the Gates Foundation recently released a study called "Measures of Effective Teaching" (MET) that supports the use of VAA and VAM. As is customary for the Gates Foundation, it hired an impressive list of economists at institutions across the nation to give the gloss of authority to its work. Among its key findings was this one: "Teachers with high value-added on state tests tend to promote deeper conceptual understanding as well." Ah, said the proponents of measuring teacher quality by the rise and fall of student test scores, this study vindicates these methods and effectively counters all those cautionary warnings.

But now comes a re-analysis of the Gates study by University of California-Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein, which says that the MET study reached the wrong conclusions and that its data demonstrate that VAA misidentifies which teachers are more effective and is not much better than a coin toss. Even the claim that teachers whose students get high scores on state tests will also get high scores on tests of "deeper conceptual understanding" is flawed, writes Rothstein. The correlation between the two tests was actually modest: About 29 percent of the teachers in the bottom quintile on the basic skills tests were rated above average on the tests of reasoning and critical thinking; these are the teachers who would be fired if the Gates Foundation had its way.

"Interpreted correctly," writes Rothstein, the analyses in the Gates' report "undermine rather than validate value-added-based approaches to teacher evaluation." Jesse Rothstein is not just any economist; not only has he studied VAA in the past, but he served as senior economist for President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors and chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. So he is well-equipped to take on the entire stable of Gates-funded economists, mano a mano.

For another take on these issues, I recommend a lively blog debate between economist Dan Goldhaber and teacher John Thompson. Thompson warned Goldhaber that economists should think seriously about the damage their methods will wreak on teachers and children and schools, especially low-income schools, where it is harder to get big test-score gains. In one of Thompson's perceptive comments, he wrote, "If teachers have a one-sixth, one-fifth, or one-third chance per year of being wrongly indicted as ineffective, none will ever have any peace of mind. Effective teachers with self-respect will flee those schools for lower-poverty schools." I was reminded of a comment by Rutgers economist Bruce Baker, who asked whether you would buy a car if the salesman assured you that it would explode only once every five times you turned the ignition key.

If we step back a bit, Deborah, don't you think there is a certain kind of madness in thinking that economists who never set foot in a classroom can create a statistical measure to tell us how best to educate children? It seems some will never be satisfied until they have a technical process to override the judgments of those who work in schools and are in daily contact with teachers and children. I don't know of any other nation in the world that is so devoted to this effort to turn education into a statistical problem that can be solved by a computer. It is not likely to end well.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I ran across this wonderful book title in The Nation's book review section: "What Technology Wants." It seems "wants" are becoming separated from human "want'ers." Like the "marketplace"—which has a strong mind of its own, too. Behind such "wants" are people who want something even more dangerous than riches. They want power.

No one can spend the kind of money these billionaires have. It's enough for most to take care of their own lifetimes at levels of luxury hard to imagine, as well as providing the same for two generations or more down the road. With a lot left over—even if they put it under a mattress.

But power is another thing—you can't spend too much if that's your goal. Every dollar counts for a wee bit more of it. It's not a coincidence that those silly arguments we used to have in my teens about whether we'd rather be rich or famous are irrelevant today when the one buys the other—and vice versa.

But not even the richest Roman nobleman and oligarch was safe from the fall of the Roman Empire, nor were the richest Russians—both before 1917 and after 1989—safe from a revolution. (No doubt money and connections cushioned their falls.)

So I remind myself: times change sometimes much faster than one imagines. As Nelson Mandela's interviewer Ariel Dorfman (also in the Jan. 10/17 issue of The Nation) notes: "One word keeps cropping up, over and over: integrity." More importantly perhaps, "his confidence that it exists in everyone on this planet no matter how harshly hidden in fear and intolerance."

Such beliefs are powerful, but hard to sustain, and easy to dismiss as naïve, or wishful thinking. But as we said in Playing for Keeps, it's precisely such "wishful thinking" that makes democracy possible and makes childhood play so vital. It's what makes me an unadulterated extremist when it comes to the imperative to keep play alive. When we (the three authors) go out to read from the book to varied audiences, I am struck by the power of the reactions we get. Both from parents who fear that their young are not "exposed" to play—as though it had to be encouraged from the outside, and from adults (especially older ones) who remember their play life. But how many of us keep that playful spirit alive into adulthood and old age?

I had such faith in the abstract when I began teaching. And to my delighted surprise, even the children I was told were too deprived to play, or had no language for play, etc., took to it without a single lesson. The room itself sucked them into a world full of possibilities, and the time and space to explore them without didactic interruptions. I was fortunate to have had the chance to see what could happen if we kept that spirit alive for 13 years, and even what could happen in just the last six years (7th to 12th grades) for kids coming from very different backgrounds—from prekindergarten until 12th grade. Combined with a powerful multi-generational community with considerable power to plan their own future—with their eyes always on what we needed (all of us) if we were going to nourish a fragile, maybe even dying, democracy. The young have decreasing opportunities to have any idea what democracy feels like, to have seen it "in practice," or to even imagine what necessarily must precede democracy—a community that accepts responsibility for all its members and can imagine changing places with one and all its members.

It alarms me that so many of those who even agree with me in opposing the Bush/Obama/Bloomberg/Rhee/Klein agenda are stuck with pretty timid messages for the alternative. Somehow everything that suggests the evil empire—like small schools and greater school autonomy, and more teacher, student, and family empowerment (including, if possible, choice)—arouses fear. Choice becomes equal to privatization, and small becomes elitist, and so on.

It was The Nation, years ago, which published a piece I wrote in 1991 entitled "Choice Can Save Public Education." Now "choice," a very nice word, which fit with our slogans about other social issues, has been turned into the enemy. Just as "small schools" became a synonym for destroying neighborhood schools and harming the least-advantaged children.

It needn't have happened, perhaps. But it did. Every one of the early innovative pioneers had largely subscribed to the above, and hundreds of such examples exist in the midst of ordinary public systems today. They are all endangered by many on the Right and many on the Left! I think the time is almost too late for joining together to celebrate the principles we began with and stated so powerfully by Ted Sizer in his three books about Horace the high school English teacher, and his 10 basic principles—principles that rest on the kind of faith, not data, that Mandela embraces. (More next week on those principles.)

A final thought, Diane. The slogan, "children first" is perhaps not a good one, appealing as it is. Nor is the constant reference to adult interests as dangerous to children. It reminds me of the worst of the "old," "new left." It reminds me of some of the slogans that arise out of fascism and communism, ready to bury adults with their old-fashioned values in the interest of raising a new kind of human to better fit the future. Adults, perhaps, who do not require much imagination to swallow the idea that "technology" is a living being with wants of its own. (Besides, what's the point of worrying about children if we don't care about their lives as adults?)

Best,
Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Words can wound, words can heal, words can inflame. Given the Constitution's First Amendment, we invariably support maximum freedom of expression, knowing that we are often extending protection to words we hate.

The latest effort to cleanse literature of a hurtful word is by now well known. NewSouth, an Alabama publisher, intends to publish a sanitized version of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, replacing the "n-word" with the word "slave." The Twain scholar Alan Gribben of Auburn University oversaw the change and believes that it will make the book less hurtful and less controversial than the original wording. As Professor Gribben surely knows, this book has been altered and censored innumerable times since it was first published in 1885. Over the past century-plus, many others have changed the n-word to "slave" or "servant" or "hand."

Bear in mind that this book is not just any old book in the school curriculum. This is the book about which Ernest Hemingway wrote: "...all modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." One assumes with certainty that Hemingway referred to the book as it was written, not to an expurgated version.

Efforts to remove offensive words from books, plays, even poems, have a long history. In a 2003 book called The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, I traced that history—and the ridiculous extremes to which it has been taken. When I was on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the federal testing program, I discovered that education publishers maintain lengthy lists of words, phrases, topics, and images that are banned from tests, textbooks, and other publications, for fear that someone might take offense. Education publishers and state agencies routinely excise language and topics that might offend almost every imaginable group—whether defined by race, ethnicity, religion, gender, age, or disability. In my research, I discovered that publishers and state agencies were sanitizing the language of John Steinbeck, William Shakespeare, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel, Carson McCullers, Herman Melville, and other well-known writers. One of my favorite examples of absurd revision appeared on a New York State Regents' exam, where a famous line in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" was changed from "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!" to "Ah, friend, let us be true to one another!"

I understand that many people, especially African-Americans, are offended by the n-word. I, too, find it offensive. But I am even more offended by the prospect that Mark Twain's classic work will be expurgated, rewritten by someone who wants to shield readers from the book's original language. How did we become such delicate creatures that we cannot dare to read a word that might discomfit us?

A friend recently urged me to order the HBO program "The Wire" from Netflix. This is a five-year series about the Baltimore Police Department, the drug trade, violence, corruption, and the ills of modern urban life. I have long abhorred movies and television programs that are violent and that contain X-rated language. I initially avoided "The Sopranos" because the vulgar language repelled me. But time has desensitized me. Now I ignore the nudity, crudity, and vulgarity, and just follow the story. Truth be told, I am fascinated by the characters and their stories and can't wait for the next installment to arrive (I am near the end of Season Three).

I thought about "The Wire" in context of the controversy over Huckleberry Finn for this reason. The n-word is used constantly. So is the f-word. Take away those two words and half the script would disappear. Black gangsters use the n-word freely to describe one another; so do the cops. To my knowledge, no one has protested to HBO or the producers. This is popular culture, so who cares?

This is a strange juxtaposition: Our schools are cleansed of all that is troubling, offensive, and challenging, while our popular culture deals bluntly, graphically, and harshly with the ugliest realities of our time. I would not want our schools to include all the vulgarity and obscenity that is commonplace in the popular culture. Indeed, I wish that our schools would elevate the popular culture and give young people a taste for something finer than what they see on television and in the movies. In my dreams, the schools would teach the best that has been known and said in the world.

They cannot do that by bowdlerizing classic literature, by pretending that bad things never happened and that we live in a cotton-candy world. Bad things have happened. Slavery was a shameful reality. So was (and is) bigotry and hatred. Schools must teach young people to read history, warts and all, and to analyze great works of literature, even when they contain words and images that offend them. They cannot develop their thinking skills if they never encounter dilemmas worthy of debate and discussion and critical thought.

I don't understand how anyone can put himself or herself in a position to rewrite the words of a classic. What chutzpah! I say, if you think you can do better than Twain or Shakespeare, write your own damn novel or play.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

There was one invaluable course I took at the University of Chicago that still sticks with me. The professor, historian Louis R. Gottschalk, gave everyone some historical facts to which most history books attested and asked us to explore them. We pretty quickly figured out that something must be wrong with them. In fact, they were all fictions that had crept into history books as facts. Mine had something to do with Napoleon's Navy and the Caribbean.

Richard Rothstein's wonderful The Way We Were? is a must-read on educational facts and fictions. If anybody who reads our exchanges hasn't read it—shame on them. I keep it close by whenever I start to write about schooling in America.

A very smart lady whose blogging I sometimes read asserts, for example, that, until a few years ago teachers in New York City didn't "do reading" until 2nd or 3rd grade. Actually, maybe she read that about Finland's schools. Or Rudolf Steiner schools. The latter claim they hold off until the first adult tooth appears. I think it's mostly so they have a chance to imbed their other ideals in kids before they get immersed into reading on their own. The Finns just prefer more play and more nature, and kids catch up and lead the way by 3rd grade!

Where do these "fact-lets" come from?

Another story: a recent New York Times article had a father complaining about all the work sheets in his son's class and longs for the good old days when he was in school. When? Where? Work sheets—teacher-designed or commercial—have been ubiquitous since I began teaching 45 years ago. Every reading series came with them; ditto math. While one read with the Bluebirds, the Robins and the Hummingbirds did work sheets.

In the good old days—when most adults with kids in our schools today were young—I found Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City public schools appalling. Class sizes were huge, kids restless and often angry, parents wary at best, the curriculum as boring for me as the kids, and science consisted only of textbook reading and art of a rare "experience." There were always exceptions. My oldest daughter fell in love with art in a wonderful, small South Side Chicago public school and then gave it up for good in a small public school in Philadelphia where she got a D on a delightful painting about a march for something or other she attended at the age of 9.

And on and on.

Here are some excerpts and headlines—can you guess the year?

1. "Attack Mounted on Dropouts/City Sets Standards for Schools"

2. "New York's Great Reading Score Scandal"

3. "Diagnostic reading tests are being given this week to 150,000 high school students as the first step in a new program—the largest and most systematic ever. ...We intend to follow through...to overcome deficiencies."

4. "The University of California (Berkeley) found that 30 to 40 percent of entering freshmen were not proficient in English."

5. "Hope for the Blackboard Jungle: ... Every year New Yorkers' performance had been getting a little worse, until by YEAR?* only 32 percent of the city's pupils [were] doing as well or better than the national average."

6. "Even Boston's 'brightest students' didn't know 'whether water expanded or contracted when it freezes.' And while 70 percent of this elite group knew that the U.S. had imposed an embargo in 1812 only five knew what 'embargo' meant."

7. "Tougher Standards in Our High. The average freshman is a year and three months behind national standards in reading."

8. "City Pupils Remain Behind ... Official Asserts the Tests Suggest Difficulty in Early Grades. Last fall 40.1 percent were reported on grade level or above ... but in March, 43 percent ... were reading at grade level or above"; and "Bleak drop out stats are raising concern."

9. "Our standard for high school graduation has slipped badly. Fifty years ago a high school diploma meant something. ... We have misled our students. ... and our nation."

10, "During the past 40 or 50 years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum ... the western culture which produced the modern democratic state."

The quotes above come from mainstream publications over the past 150 years. The earliest is 1845, the latest ... well I won't reveal it. Answers next week, or you can peek earlier on my website (deborahmeier.com).

No serious discussion can take place among people who hold so many different pictures of both current and past realities and have no patience for digging further. But is it any better when we confront any other "crisis"—environmental, Afghanistan, taxation, etc.? Probably not. And that's not the problem. But knowing what to do about our particular ignorance is what schools OUGHT to be about: making it possible for citizens to join these debates in a less dogmatic way—especially when their dogmas are often based on plain, ordinary misinformation. Plus, schools should convince kids (and I mean this just as it sounds) that caring about the future requires speaking up and listening—and sometimes changing our minds—like you did so publicly.

Funny, Diane, I think we'd both agree even as I suspect we might not go about designing the same kinds of schools or curriculums to achieve this. That's the kind of diversity I appreciate—yours and mine fit well under the same umbrella. But ... Joel Klein's? Cathleen Black's? Possibly yes, when they are thinking about their own kids.

Deb

* Editor's note: The year is intentionally left blank in this quote so as not to give away the date of the referenced article.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

I have been fascinated by the continuing commentary and controversy about the results of the international tests of reading, mathematics, and science known as PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment). President Barack Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan immediately said that the mediocre standing of American students was "a Sputnik moment," which should produce strong support for their agenda of testing and privately managed schools. Others used the results to promote whatever their favorite remedy was.

Some worried that the high test scores of Shanghai were an omen that the Chinese were on the verge of world domination (forgetting that Shanghai is one city in China and not representative of China as a whole). Others looked admiringly at Shanghai's high scores and dreamed that American students might somehow be compelled to accept the rigorous discipline, large classes, after-school tutoring, and devotion to academic success that produced those scores. In The Wall Street Journal, Jiang Xueqin, the deputy principal of Peking University High School, lamented that those high scores were purchased by sacrificing such qualities as independence, curiosity, and individuality. Even educators in Shanghai, he wrote, recognize that the singular devotion to test scores was "producing competent mediocrity."

Many American educators looked longingly at Finland as a successful model. Finland seems to be the educational utopia that was envisioned by John Dewey but came to fruition in Finland. Here is a nation that avoids standardized tests altogether, that prizes teacher autonomy, and that has regularly achieved great academic success on PISA. Skeptics said that Finland was ethnically homogeneous, relatively prosperous, and not at all like our society, so held no lessons for us. And the debate goes on.

Two points are worth noting about PISA. First, the two top-scoring participants—Shanghai and Finland—both have strong public school systems. Neither is deregulating their schools and handing control over to private organizations. Different as they are, they achieved academic success by strengthening the public sector, not by deregulation and privatization.

The other salient factor about U.S. performance on international tests is that we have an exceptional and shameful rate of child poverty. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution says that more than 20 percent of our children live in poverty, and she expects that proportion to increase to nearly 25 percent by 2014. As poverty deepens, Sawhill writes, we should be strengthening the safety net that protects the lives of the poorest. Robert Reich, the former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, says that income inequality is higher now than it has been in many decades. Most of the nations (and cities) that compete on PISA have far lower child-poverty rates.

In recent years, we have become accustomed to hearing prominent reformers like Secretary Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Klein say that reference to poverty is just making excuses for bad teachers and bad schools. But there is plenty of evidence that poverty affects students' readiness to learn. It affects their health, their nutrition, their attendance, and their motivation. Being hungry and homeless distracts students and injures their health; living in an environment where drugs and violence are commonplace affects children's interest in academics. Living in communities where many stores and homes are boarded up, and where incarceration rates are very high, affects children's sense of possibility and their willingness to plan for the future.

Researchers for the National Association for Secondary School Principals disaggregated the PISA results by income and made some stunning discoveries. Take a look at this link ("PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid"). It shows that American students in schools with low poverty rates were first in the world when they were compared with students in nations with comparably low poverty levels. Thus, the picture painted by doomsayers about American education is false in this respect. We have many outstanding schools and students, but our overall performance is dragged down by the persistence of poverty. Poverty depresses school achievement because it hurts children, families, and communities.

At a time of fiscal stringency, it seems crazy to talk about helping lift children and families out of poverty. Critics say, "We can't afford to do anything anymore," "Sorry, the money is all gone," "No one should pay any new taxes," "This is not a time for social innovation; it is a time for educational innovation." But in light of the overwhelming evidence of the dire consequences of persistent poverty, it seems even crazier to ignore it and to assume that we can reach the top of the international achievement tables by closing schools, firing teachers, and hastening privatization. These strategies will shatter already fragile communities. They will not give us schools that foster the creativity, originality, self-discipline, and initiative that we claim to value. They are strategies that avoid the hard, incredibly hard, task of economic improvement. Today's school reformers scoff at the idea of attacking poverty; it is so much easier to fire teachers. So long as we continue to avert our gaze from the festering problems bred by deep poverty and racial isolation, it seems unlikely that any school reform agenda can produce the transformation that our society seeks.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend