April 2011 Archives

Dear Diane,

I'm back from spending quality time with my granddaughter Sarah (who did all the driving) and meeting a bunch of wonderful present and future educators at the University of Pennsylvania's annual Association of African-American Students conference—this time devoted to education.

It leaves me with two conflicting feelings. The children/youth need us in our schools and classrooms more than ever. We are in a perilous time, and they need a place and a space to safely investigate the world and to care for each other. And, teachers need to use every means they can find to do what they know is right.

But on the other hand, it's time to act—to get mad—to stop acting normally in the face of the threat even to a hypocritical dedication to democracy. Rachel Maddow's show on what's happening in Michigan is a must-watch for one and all. Have you seen it yet, Diane? It's where we're heading, unless ...

And Pedro Noguera and Michelle Fine's joint article in the latest Nation is another must.

And on and on.

We are seeing an unraveling of too many cherished freedoms and safety nets, built with the sweat and blood of our ancestors. It seems like hysteria to say this as I gaze out the window to the late-arriving spring in Hillsdale. The daffodils are out, the forsythia is almost ready to reach its glory, and the grass is green now that the dead branches and leaves have been removed. But this week I go to Indiana—where you and I will meet, Diane—to hear you speak and to have lunch together. And then I fly to Michigan for my grandson's graduation and a mini-family reunion. To the very state that is leading the way toward a model of dictatorship that should stun us all. It is, their governor claims, either this or chaos, ruin, etc. Either he has the right to replace—at will—locally elected officials with his own "emergency managers" or ... That's where the crisis talk on the Right has gotten us: to see democracy as a luxury when faced with the economic chaos they have created. What next?

We need to enlarge our alliances and figure out a few key places to make clear we're not giving in. Easily or otherwise. For educators, we've chosen May 28-30 in Washington, D.C.. Plus every locality possible before hand. But this is not just about schooling. While we figure out how to tackle the "Big Picture,"* we also need to reach out to our colleagues in our schools with their everyday need to be staunch and steady and strong for the children they face each day and to remember their families as well. The damage they face in terms of the future prospects facing the youngsters must be touch.

I can't say more right now. When you read this I'll be on my way from Indiana, or maybe watching Ezra graduate. I'll be standing, applauding with tears in my eyes of pride and fear for the future of all those young people in their caps and gowns.

Deb

* This is an inside joke. Apologies to Big Picture, a school "chain" I truly admire for giving us a glimpse into what could be.—Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

One of the most interesting books I have read in recent months is Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. I was particularly interested in Chapter 5, where he explains the difference between social norms—where people act because they are motivated by a sense of idealism or purpose, and market norms—where people act because they are motivated by a desire for more money.

As I read his words, I realized that the goal of the corporate education reform movement is to push market norms into education. The corporate reformers assume that teachers aren't working hard enough and will work harder if they have the lure of more money and if they compete with one another. Ariely's studies say this is wrong, and it won't work. Last fall, the POINT study from the National Center for Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University also showed that merit pay based on test scores did not produce higher test scores.

Curiously, the corporate reform movement likes to talk about data-driven decisions, but they ignore any data that doesn't support what they want to do. For example, when the Vanderbilt study of merit pay was published, the U.S. Department of Education immediately released nearly $500 million for—what else—more merit-pay programs, and promised that another $500 million would be forthcoming. Data mean nothing when your mind is made up. Similarly, when data from Milwaukee showed that vouchers don't improve test scores in either public schools or voucher schools, the corporate reformers didn't care. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, data for Milwaukee showed that African-American public school students there—after 21 years of vouchers—scored below African-American students in the Deep South, the corporate reformers didn't care.

Our education system is relentlessly pursuing higher test scores, and everyone feels the pressure. When USA Today produced evidence of widespread cheating, the corporate reformers refused to recognize that their policies encourage the pressures that lead to cheating. When the cheating scandal focused on test scores in Washington, D.C., the corporate reformers brought out their heavy guns to argue that it wasn't true, it couldn't be true, and even if it were true, it didn't matter. When the eminent National Research Council said that it was inappropriate to judge the progress of a school district by test scores, the corporate reformers scoffed.

I get letters every day from teachers, principals, superintendents, and parents lamenting how federal policy is ruining their schools, damaging children's lives, and demoralizing teachers. This one came today from a superintendent: "[My district] borders the Navajo Reservation. Twenty-nine percent of our students are Native American and 29 percent are Hispanic. We have high poverty, mobility, and many single-parent families, and [we] truly struggle to meet the needs of our students. [Average Yearly Progress] ratings discourage our staff. Media blames the schools, and budgets keep going down."

What do the corporate reformers have to say to this superintendent? Will they fire her and half her staff and send in Harvard and Princeton graduates for two years? Will they close her school or turn it over to a charter chain? Will they do this to thousands of schools? Do they have any ideas that might keep her and her staff from losing hope?

If we drive out those who are motivated by social norms, who will teach? How can we hope to have a stable education profession if we lose those who want to make education their career knowing full well that they will never get rich?

This superintendent and her teachers did not go into teaching to compete with the school in the next county or to fight one another for dollars. They entered what they thought was a profession where they could make a difference in the lives of children. They, and hundreds of thousands of educators like them, don't understand how they became Public Enemy No. 1.

Perhaps the best letter that I received about the clash between federal policy and the realities in the schools was written by California teacher Paul Karrer. (The letter first appeared in Education Week's Commentary section.) I and many others posted it on the Internet, because it so poignantly expressed what so many teachers experience. Please read and share it.

Many years from now, when No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top have long been forgotten or remembered only by historians as a disgraceful chapter in the history of American education, people like the superintendent who contacted me and her staff will still be struggling to meet the multiple needs of the forgotten children of our society.

Someday, after this dark era has fallen into the dustbin of history, into that place where ignoble ideas go, I hope we will learn from our mistakes. If we are wise, we will have better ideas about improving our schools. Instead of the risky schemes now so popular among certain economists, like firing 5 to 10 percent of the teachers every year; or the punishments associated with NCLB and the Race to the Top, like firing staff and closing schools, we will hopefully have an education system where those who give their lives to the education of children get the respect and honor they deserve. And where parents, educators, and policymakers alike understand the difference between higher test scores and genuine education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Everything that needs to be said you said last week—and succinctly. You said it so well that it's hard to know what more you and I can say that might convince the unconvinced. But I always rhetorically claim that (1) I might be misunderstanding my "opponents" and, therefore, (2) I might be wrong, so I keep at it. In real life, I often get too annoyed to do this well.

The other day at a meeting sponsored by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, on "social and emotional learning," I lost my temper with several allies. One, a congressman I admire—Tim Ryan from Ohio—and the other, Special Olympics Chairman and CEO Tim Shriver. Both take tests seriously, even as they decry them for having narrowed the curriculum and missed the "social and emotional." They want "better tests," and more of them so that we can test social and emotional health.

I went back and forth feeling I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, I favor healthy and socially well-adjusted adults. And, of course, schools play a role in this matter, as does the rest of life. Ditto for intellectual (often misnamed "academic") health and vigor (and, I suppose, "rigor"?). Does it matter that the studies to which I was exposed suggest, for example, that from birth on we build theories—social, emotional, and intellectual—that have an affect on who we become? Newborns have both a biological clock of development and another that is driven by our relationship to, above all, our own species! We seem drawn to imitating everything we see and hear, but particularly the behaviors of those we are to become. Children watch 10 hours of TV in which adults speak the common "TV dialect" and yet they still learn to speak like the adults whose real-life company they keep. And so on. Should Ryan and Shriver have to "learn" this, too, before they make policy?

It matters who we keep regular company with from birth onward. For example, my brother and I, both devout Joe DiMaggio fans, watched him play differently. My brother was keeping company, living in DiMaggio's shoes. But I knew Joe was someone whose shoes were not open to me. Those we admire and can (or allow ourselves) to imagine becoming have an advantage as our teachers. So it is with all the habits that family and school teach us. Sometimes, of course, they teach us to never be like that when we grow up.

As students, we are in school at most a third of our waking hours every year. Given "how" we learn, how best can we bridge school and the other two-thirds "efficiently"?

Schools are not ideally suited to the job. First of all, the ratio of adult company to peers hardly provides much for children to watch and listen to about how the adult world works. Nor, in many cases, are the adults to whom the young are exposed ones they admire and can imagine becoming—if they even see them as "real" adults at all.

Nor are the adults in a position to respond to them in authentic ways. The by-play of ordinary conversation is missing: "Did you mean ... ? Are you saying that ...? I don't get it. ..." "But it seems to me that ...", and on and on. It's much like the AERA (American Educational Research Association) conference last week. When I got home I mostly shared the informal discussions I had over lunch and dinner, between sessions, and what I overheard in the group sitting next to me, even though I only attended sessions in which I had a deep interest, whose speakers I admired, and/or those being led by close friends. At some point I mostly felt like the child in the cartoon who says to his teacher: "My head is full. Can I go home now?"

It would have been even harder if I had attended sessions I knew less about or had come with a suspicious mindset, prepared to be manipulated by experts whose intentions I'm less than certain of, or who hold little respect for my ideas. Under such circumstances, we are spending at least some of our limited energies resisting, sifting, holding back. And that's not a bad habit of mind, except that it sometimes "wastes" our precious energies, makes us even more tired, or bored, which is often a signal of a disconnect between what we're hearing and our pre-existing picture of the world.

These, Diane, are the kinds of queries that caught my attention when I first started teaching. I couldn't resist writing about it. (For details, see links to my early writings in Dissent magazine at the bottom of this piece.) I'm still puzzled by its implications. If the setting allows, differences can help us see problems we otherwise might have ignored. (See Eleanor Duckwoth's The Having of Wonderful Ideas). It's in part why 5-year-olds are intriguing—they are different. Thus, I was startled, but delighted, when young James asked (when told to line up 'single file'): "What's a single file?" But I knew that this curiosity and boldness would not always serve him as well as the docility of those who naturally followed the cues. Yes, it remained for James both an enormous strength and, on occasion, a "deficiency." How we interpret such behaviors in schools does matter and is worth arguing about, for its impact both on "cognition" and social and emotional learning.

Styles of argument (which is where I get in trouble) may differ, but our reluctance to argue is a national deficiency and may account in part for why we get mesmerized by intentionally disrespectful radio/TV talk shows. Maybe if we didn't teach children to "resolve" their differences, we'd all learn better how to pursue our differences in a variety of socially productive ways.

The acceptance among the billionaires club and the educational establishment around a "common core" curriculum—often including pedagogical assumptions—is chilling. The ideal, that one could transfer schools at any time in any state and more or less fit smoothly in, is dangerous. The heart of being an educated person lies precisely in the nuances that separate our choices. Let's be cautious about aligning everything into a seamless garment.

I'm on my favorite topic—and have anecdotes (and some data) for each. I wonder what questions Tim Shriver and Tim Ryan find equally intriguing, and what settings would allow us to interact more usefully than those where I too often find myself. Probably ones that include more teacher voices than those at AERA or CASEL?

Deb

Note: I'd like to refer readers to two of my pieces for Dissent magazine in the 1960s: "Learning Not to Learn" and "A Report from Philadelphia: Head Start or Dead End?".

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

What a pleasure to discover we were on the same plane to New Orleans for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. It gave me a chance to wish you a happy birthday. When I spoke that evening, I asked everyone to congratulate you on your 80th. I told the audience that blogging with Deborah Meier had a big impact on my thinking, and I suggested you should blog with half a dozen other eminent conservative scholars. It will be hard work, but you can do it. That should keep you busy for the next 20 years, and I look forward to toasting your centennial!

In the best of times, education would not be newsworthy, but these are not the best of times. Every day brings bad news about a district closing down public schools or firing teachers or introducing testing for kindergartners. One hardly knows how to keep up with the accumulating attacks on teachers, principals, administrators, and public education.

The biggest recent news was the decision by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to replace city schools Chancellor Cathleen Black on April 7. She served only three months, which set a record for the shortest tenure ever in that position. The mayor immediately announced the selection of his trusted deputy mayor, Dennis Walcott, as chancellor. On the same day, New York State Commissioner of Education David Steiner announced his resignation after less than two years on the job. I wrote about these events in a blog for The New York Review of Books, so I won't give the full history here.

There is a rich irony in these proceedings. For the past several months, the Mayor has been running a vigorous campaign against teacher seniority, now referred to as "LIFO," or "Last In, First Out." With the support of the city's editorial boards, he has argued that experience does not matter when it comes to teaching. The fast ouster of Cathie Black suggests that Mayor Bloomberg is not entirely averse to the practice of LIFO. And when the mayor named Deputy Mayor Walcott, he pointed to Walcott's long experience in the field of education as his chief qualification for this very important position.

When Black's appointment was announced by the mayor, it received ecstatic reviews from the city's top business leaders, who assured the public that Black had exactly the skills "essential to running any large organization, whether in the private, public, or nonprofit sector," and that "you would be hard-pressed to find a more qualified and more capable candidate than Cathie Black." Black received equally enthusiastic support from former Mayors Edward I. Koch, David N. Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani, as well as from celebrities such as Gloria Steinem, Oprah, and Michelle Rhee.

What lessons were learned from this fiasco? (I hesitate to talk about "lessons learned" because these days no high-level education policymakers seem to give a second thought to evidence or logic or history).

It is now evident that Black did not have the skills essential to running the nation's largest public school system. Mayor Bloomberg boasted that she was a "superstar manager" and she may well have been a superstar as the chief executive officer of Hearst Magazines. But we now know that success in business is no guarantee for success in education. When one enters the highest position in the education sector, one should have deep knowledge and experience of schools, children, curriculum and assessment, teaching and learning, the intricacies of federal and state legislation, and a host of other issues. One must be able to interact respectfully and knowledgeably with parents, staff, and the public. Unfortunately, Black had none of that knowledge and none of those skills. Public school parents felt especially affronted by the idea that their children's fates were in the hands of someone so lacking in experience or qualification for the job.

Businesspeople seem to act on the assumption that if you are good at marketing and sales or accounting, you can transfer those skills to any product. Whether you are marketing soap or automobiles or computers or magazines doesn't make any difference.

But if we learned anything from Cathie Black's experience, it is that education is not interchangeable with business. Education is not a business. It is supposed to provide good education to all children, not to segment its market and compete with others in the marketplace. It operates on the principle of equality of educational opportunity, not a race to see who can sell the most or win the biggest market share and beat out the others.

Mayoral control was part of the problem in New York City. Mayor Bloomberg, as in the past, felt no need to have a transparent process or a national search. He didn't see why the public or other elected officials should have a voice in his selection. The decision belonged only to him, and no one else's views mattered, certainly not the views of parents. Yet U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan continues to push for mayoral control, the iron will of the mayor being absolute, even though it has done precious little for Cleveland or Chicago or, for that matter, New York City. Last June, the New York State Education Department admitted that the state scores were wildly inflated, and New York City's much-publicized "miracle" evaporated. Subsequently, Mayor Bloomberg's poll ratings started dropping, partly due to the city's inept response to a major blizzard in December, but also because the public realized that there had been no educational miracle. In the latest poll, right before Cathie Black resigned, only 27 percent of the public approved the mayor's handling of the public schools (Black's approval rating was 17 percent). For a mayor who wanted education to be his legacy, this was a bitter pill indeed, and Black had to go.

So much of the current corporate reform agenda is built on principles borrowed from the business world. Competition is supposed to drive higher test scores. Test scores are the profits. Schools that can't get higher test scores are failing and should be closed. Teachers whose students get higher scores should get bonuses. Teachers whose students don't get higher scores should be fired. Public money should be handed over to private entrepreneurs, freed of onerous regulations imposed on regular public schools, so they can compete to get higher scores.

After almost a decade of No Child Left Behind, the media seems to accept that this is the way schools are supposed to work. They come and go, like shoe stores. Profits up, they are good. Profits down, they close.

So it made perfect sense, at least to Mayor Bloomberg, that a successful publishing executive could sell his program. After all, she opened and closed many magazines, why not do the same with schools? But it didn't work. She didn't know the language, the issues, the players, or anything about public education or child development or assessment or accountability or any of the political battles now raging.

Dennis Walcott, Black's successor, won a waiver from the state education commissioner in the blink of an eye. Unlike Black, who had no experience or qualifications whatever, Walcott had spent 18 months teaching kindergarten in a daycare center many years ago. He had also run the local Urban League and served on the city's now-abolished board of education. He will reach out to parents and calm them. He knows the issues and the language. He knows the legislators and the laws and the policies. And he will continue the mayor's policies of closing public schools, placing charter schools into public school buildings, grading schools based on test scores, evaluating teachers by their students' scores, demanding an end to seniority, and doing exactly what the mayor has been doing since 2002. And, like the mayor, he will continue to praise the city's dramatic accomplishments, ignoring the embarrassing deflation of the city's test-score miracle last June.

There ought to be a law: No boasting. Anyone who boasts about test-score gains should be immediately held in contempt in the court of public opinion. The best educators, like the best professionals in any field, are those who do their job well, without boasting, without a public relations staff, without a megaphone. I know I dream the impossible, but what else are dreams for?

Diane

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

Dear Diane,

It was fun to catch even the last 10 minutes of your speech last week at AERA in New Orleans. It was too bad that half or more of the audience couldn't get in to hear you. (I finally found a secret rear door to sneak in.) And thanks for exposing to one and all that I have lived 10 years longer than I had planned. 8o is surprising, but I like it. I encourage others to aim for it.

Two experiences come to mind as I read your blog and heard you speak. It's said briefly in the title to Mike Rose's book: Why School?

In September 1969, I asked 20 5-year-olds this question while teaching at P.S. 144 in Central Harlem: "Why do you suppose your parents sent you to school instead of keeping you at home with them?" (Or something like that.) They had lots of first-round responses. "To learn to raise your hand." "To learn to line up." "To learn to talk only when the teacher tells you to." "To take turns," and so on. Finally, one child said: "To learn to read." I followed up on this by asking why they'd want you to learn to read. Almost everyone agreed: so you won't be held back. Already at age 5 they were worrying about that. (I read an article around that time about what young children most feared. The death of a parent came first, and being "held over" in school ranked second.)

OK, I said, but then if you go on to 1st grade, why would you keep reading? They had fun with this. "So you won't be held over in 1st!" they chorused. And so it went until they got through school. Then, I persisted, can you stop reading then? No, said one child after thinking carefully: "You'll have children, and you need to read to them so they won't get held over." I'm not making this up!

Now, of course, young children (and I, too) love stories that go round and round as this did, to all of our immense pleasure. So it may be that they were just pleasing me. But I doubt it. The point of school is to do well so you will continue to do well in school. At least with math, we also try to convince the young that someday they'll find math "useful"—there's a whole industry out there to explain this to 5- to 18-year-olds.

About 10 years later, I had the extraordinary opportunity to teach courses co-sponsored by New Rochelle College and the public workers' union—DC 37—in downtown Manhattan. It was a remarkable college (and reminds me of another I visited last week—Metropolitan College—that provides a course of study for so-called non-traditional students to get bachelor's and master's degrees). My students were often those who struggled with their own K-12 education, but believed in the new American dream: college or else.

My new students were largely older (often older than me) women who had no intention of changing jobs. But they wanted a B.A., and they wanted to be "better educated." They had no words to explain why, and it seemed mean to probe too far. It meant something "precious."

But we've never explored very far in the public domain what that "precious" thing is all about. We instead encourage children from ages 4 to 18 to think it's mostly about doing better in school so you'll do better in school OR, big step forward, you'll get a better-paying job. (Or ANY job.) We actually offer them statistical proof of this, over and over.

I sometimes refer to the old-fashioned phrase of the "leisured class" as a synonym for the ruling class. For a long time, the two concepts went hand in hand. You were fit to rule if you were "educated" and had the leisure to use that education to think your own thoughts, share them with others like yourself, and "of course" play a role in shaping the world around you based upon such ideas. This was one reason that the working-class movements of the 19th and 20th centuries were filled with fanatics about such concepts as child-labor laws and universal (and mandatory) free education, as well as the shorter work week and the security that the wealthy took for granted. Only when these were in place would all children be in a position to be active members of the ruling class. (Thus the struggles over women's education and the even more bitter fight over educating people of color.)

But in the process, education—except in its most rudimentary definition—lost its early meaning virtually entirely. The job of being a member of the ruling class was redefined to being allowed to vote every so often. (And serve on a jury, or get drafted?) But the heart of it— the exercising of high levels of intellect in decisions critical to one's own, one's family's, one's country's, or even one's planet's future remained quite another matter. The only job served was the job that paid you. Just as the old ruling class looked down on such utilitarian purposes, so the new education both raised it as the raison d'etre of schooling while simultaneously viewing it as a put down! And then we're surprised that it doesn't work for so many.

Today "academics" are honored and put down in the same breath. (Think of what it means to say, off-hand: "Well, that's academic.") Think about the sneer in our voices about the word "practical" in front of any course title? Practical-math courses are for dummies, ditto for science, and the arts. They are, at best, useful for getting a low-skill job. The "academic ones," in contrast, allow you to "sound" as though you are educated and "pass for" being smart. (As such, they will also help you get a job.)

I'm simplifying the argument. Yet for many Americans I think I've summarized it pretty accurately. We're still closer to the long-honored belief that the strong-hearted pioneers who went west to do practical work (shoot, hunt, herd cattle, and struggle against nature's odds) are the "real" Americans compared with the effete Ivy League aristocrats. And I'm a member of the immigrant generation that was caught between the two.

We need to think this through and acknowledge the trade-offs involved, and the proper balance between these two "ideals" that might better serve the planet.

Utopian? Well, once again, I'm for some naïve utopianism alongside hard-headed "real politics."

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Vouchers are back in the news. Several conservative governors are pushing them, and Republican members of Congress—in a showdown with President Barack Obama—have succeeded in restoring funding for the District of Columbia's voucher program, which was cut by the previous Democratic-controlled Congress. In a post-colonial mood, the House leadership insisted on reviving funding for vouchers and eliminating funding for abortions, although the mayor of the District opposed both decisions. Just a few days ago, Indiana's legislature endorsed a voucher program, cheered on by Gov. Mitch Daniels and Michelle Rhee.

The issue is especially interesting in Milwaukee, because its voucher program is the longest-running in the nation. Launched in 1998 in response to the low academic performance of African-American students, the voucher program survived legal challenges and now serves some 20,000 low-income students in 111 non-public, mainly religious, schools. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, hoping to cement his reputation as an education reformer, wants to remove all income limitations from the program. His support for the expansion of vouchers and charters is coupled, however (perhaps I should say, of course) with a proposal to cut $900 million from the state's budget for public schools.

The resurgence of vouchers comes at the same time that evidence for their lack of efficacy grows stronger. Originally, voucher proponents claimed that vouchers would accomplish two things: first, they would provide better education for poor children, especially African-American children, trapped in bad public schools; second, competition with voucher schools would cause regular public schools to improve. A rising tide, they said, would lift all boats.

That was the theory, but the reality has been disappointing.

The latest state test scores for Wisconsin revealed that students in Milwaukee public schools got higher scores than those in the voucher schools. Among low-income students, those in voucher schools scored the same as low-income students in the Milwaukee Public Schools. Some voucher schools did better than the Milwaukee public schools, but most did no better or worse. But voucher schools do not have as many high-needs students as the public schools in Milwaukee. According to state data, only 1.5 percent of voucher students are in special education, while in the public schools, the figure is about 19 percent.

By coincidence, the University of Arkansas released the fourth-year portion of its five-year study of the Milwaukee voucher program a day after the Wisconsin state scores were reported. Once again, the Arkansas research group, led by Patrick Wolf, found no difference in test-score performance in reading or math when comparing matched students from voucher schools and public schools. The voucher students had slightly higher rates of graduation and college enrollment, but some part of the difference may relate to their family background, especially their mothers' higher levels of education.

Gov. Walker responded to the latest reports by reiterating his intention to expand the voucher program. He also wants to exempt voucher schools from their obligation to take the state reading and math tests. That way no one will know how well or poorly the voucher students are doing and will certainly relieve the voucher schools of future embarrassment.

Milwaukee's 21-year experiment has demonstrated that competition did not cause all boats to rise. Milwaukee participated for the first time in the 2009 NAEP. African-American students in the Milwaukee public schools scored below their African-American peers in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana in both reading and math.

Voucher advocates are unfazed. They no longer claim that vouchers will close the achievement gap or produce miraculous academic gains for poor and minority students. Instead, they now say that choice will increase parental involvement or that choice is a good in itself or that choice will save money. That last argument is the one that really moves policymakers in these tough fiscal times. Imagine that: voucher schools may not educate kids better, but they can do the job at half the cost. That's powerful, and it reveals what matters most these days: not improving education, not encouraging creativity and innovation, but cutting costs.

The voucher schools are no silver bullet. They should not be embarrassed. But our policymakers in Washington and in the statehouses should be.

Diane

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

Dear Diane,

Even when we were fierce "enemies," we held one thing in common: our support for unions in general and the teachers' unions in particular. You were fonder of Al Shanker's politics than I was—but I rather miss him of late.

Were you as "amused" then as now by all the talk about "Big Labor"? It was, I thought, one of those white lies that serve all sides. It defused, for corporations, the classical and unflattering icon of the fat capitalist boss with one of a labor boss. But for labor, too, it was an attractive recruitment tool: "Join us! We have power, too!"

But it was a double-edged sword for the union movement, and it's amazing how it has withstood its decimation. The lead story in the American School Board Journal this month comes with this lead-in on the journals' website: "Once nearly untouchable, teachers' unions now are portrayed as barriers to school reform."

Even at their most awesome, unions in America enrolled a distinct minority of our workforce, and it was only several decades ago that most state and federal public-service employees were allowed to organize. State governors and mayors have a long history of "standing up" to unions—and forcing costly strikes (often illegal).

Untouchable? How many years ago was draconian anti-strike legislation passed even in New York state? And, how many states to this day don't allow collective bargaining for public employees, including teachers? And, meanwhile, weakened federal labor legislation, the government's use of scabs (under President Reagan), the destruction of the manufacturing base of America, and a weak and largely anti-union No Child Left Behind Act have destroyed most private unionization.

In a country in which the very richest "capitalists" now possess more than half the wealth of the nation, and when many pay virtually no taxes and earn as much of their profit overseas as they do "at home," we still hear talk about Big, Bad Labor.

Democracy requires conscious and everlasting miracles to survive, resting on needed balancing forces of power. These balances come in many shapes and forms, but since the late New Deal (in the late 1930s), chief among them has been the power of organized people—unions first and foremost—to confront the awesome power of organized money.

Lobbyist by lobbyist, the unions certainly couldn't match their opponents, even if we added in the many good citizen advocacy groups. But they had one advantage over the others: the relatively high loyalty of their members. Numbers of people vs. numbers of dollars.

What will serve as a balancing force in the days and years ahead? What prevents the richest 1 percent from spending half their money on politics, while still having more left than the other 99 percent together?

And what will stop them from using the newly privatized school chains they are busily packaging to their self-interest, not that of the families of their students? What is unique about such schools is that they are not, by law, required to be public in nature. They're not in any way governed by either their own public (parents, students, teachers, or neighbors); like any small, unmonitored business, they are hard to organize for parents or teachers, and it's difficult to "recall" their boards of trustees. They are accountable more or less only for test scores and graduation rates, if we can imagine what it would cost to truly monitor them all! Try getting real facts now. (Although, I'll admit it's not a lot easier to get reliable data from the regular public schools either.)

Yes, we need accountability. That's what, after all, democracy is all about. And, when democracy fails us, we need more of it, not less of it. We need to tackle the real dilemmas that democracy faces in the operation of a universal free education from K-12 for all our children—and ideally prior to age 5 and after 18, as well.

The various players have been arguing over this for years. (I came to New York City in 1967 during a struggle presumably over decentralizing control and left Chicago right before it engaged in a similar reform struggle.) In fact, Chicago's decentralization was a success, the documentation now demonstrates. But, as in New York, it was soon abandoned by a counter-revolution and has moved fast and furiously in the other direction ever since. Both NYC's and Chicago's decentralizing efforts were far from perfect. But they were on the right track, and many of the best ideas of the "charter movement" were borrowed from the decentralizers. In 1993, with funding from the Annenberg Foundation, New York City had an opportunity to create a truly public district of schools with charter-like freedoms, with the support of the local union; the city turned it down for more of the same. In 1995, the Boston union proposed something similar for a few dozen local schools; it grew and grew until a new administration chose to join the "new consensus."

Had all the current crowd of billionaire de-formers really wanted a more innovative and flexible school system, they'd have jumped on board long ago. But they didn't. They were either too impatient or too eager for direct power and abandoned these early efforts to democratize schooling in favor of privatizing it.

Is it too late to imagine how we might recapture the spirit of those earlier reform efforts? Do we have the patience to persuade the public that there's a safer and better solution to giving up on one of our nation's finest inventions?

Maybe Madison, Wis., is the beginning of a new cycle. Maybe, Diane, your courage and that of thousands of parents, teachers, and young people will save the day.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

I am sure you recall that when No Child Left Behind was under discussion, there was a great deal of publicity about "the Texas Miracle." I remember newspaper accounts of the wonders that had been accomplished by the simple strategy of testing and accountability.

Soon after the election of George W. Bush as president, we learned that he was the architect of this miracle in Texas. The miracle occurred because of this strategy: the state tested every child every year in grades 3-8; disaggregated their scores by race, ethnicity, and other characteristics; published the scores; and then honored the schools where scores went up and shamed the schools where they did not. Mirabile dictu, it worked! Or so a credulous press told us. Test scores went up, graduation rates went up, and the achievement gap began to close.

A few scholars warned that the miracle was an illusion. Walt Haney of Boston College and Stephen Klein of the Rand Corporation published critical reviews of the claims in Texas, but Congress ignored them. The singular feature of education reform in the 21st century is a willing suspension of disbelief. Reformers today believe in miracles. They believed in the Texas miracle, and they believe in every journalistic report of a miracle school where 100 percent of the students pass the tests, graduate, and go to college—no further investigation needed. Eventually, all such miracles are explained. (Where is Harry Houdini now that we need him?)

But the Texas miracle was good enough to persuade Congress to pass sweeping legislation that affected every public school classroom in the nation, imposing federally mandated testing (by states, not by the federal government), a federally mandated goal of 100 percent proficiency (a goal not reached by any nation in history), federally mandated remedies (none of which was validated by research or practice), and federally mandated punishments (which have led to the closure of many public schools).

Now U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan tells us that by next year, at least 80 percent of our nation's public schools will be stigmatized as failing, based on NCLB's stringent and totally unrealistic expectations. This is sheer madness.

But what we now know is that there never was a Texas miracle. At best, it was wishful thinking. At worst, it was a lie.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress of reading, 8th grade students in Texas had exactly the same score in 2009 as they had in 1998. No progress, period. No miracle. Texas is not at the top of NAEP, nowhere near the top.

Just recently, former first lady Barbara Bush wrote an opinion article in the Houston Chronicle, arguing against budget cuts to education in Texas. She wrote: "We rank 36th in the nation in high school graduation rates. ... We rank 49th in verbal SAT scores, 47th in literacy, and 46th in average math SAT scores."

Wait a minute: Ten years ago, we were told by presidential candidate George W. Bush and the national media that there had been a miracle in Texas. They were wrong! There was no miracle! We have a national education policy based on a myth, on a campaign slogan, on a fabrication. Texas confronts the same problems as every other state.

Meanwhile, the Texas model of testing and accountability has been foisted onto the nation by a credulous Congress. Will they rectify their error? Will they stop the wanton destruction of American public education? Will President Obama step back from his embrace of Bush-era policies? Will he throw out the punishments, sanctions, and "reforms" that are ruining education in this country? I hope so.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend