October 2011 Archives

Dear Diane,

If we could clone you and send you everywhere at once, with a few follow-ups from others, would it matter? Yes. Because we definitely don't reach as many people with our message as "they" (the Reformers) do with theirs.

Still, as Democrats Abroad France wrote recently in a proposal submitted to the Democratic Party Platform Committee: "We cannot improve education by quick fixes, by handing over our public schools to entrepreneurs, by driving out experienced professionals replacing them with enthusiastic amateurs, or by closing them and firing ... entire staffs. No country in the world follows such strategies."

We hold the world record in the amount of time devoted to testing—even as we also hold the record for spending less on children's health and welfare.

The causes of our exceptionalism are myriad. A piece in The New York Times Sunday Review by Alexander Stille suggests that one explanation may be that we're seeing the impact of two shifts: "one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago." He suggests that the end of social mobility is having an impact with side effects we aren't noticing. Maybe this helps explain, Diane, the irrationality of the current wave of corporate education reform. It's a distraction from dealing with the real economic crisis. Better to fight about equal test scores than equal family income and wealth.

But after more than two decades of these New Reforms—more and more testing, higher stakes, charters, and mayoral control—we do know some things for sure:

(a) Test scores have not risen, and the test-score gap hasn't narrowed.
(b) We have moved further away from building a profession that retains and uses its experienced teachers well.
(c) We are witnessing unimaginable hours spent on test-prepping and a narrowing of the rest of the curriculum while cheating is being ignored and teachers are being demoralized. Hardly trivial side effects.

And we know that our immediate bleak economic future will exacerbate all these trends, unless ... How have we gotten to this point? And how might we shift direction?

For a century or more education policy has periodically nurtured nostalgia for a past that never was and encouraged belief in a future crisis that bears no resemblance to reality. It's not a good combination. Even Al Shanker told me 30 years ago that, while he agreed with me, the public only responds to crises—real or not. We have to go along with turning this into a crisis, appealing to a variety of different audiences' fears, he said. It's a difficult legacy.

Why suddenly does the common-sense fact that teachers (and unions) fight for contracts that give them less onerous workloads, more job security, and more pay turn into a crime? Does Wall Street live by another code? (Educators and Wall Street'ers both need to watch Daniel Pink's chalk talk on motivation to consider his counter-intuitive findings—that rewards are counterproductive when it comes to honesty and doing good work.)

Yes, we're not always consistent either. We can always shout "gotcha" at each other.

Our "schooling" crisis has been in part real, a symptom of something "new" and wonderful—in post-World War II America, the temporary end of a racist immigration policy that stemmed from World War I, the success of the GI Bill of Rights, the drive for equality that grew out of the War on Poverty and the civil rights and women's movements in the '60s. These all had dramatic effects on education.

A little personal background, much of which you know, Diane. I entered teaching in 1963 during the early civil rights movement and allied myself with a growing new progressivism. Sometimes called "open education," its advocates were given a warm reception in some places of power for about five years, maybe 10. By 1985, I thought we were on the cutting edge of a transformative movement. I was dead wrong. We were declared to be too slow in showing test success and our vision hard to mandate from the top down. The New Reformers decided on a different path, which they have pursued now for between 20 and 30 years of unprecedented attention and resources.

Maybe the time has come to acknowledge that the changes we need can't be measured by the tools we've been using and that replicating by mandate in an "industry" like education has limits. Those who designed the instruments that measure us as failures admit they never intended them to be used for high-stakes purposes. There will be some schools and kids whose scores go up, some down, and some both or neither. But the whole demographic will remain unchanged unless we ignore cheating or what it means to be truly educated.

Since I began my crusade against this kind of testing in the late 1960s I've been told: (1) Something is better than nothing, and (2) we are developing better measurement tools. Bah, humbug. After 45 years of hearing this—literally—I don't believe it. We know there are both better ways of administering standardized tests that will do less damage: sampling. We know plenty of other ways that we can look at kids' work to assess their individual progress. I can name several-hundred public and private schools that have done so for decades. But the particulars of their solutions are not replicable because measures of success rest on "values" that need to be openly negotiated, not mandated. That's an advantage private schools have that could be made public.

Maybe it's time to encourage new and old reforms alike, while schools are mandated to invent very different ways to track what the public wants to know about the work of their students. Let this be in the hands of each school's lay and professional community.

We CANNOT afford the existing gross confusion between achievement and test scores. It has led us to promote the kind of education quick fix no one would propose for its "ruling class." I'll bet Socrates would agree with me on this.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Have you been following the evolving story of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind? I have, and it is disheartening. Instead of ditching this disastrous law, senators are trying to apply patches.

Most people now recognize that NCLB is a train wreck. Its mandates have imposed on American public education an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing.

• It has incentivized cheating, as we have seen in the well-publicized cheating scandals in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.
• It has encouraged states to game the system, as we saw in New York state, where the state tests were made easier and more predictable so as to bolster the number of children who reached "proficiency."
• It has narrowed the curriculum; many districts and schools have reduced or eliminated time for the arts, physical education, and other non-tested subjects.
• It has caused states to squander billions of dollars on testing and test preparation, while teachers are laid off and essential services slashed. Now we will squander millions more on test security to detect cheating.

Despite the manifest failure of NCLB, the Obama administration proposes not to scrap it, but to offer waivers if states agree to accept the mandates selected by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The secretary has a great fondness for teacher evaluation, having decided (in concert with the Gates Foundation) that the key to better education is to tie teachers' jobs and tenure to their students' test scores. This, of course, will raise the stakes attached to testing. Mr. Duncan has already used the billions in Race to the Top to bribe states to impose his unproven policies on their schools.

Happily, the latest version of the NCLB reauthorization does not include the teacher evaluation provisions that Mr. Duncan wants. That's good, but not good enough, because many states are already well down that path, not only the 11 that "won" the Race to the Top, but others that wanted to make themselves eligible. Tennessee was one of the "winners." NPR did a story about Tennessee's teacher evaluation program, which explained why the program is so thoroughly disliked by that state's teachers; see this article, as well.

When, if ever, will policymakers realize that they should find ways to support teachers, not to demoralize them? I just don't see how it is possible* to "improve" schools without the active engagement of the people who do the daily work of schooling. There is just so much top-down beating-up that can go on before teachers and principals rise up in protest, especially when so many at the top are not educators.

Lawmakers in D.C. and in the state capitals are not competent to decide how to reform schools and how to evaluate teachers. In what other profession would this kind of interference be tolerated?

The federal government does not know how to reform schools. Period. Congress doesn't, and the U.S. Department of Education doesn't.

The fundamental role of the federal government should be to advance equality of educational opportunity. That's a tall order. Congress should revive the commitments made in 1965, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed: To use federal resources on behalf of the neediest students; to protect the civil rights of students; to conduct research about education; to report on the condition and progress of American education.

So long as Congress tries to breathe life into the moribund NCLB legislation, its members are wasting their time.

Diane

* An earlier version of this blog incorrectly used the word "impossible."

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I loved Nancy Creech's piece from Valerie Strauss's Washington Post blog last summer. Thanks, Diane, for sending it along. It's a vital reminder as the nation faces a new federal Race to the Top demand: Start testing at age 3. Or else.

Creech's detailed minute-by-minute counting of what it means to pursue the latest early-childhood "Reform Agenda" is mind-boggling! Thanks, Nancy, for writing it. I've done something similar to show the absurdity of most homework policies. Designing, assigning, reading, thinking about, and responding to 20 to 30 students' homework accounts for a staggering amount of teacher time—if it's taken seriously and conscientiously. Not to mention that one cannot observe how homework is actually "getting done," nor who is doing it!

For these reasons we decided, at Central Park East and Mission Hill, on a different approach—certainly for 3- to 7-year-olds. We made an agreement with our children's families: You don't tell us what to do during the hours a child is with us, and we won't tell you what to do during the hours the children are with you. But we can both make suggestions! We promise to take your advice seriously, and we hope you will accept ours in the same spirit. Taking children's parents seriously as their child's first teacher requires collaboration not mandates.

Nancy Creech quotes a distinguished educator who says that teaching what one already "knows" is a waste of time. I disagree. We're constantly re-learning; it's how things that we have "learned" get consolidated, and sometimes revised. It's why I found teaching 4- and 5-year-olds so intellectually fascinating—because I was rethinking facts and concepts I thought I "knew," but had barely scratched the surface of, or had—in fact—misunderstood. My (frequently retold) story about 5-year-old Darryl convincing his peers that rocks were actually alive neatly captures this idea for me. In looking at the concept of living vs. nonliving he naively he picked up on "the wrong" clues. My scientist neighbor noted that he was therefore actually "on the cutting edge of modern science."

In fact, of course, as with a lot of instruction, just re-teaching something may only entrench the confusion rather than expand understanding. Watching children "in action," one learns the most about what they "know" (and don't know). It's in organizing the environment so that children are driven by curiosity to make sense of the world that they learn to drive themselves. It's in organizing the environment and then carefully observing each of those 20 children's response to it and to each other that we learn the vital stuff—the stuff to "teach."

If we carefully observe children at play we realize how enlightening their ignorance is if viewed respectfully and nonjudgmentally. They grow dumb (silent) when we fail to acknowledge it because it's our job to correct mistakes.

Jean Piaget had a big influence for a time on American educators. But mostly by giving labels to stages of development. I found, especially after reading Eleanor Duckworth's The Having of Wonderful Ideas, something more fascinating. She reminded me that we, as adults, all get stuck at an early stage with respect to ideas that either don't interest us much or where simplistic theories serve our purposes well enough. My amazement, over and over, at the light rays that came directly to me—and only me—across the lake is perfectly natural and obvious and only rarely requires realizing that it's an "illusion." That the ray of light is also coming straight across the water to you—standing 100 feet to my right—is absurd. Who cares? But, once you do ....

Teachers have never figured out how to teach more than 10 new words a week—some of which are soon forgotten, but meanwhile children between birth and adolescence actually are learning more than 10 words a day. Some more and some less, but no normal child doesn't do better teaching themselves, so to speak, than their teachers do. To turn the education of 3- to 7-year-olds into planned, deliberate, step-by-step "instruction" is to retard their intellectual growth.

The whole idea of prepping for standardized tests as a model of teaching/learning goes against not only what is most amazing about human learning, but especially the part that engages us in the work essential to our modern world. To accept, as young children do, the fact of uncertainty, and to tolerate this state of mind, grows increasingly rare as we "grow up." Asked constantly to choose: a,b,c, or d—Which is the one right answer?—is bound to retard growth even further.

I'm stuck on the form of accountability that says "throw the rascals out." Democracy in its many forms is the answer to accountability, if practiced close to where we all live, work, and think about the world.

Best,
Deborah

P.S. I have spent some time observing Zucotti Park, and watching it with my kindergarten teacher eyes and ears helps me see how they have hit upon some very novel but powerful educational tools. Spending time there was fascinating. More on that next week—maybe.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Last June, I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times disputing the idea of "miracle schools." With the assistance of two volunteer researchers, Gary Rubinstein and Noel Hammatt, I learned that several schools touted by various political leaders as miraculous were not. My intention was not to criticize the schools and their staff, but to criticize the politicians who were using the schools to imply that their policies (like firing the staff and closing the school) were working and that it wasn't all that difficult to turn around a school that enrolled large numbers of low-performing students.

The politicians seemed to suggest that their policies (testing and accountability or mass firings) sufficed to produce dramatically higher test scores and graduation rates. The subtext is that poverty and resources are not actually problems for urban schools; if they could just test more often and fire more teachers, the corporate reformers imply, then test scores would soar. This analysis suggests that schools enrolling the neediest students do not need more resources, and it rationalizes the current trend of draconian budget cuts for public education—for the arts, pre-kindergarten, libraries, physical education, and other non-tested subjects and services.

Soon after my article appeared in the Times, Newsweek published a story hailing 10 "miracle" schools. This seemed to be a direct response to my article. Gary Rubinstein and Noel Hammatt investigated the Newsweek 10 and disqualified them as "miracle schools" because they did not meet one or more of the following criteria:

1) A low attrition rate
2) High test scores
3) High graduation rate (for high schools)
4) High college acceptance rate (for high schools)
5) Fair representation of English-language learner (ELL) and special education students
6) A high percent of students who qualify for free or reduced meal prices
7) Funding equivalent to the nearby 'failing' school
8) No evidence that the school discriminates against low-performing students

Gary, a blogger, Teach for America alumnus (and critic), and high school mathematics teacher, became so interested in the miracle school phenomenon that he created a website to publish reviews of miracle claims.

Last week, Gary debunked a story that was prominently featured in Education Week about a "turnaround" school, the Academy@Shawnee in Louisville, Kentucky. This story seemed to validate the punitive policies advanced by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. But when Gary examined the school's record, he found a very different story from the one reported in Education Week.

Then Gary reviewed the miracle claims of the New Orleans Recovery School District. New Orleans has been widely touted as proof that incredible results can be achieved by getting rid of the teachers' union and converting most schools into privately managed charter schools.

Two days ago, the oft-told tale was repeated in an editorial in The New York Times. The editorial begins with the statement that, before Hurricane Katrina, more than 60 percent of New Orleans' students attended a failing school, and now only 18 percent do. Among the unasked questions: Are the students in New Orleans the same ones who were in the schools before the hurricane? How many of the city's poorest children returned? What is the definition of a "failing school"? Was the definition the same pre- and post-hurricane? What methods are the presumably better schools using to produce such miracles?

Once again, Gary found that the hype exceeded reality. By examining state data, Gary learned that the district is in fact one of the lowest-performing in the state of Louisiana. In fact, it is 69th of 70 districts. The state gave a D or an F grade to 87 percent of the schools in the Recovery School District. Its much-heralded "improvement" is based on a statistic that exaggerates growth for districts with low baseline scores.

The lesson in all this debunking is not that poor kids can't learn. Of course, they can. Let me say that again, slowly: Yes, poor kids can learn and excel. But whether or not children are poor, education is a slow, incremental process. While it is true that a student may have a remarkable change in attitude and motivation and demonstrate large test-score gains in a short period of time, it is rare indeed when an entire school or district experiences a dramatic increase in test scores. Any huge change in scores for a school or a district in a short period of time ought to provoke skepticism and a demand for evidence, not a willing suspension of disbelief.

Like you, I don't believe that test scores are by themselves a genuine proxy for achievement because test scores may indicate nothing more than a heavy investment in test prep. As Daniel Koretz points out in his valuable book Measuring Up, too much test prep may compromise the value of the measure. I used to think that test scores were a reliable gauge of academic achievement. Now I take care not to confuse the two. Not only have we seen widespread evidence of cheating and gaming the system, but it seems obvious that the over-use and misuse of standardized testing is distorting the educational process, narrowing the curriculum, and conflicting with the goals of meaningful education.

But as long as public officials insist on making test scores the measure of teacher quality and school success, then their claims should be closely scrutinized using the metrics that they themselves have made the coin of the realm. Many of the schools that politicians hail as successes have records no different from other schools that the politicians are closing.

I worry that our current national obsession with test scores has spiraled out of control and is harming students, teachers, principals, and the quality of education. How will we regain our common sense?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I've so many different topics I want to write you about! Watching a YouTube video Mike Klonsky sent me about a current demonstration in Chicago brought back a flood of memories from the late 1950s and '60s when my children's schooling began and when I was subbing throughout Chicago's South Side. Speaking of memories, Fred and I spent last weekend in St. Louis (I was speaking to a group of teachers at the Seventh Annual Educating for Change Curriculum Fair, and Fred to visit family). Both of us have roots in St. Louis and it brought back my Midwestern years—and it turns out that many of his relatives were school teachers, too.

Our anecdotal memories are useful, especially given how hard it is to believe school data—between cheating, manipulating, and obfuscating, which have for many years been standard practice. I have a lot of anecdotes to demonstrate this claim!

Both experiences reminded me that I was perhaps lucky to have entered the profession at the same time that my three children entered Chicago's public school system. My experiences in both roles led me to admire those who stuck with public school teaching as well as despair at the way the system didn't work for those children most at risk in life.

It gives me, Diane, a somewhat special perspective on teaching and parenting. It was hard not to switch back and forth during the many years in which I experienced schooling in both roles. It complicated my responses to the fallibilities of both.

There is no easy answer. Like everything else, there are trade-offs. But I am more convinced than ever that working out that relationship is central to our task, ABOVE ALL for kids whose own families failed or were intimidated by the same K-12 schools. One aspect of it, perhaps the least important, is getting the governance issues right. If you go onto the missionhillschool.org website you'll see what, given the opportunity, we designed for our governance purposes. Our division of "policy" vs. "practice" decisions is full of gray areas, but our solution is very replicable.

But the harder part is to figure out how to create a relationship built on trust between school people and families—one by one. Most of all it takes a great deal of patience and time. It can't happen in a single year ... in the most difficult situations anyhow. It may even take four to five years sometimes. But what a difference it makes! In its absence it even drives the most-advantaged parents to act stupidly. One family conference of 10-20 minutes each year and a brief report card do not create trust. But trust between teachers and parents where race and social class differences are as extreme as possible makes this trust "almost" impossible. Parental distrust is a wise given in most such cases. Besides, we're both appropriately over-sensitive!

At the schools I was most involved with we attribute a lot of our success not to our brilliant teaching, staff skill, etc., etc. (all of which I vouch for), but to what parents and families offered us in support of their youngsters. It was as true for 5-year-olds as 15-year-olds. Maybe, in fact, it's more important in high school when young people are testing authority at home and at school—and must do so as they grow into their own adulthood. If parents and schools are sending mixed, and even outright hostile, messages about each other, it isn't helpful to most kids. And while teenagers may claim to want teachers and parents to get out of their way, they need them more than ever. But they need them in different ways.

"Fortunately" my own children each had their own crises somewhere along the way, too, and it helped me think through how other parents might be feeling. Helpless. It's not good for kids to have helpless parents or teachers. So we initiated prolonged conferences between teachers, family members, AND the student several times a year. In fact, as often as needed. It changed the dynamics in critical ways. If there was more than one teacher involved, we sometimes added school adults as well.

When problems were acute, we arranged for follow-up meetings on the assumption that Plan A might turn out to be wrong, and we might need to go on to Plan A-2 or Plan B. We had a trained social worker who helped parents, teachers, and students learn how to conduct such gatherings, and to be available when needed, including providing useful external resources.

Once a parent—like me—finds that such meetings are useful, they will show up. For me, "showing up" was a ritual, a way to reassure the teacher that I cared rather than to learn something useful. We got 100 percent attendance at Central Park East and Mission Hill. Of course, that also meant we had to be flexible about when and where we met.

But, once again, it requires time, time, time, on top of all the other time-consuming professional tasks (like time to meet with colleagues, keep up with the field, read over and respond to home and schoolwork, plan ahead, etc.).

When will we ever learn that it's time worth spending, especially if it's successful outcomes—authentic achievement, not test scores—we are seeking?

Deborah

P.S. Two books worth reading: Lynne Yermanock Strieb's Inviting Families into the Classroom and Juanita Doyon's Not With Our Kids You Don't.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

I recently returned from a trip to Europe. In Berlin, I spoke at an international education research conference. Researchers from Europe, Asia, and Latin America were very alarmed by the current "reform" movement in the United States, fearful that the same trends—the same overemphasis of standardized testing, the same push for privatization and markets, and the same pressure to lower standards for entry into teaching—might come to their own countries.

The highlight of my trip was visiting schools in Finland. Of course, Finland is much in the news these days because of its success on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) examinations. For the past decade, 15-year-old Finnish students have consistently been at or near the top of all the nations tested in reading, mathematics, and science. And just as consistently, the variance in quality among Finnish schools is the least of all nations tested, meaning that Finnish students can get a good education in virtually any school in the nation. That's equality of educational opportunity, a good public school in every neighborhood.

What makes the Finnish school system so amazing is that Finnish students never take a standardized test until their last year of high school, when they take a matriculation examination for college admission. Their own teachers design their tests, so teachers know how their students are doing and what they need. There is a national curriculum—broad guidelines to assure that all students have a full education—but it is not prescriptive. Teachers have extensive responsibility for designing curriculum and pedagogy in their school. They have a large degree of autonomy, because they are professionals.

Admission to teacher education programs at the end of high school is highly competitive; only one in 10—or even fewer—qualify for teacher preparation programs. All Finnish teachers spend five years in a rigorous program of study, research, and practice, and all of them finish with a masters' degree. Teachers are prepared for all eventualities, including students with disabilities, students with language difficulties, and students with other kinds of learning issues.

The schools I visited reminded me of our best private progressive schools. They are rich in the arts, in play, and in activity. I saw beautiful campuses, including some with outstanding architecture, filled with light. I saw small classes; although the official class size for elementary school is 24, I never saw a class with more than 19 children (and that one had two assistant teachers to help children with special needs).

Teachers and principals repeatedly told me that the secret of Finnish success is trust. Parents trust teachers because they are professionals. Teachers trust one another and collaborate to solve mutual problems because they are professionals. Teachers and principals trust one another because all the principals have been teachers and have deep experience. When I asked about teacher attrition, I was told that teachers seldom leave teaching; it's a great job, and they are highly respected.

And by the way, the Finnish teachers I saw—those heaped with laurels as outstanding professionals—didn't look or act differently from many, many teachers I have seen in the United States, even in so-called "failing schools."

Finland has one other significant advantage over the United States. The child-poverty rate in Finland is under 4 percent. Here it is 22 percent and rising. It's a well-known fact that family income is the most reliable predictor of academic performance. Finland has a strong social welfare system; we don't. It is not a "Socialist" nation, by the way. It is egalitarian and capitalist.

I was asked about current trends in U.S. education, and Finnish educators were astonished by the idea that our governments intend to evaluate teachers by their students' test scores; that made no sense to them. They were also surprised that we turn children over to "teachers" who have only a few weeks of training and no masters' degree. They did not understand the idea of "merit pay." They are paid more if they do more work for the community, but they can't understand why teachers should get a bonus to compete with one another for test scores. Since they don't have comparative test scores for their students, our practices don't make sense to them. Nor do they understand the benefits of competition among teachers who ought to be collaborating.

The current crop of corporate reformers get very upset by any mention of the Finnish model. They refuse to believe that a nation can have great schools without relying on high-stakes testing. They insist that Finland cannot serve as a model because it lacks racial diversity; but they fall silent when one points out that Finland has the same demographics as Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, yet gets superior results. I am troubled by this "lacks diversity" argument, because it implies that African-American and Hispanic children cannot benefit by having highly experienced teachers, small classes, and a curriculum rich in the arts and activities.

Here's an interesting contrast: We claim to be preparing students for global competitiveness, and we reward mastery of basic skills. Our guiding principles: Competition, accountability, and choice. Finland has this singular goal: to develop the humanity of each child. Isn't that a shocking goal? Their guiding principles: equity, creativity, and prosperity.

Finland rightly deserves attention today as a nation that treats its children as a precious resource and that honors the adults who make education their passion and their career. Someday, I hope, we will recognize the failure of the behaviorist approach now in vogue; someday we will see that our current "reforms" are appropriate for the industrial era of the early 20th century, not for the needs of the 21st century. When that day arrives, we will understand the deep wisdom of Finland, with its love for children and its respect for educators, and we will be grateful that there is a successful alternative to our own failed model.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Note from Deborah: Thanks, Diane, for bringing up the troubling but critical issue of the parent role in schooling. It's a big one and not one I want to respond to off the top of my head. So, next week I'll give you my thoughts on this.

Dear Diane,

It's easy to ignite optimism in people like me. That's why I always felt lucky to spend so many years inside schools, and inside schools where we had the freedom to collectively respond to situations with our best judgment. I never despaired.

The schools I was most deeply involved in were also "horizontally" (a Wall Street-occupiers' expression) organized, around each other rather than around a leader. The protesters' language about "assemblies of people" making decisions together may sound absurd—and in some ways it is—but it is a fitting response in a climate that has more and more bought into (or just accepted) that the few shall decide for the many.

Democracy—as we explore the idea—is full of contradictions, tensions, complications, and yet ... compared with the alternatives, it's an easy choice to make, although it will take a lot more serious self-education for us to get it right. One thing is clear: a ruling class needs security, leisure, and sufficient access to resources. Insofar as we don't all have such basics, we are at a disadvantage as members of the ruling class. How much is sufficient? Sometimes human energy is the only resource we have. So then we need to use it. Overtime.

The language I hear from spokespeople at Liberty Plaza on Wall Street reminds me of our mission statement at Mission Hill (excerpted).

"Our Mission ... public education ... aims at producing youngsters who can live productive, socially useful, and personally satisfying lives, while also respecting the rights of all others. The school, as we see it, will help strengthen our commitment to diversity, equity, and mutual respect.

Democracy requires citizens with the capacity to step into the shoes of others, even those we most dislike, to sift and weigh alternatives, to listen respectfully to other viewpoints with the possibility in mind that we each have something to learn from others. It requires us to be prepared to defend intelligently that which we believe to be true, and that which we believe best meets our individual needs and those of our family, community, and broader public—to not be easily conned. It requires also the skills and competencies to be well informed and persuasive...

"Democracy requires citizens who are themselves artists and inventors—knowledgeable about ... but also capable of producing, performing, and inventing their own art. Without art we are all deprived. ...

"Our mission is to create a community in which our children and their families can best maintain and nurture such democratic habits.

"Toward these ends, our community must be prepared to spend time even when it might seem wasteful hearing each other out. We must deal with each other in ways that lead us to feel stronger and more loved, not weaker and less loveable. We must expect the most from everyone, hold all to the highest standards, but also respect our different ways of exhibiting excellence. ..."

We accepted the idea that we didn't have a shot at living up to our mission if we didn't provide sufficient leisure to work together as a school community while also acknowledging that our members had obligations to their families, their other communities, and their own self-development—as artists, lovers, environmental freaks, or whatever! Ditto democracy writ large.

One of the amazing outcomes was our own growing awareness of all the trade-offs involved, the weighing of options, and acknowledging that there were unexpected outcomes—not always good—to the best of ideas.

Our five "habits of mind" perhaps needed the addition of one of the other "habits:" "What might the unexpected consequences (trade-offs) of any good idea be?"

Such as ... if we organize the already small school—as Mission Hill first did—into two K-5 sub-schools that fed into one 6-8 school, we created problems we hadn't anticipated. So we changed that. Or, by designing a single set of school-wide themes, we'd inhibit some wonderful ideas bubbling up from the bottom. Or, once we created an "executive committee," we'd make the committee of the whole feel second rate, but that without an executive committee we'd waste time on the wrong issues. Etc., etc.

Maybe that's why Jefferson argued that we might need a revolution every so often, to go back to our roots and rethink. Schools can be a vehicle for such rethinking, if we use them that way. They can be labs for helping to rediscover democracy.

But I keep looking at the charts that the Economic Policy Institute has put together. They remind me how skewed our economy has become. And I worry that the deck is already too stacked against the 99 percent of Americans having the time and wherewithal to rethink. It's data worth pondering.

So I'm feeling bit "up," but also nervous. In Wisconsin, I had the feeling that even the cops were our friends so it pains me to see the police in lower Manhattan and on the Brooklyn Bridge so apparently personally angry and acting out. (While those who planned the action coolly observed what they wrought.) Does it require a threat to their own solidarity to create a bridge between the cops and protesters?

Patriotism—toward one's neighborhood, school, friends, team, or nation—is an expression of solidarity. Being a Yankees fan can be a benign form of patriotism or... a nasty form. (And when I hear American businessmen say that they no longer believe in the label "Made in America," I hear them with anger and want to call upon their patriotism! And yet it contains an element of healthy internationalism? (I'm giving them undeserved motives, I know.)

But, for the moment, my unambivalent "Hurrah!" to the protesters on Wall Street, to Van Jones' effort to mobilize nationally, to SOS (Save Our Schools), and many more. The future looks, at least, interesting.

Deborah

P.S. Just before I sent this, I received a message about "Occupy Albany." For more information, go to occupyalbany.org.

Also, for those of you who would like to make donations to Occupy Wall Street, they are in need of hot, prepared food, blankets, and also the use of trucks. To order food, use this link. Their physical address is here.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

There is a move under way to promote something called the "Parent Trigger" as a way to reform schools. It is another one of those deceptive schemes that comes packaged with an alluring name, but whose true purpose is to undermine public education.

In early 2010, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, the state legislature passed the "Parent Empowerment Act." This law is commonly known as the Parent Trigger. It allows a majority of parents in a low-performing school to sign a petition that leads to various sanctions for the school: firing all or some of the staff, turning the school over to charter management, or closing the school. These are similar to the options in the U.S. Department of Education's School Improvement Grant program. All of them are punitive, none is supportive of changing the school for the better, and none has a shred of evidence to show that it will improve the school. Neither the Parent Trigger nor the federal SIG program offers any constructive alternatives to unhappy parents, only ways to punish the school for low scores.

Supporters of the Parent Trigger say it empowers parents, especially poor parents, and gives them a tool with which to change their school. They say that it enhances not only parent power, but school choice.

But consider who created the Parent Trigger. The promoter of the legislation was a group called Parent Revolution, which is funded by charter school operators (it has some affiliation with Green Dot, whose chief executive officer sits on the board of Parent Revolution) and by venture philanthropists (including the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation). Its executive director, Ben Austin, a lawyer, was appointed by Gov. Schwarzenegger to California's state board of education (and removed by Gov. Jerry Brown when he took office in 2011).

Parent Revolution is what is known as an "Astroturf" group, an organization pretending to be representative of ordinary parents, but actually promoting a charter agenda.

When Parent Revolution sent paid organizers to gather signatures from parents at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, Calif., the campaign was conducted secretively. The organizers collected signatures from 60 percent of the parents. When the petition was submitted to the school district in December 2010, it designated the charter operator—the Celerity Educational Group—that would take over the school, although it is not clear who chose it. The matter is not yet resolved, since each side has accused the other of intimidation. To learn more about the battle, read here, here, and here.

People who love charter schools love the Parent Trigger. But I am not one of them.

To me, a public school is a public trust. It doesn't belong to the students who are currently enrolled in it or their parents or to the teachers who currently teach in it. All of them are part of the school community, and that community needs to collaborate to make the school better for everyone. Together, they should be able to redesign or create or discontinue programs and services. But collaboration is not the same as ownership. The school belongs to the public, to the commonwealth. It belongs to everyone who ever attended it (and their parents) and to future generations. It is part of the public patrimony, not an asset that can be closed or privatized by its current constituents.

If a school is dysfunctional, those who are in charge of the district are obliged to find out why and to do whatever they can to fix the problems. If the principal is incompetent, he or she should be removed. If there are teachers who are incompetent, they should be removed. If the school is doing poorly because it lacks necessary resources, the district is obliged to do whatever it can to improve the school.

But giving the current parents the power to close the school or to hand it over to a private management company is akin to saying that whoever uses any public facility should have the same power, the power to transfer control to a private entity. It means if those who use Central Park in Manhattan don't like the way the city of New York takes care of it, they should be able to sign a petition and privatize it. If a majority of those who patronize a national park sign a petition, they should be able to hand control of the park over to private managers. This makes no sense.

The Parent Trigger should be recognized for what it is: A stealth assault on public education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend