Bridging Differences

Dear Diane,

The absurdities you describe are on the mark and ought to kill the idea of paying teachers based on their students' test scores. But we both know the idea won't die that easily. Even the most renowned of testing experts argue that we're nowhere near being able to produce tests that can do the job of pay-by-score that folks want. I do wonder at times what "they" think they are doing?

The trouble is that when I start down that path I see conspiracies everywhere—for example, that these schemes justify hiring inexperienced and low-paid teachers—who can do scripted test-prep as well as the next guy. It has the handy side effect of destroying solidarity which from a businessman's perspective (perhaps) is a good thing, and keeps teachers away from controversial subjects—and tightly aligned to the stuff being tested. It probably weakens unions. And finally, it paves the way for a marketplace system of schooling instead of a public one (which is then relabeled a bureaucratic monopolistic model). Of course, the latter can be true—and as you know I was an early champion of choice and increased school autonomy for just that reason—within the public sector.

The charter schools have also become I fear another name for vouchers. Operated by private chains with public funding, they offer a kind of distorted marketplace, controlled by test scores standing in for profits. Thus, they kill two birds with one stone: public education and human judgment.

A test of intellectual rigor always in part rests on judgment. Democracy is built on that shaky foundation of trusting our fallible judgments. The central purpose of K-12 schooling in a democracy is thus the training of human judgment. The young can only learn how-to in the company of adults who are doing it. The means and ends are one.

But where you and I may disagree re. the Obama agenda is on the question of nationwide "standards"—e.g. curriculum. I think we are in agreement that NAEP—the only existing national exam—should remain separate and untainted by high stakes. A better labeling/benchmark system—or even doing away with any labels—would be wiser still. We can then focus on in-depth analysis of a wide range of interesting data. Those who want a 50-state common core grade-by-grade curriculum won't be satisfied with sampled NAEP scores because they want to make state-by-state, school-by-school, student-by-student comparisons. They see the competition for test scores as healthy. So, where do you stand?

In that regard, I found the recent Brookings Institution research by Grover Whitehurst et al a helpful warning. He argues that "the creation of common standards will have little impact on our future in a system in which there are also aligned assessments, and aligned curriculum, educators, and accountability for students, and aligned professional development...." And on and on. "Faith," he concludes, is not enough, and a closer look at our most successful "competitors" internationally demonstrates that this is not the path they have taken.

I don't recall the exact data, but someone once noted that teachers make dozens (or hundreds?) of decisions a minute. More than almost any other field (e.g. doctors), partly because they are simultaneously educating 20 to 30 different kids every minute. That's why they need eyes in the back of their heads and a trained instinct about those peculiar silences, mutterings, etc., which only experience teaches us to notice. Kids are complex—and each one is different. The subject matter is hopefully difficult, too. Thus, as Ted Sizer reminded me, be sure and simplify everything else you can, or you'll find yourself simplifying the kids and the subject matter. We've done the opposite under the new "deform" agenda: as school people follow ever more complicated analysis of statistical data! Becoming themselves more like machines. Truly! I sometimes wonder how many hours it would take to accomplish five hours of school time. If we each were teaching one child—home-schooling, in short. Simplifying complex people and information consumes us. It's not all wasted time, but.....

Once in a while, I'd try to make a quick round of my classroom to assess who was catching on to what. The trouble was that I usually got so intrigued by the first child I sat next to that I didn't get to the second. I exaggerate, a little.

Finding the right metaphors and analogies that work for each child is in part an art that takes time to accumulate into wisdom. It takes wariness, too, and sometimes only a good observer can catch our mistakes. It's hard not to hear our own meaning rather than the one the kids are making. Besides, many kids know how to fool us by "looking" smart.

I found this as true in my relationships with adults when I was a principal or head teacher. Because once again we don't all respond to criticism or close questioning the same way and can open up or close down very quickly. Sometimes quite politely.

I wish I could convince the new reformers—those who truly want a better way—that we need to improve and deepen NAEP while school-by-school we develop better tools for assessing that are simultaneously better tools for teaching.

Our final exercises at CPE and Mission Hill and Urban Academy and Beacon and on and on are the culmination of years of teaching/assessing approaches. At culminating years, the staff pull together to show off more formally before real-live audiences, who are assigned the task of "judging." They are, as I say over and over, real "road tests"; what people encounter in the real world of college or the workplace, and they simultaneously respond to the skills and knowledge that we need as citizens who are not easy to fool—at least not often. They serve, in short, democracy first and foremost.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Dear Deborah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane

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

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (50) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (38) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane

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

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

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

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: After this week, Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch begin their annual summer break. Their blog will return in September.

Dear Diane,

I’m still amazed at how fast the new educational establishment plans to “revolutionize” our schools. I acknowledge that your support for national testing and curriculum is a bit out of line with the train that’s long since left the station, and I suspect you will end up as dismayed as I am. So, too, will many Americans who have not in any way been consulted by their governors or their president. One look at who’s in charge gives me the creeps—SAT and ACT. Unbelievable! Hardly.

I quote IBM’s Louis Gerstner in a conversation with John Bussey of The Wall Street Journal and Joel Klein : “What I’m going to suggest (to Obama) is that he convene the 50 governors and the first thing they do is abolish the 16,000 school districts we have in the United States." Why? Because “sixteen thousand school districts are what we’re trying to cram this reform through.” With only one—how much easier. (Note: When I was born, there were 200,000 school boards.)

Getting “around” the Constitution is hardly a new practice and, after all, I’ve supported it at times. But even in the case of gun control, I think I’m closer to the Founding Fathers' idea than the NRA is. And I’m glad we didn’t try to squeeze African-Americans et al into the Constitution by legalese. Instead, “we” wrote an amendment. On local control of schools, I’m certain I am on the side of the Constitution, and I think it’s more critical, not less, in today’s world and that no such amendment would survive the American people.

I’ve become more conservative: not in where I hope to go, but in the means for getting there. Rapid changes on a large scale are dangerous—and while sometimes necessary we need to be persuaded. That slows things down a bit I know. It’s one of democracy’s intentional “drawbacks.”

If we were capable of coming up with a list of just one book or idea in each of the disciplines for a “common core” I’d buy it. But that would be a utopian wish—and probably dangerous, too! Maybe I wouldn’t buy it.

The problem with the old “new math” of the '60s was not the mathematics, but the attempt to leap ahead without either persuading or educating those who we expected to carry it out (teachers) or support it (parents).

Possibly we will raise slightly the intellectual content of what kids are presented with a national curriculum. With certainty, we will lower the chances of having an inspiring year with an inspired teacher. It’s a trade-off that seems unnecessary if we took advantage of our schools as places for everyone to learn—for teachers, students, parents, and the community. If we started with where all of these parties “are” and encouraged them—with resources—to dig deeper and more richly, with greater attention to the love of learning, we could have both. In a generation of two.

I liked your list, Diane. I think we could connect each of our lists to the future health of democracy, and by extension not only to a stronger economy, but a real understanding of what an economy is. Schools and the economy have moved lock-step into shoddy conceptions of what a strong mind and economy can be measured by and then substituted the measure for the object itself.

Books to read. There are many good books on education to read. And yes, “Middlemarch” can even help us think about schooling! That’s what I discovered about education—everything feeds it.

For example, I recently read an odd book that tells the story of the author’s encounter with a shelter for adolescents in Russia. Written by journalist Bob Belenky, “Tales of Priut Almus” delighted me. Exactly why? I’m still trying to figure it out.

I’d still recommend James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” for examining our current situation and Evans Clinchy’s “Reforming American Education: From the Bottom to the Top”—which has an introduction by me (“Supposing That..”) which I still agree with. I recommend my “In Schools We Trust” for a chapter on changing the odds, as an approach to school reform writ large—to those who keep carping that my ideas depend too much on exceptionalism.

Like your rediscovering “Middlemarch,” I rediscovered a collection of essays by physicist David Hawkins in a book entitled “The Informed Vision.” Ken Jones, formerly with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also edited a useful book, “Democratic School Accountability,” that is only three years old, but totally out of synch with the “latest” Gates Foundation wisdom. Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues Jacqueline Ancess and Beverly Falk’s “Authentic Assessment in Action” has a lot to show us, including a chapter on the old Central Park East Secondary School that I often refer to. Just this week, friends in NYC—including you, Diane—collaborated in producing a book called “NYC Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein: What Parents, Teachers, and Policymakers Need to Know.”

There are many more, depending on one’s taste. I particularly love accounts by teachers—like Julie Diamond’s “Welcome to the Aquarium.” I re-read Mike Rose’s “Lives on the Boundary” yearly. Ditto for oldies, like John Holt’s “How Children Fail.” Or anything by Frank Smith—including his most recent—“Unspeakable Acts, Unnatural Practices.” An oldie—“Horace’s Compromise” by Ted Sizer—should be read by policymakers every few years, alongside Richard Rothstein’s classic—“The Way We Were?”. Diane, there’s another history of education often forgotten even by the best historians and well-captured in “Roots of Open Education in America,” edited by Ruth Dropkin and Arthur Tobier—with a last chapter by my hero Vito Perrone.

(And as soon as I send this off, I’ll feel terrible about having left off mentioning x and y—like Seymour Sarason! Maxine Green!—and Linda Nathan’s not-yet-available book.)

Have a joyful summer—living the alternate life we didn’t live from September through June. Which is why I reject the idea of a longer school year. What kids need are fascinating alternate life experiences for two summer months. We owe them that, as we owe it to ourselves.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I don’t even trust myself to write standards (of the sort that can be specs for tests) for one school, one district, one state—much less the whole nation! I’m bound to have a better idea a week later.

And, given those who are considered the experts these days on matters of schooling, I cringe at the very idea.

I think it would be fair to argue that an institution that is funded by public monies must defend itself on the grounds that it serves, first and foremost, a public purpose—one which by its nature is held in common by all citizens, voters, and their offspring.

Here’s my suggestion. They must serve to prepare future voters to be knowledgeable and skilled citizens by the time they reach voting age—smart enough to preserve, protect, and improve the democracy of which they now are full members. We need a national “bar mitzvah” ceremony that seriously stops and takes stock of how well it has used children’s time (12-13 years of involuntary schooling) and the public’s money.

There is no reason the young can’t be offered “more,” or that we will all agree on precisely what “habits of mind” a voter needs to decide on matters of enormous complexity! But I’d have to connect the dots if I wanted to make it mandatory, not just accessible. There’s a difference, for example, between preparing future citizens to understand “the economy,” and preparing them for a specific job in it.

We cannot abandon democracy just because we are a long way from where we need to be, not to mention a long way from ever having discussed what it is, much less what it takes to nourish it. But that’s the direction—first and foremost—I want us to head in. That’s the argument I want us to engage in—school by school, community by community, state by state. Hopefully, we will come up with interesting and different answers. Meanwhile, we can also consider how we could go about assessing it down the road.

Here’s a shocking idea along such lines: It’s not mathematicians who need to decide how much and what kind of math we need! We need citizens with many different forms of expertise to weigh in on the kind/level of mathematical problems 18-year-olds should be able to make sense of. Then mathematicians can help us lay out ways to get there. If calculus is more important than statistics, let’s hear the argument.

If we give up on democracy every time it seems inefficient or even absurd (as Churchill put it), there would be no trace of it left on earth.

Yes, NAEP can, as you suggest, Diane, help us in the process by assessing K-12 students in a wide range of ways—and perhaps samples of other citizens of varying occupations—about what they know, make sense of and can demonstrate. To do that well we have to change the way we think of assessment. Instead of using a technology built on ranking, let’s use NAEP’s sampling as a way to provide better understanding of the problems. Having some portions that can be repeated for decades for comparison purposes is wise, but it should not be the be-all-and-end-all. And, as with all tests, we need to consider the ways it can be abused—the dangers—ahead of time. We need information as a tool for informing the public debate, not for enforcing solutions.

Yes, Diane, the Broader, Bolder proposal is a huge step in the right direction.

It’s not only in schooling policy that we face a dangerous fork in the road. Our disrespect for genuine expertise (the absence of any school people in the current policy debates) is mirrored in every field (even in the appointment of a financier to head GM!). So, too, the range of expertise. We confuse the role of citizen vs. expert, but even more dangerously we confuse the role of both in our capitulation to fiscally powerful private interest groups. This goes for policy discourse in many fields—not just education, but health, energy, and on and on.

The emperor wears no clothes—more charters, teachers paid for test results, and a national test are solutions that distract us. Not one of these is backed by “evidence”—even if we agreed that test scores were the purpose of education.

Next week, let’s imagine we could mandate a dozen or fewer books that rarely get read by anyone but teachers and educators but deserve a wider public audience?

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

The current effort to develop national standards in English and math is something to which we will surely pay close attention. I understand that you reject consequential curricular decisions made outside the school, but my view is that “it depends.” That's my view of lots of things. Ideas that sound good in theory may turn out to be even better or worse in practice. If you live long enough, you become a devotee of “it depends.”

National standards, in my view, are a good idea, but it all depends on whether they are done well, whether they leave room for teachers to teach without dictating how to teach, whether they truly raise standards of practice across the nation, and whether they avoid narrowing the curriculum. In this country, with our strong tradition of federalism and localism, there are more ways to do national standards badly than to do them well.

The promise of national standards is equity and excellence. Equity because national standards should assure that students across the country, no matter where they live, will encounter the same expectations. Excellence because national standards should (hopefully) identify the learning goals that are common in high-performing nations.

I grant you that this is a tough order to fill. To make equity real, the resources available in poor communities must be sufficient (what used to be called “opportunity-to-learn" standards). One can’t expect kids in poor areas to learn more just because a document got published, nor can one expect kids to do better because officials set the bar higher. Indeed, if performance is already low, setting the bar higher will cause more students to fail.

And it seems paradoxical, if not impossible, to fulfill a mandate that serves both equity and excellence. Maybe this is a circle that can be squared by wordsmiths, but not by most teachers and schools.

So, I grant the good intentions of the groups that hope to create national standards. I know why they want to do it, and I wish them well. At the same time, I am cautious, perhaps even wary, because I see how many terrible state standards already exist and fear that the same dumbed-down, vague blather might be foisted upon the nation and called “standards.”

We will watch as this project develops. But in the meanwhile there was good news this past week. The group that we both support—the Broader, Bolder coalition—released its plan for accountability, after briefing U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. This is indeed a valuable set of ideas that could easily be folded into the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as NCLB rides off into the sunset.

I especially like the proposal for state-directed school inspection teams. People ask, “What could we rely on if we didn’t do all this testing?” Here is a good answer. Establish state inspection teams that regularly visit schools to survey the quality of teaching and learning. Use these inspections to identify schools in need of extra help, and then send in the extra help. A number of other nations use inspection teams, because seasoned educators can diagnose problems and come up with valuable assistance far better than a test alone.

What do you think?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Yes, it seems so obvious to you and me. Using their metrics, the boosters of mayoral control can hardly point to any trend that supports their claims. On NAEP data, the two biggie mayoral control cities show no change, and on graduation data, NYC shows some improvement, but Chicago shows none, even if we go by the city's data. If we look at the data in the recent RAND study, it confirms many others—charter schools do no better re. test scores than their comparable neighborhood schools—some better, some worse. The data on merit pay don’t exist, of course—and it’s already a national priority. But that most comparable jobs use “performance-based” pay just isn’t a fact. The Economic Policy Institute has published a report on the subject that hardly is conclusive, but the logic suggests serious trade-offs that none of the folks in D.C. seem to be even aware of. If you do X, there are “unintended” but inevitable consequences—especially if you’re not even aware of them. (As for the charge that local control leads to more corruption? Having the right friends in the right place may lead to millions under mayoral control vs. hundreds under local control.)

School reformers perhaps should be required to publish “cautions” the way drugs do—if you do this, watch out because….(In bigger print, however.) In fact, it’s an essential “habit of mind” of a well-educated person—paying attention to trade-offs.

Regarding the kind of national standards being proposed is really a national curriculum. One of the arguments for it is a give-away: with national standards, if a kid moves from school x to y, he’ll barely miss a heartbeat. Again, no concerns over unintended consequences—teacher burn-out at the very least. There are forms of standards that could avoid this—if we feel the need for them—such as those CPESS modeled (“habits of mind”) alongside some broad sweeping propositions in each field. More like the Advanced Placement English test (at least the way it used to be). It didn’t require everyone to read the same books or spout the same answers. It directed “attention” to certain themes and ideas so that students could use what they had read and studied to come up with their own responses to timeless issues in literature. Ditto for history or science. These wouldn’t be “specs” for test producers, but specs for schools to consider in designing curriculum and assessments.

The class-size debate isn’t on the “reform” agenda. But it has been assisted by two excellent books. An EPI (Economic Policy Institute) book in the form of a debate and a wonderful study and brief in favor of smaller classes by Garrett Delavan, "The Teacher’s Attention."

NAEP then could do the deeper and broader job of seeing how these play out over time, including a look eight years down the line—in college, on the job, as a voter.

I had a fascinating conversation with a teacher who has been teaching physics for 15 years in L.A. and the surrounding area. She teaches 200 students on most days (in groups of 40 or so), at least three of the classes have the same test-prep curriculum. She feels bored. Ready to “move on”—but to what? I asked her to describe what she wishes she could do—even if it were unrealistic. Her wishes? Small classes so she could explore science more deeply with kids, the opportunity to do some interdisciplinary teaching with colleagues, to be able to approach physics from directions that might not match the state exam, to expand her own intellectual horizons alongside of and separate from her students. What kid wouldn’t say, “amen”?

In such settings, a teacher with 15 years of experience wouldn’t be at the end of her career (and wits) in the classroom. Imagine schools, in collaboration with universities, as the site for teacher-training—prolonged apprenticeships. My friend would then also be teaching other colleagues and would-be colleagues and learning from some interesting scientists on campus.

This was the “reform” idea of the late '80s. But it’s getting harder, not easier, to imagine this happening today. But, you ask—how did we move so far from this vision in such a short time, so that we now have a bipartisan plan for schools that make the old factory-model look innovative? Partial answer: We left practitioners like me and educational scholars like you out of the loop and instead turned to financiers and lawyers!

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (26) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

If you recall, I took some heat from readers when I said some while back that the Obama administration was adopting the same policies as the Bush administration and that Arne Duncan sounds amazingly like Margaret Spellings on issues like accountability and choice.

I just read a fascinating description of "Obama's Bipartisan Triumphs" by Matt Miller, who is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, one of those Beltway think tanks that sets the tone for federal policy. CAP is especially important because its director John Podesta ran the Obama transition.

Miller writes: "In Republicans' eyes, Obama sinned by not fighting to renew the Washington, D.C., voucher program that provided a lifeline to a few thousand desperate families. But the rest of his school agenda hits every Republican erogenous zone. The president is pushing charter schools, higher standards, differential teacher pay, alternative teacher certification, and even tenure reform in ways far beyond anything any president has attempted before. What's more, with Education Secretary Arne Duncan's savvy management of the administration's union ties, Obama has a chance to make more Nixon-to-China progress on ideas conservatives have long urged than has ever been possible."

Miller confirms what I earlier spotted: The Obama agenda is the Republican agenda with a smile and $100 billion in stimulus dollars to encourage districts and states to adopt conservative reforms. I recall back in the 1980s and 1990s, during the Reagan and Bush years, when Republicans wanted choice and accountability, and Democrats fought back with their own ideas. Now Democrats, with an overwhelming edge in Congress, have Republican ideas.

What happened?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (50) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Thanks for being there at the venerable old Julia Richman high school building last week, Diane. So many old friends, some new ones, and a nice net profit for FairTest—the little David facing the Harcourts, McGraws, ETS's, et al Goliaths that sponsored the event. Actually, Diane, FairTest is not anti-test, but skeptical about the instruments used for mass standardized testing and, above all, the uses to which they are put. The same publishers that once warned us against any test prep, other than the practice tests they sent out with the real test, now probably make as much in preparing for tests as testing. They once said that it destroyed the psychometric reliability and validity of the data. Then they discovered that it was either (1) too hard to enforce and/or (2) that test-prepping was too lucrative a market to overlook.

It was only in the middle of my acceptance remarks last week that I realized that my son, Nick, and his father had polar opposite test responses. Nick always found ingenious ways to read test questions and interpret test directions that lowered his scores and Fred found equally ingenious ways to answer them right. Fred was good at the game of testing, but not schooling (he never got a high school diploma, but got into the University of Chicago via testing); Nick reversed it. Son Roger loved standardized tests and managed to avoid doing much schoolwork because he was so good at acing them. (The anecdote that I told, which those in the back like you may not have heard, was Nick’s insistence on covering up the reading passages before answering the questions because he considered it cheating to do otherwise.)

This story posted in an MSP working group by one Eric Jakobbson on June 5th is a delight and a reminder:

In the book of Richard Feynman's letters compiled by his daughter, she tells the story of being told by her mathematics teacher that a particular way of solving a problem that her father showed her, was in fact wrong. So Feynman and his daughter went to see the teacher, who proceeded to lecture Feynman on the mathematics. Feynman then revealed that he was a world-famous theoretical physicist, at which point the teacher was quite embarrassed. But the Feynman letter for which this was the context was the letter of apology that Feynman later sent the teacher, for invoking his stature to intimidate the teacher, rather than sticking to the mathematics to clear up misunderstandings.

Upon discovering the oddities of ”statistics, damn statistics,” I’ve enjoyed noticing every day how the media handles statistical information. Graphs, tables, etc. It takes a lot of perusal to be sure one gets them right. For example, if one graph bar looks enormously higher than the next one, it may mean very little because their starting point distorts the difference. And on and on. The headlines about our declining rate of unemployment offer another instance, and I’ll bet a large portion of the lay public confuses the declining rate of increase with a decline in unemployment. Probably if mathematics is to serve democracy (not just those going into mathematical professions) we need a drastic overhaul of how we teach and what we teach.

Exercising good judgment about complex matters—which is at the heart of education for democracy—includes knowing when to trust and who to trust since our expertise in any particular field is bound to be limited. There’s no escaping this, but it’s surely a serious weakness of democracy. Except for the fact that there’s no easy solution to it that isn’t worse. But it also requires knowing enough about some basic skills and subjects to apply good sense to the reported data or narrative account.

If we understood standardized testing better we’d know, as Daniel Koretz et al remind us in the New York Daily News piece you quote, that shifts in scores cannot and should not follow the bizarre patterns we’re seeing. Two tests of reading are only as valid as they are alike. If one test produces higher scores than another, one or both are misleading—defining reading in seriously different manners, being prepared for it in ways that distort the product, or plainly being cheated on. I claim all three are widespread. The higher the stakes, the greater will all three thrive.

Are there alternatives? This week at my 60th high school reunion, the old friends at my tables, while agreeing with me about tests, insisted that there was no alternative. (Disclosure: They were all good testers.) But there are alternatives. Let’s explore how NAEP could be better used, Diane, and also how schools and professional associations can help school communities—parents and teachers above all—better zero in on local information, down to “how’s my kid doing?” There are schools in NYC and nationwide that have solved the latter, including schools whose founders were in the room the other night—who started small and extraordinary high schools in the early '90s. These include the schools in Julia Richman where we met (Vanguard, International, and Urban Academy), and the schools started to take in kids otherwise served by Julia Richman, including Mary Butz’s The Manhattan Village Academy and Sylvia Rabiner’s Landmark. And many more. Our elaborate alternative to standardized testing is both more educative and more revealing, as a group of renowned psychometricians testified to 10 years ago in a remarkable document directed to the state Department of Education.

Deb

P.S. The “civil rights” trio of Klein, Sharpton, and Gingrich is falling apart—with Gingrich calling Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” because she thinks being Latino has been valuable to her judgment.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I enjoyed seeing you honored as a hero of education by FairTest last week, which established an annual award named for you. If anyone had told me five years ago that I would be at that event, I would have thought them mad. This is what “Bridging Differences” has done for me, I suppose.

At the event, I was surrounded, not surprisingly, by educators who have long believed that standardized tests are more wrong than right, or that they are a crime against children’s nature, or worse. I continue to believe that we can get valuable information from standardized tests and that they can help with diagnosing problems and needs. The information derived from testing can be useful, but lately I have begun to see how often test scores are being misused to punish kids, teachers, and schools and to mislead the public.

As it happened, New York state just released the results of its annual tests of English language arts and mathematics, and the scores soared across the state to an extent that was literally unbelievable.

The state Education Department released the math scores last week. From 2006, when the current testing regime’s trend line begins, to today, the percentage of kids meeting state standards (that is, scoring a 3 or 4 on a four-level proficiency scale) has gone from 65.8 percent to 86.4 percent. In 8th grade, the proportion meeting or exceeding standards leapt from 54 percent to 80 percent. The gains for black and Hispanic students across the state were huge—for black students, from 45 percent to 75 percent, and for Hispanic students, from 51 percent to 79 percent. White and Asian students are already close to the ceiling, at 92 percent and 95 percent respectively.

Some districts saw increases that defy anyone’s wildest dreams: In Buffalo, the proportion passing flew up from 28.6 percent to 63.3 percent; in Rochester, it went from 33.1 percent to 63.4 percent; in New York City, from 57 percent to 82 percent; and Syracuse nearly doubled from 30 percent to 58 percent. All in four short years! At this rate, everyone will be proficient well before NCLB's deadline of 2014.

The news media reported the dramatic gains with a straight face. The superintendents of Rochester and Buffalo basked in the limelight. Mayor Bloomberg said the scores proved the value of his one-man control of New York City's schools, although surely his reign had nothing to do with the even larger gains in other cities in the state. Only the Rochester newspaper asked in an editorial whether these gains made any sense.

Now the New York Daily News has done an analysis of the math tests and concluded that the state tests got progressively easier from 2006 to 2009. Kudos to reporters Meredith Kolodner and Rachel Monahan, who beat The New York Times to this statistical scandal. Kolodner and Monahan had the smarts to turn to Jennifer Jennings of Columbia University, who was formerly the blogger for Education Week known as eduwonkette; Jennings analyzed the tests and discovered that the state has been testing only a fraction of its math standards, and teachers are able to predict which standards will appear on the tests.

Jennings also found that nearly identical questions have appeared every year. “In 2009, at least 14 of the 30 multiple-choice questions on the seventh-grade exam, for example, had appeared in similar form in previous years,” said Jennings. Teachers and principals chimed in and agreed that the questions were predictable and students are taking frequent practice tests that teach them the format.

A teacher explained to me recently that “we drill down into the state test to predict what will be tested," and then students practice those questions, again and again.

My guess is that if the students in New York state were given a math test from another state—one that they had not been primed for—their scores would be much lower.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan keeps telling states and districts that they are “lying” to kids when they tell them that they are doing just fine, but they really are not. Just last week, Duncan said that many states are "lying to children and their parents, because states have dumbed down their standards." New York is a perfect example of what Duncan means. The proportion of students who pass the tests keeps going higher and higher every year, but when the 2007 NAEP scores were released, the state had flat scores in everything but 4th grade math.

What we see in New York state is institutionalized lying, according to Secretary Duncan’s definition. The state is well on its way to becoming a national laughingstock if it keeps up this Ponzi scheme whose victims are its students.

Mark Twain wrote, “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"

The New York State Education Department is showing how easy it is to lie with numbers.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (82) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

You are right. We agree on the civil rights movement’s history. Schools were never the primary focus—but one of many interconnected ones.

The connection between schooling and the economy interests me—but for different reasons than the usual PR-linkage (you’ll make more money). As long as there are jobs that pay poorly there will be “the poor,” but a well-educated underclass will have a better shot at defending their social and economic interests—as citizens. And a well-educated citizenry in general will give us a better shot at a healthy economy. Maybe. It depends on what we mean by being “well-educated.” And the latest headlines about 46 states joining together to decide year by year school curriculum (and tests) is not the way to decide this.

I was talking about the end of childhood play in Washington last week to legislative aides et al—the hours spent in front of TV and the hours spent at prescribed “literacy” tasks. When we speak of the “information age,” or the “knowledge age,” we act as though the brain lived in a world of its own, rather than one interacting all the time (even in sleep) with the world around it—people and things. When we complain that poor children don’t think in abstractions and have limited conceptual understanding, we imagine “concepts” as disembodied, disconnected, and alien to ourselves. It’s the interplay—the “conversation”—the back-and-forth between ordinary “things” and “ideas” that education must build on. TV and worksheets are not appropriate 5-year-old discourse.

We forget that the American economy lived off the ingenuity of “ordinary” people, including many with limited or no formal educations, and not just “the best and brightest.” They sometimes saw themselves as anti-intellectuals—because we mistakenly created a false divide. Too many so-called intellectuals missed the connection between hand and eye and brain—not to mention ear, feet, and stomach! Americans turned their “ordinary” fascination with the world of work into hobbies and into finding new ways to do old things and old ways to do new things as well. They produced actual goods and products—good decently paid work was a source of pride.

In less than half a century we have lost it. “We” (Americans) produce less and less. We give General Motors our taxpayer charity so they can close factories here and open them elsewhere? I was stunned to read that we put a financier in charge of rethinking the auto industry. We need dreamers and tinkerers to invent a new America, not more fancy financial handlers.

Obama, alas, has surrounded himself with all the financial wisdom that got us into this economic meltdown, people who couldn’t predict it a week ahead of time, and he is, alas, doing the same in education. Hosts of rich or would-be-rich young people are now eagerly planning to save our schools as long as they can own a few. (Eva Moskowitz was paid $371,000 for running four charters with a total of 1,000 students in the 2006-07 school year. And, the retiring leader—not the principal, more like a CEO—of the Beginning with Children charters was paid close to $700,000 for her last year on the job.) Yes, it’s scary.

The leaders of business and industry (of which there are not many left) may have messed up our economy, but they still have enough money left over to bring the same mindset to schooling. The masters of manipulating symbolic goods—money in all its varied forms—are now designing our schools with the same manipulative mindset.

But “if they work, Debby,” say a few of my critical friends, "why not?" But what do we mean by “it works?” Oddly enough, even on the measures they have chosen, the answer is, “they don’t.” But it wouldn’t convince me either way. How kids do on school tests that measure (at best) school learning is petty compared with…. It’s not a good stand-in for achievement. I want to see how those kids “produce”—the books they write, the movies they make, the cars they invent, the families they raise, the gardens they plant, the medicine they practice, the songs they sing, the fast train system they put into place, the better ways they show us to grow food, to produce energy, and on and on and on. I want to see graduates coming back to see us who are good cops, teachers, nurses, architects, furniture-makers, inventors of new products and new ideas. (And powerful, noisy, feisty citizens.)

We need studies on the impact of schools on real life. We need not only the quantitative data on their future lives, but the anecdotal, the narrative ones that help us see our uniqueness, not only our uniformity.

I visited a school last week, a charter in D.C. that I’m enthusiastic about. It’s an outgrowth of the work of Experiential Learning (which grew out of Outward Bound) and the Coalition of Essential Schools. It’s got its feet in both as it seeks to grapple with the conflicting pressures of our times. But for all its immense strengths I worried at the lack of time devoted to work/play stemming from children’s own interests and passions, or even the passions of the particular adults. When I re-read what the CPE/CPESS kids said about our school 10 years later I was struck with how often they reflected on the school’s impact on their strong life-enduring pursuits. My granddaughter referred to something similar when she described a seminar with a particular faculty member at her high school: “I literally felt my mind expanding.” He had passed on something no test can measure. But not everyone in class, she noted sadly, felt the same way about her teacher’s philosophical musings. We are not, conveniently, all the same.

I suspect there is a connection between such schooling and real-life achievement, between schools that prepare us for "The 2lst Century" rather than schools that expect us to actively invent it.

Deb

P.S. Diane, I just re-read "Keeping the Promise?: The Debate Over Charter Schools" * with chapters by Ted Sizer, George Wood, and Linda Darling-Hammond that fit nicely into our conversation.
*A Rethinking Schools Publication. 2008.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I was glad to read your comments on the faux-Education Equality Project (EEP), now headed by New York City’s Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and the Reverend Al Sharpton, with the assistance of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The papers used to call Klein and Sharpton the odd couple; now they will have to refer to the leaders as the odd trio.

I have wondered why veterans of the civil rights movement of the 20th Century were willing to sit by silently and see their language corrupted by present-day politicians. The civil rights movement was about dignity, justice, and equality—not just in schooling, but in every realm of life. It was about opening the doors that were shut by law and that blocked access to almost every aspect of public life. It was about securing equality of access to education, but also to jobs, health care, housing, public transit, public facilities of all kinds, and a decent life. It was about equality before the law and the right to vote.

And now, as you so rightly point out, the EEP claims that equality can be defined solely by raising test scores. The EEP’s central argument is that schools alone can produce equality and nothing needs to be done about health care, jobs, housing, or any of the other legacies of a history of racism. The fact that we have a black president, a black attorney general, and in our state, a black governor, is a strong indicator that racism is vastly diminished. But it is not gone, and our society continues to be blighted by our history.

Frankly, I am tired of the claim that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. No, it is not. The leaders of EEP say that the civil rights revolution will be completed if only the test scores of whites and blacks converge; and that if kids take test prep endlessly and conquer the demands of standardized testing, then Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy will be fulfilled.

If the EEP “reformers” were truly concerned about civil rights and not just posturing, they would have a plan to do something about de facto segregation; they would launch a program to make sure that every child had access to good health care and started school ready to learn; they would coordinate between the schools and other government agencies to make sure that families had access to job training programs and social services and the basic necessities of life.

If the EEP “reformers” truly wanted schools to close the achievement gap, they would develop a coherent curriculum to make sure that children in every community and every school had access to the knowledge and skills that are needed to prepare for life in this society. And they would make sure that class sizes were reasonable—smaller where the children need extra attention. And they would promote their belief in the importance of education by taking steps to really improve education, not just by ratcheting up the pressure on principals and teachers to produce higher test scores (by any means necessary).

I cannot take EEP seriously because it does not actually have a civil rights agenda other than raising test scores, and it does not have an educational agenda other than threatening or rewarding teachers and principals. This is a publicity campaign, not a civil rights campaign, nor even a campaign for better education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (40) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

It would have chilled Martin Luther King’s blood to see how the struggle for equality has been narrowed into a race for higher test scores in a society that abandoned Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” We are now one of the least equal and least mobile modem societies. Less racist than we once were, but no less disdainful of “losers.” Our individualistic modes of thought have gotten badly skewed to just mean “it’s your own fault.” Or if blame must be placed, it’s the fault of those on the next rung up the ladder.

Imagine, in 2009—the year that the business and finance worlds have exposed themselves and their shoddy notions of accountability to worldwide shame. Not a day passes without another financial scam hitting the news. Yet they still dare to preach to public school teachers about working in the interests of children vs. adults!!!!!

The poorly attended, but well-covered “civil rights” rally in D.C. led by Gingrich/Sharpton/Klein last week has nothing to say about poverty or the “gap” in black/white incarceration, or income, or health data, not to mention housing and access to paid leisure, or lobbyists.

In a speech made by David Berliner to AERA a few years ago, he opined the following: “School reform…really involves relatively little money and, perhaps more importantly, asks practically nothing of the non-poor, who often control a society’s resources,” and is accompanied by the “good feelings that come from our collective expression of faith in the capacity of the poor to overcome disadvantage on their own.”

When the War on Poverty ended we not only forgot poverty existed with its unequal impact on people of color, but we also soon lost the battle against de facto segregation of schools and communities. It’s no surprise then that the recent recession has hit hardest upon the already poor, and next hardest upon recently middle-class people of color.

I became a teacher in the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the '60s. The current gross distortion of that movement’s message by these masters of Orwellian doublespeak chills and outrages me.

I have spent 45 years demonstrating that schools can do a lot if we focus on challenging the intellectual and social imaginations of the young. But I never had the chutzpa to claim that I could strip away the impact of being a despised loser in a nation that claims all can be winners (if they but will it), nor that we can unlink the relationship between money and schooling. Bah humbug. I never pretended that the advantages we garnered for our own children were of no serious account in the successes they have had in their lives. Neither President Obama nor Arne Duncan can be faulted for giving their own children the best and the most expensive educations. It’s what we can do when we have advantages.

It makes me wince that such a high proportion of Obama’s current team are Harvard graduates. I suspect their secondary schooling was equally segregated, for the “best and brightest”—those born assured in their right to rule. This sense of entitlement, which should be the birthright of all children, is not easy to teach didactically. It early on suggests to some that the larger world is “their world,” one which they (or their powerful friends) can influence. The “others,” children who enter our schools with the comparable skill, savvy, perseverance, and native ability to read the world, are equally busy using their skills to influence the world—the one they were born into. Doing double-work is not easy.

We need to more equally share the same world while also honoring each child’s own special one. When I started teaching kindergarten in Chicago in 1965, the prescribed curriculum for the fall semester was: Los Angeles and Tokyo. I was “caught” in an act of subversion by teaching my 33 kindergarteners about Chicago and Tokyo instead. (I also made the mistake of not just saying, “Oops, I’m sorry.”) The prescribed view of poor and “minority” children in 1965 was similar to one we hold today: they lack “language,” “concepts,” useful families, and Culture. Not true. But there is, indeed, another kind of gap, one that we can take advantage of or view merely as an obstacle. To do so, we’d need very different kinds of schools, different relationships between families and their schools, and far greater respect for those who know the children best. That’s why control needs to be closer to “them”—those most affected by the judgments made. NAEP samples, Diane, should be mandated: to provide information. But the “data” about “Dick" or "Jane” still must be compiled from the bottom up.

My old friend Michael Harrington wrote an influential book in 1962, "The Other America." We still have such an America, and until we confront it, the Sharptons and Gingriches will continue to cover over what needs to be uncovered.

The idea that the terms “civil rights” and “equity” are being used by school reformers to increase segregation, to attack the mothers who struggle with their unchosen poverty and the teachers who work with poor children day in and day out is painful. The public middle school across the street from my apartment in NYC (which my children attended) is being “closed” this fall, replaced by a program for children who score in the top 3 percent on IQ tests: in the name of equity! The gentrification of the West Side that began in the '60s (called urban renewal) has finally reached IS 44. A school that has for more than 40 years been predominantly black and Latino will become virtually all white on the whim of the mayor. We long ago lost the battle to make it a fully integrated school. Now the latest wave of reformers is solving it the 2lst Century way.

NYC has just inaugurated an expansion of “gifted kindergartens” open to all who score above the 90th percentile on IQ tests. To the chancellor’s “surprise,” it’s mostly white. He proclaims, however, big increases in the number of underprivileged accepted into such programs. Yes, indeed, by “reaching out” the numbers have gone from one to three (300 percent increase) in some poor neighborhoods. We’re officially tracking at age 5—along lines of race and class—in the name of “equity.”

You must all read a new study published by the Alliance for Childhood on where we’re heading in the 2lst Century, unless….It’s a shocker. More next week.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

You seem to believe that I was chastising "the poor" for their lack of manners. Not at all! We live in an age when manners, self-discipline, respect for others, civility, and courtesy are in short supply in all parts of society. Like you, I have encountered many children from comfortable, middle-class, and affluent backgrounds who were spoiled, undisciplined, selfish, and disrespectful of others. I agree that no social class has a monopoly on manners and behavior.

The subject came up in the context of David Brooks' column about "The Harlem Miracle." Brooks made the point that the results of this school "vindicate an emerging model for low-income students." He went on to laud the "no excuses" schools where lower-class children are taught in schools with a "disciplined, orderly, and demanding counterculture" that teaches "middle-class values." In distinction to Brooks, I said that all children—not just the children of the poor—should learn the values of self-discipline, respect for others, courtesy, civility, etc.

It is amazing to me that this idea should come as some sort of revelation, or as a prescription for the children of the poor. I went to public schools in Houston and all my teachers insisted on good behavior and other civic virtues. It would not have been possible to run an orderly school without everyone paying attention and behaving in a civil manner.

You are right to take issue with Brooks for treating the "miracle school" as a vindication of Joel Klein and Al Sharpton's Education Equality Project. EEP insists that schools alone—with no support from other institutions—can close the achievement gap. This is claptrap. The Broader Bolder Agenda (which we both signed) has steadfastly maintained that the gap won't close without addressing the need of children for improvements in health care and the well-being of their families. The Harlem Children's Zone was created to address these needs, and to place schooling in the context of families and communities.

Geoffrey Canada has vindicated not the cramped prescriptions of the Rev. Al Sharpton and Chancellor Klein, but rather the vision of BBA.

Regarding accountability, I am on board with your suspicion about the use and mis-use of high-stakes testing. One of the virtues of NAEP is that it is low stakes. I would even say that it is no-stakes. No child, student, or teacher has ever suffered the consequences of doing poorly because of NAEP because the assessment does not identify individual students, teachers, or schools. It gives results for the nation, states, and some cities (that volunteered).

I think our society is in dangerous territory on this subject of accountability. The so-called "reformers," the guys (yes, guys) who call themselves the Education Equality Project, would have the world believe that accountability is the key to improving American education. They think it can be done fast, not incrementally. They think the key to improvement is punishing the bad students, the bad teachers, and the bad schools. Their latest formula, as enunciated by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, is to close down 5,000 schools and re-open them. I wonder where he plans to find 5,000 new principals and thousands of new teachers, or does he just intend to reshuffle the deck?

This approach rests squarely on the high-stakes use of testing. One only wishes that the proponents of this mean-spirited approach might themselves be subjected to a high-stakes test about their understanding of children and education! I predict that every one of them would fail and be severely punished.

We agree that a better approach is needed to assess how well students are learning what they are taught. We agree that current standardized tests are not adequate to the task of determining the fate—whether they should be rewarded or punished—of children, teachers, and their schools.

I think that testing is important and can be valuable, as it helps to spotlight problems and individuals in need of help. But the determinative word here is "help." The so-called reformers want to use accountability to find people in need of termination and schools in need of closure. Let's hope this punishment-obsessed crowd is never put in charge of hospitals!

Unfortunately, events are not breaking in the direction we both prefer. The stimulus bill includes millions so that every state can create a data system. This system will track the test scores of every student, from pre-K to college, and attribute their test score gains (or lack thereof) to their teachers. When the information is available, it will be used and misused. Every teacher (at least those who teach the tested subjects) will have a public record detailing whether his or her students made gains or not. This information will be used to establish calibrated merit pay schemes, so that each teacher will get more or fewer dollars depending on the scores of the year. Is this piecework?

The federal government seems ready to impose a Dr. Strangelove approach on our schools to turn them into "data-driven systems." Not, as you suggest, "data-informed" systems, but data-driven systems. Teachers will certainly teach to the tests, since nothing else matters. The only missing ingredient from this grand data-driven scheme will be education.

Remember when we used to debate "what knowledge is of most worth?" Those were the days.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (23) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

It was wonderful to see you and listen to you last week at the lovely tribute in honor of some special people—including you. Class Size Matters and Leonie Haimson have done an amazing job and their Web site is must reading.

And while I’d like to pursue my last week’s letter—and get your responses—I have to say a few words about your Tuesday blog first.

Geoffrey Canada’s point in developing his Harlem Zone is, in fact, the Broader, Bolder point. He isn’t focused only on schools, but on the health and welfare of a community. Good for him. He fell for the “only tests count” strategy, as I read it, in part out of his own ignorance and in part because his wealthy board insisted on it. It’s the road to fame these days; nothing else will substitute. But, like you, I’ll settle for all schools having the resources and attention that Canada “lavishes” on his kids.

Where you and I are in serious disagreement is on the notion that good manners distinguish the poor from the middle-class or rich! If so—it’s in reverse order to what is too often suggested. The poor kids I encountered in kindergarten were accustomed to more formal and more consistent good manners—whether it was in how to address their elders or how to dress properly. They were less whiney and more obedient. It carried over to the doctor’s office—where middle-class kids acted like healthy brats while children of the poor sat with silent decorum. It breaks down much later.

Children of the poor get tougher and more unmannerly slowly. In time, they lose respect for authority. Perhaps because adults are rarely able (or willing) to protect them. Maybe because many public authorities quite openly treat them and their families disrespectfully. Over time, they come to depend on “the streets” and their “peer culture” for safety, and they imitate the public swagger offered on “middle-class” media of wealthy athletes, talk show hosts, et al.

You and I, Diane, want an intellectually feisty citizenry, and that’s what we don’t offer the poor. I discovered they enjoy it as much, if not more, than their richer peers.

Now, back to accountability.

Current forms surely fit well our age of distrust. Imagine pretending that the entire state of New York has earned unheard-of score increases over one year? Only someone ignorant about testing—or scornful of their audience—would dare release such absurd data. Any respectable scientist with equally startling results would avoid public announcement until engaging in an investigation—like doing a study using a different instrument on a sample of the population. We only need alternatives that do better.

We need to hold schools “accountable” in ways consistent with democracy. My default position (See Nov. 21, 2007, blog!) is “leave it to those closest to the action.” Every time we move a notch further away we need to beware. We lose something each step, so we better be sure what we gain is worth the loss.

Our schools should be exemplars, illustrative of what public scrutiny is all about. They should mirror the kind of thoughtfulness we hope goes on in our classrooms. I’d say schools are ahead of their reformers—politicians and business leaders—in this regard.

Last week, I suggested a more thoughtfully and deepened NAEP in literacy—starting no earlier than 4th grade. With math—which is both a routine skill and an academic subject, it’s more difficult. Maybe a math test at 8th grade that only covered “arithmetic” and some basics of mathematical reasoning, statistics, and odds could be arrived at? But I’m already exposing my prejudice. I’m more worried about the number of adults who can’t tell millions from billions from trillions easily (like me), who don’t know how to examine statistical claims, who are confused by “the odds,” etc. versus those ignorant of algebra and calculus. That’s why I like sampling—because it doesn’t pretend to be holding anyone accountable, but only hopes to be informative. Data can inform, it cannot drive! But, of course, the public is suspicious of sampling because we’ve never used schools to uncover their mystery even though we use the technique ad nauseam in both public life and business. Choices must be made—but none is perfect, and we have to make trade-offs all the time in life. But for the sake of our national health we shouldn’t all be required to make the same trade-offs—except for (I’d hope) demonstrating the connection between our mission and the mission of democracy.

In future weeks, I’d like to explore why we can’t ALL be doing something like “exhibitions” when it comes to “accounting” for individual learning (and external visitations re. individual schools). This month the Coalition of Essential Schools is highlighting a few schools' final exhibitions nationwide. That’s where the work really pays off—in helping teachers, students, and families be less dependent on test scores and more capable of knowing themselves well.

Such approaches allow us to measure the so-called effective skills and habits in the process of measuring the “hard” stuff. It’s a form of assessment that mirrors the values of a democratic society: the exercise of informed judgment and responsiveness to public critique.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

The columnists at The New York Times are deeply engaged in school reform these days. First Nicholas Kristof discovered that the key to high achievement is measuring student test score gains, then paying more to the teachers whose students gained the most. Then Thomas Friedman discovered that Teach for America was the key to national educational greatness, despite its small numbers.

Now David Brooks has discovered "The Harlem Miracle," which is a charter school called Harlem Promise Academy, run by the Harlem Children's Zone. Brooks says that this school has closed the achievement gap. If anyone missed the point, he writes bluntly, "Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap." Brooks asks which city will now take up the challenge to do what this school has done.

This is quite an interesting column, and I highly recommend it. There are lessons for American education, but not necessarily the ones that Brooks points to.

Geoffrey Canada created the Harlem Children's Zone with the intention of saturating a very poor neighborhood with social services, including a charter school, which now has 600 children, from kindergarten to 8th grade. Paul Tough of The New York Times Magazine wrote a fascinating book, "Whatever It Takes," about the travails of the Zone, and especially its charter school. Canada's board, which includes some very wealthy financiers, wanted results, and they wanted them fast. They looked enviously at KIPP and wanted to match its scores. No matter how hard Canada tried, the first class that he admitted just couldn't do it. So after the scores were posted, he called in all the students in that grade, told them he was closing down the grade, and told them they had to find another school.

Apparently things got better, because the school now is getting the good test scores it wanted, which is why David Brooks (quoting a study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie) has hailed it as the "Harlem Miracle." Brooks says the school succeeds because it is a "no excuses" school that teaches middle-class values and stresses good behavior and discipline. The school teaches students "to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands." Also, he attributes its success to the fact that the students go to school for 50 percent more time in the course of a year than the neighborhood public schools.

But let's take a closer look. Canada was interviewed by the CBS program "60 Minutes" about the school, which said that it has small classes and superb facilities, including state-of-the-art science laboratories, a beautiful cafeteria, and a first-class gymnasium. The HCZ raises some $36 million a year, so the school has the best of everything and plenty of money to hire extra teachers and to pay teachers to work longer days and weeks and summers.

And according to the Web site for the New York City schools, the students at the Harlem Promise Academy are somewhat different from those in the neighboring public schools. For one thing, only seven of the 600 students are Limited English Proficient, about 1 percent; that is way less than the district or city average. And, of course, the school can remove those who don't go with its program or who are disruptive, a special privilege granted to charter schools, which write their own rules.

The Harlem Promise Academy has used its deep pockets to reduce class size dramatically. Classes in K-6 are no more than 18 students, much smaller than in the neighboring public schools. Classes in the middle school range between 12 and 20, again much smaller than in the regular public schools.

And the results of the Academy are not quite as dramatic as Brooks has been led to believe. Aaron Pallas of Teachers College found that the gap persists on the school's scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Yet there can be no doubt that the school gets better scores than the neighboring public schools.

Brooks uses the Harlem Promise Academy as a way of illustrating the divide between the Klein-Sharpton Education Equality Project and the group called the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. EEP says that schools alone can close the achievement gap between children of different races, and between children of affluence and children of poverty; the answer, they say, is constant testing, merit pay, and charter schools. BBA says that schools alone are insufficient to overcome the burdens imposed by poverty and that poor kids need preschool, health services, and other supports. Brooks claims that the success of the Harlem Promise Academy suggests that the EEP "reformers" are right. This is odd because the whole premise of the Harlem Children's Zone is to surround children and families with exactly the resources that BBA advocates.

There are lessons to be learned from the success of the Harlem Promise Academy, but they are not the ones that Brooks cites. What are those lessons?

First, spend lots more money. Spend enough so that children in the regular public schools can be in classes no larger than those in the Harlem Promise Academy. Spend enough so that every public school has facilities that are state of the art, and every school has excellent laboratories and a first-class gymnasium.

Second, it is worth exploring why so many public schools in the big cities have been unable to establish a clear, fair, and functional discipline and behavior policy. Is it because of long-forgotten court orders? Have public schools become so wrapped up in procedural rights and processes that they can't provide an orderly environment for learning? Deborah, you recall as I do the claims made in the 1960s and 1970s that it was "white imperialism" to impose middle-class values on poor and minority children. Now there is a growing movement to do exactly that. My own view is that schools are by definition middle-class. If they are good schools, they teach the knowledge, skills, and behavior that one needs to function well in work, in higher education, and in life. So, there is a common-sense element to the "no excuses" mantra.

But I don't think that our schools need to be boot camps to teach courtesy, civility, respect for others, self-discipline, and other virtues necessary for democratic life. If all schools did that and had the same resources as Harlem Promise Academy, there would be many miracles.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (44) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I think it’s unlikely that the fans of mayoral control are open to persuasion. But thanks, Diane, for relentlessly pursuing them. We’re in for lots of nonsense in the name of reform.

Arne Duncan is planning a contest for a new name to replace the unpopular No Child Left Behind. It’s the name, apparently, that he sees as the problem. Actually, it’s the only thing I like about the bill! Meanwhile Sharpton and Klein and Co. (EEP) are planning a rally in D.C. to end poverty (hurrah), by…"closing the testing gap.” And, careless reporters (see May 5th AP story by Libby Quaid) claim that NCLB has had success at doing so.

It was interesting also to read James Forman Jr. in the May-June issue of Boston Review (a publication worth getting). He explores the “gap” between those who want to focus just on schools to create equity (EEP) and those who see health and income gaps as part of the problem (Broader Bolder). But the heart of the article is about KIPP. He connects their work to that of CPESS and "The Power of Their Ideas"! The coupling was intriguing (and flattering) and relates to the theme of this letter: the confusing landscape of reform, reformers, and their messages!

The “gap focus” probably accounts for the renewed interest in early-childhood education. But, alas, it usually translates into just starting traditional schooling at an ever earlier age. Sunday’s NY Times Magazine had a piece ("Kindergarten Cram" by Peggy Orenstein) about what’s happening to our kindergartens—and I might add—to nursery schools and home life, too! And she’s talking about the elites! It’s not a new subject—David Elkind wrote "The Hurried Child" 20 years ago. We’re obsessed, pressing children at younger and younger ages in the name of raising standards, and now closing the achievement gap! So it was nice to read Orenstein’s sensible comments about the topic, based on a very important study done by Joan Almon and Ed Miller at D.C.’s Alliance for Childhood. Read it—and weep.

Alarm over an endless list of recurrent crises—some real and some questionable—is the style of the day. Unfortunately, being impatient is bad for child-rearing, and bad for society-rearing also—as Elkind reminded us. The latest issue of Educational Horizons (the magazine of Pi Lambda Theta) has a short piece questioning the significance of another crisis: the U.S. “lag” in TIMSS international math scores and one on how deciding to focus on four-year high school graduation rates has created a heightened “crisis.”

False alarmism is as dangerous as false complacency, I’m discovering. (Maybe it’s just my age?) Like red alerts, false alarms lose their sting.

I thought of you last week, Diane, at the Education Writers Association sessions in D.C. The one I participated in was largely focused on national standards. I found myself resisting the PR-induced consensus that is being invented. It’s an area where you and I have historically disagreed, but I suspect you’re a little suspicious, too.

The Constitution always requires reinterpretation and sometimes even amendment. But I’m an “originalist” in legislating school reform. The odds of harmful interference are just too great. And the thinning out of all local institutions is worrisome.

Of course, I have supported some shifts toward centralized decision-making re. schooling. Segregation was a cause important enough to err on the side of state and federal intervention. So was unequal funding for low-income schools. But much as the Boston integrators are among my heroes, the impact of their sweeping mandates—eliminating all neighborhood schools—did not turn out as they hoped. There are virtually no integrated schools in Boston today. In so far as NCLB was an equity law, the same might be said of it. In neither case did we pay much heed to those on the ground in considering how it might play out. I feel the same about national standards. We may unwisely rush into this, under the battle cry of “crisis” and end up reproducing the worst of NCLB.

I think if we do not want or believe it necessary to dumb down the best of schooling in the interest of equalizing it—there are wiser alternatives. I’d like to roll out a few. For starters:

1. We could strengthen the NAEP—as a tool that helps us see trends; that notes significant differences between states, regions, and subgroups; and that can put the spotlight on particularly interesting items that deserve closer attention. Especially re. literacy where, post-4th grade, there is perhaps 99 percent agreement defining it. We could go back to some of the ideas that old-timer Ralph Tyler had for NAEP —interviews, focus groups, projects, etc. that could provide more insight than bubbled answers can. My discovery that many 3rd graders who scored poorly on reading tests would do no better if the passages and items were read aloud is, for example, worth pursuing. As was my discovery that some wrong answers suggested good reading. Such an approach, based on sampled populations and using sampled items, can avoid high stakes use while also providing richer national data. (We could require states that want federal funds to join NAEP?)

After that it gets harder, so I’m going to roll out the next four ideas next week!

Deb

P.S. Our perennial disagreement about NAEP largely regards the wisdom in setting so-called benchmarks—and the labels attached to them. Otherwise, the exams have some of the limitations of any multiple-choice standardized instrument—but not its gross high-stakes misuse as a measure of individuals.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

The good news is that most of the American people haven’t lost their common sense. And, above all, those closest to “the action”—parents, teachers, kids, and their families, plus a majority of those who work closely with schools or are “students” of schooling—haven't. What they have lost is the power to be widely heard. The Education Equality Project et al are doing their best to “brainwash” us into thinking we all agree.

If there ever was a time when I appreciate the existence of organized “teacher voices,” it’s the days we’re living through. Thank goodness for teachers' unions—weak as they are. The attacks on “big labor” are always intriguing. The labor leaders relish it because it’s hard to boast about powerlessness. Their opponents like it so they can blame unions.

You are right: The McKinsey report presents an argument for ending poverty. But you wouldn’t know it by the press it has received. A nation known worldwide for its egalitarian ideals is now least equal among modern societies; it's even near the bottom on social mobility. So, it’s no surprise that it shows up also on test scores, as we’ve known since the invention of standardized testing a century ago. For some of them (Joel Klein) to now claim that NAEP is less reliable than the N.Y. State tests is absurd (For more, see the blog Skoolboy, on the Gotham Schools Web site, by Aaron Pallas).

At a time when the Big Boys have devastated our economy, in ways that affect us all, but are hardest—of course—on the most vulnerable, they are upping their propaganda: "It’s not our fault?” Poverty has been redefined: it’s the side effect of poor schooling! All those side effects would be cured—cheaply—if we required schools to perform properly. Schools are suffering from attracting the wrong people to teaching—“sub-par” people, in Chancellor Klein’s words—and too much allowed leeway in the practice of their mission.

They may succeed—Campbell’s Law suggests that possibility. Test scores could go up if we get the right set of tests, well-aligned with universal lesson plans, and the right incentives for sticking to them! But we might not be one inch closer to eliminating poverty or raising the level of intelligent decision-making. That’s where McKinsey gets it wrong. The magical effect on our economy of higher test scores depends on the existence of enough jobs that pay better; jobs that “require” better-educated people and that can’t be outsourced more cheaply. And scores that don’t rank! Their calculations are unbelievably naïve—at best. It’s as though if everyone’s scores went up, then everyone’s wages would, too. Who will make the hospital beds, sweep the floors, and mow the lawns? And why shouldn’t they be well-paid, too?

Andrew Delbanco’s story in the latest New York Review of Books notes that “more than 400,000 students nationally from families with incomes below $50,000” met the standards for four-year college admissions and yet were unable to attend because of financial barriers. A rich kid with low scores is more likely to go to a four-year college than a poor student with high scores, he says.

I regularly meet “well-educated” people who claim that, were it not for NCLB, they wouldn’t have known that a test score gap existed. The claim, at best, is a brutal reminder of the existence of “two Americas.” Where have they been for the past 100 years?

As long as we use test scores as our primary evidence for being poorly educated we reinforce the connection—and the bad teaching to which it leads. If by some course of action we could get everyone's score the same—even by cheating—I’d be for it, so we could get on to discussing the interactions that matter in classrooms and schools: between “I, Thou, and It.” I’ve spent 45 years trying, unsuccessfully, to shift the discussion to schools as sites for learning. Such a “conversation” might not produce economic miracles, but it would over time connect schooling to the kind of learning that can protect both democracy and our economy. Because that’s where schools are (or are not) powerful.

My definition of being “well-educated” varies from day to day—but it focuses on a more equal capacity for everyone to be heard in the discourses of power. For rich people, money (and connections) can substitute for smarts. They can “buy” lobbyists, bribe politicians, not to mention the influence of just hobnobbing. But the rest of us need to organize and deliberate wisely, so that we, too, can pay lobbyists and “bribe” politicians with our more numerous votes and voices.

So I judge a school in part by the preparation it provides for entering into the arguments that shape our politics and our economics. “The academics” at best should give us the tools and habits of mind to act wisely. Mission Hill laid out five such “habits:” What’s the evidence? Is there another viewpoint that fits the evidence as well or better? Is there a pattern? What if…? And why does it matter? We organized our schools, our curriculum, faculty culture, and graduation requirements to match such habits. No student leaves our schools without publicly demonstrating them over and over again.

It doesn’t level their test scores—although it improves them. But it levels some real-life challenges over the long haul. I don’t want to pretend that even our greatest schools will by themselves reverse the wisdom of an old Billie Holiday song: “Them that’s got shall get; them that’s not shall lose. So the Bible said and it still is news”…….to some folks. Unless both the "gots" and "nots" decide they have a common interest in changing the rules of the game, gross inequalities will over time erode our economy and our democracy.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Ah yes, miracle promises are dangerous.

In the bad old “decentralization” days, we were told local “corruption” ran rampant—thus the need to centralize. Your account of the Al Sharpton/Joel Klein deal, not to mention all the no-bid contracts under Klein, the high-paid consultants, etc., makes the bad old days seem pretty good. It’s true that for me 1975-95 were heady times: I thought we might break the mold! The innovative work going on in District 4, District 2, and the Alternative High School division were the result of a lively teacher conversations occurring all over the city. We mistakenly thought we were on a roll toward serious bottom-up change made possible by some classy top-down superintendents.

I’ve been rereading work published by the old CUNY (City of New York) education department, where I first learned to think deeply about education. “Building on the Strengths of Children,” published in 1981, collects the work of some wonderful teachers—of children and adults. “The child learns to recognize objects only by working with them, that is, by transforming them in one way or another,” notes science educator Hugh Dyasi in an essay on Jean Piaget. The central role of childhood is constructing a “picture of reality,” they note. This in turn requires time of a sort which schooling rarely allows author after author reminds us. The alienation of learners from their own learning that results from trying to speed up learning is profound, they argue. Every essay is a gem.

I’ve tried over the years to practice teaching in ways that respect a child’s prior picture of “reality.” But harder still has been to transfer that mindset to my fellow adults. I’m much quicker to label them, with all the stereotypes such labels carry with them. I’m much quicker to try to overwhelm them with expertise, rather than struggle to understand where they are coming from. I get madder at them. But building a good school means to remember that teachers, like students, need the time and power to explore alternate realities.

I am truly having a hard time “getting” it when it comes to public gullibility about NYC's Bloomberg/Klein. But it’s there. Ditto for the public’s innocence about test scores, or the theory that poor kids of color need military school discipline while privileged kids learn best in open and respectful settings. I just don’t “get” why so few of my fellow New Yorkers can’t see through the false data that their mayor is presenting them.

I shouldn’t be so shocked. After all, I’ll bet most educated people still believe in Rod Paige’s Houston miracle notwithstanding exposure to the truth. Ditto for Paul Vallas in Chicago. He was acclaimed the hero of another miracle, was briefly exposed, and then went on to lead school reform in Philadelphia (where he failed) and now in New Orleans. And on and on. Arne Duncan enjoys the same PR glow, with equally dismal real data behind him. Michelle Rhee will be next.

One thought that maybe helps explain public denial:

When I came back to NYC with three school-age children in 1966, friends told me that “no one” sent their children to public schools anymore. Do the 1.2 million children attending public schools come from some other planet, I asked? Of course, you and I, Diane, know what they meant. And, this fact—which is true in D.C., Chicago, Houston, and New Orleans—helps explain the flim-flam. Those who “make” the news have only the PR data concocted for them to write about. They have no “reality” with which to check it out. It makes them dumb in much the same way as children are made “dumb” when they have no experience with the realities we want them to believe in. The media has constructed its own reality with the help of some powerful players.

The enormous disrespect for practitioners and education scholars—and ordinary parents with kids in our public schools—makes it easier. They are written off as less than the “best and brightest.” Plus “self-interested.” Some combination of Harvard and Wall Street smarts are seen as all-purpose disinterested expertise, fit for any purpose. The master key. While disregard of educators has a long history, and demonizing of teacher organizations is hardly new, it has reached new heights. A mere 20 years ago one could not imagine school systems would be run by people who never practiced or studied schooling or education. The assumption that “smarts” based on hands-on knowledge is valuable has lost its historic place in our view of reality. Law and business and finance smarts have ruled the day for this generation. At a cost. And not just in schools.

We have forgotten that we were once a nation of do-ers, makers, creators with ingenuity and perseverance and respect for “manual” labor. That’s what distinguished us from “the old world.” The aristocratic disdain for getting one’s hands dirty was “un-American.” But we have lost that special American strength. There is, as Mike Rose and Jean Piaget remind us, no conflict between “hand” smarts and “mind” smarts. They go best together. Our schools and our economy—and, above all, our democracy—require us to restore the balance.

Where, Diane, do we start on this journey? Perhaps with “the facts, ma’am, just the facts.” What have the past 10 years of mayoral control actually produced?

Deb

P.S. How about our setting up an easy-to-read chart: What the mayor says and what the real data say?

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (39) | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: Bridging Differences is back today after a week's publishing break.

Dear Deborah,

We in New York City were treated to an amazing show in early April. A group that calls itself the "Education Equality Project" held a conference and attracted such stellar educators as Arne Duncan, Joe Biden, Newt Gingrich, Margaret Spellings, and Michelle Rhee. The conveners of the conference were New York City's Chancellor Joel Klein and the Reverend Al Sharpton. The purpose apparently was to talk about how important it is to close the achievement gap between whites/Asians and Blacks/Hispanics. On this count, no one disagrees. The problem, as ever, is how to accomplish this laudable goal.

Chancellor Klein and Reverend Sharpton (dubbed "the odd couple" by the New York City media) have the answer: more testing, merit pay, and charter schools. This combination and a willingness to knock down the teachers' unions, derided as "adult interests" whose agenda conflicts with "children's interests," are the key strategies that they believe will lift up the scores of poor and minority students and close the gap.

There was a bit of an embarrassment for the EEP a day or so after the conference concluded** when columnist Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News published an article saying that a hedge fund in Connecticut that was interested in obtaining control of various gambling enterprises in New York State had generously contributed $500,000 to "encourage" Rev. Sharpton to get interested in improving education. It seems that the money was contributed to some group called Education Reform Now, which passed it on to Democrats for Education Reform (an advocacy group for charters, also headed by a hedge-fund zillionaire), which passed it on to the Education Equality Project or maybe directly to Reverend Sharpton's organization, the National Action Network. Being somewhat unsophisticated about how that kind of money gets passed from one hand to the next, I am not sure about the money trail, but Mr. Gonzalez nailed it.

What is the evidence for the formula offered by Klein and Sharpton? The great success of New York City under the reign of Mayor Bloomberg. This celebration made me think that it was time to publish a critique of the miracle of New York City. I sat down and wrote an article for The New York Times, debunking the Bloomberg-Klein claims and showing that the test scores and graduation rates have been artificially inflated. My article appeared on Friday, April 10.

Sad to say, Secretary Duncan—who likes to expostulate about the importance of data—swallowed the New York City claims without any verification. As I showed in the article, Secretary Duncan has been on a crusade to persuade the nation's urban mayors that they should follow Mayor Bloomberg's lead and they, too, can push through radical reforms without dissent. They, too, can close public schools and replace them with charter schools. They too will see great results.

The only missing piece of his argument is that New York City has not achieved great results. Instead of truly raising the graduation rates with better-prepared students, it has been gaming the system, practicing "credit recovery," whereby students get graduation credits for courses they failed or never even attended. The city further boosts the graduation rate by adding in GED students and not counting students who were discharged (many of whom were actually dropouts). As a result of all this gamesmanship, the graduation rate keeps climbing, yet 3/4 of the graduates who enter our local community colleges need to be remediated in basic skills. Remember that social promotion was eliminated? Not.

This is not improved education. It is statistical legerdemain.

Why do people swallow this swill? There are many reasons, but most of them come down to the supine media that is too lazy to check facts. And, of course, there is our complacent, compliant, and complicit State Education Department, which loves to claim victory, even when kids are learning nothing.

What a sad state of affairs.

Diane

**P.S.: I got the date wrong for the publication of Juan Gonzalez's article in the New York Daily News. It appeared on April 1, 2009. The conference co-sponsored by Chancellor Klein and Rev. Sharpton started the following day.

Posted by educationweekly at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

My own evolution, politically, has always been influenced by the realization that I might be in a minority! In fact, maybe some of us are born with that realization (even if shielded from it by a family surrounding in which we have a hard time imagining another reasonable viewpoint).

But democracy appeals to me in part because there’s always another chance—maybe next year. It‘s also an incentive for trying to learn a little more and thus being more persuasive. My exaggerated belief in the power of education rests perhaps on the hope that reason can overcome prejudice, meanness, and short-sightedness. And, if I’m not naturally a part of the majority, then I’ll need even more “reason” on my side.

So I can embrace “standards” published by the profession that have weight, the power of expert ideas, but not the power of coercion. Democracy works best when it has the luxury of being non-coercive. A sampling system of testing that adds to our informed decision-making seems relatively harmless. Especially if the nature of the sample allowed one to include some scripted conversation that helps us make sense of answers.

Seeds of doubt are always healthy; or almost always; or at least sometimes healthy!

The startling thing about Bloomberg, Broad, Klein, et al is that they appear never to have a seed of doubt—even when they reverse direction, they explain nothing and march ahead with equal confidence. The way folks caved in to Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to over-ride the public referendum against third terms is unbelievable. Chavez and Putin and others like them failed—with their even greater coercive power—in their attempt to continue their elected posts beyond the term limits. Something is rotten in NYC that this could happen here, of all places.

These Billionaire Boys—as you call them—remind me of adolescents with utopian plans for the future. They are not yet inclined to include a concern for the trade-offs involved in their utopia. I excuse 13-year-olds when they fall into such traps, but for us to be at the mercy of such logic by adults with serious power is frightening. “Why can’t everybody agree with me?” is hardly an evil complaint, but one hopes that a good education will overcome the egocentric sentiment. It hasn’t for Rhee/Klein and Company.

E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s Op-Ed dream in Sunday’s New York Times of having every child follow his curriculum and then a national test that is aligned to it is another typical utopian’s adolescent dream. I forgive him because I, too, have such dreams on occasion. Fortunately, neither of us has the power.

The evidence is clear: there has been no substantial improvement in test scores or graduation rates over the past decade as we follow the agenda of the neo-Reformers. Little squiggles up, down, and flat again is the pattern for almost the entire nation—on precisely the measurement tools upon which they have built their whole case. Would the board of directors of a “real business,” after being told their business was in a state of disaster, crisis, etc., be satisfied with such flat data???? How come we’ve bought it, against all the instincts of the wisest educational practitioners and scholars? Maybe some rethinking about “accountability” is past due.

Even the business world has, alas, not been sufficiently shaken in their confidence by the failure of their own accountability system in their own sphere of expertise to wonder, “Could we be wrong?”. Instead, they are blindly prepared to see our educational system go over the cliff with them.

To the one or two readers who asked me whether I’m not behaving like a defender of the status quo. No! I have spent 43 years critiquing it and working on the ground to change it. Even if just a little bit. But the one thing I cannot be accused of is embracing schools-as-they-are, have-been or will-be if we don’t support dramatic changes in the relationships between teachers, parents, and learners.

The kind of dramatic changes I want go in precisely the opposite direction than the current round of impatient pro-business reforms has taken us. I don’t need test scores to see that schools have become more boring, not less, and relationships thinner, not deeper. My ideas will—I always recognized—even if more vigorously supported, take a long time to “convert” the vast majority. Which is as it should be. And maybe, just possibly, I’m wrong, and we shouldn’t aim at that at all. Maybe we can live quite well with democratically governed schools and systems that take different paths, mutually respectful of their differences.

I spent a few days last week visiting a public school in Ann Arbor—called the Open School—now in its 26th year. We watched a movie—rather skeptically—about “democratic schools” of the Summerhill variant. It didn’t convert me, but it reminded me of how little danger democracy gone perhaps “too far” poses compared with what passes as our ordinary and/or neo-Reformed public schools. I’m not inclined these days to worrying a lot about the potential sins of too much democracy.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

But let’s not postpone our discussion about national standards for too long. It mostly boils down to my fear about official ideologies and centralized power over ideas. Plus, our old disagreement about intellectual “neutrality” and objectivity.

I found your analysis of Obama’s education policy intriguing: pro-spending, but largely along lines Chicago, NYC, et al have pioneered.

My disagreements are deep-seated. I want a public system of schooling that has local bases and biases—where we don’t all have to agree on what “social justice” teaching means. It’s a risk—but democracy rests on that risk. The messiness of different standards is, to me, a blessing that creates escape hatches for trying something different—within broad limits.

The power of Big Money and the Big State over knowledge and its distribution is immense—including in schooling. My early image of charters was precisely that they might be counter-powers, not so different than what in Boston we called Pilots and in NYC Alternative schools: mom-and-pop ventures, built around a few people with interesting ideas and a constituency that wants to join them in carrying it out. In the case of Pilots and Alternatives, they came under the jurisdiction of local labor-management; charters depend on an arrangement with the State.

But somehow we’ve gotten the worst of both private entrepreneurs and public bureaucrats. Transparency has never been harder to find, whether in our highly centralized urban systems or our continuously enlarging charter sector. There are no serious checks and balances, and lots of private “edu-chains” supported by public funds. There is no “public.” Thus, with virtually no public input, NYC’s mayor is allowed to close neighborhood schools and replace them with charters. Parents meanwhile try to figure out how to manipulate a bewildering array of choices while schools are “empowered” to restrict entrance only to high test-scorers, good writers, whatever. In the name of “fairness and equity” we have more selectivity along racial, class, and ability lines, more (white) gifted classes, and fewer than ever minorities in the prestigious high schools. And flat test scores and rising dropout rates.

The big business mindset, so destructive nationwide, is being offered a free hand in our schools. Schools are “delivery” systems, teachers are deliverers of curriculum, principals are CEOs. It’s an intensification of the old factory-model for new technology factories. Local empowerment in today’s schools usually means more power to the principal and less for the line workers, students, or parents—now seen as obstructers of progress.

We’re told the AIG exec bonuses weren’t tied to performance, but school teachers' salaries should be. And Eli Broad, long associated with AIG, is giving advice to our schools? (See Mike Klonsky’s Small Talk, March 17.)

Garbage in, garbage out is an adage from the early years of computers. At their best, as Walter Stroup so clearly lays out in "What Bernie Madoff Can Teach Us About Accountability in Education" in Education Week this week. Even respected tests are insensitive to schooling—by design. Stroup's succinct piece is a must-read. To make matters worse, when the stakes are high enough you can rely on doctored books. It’s called Campbell’s Law. It reminds me of the old Soviet system—with five-year goals that were met on paper, but rarely in reality. In the end, the Russian people turned the tide in WWII, but only after the State’s vaunted economic power was exposed as a lie. We’ll someday face a similar fate re. education’s cooked data.

You can’t make an omelet, as the expression went in the 1930s, without breaking eggs (meaning people). Making a “revolution” in a labor-intensive field is hard to do without abandoning democracy. Well-intentioned reformers have always seen resistors as obstacles that can best be dealt with by sending them to the “rubber rooms” or their equivalent. It’s a process which views organized teachers and organized parents as obstacles. Temps who move in and out every 2-5 years have many advantages—no retirement pay, for example, and they are less prone to loyalty to a union.

NYC's Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have a vision that requires a series of changes, one quickly following another, close control over data, and little or no discussion so that by the time they’ve “finished” we have no idea what they have wrought—or why. The old reality on the ground has simply disappeared.

A decade of the current bipartisan theory of change, which Obama seems to have bought into, has produced almost no positive results—even in test scores and graduation rates—although claims are made. In NYC class, race and “ability” segregation is one byproduct. The demise of neighborhoods is another. Neighborhood schools are first ignored and then dismantled without community approval. You and I, with our unreasonable hope for schools that put intellectual power in the hands of “the people” are not on the winning side, Diane.

I listened, last week, to some Finnish educators describing what they’ve accomplished by taking the exact opposite path—during approximately the same decade. They have no standardized test (although they do sampling) and have gone from mediocre to No. 1 in math and science. They don’t start formal reading or math teaching until kids are 7 years old, but they’re at the top internationally by age 10! (They provide a classy system of child care starting at age 4.) And they have maintained schools as sites for local community-building. Granted they have a more homogeneous population, more supports for children and families, and, like Singapore, they are the size of NYC. But unlike Singapore they are also a democracy, which should be of special interest to us.

Forgive me for being doom and gloom this week.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

Last week, I attended three different conferences in Washington, D.C. Not something I like to do, as I really do hope to finish my book in a few months. One was the “21st-Century skills” panel at Common Core, which we discussed. Then there was a panel discussion of accountability, in connection with the release of a report called “The Accountability Illusion” by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. And, most recently, I participated in a day-long celebration of the 20th anniversary of the National Assessment Governing Board. (Podcasts of this last event should be available at the NAGB Web site.)

I was fascinated with the many insightful responses by our readers to the topic of 21st-Century skills—or to be correct, the movement associated with an organization called P21 (the Partnership for 21st Century Skills). How can anyone be opposed to creativity, flexibility, media literacy, critical thinking, and so on? I certainly am not. Yet I have been around the track for too many years to feel comfortable with the way this is being promoted by technology companies and publishers and others with a vested interest, even a financial interest. The fact that its designated spokesman is a public relations executive doesn’t make me any more comfortable.

Many of our readers offered excellent examples of stupid activities that are being promoted to teach these “skills,” as though no one before the 21st Century ever learned to think or be creative. I continue to have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that this is just another misguided attempt to dumb down American education, as if we can stand any more of it.

I certainly agree with you that almost any subject matter can provoke serious intellectual work. Where we differ is in our views of whether the subject matter should be specified in advance. I assume—maybe I am wrong—that you oppose a set curriculum. I think that it is important to have a set curriculum, one that defines the big ideas and topics that students will encounter. Some 20 years ago, I helped to write the California History-Social Science curriculum for grades K-12, and it is still in use today. Given the enormous mobility of families, it is useful for teachers and students to know what the curriculum will be in each grade. Knowing “what” is to be taught does not tie teachers’ hands. Nor does it tell them how to teach. It just assures that there is coherence and continuity in what children study, no matter what city or community they live in.

For example, if the topic is the Brown vs. Board of Education decision (1954), teachers can come up with many different ways to convey the historical and political context of the decision, the reasons for the decision, the ideas that it embodied, as well as the reaction to it and its relevance to today. Students can read original documents, hold mock trials, conduct research on the Internet, write essays, interview people, take field trips, read biographies, on and on. The possibilities are endless for creative teaching. Every one of the so-called “21st-Century skills” could be brought to bear while learning about important events in American history.

But we agree that the “stuff,” the “content,” the “it” of David Hawkins’ triangle must be there. The skills can’t be learned in a vacuum; one can’t think critically without having something to think about and enough information to compare, contrast, and evaluate different points of view. And, as far as I am concerned, it is unacceptable to tolerate ignorance of the important events and ideas in our nation’s history. These events and ideas are important in shaping our civic and historical literacy, which all of us need.

A few words about the discussion of accountability at the Fordham Institute. The point of the report that was issued was that “proficiency” means different things in different states; that a school that is failing in one state would be considered passing in another state. This is hardly surprising, since NCLB pursues a strategy in which all 50 states and various territories are encouraged to set their own standards and their own definitions of proficiency. What perturbs me is that these days a discussion of assessment and federal legislation can go on for hours without any reference to education at all.

It seems that the crucial decisions about accountability will now be in the hands of psychometricians, economists, and actuaries—oh, and let’s not forget the ideologues, whose idea of accountability is to fire teachers and close schools.

We agree about “data informed, not data driven.” Data are in the saddle now, to the detriment of kids and their education. Data are being treated as objective facts, when they really are the numbers produced based on assumptions. If the assumptions are wrong, the data are useless. Our schools are now being evaluated and swamped by a tidal wave of useless data. We need to re-examine our assumptions.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Thanks for “nailing” Nicholas Kristof. Another very well-meaning ally. With friends like Kristof we... .

Kristof ought to read Rothstein et al more carefully on the complexity of the relationship between the economy and schooling. The lapse between schooling data and economic data is one source of error. Confusing correlation with causation is another. Besides, if all the people in the world became well-educated, would that be tragic?

What data is Kristof referring to that shows that teachers with a better education and who stay in teaching longer don’t “teach” better? What does “teach better” mean? Suppose it turned out that college degrees don’t raise productivity in engineering, medicine, law, Wall Street, or politics?

There’s been a lot of talk on the business pages of our media about the “data problem.” It ought to give the “data-driven” school reformers pause to reconsider. Maybe we are just creating a bubble that too will burst if we continue to base our actions on the belief that scores on standardized instruments are evidence of success.

Even the technical meaning of a “good test” is open to dispute. Margo (a frequent commenter on our blog) states that at least they are more “reliable” than professional judgment. How can she tell?

I want a nation of citizens who are less inclined to think that the “truth” can be captured in one of four feasible answers—a,b,c, or d. I mention “feasible” because in constructing such tests it is crucial not to have one “right” and three absurd alternatives. They are designed to produce differentiated responses. There’s a peculiar science/logic to this arrangement. On both IQ/ability and traditional achievement tests we’re promised ahead of time a population that fits a normal curve. We’ve replaced these in K-12 schools with judgments about benchmarks, which must still rest on a numerical rank order based on a, b, c, d. The big new invention is that there is often no technical back-up for the validity or reliability of such exams. Many big-name psychometricians shun them.

All “reliability" tells us is that the student would get a similar score on a similar test if given at another time or place. The “garbage in,” “garbage out” dilemma. All scores on old or new tests also have a substantial measurement error. Like Wall Street's numbers, we have no independent basis for relying on the scores—validity is in the eye of the beholder (human judgment). Since they correlate with family income, wealth, parental education, and race and are gatekeepers to prestigious institutions and jobs, it’s a circular game.

When parents told me that their child seemed to read well, but scored poorly, they often believed the indirect evidence (test score) and not the direct evidence (listening to their children read). Parents had been trained to distrust judgment and rely on “real evidence”. That’s how I became a testing maven—when my own 8-year-old son “failed” a 3rd grade reading test even though I “knew” he could read fluently.

We need schools that “train” our judgment, that help us become adults who are in the habit of bringing judgment to bear on complex phenomenon. This includes judging which expertise to “trust”—and defending such choices; it includes being open-minded about one’s judgments, as well as one’s favorite experts. It includes acknowledging that even experts must live with a substantial degree of uncertainty.

"I think we are lying to children and families when we tell children that they are meeting standards and, in fact, they are woefully unprepared to be successful in high school and have almost no chance of going to a good university and being successful." —Arne Duncan, U.S. News and World Report

Duncan seems more comfortable lying with statistics? What, after all, is his definition of a “good college” but one that’s hard to get into—thus consigning most people to failure. Similarly what’s his definition of “success”? Doing “better than average”? Thus consigning most of us to failure. I know too many successful adults who don’t meet Duncan’s definition to call such teachers liars.

Some folks (Diane?) think that my skepticism about tests should make me a fan of a single national test. All of these dilemmas are even worse, after all, when we are dependent on data collected from states using 50 different tools, each reporting scores in different ways, and on and on. I think I’d be a sympathizer if we could go back to the old NAEP tests, developed in the 1930s, which tried to use sampling in the interest of collecting better data—standardized prompts and open-ended tasks—that opened the door to more authentic responses. Such an instrument could provide some common data out of which we might develop uncommon responses and interpretations. But NAEP went from a promising beginning to being another standardized test. In our eagerness for simpler data, when only complex data will do, we lost a useful research instrument.

We turn classroom teaching into a “test-like” setting. When we script teaching and pre-code children’s responses we have simply another form of standardized testing. I see it daily: when teachers tell children to put on “their thinking caps.” The kids shift into that special “school-mode” of so-called thinking: trying to guess what answer the teacher wants to hear.

It’s not what was needed in the 19th Century, or the 2lst.

Deborah

P.S. Take a look at Imagining Possibilities on just this subject.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (1)

Editor's Note: Bridging Differences resumes today.

Dear Deborah,

Happy New Year to you and to our readers. 2009 is shaping up to be an important year for American education. We will soon have a new Secretary of Education, a new voice in charge of the nation's bully pulpit. There will be much for us to discuss and debate as the policies of the new administration are rolled out. I have read a great deal about Arne Duncan in the press, but still don't have a clear idea about where he stands on important questions and how tied he is to the horrible business model applied to schools. By business model, I refer to the belief that test scores are the bottom line, that schools can be closed like a failing chain store, that school systems can be run by people with no knowledge of the classroom or education, that the fundamental strategy of reform is choice/competition/testing, and that schools can be turned over to corporate entities to run like branch offices. Duncan seems to acknowledge the importance of collaboration, which sets him apart from some of his infamous peers who now are considered "reformers" by the national media (or have appropriated that term to represent their slash-and-burn tactics).

I was reminded of the business model last week when I was writing a short article about the late Senator Claiborne Pell for Forbes.com (it appeared on Monday). What I will describe is by no means analogous to what is happening today in K-12 education, but see if you can follow the logic. Sen. Pell was quite an interesting and accomplished man. Among other feats, he was the main sponsor of the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts. He will be mainly remembered for establishing a federal grant program for low-income college students, now known as Pell grants in his honor. In 1972, Pell engaged in a celebrated debate with Congresswoman Edith Green, who believed that federal aid should flow to colleges and universities. Sen. Pell, however, wanted new federal aid to go directly to students, who could take it to the college of their choice. Pell won, and in doing so, he created a voucher system for higher education. In the years since then, proponents of vouchers (such as President George W. Bush) have proposed that the federal government create Pell grants for K-12 education, building on the senator's precedent.

Today, voucher proponents point to the Pell grants and suggest that they have helped to make the U.S. higher education system the best in the world. It got that way, they say, because Pell grants encouraged choice and competition. (We are still missing test scores as the bottom line in higher education, but some federal officials have been pushing to add that ingredient.) Therefore, say the proponents, we should have a voucher system for all schooling, not just higher education.

But the counter-argument has grown louder in recent days and weeks and years, and it goes like this. Why are we pushing all students to go to college? If they want a job or career that does not require college-level studies, we do them a disservice and we load up the colleges with students who don't want to be there and would rather be working. Charles Murray has made an argument along these lines. Then there is the implicit argument in Tom Wolfe's novel from a few years back, "I Am Charlotte Simmons." Anyone who took this book seriously would conclude that even a great university, as he portrayed it, was a scene of debauchery where learning was incidental. And more recently, in The Atlantic, an essay by the anonymous Professor X describes students who are enrolled in his or her classes because they need the degree for their job but have no interest in collegiate studies, have read nothing in common (the only common reference point they share is "The Wizard of Oz" [the movie, not the book]), know little about the world, and cannot compose a coherent sentence. As you read the article, you may be struck, as I was, that the students are getting a degree for jobs that really don't "need" a college education, but that the college degree has been substituted by employers for the high school diploma, which now signifies no skills or knowledge at all.

Sadly, colleges and universities become "hooked" on remediation. They have their departments of "developmental education"—the new euphemism for remediation—and they will not relinquish them.

Continue reading "Colleges & Remedial Education" »

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (26) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

We live in a dangerous and dark time for schools. In many districts, the gears of power are controlled by non-educators who don't have a clue. They madly embrace testing and data and data-driven instruction because they have not a single idea about how kids learn and how teachers teach and what conditions are necessary to promote teaching and learning. This new breed also populates some of our nation's leading think tanks. Most of them have never taught; have never been in a classroom since they were students; know nothing of the history of education and nothing about research, but they know how to fix the nation's schools.

Watch what they do. If they are superintendents, they boast of their numbers. They close schools with impunity. They open new schools. They open them by the score. They will tell you that they are going to change "the quality" of teachers by recruiting Ivy League graduates and Teach for America folk. They are going to push out all those experienced fogies, so that their newbies have no one to learn from, no one to show them the ropes, no one to help with knotty day-to-day problems. No problem, because the new generation of superintendents has a gullible media, willing to swallow whatever numbers are pumped out, whatever success stories are generated by the public relations team.

If they are in think tanks, they know what teachers should be doing, although with few exceptions, they have never actually been teachers. They know how to recruit great teachers, though they have never recruited any themselves. They know how to measure teacher quality, and they know exactly what rewards and trinkets will get teachers to work harder and produce higher test scores. Amazing that so much genius about how to run a terrific education system has been sequestered in child-free, student-free offices in the District of Columbia.

And while I am on the subject of misguided policies, check out the piece I wrote for Forbes.com last week about the admission by the Gates Foundation that its $2 billion investment in small schools didn't work. When was the last time that you heard any foundation or big-city superintendent admit that it/he/she was wrong? So I give Gates credit for candor, but I wonder if anyone will tally up the cost of their "gift," the thousands of small schools that turned out to be incapable of giving kids a good education. The thousands of additional principals and additional buildings and additional administrative staff. When you started your small school, you brought to it a singular passion. In New York City and many other districts, small schools have been churned out en masse, without a supply of top-notch principals and teachers to staff them. They were the product of the business-minded bureaucracy, who created the schools, then went looking for someone to work in them. Not your idea at all!

We live in a time of good intentions, ignorant elites, and scoundrels. Who can tell which is which?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (45) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

Well, we have been blogging for more than a year now, and there was bound to be a screw-up sooner or later. The only question was: who would be first to do it, you or me? The answer is in (drum roll): It is me. My previous post (“Reports, Reform, and Hype,” June 24) was actually a response to your last post (“Blaming Teachers,” June 30). I think this happened because you were so energetic that you replied to me so fast, at lightning speed, leading me to answer an unpublished post of yours.

So, I can’t reply to your blog of June 30 because I already responded to it on June 24!

Let me take a few moments to reflect and lead us in a different direction, perhaps.

Yesterday (July 1) was a milestone birthday for me (thank you for your birthday greetings, blog partner!). I turned 70. I still don’t believe the number because I feel a lot younger; I know my mother and my grandmother were much less active when they reached that age. I still feel ready to go into the ring and take on all comers for 15 rounds. At least I feel that way in the mornings! I invited my seven siblings for a celebration of the fact that we are all still here, and all but one (who was ill) traveled across the country to join me.

Turning to our present matters, I have been struck by the fact that our blog has created a community of readers. Many of our readers comment on almost every post. They frequently communicate with one another on our site. They take ideas very seriously, as we do.

Why do we keep this conversation going? For me, there is a certain satisfaction in bouncing ideas around; in knowing that there are others out there who want to stop and think, who are willing to think with us and argue with us, who don’t assume that the powers-that-be must know best. I think where you and I often agree is that we assume that the powers-that-be need critics, and we are ready to give them the skeptical commentary that they need.

Sometimes I worry that we are too parochial, as we are both focused on New York City, and everyone knows that NYC is not the world. Yet, I see the developments in NYC replicated in cities around the nation. I see them as a mirror image of No Child Left Behind. I see school districts around the nation embracing privatization, outsourcing of central office responsibility, merit pay, incentivization, and other aspects of “the business model.” I see a steady dismantling of public education, not only in NYC, but in many school districts, especially in urban centers, and I know that the things that worry us are not New York-centric.

American education has always had problems and crises, but I can’t recall a time when some of the wealthiest people in the nation were putting serious money into a campaign to privatize public education.

The raison d’etre of our blog, I believe, is to look more deeply into education issues than others do. Our responsibility is to raise the questions and issues that other commentators have not even considered. Our role is to rip to shreds the phony consensus that encourages so many school districts to accept shallow and harmful “reforms.”

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Sometimes an outrageous sentence does get attention. But there is, I contend, merit to thinking about the ways in which schools are a form of “incarceration.” Nonattendance is crime called truancy. Kids are indeed “locked up” or “in” for 5-6 hours for 180 or more days a year, whether they or their families like it or not.

Is it a good idea? Yes! A closer reading than some readers engaged in would have noted that I was crystal clear on one point: I approve of compulsory schooling. At least in the world we live in. I recognize that it was a progressive step forward to have made schooling a requirement for 10-12 years. (And one that doesn’t yet exist for most children in this world. Even in industrialized China there are still tuition fees for public education.)

But, but. We’ve done so at a price.

From the very first day that I spent in a Chicago public school as a substitute teacher I recognized the special taste of fear—on the part of both many of the students and most of the adult staff. Including me. It was a fear not so different than prison employees probably feel, and which gets more and more blatant as youngsters get older. “They” outnumber “us”. Ergo the first priority: “control.” If we “let up” chaos will prevail. The atmosphere was noticeably more fearful in schools with students of color, a bit less so for poor white kids, and least of all in public schools with white middle class students.

Am I exaggerating? Not by a lot.

In a variety of ways all the usual freedoms that people in our society enjoy are removed. One needs permission to go to the toilet. One needs to walk, often silently, in line. One must sit still at all costs. One is not supposed to speak unless called upon. One cannot freely associate with ones chosen friends. And for many years—and it applies still in some places—the penalties for not obeying are pretty severe—including corporal punishment and solitary confinement of a sort. Even one’s own parents often have limited access to their children while in school, and few rights to overrule the school’s decisions or influence policy. (One NYC PTA just discovered that their longstanding tradition of sponsoring a monthly Pizza lunch was breaking a nonnegotiable citywide rule!, New York Post, March 16.)

The irony is that expulsion, of course, is the ultimate punishment.

I am arguing for a recognition that whenever one removes such freedoms one has a stronger obligation to “do no harm.” Without recognizing the “peculiarity” of the institution of schooling one misses something critical. Ruling over an involuntary “workforce”—in school or out—is not ideal. The side effects are important to recognize. Unlike school people, military men acknowledge the special qualities of a draft army versus a volunteer one. We civilians forget this too often when it comes to schooling.

We’re preparing kids to be grown-ups-- members of a democratic community, and a voluntary workforce—under circumstances that are neither democratic nor voluntary. It creates contradictions. I occasionally said to kids, “What are you doing here if you don’t want to learn?” It seemed like such a natural point to make. Imagine my surprise however when one young man took me at my word. His mother called me. He claimed I told him he might as well go home. She knew he was lying, but…. I told her he wasn’t lying. I simply hadn’t intended him to take me seriously (although no doubt I sounded dead serious). We both had a laugh over it. She sent him back.

It’s perhaps why I favor erring on the side of graduating kids we aren’t sure meet our standards rather than not graduating them if we aren’t sure whether they meet our standards. The opposite policy is the one we actually employ. After at least 12 years of involuntary schooling we better be very sure before we deprive them of an entry ticket into the workforce—and even then at not very decent paying jobs. That means looking each kid in the eye and defending our decisions as in his or her best interests.

We should be sure we use their precious time, energy, and natural enthusiasm for learning from start to finish. We should be sure that the school day is, at least, an interesting and vital experience. We should demand that we put at the command of the school every condition and resource necessary, to give all kids what the wealthiest and wisest parents provide for their own. (Even if we can’t prove it raises test scores.)

It also means taking seriously our claim that democracy is the first and best means, not the last resort. Yes, Diane, as you’ve noted in your last letter, there’s precious little “public” about how we operate some of our large urban, predominantly low-income school systems. The Pizza story is just the silliest, but hardly the worst, of what schools confront daily, The very least we owe youngsters are schools that believe in the very system of governance that they are intended to serve.

Democracy was invented as a means for holding our rulers accountable—except when it comes to schools?

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

So we took our show on the road for the first time!

For our readers' benefit, let me explain. On March 7, Deborah and I blogged live—I guess that's what you would call it—at Channel 13's "Celebration of Teaching and Learning" in New York City. Before an audience of about 250, mostly teachers and principals, we talked about whether the business/corporate model would "save" our schools. (Some of those in the audience were not New Yorkers, as educators were sent to the event by their local public television stations, and I know we had people from other states and cities.)

Who controls our schools? Should the schools adopt a model of operations based on "results" (test scores) and "incentives" (paying teachers, students, and principals for higher test scores)? Are test scores the "profits" of the school system? Who are the stockholders?

This is one of those big issues that affects many school systems, not just New York City. It also happens to be an issue—or related set of issues—where Deborah and I find ourselves mostly in agreement. Interestingly, two days later, on March 9, The New York Times Magazine featured a discussion of education philanthropy titled "How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?" This was a good follow-up to our discussion, especially its fundamental assumption that one or more billionaires have the "answers" that have somehow escaped the lesser minds of ordinary educators who toil in the classroom. As you once said to me, Deborah, the new generation of reformers seems to believe that anyone who knows much about schooling is part of the problem; only those untainted by actual direct experience in education have the insight to "fix" a school system. If they are a parent, a teacher, or an administrator, they are self-interested and somehow disqualified from solving the problems.

In our discussion, Deborah made the interesting point that successful business organizations focus on the means, not the ends. I pointed out, borrowing from a recent post by eduwonkette at edweek.org, that corporations do not necessarily tie pay to performance; that we have recently seen examples of huge compensation packages to executives after their company went bankrupt or experienced a major downturn; the executives walk away with many millions while their stockholders and employees are left empty-handed. Certainly, lawyers are not compensated based on performance, but rather on billable hours (our school system in New York City is run from the top by a cadre of lawyers).

Too bad that our session was not videotaped for television. We had great questions from the audience, including one young man who works for Chase bank and was formerly a student at Deborah's school.

Debbie, it was fun being on with you. We were able to do in person what we try to do on the blog. Engage in a lively exchange; show respect for one another; probe controversial issues; try to be intellectually honest; speak our minds candidly and fearlessly.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

Your description of CPESS and other Coalition schools sounds like a memory from a distant past. Education is now in the grips of a very different mindset, one that seeks to turn schools into businesses or to use business as a model for success in education. Test scores have become the coin of the realm, simply because they provide an objective measurement. The problem is not testing kids, but using the scores to make judgments about students, teachers, principals, and schools. I have never been opposed to testing, but I think it is bizarre to assume—as most newspapers and pundits and policymakers now seem to do—that the tests are robust enough to make these consequential judgments about people and institutions.

I remember when I visited your school. I was impressed by the seriousness of the atmosphere and the dedication of the staff. However, I know how often people said, "If only we could clone Debby Meier." They meant that as a compliment to you, but also as an implicit acknowledgement that what you did could not easily be replicated. If it were easy to replicate, it would have spread across the nation. But it didn't. It remained a rare and fragile flower, not a hearty plant that could be transplanted or could—as gardeners say—naturalize or spread on its own.

We come back to our fundamental difference about the value of a common curriculum and of testing. I continue to think there is great value in knowing that children will encounter a common curriculum in history, science, and other subjects, even if they move from one school to another in the same district, or move to another city or state. No point rehearsing all the reasons, but at bottom I believe that we already have (weak) national standards, embedded in the textbooks and tests, and that we already have international standards in mathematics and science, where our students do poorly.

Yet I think this discussion, which you think is intertwined, is not entirely germane to the issues I raised about grading schools based on state test scores. We agree that the way this is done in New York City is harmful to schools and reveals nothing that will enable schools to improve. Indeed, if schools were to turn themselves into testing mills, doing nothing whatsoever other than test prep, they would be considered exemplary.

The issue that I raise is two-fold: One, how did American education fall so effortlessly into the control of Know Nothings from the world of business, law, and politics? and, Two, how can we—that is, the American public—begin to talk again about schools that prepare students not only to take tests but to be engaged and thoughtful citizens, to participate in and enjoy the arts, and to have the interest and capacity to read a book that was not assigned by a teacher?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I’ve been pondering your letter. The grading system is so absurd as to be intriguing. How could it have happened? It suggests a disconnect between the people making decisions “downtown” and reality of humongous proportions. Its source though puzzles me—since these are not dumb men. How could they have been led so far astray?

Ordinary common sense should have led Jim Liebman (the author of the NYC grading scheme) to have junked it before going public. For just the absurdities you pointed to. But ordinary common sense doesn’t work when you hire people to make important decisions who know literally nothing about the field itself. But disrespect for educators is so deep and pervading that none were apparently seriously consulted. No one apparently asked a school person: “Does this make sense?” “Are the results credible?”

It’s part of what makes me particularly nervous, Diane, at your belief that “national standards” would be based on genuine “expertise”. Not only do I have my concerns about the reliability of even honest experts—in the face of ordinary human bias—but we’re living in a world in which expertise is scorned when it comes to the fields you and I care about. Lawyers and financiers are at the top of the pyramid. Regardless of the nature of the decisions involved. The Kleins et als of the world will soon be grading scientists and scientific truths. This is not merely a phenomenon of right-wing “crazies”, but so-called sensible centrists—like Bloomberg et al.

Wacky indeed. But also scary.

It is not just test-score wacky either. In the high schools, 55 percent of the grade went to improvement in “courses passed”. Imagine how this encourages the dumbing down of courses!

When we started CPESS (Central Park East Secondary School) in 1985 we were above all interested, ala Ted Sizer’s seminal work, in building an educational model that totally bypassed the idea of graduation by credit hours (courses passed). We built instead a system of “accountability” based on a review of work accomplished and knowledge demonstrated in 14 fields. Ted Sizer called them “exhibitions”. It’s worth rereading Sizer’s books today. The old CPESS school got a waiver from the state of New York for its radical redesign. Kids took courses, but ala Cambridge, Oxford, and the world of doctoral candidacies, we came up with a graduation committee review and defense of student achievement. We claimed a student could graduate (however unlikely) who had failed every course, but passed all 14 subject reviews! (Fourteen was absurd, but that’s another story.) We told kids they might stay with us forever—we were in no hurry to get rid of them—but they would get our diploma only if they proved to us that they were ready. It meant that the teachers of course were there to prepare kids to do the kind of work that would meet our standards, which were—in turn—open for public review and critique.

We also engaged researchers to follow up on our students after they left us to see whether our standards held up in the real world. After all, accountability ought to be just another word for accepting responsibility for the impact of one’s work. (I keep reminding myself that democracy is built around the idea of accountable authority.)

Not only did CPESS have graduation committees for each student, but we brought in outside experts every year to examine different areas of practice—subject matter, as well our standards of evaluation. We videotaped sessions as well as archived work. Other schools in the Coalition of Essential Schools network tried other approaches built around the same underlying concepts of responsible authority. No two did it exactly the same way. A state-organized panel of independent experts—mostly in educational testing and assessment—concluded that graduates of these schools considerably outperformed comparable students. But maybe that’s irrelevant, as Nebraska’s Chris Gallagher notes, in a charming satire in Rethinking Schools (winter 2007-08). You can have so much more fun “sitting around and devising indexes and rankings and play with imaginary numbers.”

It’s brutally demoralizing to discover that a dozen years later the system has learned nothing from our work, and has at great cost installed such shabby and ill-informed judgments in the name of “accountability”.

Yes indeed, Diane, you have got it right.

Deborah

P.S. There are still a few dozen schools in NY State benefiting from that late 80’s waiver. They are holding on by the skin of their teeth, constantly forced to compromise—or get Cs, Ds and Fs! How much longer can they hold out? I do not know, but I‘d not guess for long unless…But that's for another letter, Diane.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's note: Bridging Differences returns today from its holiday break with this entry from Diane Ravitch.

Dear Deb,

Let's talk about grading schools and about when it is appropriate to close schools. It seems that the accountability idea has become the overrriding passion in American education: Everyone must be held accountable, everyone must have their feet held to the fire on a regular basis, and every decision will be based on test scores. Students better raise their scores or they fail; teachers better raise their students' scores, or they will not get a bonus and might get some sort of sanction; and principals must see to it that their school scores continually go up, or they may be fired (or, if the scores do rise, the principals are in line for fat bonuses).

Hardly a day passes without a story from another school district about the adoption of bonus pay for teachers and/or principals, as well as other incentives or sanctions based solely on scores. Houston just got a big sum from the Gates Foundation for merit pay, and the state of New York just received a big grant from Gates to install a new value-added accountability system. It seems to be happening everywhere.

I find myself (once again) in the uncomfortable position of seeing ideas that I have supported as part of a broader set of reforms turn into unhealthy obsessions. I feel like someone who said that people should wear hats and then turned around to discover that people were talking about nothing else but their hats and walking around naked. Maybe there is a better metaphor to express my frustration about the new fanaticism about testing and accountability as the key element of the corporate culture imported into American education. I'll rely on our readers to suggest a better metaphor. As I recall, looking back on what I have written over many years, I always believed that a strong curriculum, sound instruction, and good working conditions were necessary preconditions to testing and accountability.

Deb, I think that one of the things that has occasionally drawn us together is that we both have a vision about education, what it might be, even when we disagree about this or that detail. Now I find that no one seems to talk about education anymore, just testing and accountability. Is it the market mentality that has taken control? Is it the business/corporate model that is driving all discussion of policy? Why is everyone submitting to these mindless, soul-less accounting schemes?

Take the latest grading system to come from New York City. Since our mayor apparently plans to run for president and intends to cite his education reforms, we should write about what is actually happening here. Our chancellor hired a law school professor to design the city's grading plan. The grading system gives each school a single letter, from A to F. This is no report card, which would measure inputs and outputs on a variety of particulars. Nope, just a single letter grade. Imagine if your child came home from school with a letter grade instead of a report card that pointed to her or his strengths and weaknesses; I certainly would find it objectionable.

The grading system has produced some very strange results. More than half of the 400 schools that are on the state or federal list of weak schools received an A or B from the city's Department of Education. A school that is on the state's very small list of "persistently dangerous" schools was awarded an A. At the same time, 99 schools that are in good standing with the state or federal government received a D or an F. Some schools that are recognized as outstanding schools in their community received a D or an F.

How did these strange results come about? The city Department of Education decided to base the scores overwhelmingly on changes in state test scores over one year, and to place most emphasis on "progress." Thus a school where 90 percent of the students met state standards in the first year, but only 87 percent in the next year might get a D or an F. And a school where 20 percent of the students met the standards in the first year, but saw an increase of a few percentage points in the next year might get an A or B.

Thus some really outstanding schools have been stigmatized as failures, while some very low-performing schools boast an A or B. This makes no sense to anyone, but the city has taken its new and unproven scoring system and decided to close 14 schools that received a D or F. Now, maybe these are truly awful schools, but some of them have gotten passing marks from both the state and feds. Some apparently are beloved community institutions. We will see what replaces them. My guess is charter schools and small schools. Will they be better? Who knows?

There remain many questions. Not only whether the scoring system is a valid measure of anything, but whether the tests on which they are based are sound enough to sustain these weighty decisions that determine the future of a school community. Somehow it strikes me that schools should be given extra support to help them get better, that closing them should be a last resort, not a first step.

What do you think?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

It's hard to resist making one more stab at it—but there's something beyond logic that pulls us apart on this one! Do send me the California standards you refer to so I can see what you mean by "consensus". Of who? What "compromises" were made along the way? Were they worth it?

And: Are the California standards without "stakes"—just a source of voluntary information—for faculty, students, school boards and the public? But I fear that our correspondent Paul Hoss—who favors such national standards is more realistic in how he sees them being used—as high-stakes tests. His support for them is, in fact, built on such an idea.

A reader asks whether I'd feel differently if it wasn't the State that was setting the standards. Yes, I would. I am very concerned at the impact that a single SAT score has on young people's futures and have joined FairTest (the nation's sole counterweight to the massive testing industry's sales job) in their campaign against its misuse. But Rachel is right. The fact that it's a private choice makes it more palatable to me. Ditto with the math community's publishing their "consensual" viewpoint on what constitutes a good math education and doing their best to promulgate that view—short of mandating it. Although I equally treasure the minority viewpoint—the hold-outs. Over time they often turn out to be ahead of the curve. Ditto for history, science, et al. The Getty Institute at one point had an enormous—and I think harmful—impact on art education through its influence on setting standards for K-12 art. But it was "an influence". It stopped being helpful when it became California's officially sanctioned K-12 art's curriculum.

I also realize that like Richard Rothstein (see Rothstein's American Prospect article, Dec. 17, 2007 ) I see the assumptions that the feds are less biased than locals is happenstance. For example, it was the federal court that turned down voluntary local efforts to end segregation this last year, even as it was the same court that mandated integration a half-century ago.

To change the subject—sort of. It occurs to me that between the ages of 5-18 we are all expected to try to be equally good at "learning" everything we are obliged to study. That means in fact, that we are required in reality to spend more time at the things we are not "naturally" interested in or talented at than those things we take to like a duck to water. An odd way to prepare for a life in which I hope we mostly do the opposite! That's assuming schools (or families) have provided the time for youngsters to develop the passions and interests that make them truly "special" to the world, and which make life itself wonderful to live.

One concern I have about all attempts to assume there ought to be the one-best curriculum or course-of-study is that it squashes, rather than expands, our zest for what strikes our fancy. I know, Diane, that this sounds flaky, but the more I watch young people the more strongly I feel about it. What they need, above all, is exposure to adults who are living their lives with intellectual passion, playfulness. Who are always chasing a new idea or a new way to think about an old idea. And by "ideas" I include far more than what we neatly divide up into academic disciplines.

The old NAEP—with its information-gathering core—doesn't kill that. It may even offer another source for teacherly curiosity: "I wonder how my students would answer that?" "Hmm, if I'd worded it differently…." But it is clearly a hard battle to keep such "standards" from turning into efforts to decide what everyone "ought to" think (know?), and then into tools for "making them" do so.

This week's Sunday New York Times Magazine piece on medical diagnosis, ends with a quote I think is relevant, but I'm not sure exactly how. "Doctors," says author Lisa Sanders, too often "look to the medical literature rather than looking at the patient for their answers." Sanders concludes by quoting Sir William Osler, "a 19th century doctor considered by many the father of modern American medicine" (as follows): 'We miss more by not seeing than by not knowing.'"

Have a wonderful holiday season, Diane (and readers).

Deb

P.S. Diane and I are saving for 2008 some amazing stuff about NYC's two newest passions—grading all its schools A-F and giving all 4- and 5-year-olds an IQ test! Both, naturally, in the "name" of equity. My New Year's wish is for both to disappear but…I fear it will take more than New Year's wishes.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Debbie,

I don't agree with your judgment—and the judgment of some (but not all) of our readers—about whether it is feasible to craft useful standards. It is difficult, but not impossible. I'll explain why I think this is so.

First, I served on a committee charged with developing history standards for the state of California in the mid-1980s. The committee included historians; knowledgeable teachers and administrators from elementary schools, junior high schools, and high schools; geographers; child-development specialists; and people from various disciplinary organizations. We wrangled, we discussed, we debated. We talked about concepts and details. We parsed every word of every draft. Eventually we ended up with excellent standards for teaching history (including geography, economics, civics, and government) from kindergarden to twelfth grade. The standards were reviewed by over 1,000 teachers, and improved as a result. There were public hearings. Eventually the standards were endorsed by the state Board of Education in 1988. Since then, they have been updated in light of changing events (e.g., the collapse of the Soviet Union), and they have been re-endorsed by the state Board of Education. I believe they have helped to strengthen and enrich history education across the state, expanding world history from one required year to three required years and adding age-appropriate study of history in the elementary grades, among other things. I consider it a minor miracle that those standards are still in use, 20 years later, when California has thrown out and revised its standards in every other subject.

Second, to those who say that consensus is impossible, I would point to the brilliant and still unappreciated work of the College Board from 1901 to the 1940s. For nearly half a century, the College Board examinations in many subjects were written and graded by teachers and professors in collaboration. Each year, groups of teachers and professors met to agree on the standards and to write a syllabus. Each year, many thousands of students "sat" for the examinations, and these examinations were graded by teachers and professors. Working together, and working for a non-governmental private organization, these scholars established high standards for the nation that have never again been equaled. If you are wondering why this wonderful arrangement has disappeared, the answer is that the College Board decided to scrap the system and replace it with the "scientific" multiple-choice tests that were the wonder of the psychometric world. So fast, so easy, so effortless, so easy to grade by machine instead of fallible human judgment! (I wrote about this turn of events in an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education called "The Fall of the Standard-Bearers." I judged it a mini-tragedy that this wonderful system based on the hard work and judgment of practitioners was replaced by the content-free, curriculum-free SAT.

Third, to those who say that issues like evolution make it impossible to have meaningful standards, I say "Nonsense!" Political scientists have long known that the smaller the political unit, the more likely it is to produce and reproduce local biases. This is why the federal government—not localities or states—was responsible for establishing and enforcing standards for civil rights laws, because it was the political agency most removed from local prejudices. In my seven years on the National Assessment Governing Board, I never heard anyone speak a word on behalf of creationism. Yet we know that creationism is alive and well on local school boards and state school boards. The very nature of the federal government guarantees that deliberations about national standards would be open, transparent, subject to verification by scientific authority, and unlikely to cave in to political pressures from small intense organizations.

It continues to amaze me that so many people, including you, think that national standards are an impossibility or are dangerous when so many other nations have managed to develop them. As I have written on more than one occasion, I would not want "stakes" attached to them by Congress or the federal government. I think that the federal government's role is to set standards and to produce good information. It should be left to state and local school boards to decide how to act on that information.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

“Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican who represents western Michigan's culturally cohesive Dutch Calvinist communities, opposed NCLB from the start because he thought it would 'tear apart the bond between the schools and the local communities'… He thinks accountability belongs at the local level," notes conservative writer George Will in The Washington Post's Dec 9th issue. Peter and George and I agree.

That’s the first part of my answer to your query, Diane. I am not in favor of arriving at a single definition of being well-educated. And while we could agree on some minimal competencies, that’s hardly what we want to set forth as “standards”—which I view as an aspirational noun, our flag of high hopes.

Anther way to think about it is noted in an amazing little piece in Educational Horizons (Fall 2007) by Fritz Mosher, Susan Fuhrman and David Cohen. They suggest that we have an inadequate conception of the goal of education which results in a discussion of outcomes that “takes place in an empirical vacuum.” Amen.

But equally surprising is a second argument—which is at the core of your letter: your confidence that we could arrive at a consensus! It is so instantly clear to me that it would be either divisive or silly for us to try! As the Northwest Lab once noted, it would take another eight years simply to cover what’s in most state curriculum guides—or what we now call standards. Could we narrow them down? Sure. It could be based on what I see as the critical turning points in history, for example; the books that I see as having that right combination of appeal and importance; to what I see as what’s at the heart and soul of science (the experimental mindset?); and the mathematical competency that can’t be done on a computer and which every citizen must wrestle with. In short, my standard is indeed related to my aspirations for citizenry—what I wish everyone knew before I got up on the speaker’s rostrum to make my argument in favor of x or y or z. But I know it’s absurd! Because people whose expertise and honesty I very much admire disagree with me! Like you. Or George Will.

But even then I’d have to take into account a third dilemma: the political biases of the citizens who send their kids to my school or classroom, not to mention their particular situation, local circumstances, recent history. In a democracy I am, within some bounds, accountable to my community, even if simply in order to be effective with their kids. It’s not enough to have "the law" on my side, I need the actual kids on my side, too.

And then, fourth…I’d have to keep an eye on what is likely to appear on some test for college admissions, SATs or the like, and squeeze that in.

Not to mention, fifth, realizing that each individual student is, hopefully, going to learn more in the 60 years after s/he gets his/her high school diploma than the 12 years before that. My most important contribution requires keeping my eye on that long future stretch of time and how and what my classroom or school did to ignite interest, passion, curiosity, along with a conviction that it’s all important and worthwhile. And do-able.

So even if we could arrive at a consensus, which might be possible if you didn’t let folks like me in the room while you decide, the rest are problematic. This is, to some degree a peculiarly “American” problem—our “melting pot” or “quilt” dilemma. But it’s also related to our size and sense of who “we” are. But finally it’s because we have a far more layperson conception of education—and a healthy distrust (in my opinion) for all elites. There is no American Academy that can pass final judgment on what all kids should speak like. Even prestigious scholars disagree. Even if one side “wins” the political battle for preeminence for a time, the other side doesn’t just give up, but fights on, upsetting the apple cart for the next generation.

At best maybe what we need, in Gerald Graff’s words in a book called "Clueless in Academe," is to view academics as a place to debate, show off, try out, both old and new ideas, over and over, making them in the process “ours”. Ideas come in the form of projects, art works, architectural wonders, inventions, information, as well as a new take on an old subject. It’s the “having of wonderful ideas” that all children have a right to, ideas powerful enough to shape their own futures. It’s not something to be put off until graduate school—it starts at birth, and good schools keep it going day in and day out thereafter.

Deb

P.S. For more on this, see my short chapter in Profession 2007, the Modern Language Association’s annual journal of opinion. (Subscription or fee required.)

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

There's a streak of naivete about you that is both delightful and infuriating! The notion that we have come to a consensus on what constitutes the well-educated 8-, 12- or 18-year-old, on what body of facts and scientific truth we all agree is essential, and finally that we have a way to get at this that will not impact on narrowing or distorting the curriculum—all seem far-fetched. Politically, not to mention technically, this seems beyond our current human capacity.

Add to it that such a testing system would demonstrate that huge majorities of the students in some states are failing by these standards and it seems politically even more unlikely. Of course, that's perhaps one of the few reasons I'd like it. How about, for starters, if we agree that we do not give any test to high school students before trying it out on all state and federal legislators—as a kind of base line? We might also test trustees of universities and major corporations.

I wrote a book, "Will Standards Save Public Education," in 2000 (Beacon) in which I set out the assumptions underlying test-based standards and contrast them to an alternate set of assumptions. If you didn't read it—it might help us to see where we diverge.

Remember, what we're arguing about are mandated state-sponsored tests about intellectual truth. The information, while not high stakes re. students in your proposal, is high stakes for the intellectual and democratic assumptions upon which the nation rests. The fallout of testing is, as we both agree, not irrelevant as some test-makers argue in claiming no responsibility for the narrowing of the curriculum. But there is narrowing of many sorts, and any national system in a nation as diverse and huge as ours has serious reverberations. How would yours avoid it?

Which reminds me of what we face in NYC right now at the other end of the spectrum—not 18-years-olds but 4- and 5-year-olds. NYC has sent principals (no names because this is supposed to be super confidential) copies of practice tests which they are expected to hand out to parents who must come to school to get them. Such parents must promise to reveal nothing about the pre-tests, in exchange for being able to use the information to help prepare their children. Hush hush. One outcome available to parents who agree is a leg up on getting their kids into gifted and talented classes—open to the top 5 percent of national test-takers. (Despite our knowledge of how IQ tests—which these are—differentially impact on kids based on economics and race—NYC is proposing this as part of its drive for equity!) What happens to the information garnered from the other 95 percent?

Erikson Institute's Sam Meisels, perhaps America's most eminent expert on early childhood, has written extensively on the unreliability of early childhood testing. We know a lot—and it's all bad news. On the basis of this, Congress agreed to remove standardized testing for Head Starters. But not NYC 4-5-year-olds. If anyone reading this letter has the inclination—please write, call and holler! It's coming next to you. I wonder who, in the field of early-childhood education, they consulted? Or did they just assume that based on their experience in business, law, Wall Street, et al they knew best?

And imagine, officially involving parents in the test-prep game! I suppose they can claim that this is leveling the field! It's also—if they knew anything about norm-based testing (which these are)—further corrupting the instrument itself once we prep for it! IQ tests are based on the assumption that everyone is taking it under the same conditions as the population they were normed on.

I see national testing as another nail in the coffin of a nation prized for being creative and innovative. I know, Diane, that textbooks often establish dumb standards, too. But whatever leads you to believe that these tests won't repeat what's already in (and not in) those textbooks??? At least now some schools—and not just private ones—can ignore them or use them as mere back-up. There remains another way to get good information without dumbing education down; sampled in-depth testing (which NAEP started out doing) could be invaluable, based on interviews, performance tasks, writing samples, etc.

We could feed our adult thirst for knowledge without mandating that schools deprive kids of a taste of the real thing. I know, I know—only some kids now get that kind of education; but what's kept me going for 40-plus years is trying to spread the real thing to more and more kids. I know it's do-able; but it's getting harder and harder.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

As usual, you raise lots of interesting questions and you sharpen our clear differences. Yes, I do think we should have national testing. This idea that fifty states should each have their own standards and their own tests is nutty. We are not getting higher standards; we may even be getting lower ones.

How did we get to this point? President Clinton's Goals 2000 pushed the states to create their own standards and tests (Clinton, to his credit, actually preferred national tests, but he couldn't persuade the Republican Congress to go along with his proposal for such tests). Then along came NCLB, and President Bush wanted a bigger emphasis on standards and testing, but knew that his own party would never accept national testing. So he built on the idea that each state should set its own standards, develop its own tests, grade its own progress towards the goal of having every student "proficient" in reading and mathematics by the year 2013-2014. Since the bill passed Congress in the fall of 2001, I assume that the goal of 2013-14 was based on the idea that this was the amount of time (12 years, starting in 2002) necessary to raise the achievement of children who were then in kindergarten.

As we both know, and as everyone knows who thinks about the matter, we will not reach the goal of having universal proficiency by 2014, unless we define "proficiency" to mean low-level, basic literacy.

Writing this goal, no matter how impossible and absurd, into federal law put pressure on the states to come up with plans to demonstrate that they intended to do it. How crazy was that? So every state has a year-by-year plan in which they will raise "proficiency" and "achievement" towards that elusive goal. This in turn guarantees that the states will dumb down their tests and focus relentlessly on test prep so that they can at least try to fulfill their promises to the feds.

We all know the results of this grand illusion.

First, we know from studies such as the one by the Center on Education Policy, that the curriculum has been narrowed in a majority of schools; many children are not having any chance to study the arts, history, or anything else that is not going to have an immediate impact on their reading and math scores. Though I would argue that children will get much higher reading scores if they spend more time learning history and engaging in the arts, school officials aren't willing to take the risk. The scores must rise! And they must rise by constantly drilling the kids in how to take tests and in practicing the kinds of test items that they are likely to encounter on the state tests. As a result of this idiocy, we may be losing a generation of young people who associate schooling with the worst kind of drudgery and test grind.

Second, we know from studies such as "The Proficiency Illusion" by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (where I am a trustee) that many states are using a very low-level definition of proficiency in order to inflate their scores and claim progress. There are states that tell the public that a large majority of the students are "proficient," and getting ever more proficient. Yet the proportion of students in these states who are proficient or even basic on NAEP remains nowhere near what the states are claiming.

We have a fundamental problem of honesty here. The public is being misled in most states about academic gains. NAEP is the only measure that is maintaining a consistent standard across the fifty states.

Yes, I believe we should have a scheme of national testing. Yes, you are right, I do not think that there should be "stakes" associated with national testing. I think that we should have national tests so that we have better information. Having watched the misuse of test results in NYC these past few years—where tests are being used to reward, punish, and grade students, teachers, principals, and schools, I would hate to see national tests corrupted in these ways. I see two healthy uses for national testing (I don't expect you to agree): First, the tests should provide information that is reliable and consistent. Second, the tests should provide information with a diagnostic value, so that educational shortcomings can be addressed in a timely manner.

The irony is that we already have national standards. They aren't exactly written out in a single document or series of documents. But if you want to know what they are, look at the handful of standardized tests given in states and districts; look at the textbooks used in the great majority of classrooms. These are not the standards that you or I would want; but there they are. I recall that about ten years ago, I gave a lecture in Wyoming on the subject of national standards and national tests. Several people in the audience, not surprisingly, objected, saying that they preferred their standards to be written in Wyoming. I pointed out that the textbooks most widely used in the state came from a New York City-based publisher and that the tests used by the state came from a testing company in New Hampshire. No one could point out what was especially local or Wyomingesque about their standards and tests.

I agree with your concern for democracy in our society. I don't think the problem is uniquely limited to what happens in schools. The changes in the mass media have made all of us feel like spectators and consumers of other people's decisions. This requires another discussion.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

The intellectual and informational inaccuracy, sloppiness and thoughtlessness of so much of education reporting still shocks me—I know I ought to have gotten over it. The story you told me about the reporter who bought NYC's claims that the latest NAEP results are a sign of the DOE's success is such a perfect example.

Investigative reporting is a lost art. They too often see themselves as conduits for press releases, with perhaps one quote from someone "on the other side" to show that it's impartial. It's their style even when I'm delighted with it! E.g.: I loved the front-page story in the Boston Globe proclaiming the success of the Pilot Schools in Boston, with its obligatory demurer from one critic. But that's not good newspaper reportage.

Thanks for alerting me to the fact that NAEP scores—representing the only national comparisons available—demonstrate that NYC hasn't moved forward or back since Klein and Bloomberg took over; except in one test at one grade level. Since tests are all the DOE cares about they can't, like me, claim that testing is not the only way to judge their work.

Another example. I ran into a headline today—NY Times, I believe—proclaiming that while we're not doing badly compared to most European rivals, we are being badly beaten by Asia. Yes, Japan and Singapore do better. But Asians? Neither China nor India are doing better—nor are their scores even mentioned in these international comparisons. Americans believe it must be true because they are the primary locations of outsourcing, and we've bought the lie that outsourcing is related to our poor public educational system—rather than appallingly low wages in outsourced sites. The headlines shouldn't obscure these realities.

Yes, wouldn't it be nice if there was something comparable to Consumer Reports on education. Maybe we can interest them in working on this?

Such a "simple" idea. Reporting that is not self-interested, that tries to explain the complexity of automobiles (toasters, etc.) in ways that acknowledge that we're not all looking for the same thing, and that we might want to easily scan the alternatives to see what the trade-offs are. I want 4-wheel drive, but….I also want…. And on and on. We don't actually have to reinvent the wheel.

I think "accountability" has to start by separating the different purposes and audiences to which we feel accountable. For example, I'm accountable to my students—they have a right to know what I think of their work and how it can be improved. I'm accountable to my colleagues to share my work in the interest of improving collective practice. I'm accountable to families to bring them into the full picture of what I see happening and what I hope together we can do about the situation. This can include standadized tests. But since such tests are designed to be statistically indirect "indicators"—at best (see psychometrician W. James Popham's piece in Education Week…), it would be odd if we ignored the fact that we have access to direct evidence. We have the hard data—the kids and their work.

But while individual schools are the best place for this assessment to originate, there's the kind of data needed by more distant publics: professional and lay, politicians and academics.

Some years ago we designed a 5-year "experimental" project in NYC—with $50 million in Annenberg funds, to explore a large-scale experiment with the above in mind. It involved an institute at Columbia headed by Linda Darling-Hamond, Michelle Fine at CUNY and other research backup, about 130 schools with 50,000 students, organized into 15 networks. It gave schools direct access to their full budgets and a great deal of freedom from union, city and state mandates in return for developing new forms of accountability. It managed to get the support of the then-chancellor, mayor, teachers' union and state commissioner. Unfortunately, as we were about to "go", both the chancellor and the commissioner departed and their replacements said "no way."

It's an oddly distorted version of this idea that emerged 10 years later under Bloomberg and Klein. It gutted what we believed was the essence of the plan: that it was voluntary, small scale (the size of the average American city), invited networks to develop self-designed plans, and had the support of some of the best independent research institutions in town to track different aspects of the work as it played out over time. We hoped that the work would help us find answers suitable to the various audiences involved. We were genuinely curious and thought it quite likely that we would end up with some shared agreement about "what works" and many different answers as well!

We lost that chance. So, now maybe you and I can try to imagine what some of these different solutions might have looked like.

D

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)