Bridging Differences

Dear Deborah,

Well, I certainly agree with you that all kids should have the quality of education now available only for students in the best schools. Given how much our nation spends on education, this should not be a pipe dream, but we know that it is not happening and has not happened in the past.

We both recall that John Dewey wrote that what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child is what the community should want for all its children. That's a good starting point. What does the best and wisest parent want for his or her own child?

Certainly, that parent would want a school with small classes, which guarantees that her child would get personal attention. Class size is a pretty good indicator of what most people mean by quality. If you visit the most elite private schools, you can bet that they don't have 32 students in a class. On the Web sites of such schools, one learns that classes are typically 12 to 15 students to a teacher. Such luxury is unheard of in most public schools, with the possible exception of schools in tony suburbs. Many of those who pronounce that class size doesn't matter send their own children to schools with small classes.

Another indicator of quality is the presence of the arts. The best and wisest parent would not want his child to go to a school with no teachers of music, art, dance, or other arts. Yet we know that in most of our public schools today, the arts have been sacrificed to make more time for test-prepping.

One more point: That wise parent would demand schools that were physically attractive and well-maintained. He or she would not tolerate the neglect, deterioration, and obsolescence that we see so often in our schools. There are lots of other things that our mythical best-and-wisest parent would insist upon, but these three points, I think, are indisputable, and a good starting point.

Are these the priorities of President Obama's Race to the Top Fund? Absolutely not! The president's Department of Education will dispense nearly $5 billion, not to reduce class sizes, not to expand access to the arts, and not to improve the beauty and functionality of our public schools, but to incentivize the workforce with merit pay; to increase the privatization of struggling schools; and to compel teachers to teach to admittedly poor tests by tying teacher pay to students' test scores.

Let's get back to the new federal education agenda. Seeing how little has changed from Bush to Obama in education policy, I want my share of that $5 billion back. (That may become my weekly mantra!).

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (71) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

It is a good idea to explore the separate elements of the federal education agenda, one by one. Merit pay, the first issue you raise, now stands high among the priorities of the Obama administration as it did for the Bush administration and as it has for the Republican Party and business leaders for many years.

The idea that teachers should be evaluated in large part by the test scores of their students has achieved a remarkable currency in the past year, because President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan have championed it. You worry that merit pay might be unfairly applied and that it would disrupt the collegial nature of schoolwork. You also worry that if teachers get a bonus when scores go up, students will see that their teachers are motivated by money, not the intrinsic satisfaction associated with professional success. And, as you point out, there is precious little evidence (you say NO evidence) that merit pay leads to better schools.

As most now define it, merit pay rewards teachers whose students get higher scores on state tests. Such teachers are likely to require their students to practice for days, weeks, even months for the all-important state tests. Such activities are likely to be repetitive, uncreative, and uninspiring. As Daniel Koretz wrote in his recent book, Measuring Up, this intensive test prep regime may produce higher scores by teaching students the format of the state test, even teaching them very similar questions; however, the students may be unable to perform as well on a different test of the same subject. Such activities, Koretz says, tend to corrupt the measure and reduce its validity.

When I was researching merit pay, I discovered that David K. Cohen and Richard J. Murnane wrote an article in The Public Interest in 1985 called "The Merits of Merit Pay." They pointed out that many urban districts adopted some sort of merit pay in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, times of Republican ascendancy in Washington when educators were trying to adapt business methods to the work of the schools. The idea tended to wane because "schools found it difficult to devise defensible criteria of meritorious teaching." Since consensus was lacking on what constituted good teaching and how to measure it, there was no agreement on how to create a sustainable program.

Back in those olden times, schools lacked the computerized data banks that now make it possible to link the test scores of individual students to their teachers. So our technology has reduced "good teaching" to test score gains.

If our sole concern is to see higher scores, then we might be able to induce teachers to produce them if the rewards are big enough. But will our schools be better? Will our students be better prepared as citizens? Will they have greater interest in science and the arts? Will they have the motivation to learn and explore and create without the whip of a test over their heads? Will they be educated to think for themselves or to produce programmed responses?

My guess is that we will see quite a lot of experimentation with compensation plans. The most successful are likely to pay teachers more for doing more—running after-school programs, mentoring young teachers, performing valuable services in the school—not just for getting higher scores. Some test-score information is bound to be part of the equation; but (in my view) it should not be the dominant part.

I do not see merit pay as a cure-all or even as a significant reform. It may be a distraction from the serious issues that confront our students and our schools. Like you, I, too, am fearful of the heavy-handed application of technology and accountability. I, too, worry that the new technocrats will squeeze the life out of teaching and learning. If this is what our nation is buying for nearly $5 billion in stimulus funding, I want my money back.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Let's explore, one by one, the separate elements of the federal education agenda, Diane. Are they based on reason and evidence or ignorance and irrationality? (I could have asked myself the same thing about our differences regarding the trade-offs and risks involved in a national curriculum.)

Merit pay is high on the list of the new business-oriented reformers and naturally difficult for unions to swallow. For unions, the big issues are above all aimed at providing employees with a fair system that won't place them at the mercy of their bosses when it comes to the basics of the job. It's obviously of less concern to people entering the field for a short period. (Ditto for retirement, seniority, maternity leave, etc.—all of which are safeguards of concern, mostly, for those in for a lifetime career.)

Merit pay involves a set of related issues of concern to me. I speak to this as a former teacher, trade unionist, parent activist, and principal. On most of these we agree, Diane, even though they have never been directly connected, as they have for me, to "self-interest."

In each of these roles, I was glad that teachers' pay benefits and seniority rights were not at stake in the disagreements we might have. I could always see how dangerous it might be if powerful parents, principals, community members, or union "bosses" were in a position to annually decide how much my own child's teacher was worth paying. Oddly enough—am I right, Diane?—most of the reforms being threatened preceded unionization of schools and exist in states in which there are no labor-management contracts. They came into existence to protect teachers from the political pressures that affected their jobs and their profession. They mirror the protections of most public employment. Union power helped to make these safeguards and benefits more secure, but their history—as you have documented, Diane—has other roots.

I'm reinforced in my attachment to these by my own personal experience and that of two of my teaching offspring! Two out of two have at some point in their teaching lives been fired, and one was blackballed. And, in both cases it was related to out-of-class behaviors: remarks made at public meetings and union activity.

But my critique of merit pay rests also on other prejudices of mine. First of all, I think schools need to be highly collegial settings and any system of financial (or other) rewards creates a setting that makes this harder, not easier to achieve. And, believe me, it's hard enough as it is. That's one reason that in NYC, the United Federation of Teachers agreed to an experiment only if the staff had the right to decide on how to spread the resulting bonus money.

Secondly, I believe that schools work best when we can help young people see that the highest goal of learning is not some external reward, but the enormous satisfaction of learning, the "power of their ideas" (the title of my first book), backed by knowledge. They come to us largely untainted by a system of rewards for the most complex learning they will encounter—the knowledge and reasoning that leads them to language competence, an enormous vocabulary even under the worst of circumstances, the names and faces of thousands of objects and people, the "rules" of the game for any number of ordinary situations. They can "read" people's moods and make sensible predictions based on their theories, as they can with hundreds upon hundreds of other theories that apply to their daily lives. Learning is unstoppable—the trick is how to turn it to some "subject matter" that they don't encounter naturally, or which they don't uncover in its fuller complexity naturally. The aims of school—whatever they may be—depend on our keeping that drive alive, nourishing it, and deliberately doing as little as possible to undermine it. Ditto for teaching.

Thirdly, there is simply NO evidence on its behalf in public or private employment, and most previous attempts at this have been abandoned for that reason. The "evidence" falls on the other side. In fact, there is evidence of a lot of danger. It corrupts. Whatever is used to decide who "merits more" will—as most high-stakes indicators do—undermine the indicator(s) chosen: Campbell's law.

No better example of this has hit the headlines lately than what is known as the "C.E.O. compensation" problem. David Owen has written a startling and chock-full-of-lessons essay in the Oct. 12 New Yorker, "The Pay Problem." I'll be quoting from it in future weeks, so I hope our blogees get a copy of it. Have you read it, Diane?

To those reading us, I hope you will help me think about which of the above arguments are best or worst, and why you disagree—if you do.

Thanks,
Deborah

P.S. Beware old-timers. I've just realized that the term "performance" assessment now refers to the paper-and-pencil test. As in a driver's test—who would imagine calling the paper-and-pencil test a performance test??? We're back to Alice in Wonderland where words can mean whatever we choose.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (70) | 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 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 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)

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 Deborah,

My guess is that we will have a long time, not months, but years, to discuss national standards and a national curriculum. The question won’t go away. It is one of the items on Secretary Duncan’s “to-do” list. In 1995, I wrote a book on the subject and predicted that we would inevitably move in this direction, as it made no sense to have 50 different ways of measuring how we are doing in math and science. I believe that NCLB has sharpened the contradictions and laid bare the confusion of so many different “standards,” as well as the yawning gap between state and federal standards.

My fear is that this effort will be captured by the NCLB basic-skills crowd or the P21 ignorance-is-bliss crowd. Or both! So you can see the seeds of doubt have been planted. I have always thought there was a downside; it’s in my nature to look at all sides. I hope I am wrong.

In terms of the bleak scenario you laid out, we have no differences to bridge. It appears that the Big Money has placed its bets on dismantling public education. Mayor Bloomberg decided long ago, when he took over New York City’s public schools, that their biggest problem was too much democracy. So he persuaded the legislature to turn control over to him, and he eliminated any vestige of democracy. We both know how messy democracy is; people make mistakes. But with a vigilant press, there is always a chance to make changes, correct errors.

That’s not the situation in New York City. Michael Bloomberg does not confront a vigilant press. The press barons applaud his every move, and there has been no vigilance, no scrutiny, and no outcry against his authoritarian mode of governance. Those who don’t like it, most especially parents, are voiceless, except for blogs. (The best is here.)

There have recently been a series of public hearings, held by the state Assembly’s Committee on Education, on whether to renew mayoral control. At each hearing, parents and advocates have expressed their frustration about what has happened to the city’s schools in recent years, the disdainful way in which the Department of Education treats them, and their fear that the next public school to die will be their own.

Under Chancellor Klein, the Department of Education has closed nearly 100 regular public schools and replaced them with charter schools or new schools. Unlike other cities where charters have to supply their own facilities, New York City gives them space in public school buildings, and sometimes the entire building. Currently, the DOE is closing a neighborhood public school in Harlem and putting a charter school in its place. The DOE tells angry parents that they should be thrilled to have choice, but parents worry that their children will have no neighborhood school to attend.

All such decisions are made without consultation. And the chancellor goes around the country boasting of his success in closing established schools and replacing them with new schools and charter schools.

Most bizarre is when the mayor and chancellor show up at charter school rallies and tell the parents that their local public schools are no good and that they are lucky to be in a charter. I often wonder at such times if these two have forgotten that they are responsible for the 98 percent of the city’s public school children who are in regular schools. It’s like the president of Macy’s telling his customers to shop at Wal-Mart.

Of course, this course of action has the enthusiastic endorsement of the Billionaire Boys Club, that is, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation. They know what needs to be done, and they don't see the point of listening to such unenlightened types as parents and teachers.

At some point the music and the upheaval will stop. But when it does, will there still be a public school system? Or will the schools all be run by hedge fund managers, dilettantes, and EMOs?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (55) | 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 Deborah,

Since you brought up the subject of “21st Century skills,” it seemed like an opportune time to talk a bit about this subject.

A week ago, I participated in a panel discussion on this topic, sponsored by an organization called Common Core in Washington, D.C.. Common Core was created to advocate for the liberal arts and sciences, particularly because of the pressure to spend more and more time emphasizing only reading and mathematics. After all, they are the only subjects that “count” for purposes of NCLB accountability, so supervisors and principals are demanding that teachers produce higher scores in the tested subjects. Meanwhile, there is accumulating evidence that non-tested subjects like history, literature, the arts, science, geography, and civics are getting less time and attention because they don’t count toward improving a school’s standing according to NCLB requirements.

Toni Cortese, who is vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, and I are co-chairmen of Common Core. As we watched the steady momentum building for “21st Century skills,” we worried that this might be yet another pedagogical juggernaut that would undercut the teaching of the liberal arts and sciences. And so, on Feb. 24, Common Core convened a conference on the subject. Toni was the moderator, and papers were presented by me, E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation), and Daniel Willingham (a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia).

Hirsch, Willingham, and I expressed our concerns about “21st Century skills,” and Ken Kay, who is president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, responded. I hope you will take the time to read our papers here. Ken Kay spoke, but did not present a written paper. The whole thing was videotaped, and the tape should be available now or in a few days at the Common Core Web site.

In brief, I maintained that the movement for “21st Century skills” sounds similar—if not identical—to earlier movements over the past century. Its calls to teach critical thinking skills, creativity, problem-solving, and cooperative group skills are not at all “21st Century.” Certainly for the past generation, these goals have been virtual mantras in our schools of education. If there is anything that teachers have been taught over the years, it is the importance of pursuing these goals, which are certainly laudable in themselves.

Earlier manifestations of the movement to teach outcomes directly was referred to as “life adjustment education,” or “outcome-based education,” or most recently in the 1990s, “SCANS skills.” In every manifestation, the movement says that we should teach students how to think and teach them real-life skills but downplay academic subjects because students can always look up “bits of information.”

E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham were brilliant as they argued that skills and knowledge are inseparable. People do not think in the abstract; they need knowledge—ideas, facts, concepts—to think about. Dan Willingham showed in his presentation that the mind does not compartmentalize into skills and knowledge. Problems cannot be solved without having the relevant knowledge to think with. Students can learn creativity, flexibility, problem-solving, and critical thinking as they learn about science, history, mathematics, and so on. To prioritize skills over knowledge, the panel argued, made no sense.

Ken Kay responded by saying that the “21st Century skills” movement gave equal weight to skills and knowledge and that he was sure there was common ground. He spoke of the many education organizations and technology companies that had endorsed the movement.

I must say, and I mean no disrespect for Mr. Kay, that I was struck by this thought (maybe I was just exercising my critical thinking skills). I have often written about education controversies, and in every case, one group of educators argues with another group of educators. In this instance, a panel of educators (me, Hirsch, Willingham) was debating a public relations executive. This seemed odd to me, and made me wonder about the movement itself.

Is it an effort on the part of the technology companies to sell more high-tech hardware and software to schools? Is it an effort to throw a wrench into the effort to develop meaningful and reasonable academic standards by replacing them with vague and pleasing-sounding goals?

One of our loyal readers, Diana Senechal, was in the audience, and she made an excellent point in the question period. (Diana, as you know, teaches in a New York City elementary school.) She had gone to the trouble of visiting the P21 Web site, where she reviewed suggested lesson plans in English. One activity was to have students read a story or play, then make a commercial or video with Claymation figures. Diana asked, “Why not discuss the ideas in the story instead of spending hours making Claymation figures?” Which approach is likelier to engage students in thinking critically? It seemed to me that she was spot-on.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (52) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

A great Tuesday letter. It has outraged some of my friends—whose strategic approach now is to applaud anything moving in our direction and speak quietly about anything we profoundly disagree with.

Yes, alas: Duncan’s office is not yet offering a change either of us can believe in.

To stimulate the economy, Obama’s education plan includes more focus on charters, and for teachers, schools, and districts that implement so-called “merit pay” based on student test scores. Aside from misdirecting the goals of education, it misdirects the path to a good education. By confusing test scores with “being well-educated,” and the motivation to do a good job as synonymous with financial reward, we undermine values essential to democracy.

The “rulers” of our economy had plenty of incentives to build a healthy economy. Trillions. They spent their smarts on making sure they increased their share of the pie. And if their pay had depended on decreasing the earning gap, I suspect they’d have hired statisticians to play with that data, just as they did with the economy—and just as their educational counterparts have done with education data. Diane, you have been a steady voice in alerting us to misinformation, especially on the NYC front. Who will be doing this for the new Duncan DOE? Hopefully it won’t be people who perhaps need to speak softly to avoid placing themselves outside the circle of power. Critics are needed as much when we win an election as when we lose one. One advantage of being older and retired is that we have less to lose.

The more high stakes the data, the more corrupt become the data—which I’m told is called Campbell’s Law. We poison the well once we promise folks more money for “better data.” When “data” (e.g. test scores) are in the driver’s seat, beware. We also need more independent “juries” to analyze and make recommendations based on independent information. The phrase itself “data-driven,” rather than “data-informed,” gives me the chills.

We also need sensible longitudinal research, to explore the connection between test scores, school models, etc., and “doing better” 10 years out. This is uncharted territory. We might explore, in short, what “doing better” could or should mean in real life.

I recently read about a high and mighty American who was lauded for “freezing” his pay—at $11 million a year. It’s not merely that such wages are a waste, maybe even bad for his particular business operation, but that they corrupt the concept of democratic society (one vote per citizen, et al). It reminds me of the story about Marie Antoinette offering to give the poor cake, or the joke about how even a poor man was guaranteed a place to sleep—if only under the bridges of Paris. (I have no doubt messed up both stories, but I suspect, Diane, you know their mythical sources.)

Whether we’re talking about schools that teach the academic disciplines or the interdisciplinary “habits of mind” and “heart” that underlie a complex democratic society, or even “2lst Century skills,” we should be alarmed at the direction the newly staffed Department of Education seems headed. The most heralded change is in finding a new title for NCLB, rather than tackling its basic hypocrisy. Despite (or because) those closest to our schools—school boards, parents, teachers—oppose the testing mania, those in D.C. seem as disposed as ever to ignore such “self-interested” opinions.

Tests, as we know them today, are not even good sources for knowing if Johnny can read. Does becoming “skilled” at the components of reading tests translate to becoming “whole” readers”? And, if it does, can we assume this translates into reading more and more wisely? There are ways to make for technically better readers that do not make for a better-educated citizen or employee, much less a creative and inventive one.

Being taught early, over and over, that making a predetermined “wrong answer” (out of a predetermined four or five) has serious intellectual and social consequences is dangerous. It leads to bad pedagogy. It’s precisely in school that it’s important to value the exercise of judgment based on evidence rather than being taught how to slyly “guess” at the one “right” answer.

Children, starting from birth, as well as at ages 3, 4, and 5, are still highly motivated to make sense of the world without any prodding. Regardless of their backgrounds. In fact, you have to prod children to stop doing so. Which is what we do at the average school—by state design. I can attest to this based on evidence from almost any source. So I am alarmed at hearing that we plan to stimulate the economy by doing this with kids younger and younger. Such schooling will, over time, undermine both our economy and democracy. We need funds for our youngest—including publicly supported child care of high quality and an end to conditions highlighted in The New York Times, Page One, "In Turnabout, Children Take Caregiver Role". It's referring to preteen caretakers!

My visits to Chicago and DeKalb kindergartens (with exceptions) scared me—the absence of playfulness has become so normal! I’d love to know where you stand on this, Diane. We could even use a little disagreement!

Deb

P.S. One and all, read Mike Rose’s blog—or did I already suggest that? Also Mike Klonsky’s, who disagrees with me for our sharp critique of Duncan. Finally, I'd also point our readers to your recent piece for Politico.com, Diane.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I was about to move on to a new topic but on Sunday read a column in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof titled "Our Greatest National Shame." Well, as you must surely realize, it is American education that is "our greatest national shame." Kristof says that "...we do know that the existing national school system is broken, and that we're not trying hard enough to fix it." I believe that when he uses the collective noun "we," he is referring to himself and other newspaper columnists, not to people working in America's schools, who are working very hard "to fix" the problems.

Kristof then moves on to repeat the very things that I wrote about in my previous blog, about the search for teachers who produce miracles.

He says "there's a real excitement at what we are learning about K-8 education."

"First, good teachers matter more than anything; they are astonishingly important. It turns out that having a great teacher is far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good school with a mediocre teacher. A Los Angeles study suggested that four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of the pool would erase the black-white testing gap."

His second revelation is that "there is no correlation between teacher certification and teacher effectiveness...[and] it doesn't seem to matter if a teacher has a graduate degree or went to a better college or had higher SATs." He concludes that we should scrap certification, that we should measure which teachers are effective by testing (not clear whether he means testing the teachers or observing the test scores of their students), and then pay more to those who teach in "bad" schools.

So, let's deconstruct a bit.

Kristof approvingly cites the economists who say that four consecutive years of a great teacher would close the achievement gap. Unfortunately he does not seem to realize that the economists were writing theoretically (and the relevant studies actually say that five consecutive years of a great teacher would have this result). This happy outcome has NEVER been demonstrated in any school or school district. It is a projection of an econometric speculation.

If I read Kristof correctly, a "great" teacher is one who can produce higher test scores. We know that this can happen through relentless test-prepping. Is that what a great teacher does?

But if that is the definition of a great teacher, then we can't possibly identify them until they have had at least three, or better yet, five years in the classroom, so there is sufficient data showing that they produced dramatic gains in their classroom.

So, that means that no new teacher—certainly no Teach for America teacher—could possibly be a great teacher, because we don't know whether they are great teachers until they have created a consistent record of big test score gains over three-five years.

Let's suppose that a district uses its data to identify the teachers who consistently produce big gains. What happens next? Do these teachers get assigned to the lowest-performing schools? Which children in those schools are assigned to these teachers? What happens to these teachers if they don't get the big gains in the next years? No one has tried to explain how this would be implemented, whether successful teachers would be willing to go wherever they are assigned, and how their services would be parceled out among many needy students.

As for entry into teaching, it sounds as though Kristof is saying that anyone should be accepted as a teacher. He is ready to scrap certification, graduate degrees, SAT scores. Maybe you don't need to be a college graduate to be a great teacher. Why not hire college freshmen as teachers? or high school seniors?

Isn't it wonderful that we have economists with tons of data (but no practical experience) to tell us how to find and reward great teachers?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 1:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (34) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I acknowledge that I have been influenced in my thinking by my frequent exchanges with you. A friend warned me the other day that I have been giving aid and comfort to the anti-testing crowd, which he said was a terrible thing. I think he got it wrong. I am not (nor have I ever been) “anti-testing,” but I am surely more alert to the misuses and abuses of testing. To the extent that I have been sensitized to these things by you, then I thank you.

However, I am not prepared to follow you to the next step, which is to question why we “incarcerate” kids in schools at all. In my research, I have occasionally come across progressivist thinkers who asked the questions you now raise, who dream of a day when work, play, and learning all wondrously merge, and “education” takes place in the fields and the activities of daily life. I have never succumbed to the lure of abolishing institutions, especially the institutions of schooling that we have. I continue to hope that we can make them better places for learning—and you have done a good bit in your lifetime to advance that aspiration.

The “down with schools” and “liberate the child” from the classroom types have never persuaded me that children will in any way be better off if they grow up in fields and factories, if they are left to find their way without adult supervision, if they are left to the tender mercies of employers, the media, and even (in some cases) their families.

And still I fear the mantle of conformity that seems to have descended on American childhood. Last week, I wrote about the eccentric and highly accomplished Claiborne Pell, and one of our most brilliant readers, Diana Senechal, wrote to ask what happens to eccentric children today. I responded that they are probably put on Ritalin or assigned to special education. How sad! I think of my own grandchildren, whose lives are closely monitored, and compare them with my childhood, when I was free to roam far and wide on my bicycle after school, so long as I was home in time for dinner.

Is it that we live in a more dangerous time? I don’t know. But I don’t think that the obvious answer is to “de-school” children. I don’t think you will pull me along with you on that journey.

As you well know, I have done my share of complaining about the business types—and the phonies who think they are thinking like business types (when in fact they are clueless about teaching and learning and therefore lean on incentives, data, and an attitude of toughness to mask their ignorance of curriculum and instruction). Nonetheless, I share their expressed concern about improving the achievement and knowledge of our nation’s children. As a nation, I do believe we will be helped or harmed in the future by the way we educate our children today.

Where I part company with today’s so-called reformers is that they think that test scores alone are adequate measures of “achievement.” I, however, do not. I hope for the day when schools are expected to teach not only reading and math but history, geography, science, the arts, literature, civics, and a foreign language, and to attend to students’ health and personal development. To me, such a rounded approach to education seems self-evident. It is what the “best and wisest” among us want for our own children. I wonder why our society is so willing to listen to the small-minded “reformers” who are willing to inflict on other people’s children what they would never tolerate for their own?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Happy New Year!

I spent last Saturday going through years of “stuff” I’ve collected—letters, essays, reports, notes, etc. that will be going to the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana. Eighty percent of it is school stuff. Several colleagues came over to help put together boxes and sort. It was hard going because we kept calling out—“oh, listen to this!”.

I recall how confident I felt in the late 70s and 80s that we could “prove” a point: all kids could grapple with important abstract ideas—and love it. We succeeded. We made a dent: several hundred schools have since opened based on at least some of the ideas we “invented.” But we mostly influenced the language, not the reality. Block scheduling, standards, advisories, small schools, portfolios, family conferences entered schooling jargon. Meanwhile, "Reform"—the well-funded form—got confused with the latest American business model. No more factories now, but financial institutions based on mathematicalized data. We skipped once again the idea of schools as communities. Why? I was told over and over: self-governing communities are too hard to replicate or control.

Along came an article by Charles Murray of "The Bell Curve" infamy. He proclaims that the failure of current reforms is proof that he’s right—serious intellectual work is not appropriate for most kids, and certainly not most poor kids of color. It’s genetic! So let’s get off the kick about all kids going to college, he argues. To my surprise, his solution rang a bell—as it did for you, Diane. It set us both thinking!

Can one separate his blatant racism from the idea itself? Furious letters followed reminding us that putting it into practice would have decidedly racist results and sink the poor into permanent poverty. He’s also dead wrong, as some noted, about the potential of “those” kids. But…given that we have in effect created a system of colleges that helps precious few to climb up the ladder and meanwhile impoverishes many families, isn’t it worth questioning our frenzy about college-going? (Full disclosure: It so happens I’m currently in close contact with two college-age grandsons. It biases me.)

I’d guess that less than 10 percent of college students attend because they are eager to learn the disciplines of the Academy. In fact, fewer academic courses are now required for this reason. The only goal is the piece of paper. Murray calls it a Wizard of Oz certification system.

Murray’s idea? That we separate getting a B.A. from any financial gain, now a requirement for 95 percent of all employment. Let students go their own way after high school, with vocational training or apprenticeships in whatever field interests them—from scholar to chef.

Daring to think about this radical idea leads me to reimagine the whole kit and caboodle. Suppose we could redesign it all? Would we “incarcerate” 11- to 14-year-olds in 400 square-foot rooms, and demand they sit still for 45 minutes followed by 45 minutes, followed by…and expect much of what happens within those classes to “stick”? Or try to frighten them into remembering, coax them with external rewards, shame them, and/or honor them. Or narrow our sights to a few high-stakes tests? (Or add more tests with stiffer penalties and rewards—and decide to start at age 3 and add hours to the school day?)

What is it we think young people entering the polling booth or the job market are actually missing? What might we design to prepare them for such roles? Not to mention the roles of friend or family member? And is 17 years of schooling/schooling/schooling an answer to these rarely asked questions? My old friend John Gatto—enemy of all required schooling—looks wiser and wiser.

CPE and CPESS were attempts to answer these questions under the constraints of NYC’s public school system of 1974 and 1985 (when each was founded). They were efforts at reconceptualizing what had grown willy-nilly over the past hundred years. From home schooling and apprenticeships for the masses in 1800 alongside elite academies and private tutors for the elite to the modern K-17 system for all. Headlines cried “crisis!” as far back as the late 19th Century, and the criticisms have been remarkably consistent.

So every so often we call in the experts. CEOs, Wall Street experts, and governors. They say, "add more penalties and rewards (or privatize). And bonuses!" Wall Street swears by them. But at least their catastrophic manipulation of short-term data was exercised by folks who knew the business they were in. Similar efforts to create mathematical formulas useful for school decision-making, by non-educators this time, have not done better—except the damage is “just” a matter of the continued poor education of kids, and generally not the ones at the top of the social heap.

Enough already, let’s have the courage to rethink what we have wrought instead of just turning the screws tighter on an indefensible system we happened upon.

So, thank you Charles Murray. It suggests that we can learn even from people whose work we often despise. It’s a luxury—this capacity to learn from people whose biases we do not like—that may be easier to exercise if one starts off with a sense of entitlement. It’s the luxury that lies at the heart of playfulness, the capacity “to imagine otherwise” that is the birthright of every infant—regardless of race, class, creed. It’s what a truly “good education” should nurture, not crush.

The first task of a good school is to be sure that no individual in it has reason to be afraid of interesting ideas or people from 8:30-3. To be unafraid, as my friend Michael Walzer says, is at the heart of democracy’s promise. It’s what comes through over and over in the archival stuff I’m going through—how intellectually exciting it was to be unafraid—"us" being both the kids and the adults.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

You quote John Goodlad, who asks “Whatever became of the idea that representative democracy is the essential starting point for public education?”

This is an important question to raise today, as I suspect that our political elites have lost faith in this idea. Take, for example, the spread of charter schools. There are now some 1.3 million children in more than 4,500 charter schools in 40 states, plus the District of Columbia. Without getting into the merits or demerits of charter schools, it is worth noting that the impulse to “go charter” seems to align with the impulse to remove oneself from the public square. Just last week, a report on the charter schools in the Twin Cities held that they were more racially and socially segregated than the regular public schools.

As we know, both John McCain and Barack Obama endorsed charter schools during their last debate in the campaign. The big foundations, notably Gates and Broad, are gung-ho for charters, as are business groups. There seems to be a strong and growing belief that the schools controlled directly through the democratic process are incapable of improvement and that only schools managed privately can flourish. Actually, a recent paper by Cecilia Rouse (with Lisa Barrow) [School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Recent Evidence, Remaining Questions] says that there is not a lot of difference in outcomes between choice schools and regular public schools, but findings such as hers seem not to have daunted the growing movement for charters and choice.

Also last week, Louis V. Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in which he called for the abolition of the nation’s 15,000 or so school districts and the imposition of national standards, national tests, merit pay, and longer hours in school. Although I have long supported national standards and national testing (without stakes!), I was alarmed by Gerstner’s conclusion that school districts, school boards, and democratic governance were the root cause of our educational ills. I wrote an article for Forbes.com (perhaps reaching some of the same readers as the WSJ) arguing that we should not abrogate democratic control of our schools, that it would be wrong to relinquish discussion, debate, and public review of education policies.

It is worth mentioning, I think, that Gerstner’s proposal is a kissing cousin to the ideas set out by John Chubb and Terry Moe in their book "Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools" in 1990. They argued then, on behalf of vouchers, that the fundamental problem in American education was democratic control of the schools. So, while Gerstner, Chubb, and Moe advocate different policies, their analysis is congruent.

I remain confused and uncertain about what kind of “accountability” is best. I am not even sure how to define the term; it seems to be rubbery, depending on who is using it and what ends they pursue. I agree with many of our readers that tests matter, and they are not going to disappear. I do believe, however, that they are being overused and misused, especially when so many rewards and sanctions are now tied to test scores. As one of our readers wrote, when every child is tested, then states will seek out the cheapest way to test every child. And then every child, every teacher, and every principal finds their future tied to a cheap measuring stick.

It is clear to me that we need more measures, more ways of looking at inputs and outcomes, and that we should not expect only test scores to become the ultimate judge of everything that happens in the school. So long as we continue to cling to simplistic measurements, we will be in a bind, the one I mentioned last time: Even if the scores should go higher, it won’t necessarily mean that kids are better educated. They may even be less well educated as a result of our misguided policies.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (45) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

On Thanksgiving day, I’m counting my blessings. Number one: you and I can have an influence (hah!) in maneuvering us through to better times in public education. We’ve at least got a 50-50 or 2-98 chance. A better future won’t come from the folks who have given us the recent past—there’s no chance of that.

I remember when the late Elliot Shapiro wasn’t allowed to become District 2 superintendent in NYC because he hadn’t taken a course on human relations. And Bobby Wagner wasn’t allowed to serve as NYC chancellor because he didn’t have proper education credentials. I thought that was silly at the time. And it was. But this is insanity at the other extreme.

These guys—New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, e.g.—aren’t experienced educators or principals (like Shapiro). Nor have they been politicians who had to listen to various publics (like Wagner). Nor, believe it or not, they aren’t businessmen—Klein never ran a big business either.

They’re con men.

Mr. (Louis) Gerstner of IBM fame considers “the fundamental thing …is for Obama to convene the 50 governors and…abolish the 16,000 school districts we have in the United States.” He bases his conclusion on his experience abolishing “81 profit centers” at IBM. Within one year “they” will develop a national set of standards in all subjects, and a year later a “national testing regime” so that on “one day in America…every 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th grader will take a national test against a national curriculum.” Plus a national teacher test that proves that they can teach.

The myth that decentralization had to go because it was rife with fiscal scandal was a phony one. Compared with the slick fiscal scandals that go uncovered by the media in the new centralization, it was squeaky clean. A superintendent bought liquor for a district party from a “friend” and paid for it with district funds, in the bad old days. (That’s what they accused Carlos Medina of in District 4. Tut tut.) Compared with what we overpaid for the British “consultants,” it’s truly penny ante—and at least it put money into the local economy! Imagine what it might be like on a federal level. Halliburton scale.

Needed now, Diane: some bold alternate schemes. How else might public education become public once again? Let’s see if we can develop some criteria for reforms—a check list of ways to judge so-called reform?

Perhaps a good place to start would be to consider who should be “accountable” for what? Which decisions belong to professionals—local, as well as state or nationwide? Which belongs to all the adults who constitute a single school community? Which decisions belong to the tax-paying local or state community that largely funds the school? What best belongs to the federal government to decide (and fund)?

I start with the principle that—as far as possible—the people making decisions about the minds and hearts of our children should be those most directly impacted by them and responsible for implementing them. This isn’t so easy. (Should 6-year-old kids be asked to decide….? No. When we speak of parents, are all their voices likely to be equally heard? If not, what can we do about it? And on and on.)

I base this principle on, above all, the danger of anything else when it comes to making public decisions about raising our kids. I also think it’s an essential for the very best practice. (But then it may be the essence of the very worst, too.) We need to distinguish between persuasion and mandates, and the risks and advantages of each. “Trusting Obama” is not an answer. We must restore our trust to schools, families, teachers, and kids.

But discourse about such alternate ideas/principles has to contend with a very powerful contemporary mythology. No one has done a better job of exposing those than my friend Richard Rothstein. You sent me a piece on “Policy Myths” by Dennis Myers. He notes how often we’ve all been told that since “business uses performance pay, so schools should do the same.” Or that schools are violent places, that parents are fleeing public schools schools, etc. “In fact,” says Myers, “business generally avoids performance pay, schools are the safest places children frequent, private school enrollment is declining, business recommends against numerical goals, and public schools generally perform better than charter schools.” Noted business leader W. Edwards Deming wrote: “A numerical goal leads to distortion and faking, especially when the system is not capable of meeting the goal,” and he pointed to the troubles such goals produced for Sears, Roebuck. Given the current meltdown of once-esteemed businesses, it might be time to start an Educators Roundtable to Save Business—by importing some time-honored school practices. But more importantly to work together to improve practices in both arenas.

Let’s try and build our alternatives on what we know first and foremost about the nature of teaching/learning—and then go from there.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (24) | 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,

I loved your last column. I really enjoyed your references to craft and tinkering. I admire hands-on work, especially since the only work I seem to do these days with my own hands is to type and occasionally to make a salad or scrambled eggs. I would only caution that handiwork, as satisfying as it may be, can never take the place of knowledge, the sort of knowledge gleaned from books and study of the experiences of others. One’s own direct experience of the hands-on kind will take you just so far and no farther. We can’t learn history except by studying it; we can’t learn science except by mastering the knowledge that has been hard-won by scientists; we can't learn philosophy other than by reading and discussing what we have read with others. As one of my intellectual heroes, William Chandler Bagley, wrote many years ago, knowledge for understanding, knowledge for interpretation, knowledge in depth requires much more than hands-on experience. It requires study (as you suggest with your list of 100 books) and concentrated effort.

Nonetheless, I reacted enthusiastically to what you wrote. Like you, I have been despondent about the decline of craft, especially in the arena that I know best, which is publishing. I can’t tell you how dispiriting it is to pick up a book or magazine or newspaper and come across errors of syntax and grammar, as well as just plain sloppiness. There used to be more spelling errors than now, but I attribute that not to an improvement in knowledge of spelling, but to spell-checking software.

One cause of the loss of knowledge, as you describe it in the auto industry and elsewhere, was the last generation of corporate raiders. Last summer, while preparing to write the book that I am now working on, I began plowing through books about American business. One of the most interesting was Connie Bruck’s "The Predators’ Ball," where she explains how Michael Milken, the junk bond king, perfected the art of taking over corporations, turning them over to wealthy friends who knew nothing about the industry, and then disposing of their assets, with everyone but the consumers getting fabulously wealthy. I highly recommend this book, as it tells a fascinating and horrifying story of the destruction of many well-known American household brands by corporate raiders, motivated solely by unquenchable greed.

Another fascinating and horrifying story is Thomas F. O’Boyle’s "At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit," which tells how Jack Welch transformed General Electric. What was once a household brand known by every American was converted to a financial services business, with profit as the only goal and the only value. If you read this book, you will see how sad it is that Jack Welch is now considered a guru of leadership, even, startlingly, in the field of education! (He was chairman of the board of New York City's Leadership Academy to train new principals, perhaps teaching them the art of ruthlessness, an art that does not come naturally to educators.) GE was a “leader” in exporting jobs and manufacturing overseas and destroying a large sector of the consumer products industry in this nation.

This profit-driven mentality has infected education with the recent introduction of programs to pay students to show up for school and/or to get higher test scores. The rationale for such innovations is that students, like adults, should be motivated by greed, not love of learning. The same rationale is behind the current enthusiasm for performance-based pay for teachers tied to test scores. If we listen to the champions of these ideas, education can be reduced to the profit motive, and test scores are the profit.

The people who advance these ideas never stop to consider that the tests now in use are totally unsuited for these purposes, and that these programs are unlikely to succeed for a variety of reasons. I wrote a piece for Forbes last week on this subject. Such programs are inherently flawed because when the money stops, the motivation stops. Furthermore, they are unsustainable and cannot be scaled up, not only because they are very expensive when they go beyond the pilot stage, but because they will consume vast resources that could be better used to promote better instruction, better teachers, smaller classes, better facilities, etc.

Now that our economy has been plunged into crisis by bad economic and business decisions, we must recognize that education is a distinct profession, like medicine and the law. It has its own ideals and values. It cannot, should not, be run "like a business." Or it will fail "like a business."

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's note: Today, Bridging Differences returns to the conversation Diane Ravitch started Tuesday, before yesterday's entries on William Ayers.

Dear Diane,

There’s a connection, as you suggest, between the economic crisis we’re now in and our misbegotten effort to “reform” schools. Maybe it’s got something to do with our disrespect for knowledge.

An odd thing for me to say? Not at all, but I realize that there are some (maybe even you?) who might think that my argument on behalf of “less is more” in terms of curriculum coverage is because I don’t respect knowledge. Quite the opposite. It’s because I honor real knowledge so highly.

We’ve gone from an economy based on expert tinkerers and close observers—to one that rests on generic training in “how to think.” “Critical thinking” and “problem solving”—which progressives like me promote—have been taken to their extreme absurdity. We’ve disconnected them from their base—deep knowledge.

I’ll bet most (all?) of the big-time school reform outfits today are headed by people who have not read more than one or two of the 100 books I recommended at the end of "In Schools We Trust." They have no idea that their latest gimmicks have been tried before. In 1971, the Center for Urban Education published a book called "Education and Jobs" by Ivar Berg. It’s controversial, outrageous, and worth reading if that subject interests you. In 1974, David Tyack wrote "The One Best System." Worth a read if one's current pursuit is “systemic” replication. I spent the summer before opening CPESS curled up with "The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform" by Seymour Sarason. Right or wrong, these are works that anyone tackling the same issues today and claiming to seek a new paradigm for solving them ought to be aware of. Then there are the works of Meier and Ravitch, of course.

Instead, they think they’ve “discovered” pay-for-results. And hold-overs, and zero tolerance... Hah. They’re the “best and the brightest” with generic smarts and a willingness to ignore the “special interests” of labor and management, not to mention parents and kids—a new breed with nothing to learn. History can teach them nothing. It’s the low quality of the people who went into education, plus laziness and unionism that got us where we are, they claim. What else do we need to know?

They represent a mindset that has been a disaster for American economic prosperity, for the auto industry, the banking business, the publishing industry, not just schooling. The days when these fields were led by people who knew autos, banks, and books is long gone. (Silicon Valley still rests on the tinkerer craftsmen, perhaps) And while McCain says it’s all about “greed,” he has forgotten that “greed” is what Milton Friedman was counting on. Is he planning to outlaw it? But even Friedman imagined that greed required knowledge.

The inventive “play” of the wizards who have undermined America is of an interesting sort. In their playpens nothing actually gets built. They don’t get their hands dirty in the mud, they don’t construct their skyscrapers block by block. They just shout “mine,” “I did it.” If it doesn’t work, they move on to other playpens—but always richer than before.

It’s probably not a coincidence that my brother and I developed second careers in our thirties that embedded us in the making and doing part of life. He became an architect, and I became a kindergarten teacher. To our parents' surprise. We were attracted, in part, to work where we could see concrete results that touched on how people lived their lives. But we were also attracted because both architecture and teaching were crafts that required hands-on expertise and knowledge. There was no way to fake it. Both architect and teacher played incessantly with the tools and materials of their trade, got their hands dirty, loved the stories that went with their craft.

The American genius lay precisely, I still think, in this “hands-and-minds-on” approach. It’s what people educated in schools and workshops shared—a merging of “street” smarts and “book” smarts. The schools we deserve need to build on that genius. At best they are a genuine place of work—a laboratory, library, artist’s studio, and marketplace of ideas for teachers, kids, and their fellow citizens.

I used to say that, “if they ran their businesses the way they run our schools, we’d be in trouble.” I suspected they took their workplaces more seriously. Maybe I was wrong. Because, oops, we are in trouble on both fronts. Short-term greed trumped long-term wisdom in American industry just as it is increasingly trumping wisdom in classrooms and schools across the country.

Deborah

P.S. Our reader, Brian, is inclined—like me at times—toward libertarianism. (Unlike me, he pairs it with being a Republican.) What we have to hash out (the 'Brians’ and I) is the role of democracy as a form of accountability.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (25) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

Over the time that we have been blogging, we have found many issues on which we disagree—mostly having to do with externally set curriculum, standards, and tests—and many on which we agree—mostly having to do with autocratic school leadership and efforts to force a business model on the schools.

Since I am writing you on a day when the world economic system is in disarray, I would like to focus on the relevance of the business model for the nation’s public schools.

For the past 15 years or more, we have heard a steady drumbeat from the business community and their allies that the schools need a strong dose of businesslike methods. They need choice, competition, accountability. They need to be more like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King, they need to fight for consumers, they need to be shuttered if they can’t get customers. In short, let’s turn the schools over to the free market. And, of course, we must measure relentlessly, shaming and humiliating those teachers whose students are not constantly getting ever higher test scores. Test scores, I suppose, are the equivalent of a sales target or profit margins.

And of course schools should be deregulated, so that the competition can be as fierce as possible.

As the free market lies in shambles around us, bringing down with it many people’s life savings, I wonder if its advocates in the education arena will stop and reconsider whether they are importing free-market chaos and free-market punishments into the lives of children? And who will stop them before it is too late?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)