Bridging Differences

Dear Diane,

I’m in the midst of reading a marvelous book by Danielle Allen called Talking to Strangers. I’d love to discuss it with others. Do read it so we can converse about it soon. Her concept of “political friendships” between strangers intrigues me.

Which relates to my unpleasant encounter between NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg that you refer to in your letter yesterday. The New York Post reported that the mayor’s aides claim: Bloomberg demanded that the Senate’s grant to NYU be redirected it to CUNY, because of … Deborah Meier! My critical stance toward the mayor’s educational policies (the story quoted me as regarding the absence of parent voices in school policy) seemed a sufficient explanation. Why the Senate capitulated, and why The New York Times didn’t report it, and why the mayor’s aides “leaked” this explanation to the media I do not know. What’s more interesting to me is that this public attempt to threaten NYU, by one of the most powerful and richest politicians in America, was apparently seen as uncontroversial. It’s clearly an abridgement of academic freedom, an abuse of his enormous power; and, perhaps above all, so petty. (In fact, I’m “merely” an unpaid—hopefully not un-honored—member of the NYU faculty.)

I’ve always loved NYC’s feistiness, a quality of mind that seems often missing in more laid-back sections of the country. But even New Yorkers can be cowed by the kind of power and intimidation that the Bloomberg oligarchy has exercised for so many years.

Which gets me back to Allen’s argument in favor of bending over backwards to encourage reasoned, thoughtful dialogue between political friends—arguments not crippled by fear of retaliation or retribution by the authority of the State. The habits of a democratic citizenry are precious, and schools are the only institution I know of that might be training grounds for such citizenship. They are both the potential lab and think tank for reasoned discourse—in a climate of friendship and mutual respect. The art of listening to each other requires careful nurturing.

And, of course, reasoning requires judgment—and both require knowledge (including experience).

Which leads me to E.D. Hirsch’s latest book (The Making of Americans). He and I even agree on many matters. But I’m intrigued by the unexamined assumptions we disagree about! He does not even acknowledge any risks inherent in a nationwide imposition of a single year-by-year curriculum. Local school boards, parent organizations, and teachers' unions can be a pain in the ass (and I speak as one who has been at both ends of each). But I see democracy resting on our reviving these institutions, not in abandoning them. The ease with which we seek to “overcome” unwelcome citizen voices by pushing power ever higher—or to more elite experts—has a long history. It’s not “unreasonable,” just dangerous. “It’s too important to get this right’” is a cry I’ve heard over and over as respected friends seek to circumvent democratic procedures. “We dare not let them vote on this” is not the defense of just fools or demagogues. Yes, democratically delegating some decisions to experts, as well as recognizing when decisions are best made in collaboration with other governmental units, are reasonable objections to placing authority in local democracies. But years of such rationales have led me to be hard-pressed to find places left where ordinary citizens experience decision-making processes. Surely not in many schools. Even hearing each other out is not something we often do in our schools, although we do grow accustomed to not talking back to the textbook, teacher, or principal—more out of boredom (or its uselessness) probably than courtesy. (How rarely do we confront any passionate convictions in our lives in school.)

We’re bad at imagining other ways of seeing the world—and probably always have been. But it is our unique human capacity. While I think that if we devoted the 13 years from K-12th grade to nurturing and training such capacity we’d get better at it, probably it will always be hard. It takes, as does science, mathematics, and the arts, hands-on-practice in a good old-fashioned “apprenticeship.”

Ah, too much rhetoric! There are some wonderful books out by practitioners that describe how we can organize schools that serve both the academic disciplines and democracy better than a “standardized one-size-fits-all” curriculum. Next week.

Deb

P.S. The health debate is instructive—reminding us of how difficult it is to engage in serious debate when the stakes are high. But the solution is not to invent a behind-the-scenes, pretend consensus where none exist, as Duncan et al seem to be doing with regard to so-called educational “reform.” For more on meaningful school reform, I highly recommend that readers seek out an excellent opinion piece by Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves that appeared recently in The Boston Globe. Among other things, they write: "Why not choose the bolder paths not yet taken in our educational system’s much-hailed “race to the top’’ and join those schools at the top of the world already?"

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: Bridging Differences returns today from its summer hiatus. The blog will resume its regular Tuesday-Thursday publishing schedule next week.

Dear Deborah,

School is open, and it is time to talk! What a busy summer for all of us who care about education.

I had a good summer, finished editing my new book, and got it off to the publisher. I also managed to finish George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, my main summer reading. It took 140 pages before I became fully engaged, but then the plot and the characters grabbed me.

The big education events of the summer were huge. Starting locally, the New York legislature renewed Mayor Bloomberg's one-man control of the New York City public schools. No surprise there. What was surprising and really shocking was a debate about whether to create a $1.6 million parent training center, a tiny bone tossed to critics of the mayor's high-handed rule. The legislators wanted to place the new center at New York University. Then the New York Post ran a scare headline warning that someone who had criticized the mayor's education reforms—Deborah Meier—would run the parent training center. This was laughable, since you are an adjunct and would have had nothing to do with the program. Nonetheless, the terrified legislators promptly shifted the appropriation (a grain of sand in our city's $21 billion education budget) to City University of New York, where the mayor can keep it under his thumb and where it will be harmlessly divided into five separate centers.

Nationally, the most important event was the release of the federal government’s regulations for the “Race to the Top.” Those regulations made clear that the Obama administration has fully aligned itself with the edu-entrepreneurs who favor market-based reforms. As I predicted on this blog, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are now the spear carriers for the GOP's education policies of choice and accountability. An odd development, don’t you think? The Department of Education dangles nearly $5 billion before the states, but only if they agree to remove the caps on charter schools and any restrictions on using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research. They just happen to be the programs and approaches favored by the people in power. Under normal circumstances, the Department of Education would need congressional hearings and authorization to launch a program so sweeping and so sharply defined. Instead, they are using the "stimulus" money to impose their preferences, with no hearings and no congressional authorization.

Is any charter school better than any public school? As we learned from the Stanford CREDO study of charters a few months ago, only 17 percent of charter schools are superior to comparable public schools; the rest were either no better or worse. Yet the Obama administration wants to open up the nation’s public schools—especially in urban districts—to massive privatization.

And with the encouragement of Secretary Duncan (and the support of the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation), privatization is taking root. Just last week, the Los Angeles board of education voted to turn over nearly one third of its schools to private management; this despite the fact that in the same week it was reported that the Green Dot takeover of Locke High School produced no gains. At Locke, 2 percent of the students met state standards in math; after a year of massive publicity about the Green Dot miracle at Locke, the scores came out, and 2 percent of the students met state standards in math. The excuses came thick and fast: the dropout rate was down, more students came to school, but…the scores were flat.

There is also no research that justifies the Obama administration’s belief that tying teacher evaluations to student scores will improve schools. I commend to our readers the response to the RTTT regulations by Professor Helen Ladd, an economist who has studied teacher evaluation for many years, as well as the one by Paul Barton, who has studied education issues for many years. What both of these responses clearly demonstrate is that there is no research basis for the priorities favored by Secretary Duncan.

This will be an interesting year. But also a very dangerous year for American public education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (89) | 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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deb

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

Dear Diane,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deb

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

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

Dear Deborah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane

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

Dear 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,

I will get back to you on another day about the strengths and dangers of a national curriculum.

Today I want to initiate a conversation with you about President Obama’s education program. We previously discussed Secretary Arne Duncan's policy views, which frankly sounded identical to those of President Bush's secretary of education, Margaret Spellings.

Now President Obama, in a speech on March 10 to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, has repeated the same views.

The president said that his administration would support whatever works, without regard to whether the ideas are liberal or conservative. He then laid out a vision that heaped goodies on both the liberal Broader, Bolder Agenda (early-childhood education) and the conservative Education Equality Project (more testing, tough accountability, charter schools, merit pay).

This is a politically astute trick. President Obama avoids choosing sides by giving both camps what they want. The left wants more funding: Done! The right wants choice, testing, and merit pay based on test scores: Done!

But let’s look at the vision of where American education is heading. The key here, I think, is the $250 million that the Obama administration will give to states to build longitudinal data systems. These data “warehouses” will collect and track every student’s data from pre-kindergarten through the end of college. Students’ test scores will be linked to individual teachers. Teachers who fail to get test score gains consistently will lose their jobs, while those who do get gains will be rewarded with bonuses or higher salaries. That is one obvious use of the data warehouses.

The assumption here is that the tests we have are excellent; that they are vertically aligned from grade to grade; and that they can safely and reliably be used as the basis for making high-stakes decisions for teachers and students. Many testing experts would challenge each of these assumptions.

Another piece of President Obama’s vision can be seen in his call to states to remove the cap on the number of charter schools that may be established. This one worries me. We both know that there are many excellent charter schools and many abysmal charter schools; states have been slow to close down the latter. But even when they do, there remains this question: Over the long term, what happens to the public school system when the most motivated students enroll in charter schools? What will be the state of public education, especially in our cities, a generation from now if the states take the president’s advice?

So President Obama would have us turn our public schools over to charter entrepreneurs. Charters were originally proposed as a way to deregulate education. We should all wonder: Is deregulation a cure for what ails American education? Or will American education find itself in the same dismal condition as our financial institutions a decade hence?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (53) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

You raise important questions about the role of trust and community in schooling. Those issues should be front and center as part of the discussion of the future of public education. We should discuss further whether trust and community are advanced by preserving and strengthening neighborhood schools or by encouraging the growth of choice schools, by charters and vouchers. Certainly, a case can be made for both routes.

The neighborhood school has always been an important center of community. It brings together people from disparate walks of life who are neighbors and gives them a place in which to work together and debate their common concerns as a community. In some cities, the neighborhood school is the only effective community organization. For many people, it is their introduction to the give-and-take of democratic civic life.

Some of the same arguments have been made on behalf of choice schools; after all, if all the families are in a school that they have chosen, then they, too, are a community and they are there because of their active choice, rather than an accident of geography.

Maybe I shouldn’t, but I worry about the kids who are left behind, and also about the implications of the business model imposed on schools.

I just finished reading two books that shed some light on these questions. One is Anthony S. Bryk and Barbara Schneider’s "Trust in Schools." Bryk and Schneider document how important it is for teachers, principals, parents, students, and administrators to trust one another. Because each person or group is in some way dependent on the actions of the others, trust is a necessary component of school improvement. They do not account for the possibility of a political structure in which almost all power is concentrated in the hands of the mayor or his chancellor. They could not even imagine a school district in which the political leader unilaterally declares that 5-year-olds must take standardized tests, regardless of the views of parents, teachers, or administrators. The lesson to be taken away from this important book, it seems clear to me, is that schools function best when there is a high degree of trust among all those involved in the educational process.

The other book, which I finished just last night, is Paul Tough’s "Whatever It Takes." Tough is an accomplished journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine; you may have seen his articles, one last year about successful charter schools like KIPP and Achievement First, the most recent about school reforms in New Orleans.

Tough’s new book is about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone. The book takes on added significance because Barack Obama has said that he wants to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities. As Tough describes it, Canada has attempted to create an all-encompassing, interlinked set of programs that will deeply affect the lives of many people in Harlem and break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage. His programs include a “Baby College,” where pregnant women (and their partners) learn important skills and information about prenatal care and baby care. Then there is a program for infants and a prekindergarten program, an elementary charter school, and a variety of programs for teens and adults. Much of the book focuses on the travails of the middle school, where educators struggled to raise test scores, in many cases unsuccessfully. The lesson that Canada drew from the poor results of the middle school was that he had to start with kids before they fell so far behind; in some cases, 6th grade students were reading at a 2nd grade level and that was a challenge that he and his school were unable to master.

Tough’s book is very hopeful. He cites a large body of evidence to argue that children will never fall behind cognitively if their parents and their environment provide them with enough stimulation and support from the beginning of their lives. This is the case, he says, no matter how poor their parents are, no matter how disadvantaged their circumstances. If we as a society do “whatever it takes,” we can close the achievement gaps and get every student ready for college or a good career.

However, and there is always a however, there is a depressing aspect to Tough’s book. As the author describes the situation, Canada is in complete sympathy with his powerful, wealthy board of directors, which includes hedge-fund billionaires. Not surprising. These directors care only for the numbers, and they don’t care how the schools get them. “The overall goal of the Zone might be liberal and idealistic—to educate and otherwise improve the lives of poor black children—but Canada believed the best way to achieve that goal was to act not like a bighearted altruist but like a ruthless capitalist, devoted to the bottom line.” (p.135).

The first principal of the middle school sounds like you, Deborah; she must have been reading your books. She is a progressive educator who worries about the whole child, about their social and emotional problems, and who wants the children to have a rounded education. But her school doesn’t get the test scores gains that the hedge-fund managers and the New York City Department of Education demand. She is removed and replaced by a KIPP-style principal. The wealthy men who run the board of the Zone are impressed by the KIPP model, which is described by one of them as “more of a military-style, real rote-learning, rote-behavior discipline thing,” because this model “delivered results.”

The new principal begins a regimen of test-prep, test-prep, test-prep, no-nonsense discipline. Drill, drill, drill. I won’t spoil the book for you by giving away the outcome, but I can only say that the school part of the book’s message was startling. Do poor black and Hispanic kids really need to be in “no excuses” schools that insist on rote learning and rote behavior? That take control of their lives and change their culture? Should this be the model for education for children of color in big cities? This was the message of Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom’s book "No Excuses," and it was echoed by a recent book by David Whitman, "Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism."

I think this is becoming the new conventional wisdom. What do you think?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

You've put it neatly—whose expertise is running the show? Except for one flaw. How come, since there are more teachers than policymakers, we give up and not them?

There are lots of reasons, of course, including the fact that teachers (and parents) tend not—as we noted once before—to "see like a State" (ala James Scott's wonderful book). Policymakers seem to do it naturally. But, of course, it's also because they represent people who are more powerful. And also people who, alas, take themselves more seriously.

When I first got into being a kindergarten teacher (as more than an idle past time), my family of origin was a bit disappointed. It was clearly a status step down. While I stuck with it because I got fascinated, part of it stemmed from another family trait—a kind of knee-jerk anti-snobbism. Of course, I had the luck (in retrospect) of being turned down for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1951 because I was a married woman! Perhaps I was also lucky in finding substitute teaching the most challenging thing I'd ever done; and alongside it getting credentialed in Chicago's school system the most humiliating. It produced a kind of feisty "I'll show 'em" response.

But I knew from the start that being an early-childhood public school teacher did not make me very interesting to important people or give my ideas much prestige. Since I wrote articles I was occasionally invited to speak publicly. But not as an expert. I was the "voice from the field", invited to add some spice. Receiving the MacArthur changed it—suddenly I was an expert; the Wizard had given me a brain.

It did help me. I had "an idea" that I thought could impact more widely on public education; so being taken seriously would be useful. I was deeply influenced by Ted Sizer's work on school reform writ large, and thus tried to "think like a State". The idea, as you noted, was the "small school movement". I saw it as an avenue for getting teachers to seriously think through and change their practices, by creating settings designed for such work. I wrote an Op Ed in 1988 for The New York Times ("Small is Beautiful", more or less), and a few years later we got $50 million from the Annenberg Foundation to take our "idea" citywide.

The idea was that all else being equal, it would be easier, faster, and more powerful to change the way schooling took place if we had small schools (under 300 students), self-governing schools (with a few exceptions), in which the constituents were there by choice. It took a decade, but the idea has clearly had an enormous impact: on everything but what we originally had in mind.

In part because it was translated by people who were better than we were at "thinking like a State". Their translation read as follows: small (under 600), with more power in the hands of principals in return for less autonomous classrooms and schools, and in which schools had more choice over whom to accept. They saw it as a way to better monitor top-down mandated change, not to foster a bubbling up of change. (e.g.: I read this week that small schools in Portland can't decide if they want their kids to be able to take electives in their sister small schools.)

If you want to be an innovator? Go private or charter, the policymakers advise. (And even most of the charters soon were looking more and more like top-down corporate enterprises designed by policymakers.)

NCLB didn't invent this, and getting rid of it won't stop it. What is needed is a serious discussion of what's best done by whom? And for what purpose? I think I've a natural paranoia for centralized decisionmaking that's usually pretty healthy. My default is always, "so why not let those most involved in having to live with decisions make them?" But I also know that if my forebears hadn't taken on racism, leaving it to the locals wouldn't have brought us as far as we've gotten. The same for global warming. And a lot in between.

Where power is unequally held, unequal outcomes are not surprising—intentionally or not. Local or federal. Still, we can't help but try.

We're left with thinking aloud about what the federal government can do to level the field (resources, for one thing), what is best left to the state, and what to the local community, school, family, individual teacher, and student?

Deb

P.S. Do you ever read Mike Rose's blog? It's great. His column this week is on a topic that has kept me in the schoolhouse for 43 years.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

You raise important questions about the trustworthiness of the data that government agencies release. I would hope that every math course, not just advanced courses, would teach students how numbers can be interpreted in different ways for different purposes. I have always thought that one of the truly impressive qualities of athletics was the honesty of the numbers. If the score at the end of nine innings in a baseball game is 9-2, you know who won the game. In a basketball game, the basket is set at a certain height, and the ball has to enter the net and drop through to score points. In football, the field is 100 yards long, and you have to enter the end zone to score. There is something refreshing about this transparency. I grant that umpires make mistakes and bad calls, but most of the time the spectators and the players know the score.

We are bombarded with numbers from government agencies on a daily basis. If we can't believe what they are telling us about the unemployment rate, the interest rate, the rate of housing starts, and a zillion other things, then we are in deep trouble. I have never believed in conspiracy theories, and I tend to trust that people are telling the truth: It is just too much trouble and too improbable to get lots of people (especially career government employees) to collaborate in a giant lie.

I agree that we all need to arm ourselves with knowledge, information, and analytical skills to judge for ourselves whether the information we receive in the daily press is logical and reasonable. The other danger—aside from government mis-information—is an excess of public skepticism, the sort that feeds zany conspiracy theories. Whenever pollsters ask, they discover that large numbers of people believe very strange things, for example, that AIDS was unleashed in minority communities by the CIA or that aliens from other galaxies kidnap people and take them to their space ships to conduct experiments on them and then return them home.

We educate people with the hope that they will be prepared to think critically and skeptically about the ideas and information that they hear. We can't afford to lose this battle.

You make the interesting reference to Joe and Carol Reich's efforts to assert control over their charter schools in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The Reichs started these two schools in a very poor community some years ago, and the schools are now charter schools, called the Beginning with Children schools. They apparently did not like the decisions of the majority of their board members, so they ousted them, to reassert control over "their" schools.

The Reichs are very public-spirited people, and they started these schools with the best intentions. They have given millions of dollars to support the charter school movement, and they no doubt feel that the schools in some way belong to them, not to the board.

But the story about them raises the important point about who "owns" charter schools. There is a charter school located inside the Tweed Courthouse, which is the headquarters of the New York City Department of Education. It is called the Ross Global Charter School and it is "owned" by Courtney Sale Ross. Ms. Ross, a woman who inherited vast wealth from her late husband, has chosen the board, the curriculum, and apparently the staff as well. In its first year, she booted several principals. This school, though located in a public facility, is hers. New York Magazine published a fascinating piece about the Ross School.

Someone mentioned to me recently that the wealthy used to collect racehorses and yachts; now they start their own charter school! What happens when running a charter school becomes a bore? What happens when they move on to collecting something else? What will they do if they don't get good results?

I read an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on July 11 with this headline: "Pittsburgh schools drop 'public' from name to boost image." The superintendent, Mark Roosevelt, decided that the district would call itself the "Pittsburgh Schools," in an effort at rebranding them. Apparently a "marketing consultant" advised the district that "public schools" have a negative connotation, and they should just get rid of that pesky word. And the leaders of the district (a.k.a., the public school district) agreed to drop it.

This is a small and maybe insignificant step in the direction we are discerning in other districts, towards privatization, towards turning schools over to whoever wants to manage them, towards delegitimatizing the very idea of public education.

What do you think?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

The disturbing comments in your final paragraph deserve a wide audience. It is always hard to know when we are being alarmists, and when we are understating a dangerous trend. Maybe schools were once less worrisome because they simply played a much smaller role in our lives and life itself was a teacher of common sense. But all roads lead to Rome, so while it may appear that I'm switching subjects, Diane, it leads to the same place.

I read the story a few weeks ago about Carol and Joe Reich's struggle to retain control over the public school they generously created for poor Brooklyn children some ten years ago. I read it with anguish—for them, for us, for the kids of that school. The tragedy is that we have too often forgotten that the distinction between public and private enterprises is that the former belong to "us", not "me." Our good intentions sometimes lead us astray. If the law allows, we can forget what we can and cannot literally "own." But is that less true for foundations? The Mayor? Why pick on just the Reichs?

The Reichs' work coincides with a period in American history when we are having a hard time denying the wealthy and powerful anything, including their right to own our public schools. We've too long given a free pass to rich people who use their wealth to impose their agenda for public education on schools for other people's children. In the latter camp, alas, go some well-intentioned leaders of foundations, like Gates, and various business and corporate conglomerates who control private largesse.

Plus a Mayor with enough private and public muscle to set an agenda without consulting those most affected by it, and then, and this is crucial, to control the data that judges his work.

I'm told, time and time again, that some things are just foolish to rant and rave against. It's just the way "things are." The reason one of our CPE "habits of mind" was called "what if?", was that we wanted young people to realize that other possibilities always existed, and still exist—whether in math, science, or in the history of the past or future. Nothing "had to be." I even tried to forbid the phrase "I had to" from our in-school language. Even with a gun to your head, I chided, there are choices. In some ways science fiction always appealed to me because it reminded me how differently the future might play out if…. Nothing in the future is "writ in stone" until it comes to pass. In the meantime we need to act "as if" our voices counted.

(As I noted to some reader recently, it's why I thought "Walden Two" by B.F. Skinner, was a dystopia—a world in which everything "had to be." Imagine my surprise to discover that it was a utopia to many others. A lesson in perspective—another useful habit of mind.)

I try to be realistic about my "what ifs", and I try to think "strategically". So, if I had to choose just one modest reform on behalf of democracy, what might it be?

Talking about the history of anti-smoking policies in the New York Review of Books (subscription or fee required), the author Helen Epstein notes the damaging effect of public distrust of statistics. In fact, however, what is even more dangerous is our love/hate relationship with statistics. The more ignorant we are the more we both bow down to and resent numbers. I've been arguing for years that instead of advanced algebra and calculus we ought to have a statistics-driven math program. Algebra may be "good for the mind", but statistics—the manipulation of data—is essential for making sense of the world. Still even that depends on the quality of the data one works with. The World Bank, I heard on NPR, is apparently having the same trouble trying to make sense of the data coming out of China as we're having with NYC.

Democracy depends on being informed. Being informed depends on having relatively honest information. As they used to say in the data-processing field: "GIGO"—garbage in, garbage out. For starters then, my modest wish would be to see if we can create a consensus around a set of proposals to de-garbage the information we get about public schooling in, let's say, NYC?

How does that appeal to you as a modest summer task?

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)