Bridging Differences

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)

Editor's Note: Bridging Differences resumes today.

Dear Deborah,

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Colleges & Remedial Education" »

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

Dear Diane,

As I was watching the Democratic party presidential wanna-be's the other night, I thought about our misuse of language. Was that a "debate"? But worse, what does it mean to ask serious potential presidents to talk about important matters—in 30 seconds?

So, in answer to: why educate? So that someday we might have a public that would be embarrassed to watch such nonsense and a media that knew better.

I turned off the TV at last and started reading my cousin Judith Larner Lowry's book on restoration gardening in California—"The Landscaping Ideas of Jays". After reading it I changed my mind. The central purpose of schooling is to help each and every child find something worthwhile they love to do the way Judith loves to garden and to be good at it the way she is. If we could just do that!

That's what I hoped education would do for my own children. As John Dewey said, what we want for our own should be what we demand for every child.

Questioning nonsense and doing work one loves well are not incompatible or unreasonable goals. And maybe only a democratic society can hold out the dream that both of these are possible for all of us.

How does this fit in with your questioning, Diane, of the Mayor's data on the success of his NYC reforms? Maybe if we had the schools we deserve neither readers nor writers of our daily media would be so easily fooled; and we'd be asking for data that's harder to fool us about. Note that every superintendent in the country has, for half a century, touted the increases in test scores and graduation rates under his/her tenure. They never go down. Can this be? Yes, if we devote only 30-second sound bites to education.

The "miracle" superintendents are over and over again replaced by others who instantly declare these same schools to be in dire crisis, e.g. Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego. [Paul] Vallas has now saved two cities and is off, with the media's blessing, to save a third. The day the miracle-workers leave, amnesia sets in. We start all over again. The New York Post and New York Times reporters repeat, like parrots, that small schools started in 2002 with Klein! The NY Times actually once ran a front-page series on the old wave of new small schools, the pre-Klein one. (They can't even check their own files?) Like you,
Diane, I would like to make it harder to get away with nonsense—in part so that I could safely celebrate the successes. But Bloomberg's comparing apples and oranges.

Martin Luther King Jr. H.S. now has a 90 percent graduation rate (vs. 41 percent in 2002)? Ditto for Erasmus, Wingate, South Bronx et al? (NY Times, Saturday, June 30). Julie Bosman (the writer of the above), be serious! Questioning nonsense is surely at the heart of being well-educated, not to mention trying to educate others.

My old secondary school (CPESS) had a 90 percent graduation rate between 1989-95, and I know what that took to do. It's not impossible. I also remember that I warned my colleagues, when they started similar schools in the Bronx, not to compare their data to ours. We were working with many kids who had been with us since elementary school, we had a more heterogeneous population than they'd have in the South Bronx, and we had 100 percent experienced teachers. I knew a lot about how to fudge data, but I also knew the risk was not mostly in getting caught as in discouraging one's colleagues, spreading an already deeply cynical culture.

Diane, you suggest national tests—in reading and math as one answer. Without stakes, given less often (I'd add, to a sample population) and with the interpretation of the results left to lay bodies (note the plural)—I'm ok with it. But using these still requires a public media willing and able to ask questions about complex data. Bloomberg is a reminder: even national standards that define graduation rates can't control for changing the kids served, for example.

Sure it would be nice to tie my banner to Bloomberg's claims. As the "grandmother" of small schools it ought to feel pretty great. But, it doesn't. In part, because they are un-believable. And, in part because we can't learn from experience when we simply proclaim it a success and move on, without paying attention to the casualties we've left behind. The best of reforms requires caution. The more recklessly we surge ahead, paying little heed to the voices on the ground, the more dependent we become on questionable, highly manipulable, self-serving data.

The ordinary people working in ordinary big and small schools are silenced in the process, classified as "whiners", "losers". Meanwhile the heralds of the "good news" will, as usual, have left for new ventures by the time the next Chancellor brings us his bad news and promises to "turn the system" around once again. And again.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

Now that our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is readying himself as a potential candidate for the Presidency, it is clear that education will be one of his signature issues. Sadly, he knows no more about education today than he did when he became mayor in 2001, based on his latest plan to pay poor kids to get higher test scores. That strategy seems to me to be an abject admission of cluelessness: When you don't know anything about teaching or curriculum, then just pay for results.

I understand your frustration about the historical amnesia that you encountered. It seems to be the policy of our New York City Department of Education to wipe out all historical memory and at that they have been quite successful. Apparently, this administration wants the world to believe that whatever it is doing is historic, unprecedented, and of course dazzlingly successful. Part of their strategy is to launch one initiative after another, to persuade the public that they are on the move, when in fact they are merely lurching from one confused plan to another.

Last Friday, the Department released dazzling statistics about the graduation rates of its new small schools. The Department has created about 200 of them, of which 47 have a graduating class this year. The rate for these 47 schools is 73 percent, compared to a citywide rate of.... This is where it gets complicated. The city says it has a graduation rate of 60 percent. The state says the city's graduation rate is 50%. Education Week's latest Diplomas Count report says the city's graduation rate is 45 percent.

So the small schools graduation rate is impressive, right? Wrong. Dee Alpert, who publishes SpecialEducationMuckraker.com is a relentless devourer of data from the city and state education departments, and she sent out a bulletin describing her inability to decipher the real graduation rates at the "new small schools." She says:

1. NYCDOE gives no list of the 'new, small schools' included in its calculations for the spinrelease, so...
2. They give percentages, not raw numbers, for their graduation rates: you can't even try to work backwards to see what was included.
3. Most importantly, they gave no numbers for 'still enrolled,' nor for 'discharged.' ...NYCDOE is notorious for mis-reporting dropouts as having enrolled elsewhere, i.e., discharged from a NYCDOE school's rolls.
4. The numbers for graduates who earned local v. Regents diplomas is also critical, and missing. In prior years, local hs diplomas predominated. According to the NYS Court of Appeals' CFE [Campaign for Fiscal Equity] decision, a local diploma resulting from passing RCT [low-level competency examinations] put a kid-depending on the subject—at between the 6th and 9th grade level. This isn't exactly college prep.

Dee Alpert concludes: "It's all obviously part of the Bloomberg presidential campaign spin." And she strongly recommends "an editorial moratorium on reporting NYCDOE spin numbers unless the complete data set accompanies the press release."

I hope not to befuddle our national readership with too much news and talk about New York City, but there is an important point here. Alpert's analysis reveals how easily education data are distorted for political purposes. We have seen this done before, but seldom so blatantly or so cleverly. It is likely the case that every school superintendent wants to release test scores and graduation rates that show what a success he or she has been. But what we have seen over the past five years is a determined political campaign—not just Bloomberg for President, although that may yet happen—but rather a political campaign to "prove" that mayoral control without any checks or balances is the absolute best way to manage a school system. The Department is incapable of impartial research. Its press releases are filled with the kind of P.R. spin that we have come to associate with politicians running for office, not with research departments where someone has his or her professional reputation on the line.

Whenever there is a new release of test score data from the state, I invariably get calls from reporters, asking what I think of the latest numbers. I have learned over the past few years never to answer their questions until I have had a chance to see the complete data set with my own eyes. I know that the Department has massaged the data and sought out every glimmer of good news while creating a narrative that distracts the reporters' attention from anything unfavorable.

Forgive me, Deborah, but all this media manipulation persuades me that we need national tests (with no stakes), so that states and cities and districts can't play games with the numbers. Failing that, I think that every state should have an independent agency to administer tests and report their results, and that these agencies should be run by professional psychometricians who can neither take credit nor blame when the scores rise or fall. In New York State, when the math scores went down last year, the State Education Department said that the test was harder; when the math scores went up this year, the State Education Department was congratulating itself and the Regents (our state board) for its wise policies. How about an agency that dispenses the facts without fear or favor or self-praise?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)