Bridging Differences

Dear Deborah,

It was interesting that you used the analogy to Consumer Reports to discuss the value of grading schools. As a longtime subscriber to CR, I understand that it is useful to have a disinterested voice evaluating the products in the marketplace. To make sure that there is never a conflict of interest, CR does not accept advertising; no one can ever say that their judgments were tainted by commercial interests.

The CR example shows, I think, the problems with assigning a letter grade (only one letter grade, not a report card) to each school. To begin with, schools are not situated in a true marketplace. We may decide to buy this car, not that one, or this television, not that one, because we are consumers and have a wide choice of products. But parents do not have the same free choice about where to send their children; even if they wanted to withdraw them from an F school and send them to an A school, the A school may be too distant from their home and it certainly will not have enough seats for students who might want to transfer in. Most parents would be happy to know that their children were attending a good school that was close to home. They have neither the time nor the sophistication to shop around the city for a higher-rated school. Given the widespread complaint that the ratings themselves are flawed, school officials may be dispensing false data to parents, scaring them needlessly about their children's school and destabilizing schools and communities.

Then, too, there is the problem of conflict of interest. Is it really a good idea that schools should be graded by the very officials responsible for leading them? Don't they have an inherent conflict of interest? Consumer Reports takes pains to insulate itself from the appearance of conflict of interest. Top school officials, on the other hand, are the ones who rank and grade and test and report on their own performance. In New York City, the situation is anomalous, in that school officials disdain any responsibility for improving the schools; under their theory of principal empowerment, only the principal is to be held responsible, even though there are many conditions affecting achievement that are beyond the principal's influence.

I certainly agree with you that NCLB should not be reauthorized until there is more careful reconsideration of what it has accomplished and what its negative consequences have been. Everything that I read and hear supports the view that it will NOT be reauthorized until after the 2008 election. A new president will presumably set the agenda for federal education policy. Since Democrats control the Congress until the next election, I think it fair to say that NCLB is now the property of the Democratic party.

Given the importance of the NEA and the AFT within Democratic ranks, I would have assumed that Congress would be taking a hard look at NCLB, but this does not seem to be the case. Last week I was invited to meet with a very smart Democratic congressman who is a member of the Education Committee in the House of Representatives. I told him that I hoped Congress would consider a radical restructuring of NCLB. He immediately disabused me of that idea. He said that NCLB will be re-authorized; that there would be changes, but that they would not be radical ones. I told him that if they did some polling or even talked to teachers in their districts, they would find that the law was hated by most teachers. That didn't seem to faze him. The law will no doubt get a new name, but the basic structure will not be abandoned.

One wonders, if the people who have to do the implementation say that it is not working, why would Congress push ahead? But apparently they are. It is time to realize that this law, in its next iteration, will be a product of the Democratic party. My guess is that no one in Washington wants to give up the power to tell teachers what to do.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

Yup, back-to-school time. I too get that funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, especially when I find myself wandering the aisles of a stationery store, looking at spiral notebooks, pens, and the other accoutrements of starting school and hearing the voice in my head saying that it is time to get ready.

This was not a great summer. I spent most of it trying to get a diagnosis and appropriate care for my beloved 10-year-old dog Molly, who became sick in early July. One vet said she has congestive heart failure and has six months to live; another said she has lymphoma and was hopeless; I am now working with a homeopathic vet who is giving her herbal capsules, and she is looking very well. So I begin the fall with hope.

I am sorry to say that education henceforth will be on the agenda in Congress for a long time to come. Having worked in the federal government in the early '90s and lived in D.C. for four years, where I watched the federal education agenda grow, I see nothing hopeful about this. When it comes to reforming the nation’s schools, Congress is possibly the worst qualified institution to do it. First, they are very far from the schools, in every possible definition of the word “far,” and second, they don’t have a clue about how to reform schools. But typically they think that if they pass a law and give it the right name, they have solved a problem. As we can see from the travails of NCLB, our well-intentioned but out-of-touch Congress has only created new problems.

Now the presidential campaign has begun in earnest, and we will hear more glib promises about fixing the schools by passing the "right" program. The candidates, and the leaders of Congress (in both parties), think that the way to fix the schools is to micromanage them from Washington. They want more regulations, more mandates, more obstacle courses for principals and teachers. If you remember, the report by the Gates-funded bipartisan commission on NCLB offered dozens of recommendations for such things. It seems that we should change the name of the federal program from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to No Adult Left Unregulated (NALU).

I think you are quite right that we must be suspicious of any school district or state that makes extravagant claims about the results of its tests. One thing that I learned while serving on the NAEP governing board was that changes in scores—whether up or down—occur slowly and incrementally. Occasionally a student may make extraordinary progress, perhaps because he or she decided to study harder and more consistently, or a student may see a dramatic decline, probably because of personal problems, but it should ring an alarm bell for parents, the public, and the media when test scores for a district or state show huge changes in a year or two.

Unlike you, I am not opposed to testing. But I don’t support testing as the primary means of educating kids, which seems to be the new business-style way to “reform” education. Testing is not a substitute for curriculum, and testing is not a substitute for instruction. Test prep may help raise test scores, but a cohort of students who have had little more than a steady diet of test prep have been cheated of a real education. In medicine, a thermometer is a valuable tool. But anyone who thinks that they can cure illness by constantly inserting a thermometer and preparing to have one's temperature read is...ill-informed at best and should really go into a different line of work.

Thanks for sending me the Pring letter. Too bad The New York Times did not see fit to print it. I expect that a lot of parents and teachers would want to know that there is another side to Sir Michael Barber’s account of his grand successes in Britain (subscription or fee required). It is unfortunate when our newspaper of record prints a puff piece about a controversial figure without permitting the contrary voices to be heard. (I am appending a copy below of the Pring letter, which is now akin to samizdat, the underground publications in the Soviet Union that circulated from hand to hand.)

My guess is that the business leaders who think they have the cure for the schools are likely to emerge from this era of faux-reform looking like Enron educators. They may get the scores, and they may pull the wool over the eyes of the press. But eventually the day of reckoning will arrive when their incredible test score gains will prove to be ephemeral, indeed in-credible, as in not credible; when the students discover that they never got an education; when educators find their collective voice and say loud and clear: “Enough.”

May that day come soon.

Diane

The following is Richard Pring's letter to The New York Times, reprinted with his permission.

Richard is now Lead Director Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training for England and Wales and Former Director: Oxford University Department of Education Studies

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

Sometimes I feel that we are having a discussion that is way too theoretical, while the world of American education is moving hard and fast in completely different directions. You may be comfortable with a school where the kids spend four years on biology, or four years (or is it one year?) taking apart cars and remaining ignorant of Shakespeare. It's a free country, and there are surely teachers and even principals who agree with you. But this is not the policy debate in Washington or the state capitals, it will not be part of the reauthorization of NCLB, no matter who is elected President or who controls Congress; it will not enter the heads of the business and foundation leaders who now seem to be in the driver's seat in many states and districts.

In other words, even if I agreed with you—which I don't—it would be irrelevant, because the policy environment is going elsewhere and not giving even a second's thought to the ideas you propose. There will be science taught because it will be tested this year, in accord with NCLB. All fifty states will have their own science test, and I have not heard them agonizing over which science to teach. My guess is that the science tests will reflect the science that is contained in the most widely used textbooks.In the early grades, and perhaps through middle school, science will likely be life science, environmental science, not much more than basic biology. I doubt that there will be much chemistry or physics on these state tests, for fear that the tests will be too "hard" and the state leaders want good news, not bad news. I doubt that there will be much chemistry or physics on these state tests, for fear that the tests will be too "hard" and the state leaders want good news, not bad news.

I confess that I cling stubbornly to the idea of a liberal arts curriculum, one that includes history, literature, the sciences, mathematics, physical education, and the arts. Forgive me for not including a foreign language. I would love to see every American student learn to speak and read a foreign language. Is that sort of liberal arts program too much to expect? Is it impossible? I don't think so.

Nor do I think it is necessary to get stymied by the question of "whose" history, "which" science or mathematics, any more than one should get stuck over which foreign language. Twenty years ago, I helped to write the K-12 history curriculum for California, and those who wanted no curriculum insisted that no one could decide "whose history" to teach. In fact, while the committee had some good debates, the content wasn't all that difficult to agree on. We all agreed that American children should know the basic ideas, individuals, turning points, and debates in our own history, and we agreed to expand the study of world history from one year to three years (that was hard, deciding which civilizations to include and which to leave out). The content of the U.S. history curriculum was straightforward; we had no problem agreeing on the inclusion of certain key events—like the American Revolution, the shaping of the Constitution, the Civil War, the progressive era, the Great Depression, the World Wars, the Cold War, etc. The interpretation of those events is left to teachers. At the very least, all the students should be able to discuss the Great Depression, for example, because they will know that it happened and will know something about its effects in American politics, its effects on the lives of many people, the art and literature associated with that era.

Will they remember all their life what they remembered in the history class in fifth grade or tenth grade? Will they remember everything they read or heard or studied? Maybe not. Probably not. But I would still argue that we must try our best to teach kids what we think is valuable, what history, literature, science, mathematics, etc., will be important to them in their lives as citizens, as individuals, as people who will work in the modern economy. After they leave school, I hope they will have a solid foundation for continued learning and have the knowledge and vocabulary to participate in our democratic society and the skills to make it ever more democratic.

Speaking of Shakespeare, as you did, reminds me that a couple weeks ago I heard a political leader say that our society will stand or fall, a century from now, not on whether anyone knows Shakespeare but on whether they have the right job skills. We would probably disagree with him, but for different reasons. If, a century from now, we have forgotten how to read Shakespeare, this would be (from my point of view) a culturally impoverished society. We will, of course, be long gone, but I hope that my grandchildren's grandchildren do not live in such a cold, hard place.

To switch subjects, I wonder if you saw the excellent piece about the NYC public schools in the current issue of The Nation (subscription required) by Lynnell Hancock? Quite a lot of teachers and parents are buzzing about it. Hancock, who is a professor of journalism at Columbia University, has done her homework. She sees a corporate style takeover of the public schools under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, and I think she nails her thesis. Their latest scheme—to pay students for taking tests and for passing tests—is yet another example of the corporate mindset, which devalues education and assumes that the schools will be "fixed" if only the scores on tests go up (no matter the quality of the tests), by any means possible. As usual, the editorial boards of the local newspapers are cheering for an inane idea.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Bridging Differences was on a brief hiatus while Deborah Meier traveled in China. Today, the blog returns with a new post from Diane Ravitch.

Dear Deb,

I hope you had a wonderful trip to China and that you are not too wiped out. I have been there a few times, first in 1987, most recently in 1998. I hear it has changed quite a lot since then.

Lots of things happening in your absence, none to gladden your heart. The Center for Education Policy released a report on NCLB, concluding that it was overall having a positive effect on achievement. CEP, as you know, is run by Jack Jennings, who was a top legislative staff person for the Democrats in the House of Representatives for many years.

Then came a column by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times on May 28, called "The Educated Giant," (available only through TimesSelect) where he commented on how successful the Chinese education system is. Apparently he was there with his wife and two of his children at the same time as you. From the column, it seems that his wife was born in China. They returned to her native village and were greatly impressed by the schools they saw. He wrote that "the level of math taught even in peasant schools is similar to that in my kids' own excellent schools in the New York area." Kristof noted that Chinese students are "hungry for education and advancement and work harder" than American children. Chinese children, he said, show up at school at 6:30 a.m. to get an extra hour of tutoring before school starts at 7:30 a.m. After a lunch break (from 11:30 til 2 p.m.), they return to school from 2 p.m. until 5. He says they do homework every night and weekend, and even do homework for an hour or two each day during summer vacation. He concludes that we need to "raise our own education standards to meet the competition" from China.

I would have loved to discuss Kristof's article with you. I wrote a blog for the Huffington Post about it, and my view is that most American kids are unwilling to work all that hard. The slacker mentality would not be tolerated in China. Here it is a dominant style.

Next came a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, which equated state proficiency standards with NAEP standards. What it found—no surprise!—is that state standards vary so widely that a fourth grade student in Mississippi who was rated "proficient" might well be judged "failing" in Massachusetts. The report, called "Mapping 2005 State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP Scales" was quite amazing. One point that came through in this report was that many states rate students as "proficient" who would be rated "below basic" on the NAEP scale.

I know you don't give a hoot about NAEP, and that you think its cut scores are way too high. But the important point that came across in this study is the crazy variability in state standards. The states with high standards are Massachusetts, Wyoming, and South Carolina. Close behind are Arkansas, Nevada, Connecticut, California, and New Mexico. The other states have set low to middling standards. I am sure this made the Bush administration unhappy, but the fundamental idea is that this variability makes no sense. We need accurate and consistent information about student progress.

I look forward to hearing whether your impression of China echoes that of Nicholas Kristof. I have a sneaking suspicion that it did not.

Best,

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)