Bridging Differences

Dear Deborah,

The elephant in the room is No Child Left Behind. This, as you know, is the latest manifestation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which was passed specifically to help educate disadvantaged children. NCLB was passed by Congress in the fall of 2001 and signed into law in January 2002. At the time, it had the overwhelming support of both parties.

Since the law was implemented, beginning (I would assume) in the fall of 2002 or the fall of 2003, it has been the subject of much debate. President George W. Bush claimed it as his proudest legacy, and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings defended it fiercely.

Four months ago, I wrote an article in Education Week saying that it was time to kill NCLB and to write a different, better law. I argued that the law had failed: "It is dumbing down our children by focusing solely on reading and mathematics. By ignoring everything but basic skills, it is not preparing students to compete with their peers in the high-performing nations of Asia and Europe, nor is it preparing them for citizenship in our complex society. It has usurped state and local control of education. Washington has neither the knowledge nor the capacity to micromanage the nation's schools."

I added, for good measure: "No amount of tinkering can repair this poorly designed law. The time has come for fresh thinking about the best way for Washington to help improve the nation's schools."

President Obama promised during his campaign to bring "change" to the nation's direction and policies. Secretary Arne Duncan has acknowledged in his speeches that NCLB is "toxic" (at least to parents), that teachers complain bitterly about its emphasis on testing, and that "few subjects divide educators so intensely."

Yet in his recent speech about reauthorization of NCLB, he praised the law for "exposing achievement gaps" (as though no one was aware of those gaps before 2002!) and encouraging us to "improve education by looking at outcomes, rather than inputs" (an idea whose provenance dates to the Coleman Report in 1966!). He also credits NCLB with expanding the standards and accountability movement (forgive me while I gag).

To add to his embarrassment, he has been traveling the nation on a listening tour accompanied by former GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich (not known for his interest in education reform) and the Reverend Al Sharpton (ditto).

Memo to Secretary Duncan: NCLB is the quintessence of the test-based accountability movement. It has nothing to do with standards. It contains no standards whatsoever. It encourages states to lower their standards by mandating that all children must be "proficient" by 2014, a goal that is beyond the reach of every district and every state unless they dumb down their standards.

Many states have indeed lowered their standards. New York started testing grades 3-8 in 2006, and in every subsequent year it has lowered the bar to reach proficiency in almost every grade. Illinois also lowered the bar for the same reason.

For Secretary Duncan to associate NCLB with higher standards—or any standards at all—is a cruel joke. As he has often said (one of his favorite phrases), we have been "lying to our children" and their parents when we tell them they are proficient, but they are not.

Now Secretary Duncan wants to get moving to reauthorize NCLB. Presumably, since the brand is toxic, he will want a new name. But the nation needs something very different from NCLB and renaming it will not cure its defects.

As I wrote last June, we are dumbing down our children and calling it reform. We are indeed lying to our children.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (59) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Dear Deborah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane

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

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

Dear Deborah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane

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

Dear Deborah,

Ah, data. A new study from the Center on Education Policy finds that state tests scores have been rising steadily since the passage of NCLB. But the report is based only on state tests, which are notoriously unreliable and even invalid because of the test-prepping that every district is doing. We should have learned by now that when state scores soar, but NAEP scores don’t, trust NAEP. It is the audit test. No one can practice for NAEP.

I am sure that you, like me, have been inundated with reports about how charter schools will save American education, especially because of their ability to impose military-style discipline and to accept “no excuses” (e.g., poverty, poor health, other disadvantages). How many times have we heard that the “no excuses” schools have proved that they can close the achievement gap because they are so much better than regular public schools?

Last week, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes released a major national study of charter schools that examined the performance of more than half the nation’s charter schools. It found that only 17 percent of charters recorded improvement that was better than the local public schools. Another 37 percent showed gains that were significantly below those of their local public schools. In the remaining 46 percent, student performance was indistinguishable from that of local schools. Overall, the performance of 83 percent of charters was either the same or worse than the local public schools.

The lead researcher, economist Margaret Raymond, said that “If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters. That’s a red flag.” The study was funded by foundations known for their support for charters, among them the Walton Family Foundation. I give Raymond a blue ribbon for intellectual honesty; it is not often that we see a report or study that conflicts with the political agenda of its funders.

Charter boosters Andrew Rotherham of Education Sector and Richard Whitmire, former editor of USA Today, wrote in response to Raymond’s report that it is time to close down low-performing charters. They noted that there are about 4,600 charters operating currently, but only 300 of them are part of a high-performing charter network. Undoubtedly there are some others, beyond the 300, that are successful, but by Raymond’s analysis, more than a third of current charters are worse than their neighboring public school and most are no better.

Yet because of the constant hype in the media by charter promoters, most of us have been sold a bill of goods. That includes President Obama. He has called for states to lift their caps on charters so that we can have thousands more of them. This would allow poor kids to escape their “bad” public school to attend an even worse charter school.

If the charter sector doesn’t clean up its act, and if the federal government doesn’t take a strong stand on behalf of quality, we will be inundated with even worse schools than we have now. The only difference is that they will be managed by private entrepreneurs collecting public dollars.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (30) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I got a few blasts for the comments you liked on Klein/Sharpton/Gingrich’s (EEP) civil rights efforts. It hit a nerve. Our obsession with schools is both a healthy and an unhealthy aspect of the American psyche. This is, at least, the second time we’ve placed schools at the center of the civil rights movement. Dr. King moved on to other issues—above all to poverty—before he died. But poverty was less appealing to the conscience of the country, and he isn’t remembered for that work. We have a very strong heritage of seeing poverty as a personal failure. Maybe more than in Europe and many other places in the world. We still see our grand old country as open to any striving person who wants to get ahead. The losers need only work harder, do their homework, follow the rules, etc., and they, too, will…..

The school integration drive of the '50s and '60s failed. Except for the legal victory, which was very critical. It left a heroic legacy of stories and heroes. NYC schools were barely touched by it. Chicago and Philadelphia—each of which I taught in—were very slightly affected. And for a fairly short time. Boston was mightily affected—except that in the end, segregation remains in place. This is not simply due to racism as it affected schools—but also to hostility toward mixed residential communities in which not only black and white live side by side, but rich, poor, and middle-class do. More another time.

Can schools play a part? Yes, yes. Creating diverse school demographics is useful, if we also decide to organize the school so that kids are not then separated by tracking. It’s also more powerful when we put kids together in small peer groups (under 20 for sure) for several years so that they can build a strong inclusive community. We found multi-age grouping a useful way to do this—with half the class moving on and a new half joining each year. “Looping” is another approach used in some schools—where the teacher moves up with his/her class. In such a setting it’s also critical for teachers to see the full range of skills and talents of her students and for kids to feel that their past experience and family history will be assets to the community. Kids who are urged to leave their intelligence at the doorstep of the school and just try to “be good” are in for trouble. I know it is hard to explain, but I never ever (as a kindergarten and preK teacher) noticed that the low-SES kids in my classes were “without language,” “without concepts,” or without wonderful stories and talents. And I was virtually always able to build close relationships with their families. From Day One, parents were invited in, and because I taught only half-day, I did lots of visiting, taking small group trips, and in other ways bridging the class divide the other half-day. Even in Head Start, where there were only poor children, I was lucky to have only 12 kids and a great para (in Philadelphia the very first year of Head Start). With the help of the children’s families we uncovered hidden treasures in Germantown where we were located. (In a local church.)

There are wondrous other ways to create communities that bridge the gaps in our society without focusing on the stereotypes that too many middle-class people hold about “the poor,” the “underclass,” etc., bad ideas promoted by well-intentioned Ruby Paynes. If our ancestors were poor, they were the worthy poor—not like “them.” Or we have mythical memories of the olden days when even the poor were heroic.

But poverty does hurt. If it didn’t, we’d all happily be poor. And the root of poverty is the absence of income. Money. And all that money can buy. Good health, nice homes, leisure to pursue hobbies, and security are great things to have. And respect. A civil rights movement that ignores our growing income gap—that tolerates the fact that what some people make in a day others make in a year—just doesn’t deserve that name.

Civil rights and democracy are, for you and me, Diane, inseparable. There cannot be democracy when there is gross and permanent inequality between people occupying the same space and the same nation.

Oddly enough, the last few presidents represent the mixed-up nature of where we’re at re. winners, losers, rich, and poor. The last Bush managed to be both the heir of a long line of wealthy New England elites and the personification of the low-brow, middle-American male. President Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, represents the social mobility of America as we like to imagine it. From the log cabin to the White House. Exemplars of what education, high IQs, and charisma can do—our wide open land of opportunity. Obama manages to hit a homer, adding race and basketball to his image (despite poor bowling skill!).

Sometimes we can use these exceptions skillfully to create a climate of openness; sometimes, alas, we use it only to heap more scorn on the losers. See? HE did it!

Jay Mathews has asked a good question in a recent blog piece. If NCLB—test-driven and sanction-driven—reform hasn’t changed the odds for the losers, what else might? The alternative is not going back to where we were. He and I—and you, Diane—agree. Naturally, I’m hoping we pick up the conversation where we left off in the early '90s. More on that next week.

This week, I’m off to D.C.—again. This time to defend childhood! I’m going to argue at an event today against the earlier and earlier intrusion of phony “academics,” standardized testing, and drill-and-sit-still in the lives of very young children. Sponsored by The Forum for Education and Democracy and the Alliance for Childhood, we will present data about what’s happened to kindergartens. Based on a study of LA and NYC—5-year-olds, if they’re lucky, have 30 minutes a day of self-initiated activity, something faintly resembling play. Some have it just once a week. The poorer the children, the less self-initiated activity allowed—after all, “they have to catch up.” The metaphors we use tell us a lot—including the unfortunate latest out of Washington: The Race to the Top. Ugh.

Deb

P.S. Speaking of using racing as a metaphor for schooling: If everyone becomes proficient, we’ll invent a new set of indicators to separate the very proficient, moderately proficient, etc. The new rank order will look a lot like the old ones—guess who’ll be on top and on bottom? On and on and on.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I watched with some amusement as the media tried to figure out how to report the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Margaret Spellings said that the results vindicated the success of No Child Left Behind. The story by Sam Dillon of The New York Times reported that the achievement gaps—which the law was designed to eliminate—remained unchanged, and the headline of the story was “’No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap.”

So which is it? Were the results heartening or not? I’ll try to parse them here for the benefit of our readers and perhaps to kick off a renewed consideration of NCLB. Readers can make their own judgments by reading the report here.

Most people (and reporters) do not realize that there are actually two different versions of NAEP. There is Main NAEP, the tests that are given every other year to measure national and state achievement in reading and math, along with occasional tests in other subjects, such as science, history, civics, economics, writing, etc. Main NAEP’s tests of reading and mathematics are based on frameworks that periodically are revised, to reflect changes in the field.

And then there is Long-Term Trend NAEP, which is given less frequently and which tests more or less the same reading and math questions and concepts that have been tested since the early 1970s, with only minor revisions to remove obsolete references (such as outmoded technology).

Another difference is that Main NAEP tests grades 4 and 8, while Long-Term Trends tests students at ages 9, 13, and 17.

The Long-Term Trend results were released last week; the previous administration was in 1999. LTT reading scores for 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds were up significantly, which is why Spellings felt vindicated.

But the scores for 9-year-olds were up by less than in the previous five years, so the rate of progress seems to have slowed. As for 13-year-olds, their scores have risen back to where they were in 1992; that’s progress, but only in the sense of recovering lost ground. And while reading scores went up for the 17-year-olds, they are still not as high as they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Again, better to see the scores going up rather than down, but we don’t seem to have made any real breakthroughs.

In mathematics, the story was similar. A significant gain for 9-years-olds, but not as large as the gain posted pre-NCLB. A significant gain for 13-year-olds, but not as large as the one posted pre-NCLB. No change for 17-year-olds, whose scores have hardly changed since 1973 (even though many low-performing students have dropped out by this age).

As for the racial gaps, they narrowed more pre-NCLB than post-NCLB in every age group.

So Spellings is right; the scores are moving in the right direction. But since the passage of NCLB and its implementation, the rate of improvement on the federal tests has slowed. Perhaps there are other strategies that would improve academic achievement with greater consistency.

By the way, you might be interested in reading my debate with John Chubb in Education Next about the future of NCLB. It was just posted.

Diane

The following was added on 5-6-09:
P.S. Thank you to a reader for pointing out that I did not clarify the dates of the tests that I was comparing. The results that were released last week were for the tests given in 2008. The previous tests were given in 2004. Before that, they were offered in 1999. Most of the pre- and post-NCLB comparisons that I make are related to comparing the results for these two periods: 1999-2004 and 2004-2008.

Thanks, and sorry for the error,
Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (32) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane

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

Dear Diane,

Sometime I imagine “them” (the think-tankers) sitting up late at night inventing new titles for “reform” packages just to annoy people like you and me. There’s more interest of late in the name for the new NCLB than the contents of the bill! Ditto what passes for 21st Century skills. I can’t figure out who is on whose side, but they all seem quite happy to cheer each other on. What they—Ed Trust, Ed Sector, Heritage, Fordham, Klein, et al—seem to agree on is that everyone should follow the same path, that it should be measurable, and that teachers and parents are the main stumbling block (and bonuses for improved scores is the best way to get them to mend their ways).

I know of no way to teach intellectually useful skills without content. The five “habits of mind” we focused on at CPE and Mission Hill are content dependent. Back to David Hawkins’ triangle: I, thou, and “it”—with “it” the stuff teacher and student are studying together. You can’t practice good soccer skills without playing soccer—knowledge alone won’t get you far. Or learn the “skills” of biking until you get on a bike. Debate over the division between knowledge and skill drive me crazy. (I like to remind folks that I possess both when it comes to putting my keys in the right place, but I lack the habit.) There’s a thin line between these—very fuzzy and full of overlaps. And they rest on our very difficult-to-quash human persistence in tackling the “mysteries” of the world we are born into. I remember asking a scientist friend of mine how he’d recommend starting the study of science. He said, “on one’s back, looking at the starry sky at night.”

Our differences—yours and mine and E.D. Hirsch’s—are over depth vs. breadth. We both can make a good argument; but I think mine is better! I think we need to defend our choices of subject matter, but that there isn’t a simple right/wrong answer. So I want us to keep playing with different answers. (Also, I want us to think about how to use school for what is out of balance in 2lst Century kids’ lives.)

I know of virtually no subject matter that can’t serve as a powerful intellectual stimulus. We studied snails at Mission Hill for three months one fall because our yard was inundated with them, and our kids were enthralled—and I recalled that Stephen Jay Gould spent a lifetime on snails. At CPE and Mission Hill we chose only to be sure that (1) we asked students and teachers to tackle different disciplinary lenses in the course of their work, (2) that we could defend the work on the basis of the opportunities provided to actually practice our “habits of mind,” and (3) that we made room for plenty of external critique—ways of looking at our own and our students’ work through both multiple and disinterested eyes and ears. And, I guess, fourth, that we reviewed the outcome “data” (via children’s graduation examinations, their lives after they left us, etc.) regularly. We wanted to be “data informed,” not “data driven.” (If only our leaders had followed this lead with regard to our economic affairs.)

Human beings are going to create the 21st Century, not “fit into it”—I hope. And it might have been a great thing if all children had learned so-called 21st Century skills in the 12th Century and the 19th. (Granted they’d have used the technologies of their time.) When was the time in history when reflection, experimentation, critical thinking, collaboration, persistence, and creativity weren’t “useful”? And I’d argue these skills/habits must dig deeply into aesthetic and spiritual domains, too—the artist and “truth” seeker in us.

To me, the liberal arts are “merely” an extension of the good kindergarten classroom—the one described by Friedrich Froebel and other—aha!—19th Century thinkers!

I want the flexibility to respond to different kids differently, while also being mindful of the risks. And to respond to what is happening around us, the events that are shaping our world while also encouraging coherence and persistence. On a day that The New York Times editorial page includes a piece about the filibuster as a way of life in Congress, I’d like to explore that in a history course—as an example of what seems “inevitable” or “unchangeable,” when in fact nothing of the sort is true. “It’s just the way it is” as an exhausted parent and teacher’s response to a nagging or teasing child is quite proper; as long as we keep in mind that heard too often we produce that “unmotivated” child we all complain about. If it’s all “just the way it is,” why would anyone relish a liberal education? A liberal education is potentially more, not less, “useful” than any other kind. In fact, it’s essential to a democracy that every single potential voter has the wherewithal to live an examined life.

Of course, I’m begging the next disagreement: our definition of the liberal arts. To save time! But, of course, it doesn’t save time—so maybe that comes next?

Deb

P.S. Clarification: Annoyed as I am by the thrust of the new secretary of education’s rhetoric with regard to school innovation, and his past history under Mayor Daley, or the harm he may do as he uses the $5 billion dollars in discretionary funds, I’m delighted President Obama has directed a lot more money into preserving teacher jobs out there in the trenches. We can just imagine what a Bush agenda would have been like! Furthermore, as the Broader and Bolder folks have argued, jobs, justice, and health are education issues, too.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane

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

Dear Diane,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deb

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

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

Dear Deborah,

I have been watching and listening to our new secretary of education, trying to understand his views on the most important issues facing our schools and the nation's children. I wanted to believe candidate Barack Obama when he said that he would introduce real change and restore hope. Surely, I thought, he understood that the deadening influence of No Child Left Behind has produced an era of number-crunching that has very little to do with improving education or raising academic standards.

We truly need change and hope. I thought he understood. He chose to keep his own children far from NCLB. He decided to send them to a private school in Washington, D.C., that shuns the principles and practices of NCLB.

However, based on what I have seen to date, I conclude that Obama has given President George W. Bush a third term in education policy and that Arne Duncan is the male version of Margaret Spellings. Maybe he really is Margaret Spellings without the glasses and wearing very high heels. We all know that Secretary Spellings greeted Duncan's appointment with glee. She wrote him an open letter in which she praised him as "a fellow reformer" who supports NCLB and anticipated that he would continue the work of the Bush administration. (Recall, Deborah, that the media today defines an education reformer as someone who endorses Republican principles of choice and accountability.)

Everything I have seen and learned since Duncan came to office has supported Secretary Spellings' admiring comments about Secretary Duncan. It turns out that Duncan, like the Bush administration, adores testing, charter schools, merit pay, and entrepreneurs. Part of the stimulus money, he told Sam Dillon of The New York Times, will be used so that states can develop data systems, which will enable them to tie individual student test scores to individual teachers, greasing the way for merit pay. Another part of the stimulus plan will support charters and entrepreneurs.

Duncan paid his first visit to New York City last week ("New Education Secretary Visits Brooklyn School," New York Times, Feb. 19, 2009). He did not visit a regular public school, but a charter school. Such decisions are not happenstance; they are intended to send a message. Bear in mind that the regular public schools enroll 98 percent of the city's one-million-plus students.

At the charter school, Duncan endorsed the core principles of the Bush education program. According to the account in the Times, Secretary Duncan said that "increasing the use of testing across the country should also be a spending priority." And he made this astonishing statement: "We should be able to look every second grader in the eye and say, 'You're on track, you're going to be able to go to a good college, or you're not...Right now, in too many states, quite frankly, we lie to children. We lie to them and we lie to their families."

Wow! More testing is needed. In New York City right now, students take a dozen tests a year. How many more should they take? How much of the stimulus package will be used to promote more testing across the country?

Are we lying to children? Deborah, you were principal of an elementary school. Could you look second-graders in the eye and tell them that they were on track to go to a good college—or not? Did you know? Did you lie and say that they were when they were not?

Doesn't this inflated and grandiose rhetoric grate on your sensibilities? Are teachers "lying" to children and their families right now when they can't project whether second-graders are on track to go to a good college? Isn't this claim—that we know which 7-year-olds will go to a good college and which will not—a baldfaced lie?

I am sorely disappointed in Arne Duncan. I don't see any change from the mean, punitive version of accountability that the Bush administration foisted on the nation's schools.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (58) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

You are undoubtedly right that what we have been calling "reform" is not producing better educated young people, but I don't think we can move on and forget about what is happening now. We have to keep talking about why current schemes don't work because so many politicians and journalists are convinced that they will work if we just keep plugging for another five or 10 years. If a journalist finds one school that seems to be doing incredibly well, that is considered an existence proof, demonstrating that every school can do incredibly well. The fact that almost 30,000 schools (out of 90,000) did not make "adequate yearly progress" under the No Child Left Behind act doesn't register with the public consciousness. The fact that the number of "failing" schools increased by 28 percent in the last year alone is not newsworthy, except in Education Week. What happens by the year 2014, when nearly 100 percent of all elementary schools in California will be deemed "failing" schools ?

The public will be riveted by a story of a little girl who falls down a well, but will shrug with indifference when they hear or read reports of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda. I guess that is why an uplifting story of one turn-around school gets so much more attention than little-noted, humdrum reports about thousands of public schools that are on track to be restructured or closed.

Speaking of turn-around schools, I want to draw your attention to a research publication that I received last week from the National Center for Evaluation Assistance and Regional Assistance, which is part of the Institute of Education Sciences, which is part of the U.S. Department of Education. Whew! The publication is titled "Turning Around Chronically Low-Performing Schools," and I opened it with great interest. My scan of research to this point has convinced me—at least for now—that no one has a formula for turning around chronically low-performing schools. I have been amused to see that several universities have opened programs to train "turn-around specialists," as though there were a set of lessons and techniques that anyone could learn to do.

So when I read this publication, I discovered that it contained four recommendations:
1. Signal the need for dramatic change with strong leadership.
2. Maintain a consistent focus on improving instruction.
3. Provide visible improvements early in the turn-around process.
4. Build a committed staff.

What astonished me was that each of these recommendations was accompanied by a notice that the level of evidence supporting it was "low." I wondered why in the world the U.S. Department of Education (and its related entities) was publishing a set of recommendations where the evidence was so slim that they were not willing to vouch for their effectiveness.

What always troubles me about recommendations of this kind, even when they do have evidence to support them, is that as phrased they are bromides. Every one, I assume, wants strong leadership; everyone wants better instruction; everyone wants quick improvements; and everyone wants a committed staff. Between having these goals and having a way to get there is a huge gulf.

This, it seems to me, is a problem with education research. If all they can offer practitioners are maxims and bromides, no wonder research gets a bad name. It is even worse when the bromides do not actually have research evidence supporting them. And worst of all, when the U.S. Department of Education has the chutzpah to publish findings for which there is "low" evidence.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I’m not sure that it’s Red vs. Blue. (It’s still hard for me to realize we are now in an age when red is the color of conservatism.) The choice of Arne Duncan leaves me sad, but maybe he’s “purple”? I hope so. I’ll wait to comment until all the education positions are filled.

There’s another axis of ideas that may cross lines on some of the issues that most concern us. We’re lined up, for example, on different issues in different places; for example, with regard to “who should decide what?”

There are complicated balances embedded in this question that are increasingly being decided centrally. I think you worry more about the lack of expertise of those making decisions, and I worry more about even the wisest of educational czars telling parents, teachers, and communities what and how to teach. On this one I’m often allied with traditional conservatives! You seem split depending on whether it’s “how” (pedagogy) or “what” (subject matter). We’ll get back to this in 2009.

The idea of equity has a more obvious Red/Blue axis. Except that some of the new defenders of equity seem only interested in equalizing test scores. I just finished reading an extraordinary piece by T. Elijah Hawkes (a NYC school principal) in Schools Studies in Education, published jointly by the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago and the University of Chicago Press. He says it better than I can. I urge everyone to read it.

The egalitarian mission that I grew up thinking was as American as apple pie has disappeared. Entirely gone for the Reds, but not so much brighter for many Blues. We are no longer the land where working men and women are middle class in anything but a rhetorical sense and where the urban poor have disappeared; we’re no longer the most socially mobile nation on Earth. Making AYP has replaced all our other lofty goals.

(Incidentally, my old Boston school—Mission Hill—missed making AYP again. Not because of test scores, but because less than 95 percent participated. We do allow parent opt-outs, and one family too many exercised that right.)

The disproportionate editorial writers' anger at high workers’ wages in the auto industry versus anger at the astronomical wages of the bankers and hedge funders is odd. You are right, Diane, it’s at least partially just old historic right-wing politics in its newest guise—fueling anti-unionism is all part of that. But it’s not Red alone.

We’re substantially gutting the basic idea of democracy—that those who make decisions be accountable to those they most deeply impact: “of, for and by,” especially the last of the trio. We all recognize that too many citizens think they have virtually no influence. This leaves many choosing to retreat from public life altogether. It lends credence to seeing wealth as the only form of power. It’s fed by an ideology that argues that the marketplace solves what imperfect political democracy can’t. (Virtually everything except modern war—and we’re increasingly privatizing that, too.) Distrust in each other grows apace as we see everyone as a competitor, not a fellow citizen. America vs. the World. My kids vs. everyone else’s. But yet—something holds us back. Something resists this trend toward privatization of everything. In that sense, the current crisis may have been a blessing, if we recover from it and learn from it.

There is a way to rebuild respect for democracy, and the proper balance of trust/distrust needed to make it work. Schools are one vehicle for rebalancing needed trust, potential building blocks for that task. Imagine if schools were community centers for intergenerational learning, focused around strong civic debate about means and ends. Imagine them as places where we’d be required to act “as if” we respected each other from 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m..

Our accountability to each other must rest less on obscure, convoluted data understood only by a small elite, and more on that amazing human capacity for “judgment.” Ordinary citizens need to be in a position to make judgments about institutions they can see, feel, and “taste.” Even experts need something more than test scores. We need schools that embody the virtues of cross-generational egalitarian communities alongside of various forms of monitoring that help alert us to serious abuses of local power in a still unequal society and in-depth sampled data that can serve to provide context and insight.

Power corrupts; but so does the lack of it. We’ve not yet tackled the balance of power needed to make schools safe for democracy. They are certainly not safe now. I look at every piece of legislation through a very narrow lens—will it enable us to pursue the work we began 35 years ago in District 4 in East Harlem? (Work that was replicated throughout the nation in small but stirring ways.) While it was “rudely” interrupted 15 years ago by other agendas, it persists in oases everywhere in this land. It’s not just “small” that matters, but where decisions are made. The change we need (call it reform or not) lies in policies that fuel the enthusiasm of those at “the bottom”—where adults and children connect. Small is only a means to that end.

NCLB, built on distrust of those close to the action and vast trust in those furthest removed, can’t get us to that better balance. It can’t unleash that enthusiasm. We need to start again with our eye on that prize: schools whose curriculum—both the open and the hidden one—is all about democracy.

Enough!

My kids are all coming up to Hillsdale soon—and grandkids—and that’s a great blessing. May you and our readers all have a wonderful few weeks until we resume our conversation. (Following a short break, Bridging Differences will return the week of Jan. 4, 2009.)

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

Back in the old days (i.e., pre-NCLB), it really didn't matter to teachers, principals, and superintendents—that is, the people who actually work directly in schools and have daily interaction with children—who was Secretary of Education. I mean, really, why would anyone in a school care whether the secretary was a governor, a business leader, or a buddy of the president? Nothing that the secretary did had any immediate—or even long-range—impact on the life of schools until NCLB. The secretary of education had a bully pulpit, and from that bully pulpit he or she could be a national scold or an inspirational speaker, but that was about it. He or she could be ignored without peril, as their speeches (which they usually didn't write) rolled on, not affecting the daily work of educators.

Now, in the NCLB era, this is no longer true. Much is expected of the Obama administration. For one thing, NCLB has created a template in which Congress and the administration can reach deeply into every classroom in the land, affecting what everyone is expected to do, setting goals and making demands. Will the next secretary add merit pay to the next iteration of federal law? Our new president says he supports merit pay. Will teachers be judged based on their students' test scores? Or will they be paid more by doing different work, like mentoring other teachers or teaching high-needs students?

Will the next secretary embrace choice and the market model for schooling? Chances are if he/she is an entrepreneur, a hedge-fund manager, or a business leader, that is likely, as that is the metric that such people know best.

I have written extensively about the New York "miracle." I agree with you. There is no miracle. For one thing, we know that New York City's NAEP scores from 2003-2007 were flat, with the exception of only 4th grade math, where the proportion of students given accommodations exceeded that of any other city tested, throwing those "gains" into question. In 2007, New York City gave accommodations to 25 percent of the students tested in fourth grade math, way beyond the proportion in Los Angeles, Atlanta, or other cities. One could dissect the much-boasted graduation rate in the same way, looking for example at the number of "discharges," students who simply are dropped from the register without being counted officially as dropouts.

My personal choice is former Governor James Hunt of North Carolina. I don't know whether he has any interest in being a member of the cabinet, but he would be wonderful. He is deeply committed to education, to children, to teachers. He is not an ideologue. I wrote a blog about him in the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Flypaper. He's my guy.

Yes, it matters very much who is selected by President-elect Obama. It matters more than ever. Let us pray that it is not one of the hedge-fund managers or prosecutors or swing-the-axe superintendents whose names are now being floated in the press.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (30) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

As this election nears a close, it is sad to note that very little has been said about education. In a way, that's a good thing, as we really don't want the president deciding what should happen tomorrow in our schools. I assume that more important tasks are at hand, such as the economy and foreign policy.

On the other hand, the candidates have been unfortunately silent in letting us know what they plan to do about the abominable No Child Left Behind law. By now, even its defenders understand that the people who must implement the law are hostile to it and know it is unworkable. Yet the candidates are silent. Clearly the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which has existed since 1965 and is the main mechanism for funneling federal aid to education) must be reauthorized. No matter who is president, that law—whatever it is called—must be re-enacted.

The question is what to do about the special features of NCLB, especially those related to accountability, remedies, and sanctions. Will the federal government continue to require that all children must reach "proficiency" by 2014? Will it continue to mandate that states must test all children from grades 3-8, and once in high school, with tests of their own devising and standards of their own manufacture? Will the federal government continue to insist on "adequate yearly progress," will it continue to label schools "failing" (or "schools in need of improvement) if they are not making adequate yearly progress towards 100 percent proficiency? Will the federal government continue to mandate choice and tutoring for "failing" schools? Will it continue to mandate such sanctions as turning schools over to state control, turning them into charter schools, turning them over to private management, and other kinds of "restructuring"?

As I re-read this paragraph, I realize that the amount of jargon being churned out by legislators is nearly overwhelming, that talking about schools and school improvement has become almost as arcane as a conversation between two medical technicians or third-year law students.

People who do not live inside the Beltway cannot imagine how strongly entrenched are the forces that demand reauthorization of NCLB, more or less in its present form. Many of the Beltway think tanks—more so Democrats than Republicans—seem to have a proprietary interest in NCLB and they jeer at anyone who wants to change it. The Republican think tanks are uneasy with the extent of federal interference and control of education that NCLB has legitimized. The Democratic think tanks think that any complaints about NCLB are the work of lazy, selfish interest groups who just don't want to do the hard work of making 100 percent of our kids "proficient" by 2014.

Last weekend, I spoke to the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents about NCLB. The most common reaction was, "How do we express our views about this law without being characterized as just another selfish interest group?" It is a curiosity of our times that the views of the people who are actually supposed to do the work of educating children—the teachers, principals, and superintendents—are dismissed out of hand by NCLB's defenders as those of self-interested pressure groups who don't care about children. After all, why listen to the people who actually work in schools?

Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a former official in the current Bush administration, is one of the few Beltway think-tankers who have begun to realize that NCLB is not working. He wrote an opinion piece last week in The Washington Times acknowledging that NCLB is "hugely unpopular with the bases of both political parties" and that there is "widespread buyers' remorse." He suggested that the federal government should stop micromanaging the schools; that it should provide incentives for states to sign up for national (but not federal) tests, then leave the states and districts to devise their own reforms, sanctions, labels, and ratings. This is somewhat akin to what I have suggested on this blog in the past, i.e., let the feds collect and dispense accurate information, and let the states and districts decide what to do about that information. (Full disclosure: I am a trustee of TBF and have known Mike Petrilli for many years.)

Since Mike Petrilli's suggestion—to get rid of Washington's heavy-handed micromanagement—was fairly close to my own (I am less certain than he is about the uses and misuses of test scores, even in the hands of state and school districts), I was glad to see his sensible proposal. However, Mike's column was met with scorn by Andrew Rotherham, who blogs as eduwonk.com. Andy, who was an education adviser to President Clinton, said that Mike was a "reflexive contrarian," and implied that he should back off his criticism of NCLB and recognize "the day to day realities of making policy..." NCLB, it seems, needs just a little tweaking, not radical change.

Petrilli is right, and Rotherham is wrong. In his article, Petrilli said that "Washington is at least three or four steps removed from the operation of local schools..." I would amend that to say, "Washington is at least 300 to 400 steps removed from the operation of local schools..." Here is a law written jointly by the Bush administration, and by Senator Ted Kennedy, Congressman George Miller, and their staffs. This group of politicians and their advisers decided how to reform every school in the nation. What experience does Senator Kennedy or Congressman Miller have as school reformers? How many of their staff and advisers have ever led or turned around a failing school? How many years did any of them serve as teachers or principals? How many schools have they personally reformed? By what logic or evidence did they decide that turning "failing" schools over to state control or private managers or charters would make them high-performing schools? Did they read Hess and Finn's "No Remedy Left Behind," which shows that none of the federally mandated remedies are working? Did they read the latest report from the Center on Education Policy on restructuring, which says that congressionally mandated restructuring isn't working?

I fear that the tenor of the current debate (or lack thereof) about federal education policy will only increase the burdens and ordeals of our public schools. When you have a debate in which those who are in the trenches are labeled as selfish "adult" interests (and therefore to be ignored), while those who know nothing are given responsibility to write the marching orders, you have a plan that will fail.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (0)

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 (10) | 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)