Bridging Differences

Dear Diane,

It’s helpful in some way to know that I “have to” write once a week for some audience—including first and foremost you. It makes me set aside snippets here and there to possibly write and think about. I put an old essay that Florence Miller and I wrote together about a book you and Chester Finn wrote 20 years ago onto my Web site. (“What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?”). I posted it in Florence’s memory—since she died a few weeks ago. She had a sharp wit, and I heard it in that piece. I still like that style, although I’m less convinced that it works. Given the change in our relationship, I felt uneasy at reprinting it. But it’s a useful reminder of where you and I disagreed—and probably still do.

Last week, I spoke at an “alternative school conference” in Troy, New York. Many of those attending were Summerhillian “free school” types. It was interesting to approach the curriculum debates from their extreme. But the common ground was our insistence that we find ways for adults and young people to meet together around interesting questions and projects—and the mutual respect that it assumes. It’s that “I, thou, and it” connection which David Hawkins wrote about that I find myself always going back to. It’s why I want strong adults, whose natural authority helps young people develop their own natural authority, whose passions inspire their passions, and whose disciplined “good work” lays the ground for novices honing their own self-disciplined work. It’s why I find it hard to agree with your focus on “what we know.” Especially in an age when just putting something into “Google” produces amazing results!

But there are those perennial trade-offs, dilemmas, conundrums that I realize seem critical to pass on to the young—in the name of democracy. In my keynote at the Alternative Education Resource Organization's conference I addressed the idea that modern democracy was just as “unnatural” and counter-intuitive as modern science. It’s filled with traps and trade-offs. There is no way to perfectly solve the question of whose voice “counts”, especially at the ballot box. Or where and why some decisions must be made close to the action versus others in more distant but representative forums. Why age 18? Why should non-experts have the same vote as experts? Why should an 18-year-old's vote carry the same weight as mine?

And if we agree that all votes are equal, then what else needs to change so that we all have somewhat more equal wisdom and power? Shouldn’t we all have equal leisure time to consider the merits, or the money to hire lobbyists to persuade our fellow citizens, or equal access to the media? And, at least, an equally powerful education?

One of our readers, Erin, keeps being disturbed at my attention to nonschool factors. Aside from sheer empathy for those whose lives are more fragile than mine, my quest for more just social policy rests on my obsession with democracy. Democracy presumes some—undefined—level of equality of mind, spirit, and condition (health, a place to sleep, food, etc). But just what level?

Then there’s the conundrum of conundrums—how to get from here to there. How to build a more egalitarian (and therefore more democratic) society in the absence of all those fundamental necessities? If one must create the future out of the stuff that the past and present offer us, is a more full-blown democracy a utopian dream? Efforts to get around this dilemma—vanguard parties of one sort or another—are not the answer. Yet the temptation is great to fall back on “vanguards”, and we all succumb to it here and there.

I spent many years trying to imagine how—if I had the power—I could design a test that would lead schools, teachers, kids, and parents to seek the kind of schooling I wanted them to have. As parent, teacher, school board member, and principal I was tempted to wish that the power rested with me. I gave up for two reasons: one, I doubted if I’d have sufficient power to do so, and two, because I kept seeing ways in which the unpersuaded could get around the ends I had in mind, but still pass the test!

But are there some “in-betweens”, measures that would increase the likelihood, the odds—on a broad and bold scale—that we could get schools to attend to creating a generation of motivated, creative, inventive, self-disciplined, and empathetic truth-seekers?

Deb

P.S. Remind me to get back to the 1967 civil rights agenda. That was the year I became seriously involved with schools and less with civil and economic rights. It was the start of an exciting experience in which I imagined we could change schools from below—and en masse—if only “they” gave us the time and resources. What were you in the midst of, Diane, during that period?

Posted by Deborah Meier at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I can’t believe that we are debating the message of A Nation at Risk in 2008, a quarter century after it appeared!

We have been agreeing so much lately that it is useful that we remember that we do have plenty of differences. That way, we can continue to try to bridge them.

This is one issue where we definitely disagree. The reason that the commission that wrote Nation at Risk focused on schools was because the name of the commission was “The National Commission on Excellence in Education.” Its charge was to “present a report on the quality of education in America,” not to propose needed changes in society and the economic order. Its chair, David P. Gardner, president of the University of California, said in his introductory letter that the goal of the report was to identify problems and to provide solutions, “not to search for scapegoats.”

Nor was the report unduly focused on blaming the schools for productivity decline. What it did say, which makes sense to me, is:

Knowledge, learning, information, and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce and are today spreading throughout the world as vigorously as miracle drugs, synthetic fertilizers, and blue jeans did earlier. If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all—old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority. Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the ‘information age’ we are entering.

Our concern, however, goes well beyond matters of industry and commerce. It also includes the intellectual, moral, and spiritual strengths of our people which knit together the very fabric of our society. The people of the United States need to know that individuals in our society who do not possess the levels of skill, literacy, and training essential to this new era will be effectively disenfranchised, not simply from the material rewards that accompany competent performance, but also from the chance to participate fully in our national life. A high level of shared education is essential to a free, democratic society and to the fostering of a common culture, especially in a country that prides itself on pluralism and individual freedom.

And more: “What is at risk is the promise first made on this continent: All, regardless of race or class or economic status, are entitled to a fair chance and to the tools for developing their individual powers of mind and spirit to the utmost.”

Nothing in these lines or in many others that I could quote can be construed as teacher-bashing. If the commission failed to ask questions about “other institutional and system failures that need to be addressed,” the same criticism could be directed to scores of other reports about school reform.

It is easy to nitpick a report because the people who wrote it did not know what we know now. They did not know, for example, that the decline in test scores—which began in the mid-1960s—bottomed out in 1980-81. We know that now. But they were writing in 1982 and did not. You know that hindsight is characterized by 20-20 vision.

Meanwhile, back to the ranch or back to the present. On one day, I received conflicting news stories in my email: One from Baltimore, which is about to jump on the small-school bandwagon; the other from Portland, Oregon, where small schools (started much earlier) have lost their luster.

Then this past week, New York State reported phenomenal test score gains, some in double digits, in every district and in almost every grade. These scores are in conflict with the state and city NAEP scores of last fall, which showed that New York’s scores in reading and math (except for 4th grade math) for the past two years were unchanged. Now, here is an interesting puzzle: How did New York State (and New York City) move from flat scores over the past few years to a phenomenal jump in 2008? Should we call it the miracle of 2008? From my experience with large-scale testing, I have learned to be dubious about any one-year changes that are large, whether up or down. One child may have an amazing improvement or loss, but it is unlikely that an entire district or state will see a sudden change of the magnitude reported by New York State.

What do you think is going on?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

"We live in interesting times." A statement generally said more in sorrow than joy—and that's how I've felt this week over the coverage of the two contrasting reports to which you referred. Probably not many folks will read either, but many will notice the gist of each. David Brooks's interpretation is the oddest. It's probably the first time in my life I've been labeled part of the status quo on education! I've almost given up on the word "reformer" anyway—given the company it too often puts me in—so that wasn't the shock. It was the straight-out teacher-bashing that surprised me.

"Thinking like a state" vs. "thinking like an educator" won't do either, because—as you and some of our readers reminded me, teachers need to think Big, too. In an ideal democracy, these would be interchangeable roles for all citizens.

I'm intrigued at the anger that the statement that "schools alone can't do it" elicits from the Katie Haycock/Joel Klein/Ed Sector/David Brooks folks (the "Education Equality" report). This confrontation has a long history. In its modern garb it began with the unfortunate "A Nation at Risk" statement in the mid-80s that carelessly labeled teachers and public schools as America's No. 1 domestic enemies. (Followed later by the Bushies declaring the NEA "terrorists".)

To lay at the door of schools all the ails of society—and particularly those that afflict people of color and low income—is such a cop-out and so transparent that it's hard for me to believe they've gotten as far as they have with that message. Our vast industrial preeminence overcome by lazy teachers? (If it's such a cushy job, why, one wonders, is the turnover rate so high?) Given the disparities in health care, I'm waiting for the same crowd to propose a cheaper, simpler healthcare solution: raise standards (all citizens shall be equally healthy) and mandate closing the gaps by 2014. McCain/Obama!

How schools can build a more powerful nation and better undermine the inequities in American society are important, debatable issues. I believe schools have immense potential in both arenas. That's why what interests me most of all are the questions that Mike Rose asks in his blog; and why I wish policy folks would reread Richard Rothstein's "The Way We Were?" and Ted Sizer's "Horace's Compromise". If it were as simple as the Kleins of the world imagine, why is it that the 'best' private schools are reluctant to educate any but those who start off with high test scores? Why is it that the poor have historically worked harder—sweat more for longer hours—than the rich?

I hadn't, of course, thought of policymakers as the spokespeople of democracy, as the elected representatives of citizens when I complained about them. You are right to remind me, Diane. I usually run into them as the paid lobbyists for various interest groups, hired to turn "self interests" into State policy. There are "my" policy wonks, and there are "theirs". So I should use my language more carefully. But the sad fact is that "my side" doesn't have as many paid lobbyists, think tanks, foundations as "theirs". That's why it's crucial for parents and teachers to take themselves seriously and be policy wonks on their own behalf.

Accountability is what democracy was invented for, and the kind teachers practice daily gets closer to the roots of that idea than most other schemes. Finding the way to capture that form of educational accountability writ large is why the Coalition of Essential Schools was started almost 25 years ago. (I just left the Coalition's board meeting). Its 10 Principles were put forth as ways for schools to build standards, and for young people to "show" what they could do to publicly meet them. In an odd twist of fate, most of the Coalition's language has been co-opted—like the small schools movement—to quite different ends: e.g. standards evolved into standardization and performance assessment into right answers on multiple-choice tests.

It's hard to keep the craftsman and policymaker view from splitting into irreconcilables. It's why as principal I kept some classroom responsibilities that put me in a similar position with my colleagues.

It's why I decided to retake piano lessons so I'd remember my vulnerability as a novice learner. Balancing the particular and the more global is tougher for me to do these days when they are so estranged and when I'm an observer most of the time.

But writing this has cheered me up. It's actually been a pretty good month. The earlier "Democracy At Risk" and the new "Broader, Bolder" reports have challenged the "longer hours", "try harder" wisdom. The old saw that the best way to tackle income and political inequality is through those at the bottom working harder for less has produced two good policy rebuttals. Good for us.

It will be interesting to see how the presidential candidates take it on in the months ahead.

Deborah

P.S. These thoughts remind me that Michael and Susan Klonsky's provocative new book—"Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society"—deserves our discussing some time, Diane.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (29) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

To answer your question, “How come, since there are more teachers than policymakers,” the policymakers get to run the show? Easy. Public education is controlled by laymen, not professionals. Decision-making power is placed by law in the hands of the local board of education, the state board of education, and the federal department of education. Lots of others influence policy, including teachers’ unions, business groups, and foundations.

I find myself getting really annoyed when people rage against the teachers’ unions, because they are the organized voice of most of the people who work in schools. The same people who vilify the teachers’ unions never complain about the influence of businesses or foundations, both of which try to steer the public schools by the power of the purse.

Just last week, we saw a conflict of visions over who should run the show and which vision should prevail.

First came the release of the statement of a group calling for a “broader, bolder” reform agenda. You and I both signed a public statement that said, in brief, that schools alone cannot eliminate the achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged children, and that government should not only improve schools, but invest more in early-childhood programs, health services, and out-of-school programs.

Only a day or so later came a press conference from a group that included the Reverend Al Sharpton, Chancellor Joel Klein of New York City, Chancellor Michelle Rhee of Washington, Superintendent Arne Duncan of Chicago, and various others. This group said that it was pursuing a “civil rights” agenda (it calls itself the Education Equality Project). But in its statements, as represented in news reports [e.g. USA Today], the spokespersons placed the blame for the achievement gap at the door of the teachers’ unions. Although it was not entirely clear what their specific proposals are, they did call for more testing and more charter schools, the sort of things that Chancellor Rhee likes to say serve the interests of children, not adults.

Columnist David Brooks of The New York Times said that the statement we signed represented "the status quo camp," while the Sharpton-Klein-Rhee group is "the reformist camp." This is simply bizarre. Brooks is often an insightful and thoughtful commentator on current events, but in this case he is simply spouting hokum, in my judgment.

How testing and charter schools and hostility to teachers’ unions translate into a “civil rights” program that will close the achievement gap is beyond my meager understanding. If testing were the answer to closing the achievement gap, why haven’t we seen it closing over the past five years? Apparently we are not testing enough! As for charter schools, I am waiting for persuasive evidence that achievement rises if schools are turned over to private governance boards; in some cases, it does; in other cases, it doesn’t.

As for blaming the teachers’ unions for the lower than average performance of children of color, that is nutty. The gap is there in non-union states, as well as in unionized states, and is probably even larger in non-union states. As the “broader, bolder” group says, the causes of the gap are to be found in social and economic disadvantage and should be addressed by reducing the disadvantages, to the greatest extent possible.

Of course, school improvement and school effectiveness are important for low-performing kids, but you and I probably agree that those goals are unlikely to be reached by the strategies described by this new organization. Rev. Sharpton and Chancellor Klein plan to launch a national campaign for their testing and charter schools agenda, they say.

It seems to be nothing more than a ploy to win reauthorization for No Child Left Behind, which already uses the same approaches. Since their agenda tracks so closely with NCLB, it must be that NCLB does not require enough testing to satisfy Rev. Sharpton and Chancellor Klein.

Diane

PS to readers: If you saw the first-posted version of this piece, you may have noticed that I changed a word: I replaced "reduce" to "eliminate" in paragraph 4. An observant reader asked me whether I really meant to say that school improvement cannot "reduce" the gap, and I said she was absolutely right. Good schools, small classes, great teachers can obviously improve the achievement of all students (though, it should be noted, when the achievement of ALL students improve, the "gap" from top to bottom is not narrowed). School improvement can indeed improve the academic performance of poor and minority students. I believe that, and I also believe that the root cause of the gap itself is demographic, rooted in persistent poverty and disadvantage. We should do all we can to improve schools while also doing all we can to reduce poverty and disadvantage. Anyone disagree?

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (36) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

On Sunday morning, as I was pondering my reply to your last blog about “making sense of our differences,” I picked up The New York Times and read a shocking story. It seems that in Tanzania, albinos are being hunted down and killed by people who believe that their skin and body parts have magical powers.

This story reminded me of how fortunate we are to live in a nation where we constantly struggle to teach acceptance, tolerance, and mutuality and to judge people as individuals, not by the color of their skin or their accent or their disability. When you and I were children, racial discrimination was commonplace; people with disabilities were hidden away; divorce was shameful; anti-Semitism was socially acceptable. Most such prejudices have gone underground, but even that is a huge step forward. It is no longer socially acceptable to be a bigot. The fact that the Democratic party has just selected an African-American man as its standard-bearer for the fall elections is astonishing. This would have been unthinkable 40 years ago, 30 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago. Maybe even four years ago.

I share your nostalgia for the ebbing of the “sense of wonder and awe that we can share across our differences.” I, too, worry that the current mania to test, test, test has changed the nature of schooling in ways that make schooling abhorrent to many children. Tests may be a necessary part of life; we know they are a source of anxiety. Turning them into a weekly routine or even a daily routine is a surefire formula for crushing the “sense of wonder and awe” that can make childhood a time of exploration and fun.

But here is the rub. The clock will not be turned back. No matter how frequently or how beautifully you describe the joys of childhood, those who are making education policy will not be deterred or persuaded. Their agenda is competitiveness. They are in the throes of data-driven decision-making, which has become a sort of mantra that takes the place of actual thinking. How can you measure the joys of childhood? How can you measure wonder and awe? Go where the numbers tell you to go, they say; but what if the numbers are measuring trivial things? Do what the numbers tell you to do, they say; but people—not numbers—devise policy alternatives.

What I am suggesting is that your longing for a more humane approach to educating children has a huge constituency among teachers, but none among policymakers. What I am suggesting is that we should talk not about a past that has been lost, perhaps irretrievably, but how to change and mitigate the policies that are now destroying joy, wonder, and any hope of a better education.

So, for example, the small-school movement—of which you are a pioneer—was lauded just last week in The Wall Street Journal as the very best way to train our future workforce. (Subscription required to read full article.) Is this what you had in mind? I doubt it.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (25) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

NYC’s decision—for budgetary reasons—to forego mandatory intelligence testing of 5-year-olds this fall is worth celebrating. But it’s a dangerous idea that will be back again. The earlier the testing culture starts, the more it erodes the resilience of all children, but above all those raised in a different culture and language than such tests rest their norms on.

Some natives, hearing the accents or dialects of foreigners, treat them instinctively with disrespect. A good friend of mine, Florence Miller, had a talent for joining other cultures and languages. We traveled together to France, Greece, and Spain. She was already fluent in French, but even in Greece she had a way of connecting that made people think she understood; and she did! No doubt our new friends thought of me as the quiet, possibly stupid one. But she made worlds open up for us. I think of our differences often lately, since she died of cancer last week. It was a gift not only of language, but larger than that.

For many 5-year-olds, kindergarten is like entering a foreign country. They respond as I did abroad—silently. Some overcome the silence with physical rowdiness, or by being naughty. They need a Florence who can bridge worlds for them. They need teachers and peers who find their experiences every bit as significant as the more familiar ones, and who seek the common ground—the shared mysteries of life. Our shared puzzlement over the meaning of “up” and “down”, over the way sound travels (the idea itself is startling) become the bridge. Even our different ways of pronouncing words can offer delight, not shame. My 6-year-old son spent a silent year in a NYC first grade because his teacher (as she confided to me mid-year) was trying to rid him of his “bad” Chicago accent! I’ve occasionally met teachers who assume their students were deaf as they regale me loudly about the impoverished backgrounds and linguistic stupidities of their students. A loving hug cannot wipe away the insult. Some kids overcome. They succeed perhaps out of defiance, or because they switch allegiances, adopting the school rather than their home. Some come from families of unusual strength and confidence, enough to brush aside the school’s ignorance. Naturally, most don’t.

Native Americans have suffered from assumptions regarding their basic inadequacy as a “race” since the Europeans first conquered them. African-Americans for just as long. I was glad to discuss Charles Murray again, Diane, as a reminder that his assumptions are alive even in “well-educated” circles. We fool ourselves if we think these theories regarding intelligence have disappeared. The history of this kind of testing—past and present—plays a role in the perpetuation of such assumptions.

There’s a lot of work to be done in our classrooms and schools to level the playing field. Foremost is tackling how we—including above all the child herself—see, hear, and make sense of our differences. The task of schooling involves overcoming what child specialists call “infant egocentricity”. But it’s not only infants who suffer from it. The natural assumption that only “I” am real, all the others are instruments to enhance or endanger me, is appropriate as a starting point. That the “I” expands to others “like me” is a step forward, but a baby step compared to what is needed on the part of teachers and students.

As I drive through the countryside—particularly at night—and see lighted windows, I am suddenly overcome with a sense of my minuteness. In every window is an “I”. It’s cause for wondering. So, too, as a scientist reminded me recently, is lying outside on a cloudless night and seeing the universe unfold.

It’s that sense of wonder and awe that we can share across differences. It’s where storytelling—fast becoming a lost art—originates. Thousands and thousands of years of human history have rested upon our capacity to invent narrative “what ifs”. It’s at the root of literacy and science. Even our well-intended focus on written text—starting from birth—and the world of virtual realities threatens that heritage. Am I foolish in imagining that good schooling can unite us across our differences if we aren’t in a race to sort and label our children?

My naiveté has probably survived so long due to the fact that 43 years ago I happened to find myself teaching 5-year-olds. I acknowledge that it’s probably an absurd idea that we can create schools free enough and powerful enough to challenge an increasingly me-centered consumer-driven competitive society.

The other night we celebrated the 25th birthday party of one of the schools I started in East Harlem—Central Park East II. For a few hours, the idea that we could overcome the odds seemed utterly reasonable. Seeing old colleagues who love their work, seeing parents who are now grandparents of CPE students, and children I knew as kindergartners who now teach at our schools, took my breath away. I drove home that night determined to remain naïve.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

Tests inevitably gauge a student’s fund of knowledge and experience, not just what was taught in school. If a student comes from a family where he or she hears a large vocabulary, where there are many books in the home, where reading and learning are valued, where there are excursions to the library or the museum, the tests will reflect that huge amount of social capital.

Tests of math and science are more likely to reflect what was taught in school because most students learn those subjects almost entirely in school. The same is probably true, I suspect, for history tests. Most students are not likely to live in homes where the family talks about the causes of the Civil War or the meaning of the Bill of Rights or the role of immigration in American history.

I think it is reasonable for teachers to use tests to find out whether students have learned what they were taught. Teachers can learn a good bit from test results about how effective they were in teaching lessons and they can learn about the needs of specific students. I also think it is valuable for districts to know whether they are making progress towards their goals, so they can make corrections if they are not. The best uses of tests, I think, are to improve teaching and learning.

We are, as no one knows better than you, in a whole different era. Tests are now being used to reward and punish principals, teachers, and students. They are being used for purposes for which they have not been constructed or validated.

Like you, I am opposed to testing 5-year-olds for admission to a gifted program. It is not surprising that this is happening today in New York City because the school system is in the hands of non-educators who think that everything and everyone can be tested. They are first-class examples of the pernicious application of the term “data-driven decision-making.” They want to eliminate human judgment (too subjective!) and base all decisions on test scores.

Of course tests for 5-year-old children are unreliable! Experts on value-added assessment also say that changes in the test scores of students based on the changes from one test to another are unreliable. Yet the non-educators who run the NYC schools have been trying to use one-year changes to reward and punish teachers and principals.

There are big bonuses available for principals who get their school scores up. There are bonuses for teachers in certain schools if their scores go up. Some kids are being paid for higher scores. I assume the scores will indeed go up. I also assume that higher scores will not mean that any child is getting a better education. Chances are they are being test-prepped to a fare thee well. There may be other causes of rising scores. But no one can persuade me that higher scores produced solely by external punishment and reward equal good education.

The sad fact is, Deborah, that New York City’s public schools now have a leadership team that is clueless about what good education is and how to make it happen. NYC is the local version of NCLB. After five years in control of the city’s schools, it is clear that our leaders know nothing about education. Yet this district won the Broad Prize, which just goes to show how meaningless the Broad Prize is. As a few people in NYC said last fall, it was one billionaire giving a tip of his hat to another billionaire.

And I agree with you: The goal of 2014 in NCLB as the date when everyone must be proficient is impossible. I don’t think the date was set with malice. Just ignorance.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

You didn't suggest that good medical care was test-prepping—that was my translation. But it does seem to me that in effect that's not a bad way of looking at it—most standardized tests rest on experiences that don't come to us from school, but from the prepping that life has offered us. It may even account for the interesting story I just read—more next week—on a Chicago study that demonstrates that actual test-prepping may hurt scores!

As to testing itself: Yes, reviewing questions for bias and using judgment to determine "grade level" rather than statistics are important. But we disagree about whether, like judgment in general, we can be "neutral", devoid of politics as well as bias.

Agreed: there are "right and wrong" answers, and you give two examples of such. But I think we both agree that these examples are not at the heart of what we mean by being a "well-educated" person. Therein lies the dilemma. It shows up, we all assume, more on the language arts sections of the test than in disciplines like math and science. Yet one of the first critiques of testing I read was by physicist Banesh Hoffman in "The Tyranny of Testing". He noted that some answers on the SAT physics test were just plain wrong (although ETS insisted that they were still good "discriminators" between smart and less smart test-takers). Too few, he noted, helped him see who was of a "scientific" mindset. In our field, Diane, asking for the "causes" of WWI, or the Civil War, were an obvious effort to overcome this by asking for "reasoning", not just "facts." But in the end they rewarded conventional memory of conventional reasoning, not evidence of historical thinking. I recall that one history question required one to believe (or simply pretend to) that the cause of fascism was the Versailles Treaty. Surely a theory, but a fact?

Scouring for racial and cultural bias—and removing obviously biased items—is good practice. But the bias I'm describing is only possible to detect if one investigates it in the manner I did. What I was "judging" was the reasoning from the evidence that students demonstrated. They occur even on "factual" questions when the facts correlate with certain experiences that children are more or less likely to encounter.

On the NAEP, girls do better in reading; on the SAT, they do not. Who is "right"? Even the decision to rest the SAT on English and math is a decision that has an impact on results. I'm not necessarily condemning this decision, but pointing to the consequences and our ability to read too much into them.

You and I agree in seeing socioeconomic status as a powerful determinant, but logic alone does not get us to this conclusion. Charles Murray builds a powerful counter-argument, which some of our readers find compelling. He argues that, in large measure, the reasons whites and Asians do better than blacks and Native Americans, ditto for Rich vs. Poor, on tests is the same reason they are ahead in the world of wealth and power; it’s due to what’s "inside" their brain. Ditto perhaps for males vs. females?

Surely, beliefs of this sort are not only still around, but they have a long and sustained history in many parts of the world. They have an impact on those who come out ahead and those who come out behind. Living within a culture which takes your "lesser" abilities as the norm, and your signs of intelligence as the exception has a deep and abiding impact. It is one of the reasons I am so opposed to NYC's intention of testing all 5-year-olds for intelligence, and then (of course) reporting the results to teachers and parents. This is a step that must be stopped because, aside from its many pernicious effects, testing of 5-year-olds is notoriously unreliable as most independent testing experts and others affirm. (More on this very soon; along with the story of 160 out of 162 8th graders in the Bronx who refused to take a practice social studies Regents exam on the grounds that this was further wasting their time.)

Maybe there’s a paranoiac streak in my nature that makes me wonder whether it was sheer ignorance that led the authors of the NCLB legislation to require that all testing gaps be closed by 2014. NCLB was passed as much as a "sentiment" as a real vehicle for improvement. But setting the goal at 2014 was naughty. I think it expressed a coalition of the naïve and the clever. NCLB was hailed by many conservatives as a test of the capacity of public education to do its job properly. Setting an impossible goal has opened the doors for a lot of crisis-reorganization plans, including privatizing schooling. It may, in the end, also reinforce old racial and class prejudices. Surely that wasn't Ted Kennedy's idea—and in fact he put his weight behind NCLB precisely to stop worse measures. But in doing so he unleashed something he did not foresee. (He’s on all our minds these days.)

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I didn’t suggest that “good medical care” was “test-prepping.” Just goes to show how easily words are misunderstood, how important it is to teach grammar, syntax, spelling, etc. so as to improve the clarity of our expression. When I went to public school in Houston, our English teachers devoted half of every year in their classes to teaching correct grammar. It was never fun, but it was very valuable. I am reminded on a daily basis of the importance of good grammar and syntax; without them, we will all of us have trouble communicating what we mean. And as you well know, your notion of democracy—and mine—depends on citizens being able to reason together, to listen to one another, and to get the drift of discussion because they share a common vocabulary with a considerable body of shared knowledge.

Like you, I too have always been puzzled when newspaper articles announce with alarm that half the children in a grade are “below grade level.” Grade level, as you note, is the norm for a particular grade, and at any given moment, half the students will always be above grade level, while the other half are below. This will be true whether achievement goes up or down.

The trend in recent years, inspired by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is to devise criterion-referenced tests, where students are judged by whether they reach a certain level of knowledge and skill (basic, proficient, advanced). There is no magical “grade level” in such tests. We regularly see NAEP results where only a small fraction are advanced, and where most students are clustered at basic or below basic.

As for the question of right answers and wrong answers, I agree with you in part and disagree in part. I share your revulsion for test questions that gauge students’ opinions, feelings, and values. When I served on the NAEP board, I frequently reviewed test questions and made sure that the national test avoided such stances. It seemed to me outrageous to grade a student on whether they expressed a politically correct attitude.

Where I disagree is that you seem to suggest that there is no such thing as a “right” answer. If I asked you who was elected president of the United States in 1960, don’t you think there is a right answer? If I asked you to multiply ½ x ¾, don’t you think there is a right answer?

Given my experience with NAEP over seven years, I agree with your concern about the meld among IQ questions, reading questions, and math questions. It is almost inevitable that a reading question or a math question will turn out to be a test of intelligence; it is very hard to separate comprehension from whatever we call IQ. To take the issue one step further, I was troubled to see the trend in which math questions were turned into reading questions, a trend found in most tests in the past 15 years or so.

Part of the difficulty comes from the effort to test critical thinking and problem-solving ability in math. The goal sounds laudable, but the questions tend to be so wordy that a student with good math ability but poor reading skills is handicapped by the form of the question.

By the way, I can’t speak for ETS’s historical practice of playing around with items, as you put it, “to ensure that male scores more properly matched or surpassed female scores.” Whether that is true, I do not know. What I do know is that girls regularly outperform boys in reading on NAEP, by a wide margin, while boys do better than girls in math, but the gap is smaller than in reading.

I think your suggestion that the performance of black students, as compared with white students, is a function of the test questions is simply wrong. For at least the last 20 years, the tests—national and state—have been scoured to remove any hint of racial or cultural bias (forgive me, but I wrote a book about this, "The Language Police"). The racial gap on test scores is large, and I personally attribute it to inequality of educational opportunity, not the wording of the test items. The suggestion that the gap would disappear if the tests were changed doesn’t hold water.

I agree with the hint in your postscript that the achievement gap is in part a function of very large gaps in income and social advantage. That should be no surprise. Demography and socio-economic status have long been powerful determinants of educational achievement. Just because we have a federal law that declares that all children will be proficient by the year 2014 does not change those facts of life. I don’t know of anyone who thinks that the gaps will be closed and that no child will be left behind by 2014.

It seems safe to say, however, that thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of public schools will be declared failures by 2014 for not having met that impossible goal. This will give an enormous boost to the forces that are promoting privatization of public education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

The notion of good medical care as "test prepping" is delightfully bizarre, but maybe no less so than traditional forms of test-prepping? Perhaps Richard Rothstein is correct that it would have a greater impact on test score gaps.

Traditional psychometrics is filled with problems built into the excellent history you’ve offered us, Diane. It presumes that scores fit a curve, and that there is a norm, usually labeled 100 or expressed in percentiles with 50 percent below, 50 percent above grade or age “level”, with a particular cluster toward the center. All very precise.

How come half the kids are still below grade level after years of school improvement, I was once asked? Half were below because that's how we defined "grade level", I explained. If more kids started doing better—via test prep or actual skill—they'd renorm the tests. Scores were just a "promise" about where one stood in the rank ordering of all students who might take this test at this particular point in their school career.

Recent attempts to change the scoring method so that it reflects benchmarks of skill rather than percentiles is a positive step, even if you and I disagree regarding current definitions of basic, proficient, etc. The big plus (or weakness) is that they now rest on human judgment, not mathematical formulas.

Incidentally, in response to some of the critics who worried about my two math examples: they weren't intended to "prove" anything except that we know precious little about why "right" answers appeal to some people more often than to other people. I included that duo precisely because they puzzle me, and why I appreciated readers' efforts to explain them, and Jay Rosner’s replies.

What I’ve discovered is that both the kids who get the answers right and the ones who get them wrong can often give persuasive reasons for their selection. Sometimes—and over the years I’ve collected a host of these—the right answer is, upon closer examination, even clearly wrong. But what they are never wrong about is who gets which ones right! Are you following this?

When asked on a 3rd grade reading test, for example, how the children felt when the trucks came and cut down the trees to widen the highway by their house, only the middle-class kids said "sad"—which was the "right" answer. Many of the others said "excited". I know that's a particularly stupid question, but the division was startling.

Ditto for a familiar IQ question on what to do if you lose a friend's ball. Middle-class kids are more likely to say "buy him a new one" and working-class kids to say "tell the teacher". In fact, the latter are the least likely to tell the teacher, but more likely to believe that was the right answer.

Also interesting is how hard it is to guess whether items come from IQ or reading or math tests. I've tried random items out on audiences and gotten random answers.

Rosner's point, among others, was that if ETS (Educational Testing Service) has historically played around with items to ensure that male scores more properly matched or surpassed female scores, it could do so for race. Yet, he discovered, that the pre-tested items on which blacks more often got answers right were virtually never used—although they existed. The two items described were among that pool.

Democracy requires us to "act as if" the views of every single citizen are of equal importance. Not equally "correct" or "wise"—just equally important. And that each has a "logic" that the community would do well to acknowledge and make sense of.

That's what I rest my case on for democracy writ large, and writ small. I take it for granted, or tried to, that the stupidest questions or answers were important to understand. Doing so did not always lead to new truth. But it amazes me how often it broadened my understanding and that of others in the class. After a while it became possible to "outlaw" the phrase "it's obvious" in class! Jean Piaget’s work helped us see precisely how difficult it was to convince someone else of "the obvious" when they were viewing it from a different perspective of age, experience, temperament.

A youngster, studying a world map in the hall, asked me (shyly) why the West Indies was in the east and the East Indies in the west? It startled me into noticing an "obvious" misnomer stemming from the perspective of the maps we were accustomed to using. Ditto the 5-year-old who corrected me when I asked what the man on the moon might see if he looked “down” at us? She blurted out, “he’d look up!," setting my mind whirling on the concept of up and down!

Children aren't being "cute" when they say surprisingly wise things; they are just being both observant and accustomed to taking their observations seriously. Too often, schooling cures them of both. In contrast, while schooling based on both these qualities allows us to cover less in the here and now, it rests on the conviction that—in the long run—it will cover more. Yes, “less” can just be “less”, contrary to one of my favorite Coalition of Essential Schools principles. It all depends on…..

And that’s where the craft of teaching begins—with “it all depends on…”

Deborah

A P.S. for future conversation. You and I remain unpersuaded by Murray and Herrnstein, Diane. I'm glad. But that a public bombarded with the apparent intractability of the "achievement gap" might fall back on centuries of racist/classist conclusions seems inevitable.

It's one of the potential unintended consequences of the well-intended battle cry to "close the gap" without more carefully examining what test scores as we know them can and can't tell us, and what other gaps we might start closing.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

When I first read Murray and Herrnstein’s "The Bell Curve," I was unpersuaded. They argued on behalf of the heritability of IQ and the linkage between race and education. Richard Herrnstein has since died, but Charles Murray continues to write about the immutability of inherited intelligence and the futility of any efforts to improve intelligence by education.

I was not persuaded then by their claims; I am still not persuaded. I do not understand how they could be so certain about how much of intelligence is genetic and how much is environmental. Is it 40 percent genetic and 60 percent environmental? Or the other way around? Or, is it 30-70 or 70-30? Or is it some other set of numbers? 20-80? 80-20? How could they be so sure that their numbers are just right? Are the ratios the same for everyone? Or not? It is not as if anyone could dissect brains in autopsies and find the answer.

One reason I was skeptical was my own family experience. I am one of eight children. We all had exactly the same parents and the same grandparents. Yet our school smarts and coping skills varied widely, probably as much as the variation among randomly selected people. Based on what I knew from my own life, I was not willing to concede that heredity and genetics predetermined one’s intelligence and life chances. If Murray and Herrnstein’s arguments were wrong in my family, I was willing to bet they were wrong in lots of other families as well.

When I wrote "Left Back," I devoted a chapter to the huge influence of IQ testing on American schools. I called the chapter “IQ Testing: ‘This Brutal Pessimism.’” (See pp. 132-133). The subtitle of the chapter was a direct quote from Alfred Binet, one of the earliest designers of mental tests. In Binet’s own words, he disagreed with those who “assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.”

Binet was wiser than many of those who followed in his footsteps. He was skeptical of precise numerical descriptions of intelligence. After he and a colleague devised the first functional intelligence test, they concluded that the fundamental characteristic of intelligence is judgment, “otherwise known as good sense, practical sense, initiative, or the faculty of adapting oneself.” Who today would claim that IQ tests are the best measures of these qualities?

Contra Murray, Binet believed that children’s intelligence could be improved. By “practice, enthusiasm, and especially with method one can succeed in increasing one’s attention, memory, judgment, and in becoming literally more intelligent than one was before.” Binet developed exercises that he called “mental orthopedics” to demonstrate that the intellectual level of any child could be increased. Charles Murray would do well to read Binet.

During World War I, some of America’s most prominent psychologists designed intelligence tests to enable the Army to select officers from the millions of men who were inducted for military service. Later analyses of the test scores showed very large differences among racial and ethnic groups. The highest scores went to recruits who were native-born and of northern European background, while the lowest scores went to those who were foreign-born, of southern and eastern European background, and black.

Carl C. Brigham, a Princeton psychologist who helped to develop the Army tests, wrote a book called "A Study of American Intelligence," in which he said that the test scores showed the danger of continued immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Brigham identified what he called three distinct European races: the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans. Of the three, the Nordics (northern Europeans) were supposedly the superior “race,” and this group got the highest IQ scores on the Army tests. (Brigham, incidentally, designed the original Scholastic Aptitude Tests in the late 1920s, which eventually displaced the College Boards in 1941.)

One of my intellectual heroes, William Chandler Bagley of Teachers College, punched holes in the theories of the IQ testers. He was literally the only prominent psychologist who took on the leaders of his field. Bagley wrote critical articles and a book ("Determinism in Education") in which he said that the IQ tests were a threat to democracy because they were being used to close the doors of educational opportunity to large numbers of people. Bagley showed that the groups that had the highest scores on the Army tests were those who had had the greatest educational opportunities. In a coup de grace, he pointed out that the IQ scores of literate northern blacks were higher than those of literate whites in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Since southern whites were the purest “Nordic stock” in the country, Bagley said that Brigham would have to acknowledge that the test scores were the result of education, not racial inheritance.

All the best minds of the 1920s were in favor of IQ testing, and Bagley soon became a figure of derision among the leading progressives because of his stubborn belief in the power of education to improve intelligence.

I encourage readers who want to learn more about Bagley to read a terrific biography of him: Wesley Null’s "A Disciplined Progressive Educator." Wes, who is a historian of education at Baylor University, also wrote a brilliant biography of Isaac Kandel, another great and (now) little-known giant of American education, titled "Peerless Educator: The Life and Work of Isaac Leon Kandel." This biography was just reviewed by E.D. Hirsch Jr., in Education Next, and it is well worth reading. A couple of years ago, Wes and I co-edited a collection of essays called "Forgotten Heroes of American Education." Deb, I think you would enjoy it.

As for Richard Rothstein's contention that we could do more to raise test scores by providing good medical care than by test-prepping: I think that is the wrong issue and the wrong choice. We should have good medical care for all. We should have good education for all. Test-prepping is not good education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (33) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

We’ve both now had a chance to read Charles Murray’s recent essay. I’m of two minds: to ignore it (bury it) or to take it on. You’ve settled it. But I’m not sure I’ll be happy about it a week from now. First of all, it means I’m suggesting people read his essay! Ye Gods!

He’s been a controversial figure for years in our circles—both of ours. He’s had no compunction about taking IQ as “the measure of the man” (close to the title of a wonderful attack on IQ by Stephen Jay Gould.) His scholarly book, "The Bell Curve," written with Richard J. Herrnstein was much admired and detested a few decades ago. His thesis—very roughly speaking—was that we were perpetuating a myth when we contended that all people were capable of high levels of thought, and/or that there weren’t serious differences—on average—between different groups, sorts, races, classes of people. And finally, that social policy—especially education policy—that ignored this was just asking for trouble. The gap was a gap of fact, not the fault of schooling or nurturing (although aided and abetted by both perhaps), but innate and unchangeable.

From the start of NCLB I had the fearful feeling that nothing was more likely to play into his hands than the relentless assault on the test-score gap, the data about which he had been promoting for years.

The racism of Murray’s argument (or put another more neutral way—the claim that race and intelligence were connected) has a lot of “common” sense behind it. If IQ tests measured intelligence, it was well-nigh irrefutable. The claim, after all, was common sense even before tests were invented with regard to women vs. men’s intelligence, the rich vs. the poor, and whites vs. blacks, Indians, etc. (I’ve just finished reading "Oliver Twist," and as always am amused at the fact that Oliver learns to speaks the King’s English although born in the poorhouse in which no one else speaks it. Yet it never seemed absurd to those in the story, or his readers, or me when I first read it.)

Modern psychometrics is a century-plus old, based on the development of an instrument intended not only to sort individuals but verify such long-standing assumptions. All modern tests are updated variants on the originals. And they all demonstrate, over and over again, the unmistakable social status of the society itself. Scores go up for every dollar more the family earns, for example. It places an enormous burden of self-doubt on those declared unfit by IQ. Many—such as Jews—overcame the description by the clever dodge of getting rich, and then becoming smart, too—speaking of Oliver Twist. For some white immigrant groups, it took longer.

It works to the advantage of first-borns as a whole. Women have finally managed to beat it. Asians have. So what’s wrong with African-Americans? And Native Americans? The sting, the injury is deep and enraging. And the implicit accusation, which Murray makes explicit, is not easily overcome. And year after year of headlines proclaiming these “self-evident” truths does much to vindicate Murray’s argument—or so he claims. (For many African-Americans, as you note Diane, it is equally self-evident proof of racist schools, racist teachers, curriculum, personal or systemic, or both. I buy their argument, at least in part.)

I argue, in a set of chapters in "In Schools We Trust," that most, if not all, can be explained in quite natural and equally commonsensical ways. But it requires starting off by believing, as I try to demonstrate, that tests are not what they seem. They are, I claim, a reflection of the “common sense” of a particular stratum of society at a particular time and place and of their particular form of thinking about the world. I try to show it by specific examples of specific questions and the ways test-takers respond to them. I note secondly that the very nature of the psychometric tool itself requires this to be the case. And where it doesn’t work that some fiddling sometimes makes it work, e.g. the unused items in the SAT tool as noted by Jay Rosner. (And the ways test-makers fiddled with gender differences.) I argue that “thinking like” the dominant high-IQer helps. There are ways to make such thinking easier or harder and society and schooling can contribute to doing so. It helps if you imagine you could be and would like to be them. (I note that first-born, even within the dominant white middle class, are more likely to think “like/”identify with grown-ups, for example.) Claude Steele’s “stereotype threat” theory accounts for some of it also—as a good test-taker must rely on a certain brash self-confidence that status-anxiety erodes. Related to Steele’s theory—that you not only have to “care” about doing well, but you have to have good reason to believe that your efforts will work to help rather than hurt you. And, finally, if test-prepping ever eliminated these gaps, psychometrics demands that we reinvent them since differentiation is the name of the game.

Of course, being rich and being white goes along with having both a bigger and a “richer” vocabulary (one more likely to show up on tests). Yes, of course, being rich and being white goes along with having the experiences that will help you recognize right answers from wrong ones on tests better than kids who are poor and black. And on and on. Would a test that produced results that went against this “common sense” even get off the drawing board—one in which lower-class test-takers scored higher than those from high-status families? Would even a single test question survive under such scrutiny?

It even works, as Rosner notes, on apparently neutral math test questions! One of his examples from the SAT pool is below.

If they are a reflection more of social status than intelligence or schooling, then maybe the solutions are different. Richard Rothstein has argued that we could do more to raise test scores by providing everyone with good medical care than good test-prepping.

The stakes are too big to keep avoiding this argument. The decision by the DOE in NYC to start the testing of children at age 5, the use of low test scores as a rationale for depriving kids of playtime and as a reason for increased focus on test skills and less on higher-level subject matter are powerful reasons to explore the meaning of such test differentials (aka gaps) themselves. Shall we, Diane?

Deb

Example:

If the square root of 2x is an integer, which of the following must be an integer?
a. square root of x
b. x
c. 4x
d. x squared
e. 2 times (x squared)

If the area of a square is 4 times (x squared), what is the length of a side?

a. x
b. 2x
c. 4x
d. x squared
e. 2 times (x squared)

Blacks outscored whites on the first, and whites outscored blacks on the second.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

As you know, Americans have a long history of looking to other countries for answers to our educational problems. In the 19th Century, American educators traveled to Prussia to see the wonders of its national education system. In the 1960s, the British education system became the American educational Mecca because of its demonstrations of infant education and open classrooms (with an occasional side trip to Summerhill).

Recently, Finland has won admiration for its educational accomplishments—not long ago in a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal, and now in your address to your colleagues at the Forum for Education and Democracy. I note that you and the Journal identify Finland as a success because of its performance on international assessments; without those assessments, how would we know that Finland’s education system was worthy of discussion and emulation? We would be in the dark.

In some ways, Finland is not exactly a fitting role model for the United States. For one thing, it is a tiny nation, with about 5.3 million inhabitants (smaller than New York City). And unlike New York City, it is not notably diverse in ethnicity and religion: The population is overwhelmingly homogeneous, ethnically and religiously. More than 80 percent of Finns are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is recognized by the government as an established church (Finland has school prayer). More than 90 percent speak Finnish as their native language. Less than 3 percent of the population is foreign-born. Finland also has a demographic problem that we do not share: The birthrate is very low, and the population is aging. Perhaps this is an advantage for children, because they are prized. Finland is one of the most sparsely populated nations in Europe.

You are right about the wonderful schools and conditions for teaching in Finland. There is considerable local autonomy, school autonomy, and teacher autonomy. Finland has a very egalitarian school system, and its results on international assessments are impressive in every subject. The number of dropouts is small; the variance between high achievers and low achievers is also small. Another point that you might have made: Most of Finland’s schools are small. The majority of students are in schools with fewer than 500 students.

But there is yet another aspect of the Finnish education system that you did not mention. Finland has a strong and coherent national core curriculum. The core curriculum describes the general principles of instruction, as well as the specific knowledge and skills that students will acquire over the course of their basic education (from grades 1 through 9).

Finland doesn’t get great results by hiring excellent teachers and then leaving them to do whatever they choose. It specifies the subjects that will be studied, the objectives for each academic subject, and the assessment criteria for 8th grade. One reason, perhaps, that Finnish students excel in science is that there is a national course of study in physics for grades 7 through 9. The children study motion and force, vibrations and wave motion, heat, electricity, natural structures (including “radioactive decay; fission and fusion; ionizing radiation and its effect on animate nature; protection from radiation”). The national core curriculum has a carefully specified format of concepts, knowledge, skills, and behaviors that are to be taught not only in physics, but chemistry, biology, history, geography, social studies, languages, health, religion, ethics, music, visual arts, crafts, physical education, and home economics. (To learn more, click here and here.)

The content and objectives of each subject are thoughtfully detailed. Teachers have wide leeway in how they teach and in formulating their lessons. But the core content does not appear to be controversial or disputed.

This is precisely what I have been advocating in our dialogues for the past year, as well as for many years before that. I do not presume that a national core curriculum would solve all our problems, far from it. One need only look at eduwonkette’s recent post about violence in Chicago to see that our social problems are not confined to curricular issues, or to Richard Rothstein’s many writings about how issues of poverty restrict the ability of schools to teach children.

What I take from all this is that a nation will have more successful schools if it can arrive at a fundamental agreement about what the schools are supposed to do. If we leave matters at the disposal of every school and every teacher, to do as they see fit, we will not be following the Finnish model of success.

It is worth noting here the “mission statement” of the Finish education program: “Basic education is part of fundamental educational security. It has both an educational and an instructional mission. Its task on the one hand is to offer individuals the chance to acquire a general education and complete their educational obligations; and, on the other, to furnish society with a tool for developing educational capital and enhancing equality and a sense of community.”

“Basic education must provide an opportunity for diversified growth, learning, and the development of a healthy sense of self-esteem, so that the pupils can obtain the knowledge and skills they need in life, become capable of further study, and, as involved citizens, develop a democratic society. Basic education must also support each pupil’s linguistic and cultural identity and the development of his or her mother tongue. A further objective is to awaken a desire for lifelong learning.”

“In order to ensure social continuity and build the future, basic education assumes the tasks of transferring cultural tradition from one generation to the next, augmenting knowledge and skills, and increasing awareness of the values and ways of acting that form the foundation of society. It is also the mission of basic education to create new culture, revitalize ways of thinking and acting, and develop the pupil’s ability to evaluate critically.”

Tiny Finland cares about its children and its future. There is much here to admire.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

By the time you read this we’ll have spent an hour at the Channel 13 event (mostly agreeing) about the risks involved in treating schooling like “a business"; and I’ll have spent a few days at a board meeting of the Coalition of Essential Schools; visited my son, Nick, who teaches at California State University at Monterey Bay; looked at schools in Oakland and San Jose; and had the pleasure of being accompanied by my granddaughter, Sarah. I’m hoping I’ll find a few great early-childhood classrooms—however unlikely. And that I’ll come back with some stories of hope that I can pass on to others.

I’m particularly struck these days with the negative impact of a policy that I support: universal mandatory school from ages 6-16 (or longer). I see, at least in a society as unequal as ours, no alternative to it. But it places an enormous moral burden on schooling. “Do no harm” becomes more critical under circumstances in which the population we serve are literally incarcerated. Only the draft army, perhaps, takes away our freedoms in quite this way. To skip school is akin to being AWOL; it is to commit a crime.

Teacher, writer, and libertarian John Gatto would abolish the obligation; I think he is dead wrong. But he has a point, and one we do not take seriously enough.

Pedro Noguerra asked a simple question last week at a hearing we attended on Mayor Bloomberg’s new plan to hold over 8th graders until they pass a high school entrance exam. Is there any research evidence that this kind of policy works? And, in particular, has New York City done follow-up studies of its mandatory hold-over policy in Grades 4 and 6? (He was also curious about where they planned to house all the hold-overs given the overcrowded schools in NYC.)

The answer is not only “no”—as Noguerra knew. But worse there is a staggering amount of evidence that it does young people injury. As Noguerra noted, if it did work, how could there be so many 8th graders who still don’t pass this test—since many were held-over in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and/or 7th grade? A large-scale study in Chicago notes that 73 percent of those who dropped out were over age when they entered high school. (And probably quite a few never even enter high school.) Why would NYC be different?

A study I read many years ago, whose source I can’t cite, claimed that next to losing one’s own parent, being held over is what young people fear most. I believe it. My kindergarten students, when asked why they needed to learn how to read, almost to a child said, “so you won’t get held over.”

When did being tough and upholding “standards” justify the harm we do? Years ago a friend (and principal) asked an audience to help her resolve a dilemma. She said (more or less), “I have a 20-year-old student with a wife and child who has a good job waiting for him next fall. If he graduates. But despite our best efforts he keeps failing the math exam, and not just because it’s a bad test. Shall I ‘cheat’ on his behalf or hold firm to our standards?”

We’ve created this absurd dilemma; it’s up to us to spend more time trying to resolve it before we do more harm. It’s corrupting to our work, as teachers and citizens, to be deliberately punishing kids who have committed no crime. Not to mention the enormous loss to society itself when we let such youngsters drift away unacknowledged and uncelebrated.

I‘ll return next week with, hopefully, some more thoughts on this—based, in part, Diane, and readers, on your thoughts.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Debbie,

The reason that I directed your attention to the AIR study was that it included only the dozen nations that participated in both TIMSS and PISA. Otherwise, it is confusing to refer to the U.S.'s standing in these assessments because many nations participated only once. When several less-developed nations join in the assessments, our scores look better and better. Should we reall