That would be like the guy who worked on cars for 2-3 years leaving the oil pit and spending the next 30 years telling mechanics how to fix your car. Who knows more about fixing your car? The one who quit fixing them?...or the one who stayed and did it year after year after year?

Exactly.

Teachers need to be the ones at the table - telling Congress what we need for them to do. Please pardon me for saying this - we teachers need to be telling you what we need for you to do. NOT the folks who taught for a couple of years and left to go on to decide policy the rest of their careers - but those of us who stuck with it and learned from our years of experience and advanced study.

Kelly Meuller, Missouri

Remember that policy levers (RTTT grants, pay for performance, national standards and tests, alternate entry into teaching, non-standard school governance models, and mandating high-tech statistical analysis of achievement) are merely things that policy-makers can do. We can expect those things to shift the balance of decision-making power. But we cannot and should not expect policy creation to shift actual classroom practice or change our mindset from "punishment" to "investment." Reaching our potential will never happen unless and until instructional practice--what happens between teachers and their students--radically changes.

Nancy Flanagan, Michigan

The most important thing I can teach is critical thinking. That isn't assessed on the standardized tests we use in our state achievement tests. Since we have had to teach to these tests there isn't as much time for teaching higher-level t...hinking. Also, creativity has fallen by the wayside. Creative thinking exercises are as important as ever, yet, there is no emphasis placed on giving students creative opportunities.

I hope President Obama will deliver on his promises and listen to those of us who are on the "front lines." Administrators and politicians really have no idea what we do. They don't realize that so many of us live to teach. Teachers need to be listened to and heard. Law makers need to support us so that we can support our students and give them what they need to be contributing citizens.

Roberta Zivanov

Those teachers we so fondly recall are still there, but now they are restricted by a system that instructs teachers to remove the creative process and instead teach their students to "critically" analyze between a set of possible responses to a given question and learn to recognize which of four possibilities is more correct than the other. So teachers have become coaches that reinforce strategies based on a formula that two of the responses will likely be ridiculously errant, while the two remaining possibilities will have a semblance of correctness, yet one answer is more perfect than the other, and it is the student's task to spot the more correct answer and make that selection.

When I was learning, the best lessons were the ones where the teacher through his/her initiative would inspire in the student the importance of the subject matter while challenging the student to develop the lesson further through the students own enterprise.

Albert Pardo

On the subject of merit pay, I would simply remind you that while some teachers have students who come to school prepared to take on the rigors of learning, others are not so well-prepared. Can we consider merit pay when it doesn't take into account the hand a teacher is dealt? I am reminded of the "Blueberry Story"---about a businessman (a business dealing with fresh fruits) who thought he could run schools just like a business, only to be reminded by a teacher, that, when HE receives a batch of blueberries that are not up to his standards, he can refuse to take them, teachers take each of these blueberries (students) as they come, with all their differences (ADHD, ADD, Autism, Asberger's, OCD, ODD, low/high IQs, etc.) and take each one as far as we can.

Jacque Verrall, Washington

I hope that President Obama would push for educational policies that mirror the private school education (Sidwell Friends) his daughters enjoy. Many politicians send their children to this school. Is Sidwell caught up in a testing frenzy? I have a relative who also attends this school and I've never heard any mention of the school curriculum focus being on improving test scores. Why is the Sidwell model not the model for public education?

Sigrid Wurthman

I respect your goals for education and the level of engagement you had on this topic while working in Chicago. But I am concerned that the approaches you are using will throw the baby out with the bath water. In attempting to reform education, much of the emphasis seems to be on YOUNG teachers as role models for what is right. I urge you to work more closely with veteran teachers who are successful with high-risk students. These teachers have been through the high-energy, ultra-involved phase that young teachers experience, but have avoided the burnout that leads many new teachers to give up in frustration. The oft-cited culprit for burnout is "the system;" but the goal of changing the ENTIRE system lacks focus, and therefore support, from some of the more experienced educators. Listening to successful long-term educators, in addition to younger teachers, would give the Education Department an idea of how to triage the areas of public education in need of attention. It would also avoid organized opposition to reforms.

Adrienne Mooney Karyadi

What do you think of these views? Will you add your own voice to the dialogue with President Obama?

Obama believes teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. He will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college and the workplace and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner. Obama will also improve NCLB's accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.

As it stands now, Secretary Duncan has initiated policies to:

• "Turn around" 5000 of the nation's "worst" schools (based on test scores) although recent reports from Chicago reveal that the 5,445 students displaced by his school closures there did not do any better than before.


• Tie teacher pay to test scores, though research and common sense suggest this will result in even more narrowing of the curriculum and teaching to the test.


• Insist, in spite of more and more research that questions their effectiveness, that charter schools should be dramatically expanded.


• Rank teacher preparation programs - once again, by how well they increase student test scores

We have had eight long years of No Child Left Behind, which systematically assaulted our schools by establishing impossible to meet test score targets and Byzantine rules about subgroups. Your election a year ago was supposed to change all that. But thus far the policies we see are actually worse than before.

We can agree that teacher quality is critical for the success of our schools, but test scores are a wholly inadequate means to measure or improve quality. Furthermore, you have a Secretary of Education who is not listening to teachers. Teachers need to be active partners in school reform at every level, from the classroom up to the cabinet meeting. Right now our views are being shut out and ignored, and we are not represented. This is driving morale down at a time when our schools need to rally together for our students.

If teachers are demoralized and sidelined, we are lost as partners in the change process. We will remain the subjects of change rather than agents, and our creative vision will be missing. This is the biggest reason NCLB has failed, and will continue to fail under Secretary Duncan so long as he maintains this direction.

It does not have to be this way. Teachers are ready for change, ready for mutual responsibility, ready for better assessments of student learning that honor our classroom practice and our students' capacity for critical thinking. We are ready, but we are still waiting to see these things.

I urge you to take a closer look at the policies that are being implemented by the Department of Education.

• Review the report recently offered by the National Academy of Sciences which points out many flaws in the Race to the Top guidelines.


• Review research that reveals that charter schools are no better on average than their public school counterparts.


• Pay attention to the continued narrowing of the curriculum that you decried as a candidate.


• Listen to the deeply held concerns of this nation's classroom teachers.


• Hold your Secretary of Education accountable for enacting the vision that you campaigned on, that gave so much hope to millions of teachers and students across this country.

Your supporter still,

Anthony Cody

What do you think? Will you join me in signing this letter? Or authoring your own? What would you tell Obama if he joined you for lunch today?

image by Anthony Cody

Update: I created a Facebook group to allow teachers to post their own letters to President Obama, or sign on to others that are posted. Come and speak your mind.

These results were used to justify the NCLB policies that hold schools accountable for test scores and under the belief that this would force them to improve.

But a few years later the Houston Miracle was debunked. It turned out that schools there systematically manipulated the system to generate better numbers. Students in the 9th grade were held back so as to avoid lowering the average scores on tenth grade tests. Thousands of dropouts were hidden. And principals received $5000 bonuses for their great statistics.

Now here we are and it is déjà vu all over again. Secretary Duncan is continuing and in many ways intensifying the practices of NCLB, based on the supposed successes he presided over as CEO of Chicago schools.

As former president Bush once said, "fool me once...shame on you ...you can't get fooled again." A report came out today that reveals that the ambitious program of school closures initiated under Duncan did not work. The report states: "there was almost no difference in achievement for students whose elementary schools were closed from 2001 to 2006, mostly because the schools they later went to were among the city's worst."

Nonetheless, Duncan has called for the "turnaround" of 5000 of the nation's worst schools, citing his success in Chicago as justification.

Other reports show that during Duncan's tenure in Chicago test scores improved very little, and the achievement gap actually widened.

To be fair, I do not believe standardized tests should be used as the only measure of success. However, the Duncan administration has made it clear that test scores will continue to be the primary drivers of reform, so it is only fair to apply this to his own system.

This week another big blow came to the credibility of Duncan's Race to the Top when the National Academy of Sciences released a strongly worded report questioning the research base of its reform strategies.

The NAS rarely takes such a public stand. The Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) made a number of sharp points responding to key elements of Race To the Top:

They warned against the use of the National Assessment of Educational Progress as means of checking achievement data for specific initiatives, because it is not designed to reveal performance at the local school or district level. They also warned that NAEP's validity flows from the low stakes attached to it. If it becomes important, schools will "teach to the test," and this will invalidate the results.

They are also very clear about the weakness of systems that rely on a single set of tests to measure achievement:

We encourage the Department to pursue vigorously the use of multiple indicators of what students know and can do. A single test should not be relied on as the sole indicator of program effectiveness. This caveat applies as well to other targets of measurement, such as teacher quality and effectiveness and school progress in closing achievement gaps. Development of an appropriate system of multiple indicators involves thinking about the objectives of the system and the nature of the different information that different indicators can provide. Such a system should be constructed from a careful consideration of the complementary information that is provided by different measures.

The use of the value-added model was also questioned, and the BOTA pointed out numerous specific problems with this approach.

1. Estimates of value added by a teacher can vary greatly from year to year, with many
teachers moving between high and low performance categories in successive years
(McCaffrey, Sass, and Lockwood, 2008).
2. Estimates of value added by a teacher may vary depending on the method used to
calculate the value added, which may make it difficult to defend the choice of a
particular method (e.g., Briggs, Weeks, and Wiley, 2008).
3. VAM cannot be used to evaluate educators for untested grades and subjects.
4. Most data bases used to support value-added analyses still face fundamental
challenges related to their ability to correctly link students with teachers by subject.
5. Students often receive instruction from multiple teachers, making it difficult to
attribute learning gains to a specific teacher, even if the data bases were to correctly
record the contributions of all teachers.
6. There are considerable limitations to the transparency of VAM approaches for
educators, parents and policy makers, among others, given the sophisticated statistical
methods they employ.

They conclude,

Even in pilot projects, VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness that are based on data for a single class of students should not used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.

They point out that the large-scale tests currently used for accountability purposes are very different from the sorts of tests educators should use for more frequent checks on student understanding, and that the Department of Education should be careful not to promote the inappropriate use of such tests. This sentence jumped out at me:

Assessment of complex reasoning and problem-solving skills typically demands assessment formats that require students to generate their own extended responses rather than selecting a word or phrase from a short list of options.

It appears that Secretary Duncan is preparing to spend more than $4 billion of our money on reforms unsupported and even proven worthless by solid research and concrete experience. The hucksters that sold us Baby Einstein videos are giving refunds for their product. But Rod Paige and George W. Bush have not offered us a refund of the billions spent on NCLB. And we are getting ready to spend even more billions on the next surefire cures for our schools.

I do not know what combination of solid research, legal pressure and conscience prompted the Disney Company to offer refunds on Baby Einstein videos. But I think we need to figure it out, and apply the same combination to Arne Duncan and the Department of Education, because it looks as if we have another boondoggle in the making.

What do you think? Should we be demanding a refund for NCLB? How about Race to the Top?

Creative Commons image by eedrummer.

Dr. Noe's team did a clever experiment. They taught a single low-status monkey how to open a special container filled with tasty apples, which were then available to all. Within an hour, this low-status money was enjoying new status, lying back and being groomed.

Then Dr. Noe taught a second monkey this ability. Now the first monkey was not the only one with this special ability - and guess what? The grooming she got dropped by half. The monkeys intuitively knew this skill was no longer so precious, and the "price" she was paid for it dropped accordingly.

This makes me think of two things related to education issues. First of all, we are constantly told that "all our students" must be prepared to go to college. The students themselves are told this will guarantee them a middle class income. But if the monkeys are any indication, the more of our students we get to college, the less special these abilities will be, and the lower the rewards will be for having the skills a college education gives us.

And let's take a look at the teaching profession. Teachers have some special skills, but, like can-opening monkeys, can be replaced relatively easily. The amount of skill or responsibility a job requires seems to actually have zero connection to the amount of pay. Just look at airline pilots, who must have thousands of hours of training, and have hundreds of lives in their hands - yet are paid miserably. Simply because there are plenty of people who want to be pilots, and are willing to work for peanuts.

There is a time-worn solution to this dilemma. The can-opening monkeys need a union! They need to be willing to act together to withhold their can-opening services to bargain for a decent rate of pay. The pilots' union has been greatly weakened by deregulation of the airline industry, which allowed regional carriers to make cut-rate contracts for pilots.

Teachers have two of the strongest unions still standing in a largely disorganized American workforce. But the strength of these unions has been greatly undermined, in part because the unions have been portrayed as opponents of educational reform. But if our profession is going to have decent pay, and the ability to advocate for ourselves in our working conditions, we absolutely need an organization that can bring us together to act together - and to withhold our services if necessary.

What do you think? Do teachers need unions?

Creative Commons image by JosephFischer

That idea echoes in education reform rhetoric today. Sometimes it feels as if we are fighting the last war, with calls for a new Sputnik-fueled push for education to beat our economic rivals. Young people are told by our leaders that if they work hard and go to college, they will prosper. We are told that our economy will beat back threats from abroad if our workforce is well-educated. But I am feeling a bit skeptical about the promise of education to fix what is wrong with our economy.

It was the very smart and well-educated financial wizards who invented the derivatives and credit default swaps that have destroyed our economy. Their ingenuity was our downfall. Across the country college-educated people are finding themselves out of work, with few prospects for employment. Those that took out big loans to finance their educations are in the worst shape of all.

And higher education is becoming dramatically more expensive, and thus will soon be out of reach for even more people.

Brains and education are not enough. We need to be smart enough to save our economy from our own worst tendencies.

We are beginning to realize that wealth comes from producing real things. Wealth is produced when we create something of value to others. There is a limited value in financial services, but most of the trillions that industry generated over the past decade were illusory, and now that they have vanished we are all paying the price. The basis of our economy has to be growing things, building things, and harvesting energy. We need to get over the idea that we will get wealthy through speculation and catching the next bubble on the way up. Too many people get hurt when these bubbles pop.

We also need to reappraise what makes us feel wealthy. We all need a basic level of shelter and food, but beyond that, we can live in luxury if we appreciate the things that are free in our lives. The beauty that comes from art we create, the joy we get from walking in nature, the pleasure we get from the company of friends. These things are much more precious than the mansions and toys our culture has become fixated upon.

Our students also might do well to learn that as industry expanded after World War Two, labor unions expanded as well. Wages did not rise just because workers were more productive. We have seen huge increases in worker productivity over the past decade, but real wages have fallen for working people. Wages during the 1950s and 1960s rose because workers organized themselves into powerful labor unions that defended their interests. They acted together, because one worker was no match for a large corporation, but thousands together had some clout. The social and cultural changes of the past half-century were likewise the result of organization and collective action. We will need to act together to create the change we want.

We also need to press the reset button on our educational values. Our goal should not be the degree at the end of college. Our goal is knowledge and the ability to do useful, creative and productive things in the world. The quality of education needs to be measured not by how well we get our students to score on tests, but on how capable they are at interacting powerfully with the real world. Are they able to do skillful work? Are they able to express themselves through writing, music and art? Can they invent solutions to the problems that have landed in their laps?

No multiple choice tests can give us this data. This will be seen in the work our students do - the ways they are encountering the world. Are they learning about their own community and proposing solutions to the problems they face? Can they use a knowledge of history to understand what is unfolding around them? Are they using the skills of math and writing to express new ideas? Are they able to use science to investigate the local environment? To pose and answer their own questions?

Albert Einstein once said "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." Our students are faced with a set of problems created by a Twentieth Century consciousness. We keep pushing them to work harder to fit into the molds for roles that no longer exist, as if that will magically sustain a system that is breaking down around us. It is time to let go of the illusions that have sustained this system. It is time to let our children help us re-imagine how things should be. Give them the permission they do not need to reshape our economy and culture, and create one that is sustainable, just and humane.

What do you think? Can we reshape our way of life? How can we best equip our students to meet the challenges of this new economy?

image by Anthony Cody

Dr. Atkin recently sent me a paper he published in the UK, entitled "What Role for the Humanities in Science Education Research?" (subscription required). In this article, he offers some insights into some issues that have cropped up recently around the nexus of education policy and research. I asked him some questions so he could share some of these thoughts with us.

Cody: Why is it that education research seems to be ignored or only cited when convenient in making education policy?

Atkin: Education policy, like all social policy, is undergirded by a set of values. Scientifically based educational research seldom addresses the often conflicting underlying values. It can't. Yes, education research can inform a decision about whether a particular method of teaching Newton's Laws seems more effective than another, but only if there is agreement about what should be taught about Newton's Laws. Teach students to state them and give examples? Teach them to state them and also understand the evidence that supports them? Understand the conception of motion that preceded Newton's Laws, better to understand their extraordinary contribution to human knowledge? Understand how Newton's Laws apply to novel situations? These kinds of questions about what should be included in the curriculum are best resolved by deliberations about what is of value educationally. And different people bring different values to the table. Scientific research alone is insufficient. What works is a different matter from what is of worth. Scientifically driven research can sometimes contribute to deciding the former. It is of little value with the latter.

Cody: What role does scientific evidence play in decisions about educational policy?

Atkin: It is often the case scientific research is cited to buttress a policy that has already been formulated on the basis of the educational values of the policy maker. When European high schools went comprehensive after World War II and moved away from different schools for students of different apparent academic ability, there was first a political decision to do so. The Swedes liked to consider themselves "scientific," so they commissioned an expensive and well-conducted study to collect data about schools that selected by ability and those that were "comprehensive." The study found that low-performing students did better in comprehensive schools. But the study was commissioned to legitimate a policy that already had been decided on the basis of a politically held position about the importance to Sweden's emerging view of itself as a more egalitarian society. Mixed-ability grouping at the secondary school level was a political priority. (The researchers did not examine the effects of mixed-ability grouping on high-performing students.)

We have come to the recognition that scientific research can be used to
legitimate policy -- despite the fact that different American think tanks predictably develop different recommendations about a given matter and despite the fact that they are staffed with people of equivalent academic credentials. The underlying values at each think tank make a difference in the recommendations in the report.

Cody: What sort of education research is of the most value in determining what course of action we should take?

Atkin: My own predilection is to focus more resources than at present to understanding what is happening in classrooms today. For example, if we're interested in improving English-language learning of six-year-olds whose first language is not English, let's identify classrooms where such learning seems to be occurring pretty well. Furthermore let's identify a range of classrooms where there appear to be differences in the classroom setting, the teacher's approach, the resources used, etc. -- yet all the approaches seem to be effective when knowledgeable people (other teachers, parents, school administrators, accreditation reports) make evaluations. Right now in this large country, many teachers are doing this work with six-year-olds relatively well -- but they're not all doing it the same way. The research community can help the profession and the public to understand variation in good practice, instead of looking for the one best way.

Teachers operate in different contexts, and they have their own strengths. Building on strength strikes me as a more effective method of improving education than solely trying to remedy weakness. The specific approaches to improving education stem from the teacher's professional and personal goals, as well as from circumstances in the class and community. If we're looking for metaphors, education improvement is more like evolution than engineering. Pushing the metaphor, each teacher works in a particular niche that has to be understood. There is enormous natural variation in American schools. Researchers would do well to focus on variation as well as similarity -- and at least do no harm.

Cody: What can be learned from more contextualized, small-scale studies?

Atkin: It's this point that I try to emphasize in my preceding comment. All kinds of challenges have been already addressed in the classrooms where a program seems to be going pretty well. Let's build on what we have, rather than implement new "solutions." Even in engineering, unanticipated side effects -- many of them counterproductive -- will arise. And if values shift, the side effects can begin to look like the main effects. We design heavy and large vehicles to go 90 miles per hour, but then people decide that fuel consumption or air pollution are more important than speed and cargo capacity. Companies with the best and brightest engineers go out of business. We design a program to teach reading to six-year-olds. Then we find out the decoding methods used are so aversive that the children taught by such methods do not read as much as students taught by less rigid methods.

Cody: What value is there in teacher action research?

Atkin: Teachers have enormous potential to improve their practice if they are encouraged to try -- and evaluate -- new approaches that grow from their own sense of how to improve their work. The effectiveness of teacher-conducted research on their own practices is enhanced when teachers work together in such an effort. How can we design assessments that more closely gauge what we really want to teach in seventh-grade science? What should we try? And what can we learn from each others' experience in the collaborative effort.

What do you think? Why is education research often ignored when policies are crafted? What kinds of research do you think are of greatest value?

Photo by J Myron Atkin.

Edweek reports:

"The reporting requirements are so huge and so vast; they're really quite onerous," said John Musso, the executive director of the Association of School Business Officials International, based in Reston, Va. For example, officials from across the spectrum of the federal government have issued hundreds of pages of guidance and regulations, much of it highly technical, that govern how stimulus spending is to be tracked and reported.

There is no doubt that tracking this spending will consume thousands of hours of time by District-level administrators. And this is at a time when everyone's top priority should be getting resources to our classrooms.

There should be accountability for taxpayer funds. However I have to wonder how come schools are held to these stringent standards, while other institutions who have received bail-out funds have had no accountability whatsoever. Today comes the news that in spite of the banks having received more than $800 billion last year, foreclosures are higher than ever and few homeowners have benefited from loan modifications that could save their homes.

Teachers are among the most responsible members of our society. We have the most powerful form of accountability greeting us every morning - those students who show up in our classrooms. We know we need to challenge them, communicate with parents, plan engaging lessons, and monitor their progress towards meeting our goals. The best schools are ones in which peers are accountable to one another for meeting high professional standards. We agree to collaborate together to set common goals, to share curricular resources, and figure out how to build a framework for success for our students.

We are told by Secretary Duncan and others that one key to improving student achievement is to tie teacher pay to test scores. However, teachers are only one of many factors that affect student performance, and the small number of students in a given class means that one or two very high or low students could completely skew results.

Meanwhile, performance bonuses go out to bank executives who have gambled and lost with company funds, their bets (and bonuses) covered by the taxpayers. It is thought that these perverse incentive structures that rewarded risk led to the financial collapse. Providing incentives for high test scores is also likely to have perverse effects -- increasing the tendency to narrow the curriculum to focus on tested subjects and test-like lessons. Meanwhile teacher pay is the first casualty of state budget shortfalls, and we are unlikely to make up the current cuts for years.

The Green Financial Advisor reports

1. The compensation of 29 CEOs increased in 2008 by more than 1,000%.

2. Nearly three-quarters of CEOs had increases in base salary, and only 3% saw a decrease.

Incredibly, in a year in which so many companies had dismal performance, only 3% of CEOs saw a decrease in pay, which is supposed to be linked to performance

Teachers have been unfairly painted as being afraid of accountability. We do need to improve our evaluation processes, and get teachers more involved in looking at one another's practice. There are robust models, such as the one developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, that actually look at teaching practice deeply. Seventy-four thousand teachers across the country have voluntarily submitted their work to this examination and met their rigorous standards. This is the sort of model our schools should be emulating. We need to shift our evaluation practices to involve teachers more directly, and to focus on deep reflection on evidence of the effectiveness of our teaching.

However, there is such a glaring double standard at work here, I believe it is time teachers begin to take our dismay beyond the teacher lunchroom. The next time our representatives show up at a town hall, I say we let them know where we stand!

What do you think? Is there a double standard at work regarding accountability? How should teachers get our voices heard?

However the Labour-led government left in place the Sats for eleven-year-olds, on the grounds that this was essential to make primary schools accountable for results. However, an upcoming report is raising concerns that echo the debate here in the US over the effects on NCLB.

From the UK's Daily Telegraph:

The conclusions - by the Cambridge Primary Review - will represent a damning indictment of Labour's education reforms.

It will say that a "narrow" focus on English and maths has been at the expense of a more rounded education, leaving many children ill-prepared for secondary school.

The four-year review, led by Professor Robin Alexander, based at Cambridge University, will say that art, music, drama, history and geography need to be "vigorously re-asserted" in primary schools.

It is also expected to claim that science has been neglected following the implementation of Labour's "national strategies" in 1998 designed to improve standards in the three-Rs

But it is feared the Government will largely shun the report, which is being produced following submissions from 900 academics and teachers around the world.

Sound familiar?

The authors of the report, which has not yet been released, are expected to recommend that the tests be replaced with a system of teacher assessment.

What do you think? Should educators in the United Kingdom change course? What will it take to get our elected leaders and policymakers to respond to these concerns?

1. Some infants "latch on" right away, while others take quite a bit of instruction in learning how to breast feed.


2. Some defy the normal "walk at one, talk at two" expectations set by society. The most intelligent children walk at 9 months, and talk at a year and a half.


3. Some infants lag significantly behind their peers and do not talk until age two, or walk until age two-and-a-half!

The more advanced children are being intensively studied. Their ability to walk and talk earlier confers significant advantages on them. If they can start walking earlier, their physical development can be "fast-tracked," and thus they can be better prepared for success in kindergarten athletics. Research has shown that students gain confidence from success at such games as tag and playing on the monkey bars. Clearly those students who walk weeks or even months earlier than their peers will have significant advantages in these competitive arenas.

Early talkers also have significant advantages. They can begin building the vocabularies they will need for success on the tests they will take in the first grade, and can also respond when parents begin to review the new words on their first picture flash cards. They can also begin to learn their alphabet so they know which letters to bubble on the tests.

Researchers are also studying the parents of these children. Their working hypothesis is that these parents held unusually high expectations for their children. These parents did not simply accept it when the children grunted meaninglessly. They withheld food until the child said "Banana" clearly. To encourage walking, toys were placed out of reach so the child would have to walk to get them. Most powerfully, clear learning targets were set by these parents, and explicitly demonstrated for the toddlers.

Unfortunately there are also children who lag behind the norms. These children are of particular concern, because the existence of this early achievement gap means that many of our parents have failed, and calls in to question our system of parenting. These parents are assumed to have set low expectations for their offspring. These children were allowed to crawl around the floor like animals, instead of being shown the proper mode of upright bipedal locomotion. These children were apparently given food even when they squawked or squealed like little piglets, rather than having the food provided only when requested using proper English.

Low expectations results in these poor outcomes - but in our current system of parenting, where are the consequences? If we are serious about closing this achievement gap, we need attention-getting consequences for success or failure. Policymakers have been hard at work and have come up with several new ideas which can be implemented soon. Toddlers who can demonstrate their ability to walk and talk on a standard walk/talk test will qualify for early admittance to kindergarten. This will allow them to complete high school and college a year early, which means they get a head start on all their peers, and more importantly, an additional year of earnings once they graduate. Those earnings could be significant! Furthermore, their parents will be rewarded because the offspring will therefore be off to college and out of the house a year earlier, saving additional dollars (not to mention headaches!)

Toddlers who are behind the curve are currently escaping detection. The standard walk test should be given at age one, and the talk test at age two. Those who are not at appropriate age level in their skills should be placed in special motivational classes led by individuals equipped with research-proven scripted curriculum to ensure uniform opportunities for skill acquisition. We can no longer afford to leave this to chance - too many children are being left behind before the race has even begun!

We all know the starting gun in the race for success sounds the moment that doctor slaps that baby's pink butt. Effective parents take advantage of every minute to prepare their little one to win this race - and all we ask is that they teach their babies to walk and talk. We have turned a blind eye to the achievement gap in this area for far too long. It is time that ineffective parents are identified and helped to improve, or encouraged to give their children up for adoption by other, more capable parents, before irreversible harm is done.

So I offer my thanks to the Florida team. Our policymakers can get to work right away, armed with this potent research, and in a few years, all our children can live up to our expectations that they be normal and hit their age appropriate learning targets. This will surely make us all much more competitive in the Race to the Top!

What do you think? When should the Race to the Top begin? What can be done to close the toddler gap?

Image provided through Creative Commons, by mbrubeck

The term "Data-Driven Decision-Making" has a sort of value-neutral, rational sound to it. It means we are basing our choices on facts, that we are willing to make tough choices in the interest of student achievement. That should be good news, right?

But the choices that are made actually do carry value judgments, and I am not sure that we are considering all the relevant data when we make these decisions.

A few weeks ago, a San Diego area teacher named Ellen posted the following comment to this blog. She wrote:

I can see the disparity on a daily basis, as the tight economy and the effects of NCLB with its relentless pursuit of annual "progress" narrow the scope of my students' education. Where once students had the opportunity to express themselves in art, music or organized sports, they are now forced into the straightjacket of language arts and math.

I am required to have a daily 2 1/2 hour language arts block (using a scripted program, no less) and a 1 1/2 hour math block. Science was recently added to this limited curriculum because it is now tested on the CSTs, but there are no hands-on experiments because of the time constraints and lack of equipment. Science consists of students reading from a textbook and answering multiple choice comprehension questions in a workbook.

Recently our school celebrated an increase in test scores, but teachers were castigated because the English Learner subgroup did not pass.

It appears that the program Ellen describes has, in fact, resulted in increased test scores in Language Arts and Math. Thus, according to the rules of Data-Driven Decision-Making, it should be considered a success. But Ellen's description has me wondering about the nature of the data we are relying upon, and what questions we might ask to uncover additional data.

1. The CST data we are using measures primarily language arts and math performance. What information might we be missing as a result of being driven by this narrow set of data?
2. What academic, cultural and physical activities were cut to make room for the daily regime of 150 minutes of Language Arts and 90 minutes of Math? Has this data been sought?
3. What might the impact of the elimination or reduction of hands-on science, history, art, music and PE be on the long-term success of our students? Has success in math and language arts come at the expense of future success in other subjects? Is this question being asked?

Scientists know that the data one collects depends on the questions we ask. It is possible to go a long way down the wrong path if we focus on the narrow set of questions posed by NCLB.

The underlying issues behind my questions are ones of equity. These intensive language arts and math programs are motivated by concerns about inequitable outcomes for the mostly Latino and African American students attending the affected schools. But there are also equity concerns raised by the time taken that must come at the expense of other subject areas. It is the higher-performing schools that have more time for science, history, art, etc. because they are not obliged to spend 90 minutes a day on math and two and a half hours a day on language arts.

This raises a bigger question about Data-Driven Decision-Making in general. This term is used in a way that implies an objective, value-neutral focus on results. In fact, the data is so limited that the decisions one makes are constrained within a narrow range of options. The data gathered carries a set of values that have been determined, in this case by priorities set by NCLB.

Another business school term is "opportunity cost." There is no free lunch. If our school communities wish to make student achievement on math and language arts our highest priority - over science, history, art, PE, and music, then at the very least we need to be aware of what we are giving up in the bargain. I have a problem with policymakers and school leaders making this decision without acknowledging that there are in fact choices being made, and that there are tradeoffs, and that these are decisions that have values embedded within them. I have a problem when we do not even measure the impact these choices are making in other areas, and then we act as if our decisions are driven by pure data.

What do you think? What data is missing from the decisions being made at our schools?

Here is what movement leader Mario Savio said then:

We have an autocracy which runs this university. It's managed. We asked the following: if President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received -- from a well-meaning liberal -- was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?" That's the answer! Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material[s] that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

I was only six years old at the time of the Free Speech Movement, but my parents were involved in the events that unfolded. Their bookstore on Telegraph Avenue was a hotspot in those days, and Mario Savio worked there in the 1970s. I helped organize a twentieth anniversary commemoration of the FSM when I was a student at Berkeley in the 1980s.

It is inspiring to see today's students picking up the torch and fighting for the rapidly eroding principles of public education.

Last Thursday 5,000 students and staff at UC Berkeley walked out in protest over plans to boost fees by 32%, pushing attendance out of reach for many students.

A hundred miles away, at UC Santa Cruz, students have been occupying the Graduate Student Commons building for almost a week.

One student wrote, in a Communique from an Absent Future, words that carry an echo of Savio,

University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. "Work hard, play hard" has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for...what?--drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn't education; it's debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century--80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume--a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education--rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can't walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday's finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today's humanities majors.

Update #1: Several hundred UC Berkeley students occupied the Anthropology library for 24 hours this weekend (Oct. 10-11) to protest budget cuts and library closings. Read details here.

Update #2: An agenda for the Oct. 24 Save Public Education conference has been posted here.

What do you think of the protest movement taking shape in California? What should be done to defend public education? What should teachers be doing?

Photo provided through Creative Commons, by Epiole.

In his speech in Washington, DC, this week, Duncan evokes the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose Letter from a Birmingham Jail inspired the title of this blog. King was frustrated with religious leaders who counseled patience in the face of intransigent defenders of Jim Crow laws. He demanded action. Here I think we can all agree with Duncan. Something should be done - the question is what.

I started my teaching career studying the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., as they pertained to education. King was a passionate advocate for the poor, and knew very well the deprivations they faced. King advocated desegregation, but much more than that, he was a believer in economic and social justice.
At the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, King spelled out his vision for the future.

Let us therefore continue our triumphant march (Uh huh) to the realization of the American dream. (Yes, sir) Let us march on segregated housing (Yes, sir) until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. (Yes, sir) Let us march on segregated schools (Let us march, Tell it) until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past, and Negroes and whites study side-by-side in the socially-healing context of the classroom.

Let us march on poverty (Let us march) until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat. (Yes, sir) March on poverty (Let us march) until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns (Yes, sir) in search of jobs that do not exist. (Yes, sir) Let us march on poverty (Let us march) until wrinkled stomachs in Mississippi are filled, (That's right) and the idle industries of Appalachia are realized and revitalized, and broken lives in sweltering ghettos are mended and remolded.

In his speech this week, Secretary Duncan described a future for our schools that we can all believe in. He says:

Let's build a law that respects the honored, noble status of educators - who should be valued as skilled professionals rather than mere practitioners and compensated accordingly.

Let us end the culture of blame, self-interest and disrespect that has demeaned the field of education. Instead, let's encourage, recognize, and reward excellence in teaching and be honest with each other about its absence.

Let us build a law that demands real accountability tied to growth and gain in the classroom - rather than utopian goals - a law that encourages educators to work with children at every level - and not just the ones near the middle who can be lifted over the bar of proficiency with minimal effort.

Let us build a law that discourages a narrowing of curriculum and promotes a well-rounded education that draws children into sciences and history, languages and the arts in order to build a society distinguished by both intellectual and economic prowess

Let us build a law that brings equity and opportunity to those who are economically disadvantaged, or challenged by disabilities or background - a law that finally responds to King's inspiring call for equality and justice from the Birmingham jail and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

While these sound like good goals, a closer look reveals that some of them have proven to be mutually exclusive. If you pursue accountability by measuring performance in reading and math, then you get the narrowing of curriculum we have clearly seen in the past seven years. This results in students in impoverished schools having an equally impoverished curriculum - the four hours of scripted reading and math described in the comment here this week by a California teacher.

What is more, there are a few elephants in the room, obscured by this flowery language. According to research by the Civil Rights Project of UCLA, America's schools are more segregated now than they were in the 1950s.

Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement forty years ago. In Latino and African American populations, two of every five students attend intensely segregated schools. For Latinos this increase in segregation reflects growing residential segregation. For blacks a significant part of the reversal reflects the ending of desegregation plans in public schools throughout the nation.

Schools in low-income communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified teachers, and curriculum. The report indicates that schools with high levels of poverty have weaker staffs, fewer high-achieving peers, health and nutrition problems, residential instability, single-parent households, high exposure to crime and gangs, and many other conditions that strongly affect student performance levels. Low-income campuses are more likely to be ignored by college and job market recruiters. The impact of funding cuts in welfare and social programs since the 1990s was partially masked by the economic boom that suddenly ended in the fall of 2008. As a consequence, conditions are likely to get even worse in the immediate future.

Of this re-segregation of our schools we hear not a peep from Secretary Duncan. Only the promise to intensify accountability measures that have resulted in the drill and kill emphasis on reading and math test preparation in the afflicted schools.

Furthermore, even as the schools have become more racially segregated, the gap between rich and poor has widened. The economic crisis has placed even greater pressure on the poor, decreasing school funding, and food and medical programs that serve the poor. It is unconscionable under these circumstances to continue the ritual flogging of schools that has made NCLB such a failure.

President Obama promised a new era of shared responsibility for the school children of our nation. Thus far, however, in spite of the rhetoric, Secretary Duncan's bottom line holds schools and teachers alone accountable.

What do you think? How can we advance civil rights in the era of NCLB and Duncan?

What good is a theory if it fails to predict the future? From the point of view of a scientist, we observe nature -- or human activity such as commerce or education - and make hypotheses that can be tested. Then, if we are diligent, we conduct experiments, or at the very least intensify our observations to see if our predictions are borne out.

Education in the United States remains in the throes of a monumental experiment engineered by ideologues of the left and right - No Child Left Behind. The basic theory that drives this project is that poverty and race should not matter in educational achievement, and that we can close any achievement gaps by "shining light" on them. Once this light has shone the inadequacies of these schools, they are to be inspired to improve by the threat of closure.

This approach asserts that we can drive change forward by creating marketplace alternatives, in the form of charter schools that are unconstrained by numerous disadvantages that weigh down traditional schools - such as the requirement that they accept all students in their attendance areas. We also drive change by continuously ratcheting up performance expectations until they reach levels that everyone agrees are impossible - 100% proficiency by 2014.

Here we are in 2009, with almost eight years of experience with this law. Surely by this time we should have ample evidence to determine if it has been successful.

If we were evaluating a medicine to see if it should be approved, the first question would be "Has it done the patient any good?" According to Chester Finn, one of NCLB's most ardent defenders, it has not.

In a speech earlier this month, Finn states that,

despite all the reforming, U.S. scores have remained essentially flat, graduation rates have remained essentially flat, and our international rankings have remained essentially flat. You can find some upward blips but you can also find downward blips. Big picture, over 25 years, is flat, flat, flat. In other words, all the reforming has yielded little or nothing by way of stronger outcomes.

So the medicine has not worked on the primary measure chosen by its proponents.

How have the component strategies worked? Arne Duncan's Race to the Top is requiring states to allow unlimited expansion of charters. Is there evidence that they have produced results? At best, the evidence is mixed. In Minnesota, an early pioneer in charters, there is scant evidence that they have achieved their goals. The Stanford University CREDO study released in July compared charter schools to their public school counterparts and found the charters actually had significantly worse performance in reading and math. In their favor, senior Hoover Institution fellow Caroline Hoxby recently released a report in which New York City charter schools are found to be better than traditional public schools. In the face of this confusion, Duncan has asserted that he is not for all charters - merely for successful ones. How clever! I am not sure how he will know in advance which ones will be successful once he has removed all barriers to their formation though. It seems as if this zeal for charters is motivated more by a belief that they should work than any actual evidence that they do -- especially for the ailment for which they are being prescribed.

The other step we would take in evaluating our new medicine would be to look for side effects. Here the evidence is unequivocal.

Chester Finn (with Diane Ravitch) wrote in 2007:

We should have seen this coming ... more emphasis on some things would inevitably mean less attention to others. ... We were wrong.

[If NCLB continues,] rich kids will study philosophy and art, music and history, while their poor peers fill in bubbles on test sheets. The lucky few will spawn the next generation of tycoons, political leaders, inventors, authors, artists and entrepreneurs. The less lucky masses will see narrower opportunities.

A teacher named Ellen posted the following comment on my blog this week, providing very solid evidence that this has already occurred. She works in a low-income school in California that is 87% Latino.

I can see the disparity on a daily basis, as the tight economy and the effects of NCLB with its relentless pursuit of annual "progress" narrow the scope of my students' education. Where once students had the opportunity to express themselves in art, music or organized sports, they are now forced into the straightjacket of language arts and math.

I am required to have a daily 2 1/2 hour language arts block (using a scripted program, no less) and a 1 1/2 hour math block. Science was recently added to this limited curriculum because it is now tested on the CSTs, but there are no hands-on experiments because of the time constraints and lack of equipment. Science consists of students reading from a textbook and answering multiple choice comprehension questions in a workbook.

We have zero funds for field trips for children who need it the most. Many of my students have never been farther than 10 miles from home and have very little understanding of the world beyond their violent barrio.

Even the annual zoo trip had to be canceled because the cost of bus transportation was almost doubled. Our fund raising efforts last year yielded $2500, which was used to buy instructional supplies for the classrooms.

Recently our school celebrated an increase in test scores, but teachers were castigated because the English Learner subgroup did not pass.

Many teachers at my school see the writing on the wall. By next year our school will be failing no matter how much we improve.

With all the talk about teacher accountability and pay tied to student achievement, is it any wonder that most of our staff is planning to move to schools in higher income areas?

If we assume good intent, the designers of NCLB thought their plan would lift students in poverty by improving their schools. They had their ideas, and their ideology to support them. But as we survey the results in our schools, especially those in areas of poverty, surely ideology alone is insufficient to continue down this path.

What do you think? What does the evidence reveal about No Child Left Behind? When will our politicians be held accountable for what they have done to our schools?

Reporter Joanne Faryon went to two schools in San Diego. At the toney La Jolla Elementary, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, she found a parent organization that raises at least $300,000 every year. According to the Friends of La Jolla Elementary site,

The funds raised each year pay for educational enrichment such as art program, choral music program, technology in the classrooms, additional teacher for upper grades (lower class size), and instructional resources and materials. Additionally, funds are raised for school campus improvements.

This year they actually raised $450,000 so additional money could be spent installing artificial turf and beautifying the school. As you might suspect, fewer than 10% of the students at the school are economically disadvantaged, and 99% of the fifth graders scored proficient or advanced on the state reading and math tests.

Eighteen miles away, she found Horton Elementary, where more than 90% of the students come from disadvantaged households, and most are English learners. While the school gets a bit of additional funding for these reasons, it does not have any foundation to raise special funds. This school has no artificial turf, and there are holes in the playground where trees that were planted years ago have died. Here, 23% of the fifth graders scored proficient or advanced in reading, and only 20% were proficient or advanced in math.

There are small, affluent areas where these practices are district-wide. In Rancho Santa Fe, the elementary school is only about 2% economically disadvantaged, and parents raise enough money to lower class sizes to seventeen. About 90% of the students are proficient or advanced in reading and math. The Del Mar Union district sends a letter home every year to each family asking for a donation of $800 for every student they have enrolled. In this district, fewer than five percent are disadvantaged, and more than 90% proficient and advanced.

This disparity occurs in Oakland as well, where schools in wealthy neighborhoods like Chabot Elementary raise more than $100,000 each year through silent auctions and many other fundraisers, the money spent on classes in music, Spanish, technology, and a new library and media center.

You can't really blame parents for wanting to support their children's education, and it is really the best aspect of a community that says we pull together to give our children what they need. At one time we had a notion that the whole state was our community, and everyone was taxed at a level necessary to support the schools at a decent level. But back in 1978, Proposition 13 in California rolled back property taxes for all property owners. The proposition was sold with sympathetic images of elderly people getting taxed beyond their means as their home values rose. But the benefits have largely accrued to large corporate property owners, and the tax base for our schools has shifted onto homeowners even more. San Francisco's assessor, Phil Ting, reports that in his county,

Thirty years ago, commercial property owners contributed 59 percent of property tax revenues and residential property owners contributed 41 percent. Today, we see a virtual flip: commercial property owners contributed just 43 percent of property taxes in 2008, while residential property owners contributed 57 percent.

Now that property values have fallen, state revenues and support for schools has plummeted, and schools are in real trouble. An effort is underway to close this corporate loophole in California.

What we are seeing is that people with money are stepping forward to protect the schools in their immediate community from the full impact of these cuts. Meanwhile, schools in poor neighborhoods are forced to lay off teachers, increase class sizes, cut off needed supplies and eliminate after-school programs.

The students in poor neighborhoods are also being hit with cuts to state and local programs that support those in poverty - local health programs, support for homeless shelters, and many other programs. More than third of the funding for Healthy Families -- $144 million, was cut. This program covers 942,000 children in California, and will result in hundreds of thousands of children losing health care.

There are racial implications as well. The impoverished schools I cited above have predominately Latino or African American students, many of them English learners, while the wealthy schools are predominately white. And as Barbara Ehrenreich and Derrick Muhammed recently reported in the New York Times, this recession is having a hugely disproportionate impact on African American families.

There are two big lessons in this for me.

First of all, we can no longer pretend that money does not matter in school achievement. Rich people are not stupid. If money did not matter, they would not go to so much trouble to raise money for their schools. While test scores should not be the only measure of learning, they provide some evidence of the impact money can have - and the impacts extend beyond test scores and can be seen in dropout rates and other indicators as well.

Second, our society needs to decide if we want to continue the path we are on to widening the divide between rich and poor. Education is supposed to be an equalizer in our society, providing opportunities for all to excel. But this democratic ideal is threatened by the deprivation now being inflicted on students in the wrong schools. If we truly expect to reduce the achievement gap, here would be an obvious place to start.

This is not the fault of the schools, or of their teachers, or of their parents. In spite of our reluctance to see our country as anything other than a democratic meritocracy, we are seeing class war up close, and the poor are getting slaughtered.

What do you think? What do you think about these disparities? Who should be held accountable when schools are not funded equitably?

photo by Anthony Cody

This month Zhao published a book, Catching Up or Leading the Way; American Education in the Age of Globalization, which provides solid backing for his perspective. Zhao has an unusual background - raised in a rural village in China, he considers himself lucky that he escaped some of the tyranny of his nation's rigid schooling. He reports firsthand how the Chinese system, rooted in the keju -- the civil service exams developed 1400 years ago, has resulted in a culture that values test performance above all else. The Chinese word for education is dushu, which literally means reading the books. Until the start of the 20th century, this meant the ability to memorize classic texts and reinterpret or restate them. More recently it has meant intensive preparation for the gaokao - the college entrance exam, which has many of the same qualities as the keju.

The result of this emphasis on test ability is a systematic stifling of creativity and innovation. Paradoxically, Zhao reports, many of those who score highest on tests in school fail to live up to this potential in their careers after graduation. As a society, China has failed to produce innovations in spite of leading the world in manufacturing. In 2005, there were 21,519 patent applications from China, while more than 134,000 originated from the United States. Furthermore, most of the Chinese patents were for changes in appearance, rather than original inventions.

Zhao makes a strong case that uniform tests result in monolithic thinking. In the modern global economy, the passion that results when people are allowed to develop along diverse paths is far more precious than the large scale mediocrity that results from national standards and a test-centered (or "data-driven") school culture.

Asian leaders are keenly aware of these problems, and have launched education reforms that sound much like those being advocated here by the 21st Century Skills movement. In Singapore, Zhao tells us, reforms aim to reduce subject content and increase critical thinking. They are allowing greater autonomy for teachers and schools, and encouraging diversity and flexibility.

Zhao writes:

While the United States is moving towards more standardization and centralization, the Asian countries are working hard to allow more flexibility and autonomy at the local level. While the United States is investing resources to ensure all students are taking the same courses and pass the same tests, the Asian countries are advocating for more individualization and attending to emotions, creativity and other skills. While the United States is raising the stakes on testing, the Asian countries are exerting great efforts to reduce the power and pressure of testing.

Why are the Asian countries, which some American reformers admire, eager to abandon their education tradition, which seems to have resulted in high test scores or academic excellence, and instead learn from America? The answer is simple: because they know very well the damage that results from standardization and high stakes testing.

Zhao makes no bones about the implications of his observations. He concludes:

American education is at a crossroads. Two paths lie in front of us: one in which we destroy our strengths in order to catch up with others on test scores and one in which we build on our strengths so we can keep the lead in innovation and creativity. The current push for more standardization, centralization, high stakes testing, and test-based accountability is rushing us down the first path, while what will keep America truly strong and American prosperous should be the latter, the one that cherishes individual talents, cultivates creativity, celebrates diversity, and inspires curiosity. As we enter a new world rapidly changed by globalization and technology, we need to change course. Instead of instilling fear in the public about the rise of other countries, bureaucratizing education with bean-counting policies, demoralizing educators through dubious accountability measures, homogenizing school curriculum, and turning children into test takers, we should inform the public about the possibilities brought about by globalization, encourage education innovations, inspire educators with genuine support, diversify and decentralize curriculum, and educate children as confident, unique, and well-rounded human beings.

I believe this book helps illuminate the challenges posed by both Merrow and Ravitch this week. Zhao helps us understand why the US, in spite of the frequent sloppy indictments of our schools, remains a world leader in scientific and creative innovation. He provides a solid defense of the critical thinking skills derided by Ravitch, and warns us of the dangers of the test-centered path we are on. Most pointedly, he questions the contradiction between President Obama's condemnation of the emphasis on tests, and his embrace of "tougher, clearer standards" as the key to reform.

In his afterward, he weighs in on the latest effort to standardize education in the US:

Theoretically national curriculum standards for each subject can be useful, but unless we can develop sound standards for all subjects and knowledge we think our students should have, unless we can develop and implement valid and reliable assessment for all standards, unless we can enable our students to choose from a wide range of offerings, and unless we can attach equal value to a broad range of knowledge and skills, national standards will do more harm than good.

What do you think of Yong Zhao's perspective? What lessons can we learn from China? Which path should we follow forward?

Image provided through Creative Commons, by neuezukunft.