State of the State speeches demonstrate bandwagon effect

Found a clever note by Andrew Ujifusa in Education Week magazine that illustrates what happens when strange new ideas take hold in the political imagination.

For the slackers and malingerers who failed to watch every governor's State of the State address this year, the Education Commission of the States performed a nice public service recently by tallying up how often, and in which states, certain phrases about education policy were mentioned in the governors' State of the State speeches, from 2012 back to 2005 (except for 2010).

Let's look at the frequency of various popular education phrases in the speeches this year, compared with 2005.

This may only be surprising to education policy acolytes, but the total number of references to education was lower this year than in 2005: 348 mentions, compared with 372, according to ECS. Some of that may be due to the drop in references to education finance from governors who were leery of focusing on state budgets unnecessarily in 2012.

The speeches mentioned issues related to school choice, such as vouchers, 20 times this year, compared with only 13 in 2005. Teacher quality issues came up 63 times this year, compared with 47 times seven years ago. Student achievement was not mentioned in any speech in 2005, but came up eight times this year. Interestingly, other education buzzwords, such as "accountability," were mentioned more times by governors in 2005 than in 2012, according to ECS.

Early-childhood education (or "P-3" in education jargon) got more mentions in 2012 (30) than in 2005 (26), but what is striking is the evolution of the term in speeches. In 2005, the only four types of references made to early education were to child care, kindergarten, preschool, and "the early grades." By 2012, there were 14 distinct types of P-3 references, ranging from system evaluation to full-day kindergarten.

The database doesn't just give you numbers, however. It also allows you to see who mentioned which terms and why they did. For example, in California, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) wanted to develop a statewide system of qualitative teacher evaluations. Creating "Learn and Earn" programs for students to get work experience was a proposal from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D). South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) wanted a new accountability system that would test students at the beginning, middle, and end of each school year.

Obviously, it would be simplistic to use the numbers to draw any broad conclusions. But governors have to jam many odes, denunciations, and bold ideas into their speeches, so what they focus on and how often they mention certain proposals is part of the education debate. Maybe a "How'd They Do?" scorecard-type feature based on this speech database is called for?

PLThomasEdD: South Carolina defies education reform myths

I discovered today a great new voice being published at the mega-blog, Daily Kos. Daily Kos has a left-leaning reputation, which simply means that the people who post there rely heavily on facts, figures, rational thought and reasonable solutions. That's certainly true of the blogger PLThomasEdD, whose essays I spent the morning reading.

I commend his work to South Carolina's education professionals for several reasons, in addition to its reliance on facts, figures, rational thought and reasonable solutions. He's a South Carolinian himself, with a career rooted in public education. His essays are heavily noted and linked to external primary sources. And he communicates his perspectives clearly and forcefully.

This isn't to say that I agree with all of his assertions or perspectives, but his is a voice that should be included in conversations around public education and its so-called reforms (or de-forms), around South Carolina's cultural attitudes toward education and around directions forward.

His most recent essay, for instance, takes on our just-concluded Republican presidential primary and the hardline positions taken by education reformers/deformers, finding each to have benefited from "popular assumptions and stereotypes."

In The New York Times, Charles Blow has documented both the pervasive racism and classism coming from the Republican candidates for president (inequality, anti-black rhetoric, and envy) and the lack of credibility of their narratives. Yet, polls in SC during the primary season show that refrains about free markets, an equitable America, and deficit views of people and children living in poverty work among the majority Republican electorate.

As I noted, PLThomasEdD's text at Daily Kos is heavily-linked to primary sources, so I urge readers to read him there and take advantage of the research links.

The release of Waiting for "Superman" as well as the popular reaction to the documentary revealed that charges about "bad" teachers, corrupt teachers' unions, "miracle" charter schools, and the "missionary zeal" of Teach for America (TFA) recruits are as compelling as the race and class baiting among Republican candidates—again despite ample evidence that the documentary and its central claims are misleading at best.

Republican candidates for president depend on assumptions and stereotypes to drive their agendas and candidacies just as "no excuses" education reformers require several narratives to remain robust in the public in order for their agenda to control education policy in the U.S.: (1) poverty is not an excuse (success and failure are earned, lying in each person and not social mechanisms), (2) teacher quality is the most powerful element in student learning, (3) teachers' unions are preserving a failed status quo, and (4) accountability built on standards and testing are central to sustained education reform.

While SC is the crucible de jure for the 2012 race for presidency in the U.S., let's test (again) as well the claims from "no excuses" reformers in the context of SC.

Here is where being a veteran educator, being a South Carolinian, being familiar with the research literature and contemporary viewpoints, and being capable of synthesizing multiple conclusions into a rational whole proves useful in addressing these topics. Most of the voices given attention in South Carolina on matters pertaining to public education and reform don't combine any two or more of these characteristics.

PLThomasEdD takes apart four grand claims in grand style:

(1) If poverty is not an excuse, then how do we explain the powerful and persistent correlation between poverty/affluence and tests scores? Consider that a recent ranking of the 100 worst schools in the U.S. included over 70 schools from SC. Setting aside the egregious problems with ranking, this list is notable since it reflects what we can safely say about nearly all designations of failing or "bad" schools -- a high rate of poverty. To offer context, I paired with this listing the poverty indices from the SC department of education, revealing that nearly all of the schools labeled "worst" had poverty rates above 90 (out of 100). While suggesting that anyone is using poverty as an excuse is essentially a strawman argument, we must confront that "no excuses" reformers are stating that all of these schools, nearly three-fourths of the list, are filled with students and teachers who simply aren't trying hard enough. That defies logic, but does mask what these correlations between test scores and poverty show: Education alone is not enough to overcome the varied and extensive consequences of poverty.

I would add that much of the data entered into evidence by Carl Epps and Steve Morrison in the ongoing Abbeville v South Carolina case reflected this very conclusion; some of their powerpoint presentations are still available online for review.

The "Corridor of Shame" that Speaker Newt Gingrich referenced during a (misleading) debate response in Myrtle Beach exists because poverty as a determinant factor in student achievement in that region has not been addressed.

(2) If teacher quality is the most powerful element in student learning, then how do we explain the impact of National Board Certified teachers in SC (just one of many initiatives implemented in SC over three decades to address teacher quality) since the state has lead the nation in numbers of teachers gaining national certification, and how do we explain, as identified above, the persistent correlation with student and school success with poverty levels, and not with teachers (SC SAT scores, for example, remain low and correlated with socioeconomic conditions despite those students having the best teachers in the state)? SC proves to be the ideal setting refuting the misleading claim that teachers are the most important aspect of student learning. This mantra by the "no excuses" reformers is factually misleading (out-of-school factors dwarf teacher influence) and a tremendous distraction. As long as time, money, and dialogue are spent on weeding out "bad" teachers and rewarding high-quality teachers, we are not confronting the greatest weight on student learning -- the inequity in their lives. But, again as I asked above, are we to believe that all of the schools labeled as failures and highly correlated with poverty are staffed by "bad" teachers who are collectively and across the state simply not asking enough of their students?

Attend legislative committee meetings on such topics and you'll find that this is, in fact, the belief most widely-held by lawmakers: Leadership is paramount, faculty compliance is key, and giving superintendents and principals the sole and unquestioned authority remove and replace a classroom professional with the least obstruction and disruption will free them to hire the best, brightest and most compliant.

Ask a lawmaker, especially one who has studied closely the wisdom of the American Legislative Exchange Council, to identify the biggest impediment to optimal student achievement outcomes, and he or she will tell you it's the inability to remove and replace bad teachers, who must occupy the largest number of teaching positions in the state. Which leads directly to the third mistaken claim in PLThomasEdD's list:

(3) If teachers' unions are preserving a failed status quo that protects "bad" teachers who are, inexplicably, the primary forces behind low student outcomes, then how do we explain that SC remains low-achieving and is an at-will (non-union) state? No teachers in SC work under contracts, pay scales, or tenure negotiated by a union since unions have no power in the state. And very few teachers even bother to join NEA or SCEA as a result. If the claims embedded in Waiting for "Superman" and nearly every proposal endorsed by "no excuses" reformers are true, then are we to accept that teachers' unions in other states are so powerful they are collapsing education in SC in the same way that every teacher in high-poverty schools is the cause of low achievement? Both claims about the influence of poverty and the singular power of teachers defy logic as well as collapse against the same data the "no excuses" reformers appear to embrace.

In fact, I would argue, do argue, have argued, that our sad state of affairs in South Carolina exists because too few or our education professionals will and do organize themselves.

Rooted in our culture is a misguided individualist ethic that ridicules collective action by the working class.

Events in our civic history warn against collective action by the working class: The Honea Path massacre of 1934, the imposition of "right-to-work-for-less" by the legislature in 1954, the closing of the Darlington Manufacturing Company in 1956 when workers voted to organize.

Our persistent, aggressive resistance to the intervention of federal authority provokes in South Carolinians the very behaviors that defy their best interests: Attempts to establish public schools during Reconstuction failed when those who most needed them rejected the stigma they represented. In the twentieth century, the Segregation Commission led by Senator Marion Gressette during most of the 1950s and 1960s focused on strategies to delay as long as possible implementation of the Brown v Board of Education decision and its subsequent orders, in open defiance of the law. Most recently, our state leaders have taken great pride in defying intervention by the National Labor Relations Board into matters clearly under its purview regarding the decisions and motives of corporate interests.

All of these historical events have fed a psychology of oppression that continues to infect our discourse.

And I, for one, do not hesitate to include education professionals in the definition of South Carolina's working class. So long as professionals have no rights to govern their own profession, so long as their wages and benefits are dictated by a legislature that doesn't regard them as professionals, and so long as the rhetoric of the powerful seeks constantly to keep professionals in a submissive position, we are all working-class subjects of a tyrannical authority.

The situation brewing today in Sumter is reflective of this psychology; organizing for collective action is the clearest solution, but cultural and historical factors weigh so heavily against it. If organizing under the banner of NEA and The SCEA will lead even incrementally toward better conditions for professionals there and elsewhere, it behooves professionals to do it. Else, the cycle continues another generation, and another, and another.

Finally,

(4) If accountability built on standards and testing are central to sustained education reform, then how do we explain that SC remains trapped today in the same charges of failing schools as we did in 1984 when the state was one of the first and most aggressive states embracing the accountability paradigm of standards, high-stakes tests, and accountability for students, teachers, and schools? Throughout the accountability era since 1983's A Nation at Risk, think-tanks and the media have examined and assessed various states' accountability systems. While many conclusions have identified too much variety among the states, SC has, ironically, often been identified as both a low-achieving state and one of the most challenging states based on our standards and tests. SC, like 49 other states, have not found accountability to be effective for raising student outcomes; thus, why should we think that national standards and testing will accomplish something different?

Here's a radical notion to test: Public schools as they exist in South Carolina today -- and as they've evolved since passage of the Education Finance Act in 1977, 34 years ago -- work precisely as they are designed to work, and produce precisely the results they are designed to produce.

Consider this: What if a state designed a system of public instruction to benefit a particular class or stripe of students, and defied overtly and covertly any attempt to revise that system to include any other classes or stripes of students? In such a case, "accountability" serves as a check to ensure that the fundamental goal is being met, and as a stick with which to ridicule and punish those not meeting the standard, thereby reinforcing the system as useful and effective over time?

In my view, this goes far toward explaining our circumstance. Costs of achieving successful student outcomes across all strata of students are identifiable -- and high. But isn't the intent of those who control our government and its systems of raising and appropriating the funds necessary to meet those costs, in large part because it isn't the intent of those who control our government and its systems to achieve successful student outcomes across all strata of students. In sum, those who are meant to do well receive the necessary support -- both from the state coffers and through the happy devices of "local control" -- while those who aren't meant to do well, and who never have been meant to do well, are left to hang by the same devices of "local control."

The system, therefore, produces precisely what the system is designed to produce.

Newt Gingrich has stood on a caustic claim about children living in poverty, as reported by Mail Online:

"Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and nobody around them who works," Mr Gingrich told fundraisers Thursday night at a dinner outside Des Moines, Iowa.

"So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash'... unless it's illegal."

This stereotype of people trapped in poverty being inherently lazy and prone to criminality is a base cousin to the claims being leveled at students and teachers by the "no excuses" reformers—all of which are false but all of which remain effective.

U.S. politics and education would do well to listen and look carefully at SC during this primary season. Our democracy and children deserve better than the attacks being leveled on the powerless by the powerful whether the context is politics or education. SC remains the state of vivid lessons needing our attention.

Here, here.

Barkan on "the grand coalition against teachers"

Researcher Joanne Barkan has published a powerful and important new study, found in a recent edition of Dissent magazine, on the influences brought to bear on public education during the past generation and, specifically, the massive, well-funded and coordinated attack on America's education professionals.

In her own words, her study investigates

the fix-the-teachers campaign of today’s “education reformers.” It’s not their only project. They also want public schools run with the top-down, data-driven, accountability methods used in private businesses; they aim to replace as many regular public schools as possible with publicly funded, privately managed charter schools; some are trying to expand voucher programs to allow parents to take their per-child public-education funding to private schools. All this will reshape who controls the $540 billion that taxpayers spend on K-12 schools every year. It endangers the democratic nature of public education as well. But nothing affects children more directly in the classroom than what the reform movement is doing to teachers.

The attack on teachers, she states, is blatant, straightforward and purposeful:

In a nation as politically and ideologically riven as ours, it’s remarkable to see so broad an agreement on what ails public schools. It’s the teachers. Democrats from various wings of the party, virtually all Republicans, most think tanks that deal with education, progressive and conservative foundations, a proliferation of nonprofit advocacy organizations, right-wing anti-union groups, hedge fund managers, writers from right leftward, and editorialists in most mainstream media —- all concur that teachers, protected by their unions, deserve primary blame for the failure of 15.6 million poor children to excel academically. They also bear much responsibility for the decline of K-12 education overall (about 85 percent of all children attend public schools), to the point that the United States is floundering in the global economy.

In the last few years, attention to the role of public school teachers has escalated into a high-profile, well-financed, and seriously misguided campaign to transform the profession based on this reasoning: if we can place a great teacher in every classroom, the achievement gap between middle-class white students and poor and minority students will close; all students will be prepared to earn a four-year college degree, find a “twenty-first-century job” at a good salary, and help to restore U.S. preeminence in the world economy.

A synopsis of her lengthy article doesn't do it justice. But she focuses on the role of administrators in the assault:

Everyone who supports public education believes that only effective teachers should be in the classroom; ineffective teachers who can’t improve should lose their jobs. Accomplishing this requires a sound method for evaluating teachers and a fair process for firing. In the current system, school principals have the responsibility to assess teachers’ performance and dismiss ineffective ones. Making sure that principals do this well is the district superintendent’s responsibility (not the teachers’). The system works if administrators at all levels and school boards do their jobs.

She draws attention to the language of the so-called education reformers and the several targets of their derision:

The ed reformers have a formula for producing an outstanding teaching force: identify and dismiss all bad teachers, replace them with excellent ones, keep the latter on staff by paying them more, and evaluate everyone regularly to make sure no teacher is slipping. Private schools have the freedom to do this. But public schools, according to the credo, are hamstrung by protections for teachers -— due process (imprecisely called tenure), seniority, and set salary scales -— which are written into state laws and union contracts.* Because of due process, the reformers claim, it’s too difficult to get rid of bad teachers; because of seniority, they aren’t necessarily the first laid off; because of salary scales, they get paid as much as better teachers. The reformers want the quality of teaching alone to determine if a public school teacher stays employed or gets a raise.

But how do you measure quality accurately? The reformers promote relying heavily on students’ standardized test scores: students who do well on these tests have clearly learned something, the argument goes. Therefore if you track the test scores of each teacher’s students every year, you can measure how much students have learned and use that number to make personnel decisions. The traditional protections can go, the unions will be weaker (a boon to reformers who consider them roadblocks to change), and, voilà, public schools will improve.

Due process, seniority, and salary scales predate unionization; they grew out of state and local civil service reforms in the early twentieth century when political machines thrived in large part by controlling jobs. Civil service laws protected teachers against the graft, cronyism, and favoritism that plagued public school systems under the thumb of political bosses and run by patronage. The laws benefited children by aiming for a meritocracy: teaching jobs would go to those who had training and skills. Since the 1960s when public employees in many states won the right to bargain collectively, teachers’ contracts have included the same protections.

The traditional protections are just that—protections against corruption and favoritism; they have nothing to do with evaluating teachers. Even if an ideal evaluation system existed, teachers would still need recourse when administrators and politicians ignored regulations. Yet the reformers have misleadingly conflated the two issues: we can’t get proper evaluations, they claim, without eliminating protections. Since state laws can be written to take precedence over teachers’ contracts, the most effective way to eliminate protections is to get state laws changed. This is what the reform campaign is doing around the country.

And she examines the role of billionaire ideologues and their charitable foundations in buying off the public debate in state legislatures:

For most ed reformers, better a train wreck than no reform. They want as much change as possible as fast as possible in order to take advantage of momentum and the favorable political climate. The rush to pass state laws has provided their greatest opportunity so far. In response, they’ve skillfully built state campaigns, spending millions on organizers who advise lawmakers and legislative staffs, generate grassroots support, and run ad campaigns. A pipeline of private money—most of it from large private foundations—funds their state operations just as it funds almost all the ed reform movement’s activities. Two groups in particular—Stand for Children [14](headquartered in Portland) and Democrats for Education Reform [15] (DFER, headquartered in New York City)—have played substantial roles by setting up branches in legislative battle states. Stand has a long list of contributors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [16], which donated $5.2 million between 2005 and 2010. DFER gets most of its money from financiers, especially hedge fund managers.

It’s difficult to overstate the role of the mega-rich private funders: look into any ed reform project—even those that appear to be individual or small local efforts—and you’ll likely come across the large foundations and financiers. This is typical: a small group of Indiana teachers campaigned successfully for their legislature to abolish seniority-based layoffs. They received media coverage but neglected to say that they had been recruited by Teach Plus, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based group that operates on a $4 million grant given to them in 2009 by the Gates Foundation (New York Times, May 21, 2011 [17]).

Finally, she addresses the negative impacts that these "reform" campaigns have had on the profession, particularly in dissuading young people from entering the profession.

With the zealots’ mix of certainty and fervor, ed reformers have made this a wretched time to be a public school teacher. Indeed, fewer and fewer people are interested in trying. In the last seven years, the number of Californians seeking to become teachers dropped 45 percent (California Watch [22], December 14, 2010 [22]). In 2011, due to declining interest, Yale ended both its undergraduate teacher preparation and certification program and its Urban Teaching Initiative, a tuition-free M.A. program for students committed to teaching in New Haven’s public schools. Teachers all over the country—in affluent districts as well as high-poverty schools—are dispirited. In New York City, 50 percent of all new hires leave after five years in the classroom.

Barkan's study is worth much more than the cursory summary I've offered here. Read the full text, and share with others, at Dissent's website.

Ravitch: Well-funded effort to replace public schools

Education researcher Diane Ravitch marks the end of the school year with a review unlike any in her history, she says: "For the past year, the nation's public schools and the educators who work in them have been subjected to an unending assault."

Occasionally someone will suggest that this is just another swing of the pendulum and is nothing new. I don't agree. In the past, we have had pendulum swings about pedagogical methods or educational philosophy, but never a full-fledged, well-funded effort to replace public schools with private management and never a full-throated effort to hold public school teachers accountable for the ills of society.

What is happening now has no precedent in the past. For the first time in our history, there is a concerted attempt, led by powerful people, to undermine the very idea of public schooling and to de-professionalize those who work in this sector. Sure, there were always fringe groups and erratic individuals who hated the public schools and who disparaged credentials and degrees as unimportant.

But these were considered extremist views. No one took them seriously. Now the movement toward privatization and de-professionalization has the enthusiastic endorsement of governors and legislatures in several states (including, but not limited to, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Indiana, and Wisconsin).

But she finds cause for hope, she says, "grounds that I believe will in time permit a revival of a sane, sound public policy."

One is the anger of teachers themselves, and the upcoming March on Washington on July 30, led by national board certified teachers.

Another is the frustration of parents toward the "creep toward privatization" and high-stakes testing.

In addition, she says, "As research studies accumulate, the evidence in support of current corporate reform policies grows weaker. The evidence about the effects of high-stakes testing, merit pay, judging teachers by test scores, charter schools, and vouchers runs strongly against No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, as well as the mean-spirited policies advanced by Tea Party governors with the support of Michelle Rhee and her Students First front group."

Growing evidence and growing resistance by teachers and parents, by administrators and school boards, will eventually make it possible to break through the media shield that protects corporate reform. In time, the general public will understand the full dimensions of this corporate effort to reduce public space and to hand more of the nation's children over to the private sector. When the curtains are pulled away, we will learn that many idealistic and well-meaning people were cynically used by people with an ideological axe to grind, with a will to power, or with dreams of financial gain.

Finally, she writes,

And then there is history. I only wish I might be alive and vigorous enough 20 years from now to write this story. I know I won't be, but I see the outlines already. It will make a fascinating read. There will be heroes, villains, naive collaborators, rigid ideologues intent on imposing their failed philosophy regardless of its effects, and those who were just following orders or unthinkingly carried away by the latest idea.

Of one thing I feel sure -- history will not be kind to those who gleefully attacked teachers, sought to fire them based on inaccurate measures, and worked zealously to reduce their status and compensation. It will not admire the effort to insert business values into the work of educating children and shaping their minds, dreams, and character. It will not forgive those who forgot the civic, democratic purposes of our schools nor those who chipped away at the public square. Nor will it speak well of those who put the quest for gain over the needs of children. Nor will it lionize those who worshipped data and believed passionately in carrots and sticks. Those who will live forever in the minds of future generations are the ones who stood up against the powerful on behalf of children, who demanded that every child receive the best possible education, the education that the most fortunate parents would want for their own children.

Now is a time to speak and act. Now is a time to think about how we will one day be judged. Not by test scores, not by data, but by the consequences of our actions.

Darling-Hammond: Keep your hand on the plow

This is worth reading. Linda Darling-Hammond is a renowned American education researcher and testified in the Abbeville v. South Carolina school funding equity case a few years ago in Manning.

While I'm at it, this is a great time to thanks to South Carolina's teachers, who are working harder and longer, serving more students with fewer resources, with little support from state and local officials, for another great year. I'm hopeful that the arc of history will turn soon and the conditions under which educators labor will improve.

From The Nation magazine, May 21:
At the commencement ceremony for Columbia University's Teachers College on May 18, Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond -- a nationally renowned leader in education reform and former education adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign -- was awarded the Teachers College medal for distinguished service. Professor Darling-Hammond marked the occasion by delivering the following address:

I could not be more honored than to be awarded this recognition from Teachers College, one of the places of all those I know in the world that holds the tightest grip on my heart and best represents my values and beliefs. Thank you for this recognition—and, more important, thank you, Teachers College faculty, trustees, students and graduates, for who and what you are.

My first real glimpse of what Teachers College is and does occurred not in New York City but in a school in Washington, DC, where one of my children had transferred into a first grade classroom to avoid the truly terrible teaching that was literally undermining her health in another school. In her new school, Elena’s teacher, Miss Leslie, had created a wonderland of stimulating opportunities for learning: children experimenting and investigating in the classroom and the community, designing and conducting projects, writing and publishing their own little stories (one that my daughter wrote after the birth of her little brother was entitled “Send Him Back”). This teacher—who was in her very first year of practice—not only had created a classroom that any mother would want to send her child to, but she also had the skillful eye and knowledge base to figure out within weeks that Elena was severely dyslexic, to teach her to read without her ever being labeled or stigmatized, and to instill in my daughter a lifelong love of books and learning that has led to her being a literacy teacher working with special needs students today.

One day, I asked Miss Leslie how she had learned to do this miraculous work as a brand-new teacher. And she told me that she had learned to be this kind of teacher at Teachers College, Columbia University. She listed the courses she took in the Curriculum and Teaching department and the Special Education program that built her knowledge base and described what she learned with intensive supervision in a carefully designed clinical placement. It was then that I knew that a profession of teaching was possible, and I learned much more about what is possible in building a profession from my colleagues here and in our partner schools when I later came to teach at TC. I became persuaded that policy-makers needed to understand how to enable all educators to acquire the knowledge and skills that could truly allow all children to learn—rather than to try, as so many have, to manage teaching through mind-numbing, and ultimately futile, prescriptions for practice.

Teachers College has, for more than a century, represented the heartbeat of the education profession in the United States and our deepest aspirations for a democratic system of education. When TC was founded by Grace Dodge in 1887 as the New York School for the Training of Teachers, it was intended to provide a new kind of schooling for the teachers of the poor in New York City, one that combined a humanitarian concern for helping others with a scientific approach to human development and learning. At that time, when most teachers had little more than a high school education (and were frequently taught primarily to follow scripted textbooks that were popular at the time), TC teachers—a group of extraordinary women and men of all races, who came from all parts of the country—were earning masters degrees and were prepared for a research-based practice that was informed by the educational research also planted in the college: in psychology and sociology, in the content areas and in pedagogy. They, along with administrators and researchers in training, were also expected to develop a deep understanding of the history, philosophy and purposes of education and to be grounded in a set of strong values and ethics that guide all professionals.

Then, as now, the creation of truly professional educators was subversive business. As scientific managers were looking to make schools “efficient” in the early twentieth century—to manage schools with more tightly prescribed curriculum, more teacher-proof texts, more extensive testing, and more rules and regulations—they consciously sought to hire less well-educated teachers who would work for low wages and would go along with the new regime of prescribed lessons and pacing schedules without protest. In a book widely used for teacher training at that time, the need for "unquestioned obedience" was stressed as the "first rule of efficient service" for teachers.

No wonder that obedience was prized, when the scientific managers’ time and motion studies resulted in findings like the fact that some eighth grade classes did addition "at the rate of 35 combinations per minute" while others could “add at an average rate of 105 combinations per minute"—thus schools were to set the standard at 65 combinations per minute at 94 percent accuracy. One speaker at an NEA meeting in 1914 observed that there were “so many efficiency engineers running hand cars through the school houses in most large cities that the grade school teachers can hardly turn around in their rooms without butting into two or three of them.”

During that decade, precisely 100 years ago, nationally distributed tests of arithmetic, handwriting and English were put into use. Their results were used to compare students, teachers and schools; to report to the public; and even to award merit pay—a short-lived innovation due to the many problems it caused.

Does any of this sound familiar?

In the view of these brilliant managerial engineers, professionally trained teachers were considered troublesome, because they had their own ideas about education and frequently didn’t go along meekly with the plan.

As one such teacher wrote in The American Teacher in 1912:

We have yielded to the arrogance of "big business men" and have accepted their criteria of efficiency at their own valuation, without question. We have consented to measure the results of educational efforts in terms of price and product—the terms that prevail in the factory and the department store. But education, since it deals in the first place with human organisms, and in the second place with individualities, is not analogous to a standardizable manufacturing process. Education must measure its efficiency not in terms of so many promotions per dollar of expenditure, nor even in terms of so many student-hours per dollar of salary; it must measure its efficiency in terms of increased humanism, increased power to do, increased capacity to appreciate.

Sounds suspiciously like John Dewey and Maxine Greene, doesn’t it?

While the scientific managers’ foolishness was creating a stranglehold on schools under the banner of education reform, TC teachers, school leaders and professors (ranging from John Dewey to William Heard Kilpatrick to George Counts and more) were creating progressive schools in which students engaged in intellectual inquiry, hands-on projects and activity-based curriculum—guided by an understanding of child development, the new sciences of learning and emerging practices of pedagogy. These schools practiced democracy in action and provided a counterpoint to the factory model schooling that Dewey called “mechanical, dull, uninteresting, and hardly educative in any meaningful sense.”

Then as now, TC graduates set the standard. Highly educated and deeply committed, you and your colleagues have gone out to plant the ideals of democratic, progressive education as leaders in schools, colleges and governments all around the world. TC has always represented what a profession is meant to foster: 1) a strong ethical commitment to serve clients well—in the case of education, to make decisions based on what is best for students, not what is cheapest, easiest or most expedient; 2) mastery of a common body of knowledge and skills—and a commitment to always seek more and better knowledge to meet students’ needs (and oh, how I love that magical moment at TC when the doors fly open at around 4 pm and thousands of dedicated educators from all over New York, and even New Jersey and Connecticut, swarm into the building with such a thirst for professional knowledge to serve their students more fully); and 3) a commitment to define, transmit and enforce standards of practice—a community that pledges to work together to “do the right thing,” as Spike Lee put it.

That commitment is more important now than ever before. We live in a nation that is on the verge of forgetting its children. The United States now has a far higher poverty rate for children than any other industrialized country (25 percent, nearly double what it was thirty years ago); a more tattered safety net—more who are homeless, without healthcare and without food security; a more segregated and inequitable system of public education (a 10:1 ratio in spending across the country); a larger and more costly system of incarceration than any country in the world, including China (5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its inmates), one that is now directly cutting into the money we should be spending on education; a defense budget larger than that of the next twenty countries combined; and greater disparities in wealth than any other leading country (the wealthiest 1 percent of individuals control 25 percent of the resources in the country; in New York City, the wealthiest 1 percent control 46 percent of the wealth and are taxed at a lower level than in the last sixty years). Our leaders do not talk about these things. They simply say of poor children, “Let them eat tests.”

And while there is lots of talk of international test score comparisons, there is too little talk about what high-performing countries actually do: fund schools equitably; invest in high-quality preparation, mentoring and professional development for teachers and leaders, completely at government expense; organize a curriculum around problem-solving and critical-thinking skills; and test students rarely—and never with multiple-choice tests.(Indeed, the top-performing nations increasingly rely on school-based assessments of learning that include challenging projects, investigations and performances, much like what leading educators have created here in the many innovative New York public schools.)

Meanwhile, the profession of teaching and our system of public education are under siege from another wave of scientific managers, who have forgotten that education is about opening minds to inquiry and imagination, not stuffing them like so many dead turkeys—that teaching is about enabling students to make sense of their experience, to use knowledge for their own ends, and to learn to learn, rather than to spend their childhoods bubbling in Scantron sheets to feed the voracious data banks that govern ever more decisions from the bowels of the bureaucracy.

These new scientific managers, like those of a century ago, prefer teachers with little training—who will come and go quickly, without costing much money, without vesting in the pension system and without raising many questions about an increasingly prescriptive system of testing and teaching that lines the pockets of private entrepreneurs (who provide teacher-proofed materials deemed necessary, by the way, in part because there are so many underprepared novices who leave before they learn to teach). Curriculum mandates and pacing guides that would “choke a horse,” as one teacher put it, threaten to replace the opportunities for teachable moments that expert teachers know how to create with their students.

The new scientific managers, like the Franklin Bobbitts before them, like to rank and sort students, teachers and schools—rewarding those at the top and punishing those at the bottom, something that the highest-achieving countries not only don’t do but often forbid. The present-day Bobbitts would create “efficiencies” by firing teachers and closing schools, while issuing multimillion-dollar contracts for testing and data systems to create more graphs, charts and report cards on which to rank and sort… well, just about everything.

And the new scientific managers cleverly construct systems that solve the problem of the poor by blaming the teachers and schools that seek to serve them, calling the deepening levels of severe poverty an “excuse,” rewarding schools that keep out and push out the highest-need students, and threatening those who work with new immigrant students still learning English and the growing number of those who are homeless, without healthcare or food security. Are there lower scores in under-resourced schools with high-need students? Fire the teachers and the principals. Close the schools. Don’t look for supports for their families and communities, equitable funding for public schools or investments in professional learning. Don’t worry about the fact that the next schools are—as researchers have documented—likely to do no better. This is the equivalent of deciding that if the banks are failing, we should fire the tellers. (And whatever you do, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)

But public education has a secret weapon—a Trojan horse, if you will: the members of the profession like yourselves who have mastered a strong body of professional knowledge, who hold a strong ethic of care and who are determined to transmit this knowledge and this commitment to others throughout the education system.

At Teachers College are those who are leading the fight for more equitable funding for public schools (and who won a major victory in New York state); there are those who are leading the efforts to create more thoughtful and creative curriculum and instructional strategies; and who are developing more effective teacher and leadership education and professional development.

Among those of you who are graduating are many who have created and will create more exciting and empowering schools for children; more useful and appropriate assessments of learning; and more just and humane policies to guide a system focused on learning, not selecting and sorting, rewarding and punishing. You will do this in the strong professional communities you have created here at TC and in your work in the field. You will carry on the work of building a profession that serves democratic education—one that provides for all children what the best and wisest parent wants for his or her child, as John Dewey put it.

Many of you have arrived here today with significant debt and at considerable personal sacrifice. But you are here because of the work to which you have committed your lives, and because you know that it is the right thing to do.

And doing the right thing—meeting that professional commitment—is not easy. Whether it is standing up for a child who is mistreated, or finding the energy to go that extra mile to reach out to a troubled parent, or taking up a challenging issue in the research, or taking on a difficult concern in the public discourse, doing the right thing is often hard. As King reminded us:

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.

Take heart in knowing that the arc of history is long, as King noted, but it bends toward justice. Take courage in knowing that where a community of hands comes together to work toward justice, a freedom seed will grow. And take pride in knowing, when the work is challenging and setbacks come—as they must when anything important is happening—that you are building a better future for every child and family and community you touch. And remember, as Robert F. Kennedy observed:

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.

Thank you for each and every time you do what is right for our children and for each ripple of hope you create. Thank you for your courage and your commitment. And thank you for spreading the spirit of Teachers College. Keep your hand on the plow…. Hold on!

Ravitch: Don't let schools become "profit centers"

Education researcher Diane Ravitch told members of the Georgia School Boards Association this morning, “Stand up for public education. Don’t let private entrepreneurs divide your community and turn your schools into profit centers. Don’t stand by and let politicians tear down a public institution that has been the foundation of our democracy for 150 years.”

Blogger Maureen Downey, writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, covered the association's annual meeting in Savannah, and she reports that Ravitch "lambasted most of the reforms du jour in education today, merit pay, value-added teacher evaluations, charter schools, vouchers and testing."

She cautioned the 600 attendees to look critically at reforms being led by the high tech sector and hedge fund managers “who don’t much about public schools. They don’t much about education and, sometimes, I think they don’t know much about children.”

The competitive model that they are pushing will not work because the goal of education is not to produce winners and losers, Ravitch said, but to give “every child our best effort.”

Reminding the audience that 93 percent of Georgia’s students attend public schools, Ravitch said, “We must improve those public schools. We must not pretend those children don’t exist while we are creating more choices for 2 to 3 percent of them.”

Author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” Ravitch cautioned school board members to think twice about proposals and reforms that might inflict harm, saying, “We adults can take a few wrong turns and survive it, but children shouldn’t suffer because of our mistakes.”

This frenzy to tear down schools and start over does not work for children who don’t thrive in upheaval and chaos, but who need stability, she said. And the destruction of our current education system is built on lies, including that American education has failed, that it was far better 50 years ago. One of the nation’s premier education historians, Ravitch said, “Take it from me. They literally don’t know what they are talking about.”

The education system 50 years ago shortchanged children of color and ignored children with disabilities. While the corporate reformers decry the rise in education costs, Ravitch said they overlook the large increases due to federal laws requiring schools to educate all children, including the profoundly disabled. Congress mandated special education, she said, but has never fully paid for it.

Ravitch also disagreed with complaints that American children have shown no academic progress in that time, noting that there has been a slow and steady rise. She cited the gains made by black students in the 1970s and 1980s. She cited the rise in math performance on NAEP — a federal test considered the gold standard — since 1992.

This is a smart lady. If you haven't read her book, it comes highly recommended and gives a great history lesson on the forces that have amassed against public schools in the last couple of generations, including the self-styled philanthropic foundations and corporate interests who profit from public education.

Downey added a brief digest of highlights from Ravitch's remarks:

–America will never improve schools by running down or running off teachers. Citing the loss of 50 percent of teachers in their first five years, she said getting rid of teachers is clearly not the answer.

–She fears that a dozen years of multiple choice testing as a result of No Child Left Behind will squeeze every ounce of creativity, imagination and innovation from children’s brains.

– She said merit pay has been tried again and again since the 1920s. “This is an idea that never succeeds and never dies,” she said. Ravitch referenced the Vanderbilt study last year that found merit pay did not change student outcomes. She cited the view of business guru William Edwards Deming that merit pay destroys teamwork and collaboration and makes people only think of what is best for them rather than what is best for the organization.

–She also said there is no evidence that closing schools and starting fresh does anything but undermine communities and destroy social networks, citing Arne Duncan’s school closure regimen in Chicago. “It didn’t help in Chicago,” she said.

–The goal of education should not be higher test scores, but a balanced and full education that includes arts, music, science social studies, geography and health, she said.

–To improve education outcomes, make sure every young woman has prenatal care and expand early childhood education. The No. 1 goal of the nation’s education vision in 1990 was that every child arrive in school ready to learn. That goal remains unmet, Ravitch said.

–“It is incomprehensible that the richest country in the world cannot afford a found education for its children,” she said.

–When the United States recently ranked in the middle of international rankings, President Obama said it was our “Sputnik moment.”

Noting she was around for the original Sputnik moment, Ravitch said American students ranked dead last in the first international comparison in 1964. Yet, that generation went on to create a dynamic business environment, the high tech industry and the world’s most respected higher education system. “How can a generation that ranked in the bottom quartile produce those amazing achievements? she asked.

–She also noted that the media greeted the original Sputnik moment with complaints that schools were to blame, that the Soviets had put us to shame and left us in their academic dust. “I would like to point out that they are gone and we are still here,” she said of the Soviet Union.

–As for the current rankings that put Finland in the top slot, Ravitch said, “If those international tests predicted the future, we should be worried now about Finland dominating the world. We will be forced sit in saunas whether we want to or not.”

Her point was that these tests may not tell the whole story or predict much of anything in terms of a country’s economic future.

Attacks on public schools are echoes of 1920s

I suspect there are no teacher working today who were working in classrooms through the 1920s. If there are, God bless them; they'll make it to retirement eligibility under South Carolina's laws one day. Luckily, there are people who study the history of public education in America, and Mike Rose is one of them. Rose is on the faculty at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. In a Washington Post column, Rose reminds educators that what we're suffering today, our professional forebears suffered nearly a century ago.

I encourage you to read the whole column here. But here's a taste to whet the appetite.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, public schools came under severe attack, with magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal leading the way. Schools were assailed as being antiquated and inefficient. "[T]he American public-school system," wrote one critic, "is an absolute and total failure."

Modern business was in ascendance, and this was the era of scientific management and the efficiency expert. The nation was abuzz with talk of economizing and making more efficient everything from factory work to running a household to the practice of the ministry. So it was the notion of efficiency that shaped both the direction and language of the school reform of the time.

School administrators began to see themselves as "school executives." There was a call for "'educational engineers' to study this huge business of preparing youth for life." Precise standards and metrics were developed to help teachers determine their efficiency: "Having these definite tasks laid upon her, [the teacher] can know at all times whether she is accomplishing the things expected of her or not." Anyone falling short would be "unmistakably shown to be a weak teacher."

Sound familiar?

Fast forward to our time.

Once again, there is a powerful and concerted attempt assisted by mass media to portray public education as a catastrophic failure. Once again the business framework and business people play a huge role in contemporary school reform - actually, more so today. Once again reformers are equipped with what seems like the best new science - the economist's way of framing problems, cutting-edge statistical models - and a technocratic language that sounds precise, definitive, and action-oriented.

We will "incentivize", "scale up", "move the needle." Since teachers are - when it comes down to it - the problem, we are busy devising systems and techniques to direct them. And we believe we have objective statistical procedures to measure their effectiveness.

...
It would be a healthy thing for current reformers to look back at their early twentieth century predecessors. That is a history we don't need to repeat. Unfortunately, it is a characteristic of reform movements - especially with the kind of momentum this one has - for its participants to feel they are on the edge of history, solving with new ideas and new tools the problems that flummoxed everyone before.