One of the biggest problems, I’ve found, with developing a sudden interest in education policy is that there is SO MUCH information to absorb, much of it in the form of numbers and ever-changing acronyms. Luckily, for the time being, we still have libraries. Thus, I’m reading up on what’s what in American education. And posting my findings as I go…
I decided to start my investigation with Diane Ravitch’s The Life and Death of the Great American School System. This was chiefly because it had been recommended to me by my boss, who runs an organization dedicated to the Community Education model (Alas! Scholarly bias! Don’t worry, I plan to check out the other side next week). But also, no matter what side she’s on, Ravitch’s training is a historian and she has the historian’s knack for tracking ideas as they grow and change. Consequently, Life and Death is a great start for anyone interested in the players and the ideas in today’s “Education Wars.”
The history lesson more or less starts around the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” the 1983 report commissioned by Reagan’s education secretary Terrel Bell, and continues on through the No Child Left Behind era. The middle three chapters, which focus on the names and personalities of a few specific urban districts, especially Alan Bersin and Anthony Alvarado in San Diego and Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein in New York, are so repetitious that I can easily reproduce them here, in old-timey Western melodrama form:
Professional Businessman or Other Corporate Non-Educator Type:“Simple townsfolk! I have inexplicably been put in charge of your schools and now I have come to shake up the joint! I’m going to send you all to professional redevelopment and fire anyone who doesn’t agree with me!” (Twirls mustache.)
Townsfolk and Teachers Unions (all wearing sun bonnets): “We don’t like that.”
Business Type: ”STAMPEDE!”
And so on and so forth. Particularly helpful later chapters deal with the origins of the school choice and charter school movements, spell out the mandates of NCLB, and profile the top three philanthropic foundations funding American education today – the Gates, Broad and Walton Foundations. (The latter chapter – “The Billionaire Boy’s Club” – reads like the best journalistic muckraking of the 20th century: “These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are after all not public agencies…not subject to public oversight or review…The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.”)
Ravitch is particularly concerned that No Child Left Behind’s testing measures are using standardized tests in a way they were never designed to be used – that is, as the sole indicator of the academic success of a student, a teacher or a school – and that these inaccurate measures are leading to harsh sanctions. “Our schools will not improve if we value only what tests measure,” she scolds in her concluding chapter, naming such hard-to-test abilities as innovation and inquiry, ”Not everything that matters can be quantified.” She ends with a call for a strong national curriculum and support for the institution of the neighborhood school, a “public good” that should not be left to the whims of the market. Here are some tidbits I didn’t know before this read-through:
- “Curriculum-narrowing.” Is the name of the phenomenon in which schools weaken or drop some subjects altogether to focus more on tested subjects that will affect their funding. Since No Child Left Behind tests entirely in Reading and Mathematics, almost any subject can fall victim to curriculum-narrowing: social studies seems to be the most frequent casualty.
- Though I knew the focus of NCLB was on accountability through testing, Ravitch explains exactly how the government monitors this. “Adequate Yearly Progress” or “AYP”, is a statistic left to the schools and districts to decide as long as they meet the goal of 100% proficiency in reading and mathematics by 2013-2014. Now, stop one second. Read that again. 100% PROFICIENCY BY 2013-2014. That is, in less than a year, every single public school student in America has to have a passing. And schools that can’t do this face sanctions, loss of funding, and closure. Be afraid!
-”Value-added assessment” is a statistical technique developed by William Sanders of UTennessee that purports to measure how much INDIVIDUAL teachers contribute to the gains or losses of their students’ test scores. There is a movement now calling for this technique to be used in determining teacher salaries and class assignments, as well as a call to fire the bottom 5% of teachers based on test scores. The basic idea is that, since experience level and class size makes no difference on the effectiveness of teachers in a value-added model, that the fired 5% will be replaced by fresh young professionals, such as the high-performing college graduates funded by Teach for America. There is also a movement who is calling this all complete crap that statisticians made up. Some tension between these camps, as you might imagine.
Checking my sources, I’ve found plenty of critics ready to step up against Ravitch. Most complain that she is misinterpreting studies in the interest of self-promotion, though I find it interesting that many begin their criticisms the same way that Ravitch begins her book – acknowledging that she is a former strident supporter of testing and school choice, and that she changed her mind. This excellent piece by Dana Goldstein in the Washington City Paper does a good job of summing up both the woman and her critics, and there’s a good overview of the book in its New York Times review.
But while I appreciated her views, the real benefit of Ravitch’s book for me was how it laid clear the overlap between the education policy we have today and the history of 20th century thoughts and ideas with which I was already familiar (Thanks, Indiana public school system!). Because whether the “reformers” of Ravitch’s story are overhauling the structure of an entire district, a single school, or even just the classroom of an individual teacher, they all seem to operate under the same assumption: that all the pieces of the education “machine” operate in a vacuum, are not affected by outside forces, and are interchangeable. There’s a name for that assumption – Taylorism. Scientific Management, if you’d prefer – a theory designed to maximize efficiency in factory work in the 1890s the ideas of which have percolated their way down through the corporate culture of the 20th century. Unfortunately, the US education system is not a steel mill (that’s probably fortunate, actually), and children are not identical girders to be cut to specification. Okay, now I’m caught on that image. My point is, historically, it makes no sense that this particular set of ideas would be successful in producing innovative, motivated thinkers. Point: Ravitch.
NEXT WEEK: Now that I’ve got a hold on the anti-charter folks, it’s time to check out those archenemies of theirs. Get ready for Waiting for Superman…
