No Child Left Behind is dead!

Okay, that’s a vast overstatement. Last September, the Obama administration revealed a plan that would let states apply for waivers to be excepted from many of the harshest requirements and sanctions mandated by No Child Left Behind, especially the mythical mandate than 100% of students be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014 (the problem with which I wrote about back in January). Lots of states applied and last Thursday the first ten waivers were announced, including one to my home-away-from-home state of Indiana.

To receive waivers, states were required to show that they had an acceptable alternate plan. I haven’t got the intestines to read through all ten plans, though my friend Kristin has written a more detailed review of the standards Indiana will be adopting. But given the nature of my readings lately, I found it very interesting to read storied NPR education reporter Claudio Sanchez’s analysis of the different state plans; namely, that they’re a cop-out:

 ”…not a single state is expected to use their waiver to do something really innovative or creative in the classroom. All 10 states in this first round will just be happy that the U.S. Department of Education won’t be breathing down their necks for the next couple of years over things like “adequate yearly progress” or shutting down failing schools”

Even assuming state officials were just working as fast as they could to get waivers in place and give themselves some breathing room, it’s an excellent point: What next? In the last ten years, the public consensus on education has been that it’s bad and that it’s getting worse; No Child Left Behind has been a national punchline almost since it was passed. But as we move (fingers crossed) into a post-NCLB era, you’ve got to wonder if anyone has any better ideas. Experts agree that the system is failing. They agree that other countries are doing better (read enough educational literature and you are quickly going to get SICK of Finland). But when you wade through the condemnation, the expert advice tends to fall into two separate camps. Let’s check them out:

Camp 1: “The Efficiency Experts.”

Led by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, who was the lead talking-head (the Head head, as it were) of Waiting for Superman. These are the guys who just look at testing results and get all hot and bothered. They are big proponents of the “value added” statistical method I talked about back in my Diane Ravitch review, where students’ test results are calculated in a way the purports to show exactly how much their individual teachers are contributing to their testing gains. Their two big questions for policymakers, as framed by Hanushek in Schoolhouses, Courthouses and Statehouses, are:

As a result, they’re also big on accountability and sanctions and want performance pay for teachers, rather than pay based on seniority. You can think of them as the free market educators, working under the assumption: “If schools are in competition for students, they will improve.”

Camp 2: “The Educators”

I’m still slogging through The Flat World and Education, so Linda Darling-Hammond is going to be figurehead for this side. They have a lot of different theories, and tend to annoy Eric Hanushek by pulling away from the numbers and asking questions like “What is the meaning of educated?” They want challenging curriculums. They are big advocates of ‘inputs’, which in education reform are generally things you put into the classroom to improve education, such as spending more money on curriculum development, teacher training, making available better resources like books and computers. Making classes smaller is also an input. This is one of the big, if not the biggest, disagreements between the two groups. Hanushek doesn’t believe in wasting money on inputs, because there is “no evidence that added resources….have improved student performance” in US schools.

The Educators aren’t against testing (assesments is the Edu-world term), per se, though they’ve had problems with NCLB since the beginning. However,  instead of defining their goal as ‘adequate achievement’ that can be quantified and made cost effective, they want children to learn generative skills, which transfer from one task (say, taking a test) to another (say, handling a difficult situation in a fast-paced modern workplace).

And of course, there’s the most interesting fact about these two camps: they don’t exist.

That’s right. Just like any other issue where money and political power is on the line, it’s convenient to create sides and have them blame each other for the plight of the children. Hanushek’s policies might be falling out of favor with the dismantling of NCLB, but he makes cogent points about systemic bloat; Darling-Hammond agrees that we need a way to assess teacher performance.  But I can guarantee you that as the 2012 election season hurtles forward, policymakers with stakes in one camp are never in a million years going to allow the experts to come together, overcome their differences, and hammer out a system that is strong both in theory and numbers. As Darling-Hammond says: “Policies frequently force schools to change course based on political considerations rather than strong research about effective practice.”

This is even more terrifying when you consider that education is such an interesting issue because it touches on SO MANY PARTS OF OUR SOCIETY – from poverty and race issues, to health and nutrition, to how we see ourselves in the global economy in fifty years. As Pedro Noguera says in his book The Trouble With Black Boys, “Public schools are perhaps the only institution that is positioned to play a role in addressing the effects of poverty and social marginalization and furthering the goal of equity.”

We’ve had ten years of systematic failure and the world isn’t going to wait around for our politicians to argue each other into submission.  We have to get it right this time…

*This post title was chosen entirely to make an obscure historical joke, based on knowledge from The Many Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh, far and away and without a doubt the best book I read last year. If you like well-written histories, radical religious movements, outsider histories, or just generally being convinced that witches, pirates, Indians and slaves were truly the American founding fathers…well, don’t take my word for it. Read EVERYTHING.

I’ve been trying to average at least two posts a week, but this Tuesday I instead dedicated myself to finishing my novel. What’s that? Oh yes! Orfelinat, the novella that I wrote as a Division 3 project at Hampshire College, has overcome general apathy and TWO TRAGIC COMPUTER CRASHES to finally burst triumphantly into completion. And you can read it! Should you be so inclined.

I’m about halfway through Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education, which I’ll have a write-up for next week. In the meantime, I’ve been working on clarifying a little more what I want out of this study, and have prepared the following handy-dandy little outline:

“First, Teach Thyself” – A Study Study

Study Goals: 

Ok, I’ll modify that a little. If you can read and if you’re moderately well informed, there’s no way you could have missed this movie. There’s been nary an article about education in America published in the last two years that hasn’t at least mentioned the documentary by An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim, which intercuts statistics and the opinions of school reformers with the personal stories of five children enrolled in charter lotteries across the country. Some get in. Most aren’t so lucky. While some commentators have praised the movie for its call to action – Time called it a tool to “stir discussion” – others, like the experts quoted here in the Christian Science Monitor criticize its conclusions, which have unilaterally been summarized thus: “Teachers unions bad! Charter schools good!”  (In a related thought, wouldn’t you just kill to see Waiting for Bizarro Superman?).

Either way, the film’s major statistics and talking points – that entrenched unions enforce tenure and other job-protecting rules, making it impossible for heroic reformers to get rid of bad teachers – have by now been widely discussed and circulated. And if you missed something, why, every single fact can be found on the interactive WaitingforSuperman.com! So why did I bother watching it? Well. Because it’s a movie… Let’s start with two things that really stood out to me on my first viewing:

1. The adults in these children’s lives want them to succeed.

Fernando’s mother reads with him every night and advocates relentlessly for him when his teachers single him out as a problem student. Bianca’s mother pays more than she can afford for Catholic school because, she says, “There’s just no second-guessing on that one. You go to college.” Anthony’s grandmother seems to be raising him on her own, after the death of his drug-addicted father. And thank god for her. Thank god for every single one of them.

These are good parents and they deserve all the respect and credit in the world for this; in the words of the documentary’s producer, Lesley Chilcott, “Every parent was working for the sake of their kids to make sure they had a better education.” Of course, this isn’t all that surprising, since the filmmakers selected these children “through school admissions officials and interviews conducted at lottery information sessions.” One of the major criticisms of charter schools they engage in “skimming off the top,” admitting the children in traditionally challenged demographics (that’s poor kids and nonwhite kids, generally speaking) who are nonetheless more likely to do well academically, such as those with attentive parents: ten year olds whose parents are checked out are not very likely to apply for charter lotteries on their own. Similarly, by choosing their subjects this way, Chilcott and Guggenheim are shaping a film about the children of attentive parents.

2. All the students profiled are prepubescent.

Ok, this might seem picky, but think about it. Guggenheim and his team follow five students through the lottery process: two fifth graders, Anthony and Daisy,  first grader Francisco and a kindergartner, Bianca. The lone teenager is Emily, the white girl from Northern California cherry-picked to show upper-middle-class viewers that their children, too, are at risk from this system, and she’s still a very young rising 9th grader. Part of this is a function of the lottery system, which only admits kids at certain key times in the learning process. It’s also a very effective narrative stakes-raiser: will the adorable child’s life be saved or ruined? Also, not to be cynical, but don’t you find it easier to identify with a bright-eyed moppet entirely dependent on its heroic parents than with a sullen teenager? Especially a sullen black teenager? In this film – as often, sadly, in life – once you’re no longer young and cute, then your fate is set.

In his making-of section in the “media guide” published by Participant Media to supplement the film, Guggenheim is pretty open about the decision making process that lead him to create what he calls a “hybrid film,” actually edited together out of two separate short films (The name of the lottery film? “Other People’s Children.” Of course.) Why did he do this? Storytelling. Or, as his documentarian father once taught him, “people are interested in people.” If you’re going to make a film about a big issue, show the audience the people involved. Get them to identify with the person onscreen. Then they’ll care about the issues affecting them. This is socially aware filmmaking at its most basic.

By choosing articulate, sympathetic parents and adorable children and contrasting them with terrifying (unattributed) statistics, Waiting for Superman very effectively constructs a simple narrative wherein the bureaucracy of the school system is evil and the children need saving. You can – and I would – argue that this simplicity leaves people mad rather than prepared to act, but there’s little point in accusing a Hollywood movie of trying to be entertaining rather than academically sound. Nature of the beast.

But there’s a second narrative here, apart from that of the tiny cute children versus the nail-biting lottery, and that is the narrative of white upper-middle class filmmaker Davis Guggenheim feeling bad about this whole helpless poor children thing. In the story that kicks off Waiting for Superman, Guggenheim tells the story of driving past three underperforming public schools on his way to drop his kids off at their private school. He is guilty about this, but not guilty enough to put his own children’s futures at risk by sending them to these schools. It just seems like such a big problem, too big for him to do anything about! “Maybe those kids just can’t learn,” thinks second generation filmmaker Davis Guggenheim sadly.

Those kids…what a dirty thought for a socially aware filmmaker! He calls it one of his “darker voices,” and hopeless thoughts like these are what he intends to knock down with his portraits of bright, well-parented poor kids who could obviously succeed if they were only given a chance. The problem with this argument? It’s a straw dog – made only to be torn to pieces. And yet they spend so much time on it!  No one I know who works with children in underperforming schools thinks lack of mental capacity is the chief problem of their students, especially when compared to bad attendance, crappy homelife, a discipline policy that treats them like criminals or – yes – bad teaching and horrible mismanagement. There are teenagers in public high schools across Austin that have been truly and criminally failed by their school system.

But, as an upper-middle class white reformer, there are uncomfortable questions we have to ask ourselves before we can start effectively dealing with these admittedly large and difficult issues. Is it folly to even wish that a mass-market documentary would at least leave a few uncomfortable silences? Better just to raise and dispel a dark voice: “Look, they can learn! You’re not racist, you just hate bureaucracy!” Then they can go to the webpage and host a dvd house party…

Guggenheim writes about how disappointed he was that The First Year (his first documentary, profiling Teach for America volunteers through their first year of teaching) failed to stir up a national debate. ”When you make a film about a social problem, you hope to have an impact on the national conversation.” With Waiting for Superman, Guggenheim “didn’t want to spend two years of [his] life struggling to make a movie that would fail to drive a real spike into peoples’ consciousness.” For better or worse, it worked.

Reminds me of Act 1 of this This American Life episode…

Next week: So what do YOU suggest, Missy?

Find the grumpy old ladies. Then sit where they sit.

It doesn’t matter where you are or what the meeting is about. In this case, I was at the beautiful Texas State Capital last Tuesday, watching the  Texas House Committee on Public Education  hearing testimony about STAAR, the new set of standardized tests here in Texas that’s coming to replace the previous TAKS test. That’s the “State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readyness” of course, which is entirely different from the “Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills” for many reasons that are not entirely clear and one reason that is causing conniptions statewide: Now, for the first time,  how a student performs on their state standardized test will DIRECTLY AFFECT their class ranking and GPA. This is obviously a huge concern for many reasons that I’ll get to in a moment – the hearing room was already packed when I arrived, half an hour before the scheduled start time. But still, near the back I found myself a mostly unoccupied row and found a place between two white-haired ladies, the one a newspaper reporter, the other a secretary for Elliott Naishtat, one of Travis county’s representatives. Our seats were close enough to hear but also close enough to the back that you could slip out if you needed to use the bathroom or make a call. This is the second most important benefit of sitting with old ladies: they always have an exit strategy.

Benefit number two, of course, is that they usually know what’s going on. This is important, because the people running the meeting will not. Tuesday, for example, began with an unplanned 30 minute grilling of a Texas Education Agency lawyer by Scott Hochberg, the vice chairman of the committee. It seems that, in a move horrifying to Texans, Premont ISD near Corpus Christi is shutting down its sports program to save money and focus on their test results. This actually seems like a reasonable loss, since alternative is for the community’s schools to be absorbed into a neighboring ISD. One of the mandates of No Child Left Behind is “accountability” – so, if your test scores stay low, you lose your schools. Seems reasonable, right?

But Rep. Hochberg, in a move that singlehandedly made him my hero for the day, crunched numbers and pointed out that predominantly poor districts like Premont, which receive less state money per student, are overwhelmingly the same low-scoring districts who are now being threatened with sanctions and closure.  Of course, this is what it turns out that he said, after I checked the notebook of the secretary sitting next to me. To me, it just sounded like lots of numbers. Judging by their faces, most of the Education Committee felt the same way.  Thank God for sitting next to people old enough to have been taught effective note-taking and penmanship.

Finally, though, the meeting reached the point where we were actually following the set agenda: first, a presentation from the TEA Student Assessment Committee, then a Q&A with a panel of superintendents from different school districts across Texas, explaining the problems they were facing in the transition between tests. This is where the last and most essential skill of the grumpy old ladies came into play. Take their reaction to the following exchange:

Representative Dutton: “Is it possible that children who are on the bottom of the old tests are going to be anywhere but on the bottom of this new test?”

TEA Committee Member: “That depends on the quality of the local instruction.”

…which was widespread hissing and coughs of laughter. Because of course, it is the job of the instructor in the classroom to teach students the material they will be evaluated on. But, according to the superintendents, the first STAAR test will be administered in March and teachers are only just now beginning to see what is on said test. This is not to mention any factors outside the classroom that might contribute to a students’ performance on ANY given test, such as low attendance, behavioral issues, or social advancement (where a student is pushed on through to the next grade without mastering the academic skills necessary to pass). “It is our job to follow the law,” one of the superintendents, “Our goal is to do this in the most simple way possible and to do the least harm to children.” Because, when you’re listening to educators plead that an entire generation of children is being used as guinea pigs in this experiment of accountability, your natural reaction may be to despair. But grumpy old ladies?  They know how to laugh in the face of despair. This can save  you.

Of course, there is only so much of this the uninitiated mind can handle. I reached my limit at 2 1/2 hours, in the middle of the superintendent panel. One of my grumpy old ladies was outside making a phone call; the other stealthily had unwrapped the sandwich she’d brought from home and was eating it with one hand while taking notes with the other. I saluted them before heading back up into the sunshine. God willing, maybe someday I will be one of these effective old broads. Until then, I can only watch and learn…

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…