Thomas Toch, an education specialist at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, has an interesting article in our March/April/May issue of the Washington Monthly on how the teachers’ unions and Tea Party teamed up to force a major change in the Obama administration’s education policy.
This culminated in the president signing the Every Student Succeeds Act while praising the bill for “empowering states and school districts to develop their own strategies for improvement.”
The piece takes a hard look at the successes and failures of No Child Left Behind, Common Core standards, and the associated efforts to lift standards, help failing schools and improve classroom instruction.
While acknowledging most of the frequent criticisms of the former policy regime, Toch sees the administration’s capitulation on standards as harmful:
But the new federal education law both gives local educators more day-to-day flexibility and liberates them from external expectations, a strategy that risks returning many students to second-class educational status. Rather than being a path toward a new paradigm in public education where all students are taught to high standards, it invites a capitulation to traditional race- and class-based educational expectations, half a century after the passage of federal civil rights laws and just as the nation is transitioning to a minority-majority school population.
When “local control” in education is looked at through the lens of what’s best for students rather than through the filter of adult agendas, it’s clear that we’re not going to get many of the nation’s students where they need to be without explicit expectations for higher standards in much of what schools do, and without the policy leverage needed to ensure that educators deliver on those expectations.
The ‘policy leverage’ part of that critique is worth considering because, according to Toch, “the new law makes it virtually impossible for the U.S. secretary of education to proscribe, enforce, or even incentivize rigorous academic expectations, quality tests, school performance standards, and the measurement of teacher performance—core improvement levers.”
Read the whole thing and tell me what you think.
Destroy neighborhood schools, destroy the teaching profession, privatize public education for corporate rentals–what about that side of the f*cking equation?
“Neoliberal “education reform” (aka destruction of free and universal public education) can never fail; it can only be failed.”
Right. We all want to raise educational standards. But this “cure” is worse than the disease.
How Obama Got Schooled by Thomas Toch | The Washington Monthly
I feel this fails to account for the US cultural impact on world. Living in Sweden, the US debates (though adapted to Swedish politics) tends to resurface here some one to five years after they bloomed in the US. I would guess Sweden is in the group most eager to adapt, but if a study is recent now, the cultural effects of the Bush years has had plenty of time to form the world before the study.
To your point about the spread of infection….http://dianeravitch.net/2016/03/29/education-in-crisis-the-threat-of-privatization-around-the-world/
The problem is not testing, as such. It’s that the American way of testing is eating the curriculum. The schools are forced to “teach to the test.” And the test is just another corporate boondoggle.
I think the general trend in the western world (at least, don’t know much about school trends outside) is the proletarisation of teachers and turning schools into factories. Measuring output is critical for a proper run factory. And of course this goes hand in hand with proving that the public sector does not work, giving further arguments for privatisation.
The particulars are different, but the trend is the same.
“Teaching to the test” sounds like sticking to the curriculum which is good. What I saw with my grandkids was teachers taking two months to drill on test taking techniques (“do the easy ones first” “don’t stay too long on one question” yada yada yada yada) while in my day we had 5 minutes of this instruction before the SAT. Anyone who needs TWO WHOLE MONTHS is hopelessly stupid. And for my money, so are the teachers who waste their class time this way.
A curriculum that reflects only the test is hopelessly narrow.
The alternative, as I see it, is every teacher teaching what they like. That way, if they are anti-labor, kids never find out about the labor movement or the anti-war movement or why we have a bill of rights. They are told shoddy science like “nature abhors a vacuum” and “a rocket works because it’s exhaust pushes against the atmosphere”. Important people in English Literature are ignored because the teacher doesn’t like them.
There should be a common core, although I don’t know anything about the capitalized Common Core to praise or vilify it. But teacher’s unions fight the concept of a common core of knowledge and any measurement of teaching skill.
Teaching should be a profession with internal standards and sanctions. The industrial union is the wrong model. How can you decry factory schools when the teachers view themselves as factory workers?
Most teachers, even today, have a common understanding of what children need to be taught. It is state priorities in curriculum and especially textbooks even before the current boondoggles that excised the labor movement from the curriculum.
The major debate is over how to apportion time between competencies (doing) and content (knowing) and attitude (being). It is not hard to get a sense of Common Core; the standards are online. And they apply to Mathematics and Language Arts. It’s pretty simple to see what the standard is for each grade. Then look at how your state has taken that standard and converted it into a state standard and how the state does other standards for science, history, art, and other subjects.
Teachers unions exist because it is the administration that views, treats, and pays them like factory workers. Most teachers would prefer to have the power of a professional union with control over their professional practices if they are to meet specific standards. They would prefer not to have to goalposts of those standards changed every third or fourth year. They would prefer not to have to bring students from meeting few standards to all standards in one year without additional resources to deal with those students who are having difficulty. Finally, they would prefer not to have to deal as well with mainstreaming behaviorally and emotionally disabled kids at the same time in their classes, especially when classroom sizes do not allow for the individual attention required to do that sort of remedial teaching. Common Core can address none of the peripheral issues that prevent students from learning. But it can get them fired if the numbers are not up on the end-of-year test.
Teacher’s unions want control over how to teach common core competencies and want to be able to do that teaching outside the pressure of high-stakes tests that few other professions endure.
Teachers also want strong defenses against corrupt administrations. And strong political means of countering bad decisions of boards and administrators.
I’m not altogether sure how one measures teaching skill outside participant observation techniques. The averaging of class scores on end-of-year tests fails to adjust for differences in incoming students and differences in available resources. It becomes an excuse to close the very schools that serve the students who most need resources if they are to meet the ambitious state standards. Teachers are very aware of the political game that is being played with students’ lives and the fact that they are the scapegoats for not being able to implement a major change in education during the time one cohort of students goes from K to 12.
“The alternative, as I see it, is every teacher teaching what they like.”
Well, that would be true if anarchy and industrial-grade uniformity were the only possible choices. But that’s absurd, there are many other possibilities. As far as I know, school systems have always had definite curricular guidelines, and teachers have traditionally had room to follow those guidelines. We still see that in the pre-testing grades (if there still are any pre-testing grades where you are).
The problem is the testing companies, especially those tied into the textbook publishing industry. Changes in the test drive a new edition of the textbook that every customer school district absolutely must have in order not to lose state funding from poor test scores. It is a racket.
And the testing companies themselves do not have demonstrable testing of teacher or school competence, but the scores are being used that way.
Moreover the scoring of writing samples and other written text questions basically amounts to having multiple readers score the answers and correlate the variance. If the variance is too much, figure out which scorer to fire. Hint: it tends not to be the one that makes the state hiring the testing company look good.
Like polling companies, they earnestly believe in their statistics, but the data underlying the statistics has to have some strong educational reasons and not just creation of random data.
Too much is at stake on the basis of these tests. Many good students have been frustrated and many good teachers have lost their careers just by overemphasizing the numbers. Schools have been closed and even entired school districts seized by the state on the basis of these tests. A huge amount of statistical malpractice and politics has been let loose.
Private companies should not be involved at all! The tests should be designed by professional education civil servants at the Department of Education. Or is that too 19th century?
One of the first things to get privatized, wasn’t it? The Iowa tests (1935, sez Wikipedia) are from a state university, but the College Board was always a (nonprofit) private corporation, from 1899. We’ll get socialist electricity before we ever get socialist testing, I’m afraid, those suckers will never let it go.
some samples of core cur. tests had PRODUCT PLACEMENT- no apology for yelling
I think this falls into the “elections have consequences” category. NCLB was just awful once the minimum standards really kicked in, and it had to go. With a Republican Congress, it was pretty inevitable we’d get a conservative reform with few ways to make sure schools are actually good.
“It should now be clear that corporate reform failed. The ostensible leader of the campaign, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is gone, as are the highest-profile leaders of transformational reforms in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, Houston, Memphis, Washington D.C. and other districts. The quantitative portions of teacher evaluations are all but dead, and Common Core has replaced NCLB as the most toxic brand in education. After the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced NCLB, and , it is likely that federal support for this top-down social engineering experiment is history.”
http://linkis.com/livingindialogue.com/FuZtZ
“…after Hillary Clinton distanced herself from charter schools.” Or not. LOL
And btw, Obama’s new Sec Ed is just as corporate.
“What do you think? Corporate school reformers were once open about their belief that public education was hopelessly broken, and that the entire system needed to be blown up. Are the “portfolio” models prompted by the CRPE, the Broad and Walton foundations, and others any kinder and gentler?”
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/03/03/389282733/where-have-all-the-teachers-gone
My significant other…and many other close friends…teach in public schools in and around NYC. I occasionally do, as well. I thought that they were so bad in the early ’90s that I left NYC for the suburbs to raise my son. The suburban schools weren’t that much better, it turned out, but better enough to make the move productive. Over the the last 8 years they have simply become unbearable. The teachers have lost all hope of creative teaching; less and less is required of the students and the administrators are almost all hidebound, rule-bound, lockstep idiot bureaucrats.
I am totally against interference from the feds on this matter. The closer to the school the rule-makers reside, the better. Almost every community has a core of residents that want nothing but good for their children. Give them the reins. Not the county, not the state and most definitely not the
feral…errr, ahhh, federal…government. The people!!!Please!!!
AG
But how about the communities who want to teach about Noah’s Ark and whose version of American history is “Christian nation” and “happy darkies who loved their master”?
My junior year American History textbook was around one third labor history. We learned about Samuel Gompers, the wobblies, the difference between the AFL and the CIO, Haymarket Square and the United Mine Workers. This was in a rock solid Republican suburb. Now, in my current suburb in a Democratic district, my grandkids learned NONE of that. Organized labor wasn’t covered at all.
In South Carolina in 1962-1963, my junior year American History textbook was about labor and industrial history, taught by a David Lawrence loving Goldwater flogger conservative who was always baiting one of the privileged that the communists were going to take his red convertible (it was red) away from him. I was clueless about unions then, but learned enough to be curious about this history later. Of course, the last thing that the corporate presidents in “The Textile Center of the World” wanted in those days was any mention of the word “union”.
Oh yeah! I was in the center of the Midwest “Rust Belt” storm. You were in the center of the Southern Textile Industry storm. Where are those textile jobs now? Bangladesh? That’s what I read on all the labels, except at K-mart where most say “China”. Really poorly made, too.
…Founded by Mr. Toch, a former staff member of Education Week and U.S. News & World Report, and Andrew J. Rotherham, who was a domestic-policy adviser for President Bill Clinton, Education Sector seeks to put political and ideological independence at the center of its mission.
The group’s core financing comes from seven foundations, including the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has provided $136 million to the charter school movement, according to the report. (The Gates Foundation also provides support for Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week.)
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/12/03/14charter.h29.html
An interesting piece. M. Toch was more balanced back then, but has been a long time proponent of charters.
Just a few more educational reforms and for $10,000/kid/year, future generations will be illiterate.
or worse
Our schools have stopped teaching penmanship. We are told that the future is keyboarding and written communication is passe.
I thought keyboarding was a musical term.
Tech shouldn’t be automatically shunned in education. Penmanship is no longer necessary, even if it’s a nice skill to have. Make it an elective. (As a leftie, I struggled to get a C in penmanship and would have preferred to spend that time on something more productive.)
You don’t think kids should be able to sign their names? Or write a short note with paper and pencil? Or be able to read one?
Some time in the future illiteracy may be the norm with thumbprints or retinal scans replacing signatures and all communication via voice only. But it will be an anti-utopia.
What’s wrong with thumbprints? Kids today text their parents and friends and probably avoid pencil and paper except when they can’t in school which reinforces their hatred for school.
Your brain on Cursive…
http://mimlearning.com/cutting-cursive-the-real-cost/
Okay, if learning and practicing cursive is to cognitive development what crawling is to walking, then we’ll have to keep it. Suspect it’s not, but we should let the research/science guide us on this.
Voice, I see this a little differently.
My younger daughter wasn’t taught penmanship. She is currently a fine arts major at University of Kentucky. She cannot read the old letters of historical figures she studies sometimes. Any artist before the computer age, for example. Cutting off the knowledge of how to read cursive writing, cuts off all the direct knowledge stored in such documents. All you have left if what somebody who has typed them into a computer says they contained, and we all know nobody in education reform would play around with that one.
For example all the hand written documents from Jefferson, Madison etc. surrounding the writing of thee Declaration of Independence or the drafting of the US Constitution. The contextual meaning is lost, then some damn “originatists” get to claim to secretly know what they “really meant”.
Texas board of mis-education for example …..
Go bank to giving future citizens the tools needed for them to do their own research.
Wow, I hadn’t thought of that – I find that quite frightening…
In college, I spent a semester transcribing medieval manuscripts. I also spent a little bit of time reading Darwins letter. Reading hand written text can be challenging; I sometimes can’t even read my own writing.
The thing is, the literature that hasn’t been transcribed aren’t important founding documents; they are informal and casually and quickly and perhaps sloppily written. It takes a good deal of time to learn to read it, and every writer’s script is different. So even teaching children to write cursive is only really a small step to making that personal connection with the past.
Because, honestly, I’d much rather read transcriptions if I can. Or put another way, I’d much rather read one hundred pages than forty.
Well we will have to disagree, as I do not have the troubles you describe.
What exactly is the “where they need to be” criteria and who is responsible for defining it? That the business community has botched defining it for the past twenty years, driven students to hate education, and still not gotten their pre-packaged workforce speaks volumes about the failure of business to guide education policy. That professional educators have been whiplashed by a variety of fads and school districts are driven to squander funds on repeated teach-to-the-test preparation curricula, practice software, and teacher training as each fad surges has not helped.
Reducing what the student needs to “good jobs” has become a disaster as the jobs that were important when kids enter school or enter high school disappear as a result of the policy actions of the same corporations that tightly focused the education tracks.
And the public-private charter schools have in too many places become corrupt deals between unqualified entrepreneurs and shady politicians. By far the most blatant are Chicago’s charter schools and Rahm Emanuel. The closure of a third of Chicago’s public schools, some with long traditions, cannot have contributed to improving Chicago’s educational opportunities.
For years, the IEEE has been reporting how business has been pressuring Engineering Schools to spend less time on concepts and scientific methods and to spend more time on “practical technology” so that they are immediately productive on graduation. So schools should have taught how to design a pentode and taught BAL and COBOL instead of the the theory of computer languages and programming tricks for the IBM 360/370 or Intel 8008 instead of the theory of algorithms or operating system design.
Actually, business seems to have won. The new engineers are obsolete after eight years and they just hire a new batch or import more from Bangalore.
As cogent an explanation for Trumpism and xenophobia in the US as I have seen. One analyst talks about the crapification of every job in the economy. Even the MBAs who become CEOs lack the vision and flexibility of many of the liberal-arts-trained corporate presidents of a century ago.
The word Fordism comes to mind; I believe that harks back to Huxley’s Brave New World.
And the old engineers? Essentially permanently unemployable because they are overqualified and underqualified at the same time.
As for myself, I’m retired now and writing programs again – for myself and the Open Source community.
Good for you.
That was very stimulating.
I think Toch makes a big error in failing to understand what the motivation of the teachers was–as did Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel and in a big way Obama himself. The testing in and of itself wasn’t the problem in the NCLB, everybody was used to some of that; what was new was the high stakes, and the punitive nature of the law, designed to close down schools and fire principals and divide teachers into the deserving (merit pay) and the sluggards.
You need data on educational outcomes, and testing is the way to get it, but it should be used to find out who needs what kind of help, not who to get rid of. Teachers recognized the law as a way of controlling them, and they didn’t just resent it, they also feared it. Teachers and principals alike began teaching to the test to save their own asses, quite understandably, and frightening the kids, who obviously shouldn’t have felt any pressure whatever (anybody remember being scared by the Iowa tests four or five decades ago? Of course not! It was a little holiday!), but were now getting nightmares and panic attacks, which frightened their parents, also quite rightly.
And states began dumbing down the instruments to save their own asses, and the charter movement and the publishers like Pearson started devising these methods of scripted instruction taking all the spontaneity and interest out of the classroom, and the teachers started being subjected to what they call “de-skilling”, and the system just got worse and worse on the pressure.
My kids were in elementary school in that Bush decade, but they were lucky enough to be in a pretty good NYC school where teachers openly refused to do some of the worst stuff (they’d defiantly stick to the Friday spelling test after the DOE banned it, for instance). I remember my son’s 6th grade teacher, who’d majored in geography, talking with great excitement about the social studies unit he wanted to do, but he had to wait because the students had to prep for an idiotic Social Science Test that had just been imposed on them, and I don’t think he ever did get around to it with the kind of depth he had in mind. Anyway you all know all that stuff.
But when the time came to fix NCLB, they would not look at the one thing that really could have helped, of taking the pressure off. They came up with a positive incentive, but it was a zero-sum game, the Race to the Top, where they’d have states essentially competing against each other for merit pay at that level. (I know everybody loves to hate on Timothy Geithner, but to my mind Arne Duncan was the worst hire of the Obama administration bar none, a stupid and ill-natured man, and not very well educated himself.)
The Common Core is full of pretty good ideas, though I’m not crazy about the privatized production of materials (tests and test-prep-style textbooks from companies, again, like Pearson), but no standard is going to be any good if it’s always used to bludgeon people.
I believe things are actually getting better under the current rules in at least some states; New York in particular has agreed under huge pressure from the teachers’ unions to make testing far less of a factor in teacher evaluations, and the strength of the movement in NYS to opt out of testing is probably going to make the tests themselves less of a threat to children (if they wanted to use them to kill you, they wouldn’t let you get out of it).
But Toch making a cute little paradox of how the UFT was collaborating with the Tea Party really distorts what it was about.
“…to my mind Arne Duncan was the worst hire of the Obama administration bar none, a stupid and ill-natured man, and not very well educated himself.”
10X yes. Wonder where he ends up employed?
What will happen with New Orleans charter schools, given the dire state of the La budget?
Must be a neoliberal Democratic governor…http://ctmirror.org/2016/02/05/malloy-increase-charter-school-cut-neighborhood-school-funding/
He must have been talking to Rahm Emanuel.