AssortedStuff

On the Washington Post web site, Diane Ravitch recommends three books that offer “some dissenting views” on the administration’s current education reform plans.

I haven’t read the books and can’t verify their quality, but this observation by Ravitch in her introduction is right on target.

Now that the Obama administration has invited the states to compete for $5 billion in stimulus funds, the winners will not be those that come up with the best reform ideas, but those that agree to do what the administration wants: create privately managed charter schools, evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores, and close low-performing schools.

Money + power = do it our way.

diane ravitch, education, race to the top, reform

In today’s post on his Class Struggle blog, Jay Mathews disagrees with a recent column by Dana Milbank that spotlights many of the negatives to our all-testing-all-the-time educational system.

Hardly a surprise since Mathews never met a standardized test (or a charter school) he didn’t like.

So, why is Milbank wrong?

As near as I can figure Mathews’ side of the argument all boils down to politics since “…Milbank already knows that campaigning against standardized tests is a loser”.

And…

Since at least the late 1980s, the majority of Democratic and Republican legislators and executives have been reconciled to creating systems in which all children take tests and changes are made in schools that do not score well.

Still, liberals and conservatives in Congress appear to agree that test scores will remain important in any revision of the law.

So, the consensus among our politicians, most of whom have little understanding of K12 education beyond sitting in class for thirteen years, is that wrapping schools in a culture of test prep is the best policy to improve student learning and prepare them for a constantly changing world that never gives standardized tests.

Yeah, that sounds right.

jay mathews, reform, school, standardized tests

For all the talk about change during the 2008 presidential campaign, one policy area in which the Obama administration differs very little from that of his predecessor is education.

In this morning’s Post, Dana Milbank discusses the similarities between the two.

Unfortunately, his focus is almost entirely on the political consequences, which, as we all know, is far more important than any impact of the policy itself.

Easier to write too since most political analysis these days seems to be based on personal opinion, the louder the better.

Anyway, Milbank does manage to make a few relevant points.

But in education, the Bush-Obama comparison is spot on. If anything, Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law — an obsession with testing — and amplified it.

Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed — despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he’s offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives. (emphasis mine)

And…

There’s nothing wrong with testing*, but when you use tests to determine pay and job security, you inevitably induce teachers to turn children into test-taking automatons, not the creative thinkers that have been the most valuable product of American schools. Test obsession won’t help the bad schools, and it will wreck the good ones. (emphasis mine)

“The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind,” New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, an education official in George H.W. Bush’s administration, wrote of Obama’s education policy in a piece for the Huffington Post. “There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system.” The tests, she said, are “simply not adequate” to separate good teachers and schools from bad.

We can only hope that “Obama’s erstwhile allies” who Milbank claims are now pushing back on his Bush-like education policies are able to alter that all-consuming effort to graduate “test-taking automatons”.

*A more accurate statement would be there’s nothing wrong with assessment.

education, obama, politics, reform, testing

Were you aware that “public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution” in the US?

I wasn’t.  And after reading this morning’s Post, it’s clear the writer’s use of the term “revolution”, quiet or otherwise, is a major overstatement at best.

It seems this particular “revolution” is being funded by the big money foundation headed by Bill Gates and his wife.

However, actually reading past the headline we find that almost all of their cash is going into a variety of experiments focused on relatively minor variations on the status quo: national standards in language arts and math, pay-for-performance systems, and charter schools.

Of course, this is the same Gates Foundation that over the past ten years has already dumped $2 billion into their failed program to develop a small high school concept.

Which in most cases resulted in a shrunken version of the standard educational structure used in most high schools and little improvement student learning.

But that piece of history gets only a brief mention in this glowing assessment of Gates’ education current funding of reform efforts.

The other side of the issue gets only slightly more space.

Skeptics say the Microsoft founder is foisting a business-driven agenda on schools without understanding the challenges of public education. “I suspect that eight years from now, the Gates Foundation will say, ‘Whoops, we made another big boo-boo. What should we do now?’ ” education historian Diane Ravitch said.

And then there’s this little bit of information from the second half of the story, providing one likely reason for this puff piece to be published at all.

(Melinda Gates, wife of the Microsoft chairman, and investor Warren E. Buffett, a major donor to the foundation, are both on The Washington Post Co. board of directors.)

The price of having a major newspaper declare what you’re doing a “revolution”?

bill gates, education, foundation, reform, washington post

In the US, charter schools for the most part are a side show to the local district. A relatively few schools that siphon away public money to run largely autonomous educational programs.

But what if all or nearly all schools were charters?

As I noted in an entry from two weeks ago, the new UK Education Secretary wants to allow all schools in that country to apply to be Academies, essentially charter schools which their Department for Education describe this way:

Academies are publicly funded independent schools, free from local authority control. Other freedoms include setting their own pay and conditions for staff, freedom from following the National Curriculum, and the ability to change the lengths of their terms and school days.

So, is this a concept we should import? Solve our education problems by simply letting every K12 school be independent and “free from local authority control”?

Before anyone embraces a go-all-the-way charter plan in the US, read this post* noting some primary reasons why teachers in England oppose Academies, from a document written before the Secretary’s new proposal.

While some of their objections are unique to that country’s education system, many have great validity on this side of the Atlantic.

Academies hand over state schools to sponsors: Creating Academies in place of community or foundation schools involves the transfer of publicly funded assets to unaccountable sponsoring bodies.

Many sponsors are unsuitable: Sponsors are not required to have educational expertise or experience.

Academies have a damaging impact on other neighbouring schools and on local authorities: The entitlement of Academies to select ten per cent of their pupils means that they are able to choose more academically successful pupils.

Academies do not offer pupils a better education than other local schools: Academies are based on a flawed premise that standards will be raised simply through designating a school as an Academy and by transferring it to a sponsor.

Substitute “charters” for “academies” and this list not only explains why charters have done nothing to improve the American education system, but also why current plans to expand the concept will not work any better.

*Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.

change, charter, england, schools

In her Education Week blog this week, Diane Ravitch offers ten reasons why states should decline to participate in the DOEs big money game show, Race to the Top.

I can’t speak to the validity of all ten, but I suspect most her predictions of what will happen to American education as a result of this most recent attempt at “reform” are far too accurate.

Especially number five.

By raising the stakes for tests even higher, Race to the Top will predictably produce more teaching to bad tests, more narrowing of the curriculum, more cheating, and more gaming the system. If scores rise, it will be the illusion of progress, rather than better education. By ratcheting up the consequences of test scores, education will be corrupted and cheapened. There will be even less time for history, geography, civics, foreign languages, literature, and other important subjects.

All of that applied to No Child Left Behind, of course, except for the part about rising scores.

Supporters of NCLB simply made claims of major progress without even minimal statistical evidence.

diane ravitch, education, nclb, race to the top, reform

England has a new government (albeit one cobbled together out of strange bedfellows) and also a new Education Secretary.

And it sounds like he’s an even bigger fan of charter schools than ours.

Mr Gove confirmed he intended to move quickly on plans for all schools to be given the freedom to become academies – schools which are funded by the state but are largely independent.

“In the weeks ahead, I want us to offer all schools the chance to enjoy academy-style freedoms so that heads and teachers across the country can be liberated,” he wrote.

However, unlike Mr. Duncan, the new head of the UK Department for Education (name changed from the Department for Children, Schools and Families), is also calling for less national control of the process.

Other key priorities confirmed by Mr Gove were to:

• give schools greater freedom over the curriculum
• “radically reform exam system” so that all schools can offer a wider range of qualifications
• support teachers by giving them more powers “to ensure higher standards of discipline”

No particular comment to make. I just find the differences between the US and UK approach to public education interesting.

Image: Colliery Village School by freefotouk used under a Creative Commons license.

change, charter, education, england

Lots of school reform “experts”, including our current Secretary of Education, claim that charter schools, lots and lots of them, are the key to improving American public education.

Unfortunately, the ones we already have are not living up to the hype.

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.

With few exceptions, charter schools use the same curriculum and the same instructional methods, maybe with a few small alterations (longer days, more days), as the public schools from which they draw students and money.

Charters are not reform. They simply repackage the status quo.

charter, education, reform, schools

Lots of media attention on education lately.

The president says he wants to rewrite No Child Left Behind, re-envisioning (but not lessening) the federal role in education.

Of course, the law will continue to over-emphasize testing, except that we’re now going to use the softer term “assessment”.

The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers decided to create a set of national standards for teaching English and math.

But they seem to have largely ignored the national standards created by NCTE and NCTM (don’t bother, they’re just educators) and some states may decline to join this particular nation.

Meanwhile, Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Education, is doing his best Monty Hall impression by handing out the first round of prizes in our new billion dollar game show, Race to the Top.

I’ll offer you $500 million for the charter school behind door number 1!

And Newsweek says we should fire all the teachers.

Or at least all the bad ones. And everyone in Rhode Island. They aren’t clear on where schools will find replacements other than that good teachers can’t be union members.

Bill Maher, on the other hand, says to fire all the parents.

Ok, so we have no shortage on education experts in this country.

However, all of this frenetic activity in the name of “reform” is just messing with the appearance of the pieces on the same old chessboard.

Missing is any serious discussion of the fundamental structure and purpose of American education.

We need to start with Will’s straight-to-the-heart-of-the-matter question: What’s the problem that schools solve?

Image: monty hall by debaird, from Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.

curriculum, education, nclb, reform, teachers

In his discussion of Diane Ravitch’s new book, Jay Mathews inserts several declarative statements of what he believes to be truth, including the assertion that I must be nuts.

And by his definition, I am.

Many education reforms have gone badly in the last 20 years, but there never has been a golden age of school improvement. No Child Left Behind had many flaws, but it left us better off than than we were before, with more attention to low-income and learning disabled children, and some gains in lower grades, particularly in math. We bumble along, doing our best, hoping that our next idea will produce big gains but knowing that all we can expect is to be a bit better than before.

If the best that billions of dollars and the establishment of a test-score-obsessive, standardized education system can produce is “more attention” and “some gains” (as measured by those same tests, of course), that is not “better off”.

Narrowing the curriculum studied by almost all students in public schools to little more than reading and math drills is more than a “flaw”.

Forcing schools to treat all students exactly the same by expecting them to learn at exactly the same rate is not “doing our best”.

There are some crazies out there who disagree with this and say an education revolution is possible. They know who they are. They don’t include the weary legislators and White House aides who put together No Child Left Behind, making the compromises that are necessary in the democratic society that Ravitch celebrates throughout her book.

I guess I must be one of those crazies, because when I take a good look around it’s not difficult to understand that not only is an education revolution possible, it’s happening.

Just not in schools.

In fact, a revolution in the way people learn and develop and communicate and collaborate and grow is happening almost everywhere else EXCEPT in our schools.

However, the reason that those legislators and aides who put together NCLB didn’t think a revolution was possible is because they didn’t want one in the first place.

NCLB and those other school reform efforts of the last 20 years Mathews declares to have “gone badly” were all designed to craft a better status quo (often in the form of charters and voucher farms) instead of taking an honest look at how and why teaching and learning needed to change and then creating schools that work for the kids, not the adults running them.

So, yes, call me crazy if you like. I do believe there needs to be an education revolution.

And it needs to happen in less than another 20 years of bumbling along.

diane ravitch, jay mathews, nclb, reform, schools