April 17, 2009 1 Comment

More of the Same is Not Reform

This week Time Magazine has an interview with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, calling him an Apostle of Reform.

Nice title. However, you won’t find much “reform” for American schools in what he has to say.

Duncan wants kids to spend more time in class, which makes very little sense without talking about what they will be doing with those extra minutes.

More of the same is not reform.

He likes charter schools and wants to give parents more choice.

Which is fine until you realize that most charters use the identical instructional model, curriculum, and materials as public schools.

More of the same is not reform.

And choice is wonderful as long as the people doing the choosing have a good understanding of their options.

If you plan to ask parents to select a school for their child, they first need understand the different educational philosophies being used by the charters.

As opposed picking the one with the slickest marking campaign.

Then we get to No Child Left Behind.

Duncan thinks the problem with this train-wreck of a law is that we need national goals instead of letting each state set their own.

That goal would be to have “common college-ready international benchmark standards”.

Roughly translated that means one standardized test that continues to focus American education on sending every child to college.

Whether or not that form of post-K12 training is the best fit with the interests and skills of the student.

In other words, more of the same.

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February 14, 2009

Throwing Money

The morning Post tells me that our new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, gets $5 billion from the newly approved economic stimulus bill to support “educational innovation”.

What the article doesn’t do is offer a clear idea of what anyone in charge means by “innovation”.

However, I have a couple of ideas for where to start.

Kill off No Child Left Behind and go looking for classrooms that don’t look like they did fifty years ago, including those not in the US.

And don’t send a dime to KIPP or anyone pushing AP classes as their one and only solution.

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January 14, 2009

Move Along… Nothing New Here

Arne Duncan, nominee to be Secretary of Education, had his confirmation hearing before a Senate committee yesterday.

So, what did the future leader of American education have to say?

He laid out a thoroughly pragmatic agenda, vowing “to scale up what works” to raise student achievement. He said the Obama administration intended to expand early childhood programs, encourage charter schools, improve teacher training and recruitment, reduce the high school dropout rate and increase college access. He called education a moral obligation, an economic imperative and “the civil rights issue of our generation.”

He also stated.

“We must do dramatically better. We must continue to innovate,” Duncan said. “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work. And we have to continue to challenge the status quo.”

Sorry, but the agenda he outlined for the panel contains very little innovation and sounds exactly like the status quo.

We are at a point in American education where “pragmatic” is just not good enough.

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January 12, 2009

Advice For The New Secretary

For the Monday morning education page of the Post, editors asked some experts for advice they would offer to the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, whose confirmation hearing is tomorrow.

My favorites come from “The Author”, Alfie Kohn:

Theory, research, and practice all suggest that carrots (merit pay for teachers, cash rewards for students) and sticks (public shaming, threatening to close down schools that need help) are as ineffective as they are insulting. But a wrong-headed strategy becomes far worse if the criterion for success or failure consists of the scores on fill-in-the-bubble exams. Thus, lesson #1 for the new secretary: Standardized tests measure what matters least. Mediocre schools can often manage to jack up these scores, in part by eviscerating meaningful learning opportunities for students. Terrific schools, meanwhile, may have unimpressive test results because they’re busy helping students to think not memorize isolated facts or waste time practicing test-taking skills.

“The Critic”, Gerald Bracey:

Education doesn’t need reformers. It needs renewers. There’s nothing renewing about charter schools, merit pay or, especially, No Child Left Behind. When’s the last time anyone spoke about “love of learning” rather than raising test scores?

I’d like to see President Obama set in motion a means of establishing forums at the local level, certainly no larger than at the state level to debate what educative experiences children should have to help them become engaged in and responsible for their own learning and become citizens in a democracy (which we nearly lost in the last 8 years). Right now, we’re just teaching them to be passive which is what some believe corporate America wants but it won’t say so.

And “The Professor”, Diane Ravitch, professor of education at New York University.

You have a chance to make a historic difference by abolishing the No Child Left Behind legislation. Signed into law in 2002, this law has turned our schools into testing factories, narrowed the curriculum to the detriment of everything other than reading and math, and prompted states to claim phony test score gains.

The law’s remedies don’t work. The law’s sanctions don’t work. The goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 is ludicrous; no nation or state has ever reached it.

I can only hope our new national education leaders will listen to them.

Side note: In the dead tree edition of the paper, all of the short pieces of advice were in one article, occupying one newspaper column. For the online version, they posted each segment on a separate page, not even linked in a thread. I suppose that produces more ad impressions, but it doesn’t establish any continuity for the theme and is very, very annoying.

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December 18, 2008

Change That Looks Pretty Much The Same

We now know the next Secretary of Education is going to be Arne Duncan, currently the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools.

But what does that mean for American education and more specifically for any real reform of the system?

If you listen to Gary Stager (and I generally do), the choice pretty much means no changes from what we’re doing now.

Duncan is a fan of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and never met a standardized test he didn’t love. His education policies and practices are indistinguishable from those of the Bush Administration. In fact, the current unqualified Secretary of Education Spellings virtually endorsed Duncan while she posed for for a photo-op with him four days ago. Today she praised Duncan’s nomination while spinning her own tall tale and invoking romantic visions of student accountability.

According to everything I’ve read about Duncan, his “reform” efforts seem to be centered around charter schools, NCLB-style standardized testing, and merit pay for teachers.

Unfortunately charter schools, while a wonderful concept with lots of potential, have largely turned out to be selective, underfunded clones of the schools around them.

Most use the same traditional structure, curriculum, and teaching methods as the public schools their students formerly attended.

Uniforms, boot camp regimentation, and adding hours to the day or days to the year is not innovative and fundamentally changes nothing.

The American concept of school needs a complete overhaul, not thousands of little experiments that do little more than tinker with the current format developed a century ago.

As for merit pay, any system that targets individuals does little more than reinforce the illusion that teachers are independent contractors, each classroom is an island unto itself, and that nothing outside the door affects the kids.

If you are going to pay bonuses for improving student learning, it must go to teams of teachers, entire schools, or even to communities of people from inside and outside the physical building.

And then there’s NCLB. Forget it!

The law is based on the incredibly stupid philosophy that all kids learn at the same rate, that all schools/students/teachers are exactly alike, and that anything worth learning can be assessed using a standardized test.

NCLB needs to scrapped and instead the next Secretary of Education needs to begin the change process with a serious discussion about the concept of what it means to be “well educated” and about the skills and knowledge kids need to develop to be successful in their lives, not just on the next test.

However, if everything I’ve read about our “pragmatic” (the adjective most used to describe Duncan) new leader of American education policy is true, we will continue to tinker about the edges and call it “reform”.

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